Vice watched as the world crumbled.

It was very peaceful, he thought, even as he fought to control the panic bouncing around within him like something caged. By training he kept the feeling at a remove. It would be peaceful, he decided, to watch the world end by fast increments. When he fell, and he would fall, he decided he would not scream. He would go to that place ready for him in the sky and there he knew he would face an eternity of waiting.

It sounded very peaceful.

"Vice?"

The voice came from behind him. The monk did not stir. The voice was just a quiet thought made loud by his meditations and his fear, a fleeting and returning blink of a familiar sound when he was faced with the end.

"Vice!"

It sounded like Saber. But it could not be. Vice had stepped through. He was lost to the world. The Citadel had swallowed and defeated him like a whale of purpose.

"Fucking hell, Vice, why are you just sitting there?"

With an irritated growl, Vice humored this hallucination that was just as irritating as the real Saber and turn around. There he was, standing in a rip in the world. The rest of the Armory stood behind him.

"You aren't real," Vice said.

Saber rolled his eyes. "Your god's bullshit and I fucked half your order and your mother. Do you want to smack us over that? Or you just wanna sit there until you grow roots out of your asshole?"

Vice blinked.

"Vice," Dagger said, moving Saber out of the way, "move your ass."

Vice stood and stepped through the rift. The moment he was through a platform trailing a bunch of stairs like streamers smashed into the one he'd been sitting on. He turned at the noise, and coughed as stone dust blew through the rift. The he'd been sitting on groaned and shrieked with the sound of stone grinding against stone.

It shuddered and fell.

"Ah," Vice said, sounding a bit wistful.

"You sound disappointed," Saber said.

"I would not expect you to understand."

"You'd be surprised," Saber said, staring out at the crumbling world on the other side of the portal.

Vice humphed.

"Might have been nice to be done," Saber said.

Vice turned to regard the duelist and libertine. Even his hood looked shocked.

"What?" Saber said, "Yeha, I feel it. I just don't walk around moping all the time."

"I do not... mope."

Saber threw his arm around Vice's shoulder. "It's okay, Vice, it's a very dignified mope."

"Saber..."

"Fifty poets and a hundred painters could not hope to mope with even half your gravitas."

Vice sighed heavily but did not throw off the duelist's arm. They walked through the strange cubicle-studded room to where Pitch was examining the controls.

"Can this thing get out of here?" Dagger asked Pitch as she entered the room.

"How was wandering through oblivion?" the alchemist asked.

"Quiet and very hazardous."

Pitch chuckled. He looked down at the rows of buttons on the table and pushed one of them. Scenes shifted one by one, each stranger than the last. There was even one that appeared to be underwater. The Armory heard a thunderous, roaring splash and the air filled with the reek of salt.

"What the hell?" Pitch said, preparing to get up and check when Dagger lunged past him and pushed the next button. The roaring stopped.

"I don't want to drown, Pitch."

"But I... No, that's fair."

The next scene was one more familiar. A stone hall with a solid stone floor.

"Looks more like the citadel we know," Dagger said. "What do you think, Pitch?"

"I think this is the least strange of all the options."

"Good enough."

They stepped through the rift into in a chamber so vast it spawned a gentle wind against their faces. They stared up into an expanse with a ceiling so distance it was a shadow, and walls so far away that not even the bricks that built them could be seen. To either side of the platform was an endless drop. At the far end a single set of stairs with no railing.

They led up.

Powder whistled. Somewhere were the faint sounds of battle: screams of men and beasts, the clash of steel and claw, rushed footsteps on stone.

Saber gestured to the only set of stairs. "Should we go up? Or up?"

Dagger led them up the narrow steps.

The things that happened to them next became a blur of bottled time and violence.

