***Chris Campbell, Aging Detective***

I’m too old for this shit.

Ever since Grant sent him on the mission to find out why the Endless was unstoppable, he’d been riding the razor’s edge of danger. He’d also lost twenty pounds and counting. His family might not even recognize him when he made it back to Earth.

Because I will.

Chris winced at the sound of metal scraping against bone, audible even over the cheering of the crowd. He still couldn’t get used to the casual violence these people perpetrated on each other. And that was coming from a cop.

The sword was withdrawn from the young man’s chest, flames flickering from the fingertips of the loser as he slumped to the ground, bleeding into the hard-packed snow.

The victor of the tournament stepped away, wobbling on his feet, panting heavily, covered in cuts, burns, and bruises, but the uncontested champion of the southern people. He raised his bloody blade into the air.

He was young, strong, huge, ruthless, smart, and fanatic.

In short, a perfect soldier.

The Endless stood from her seat, and the loser disappeared, reappearing at the edge of the ring, momentarily confused, leaving only the victor in the center of the blood-stained circle.

“People of Deraan, I give you the greatest warrior in the southern states!” She said.

“Kole Hothwarn Peros Devos, Ungar Slad, Jok Tomba, come forward.”

The winner and three finalists stepped forward, each of them a talented fighter with their own unique style of magic.

“Jok Tomba, you won every battle, and are undoubtedly the greatest fighter in the south, but no man can do everything alone, which is why you will be joined by the other three. May you carry your brothers along where you can, and be carried by them when you must.”

“The four of you will form the most elite team our people can muster, you will smash the resistance of the pathetic lordlings that shipped your people to the south for generations of oppression. You will form unshakable bonds of brotherhood, and will fear nothing…Especially not death. Because you will never die. You have the blessing of The Endless.”

She leaned forward and kissed each of the fighters on the forehead.

Chris watched the ceremony wind down as the four finalists clasped each other’s hands and went to go drinking, with the rest of the Deraan people clapping them on the shoulders and congratulating them.

I wonder if Grant knows The Endless can un-death people? Chris thought idly, itching his nose, forced to raise both hands on account of the ropes around them.

He probably does. I’m looking for why she/he can undeath people. I have no idea why.

Recently she’d been more she, but it fluctuated. The other week, he could have sworn he was looking at Tom Graves.

“What did you think?” She asked cheerfully in perfect English, taking her hair out of its severe bun and groaning as she rubbed her scalp, reminding him of a secretary or a college student, coming back from a long day of tense discipline.

“Horrifying as usual.” Chris said.

“You wanna be a cult leader, you gotta break some eggs,” She said with a flippant shrug.

“How do you do that?” Chris asked. “Bring back the dead?” it didn’t look like restoring life to a corpse. More like reversing time, or a save state.

“Wouldn’t you like to know? Tell me, what’s Earth like? Carol told me so much about it, mostly just the killing though.”

“Variable, I suppose. Tundras, deserts, jungles, the like. A lot less murder than you probably think. Hawaii is nice. Went there for my honeymoon.

“Why are you doing this?” Chris asked. “Seems like a lot of effort when you could leverage those abilities you have and be obscenely rich, minus the whole holy war against the royal families.”

“Oh, that’s easy, The royal houses killed my f…amily.”

Her body shifted mid-sentence, until she was almost entirely masculine.

“Why do you ask?” He asked, glancing at Chris.

“Trying to make sense of what I’m seeing,” Chris said, brows furrowed.

What the fuck is up with this dude/ette?

***Grant En’hol***

“Get the fuck outta the way, Grant,” Aunt Marida said with narrowed eyes. “Or I will have to shoot through your liver.”

She bore a shiny metal pistol no doubt smuggled from Earth by a Kinzena with more greed than sense.

Grant’s heart pounded, but his voice was calm as he took a gamble.

THUMP. His heart thudded heavily as he began to tap into his well, aiming for the future he wanted.

“Aunt, I deeply suspect…that you are wrong.”

He spotted the vein in her temple begin to throb as she did the same, attempting to outmaneuver him. Outscry him. It was a bizzare combination of preparation and letting their mouths steer themselves.

“Did you just contradict The Omniscient?” Marida En’hol asked, pointing the gun away from the bawling child behind him and towards his face.

Grant suppressed a flinch as several possibilities were snuffed out right there.

“I’m not disagreeing with you that the baby is key to the events going on around us. I just think that she’s not the only key.” I think we’ve been locked into a death spiral, and our actions to escape it, drive us further down it.”

The temperature in the room cooled several degrees as the surrounding En’hols paled at the mention of the dreaded death spiral.

A death spiral was a situation where an En’hol was going to die, and no amount of viewing the future would change it. It was called a spiral because the typical reaction to one was to frantically scry the future, experiencing death after death, with shorter and shorter lengths of time between them, until the future and the present merged, and the seer was forced to live through every terrifying second of their own demise with full knowledge of how it played out.

It was the worst possible fate an En’hol could experience, and it was thankfully very rare, but not entirely unheard of.

