When Marianne’s body hit the ground, she was already dead.

Valdemar experienced her murder as if he had perished himself. Their souls had been intertwined through their shared dreams. They had made love in the flesh and in their thoughts. A bond remained even when they were awake.

When the link ruptured, so did the heart in his chest.

Valdemar had felt the cold hand of Lord Och as his pale fingers closed on Marianne’s soul. His chest had burnt when the lich’s magic tore his lover’s spirit from her flesh. His dark power severed the anchor that bound her soul to her body with surgical precision. There was no malice or hatred in the act, nor regret.

When he coldly murdered Marianne Reynard, Lord Och felt nothing.

Valdemar let out a scream of pain as Marianne’s body landed at his side. Her skin was as pale and lifeless as his was bloody red. Her pale eyes were devoid of life, the soulstone around her neck oozing a vaporous black mist. Her beloved rapier slipped through her fingers.

When Valdemar found the strength to hold her, she was already cold to the touch.

Lord Och’s fingersnap had snuffed out all warmth within Marianne. Her heartbeat, quick and strong, had stopped. Ice coursed through her veins. The warm breath that Valdemar had tasted when they last kissed had turned into empty space. Her soft lips and fingers no longer moved.

No, no… Black blood dripped from Valdemar’s fanged mouth. His chest hurt and his eyes struggled to see. A sick sensation filled his stomach. Please, please, no…

She couldn’t… she couldn’t… not now, not right after… not right after they won.

Overcome with horror, Valdemar stabbed his lover’s flesh with his fingers. His flesh merged with Marianne’s. His biomancy magic traveled through the roads of her nerves and the cables of her arteries. If Valdemar could repair the damage Lord Och had done within minutes, he could save her! He could bring her back!

He didn’t find anything wrong. No organ had ruptured. No spell had flooded her brain with blood until it drowned. Her cells simply refused to work. They were dead, every last one of them.

The soul was gone. Gone from her body…

But not from this world.

A shiver went through Valdemar’s nerves when he detected the faint smell of a spirit. His many eyes looked at his lover’s necklace, at the black jewel on her skin. A violet hue reflected on its polished surface. The empty space within it had been filled.

The soulstone had worked.

The device had caught Marianne’s soul when Lord Och murdered her. Or maybe the lich’s spell used the soulstone to kill her by capturing her spirit.

Whatever the case, Marianne’s soul had survived. Hope warmed Valdemar’s innards once again as he removed his hand from his lover’s body. If he could transfer her soul the right way, maybe he could—

His master’s grim shadow blanketed him in darkness.

“Such a panicked response for a woman?” Lord Och’s tone betrayed his disappointment. The sound of lightning coursed through the air when he spoke. “Truly the pleasures of flesh can dull even the greatest minds.”

“You…” Valdemar raised his hand to fire a blood bullet at his former teacher. His movements were slow, his arms weak. He had lost too much blood. “You heartless bastard…”

Crimson lightning surged from Lord Och’s hands.

Electricity raced through Valdemar’s flesh and fried his remaining nerves. Whatever organs he had left cooked inside his own boiling blood. His brain burst out of his skull, yet he didn’t die. The lightning destroyed his body from within, but his soul refused to leave his mortal coil behind.

Not since his fall down Lord Bethor’s tower did Valdemar experience such absolute, mind-numbing pain.

“I will coddle you no more, my apprentice.” Lord Och’s mask of fake charm and affability had slipped. The cruel, cold-hearted undead underneath saw no need to hide his inhumanity anymore. “I have tolerated your insolence long enough.”

“Ktulhulu!” Ktulu snarled, wings extended and tiny hands raised. The familiar valiantly flew at Lord Och’s face in a foolish attempt to protect his summoner. “Ktul—”

Lord Och mercilessly struck Ktulu down with another thunderbolt. The poor familiar squealed as it fell to the ground, but the lich didn’t stop. He blasted the child Stranger with a torrent of lightning, again, and again, and again.

Worst of all, Lord Och did it with a ghoulish smile on his skeletal face.

“Ktul…” Valdemar rasped, but only smoke came out of his lungs. He felt his familiar’s agony through their bond. They screamed as one with each electrical shock. Daggers of lightning stabbed them both until they could no longer move.

Valdemar’s vision blurred. Half his eyes had melted into his skull. His strong alien limbs refused to move. He felt so weak that the Blood itself slipped through his grasp.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Lord Och’s hands burned with hellfire. “Forgive me, my apprentice. You may experience temporary discomfort, but I cannot waste precious time on sentimentalities.”