For one hundred years, the Armory battled in the Citadel of Stairs, down one flight and up another in a stasis of conflict. They charged down some hallways and fought along corridors in creeping, tactical retreats. Direction lost meaning. Up was the same as down. Turning around meant nothing. One dimly lit path was the same as another. They fought men. They fought beasts. They killed things that were both and neither. They witnessed horrors and wonder in such variety that shortly there was no distinguishing one from the other as Pitch's rationed chemicals muted terror and triumph alike. They fought along narrow platforms where the ceiling became the floor, and they battled sideways, where any misstep might have sent them hurtling to be smashed against the side of the tower. There was no escape. No hunger to mark the time. No daylight. The top of the citadel was as distant as never, and as close as yesterday. In a rare moment between fights, Pitch stitched a cut on Dagger's leg and sealed it with glue. Powder sighed and fingered the bullets in her pouch and thought they want us to fight forever. Saber sat, his humor spent, his hand curled dejectedly around the hilt of his weapon as he carelessly let its point rest upon the ground.

"We fight forever anyway," Dagger said as if Powder had spoken the thought out loud, "we struck that deal long before we got here," she said and got to her feet with a grimace of pain. "So straighten up. There's no over for us."

"Captain," Powder said with a nod, and reloaded her weapons.

But eventually even the Citadel of Stairs ran short of sameness, and a turn that looked like any other they'd taken in the last patch of endless time showed a difference as welcome as spring thaw.

They ducked into a narrow and winding corridor of stone where the torches grew sparse and guttering, poorly tended and dim.

"This is different," Pitch noted.

"Never thought I'd be happy to see less torchlight," Saber said.

At the end of the corridor was a spiral of steel stairs leading up, as if up had become something other than a matter of warped and lost perspective. They climbed it, passing level after level of stone landings out of reach where men and beasts trapped just like them slavered for blood and battled each other in tableaus the Armory could not have joined if they wanted to. There was no way off the stairs. They climbed and the stairs steepened. Eventually the spiral tilted so much that it became a ladder instead. The hand and footholds were deeply grooved and gleaming, as if they'd just been built. Where so much of the tower seemed to be in a state of halted disrepair, the ladder gleamed. They climbed and climbed as the shaftway tightened.

"Maybe it leads to the roof," Saber suggested.

"Or the basement," Powder countered.

They paused often, twining their arms and legs between the rungs to hang and rest their aching limbs. Finally Dagger saw a grid above them, and an opening. She dragged herself off the ladder and stood tall for the first time in hours or minutes of climbing and looked around the industrial landing. The walls were steel. It gleamed as if new-made. She wondered if they'd ever been meant to find their way into this place, and considered the tower's nature. She could not decide which possibility bothered her more: That they'd not been meant to find this, or that they had and it was just one more boring, eternal twist in this tangled, walless jail cell.

The room was lit by glowing orbs bound in cages of steel. It had only one door, and that was closed with a single glass aperture at eye level. As the rest of the Armory dragged their way up from the ladder, Dagger cautiously peered through the glass. Beyond was another corridor with a towering ceiling. It was lined with other doors. Light filtered through some, casting rectangles along the path. It looked like a shiny version of the corridor they'd first entered, but if this was a dungeon, it could only be for the most important of prisoners.

There was a sign above the door in a language she couldn't read.

"Pitch, any idea what that says?" She asked.

Pitch peered at the sign for several moments. "Pictographs. It would almost be ancient Couju. But that's a dead scholar's language, and this is..."

"What?"

"It looks like what might have happened if the language never died. Or what it might have looked like in the years before it did."

"Want to explain that?"

"Spoken and written languages change as they're used. They evolve with time as they're spoken. Accents change and meaning with them. Words are lost and new ones are invented. Languages only die when they stop being spoken. Couju fell hundreds of years ago. Nobody has spoken it since. The ones that escaped that cataclysm learned other languages where they settled. Eventually they lost their own. It wasn't useful anymore. We only have a few books. We don't know what it sounds like."

"Can you read it?"

Pitch peered closer. "That word could be box, or well, or lock."

"Pitch, it's one word," Saber asked.

"Couju's grammar and meaning are contextual. The pictographs to either side that I can't read, they provide the context for the meaning of this one. We had books at the academy, but they're histories. Not a lot of use in modern alchemy. This is the one shape I kind of recognize."

"Box, well, lock," Dagger muttered. "Box, well, lock."

"Prison?" Powder suggested.

Pitch nodded. "It's possible."

