- [Pilot] -

Legions.

Legions of men and women have come to this world to bring about a new era of peace, marching, trampling, and climbing over the scores of endless dead who litter the battlefields. But to what end? To what end does a man rise with the sun, grab his rifle with empty eyes, and continue on over the bodies of those who had walked the same road, those who had died yesterday, a year ago, and those who will die today, of which he himself might be one? When the man looks down the barrel of his rifle, aiming it with a steady hand toward the heart of his dark enemy, what could he possibly see in that second before he pulls the trigger that makes all of this worth it? The war that never ends is called such because it is carried within a person. Even when the smoke leaves the rifle, when the body falls to the ground, and when the horizon is marched toward and claimed, the war persists, because it always has and always will. Even when the last enemy is defeated and taken by the soil, and even when the greatest powers to be declare that peace has come to the world, the man in black boots and those who sit around him alone all know that this is but a lie.

Peace can never really come to the world, because while it may wash over the others, while it may fill houses and hearths with warmth and radiance — those who have been marked by the war that never ends and claimed as its children will never know peace. On quiet days, when birds sing, their eyes will watch the forests for movement. In beautiful summers, they will think of those dead brothers and sisters who have become part of the ground that is now built on without love or memorial, more than a wayward statue here and there.

So, again, what does a man see down the barrel of his rifle when it is aimed at the enemy?

His weapon acts as a guiding compass arrow, pointing him in the direction he needs to go. The enemy is not the focus; the war itself is not the focus — not the one in his heart. The object of desire, the thing that makes it all worth it, the promise that is whispered to the man with black boots, is what his rifle’s direction points towards. He sees the silhouette created by the rising sun behind his enemy and the god rays that streak alongside the edges of the other body; he sees the promise of a sunrise on the distant horizon, a sunrise to which he too may belong. But it is an illusion.

The bullet flies.

The body falls.

And the man with the black boots is left there, standing alone, having no choice but to march further until he finds the next fata morgana that promises to be the solution to what he’s trying to find.

— A sunrise, a new start, a way to close the cursed door he had opened.

Be it the whispering thoughts of love, of family, of new beginnings and new hope, of a cherished life more clean and pure than the one that he has lived now until this day and for the brief fraction of a second as the rifle cracks out thunder and the echo reverberates across the world from his hands like the scream of a dying man, he believes it to be true, to be possible. He believes that this strike of a gunshot that deafens his senses is one and the same noise as him finally breaking through that locked door that had shut itself closed behind him.

But the man is a fool, and he knows it.

Because the cursed door that opens when one assumes the role of a man in black boots, when one becomes a soldiers of the war that never ends… well, it never closes. Once it has been opened, once a person steps inside, once they grab the rifle and fire, the ritual has been completed, the pact has been sealed, and a soul has been claimed in a way that none could ever really understand if they haven’t undergone it themselves. It’s an esoteric bind between a man and himself, not with any devil, spirit or god. No, a man in black boots has made a devil's bargain with himself for the price of his own soul, which becomes locked deep within the confines of his body in a place where he might always sense its presence, but is never able to touch it again as he had done so in younger innocent days of his unclaimed life.

He knows it.

His body knows it.

The others who are cursed to the same fate as him know it when they march side by side.

For you and for those like you, the war never ends. It never can, and it never will. No matter who dies or who is killed. It doesn’t matter what you build, what you do, who you try to become, because the deal was made, and this is the price to be paid, and there are no refunds.

— Pilot starts the engine of the Kestrel, a familiar roar filling his ears and surging through his body like the pumping of lifeblood in a sprint.

But it doesn’t matter, does it? A man with black boots is already dead. He might try to prove otherwise, but his body and spirit already belong to something else and they have done so for a long time.

But for those other people who are not like him, those who have not committed their souls to the war that never ends, they can be saved. The rest of the world, the people who aren’t like him — like them — they can be saved from a damnation they might never understand the depths of.

The Kestrel lurches forward.

Pilot looks out of the window toward Caretaker, who is restraining Luisa in half a choke-hold, trying to stop her from running after him. The two of them have done their part for the war, but they’re still on the safe side of it. They are marked, but not yet claimed, like he is.

The two of them meet eyes, knowing that today is a day of finality, one way or another.