Flames swallowed Valdemar. The last of his eyes burned to a crisp and fell off his face.

He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t taste anything. His mangled body didn’t have the tools left for that. Only the Blood gave him slight awareness of the world around him. He sensed Lord Och’s magic at work and Ktulu’s presence nearby, space twisting around them all, Marianne’s presence slipping away…

How long was Valdemar trapped inside his own mangled corpse? Seconds, minutes, hours? Time lost all meaning when the world around you had become a blur.

The Blood returned him to life ever so slowly. Currents of magic created new cells for his organism. They borrowed flesh from all life in Underland to return him to his original state. Was it his newly awakened Stranger nature at work? For a moment, Valdemar had nearly become one with the Father of All and the flesh beneath the stone.

It’s… from within… Valdemar realized. He thought it was the souls he had consumed at first, their spirit transformed into matter, but he was wrong. They were all within him, suppressed but present.

A force in the Blood strengthened him. It called flesh from other places to help him regenerate. Valdemar was already doing it passively, but now the dam had broken; where droplets dripped through before, now a river of blood poured within his veins.

Could he be tapping more directly into Ialdabaoth’s power now that Crétail was imprisoned? The two twins had been born avatars of Ialdabaoth. Perhaps they had been splitting the power between themselves, and now that one of them was incapacitated, Crétail’s leftover energies moved into Valdemar…

Light struck through the darkness and a loud rumble filled the silence. Two eyes and ears, not more, stabilized his vision and hearing. He moved a hand whose fingers grew like plants and a leg that snapped back into a straight shape.

I’m… human… Valdemar thought. The first thing he saw were arms wrapped in skin and sinews, laying on a cold stone floor. Colorful lights filled the horizon. I’m… I’m in…

The Pleromian vault.

The dusty tomb that had haunted Valdemar’s dreams was returning to life. The fiery glyphs in its ceiling flickered in and out of existence. They moved left and right, above and below. The magical formulas they formed changed in the blink of an eye. They swirled around the Painted World and lifted it above the ground, to the very roof of the stone dome. Tendrils of colorful energy grew out of the canvas. A pillar of light fell down from it and onto the Pleromian portal. Its shining radiance hurt Valdemar’s regenerating eyes when he looked at it.

The shadow of Lord Och stood before the pillar, his back turned on his apprentice.

Valdemar gathered his thoughts. He was human again, and naked like the day he was born. Marianne’s corpse was nowhere to be seen, nor Hermann’s. But Ktulu…

“K…” Valdemar turned to the source of the sound, a broken child laying on his left. “K…”

The sight broke Valdemar’s heart.

Ktulu had lost half of its eyes. The left side of its tiny face showed severe burns deep enough to reveal green flesh underneath. Lord Och had ripped out its wings, severed some of its tentacles, and broken its tiny legs. The familiar was still alive, but only barely so. It didn’t even have the strength to whine or cry.

“Ktulu, hang on…” Valdemar rasped. His dry, sore throat hurt with each word he vomited. The summoner touched his familiar and used his biomancy to help hasten the tiny Stranger’s recovery. “Hang on…”

“I see you recovered quickly, my apprentice.”

Valdemar froze while expecting a new lightning bolt.

It never came.

“I didn’t think this chastisement would keep you down for long.” The lich kept his back turned on his apprentice. He only had eyes for the pillar of light. “Look. Can you see its beauty?”

Valdemar’s first instinct was to stab the lich in the back, but a glance at the source of the lights paralyzed him. His mind came to an abrupt stop as it struggled to comprehend what it saw at the feet of the pillar.

Colors.

Not the pigments Valdemar and Hermann used to paint their world, but new ones unlike anything humans had ever seen. A splash of stygian blue, saturated and yet so very dark. A streak of magenta on a jet black spot. A shade of greenish-yellow pink on a floating bubble of something… something that Valdemar’s mind perceived as black light. His eyes weren’t equipped to understand this visual stimuli.

The Pleromian portal stood at the heart of the pillar. Its archway of steel now looked like a ring holding the eldritch colors contained within itself. The portal had become a lens peering into a realm of unfathomable beauty. When Valdemar peered into it, he gazed into a swirling abyss of colors that didn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t exist in this world.

The world beyond the portal was deep and flat, high and low, nowhere and everywhere. Its magenta radiations and eldritch oscillations bent the will of space, the rules of time, the conservation of mass. Its wavelength existence displaced the feeble light of the material world and pushed gravity backward. Its singularity burned hotter than the mightiest volcano. Its pull called the stars to it like moths to a flame. It was the forge of suns, whose anvil was the primordial soul and its hammer the heart of wonders.

