It would be peaceful, Vice thought, to watch the world end. Fitting.

When he fell — and he would fall — he decided he would not scream. He would go silently to that place in the sky and there he would continue to watch, to keep his Vigil in both heart and mind as that eternal rest crumbled as well. It would not be quick, but he would be there to see the machines of his heaven fail by degrees. Without him below there would be nobody to harvest for above. Perhaps he would don a gray robe. It would be peaceful. Quiet. He knew the other servants would not judge him for his failure — they had all failed as well.

And the rest of the Armory would be free from this eternal cycle. He hoped they would not be too upset about that. Dagger's hammer would rust when she grew too weak to lift it. Saber would slow down, perhaps forget his appetites. Powder's sight would fade, her trigger finger would grow arthritic. Pitch's mind would crumble with the years. Perhaps, as he neared the end, even he would learn to pray. Maybe before that happened, they would even earn enough gold to live in comfort while they fell apart.

But as Vice thought of all of that, a pain grew larger and larger in his chest, a pain he tried desperately not to understand.

"Vice?"

The voice came from behind him, but the monk did not stir. It was just a quiet thought made loud by meditation, memory and forecasted remorse, a fleeting and returning blink of a familiar sound when he was faced with the end.

"Vice!"

It sounded like Saber. The mind was an absurd little animal: Who would want to hear Saber's voice at the end? It could not be. Vice had stepped through. He was lost to the world. The Citadel had swallowed and defeated him like a whale of purpose.

"Fucking hell, Vice! Why are you just sitting there?"

With an irritated growl, the monk humored a hallucination just as irritating as the real Saber and turned around. There was the dissolute duelist, standing in a rip in the world, the rest of the Armory with him.

"You aren't real," Vice informed them.

Saber rolled his eyes. "Your god's bullshit. I fucked half your order. I fucked your mother. I'd fuck you too if you were five minutes younger. Are you just gonna sit there until you grow roots out of your asshole?"

Vice blinked.

"Vice," Dagger said gently as she shoved Saber out of the way, "time to go. Die later."

Vice could see from her expression that she understood why he was just sitting in acceptance. He got to his feet and stared at his comrades for a few moments more, peering at each of their faces and testing his heart against these phantoms. They did not waver.

Then he sighed and stepped through the rift.

Behind him a platform trailing a sets of stairs like streamers smashed down where he'd been sitting. He turned at the noise and they all coughed as a cloud of dust and grit blew through the rift. His platform groaned and shrieked with the sound of stone grinding against stone.

Then it shuddered and fell.

"Ah," Vice said, a bit wistful.

"You look disappointed," Saber said.

"I would not expect you to understand."

"You sure?" Saber said, staring out at the crumbling world on the other side of the portal. "Might have been nice to be done."

"And we will be," Dagger said, "one day. But not today."

But Vice was still staring at Saber. Even his hood looked shocked.

"What?" Saber said, "Yeah, Vice, I feel it too. I just don't walk around moping all the time."

"I do not mope," Vice grumbled.

Saber threw his arm around Vice's shoulder. "It's okay, Vice, it's a very dignified mope."

"Saber."

"Fifty poets, a hundred painters and a thousand bards could not hope to mope with even half your gravitas."

Vice sighed heavily but did not throw off the duelist's arm as they walked through the strange cubicle-studded room to where Pitch was examining the controls.

"Can this thing get us out of here?" Dagger asked as she entered the room.

The alchemist nodded at Vice. "How was wandering oblivion?"

"Quiet," the monk said. "Peaceful."

Pitch chuckled as he looked back down at the rows of buttons on the table. He began to push them, one at a time and in order, making notes in his book as he did. The scenes in the glass shifted one by one, each stranger than the last. There was even one that appeared to be underwater. They all stared, mesmerized by a scene even they had never witnessed. There was a thunderous, roaring splash from the other room and the air filled with the reek of salt. Briny water sloshed around their ankles.