"The whole place is a prison," Dagger said. "Pitch, we entered through a prison."

"We did. It certainly looked like one. As we understand them anyway. But perhaps it wasn't a prison originally," Pitch said.

"What else would that have been?" Dagger asked.

"Think of what we've seen, the automations, the crumbling systems. So much of this is like an observatory. And think of how the queen described the Citadel's actions. Experiments. Not one sign of an authority figure or anyone who runs this place. The walls are holding all this in, and Temker's Clock is still functioning on the living creatures who entered. Probably because nobody who comes in can find their way back to break it. But the rest of this place is obviously untended mechanisms run wild. If this is the prison level... and it almost looked maintained..."

"Then things are about to get nastier," Dagger finished.

"That would be my guess, boss, yes," Pitch said.

"Well, we know what's behind us. Forward always."

"Forward always," the rest of the Armory muttered, more or less in unison.

Dagger grabbed the handle and pulled. The door would not open.

"Pitch? If you would?"

Pitch came forward and peered into the lock. It wasn't a keyhole as any of them had seen before. It was just a large black circle. He bent down and peered inside, but the void of it was complete and untouched by light. He took a metal funnel from his kit and slid the slender end into the hole. Into the funnel he poured a measure of acid and they waited while the liquid smoked its way through the mechanism's works. Beyond the door something clanked and fell away. Pitch shrugged and pulled the door open. Dagger stepped through first, hammer ready, but there was no threat in the hallway beyond. They crept their way along the narrow corridor until they reached the first set of doors. On one of the doors was a metal plaque with more of the same writing as above the entrance, and to the right was a large window that looked into the room.

It looked empty.

"Maybe they just built this place and haven't put anybody in the cells yet," Dagger said.

The glass vibrated and flexed outward. Dagger flinched back and brought her hammer up. The glass thrummed again as something inside the room that none of them could see smashed itself against the clear wall. It held. The smashing continued, and Dagger put her palm on the barrier.

"It's not ordinary glass," Pitch said.

"Thanks, Pitch," Dagger said and shook her head.

The cell, for it could be nothing else, was far from empty.

They passed cell after cell along the hallway.

In one was a single human man, then the air in the cell shivered and there was four of the same man, then two, then so many his face and staring eyes filled the cell with so many duplicates there was no space between their shoulders. They all jockeyed to press their faces against the glass, to knock and beg and gesture for somebody to open the door and free them. They jostled and quarreled with each other, three of them eventually getting into a brawl that absorbed the rest. The copies flickered and fought and then vanished until there was only that man, squatting on the ground with his head in his hands and his fingers rubbing his scalp. In another was the head of a hound the size of a country shack. Its neck ended in a ragged, still-bleeding stump. Blood covered the floor and ran toward a drain at the center. Whatever had been used to sever it from its body was dull and heavy. The giant hound's tongue lay dead between its jaws. When the Armory got close, one of its eyes, entirely too human, rolled to regard them and the tongue flopped and licked the glass. In another was a basalt obelisk draped in chains. It was shivering as if cold, and the chains vibrated and rattled silently around it. The corridor stretched. Every step could have been the same. Each of the Armory felt a strange displacement, and an odd gratitude for the strangeness in each cell. Without that, there would have been no way to gauge the distance or the difference, and every step would have seemed meaningless and infinite.

Vice pushed his way to the front of the line past Dagger, shouldering her aside.

"What the hell, Vice?" Dagger muttered as the monk nearly ran down the corridor ahead of them. He did not answer.

The Armory could but follow to make sure that whatever he faced next, he would not do so alone. The cells blurred as they hurried after Vice, random strange horrors dragged out into a blur as they sprinted to keep up.

"Where are you going?" Dagger called. The monk did not slow.

Finally the corridor opened up into a rotunda. At the far end of the circle was a single cell, far larger than the rest. Vice dashed to it until both his hands were pressed against the glass. He collapsed to his knees and stared up at the cell's occupant.

