Making Mount Doom safe was not going to be an afternoon job. A significant portion of the total mob reserve had gone with us on the Atlan campaign, and those that hadn’t died in battle had been banished by the sun. But Kevin’s spawns had been replenishing the pens ever since we departed, with Bojack collecting whatever appeared in the cube.

The wyverns in the aerie were chained and could be discounted in the short term. The trolls at the gate went feral shortly after Bojack’s death, and we dealt with them together. A few men had died before we arrived to take care of them. While it could have been worse, those deaths weighed on me. This was a new Dargoth, and people’s lives needed to matter.

We also lost a pair of feeders who happened to be in the pens when the demon’s influence lifted. Rather than try to clear the space, I sealed the entrance. There were hundreds of shamblers down there and scores of more serious monsters. We didn’t have a running inventory, but trolls, chimera, and vorokai would be waiting for us whenever we had the time to venture under the mountain.

They might all starve, or at least eat each other, but there were two problems with leaving the mobs to their own devices. One was that if a demon infiltrated Mount Doom, as long as they could get through my hastily erected wall, they would have a ready army within the fortress. The second, letting them die on their own was leaving a tremendous amount of experience on the table.

Getting Esmelda and Gastard to level thirty would unlock their Systems, give them ranked entity status, and go a long way to better positioning us to deal with the remaining demons. For myself, though the System notifications hadn’t stated it explicitly, I believed hitting the level cap again would increase my rank as well.

My assessment, and the rank that came with it, hadn’t come with much in the way of instant benefits. But the cap on my mining skill had been removed, or at least extended. It was currently at thirty-one. New materials had become available to me as it advanced, and though I had no idea what was left after the five meta-materials were unlocked, the System was capable of surprising me.

Grinding the mining skill, however, was very low on my to-do list.

Gastard watched me place the last stone to block off the entrance to the pens.

“Zareth believes more Endermen are wandering the halls,” he said. “I will hunt them.”

I looked to the sky. It may have been my imagination, but I thought the clouds were thinning. Red, silent lightning still flashed among the clouds, but I could tell where the sun was, and it was sinking.

“I need to light up the cube,” I said. “And I’ll have to spend the night in there, or else run outside the walls so I don’t endanger the people here.”

“Aren’t our rooms already safe?” Esmelda asked. She’d just finished having a conversation with one of Garron’s lieutenants about the new status quo, no monsters, no demons allowed, and the expectation of an attack in the near future. She’d taken off her headgear, which I wasn’t a hundred percent on board with, but the soldiers recognized her as the Lady of Dargoth, whereas most of the people on Mount Doom only knew me by my armor. It wasn’t a function of her class, she was just better at making human connections than I was.

“Yes and no,” I said. “Our rooms are safe from spawns, but there’s a chamber underneath them where mobs can still appear, and I don’t have enough torches to cover the whole space.”

“But Leto can still…” she trailed off, her eyes widening as we both realized that our son was not with us.

“You should get him,” I said. “Both of you, to be safe. I’ll manage things here.”

We hadn’t forgotten our son, not really. He might not have been on my mind for the last couple of hours, but that didn’t count as forgetting, right?

“What about the Endermen?” Gastard said.

“They aren’t as aggressive as some of the other mobs,” at least, that was how it worked in the game. “Just make sure Leto’s okay, and I’ll take care of things here until you go back.” Fetching our son was a one-man job, but Esmelda would want to go, and I would feel better about it if Gastard was with her. It would be the first night as heroes without me, and they might have to deal with spawns. Leto wasn’t in immediate danger, but he was alone, and wondering whether his parents would ever come back. If we waited too long, he was supposed to ride back to Atlan, and that was a complication we didn’t need.

Esmelda put her hand on my neck and pulled my head down to plant a quick kiss on my mouth.

“We won’t be long,” she said, “don’t break anything while we’re gone.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, wondering, not for the first time, how I had been fortunate enough to have this little woman agree to be my wife. Gastard gave me a nod, and the pair of them went to the stables to procure mounts.

I headed back to the citadel with my head down, thinking about the best way to arrange torches for maximum coverage, and came face to blade with a halberd at the entrance to the great hall.

“Declare yourself,” the soldier said. “The Dark Lord has banned demons from this hall.”

He wasn’t an officer, there was no sigil on his pauldron. Out of my armor, most of the men had no idea who I was. No wonder they had been going to Esmelda for orders. Didn’t the effect of the Sheltered achievement cause them to recognize me as their ruler? Apparently not. He thought I was a monster.

A second soldier nearly tackled the first.

