A host of dead stood before the walls of a city, their forms held animate by chains of Experience and will. They were linked together by, and operated, under the Manifold Mind of William Barka, who stood at the host’s head in a suit of shining silver.

To William’s left stood a golem of reforged flesh, the Links of a dozen lesser dead flowing between it and the silent army, and to the soul caged within by chains of meat and bone. The amalgamated body of his strongest soldiers stood as testament that William has achieved the rank of Monarch upon the cold, dark world on which he had found himself. Unlike those others who thought to rule those lands, who farmed the living to reap their armies, the silver-clad man who stood before that city had killed each of his army personally, choosing only those most fit.

Between one moment and the next, the smile William wore slipped, and he tilted his head as he spoke, his voice echoing through the golem by his side as if spoken by the sky itself.

“Emperor of the Ash Rose Empire, your time has ended; I have come to claim your lands and people. Surrender, and I will make your final end swift, and I will spare the majority of your herds."

The ex-Earthling had considered this war from every possible angle, his Manifold Mind spending a combined thousand years calculating and analysing; this siege was but the final step, having defeated the armies sent against him with, so far, little effort.

As he awaited the response he knew would come, minds forming and collapsing within him almost constantly, the faces of his army came together and fell to nothing within his mind’s eye; each imagined face was of their last moments, fear and despair written large on skin. A strange sensation flared to life within him as he contemplated and dismissed the strange images; the sensation, and the images had come more and more over the course of his year-long war.

“Pitiful Monarch, you think to end an Emperor? I have no final end, fool. I am eternal. I will crush you, as I have crushed all that came before you.”

Shaking off the alien thoughts, William re-focused upon the figure stood above the giant gates, a golem of his own stood to one side; he was a creature of angles and bones, his skin corpse-pale in the dim beneath grey clouds.

William had known he would say something along those lines, of course. They had lived that moment a thousand times, though those times had lacked the feelings, they were largely irrelevant to his plans.

With a minor effort of will, a bullet roughly the size of the Agent’s fist formed and vanished with the snap of the sound barrier breaking, and atop the wall, the Emperor’s head vanished in a spray of gore and bone-shrapnel. Simple plans, William knew from long experience, had the least number of possible points of failure.

A shared reaction echoed out through their many minds. Their golem, along with two more, surged forward, their unfeeling fists falling like a rain of hammer-blows against the ancient wood of the city gates. The wood shattered beneath the blows of the golems, as the simple wooden things had never been designed to withstand so many greater dead; Aristocracy did not work together, and none before William had the capacity to control more than a single greater dead.

The gate crashed open, the beam that had barred it now splintered and broken. William’s army of lesser dead rushed in as if they were one creature, the movement sudden and silent as they flowed around their Monarch’s still form.

The face of a child crept into his mind’s eye once more; William had taken the girl’s father for his army, her expression had twisted in to what the ex-psychopath understood to be fear and loss. The smile that had grown seeing his plans come to fruition slipped free and fell from his clean-shaven face a second time, and as the last of his dead army cleared him, he was left with only the former Duke class Aristocrat he had killed and taken upon his arrival on that world. With a barely perceptible blur, dirt sprayed as something impacted the ground a short distance from William. Rising from the small crater, the opposing Emperor’s golem straightened, moving with the uncanny motion of the dead, ignoring the damage it had no doubt sustained in the impact. Whipping one blade-embedded arm around and down, the opposition’s golem struck, splitting the once-Duke's animated body in two. It had come to remove the serpent's head - William, as the dead could not walk Unlinked and to remove him meant removing the entire army. But this too had been foreseen, and the two golems which had not echoed his voice returned to his side in a flicker of sudden motion, just in time to carry the enemy to the ground, where it was torn limb from limb, its gut, heart and head crushed beyond hope of recovery.

William felt the mind that had been controlling the Duke for a year collapse and re-join his own and there was a painful disharmony as the cold with which he was born met the alien sensations brought on by the faces of his dead.

*

**

***

William sat upon a throne of carved granite, watching the former Ash Rose Emperor scream silently as the flames took him, his lungs already too damaged to supply the air needed to make the screams audible.

