How tame was tame? Though the pens had been cleared, and the wandering monsters rooted out of the fortress, five wyverns still lived in the aery. They were chained, and I handled the feedings myself when I could, but the handlers had to be wary of them, and we weren’t sending letters by air anymore.

Esmelda had written to King Egard, Torgudai, and Boffin about the future of Dargoth, and horses were currently carrying those messages away from the mountain. I was the only person flying on the wyverns, but I didn’t want to kill them. Harpies had taken to roosting in the aery as well, and the birds were surprisingly comfortable with the larger predators, often landing and preening within reach of their jaws. They seemed to consider them honorary members of the flock.

“We must speak.” Celaeno perched on the back of a resting wyvern, the same beast I’d ridden to Nargul. They didn’t have names. I still felt bad about what had happened to Noivern, but this one was easy to recognize, with a line of green scales over his beady eyes.

“Sure,” I said, “I’m sorry I haven’t caught up with you since the battle.”

She bobbed her head, acknowledging my apology, and chirped. “Yes. The battle. There is much flesh, more than we can eat. Still, we lost too many sisters. We cannot fight for you as we did.”

“Are you saying you’re going into retirement?” That sucked, but I didn’t blame her. The flock had done more for me than I could have asked for, risking arrows and fangs alike. They got something out of it, but getting to eat phantoms every night wasn’t worth anything if they all ended up dying.

“We will remain close,” she said. “But the demons are beyond us. If they come again, we will flee.”

I’d never kept a running count of my gang, but I’d noticed fewer homies in the sky every time we had a major conflict. Their numbers had ballooned during the ten years they spent in the Free Kingdoms, and ever since my return, they had been throwing themselves into conflicts on my behalf.

“I won’t ask you to keep fighting for me,” I said, “but the flock is invaluable for scouting and communication.” For obvious reasons, we couldn’t send a scary black bird with a letter for King Egard; it would never reach its recipient, but they were perfect for passing notes within Dargoth’s borders.

Celaeno ground her beak and adjusted her footing as the wyvern shifted under her. They’d already been fed, but the beasts always watched my hands closely in case I was about to turn coins into fresh meat.

“We will watch the skies for you, carry your words, but we cannot give more until the flock has recovered.”

“I understand.”

Her eyes flashed, and her head quirked to one side as she examined me. “You have changed again. Your future is clouded.”

“Isn’t the future always cloudy?” It was hard to tell if Celaeno had psychic powers or if she was just intuitive. The harpies might have something like an aetheric sense of their own. She’d warned me about the Pebbleheart, though she hadn’t known exactly what it was, and she regularly made cryptic comments about fate. It was more ominous monologuing than actionable information.

“Yes,” she said. “But not like this. The veil is thin, and an ocean presses on the other side.”

“I’m planning on going to Bedlam soon. Do you think that’s a bad idea?”

Celaeno clacked her beak. “I cannot say. The world bends around you, but you may bend as well.”

She was right about that.

***

There was now a platform around Kevin’s cell. The absence of a path between it and the entrance to the cube had never hindered anyone but me, so I’d abandoned the practice of packing up my bridge whenever I left. Besides, it wasn’t just me visiting today.

“I don’t like it,” Kevin said, his thick mouth turning down. Some of his hair had fallen out, and what was left was an oily mess parted to the left. His blackened eye flicked between Esmelda, Gastard and me, unnervingly independent of the other.

“Those are the terms,” I said. “You can accept them, or I can move you so deep underground that we don’t have to worry about spawns and leave you there.”

Esmelda had just finished explaining his oath to him. It was stricter than what Bojack had done to me, and with Gastard’s skill behind it, the penalty would be more immediate. Kevin was forbidden from attacking the three of us or anyone who wasn’t a demon or a mob, even in self-defense. Anything I told him to do would be treated as an order that could not be disobeyed. We had to be careful about the wording. Oaths could be violated with thought crime, and that would have worked to his advantage because of the nature of the curse.

The paralysis needed to only be triggered by action, not feelings or intent. Otherwise, he could decide to push me off a cliff, freeze for however long the curse froze him, and then do it during the cooldown period.

We were speaking through a gap in a foot-thick diamond wall, so his body looked a little distorted, but I saw his claw clench beside his waist. “I don’t want to go to Bedlam,” he said.

“That’s what I need you for.” If he didn’t want to go, that was a good thing, unless this was an act intended to make me think he didn’t already have a plan for how he was going to betray me on the other side. “You’ll be teaching me Inscription as well, but how you behave in Bedlam is going to decide how many privileges I can afford to give you when we get back.”

“Privileges?” he scoffed. “I should be free.”

“You should be dead,” Gastard said flatly. “That you live at all is a privilege you do not deserve.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Kevin shot him a murderous look, but kept his tongue. What an achievement.

“This isn’t a negotiation,” Esmelda said. Considering everything Kevin had done, it was impressive how calm she sounded. There was no anger in her voice. She could have been explaining a lesson to a child. “We will fight this war without you if you do not agree. If you are unwilling to do as we ask, that is the end of this discussion.”

Kevin ignored her, choosing to address me instead. “You’ve gotten worse. If I don’t help you now, you’ll be like Kael the next time I see you.”

He might have been right. I hadn’t been fantasizing about eating people, but I could feel something going wrong in my mental state. My mind kept drifting to a conversation I’d had with Gremory. She’d told me that after the One Who Knocks passed through Plana, I could become something very close to a god. The prospect was becoming more and more tempting. What did mortals matter if I had the power to shape the world into anything I wanted? Esmelda would be safe. Maybe I would be strong enough to make Leto a hero too. My family could live forever. We could rule freely, untroubled by demons.

