It came, another meteor from the Ogre's arm. Rooster dove to the ground, careful not to drop his fifth stone Bad Kisser or let it touch the earth. Ogerius' rock hissed above like a Reaper bolt. Rooster got to his feet and aimed. This throw must count. Pittantho had also gone to waste, Rooster's fourth rock, whose name was borne from his son's favorite puppet when Dreu was just a boy. Now Dreu lay in a grave, taken by the war gods as so many others Rooster had loved and cherished. He once thought those deities of combat favored him but now questioned that notion. Perhaps this duel would tell.

At the thought of his slain issue Rooster's stomach heaved. He held down the bile. Could not lose face and puke in front of all those eyes. He would not give his enemies the pleasure or his allies the dishonor. Garmund drew in a breath and stilled himself. Felt the wind on his reddened face and shut out the murmurs from the crowd. He raised Bad Kisser and took careful aim. A lover had bought that stone for Rooster in a Bleatmoor shop while he was on shore leave. The Ypsi seductress claimed the flecked piece of starstone would be good luck on his campaigns. Blessed it and said it would never miss. Rooster would now see. He kept his focus, his discipline. Attentive to every muscle and every moment. He breathed in a lungful of air and strode forward and launched Bad Kisser at the Ogre. That Ypsi lover was made a liar by the throw. Another infernal miss. Ogerius even laughed at the attempt, as did others among the crowd. General Grattus did not.

Rooster shook at the wounds to his being and spirit. As soon as he drew his next stone—one of great meaning to him—Ogre's next confident throw was already cutting the air between the rivals. Rooster found his body unwilling to move. He'd felt fear before in the face of wasters and pirates and leviathans of the sea but had never been paralyzed by those confrontations. And now he stood like those statues of dead lawmakers and generals that lined this boulevard as the stone zoomed ever closer. Rooster knew not why. Perhaps it was simply the toll of age and blood. Finally he found the will to dislodge his frozen joints and moved to avoid the missile. As if guided by the Trickster's own malicious hand the stone's curvature compensated for Rooster's movement and spun upward and glanced off the front of his skull. The pain smacked him from his body. Rooster stumbled and—curse every god uttered by the lips of man—dropped the sacred stone named after his martyred father. And so he shamed Logrus and himself. He had picked that stone from the shores upon which his father had died. The Laughing Sea, so named for the mocking sound if its waves. Those white crests of raging foam had indeed mocked Garmund as he honored his father on that mournful pilgrimage and now they once again mocked him here so far from that gray strand.

— • —

The Commander collected himself as those waves withdrew from the shores of his mind. Realized he had lost time and was now lying on his back. People stood over him, speaking, prodding. One of Grattus' afterlings asked him if he was done. Rooster answered by ordering the man to help him to his feet. Once he stood again he touched his hand to his head and found there blood. His brainbasket reverberated like a waster drum. He was lucky he had moved that last moment for the stone had merely glanced from his brow and still he was devastated and spinning from the impact. A direct hit of such force and he would have been feeling nothing at all.

It was now his throw. Rooster's handsmen retrieved Logrus from the street as they had the other lost and hurled stones. The Commander whispered an apology to his father and drew the next rock. This one he did not linger on. He had carefully calculated and aimed his previous throws and they had been disasters. Perhaps he'd been overthinking things. Rooster had often found that the best approach was to simply do and not to ponder. The blow to his head had taken much out of him. But it had also put something back in. Shaken the old Admiral awake and alive. Resurrected the Reaper in him. Rooster decided in that moment as he drew Kirst (named for a city-state of gothic beauty in the cold north of which he had only seen haunting paintings) that he would not think. Just throw. This he did. Given more thrust and control from his raw spirit and refusal to lose than any muscle or skill, Rooster was astonished by the accuracy and power of the pitch. The Ogre's eyes shot wide with marvel at his opponent's ungodly throw from out of the nothings. He backpedaled and lost his step and stumbled and the stone was there. Ogerius kicked back and raised his arms to protect his head and waited for the rushing impact. It struck him hard in the side of his thick torso. The Ogre inhaled a sharp gasp and collapsed into the dust. He writhed in pain. Seemed unable to breathe. The crowd leered. Was the fight already decided? Rooster tried to see through the blood and sweat in his eyes and past the onlookers to determine whether his foe was truly down. The sweet rush of victory began to seep into his blood—but he could not be sure until he was. Rooster began to push his way forward. "Is he done?"

