I ignored the notification ding in favor of taking in the scene before me. Down the length of the hall, armored Dargothians were kneeling to me as their Dark Lord. That had been Bojack’s plan, but thinking about taking on a role and having it appear in my lap were two entirely different things. It shouldn’t have been this easy.

My encounter with Kevin had been anticlimactic, and though Bael had proved a more formidable opponent, our skirmish had played out in a few frantic minutes. It had been sketchy, the outcome uncertain, and we’d lost a demon in the process, but I wouldn’t be shedding tears over Vepar. The journey here had been long, and the climax had come and gone almost before I had a chance to register what was happening. Now it appeared that physically occupying the Throne of Shadows was enough for the people of Mount Doon to recognize me as their master.

It felt wrong on a lot of levels. Was this really all it took to overthrow a Dark Lord?

Bojack ascended the dais to take a position beside the throne. His burns looked painful, but there was no weakness in his voice when he addressed the kneeling crowd.

“Bael betrayed his oaths, plotting to take Dargoth for his own.” The demon’s voice, rolled through the hall, as loud as if he was using a megaphone. “When his schemes were uncovered, he attacked your Lord, and now he has paid the price of treachery.”

Bojack gestured to the remains of the toad demon, a flabby, murk-green body in torn robes with a dagger in his eye. “All of you have borne witness, and the throne remains intact. Return to your posts, there is no more to be done here.”

The officer stood first, turning to address his men.

“You heard the Aychar, march.” His voice wasn’t as strong as Bojack’s, but he sounded accustomed to addressing a parade field. As the soldiers left the hall, the officer faced us again, his gaze wandering over the demon, me, and the banner still burning behind the throne. His face clouded for a moment, and then he shook his head, thumping his fist against his breastplate in a gesture of respect.

“It is my honor to serve the throne,” he said, the words almost lost to the bootsteps echoing in the hall. There was a pause that begged for a response, and I gave him a thumbs-up. I didn’t mean to, it just happened. The old soldier, whoever he was, furrowed his brow, gave a deep bow, and followed his men out.

Then it was only me and Bojack and a couple of Endermen, one of which was leaking purple fluids.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Bojack said, slumping. The fight had taken a toll on him, and with no other witnesses, he allowed his exhaustion to show. As most of his clothing had been blasted off, I could see there was no oathdagger strapped to his arm. He’d said it was hidden, which meant that if killed him now, the curse would cripple me long before I found the dagger.

Was it in Henterfell? He wouldn’t have entrusted Godwod with something that important, would he? The demon looked at me with an expression that suggested he had guessed my thoughts, his ears pinned back against his skull.

“Where is your predecessor?” He asked. “Did you kill him?”

“No,” I shook my head. “He’s trapped in a hallway below the forge.”

“Show me.”

Wearily, I levered myself out of the throne. My skin was still stinging, and the strap that held my coin pack in place was reduced to a blackened thread. It was a wonder it hadn’t fallen off. The Dargothian who had led me to the great hall was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t know if he’d taken part in the fighting and been cooked by Bael or simply left with the others. The soldiers had taken Bojack’s order seriously, not so much as stopping to collect their dead. In addition to Bael, there were several charred suits of armor below the steps.

Clean-up could wait. Bojack followed me out the side door that I’d entered from, and we walked the halls together. Many of the passages had been mined out of the mountain, with natural walls cut unnaturally smooth. The floors, however, were all crafted stone. Kevin hadn’t been particular about his material usage. The blocks were uniform within the bounds of each hall and floor; basalt, granite, andesite, varying shades of gray.

“What happens when a demon dies?” I asked, tired of hearing Bojack’s sandals slap as we walked. “How easy is it for them to respawn?”

“We do not cross the boundary of the veil as easily as the lesser entities,” Bojack said. “The more essence we possess, the more difficult it is to return. Bael will require months to reincorporate, if not years, and that is only if our master does not send him elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere? Like other worlds?”

“Other realms, yes. Plana is but one battleground among many.”

Did that have something to do with why there were so few heroes on Plana? Mizu, goddess or not, did not have unlimited power. She invested resources to give someone a new life and a System, and there was only so much of her to go around. She’d intervened to get me out of a time sink, not as quickly as I would have liked, but she had done it. The goddess couldn’t be completely derelict in her duties, as much as it seemed like she was an absentee.

“How many realms are there?”

“In this sector? Hundreds, though most of them are beyond our reach.”

At least we weren’t dealing with an infinite assortment of parallel worlds. Hundreds was a lot, but it was still finite.

“What do you mean by sector?”

Bojack snorted. “Does Harmony tell you nothing? By sector, I mean the collection of worlds under the governance of a single dominant entity. Your Mizu.”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“How many sectors are there?”

Bojack was silent for a while, and by the time we reached the forge, I assumed he didn’t intend to respond. Smoke still billowed from the cauldron suspended over the lava pit, and a minecart bounced back and forth between the furnaces and an anvil on a powered rail. There were no hoppers or other signs of automation, the cart was just caught in a loop.

“That is not something I can answer,” Bojack said as we crossed the platform. “Discord is infinite, or close enough to infinity that there is no call for distinction. The Hierarchy is vast enough to oppose it.”

It didn’t matter how big the universe was. In my original life, I’d been comfortable assuming that the cosmos went on forever and that there were probably aliens out there doing alien things, but space was big enough for their shenanigans not to influence what happened on Earth. Dying and having my soul shunted into another world had changed my mental model of reality, but the basics were unchanged. I needed to worry about what was going on around me, the reality I could touch. Everything else was theoretical.

