Saga Of The European King

YEAR ONE:

The war was pretty terrible. It wasn't at all like the fun wars the King had fought throughout his awesome life. The enemies in this war were not birds or foreigners or Chaotic Evil Spaniards or undead or totally out to get him – these were like real people you could otherwise hang out with or make love to or meet with a party.

It pranged even the hardest of the King's hearts most smartingly whenever he had to put their villages to the sword, whenever he had have their houses burned, their fields salted, their ladies raped, their dogs smashed and not one of their stones left standing atop each other, because every one of those people were worth knowing, all of their villages were fun places with interesting museums and nice restaurants, their fields were full of delicious food that their classy ladies could whip up for you, their dogs were cute and well-behaved and didn't leave that gross dog smell on your hands if you so much as brushed against them and even their stones were pretty and often well carved. It just didn't feel right.

And so the King – both of him – did his best to keep the warring factions of Europe from ever meeting. This was difficult, as whenever one King brought his faction anywhere near a town or city, roughly half of the population would leave their homes and join in arms against the rival faction. They would disregard all bonds of family, all oaths of duty, bringing only the clothes on their back and the most offensive weapon that lay in their path from their home to his army. His forces swelled, the King would then remove his army from the area of the town his presence had halved, being careful to avoid any confrontation. This was the cleanest way he could operate. Bloodshed was rare, but some defectors were dragged back into their forsaken homes to pay for their treachery. The King learned, after a few botched rescue attempts, that his mere presence amongst so many Europeans at once would raise the bloodshed to a bloodbath or even a bloodelephant, which is an elephant made of blood.

With half of the town added to his faction, the King would take his forces out towards the next town and the process would repeat. Presently, the town he had just left would be visited by his other self and the remaining half would fasten itself to that horde. So long as one King kept ahead of the other King, conflict could be avoided, but the logistics of constantly missing each other were difficult to maintain.

The King was, as I'm sure you know by now, the smartest guy in the world. It stands to reason that he could therefore outthink any cat or kitten who matched wits with him. The problem was that now he was matching wits with himself and both sides were aiming to be outwitted. Whenever the King had to decide where he should move his faction next, he had to appreciate that the other King running around out there would be able to figure out exactly what his choice would be, so then he'd have to resolve to go somewhere unexpected – to the last place he would possibly think of going, but then had to be mindful that his other self hadn't gone to that exact same place because he wanted to be sure he'd miss a collision. The options left to him in the middle of the bell curve were always a gamble and that meant that he had to pit his brilliant luck against an opponent who was just as lucky. Remaining where he was and trusting that his other self would reach the same conclusion was right out too, as his horde was so large that it quickly exhausted any and all food reserves in any area they passed through. All that partying had really wrecked the agriculture.

It was hard to figure out, but if the King wasn't up to it then it wouldn't make sense that he was so popular now, wouldn't it? And so he managed to successfully in-maneuver his other self well enough that they danced their factions around each other without major incident for a year. These were the good days of the war. Europe's resources and infrastructure was being systematically ground away by abandonment and the wandering strip-mine that the factions represented, but dissent within the ranks was low, the King's Euro-magic was at a high enough ebb to prevent those in his horde from being uncool to each other and the winter that year was mild. That may have been a nice thing for Winter to do, but don't think for a second that the King had forgotten all the other terrible stuff that Winter pulled just on all the other years. Both Kings celebrated Christmas and New Year with their factions, and everyone let the holiday season make them just a little bit sad that they hated the other half of the country so badly. The last of the booze got drunk and the year that followed promised nothing.

Soon the Kings found that when they came across a town or city that neither of them had visited since the war began, it was more often than not beset by a tiny civil war of its own. The luxury of being non-confrontational was over. Instead of letting one half of the town come to him and leaving the other half be, that remaining half had to be pacified from their terrible rage. They would not surrender, they would not negotiate. Sometime they could be escaped but sometimes they held siege weaponry, powerful magic items and mighty heroes and could not be ignored. The King tried to put them down gently, but the zeal of his faction was impossible to soften. After a victory – and he was always victorious – he would have a sturdy prison built for the survivors, stocked with as much food as he could spare, in the hope that his other self would shortly be along to collect those he had not slaughtered. It was a meagre hope, and many good Europeans starved or dashed themselves to pieces against the walls of the prisons. Every night the King cried tears that were so heavy that they fell right through the ground. If you had the Hearing Of The Wolf, you could hear them hiss as they vaporised against the metal of the Holy Grail at the centre of the Earth. Then would come the only thing that could stop tears like that. The phone rang. It was General Majesty but he was just holding the phone because there was someone else who would like to talk to the King.
“Hiya Dad,” said David. He'd made it. He'd had adventures, sure, but Glowfist and Rigor Mantis had seen him and his sister safe all the way to the Chillinous Plains.
No matter how dark and murderous the Civil War became, there was always something to look forward to. Every night, a phone call from the children. They didn't often have much news to report or interesting things to say, but they were everything, they were the Future. The war seemed small and inconsequential so long as they were all right.

YEAR TWO:

In the third month of the second year, one of the Kings had a critical failure of luck. It doesn't matter which King – the rocket-handed or the extendo-handed – was the one who failed, the result would have been identical either way. What happened was that the Kings were travelling through Greece towards Constantinople – one of the few great European cities that had not been visited by their hordes. On the official List of Awesome Places that had been decided by the Big Important Council Of Europe many years ago, Constantinople ranked 3rd, right under Brussels (1) and Jerusalem (2). And even though the King was Europe and the Big Important Council was supposed to enact his will and feelings across his Kingdom, the King secretly thought that the List was wrong and that Constantinople should at least be number two. He had spent a good deal of time there in his younger years – he would pass through it whenever he was to venture East on his half-year travels with Father Dominoes and he used it as his main save point during his journey across India. Constantinople, as a concept, was how the whole of Europe would be as soon as the King got his desk cleared and really got things organised. It was against the law to be hungry in Constantinople and works of art had to be above a certain threshold of beauty or they would magically crumble into piles of dust that would spell out the words 'TRY HARDER.' The beach was always perfect and no citizen would willingly litter or build a house anywhere near it even if you paid them to do so. It never got dark or spooky because the Greek Fire lit every home, alleyway and fabulous casino. The King knew why the Big Important Council had got the city figured so wrong. It was one of the few times that their love of the King had clouded their judgement and since the King lived in Brussels then Brussels had to automatically be the best place in Europe. Also, there were politics involved. There was the Mirror.

Both Kings, on their separate paths to Constantinople, had received word from their respective scouts that the other faction was marching not very far from their location. This was okay – it was a pretty regular thing to happen. The King reckoned that the best thing to do would be to cut and run - his other self could check on Constantinople and do his best to quell any conflict he would find there. Once the coast was clear, he could take his own faction over to pick over what was left and make whatever arrangements would be necessary.

The problem was that the incredibly, ridiculously improbable occurred and both Kings made a paltry Luck roll at the same time. Both of them decided to turn away from Constantinople and choose the least predictable place to hide. He changed course at Edime, marched his faction down to Enez, picking up half of the citizens along the way, then, once he'd built the customary prison to house the remnants of the other half of the citizens he's encountered along the way, set his massive faction to work to build enough ships to sail them down to Atlantis, where they narrowly avoided a terrible naval battle, over to Paphos Harbour in Cyprus, where he crammed all of his followers into the majestic tombs there. He knew that the tombs were safe because he'd cleared out all the mummies and zombies back when he'd been a boy. How difficult it was back then to kill even a single mummy! Mummies were nothing to the King these days. But the tombs were not safe, you see. Shortly before the King had piled his faction into the necropolis, the other King, unhampered by the near-miss down at Atlantis, had done exactly the same thing. Roughly a third of the population of Europe was now sealed up like sardines at the bottom of a coal mine. One half of everyone there had a deep, bestial, irrational hatred of the other half. Everyone was armed. 'Bloodelephant' doesn't even begin to describe what happened down there. Try 'bloodsuperfreighter' or 'bloodPacificTrashVortex' or, if you're feeling literal, 'bloodTombOfTheKings.' Each King escaped from that tomb with about a dozen men left in their faction. They stared at each other absolutely bewildered, their hearts rapping out a symphony of horror, not a single thought in their heads that was not as saturated in blood as they were. Jacob Hillmounter emerged – his higher-than-average hit points had protected him in the tomb – joined his favourite King and was followed soon after by Timothy Clashradish. The former comrades broke the stare and added to the bewilderment by immediately shouting at each other.
“Get him, Your Highness! End this now, crush his trusted lieutenant and you can be whole again!” said Jacob Hillmounter.
“Quickly, Your Highness – their faction will be worthless without their military mastermind! Destroy them with one strike of your mighty hand!” insisted Timothy Clashradish.
The Kings fled in opposite directions, with their trusted lieutenants and military masterminds bleating after them.

One of them ended up at the walls of Constantinople. It had been many months, but he still could not quite get all the blood out of his beard and hair. He had picked up a few hundred additions to his tiny faction along the way. He had not given his followers much heed on the journey. He said little, ate nothing and cried even as he slept. What happened there at the walls was unusual for this period in history. The gates were not opened to allow half of the population of the great city to join him, followed by the remaining half trying to kill them. Nor did he find just half of the city occupied by only those who were friendly to his cause. Instead, his motley rabble was ignored, then interrogated, then shot at a bit, before the King had to scream. The scream knocked down a portion of the wall and gained a lot of attention from the city's elders. The King was greeted, with a look of conspicuously-hidden pity, by Brother Kinetic of the Mandatory Order, who had been a close childhood friend. They hugged and the King wept even harder than ever.

His followers were put up on couches among the citizens and the King stayed in the Sancta Sophia itself, where Brother Kinetic could keep an eye on him. He was left more or less alone for a week to recover and was fed only the holy milk they kept as a relic – milk that had spontaneously lactated from the breast of the King's great great grandfather during a very tense poker game with the Shadow Puppets. But when his sobs threatened to crack the great dome of the basilica, Brother Kinetic took him for a walk through the House Of Flowers and into the city.
“It is so peaceful,” mumbled the King. It was the first bit of sense that had been heard from him in days.
“We have not had the troubles that we have heard about again and again from across the rest of the Kingdom,” croaked Brother Kinetic. His voice was all coughs and whistles. He was possibly the oldest person in Europe. He had hung out with the King's grandfather and been an on-again, off-again Adventure Friend for almost a thousand years. He wasn't much of a fighter or a particularly skilled magician, but he sure was up on his Lore and he was an expert charioteer. If you needed a driver who could outrun and outfox any pursuer in the past epoch, Kinetic was your man. Apparently he used to be able to turn into an elephant but he hadn't done that for years and years.
“There isn't any more fighting amongst us than usual,” the ancient holy man went on, “The merchant guilds are keeping what they call a peace amongst themselves and even the hooligan horse-racing gangs aren't kicking up too much of a fuss, Your Highness. We're holding steady.” The King looked at him insistently. Brother Kinetic smiled at him through a sideways glance. “And the Mirror is safe, of course. You'd be seeing a very different view right now if it wasn't, believe me.”
“It's you, isn't it, Brother. Your magic is keeping civilisation together here in the East. You were buds with my grandfather, you were my father's godfather, you've been there the whole time. You must be an endless reservoir of -” whispered the King. He was getting excited. Brother Kinetic cut him off with a raised, quavering hand.
“Only so much of that a man can hold, lad. Only so much a land can hold, for that matter. No. Remember the nature of this city. We're not entirely European out here, are we?” he said. The King fell silent. “No,” he continued, “We're all out of Euro-magic, Your Highness. And all I do to contribute to our stability these days is read the same two dozen romance novels again and again. But we've got more than enough of another kind of magic leaking out of our Mirror. Without it, we'd be as beasts.” The King bowed his head and nodded gently as he walked. Presently, the weeping started up again.

He took his faction and traveled back to the West. He didn't know particularly where he was going but he went there anyway.

YEAR THREE

It got worse. Most of the city-states across Italy had burned themselves to the ground before he got there. The scattered survivors in the hills would join with him if he passed by them. They would crash his encampment in the night looking for food and attention. He never had enough of either to spare.

Some cities and town were outright hostile to his faction, having slain their brothers, wives and children who would have been friendly to its approach. When he was close enough to hear their cries, he found they were unwavering calls of love and support to his Royal head, promised that the sender of the cries would soon liberate him from the unholy jailers who were holding him hostage. He screamed an explanation, he sent message after message in any number of media, but they didn't understand. They had lost the capacity to keep a society together.

Sometimes, running was not an option. His people needed food and rest and medicine. They needed fresh water and clothes and a place to shelter for the winter. There were often more people in his travelling faction than there were in the town that was antagonising it. Sometimes a King had to consider the good of the many over the good of the few.

And when the homes had been burned, the weapons wrested from the people's grasp, the good plundered and the ringleaders put to death, the King would walk through his stolen city and try not to hear the whispers and pleadings of the survivors, which almost always went like this: “There's the King, our King, I sent him a birthday card last year. I made it myself. Why doesn't he help us? Why doesn't he put a stop to this?”

YEAR FOUR

The food ran out. Hardly anyone across Europe had grown anything since the party had began on the King's return. Every settlement above a certain population had torn itself apart and was at siege with itself. Trade was a distant memory. One particular trading partner had a longer memory than others.
“Hope you don't mind if I help myself to a little soup,” said the Angel Cowboy when he appeared in the King's camp one morning. He already had a steaming bowl in one hand as he walked and was carefully slurping from a spoon without getting any in his moustache. “Haven't had a bite all morning and I'd hate to get disagreeable on you at a time like this.”
“How did you find me?” asked the King flatly. He wasn't shocked but he was curious.
“Oh, that's Sidewinder's department. I didn't bother him for the details much, but I understand that there aren't a lot of people of the magical type left round here. What's left tends to light up like fireworks and once we found out where the Hell gates were, well, but let's not get into that boring old jibberjabber, let's have us a powwow, how about it?”
“We broke our trade treaty because we're fighting a Civil War,” said the King without flavour. The Angel Cowboy did not look up from his soup, though the King's eyes were set to Super-Piercing.
“So I gather, so I gather. Canoes came up to Brussels with a healthy dose of merchandise on their backs and there wasn't nobody to come and take it off our hands. That sends up a red flag. Canoes come back to the States, words get exchanged, scouting expedition gets sent over to find someone who'll be so good as to tell us what's going on, they don't come back, suddenly there are red flags further than the eye can see. That's when I get called away from our little project in the Chillinous Plains, have all sorts of words with all sorts of people, and get put on a canoe bound here so's I can sit with you right now over a bowl of this very fine soup, my compliments to the chef.” The bowl was finished now. The Angel Cowboy put it down and looked at the King, matching Pierce for Pierce. “Course, you know well as I that the contract you signed had a special clause for States of Emergency and, since Europe out there don't look exactly like it does on the brochures, I think I'm right in my assessment that this is one of those States. So relax, we're still in business, nothing broken and nothing needs fixing.” He stood up and doffed his hat. He looked like he was going to turn to go, but then looked back at the King and said, “Your children are fine, since you're asking. Princess is, well she's Princess. And David was about as good a help at the construction of Fort Majesty as you could hope a boy to be. Hell, he's practically a young man now. It's the sweetest thing, says he speaks to his daddy every day. Don't kids say the funniest things sometimes?” And then he really did leave the King's tent. The King rose and gingerly grabbed his arm before he could exit.
“If you knew about the Magic Telephone, why did you come all the way out here to see me personally?” hissed the King. The Angel Cowboy smiled and looked friendly.
“Your Highness, you know me. I'm the old fashioned type. Like to do these things face-to-face. Besides,” he said, brushing off the King's wooden hand and stepping outside. “I had something to show you.”

It was impossible. There is no way he could have brought so much -stuff- up here without any of his scouts and lookouts noticing.
“That's the four years worth of backlogged trade we owe. You can go through the records, it's all there. Now you've got fifty years to get back on your feet before we want back what you owe us. Sound reasonable to you? And don't worry about the perishables and breakages in shipping caused by this little lapse here, we'll write that off, just clean off the record.” The Angel Cowboy's slaves were stacking up mountains of boxes on the King's faction's doorstep. Food, supplies, beasts of burden, luxuries, building material – enough to keep the whole of Europe awash in foreign goods for four whole years. “And we'll keep it coming,” cheered the Angel Cowboy. “Yessir, no matter where you are, we'll make sure you're not without your delivery here. Remember, you've only got to pay us back in fifty years time, plus interest of course, and oh, here's your special shipment you ordered,” he said, walking towards one particularly pile of more carefully stacked crates of a different colour and material. He stood by them and smiled again. “You'll want to be careful with those. Might want to get a guard to watch them.”
“What special shipment?” asked the King. He smelled danger. The Angel Cowboy made a good show of looking confused. “Well, the weapons you asked for. High-premium stuff. Ain't nobody else in the world right now with weapons like these.” He produced his little finger-dirty folder from his carryall, rifled through a few leaves of paper and produced from it a document that he held up for the King to get a look at.
“That is not my signature. What's a 'chocolate?'” said the King. The Angel Cowboy brought the paper over to his own face, frowned, and squinted at it.
“Transpires that it aint. Looks like your daughter's signature to me. Princess Princess.” He handed it back over to the King, who saw then that it was exactly as the Angel Cowboy had described. The King worked up the breath to say something but the Angel Cowboy, quick as a flash, freed another paper from his folder and held it up for the King's inspection. It was a photocopy from the Book Of European Law. The King could only wonder how this man had procured it. “Happened to have this on me, and it seems to say that in the event of wartime, a King's firstborn has the power of treaty if he is away on battle. At the time, as I recall, my nation was at war with your nation and you were bravely bouncing around on people's heads while riding a demon horse.” The King didn't need to read it. He knew European Law. It had been his bedtime story for eight years when growing up. “You wouldn't break a European Law would you, Your Highness?” said the Angel Cowboy as his smile slipped and the King got a good look at the man he was inside. He put the papers back in their place and then the smile and easy manner had returned. “You're at war, Your Highness. You've got a lot of people who need protecting every day for the next who-knows-when. You're getting these weapons of ours for sweetheart rates – that's the deal. All you need to do in return is to ask your men to fill out some surveys after they've used them so we can know how well they've turned out. Trust me, you're not going to find anything like this on any battlefield in the world. You've got the edge now, no doubt about it. And there's something else you're getting in the deal, too – we're giving you a detachment of the brightest graduates from of Shaman School, fully-trained healers, the cream of the crop. You won't have any problems with the health of your boys any longer.”
The King looked up at the unseemly tower of hardware that was accumulating in his camp. He saw the contingent of United Statesian healers appear, on cue, from behind a hill of supplies. He thought he saw a glimmer of Hope.
“You haven't … spoken to anyone else about this, honoured Cowboy?” said the King to the Angel Cowboy.
“Who else would there be to speak to, Your Highness?” said the Angel Cowboy without looking up from his papers. He then closed his folder, slapped the King on the back and went to busy himself with some important part of the offloading, leaving the King to stare at his new riches.

If he could maintain a stronghold, if he could reliably expand the walls of his faction again and again, unchallenged by wonderful new weaponry, he could start Europe all over again. Once the server was reset and the Euro-magic came back, Europe could be powerful enough to finally take on the Kingdom of Sharing. They could eradicate the Ire Lords. Winter wouldn't know what had hit it – Fort Majesty was still there, all the pieces were in place... All he needed to do was to hold out just a little bit longer. To keep it together. To keep being the King.

That is what he was best at in all the world.

YEAR FIVE

The two factions began to look very different in the fifth year. One was the Faction of the Rocket Hand, with Timothy Clashradish as its High Prefect. The Rockets were based in Salzburg, rooted to the spot, behind impenetrable walls and a wide network of guard towers. The King held court in the Cathedral, resplendent in llama skins and gold leaf, bearing Cutty, that legendary old fusspot of a sword. They had sowed seed in their fields and the harvest promised to be decent, and till then there were supply top-ups from the United States every six months or so. Conditions were cramped and crowded and there was serious talk of extending the walls all the way out to Grödig. Raiding parties were coming in with more and more survivors and half-feral wanderers and they needed more space and food and protection than there was to go around.

Then there was the Faction of the Extendo Hand, with Jacob Hillmounter as its Chief Hunter. They roamed the wastes of Viking Europe, assimilating all that they came across, lashing every resource they could find onto their hardened procession of fleabitten vagabonds. The King was always at the head of the march, bring down game and enemies with telescopic punches and sharing out every scrap before he would get so much as a bite. They avoided population centres and kept their numbers low. When they swelled too large, they would thin their populace out by appropriating old Viking ships and sending their strongest out towards the Chillinous Plains and the completed Fort Majesty. They would be safe there under the watchful hand of kind Colonel Glowfist, powerful General Majesty, wise Mechanicus and deadly Rigor Mantis – icons of a world that seemed to have disappeared forever. They carried messages for the King's son and daughter and salted meat for the journey.

Those Europeans who had never met either the Extendo Faction or the Rocket Faction had degenerated into tribal groups led around in circles by the remaining heroes and the matured boys-with-a-destiny. They tried to be good and honourable but they had trouble respecting and keeping to old codes like marriage, law, justice, dinner parties, economics and religion. They forgot the rule of the King's Father in Heaven, they looked for food only when they were hungry and they would only share with their closest kin. Besides from hunger and the more mundane misfortunes, they were preyed upon by indistinguishable groups led by villains, bosses and enemies who would have, in better times, provided fine sport for any enterprising adventurers hoping to get a quest or two under their belts before retirement. The exception was the proud city of Jerusalem, which stayed aloft in a sea of darkness thanks to the iron will and good charm of it's Mayor, Michael. But more on Jerusalem later. The group we should really be focusing on right now is the Forest People.