"What the hell?" Pitch said and got up to check but Dagger lunged past him and pushed the next button. The roaring stopped.

"I don't want to drown, Pitch."

"But I," he began, and then stopped. "No, that's fair."

The next scene was somewhat familiar. A stone hall with a stone floor.

"Looks more like it," Dagger said. "Drier, anyway. What do you think, Pitch?"

He shrugged. "It could be any where or when. But it's the least strange of all the options."

"Good enough."

They filed out to the rift.

"All together this time," Dagger said.

"Should we hold hands?" Saber asked.

They stepped through the portal in a tight clump and found themselves on a narrow platform in a chamber so vast that a gentle wind caressed their faces. At the far end a single set of stairs with no railing, leading up.

Powder whistled long and loud. Somewhere in the unseeable distance were the faint sounds of battle — screams of men and beasts, the clash of steel and claw, rushed footsteps on stone.

Saber gestured to the stairs. "Should we go up? Or up?"

Dagger led. What happened next was a blur of bottled time and violence.

For what might have been one hundred years or one hundred minutes, the Armory battled in the Citadel of Stairs in a stasis of conflict. They charged down hallways and dashed through tunnels in creeping, tactical retreats. Up was the same as down. Left and right became irrelevant. Turning around meant nothing. To backtrack was to go forward. One dimly lit path was the same as another. They fought men. They fought beasts. They killed things that were both and neither. They witnessed horror and wonder in such variety that there became no distinguishing one from the other as Pitch's rationed chemicals muted terror and triumph alike. Sometimes the ceiling became the floor, other times they battled sideways, and any misstep could send them hurtling to be smashed against the walls. There was no escape. No hunger to mark the time. No daylight. The top of the Citadel was as distant as never, and as close as a minute into memory.

In blinking moments between battles, Pitch stitched their cuts and sealed them with thread or glue. They camped in abandoned jail cells and moldering throne rooms. Pitch and Powder scavenged chemicals and old metal to make bullets and bombs. Powder fingered the new bullets and thought they want us to fight forever. Saber sat, his humor spent, his hand cramping around the hilt of his weapon as he carelessly let its point rest upon the ground. Vice prayed so much the words lost meaning. Pitch looked down at his notebook map of the Citadel, muttering about wasted time. With a disgusted grunt, he used a few of the disjointed drawings to kindle a fire in the helmet of an ogre they'd felled moments before.

Even Dagger gave a small sigh when she was able to set down her hammer, but as she looked at the drawn faces of her crew, her hand clenched around the haft once more.

"We fight forever," Dagger said as if one of them had voiced their thoughts, "we struck that deal long ago," she got to her feet with a grimace. "So, straighten up. Forget the end. It doesn't exist for us."

"Captain," Powder said with a nod, and reloaded her weapons. Saber massaged his hands and sheathed his blades. Vice rose from his knees. Pitch was the last to get up. He looked down at his pages of his notes, and then tore them in half and tossed them into the fire.

And so, they strode out to find the next battle, each hoping it would be the signpost that might hint at the true distance traveled.

A battle came. Then another. Eventually even the Citadel of Stairs ran short of sameness, and a turn that looked like the last thousand they'd taken showed a difference as welcome as spring thaw. In a narrow and winding corridor of stone, the torches grew sparse and guttering, poorly tended and dim.

"Different," Pitch noted.

"Never thought I'd be happy to see less torchlight," Saber said.

At the end of the corridor, a spiral of steel stairs led up, and for once in what seemed like a generation, that direction felt like something other than arbitrary perspective. They climbed past floor after floor of stone landings where they could see men and beasts just like them, trapped and slavering in bloody, ceaseless battle. The stairs steepened, and the spiral tilted and became a ladder. The hand and footholds were deeply grooved and gleaming, and while so much of the tower seemed to be in disrepair, the ladder shone as if newly built. The shaftway closed in around the stairs as they climbed.

