Saga Of The European King

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

Father Dominoes' magic was fairly straightforward when you got down to it. Really, it was all about talking.

If you wanted to be a priest back in Medieval Europe, the first thing you did was pick a god or a team of gods (this decision would be narrowed down a lot by where you lived – gods are fiercely territorial – and what kind of thing your parents were into – eg. Farming, fishing, parties, war,) and then you spent years and years just reading. You had to learn all the languages your god would listen to, or at least an old-fashioned version of your own language. You also had to learn all the rituals, magic words and costumes that would get your god's attention - though, to be honest, most gods are interested in anything that is shiny, expensive or which moves quickly – and then you have to practice at talking to your god. This part is the hardest, because gods are difficult and never really in the mood and tend to kill people to prove a point. Eventually, you got a relationship going, though it usually took at least a year for the god to remember your name. If you battled through and you and your god got to be on good terms and you could rely on him or her or them, you could get them to lay down the magic on a nicely regular basis, or have them advise you on the best way to use any spellbooks or ancient weapons they've left lying around.

With wizards, however, things were different. Wizards didn't bother with gods. They sucked the magic they used directly from the same source as the gods did – the land itself. Every land had a different flavour. Europe was the tastiest and most fulfilling kind of magic, of course. Romanian magic tastes of ash and blood, the Kingdom Of Sharing's magic tastes of thin gruel and steel, United Statesian magic tastes like smoke and feathers and chilli peppers, and so on. Gods are better at this trick, naturally, because they are creatures of magic the same way we are creatures of flesh, but a wizard beats a god nine times out of ten when it comes to reliability, empathy, timekeeping, natty conversation and good company. Most of them can cook, too. All of their reading and academic training was really only there to slow down their progression in magic to make it equal to their levels of politeness and use around the the house.

The trouble that Colonel Glowfist was having with David was that David had learned a huge amount of applied magic while on their travels but had only had a few rudimentary classes in magic theory, which had been conducted from Colonel Glowfist's memory in less-than-ideal environments. Colonel Glowfist only kept a few grimores of wisdom in his inventory and they were very advanced stuff. All the best books and scrolls and talking skulls for David's level were kept in the Bibliotheque Royale back in Brussels, of which Colonel Glowfist was the non-executive custodian when he wasn't off having adventures.

And so, immediately upon their return to Europe (at least, when all the business with the whole attempted invasion was done with), Colonel Glowfist had cleared out his grand old room in the clock tower of the library, summoned up a demon cot for David to sleep on, and immediately tried to cram five years of magical study into six weeks. David was to learn, Aramaic, Greek, German and Sanskrit – the magical languages, as well as the proper arrangement of cutlery for a fish meal, the meanings of animals, the what-to-do-list for when one is challenged to a duel by a Bedouin, good story structure, seven kinds of highly archaic verse, the King's father's extensive deconstruction of the Viking sagas and eight different ways to prepare a scrumptious meal using mostly termites and twigs.

Glowfist got into his new role as a holistic and well-rounded educator by hitting the finest boutiques in Brussels. No longer would he be a half-wild, bedraggled, one-footed hermit with cracked skin and scaly brown talons. He had his enormous body washed, scrubbed, manicured, combed, styled, drained, dusted, tucked and scented. He made a great show of riding a pair of Awesome Horses right through the town centre and the party that was happening there, straight up to the office of Tailorsaurus, the stitch-wizard who had studied under Mechanicus and who famously made the King's natty threads. He demanded that he stop partying and attend to his custom, and threw a hefty sack of gold down to make him obey. Only Tailorsaurus had the skill and the equipment to make a set of clothes that were both stylish as all get-out, and expansive enough to contain the swollen archmage.

The Colonel hired a research assistant to find and gather the most relevant and soberly-written volumes that would further David's learning. Anticipating a return to life on the road, he auctioned off a load of magical staffs and murky potions he'd accumulated on his travels and registered for patents on the higher levels of the Explodo spell, Extended Haste and Summon Awesome Horse that he'd discovered. The demand for them was instantaneous and enthusiastic. Wizards across Europe had been mucking about with basically ineffective Explodos and Awesome Horses that really weren't very Awesome and disappeared after only a few hours. He invested this windfall into additional inventory space and powerfully enchanted strips of leather that, when worn, would increase his base carry weight, which he had woven into his spiffy new clothes. Finally, he bought an upgrade for his staff that would enable it to be converted, at a word, to be converted into a small but quiet classroom, which he promptly filled with a desk and shelves and lots of writing paper and some books from his own collection, so that David would have a good working environment even if the Adventure Team happened to be stuck in Hell or Sicily or Ethiopia, of all places. He could not wait until Roxy Tripfoot got to see how diligent and resourceful he was. It was undoubtedly a much better tactic that appearing pitiful and helpless – and more demonstrably expensive, too. He hoped she'd appreciate that part most of all.