Logging had not been practised across Europe in any major capacity ever since the party ended and the tridecimation of the population had put a serious drop in the levels of hunting going on. It's amazing what a sturdy biome can do when given a gap to fill, especially if it is organised. The forests and woodlands of Europe, once regimented and ordered so carefully, leapt out like a cat on a spring and ran, ever so slowly, over the ruined and abandoned villages, the scorched farmlands, the empty abbeys, the disputed badlands. Every sort of non-human, non-magical creature and plant flourished and multiplied. By their patterns, it seemed like some sort of mind was behind it, even though the Green Gods had long since been rounded up by the Devil and put to work doing something useful in Hell. This was a different sort of power. This was not magic. This was industry.

Axe Axewound had seen his calling in the wild and, as soon as his legs and spine had fused themselves into a modicum of usage, had hobbled towards it at maximum speed. Gone now were his responsibilities to the world of men. Gone were his complicated issues with his family, the pressure of being worthy to the King, the complexities of a werewolf / lady romance. At nights, he would have visions of the future. He was a prophet, one of fur and claw and blood. He would take up his rightful place as King of the Beasts and provide a future for the wilderness in the dark times that were approaching. His visions had stopped as soon as he had left Father Dominoes' mission and this had taken the wind out of his sails a little bit, but by that time he was up to his neck in jubilant animal friends and obedient wildlife so it would have been awkward to have gone back right there and then.

The main problem with the wild, really, he thought as he sat on his mossy throne in the heart of the woods outside Brussels, was that it was just too wild. It was messy and unpredictable. Squirrels would bury acorns and then sometimes forget about them and sometimes oak trees would grow. How about if the squirrels were fed a set quota every day and were trained to bury acorns – in a specific area - but never dig them up? If you did that with a hundred squirrels you could plant a hundred trees a day. Didn't have to be acorns, either. And all those creatures that eat squirrels, well they'd have to be fed every day so that they didn't muck up the plantations. Or you could keep them in a different area. It was quite fun when you started to think about it. He came up with hundreds of simple plans and mechanisms that all fit into each other to create a forest-growing machine. The creatures of the forest liked being told what to do by a formidable predator, the trees appreciated any sort of attention and everyone got to benefit from the expansion of the habitat.

This kept Axe Axewound cheerfully employed for the best part of four years. He missed the King, sure, and he felt bad for running out on Astrid Gimmerleck, and he really wished sometimes that he'd spent a few weeks longer under the healing of Father Dominoes, for his mobility and movement was very badly restricted by his injuries. But he could indulge any other lust or hunger that stirred and still have plenty of time for his dayjob of expanding the forests. He created corridors of growth that linked previously isolated outcrops, enforced strict quotas on predation, instituted an excellent distribution programme to ensure that population growth of one species did not swamp another, bred some remarkable new kinds of creeper, moss and mushroom, fathered about a gazillion werekids and ate a whole deer and change every day. Things were going really smoothly until, one day, a flock of goats appeared in the forest near his ever-moving headquarters. A day later, the prophecies came back to him.

They started off small, just like they had been before. He dreamt that a voice told him he'd find a rare sort of beetle in his leftover deer carcass. The next night, he was told he'd narrowly avoid being crushed by a falling tree. It turned out that the tree, when it did fall, missed him by a mile, but still! There were discoveries of strange chunks of metal embedded in moss banks, the return of a cub of his who had been lost weeks ago, a partial solar eclipse he dreamt of a full week before it happened, a snake that appeared in his favourite log and so on and so forth. It was hard to get his animal friends to appreciate the magnitude of these things. They couldn't quite get a grasp on the idea of the future or why it would necessarily be different from today. He tried to explain it to them in terms of weather.
“It's terrible being caught out in the rain, isn't it?” he said to an assembly of beasts at breakfast.
“I hate it, I like being dry,” said one wolf.
“I like it when there's sun,” said a cricket.
“The rain can flood our burrows and drown up to eighty percent of the eggs,” said an ant colony. “This is unacceptable.”
“So imagine if you knew the rain was coming and you could stop it from happening, or go somewhere that was dry instead,” he said.
“But the rain is not here,” said the wolf carefully.
“It does not sound like rain is going to be here today,” said the cricket.
“Atmospheric conditions are not optimal,” said the ant colony.
“Yes, that much is given, it's not raining now, but what if you knew for sure that it will rain tomorrow?” Axe tried. His audience took this in.
“It is not raining,” said the wolf. That was as far as he could get them. It didn't matter much, really, since they did exactly what he asked of them without even wanting to know why it was he was asking them to do so. This was frustrating, as the human side of him, very much still active, wanted to be understood and sympathised with, but it also made the execution of big, complicated projects somewhat easier. And that was fortunate, because one heck of a big prophecy rattled into Axe's skullpan one night and you can bet that it demanded a lot of complicated action.

In his dream, he was told of rampant raiders – villains and feral slaves, who would beset the southern arm of his forest kingdom and destroy every green and living thing to be found there. They were filthy and treacherous and would not even make anything useful or cool with the resources that the forest represented, they would just smash it all into splinters, grind it into paste, trample it underfoot and move on. This was why the future-sight had returned to him. This was the point of his gift. This was why the King's Father had spared him from death back during his solo adventure. To fail to act would be to spit in the face of Destiny. Everything was building up to this point, life was no longer an inconceivable puzzle where the pieces are constantly shifting from invisible to graspable to simply absent. He, the nameless King of the Greenwood, who in a former life had been Axe Axewound, would stop this from happening. With a word, his magnificent flaming axe was once again in his hand. He wouldn't actually use it for another few days but it helped him to focus.

The dream had offered him hints at a solution and he had taken the advice under the most serious consideration. There was a settlement of dark magicians and demons in the former city of Salzburg. If he could force the raiders' attentions to the city rather than his forest, he could wait for them to dash themselves against the walls and then tear the survivors apart with his fanged legions. The same strategy could work even if they succeeded in taking the city. He had some time and he set his forest-subjects to work accordingly.

The march of the Faction of the Extendo Hand halted as soon as the King's expert senses detected that there was a present for him somewhere nearby. The King could tell if you had a gift for him even if you had it hidden behind your back or way at the bottom of your cupboard. This made him very difficult to deal with at Christmastime because he would get overexcited and wouldn't sit still. He told Jacob that they would be altering their course away from the forest to investigate the present. Jacob was sure that it was a trap. The King wasn't bothered. There wasn't a trap that could be set that could do him a significant amount of damage these days and his saving rolls were so luxurious that it wasn't likely that he would suffer any damage in the first place. He would unwrap the present personally. He was the King, after all.

Turns out that they didn't even need the King's super-senses because the delicious smell of delicately roasted meat caught the wind perfectly before they got anywhere near the package. I say 'package,' but it was more of a hut, with walls of hide and horn, packed full of meat. Pork, stuffed quail, venison, wild berries, crunchy crackling, flame-roasted tubers – not to mention all the useful leathers and crafted bones that made up the box it came in. The King took a bite out of everything and found no traps at all. Everyone in the faction got a small portion of meat and their spirits were greatly lifted. Perhaps there were allies out there. Perhaps the rest of the country wasn't an enemy after all? The hope in their hearts was a more substantial thing than the meat in their bellies.
“Everything is going to be okay,” said Jacob Hillmounter to the King after dinner. He was always happiest after meals.

The next day, the King's senses once again predicted a wonderful odour that led them to another present, this one even bigger than the last.
“Ho! At this rate we'll all be jolly fatties!” yelled the King and he wolfed down a suckling pig. Everyone could have new clothes thanks to the leather they'd accumulated. Shoes were especially welcome. The life of the Extendo Faction was one of endless walking, walking, walking. They all had calves like tractor wheels!

For two weeks, the King and his faction followed the trail of scrumptious packages across the rough German country, down south towards the lost city of Salzburg. They could tell, even at a distance, that the city was occupied and hardly lost at all. There was a truly massive present waiting for them not so far from the city walls.
“These are our benefactors?” mused the King to his Chief Hunter. “They may join us or they may be possessed of up to 90% cunning and malice. Wait here and I shall inspect this latest gift,” he said and then he did. Great, bounding steps he took. Distance was stupid to steps like that. He pulled enormously at the big bow that the present was wrapped in and the wrappings crashed away all about him. Inside were more wasps and snakes than had ever been seen in one place. They immediately attacked the King, having no respect for rightful authority nor sympathy for one who has been sorely punk'd. Their cruel stings and envenomed bites took off scores of the King's hitpoints and though the King had scores more, he was soon under real threat from the hail of artillery that soon after came forth from the city walls. He ran back to Jacob Hillmounter, waiting by his faction's militia. He trailed wasps and serpents all the way back over that distance his massive bounds had carried him.
“Bring out the special weapons! Wasps! Wasps! They have made a fool of their King!” he managed before screaming for fifteen consecutive minutes. This killed the majority of the wasps and snakes but the shame remained.

It was in this manner that the two Kings learned that they had both been sold incredibly powerful and dangerous weapons by the Smith Dynasty and that it only took a few discharges of an Anthrax Cannon or a Mustard Howitzer to all but wipe out an opposing force. Fortunately, they both had healers on hand who were very quick to treat the simply horrific wounds and conditions that these weapons brought about, and who were very keen on asking a lot of questions and filling out a lot of paperwork while they worked with their patients. They never did find out who had left the presents for the Extendo Faction but they did resolve that they had to meet and coordinate the next plan of action amongst themselves before they continued in this war.

In the ruins of Salzburg, with their remaining few dozen men (not including the Smith-supplied healers, who had escaped harm) standing about them, coughing piteously, the Kings hashed out the final stage of the Civil War. The Extendo Hand King would retreat to the very east of Europe and stay there with as many people as he could rally to him. The Rocket Hand King would do the same to the very West. Neither one was to open any presents and, if they saw the Angel Cowboy, they were to kill him immediately. Though they would accept the Smith Dynasty trade offerings because, if they didn't, then they and everyone else would starve to death. Also, it turned out that they were both getting these shipments from the United States which meant they had to double the debt they reckoned the nation was in. Great. They'd deal with that later. The Rocket King brought the Extendo King up to speed with the conversations he'd had with David and Princess and the Extendo King was much gladdened by the news.

The Kings followed to the letter these instructions they had agreed upon. They gathered up yet another avalanche of followers to their factions and went to opposite sides of the country, passing acre of acre of levelled and despoiled forest on their way. The Kings realised that those ruined miles must have been where the savage trickster had turned the forest inside out to procure the riches of the presents he had left. The Kings swore that they would find whoever had struck Europe this further blow. It was probably Terrorthaw, they decided independently. That guy is always up to something.

Almost as soon as the new Faction of the Rocket Hand had reached the edge of Portugal – rather too close to Dark Spain or the predations of Ireland for the King's comfort, but rules were rules, did the King fall ill. At first it was kind of funny. He sneezed and sniffled through the construction of the rudimentary system of forts that encompassed the faction, spluttered through the strategy meetings and moaned through the troop assemblies. It was cute because the King had never been ill before (unless there was poison or dark magic involved) but also worrying for the same reason. In the third day of the malaise the King entered into a sneezing fit that was so severe that you couldn't get anywhere near him without getting soaked. That was what Timothy Clashradish feared when he had to go in to the King's tent to present to him the options for fortifying the seaboard wall. He had heard that if the King's spit ever got on you then it would not dry, not in a million. He did not like the sound of it but, then again, it did sound like something he had made up himself. While he racked his memory for the answer to this, the King let out a sneeze so violent that Timothy's jaw collided with his maxilla and his body was seized by the instinct to protect his sovereign. He pulled the tent-flap aside, sword drawn in case he was to find some hateful bacterium inside, he found not one King, but two. They both looked a little embarrassed.

“Your Highnesses,” said Timothy quickly, sheathing his sword. “I did not realise that the Extendo Hand Faction -” his eyes darted towards the King's many sleeves. He saw that the Kings only had one hand between them and his words were left stranded in the air.
“Timothy, you must open the gates and allow a clear passage. They will all start fighting again. The Faction is broken. There are three sides to this accursed war now,” said the King with the rocket hand, looking sourly at his new double, whose face then wrinkled and opened into a sneeze. There was an impossible flip of the world and then there were three Kings in the tent. The copies of the rocket-handed King looked dishevelled and hungry – they were a tiny bit shorter with less voluminous beards and dress of an inferior quality.
“Four sides,” said the King sadly.

The two new factions left in the night, taking their fair share of the accumulated supplies with them. There were some casualties in the scuffle, but thankfully no fatalities. The rocket-handed King glumly went back to the plan of the West Coast stronghold, but his mind was somewhere else. Most of him was waiting while the rest of him was working as usual. Every week thereafter, another sneezing fit split him afresh and the Faction of the Rocket Hand became a progressively less important player in a war that was dizzyingly careening out of any sort of hand. In far too short a time, the creatures that split off from the rocket-handed King were tiny, hunched things, almost hairless, in cheap supermarket clothes and plastic shoes, with only a certain brightness of eye and firmness of voice that betrayed their royal heritage. The divisions took their toll on the rocket-handed King too and it was not a month before he was indistinguishable from the latest spawn that had fallen out of him in the night. As the summer came to an end, what the Rocket-Handed Faction had once called a King was a head with tiny arms and legs, splitting further every day. Then the King was without nose, without mouth, without eyes, then without all else - just a disembodied voice that told his people what to do. There were hundreds of factions out there and hundreds of conflicts going on every day. Weapons were spread thinly across the emerging factions and so much of the fighting was by fist and nail, or rock or mud or simply cross words from a safe distance.

-

It looked to Timothy as though there would not be anything that could reasonably be called Europe left by the end of the year. He prepared to leave the husk of the Rocket Hand stronghold. Perhaps he would become a solider of fortune, he thought. It would be a life of adventuring and possibly the only thing left in this new world that resembled at all the high fun of the King's Adventure Team. Though to do so would mean allying himself to one of Europe's enemies. Perhaps the Smith Dynasty was hiring... or perhaps the Ire Lords would find him useful... The very fact he was even able to think those thoughts should be evidence enough that Europe was over with, dear reader. That beautiful nation that we loved so well had drifted from our world to the phantom globe of memory and regret that haunts old books and inaccurate maps. Timothy could no longer even summon the coolness to feel bad about this as he marched with some NPCs to the shores facing Angleland with the intent to scour a logboat or a sack of potatoes that he could use to step over to Europe's misbegotten son, the dreadest of all isles, the land of Ire. When his raft had been prepared and some rations scraped together for the trip, he stopped for just one moment, one brief distracted slice of time, and felt many things all at once. It was like he had remembered something back at the house, something important, like his car keys, which he'd left on the table. But the house where he remembered leaving them at was the house he grew up in, which he'd moved away from when he was a young man and had subsequently burned down. Mixed up in that strange thought was a joy and an anxiety and a feeling that he really had to go and check something. He'd left the hair-dryer on and he owed Jacob money and he hadn't fed the dog all day and he really should call his mother and and and
He had to get home. Home to Europe.

He gathered up his NPCs and ran back towards the mainland, laughing so hard that he could hear nothing outside of his own chest.

-

Jacob Hillmounter looked out East to the mountains that guarded Europe from the Kingdom Of Sharing. The Sharingists had not messed with Europe directly since the King's Father had wrestled their Czar to the ground and pinned him there for two whole weeks, but the relationship between the two nations was frosty and only occasionally polite. As he thought about Europe's troubled history with the Kingdom of Sharing, an entirely new thought occurred to Jacob. He thought that maybe the Sharingists had a better way of doing things that the Europeans. Maybe they had a point, with the sharing. Maybe their dancing wasn't just crazy and weird and was actually enjoyable. Maybe they weren't all violent, sour drunks. He allowed this sudden burst of cultural empathy to fill him up until his brain was drowned in the desire to actually become a Sharingist himself. It all made sense to him then. He would cross the mountains, become a citizen of the Kingdom beyond, be granted his fair share and live in their transparent towers. He would shed his petty, private desires and be subsumed into the strength of the State. It wasn't all that different from serving the King, only it would mean more star-jumps in the morning and bigger women. He could handle large women. It wouldn't be so bad.

But he realised that they wouldn't take him just like that. The memory of that fateful wrestle was still lodged like an electrode in the Sharingist's shame centre. Their schoolchildren were made to swear that they would work their entire lives to, one day, redeem the Kingdom of Sharing from that humiliation suffered under the King's Father's sweaty, leotarded body. Jacob would need to give them an offering, some token of his new loyalty to the Sharingist way of life. He looked back towards the Extendo Faction camp – though, these days, the Extendo Faction was just him, a banner, the jar and ten dudes - not counting the Smith healer people. They had managed to hang on to a few of the experimental Smith Dynasty weapons throughout all the dissolutions of the King. But they wouldn't be enough as an offering, not even if he threw in the healers as hostages. The Kingdom of Sharing was lousy with weapons and military might – most of Europe's army, of late, had been loaned from them. But then there was the jar. It contained the King's wooden extendo hand and, clinging to its splinters, the King's voice. He would uncork it when he thought he needed orders or guidance for the Faction. It was the smallest remaining fraction of the King that could still be thought of as the King. Now that he thought about it, Jacob realised it was kind of humiliating for the King to have been brought so low as to be a voice in a jar. Almost as humiliating as the defeat the Sharingists had suffered under the King's Father. He descended from the small outcrop that had been his perch and peeked inside the King's tent. The jar was still there. There was nothing to stop him. The others in the camp would not even question him if he were to up and leave with it. He'd be on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Sharing in under a week if he took a horse, so long as he wasn't travelling too heavy. He walked gently towards the jar on its cushion. He just wanted to see how much it weighed, he thought as he put his hands on the vessel. Why, it hardly weighed much at all, he'd be across the border in no time. Maybe he should check to see if it stowed nicely in his pack.

The jar sprang up, rebounded off his chin then flew through the fabric of the tent wall, screaming all the way. Jacob would have been stunned by the blow for three rounds but he rolled to save and was able to get out of the tent in time to see where the jar flew off to. It was heading off in the direction of the last King-thing to have split off from their faction and on its separate way. He grabbed the nearest horse, which was actually a goat, and rode on after it. The other Europeans in the once-great Faction Of The Extendo Hand realised pretty quickly that something cool was happening and followed on whatever livestock they could muster. In the event that a quadroped could not be mustered, they rode piggy-back on each other. It was a very exciting moment. You just had to be there.

When they came upon the camp of the latest faction, they found the people they had come to regard as traitors and turncoats in a similar state of excitement to themselves. Jacob asked the head NPC what was going on and once he had stopped jigging and dancing around, the head NPC told him that a jar screaming in the King's voice had struck the set of teeth that was their King. The jar had broken and – this was the confused bit – the teeth now had a hand and it had scurried off over the hills and they had to follow it, quick! Jacob shouted that exact same sentiment at the top of his voice and both factions – united again as they had been just a few days before – ran in the general direction they thought the King had gone.

They found more camps, more splinter groups, more famished gangs, all of which had a similar story and a similar joy that they could barely contain in their breasts, so wonderful it was to behold. When they weren't dashing off to the next King-sighting, Jacob was moved to find that these other folk from other factions that they were gathering up like some hay into a bale – these were cool guys and he would like to get to know them better. His mind raced with ideas for a get-together they could have when things settled down. A poker night or a Scrabble evening or just drinks down the local, you know? He thought of all the people he had enjoyed hanging out with and then he realised that they had been killed in the past five years of insanely bloody and senseless war and then he thought maybe it was better to think more of the poker nights and less of the murder.

-

Timothy stood proudly by his King – his whole King. Well, approximately one half of the whole of the King – the Rocket Handed half. The Extendo-Handed King was still in the far East of the country and they would have to go out and meet him later. Right now they had more immediate concerns. 'More immediate than restoring the King to tip-top condition?' you should ask, and rightly so. The King was receiving guests.

The King had ordered Brussels to be cleaned up before the guests arrived. This was quite difficult as it had been largely abandoned for five years, during which it had been raided by bandits, scavenged by some faction or another, torn down for supplies, burnt by careless cows, rained on from the sky, of all places, and squatted in by birds and demons. The King had cleared out the bandits, beasts and demons with force and charmed the birds with kind words but it was up to one half of the survivors of the European Civil War to get the place looking nice. Timothy was instrumental in the preparations. Once hospital camps had been erected on the outskirts of the city for the sick, wounded and women and hunting parties had been organised and charged with the task of running out and finding enough to feed everyone in style, whomever remained was put to work with tidying, dusting, defoliating, mending, rebuilding and decorating. It was a month before the city was in any condition at all, and six weeks before the King was satisfied that any of his friends could come round and visit. There was a boss-level demon hanging out in the upper levels of Laeken Palace that he needed to go off and deal with and he made Europe promise that they'd have everything absolutely spic-and-span by the time he came back. They agreed and they kept to the promise, because they were Europeans and they were good people.

This may all sound like a major hassle but the people of Europe were more glad than anything you've seen to be doing something that wasn't marching from place to place, slowly starving between bouts of killing each other. They couldn't quite believe that they'd been doing stuff like that for so long. The world, they realised, was full of love and light and great new things to do. All the while they were cleaning up Brussels, people were seeing the possibilities that lay before them. Their minds were abuzz with all the stuff they would do, all the recipes to cook and books to read and contraptions to build and paintings to paint and friends to make and blogs to write and places to see. It was a pity that the nation's infrastructure was utterly demolished, yeah, but they could make a new one. They'd done it before, some of them. They had the ground below them, the sky above them and their King smiling upon them. They tidied up as best as they could and their best was brilliant. The King returned from his boss battle with a backpack full of gold, some ancient thingimajig that would probably be important later and the most delighted look of surprise on his face when he saw what the people of Europe had done to make Brussels a cool place again.
“Roxy is going to love it!” he laughed. They all laughed!