“That is our Lord!” He must have seen me in the hall with Zareth. The first man fell to his knees, dropping the halberd.

“Forgive me,” he said, his voice raising an octave. “I am a fool.”

“It’s fine,” I said, moving around them both, “we’re doing a thing in the morning. Get all of this cleared up.” Prior to my arrival, Bael had run things on Mount Doom, and Kevin had hardly ever been seen out of his full panoply. I’d done little to change that, replacing Bael with Bojack, and only showing my face on a handful of occasions. It wasn’t an ideal way to run an empire. Maybe I could commission some portraits when I had time to sit down. Get the populace of Dargoth accustomed to my face.

The soldier continued to apologize but didn’t follow me into the hall. The throne room was empty. The bodies had been removed, and Zareth had gone somewhere to do vizier things, probably putting out fires I didn’t even know existed.

No one else accosted me as I returned to the cube. With no one to talk to, Kevin had returned to his favorite corner of the diamond box. We needed to post guards here, I’d been relying on Bojack to monitor him, but that could wait for another day.

Spawn-proofing the cube wasn’t difficult, just time-consuming. I had to craft a walkway along the interior, placing torches as I went. The former Dark Lord showed some interest in what I was doing, watching my progress. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Inmates had nothing to do, and they would stare at whatever was happening around them for extended periods until there was something more interesting to draw their attention.

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He wasn’t plotting his escape, necessarily.

The cube smelled like a landfill, if it was a landfill where you could drop off dead bodies. Gremory’s body wasn’t the only one down there. A few dead zombies were there as well, mushrooms sprouting from their backs. Bojack had taken control of whatever mobs appeared, but accidents happened.

The whole system had been haphazard to begin with. Why was I always solving problems with half-measures? It wasn’t a good way to run an empire. I used every torch I had, erasing shadows until there wasn’t enough darkness left for a baby kulu to spawn, and came to rest on top of the diamond cell.

There might have been an hour or so left before nightfall, I couldn’t tell, and there was no reason for me to try to nap anywhere else. Wherever I went, it was an opportunity for Discord to sink its roots a little deeper into Plana. And the only person who had any idea how to stop the process was beneath me.

“You still feel like talking?” I asked, and Kevin looked up. His blackened eye was leaking tears of blood. That had to be uncomfortable. Not more uncomfortable than the lillits had been chained to their station in his train set in Nargul, but still. Wanting to inflict suffering on those who had committed evil acts was natural, but I didn’t have the stomach for it.

It was one thing to want to hurt someone out of anger, or in direct response to something they had done, but Kevin had been sitting in this cell for a while, and I didn’t experience any pleasure in witnessing his pain. I just wished he was better than he was. I wanted him to be someone we didn’t have to punish forever.

There’s a trope in fiction I’ve never enjoyed. The hero spares the villain because killing is wrong, or whatever, even though he’s just mowed down a legion of faceless henchmen who all had families and backstories we would never know about because they weren’t important to the story.

This wasn’t that. If killing Kevin could have solved anything, I would have done it a long time ago. He would come back, and come back twisted. Maybe the toll that his pact with the big bad was taking on him would eventually cause him to stop returning, or maybe it would turn him into a gibbering monster. Either way, it would be the loss of what was a potentially important resource.

Kevin took a long time answering, looking at me through a foot of diamond.

“Sometimes, silence is the best answer.” He said.

“I don’t know what you mean by that.” Was he quoting something? When we’d fought, I’d been sure he was padding his dialogue with movie quotes. Kevin was LARPing at all times, and apparently, spending months in a cell wasn’t enough for him to break character. “I’d like to ask you some questions. Not about the runes. Personal stuff.”

“You can do what you want.” He looked down at his hands. One of them was normal, the other was stick thin and scaly. Had his fingers gotten longer? It almost looked like the arm of an Enderman.

“How old are you?”

Another long pause.

“Age is but a fleeting concept in the grand scheme of eternity.”

That was definitely a quote. I didn’t know what from, but there was no way that was how he talked. If he refused to have an actual conversation with me, we weren’t going to get anywhere.

“Listen, man,” I said, “you’re not helping yourself. There’s no one for you to sound cool for here. You asked me to let you out, and I’m the only one who has a key to your cell. Right now, I don’t think freedom is an option for you, but if that’s ever going to be on the table, you’re going to have to start with being honest with me.”

He thought about it.

“I don’t know. The scribes can tell you how long I’ve been here. They keep records. Eight hundred years or something. What does it matter?”