David, however, was not taking to these new habits as enthusiastically as Colonel Glowfist was. It is very difficult to learn Aramaic in a week while the biggest party Europe has ever seen is happening right outside the window, with the screams of cats piercing every hour of the day and night. Princess Princess was another heap of distractions too. She had taken to hanging around David whenever she got suspended or expelled from high school, which was once every three days or so. She would wander into the library, spend a few minutes dancing around the aisles or building a bed out of books that would support her while she lounged, then would roll around on the floor at David's feet or stand on the table upon which he was working and start her routine of berating him while also updating him on her thoughts and movements. It would go like this:

“You're such a little snot. You're a swot and you spend all day in here reading this gobblydegook. It's such rubbish.”
“Could you get off the table please, Princess?”
“No. There's a party going on outside and it's so much better than in here. There are so many people, there's music and delicious foods, there's nothing of the sort in here. It's cold.”
“Then why are you in here?”
“To annoy you, stupid. And to play with little Scruff, who must be so bored in this cold, old, stupid place. Where is Scruff anyway? Scruff!”
“He's out,” said David simply.
“I've had the most awful day – they told me to leave that beastly school again, the nuns there all hate me in any case and I hate them, so good riddance. School's boring. I'm so much older than all the other children and all we do talk about sewing and choosing which baby is the best one to kill. It's always the girl, of course. It's so dull.””
“I'm trying to work -”
“Oh, you're always doing that. You're just like the stupid girls at school. They don't know any good games, just boring ones, and when I try to teach them one of mine, they go and tell me that I have to leave.” At this point in the conversation, she'd pick a small, gold object out of one of her petticoats, peel the gold off to reveal a dark brown dome or mesa or pyramid and pop the strange shape into her mouth with a grin. When the wrapped came off, David would catch a whiff of the thing and his head would shoot up as if it were on a string.
“What's that you're eating,” he'd politely say up at her.
“You can't have any, I've got none left,” she'd say.
“Yes you do, I saw them in your pocket when you put your hand in.”
“I think -I'd- know if -I- had any left,” she'd say, grinning with a mouth full of brown-coated teeth. “Anyway, this is special, United Statesian magic food and it's just for me.”
“Fine then,” David would say at that point, leaning back in his chair. He'd reach into his own pocket, pull out his own piece of United Statesian magic, light it with a LVL.1 Flame spell and take a long puff. Princess would watch him for a while, then -
“Give me one, David!”
“No,” said David, inhaling deeply. He was good at it.
“I'm older than you now give it!” came the cry, and then a small struggle would break out. Princess would leap down off the table or from the book-bed she'd made and would make a grab for David's mouth. But David had spent most of his life getting away from enemies and he had once messed up Terrorthaw with his father's sword while hopped up on jump juice. He could duck and weave better than most people you've met. Princess had grappled plenty of times with her eunuchs, sure, but they were fat and kinda old and they tended to just lie there and take it. After about ten seconds of wasted effort, she would sense that she would most certainly lose The Struggle For The Cigarette and would resort to Mutually Assured Destruction.
“Colonel Glowfist! Colonel Glowfist!” she'd scream, and you have to remember that she was the King's daughter. “David's using magic indoors! He's a little twerp and he won't give it and come quick!”

Colonel Glowfist would appear then, leaning heavily on his staff, at the entrance to the library. He'd have been out shopping for some additional foppery and the Haste spell would be steaming off of his clothes.
“Here comes Mr. Fatty,” Princess would say. Once, when Colonel Glowfist had returned from selecting a dignified powdered hairpiece, she remarked, “How rare! A pig in a wig!” Needless to say, there would at this point be a short chase wherein Colonel Glowfist would run Princess out of the library at a low speed. He'd spend the evening trying to cajole the headmaster of some school or another into admitting Princess into their hallowed halls. On more than one occasion, he had to remind a headmaster that he was, don't forget, - Colonel Glowfist, - the only man in Europe who could throw a LVL. 8 Explodo Spell while both looking cool -and- not Explodoing himself.