The Adventure Friends rode in to the city escorted by the very finest donkeys that had survived the awful conflict. Roxy Tripfoot, Bernadetta Leathervest, Cajun, Commander Flightfeather, Astrid Gimmerleck and a strange, handsome young Islamalandic-looking gentlemen who claimed to be Ba'al Hadad walked into a Brussels that looked better than they had ever seen it. It was like all that stuff with the fighting and war never happened! They looked so splendid in their exotic Irish clothes and flushings of victory, there wasn't a single person in Europe who wouldn't have married any one of them at a moment's notice, and no parent who wouldn't be thrilled at the news. There was so much hugging – it was just about possible for Roxy to hug everyone present in under a day – and you can bet they had a party. A small one, sure, but that made it all more intimate and personal. And everyone respected each other at the party, no one macked on each other's girls or anything and everyone helped with the cleaning up afterwards.

A great deal happened later, as the King and his partially-restored Adventure Team sped across the badlands of Central Europe, bringing justice and peace to the criminal gangs and foreign loiterers they found there, but the hope and jubilation that their passage brought was felt in the hearts and dreams of Europeans everywhere. When the King met his counterpart in the East, Europe would again be whole, the land would heal and everything would be pretty awesome once again.

Which is why it came as an unpleasant surprise to everyone when the King arrived in Eastern Europe to find it invaded by Islamaland, his brother dead and his counterpart ears-deep in another one of those horrible wars.

End Of Chapter 100

Terrorthaw, who was King of Europe, Father Of All Men, Bester Of Gods and the Brightest Jewel In The Crown Of The World, landed heavily in his throne. With a contented sigh, he closed his eyes, accessed his pyramid palace's virtual control panel to turn the thermostat right the way down, wriggled his cybernetically-enhanced buttocks into a comfortable groove and waited for the ice. It would take a few hundred years to cover him and his sleeping Kingdom but he was, above all things, a patient man.

He was alone now at the end of his empire, as alone as he had been at the beginning. Those of his minions, children, creations and champions who had elected to follow him into the New Age were slumbering peacefully in their chambers nested within the endless caverns beneath his feet, safely insulated from the cold and the years. Those who wanted to make the most of the world as they knew it were on their way across the oceans towards the untouched continents of the North, no longer forbidden to their many curiosities and hungers. There, his children would find their awaiting destinies as the progenitors of the Royal Bloodlines and Founding Dynasties of India, the United States, China, the southern United States, Ethiopia, Old Celtland, MegaRussia and a certain nation that would also be someday called Europe. They had their King's blessing and as many of his data caches, treasures and materia as could be stowed in the holds of their immense hovercrafts. They would need all the help he could offer, he knew, if they were to overcome the many difficulties that the histories predicted for them.

He had been looking forward to this time of lonesome reflection for centuries. There simply had not been any time in the past one hundred and fifty million years to relax and chill out and reflect on days past, lessons learned, better times and choice victories. So many of each had accumulated from the moment he had set foot on the continent that was his home and Kingdom after disembarking from the landing shuttle of Mechanicus' ship. In that ineffable, primordial time, everything was an enemy – from the roving, city-sized slime moulds, the dotted encampments of shipwrecked ancient astronauts, the wild gods, the dragons, the sponge-colonies, the Moonmen, even the air and water and earth spat poison and fire at him to daily test his defences and endurance. He was so weak back then. His magicks were unwound and his machinery was nearing obsolescence. He had to rely on his cunning and ingenuity to survive. It was quite enough.

He went for the ancient astronauts first. His aim was to seize their alien technology to upgrade himself and his offensive capabilities. Their encampments had progressed well into their third clone-generation and their programming had suffered some decay in the harsh atmosphere. They had little interest in anything other than diligently building pyramids upon every flat surface. After a few days of basic remote viewing, he was easily able to infiltrate one of the camps, knock out their remaining sensor nets with his ageing EMP necktie, snap the feeble neck of a guard on armed dragon watch, drag the corpse away to his spider hole and inspect the creature's eyes and central nervous system well enough to be able to modify a simple invisibility spell to bamboozle their minds. Now all he needed was a source of magic so that he could cast such a spell. As masterful a sorcerer as he was, he would have to expend a very good deal of time and effort before he would be able to commune directly with this strange and ancient land, so he turned his mind to the bits and pieces of priesting he'd picked up over the years. During his teens, he'd listened to plenty of Learn A Dead Language audiobooks in his car when he'd been an Evil Pizzaboy, so he already knew the tongue of ancient, time-lost entities like the God of Carbon Dioxide. And so, with the mutilated body of the ancient astronaut slung over his shoulder, no heavier than a child's, Terrorthaw retreated to his base at the landing shuttle to prepare a sacrifice.

He powered up the Prayer Amplifier housed in Mechanicus' ship and, inspecting the readings, reckoned that its fields would be able to affect his psychicraft from the ship's position in orbit. The Future Folk installed Prayer Amplifiers on all pieces of equipment above a certain size – in their time, the gods had been utterly enslaved to the last spirit and the Future Folk did not have to worry about pleasing or being diplomatic, all they had to do was be heard. The God of Carbon Dioxide was quite surprised to be spoken to by an animal. Its business had always been with gases, which were straightforward, and it was still getting the hang of plants, and all they wanted was more carbon dioxide which was easy enough, but still. This ambulatory mass of confusingly woven animals was asking, in a clear and loud voice, to have a specific band of electromagnetic radiation temporarily bent around its one-shaped body and would, in return, dedicate the carbon dioxide in this other non-ambulatory mass of animals to its glory. The God of Carbon Dioxide didn't really understand. It was huge and simple, even by godly standards, it had no idea that it even had a 'glory,' and had never accepted a sacrifice before. But it felt curiosity for the first time in its existence and so wafted a breath of hot air over the mess of animal to mark its agreement. Terrorthaw burned the body of the ancient astronaut, which was a very difficult thing indeed to do in a low-oxygen environment and required a lot of manual rejiggering of his respiratory systems and then more huffing and puffing that he thought he could bear, but eventually the body did burn in parts and the God of Carbon Dioxide was too taken with the novelty of it all to get fussy. Another waft of hot air passed over Terrorthaw and the invisibility spell that he had prayed for was cast. He was able to walk right into the ancient astronaut camp, help himself to their weapons and start blasting away. The spoils of his victory were disappointing. Many of the machines he had crafted in his own time had been reverse engineered from ancient astronaut technology, the designs of which he'd improved on considerably. However, one particular ray-gun caught his eye – it had once been mounted on one of their starships but had been modified into a portable siege weapon that could be lifted by a small crew for the purpose of fighting off dragons. He recognised it instantly, for it was the same ray-gun he himself had used during the Bird Wars. It was basically his signature weapon for that period. He'd have to bury the weapon in the place where his earlier self would find it in the far future. But for now, his Kingdom-to-be needed to cleared of the vile wyrms, and a little bit of overwhelming firepower could get a lot of chores done.

With the ancient astronauts eliminated, he took up residence in one of the many shiny new pyramids they had erected in the moss jungles. He was grateful for the shelter and eager to plumb the secrets of these strange buildings. He fashioned some tools and spent a few weeks investigating his new home, being interrupted only once by a colossal slime-mould which oozed through one of the stargazing vents, evidently it wished to be out of the sun. It brought with it a smattering of the dust, rocks, debris and whole ecosystems it had gathered up along its gelatinous yellow body throughout its travels. His magnificent new ray-gun made short work of the sprawling creature before it managed to engulf the whole building but the clean-up was arduous. He did not yet have a single helper drone, past self or vat-grown manservant to help him. He had to do it all himself. 'This is not the way the world is meant to be,' he thought to himself as he mopped and mopped and mopped.

In time, he learned that the pyramids worked together as a network to form a magic-containment system within their walls. This was exactly the kind of thing he needed for the next phase of his plan: to secure a permanent source of magic that did not rely on him trying to get a fire going without any oxygen. In preparation for that, he embarked on an expedition to find the spaceship that had originally brought the ancient astronauts to Earth. He found an empty husk, with anything it once contained long since repurposed by the reluctant settlers. But a husk was all he needed. He caught the attention of a slime-mould the size of a locomotive, relatively small by the standards of the time, with some hand-packed mossball treats, then steered the slime over to the spaceship, whereupon the slimy beast unwittingly scooped it up into its body as it swept across the algal savannah in which the ship was moored. The mould followed a trail of thrown mossballs back to the pyramid and then it was slain, quite a way removed from anywhere that would need cleaning, depositing the spaceship's skeleton a short distance from the pyramid's doorstep. Now Terrorthaw had the otherworldly materials he needed to build a very special cage.

He had some experience in xenometallurgy and the composition of the ancient astronaut's spaceships, with their aligned atoms and impermanence to most of the wavelengths he had at hand. He guessed, quite correctly, that the samples he had worked on in his own time had come from similarly ill-fated rescue and recovery missions on behalf of the castaways he had slaughtered. After a quick hunting party and a repeat of the slime-mould heavy lifting trick, he had the precious bones and hide of a dead dragon to work with. It did not take him long to build three cages: air-tight, magic-proof and effectively indestructible. He'd dreamt up the design to hold his old nemesis, the King, and it would have worked too, if he'd been around and available for trapping. But he had even grander quarry in mind. He checked the seals on the small steely apertures
that dinted the otherwise completely sealed surfaces of the cages for the eighteenth time, extinguished all of the lamps and then went out to catch mosquitoes.

He'd been thinking over this particular part of the plan ever since his scanners had detected Mechanicus' time-jump, but he'd been greatly inspired by his short encounter with the God of Carbon Dioxide. The gods of his time had been through a lot of relatively recent upheavals that had knocked a keen sense of wariness and sophistication into their collective skulls, a sense that these ancient gods were baldly lacking. They had not been co-existing with humanity for millennia, had not fed on their ideas and culture and fear like so many ultradimensional ticks, had not stood before the wrath of a King at the height of his powers, nor been turned out of their godly realm and hunted across the psychoscape by the Devil's relentless Dogma Squads. They had a lot to learn.

The God of Carbon Dioxide fell for what was, by definition, the oldest trick in the book. Terrorthaw would write the book himself during a lull in his empire-building specifically so he could make this claim. Here is the Oldest Trick, according to Terrorthaw's famous book:

STEP 1:
Gain audience with FOOL within range of his soon-to-be ETERNAL PRISON (see Sec.6 – GAINING AN AUDIENCE and Sec.3 – CONCEALING THE INTRUMENT OF YOUR MASTERSTROKE IN PLAIN SIGHT)

STEP 2:
Flatter FOOL on his mighty STRENGTH and gigantic POWER.

STEP 3:
Upon concurrence of flattery, invite FOOL to demonstrate established MIGHT by slipping into the GENIUS CONTAINMENT DEVICE OF MY OWN DESIGN. If FOOL hesitates, proceed to STEP 4. If you have done well, proceed to STEP 5.

STEP 4:
If FOOL hesitates, proceed to CHIDE and MOCK the FOOL'S STRENGTH or strongest STAT, starting gently before escalating sharply. Do not be afraid to get sort of FLIRTY, accentuating the HOMOEROTC SUBTEXT.

STEP 5:

Upon capture, laugh until NO MORE LAUGHTER WILL COME OUT.

With the God of Carbon Dioxide under lock and key, he decided to up his game with the God of Moist Places and arranged for Mechanicus' ship to nudge some chunks of orbiting debris on a trajectory towards his pyramid, simulating an attack that he begged the God to hide from in this special little shelter he had for just an occasion...

He felt as though he'd overworked it in that last instance, so for the God of Meiosis he tried a pie, a stick on a string and an upturned milk crate. He didn't even need to hide in a bush or around a corner. It worked beautifully.

He had three captive gods – gods immeasurably more powerful than the kind he was used to. After all, the gods of his time were gods of things like wines of a particular region, or a river or a city, one tribe of people or just one of a zillion gods of the sun, moon or a celestial misunderstanding. How low had their kind been brought by their romance with man, to such paltry and hollow depths they would sink, and would continue to sink – as the Prayer Amplifier and the habits of the Future Folk would show. And how far would man climb – humanity would drop these strutting crudities of magic and myth from the greatest height imaginable. Terrorthaw would have the privilege of giving the first push. He released the mosquitoes.

Normally, he reflected as he crunched through a big bowl of oversized, blood-filled mosquitoes swimming in milk, one would go by a less disgusting route to wring magic from a spirit. But those methods were not available to him in his current situation, and it wasn't as if a bowl of giant, ancestral mosquitoes was the grossest thing he'd ever eaten. He'd once eaten a goblet-full of the gallstones of holy saddhus to gain an edge in his magical war against Mystic Boy and on one occasion he'd eaten one of his own hearts for some reason he couldn't quite recall. The real tricky part had been in getting the captive gods into a state where blood could be drawn from them by the mosquitoes. He'd tried showing them television documentaries of lizards that he'd found on Mechanicus' ship, so they'd try to change form to mimic the things they saw so they would be better able to command/rape/con them. But the gods needed to be taught first how to see in the appropriate time-frame, along with the fundamentals of trichromatic, stereoscopic vision so that they'd be able to make sense of the images, and Terrorthaw didn't know where to begin on that. Fortunately he could rely on their simplicity, so he just told them, in their own languages, to assume this shape or that and he would set them free.

He could feel the god-blood being broken down by his systems and the magic beginning to seep into his cells. It was raw and dangerous stuff and there wasn't too much of it he could absorb, but it was enough for him to go out and upgrade his whole magic-retrieval mechanism he'd worked out. He'd need some demons.

As marvellous as his big ray-gun was, as glad as he was to be reunited with it and as deadly as he was in combat generally, everybody knows that you don't tangle with demons unless you've got some magic on the table. You learn that stuff in kindergarten in Medieval Europe. And demons, being lesser, easily-tamed gods who work for a living, are exactly the kind of thing you'd need to siphon magic from one source to another. He set out demon-spotting with caution, very aware of the sheer power of these old gods and mindful that they had not gone to the trouble of ranking themselves into neat, easily-recognisable categories like they did under the Devil's rule in Terrorthaw's native time. The key to finding a god small enough to qualify as a demon was to watch the dragons, who would rumble with demons every Friday in the parking lot behind the soda stall. A lady dragon would usually kick it off by getting the guys excited with some loose talk and a suggestive wiggle, then saying in not so many words that she would only put out for the biggest, coolest, most demon-stomping boy dragon around. The dragon guys would then sit in the diner, sip enough soda (or a soda float if it was Christmas) to work themselves into a frenzy, then slither around outside to the parking lot in a gang, looking for the smallest, easiest-to-handle god they could find – usually a god of a short-lived but novel arrangement of organic molecules, or the god of a meteorite that had recently struck the Earth. Sometimes the dragons could pull off this magical trick where they broke a larger god down into many smaller ones. If the dragons won the rumble, they would habitually emasculate and belittle the god by forcing it to follow them around to help support their massive, conventionally unfeasible bulk. So necessary was this parasitism to the dragon lifestyle, that dragons who failed to ever bring down a demon or persuade an older dragon to lend some spares would become beached and useless when he grew to a certain size. Lady dragons thought a beached dragon was the stupidest and least attractive thing on the face of the planet, as was any dragon who remained friends with such a poor specimen, and so the beached, demonless dragon would soon die, his lungs collapsing under his own weight.
If a gang of dragons lost a rumble with a god – which happened fairly often to horrendously bloody effect, then the lady dragon would have to go find another gang of fellas to work up for the following Friday.

Safely cloaked from the dragons' detection during his observation of these strange rituals, Terrorthaw quickly deduced that he was in all likelihood witnessing the origins of the whole concept of demonic labour – these parasitised gods would be inherited by another dragon upon the original host's death. It was conceivable that some of the older demons he'd known in his own time – those he'd so often fought and tamed and enlisted the services of, were the very same ones that he saw getting jumped by malt-crazed snakes on those strange, primordial Fridays. He travelled back to his pyramid, unravelled the stretch of dragon-hide he had left over from the construction of the god-cages, shook it out with a few magic missiles, calibrated his mechanical eye so that he could see the form of a spirit and donned as many spells of magic armour as he could remember. Three little gods whispered their way out of the rolls of dragon hide. One was the god of a single base substitution in the organelle-RNA of a momentarily successful species of fern. One was the god of a sulphur-rich pool, 1m x 20cm x 60cm in dimension, that contained a handful of nutritious clay. The third was the god of a bubble of methane buried deep beneath the ground near the dragons' soda stall. Terrorthaw had a hard time trying to figure out all three of their languages at once. The gods were angry and eager to fight for their freedom. Trickery was not an option. A mighty battle ensued and many ultimate attacks were made, with colours flying every damn where. Terrorthaw was victorious but suffered injuries so severe that he needed to eat three loaves of bread and rest for the night before he could recover. Nethertheless, victory was his and so gods would serve him now, the first demons to be named as such, because that is how it worked.

He put the demons to work on drawing the magic of the gods out into his pyramid, and used the last bowl of mosquitoes he'd ever eat to bind himself to the pyramid, as well as to paint the place and its surrounding network with protections against decay, erosion and such. Magic was now flowing nicely from the land, into the gods, through the demons, into the pyramid and then into him. His reservoirs of power grew more voluminous by the second. But his imagination had no use of seconds. His plans were on the scale of millennia and thousands of millennia. Now that he had a time-proof source of magical energy ticking away, he could get to the fun part.

He reasoned that if he time-jumped anywhere near a chronology that contained Mechanicus, he could very well be tagged and traced and the Future Folk would be on him so fast and then it would all be over. So he limited himself to the times between his initial landing in the past and the first few years of the King's life, before he met Mechanicus. After carefully programming the ship's time travel mechanism to not time-slide him into the middle of a known war or a gradually creeping piece of geography, he embarked on the long, long journey that skipped him like a stone through the history of his empire. On each jump, he would skip ahead few years at a time and then stop to inspect the pyramid network's fortifications against attack and the elements, check that the gods were stowed safely in their cages, refresh the protection spells or, once a certain time-threshold had been crossed, he'd ask his future selves if they needed a hand with something. Indeed, they were always expecting him and would have detailed lists of chores drawn up. He'd be roped in to take care of this border incursion or that meteor shower threatening the orbiting ship, to sign a stack of paperwork as tall as he was, to avert one of the many ecological crises that a super-empire threw up, or just to clean the bathroom. It was a curious thing, for as an unshakably committed antiauthoritarian like Terrorthaw, to find himself in a situation where his own well-being and convenience relied on him doing the bidding of another, even if that other was a future version of himself. But every time he resisted the common urge to slit the throat of his future self and claim his empire as his own, his future self would catch that glint of conflict in his eye, give a grin of recognition and then they would all be laughing.

After a million skips or so, he had learned to just get on with whatever needed to be done without question or hesitation. His many errands took him all across his empire, introduced him to the lieutenants, governors, elders, monsters and bishops who would make that empire great, and who took the time to teach this younger version of the Terrorthaw they served all that they knew on the finer points of statesmanship, diplomacy, community planning and warfare that even he could improve on. And, as could be predicted, with all that adventuring, his XP went through the freakin' roof. I'd tell you what level he got to at the end of this first sweep across the timespan of his kingdom but you wouldn't even believe me.