One of the judges, Hortecrus, commanded the spectators to step aside. Few listened, even to him. The crowd was transfixed. A collective gasp rippled through them as they backed away from The Ogre. He rose. A titan roused from bad torpor and in a mood of world-crushing color. Rooster watched on, cursing as he saw Ogerius' gray head and broad shoulders rise above the throng. The man was indeed a titan among them. His face had been bruised in his fall. His clothes were dirtied and disheveled. He glared with new hate. A True Ogre.

— • —

Ogerius did nothing to dodge Rooster's next throw, so confident was he that it would not strike true once it took flight. It harmlessly struck the ground beside him and clambered into the parting throng. Another miss. Both Ogre and Rooster had been shaken by the hits they previously took and their pitches suffered. Ogerius rubbed his sore flank. His face burned from scraping on a sharp cobblestone in his fall. He put all that anger and pain into his next assault. It alighted from his hand at the speed of a falling star.

— • —

But it missed. Dumu's Scrotum, so named after the said anatomy of the stone god, had too failed Rooster and now he was on to his next contender, Herndop. This rock he had taken from the loser in his last such reckoning. It was custom that the winner had his pick of the loser's stones, whether or not the latter had survived the match. That one Rooster had won well, so many years ago. Herndop had fallen on the third throw. How much Rooster had faded in skill and strength since then. And how greater the opponent he now faced.

Again Rooster chose not to overthink. He had little choice but to fire off the pitch without much aim for his eyes were nearly useless now thanks to the mingled sweat and blood. His head thrummed and he wondered if his skull was bleeding inside. Perhaps he was already doomed to die. But he had two more stones and would not let them go unslung before he did.

As soon as Herndop left Rooster's hand he knew it was a lost throw. It was too low and struck the ground between them. But then the Trickster's coin came up in the Commander's favor and his daughter Fate obliged. Ogerius misjudged the rock's odd trajectory. Its ugly bounce sent it toward his lower legs. Struck him hard in the shin with a crack. The Ogre snarled in pain and staggered. Gathered himself and readied his next stone. He threw and the thing went for Rooster like a diving raptor.

— • —

The jagged rock careened through the air between Ogerius and the Commander. Hooked like the scytheblade of a First Reaper and caught blinded Rooster directly in the throat. Old Garmund dropped his last stone and fell to the earth with his hands at his neck, gasping for air. Surely the blow had crushed his windpipe. The crowd came alive and filled the empty space, obscuring Ogerius' view of his fallen foe. It appeared the Ogre had brought down the great Rooster. But he swore that his war with the Reapers was far from done.

— • —

She kept a trove of the black gems in the heart of her buried complex, that sandstone vault far below the wastes. Few knew the Heraspex was there, at the lowbelly of an ancient airstarved tomb far from Xul's burning and damning eye. Those who'd had awareness of Maxith's hiding place were now all dead, slain within a single knot of the confused moons. Their killers cut across the map like a sacrificial blade, felling ancient masters one by one until they had now come to her doorstep. Psychic alarms rang in her stonebound domain, warning her of their entry. Maxith's growling familiars reported it was a lone man, a human covered in runes. The Heraspex did not flee. Though she had traps and protectors—whirling blades on runed gears, mummified sentries, vampiric spiders the size of mekme—those things were not the origin of Maxith's fearlessness in the face of her coming death. She would still have not wavered and fled had she been in the open wastes with not a stone with which to defend herself. Maxith knew she would perish. She had foreseen it. Wished it. She had died once. Let this be the last. Let the revenant intruder with his ancient sword slavemaster have what they came for and be so burdened and so cursed.