"Maybe it leads to the roof," Saber suggested.

"Or the basement," Powder countered. "At this point how would we even tell?"

"If it leads to the roof we could just jump off," the duelist suggested.

"At this point, I'd push you," Powder said.

"Kinda sweet under the circumstances."

They paused often to rest, twining their arms and legs between the rungs to hang and ease their aching limbs. Finally, Dagger saw a grid above them and a hatch. She dragged herself through it, stepped from the ladder and stood tall.

The walls and floor were new steel. The room was lit by glowing orbs in wire cages. It had only one door with a small glass window. She wondered if they'd ever been meant to find their way into this place and considered the tower's nature. She could not decide which possibility bothered her more: That they'd not been meant to find this, or that they had, and it was just one more boring, eternal twist in this weird, tangled labyrinth.

As the rest of the Armory dragged their way up from the ladder, Dagger peered through the window in the door. Beyond was another corridor. Like the one they'd entered through, it was lined with doors, but unlike that battered hallway, none of these doors were shattered.

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Dagger leaned back from the window and looked up. There was a sign above the door in a language she couldn't read.

"Pitch, any idea what that says?" She asked.

Pitch peered at the sign for several moments. "Pictographs. It could almost be ancient Couju, but that's a dead scholar's language, and this is..."

"What?"

"It looks like what might have happened if the language never died."

"Want to explain that?"

"Living languages change as they're used," Pitch said. "They evolve. Accents change and meaning with them. Words fall out of use and new ones are invented. A language only dies when it stops being spoken. Couju fell hundreds of years ago. The ones that escaped the cataclysm learned other languages where they settled and eventually abandoned their own. It wasn't useful anymore. We only have a few books in Couju. We don't know what it sounds like."

"Can you read it?"

Pitch peered closer. "That word could be box, well, or lock."

"Pitch, it's one word," Saber said.

"Couju's grammar and meaning are contextual. The pictographs to either side that I can't read would provide the meaning of this one. The books we had at the academy were all histories. Not a lot of use in modern alchemy. This is the one shape I kind of recognize."

"Box, well, lock," Dagger muttered. "Box, well, lock."

"Prison?" Powder suggested.

Pitch nodded. "It's entirely possible."

"The whole place is a prison," Dagger said. "Pitch, we entered through a dungeon."

"Was it? It certainly looked like one, as we understand them anyway. But what if it wasn't a dungeon at all?" Pitch said.

"What else would it have been?" Dagger asked.

"Think of what we've seen, the automations, the crumbling systems. So much of this place is like an observatory. And think of how the queen described the Citadel's actions. Experiments. Yet not one sign of an authority figure or anyone who runs this place. The walls are holding all this in, and Temker's Clock is still functioning on the living creatures who entered, probably because nobody has found their way back to break it. This place is full of untended mechanisms run wild, so if this part looks this well-maintained—"

"—then things are about to get nastier," Dagger finished.

"That would be my guess, boss, yes," Pitch said.

"Well, we know what's behind us."

"Forward always," the rest of the Armory muttered, more or less in unison.

"Quit stealing my lines," Dagger said with a smirk, grabbed the handle of the door and pulled. It would not open. She swore.

"Pitch? If you would?"

Pitch peered into the lock. It was large and circular.

"Never seen a key that would fit this, but that's nothing new," said the alchemist. He took a metal funnel from his kit and slid the slender end into the hole. Into the funnel he poured a measure of acid, and they waited while the liquid smoked. On the other side, something clanked and fell.

Pitch pulled the door open, and Dagger stepped through first, hammer ready. They crept their way to the first door. Above it was a metal plaque with more of the same writing as above the entrance, and to the right was a large window that looked into the room.

It looked empty.

"Maybe they haven't gotten around to putting anybody in the cells yet," Dagger suggested.

