Basalt Tower was a ruin.

I saw the marks as I got closer. Walls that had withstood the combined might of the Alliance were now rent and blasted, in places melted to slag. Fissures marred the courtyard within, fissures that were now cool but which had, in the not so distant past, vomited lava up through the structure even as the earth trembled and the tower’s stones were shaken into dust.

Sansis.

It wouldn’t have taken all that much power. Redirecting heat wasn’t that difficult. Redirecting enough of it to shatter the defences we’d built into the volcano below would have been difficult, had the attackers not known the secrets of how those defences had been built. Had they not known where the secret knots of vulnerability were that could bring the whole thing down…

We’d set said defences up such that we could collapse them in the event of an Alliance victory. Not to bury our own it what was ostensibly peacetime.

The eruption had been weeks ago, I’d learned that much from the old man. A paltry thing in volcanic terms, barely worth mentioning on a world like Sebaria. Normally such an eruption might have meant an investigation by the nearby town, perhaps an expedition to the tower to see what remained. But not this time. Not when the noise of terrible, ungodly battle had echoed down from the fortress both before and after the event. No, the locals had left well enough alone.

Until ten days ago, anyways. Then, lured by the thought of what might be found in the ruins of the fortress, a small party of investigators had headed up for a look.

They had not returned.

The imaski who had lived in Basalt Tower had been known by the townsfolk. While most had believed them demons, that hadn’t stopped a trickle of trade flowing between the two settlements. Whatever neighbourly goodwill had been built up, however, it had vanished with that one missing party of would be investigators.

Would be looters, is more like it.

I stood on the cracked stones of the castle courtyard. It was quite cool, no sign of heat nor flame, only an indifferent, still-settling ash. I stood there with my hands clenched into fists of impotent rage as I beheld what lay before me.

Spikes.

Spikes and the people spitted on them.

Not many. But then not many would have survived the eruption. They’d had no defence, of course, not without someone raised to the power there to sense the approaching danger. These nine must have been the lucky ones.

Or the unlucky ones, hoisted as they were upon the shafts of black, pitted metal that grew, tumour-like from the broken stonework of the courtyard. Nine of my imaski, hanging there like obscene fruit upon nightmarish trees, like bugs pinned to paper.

I knew their names. I knew all their names.

Osrim, Takash, Queli, Palan,Cai, Dunumir, Fulrim, Angdarian, Ushral…

Nor as I looked upon the dead was it their imaski faces I beheld, but rather the human ones that lay behind the mask-like chitin of their exoskeletons, hidden by time and change and death. I saw in my mind’s eye the varying shades of their mortal selves, each pale with death, and I felt the blood trickle from where my nails met my palms.

I was a thrice-damned fool.

The imaski were loyal. Everyone knew this. Everyone. It followed, therefore, that if you moved against the Last Evil you moved against the imaski as well. And why wait for those two parties to be joined? Why wait for the imaski to scatter across worlds and ways, resuming the kind of bloody, small group guerrilla warfare at which they so excelled?

Why not drop the hammer on them while they were concentrated?

I felt, unbidden, the pressure of tears behind my eyes.

I could not swear vengeance, for vengeance was already sworn. I could not console myself with the thought that there were more imaski in the multiverse than had been here on Sebaria, for I had no way of knowing the fate of these groups either. There were no heavens for me to rage against, for I was a being of chaotic power and thus recognised no gods.

Thus I was denied even the small comforts of impotence. I could only stare at the nine corpses, and rage, and hate…

And then, unbelievably, one of the corpses opened its eyes.

‘B…boss? Is… is that…’

It was Queli. She was still alive.

I stepped forward instantly. The spike through her body went in through the abdomen and up and out through her back. For an imaski that was not usually a fatal wound, not if it had missed the main cluster of organs on the way in. Imaski couldn’t use Ensis any more than any other mortal, but they had a natural healing factor, and they could function while severely damaged. If you wanted to kill one it was best to ensure that you killed them outright.

‘Boss… it… it was…’

I stopped. I was tempted to tell her to shut up, to conserve her strength until I had her off the spike. But that would have been the path of a fool. I needed to know what had happened far more than I needed a single imaski.