Fifty years ago, Thaddeus En’hol had described his own death spiral in his memoires.

It doesn’t matter what I do, or where I go, death has found me, as if the entire universe has been bent against me. I am like an animal in a cage, madly rattling the bars as the inevitable future I see marches towards me. All my cunning, all my power, meaningless before the will of the universe. I can only imagine some higher power, some God, has decreed my demise, and is watching my manic struggles with amusement.

Is this what it feels like to be Dull?

“All of us?” Marida asked. “That’s impossible.”

“Have any of you seen a future where you’re alive after the next six months?” Grant asked, scanning the seers surrounding them.

The expressions on their faces told him everything we need to know.

“Thaddeus En’hol said-“

“Thaddeus En’hol died,” Marida said, sweat beading on her brow. “Like an idiot.”

“If one finds themselves in a death spiral, would it not be wiser to embrace the unknown and hope for the best?”

“I’m the Omniscient. I know everything!” Marida shouted. “There is no unknown! It’s her fault! You don’t see what that thing is doing to the future!?” She gestured at the baby behind Grant. “All I need do is eliminate her and we will survive!”

“The baby behind me,” Grant said, his heart hammering as they came to the end-game. “What is she wearing?”

“What?” Marida demanded.

“If you know everything…what clothes did the baby’s wet-nurse put on her this morning? That should be an easy one.”

The silence hung between them, and for a heartbeat, the entire mansion was silent as a tomb not a single cousin dared speak.

The silence was split as Marida En’hol pulled the trigger.

***The Immortal***

“I hate the south,” Corvos Honnuken muttered, alighting on a thick branch and shaking the icicles off his wings.

Shapeshifting had some hard limits, and Corvos was unable to create feathers, which restricted him to skin-based wings. Skin-based wings were less than ideal in subzero temperatures, and Corvos was forced to grow a fantastically thick mat of hollow hairs around his torso, and a thinner amount to cover the wings as well as he could, while providing robust veins to supply warm blood to them, just barely enough to keep the skin from freezing solid in the weather.

He might be able to grow a separate set of wings to keep his hands free, but it was terrifically unbalanced, no matter how cool it looked, and Corvos wasn’t brilliant enough to come up with a working mechanism for flight off the cuff, so he copied bats.

They seemed to have their shit together.

So that was how a man-faced monstrosity that looked like a thick-furred bat with a twenty foot wingspan wound up hanging from the thick branches of a snow-draped Maripa tree, watching the strange army pass underneath him.

There were a lot of people of similar height and build. A lot of them with the same exact uniform. It was difficult to comprehend.

They looked spotless, with crisp, clean uniforms and a steady gait, like they were on a parade. That just doesn’t happen on a march. Clothes get dirty. People get hungry.

And who on the Deraan continent would be able to field an army of this size and this well-equipped? There simply wasn’t enough wealth in the south to equip thousands of young men with crisp, clean uniforms, winter overcoats, steel tipped spears and a jeweled saber as a sidearm.

There weren’t enough rubies on Orsoth.

Wait a minute…They’re the same people!

The army itself was composed of the same four young men in a repeating pattern, each of them ridiculously fit, healthy, and with a steely gaze.

It was as if someone gathered the four best fighters of the south, equipped them with the best gear the south could muster, and stamped them out with a printing plate.

The fur on Corvos’s wings and spine stood up as his body was covered in goosebumps.

I’m starting to understand why they call him The Endless.

Well, it’s fine, Corvos shrugged.

In theory, replicating a handful of elite soldiers was a good idea, but in practice, not so much. Once a Morkel unraveled the mind of a single one of these studs, the next one would be easier and faster, until it took no more than the effort of waving a hand to mind-slave the entire army, because there were really only four different minds present.

Once they created their master-keys, it would be over.

The Morkels will handle this, as long as they didn’t all get killed while I was away. They’ll be insufferable afterwards though, with their constant requests to soften their features, reduce wrinkles, and ‘plump up’ certain parts of their anatomy.

Corvos rolled his eyes.

“You’re an ugly one, aren’t you?”

Corvos turned his head a hundred and sixty degrees to spot the vith-blooded youth perched on a branch directly behind him, his gilded saber already drawn, words of power shimmering gold in the evening light.

“Eeeek!” Corvos let out a girlish/batlike shriek and lost his grip on the branch, tumbling downward until his skull impacted against a thick branch, causing him to bite his tongue.

Not my finest moment.

***Tom Graves***

“Whaddya think you’re doing?” Tom asked, stopping Carol in the hall outside the cells of the five Morkel women. She was armed with her hammer, covered in blood, matted hair and skull fragments.

“Nipping things in the bud.”

Tom raised a brow.

Carol sighed and rolled her eyes.

“Something they don’t teach you in that pathetic daycare you call American school, is that when you kill a family, you gotta kill the entire family, root and stem, or else they come back and fuck up your day in twenty years or so. If you don’t kill these people now, their vengeance will most likely come back to haunt Ella, which I can’t tolerate.”

