“What the frack is this?” Kevin lowered his shield a fraction.
“We’re good,” I said, half-turning. “Get out from behind me, you’re creeping me out.”
Things may have gone this far without betraying me, but that didn’t mean I felt comfortable having him at my back. He obeyed without needing to have the curse freeze him first, stepping around to my side so we could both look up at the blue-green phoenix that rested atop the granite pen. A wyvern hissed within the stalls, and I heard the others scratching their claws against the walls, impatient to be free.
“Fascinating,” Astaroth said. “There’s two of you.”
“Who is this?” Kevin said again. “How do you know something in Bedlam?”
“You don’t recognize me?” The phoenix spread its wings, their feathers several shades darker than its crown, and flames crossed them like a band of light moving over still waters. “I am Astaroth, Twenty-Ninth Harbinger of the One Who Knocks. Or I was. I suppose that seat will be given to another now.”
“You were one of mine?” Kevin said, his expression hidden by a steel visor.
“I was, and then his,” Astaroth bobbed his beak to me. “Though I was banished from Plana, I consider us allies still in the greater game.”
“The shamans disintegrated you,” I said. “I thought you wouldn’t be able to come back for a long time.”
“They wounded me sorely. I am not strong enough to cross the veil into that world, or any world, for now. But this is my natural plane.”
“Allies?” Kevin directed the question to me. “What is it talking about?”
“We had an agreement,” I said, “outside of the normal demon stuff. He helped me deal with the others when I broke my oath to Orobas.”
“That’s crazy. It betrayed Towk? It should have gotten ripped apart as soon as he got to Bedlam.”
“That’s a good point,” I admitted, addressing Astaroth. “Weren’t there consequences for you switching sides?”
“My essence is my own,” the phoenix’s eyes flared gold, then dimmed. “My only injury since returning to this realm has been to my pride, in learning that I am not significant enough to punish.”
Was that true? It was impossible to read dishonesty in the face of a phoenix, but a betrayal from Astaroth at this point would feel too convoluted. Unless, of course, the One Who Knocks had taken him back into the fold under the condition that he lure me somewhere uncomfortable whenever I appeared in this plane.
“Where is he? The One Who Knocks. If you sensed me, wouldn’t he? Am I about to get ganked by a demigod?” The last time I’d been in Bedlam, I hadn’t been accosted by any demons, let alone the entity they served. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a risk, and the fact that Astaroth had flown to meet me suggested he wasn’t the only one who could find us here.
“Ganked,” Kevin’s laugh ended in a snort. “That sounds right. I’m going to get my throne back sooner than I thought.”
“He resides in a realm of his own making,” Astaroth said, “not Bedlam. Bedlam does not belong to him, though he uses it as a staging ground.”
“That didn’t answer my main question. How did you find me? Are there other demons coming?”
“My oath to you is gone. I assume you have broken the blade we swore upon. But I attached a thread of my essence to you in that other world, and the thread, though frayed, remains. I followed it as soon as I realized you were here.”
“You did what?” I hadn’t felt him doing anything like that, and my awareness of him wasn’t any clearer than it would have been of any other entity we came across. Though I was glad that Astaroth was okay and still willing to help, I didn’t enjoy the thought of him performing weird demon magic on me without my knowledge or permission. That was definitely crossing a line. “You should have said something, at least asked me first.”
“There was no ill intent to my actions,” Astaroth said. “If there had been, the oath would have punished me for it. I will be more forthright in the future.”
“It’s lying,” Kevin said. “You can’t trust them.”
“I have more reason to trust him than you,” I replied, and I could have sworn I heard him grinding his teeth under his helm. “How do I know the other demons didn’t do the same thing?”
“Some did,” Astaroth clucked, “and I severed the links after Malphas and the others were slain.”
“Well, thanks. But again, that’s something you could have told me about.” If demons could put tracers on me I had no way of sensing or dealing with on my own, that was a serious tactical disadvantage.
“I suppose.” He didn’t sound apologetic, but it wasn’t like the expressions of a flaming bird were easy to read, and if he was telling the truth, he’d acted for my benefit.
“Bereth knew I’d switched sides. Was that because his link got cut?” The tiger had said he’d felt it as soon as the other demons began to die, but this would be a simple explanation for his lack of surprise in learning that I was the one killing them.
“I cannot say.” Astaroth shifted on his perch. The talons on his feet clicked against the stone. They looked like sharpened topaz. “As to my brethren, they are not coming here. But your entrance into this realm did not go unnoticed. I came to warn you that they are gathering around your portal.”
“How many?”
The phoenix lifted its head, gazing into the void of floating islands as if he could see the way we had come. “Bael, Beleth, and Vepar.”