The stray thoughts, confusing and conflicting, formed in Valdemar’s mind as it tried to explain, to comprehend, to fathom what he was gazing at. Neither his eyes nor his psychic sight could make sense of this awe-inspiring vision. They stared into a realm of wonders that put the Silent King’s throne to shame in its scale and complexity.

Tears formed in Valdemar’s eyes as he stood on his feet. His arms carried the crippled Ktulu, the little familiar breathing against his chest.

“Is this…” The name of the abyss was on the tip of Valdemar’s tongue, but he felt unworthy of saying it. Something in his soul begged him not to sully this sublime cosmic force with petty human words.

“The divine spirit from which our souls descend,” Lord Och whispered with near-religious reverence. “The origin point of everything. Beyond space, beyond time, beyond the laws of magic and physics. A cosmic sea of knowledge and power.”

The lich slowly turned his back on the glowing portal to face his apprentice.

“This is the Light, Valdemar.”

This… this is what I longed for all my life, Valdemar realized. He couldn’t take his eyes off the abyss beyond the portal. It called to him like the sun of his dreams. He heard its melodious song of energy burst.

Ktulu let out a cough in Valdemar’s arms. With the shock of seeing the Light having passed, Valdemar suddenly remembered what the lich had done. He changed his skin to hardened carbon, ready to take down his former master.

“Careful, child,” the Dark Lord of Paraplex warned with his hands behind his back. “The portal hasn’t stabilized yet. You might destroy your beloved masterpiece by accident.”

Valdemar’s teeth gritted in frustration. The Dark Lord was telling the truth. A thick veil of transcendental energy separated the abyss beyond the portal from the material world. The Pleromian portal stabilized the cosmic powers at work, but any interference might cause a catastrophic backslash.

“I apologize for the brutality my dear Valdemar, but I only had a short window of opportunity. Minutes at best. The Painted World is too precious for my former colleagues to let me keep it unsupervised.” Lord Och glanced at Ktulu with a pitiless expression. “I did not dare to destroy him. The death of a familiar leaves the owner’s soul diminished if they have bonded with them too deeply. That’s why I never took one myself.”

If he hadn’t killed Ktulu to harm Valdemar, then the lich needed his apprentice alive. Valdemar double-checked his magical defenses and hid his thoughts behind a veil of stolen souls.

A question burned on his lips. “Where is Marianne?”

“Her soulstone?” Lord Och snorted with a ghoulish expression of absolute disdain. “Safe… for now.”

Valdemar’s fingers trembled with fury. The Dark Lord kept Marianne’s soul on himself. As a hostage.

Valdemar returned his chest to normal skin and reshaped his body to open a hole in his chest cavity. His ribs opened like a maw, allowing him to put the wounded Ktulu within them. His chest closed and hardened back into steel. The summoner would keep his familiar safe in his body.

“Creative,” Lord Och commented with amusement. “I wouldn’t do that in the presence of female company if I were you. She might die of fright like the last one.”

It took Valdemar all his mental fortitude to ignore the cruel jab. He was more angry for Marianne than for himself. The lich considered her nothing more than ammunition to taunt and torment his apprentice. Lord Och had felt nothing when he killed Marianne, and even less when he demeaned her post-mortem.

“This entire crisis… you engineered it all, didn’t you?” Valdemar guessed, keeping an eye on the Dark Lord and another on the portal. Could he teleport safely so close to a cosmic phenomenon of this magnitude? He would need to do that to contact the other Dark Lords above ground, but if a spatial interference tore him apart midway… “It was you all along.”

“You overestimate me. I simply took advantage of opportunities as they came, nudged you here and there… If you never lose sight of your goal, my apprentice, you will always find a path to reach it.”

Wards are active, Valdemar thought as he scanned the room. The Dark Lord had sealed his vault with magic and blotted out the exit corridor with a wall of stone. Valdemar would struggle to teleport past them, or even summon anything. The other Dark Lords are distracted by the Qlippoths outside and don’t know the way in… they won’t help.

“You named me your successor to distract the other Dark Lords,” Valdemar said. Maybe I could send a message through the wards somehow… “You confused them, made them focus on me rather than you.”

“Well, how should I say it…” A cold chuckle came out of the Dark Lord’s mouth. “That part was my idea of a prank.”

By the Light, this asshole was serious.

“Come on, you must have laughed a little at my colleagues’ expressions,” Lord Och said. He clearly took joy in his student’s anger. “Humor is at its best when mocking the powerful. It drags the haughty down to earth.”