That my internal dialogue had ever included the word “mortals” referring to regular people was a massive red flag.

“You wouldn’t see me,” I said. “Even if I did decide to give Plana to the demons, that wouldn’t make us buddies. The One Who Knocks wouldn’t need you any more than I did. You’d starve to death, maybe a few times, and then give up. Whatever happened to your soul after that, why would I care?”

Kevin took his time in replying. He knew how precarious his position was.

“There might be some atreanum,” he said. “You never know with Bedlam. It changes too much, and I haven’t been there in forever. The island was way off from my base, and it could have moved too far for us to ever find it.”

“We won’t know that until we look.”

“You’re still a noob,” he raised his voice, “we won’t make it! You should just let me teach you runes.”

“You will teach me,” I said. “But we are going to start in Bedlam. We’re going to spend some time together over there before I’m willing to even give you a chance to cause problems for me here.”

No matter what happened in Bedlam, I had no intention of giving him his freedom. He couldn’t be trusted out of my sight. Kevin had to know that. Still, we weren’t going to put any other options on the table for him. Maybe he was deluded enough to believe I really would let him go when we got back, that he would charm us all into complacency. Even if he wasn’t, live burial was not an idle threat. His window of opportunity ended right here.

I could hear him grinding his teeth. That eye kept moving like it was looking for a way out, but the cell was as solid as it had ever been.

“Fine, let’s get this over with.”

Gastard demanded that Kevin kneel, which he did with grumbling and dark looks, before putting his hand through the window and placing it atop the former Dark Lord’s head.

“Under the light of Gotte, give your oath to William.”

Esmelda fed Kevin the words, and we all listened carefully as he repeated them. The sigil on the back of Gastard’s hand glowed white, then tinged with red. When the oath finished, the light vanished, and he got a notification ding. He stepped away from the wall so I could break it down and we could give the oath a test.

“I want my armor,” Kevin said as the diamonds disappeared under the swings of Durin’s Digger. “And that’s my pick. Give it back.”

When there was nothing between us, I pushed him. He stumbled back, snarled, and threw out his hands to grab the tool in mine. Kevin froze, muscles straining, his face still twisted in anger.

“One steam engine,” I said, “Two steam engines…”

His paralysis lasted twenty seconds, at which point he dropped his hands and pouted.

“You did that on purpose,” he said sullenly. “You could have told me.”

“Wouldn’t have been authentic.” Twenty seconds wasn’t a long time, but it would be more than enough to take him out if he suddenly decided to push me into a lava pit. The question was what kind of grace period he had between punishments.

“Walk in a clockwise circle,” I said.

“I’m not your toy,” he folded his arms over his chest. “Give me my armor and we can go already.”

“Not yet. Walk in a clockwise circle.” He tried to move past me, and I pushed him back in the cell. I wasn’t being rough with him, but I wouldn’t let him out, either, and I kept repeating the command. Soon he had frozen again, this time in mid-step.

“Two minutes,” Esmelda said, “or close to it.”

Gastard was looking at his status screen. “The Oath cost me, but its enforcement does not. I feel it when he resists, a weight upon my spirit, but that is not reflected here.”

“Satisfied?” Kevin came free of the paralysis. Twenty seconds exactly. “I told you it would work. You don’t have to be a dick about it.”

“Had to make sure,” I said, pointing to an open section of the platform and summoning a chest from the Storage Ring. “Your stuff is in there.”

Kevin brushed past me to flip open the lid of the chest, then stared at its contents for a long moment.

“This is bull—”

***

Not long after, we had gathered in the cathedral-like structure dedicated to the portal. Kevin, Gastard and I were standing on the dais before the Stargate along with every wyvern from the aery. They weren’t chained, but I’d led them through the fortress like a pack of giant, winged dogs, and they hadn’t caused any trouble. I still wasn’t ready to give them proper names, but I could easily tell them apart, and was thinking of them as Alpha through Epsilon. They had harnesses and packs, though most of the resources we were taking with us were in my inventory. Keeping a chest full of coins in extra-dimensional space wasn’t convenient for retrieval, but I was tired of having my potion smashed when I carried them around in a backpack.

Esmelda, Leto, and Zareth were standing below the dais to see us off. We’d already said our goodbyes. Nothing too dramatic or full of promises. This wasn’t a time to be dropping flags.

“Go ahead,” I told Kevin, “activate it.”

The former Dark Lord glared at me, his face hidden by a Halloween mask. He was dressed in a complete set of zombie leathers, with unenchanted iron tools strapped to his back and not a single blade to his name. Oath or no oath, I would rather have him stay out of combat than provide him with the equipment that would make him a threat. He’d never been very good at sword fighting anyway.

I held out Caliburn for him to prick his finger on its point. He let a droplet fall onto the base of the obsidian arch and the air ripped open, replaced by the alien snow roiling between the realms. It didn’t smell like eggs this time. The scent of freshly baked gingerbread cookies wafted from the silently screaming maw of chaos, making me wonder what exactly in the space between worlds smelled like that. Probably nothing delicious.

Turning toward Esmelda and Leto, I gave them a stiff salute. She smiled at me and shook her head. Leto waved, barely paying attention to me as the portal drew his gaze.

“What are you doing?” Kevin demanded as I took his hand in mine.

“Just wanted to make sure we went through together,” I said. “It's a bumpy ride.”

The wyverns didn’t hesitate to hop through when I commanded them to. For them, it was going home. One bulky body disappeared after another, and then it was our turn.