That was about what I’d assumed. The lillits had left Dargoth centuries ago, and Kevin’s arrival had been long before. The sheer span of that kind of time was unimaginable. It gave credence to his claim that he had saved the world, or at least staved off its demise. Wars didn’t last eight hundred years. Somebody won. Somebody lost. With Kevin as Dark Lord, Discord and Harmony had been at a stalemate on Plana for a very, very long time. It wasn’t an excuse for his actions, but it did make me extremely curious about how things had worked out the way they had.

“Humor me. How old were you when you died on Earth?”

“Sixteen.” It was almost a whisper.

God. That was messed up. Why was Mizu reincarnating kids? In one sense, the very young were the most deserving of a second chance, but the fact that giving them a second life fixed them at their given age made the whole thing deeply problematic. David’s situation was heartbreaking. Kevin wasn’t as bad, at least he’d gone through puberty. But it still called into question the character of a goddess that would throw kids into a new world with superpowers, freeze their development, and write it off as some kind of divine test.

The main characters in most anime, and a lot of fantasy, were young. The reasons for that related to marketing, but resting the weight of the world on a teenager in real life was not a good idea. I’d made some crazy decisions at that age, and giving me superpowers would not have improved the situation.

“How did you die?”

This time, his reply was immediate. “I fell into the sky.”

“What?”

“I fell into the sky.”

I put my face in the hole I’d made in the roof of his cell to make sure I was seeing and hearing him quickly. He wasn’t smiling. He sounded serious. But his statement was ridiculous.

“I’m gonna need some context,” I said.

Kevin made a helpless gesture. “There was this new game, Minecraft. It was perfect. I played it so much, my mom told me she was going to throw out my computer. She said I had to go outside. When I beat the Ender Dragon, I said, ‘Here Mom, I’m going outside, I’m going to touch grass. And I did. Then I fell into the sky.”

The “fell into the sky” phrase briefly took a backseat to the realization that Kevin had played Minecraft. That meant he hadn’t died until at least the game had been released in two thousand and eleven. I’d died in twenty-twenty-three. That was only a twelve-year difference. Eight hundred or so years had passed from Kevin’s perspective and only twelve years on Earth.

This was math I needed pen and paper to do, but it sounded like the time dilation was so severe between Earth and Plana that it had been less than a year since I disappeared. If there was no way back, the difference didn’t matter. But if there was a way back, that meant that I could spend fifty years here, or however long, and my parents would still be alive. My brothers wouldn’t be much older than I remembered them being.

Having a confirmation of the time difference relieved a stress I’d been studiously avoiding thinking about. My family. My original family. They wouldn’t have to go the rest of their lives thinking I’d run away and never contacted them, or else been murdered at a Subway, depending on how the aftermath of my death had worked out. Of course, seeing them again would involve fixing Plana as well as figuring out dimensional travel and whatever regulations or restrictions the Hierarchy placed on that sort of thing, but it was a possibility.

Could I bring Esmelda? Leto? My mom wanted grandchildren, and for a variety of reasons, my brothers had not been inclined to give them to her. I was getting ahead of myself. That was all theoretical. Kevin was right here, and he was telling me something crazy.

“Can you explain ‘falling into the sky’ to me? I’m confused.”

Kevin blew a breath out from between his lips. “What do you want? I went into the yard, and I fell up. I kept going faster and faster. And I was in the sky. Then I passed out, and I met Princess Zelda, and she told me I could be a hero.”

Oh. That was…bad? Another confirmation, certainly. Mizu had appeared to me in a form conspicuously similar to that of a goddess from an anime I had watched before my death. She had appeared to Kevin in the guise of a beloved video game character. The goddess was presenting herself in a form that her target was familiar with. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, but it did call into question the nature of the entity we were dealing with. But the lillits knew Mizu as Mizu, so there had to be some consistency in her appearance. Had she gone by a different name as well?

“Are you talking about Mizu?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s what she called herself, but she looked like Zelda to me. The other players saw other characters. She’s fake, anyway. I don’t even think she’s a girl.”

That was fair. Gender probably didn’t apply to gods. But for whatever reason, Mizu presented herself as female. Though maybe that was only the case for dudes. Had Nadia seen a god instead of a goddess when she died? That was a sidebar we didn’t need to go down.

Kevin had fallen into the sky. I had no call to doubt him. I couldn’t remember my original death, but I remembered most of my conversation with her. Was Kevin’s demise another transdimensional mixup on the part of the goddess? The cynic in me was saying that none of this was accidental. Thinking Mizu had put me on Plana to sweep a mistake under the rug was one thing, but what kind of goddess only made heroes out of mistakes?

“Tell me about the others,” I said. “Tell me about what was happening on Plana when you first came here, and why you switched sides.”

He did.