And so the days went by and the summer wore on. The routines became a performance and everyone filled their roles wonderfully. One day, however, the whole thing was different. Princess was up on the table, eating her chocolates and pretending that she'd just eaten the last one in the world, David was lighting up his cigarette in retaliation and the minor scuffle was just about to break out when the King, their father, burst through the truly immense doors of the library and used his lowest, most genial scream to summon Colonel Glowfist. Then he saw his lovely children – sweet, gentle David and once-beautiful, fleshy Princess.
“My children!” he cried as he fell to his knees and flung out his arms for a giant hug. David and Princess peered at the kneeling King through their smoke and their mastications for an instant before consulting each other's faces and running into his hug. The King growled joyously as he embraced them. “For the sake of my children, for all the children – I must hold back the tide of darkness that threatens to drown us all.”
“Hi dad,” said David.
“Where have you been, Daddy?” said Princess. They hadn't seen him at all since the party had started.
“I've been thinking most hardly, my pudgy Princess,” said the King. He broke the hug and inspected them both. “You were fighting, just then, the two of you? Brother against sister. Kin on kin.” David looked guilty and Princess heaved herself into defence mode.
“I wasn't fighting, David was trying to get my chocolates, he wanted them all to himself – he's selfish and he's not in control of himself, he said he hated you, Daddy,” she began, but the King hushed her by laying a heavy palm upon her head.
“Princess, you would fight your own brother, but were it to come right down to it – would you fight me?” Princess roughly grabbed his wooden hand and removed it from her head.
“Of course not, Daddy. You're the King.”
“And you, little David. Your sister would turn on you and generally be mean, but do you hunger, in the most secret of your hearts, to overthrow me, your father, and claim my divine throne for your own, twisted, parliamentarian ways?”
“No,” said David. “I never want to hurt you, dad.”
“Hmm,” said the King. He said it a few more times as he passes the matter around his brain. As he did that, Colonel Glowfist arrived. He'd been out buying the finest pair of decorative eyeglasses the Kingdom had to offer. He was expecting to find David and Princess bickering over cigarettes and was preparing to slowly chase Princess around the library before he ran out of breath and she escaped, possibly taunting him as she went. Instead he found the King humming under his breath, clutching a visibly frightened David and an irritated Princess. This looked like a very distracting situation indeed for the poor boy.

“My King, it is very pleasing to me to see you up and about,” said Colonel Glowfist. “How goes your recovery?” The King whirled, released his children and stalked towards the archmage, smiling.
“Colonel Glowfist! My, you are a sight and a smell and a wonder to behold! I see you've put your share of the plunder to good use and maxed out your fanciness!” Colonel Glowfist blushed, but you couldn't tell under all the powder he had clinging to his cheeks. “Colonel, we must discuss things, you and I. My children are relieved.” He whirled back to them. “Go! Play, play with all your might!” Princess' eyes lit up while David's did a groan. She grabbed her brother by the arm and dragged him into the sunlight outside. The King put an arm around as much of Colonel Glowfist as he could and whispered as loudly as possible. “The war approaches, treasured Glowfist. I fear it is beyond even my power to halt it on my own. Half of our land is all pissed off with the other half. Brother has turned on sister, as you have seen, but the same is writ large in the Politics Forum. Once this party clears and the goodwill it brings shrinks into the working day, no doubt we'll find that the same is true across all of Europe. This is no simple matter or Politics that can be solved with talk. This is magic and nobody does magic better than Colonel Glowfist.”
“I've been studying the problem since our return here,” lied Colonel Glowfist. To be fair, he had meant to get to work on figuring out how the effect of the King's law-breaking could be negated, but he had diverted so many of his energies into shopping, grooming and David that he just hadn't found the time. “My theory is that when you hit on petite Astrid - while under the influence of those many poisoned Viking hearts, of course - you blew the metaphysical mind of Europe so hard that you caused a stack overflow and crashed Europe's main magic server,” this was a guess, but it was an educated guess. Europe's servers had crashed before – it was well documented in the magical histories – and such an event was always followed by a sudden stemming in the flow of European magic from the land into the various outlets that existed across the land – gods, central heating, wizards, the King himself, cool weapons, borders, laws, that sort of thing. While the effects were geologically sudden, it would take the last pump of magic a few years to gurgle its way through every outlet in the system and so they would gradually falter and fade over a few years before stopping altogether. “It could be that your difficulties of late are not entirely to blame on Oranje's theft of your Super-Chastity flower. Your magical birthright that names you King might simply be running low on vital fluids, just as blessed Europe is running low on the magic that makes it the singular, harmonious nation that birthed us.” That sounded pretty good to Colonel Glowfist when he played it back in his head. He'd check it out later, of course, but for now it all seemed to follow logically. The King got as close to Colonel Glowfist as a man could without disappointing the ghost of his parents. He grabbed the back of his wig, pulled him in and whispered this:
“What must we do, Colonel? How can we save Europe?” Colonel Glowfist's wigged head swam with colours. Every colour was there and each one represented a thought and each thought represented a possibility. Only one combination would lead to salvation. Colonel Glowfist carefully chose the one he felt was the best match.
“We have to reset the server,” he said. “Manually. We'll have to travel there, unplug it, then plug it back in, then check the lights.”
“Magical jargon,” smiled the King. “But where there's a will, there's a way – and my will counts for one hundred.” The King then peered into the archmage's eyes to check if he thought he was joking or not. “Prepare yourself to leave within a few days, Colonel. We might not have much time.” He squeezed his grip momentarily on the Colonel's wig, signalling an agreement between them, then he released, disengaged and turned to leave. Before he reached the library doors he paused and shouted to the room at large. “Where do we go to find this server of Europe, honoured Colonel?” At this, Colonel Glowfist released the air he'd been holding inside of his body. He hadn't realised he'd been holding his breath for some time.
“Ireland, Your Highness,” he gasped. The King nodded his head. Ireland. Of course. How fine. Then he continued leaving until he was gone.