The world tree is dying, even if they defeat Tango, there is the matter of the fact that the magic that binds him to this world, this reality, is fading. He was taken from his old world and brought to this one by the world tree, but without it, he might well be sent back or somewhere else entirely. Nobody can really say for sure. But if they win and defeat Tango Prime, at least the others will be safe.

His fate as a man with black boots has always been damnation from the very start. But he can save the others.

They can.

His eyes turn forward, looking out of the cockpit and up toward the sky as the barge rocks in the black ocean. The Chaplain has pushed its way through the open seas around the spirit world toward the central enemy. There it is. A storm rages high in the sky, and nested within it like a splinter jutting out of a mold-covered wound is a structure. A tower. A massive, black, dripping needle hangs down from the sky toward the ocean and secretes poison endlessly.

He doesn’t know much about the mythology of the world or what this all is, but he knows it’s what needs to be destroyed. The scholars and the church call it ‘the tower of Isaiah’. His people call it Tango Prime.

It is a corrupted monument built by the usurper god Isaiah of a bygone era, who had laid claim to the spirit world and slain the other gods — as the story goes. But that god has fallen and his power taken over by a rival entity, a powerful witch from that forgotten time, who carried a bitter grudge against him to the point where, even now, countless generations later, the war between Isaiah and the witch has destroyed the world — the physical world — by proxy. The war against the world tree, against humanity, is just another piece of the witch’s revenge.

This war was never really even his to fight. But he had to. Because that’s what people like him do, the claimed.

“Vanguard two, ready,” comes a voice over the radio, the squadron of planes behind him starting to idle across the barge’s runway into position.

“This is Vanguard three; we’re good to go,” adds a new voice as more planes begin to move into position. “Waiting on you, Blackbird.”

“All units, this is Garuda,” comes the voice over the radio. “We are entering the engagement zone. I repeat, we are entering the engagement zone. Proceed.”

Pilot presses the throttle forward, the Kestrel screams into motion, dozens of other planes behind him launching off in his shadow as a full swarm that rises up toward the storm like bullets shot toward the enemy’s heart.

Planes rise up toward the sky as dozens of smaller attack boats diverge in all directions. Off on the distant shoreline, claimed by ground and armored assaults, howitzers and rocket arrays begin to align themselves. Everything and everyone is here. The spirit world has been captured from shore to shore. The last nests were destroyed, the last obelisks were crushed, and the last ghosts were vaporized. All that’s left is this, and then it’s all over.

Rain and wind streak against the glass as the squadrons rise up toward the storm.

“It really is huge,” says a flummoxed voice over the local radio, coming from one of the other planes. “How the hell are we supposed to destroy that?” asks the man, as the planes align themselves and fly toward the suspended, dripping tower that is well beyond the scale and scope of any human or mortal construction.

“Command’s got that figured out,” replies a voice on the radio. “Focus on the objective.”

“Just wondering if we have enough bombs is all,” replies the first man, as they line up.

Pilot checks his cluster, reading the Kestrel’s gauges to see what the plane has to say to him. The unusual magnetism and energies of the spirit world, together with the storm, play havoc with many of the systems. Even his altimeter is useless, as the value almost seems to invert the closer he gets to the tower, as if it were reading the upside down structure as being base sea-level, rather than the actual ocean below them. Everything seems to be in order, however, even given the oddity of the situation.

His eyes rise back toward the canopy, staring out at the intensifying storm as they fly toward the tower. In the mirror, he can see the fleet below them, moving into position.

Something seems off. The Kestrel’s sensors aren’t showing him much, but some tingling in his gut tells him that something isn’t what it ought to be here.

“Blackbird. Status?” asks a voice over the radio, coming from command. “Any eyes on Tango Actual?”

Pilot, holding the receiver in one hand, eyes the honeycomb pattern sky around them. “Nothing to report,” he replies. The planes draw closer to the tower.

There aren’t any demons, ghosts, or dragons. There’s no enemy, no resistance.

There’s nothing in the air except them and the rain. The ocean below seems almost placid and calm, despite the storm above them that never wanes or moves. There’s no gunfire, no explosions, no magic — nothing except the spearhead he leads, which finds no flesh to press into.

It’s just the dripping tower and them.

But then the radio starts to crackle. It sounds like the rain at first, being picked up by an overly sensitive receiver. But then the hissing static begins to merge together into a single, consistent noise that sounds oddly wet. It’s a voice, one that he’s heard only ever once before, after the crash near the elder vampire Runibella’s lair, who is back at home, making undead workers for their forces. It is the voice of the true enemy, Tango Prime.

