Bojack was at his desk facing the diamond cell. His journal was open, and he was so focused on his writing that he didn’t hear me walking up behind him. I got a look at what he was working on before he snapped the book shut.

Trapped in light’s cruel dance, slow sleep of winter’s grace, gift of amber.

He stood. “We need to discuss the future.”

Sure, we could discuss the future, but I had to know.

“Bojack...are you writing haikus?” Of all the things I’d imagined he might put in that book, poems had not crossed my mind.

“Merely recording my thoughts,” he said, “it is none of your concern.”

“If anything, I’m less concerned. Can I see it again? I think your syllable count was a little off.”

He eyed me suspiciously. “Syllable count?”

“For a haiku, it’s supposed to be five, seven, five. I think you were close. Was that about Kevin?”

“It wasn’t a haiku,” Bojack said tersely. “I am beyond the poetic forms of mortals.”

“Hey, yeah, you do you. I thought it was pretty good.”

His eyes narrowed. “You did?”

“Yeah, ‘gift of amber’ is a cool phrase.” It had never occurred to me that a demon would have hobbies. They were divorced from normal human needs in many ways, and I’d never seen Bojack do anything for pleasure. My mental model of him had always been more robotic; as if he was programmed to want certain things, but he otherwise just existed without a lot going on inside.

“Can I see it again?”

He reopened the book and shifted it so I would have a better view.

“Did you write these about me, too?” I asked.

“A different book,” he said. “You were gone a long time.”

I suppose I was. He must have filled a shelf while I was trapped in Bedlam. “You’re immortal though. Was it that long for you?”

Bojack snorted. “You’re immortal. Do you experience time differently simply because you know you will not die?”

He had me there. “I guess not.”

In books and movies about long-lived beings; elves, vampires, and gods; there was usually a lot of emphasis on how the passage of time was different for them than for mortals. That was a cop-out. Even just making it into the early thirties in my first life, I’d gotten to experience a little of how a person’s perspective on time could change as they got older, especially given that a lot of my coworkers at Subway had been teenagers. But just because you thought about time differently than younger people didn’t mean that an hour didn’t feel like an hour, or a day a day.

“Do you...enjoy poetry?”

Bojack shrugged. “It is something I do, another form of memory. I have read some of the literature of this world, and other worlds, but it does not hold much interest for me. The prattle of humans is not much different from the songs of birds.”

“How many worlds have you been to?” Berith had mentioned being in other worlds as well. The demons were all repeat transmigrators, but I’d never really questioned them about it.

“Many,” Bojack said, “though not as many as the elder entities. The One Who Knocks stretches far, but his reach is not infinite. Plana is the first world in this cluster that I have visited.”

“Cluster?” If we were going to get into cosmology, I was all ears.

“The grouping that surrounds your earth, the domain of the blue goddess.”

“Were there humans everywhere you’ve been?”

“Humans, or beings who were like humans. Not all of them walked on two legs or had faces like yours, but intelligent animals tend to develop along similar lines.”

Intelligent animals, that was one way to put it. “Do you take notes like these wherever you go?”

“Generally, though I leave the books behind when our work is done and I return to Bedlam.”

So he didn’t have a backpack full of alien journals anywhere. Somehow, that felt disappointing.

“What’s your success rate, anyway? Of all the places you’ve been, how many belong to Walter White now?”

Bojack shut the journal. “This world is the only one you need to consider. As the other harbingers come to accept the new order, we must turn to what is coming. There are steps to be taken to weaken the veil between this realm and Bedlam.”

“Like what?”

“The cauldron at the heart of Mount Doom, we will have to craft more of them. Apart from that, there are monuments supporting the integrity of Plana that must be destroyed. Dargoth is free of them, but in the Free Kingdoms, Atlan, and Thallaso, there are still structures sacred to the blue goddess for us to bring to ruin.”

“You expect me to craft another cauldron? One is bad enough.”

“It is not the only cauldron in Dargoth, merely the largest. And I do not need your help to make it. There are not men like you in every world we visit. The construction requires seven demons working in concert, each with a different elemental affinity.”

“Seven? How many elements are there?” Earth, air, fire, and water were all pretty obvious. Asmodeus could only control metal, which I’d thought of as being a subcategory of earth rather than entirely its own thing. That still only got it up to five.

“There is no true limit,” Bojack said. With one hand, he reached for the wall and pulled out a handful of stone like it was soft clay. The fragment hardened again in his palm, a shard of dull granite. “Every cluster has its laws, though there are common themes among them. We are more constrained here than we would be in Bedlam, which is closer to the raw chaos of the void. Some affinities are more common than others.”