“Three dead demons,” I said. Of course they would be here, and they had each had longer to reconstitute than Astaroth, especially Beleth. I’d killed the cat over a decade ago in Plana time. “Wait, Vepar was the squishy one with the tentacles, right? Shouldn’t he and Bael be against each other? He helped me and Bojack overthrow him.”
“My brethren are often at odds, but given the events that followed, Bael was likely willing to overlook the quarrel.”
Three demons, and even if they were still recovering, it was safe to assume they would be much tougher opponents in their natural environment than they had been on Plana. “Do they have the same affinities as before? Or are things different here?”
“Bedlam is easier to shape than a more stable realm, but their affinities remain.”
So we would be dealing with fire, water, and air. If Bojack showed up, that would complete the set of traditional elements. Hopefully, three wouldn’t be enough for them to go all Avatar on us. Now that we knew they were there, this was a fight we could be prepared for. And for once, I had more atreanum than I needed.
“Are you going to help us?”
He nodded.
“Screw that,” Kevin threw up his hands. “I’m not going back there if demons are waiting for us. We can just use another portal.”
I stared at him. Under the circumstances, I had fully expected him to use this as an opportunity to get me out of the way and resume his place as Dark Lord of Dargoth. That was the obvious play. The Kevin I thought I knew would have pretended to be on board until the opportunity came for him to side with the demons. The curse would cause him some trouble, but even if I ordered him to help, I couldn’t force him to be an effective battle companion. It would have been necessary to incapacitate him before the fighting started. If we could get to another portal, it would keep us from having to deal with the demons. Even if we appeared on Plana far from Mount Doom, that was still the safer option.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Kevin,” I said, raising my visor. “Not that I’m complaining, but why aren’t you trying to use this to your advantage?”
He went quiet and stayed that way for an uncomfortably long time. Astaroth looked between us, a curious light gleaming in his already brilliant eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I guess they would be on my side, wouldn’t they? I was the Dark Lord for a long time, and it wasn’t always great. I might—I don’t know. There could have been things that I might have done differently. It’s been so long since there was anyone else like me…” He trailed off.
“Are you trying to say that you regret being an evil bastard for so long?”
“I saved the world,” he said, stiffening. “But it might be better to do that without so many demons around. Like, this hasn’t been so bad. Fighting monsters, I remember it being scarier, harder. Plus, Towk, he’s not really as cool as I thought he would be. He talked to me the last time I died. It was…he was…not cool.”
“You spoke to the One Who Knocks?” Astaroth asked. “Directly?”
“Something.” Kevin made a move like he was going to scratch his head, but there was a helmet in the way, so he let his arm drop. “Something has my soul. He kept saying how I’d disappointed him. That I was running out of time. I don’t want to go wherever his souls go. If I help you, if I help Plana, do you think Mizu would take me back?”
“I honestly have no idea how any of this works,” I said, looking up at Astaroth. “What about you?”
It seemed obvious to me that Kevin wouldn’t find much in the way of forgiveness from the people he had harmed, but Mizu was another story. My impression of the goddess and the Hierarchy was that they let heroes grow up free-range, and the ones who joined the dark side were eventually destroyed by the consequences of their own choices or became tools of Discord. The heroes who did well advanced to become realm guardians or whatever.
Would they categorically reject someone who’d already failed the morality test? Probably, but I didn’t really know.
“You don’t have to depend on gods and devils,” Astaroth said. “If you grow strong enough, your essence can be your own. An entity that learns to retain its consciousness after the death of its body has more freedom to evade the shackles of the gods.”
“You mean we’ve got to level up?” Not that I had a particular beef with the Hierarchy of Harmony. There was plenty to complain about, but I didn’t feel at risk of having them tear up my soul the next time I died. Still, being an independent operator was far preferable to having your immortality in the hands of beings you didn’t completely trust or understand. “Then what, we get to fly around as spirits and pick our own point of re-entry?”
“Advancing to the next rank would make the transition easier, but it is not the only path. By the standards of the Hierarchy, your rank and mine are the same. But you were born as a mortal in a highly fixed realm, whereas I have always been much as I am now. My essence is more flexible than yours. Developing your Presence, and your awareness of it, would be the first step toward becoming truly free.”
“Eeeeh.” Kevin imitated the sound of a game show buzzer in the most annoying way possible. “No way. You already said the only reason you’re around is because you're not important enough for Towk to bother with you. So you’re not free either, right?”
“Freer than you,” Astaroth ruffed his feathers. “If I needed a god to remember myself, then I would be in his clutches now.”
“So there is a way for you to be out of the hands of the One Who Knocks,” I said to Kevin, “if you’re being real about wanting that. But it’s not something that’s going to happen today. Do you know how to get to another portal from here?”
“Oh, not really. Jason broke most of his, and my other one got eaten by a leviathan.” He sighed. “I lost so much stuff.”
“Come again with the leviathan thing?” He was focusing on the wrong details.