— • —

"Go forward, Reaper. Together we claim our destiny." So Rattanak commanded as he marshalled Halo's brain through a gauntlet of mazes and fire toward the oracle's secret library below. He had detected its keeper after puzzling through the stolen minds in his limbotic cradle. Found her secret lair in the traces of others' memories. Here was believed to be a great private collection of old arcana, tucked away in selfish pride by the Heraspex. Maxith would surely be hell to face. But combined they were unstoppable, Reaper and Zhjaki. The August One's host Halo was now more golem than man. Given life through sorcery and not blood. Drained of that base stuff. Made better, stronger, faster. Augmented by those they'd slain. A walking furnace of soulfire. It required eternal patience, forcing captive Donric's hand via sheer titanic will to carve those precise marks into his own flesh across the course of their journey and maintaining the glyphwork (though the sigils were warded to remain intact in the face of elements and wear, they still required constant care in these harsh lands). A Reaper's mind was not easily wrangled, not one such as this. It was fortunate that Rattanak had learned such patience in his crystalline prison while in the grasp of the Justicars.

As Rattanak gorged on the obscure trees of knowledge leaked by the dying souls of their prey he came to know many things that had been denied him while in the long custody of the Justicars. That grinding marathon ended when Yanhamu fell to the Reapers, slain by Halo himself. Rattanak's immortality had come at a cost for he was condemned to be carried by others and forced to see the world through others' eyes—but the August Emperor had now found a way out of the gemmed blade. He had come to understand enough sorcery to unlock the phylactery and gift himself with a new body to thrive in. But for Rattanak even that was only a mockery of life, such a shared existence. The emperor longed to be whole again, to have his own true living body. To eat again and to fuck again and to feel what it was to kill with his own hands again. Perhaps there was a way. Sorcery opened doorways to the dreamer's playground.

The emperor had picked through the bones of his victims' memories. Learned secrets untold. With practice he could become the greatest archmage that ever lived. He would continue to pit his new powers against foe after foe as he traversed the Outers, making his way home, long overdue. Back to the marshy Heartlands and its great hive cities, where Rattanak would seek out his purest descendant and claim his body and lay claim to the throne of the Empire.

— • —

Halo fixed his mind on Mulia and his girls as his body was mutilated by blade and flame. His diabolical master bade him onward into the dark depths. The Reaper needed no torch or sorcerous light to make his way, for his undead eyes could penetrate the pitch. Rattanak had accumulated great power, piece by piece, on their trek. Not armies, or coin, or influence. Knowledge—the most powerful weapon in such a world as theirs. Knowledge could bend reality itself, conjure interdimensional minds, obliterate entire towns, turn mortals godlike. The widespread fear was well-founded.

Halo had little control over his body any longer, forced simply to be witness... to watch and hear helplessly as another took the reins. The Reaper was disembodied, anchored to his mortal coil that had by then begun to mummify in the dry heat. No more did it decompose. No longer was he badgered by vulture and raptor and wastehound. He lamented the loss of his life. Never again would he feel the sensation of his heart pumping and lungsful of air. As a Reaper he respected and cared for the body and enjoyed the rush and crucible of physical action. He would miss that part of his life dearly, even the pain—as if he had more in common with the masochistic wasters than he cared to allow.

Rattanak (for it was he who drove them forward now) gripped a stone slab that obstructed their way. It would have taken ten normal living men to move it. It took only him. The runery pulsed through his legs and arms as he shoved the monolithic door aside. He stepped through. A clacking greeted him. Insects disturbed by the visitors. Protective of their Queen, the Heraspex. Rattanak drew his sword as Halo watched on.

— • —