Tom frowned.

“I can’t do that.”

“Then just turn the other way and I’ll take care of th-“

Tom juiced up Carol’s control ring.

“I can’t do that.”

Carol’s eye twitched. “Fine, but you’re setting yourself up to get fucked over.”

“I know.”

Carol shook her head as she turned away. “And you were doing so well, too, but you’ve still got so much of that peasant left in you.”

Tom made sure Carol had actually left, then went back to his room.

Today we take a huge step forward.

Tom was going to solve the Raze problem, and once that was dealt with, he was damn likely to get his daughter back. Or kill the people responsible for her murder.

Whichever happens.

If Ella was dead already, Tom was tempted to simply let Raze murder everyone. But he remembered seeing Ella floating along beside him, thousands of miles above above the Americas.

It was a horrifying sight that Tom would never get out of his head, but the silver lining was that it meant she’d been alive as of three days ago.

Tom sat down in his chair and regarded Raze’s business card, flipping it over and over in his fingers as he plotted.

He’d never really plotted before, but Tom was starting to discover that he had a talent for it.

Alright, let’s do this.

***DREAM***

“It’s about time you got back to me,” Raze said as he appeared in the office, the smell of nature and humidity accompanying him as he arrived. “I’m running up against the limit of the time I can stall.”

“Noted,” Tom said. “I’ve decided to help you kill Vendrith.”

“You have what you need?” Raze asked, glancing over Tom’s gun.

“I sure do.”

“What took you so long to decide?”

“Had to kill the Morkels.” Tom said with a shrug.

Raze gazed at Tom for a moment, eyes narrowed behind the featureless mask.

“Very well,” He said, offering Tom his hand.

Tom took a deep breath and took it.

They arrived in Vendrith’s Office, like they always did.

BOOM!

Marida En’hol got her shot off on Raze’s face, having predicted the exact timing of his attempted coup on his father. This time Raze lost an eye.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

Tom, not surprised in the slightest, put two bullets in Raze while he staggered backwards, two in Vendrith, and the last two in the stunned Marida En’hol.

Vendrith and Raze died immediately, but Tom missed Marida’s vitals.

He stepped forward and kicked the gun out of the woman’s shaking grasp.

Where did medieval soothsayer even get a semi-automatic?

Once she was disarmed, Tom ignored her and went for the thing he was really here for.

The cursemark that Vendrith had nearly pulled out of his pocket.

Tom carefully tugged the blackening fabric the rest of the way out of Vendrith’s pocket moving the old man’s twitching fingers out of the way as he did.

It wasn’t a handkerchief. It was fraying on the bottom like it’d been cut away from a larger piece of fabric, but it had embroidery at the top, implying it had been part of something, along with what looked like a chunk of torn stitching where a strap might have been attached.

The top of a dress, perhaps? There had to be a story there, but Tom was more interested in the practical application of owning a copy of Raze’s cursemark.

“Gotcha,” Tom muttered, carefully folding the fabric in his hands.

“It’s you. The other blind spot,” Marida En’hol muttered, leaning back against the bookshelf, her hands clutched over the bloody wounds in her stomach. She glanced at the cloth in Tom’s hand and gave a bloody chuckle. “I get it now. Hanameh, you dumb cunt.”

“Is she the owner of this?” Tom asked, holding out the cursemark.

“That bitch knew.” Marida said, shaking her head, seemingly wrapped up in her own thoughts. “She knew this would happen. Whether it’s you, Raze, or the baby. She’ll get her revenge. She put us in a fucking spiral! HANAMEH! I WON’T LET YOU WIN! YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME!?”

Scrape! Tom’s lungs were paralyzed in his chest as a knife scraped in between his ribs.

It was Raze, alive somehow with a bullet hole through his lungs and heart, twisting a curved blade through Tom’s aforementioned organs.

This seems like a good time to bail.

RIIPP!

Tom dumped soul pulses into the cursemark and TUGGED.

***AWAKE***

Tom’s eyes opened and he sat upright in his chair.

Clutched in his hand was the cursemark. A perfect duplicate of Raze’s cursemark, and presumably with the same power to control the monstrous teleporter.

The perfect trump card to bring this struggle to a close and get his daughter back.

The only problem was it was a baby’s breath away from crumbling into ash.

Tom needed to reverse the damage, and there was only one way he could think of to do that, and it involved a lot of dead people.

Tom opened the drawer of his desk and withdrew the wooden wand inscribed with the explosive Spell-phrase.

How many deaths am I worth? He wondered, turning the plain brown stick of death over in his hand. Tom was not unaware that his crusade was causing thousands of deaths, and if he had done nothing, only he and Ella would suffer. He was aware that the dividing line between sparing these Morkels while slaughtering those Morkels was highly arbitrary and only served to reassure himself that he was still a good person with a moral compass.

It was the height of selfishness to hold himself above others, sacrifice their lives to make his more pleasant.

Tom shrugged.

But…they started it.