“A greater entity,” Astaroth said, peering at Kevin, who was scuffing over some loose shreds of fungus with his boot. “We are beneath their notice, though if enough resources were gathered in one place to interest one of them—”
“So much stuff!” Kevin threw out his hands. “It ate the whole island, and I barely got through the portal in time. That was the last straw for Bedlam for me.”
“This whole time,” I said slowly, “there have been space whales floating around Bedlam big enough to eat entire islands, and nobody ever mentioned it?”
“What do you think dies to make meta-materials?” Kevin said. “Duh.”
“Alright, we’re getting off track. You suggested we go to another portal, but you don’t know where another portal is.” Jason’s base still existed, but I had no way to find that place either on this side of the veil.
“So what? Just make a compass.”
“I told you I don’t have any sanguinum.”
“We can find some in a desert biome. You’ve got Durin’s Digger. It will work. Or we just make a new portal on this side. How much obsidian did you bring?”
“Some.” It wasn’t a material I used often, but I knew there was a bit tucked away in my chest. Crafted obsidian was far more durable than it had any right to be, harder than most stone blocks. “What’s the minimum viable size for a portal?”
“Thirty blocks,” he said instantly, “and it takes XP to start it up the first time.”
I cast my gaze over the mushroom jungle, a red and brown sea enveloped in a cloud of spores. It wasn’t a place I would want to visit often, but planting a portal right next to where I’d entombed Gastard felt kind of right. “Any idea where we are relative to Plana and Dargoth?”
“How should I know?” Kevin said, annoyed. “Am I supposed to have all the ideas?”
“I’d still rather have a compass then—several compasses—in case we pop out somewhere unfamiliar. Would that island with all the Endermen count as a desert? You think there’s sanguinum there?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Pretty sure. It’s Bedlam. We could get swallowed by a leviathan before we get anywhere.”
“I sense none,” Astaroth said. “And I will inform you if the void stirs.”
“Great.” The last thing I needed to be worrying about now was having a Pinochio arc in the belly of a space whale. “We fly to the Endermen island, do some digging, and either build our own portal or get lucky and find out there’s a lost one floating nearby. First, though, I’m going to need a lot more buckets.”
To that, Astaroth and Kevin had the same response.
“Buckets?”
There was plenty of iron, even if I had wanted to craft an entire stack of fresh buckets. Kevin had emphasized their importance before for the potential of clearing out a lava pit and collecting an elemental core, but that wasn’t the project I had in mind at the moment. On the way to the swamp, we’d passed by an island that wasn’t really an island at all, just a liquid Mobius strip that somehow held itself together like a river that had been picked up and tied into a ribbon.
That was another weird thing about Bedlam. Though the islands floated in space, there was a universal down, gravity where there should have been none. After I’d finished with the crafting table and we were on our way, I asked Astaroth about it.
“The pull of the void,” he said, and that was enough for me. Things didn’t have to make sense here. They just had to be appropriately spooky. Kevin pestered me about the buckets, and I gave in.
“You said we can get water source blocks from the river island, right? What do I have to do, scoop anywhere, or swim down?”
His wyvern, Gamma, was a wingbeat behind Epsilon, while Delta followed close behind. Astaroth’s speed appeared to be disconnected from the actual motion of his wings. The demon was flying literal circles around us, with shimmers of heat trailing behind his tail feathers, as the water world came into view.
It wasn’t as big as an ocean, I thought, though maybe a great lake. Only a few miles from top to bottom of the figure eight, and half as wide. Not a world unto itself, exactly, but more than enough to play home to a host of phantoms like I’d never seen, and I had seen a lot of phantoms.
Water and air, they seemed equally adept in either environment, rising and falling in flocks. Their wide wing flaps would have darkened the sun if there was one to darken, and we weren’t above them. The water itself was glowing, some kind of bioluminescent plankton, which the phantoms were hunting.
Avoiding the flocks, I rode Epsilon down to the current, stretching precariously to swipe a bucket at the water over the wyvern's broad head. A small chunk of the river vanished, leaving behind an indentation as if it had been ice cream attacked with a spoon. It restored itself almost instantly, but my bucket was full, so I converted it into a medallion and summoned the next from the Storage Ring.
This was going well enough until a wall of phantoms rose from the water twenty paces behind us. Not that I was afraid of phantoms, but there were enough of them to smother me to death if it came down to it. Hundreds of floating mantas, a cloud of wings and spiked tails.
Astaroth zipped by, diverting the flock with a series of fireballs. The chained explosions were a welcome relief from the white noise of the continually rushing current itself, as well as the susurrus of countless phantoms. I got a few more buckets filled, Epsilon skimming along the surface of the Mobius strip, before Kevin called out a warning.
“Big thing!” He shouted. “Big bad thing!”
It was a shadow in the water beneath me, growing as it rose.