His plane rocks, wobbling as a gale shoots across the spirit world, the wind threatening to throw him and the others off course. Pilot holds the stick, pulling the left wing back down against the pressure from the side. “Hate you,” is the first thing the bubbling voice says, sloshing and throbbing in its words, spoken with raw, deep conviction. “For ten thousand years, I’ve hated you,” says the enemy. The planes fight against the wind, which begins to grow in intensity. The radio begins to muffle. He thinks its the signal, but then, looking down, he notices the drip starting to leak from the electronics. Black sludge drips out from the radio, drop by drop, hissing as it strikes the metal floor of the kestrel between his boots. “I’ll always hate you. It doesn’t matter where you go or what you do,” promises the voice. Pilot looks through the canopy, watching as the sky begins to surge, pulsating in and out like a swollen, festering pustule that is ready to burst. Throughout the clouds, the honeycomb pattern bulges in and out, as if there were worms trying to burrow out through the skin of God. “It doesn’t matter what form you take, what body you choose, what you build, or what world you do it in; I will always find you; I will always break it all and make you watch me destroy what you love like you did to me,” threatens the enemy, a black sludge continuing to ooze out of the radio. “I’ve taken everything from you, broken it all — your world, your creation. This little resistance of yours is nothing; just like last time, I will shatter everything you are, except this time you won’t be able to hide again!” it screams, bubbles popping and forming in the radio that begin to spark down at his chest. “— BLACKBIRD!”

With one hand, Pilot gestures through the canopy glass, the vanguard wings diverting off into separate clockwise directions around the base of the tower as he picks up the receiver with the other hand.

“I actually don’t even know who you are,” replies Pilot dryly, his thumb holding down the button on the dripping radio. “And I don’t really care,” says the man, changing the world in a fraction of a second with his words as he hooks the receiver back into the wet radio. “To me, you’re just Tango.”

The sky, the tower, the ocean — everything surges as a howl that never stops forms at the base of the leviathanic monument. The bubbling structure quakes in the echo of the scream that comes not from any radio or transmitter but from everywhere around them all at once, throwing black sludge in all directions that crashes down into the ocean, creating massive waves that rush in all directions. The honeycomb sky ruptures, the web-like pattern in it ripping apart violently as the pressure behind it rips free, falling together with the rain. Demons, monsters, things — thousands of them pour out by the second in all directions, directly into barrages of anti-air gattling guns illuminating the sky from down below with orange shines so bright that one might think they were intent on creating new stars above. Pilot yanks the Kestrel to the side, the wings turning in a sharp tilt instantly as he spins, navigating through screaming, shredded pieces of corpses that rain down like hail toward the distant ocean below. His finger pulls down on the trigger, the wing-mounted machine-gun array opening fire and clearing a trajectory for him to arc through.

The ocean surges, silhouettes and shapes swirling and swimming below the blackwater, crashing out as masses fully indistinct from the waves of the suddenly violent sea — apart from the screaming faces and maws of beasts that have no coherent shape and even less of one as they begin to be blasted apart by depth charges, torpedoes, and local cannon fire from the Breathless Chaplain and its escorts.

The Kestrel fights against him, its belly crashing against the windstorm as he pulls through a tight flight vector. Pilot’s eyes rise up toward the tower he is flying around, its massive opening archways bubbling as within it nests a black sludge so thick and mucousal that it can’t even seem to drip by the hand of gravity, which he himself defies as well. Black, hollow eyes begin to press themselves out of the tower, pulled by hands that are indistinctly shaped and then followed by a mass that should perhaps be a body, but in reality is nothing more than a mess of sludge and screaming harrows, made up of tens of thousands of drowned faces that never stop screaming. It is the same monster he had encountered but once before, but only escaped by the grace of fortune. It is a thing that drips, a thing that knows nothing but hate and poison and is made up of nothing more or less than such.

The leviathan oozes out of the tower, a rot, a parasite, pressing itself free from its dead host, and all around it swarm one million demons, ghouls, monsters, and wretches.

It is Tango Prime.

Pilot’s arches the plane up, increasing the throttle just in time as a massive hand swipes out, trying to smash him out of the sky. Explosions fill the air, the other wings coming back around the tower, focusing on clearing the path for him as he spirals upward, one massive, black, sludge-comprised hand after the other slamming closed just behind below him as a dozen more form every second from the shapeless monster that is trying to crush him.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

— Something blocks his vision.