“You know what I’ve seen already,” I said. “What else is there?”

“Flesh and wood. That will be enough to bring us to seven. If you come across a demon that bends either of those elements, I ask that you take extra care to bring them to our side. They are rare enough that they would be hard to replace.”

“How is flesh an element?” I was pretty sure that wood counted as an element in some Eastern frameworks, but I’d never heard of anyone adding flesh to the list.

Bojack dropped the stone, and it clinked against the floor beside his desk. “How is earth? Or water? There is nothing fundamental about any of these things, they are merely concepts.”

He had a point there. If we were going to get technical, there were well over a hundred elements on the elemental table, and physics got pretty weird when it came to deciding what was fundamental. Atoms were made of particles, particles were made of quarks and electrons, and it got stranger from there. No one knew where the bottom was, or why there was something instead of nothing, no matter how many theories had been proposed. Maybe it was turtles all the way down.

“Okay, I can keep that in mind when I go north. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Kevin killed himself while you were gone.”

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

My heart jumped, but when I looked at the diamond cell, the former Dark Lord was still there, lying on his side and watching us with sunken eyes. There was something different, though, dark splotches on his skin that didn’t look like bruises.

“What happened?”

“He broke down some of his food into a powder and refashioned it into a small blade. It wasn’t strong enough to scratch the cage, but sharp enough for his purpose. I removed the body, and he returned to life as you see him now.”

That was something I had no idea how to do, but Kevin’s skills were beyond mine.

“I thought he was afraid of dying.”

“Perhaps he is running out of hope. Regardless, there were changes to his body. Bedlam is more a part of him now than it was before.”

“What does that mean? Is he going to turn into a monster?”

“I cannot say. Kevin has not died in centuries, and his patron is the One Who Knocks. A rebirth of that kind is less clean than one provided by the blue goddess.”

That was worrisome. The cage only worked if we could account for his abilities, and if Walter White was changing the rules on us, there was a chance he could escape without the help of a demon. Gremory had said their god was fine with me taking over, but that could have been a lie to put me at ease.

“Do you think he’s going to try again?”

Bojack shrugged. “He has been quiet since his return. Refusing food. The One Who Knocks has no attachments to his servants. Whatever bargain they made did not give him what he wanted. You should take this as a warning. There is still room in this world for another demon, and the next might be able to free him. The One Who Knocks has not chosen sides between you, but he will if you fail to advance our cause.”

“Message received,” I said. Working with the demons was one thing, but allowing their god to claim this world for his own wasn’t an option. It was just hard to see a way out of it while Kevin was still lurking in the background.

I left Bojack to work on his poems and spent a little time in the forge before dinner. With the training I’d done on the road, Alchemize was nearly at level ten, which I hoped would allow me to brew something more advanced. After setting another batch of Might potions to simmer, I told

Malphas to take them out for me when they were done and went to spend the rest of the evening with my family.

Esmelda was reading to Leto out of a book of fairy tales, which reminded me that there was an entire library in Mount Doom for me to absorb if I ever got around to it. I changed out of my armor and joined them in the sitting room. Gastard was training with the garrison, so it was just the three of us and Ogness, who was preparing a meal in the kitchen.

The story reminded me of something out of Grimm’s, as it was rather dark. It was about a boy who went on a journey to rescue his sister from a castle where a monster kept her captive. The tale ended with the boy’s death and the princess’s wedding to the monster.

“Why did she marry him?” Leto asked when the story was over.

“She had little choice,” Esmelda said. “It wasn’t a happy ever after.”

“I think it’s stupid,” Leto flipped around on the sofa, putting his feet in the air and his head hanging toward the floor. “Her brother should have saved her.”

“That would have been more fun to hear about,” I agreed.

“Not all stories are happy,” Esmelda said. “Life is full of difficulty, and you have to learn to find joy even when it seems like there is none. That’s the lesson.”

“Why does there have to be a lesson?” Leto got up and paced around the couch, his thin face scrunched in annoyance. “Why can’t a story just be fun?”

“Do you think the girl was able to find joy,” I asked, “if that was the lesson?”

“It ends there,” Esmelda said, “but I doubt it. Most of these tales are rather bleak. I remember hearing some of them when I was a child, but I had forgotten how depressing they could be.”

“I used to want to write stories,” I said. “Novels. And I didn’t mean for them to be dark, but whatever concept I started with, the longer I went on, the more bad things would happen.”

Esmelda gave a small laugh. “You make it sound like you weren’t in control. But you were writing the story, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, I was. But things have a way of just coming out of you, and it’s hard to see them for what they are until they’re down on paper. It had something to do with the way I looked at the world when I was younger. I think I was too detached.”