And so, after he'd inspected nearly every year of his rule and ensured that his captive gods stayed captive, his ship stayed floating in the sky, his Kingdom stayed hale and hearty and his pyramid headquarters stayed clean and untroubled, he met himself at the very end of his first reign as King. This part was quite shocking to him. His future selves looked different with each timejump he made – in fact, he was fairly sure that they were making a conscious effort to distinguish themselves from each other by upgrading their cybernetic implants, adding on or subtracting a few limbs or wings or spikes or armour or guns, or swapping bodies/brains with a bush kangaroo, a giant sloth, a gorilla, or a pack of ferocious dogs. Sometimes his future selves were regrowing a new body from scratch and could be anywhere from an infant to an old man. Here on the last time-jump, he met his future self as a 27 year old image of himself in perfect health, sensibly dressed in a modest cloak and evening dress, with no visible mechanical contrivances or blade-arms or tank tracks or anything. He almost did not recognise him. They met in the usual place for the time-jumps, on the top floor of the central pyramid – his private quarters that overlooked one tiny portion of the Kingdom outside. When he materialised, his future self was standing by the very large circular window at the apex of the pyramid like he was guarding it. He took a minute to orientate himself and take the usual look around to note changes in the décor, equipment and layout. The pyramid was apparently deserted by the staff, the curtains were all drawn and the hustle and hum of a city devoted to the running of a continent-sized empire had been replaced by an eerie silence. He approached his future self at the window and felt like an awkward teenager wearing a foolish, faddish costume of a body. His future self knew what he was thinking and smiled at him. Terrorthaw had forgotten how nice a smile could look when you didn't have a mouth full of jagged fangs or robotic lips.
“We thought we'd try something different for this part,” said his future self, indicating his handsome young body. “All I have to do is sleep now. I'll let the world happen out there, I'll let history begin, I'll wait for the fall of Fort Majesty to pass by and then I'll pay a visit to the King.” The fall of Fort Majesty. It was already so long ago, according to Terrorthaw's personal chronology. He no longer kept that particular set of memories in his wetware or two back-up mechanical brains he kept in his abdomen. He psycholinked to the pyramid's system and found the memory almost instantly on Server 48B66-Romeo, one of the stacks located in his Kingdom's annex of the Astral Plane. He'd had a feeling that was where he'd kept it. It was a good memory – some years after the botched attack on Brussels with all those gypsies, he'd retired to one of his castles, lived through his spy-birds for a time and settled into a frightfully entertaining new plan to irritate the King. He used a magical knife his minions had excavated in Ethiopia to rouse every malevolent spirit of the North, and a microwave laser, which he'd sent back in time during his brief but eventful stay in the future for just such a project, to agitate said spirits and direct them towards the Chillinous Plains. Wave after wave of malevolence fell upon the King's beautiful little base camp and not only did he have the delight of seeing the King's precious Winter plans frustrated, but he had quite unexpectedly forced Mechanicus, who'd proven a most delectable adversary with his deft command of the tower defence corps, into making a time-jump, which sent the machines in his lair quite wild. Within an hour he'd learned of the magnitude of what he'd witnessed and dropped everything to devote the following three years of his existence to planning the heist of Mechanicus' ship. He couldn't believe he'd forgotten all of that. He moved the memory cluster into his wetware and created a special little loop for it. It was one to treasure. His thoughts returned to the matter at hand.
“Now finally I can begin my long and glorious rule!” he cried triumphantly to his future self. “I have done my menial chores and now comes the reward! I shall return to the beginning and -” he was cut off by his future self's quite obnoxious laughter. He was always annoyed by how badly his future selves did the laugh. He was much better at it.
“You'll have to wait just a little longer before you get to any of that, young one,” chuckled his future self as he stepped smartly towards an unnecessarily ornate coffee table carved from dragon bone and magically levitated by a matrix of crystals harvested from a far-distant supernova. On the table was a book as thick as Terrorthaw's chest and about as half as tall as his impressive height. It was bound in obsidian plate, its pages were treated dragon-hide, its binding glue was superglue. His future self lifted it as if it were a tissue and put it meaningfully into his arms. “What you hold is a log of every failed attempt by those miserable Future Fools to undermine our perfect Kingdom. In my youth, I visited every occurrence listed in this book and I made sure that they did indeed all meet with failure,” his future self said through a sadistic grin. See, that was the downside of losing all the crazy teeth and facial hardware – when you grinned evilly, you could look no more threatening than the next dumb ape. He hefted the massive book around and managed to both get it open and pointing towards his face. The script throughout was laser-etched so tinily on the pages that he needed to use his bionic eye to read the lines:

YR 30162=18/11/=01H38=SPY=ENTRY:SEC52/A7=4PERS=THREAT:INDIGO
YR30162=23/11=19H02=INV=ENTRY:SEC02/B12=10300PERS=THREAT:DOUBLECRIMSON
YR30163=02/01=09H13=DISAST=ENTRY:SEC106/Y41=PROFILE:EARTHQUAKE=THREAT:LIME
“If I'm reading this correctly, my dear Terrorthaw,” purred Terrorthaw to his future self, who was standing again by the curtained window, his grin wearing a grin. “Then our Kingdom – which I've yet to rule over for a single day – is to be invaded by Future Forces at least once a month, and will from time to time be beset by spies, saboteurs and natural disasters?”
“You left out the insurrections and economic collapses,” hummed his future self. “But you will stop or contain every one of them.”
“I'll need a hundred armies to do all of these things,” he said in anticipation of what he guessed all this was leading to.
“You have one!” his future self shrieked in excitement as he pulled the ultra-cord that drew back the luxuriant velvet curtains that blinded the pyramid's all-seeing eye. Out there, standing in file before the pyramid, in ranks that stretched back further than the bionic eye could see, was the greatest army that had ever been, or would ever be assembled. It was larger than the one that the King's Great-Grandfather led to liberate Portugal from the Dark Spaniards, more disciplined that the legions of Ghost Romans that the King's Grandfather repelled on the fields of Germany in the Super Visigoth Wars 2, more brave than Erik Rage-Eater!'s Vikings that terrorised the King's father and more magical than the bird army that Terrorthaw himself had brought into the world to do battle with the King. Every soldier who was not a giant monster with the firepower of ten fighter jets was a winged angel with the speed of fifteen fighter jets. Those that did not have the power of one and a half archmagi had the muscle to punch a dozen men to mud with a single blow. Those which were not on Level 99 were lurking unseen, yet all around, on the Astral Plane, were XP worked totally differently. For every two hundred combatants was a space elevator to whisk them up into the sky, a corps of engineers and technicians, a fleet of floating supply caravans, mobile armouries and all of the wonderful engines of war. It was an investment of skill and time and energy and intelligence beyond all reckoning.
“I just whipped it up in the last forty thousand years or so,” breathed his future self while inspecting his fingernails (which were pink and small and not the slightest bit talonous, which was a little unsettling to Terrorthaw.) “Take the time-ship, stock up with what you need and travel to every point listed in the book and pre-empt it. You'd better get cracking, boy,” he said, looking over to the window and trying feebly not to look impressed by his own display. “Looks like you've already started.”

As Terrorthaw watched, he saw innumerable future versions of Mechanicus' landing shuttle, each with a different pattern of scorch-marks, repairs, upgrades and battle damage, pierce the bubble of the heavens, descend amongst the assembled troops and disgorge a future version of himself, who stalked among the ranks, liaised with yet other future versions of himself, addressed the various sergeants and field commanders, then corralled whatever forces and equipment that were needed for their next mission into the space elevators and jump-rocket platforms, where they were swept up into the multitudes of future versions of Mechanicus' ship that hovered in the sky far above. The elevators that were not going up were coming down, bringing the veterans, the wounded, the captive enemies and the dead back from the sky to the ground, where they could be driven by hovercraft to the appropriate facility for R&R, rebuilding, interrogation or taken to a lavish memorial for their family, followed by recycling. When the admin was done and the preparations made, his future selves, so tiny and fuzzy there among the thronging crowds, would turn and wave up at the pyramid's watching window, up at him, before stepping into their landing shuttle and returning to the sky. This would be his life for the next few epochs. He wondered how long, precisely, this stage of his life would last – how long this defensive time-war against the Future Folk would wear on for, and detected on the pyramid system the artefacts of the future version of himself that stood in the same room as he. The future version of himself was accessing the fresh memory files as he was uploading them to the network and he experienced the strangely unpleasant sensation of having the same thought twice instantly, from wildly different perspectives, many millions years apart. His future self cleared the feedback by touching his shoulder and simply answering his question. “You'll spend a total of eight hundred and five thousand, two hundred and forty five years in combat,” said his future self, no longer grinning. “I didn't log the hours I spent preparing, in transit or taking sabbaticals. All that would make it five times as long.” Terrorthaw looked out again at his army. His future selves were still waving every time they were just about to leave. Those waves were more mocking than friendly. No doubt the world outside rang loud with annoying future-laughter. He sighed with the humility he could only show to to his future selves, the kind he always regretted showing whenever he was out of their presence. He walked down the empty stairs of the pyramid to meet his troops for the first time. Whenever he saw the past version of himself emerge from the pyramid into the deafening cheers of the assembled troops, he felt so sorry for the weight that had just been dumped on the poor self's shoulders. This emotion would always be swiftly replaced by the anticipation of becoming the future version who would be responsible for dropping that weight upon him. Terrorthaw was a conflicted sort of character.

“We've broken their barricade, Your Highness. We're processing the first round of prisoners for asset-stripping now.” came Lord Pitfight's thought-shape over the psycholink. Nothing else needed to be said or thought. It was over. The battle that his armies had won out there on the molten hellscape they'd made of the planet outside his black fortress had been fought against the Future Folk at the very peak of their power and ability to deliver it. Every skirmish and incursion after this (relative to the Future Folk's timeline) would lessen in force and intensity and will until at last they petered out and stopped altogether. He'd already fought and won all of those battles-to-be that came after this almighty victory, and he'd ranked them according to their difficulty and listed them in his working copy of the giant ledger he'd receiver from his final self. Terrorthaw creaked up from the reproduction of the throne in his pyramid back at home, edged over to the ornate coffee-table that supported the open ledger, carefully etched in the final line with the laser in his index finger, then collapsed back into the throne. He was, to his shame, exhausted. He hadn't been able to even actively participate in this final, apocalyptic battle, but he felt as though every las-blast, graviton cannon, cataclysm ray and chunk of the Earth's crust of the war had hit him right in the face. The Future Folk's attack this time had been as sneaky as it had been overwhelming. They'd come as far back in time as they dared to tread and their target had been the gods themselves. Since a spy had uncovered the source of Terrorthaw's power, they had elected to attack that rather than his Kingdom directly. In this case, they had aimed to wipe out all gods on the face of the planet before Terrorthaw had a chance to capture any of them. As in any attack they made before his god-cages had been established, he was unable to rely on any of his magical tricks to fight against them. He had to fall back on technological might plundered from earlier encounters with the Future Folk themselves, which put them at a distinct advantage. And so he'd been forced to watch. He watched through the all-encompassing system of sensors he'd spent years preparing across the planet and its upper atmosphere. It was the most terrifying experience in his long, troubled life. He could shout commands and orders at any number of field commanders and generals in the field, but they were so thoroughly well prepared and battle-hardened by this point that it did little good. He could personally fly his fortress up into the stratosphere and aim potshots at a few targets, but this only left him vulnerable to attack, unable to keep an eye on things and generally in the way. A man with Terrorthaw's history and habits could not help but get stressed out a little when the future was all but entirely in the hands of his minions. But force and foresight and effective resource management was on his side. Every part of the battle had been predicted and countered for before a single shot had been fired. His armies beat the Future Folk in space, in the upper atmosphere, in the air, on the ground, beneath the ground, near the core itself and on the Astral Plane. Terrorthaw suffered three stress-related heart attacks during it all, but in a few short decades it was all over. The majority of the gods had been preserved, usually by being captured by Terrorthaw's forces before the Future Folk could put them down, the enemy had been routed and the firepower expended had reduced the Earth to such a hazardous pile of burning rubble that he risked losing more troops by hanging around than had been killed in the conflict - whole chunks of the crust had been blasted off into space and it was raining molten metal across most of the surface of the planet. He sat back almost horizontally in his throne and massaged his tired eyeballs. These ones were opaque iridium balls. They were uncomfortable and hard and he wanted to change them as soon as he got back to the troop assembly outside the pyramid. He had no idea why he had installed such uncomfortable eyes or when. He reached for the memory but one of his machine brains reminded him, for the six zillionth time, that he did not have access to the pyramid's network because it hadn't been built yet. He would need a very long and very relaxing stint on Enceladus after this. He kept a small, exclusive Paradise Habitat there, full to the brim with his favourite body-workers, spa technicians, dream girls and virtual playworlds. He'd have to schedule it right so he didn't run into any past versions of himself while he was there. He tried to remember when a stretch of two years or more was open to him, he searched for the memory and argh! One of his machine brains told him again that he didn't have access to the pyramid network and -
“Lord Pitfight, you're in control,” his thought-shape hissed.
“I'm in – I'm in what, Your Highness?” came Pitfight's puzzled reply.
“Control. Command. You are in charge of all operations. I've done all that I can do here. I'm leaving to set up the celebrations for your return.”
“But, Your Highness.”
“What is it?”
“You've never – this is -”
“Just pretend that I'm here. If you have any questions, just ask them to the pretend me that lives in your head. He'll know what to do.”
“The remnants of the Folk are regrouping in orbit, they are consolidating some of the larger flecks of rock into a new base, they -”
“What does the little version of me in your head say, Pitfight?”
“It says to cut off their very clear supply lines and leave them to rot, Your Highness.”
“A fine plan.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Goodbye, Pitfight. Well done and so forth.”

He rushed back to spend his first day ruling his Kingdom. He'd never been so sure of having earned the right to do something in his life. He went right back to the start – a few years after the gods had been captured. He'd left the pyramid empty to go on his first tour of the Kingdom across the years and there was enough stored magic in the pyramid network to do his favourite low-level tricks. He voyaged into the far future with a robotic excavation team and moved layer after layer of ash and sand and compressed plastic until he'd dug up half a desert. He uncovered a lonely shrine to a warrior who'd finally been allowed to fall, decorated in a Celtlandic fashion that was the last expression of an identity the warrior had long abandoned. Among the treasures and riches and knick-knacks he'd been buried with, the warrior's weapon was still burning fiery bright. An axe whose fire never went out, and that idiot had given it to someone who would use it to hit people with. Terrorthaw took the burning axe gleefully, whispering promises of a proper home for it at last then returned with it to his pyramid in the earliest available time-frame. He emptied out the lowermost levels, placed the axe in the largest chamber and then flooded them with water. The air vents and stargazing chutes that led to the basement were fitted with turbines. Soon he'd have a good head of steam building up. You can't build an empire without power and there was only so much you could get done with magic alone, after all.

He spent a good few months getting the place fixed up just the way he remembered it, using his visiting past self as extra manpower, and learned how to use the cloning facility in the basement to birth his first generation of children. In the evenings, he went dragon-hunting with his ray-gun. Finer sport was never had. It kept their numbers down and bolstered his host of enthralled demons. His first major challenge as King was to put down Lord Pitfight's bloody rebellion that was launched following the commander's return to the pyramid and discovery that there was no party for him like Terrorthaw had promised. Destroying the remnant of his army, victors of a million wars across time, was difficult but satisfying. He kicked it old school – a robot decoy, a maze of death-traps, a storm of nightmare-spells to scatter their forces, riding in from the tall cliffs with a whole gang of mind-controlled dragons, mortal combat with Lord Pitfight on narrow walkway over a bottomless pit that crackled with green lightning – it was like being reborn.

He ruled his Kingdom for millions of years. Its splendour was beyond the stuff of legend, beyond the most excessive CGI effects and matte backgrounds. He stayed more or less in control of the continent-wide domain for the entire duration, with brief periods of rebellion where he went on the run and returned in overwhelming force. There were many other minor challenges to his well being and governance, mostly to do with his law of not straying beyond the continent's shore to the North, but he was on such a high level by that point that none of it came to anything more than a fun distraction. His every day was spent immersed in the comings and goings of billions of people – clones and monsters and robots and godlings, demons and dragon-men, reformed Future Folk and refugees from the Astral Plane. His citizens intermingled and happily went about their business running his Kingdom's industries, fuelling its academic and scientific knowledge, crafting its great works and arts, refining and elaborating on its fair and elaborate legal system, and doing their part to make the world a little bit kinder, more bearable and merciful each day. Terrorthaw mellowed with the demands of statehood. With his war days behind him and no rival King to frustrate him, he allowed his nurturing and friendly side to flourish with the generosity that his power allowed. He became disenfranchised with gauche shortcuts like mind control, genetic subservience and time travel stunts and preferred to take the long and difficult path of generating loyalty by fulfilling the needs and happiness of his people while working as best as he could to improve them. What his past self had heard in his laugh was not an intolerably raised level of obnoxiousness, but an overcompensation for a dark side that had long since faded. In fact, it might bum you guys out to tell you this, but Terrorthaw's Europe was even better than the King's Europe, if only because there was no Terrorthaw around to mess things up every once in a while.

It seemed like it was all too soon that the century came around where he'd have to begin to prepare for the journey into the New Age. His ultimate army to fend off the Future Folk had to be prepared, his industries had to be wound down and his people would have to be stored, one by one, in the winding subterranean city of sleep beneath the Kingdom. Once he'd given his past self the ledger full of battle dates and watched in quiet pity as he'd gone down to meet all those mocking waves, he made his plans to do one last spree of time travelling. The fast kind of time travel, not the kind where he slept under two miles of ice for several geological ages.

Mechanicus' ship was on its last legs by that point. He'd been very careful to ensure that it was the only thing in his Kingdom capable of time travel and had destroyed every time-capable craft of the Future Folk that he'd captured, and its repair systems were wearing thin, taking longer and longer to recover after each healing hibernation. It might not survive the next reboot. So he got the most out of it before it was time to say goodbye to the old girl. He went on leisure cruises, mostly – his reward for a life, billions of lives when you looked at it, well done. He went on some dates, met some people he'd always wanted to meet, visited some sights, satisfied a few curiosities. He buried his ancient astronaut ray-gun in the place where he would find it earlier on, along with few more bits and pieces that might come in handy. A belt, some old hammer. He watched the first gods come to Earth on their clockwork comet, he visited the stars and the heart of the galaxy itself.

Then he made the journey that would bring the Future Folk down on him. He stood at the top of his pyramid and had Mechanicus' ship take him as far forward as it could possibly take him. He landed on a black and dusty plain, in near vacuum, under the dull light of a swollen and angry star a century away from boiling the planet into nothing. His body squirmed and shook and twisted to adapt to the terrible conditions. It took hours and the discomfort was quite severe, but his patience was rewarded when the globe spun round and he saw the night sky. He stood on a dead world, where anything resembling complexity had long since simply fallen apart. The only testament to the richness and glory that he had seen were the fossils of microbes beneath and a slight trace of heavy metals and fissioned material in the dust. But when he looked up, he saw where the life and the intelligence and the beauty had gone. It had impregnated the sky itself, which now teemed with every kind of life, dancing and bright. The stars moved, galaxies wheeled around under conscious control, there were explosions of nova fire to fuel a thousand billion glittering civilisations, every one of them at least as glorious as the one he'd shepherded. When he dropped his neck to look down at the dark and dead ground, he saw a dozen or more shapes shimmering slowly towards him, attracted by his life, by his mind. Dying gods, trapped on an irrelevant world. They stuttered out a litany of promises, of hopes and dreams, of threats and oaths, each one as pathetic an offering as a tadpole could give to an elephant. He ignored them and went back to admiring the lights.

He made one last stop. He visited the time of the Future Folk and stole one of their East Coast cloning facilities. He loaded an entire warehouse of equipment and samples into Mechanicus' ship in a single night. It felt to him more like a childish prank, something the old him would have done with a giggle and a taunt, than an act of war. As he was installing the loot in his home pyramid during the time period when he'd just captured the three gods and constructed the axe-powered reactor, he received a message through his implanted link with the ship that the Future Folk would be coming to eradicate him and his illegal chronoship, and would erase all of his unauthorised meddling from the timestream. He could hardly work up the energy to laugh at that one and when he did it took him a while to remember why it was even funny, that the war with the Future Folk was long over and they were as beaten and irrelevant as the gods were.

Then, with all but one life ambition fulfilled, Terrorthaw went to his quarters in his home pyramid. His room was littered with trophies from his thousands of victories, some of which he hardly recognised. He had not spent a huge amount of time in his room, as a rule. He'd modified himself to be able to operate without sleep before he'd even made the first time-jump and he spent most of his leisure time tinkering about in his stolen genetics facility. His bed was unmade and shook out a thin cloud of dust when he pulled off the mattress to reveal the control panel for the laser cannon. The pyramid had dozens of laser cannons concealed within its nooks and hideyholes, all operated from the network like every other feature, but the laser cannon controlled by the panel under his bed was a very special one. That is, while it was standard in its specifications, it was permanently pointed at one particular position in the sky. He flipped up the guard and pressed the single, red, dramatic button on the control panel, then he dropped the mattress to the frame with another cloud of dust and went up the stairs to his throne room. By the time he'd reached his throne, Mechanicus' ship had been vaporised. As he took his seat on his throne, he took a few seconds to mourn the ship that had allowed him to come so far, so very very far. But they'd had their time together, there was nothing more it could do for him and there was no way anyone was going to find it and use it against him now.

There was one enemy left, one foe who had not been ground beneath the rock of ages and left as dust on a dead world. And he had to know – was the interstellar dance he'd seen out there the progeny of his Europe... or the enemy's Europe? He'd examine the evidence during his long period of rest and reflection before the ice came, but the one thought that Terrorthaw could not help but return to again and again as the cold slowly wound around his sleeping Kingdom was this:

He could hardly wait to see the King again.

End Of Chapter 99

1. The King.

The King awoke the next morning completely refreshed, despite his dream. He always woke up refreshed because he slept in the secret Narwhal Position he had learned in India. It aligned his various heart chakras just so, and they formed the beautiful fractals that were the key to restful sleep. He put all thoughts of his dream aside, screwed his hands on and resolved to inspect the ruckus outside his window. He didn't even need to pick the crust out of his eyes to see – his eyes were clear and in perfect working order. A little bit of fuzz might have helped though, because what he saw outside was not relaxing at all.

2. Yvonne Larcher.

The King's girlfriend awoke with a terrific fright. Where there had been sleep and peace and contentment, there was suddenly the distress and panic of the King in an almighty flap. He ran into her room, screaming at a stage-whisper, and unthinkingly punched a chair to kindling with one blow because it was almost in his way. He powered through racks of clothes and dressing-mirrors by the dozen, scattering a pack of ladies-in-waiting like ninepins. He flew onto her bed and grabbed her naked shoulders in his mahogany vices. Her eyes were as wide and wild as his when their gazes met and for one awful, delicious instant, wherein the pit of her stomach fell right away, she hoped that this would be the moment he finally took her – violently and suddenly and to hell with Super-Chastity and Winter and all of it. He moved quickly. He came very close and he said,
“Yvonne! You need to go!” at a medium-level yell.
“Go where? Now?” she stammered when she had recovered.
“It has happened too soon and too close. We thought that Ground Zero would be in Spain for sure, or old Viking Europe – somewhere that isn't strong – but it's happening here, my love, it's happening right outside!”