“Are we all toys to you?” Valdemar couldn’t suppress his bitterness. He felt betrayed to have believed the Dark Lord might stand for something greater than himself once.

“Toys or tools, what’s the difference? I take good care of them so long as they fulfill their purpose.”

The lich glanced over his shoulder and gazed into the Light. He didn’t lower his guard, however. Valdemar was certain that the Dark Lord’s hidden hands were ready to spellcast at a moment’s notice.

“I was denied entrance to this place for so long.” Lord Och’s voice brimmed with longing and nostalgia. “How many times have I dreamed of it when I could still sleep? I remember the pain in my chest I felt each time I woke up. The world was so cold, so lifeless. Even when I tore my soul from my corpse to embrace lichdom, even when I shed my humanity and deadened my emotions, the agony remained forever raw.”

Lord Och laughed as he turned his attention back on Valdemar. “But now, the path closed to me by the gods has been opened by the hands of men. Truly, nothing can resist the march of human genius.”

Why is he telling me this? Valdemar couldn’t grasp his teacher’s motivations. Does he still need me somehow? Did he spare me because he wanted an audience to gloat in his moment of triumph? No, Lord Och has never been so careless…

Something didn’t add up.

“How?” Valdemar asked. If he understood the phenomenon, he could exploit it.

“The Strangers were cast down from the Light above. Even to this day they still mourn their fall. They cannot let go. They are fragments of a broken mirror, desperate to pull themselves back together. I thought souls of believers would do the trick, but alas even martyrs can't open the path for the sinful. As for Sophia, her curse still stands. I needed a better power source that belonged to both the Blood and the Light.”

A resonance, Valdemar realized. He’s creating a resonance between Ialdabaoth and the Light by using Crétail as a focus.

Valdemar’s hands clenched in rage as he started to get a better understanding of the situation. “That was why you took me on as an apprentice. You were grooming me for the sacrificial altar from the start.”

“Haven’t I told you? All social interactions are based on self-interest. I help you, you help me.” The Dark Lord’s head tilted to the side like a curious bird. “My original goal was to study you thoroughly, I won’t deny it. I wanted to witness the extent of your powers, to observe you act in a controlled environment.”

Like an animal in a cage…

“The more I studied you, the more I realized you would never be the key I sought for. You were too attached to improving the mortal condition, too willful, too thoughtful…” Lord Och smirked fondly. “Too human.”

“You almost sound proud,” Valdemar noted.

“I am.” Lord Och’s gaze was sharp as a blade. “In many ways, you are the ideal our species aspires to. The power of the cosmos at the fingertips of human will.”

Somehow, the Dark Lord’s appreciation filled Valdemar with shame. It was just another petty manipulation tactic.

“This spawn,” Lord Och pointed at the Painted World with a finger, “was a far more suitable tool for my purpose. I have faced Nahemoths in the past, but this one is something else. Your brother is a trueborn incarnation of Ialdabaoth. I knew you and Hermann would succeed in binding him in a way that would make it possible to harness his power.”

“Some teacher you are,” Valdemar replied with disgust. “You steal the discoveries of your students to make them your own.”

“I told you from the start that the purpose of this Institute was to accumulate knowledge for my own pleasure. I give shelter and purpose to scholars whose discoveries serve my needs. It was an even trade for the time it lasted.”

“An even trade?” The expression made Valdemar’s blood boil. “You stole Hermann’s work and then murdered him. How was that an even trade?!”

Lord Och remained unflappable. “Believe me, I would rather have spared him if I could. I appreciated our dear troglodyte. Alas, his knowledge of pictomancy was too dangerous for my plans to ignore. I couldn’t risk letting him unravel the Painted World.”

Because you won’t risk it yourself. Valdemar couldn’t read Lord Och’s mind, but he knew that was what he thought. You won’t let your brother disappear, would you?

Even if Valdemar was willing to make that sacrifice, the consequences would be disastrous. Destroying the Painted World so soon after completion might release Crétail and the Nightwalker before they could be fully assimilated into it. The new pictomancy universe within the canvas was young, fragile. It could easily revert back to what came before if disrupted.

They would be back to square one.

“What then?” Valdemar asked. “Where do all these murders and cruelty lead?”

“My, where else?” Lord Och waved a hand at the portal. “I will enter the Light, but on my own terms. Not as a disembodied spirit devoid of personality, but with the full weight of my human desires and unbearable sins.”

The veil separating the Light from the material world had grown thinner. Not thin and stable enough to let anyone through safely, but closer.