Leto stopped pacing. “Detached from what?”

It was a good question.

“I’m not even sure what I mean. It’s different thinking about a story as an idea, and experiencing it, or reading it. Some stories seem like a slap in the face, because it’s so obvious what should happen, what would be satisfying, and the author doesn’t give it to you.”

“Sounds like a dumb story, then,” Leto said.

“I don’t know. Sometimes, people just like different things. One person may want one outcome, and two other people want something else.”

“One of them is wrong.” My son crossed his arms, supremely confident in his conclusion, and before Esmelda could continue the debate, Ogness appeared to summon us to dinner.

***

There was no reason for us to delay the journey to Atlan. I was feeding Noivern, preparing to unchain him, when a voice startled me.

“You are fond of that beast.”

I spun around and saw that Gremory had appeared in the arch of the aery. Her beauty was unsettling in more ways than one. It wasn’t just that she looked like Esmelda, there was an unnatural quality to the perfection of her appearance. She looked the way people look in movies and carefully curated photographs instead of how they are in real life. That and the fluffy ears sticking out of her hair. She’d found herself a set of white robes that had serious high-priestess vibes.

“We’re about to head out,” I said, “Do you need something?”

“Merely to know your mind.” She made a twirling motion with one of her hands, and I heard Noivern’s manacle pop open. “We share a master, but you are an unwilling servant. I know Orobas has bound you. I wonder what we could offer you to make such binding unnecessary.”

“You guys could all leave Plana,” I said, “let us live in peace.”

“That is not a gift within my power to give,” she sounded amused, her feet carrying her softly into the stone silo that housed the wyverns. Noivern trilled, happily lifting his leg free of its chain. The other beasts crouched low, silently watching the demon. “Peace, however, will be within your reach, once our work is finished.”

“I’ve been to Bedlam, it wasn’t very peaceful.”

“Plana will not become Bedlam,” she laughed, light and low, “it is a stepping stone on our master’s path to reach the center of the cluster.”

“He wants Earth?”

“No. He wants the blue goddess.”

Walter White was after Mizu? “Why?”

“To kill her. There is some history there. I will not bore you. I want you to understand that helping us does not mean the destruction of this world. The One Who Knocks wishes to enter only to cross through to the next realm, and the next.”

“That doesn’t sound much better. Mizu protects Earth, and all the worlds around it, doesn’t she? If she died, wouldn’t they all fall apart?”

“Some would,” she slipped closer to me, lifting a hand to touch my cheek. Her fingertips were inhumanly warm against my skin. “But you could become the axis around which Plana turned, a point of stability. Our master could give you that kind of power.”

I pushed her hand away. Was she saying I could become a god?

“I’m not looking for that kind of responsibility.”

Gremory skipped away, laughing again. “His victory may be a beginning for you or an end, that is your choice to make. Think on it.”

She left me with the wyverns, and a few minutes later, Noivern and I were flying up out of the shaft of the aery and into the smoke above Mount Doom. There were always harpies in the sky, and they greeted us with caws and coughs as we circled back down toward the forward gate of the fortress.

Gremory’s suggestion was more tempting than I wanted to admit. Not that I could trust anything she told me. Break the world and make a new one, what could go wrong with that? Even if Plana could be preserved, there were going to be more compromises along the way than I was willing to make. How many people would die in a war among the gods?

Esmelda, Leto, and Gastard were waiting for me on horses near the gate.

The animals had been raised in Mount Doom, so they weren’t deathly afraid of monsters, but Noivern’s arrival certainly caused them some alarm. Gastard was the quickest to master his animal, controlling it with his knees. Marie had always been a stoic. “I see your beast has recovered. I take it the potion was a success.”

“Very much so,” I said, sliding off of Noivern’s back. “Is everybody ready?”

“I am,” Leto was happy to see the wyvern again.

Esmelda was less positive. “Are you certain you won’t ride a horse?”

“I’m going to need him later,” I said. “We don’t know what we’re up against in Atlan, and I want a bird’s eye view.”

“I suppose you would,” she said.

We were going ahead of the army. Gaap was bringing Astaroth and Malphas along with a full complement of monsters from the pens, but only a small support of human soldiers and laborers. They were harder to feed on the road, and I preferred to know that I was leaving Mount Doom well-defended. Bojack and Gremory could certainly handle themselves, but there was always a possibility of another siege.

“My lord,” a soldier in gleaming white armor marched up and saluted me. “There is a man camped about half a mile out of the city. We sent a party to assess the situation, and he claims to be a traveling merchant.”

It was certainly odd, but not necessarily something that demanded a ruler’s attention.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“He says his name is Fladnag.”