He took her to the window, smashed out the glass and showed her the two clouds of people, heavy with bad vibes, that were squared off against each other on the steps of the Palace. At the sound of the broken window, many faces turned up at them. Voices rose from the ground below.
“What's that?”
“Who's that up there?”
“I saw the King!”
“Your Highness! Come down and settle this!”
“Yes, do!”
The King hurled himself back into Yvonne's room, taking out a cadenza and two handmaidens in his haste.
“They will find me and I will be sucked into this madness!” he screamed. Then he picked himself up from the mess he'd made and clenched his extendo-hand and his rocket hand. “So be it. I will slow them and delay them for as long as I am able. Yvonee, soon it will not be safe here. Go to Colonel Glowfist at the Bibliotheque Royale, tell him he must leave immediately. Tell him that are to go with him.” He ran to the door.
“Your Highness!” his girlfriend called out to him. “Where is Mr. Glowfist going? Where am I going? The library is miles away! You never tell me what you and your friends are -doing!-”
“It'll take too long, goodbye – I love every part of you!” he shouted as he slipped through the door and charged down the passageway. Yvonne put on her shoes and wondered what on Earth could be happening.

3. Colonel Glowfist

Colone Glowfist woke up with the now-familiar deathly pain gnawing at his stump and the faint idea in his head that someone was in his room and wanted him to expend a lot of effort on something he didn't really want to do. After he'd grabbed his staff propped up by the side of his beds and fired a few Heal and Anti-inflammatory spells at his leg, the image of the King's girlfriend formed in his mind and her frantic attempts at getting him out of bed became clear to him.
“Colonel Glowfist, you must get up, sir!” she hissed as she pulled his arm about, at this point, more out of irritation than a real effort to move him.
“No, I was up very late, give me until ten, woman,” he moaned. Yvonne straightened up, dropped his arm, let it fall limp over the side of the bed where his knuckles were dashed against the wrought-iron bedframe. He yelled in confusion and hurt. Yvonne waved her own fists in the air.
“Now listen to me Colonel, the King said a lot of stuff way too loud and I didn't understand any of it but I rode all the way here on my own and he said it's started and you've got to go and I've got to go and we've all got to go together and he won't even say why or where and I'm at my wit's end, I really am!” Her plea did the trick. Colonel Glowfist rolled out of his beds as fast as he could, crushing David's unoccupied demon cot when he thumped to the ground.
“It's started?” croaked Colonel Glowfist, unperturbed by the smashed bed beneath him.
“Yes!” cried Yvonne. “He showed me out the window – they're all arguing on the lawn outside the Palace. They're trampling the grass and I had to leave by the servant's entrance!”
“Roxy!” he spluttered. He waddled to the door of his little alcove and called into the gloom of the library's clock tower's staircase outside his room. “Mantis! Did you hear all of that?”
“Yes, honoured Colonel,” came a distant voice.
“Find Princess and bring her here!” called Glowfist. An answer from the dark was not necessary. He turned back to his room. The King's girlfriend, having nothing else to do, had begun to make the beds. “Don't do that now!” said Glowfist to her as he squeezed past to get to his staff. “You'll need to help little David,” he struck his staff on the floor and it dropped a dimension and spread out to form a door that led to a small classroom, lit by some floating magical orbs. Yvonne peered inside. There was a desk and a table inside, some stacks of exercise jotters, an empty bookshelf and not much else.
“What is that?” she asked plainly. Colonel Glowfist's sense of calm was getting away from him.
“It's where David is to take his lessons while we travel!” he said as he picked his Infernal Gauntlet off the bedside table. “But he has no books, nothing to take a lesson from! I've been at the Palace all the time, talking to the King about Ireland. I was going to do it tomorrow!” He squeezed a Haste spell out of his Infernal Gauntlet and the spell rolled and fumed across his substantial frame. “I must go to warn darling Roxy of this urgency. Yvonne, by the King, fill this classroom with David's books, please, and with food for the journey. He must learn!” He lumbered out of his room at a medium speed, clutching his wig to his scalp, and disappeared into the darkness beyond his door, his stump sounding a softening 'clomp clomp clomp' in time with his exit.

Yvonne Larcher was left with a half-made bed, a shimmering doorway and the smell of bachelor all around her.
“How do I know which books are David's?” she asked no one. Then, with a sigh, she finished making the bed.

4. Roxy Tripfoot

It was surely Colonel Glowfist's intention to be the one to gently wake Roxy and softly alert her to the Big Important Stuff he was intimately embroiled in, and then to give her the exact instructions that would lift her from the danger and confusion. He would be her saviour. He would see her safely leave this peril behind and, when next they met, she would remember this great deed he had done. It all stacks up. You have to be your best all the time. He arrived at her room in the Palace with all of his Haste Spells exhausted. He had somehow managed to exhaust an Awesome Horse on his flight from the library, and it had evaporated in protest halfway through the journey. But he was here now. He would be her rock.

However, when he came through the open door of her room, he found her already awake with the other members of her Adventure Team assembled around her. She was quickly and unfussily overseeing the preparations for her upcoming departure.
“Flightfeather, get down to the kitchens and have them put all of the leftovers from last night into Tupperwares. Ah, Cajun, you're back - did you get the walking boots? They had them in Bernadetta's size? Good. Colonel! My love! So good to see you – David's just getting changed into his travel clothes.” she said all this in one smooth line. She was making things happen. Colonel Glowfist felt that he was in the way as soon as he entered the room.
“Roxy, it is not safe, the Civil War is beginning, they are all gathered together outside, it -”
“Yes Colonel, I saw it all perfectly well from my window and heard the King's shouts an hour ago. They've all cleared out now, as you would have noticed,” she said. Colonel Glowfist hadn't noticed that the courtyard was empty, he'd been too focused on finding her. He let his mouth move around his face for a few seconds, but as he did so he saw that he did not have long before Roxy went back to her organising and order-giving. He had to be quick.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Outside!” he cleverly added. Roxy gave only the tiniest pause, but for all her display of coldness, she was highly sad at being kept apart from the Colonel for another adventure. She'd been greatly heartened by his dandification, for it seemed to her that he'd turned a corner and left behind his bad case of bandit self-harm. The finery and powders were not exactly to her taste, if she had to be honest, and he was still so dreadfully girthful – but, all told, she would miss her friend and proper goodbyes are very important. She stepped outside to the corridor with him, leaving the others about their tasks. They encountered David out there, having just returned from the shower.
“Ah David, how nice to see you – we're just about to leave, you know. Go to the library and help your father's sweetheart with the packing – she's probably making a mess of things as we speak.” David nodded, stole a glance at Roxy and turned to go, when Roxy leaned forward and put a halting hand on his shoulder.
“I think the packing can wait, Colonel, until I've bid goodbye to my future husband,” she said with a smile. Glowfist stepped back and glummed up. Just now it had been his turn for a proper goodbye. She took David a few paces down the unlit corridor of the Palace. She crouched down to get level with him and said a few things that Glowfist mostly couldn't hear, but the message seemed to be that David should be brave and stay brave. Colonel Glowfist stood in the doorway and tapped his stump against the floor. No duh, David was brave, thought Colonel Glowfist. He'd been invincible for most of his life. He'd seen him take out a swamp full of alligators, not to mention dozens of rustlers and rattlesnakes and the like. The boy grew more magical by the day. He didn't need to be told how great he was all the time – it might spoil him. And it's not like he deserved special treatment just because his mother was dead. Colonel Glowfist's mother was killed by Terrorthaw's science project back in the day but -he- didn't get Brave Credits or any sweet hugs and soothings for it, did he?

Roxy said her last goodbye and David ran off in the direction of the library. She rose and faced Glowfist. She inspected him for a few beats.
“Don't think mean thoughts, Colonel,” she said. He uncrossed his arms and stopped tapping his stump on the floor. He'd been an embarrassingly open book. “You can't be the guardian of a boy you're jealous of, you'd spite him every day with a thousand tiny thorns,” she said, and as she did she took a step towards him. He held his breath. “You don't deserve this, you know,” she said before she kissed him. It was a gypsy kiss – strong and quick and full of secret messages and hidden meaning. Colonel Glowfist had never been kissed like that before in his life and he hoped that every day he lived could contain a kiss of that sort. “May we meet again soon, Colonel,” she said, leaving him flushed and dehydrated. “Look after the boy – we're all bound to him, one way or another,” she melted back into the light shining out of her room. “And lose some weight, please,” she finished. He blinked and worked up the saliva to lick his lips then popped his head around the door to say farewell to the others. Roxy gave him one last small smile and then he was hobbling through the brightening hallways of the Palace, his head swimming, his wig itching, on his long way back to the library.

5. Timothy Clashradish

Some time previously, before the sun had even considered rising, Timothy Clashradish came rudely to consciousness, still quite drunk, as his good friend, Jacob Hillmounter – who'd been his crèche-mate in Ms. Merriweather's nursery, been drinking with him in Leiden when Sergeant Fistknocker had come recruiting, had gone through the Academy with him, marched alongside him on the road to Dark Spain and Cario, joined the Royal Brussels Guard on his recommendation, rode next to him on Gappy's magical back where they starved and suffered quite terribly, and had been at his side as slew legions of the undead in Romania – this lifelong companion of his was trying to murder him with one of his own shoes. He was spinning it up by the lace and then raining down the blows upon Timothy's side. It hurt, even through the duvet.
“Die!” barked Jacob, swaying uneasily.
“Jacob, no!” shouted Timothy.
“She was into me!” said Jacob to the accompaniment of another shoe-strike.
“Obviously she wasn't so much,” said Timothy, but his voice was muffled because he was holding his duvet up and stretching it out to form a shield. Jacob knew the tactical counter to this, which was to hammer on Timothy's hands. He was serious about this murdering.

The fly lady at the eye of this fraternal storm then came to Timothy's door, for she had stopped vomiting, and then she shrieked at the appalling use of shoes that she saw inside. Timothy had been too drunk for entirely effective and prolonged lovemaking and he had snored violently throughout the night and ignored her repeated requests for a glass of water, but she had been into him, had liked his dancing and drinking skills and had been glad that he was a Taurus, so she felt bad that he was getting badly shoe-whipped. She realised that she had to stop these two going on like kids fighting over a dolly. She would shout loudly to get their attention, point out their folly while she had it and make it clear that she considered this behaviour to be supremely unattractive, and then she would leave, thus removing a volatile element from the conflagration and allowing a reconciliation to rise from the embarrassment. She would have a Palace Guard escort her home and she would call the following day, when she was feeling better.

But when she subconsciously reached for a crop of magic that would turn the preceding description into real events, she came up short. It was through no fault of her own – the magic was just not to be found. Instead, what she did was run out in front of Jacob, waved her arm about in an attempt to grab the shoe from the seasoned and high-level warrior and snarled in his face that she -loved- Timothy and -hated- him and that he wasn't even a Taurus. She was struck across the face with the shoe and then Timothy was on his feet and, naked as a summer breeze, leapt through the space between him and his old friend / new adversary. Their fighting spilled out into the hall and took them down the winding stairs, with the fly lady (whose name was Jean, everybody) screaming and cursing at their backs all the way. The fuss they kicked up alerted the guards on duty and stirred the men in the garrison from their beds. When they crept into the angrily echoing hallways and saw their respected Lieutenant Commanders in undignified combat with just one shoe and one pair of boxer shorts between them, they too, to a man, thought first that they should do what they could to defuse the situation, to make peace and mend friendship and to assert that everything would look different in the morning. But then they found, to a man, that the energies required to act so cool and understanding were no longer within their grasp and soon they were taking sides – Jacob's or Timothy's – and they based their decision on petty things, like which of the two had been the last to speak to them or which one was taller or who was more naked. Then came the second wave of side-taking, where men picked sides not on account of Jacob or Timothy, but on the account of those who had already taken a side. Every quarrel, every tease or unkind remark, every time the last sausage had been snatched in the mess hall, every towel-lashing and dirty look – they were all remembered then by the soldiers and guards of Laeken Palace, and they organised their faction lines to those recalled scowls, slights and suspicions. Then came the third wave of choosing, where people would pick their side based on the feel of the crowd – which one was bigger, which one had more girls in it, which one was more colourful or louder or whatever.

By the time Jacob and Timothy's sweaty grapple (refereed by the shrieking Jean) had gained too much mass and momentum to be contained by the walls of the Palace and the combatants had toppled over the steps that led to the regal courtyard, the show had gathered an audience of nine hundred garrisoned soldiers, two hundred of the wenches bedding with them, eleven excited dogs and some assorted servants, night-owls and slaves. Their numbers were split evenly down the middle – one half singing the praises and cheering the strength of Jacob, the other half evangelising the deeds and works of Timothy. The competing crowds furnished their respective champions with clothes and armour from their own bodies, along with items and weapons from their own inventories. And so the bare flesh, boxer shorts and whirling shoe was replaced with an ill-fitting but functional mish-mash of plates and helmets and some cheap swords that the donors did not mind to lose. The clang and clatter of steel on borrowed steel was greatly masked by the thrill of the crowd and, rising above even that din, were the complaints and curses of Jean – the fly lady.

Even from within his fortified Narwhal sleeping position, those screams were able to penetrate the King's dreaming. In his sleep, he took them to be the awful cries of She-Who-Shall-Never-Again-Be-Named, rising from her pauper's pyre, all apart and aflame, immune to physical attacks, screaming all the way, promising dread and death and destruction...

Soon there was a crash from the King's girlfriend's window and several young men from both factions looked up to see the King looking down upon them. They knew that the King would pick the right side, the true side.
“Your Highness! Come down and settle this!” said one, while the fighting continued.
“Yes, do!” said another. And then everyone was saying it and things just like it. It was the cool thing to say. In no time at all, the King was at the top of the Palace steps, stood before the opposing factions and, at last, Timothy and Jacob's fight broke for a cut-scene as they both fell to their knees and prostrated themselves before the King and blurted out their accounts of the night's events while Jean stood behind them, suddenly silent.
“He started in, My Highness -”
“Unprovoked aggression -”
“We were out partying -”
“Look how fly this lady is, my liege,”
“She was into me -”
“She was totally into me -”
“Broke all the laws of Europe!”
“Hit me with a shoe!”
“ENOUGH!” roared the King. For a beat, the Palace was as silent as the grave. Even the crickets and frogs that made a home on the grounds fell still. “Everyone go back to bed!” said the King. “When the sun has found a decent angle in the sky, the cooks will make us a breakfast the likes you've never seen. After breakfast I will show you the new coin tricks I discovered on my travels.”

The response was instantaneous.

“They'll smother us in our sleep!” said a representative of Jacob's camp.
“They'll put toothpaste on our faces!” said one of Timothy's men.
“They'll poison our share of the breakfast!”
“They'll put laxatives in the juice!”
“They'll sharpen the coin, Your Highness, so that it will cut your hands.”
“They'll heckle your performance and make sarcastic remarks!”
“They hate you, Your Highness!”
“Timothy's side hates you!”
“Jacobs men hate you!”

Then someone grabbed the King's arm and began to pull him towards the crowd. The King recognised him. He'd been there in Romania and fought the undead at the Dracula King's castle. He was one of the thousand or so who had returned to Brussels after the King had disappeared. Those thousand men now made up the bulk of the highest-ranking officers in Europe's army. He commanded a lot of men and was of a relatively high level, and he'd sent the King handmade cards on every birthday but, even with all these qualities, he could not move the King by pulling on his arm. He tried to state his case to the King as he did so:
“Stand with us, Your Highness, for we are the ones that truly love you. Join us and Timothy and we shall crush these haters!” As the King turned to answer him, he felt a tug at his other arm. The one behind this this new tugging was another who the King recognised – but let's just come right out and say that the King knew the names, birthdays and favoured sports team of everyone in Europe because he cared so much. This man was also a soldier, a grizzled veteran of the Palace Guard and a lifelong supported of the new Jacob faction, who'd fought magnificently against Terrorthaw's last invasion. The King had seen him utterly destroy seven gypsies during the defence of the city and remember that gypsies were hardcore. He too had sent the King birthday cards, and the King remembered that he had often used three colours of glitter, which in those days was just as impressive as the gypsy-destroying. He too pleaded for the King to join his side. He tugged insistently.

The King tried to be patient. There was no way that the men pulling on his arms could command the strength to physically move him to their respective sides of the Palace steps. If he could just remain resolute and steadfast until everyone calmed down, he could reason with them and let them know what assholes they were being. This wasn't even something he would have needed his Ring Of Diplomacy for, the case was as clear as the nose on his face. He could wait all night if need be.

This is what started the European Civil War: one sharp and sudden tug. The tug was made by the veteran Palace Guard and what he tugged at was the King's wooden hand – his wooden extendo-hand, which had been so useful during the Bird Wars for swinging from particularly-surfaced ceilings that appeared suddenly all over Europe, allowing him to land on some otherwise-inaccessible platforms, where he found many sacks of money or a vital lever to pull. Point is, the King's extendo-hand was old and oversensitive and tended to go off at comically inappropriate time or when his Super-Chastity was being tested, for a cheap laugh. When the veteran Palace guard gave that fateful tug, he triggered its extendo mechanism and was punched right off his feet, through the air and into the crowd at the bottom of the steps.

First, the King's lightning mind computed exactly what the outcome of this punching accident would be, and he released from his soul a 'No' noise with more 'o's' than would be possible in this modern age, what with air pollution and pharmaceutical companies mucking everything up. The King's 'No' would have looked like this:
“NoooOOOoooOOOoooOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooOO[][]00()()()()”

Second, the Timothy crowd surged at the Jacob crowd, thinking that the accidental punch had been an instruction to attack their age-old enemy. The Jacob crowd, conversely, had seen the accident for an accident but had somehow interpreted the King's 'No' as being a cry of 'Jacoooo(etc.)b!” This is how it would always be. No matter how clouded by uncoolness the minds of Europe became, no one could imagine themselves aligned against their beloved King. The first blows of the Civil War were stuck with his imagined blessing. The first fatality was dealt by a young fresh-faced member of the Palace guard upon his bunkmate, and both had the King's name on their lips as the sword pierced his heart.

The King facepalmed and the facepalm was epic. It really had come to this. They would fight and they would kill for any reason in front of them and he knew that he was the biggest reason of all. He would have to do something drastic – something he wasn't sure he could even do while his powers were so low.

He needed to concentrate and the mild slaughter in front of him was really upsetting him. It was growing less mild and more extensive by the minute, with civilians and housemaids and children and other NPCs joining this side or that. Soon all of Brussels would be involved – then all of Belgium, and the fight would spread across all of Europe exactly as the awesome party had begun just a few weeks before. Well, if there was going to be a big fight, it might as well be a war. Wars have rules, they have a purpose and they have a leader. These would be his gifts. He called for silence. Silence came. He knew it would not last for long so he spent the time dearly. He breathed deeply and spiritually, brought his hands together as if in prayer, grit his teeth and then screamed and pulled his hands apart as if he were prying open the doors of Heaven. Slowly came apart his hands, first at the rate of a hair's breadth a minute, accelerating to an inch a minute as his hands came to a rabbitsbreadth apart, then a foot a minute, a metre a minute and then, suddenly, a mile a minute, and then the King's hands were so far apart they were on opposite sides of the Palace's front step. Attached to each hand was a wrist, an arm... and a King. The King stared over at himself and the King stared back. Then both of them looked out at the completely astonished crowd.

One King was standing in front of the Jacob crowd and the other was standing in front of the Timothy crowd. Each side got a King, that's how it would be. The King looked deeply into his own eyes and both of them understood their roles. They stuck out their one hand at each other. The King of Jacob's camp had retained the powerful rocket-hand and the King of Timothy's camp had inherited his useful extendo-hand from the fission. This was the limit of their differences – in every other aspect of form of mind and voice they were identical. Otherwise it wouldn't be fair. The rocket-hand was formed in the shape of a scissor, the extendo-hand was flat, akin to a sheet of paper.
Best out of three.

The crowds watched enraptured as the ancient and mystical ritual named Rocket-King as the one favoured by fortune. At first the crowds surged again, thinking this was a sign to attack, but the Kings called for calm, and the crowds gave calm for a short while, though the uncoolness in their hearts could not be tamed forever.
“Close your eyes, my followers!” bade the Rocket-King. The ritual had named him Seeker. He closed his eyes and so did the several hundred people assembled before him in their night-clothes.
“One!” roared the King. The crowd echoed him. “Two!” he went on, and again the crowd repeated it. They went on like that until at last they reached the ancient and mystic number of 100, lord of all numbers, whereupon they opened their eyes and saw that the opposing camp had disappeared without a trace.

The Rocket-King ran through the crowd's body, passing out through its rear and continued his run out to Brussels, to Europe, into the new day ahead.

6. Axe Axewound

Out the back, in the little mission on the Palace grounds, Father Dominoes shuffled speedily to the guest bedroom which had been Axe Axewound's ward for the past few weeks. A messenger boy had awoken him and given him some very specific instructions from the King. His staff of healers and witches and lesser priests were nowhere to be found, but he could hear the distant shouts from the other side of the Palace and would have to assume the worst. He searched in the pale light of the new morning for a lantern and spoke loudly and clearly so that Axe could hear him.

“Now Axe, I don't want to panic you, really I don't, but I know you don't scare easily, so what I am to say, I'll say unadorned,” he stammered. He didn't want Axe to get a word in edgeways for fear that he would start predicting things again. He'd been predicting things all day yesterday and the day before, often in the mornings. They were little things – a certain tree falling on the Palace grounds, a missing hairbrush, a fridge in the Royal Kitchens that was about to fail, a flock of birds flying overhead at exactly three 'o clock... He was ever so eager to make these prophecies known to whoever came to see him, from Astrid to the lowliest bed-changer, and Father Dominoes would be very tired of hearing them by the end of the day. He did hope that today's batch could wait until they'd got themselves organised.