On the other side of the glass was a towering figure, twice even Dagger's height. It brushed the ceiling. It seemed to have two forms, and either both existed at once, or it phased between both so quickly as to seem so. It was a tall figure, hooded and draped in floor-length robes of plain gray, but also a stone watchtower with a colorless fire burning at the top. The light from the flame created a kind of nimbus around the figure's top, be that hooded head or flame-peaked roof.

The Armory stopped in a loose semi-circle around the prostrate monk.

"What is it, Vice?" Dagger asked, but Vice said nothing only kept his imploring hands on the glass and his head bowed.

"The Vigil," Vice murmured.

"That's what the Vigil looks like?" Saber asked.

"What did you expect?" Pitch said.

"Oh, don't act so casual. You've never seen a god either." Saber shot back.

"And definitely not one in jail," Powder muttered.

"Didn't know they made jail for gods," Saber said.

Dagger leaned away from the glass and appraised the cell's occupant as Vice clasped his fingers so hard his arms shook. He muttered furiously under his breath, and no matter what was said to him, refused to open his eyes, answer or move. They waited as the prayer, or whatever it was Vice was muttering, stretched into minutes.

"So, this is where we live now?" Saber asked.

"Quiet, Saber," Dagger said absently and laid her hand on Vice's shoulder. "Vice, is this really the Vigil? Think. That can't be possible."

"I can feel it," Vice whispered. He opened his eyes and his expression as he tilted his head back and his hood fell away was pained and full of longing. The monk, who none of them had ever seen beg for anything, pleaded with his eyes at his god on the other side of the glass. Then he leapt to his feet and hammered at the door with both fists, not even bothering with the knob. His fists didn't even scuff the steel. With an effort, he gathered himself and gripped the handle, but it did not turn. He yanked back as hard as he could, but the door did not move.

"Pitch!" Vice shouted. "Open this for me!"

"Wait just a moment, Vice," Pitch said and backed away from the door.

"Pitch!" Vice howled.

"Vice, I need you to calm down!" Dagger said.

Vice growled and grabbed the handle with both hands, tugging and wrenching and thrashing against it. Pitch looked around the room. Inside the cell, the towering figure/watchtower, did not react. The alchemist inspected the room, ranging his eyes across the floor to where it met the cell wall and up along the boundaries of the ceiling. Finally he inspected the brass plate by the door. It was different than the others. Near the writing was a button. He pressed it.

Who are you?

The voice spoke in all their minds at once. It was so dry it made them think of water. Vice fell back from the door.

"Watcher, I have come!"

"What the fuck," Pitch whispered, his hand still on the button.

I am the Watcher in the Darkness. Why have you come?

"We've come to destroy the Citadel's power," Dagger answered.

"We've come to free you," Vice said.

"No," Dagger said, "we did not."

Admirable. Honest. Perhaps. You are killers. But there is nobody left to kill. I have watched as time dragged them like a dead knight dragged by the stirrups of his charger. They have all been pounded dead beneath hooves of time.

"You know what happened here?" Dagger asked.

I am the Watcher in the Darkness. I see all. I have watched your bloody march through this place. I have watched the deteriorated systems try in vain to slow you down. I believe that you are not liberators. That does not mean you cannot liberate.

"You watched us?" Dagger asked.

Yes.

"Then you know who we are."

You are wedge and fire, the finger on the scales, the dagger in the back of power. You are prisoners. As I am.

"What?" Saber asked.

I see you all so clearly. Your newness to this place marks you like motes of light in perfect darkness. The one of stone. The dancing fool. The worshipper of the new gods called science. The distant killer. The faithful one. You are catalysts, counter-weights. You are fate's flung stone.

"That sounds impressive," Saber said.

You are change made flesh. But you are trying to change a dead thing already past the grip of time. You are maggots on a corpse.

"I liked fate's flug stone better," Saber said.

And you are not funny.

Saber closed his mouth.

"Watcher, what would you have us do?" Vice said.

Free me. Free me and I will guide you from this place. We will destroy it together. I will wreak my vengeance on this place. You will help me. In exchange I will free you.

Most of the Armory stood in something like shock, feeling a bit like squatters who finally come across a mad landlord in the attic.