The glass vibrated and Dagger flinched back with her hammer up. The glass thrummed again, more violently this time, as some force inside the room threw itself against it. The glass held as the smashing continued, and Dagger cautiously put her palm against the transparent barrier.

"It's not ordinary glass," Pitch noted.

"Thanks, Pitch," Dagger said dryly.

They moved on.

The next cell was more obviously occupied.

Inside, was a single human man, then the air in the cell shivered and there were four of him, then two, then so many that the cell with filled with duplicates of his face and staring eyes. There was no space between their shoulders. They jockeyed to press their faces against the glass, to knock, beg and gesture for the Armory to open the door and free them. They jostled and quarreled, three of them eventually getting into a brawl that absorbed the rest. The copies flickered and fought and then vanished until there was only one left, squatting on the ground with his head in his hands, his fingers rubbing his scalp.

In the next cell was the head of a hound the size of a wagon. Its neck ended in a ragged, bleeding stump from which the blood was still seeping, covering the floor and running to a drain at the center. Whatever had been used to sever head from body had been dull and heavy. The giant hound's tongue lay dead, lolling between its jaws. When the Armory got close, one of its entirely too human eyes rolled to regard them, and the tongue flopped and licked the glass.

In another cell was a shiny black orb draped in heavy chains. It shivered, and as it did so, the rattled silently around it.

The corridor stretched on, but the Armory was grateful for the oddities in the cells — they interrupted the monotony of the hallway. Without them, there would have been no way to gauge distance or difference, and every step would have seemed as meaningless and infinite as the one before. Then, with a gasp, Vice shouldered past Dagger.

"What the hell, Vice?" Dagger muttered as the monk ran ahead. He did not answer. The Armory could but follow to make sure that whatever he faced next, he would not do so alone. The cells blurred as they ran.

"Vice! Slow down!" Dagger called.

The corridor opened into a rotunda with a single cell, far larger than the rest. Vice dashed to it and pressed his hands against the glass. He fell to his knees and stared up at the cell's occupant — a figure twice even Dagger's height, so tall that it brushed the ceiling. It seemed to have two forms, and either both existed at once, or it phased between both so quickly that they appeared to. The figure was hooded and draped in floor-length robes of plain gray, but it was also a stone watchtower. A colorless fire burned at its highest point, creating a nimbus around both the hood and battlements.

The Armory stopped in a loose semi-circle around the prostrate monk.

"What is it, Vice?" Dagger asked. The monk only kept his imploring hands on the glass and his head bowed.

"Vice?" Dagger tried again.

"The Vigil," Vice murmured with awe.

"That's what the Vigil looks like?" Saber asked.

"What did you expect?" Pitch said.

"Oh, don't act so casual. You've never seen a god either." Saber shot back.

"Definitely not one in jail," Powder muttered.

"I didn't know they made jails for gods," Saber said.

Dagger appraised the cell's occupant as Vice clasped his fingers so tightly that his arms shook. He spoke furiously under his breath, and no matter what was said to him, refused to open his eyes, answer, or move. They waited as the prayer, or whatever it was Vice was muttering, continued. And continued. If Vice took a breath, he managed to speak at the same time.

"So... we live here now?" Saber asked.

"Quiet, Saber," Dagger said and laid her hand on the monk's shoulder. "Vice?"

The holy man did not answer.

Dagger took a deep breath and tried again. "Vice, talk to me. Do you really believe this is the Vigil? Think. That can't be possible."

"I can feel it," Vice whispered. He tilted his head back until his hood fell away. His face was pained and full of longing as the monk, who none of them had ever seen beg for anything, pleaded with his eyes at the figure on the other side of the glass. Then he leapt to his feet and hammered at the door with both fists but couldn't even scuff the steel. With an effort, he gathered himself and finally laid hold of the handle and yanked as hard as he could. The door held. The Armory had seen Vice break plate steel with his fists and rip chainmail like it was cotton gauze.