Later that day, when Axe Axewound was awakened for supper and sheet-changing, Father Dominoes was astonished to find that his patient was not only quite chatty – not a common state for the Celtlander even before his Presidential molestation – but was suddenly very interested in the day's hag-races. He was adamant that someone should tell him which hags had run that day and he would not move out of bed or swallow a spoonful of nourishing broth until someone told him. Father Dominoes didn't know and neither did any of the attendants on duty, so one was sent out to ask one of the garden slaves. They -always- knew what was going on with the hags. It wasn't long before an old garden slave with stumps for fingers and gravel for teeth was found and gently interrogated until a list was introduced, which was then read to Axe:
Mrs. Timmermans
Old Mrs. Jansen
Ms. Van Stappen
The Hairy Cackler
Karlijn Wimple
Heartless Attack
Mrs. F. Redback

“That's her,” said Axe Axewound before Father Dominoes could read any more hag-names from the list. “That's the hag that won.” Then he tried to get up and spilled his bedpan. There was a flurry of assistants and somewhere in the middle of it, Axe was quickly fed, medicated and sort of cleaned. By the time things had quietened down and Father Dominoes could even get close to him, Axe had fallen asleep. Father Dominoes re-summoned the garden slave and learned that Axe's pick had indeed won the race that day. The garden slave was sent back with a Tupperware full of broth and a spare blessing that Father Dominoes had found on the dresser.

It was such a little thing in the scheme of things but there was no choice but to wonder about it. One of the assistants could have told Axe at some point, o course. Or they might have discussed the races among themselves while Axe slept. The assistants had been slipping out to the party and the hag races were big news in any weather, but Father Dominoes wasn't sure that any of his staff were big fans. It was possible that Yahweh could have told Axe something, since he was hanging around the mission in his Spirit Form listening in on all the prayers that were flying around, and Yahweh was prone to prophecies, although they weren't usually very accurate. You never pointed this out to him though, or else he'd get angry and stop talking to you and probably smite you with leprosy. Yahweh was basically obsessed with leprosy.

So I guess we've got a mystery on our hands, guys! Let's put it on the pile and sally on.

End of Chapter 95

The party to mark the King's return to the amazing shores of Europe had been rocking on for a month and ten days. Every living serf and scraper in that wonderful time-lost Kingdom of old was partying harder than most people of today are capable of imagining.

All citizens, young and old had been required under European Law to kill at least one cat in celebration of a grand event like a return of a King, but once again the the brave people of Europe had shattered all expectations and really gone the extra mile: From Angleland in the West to Constantinople in the East, from the Southern spires of Atlantis to the Northern crinkles of Viking Europe, the delicious smell of roast cat clung sweetly to the air. Every valley in the Swiss Alps was a moist and furry carpet, while all the peaks and clifftops were alive with jubilant Europeans cherishing the thought of their King at last back amongst them. Dead cats clogged every alleyway, were crammed in every barbecue grill, were wrapped around every mill-stone and were jammed upon every jagged fence-post in the land. So many had been used to fuel the party that the King even thought he'd have to have a word with his old Adventure Friend, Baroness Catsex, who'd ascended to Heaven to become the European goddess of cats and dressing up like cats, to check if the supply would hold. But honestly, the King had more important things on his mind. Yes, some things were even more serious that parties. What could those things be? Well, I'll tell you. They are, in no particular order:

The King's Father
Terrorthaw acting out
The Irish
More parties
The dissolution of Europe into a bloody, protracted Civil War

The King's mind was on the last one, of course. He could feel the fractures in the cat-soaked air around him with the fingertips of his mind. His Kingdom was a fairy-cake caught in the delicious moment before crumbling in the maw of chaos. No matter how much joy he saw on the faces of his beautiful subjects as they drank and cavorted and cheered and made stupendous bets on the hag races and put cat after cat after cat to the sword, or knife or hammer or whatever, he knew that their joy would soon be a lie. He had personally broken one of the most important laws of Europe, perhaps -the- most important law. It was bad enough when a normal dude pulls something like that, but for the King to try it – jeez man, that's something else. The King wanted so hard to put everything right – to grab those fractures by the neck and smash them to bits until they mended and everything was cool again – but he was still so weak from losing his Super-Chastity. Instead of smashing, his days were spent resting in bed with a hot water bottle and the Royal Cuddler, where he'd occasionally rise to walk over to the window to wave and crack a laugh for the partying crowds outside.

Frustrated and tearlogged, he focused his chi and his XP for a whole week, eating nothing and talking to no one. The witches and healers and sexy nurses and the Royal Cuddler - who'd been assigned to his bedside by Father Dominoes - were all worried and kept crowding around him as he sat there, glowing gently on the bed, his teeth gritted so hard you could hear them. They tried to wake him up by offering him ice-cream, flowers, figurines of his favourite cockfighting champions and all the rest of his favourite things, but the King would just grit his teeth even harder and they'd all have to run out of the the room with their ears ringing. Father Dominoes had to assure them at the end of every day of that week that the King was fine, he was just gathering strength for something important and Kingly. Most of the witches and healers and what-have-yous got the message and began working half-shifts so they could join in the partying.

Sure enough, at the end of that week of glowing and chi-gathering, the King's eyes sprang open like backwards bear traps and he screamed. He screamed as put on his purplest robe, screamed he ran to the Politics Forum and screamed until Commander Flightfeather appeared.
“Your Highness! How warm to see you're well and firm, but what -” but his words were no use. The King screamed and screamed until Timothy Clashradish and Jacob Hillmounter appeared in the Forum, until Gadfly and Formation, the heads of the Church and the Merchant Guilds and the Commander of Cashflow and the Chief Librarian and all the little Dukes and Barons and Sirs who thought they were so great were correct and present and seated there in the Politics Forum. Once they were there, the King stopped screaming and just breathed for a little while. Everyone took the opportunity to finish the drinks and nibbles they had brought with them from the party. Then the King spoke and it was real.

“Gentlemen and honourary gentlemen,” he roared, “As the newscriers and gossiptrees have told you, as the revellers sing it outside, as it has been written in psychic flowers across the ceiling of the Astral Plane, I have returned to you, cherished Europe, though my quest is not yet complete. My crazy ex, Oranje, who you all know well – remember all the messages she put up on the notice board – she opposed me at every turn. My Adventure Friends and I went to the Moon and there she was. We fell to the darks of Romania, home to the savage gypsies and their foul defilers, the Draculas, and there she was also I chased her from that shrouded realm across the sea all the way to the New World you may have heard about, the world of the New Viking Europe, where she fought me to a standstill. Yes, me. Eventually I ran up through the totally strange domain of the President Of The United States, where most things are different and they use words for things that we wouldn't use. She was the one who launched the recent attack on Normandy and she was the one who brought me back home prematurely. Had it not been for the brave and talented actions of my son, Prince David, who you all know well, the consequences of her feminine hysteria could have been grave indeed. Now she is defeated at last and my quest to murder Winter from ear to ear and free us from his chilly tyranny must continue. But for now, I am back in Europe, my home – the sweetest most awesomest land in all the lands of this world. And yet I sense that not all has been well in my long absence. You've got feelings, my countrymen, and some of them are hurt. Let them all out here, in front of your King. Let them spill out on the ground and I shall sort through them like a sea otter diving for clampets. Spill those feelings now before they fester and rot and wreck us from the inside. Speak!”