The ruthless mathematics of war.

‘…Ex…Exan. He broke the mountain open… could… couldn’t stop him.’

She coughed, and green ichor vomited from her mouth, splashing down over the cracked chitin of her chest.

‘I…’

Exan.

I mean, I wasn’t an idiot. I’d known. But the confirmation stoked the rage within me nonetheless.

‘He came alone?’

‘N…No. Had… had an army. Disciples. Some… some white… white things. They served him.’

‘White things?’

She shuddered violently on the spike. ‘Mortal… maybe. Don’t… don’t know. Hadn’t seen…’

I closed my eyes briefly. ‘All right, soldier,’ I told her. ‘That’s enough.’

I stepped forward to examine the spike.

The damage to the chitin was almost irrelevant. It caused then no pain when it was breached, was more like living armour than skin. You could patch it with glue and resin or anything else you had to hand, and it would grow back into place in a matter of weeks. The torso cavity beyond was filled with green ichor, organs suspended within on filaments of muscle. A breach did not cause all the ichor to flow out, because it was a thick, viscous substance and clotted almost instantly upon contact with the air. Thus piercing wounds were only really a concern if they hit an organ, and were just as likely to push these vital tissue structures aside as they were to tear into them.

The spike through Queli’s body had entered below the main cluster of organs, and from what I knew of imaski anatomy – which was literally everything – would have pushed them up out of the way. No doubt a dozen things would have been torn and rent by the passage of the spike through her body, but in the weeks since the attack her natural healing factor would have taken care of the damage. Indeed, now that I looked, I could see how the chitin had sealed itself around the spike…

They were sloppy, I thought, with a certain grim satisfaction.

Each of the others was nailed right through his or her heart. I glanced round at the other eight corpses, each hanging limp. It took precision to kill an imaski, precision that had been lacking in Queli’s case.

Of course, ripping the spike out or lifting her off it would be as bad as shoving it in in the first place had been. I needed to sever the spike above where it came out of her back, and then below. Take it out piece by piece, use Bayis to fill the cavity with ichor, to seal up the breaches in the chitin…

All of which would take power.

‘Hang tight,’ I told her, and headed for the rent.

* * *

The access down to the rent was a stone stair down the insides of a great chasm – not a new fissure, this, but the split in the earth around which Basalt Tower had been built. From the ground floor of the ruined keep it led down, deep into the bowels of the earth.

It had been cleared of rubble. I was unsurprised. It was only sense. Exan and his disciples would have wanted to recharge their stores of chaotic power before leaving Sebaria. Of course, they might have tried to bury the rent behind them but why bother?

To deny the ground, Rukh, I told myself. They are not holding the fortress themselves, so why not deny it to the Alliance?

Yeah, but burying the rent wouldn’t do that. It would only be a problem for people who were dry or nearly dry, like me. If the Alliance came here to set up a base of some sort, they would come with power to spare.

From its place at my hip, Akeem was continuing its endless, psychotic litany. ‘…draw me, use me, draw power, kill, kill, kill…’

The thought occurred to me that there were other ways to deny the ground. If Exan didn’t want to reoccupy Sebaria himself, he could always have blown the rent. Fed his own chaotic energies back into it, causing it to widen. Continued the process until the rent got too large, until the chaos radiating from it was enough to crumble the stuff of Reality at its borders, causing it to grow on its own…

Used Faris to flee through the ways while chaos devoured the planet behind him.

Why hadn’t he?

In that moment I imagined Isande’s expression if I’d asked her that question. The indignation Sanjay or Carmen would have expressed in response, the shocked, slackening of Cass’s jaw…

Because such things were unconscionable. Worse than genocide whilst encompassing all the same evils.

Only Exan didn’t think that way. He ascribed even less value to mortal life than I did, and that was saying something. Certainly, he had no sentimental attachments to Sebaria as a place…

Perhaps it was the permanence of the decision that had stayed his hand. Perhaps he saw some use for the place as a waypoint in future. Perhaps the “white things” Queli had mentioned had been prepared for guerrilla warfare against the Alliance, and even now lurked in the mountains around Basalt Tower.