Vice turned from the door and rounded on the alchemist. "Pitch! Open it!" he shouted. "Open it now!"

Pitch backed away. "Now, just wait a second, Vice."

"Pitch!" Vice howled, and advanced on the alchemist. His face was bright red, his eyes were bloodshot. Tears streaked his cheeks.

"Vice," Dagger stepped between them, "calm the fuck down!"

Vice only growled and turned to redoubled his efforts, tugging and wrenching and thrashing against the door's handle.

Pitch looked around the room. Inside the cell, the towering figure/watchtower, did not react. The alchemist raked his eyes across the floor to where it met the cell wall and up along the boundaries of the ceiling. Finally, he saw a brass plate by the cell door that somehow none of them had noticed, and on it was a button. He pressed it.

Why are you here?

The voice spoke in all their minds at once. It was so dry it made them thirsty. Vice fell back from the door.

"Watcher, I have come!" The monk said.

"What in the fuck?" Pitch whispered, his hand still on the button.

I am the Watcher in the Darkness. Again, why are you here?

"We've come to destroy the Citadel," Dagger answered.

"We've come to free you," Vice said.

"No," Dagger said, "we didn't."

Admirable. Honest. Perhaps. You are killers. But there is nobody left to kill. Time dragged them along like a dead knight with a foot trapped in the stirrups of his charger. They have all been pounded flat beneath hooves of time.

"You know what happened here?" Dagger asked.

I see all. I have watched your bloody march through this place. I have watched the deteriorated systems try in vain to slow you down. I know that you are not liberators, but that does not mean you cannot liberate.

"You watched us?" Dagger asked.

Yes.

"And you know who we are?"

You are wedge and fire, the finger on the scales, the knife in the back of power. And you are prisoners. As I am. But you know it not.

"What?" Saber asked.

I see you all so clearly. Your newness to this place marks you like motes of light in perfect darkness. The one of stone. The dancing fool. The worshipper of the new gods called Science. The distant killer. The faithful one. You are catalysts, counterweights. You are fate's flung stone.

"That sounds impressive," Saber said.

"You're the dancing fool," Powder muttered.

"Obviously."

You are change made flesh. But you are trying to change a dead thing already beyond the grip of time. You are maggots on a corpse.

"I like 'fate's flung stone' better," Saber said.

And you are not funny.

"I'm also not locked up," the duelist countered.

Aren't you? Do you feel free, dancing fool?

Saber was about to speak but closed his mouth.

"Watcher," Vice said, "what would you have us do?"

Free me. I will guide you from this place. We will destroy it together. I have watched long enough. I will act. And you will help me. In exchange, I will free you from this place.

The Armory stood in something like shock, feeling a bit like squatters who'd finally found the landlord in the attic, mad as a rat in a tin shithouse and chewing on the walls.

"Vice, what do—" Dagger said, but Vice suddenly flinched as if slapped. He stood and unclasped his hands. The exultation fell from his face, and he backed away from the glass with an expression of fury and revulsion.

"Vice, what's wrong?" Dagger asked.

The monk fled the room and down the corridor at a fast walk.

Do not run, my little watcher. You have found me, faithful one.

Dagger gestured at Pitch.

It is unseemly to flee from the tru—

Pitch took his hand off the brass plate and the Vigil was cut off midsentence. A weight settled across them in the silence of the prison hall. The jailed god moved closer to the glass in a flicker, and the Armory backed away as the Vigil's gray watchtower fire burned brighter.

"Stay back from that glass. Pitch," Dagger said, "and don't touch that button until I say. Saber, go get Vice."

"Me?" Saber asked in disbelief.

"He likes you."

"No, he doesn't."

"Captain," Powder said, "Vice doesn't retreat. This doesn't need a lighter touch, it needs yours."

Dagger sighed. "Fine," she said and left the rest of her crew staring up at the god on the other side of the glass.

When Dagger caught up to the monk, he was at the end of the corridor, staring down into the hatch with the ladder as if it were a wishing well.