It took a little while before anyone could speak because they were so glad to be in the presence of the King and his voice. They were thrilled to be given this opportunity to clear the air, so thrilled that they didn't know what to say. The first to recover from the pleasant shock were the bird leaders, Gadfly, the penguin and Formation, the puffin. Gadfly fluttered and puffed and then squittered this to the King:
“Morning morning sun sun, hello girls, this is my location. Keep a comfortable distance, rivals-that-are-near: Morning morning, big nest very big all rivals all girls morningnoonevesleep – big nest very big ?not? Uncertain, uncerta - Aggression! Keep away, I am not showing pain! Morning.”
The King cleared his mighty throat. He had understood, of course, as there was no language of man nor beast he could not divine, but he sensed that the rump of the audience was lost.
“Commander Flightfeather, old friend – could you repeat honoured Gadfly's song in plain European for the benefit of those assembled?” said the King. Commander Flightfeather chirped nervously then stood and said,
“He feels – all of the birds nesting here in Europe feel – that they were promised the land of Luxembourg for a permanent nesting site, free from rats and the other enemies of birds. He is angry and hurt that this has not happened yet, but doesn't want you to know how sad it makes him feel.”
“What's this?” said the Duke of Luxembourg at the back.
“Don't fret about it. We told the little bird that they couldn't do that,” rolled Jacob.
“We told them ages ago,” added Timothy.
“There where did they get this blasted idea -” started the Duke.
“They don't understand the meaning of 'no,'” said Jacob.
“Because birds are stupid,” offered Timothy. At this, the King clenched his fists, sucked in a melonful of air and bellowed:
“Be nice to birds from now on!”

Nobody said anything for one whole minute. Jacob and Timothy looked in shame at each other's shoes. Their minds were full of images of birds, beautiful birds, drifting through the sky, so lucky, so musical. The King breathed heavily. He wouldn't be able to shout like that again for the rest of the day. He felt dizzy but he hung on. A small voice eventually arose from the heart of the crowd.
“Ahum, Your Highness, no doubt you are aware by now, but Europe's economy has floundered while you've been away.” The voice belonged to Henri Moneyfight, Warchief of the Moneyfight Pizanos. He was a slight, nervous man who'd inherited the centuries-old post of Commander of Cashflow for all of Europe during the King's absence and has having trouble getting the hang of it. He looked like he'd been up all night.
“Commander Flightfeather did mention it to me,” said the King, “But I thought it didn't matter. What of the great boons I brought from those faraway shores? What of the haunted gold I personally plundered from a temple full of ghosts? I had to fight them by smell. And are we not ass-deep in United Statesian trade?” There was a murmur around the Forum. Many had heard about the riches that had flowed forth from the King's inventory and of course everyone had already gotten used to the idea of the United Statesian trade-canoes sailing in once every while. Henri Moneyfight dabbed his mouth with a hanky and spoke:
“Yes, Your Highness, but the gold you brought to the coffers was a drop in the ocean of our debts now that the Rock Kingdom has raised its price on precious jewels to fifty horses per ounce. Our horse reserves are almost exhausted and if we don't open up a new trade route with the Kingdom of Sharing or -” he swallowed, “- Islamaland, there soon will not be a horse to be found anywhere in Europe.” York Sykes, Europe's Executive Slavemaster, stood up and joined his words to Henri's.
“Not only that, Your Highness, but our workforce has been crippled since the trial period on those United Statesian slaves expired,” he said.
“Trial period?” asked the King, a bit too surprised for his own liking.
“There was a poison in them, magical, I expect.” York said. “Six months to the day after we put them to work, they fall asleep. Every last one of them, didn't matter where they were or what they were doing. We can't wake em by any earthly means, and believe me, we've tried. All we can get them to do is talk. They all say the same thing and they all say it in the same voice. They want gold, every one of them. That adds up to a lot of gold, Your Highness, you don't need be to point it out. They say we're to pay the gold to a representative of the Sidewinder Slavery Corporation next time the United Statesian boats are in, in which event the antidote will be given and they'll wake up and get back to work. It's caused a world of trouble, needless to say. We've got unfinished projects all over the Kingdom gathering dust as we speak – the new Cathedral, the statue, the conference centre – and we were supposed to sell most of the slaves off to the Kingdom of Sharing to pay for it all, but we can't do that now, obviously. We're in quite a state.” He sat down and Henri Moneyfight continued to jam.
“The trade with the United States is the only thing keeping us afloat from day to day, Your Highness. Your return was very fortuitously timed. But, as our good representatives of the banks and the trade unions will tell you, they're not talking to each other until they get quality sitting time in the conference centre that hasn't yet been built. Our industries and businesses can't expand until that happens, so we're left at the mercy of the United States' whims. If they decide to raise their prices or boycott even part of our agreement, we could all starve. We must reinvest what we have wisely or we'll have to convert back to a conquest economy and decide which nation we should sack first.”
“Only we can't,” barked Jacob, fully intending to spoil the party.
“Our once-mighty army is a depleted to the point of being a wholly regrettable shambles,” said Timothy.
“The attack at Normandy knocked us for six – we're still licking our wounds from that,” said Jacob.
“Commander Flightfeather's commanding wasn't quite up to scratch on that one, eh Your Highness?” Commander Flightfeather twitched in his chair.
“Not to mention,” went on Timothy, “That all of the mercenaries we hired from the Kingdom of Sharing have up and -” The King rose.
“Again with the Kingdom of Sharing!” growled the King. “I thought we didn't deal with those guys! Those guys are bad guys!” Commander Flightfeather flapped in a calming way.
“Your Highness, we've kept our doings with them as limited as possible, but Ethiopia won't return our calls, we've left so many messages and weren't here and we didn't deal with the Sharingists directly -”
“We've had reports of Irish attacks in Angleland,” said Timothy.
“And the Minister of the City Of Ric sends word of Islamaland encroachment into the formerly Dracula-held territories in Romania,” said Jacob. “Remember when we went for the big push against those Draculas, Your Highness?”
“We're all out of red!” cried Hieronymous Adelaide, head of the Bible-Maker's Guild. He had frankly had enough. He was pink and wet and quivering, like a finger that had just been pulled out of a dyke. The flood that followed only helped to strengthen the simile. Every voice rang out and every voice was tagged with a grievance. The voices filled every part of the Politics Forum and smashed against each other like angry sperm, they got inside people's heads and made them angry, they jostled and pleaded and bit and complained and confused and hurt. There were so many solutions being offered, but only one of them was right.