The conflict between Discord and Harmony extended into a distance I couldn’t imagine, but my small slice of that conflict was here, on Plana. And a big part of that was hinging on a single guy, who was currently face down, butt up, in a warpstone corridor.

When Bojack saw Kevin, he laughed, the sound booming in the confined space.

A part of me had expected Kevin to be gone, his defeat an illusion. But the Dark Lord, or former Dark Lord, was exactly where I’d left him. The obsidian anchor rested against the wall, its runes glowing and dimming in a steady rhythm, almost as if it was breathing.

“Can you tell if he’s alive?” I asked.

“He is,” Bojack said, still chuckling. “His essence had not left his body yet.”

“Then what do we do?”

The demon moved past me to kneel beside the anchor, running one hand over its, dark, pulsing surface. “I will bury him, to ensure he suffocates. It will be your task to construct a prison.”

I thought about the diamond egg that Kevin had trapped me in. A build like that could not be replicated overnight. But we didn’t need to craft a diamond stadium. The demons had been griefing people for a long time, and they knew the respawn rules a lot better than I did. We could only come back on solid ground, relatively close to our point of origin.

If we put the anchor on top of a high enough pillar, we could limit his potential spawning ground to a small platform. You couldn’t break diamond by hand. That wasn’t strictly in keeping with Minecraft mechanics, but it was the reason my cage had been built the way it had. In the game, you could break a block without tools. It would be slow, and you wouldn’t be rewarded with a drop, but you could do it. Here, though, the mining skill simply didn’t function on diamond without a tool.

“I can do that,” I said. “And when he’s trapped, will you tell me where Esmelda is?”

“She is living in a forest,” Bojack said, rising, “with her son and a retainer. I have monitored her location since I discovered her, but have never had reason to interfere.”

“What?” My heart jumped into my throat. Esmelda hadn’t been captured? It was the best possible version of this scenario, but it also came with questions.

“Then why did you have her comb?”

“Heroes without personal connections to this world are less likely to return, and your resilience prompted me to question Godwod about your relationships. Esmelda was already gone when your town was sacked and the lillits were taken, but the comb was one among many items that were recovered from your home. It took me several months, and a great many kilahoro, what you call phantoms, to locate her. No one else was looking, and it suited my purposes to leave her as she was.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this revelation. On one hand, it meant that Esmelda hadn’t been subject to capture or imprisonment. Bojack lying, or at least misleading me, wasn’t a shock, but it meant that I could have found her without his help or permission. There was only one place Esmelda would have gone after things went south, the shelter I had prepared for her. My original spawn point.

“The retainer,” I said. “Is it Gastard?”

Bojack shrugged. “A man. A knight of Drom, from his appearance. I do not know his name.”

It had to be Gastard. My friend was alive. My wife, my child, they were okay. They hadn’t been subjected to torture or imprisonment. Life couldn’t have been easy for them, but they had been spared the worst of conquest.

The demon took a step closer to me. His huge, dark eyes, locked onto mine.

“You can go to them, if you choose, as soon as Kevin is secure. But there is more for you to consider.”

“Like what?” He wasn’t ordering me to stay. Maybe he knew that I would risk a curse to have my family. He needed me to play his game, and he knew he couldn’t keep dragging this out forever. Bojack wanted me to be a willing partner, and admittedly, finding out that he’d never actually harmed or threatened my family was a point in his favor, but the threat was still there. He’d left them alone because it was convenient to leave them alone, not because he harbored a compassionate heart.

“Your wife is comfortable enough, and you have been gone for ten years, a few more weeks will make little difference to you or her. But there are the other lillits to consider, those you claim to care for. Their fate has not been as kind.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Most of your wife’s people are in Nargul, chattel slaves. Kevin used them to operate his train, and that is where they will remain until you free them. Dargoth is rife with evils that you would not abide. Will you let those evils stand while you travel to reunite with her? What would Esmelda think of such a choice?”

It wasn’t a fair question. I wasn’t responsible for everything Kevin had been doing for the last ten years, or the last ten centuries. But he had a point. What would Esmelda think about me being oathbound to a demon? She was a reasonable woman. She would understand, right?

What about Boffin and Brenys? Esmelda’s father and aunt would be with the rest of the lillits. Finding out what had happened to them, and getting them out of whatever predicament they were in, took priority over my desire to see her again, didn’t it?

A part of me didn’t care. Having her with me, and meeting my son, were my only immediate priorities. Another part was afraid of what she would think about me taking Kevin’s place. As the lord of Dargoth, I could make life better for the lillits, and change the empire however I liked, up to whatever limits Bojack put in place.

I was compromised.

“Tell me exactly where she is,” I said. Bojack could still be lying. Suggesting I delay the trip did not improve my confidence that he was being transparent.

Bojack’s ears relaxed, and his eyes softened. “A stream runs from the mountains to what was once Ehriseht, the forest where she resides is south of that stream, a day’s ride from the abandoned village. I can draw you a map if you like.”

I didn’t need a map. It was my point of origin, I was sure of it. She’d been right where I’d hoped she would go, all this time.

“We secure Kevin,” I said, “and you get me information on the lillits. Then I’m going to find my family.”

“Of course,” Bojack said. “That is our agreement.”

Why did I get the feeling that it wouldn’t be that simple?