I knew of no mortal races upon this world beyond the people in the valley below, but that did not mean that there weren’t any.

Perhaps he simply hadn’t thought of it.

‘Lets do it,’ said Akeem, as the stairs bottomed out and I reached the rocky floor of the chasm. ‘Let’s end it. End this world!’

I ignored the blade, as was my want.

The rent glowed ahead of me, pulsing with tendrils of multicoloured light. I stepped up to it.

Drew.

At my hip, Akeem sighed with ecstasy, and it was all I could do not to echo him.

The chaos of the rent roiled in response to my touch. Snaking tendrils reached for me.

I stepped around them. Stumbled a moment.

I was weakened. Reliant on mortal sleep and food and all the constraints of the powerless, a consequence of my conservation of power. In worse shape, in fact, that when Isande had been taking me to the House. I should have prepared myself better before stepping close, but my haste to rectify my loss had betrayed me. My concentration was frayed, the demands of my flesh screaming for attention…

Chaos poured into me. It poured too fast and too hungrily and it took all my will to struggle with it and for a moment…

For a moment I was back on Ashmar.

My first time.

It had been after that battle against Lord Tirik. A worthy opponent then, though he would have seemed less than an insect to me now. I had been separated from my forces, wandering alone through the edge of the broken mountains….

Harsh, volcanic terrain, not dissimilar to this part of Sebaria.

The rent had been nestled atop a high plateau, one I’d climbed in an attempt to get a better view of the land. I’d seen it, wondered what it was, marked at how the rip in the stone was only wallpaper around the rear in very fabric of the world itself…

A tear in Reality, though I had not known what that meant.

To this day I do not know why I stepped up to it. But I did, and I felt the power reach for me, and it seemed the most naturally thing in the world to attempt to force it to my will. I wrestled with it, felt it scorch me, flesh and soul, felt it seep into the being of what I was and it was all I could do to hold myself together and then…

Then I had been waking up in the House under Dalarion’s care. Neither he nor I knew how long I had stood there, how long I had wrestled with raw chaos before I won.

A natural binding. No teacher to guide my way, to even let me know it was possible.

Unheard of.

And that had been my mortal self, a self without training in the disciplines, one who had not before faced and drawn from a rent, one untempered by the crucible of cosmic warfare and the black abyss of time that had passed since that day.

No matter how little power I had left, I would never again be that powerless.

And, beside the challenge of that ascension, drawing from the rent before me while a little tired and out of sorts was nothing.

I seized the power before me with a surge of will, dispelled the tendrils that reached for my physical form, and drew.

‘Yes,’ hissed Akeem, from his place at my hip.

As always, I had no idea how long it took. But when I stepped away, I was once again replete with the primal energy of chaos.

I started up that tiny trickle of power that maintained my physical form, wiped away some of the aches and pains of the last few days with judicious application of Ensis, and headed for the stairs.

* * *

Queli was still alive.

‘I am going to try and cut through the spike,’ I told her. ‘Most likely, you will fall. I will attempt to ensure that the landing does not jar too much, but you must be prepared for some pain.’

A black smile split the imaski’s face. ‘Always… prepared, boss. Always.’

Atta girl.

I took Laya from my pocket and slipped its brass knuckles shape over my fingers. Akeem sulked at my hip, muttering its insane disapproval, but I ignored it.

As before, I felt a surge of warmth from the ima as I took hold of it. Formed it, with an effort of will, into a hacksaw.

I had no idea how deep Laya’s reserve was, but it had been with me when I’d drawn from the rent and changing its form was bound to be a lot easier that creating rifle rounds and accelerating them with kinetic force. No doubt it had power to spare.

Laya’s edge bit into the spike, a few inches above where it protruded from Queli’s back.

‘Hang tight, soldier,’ I said, and began sawing.

Screech as the Laya-hacksaw chewed through the metal.

Screech.

As I worked, my eyes fell, unbidden, on the nearest of Queli’s slaughtered companions. It was Osrim. The spike had been rammed through his torso in a similar manner as it had through Queli’s. He was quite dead though, skull partially caved in, chestplate burst open by the passage of the spike. He hung limp and…

…skull partially caved in?

Screech.