The King closed his eyes and tried to hear every voice at once, to hear that one solution that would win the day. He knew before he even tried that it wouldn't be there. He moved to touch his Ring of Diplomacy, to give it two twists and activate its power. But his Ring was gone – it was still on his finger, which he'd left inside the President Of The United States, along with his awesome Bear Claw. He'd replaced his hand with an old one – the extendo-hand that he'd used back in the Bird Wars. He'd used it to swing from certain platforms to get across wide gaps, and it could beat enemies from half a screen away. It wasn't nearly as powerful as his missing rocket-fist, but it would do in a pinch. It was the Ring that was the real loss. He might have been able to have calmed the crowd down before, even without his Ring, but now he just felt so tired. He wanted to leave them all to their squabbles and go back to bed. But he was still the King and this was still Europe. He gathered up the threads of his strength and wove them into a Quilt Of Resolve.

“Gentlemen!” he yelled. The Forum quietened once again. It had to. “Let's put it to a vote.” There was a hum of agreement. Voting always solved problems. The King would hold a vote and they would vote, 'Yes,' because they loved him. “Good, good. Now. Hands on your knees, get ready,” coaxed the King. “Now, who votes 'Yes,' on the motion to not argue and to all get along and don't worry? Who votes 'Yes' to that? Raise your hands - - Now!”
Exactly half of the people sitting there in the Politics Forum rose their hands. The silence was stunned, concussed, and came round to the sound of tears. Every Headof and Princelet and Lord cried all over their chests right there and then because this had never happened before. They usually all voted 'Yes.' It's not that they don't love the King, it's just -

The assembly broke up soon afterwards. No one spoke much – there suddenly wasn't a lot to say. A lot of the Barons and Ministers and Knights and what-have-yous went outside into the streets and tried to join the party but they couldn't get into it. A crowd of Danes accosted the King as he staggered through the Town Square, bleary-eyed and afraid. They handed him a cat and he smiled faintly, asked them their names and obliged them. He threw the cat high up into the air and launched a rocket-punch at the pinwheeling furball. The blazing fist completely missed the cat, which fell somewhere among the marching band. The Danes tried to hand the King another cat but it was all too much for him. He clasped his hand, when it had returned, to his mouth to stop himself from throwing up out of shame and ran through the partying crowd to nowhere in particular.