"Vice, what do..." Dagger said, but Vice had changed. He stood and unclasped his hands. The exultation fell from his face. He backed away from the glass with a look of fury and revulsion on his face.

"Vice, what's wrong?" Dagger asked.

But the monk was fleeing down the corridor at a fast walk.

Do not run, my little watcher. You have found me.

Dagger gestured at Pitch.

He cannot run. It is unseemly to run from the tru...

Pitch took his hand off the brass plate and the Vigil was cut off midsentence. A weight settled across them in the silence of the prison hall. The Vigil got closer to the glass in a flicker of movement. The Armory backed away from the glass. The Vigil's gray watchtower fire burned brighter.

"Stay back from that glass. Pitch," Dagger said, "don't touch that button until I say. Saber, go get Vice."

"Me?" Saber asked

"He likes you."

"No he doesn't."

"Captain," Powder said, "Vice doesn't retreat. This doesn't need a lighter touch, it needs your touch."

"Fine," Dagger said and left the rest of their staring up at god on the other side of the glass.

Dagger found Vice nearly at the end of the corridor, staring down into the hatch with the ladder as if it were a wishing well.

"Talk to me Vice."

"That is not the Vigil," the monk said, his voice thick with grief.

"What do you mean? You were sure that it was. You nearly broke your hands on that door."

"The Vigil is dead, Dagger. Gone. The Vigil would never seek vengeance, would never beg for freedom. That was why we were created. We are the hands, but The Vigil is the eyes of the faith. We choose our acts carefully. To intervene is sin. Every moment I am with you, I am defiled further by active change. But that is... necessary. To keep a memory alive."

"Maybe they just captured the Vigil. Maybe it's been a prisoner here this whole time. Being in jail can change anybody."

"Nothing can change the Watcher in the Darkness, not even time. Nothing can hold it. The world is the Watcher's prison, as it is all of ours. That is not the Vigil, Dagger."

"How can you be sure?"

"Wouldn't you know your own father if you met him?"

"No."

"Perhaps that was a poor example. But..."

"Vice, you've never known the Vigil. Your faith..."

"Say it," Vice said miserably.

"Your faith is defined by grief.

"It is. But Dagger, the Vigil... the true Vigil... it would....""

"What?"

"It would be horrified by us. By me. By what we have done to preserve what's left of the faith. It would know the ways we have perverted its teachings to persist."

"God's forgive."

"Not mine. What we do is antithetical to the Vigil's teachings. Killing on its behalf? Slaughtering hundreds to feed dying, celestial machines. It would know my guilt. And this... creature does not."

"Maybe. But it saw what we did to get here."

"Dagger, if the Vigil had been alive, it would never have allowed us to do what we do."

"Even if it was locked up? Think of what we've seen in here. This place has power."

"I do not know..."

"Well, whatever it is, it might be our only way out of here. We might need it."

"What do you mean?"

"It seems to understand this place."

"Maybe. But if it is not the Vigil then it is something else."

"I am going to ask you to do something you won't like."

"I like nothing that I do. I do it because it is needful," Vice said. "I do it for the refugees of our faith."

"Then this won't be any different. Talk to it. Get it to help us. If it isn't the Vigil, it thinks it is. If it has a fraction of power, it can cut us a way out of this timeless shithole."

Vice thought for a moment, his features contorting with the enormity of what he was being asked. To lie to his god, even a copy.

"What you ask..." Vice said. "What you ask would never be possible with the true Vigil, the true Vigil would see the lie, would see my soul and know my mind."

"Then it's a means to get out of here. And if it's not the Vigil, you don't offend it by lying. I'd do myself if I could, but I can't. None of us can. Only you. We can't talk to it like you can."

Vice knelt for a moment and clasped his hands. He prayed.

"Vice we don't have time for this."

But Vice ignored her. She waited while he prayed and minutes, if that's what they really were, ticked by uncounted.

"Very well," Vice said in a sick voice, "I'll talk to this false creature."

"Lock down your guilt, Vice," Dagger said, "it has to believe it's a god. Lie if you have to, teach it your faith if you have to."

"And if it's some mad creature like so many things in this place?"

"We've made deals with worse. I don't think we have a choice."