A missile flies out from under his window, violently exploding as it collides with the black wall that had formed in his path. The kestrel spins, streaking toward the sky with red trailing along the edges of its wings as he shoots through the fireball and the opening, carrying a wisp of flame with him toward the clouds.

He’s approaching the base foundation that the tower is mounted on, a solid floating landmass. Watching in the mirror, he sees the shape of the thing — the creature — chasing after him as it climbs over itself in its pursuit. Explosions pepper into its side as long-range artillery from the shore begins to arrive, colliding both into the tower and into Tango. Fire and ooze fly in all directions, pieces of it crusting over where the super-heated explosions harden it for a second. However, the ‘wounds’, if they can be called such, immediately refill with wet, thick blackwater sludge as the dripping, shapeless mass continues to climb and grow.

A hand reaches out, lunging after him, its open palm filled with the endlessly screaming faces of drowned souls from a forgotten time.

Pulling the stick back, the Kestrel begins to loop, making a sharp turn as he flies directly upside down along the ground of the overturned floating island, his eyes locked forward as he flies straight into a massive, open archway on the side of the tower, large enough for an army host to march through all together in open formation at once.

The sky, the ocean, and the world vanish as the fighter plane flies into the structure itself, not slowing down by as much as a single kilometer per hour as everything behind floods. Pilot holds the Kestrel steady, stone columns and monuments rushing past him on all sides as he soars through a hall, the white marble stone coming within inches of his wings on either side as he flies straight through the inside of the tower. Behind him, it all crumbles and crashes as the power of the rot surges after him.

The tower rumbles, shaking and rattling as he unlatches his unguided munitions. One after the other, deep, quaking explosions vibrate his plane as his mirror is filled with nothing but orange and black.

His hand grabs a lever on the side of the dashboard, the Kestrel’s rear bomb bay opening as a single, long, metal cylinder glints in his exposed underbelly, reflecting against the stonework.

The opening on the other side of the tower is ahead of him. The lightning flashes and the high-explosive shine that fills the battle-sky make it clear to see. But the edges begin to close in as blackwater starts to drip down the edges to seal off his way out. The engine screams as Pilot pushes the throttle to the max, the cylinders firing with critical speed, flakes of carbonized ash flying out of the exhaust grills. The tower quakes, rumbling, debris falling from the ceiling as he weaves his way past the falling shadows of breaking marble and black slime.

It’s closing too fast.

The closing gap narrows, and the archway seals itself almost entirely with ooze. The wings won't fit.

— Pilot cranks the lever forward, the single unexploded ordinance dropping down below him with high momentum, clinking and clanking audibly as it crashes through and embeds itself into the tower floor but doesn’t explode.

In his mirror, he watches a blinking light on the canister vanish as it is swallowed by howling sludge.

“Blackbird. Blackbird,” comes an almost fully emotionless man’s voice over the wet radio. “Keep center. Roll axis ninety. Waltz,” comes a man’s voice over the radio. Instinctively, Pilot grabs the stick, the plane turning with one wing just barely an inch above the reflective stone ground, its soaring across, and the other arcing toward the ceiling. In the same instant, light shines in from ahead as a spray of tracer rounds fly past him through the doorway on either side of it, bullets streaking above and below his canopy, cutting like a knife through the sludge that was closing around the exit. Two fighters curve toward the tower from outside, their machine guns flaring with starbursts as they cut through the black mass and reopen the way out. They divert, pulling down at the same second he shoots out directly toward their prior vector, the three planes wings scraping by each other close enough to share paint scratches.

Pilot spins the Kestrel, shooting out through the exit on the opposite end of the tower. Black streaks launch like thrown spears just past his wings as he drops downward toward the ocean. The two planes spiral down next to him as the three drop in a rotating downward helix formation. He lifts a hand, waving a quick two-finger salute to one of the other pilots there, Ruby, before the formation breaks apart — a black pendulum striking down where they should have been going.

“Command,” says Pilot, grabbing the receiver as the Kestrel spins, flying through a cloud of winged demons that try to latch on to him, leaving deep scars in the plane’s metal that slowly begins to regenerate through the power of his passive abilities. “The seed is planted,” says Pilot, looking back at the tower in his mirror. “We are go,” says the man.