Why had his skull been caved in? A glance around showed that none of the others had suffered such an injury. A blow he’d taken in the battle? Had he been dead when they’d impaled him?

No. Look at the spike, Rukh…

Screech.

I looked. I looked at the angle. Looked at how Osrim’s body hung. The impalement hadn’t killed him outright either. So they’d smashed his skull to finish the job.

Which begged the question… why not Queli’s?

Screech.

Because they’d missed her? They’d not checked?

It was possible.

Screech.

Or maybe they’d thought I might be coming by. Sebaria was the closest stronghold to the House where imaski might be found. Maybe they’d thought my first move would be to surround myself once again in black-armoured loyalty. So they’d left Queli alive, as bait. Bait to draw me here.

Screech.

My eyes scanned my surroundings. No sign of any trap.

And wouldn’t two impaled imaski have been better bait than one?

Clink.

I glanced down. Laya’s sawblade was several inches deep into the spike, and had just crunched through something that wasn’t steel. Something that sounded like…

…like glass.

Oh fuuuuuuuck…

I snatched the saw up out of the gully it had made even as the metal came apart in multicoloured dust. A tendril of chaos, reaching, grabbing…

I leapt back, knowing that if Laya hadn’t been an ima it would have dissolved too, along with most of my arm and quite possible all of the rest of me. The spike was shredding apart into petals of random, kalaedescopic colour, Queli’s skin was bubbling and mutating, here a burst of flame, here a sudden spray of feathers…

Her face bore a look of almost comical surprise.

I turned on my heels, and I ran.

An abhorrence bomb. A fucking abhorrence bomb.

Trickster had made the first of the Dark Pact’s abhorrences during the War, but it had not been the first ever made. The knowledge had been around for a long time – making one was hard bloody work and beyond dangerous, but it wasn’t complicated.

You used Akisis to bind a filament of chaos inside a filament of glass in such a way that when the glass broke, the chaos was released. Then you did it again, and again, and again, and when you had a couple of hundred filaments of glass you bound them together and slapped a prosaic detonator on the whole mess.

When an abhorrence went off, the resulting blast of chaotic energy would do two things – one, it would most likely blow a hole in the fabric of Reality, birthing a new rent. Two, the resultant unleashing of chaotic radiation would destroy just about everything in a several mile radius.

Everything. Mortal and otherwise.

I’d not detonated one, I’d just sawed into it with a hacksaw, unleashing a single filament. But that filament of raw chaos would warp and twist anything around it, and most likely set of a cascade that would trigger the whole device.

I had seconds, likely less.

Queli had indeed been bait in a trap. Osrim had been killed not because he wasn’t needed, but because they’d wanted me to cut into the correct spike…

I sprinted out of the courtyard, Turis-assisted feet smashing the broken flagstones. I heard Queli’s cry of loss behind me but she was gone anyway, half-twisted into a gibbering nightmare, and staying to rescue whatever she had become would have killed us both.

Not to mention the fact that I had just had a harsh reminder of the price of sentiment.

The air slammed hard against me as I accelerated. I heard the pop behind me as more filaments gave way, felt the surge of chaotic power at my back the way a mortal feels the sudden heat of the sun coming free of cloud.

I was almost back at the ridge when it went off for real.

A sudden, silent implosion. The swooping drop in the pit of my stomach as I felt all reason drop out of the world.

I had to turn back to look.

The rushing column of multicoloured light…

A thunderous explosion, as though the fist of some immense God had slammed into the earth.

Basalt Tower collapsed into multicoloured dust, as did the ridge beneath it, and the lava that plumed from the suddenly-opened volcano, and the ground around it…

And in their place, chaos.

Detonating an abhorrence was bad enough. Detonating one right on top of an already existing rent was a sure-fire way to destroy an entire world. The proof of that was right there in the rapidly accelerating wavefront of crumbling Reality that was even now sweeping towards me.

Denial of the ground indeed.

At my hip Akeem was cackling with glee. ‘Knew you’d do it! Knew you’d end it!’ The blade paused, suddenly. ‘Shouldn’t you be running though?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I probably should be.’

And, so saying, I turned again and sprinted for the nearest way on Turis-assisted feet.