The silver-clad Monarch frowned, barely taking in the grisly scene; he was instead considering what the now former Emperor had revealed, before William had conceded him his death. The secret of the Emperor rank, of almost true immortality was spun and processed by their many minds.

It had taken a week of work, but in the end the fool had broken, as all things did when sufficient pressure was applied. A jagged needle of silvery soul-stuff had been inserted into the point within his gut that seemed to house the curious energy, what the locals called ‘Experience'; the Emperor had been stoic to that point, even laughing at their attempts to cause him pain, but the Mind had found a way. And he had screamed the truth, spitting it out into the world like venom, at last, unused to pain as he was.

Then there was a pop and with a flash like a dying lightbulb, the now carbonised body of the Ash Rose collapsed and came at least to resemble its namesake as the ash billowed amidst rising embers.

Wearing the smile of a job well done, William welcomed the golden box which appeared at the centre of his vision:

Quest Received...! Difficulty: Vastly Annoying... Time Limit: 0 years, 0 Days, 0 Hours, 0 Minutes.

Kill the Emperor of the Ash Rose Empire.

Bonus Reward: None.

Status: Completed

Quest Received...! Difficulty: Verging on trivial, surely... Time Limit: 10 year, 10 Days, 10 Hours, 10 Minutes.

Kill the Crowned in Deepest Black, or remove her from the world.

Bonus Reward: Succeed within five years.

“What is a, ‘Crowned’, Deiry?”

William had never heard the term before, and it did not fit into the hierarchy, as he understood it: Knight, Count, Duke, Monarch and finally Emperor.

No answer was forthcoming from the vain being that had placed him upon that world, and though his expectations had been low, he nonetheless felt irritation; information had been a necessary component of his success thus far, and while they were capable of a high degree of accuracy when it came to speculation, it was never pure speculation.

Climbing to his feet, the Duke walked from the smoky, stench-ridden throne room, the herd-like servants scrambling out of his way, even as he ignored them. They were not fit for his army, and even had they been, it was still less than appetising to be served dinner by the dead, even for him.

Entering an antechamber, the Agent stood to one side to allow his golems to enter behind him. Closing the door and sitting, the trio of mélanged flesh guarding stood between himself and the door, William waved away his new prompt and instead turned his mind to what the Emperor had told him.

“To become an Emperor... y-you must divest your power into a g-golem, die and b-bind your own soul to your corpse. Now p-please, let me end.”

There had been more panting and moaning in amongst the words, but those had barely been registered at the time, focused as William had been to take the last step to power. Once he had attained the rank of Emperor, the Links between his army would grow in strength, and as one of his own dead, it would increase his own as well. Once he had conquered time, his army would grow to hold the world in the palm of his hand, an army the likes of which had never been seen, managed by his Manifold Mind.

And then, if the locals could be believed he would expand to other worlds; being immortal would make his expansion inevitable.

With a small smile, William began to experiment with the connections he shared with his golems, possibilities being tested and discarded as thousands of minds bent their will to the task. Pushing energy, Experience, through the links resulted in it returning; the bodies he controlled had set, finite limits with the total he had access to being the sum of those he ruled.

After almost an hour of objective time, William thought he had a reasonable hypothesis; he would create the Link for a soul and body, like he would with a golem, and put his soul, along with the energy storied within his own body, into the network. His experiments told him that this would accomplish the death portion of the requirements, but the network should then push the energy, along with the Link back into his body, completing the binding and elevating him to the rank of Emperor.

It seemed sound, from the number of simulations he had run, but it was unfortunately impossible to test without finding somebody else to elevate first, and the region was woefully short of candidates, after his campaign over the last year.

If all else failed, he would be leaving a piece of his soul there with his body, in the form of his suit; perhaps if he died, he would be able to find his way back to his body, given he could feel the connection.

Taking back the minds managing the three golems, William spun them back out with explicit instructions to try to resuscitate him, should he die, and then with a slow even breath, he began to form the links that would be required to bind him to his own corpse.

The bindings themselves were not overly complicated, as they were essentially identical to those used to bind a golem, a link for body and soul at the gut, heart and head. Why those three places in particular, William had been unable to discover; only one seemed to server any mystical purpose, but any attempt at making the connections elsewhere had resulted in nothing but failure.

