Fate nodded.

Then one last thought struck Dorian. He frowned. “Say,” he said. “How did you find me here? How do you keep finding me?”

“Ah…yes! That.”

“You haven’t been meddling in my run, have you?” Dorian narrowed his eyes. “Too many strange things have happened. A few too many to be just coincidence.”

“I—err—well, perhaps I wouldn’t quite term it meddling—“

“What did you do?”

Fate swallowed. “I… may have marked you?”

“So it was you! I knew it!” His whole run was starting to make sense. “Since the start of this run I knew something was off. The probabilities were all out of wack! No wonder!”

“I’m sorry! But… I had to, you see! I couldn’t lose track of you in case something like—well, something like Jez happened.” He frowned. “But I must protest! It should’ve been but a surface-level mark. The disturbances it made should’ve been minor.”

“Clearly not.”

“That wasn’t all me! I alone can’t cause the sort of—good sire! I took a gander at your run, I’ll have you know. The strings of your Fate are far too tangled. No mark of mine could possibly do such a thing!”

Dorian raised a brow. “Explain.”

“Somehow the Fates of you and Jez are intertwined,” said Fate. “The strings between you are very old—old indeed, stretching centuries! In that Lower Plane he was bound to you. He is still bound to you in ways I admit I don’t fully understand…”

“Ah. I suppose it follows.” Dorian shrugged. He did technically set Jez on his current trajectory, after all—however accidentally. In a way, he was Jez’s creator. “Still—that hardly explains the disturbances. I must be bound to thousands of idiots I don’t know, and they haven’t made a lottery of my run.”

“Jez is different. What he does defies the order of the Multiverse…he aims to destroy its very order! He is a being of pure qi, you see. A being that has renounced all natural Laws—and whatever twisted Laws he does have are of his own make! His Fate is outside the Multiverse’s jurisdiction. If I were to hazard a guess, the more he destabilizes the Multiverse, the less stable your Fate becomes too.”

“…What exactly is that supposed to mean?” Dorian’s head was starting to pound. “What happens now?”

“I don’t know!” wailed Fate. The old man threw up his hands. “I am hardly a soothsayer, a reader of tea-leaves—there is no such thing as future-telling! The closest thing to it is what your brother does! Everyone expects me to take a glance at the lines on their palms and derive the hour of their death. That is not how this works, you see!”

Fate sighed. “I don’t decide others’ Fates. I cannot see how the twining of its strings play out. The best I can see is, too, prediction—when a panoply of Strings all twine downward, tinge black—it is but a warning. It is how I saw, vaguely, a great evil coming to the Multiverse! But that is all. I am subject to Fate’s whims as much as any other. It is best to think of me like… like…”

He paused. “If we are all passengers on a ship,” he said slowly. “I can see the ship’s direction. I see from whence it came. I have some small influence over its rudder. If I wished, perhaps I could alter its speed slightly. Or change the material of its decks. I can throw other passengers overboard! But I am not the captain, only a deckhand. I cannot chart the course, in truth, nor do I know the destination.” He smiled, happy wrinkles touching his eyes. “I am the Godking of Fate because no-one else thinks they are on a ship at all.”

“Hm. Fine.” Dorian opened his mouth to say more, but then there was a shock of cold. Suddenly physical senses intruded on this space. The last thing he saw was Fate’s eyes pop; then he was jerked back awake, gasping, sitting bolt upright, face-to-face with a bored-looking Sun holding a half-empty pail of iced water.

***

“‘Morning!” said Sun cheerily.

“Why,” said Dorian, dragging in a ragged breath, “am I alive?” Instantly the headache started pressing in on his skull again. He almost wished he was still unconscious. His body ached all over; pain stabbed up and down his torso.

“Seemed kind of mean to kill you in your sleep.” Sun shrugged. “Everyone deserves a proper last meal, y’know?”

She slid a bowl over to him. What looked to be the husks of dried yellow worms, wrangled into noodles. A slab of seasoned meat cooked so well it could’ve been charcoal.

“…Thanks?”

He squinted at it, and sniffed. Something vaguely nauseating. That did not smell like meat.

Then he had a hunch. He glanced down to his chest, where faint white lines were scratched against the scales. Had those always been there? He frowned. On his stomach, too, ran long thin lines. His wrists, too, and his thighs. Really all his vital points. His neck stung like mad. If he looked in a mirror he wagered he’d see a bone-white crisscross lacing his throat.

At Sun’s side was a cleaver. Its edge was chipped.

He glanced at it. Then at his bowl. Sun saw his look. They stared at each other.

Dorian sighed, sloshing the soup about. “…This is poisoned, isn’t it?”

“Pfft!” She puffed out her cheeks in annoyance. “Why’d you have to be so damned hard? I mean--literally.”

She jabbed a finger at his a plate on his chest. “I sawed at that thing for a good half hour! Couldn’t even get to the skin. And your neck! I never saw so many scales. You Torchdragons are ridiculous!”

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” he said dryly. He held up the bowl. “What’s with all this? Why not just bash in my head with the Jingu?”