“So here it is – we're going to pack up our things, very carefully so as not to forget anything, we'll summon all of your animal friends out there, then we're going to go to Hell. It's safer there, I think. There are a lot of rooms kept open for me so I'm sure we can put you up in one and I can talk some some healing demons into looking after you. I've got quite some clout in Hell now, you see.” He came across a lantern at last – right on the bedside table, where he'd left it, of course. Axe could have made a -useful- prediction and told him where it was, but that's not the way they seemed to go, unfortunately. “Once you're, ah, back on your feet, so it were, I can arrange a path through Hell back to Celtland for you. Most of Hell's restructuring around there is complete now and I don't suppose it will be too much of a bother to pinpoint a gate...” He lit the lantern and the wan morning was brighten up to mid-afternoon levels. Axe's bed was brought into fine detail.

Axe was gone.

Father Dominoes put his hand to the bed. It was cold. A short search of the grounds found that his animal friends had gone too. Father Dominoes did not know what to do.

7. Princess Princess

Rigor Mantis, with a manner as soft as a vampire bat lapping at a bloody slit, whispered the Princess into wakefulness. She had not been difficult to find. She had built a squat fortress out of the library's books and made made a nest of paperbacks inside of it, upon which she lightly snored atop a eunuch. As she came to, she grabbed listlessly at his chest and thighs while giggling under her breath and the assassin recoiled to the entrance of the book den.
“You smell nice, I want to smell you,” murmured Princess. Rigor Mantis coughed.
“Princess, this is no time for games. You must prepare yourself for a long journey. We are to leave very soon, very soon,” he said.
“I'll need my things then,” said Princess, idylly tossing aside a few volumes of bard-verse.
“Tell me where your belongings are and I will fetch them, my Princess,” said Rigor Mantis. Princess yawned.
“They're back in the Tower, we'll have to go there first, quickly,”
“My Lady, the Tower Of Super-Chastity is in France,” he said mildly.
“I know that, you idiot.”
“We are headed North, to the Chillinous...”
“Go and get me my things. It isn't -that- far. You must have travelled further than that before, mustn't you? I'm the Princess and you're the smelly man. My other eunuchs are there and I can't go North without them, it would be bad luck. You wouldn't be the one to bring -bad luck- on a -Princess,- would you?” she said. Then she looked at him, smiled and began to take off her night-gown. He looked away.
“We have wasted enough time,” he muttered and was gone from the fortress of books. “You don't look after books,” he scolded as he left. He drifted up the stairs to Colonel Glowfist's room and found Yvonne sorting the archmage's clothes into piles of whites, brights and darks.
“I don't know -what- to do about these books,” she tutted to him. “I can't tell one from the other. David hasn't even put his name on the right ones!” Rigor Mantis sat down on the immaculate bed and massaged his eyeballs. There never used to be so many women about. There was just Sally and she did what she was told, on the occasions she wasn't dead. Presently, David returned, as did Colonel Glowfist and there was a lot of fuss and bother about the books and the piles of clothes that Yvonne had made because his clothes didn't even need washing and then Princess appeared and started screaming about her eunuchs and Rigor Mantis had to go outside for a little bit.

The Palace was deserted and the King was gone. Fires had broken out across Brussels. The smoke turned the sky over the city to a smudge of brown. He did not feel that he was in Europe any more. This was but a place, these things he saw were but buildings and trees. He did not know when Europe would be back.

End Of Chapter 98

Roxy Tripfoot led the way into the Palace and Cajun, Bernadetta Leathervest, a bruised Commander Flightfeather, Scruff and Astrid Gimmerleck followed her because she was the strongest character among them and the strongest character in a group always becomes the leader because it is the law.

They had to give the King their account of the trouble they'd encountered, and there was a good chance their meeting could lead to an adventure right here at home. Yes, home. For, although everyone in the group except Flightfeather was technically quite far from their birthplaces and families, Brussels was such a rad place that they had all come to think of it as their home in the short time they'd spent there. As nice as place as Brussels had been, though, the signs marking its descent into crappiness were all over the streets. Nobody had bothered to clean up ninety five percent of the mess left by the party – people had only cleared their doorways and front porches, leaving pyramids of trash on the ground that wasn't anyone's immediate territory. When they walked down the street, the people wore sunglasses so they could pretend they hadn't seen you if you tried to talk to them or ask directions – that is if you'd caught them at a moment when they weren't on their cell phones, gossiping about their manager. It had to have been the birthday of at least twenty people that day but the Adventure Friends did not see one person crafting handmade birthday cards or blowing up balloons or setting off fireworks from their roof. If this sort of behaviour carried on, Europe would surely be in tatters by the end of the month. But there was no time to dwell, Roxy thought. She had to do. She quickened her pace as she moved through the Palace, causing the others to quicken theirs in time. She was the leader.

They found David kicking around in the Grand Hall, quite alone. He was smoking and trying his best to read a book on the principles of political opinions expressed at a dinner party but the book was too heavy for him to read it with one hand while the other worried at his burning cigarette, so he had to keep putting the book down on the Grand Table and rub his wrist. When he noticed that Roxy and his dad's friends had come through the truly immense doors of the Grand Hall, he picked up the book and pretended to have the wrist-strength to be riveted by it. When she had drawn close enough to hear him, he pointed at the open book with his cigarette, dramatically rolled his eyes and exclaimed, loudly, “Oh of course! You must strongly disagree with the guest who brought the least substantial dish for the table! I knew that, of course!” He turned to Roxy and acted like he had just seen her. “Oh, hi Roxy, I was just studying, you know, becoming more powerful.” Roxy smiled kindly with her mouth but closed her eyes for a little bit longer than the smile lasted. At some point since their return to Europe, David had got it into his head that mere Politics were not enough to secure his arranged marriage to Roxy Tripfoot, so he had taken to trying to impress her at every opportunity. There's nothing like a ten old boy's display to impress a beautiful ageless gypsy queen to make a beautiful ageless gypsy queen smile kindly with her mouth but close her eyes for a little longer than the duration of the smile. She knelt down so that she and the boy were eye to eye. He was growing like a weed! When she'd first met him, on his sixth birthday, she'd had to get right down on her knees to talk to him like that. More lately she had to move into an uncomfortable crouch with her arms extended downwards and her hands gripped to her knees.
“And what if the host agrees with that person who brought the least substantial dish?” she asked softly. David's eyes widened in panic and darted back to his book, then back to Roxy before he could read anything there because he'd said that he knew already, and then back to the book again because he had no idea what to say. His wrist trembled.
“That looks heavy,” said Roxy. “Would you like me to take it?” she awaited no answer and extended one trim, tan-coloured and luxuriantly furry arm towards the book. David jerked it up to evade her slender fingers. The book escaped his feeble grip, flew through the air to hit him lightly in the face. His cigarette skidded across his cheek and hit for 1 burn damage. The look of horror on his face was one that Roxy had seen all too recently. Her Guilt rating hit maximum as she was beset by the unwelcome recollection of the maire's servants scooping the few undevoured scraps of Oranje from his bedchamber rug with hand-shovels, how the insects of Axe's menagerie stung the lumps of flesh all the way to the anonymous pyre on the Abbey grounds...

She wrapped her arms around him and pulled his face into her breast to hide his sobs from the others in the team, who were in any case maintaining a respectable distance from the prince and his bride-to-be. “Sssh, hush now,” said Roxy, stroking his hair softly and quickly. Then she put her nose on his cold ear and whispered, “It's okay. You can stay with me tonight, child. It's all right.” She held him until he calmed, helped him to dry his tears and then handed him his book back. It was, in fact, pretty heavy. “You're very brave,” she said. “Kings are brave. Kings are very, very brave.” At that moment, Scruff joined in and used his licking and clumsy snuffling and baby-laugh to help get David running stable again. Commander Flightfeather had released him as soon as he'd seen that crying was happening. His people did not cry and their only form of intense emotional release was to die suddenly of overstimulation, so he was always nervous whenever someone looked a bit distraught. Scruff almost knocked David to the floor with his eagerness to heal him. Scruff was getting to be quite big too. He wasn't yet fully grown. As werewolf cubs take a little longer to mature than normal-wolf cubs, but he was getting there. In fact, the reason most werewolves are kind of assholes is because they were invariably teased by the other wolves in their pack for being behind on their growth spurts. But Scruff wouldn't be like that. He would not become an asshole. He'd known only love throughout his short life, despite some paternal abandonment issues (which wolves are generally cool with.)
“We came to see your father,” said Roxy when Scruff was about finished with his rolling and gumming and laughing routine.
“He's in his bedroom,” said David. He had Scruff in a headlock and the last of his tears had soaked into his shirt. “He's planning something with Teacher. I think we're going to go travelling again,” he said thoughtfully.
“Then we'll go and talk to him there then,” said Roxy rising. “Where is your sister?”
“She made a house out of books in the library. She's in there,” said David.
“So then we'll go there and get her out of her book-house,” frowned Roxy.
“She's got one of her eunuchs in there with her,” said David, straining to think of a way to describe exactly what he meant. He thought of his rough life spent on the road in the United States, where he'd witnessed a lot of the behaviour of cowboys and bandits and gringos. “She's establishing dominance,” he tried.
“Very well,” said Roxy, steering the conversation back on track. “She can join us later, but for now, would you like to come with us? What we have to discuss concerns you too. You can put your studies aside for now.” David's eyes lit up. He let go of Scruff and then boy and dog ran to Roxy's side and she held his hand as they Adventure-marched up to the King's bedroom with the others in tow. There were no guards or locked doors or anything along the way – no citizen of Europe would ever try to harm the King unless he or she was under some kind of spell or very soapy brainwash – which was something that actually happened quite often – in which case it was fortunate that the Palace was bristling with Adventure Friends whenever the King was around, or at least some generic heroes of a random level or a few boys-with-a-destiny, so only something that was a really big deal could ever pose a threat, so guards or locked doors were useless anyway. Doors were a meaningless concept to a villain above a certain level and it was against the law to employ anyone who was cool or hardcore as a guard on the grounds that it was cruel to do so. Cool, lucky, hardcore people with names are much happier going off on adventures and finding treasure than staying in one boring place, looking after some crummy door that doesn't even matter. You couldn't get someone like that in a uniform anyway, not unless it was a disguise.

And so Roxy's group of Adventure Friends – which was now nearly all of the current Adventure Team – climbed the Stairs Of Noblilty, passed under the Awesome Archway and entered the King's rad bedroom. At that very moment, elsewhere in the Palace, Jacob Hillmounter went out to the bathroom he shared with Timothy Clashradish to splash some water on his face and maybe find something magical to rub on his hangover. When he opened the bathroom door he found the fly Sagittarius lady from the precious night knelt down on the bathroom tiles, vomiting into the toilet. At first he thought that maybe he'd made some fly love to her that he'd forgotten about – possibly in that window between two AM and four AM when he'd possibly been napping on the Palace couch – but then he saw that she was wearing Timothy's t-shirt. He gasped once and then he gasped some more.

The King welcomed his Adventure Friends into his bedroom and bundled them in for an impromptu secret war council. Colonel Glowfist was there and there was a shape behind the curtain that everyone was too polite to mention. The King sat on his bed and they gathered round. He'd put some maps up on the walls – right over his Leonard Cohen poster and the chart that showed you what the inside of the Earth looked like (crust, Rock Kingdom, Hell, then it was mostly snakes until you hit the Holy Grail at the core.) The King thought back to the last war council he'd had right there in the very same bedroom. How long ago it was and how different were the faces around him then! Well, except for Flightfeather – Colonel Glowfist looked completely different since the fattening and the dandification. Of the absent ones, Father Dominoes on the grounds looking after poor Axe, but he was bound to his new duties in Hell and Axe would probably not fight by his side again. The King foresaw a quiet life of politics and big dinners for his brave friend, and if poor Axe wanted to kill anyone again, he'd have to use poison like a child. Silly old Sally was dead, of course. General Majesty and Mechanicus were up North, in the future, finishing the second Fort Majesty with the help of the Angel Cowboy. He had told them all that they were going to kill Winter and now here he was, years later, with Winter still doing its thing, completely unmolested by righteous fury or richly deserved vengeance of any kind. Well, they would get there, they really would. The King knew that once he'd just cleared up this bothersome Civil War problem, he'd devote 100% of his energies to getting round to Winter like he'd promised everyone. He was still the King, this was still Europe and he still had his Adventure Friends, even if they were all different now:

######ADVENTURE FRIEND ROLL-CALL

# CAJUN aka AGENT CAJUN, AGENT CAGE, 'CAGE-O', 'C'

HERO TYPE: Former recurrent villain
CLASS: Spy
LVL: 29
EQUIP HANDS: Portal gun
EQUIP HEAD: Mirror shades
EQUIP BODY: Skinwalker fur
EQUIP OTHER: Bo-hypno amulet

The King's scoop: Cajun had watched over the King for his entire spying career but had turned rogue while in possession of highly experimental, highly magical and highly useful CIA equipment. Could he be trusted? Were his loyalties absolute? Probably, thought the King. How lame would it be if he went back to the President's side now? No one would do that. And even if he did, the President would probably order him to execute one of his former comrades – a cute one, like Flightfeather – and he'd be just about to do it and then -whammo!- he'd have a crisis of conscience and go back to the King's side, so there was really no need to worry.

# BERNADETTA LEATHERVEST aka BERNARDETTA LEATHERVEST

HERO TYPE: Found in a bar
CLASS: Lesbian Warrior
LVL: 84
EQUIP HANDS: The Hammer That Broke The World
EQUIP HEAD: Crew-cut
EQUIP BODY: Leathervest family leather vest
EQUIP OTHER: The King's Father's lost belt

The King's skinny: The burly sappho seemed to be quite nonchalantly wielding the legendary Hammer That Broke The World. There were songs about that hammer. There was a book as thick as a man's head in Colonel Glowfist's library that detailed its every rivet and inscription and constantly lamented its persistent loss. The King wasn't up on the entire history of the thing, but he was fairly sure that it was one of those items that his great-grandfather had found, or wrestled off a boss, had blessed by some god, upgraded all the way up to maximum on his workbench, then carelessly dropped in a swamp one fine day. Years would have gone by, then a Slavik Leech-Lord would have found it and yadda yadda, absolute power, yadda yadda, a hundred years of darkness and then it would have wound up in some damn shop with an extortionate asking price. And now Bernadetta had it. Oh, she was also wearing his father's long-lost belt – the one that conferred to the wearer the strength of every European slain in his disastrous 500-man instance raid on Istanbul. Erik Rage-Eater! had famously torn it from his waist and thrown it into the Rhine because he was drunk and a bunch of his friends were filming it on their phones. That belt (and the promise of its eventual return) was the symbol of over a hundred schools, sports teams and breakfast cereals across Europe. One of the most popular Morning Prayers for priests of all creeds is for the safe return of the King's Father's belt, so that the strength lost to the Islamalandians in that fateful raid could return to make Europe all the more fruitful and awesome. And now Bernadetta had it, too. It was odd, thought the King – he never could get thinking about Ms. Leathervest for any length of time without spending the majority of that time considering the stuff she carried. The King couldn't remember a conversation with her that didn't involve stuff, getting more stuff or the best way to use the stuff she had. And now he'd have to have another conversation like that, about where in the name of his father did she get that awesome new stuff. But after that, sometime, he'd have to sit down with her and really get to the bottom of who she was and what she wanted.

# ASTRID GIMMERLECK aka LAMB
HERO TYPE: Girlfriend
CLASS: Archaeologist
LVL: 4
EQUIP HANDS: Trowel
EQUIP HEAD: Fedora
EQUIP BODY: Khaki shirt
EQUIP OTHER: Bag of European teeth

The King's mindthoughts on her: If there's one thing that any sort of organisation needs, it's a capable, switched-on young lady with a shovel, an acquired immunity to curses and an aptitude for solving mysteries and swinging from a vine (or even a snake) over a pit of crocodiles. It was just a pity that things were still so weird between them. Her unusual romance with Axe Axewound didn't bother the King at all. To him, sex between two people of any description was already pretty odd and gross, so sex between a woman and a wolf, or at least a wolf-monster, wasn't anything particularly new to take on board. It was just all that business with the Viking hearts that embarrassed him, especially now that it had led to a whole big Civil War. He did find less awkward to be around her since Axe had been crippled, but he knew of course that he couldn't dare talk to her while her man wasn't around, or else he'd only compound his earlier uncoolness. Life is so complicated sometimes!

# COMMANDER FLIGHTFEATHER aka JAMES 'COMMANDER' FLIGHTFEATHER, FLY
HERO TYPE: Foundling
CLASS: Bird
LVL: 10
EQUIP HANDS: n/a
EQUIP HEAD: Mottled appearance
EQUIP BODY: Rhea charm
EQUIP OTHER: Perfectly ordinary sword

The King's low-down: His old chum - and ours – was keeping to the back of the crowd of Adventure Friends, close to the wall. The King had dearly missed the funny little bird-creature while he'd been away and he was proud of the fairly decent shake he'd given to being Custodian of Europe. True, the place was now threatening to come crashing down around their ears, but very little of that was Flightfeather's fault. He was a nice guy and good with people and the King would punch to death anyone who said different. Still, the strain of leadership had taken its toll on the poor guy. He was moulting a little on his neck and his beak looked a bit scaly. The King decided that he was better suited to the adventuring life, out in the fresh air.

He wondered how the Commander's pet little man was doing. How long do little men live in captivity?

# ROXY TRIPFOOT aka QUEEN ROXINNIA
HERO TYPE: Romantic tension
CLASS: Gypsy Queen
LVL: 60
EQUIP HANDS: Sharp hula hoop
EQUIP BODY: Sexy jangly things
EQUIP OTHER: Enchanted eye-liner

The King's big info: What a fine wife she will make for David someday. There she was, with his hand in hers. What a strong female character she was! It was a shame that she lost the rabbits, thought the King. That had been a neat trick. He had so many friends-who-were-girls now. That made him feel pretty cool. He wondered for a second if he could add his girlfriend to the Adventure Team to up the lady quotient but he had to discard the thought because his girlfriend didn't have any skills or cool powers, apart from being really understanding, and she couldn't walk for very long without needing a break.

# COLONEL GLOWFIST aka FATTY, MR. FATTY,
HERO TYPE: Troubled best friend
CLASS: Archmage
LVL: 70
EQUIP HANDS: Infernal gauntlet
EQUIP BODY: Powdered finery
EQUIP OTHER: Hilarious wig

The King's understanding: There he stood, a respectable distance from Roxy and her groom-to-be, taking up the space of three of his former selves - his friend and companion, Colonel Glowfist. He'd been briefing him on the upcoming Irish Server Quest and the dangers that his friends would face. Ireland was a pretty fascinating place when you got down to it. It was a pity that they were such a fearsome and determined enemy of Europe / goodness. The journey into the heartland of that foul land would be perilous indeed, and it would have to be done without attracting the attention of the Ire Lords, lest they retaliate with all-out war. And the King's Adventure Friends would have to embark on this quest without him. Never mind that, though. The King had a plan. He'd figured it all out.