"Talk to me, Vice."

"That... thing," the monk said, his voice thick with grief, "that is not the Vigil."

"What do you mean?" Dagger asked. "You were so sure you nearly broke your hands on that door. What changed?"

"It wants vengeance. It is angry. The Vigil is dead, Dagger. Gone. The Vigil would never seek retribution. It would never beg for freedom, especially not when it could watch. That was why we were created. We are the hands, but The Vigil is the eyes. We choose our acts carefully. To intervene is sin, but a sin taken gladly depending on consequence. Every moment I am with you, I am defiled further by active change. But it is all necessary. To keep a memory alive, to give our faithful a place to go at the end. I take on that defilement. Gladly. But this thing..."

"Maybe," Dagger said. "Maybe not. If they only captured the Vigil, it may have been a prisoner the whole time."

"Nothing can hold the Watcher in the Darkness, not even time," Vice said. "Nothing. The world is the Watcher's prison, as it is all of ours. That is not the Vigil, Dagger."

"Are you sure?"

"Wouldn't you know your own father if you met him?"

"No."

Vice sighed. "Perhaps that was a poor example. But—"

"Vice, how long has it been? Your faith..." She trailed off before she could finish delivering a hard truth.

"Say it," Vice said miserably.

"Your faith is defined by grief."

The monk nodded sadly. "It is. But Dagger, the Vigil, the true Vigil, it would..."

"It would what?"

"It would be horrified by us. By me. By what we have done to preserve what's left of the faith. It would know the ways we have perverted its teachings to persist. It would never even speak to me. It would condemn me with silence."

"Gods forgive."

"Not mine," the monk said. "What we do is antithetical to the Vigil's teachings. Killing on its behalf? Slaughtering hundreds to feed dying, celestial machines. It would know my guilt. And this creature does not."

"Maybe. But it saw what we did to get here."

"Dagger, if the Vigil had been alive, it would never have allowed us to do what we do. We would never have had to!"

"Even if it was locked up?" Dagger countered. "Think of what we've seen in here. This place, this prison, it has power. Vice, believe me, being locked away changes you forever. It changes the rules. It writes new ones that are impossible to forget."

The monk did not answer. He stared at his feet.

"But whatever it is," Dagger continued, "it might be our only way out of here. We might need it."

"What do you mean?"

"It seems to understand this place. It says it can see beyond its cell."

"Maybe. But if it is not the Vigil then it is something else."

Dagger took a deep breath. "Vice, I am going to ask you to do something you won't like."

"I like nothing that I do. I do it because it is needful," Vice said. "I do it for the refugees of our faith."

"Then this won't be any different," she said. "Talk to it. Get it to help us. If it isn't the Vigil, it thinks it is, and if it has a fraction of the power it claims, it can cut us a way out of this timeless shithole. Vice, we can finish the job."

Vice thought for a moment, his features contorting with the enormity of what he was being asked.

"What you ask..." Vice paused to gather himself. "What you ask would never be possible with the true Vigil, the true Vigil would see the lie, would see my soul and know my mind."

"Then it's simply a means to get out of here. One more ugly, needful act. If it's not the Vigil, you won't offend it by lying. I'd do myself if I could, but I can't. None of us can. Only you. We can't talk to it like you can."

Vice knelt for a moment and clasped his hands. He began to pray again.

"Vice, we don't have time for this!"

But Vice ignored her. She waited while minutes, if that's what they really were, ticked by uncounted.

"Very well," Vice finally said in a sick voice. "I'll talk with this false creature."

"You better lock that shit down first, Vice," Dagger said. "It has to believe you think it's your god."

"And if it's some mad creation like everything else in this place?"

"Then, Vice," Dagger said in a gentle voice, "let's hope you learn to lie better than Saber in the next five minutes, or we'd better hope we're far worse than it is."

Vice nodded sadly.