It was the effort of moments to pull together the energy and prepare it; his first linking had been a relatively clumsy thing and he had wasted a significant amount of energy, but that had been hundreds of real attempts earlier, and before many thousands of theoretical tests.

With one last look around the room, William forced all of this energy into the links and pushed them out into the network.

***

**

*

The sky was dark and the air cold when William opened his eyes again, his breath billowing in the chill.

“Oi, stop gawping and get out of the way; there’ll be another through in a couple of seconds and you’ll hold things up.”

The voice was rough and every bit as cold as the air; turning his gaze from the sky, William found himself starring at an older man with a scruffy grey beard, skin creased with age and so pale it may never have seen a sun.

Without replying, William spun a bullet out of his soul and sent it to kill the disrespectful fool. He would need to discover how he had been taken-

Pain like nothing he had felt before tore through the displaced Monarch, causing him to stagger to the side clutching at his stomach.

“What was that supposed to be, some sort of attack? Hah, you’ll have to do better than that, Fresh Meat. Now get moving before I slap you so hard you’ll Hollow!”

William stared at the old man, who was now coated in a thin layer of dull grey dust, and was glaring at him from underneath shaggy eyebrows, his eyes a frigid black.

Looking around in confusion, William noted his surroundings; he was on a polished black stone platform with a narrow walkway of the same material leading away. He could see hundreds of similar platforms stretching away from him to wither side, and could hear the distant sound of breaking waves far below him.

He began to carefully move along the stone walkway, conscious that it was only a couple of feet wide and with a drop into darkness to either side left open by a lack of any guard or rail. A few moments into his walk, a scream sounded from all around him and a flash that was almost blinding, even from behind him. Turning, William saw a figure standing atop the platform he had just vacated, staring into the sky.

Making his way across the walk, he turned his attention to the links to his army, but while he felt them, they were faint and felt stretched in a direction he had no name for. Coming to the end of the path, William found a wall bearing a polished metal plaque, and to its side stairs. The writing upon the plaque was written in a strangely curved script, twisting in ways almost impossible to follow. William did not recognise the language, and could not read it, but as he gazed upon it, he found he could understand it.

“Welcome to Purgatory; if you are reading this, your soul has faded to a shadow of its former glory, dulled by a lack of use throughout many lives. Your former plane is incapable of holding onto a soul of so little energy, and so you have fallen. This plane exists to provide you with one last chance to rise, fore-armed with your memories so that you may build upon your mistakes; seize upon Experiences and do not fall prey to Apathy, to fail is to fall. You have been warned.”

William stared at the metal characters as another scream sounded and he had to shield his eyes from the reflection of the light from off the plate. Something had clearly gone wrong with his attempt at becoming an Emperor, but from what he understood of the situation, at worst he should have returned to whatever plane Earth rested upon. Not this place.

A cough sounded behind him, and turning, William came face to face with a massive body, grey-white with gemlike red-on-black eyes, its form gaunt.

“With a corroding fucking headache, move or be moved, little thing. I’m in no mood to be held up.”

William contemplated killing him, or at least trying, but a voice in the back of his head muttered softly that it was the wrong move, and with a tilt of his head, the twice-dead conqueror spun out his Manifold Mind to make some sense of his situation. A single mind spun slowly into existence as a burning, tearing pain raised through his head, causing him to stagger.

As he regained his balance, he was knocked aside as the massive form pushed past him, not even stopping to read the metal plaque. With pain still rocking him, William balanced upon the edge of the walkway, only darkness and the whisper of waves below him. For long moments he hung there, on the verge on falling, but their two minds eventually found balance and they stumbled back onto the path, cold sweat dripping down their face.

Not wanting to risk another such incident, William began to climb the stairs, their minds working the problem furiously, though there was something strange about the interaction, something that seemed to make the process less efficient, and it was not just that there were far fewer of the minds than they were used to.

Upon the top of the stairs, still pondering, William found themselves facing a vast city, dotted with thousands of massive fires; he could see tiny figures gathered around them, seeming to huddle for warmth. Above it all hung a dull red star, massive in the otherwise starless sky; the sullen red orb cast its sparse light balefully down upon the city below, just barely adding definition to the sprawling mass.

“...Fuck.”