“My friends, my dear friends,” said the King at last. He'd been staring at them for half an hour prior to this. He did that when he was planning. “You were wise indeed to notice that all is not right with our fellow Europeans. The Euro-magic that polishes every heart and mind across our nation to a bright golden shine is down to the last daub on the hanky. You here have been spared of this draining because you've been hanging out with me, both abroad and in my crib, but I have been weakened, as you know, my friends, by the stinking unfair ex-craft of She-Who-Shall-Never-Again-Be-Named.” He paused to stare at David for five seconds. David quivered and Roxy held his hand very tightly.
“What will happen when the Euro-magic drains away, Your Highness?” asked Roxy, hoping to move things along. “Will we return to the pointless savagery of beasts?”
“There will be a war,” whispered the King and he clenched his fists. “That much is inevitable. It has been seen it times to come. I shall have to guide it, to delay the slide into beastliness, while you, my friends, labour to restore the ebb and flow of Euro-magic to the mighty tide we have enjoyed for generations.”
“Dad, no! You're splitting us up again?!” gasped David. “We only just got back together again!”
“We spent some time together on the boats, remember?” said the King, sure as ever.
“It was so dark!” wailed David, but the King put up his hand. He was speaking.
“The coming war will pit brother against brother, husband against wife, neighbour against dog, and it would break my many hearts, young David, if it were to be Adventure Friend against Adventure Friend … or father against son.” David said nothing. He did not move. He wanted to cry out, to clutch Roxy's hops and bury himself in the folds of her dress, but he was big now. He couldn't let these sorts of emotions out when his dad's friends were all watching.
“David, I'm sending you and your sister to Fort Majesty. It is the safest non-European place I know of. The icy miles of the Chillinous Plains will protect it from the vagaries of war and its construction should be complete by the time you arrive.”
“You'll be travelling with me, of course. You've many lessons left to take, young Prince,” smiled Colonel Glowfist as he leant on his staff. “Besides, the Ire Lords would be alerted the instant I crossed the little sea into Ireland. That sea didn't always used to be there, I'll have you know,” he said cryptically.
“Will the little Scruff-puppy be going with them, Your Highness? Your Highness, please?” shrilled Commander Flightfeather.
“Yes, what a good idea! You can take Scruff with you, David. An animal companion can be a young King's most valuable asset. They can chew through ropes, that sort of thing. I had a lion and a reindeer, you know. Oh, we're also sending Rigor Mantis with you as a body guard.” On cue, Rigor Mantis threw open the curtain he'd been hiding behind and stalked forward. He brandished a stiletto. It was designed to slip through ribs and puncture lungs. David's composure snapped. He shrieked, hurled a LVL 2 Flame spell at the shrouded face of the dark creature that had appeared in the room and then he grabbed Scruff and ducked behind Roxy's legs. Mantis caught the spell his absorbent armguard, spun his body through the air towards David and, with a while of silk and steel, landed behind Roxy and at David's feet in a low bow.
“I shall protect you beyond my last breath, my Prince,” he said, and then, rising, “And I too can chew through ropes.” His brown eyes twinkled from within the layers of silk wrapped around his face and hair.
“Our newest friends may not recognise Mr. Mantis. He has travelled with me many times before. He was a close childhood friend. He and Colonel Glowfist once saved all of France from the Dark Spaniards and he fought with 2X heroism at Normandy and now he is ready to join the Adventure Team once more.”
“A pleasure to meet you,” Roxy said coldly. She did not think it had been necessary to scare the boy like that, but held her sharp tongue for fear of what the King had said about Adventure Friend fighting against Adventure Friend. “And what have you planned for the rest of us, Your Highness?” she said to the King. Colonel Glowfist was the one to respond.
“Cherished one, you will head up a sneaky undercover team to the Server that provides Europe with its connection to the magical aether.”
“Why is this thing in Ireland of all places?” asked Bernadetta Leathervest, shifting her massive new hammer from one hand to the other. She was quite bored of all the yakking.
“Ireland used to be part of Europe,” growled the King. “My grandfather ruled over both nations as one. But then – betrayal, blood, an iron storm, a report that rung across the heavens.” He paused for so long that everyone had thought that he'd stopped talking. “Even now, eight hundred years later, I can close my eyes, search my hearts and feel the pain dealt to Europe on that Day Of Separation.” The King did in fact close his eyes right then and he checked if the pain was still there. Yep, there it was.
“Not a physical separation,” grinned Colonel Glowfist. “That was not done until much later, back when I was -” The King's eyes snapped open, a fresh film of ancestral pain clinging to his orbs.
“Yes, now is really an appropriate time to tell everyone how awesome you used to be, Colonel,” he scowled. Colonel Glowfist shuffled his remaining foot and his stump capped off in bronze, admonished.
“I will be more awesome in future, Your Highness,” he said. The King clapped a wooden hand on his shoulder.
“I know you will, my friend.” Glowfist put his hand on the King's and smiled. “Please continue,” said the King.
“Roxy, your team will be made up of yourself, Cajun, Bernadetta, Astrid and Flightfeather. You'll need to travel to Jerusalem first to fetch Ba'al,” said Colonel Glowfist. Cajun moved his glasses around on his face to show that he wanted to talk.
“With respect to the other considerable abilities in his profile, Ba'al Hadad's modus operandi would appear, in my assessment, to be incompatible with the low-visibility parameters of this operation,” he said.
“That is an excellent point, Cage-O,” said Colonel Glowfist, getting a feel for his nickname. “One that we had our friend Father Dominoes think about. He told us about these two scrolls we found in the library, you see...” The King was already rummaging under his pillow as he said it. He pulled out two old coffee-coloured scrolls and handed them to Roxy Tripfoot.
"The first one you are to read when you meet Ba'al in his cave outside Jerusalem. The second, you are to keep in the deepest, safest part of your inventory, where it shall remain, until the time is ripe." Roxy did not fully understand but the King looked at her and th look told her that she would.

Then he hugged her and everyone applauded, and, when the hug was complete, the King was crying and there was a note in Roxy's inventory. After three sobs, the King spread his arms big and wide and cried, "I'm going to miss you all so much!" This was the signal for a Group Hug. Everyone crowded in, even Colonel Glowfist, who was fat. Raw love crackled in the air and, at the peak of the embrace, everybody's everything went up by one.

That night was hard for David. He could not bear the thought of being separated from his father once more, and of being pushed to become all the stronger and more hardcore by the pressures of travel and the random encounters and sub-quests he would surely experience along the way. He cried all night there in Roxy's bed. He was far too young for lovemaking, so instead she held him and stroked his hair and tried to soothe him with her closeness.
"He loves you, he loves us all, he just has to do this one thing and then we'll all be together," she sang into the sniffling darkness.
"I wanted to have a birthday party!" David cried inbetween his inarticulate sobs. "Everyone would come! Everyone would see."

Scruff whined at the foot of the bed. The sun rose.

End of chapter 97

Terrorthaw, who was King of Europe, Father Of All Men, Bester Of Gods and the Brightest Jewel In The Crown Of The World, landed heavily in his throne. With a contented sigh, he closed his eyes, accessed his pyramid palace's virtual control panel to turn the thermostat right the way down, wriggled his cybernetically-enhanced buttocks into a comfortable groove and waited for the ice. It would take a few hundred years to cover him and his sleeping Kingdom but he was, above all things, a patient man.

He was alone now at the end of his empire, as alone as he had been at the beginning. Those of his minions, children, creations and champions who had elected to follow him into the New Age were slumbering peacefully in their chambers nested within the endless caverns beneath his feet, safely insulated from the cold and the years. Those who wanted to make the most of the world as they knew it were on their way across the oceans towards the untouched continents of the North, no longer forbidden to their many curiosities and hungers. There his children would find their awaiting destinies as the progenitors of the Royal Bloodlines and Founding Dynasties of India, the United States, China, the southern United States, Ethiopia, Old Celtland, MegaRussia and a certain nation that would also be someday called Europe. They had their King's blessing and as many of his data caches, treasures and materia as could be stowed in the holds of their immense hovercrafts. They would need all the help he could offer, he knew, if they were to overcome the many difficulties that the histories predicted for them.

He had been looking forward to this time of lonesome reflection for centuries. There simply had not been any time in the past one hundred and fifty million years to relax and chill out and reflect on days past, lessons learned, better times and choice victories. So many of each had accumulated from the moment he had set foot on the continent that was his home and Kingdom after disembarking from the landing shuttle of Mechanicus' ship. In that ineffable, primordial time, everything was an enemy – from the roving, city-sized slime moulds, the dotted encampments of shipwrecked ancient astronauts, the wild gods, the dragons, the sponge-colonies, the Moonmen, even the air and water and earth spat poison and fire at him to daily test his defences and endurance. He was so weak back then. His magicks were unwound and his machinery was nearing obsolescence. He had to rely on his cunning and ingenuity to survive. It was quite enough.

He went for the ancient astronauts first. His aim was to seize their alien technology to upgrade himself and his offensive capabilities. Their encampments had progressed well into their third clone-generation and had suffered some programming decay in the harsh atmosphere. They had little interest in anything other than diligently building pyramids upon every flat surface. After a few days of basic remote viewing, he was easily able to infiltrate one of the camps, knock out their remaining sensor nets with his ageing EMP necktie, snap the feeble neck of a guard on armed dragon watch, drag the corpse away to his spider hole and inspect the creature's eyes and central nervous system well enough to be able to modify a simple invisibility spell to bamboozle their minds. Now all he needed was a source of magic so that he could cast such a spell. As masterful a sorcerer as he was, he would have to expend a very good deal of time and effort before he would be able to commune directly with this strange and ancient land, so he turned his mind to the bits and pieces of priesting he'd picked up over the years. He'd listened to plenty of Learn A Dead Language audiobooks in his car when he'd been an Evil Pizzaboy during his teens, so he already knew the tongue of ancient, time-lost entities like the God of Carbon Dioxide. And so, with the mutilated body of the ancient astronaut slung over his shoulder, no heavier than a child's, Terrorthaw retreated to his base at the landing shuttle to prepare a sacrifice.

He powered up the Prayer Amplifier housed in Mechanicus' ship and, inspecting the readings, reckoned that its fields would be able to affect his psychicraft from the ship's position in orbit. The Future Folk installed Prayer Amplifiers on all pieces of equipment above a certain size – in their time, the gods had been utterly enslaved to the last spirit and the Future Folk did not have to worry about pleasing or being diplomatic, all they had to do was be heard. The God of Carbon Dioxide was quite surprised to be spoken to by an animal. Its business had always been with gases, which were straightforward, and it was still getting the hang of plants, and all they wanted was more carbon dioxide, which was easy enough, but still. This ambulatory mass of confusingly woven animals was asking, in a clear and loud voice, to have a specific band of electromagnetic radiation temporarily bent around its one-shaped body and would, in return, dedicate the carbon dioxide in this other non-ambulatory mass of animals to its glory. The God of Carbon Dioxide didn't really understand. It was huge and simple, even by godly standards, it had no idea that it even had a 'glory,' and had never accepted a sacrifice before. But it felt curiosity for the first time in its existence and so wafted a breath of hot air over the mess of animal to mark its agreement. Terrorthaw burned the body of the ancient astronaut, which was a very difficult thing indeed to do in a low-oxygen environment and required a lot of manual rejiggering of his respiratory systems and then more huffing and puffing that he thought he could bear, but eventually the body did burn in parts and the God of Carbon Dioxide was too taken with the novelty of it all to get fussy. Another waft of hot air passed over Terrorthaw and the spell that he had prayed for was cast. He was able to walk right into the ancient astronaut camp, help himself to their weapons and start blasting away. The spoils of his victory were disappointing. Many of the machines he had crafted in his own time had been reverse engineered from ancient astronaut technology, the designs of which he'd improved on considerably. However, one particular ray-gun caught his eye – it had once been mounted on one of their starships but had been modified into a portable siege weapon that could be lifted by a small crew for the purpose of fighting off dragons. He recognised it instantly, for it was the same ray-gun he himself had used during the Bird Wars. It was basically his signature weapon for that period. He'd have to bury the weapon in the place where his earlier self would find it in the far future. But for now, his Kingdom-to-be needed to cleared of the vile wyrms, and a little bit of overwhelming firepower could get a lot of chores done.

With the ancient astronauts eliminated, he took up residence in one of the many shiny new pyramids they had erected in the moss jungles. He was grateful for the shelter and eager to plumb the secrets of these strange buildings. He fashioned some tools and spent a few weeks investigating his new home, being interrupted only once by a colossal slime-mould which oozed through one of the stargazing vents, evidently it wished to be out of the sun. It brought with it a smattering of the dust, rocks, debris and whole ecosystems it had gathered up along its gelatinous yellow body throughout its travels. His magnificent new ray-gun made short work of the sprawling creature before it managed to engulf the whole building but the clean-up was arduous. He did not yet have a single helper drone, past self or vat-grown manservant to help him. He had to do it all himself. 'This is not the way the world is meant to be,' he thought to himself as he mopped and mopped and mopped.

In time, he learned that the pyramids worked together as a network to form a magic-containment system within their walls. This was exactly the kind of thing he needed for the next phase of his plan: to secure a permanent source of magic that did not rely on him trying to get a fire going without any oxygen. In preparation for that, he embarked on an expedition to find the spaceship that had originally brought the ancient astronauts to Earth. He found an empty husk, with anything it once contained long since repurposed by the reluctant settlers. But a husk was all he needed. He caught the attention of a slime-mould the size of a locomotive, relatively small by the standards of the time, with some hand-packed mossball treats, then steered the slime over to the spaceship, whereupon the slimy beast unwittingly scooped it up into its body as it swept across the algal savannah in which the ship was moored. The mould followed a trail of thrown mossballs back to the pyramid and then it was slain, quite a way removed from anywhere that would need cleaning, depositing the spaceship's skeleton a short distance from the pyramid's doorstep. Now Terrorthaw had the otherworldly materials he needed to build a very special cage.

He had some experience in xenometallurgy and the composition of the ancient astronaut's spaceships, with their aligned atoms and impermanence to most of the wavelengths he had at hand. He guessed, quite correctly, that the samples he had worked on in his own time had come from similarly ill-fated rescue and recovery missions on behalf of the castaways he had slaughtered. After a quick hunting party and a repeat of the slime-mould heavy lifting trick, he had the precious bones and hide of a dead dragon to work with. It did not take him long to build three cages: air-tight, magic-proof and effectively indestructible. He'd dreamt up the design to hold his old nemesis, the King, and it would have worked too, if he'd been around and available for trapping. But he had even grander quarry in mind. He checked the seals on the small steely apertures
that dinted the otherwise completely sealed surfaces of the cages for the eighteenth time, extinguished all of the lamps and then went out to catch mosquitoes.

He'd been thinking over this particular part of the plan ever since his scanners had detected Mechanicus' time-jump, but he'd been greatly inspired by his short encounter with the God of Carbon Dioxide. The gods of his time had been through a lot of relatively recent upheavals that had knocked a keen sense of wariness and sophistication into their collective skulls, a sense that these ancient gods were baldly lacking. They had not been co-existing with humanity for millennia, had not fed on their ideas and culture and tear like so many ultradimensional ticks, had not stood before the wrath of a King at the height of his powers, nor been turned out of their godly realm and hunted across the psychoscape by the Devil's relentless Dogma Squads. They had a lot to learn.

The God of Carbon Dioxide fell for what was, by definition, the oldest trick in the book. Terrorthaw would write the book himself during a lull in his empire-building specifically so he could make this claim. Here is the Oldest Trick, according to Terrorthaw's famous book:

STEP 1:
Gain audience with FOOL within range of his soon-to-be ETERNAL PRISON (see Sec.6 – GAINING AN AUDIENCE and Sec.3 – CONCEALING THE INTRUMENT OF YOUR MASTERSTROKE IN PLAIN SIGHT)

STEP 2:
Flatter FOOL on his mighty STRENGTH and gigantic POWER.

STEP 3:
Upon concurrence of flattery, invite FOOL to demonstrate established MIGHT by slipping into the GENIUS CONTAINMENT DEVICE OF MY OWN DESIGN. If FOOL hesitates, proceed to STEP 4. If you have done well, proceed to STEP 5.

STEP 4:
If FOOL hesitates, proceed to CHIDE and MOCK the FOOL'S STRENGTH or strongest STAT, starting gently before escalating sharply. Do not be afraid to get sort of FLIRTY, accentuating the HOMOEROTC SUBTEXT.

STEP 5:

Upon capture, laugh until NO MORE LAUGHTER WILL COME OUT.

With the God of Carbon Dioxide under lock and key, he decided to up his game with the God of Moist Places and arranged for Mechanicus' ship to nudge some chunks of orbiting debris on a trajectory towards his pyramid, simulating an attack that he begged the God to hide from in this special little shelter he had for just an occasion...

He felt as though he'd overworked it in that last instance, so for the God of Meiosis he tried a pie, a stick on a string and an upturned milk crate. He didn't even need to hide in a bush or around a corner. It worked beautifully.

He had three captive gods – gods immeasurably more powerful than the kind he was used to. After all, the gods of his time were gods of things like wines of a particular region, or a river or a city, one tribe of people or just one of a zillion gods of the sun, moon or a celestial misunderstanding. How low had their kind been brought by their romance with man, to such paltry and hollow depths they would sink, and would continue to sink – as the Prayer Amplifier and the habits of the Future Folk would show. And how far would man climb – he would drop these strutting crudities of magic and myth from the greatest height imaginable. He would have the privilege of giving the first push. He released the mosquitoes.

Normally, he reflected as he crunched through a big bowl of oversized, blood-filled mosquitoes swimming in milk, one would go by a less disgusting route to wring magic from a spirit. But those methods were not available to him in his current situation, and it wasn't as if a bowl of giant, ancestral mosquitoes was the grossest thing he'd ever eaten. He'd once eaten a goblet-full of the gallstones of holy saddhus to gain an edge in his magical war against Mystic Boy, and on one occasion he'd eaten one of his own hearts for some reason he couldn't quite recall. The real tricky part had been in getting the captive gods into a state where blood could be drawn from them by the mosquitoes. He'd tried showing them television documentaries of lizards that he'd found on Mechanicus' ship, so they'd try to change form to mimic the things they saw so they would be better able to command/rape/con them. But the gods needed to be taught first how to see in the appropriate time-frame, along with the fundamentals of trichromatic, stereoscopic vision so that they'd be able to make sense of the images, and Terrorthaw didn't know where to begin on that. Fortunately he could rely on their simplicity, so he just told them, in their own languages, to assume this shape or that and he would set them free.

He could feel the god-blood being broken down by his systems and the magic beginning to seep into his cells. It was raw and dangerous stuff and there wasn't too much of it he could absorb, but it was enough for him to go out and upgrade his whole magic-retrieval mechanism he'd worked out. He'd need some demons.

As marvellous as his big ray-gun was, as glad as he was to be reunited with it and as deadly as he was in combat generally, everybody knows that you don't tangle with demons unless you've got some magic on the table. You learn that stuff in kindergarten in Medieval Europe. And demons, being lesser, easily-tamed gods who work for a living, are exactly the kind of thing you'd need to siphon magic from one source to another. He set out demon-spotting with caution, very aware of the sheer power of these old gods and mindful that they had not gone to the trouble of ranking themselves into neat, easily-recognisable categories like they did under the Devil's rule in Terrorthaw's native time. The key to finding a god small enough to qualify as a demon was to watch the dragons, who would rumble with demons every Friday in the parking lot behind the soda stall. A lady dragon would usually kick it off by getting the guys excited with some loose talk and a suggestive wiggle, then saying in not so many words that she would only put out for the biggest, coolest, most demon-stomping boy dragon around. The dragon guys would then sit in the diner, sip enough soda (or a soda float if it was Christmas) to work themselves into a frenzy, then slither around outside to the parking lot in a gang, looking for the smallest, easiest-to-handle god they could find – usually a god of a short-lived but novel arrangement of organic molecules, or the god of a meteorite that had recently struck the Earth. Sometimes the dragons could pull off this magical trick where they broke a larger god down into many smaller ones. If the dragons won the rumble, they would habitually emasculate and belittle the god by forcing it to follow them around to help support their massive, conventionally unfeasible bulk. So necessary was this parasitism to the dragon lifestyle, that dragons who failed to ever bring down a demon or persuade an older dragon to lend some spares would become beached and useless when he grew to a certain size. Lady dragons thought a beached dragon was the stupidest and least attractive thing on the face of the planet, as was any dragon who remained friends with such a poor specimen, and so the beached, demonless dragon would soon die, his lungs collapsing under his own weight.
If a gang of dragons lost a rumble with a god – which happened fairly often to horrendously bloody effect, then the lady dragon would have to go find another gang of fellas to work up for the following Friday.

Safely cloaked from the dragons' detection during his observation of these strange rituals, Terrorthaw quickly deduced that he was in all likelihood witnessing the origins of the whole concept of demonic labour – these parasitised gods would be inherited by another dragon upon the original host's death. It was conceivable that some of the older demons he'd known in his own time – those he'd so often fought and tamed and enlisted the services of, were the very same ones that he saw getting jumped by malt-crazed snakes on those strange, primordial Fridays. He travelled back to his pyramid, unravelled the stretch of dragon-hide he had left over from the construction of the god-cages, shook it about with a few magic missiles, calibrated his mechanical eye so that he could see the form of a spirit and donned as many spells of magic as he could remember. Three little gods whispered their way out of the rolls of dragon hide. One was the god of a single base substitution in the organelle-RNA of a successful species of fern. One was the god of a sulphur-rich pool, and 1m x 20cm x 60cm in dimension, that contained a handful of nutritious clay. The third was the god of a bubble of methane buried deep beneath the ground near the dragons' soda stall. Terrorthaw had a hard time trying to figure out all three of their languages at once. The gods were angry and eager to fight for their freedom. Trickery was not an option. A mighty battle ensued and many ultimate attacks were made, with colours flying every damn where. Terrorthaw was victorious but suffered injuries so severe that he needed to eat three loaves of bread and rest for the night before he could recover. Nethertheless, victory was his and so gods would serve him now, the first demons to be named as such, because that is how it worked.

He put the demons to work on drawing the magic of the gods out into his pyramid, and used the last bowl of mosquitoes he'd ever eat to bind himself to the pyramid, as well as to paint the place and its surrounding network with protections against decay, erosion and such. Magic was now flowing nicely from the land, into the gods, through the demons, into the pyramid and then into him. His reservoirs of power grew more voluminous by the second. But his imagination had no use of seconds. His plans were on the scale of millennia and thousands of millennia. Now that he had a time-proof source of magical energy ticking away, he could get to the fun part.

He reasoned that if he time-jumped anywhere near a chronology that contained Mechanicus, he could very well be tagged and traced and the Future Folk would be on him so fast and then it would all be over. So he limited himself to the times between his initial landing in the past and the first few years of the King's life, before he met Mechanicus. After carefully programming the ship's time travel mechanism to not time-slide him into the middle of a known war or a gradually creeping piece of geography, he embarked on the long, long journey that skipped him like a stone through the history of his empire. On each jump, he would skip ahead few years at a time and then stop to inspect the pyramid network's fortifications against attack and the elements, check that the gods were stowed safely in their cages, refresh the protection spells or, once a certain time-threshold had been crossed, he'd ask his future selves if they needed a hand with something. Indeed, they were always expecting him and would have detailed lists of chores drawn up. He'd be roped in to take care of this border incursion or that meteor shower threatening the orbiting ship, to sign a stack of paperwork as tall as he was, to avert one of the many ecological crises that a super-empire threw up, or just to clean the bathroom. It was a curious thing, for as an unshakably committed antiauthoritarian lie Terrorthaw, to find himself in a situation where his own well-being and convenience relied on him doing the bidding of another, even if that other was a future version of himself. But ever time he resisted the common urge to slit the throat of his future self and claim his empire as his own, his future self would catch that glint of conflict in his eye, give a grin of recognition and then they would all be laughing.