“Copy, Pilot,” replies the radio operator back on the Chaplain, which is down below on open water, spitting fire from itself in all directions like a dragon on its belly. Tracers, rockets, and flak fill the air in endless lashes of vividly orange and red whips that cut through the sky. “Weapon is detected and armed. Begin withdrawal. All units. Begin withdrawal,” comes the operator’s voice over the radio. Planes swirl, the nimble fighters out-gunning and outmaneuvering any demon or monster that tries to keep up.

The squadrons begin to reassemble, collecting together in a multi-headed arrow formation.

“…Festering…” hisses a voice over the radio — Tango Prime. The machinery crackles, starting to drip again. “For aeons, I’ve had to deal with the festering rot that you people are in my worlds,” says the creature, demon, monster, or something greater than any such classification could hold. “Humans, people, for as long as I can remember, you’ve been a festering wound in my side that just won't heal.”

The tower behind them rumbles, the creature pressing itself out, stretching further and further toward them in a sickly elongation that destroys any semblance of a coherent body it might have once been trying to keep together. Hands, faces, teeth — anything that could have an identifiable shape ceases to do so. Anything that an eye and a mind could recognize as being part of a person becomes so abstract and indistinct that it all just jumbles together into a nightmare. The ocean starts to churn. The blackwater above in the sky and the blackwater below that makes up the sea all begin to swirl together in a singular motion, as if some greater hand from above had taken in its grasp the entire spirit world and had begun to spin it, to twist it. The honeycomb pattern sky warps, bending and folding under an unseen pressure, as if the hand of God were trying to crush the world between his fists. “You will not provoke me just to run and hide again!” says the voice over the radio, full streaks of sludge pouring through it now. The poison has eaten a hole in the floor of the kestrel, and it runs out from down between his feet as if the plane were an eviscerated animal on the run. “You will not get away without knowing what it is to suffer as I have. See what I see, Blackbird,” screams the enemy, their words melting into an indistinguishable brack that oozes past his black boots that cannot be stained by a murk of the same color, which nonetheless eats away at the leather siding.

The ocean erupts, and black needles shoot toward the sky, connecting to the clouds. At the same time, the clouds rip apart as if torn by furious hands, black needles stabbing down to the ocean below. Dozens, hundreds of them appear — each the size of a world-spanning giant — as a ring begins to close around the tower. A prison begins to emerge, one needle after the other as the sky is cut off and the ocean is cut off. Poison and monsters leak out from all directions in impossible numbers. The radios go haywire as the frantic commands of dozens of panicking officers are jumbled together with the overpowering screams of the damned that take over the airwaves.

The last needle closes.

The prison completes.

“Feel what I feel,” commands the enemy, its voice, her voice, coming over the radio.

And everything, everywhere, goes black.

There is nothing to see except darkness. There is only cold, dampness to feel, together with the wind and the suffocating engine of the kestrel. There is nothing to smell except for a vague, acrid burning and the odor of rot.

Ahead of him, the black wall changes and shifts, rippling as the leviathan takes on a new form as it molds and drips along the black needles into a giant, melting, horrific face with features that run like thick, milky secretions down the front of a rotten corpse. The size of the world tree, the size of the gods of old days, it blocks off the way forward and out, as ten thousand hands and arms and tentacles and limbs of many natures form from the poison water and prepare to crash down over the Chaplain, through the planes, through everything that lies from here to the black eternity from whence this creature first came.

“— DESPAIR!” howls Tango, everything falling all at once in a final tidal wave: the radio exploding and catching fire, planes falling out of the sky as the pilots’ systems go haywire, and an endless array of black needles shooting toward them all — the last host of humanity and its ilk.

The world knows now, for the first time since the beginning of the war that never ends, silence.

It only lasts for a fraction of a second, but in that moment, everything aligns for just a microcosm of an instant. The droplets of falling rain, none of which strike his plane’s exterior, the engine’s cylinders, which gasp for a moment; the radio, which falls into silence for a second; and the gap between the beating of his heart as he watches the black shadow fall over the ship on board of which his most precious things lie.

And that silence ends in golden light.

Screaming comes from all around, from impossible places and depths, as the blackness all around them is ruptured in an instant as someone takes a gleaming knife and slices through the brack. The walls, the sludge, the enemy — all of it falls into itself for a second, the ocean churning wildly as colossal waves send the ships flying up and down across the storm. Planes arc in all directions, undergoing emergency dives to escape the anarchy as the sunset cuts through the wall.