“And destroy your eyes and brains? Those things could be delicacies! Besides, I probably couldn’t even dent your skull.” She sighed. “Hence the soup. It’s supposed to soften you up from the inside. I tried feeding it to you in your sleep, but dragonkin have jaw muscles like you wouldn’t believe. So all that’s over, I guess…”

She crossed her arms. She shot him a cross look. “I’ll have to go in the hard way. It’ll take ages to saw through all that scale.” She picked up Jingu. “You’d better taste good, mister.”

“Hold on!” Dorian sat up, swallowing despite his dry throat. Then a vicious dizzy spell sent him reeling again. “I—I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

“Oh, we’re well past that!” Sun brandished her weapon. “Goodbye!”

“Wait!” he said quickly. “You can tell if I’m lying, can’t you? Then listen—it is not in your best interest to kill me.”

That got her attention. “Huh. You are telling the truth.”

“I know the Ninth Circle of Hell,” said Dorian, staring her dead in the eye. “I know it better than nearly anyone alive!” Heavens knows I’ve nearly conquered the damn place before—and died here a hundred times besides! “Which means I also know where to find delicacies you can only dream of. Give me time and I can procure nearly anything on this plane. I’ve tasted teas made from tears of the Golden Phoenix. Do you know what treats ferment in the Swamp of the Damned? Or what back-alley auctions in the Demon Kingdom sell the most succulent Taotie tongues? Kill me, and you lose all that.”

She brightened. “Woah. How are you doing that?”

“What?”

“Lying!” She prodded him in the chest with a finger. “You shouldn’t be able to do that to me.”

“I’m telling the truth. Which is something I say a lot, but this is one of the very few times in my life that I’ve meant it.”

There was a long silence. He watched her, feeling like his head might split open at the seams at any moment, and waited. She wrinkled her nose. She chewed on her lip. She stuck out her tongue.

At last—“Alright. Say I believe you. How in Houyi’s name did you know all that? Who are you?”

And Dorian sighed. The question he really hoped she wouldn’t ask. He thought about wriggling his way out of this one. But something told him if he tried anything fishy the underside of that frying pan would be the last thing he’d ever see. It’d already bitten him in the ass enough already.

“I’m Dorian. The Godking. Yes… that Dorian. You may have heard of me.” He smiled wanly. “Well—once-godking. Now… decidedly not. Not even a Demigod, officially, until I get one of my Laws up to snuff.”

Her eyes went wide. Her mouth dropped open. It was a common enough reaction to hearing his name. He basked in it for a second. After so long as a weakling this run—so long toyed with, tossed around—finally, some respect!

“You! Didn’t you come by the enclave half a millennium ago?”

“What?” Dorian pursed his lips. A decidedly unpleasant memory bubbled to to mind. “Ah. Yes. That.”

“You tried to steal Grandpa’s Crown of Ultimate Truth!”

Dorian winced. “Did I, now? The details are rather hazy… it has been quite a few centuries…”

“He beat the shit out of you!”

He frowned. “Oh, please! It was at best a draw.”

“So. Dorian. Godking.” She blinked. “Hmm. Okay. I’ve got it.”

“…Really? Just like that?” He’d almost been expecting more doubt. Then again, she did have the ultimate truth detector built into her Bloodline.

“You haven’t been around these parts lately, have you?” She shrugged. “All kinds of Godking refugees have been pouring into the few Upper Realms that madman hasn’t conquered. What’s one more?”

He spread his hands, sighing dramatically. “You’ve got me. Tragically I lost my Godking bodies. It was a little like what your Grandpa did. You see, I staged a brave last stand against Jez’s forces. In the epic battle I managed to badly wound him! But by some underhand trickery he managed to get the better of me…”

She raised an eyebrow, deadpan. “Uh-huh.”

“…So now I find myself here.” He cleared his throat. The one way out of this mess for him popped into his woozy, half-lucid mind. It was a desperate try, but—“I need to get my strength back to strike back at the ruffian. You want to taste Hell’s best treats! We can help each other out here.”

Her brow went even higher. “Eh?!”

“Certain regions of Hell are jam-packed with treasures, and the rarest, most powerful beasts so often taste the best. I’ll take the cores. You take the meat. I need cloaking if I am to journey through Hell without being constantly beset by hordes of demons. You’ll need muscle if you want to get any of the good stuff—unless you plan to keep skulking around poaching eggs.”

Now that he said it aloud, it made a strange amount of sense. And to his relief she was scratching her chin, chewing on it. He pressed on, fighting back another spasm of near-crippling nausea. Blast that Jingu!

“Take the Swamp of the Damned. It’s not far from here. Did you know there is a vineyard of Forbidden Grapes submerged in the boiling oil-bogs? They taste simply divine. Each one can boost a mortal from untrained to Sky! But they’re guarded by tar eels, and swamp-demons, and other ghastly horrors lurking the deep. But I know how to get past them, and your cloaking can get us there unharmed. And that’s just one stop.”

He stuck out a hand. “So? What do you say?”