After a million skips or so, he had learned to just get on with whatever needed to be done without question or hesitation. His many errands took him all across his empire, introduced him to the lieutenants, governors, elders, monsters and bishops who would make that empire great, and who took the time to teach this younger version of the Terrorthaw they served all they knew on the finer points of statesmanship, diplomacy, community planning and warfare that even he could improve on. And, as could be predicted, with all that adventuring, his XP went through the freakin' roof. I'd tell you what level he got to at the end of this first sweep across the timespan of his kingdom but you wouldn't even believe me.

And so, after he'd inspected nearly every year of his rule and ensured that his captive gods stayed captive, his ship stayed floating in the sky, his Kingdom stayed hale and hearty and his pyramid headquarters stayed clean and untroubled, he met himself at the very end of his first reign as King. This part was quite shocking to him. His future selves looked different with each timejump he made – in fact, he was fairly sure that they were making a conscious effort to distinguish themselves from each other by upgrading their cybernetic implants, adding on or subtracting a few limbs or wings or spikes or armour or guns, or swapping bodies/brains with a bush kangaroo, a giant sloth, a gorilla, a pack of ferocious dogs. Sometimes his future selves were regrowing a new body from scratch and could be anywhere from an infant to an old man. Here on the last time-jump, he met his future self as a 27 year old image of himself in perfect health, sensibly dressed in a modest cloak and evening dress, with no visible mechanical contrivances or blade-arms or tank tracks or anything. They met in the usual place for the time-jumps, on the top floor of the central pyramid – his private quarters that overlooked one tiny portion of the Kingdom outside. When he materialised, his future self was standing by the very large circular window at the apex of the pyramid like he was guarding it. He took a minute to orientate himself and take the usual look around to note changes in the décor and layout. The pyramid was apparently deserted by the staff, the curtains were all drawn and the hustle and hum of a city devoted to the running of a continent-sized empire had been replaced by an eerie silence. He approached his future self at the window and felt like an awkward teenager wearing a foolish, faddish costume of a body. His future self knew what he was thinking and smiled at him. Terrorthaw had forgotten how nice a smile could look when you didn't have a mouth full of jagged fangs or robotic lips.
“We thought we'd try something different for this part,” said his future self, indicating his handsome young body. “All I have to do is sleep now. I'll let the world happen out there, I'll let history begin, I'll wait for the fall of Fort Majesty to pass by and then I'll pay a visit to the King.” The fall of Fort Majesty. It was already so long ago, according to Terrorthaw's personal chronology. He no longer kept that particular set of memories in his wetware or two back-up mechanical brains he kept in his abdomen. He psycholinked to the pyramid's system and found the memory almost instantly on Server 48B66-Romeo, one of the stacks located in his Kingdom's annex of the Astral Plane. He'd had a feeling that was where he'd kept it. It was a good memory – he'd used a magical knife his minions had excavated in Ethiopia to rouse every malevolent spirit of the North, and a microwave laser, which he'd sent back in time during his brief but eventful stay in the future for just such a project, to agitate them and direct them towards the Chillinous Plains. Wave after wave fell upon the King's beautiful little base camp and not only did he have the delight of seeing the King's precious Winter plans frustrated, but he quite unexpectedly forced Mechanicus, who'd proven a most delectable adversary with his deft command of the tower defence corps, into making a time-jump, which sent the machines in his lair quite wild. Within an hour he'd learned of the magnitude of what he'd witnessed and dropped everything to devote the following three years of his existence to the planning of the heist of Mechanicus' ship. He couldn't believe he'd forgotten all of that. He moved the memory into his wetware and created a special little loop for it. It was one to treasure. His thoughts returned to the matter at hand.
“Now finally I can begin my long and glorious rule!” he cried triumphantly to his future self. “I have done my menial chores and now comes the reward! I shall return to the beginning and -” he was cut off by his future self's quite obnoxious laughter. He was always annoyed by how badly his future selves did the laugh. He was much better at it.
“You'll have to wait just a little longer before you get to any of that, young one,” chuckled his future self as he stepped smartly towards an unnecessarily ornate coffee table carved from dragon bone and magically levitated by a matrix of crystals harvested from a far-distant supernova. On the table was a book as thick as Terrorthaw's chest and about as half as tall as his impressive height. It was bound in obsidian plate, its pages were treated dragon-hide, its binding glue was superglue. His future self lifted it as if it were a single sheet of A4 foolscap and put it meaningfully into his arms. “What you hold is a log of every failed attempt by those miserable Future Fools to undermine our perfect Kingdom. In my youth, I visited every occurrence listed in this book and I made sure that they did indeed all meet with failure,” his future self said through a sadistic grin. See, that was the downside of losing all the crazy teeth and facial hardware – when you grinned evilly, you could look no more threatening than the next dumb ape. He hefted the massive book around and managed to both get it open and pointing towards his face. The script throughout was laser-etched so tinily on the pages that he needed to use his bionic eye to read the lines:

YR 30162=18/11/=01H38=SPY=ENTRY:SEC52/A7=4PERS=THREAT:INDIGO
YR30162=23/11=19H02=INV=ENTRY:SEC02/B12=10300PERS=THREAT:DOUBLECRIMSON
YR30163=02/01=09H13=DISAST=ENTRY:SEC106/Y41=PROFILE:EARTHQUAKE=THREAT:LIME
“If I'm reading this correctly, my dear Terrorthaw,” purred Terrorthaw to his future self, who was standing again by the curtained window, his grin wearing a grin. “Then our Kingdom – which I've yet to rule over for a single day – is to be invaded by Future Forces at least once a month, and will from time to time be beset by spies, saboteurs and natural disasters?”
“You left out the insurrections and economic collapses,” hummed his future self. “But you will stop or contain every one of them.”
“I'll need a hundred armies to do all of these things,” he said in anticipation of what he guessed all this was leading to.
“You have one!” his future self shrieked in excitement as he pulled the ultra-cord that drew back the luxuriant velvet curtains that blinded the pyramid's all-seeing eye. Out there, standing in file before the pyramid, in ranks that stretched back further than the bionic eye could see, was the greatest army that had ever been assembled. It was larger than the one that the King's Great-Grandfather led to liberate Portugal from the Dark Spaniards, more disciplined that the legions of Ghost Romans that the King's Grandfather repelled on the fields of Germany in the Super Visigoth Wars 2, more brave than Erik Rage-Eater!'s Vikings that terrorised the King's father and more magical than the bird army that Terrorthaw himself had brought into the world to do battle with the King. Every soldier who was not a giant monster with the firepower of ten fighter jets was a winged angel with the speed of fifteen fighter jets. Those that did not have the power of one and a half archmagi had the muscle to punch a dozen men to mud with a single blow. Those which were not on Level 99 were lurking unseen, yet all around, on the Astral Plane, were XP worked totally differently. For every two hundred combatants was a space elevator to whisk them up into the sky, a corps of engineers and technicians, a fleet of supply caravans, mobile armouries and all of the wonderful engines of war. It was an investment of skill and time and energy and intelligence beyond all reckoning.
“I just whipped it up in the last forty thousand years or so,” breathed his future self while inspecting his fingernails (which were pink and small and not the slightest bit talonous, which was a little unsettling to Terrorthaw.) “Take the time-ship, stock up with what you need and travel to every point listed in the book and pre-empt it. You'd better get cracking, boy,” he said, looking over to the window and trying feebly not to look impressed by his own display. “Looks like you've already started.”

As Terrorthaw watched, he saw innumerable future versions of Mechanicus' landing shuttle, each with a different pattern of scorch-marks, repairs, upgrades and battle damage, pierce the bubble of the heavens, descend amongst the assembled troops and disgorge a future version of himself, who stalked among the ranks, liaised with yet other future versions of himself, addressed the various sergeants and field commanders, then corralled whatever forces and equipment that were needed for their next mission into the space elevators and jump-rocket platforms, where they were swept up into the multitudes of future versions of Mechanicus' ship that hovered in the sky far above. The elevators that were not going up were coming down, bringing the veterans, the wounded, the captive enemies and the dead back from the sky to the ground, where they could be driven by hovercraft to the appropriate facility for R&R, rebuilding, interrogation or taken to a lavish memorial for their family, followed by recycling. When the admin was done and the preparations made, his future selves, so tiny and fuzzy there among the thronging crowds, would turn and wave up at the pyramid's watching window, up at him, before stepping into their landing shuttle and returning to the sky. This would be his life for the next few epochs. He wondered how long, precisely, this stage of his life would last – how long this defensive time-war against the Future Folk would wear on for, and detected on the pyramid system the artefacts of the future version of himself that stood in the same room as he. The future version of himself was accessing the fresh memory files as he was uploading them to the network and he experienced the strangely unpleasant sensation of having the same thought twice instantly, from wildly different perspectives, many millions years apart. His future self cleared the feedback by touching his shoulder and simply answering his question. “You'll spend a total of eight hundred and five thousand, two hundred and forty five years in combat,” said his future self, no longer grinning. “I didn't log the hours I spent preparing, in transit or taking sabbaticals. All that would make it five times as long.” Terrorthaw looked out again at his army. His future selves were still waving every time they were just about to leave. Those waves were more mocking than friendly. No doubt the world outside rang loud with annoying future-laughter. He sighed with the humility he could only show to to his future selves, the kind he always regretted showing whenever he was out of their presence. He walked down the empty stairs of the pyramid to meet his troops for the first time. Whenever he saw the past version of himself emerge from the pyramid into the deafening cheers of the assembled troops, he felt so sorry for the weight that had just been dumped on the poor self's shoulders. This emotion would always be swiftly replaced by the anticipation of becoming the future version who would be responsible for dropping that weight upon him. Terrorthaw was a conflicted sort of character.

“We've broken their barricade, Your Highness. We're processing the first round of prisoners for asset-stripping now.” came Lord Pitfight's thought-shape over the psycholink. Nothing else needed to be said or thought. It was over. The battle that his armies had won out there on the molten hellscape they'd made of the planet outside his black fortress had been fought against the Future Folk at the very peak of their power and ability to deliver it. Every skirmish and incursion after this (relative to the Future Folk's timeline) would lessen in force and intensity and will until at last they petered out and stopped altogether. He'd already fought and won all of those battles-to-be that came after this almighty victory, and he'd ranked them according to their difficulty and listed them in his working copy of the giant ledger he'd receiver from his final self. Terrorthaw creaked up from the reproduction of the throne in his pyramid back at home, edged over to the ornate coffee-table that supported the open ledger, carefully etched in the final line with the laser in his index finger, then collapsed back into the throne. He was, to his shame, exhausted. He hadn't been able to even actively participate in this final, apocalyptic battle, but he felt as though every las-blast, graviton cannon, cataclysm ray and chunk of the Earth's crust of the war had hit him right in the face. The Future Folk's attack this time had been as sneaky as it had been overwhelming. They'd come as far back in time as they dared to tread and their target had been the gods themselves. Since a spy had uncovered the source of Terrorthaw's power, they had elected to attack that rather than his Kingdom directly. In this case, they had aimed to wipe out all gods on the face of the planet before Terrorthaw had a chance to capture any of them. As in any attack they made before his god-cages had been established, he was unable to rely on any of his magical tricks to fight against them. He had to fall back on technological might plundered from earlier encounters with the Future Folk themselves, which put them at a distinct advantage. And so he'd been forced to watch. He watched through the all-encompassing system of sensors he'd spent years preparing across the planet and its upper atmosphere. It was the most terrifying experience in his long, troubled life. He could shout commands and orders at any number of field commanders and generals in the field, but they were so thoroughly well prepared and battle-hardened by this point that it did little good. He could personally fly his fortress up into the stratosphere and aim potshots at a few targets, but this only left him vulnerable to attack, unable to keep an eye on things and generally in the way. A man with Terrorthaw's history and habits could not help but get stressed out a little when the future was all but entirely in the hands of his minions. But force and foresight and effective resource management was on his side. Every part of the battle had been predicted and countered for before a single shot had been fired. His armies beat the Future Folk in space, in the upper atmosphere, in the air, on the ground, beneath the ground, near the core itself and on the Astral Plane. Terrorthaw suffered three stress-related heart attacks during it all, but in a few short decades it was all over. The majority of the gods had been preserved, usually by being captured by Terrorthaw's forces before the Future Folk could put them down, the enemy had been routed and the firepower expended had reduced the Earth to such a hazardous pile of burning rubble that he risked losing more troops by hanging around than had been killed in the conflict - whole chunks of the crust had been blasted off into space and it was raining molten metal across most of the surface. He sat back almost horizontally in his throne and massaged his tired eyeballs. These ones were opaque iridium balls. They were uncomfortable and hard and he wanted to change them as soon as he got back to the troop assembly outside the pyramid. He had no idea why he had installed such uncomfortable eyes or when. He reached for the memory but one of his machine brains reminded him, for the six zillionth time, that he did not have access to the pyramid's network because it hadn't been built yet. He would need a very long and very relaxing stint on Enceladus after this. He kept a small, exclusive Paradise Habitat there, full to the brim with his favourite body-workers, spa technicians, dream girls and virtual playworlds. He'd have to schedule it right so he didn't run into any past versions of himself while he was there. He tried to remember when a stretch of two years or more was open to him, he searched for the memory and argh! One of his machine brains told him again that he didn't have access to the pyramid network and -
“Lord Pitfight, you're in control,” his thought-shape hissed.
“I'm in – I'm in what, Your Highness?” came Pitfight's puzzled reply.
“Control. Command. You are in charge of all operations. I've done all that I can do here. I'm leaving to set up the celebrations for your return.”
“But, Your Highness.”
“What is it?”
“You've never – this is -”
“Just pretend that I'm here. If you have any questions, just ask them to the pretend me that lives in your head. He'll know what to do.”
“The remnants are regrouping in orbit, they are consolidating some of the larger flecks of rock into a new base, they -”
“What does the little version of me in your head say, Pitfight?”
“It says to cut off their very clear supply lines and leave them to rot, Your Highness.”
“A fine plan.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Goodbye, Pitfight. Well done and so forth.”

He rushed back to spend his first day ruling his Kingdom. He'd never been so sure of having earned the right to do something in his life. He went right back to the start – a few years after the gods had been captured. He'd left the pyramid empty to go on his first tour of the Kingdom across the years and there was enough stored magic in the pyramid network to do his favourite low-level tricks. He spent a good few months getting the place fixed up just the way he remembered it, using his visiting past self as extra manpower, and learned how to use the cloning facility in the basement to birth his first generation of children. In the evenings, he went dragon-hunting with his ray-gun. Finer sport was never had, it kept their numbers down and bolstered his host of enthralled demons. His first major challenge as King was to put down Lord Pitfight's bloody rebellion that was launched following the commander's return to the pyramid and discovery that there was no party for him like Terrorthaw had promised. Destroying the remnant of his army, victors of a million wars across time, was difficult but satisfying. He kicked it old school – a robot decoy, a maze of death-traps, a storm of nightmare-spells to scatter their forces, riding in from the tall cliffs with a whole pack of mind-controlled dragons, mortal combat with Lord Pitfight on narrow walkway over a bottomless bit that crackled with green lightning – it was like being reborn.

He ruled his Kingdom for millions of years. Its splendour was beyond the stuff of legend, beyond the most excessive CGI effects and matte backgrounds. He stayed more or less in control of the continent-wide domain for the entire duration, with brief periods of rebellion where he went on the run and returned in overwhelming force. There were many other minor challenges to his well being and governance, mostly to do with his law of not straying beyond the continent's shore to the North, but he was on such a high level by that point that none of it came to anything more than a fun distraction. His every day was spent immersed in the comings and goings of billions of people – clones and monsters and robots and godlings, demons and dragon-men, reformed Future Folk and refugees from the Astral Plane. His citizens intermingled and happily went about their business running his Kingdom's industries, fuelling its academic and scientific knowledge, crafting its great works and arts, refining and elaborating on its fair and elaborate legal system, and doing their part to make the world a little bit kinder, more bearable and merciful each day. Terrorthaw mellowed with the demands of statehood. With his war days behind him and no rival King to frustrate him, he allowed his nurturing and friendly side to flourish with the generosity that his power allowed. He became disenfranchised with gauche shortcuts like mind control, genetic subservience and time travel stunts and preferred to take the long and difficult path of generating loyalty by fulfilling the needs and happiness of his people while working as best as he could to improve them. What his past self had heard in his laugh was not an intolerably raised level of obnoxiousness, but an overcompensation for a dark side that had long since faded. In fact, it might bum you guys out to tell you this, but Terrorthaw's Europe was even better than the King's Europe, if only because there was no Terrorthaw around to mess things up every once in a while.

It seemed like it was all too soon that the century came around where he'd have to begin to prepare for the journey into the New Age. His ultimate army to fend off the Future Folk had to be prepared, his industries had to be wound down and his people would have to be stored, one by one, in the winding subterranean city of sleep beneath the Kingdom. Once he'd given his past self the ledger full of battle dates and watched in quiet pity as he'd gone down to meet all those mocking waves, he made his plans to do one last spree of time travelling. The fast kind of time travel, not the kind where he slept under two miles of ice for several geological ages.

Mechanicus' ship was on its last legs by now. He'd been very careful to ensure that it was the only thing in his Kingdom capable of time travel and had destroyed every time-capable craft of the Future Folk that he'd captured, and its repair systems were wearing thin, taking longer and longer to recover after each healing hibernation. It might not survive the next reboot. So he got the most out of it before it was time to say goodbye to the old girl. He went on leisure cruises, mostly – his reward for a life, billions of lives when you looked at it, well done. He went on some dates, met some people he'd always wanted to meet, visited some sights, satisfied a few curiosities. He buried his ancient astronaut ray-gun in the place where he would find it earlier on, along with few more bits and pieces that might come in handy, he watched the first gods come to Earth on their clockwork comet, he visited the stars and the heart of the galaxy itself.

Then he made the journey that would bring the Future Folk down on him. He stood at the top of his pyramid and had Mechanicus' ship take him as far forward as it could possibly take him. He landed on a black and dusty plain, in near vacuum, under the dull light of a swollen and angry star a century away from boiling the planet into nothing. His body squirmed and shook and twisted to adapt to the terrible conditions. It took hours and the discomfort was quite severe, but his patience was rewarded when the globe spun round and he saw the night sky. He stood on a dead world, where anything resembling complexity had long since simply fallen apart. The only testament to the richness and glory that he had seen were the fossils of microbes beneath and a slight trace of heavy metals and fissioned material in the dust. But when he looked up, he saw where the life and the intelligence and the beauty had gone. It had impregnated the sky itself and now it teemed with every kind of life, dancing and bright. The stars moved, galaxies wheeled around under conscious control, there were explosions of nova fire to fuel a thousand billion glittering civilisations, every one of them at least as glorious as the one he'd shepherded. When he dropped his neck to look down at the dark and dead ground, he saw a dozen or more shapes shimmering slowly towards him, attracted by his life, by his mind. Dying gods, trapped on an irrelevant world. They stuttered out a litany of promises, of hopes and dreams, of threats and oaths, each one as pathetic an offering as a tadpole could give to an elephant. He ignored them and went back to admiring the lights.

He made one last stop. He visited the time of the Future Folk and stole one of their East Coast cloning facilities. He loaded an entire warehouse of equipment and samples into Mechanicus' ship in a single night. It felt to him more like a childish prank, something the old him would have done with a giggle and a taunt, than an act of war. As he was installing the loot in his home pyramid during the time period when he'd just captured the three gods, he received a message through his implanted link with the ship that the Future Folk would be coming to eradicate him and his illegal chronoship, and would erase all of his unauthorised meddling from the timestream. He could hardly work up the energy to laugh at that one and when he did it took him a while to remember why it was even funny, that the war with the Future Folk was long over and they were as beaten and irrelevant as the gods were.

Then, with all but one life ambition fulfilled, Terrorthaw went to his quarters in his home pyramid. His room was littered with trophies from his thousands of victories, some of which he hardly recognised. He had not spent a huge amount of time in his room, as a rule. He'd modified himself to be able to operate without sleep before he'd even made the first time-jump and he spent most of his leisure time tinkering about in his stolen genetics facility. His bed was unmade and shook out a thin cloud of dust when he pulled off the mattress to reveal the control panel for the laser cannon. The pyramid had dozens of laser cannons concealed within its nooks and hideyholes, all operated from the network like every other feature, but the laser cannon controlled by the panel under his bed was a very special one. That is, while it was standard in its specifications, it was permanently pointed at one particular position in the sky. He flipped up the guard and pressed the single, red, dramatic button on the control panel, then he dropped the mattress to the frame with another cloud of dust and went up the stairs to his throne room. By the time he'd reached his throne, Mechanicus' ship had been vaporised. As he took his seat on his throne, he took a few seconds to mourn the ship that had allowed him to come so far, so very very far. But they'd had their time together, there was nothing more it could do for him and there was no way anyone was going to find it and use it against him now.

There was one enemy left, one foe who had not been ground beneath the rock of ages and left as dust on a dead world. And he had to know – was the interstellar dance he'd seen out there the progeny of his Europe... or the enemy's Europe? He'd examine the evidence during his long period of rest and reflection before the ice came, but the one thought that Terrorthaw could not help but return to again and again as the cold slowly wound around his sleeping Kingdom was this:

He could hardly wait to see the King again.

End Of Chapter 96