Light, brilliant, shining, golden light radiates behind the steel hull of the Breathless Chaplain as it crashes back down against the waves. A hundred rockets barrage in from the horizon, pelting through the mess, and a thousand angels fly past them with wings of white and ocher.

The enemy screams, letting out a voice and a noise that goes beyond creature or entity — it’s otherworldly.

The Kestrel’s systems all scream, hitting their limit. Pilot pulls down, not slowing his speed as he turns.

Angels fly in from the shore as a collective, every single one of them. Alabaster white bodies fill the sky, their hands still glowing with the golden magic they had collectively used to destroy the black barrier formed around them all. Armed with prismatic golden swords made up out of raw, radiant holy magic, they blast in like pure water washing through a deep gash, removing traces of ink and rot in all directions, either through their magic or through the more conventional power of the enchanted guns and rifles they’ve been equipped with. Golden, pristine forms shoot through the air, weaving between the maimed fighter formation, making battle and war with the demon forces now in full counter as they fly.

Pilot turns his plane, looping around the deck of the Chaplain, watching as sailors run across the vessel at full alert from station to station, batteries firing past him in all directions. The front of the ship glows, as if held in full lantern light. Out of the canopy, he sees Caretaker standing there at the head of the ship, her hands in the air and raw, natural magic pouring out of her in unseen streaks that gust toward the sky like tufts of wind — unseen to the enemy’s eye. Priests, druids, and enchanters of all the like standing behind her, all of them collectively gathering their power together for the final stage of the operation, while at the same time maintaining magical shields around the boats to keep them safe from the monsters pelting them with magical spells from the sky.

Their eyes meet as he sails past — the man with black boots who was already always dead and gone in all manners past the body and the healer who healed him nonetheless, in full defiance of the natural laws of war that had claimed contract over his soul.

The war never ends — not for him. It’s always there for him; it always has been. But maybe it didn’t ever matter if it kept going or not, because ever since he met her, there was always someone else to hold onto as they both descended into the frenzy needed to survive in days such as these. If the war never ends, then neither do the two of them, because they belong to it just as they do to each other.

Caretaker can live in times of peace.

But he can’t. He is a man who has known anything but the fight. For him, days of peace are not available, and they haven’t ever been, ever since he was a boy back in that other world and given his first uniform, his first gun, and his first kill.

It’s too fast — too quick to share anything more than a glance — but he can feel her touch through a gust in the wind that runs across his face for only the blink of an eye.

“Signal lost. Blackbird. We have lost the signal,” comes command’s voice over the radio.

Pilot slingshots around the light cruiser, flashing up and back toward the tower in the near distance. Explosions rattle its surface, chunks of it crumbling down into the water as it shatters and breaks apart. With him toward the tower fly magical winds, cast from the deck of the Chaplain through a complicated array of magical technology that amplifies the strength and range of the casting, sending it further than it could have ever gone by just itself. Everyone is so busy with the fight, with the anarchy, that they don’t notice the shimmering, the glistening, the crackling. “All units, withdraw. All units, withdraw.”

“I’m on it,” replies Pilot, not sure if they can hear him or not, as his radio is beyond touching at this point.

Magic pours in through a series of relays all along the coast, all along the spirit world, on the deck of every ship, and all the way back to the home city through the portal. Hundreds, thousands of antenna relays have been set up that transfer magical energy from one point to the next like an electrical impulse. It jumps from antenna to antenna, from node to node, from a thousand wizards and casters and sorceresses and all the like of their kind, all together to the central point that is the powerful of them all — Caretaker and she focuses the spell onward toward him, toward the antenna mounted on his plane — which has gotten damaged during his push — and toward the tower.

— Toward the unexploded, highly experimental bomb he had let drop inside of the structure as he flew through it. Contained within it is a single, unsprouted seed from the world tree, a seed thirsty and strong enough to hold within it all of the world’s magic so that it might burst open.

That’s exactly what they intend it to do.

But not so that it can grow.

It’s housed within a criticality-dense metal casing, bound in ancient enchantments and power so strong that it will hold firm beyond the application of all human strength and time put together. Only a small receiver on the interior of the bomb, connecting with wiring directly to the seed, juts out, and it is one and the same sort of magical reliever that has been planted all across the spirit world. By the second, by the moment, magic is flooding into the seed at an unimaginable rate, and it fights and yearns to grow, but has nowhere to expand because of its metal prison. Pressure mounts. But the metal doesn’t give.