“I will not beg for a place in paradise, no. I will take it.” Lord Och’s smile widened. It was the satisfied smirk of a winner, the vicious grin of a conqueror rejoicing at his enemies’ defeat. “I will flaunt the feeble teachings of Sophia, shed my mortal coil, extirpate myself from the limitations of matter and form. I will become a wavelength, my apprentice. An unstoppable radiation, an invisible force as irresistible as gravity itself.”

A sudden feeling of cold made Valdemar shiver. He gazed into the colorful abyss of the Light and the cosmic energies bursting from within it. “You want to become a god. To transcend the Strangers and achieve a higher state of existence.”

“Must you make it sound so pedantic, my apprentice? What I want is absolute freedom. From the laws of men and gods, of physics and reality. Freedom from this ceiling of stone and a doomed universe. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The twin lights in the lich’s eyes flared with a blue hue. “I thought you would understand that, Valdemar.”

Was that why he had spared his apprentice and given him a chance, however slim, to ruin his moment of triumph? Because he wanted validation? An ancient undead of his age and experience can’t possibly be that insecure, Valdemar thought. I don’t get him at all. What’s his game?

“I understand your vision, but I do not endorse it. Not at the cost you’re ready to pay.” Valdemar squinted at the portal’s baleful energies. After having observed it carefully, he had a pretty good idea of where this phenomenon would lead unless stopped. “What will happen after you cross this doorway to Heaven? You need a willing martyr to create a stable portal. You're forcing the path open just long enough to go through, but the rift will soon grow unstable. What will happen then?"

“Do you truly want me to say it, my apprentice?”

“Yes. I want to hear it from your mouth.” Valdemar wanted to hear the faint sound of regret, of hesitation. Any hint that he could still talk down his teacher from his madness.

“Well, the most likely possibility is that the breach will explode.” The Dark Lord spoke with the cold, clinical confidence of a soulless doctor. He had given a lot of thought to his plan and considered its potentially disastrous consequences. “The energies of the Light would pour out uncontrollably in a lesser universe unsuited for them. The portal might bloom into the heart of a newborn sun. Ialdabaoth will boil like an egg, the Whitemoon will melt, and everyone will die. The end.”

He didn’t care one bit.

“Or maybe the breach will collapse on itself and harmlessly dissipate,” Lord Och dismissed Valdemar’s worries with a shrug. “Maybe the portal will explode and destroy this facility, but spare the rest of the Domain. We’re in uncharted territory. Anything could happen.”

“Exactly, anything could happen!” Valdemar snarled. “You would abandon everyone to die! The Scholars, Lord Bethor—”

“Lord Bethor will survive.” To Valdemar’s surprise, it seemed that the lich truly believed it. “My former apprentice is already an almighty existence that transcends humanity. I doubt anything short of the complete annihilation of this reality will permanently destroy him. Even then, I’m uncertain.”

The fact that Lord Och believed Ialdaboth would perish in the cataclysm but not Bethor surprised Valdemar. The Dark Lord of Sabaoth was a powerful man, but to survive the world’s destruction demanded more than power. Was Bethor some kind of lich whose phylactery was hidden in another distant world?

Even then, Lord Och didn’t bother to pretend that he cared about anyone else. “Anyway, does it really matter what happens to this world after we’ve crossed into the other side? Yes, Young Valdemar, a few meaningless lives will be lost, but such is the cost of progress. We can always create new worlds and life in our image after we ascend.”

It mattered to Valdemar. He couldn’t let Och proceed with his mad bid for godhood if there was even the slightest chance that it would destroy Underland as a side effect. The risk of releasing Crétail and the Nightwalker was a lesser evil at this point.

Did you expect a heart of gold in my ribcage? The old taunt flashed back in Valdemar’s mind like an ominous warning. He doesn’t care about anything or anyone—

“Wait.” Valdemar squinted, as his teacher’s last sentence registered in his mind. One word in particular rang in his head. “We?”

Lord Och didn’t make a sound. For a few seconds, only the faint song of the Light and the bursting cracks of the Pleromian glyphs filled the room.

“Why did you let me live, my teacher?” Valdemar asked, utterly confused. “Why did you bring me here? Why didn’t you restrain me? Why are you telling me all of this now?”

The ancient lich’s stone face morphed into an expression that his apprentice had never seen before. An emotion Valdemar found more surprising than the cosmic Light in the background.

A flash of vulnerability.

“Valdemar.”

Lord Och extended a hand to his apprentice as the world trembled around them.

“Come with me.”