And when it’s finally enough, once critical mass has been reached, the seed finally breaks through an electronic, radio-frequency-controlled opening with enough power, with enough strength, with enough radiance, and with enough rapidly freed energy that everything within eyesight will be freed from the burden of having to exist.

The tower surges, Tango Prime lashing out in all directions at once like a voodoo doll, thrusting all of the needles back out of itself. Planes, angels, demons — shapes move and flit in all directions through the chaotic sky as Pilot pushes the Kestrel forward, higher, faster, toward the enemy, toward the thing that screams. Fighters fly opposite of his trajectory, together with the smaller attack boats on the ocean — everyone is moving away from the enemy. The angels fight bitterly, the sky clashing in all directions as they fight their fight and humanity fights its own.

The kestrel lurches.

Pilot jolts against the side of the canopy, barely keeping the plane steady as he looks out of the glass, seeing that a chunk of his right wing is missing, torn off by a black spear that had fallen his way. His aerodynamics are shot. Holding the plane steady, he rises.

“What’s wrong?” asks Tango over the hissing radio, towering up toward the ceiling of the upside-down island that the tower is fastened to. Pilot can see the ocean through the burned-away floor of his plane, but the wind coming inside creates too much drag against the canopy interior. Together with his broken wing, the kestrel is barely staying airborne. “We’re not done here!” yells the witch’s voice after the planes and the ships begin to drift away, further and further back into the storm.

The kestrel evens itself out. Pilot looks into the mirror for a moment, glancing back at the strategic withdrawal as he maintains a cruising speed and altitude directly toward Tango Prime. A face the size of a mountain turns his way, its features empty and void, made up of nothing but poison on the inside and out. “Blackbird…” hisses the enemy as the kestrel lurches directly toward the thing. The voice rumbles over him, coming from places further and more distant than here and now.

Pilot scans the area, the broken tower that is half collapsed into the sea, and the sludge, looking for it.

The kestrel loses height, a piece of the wing breaking off by itself as the materials give way to the pressure of the air’s resistance.

There!

He sees it — the bomb, drifting through the sludge down the head of the monster. But he’s too low. The plane won’t rise anymore. Pilot yanks on the yoke as an array of hands reach out to grab him whole — the last plane, the last man.

Something lurches.

White shapes grab the plane from underneath, holding his wings steady. Angels latch on to the kestrel, holding it upright and arching his trajectory forward toward the radiating heart of the beast that they were so kind to give it.

Pilot exhales, his hand dropping down to his side and landing on a single lever — the one that had begun all of this. His reincarnation, his travel to the other world, his new life, and everything it has brought him. His fingers wrap around the lever of the experimental mechanism.

“It’s over,” says the enemy. “It took me ten thousand years, but our war is finally over…” says the witch’s dripping, wet voice with satiation as fingers begin to close in around him, blocking his line of sight as black sludge drips down his canopy.

Pilot has never been a man of words nor humor. He’s never been a talker, a joker, nor a ‘character’, as some at a bar would describe their friend when giving a statement to the constabulary. He’s always been this way; he was formed this way — quiet, stoic, and resolved. The hand of God made him who he is from the day he heard his first artillery shell in the crib and wondered instinctively if it was the sound of his own mother’s heartbeat. The closer it came — the explosions — the more comfortable and at home he felt, compared to the others who would cry and scream, and hide.

And this man, this empty man, he can’t help but laugh at the statement as if it were the first joke he had ever been told in his entire life. In a way, it is.

“No,” says Pilot, raising his eyes and lowering his head only just an inch as he smiles just the slightest bit, just enough to break regulations, leaning forward toward the glass, toward the enemy, toward the second love of his life — war — “The war never ends.”

His arm cranks forward, the seance drive screams, the Kestrel lurches, and then, as the last arrow resting in the quiver of the heavens — everything blaring, screaming, and flashing all around him — the plane shoots forward out of the hands of the angels and into the guidance of his own destiny.

The machine cuts through the sludge, the poison, the thing that is Tango Prime, and for the smallest fraction of a millisecond, the receiver on his plane comes into contact with the bomb.

Everything goes white as the spirit world, with its many moons — some of which are broken — gains a second sun for only a heartbeat before the explosion takes everything.