And then, on the far side of the Laeken Palace grounds, at the mouth of the heavy woods that served as the King's personal hunting/training spa - where Axe Axewound's animal friends now roamed and fed and bred and grew mighty - inside the warm little cottage whose lofty windows caught the forest-filtered light just so, slept an old priest and a broken werewolf. Father Dominoes was all tuckered out after a hard day of healing Axe Axewound. Axe was tired simply because his body didn't work properly.

Father Dominoes had spent much of the past month-and-a-bit in prayer and meditation, fasting as hard as he could, in order to discover which parts of the Bible would even work on a werewolf. His god, Yahweh – a tough old desert god, contemporary of Ba'al, who'd made a name for himself when he had teamed up with a newfangled sun god and a netball team of Mother Natures and changed the whole god game around – was not in a revelatory mood. Heaven was disturbed by the political situation in Europe, the King's Father was in a tizz, there were rumblings coming in from all the factions of the extant gods and no one had heard from the Devil in weeks. All Yahweh wanted to talk about was which verses of the Bible hurt werewolves, or hurt the Celtish, or which could hurt anyone. This was helpful in itself but Father Dominoes had to pray very carefully to tempt him out of his bad mood.

Despite this, progress had been good. Father Dominoes wasn't just any fat old man with a drinking problem. He'd helped Axe Axewound mend to the point where he could stay awake for an hour or longer and he was quite able to move his arms in any direction he wished without experiencing much pain. His grip was weak and it would be an age before he could walk, but it was a great improvement over the insensible lump he'd been a month previously. And so the priest dozed on his bed after a hard day's healing and a stout drink. His attendants had all retired to their own quarters within the Palace. The sounds of the forest hid the nervous bleats of the goats outside and no one saw the old man walk over to the bed and whisper in the warrior's ear.

End of Chapter 94

Guys!

Everything is still okay!

I think it is time to reveal to you the many plans that swirl beautifully around the bathtub of the inner mind, in space.

Here are the illustrations for Chapter One of Saga Of The European King:

But hold your horses and nail down your hats, fellows, because that's not all! Here is the first of many Kingcasts - mysterious objects that play a recording of a particular chapter in the Saga when moved to do so.

On these words lies the Kingcast for the very first chapter.

And here is a special, crazy preview of what lies ahead in the special, crazy future of Chapter 11.

And on that same vein, here are some freestylin' character studies of all of your favourite SOTEK (As we call it in the office) characters, except if your favourite character is a girl or Cajun. The man behind most of the voices is called Mano Camatsos. He used to be my neighbour.

Click to awaken:

Axe Axewound

General Majesty

Michael

Cutty

Colonel Glowfist

Erik Rage-Eater!

Dr. Tchaikovsky

Father Dominoes

David

- Guest starring my housemate (and friend, I guess), Kasia.

Commander Flightfeather

Ba'al

Terrorthaw

Mechanicus

Old Goat Man

Will Smith

and finally,

The Angel Cowboy

That should keep everyone busy for a little while. Is it the required etiquette to tell everyone that the voice workshops are NSFW? They contain swearing and some outrageous stereotypes. Also, canonicity is questionable!

More story soon. You deserve it!

Hey everyone in the world and you, I think this story is going great. So great that I'm going to stop it for a while to get some drawings and recordings done. That's right. The King and his story are going to be represented in other media than plain old boring text. This will make it easier to tell your friends about the King and to make them understand.

But don't worry, I won't be away for long. Every part of me burns to tell the rest of this story and to answer the questions that may be sprouting in your manymind -
Who is the traitor?
Is there really going to be a Civil War? How awful!
What's Terrorthaw up to in the Ancient Past? No good, I expect.
How's Axe Axewound doing, is he okay?
I miss Sally Minefield! (Not really a question)
Is the King going to get his Super-Chastity back?
When are they going to kill Winter, please?
What's up with Scruff? Is he magic?
When is Ba'al coming back?
What's the Cowboy Angel got planned for the Old Man?

There are probably other questions and I'm going to answer them too. I'll also be filling in the old chapters with the illustrations and recordings I'm making, but I'll tell you when those happen.

Things are about to get awesome and sad.

Astrid Gimmerleck sped away from the abbey and all away at full pelt down towards the beach. She was fit and lithe and good at running. You had to be, really, if you were a Vikinca archeologist. The slow ones get chomped by a ghost or strangled by a mummy in their first week on the job.

But, fast as she was, it seemed to her that it took an age before she arrived at the beach. She darted about the chattering, idle European and United Statesian troops until she found Colonel Glowfist inside one of the many, many hospital tents that had sprung up like mushrooms all around the base of the Tower of Super-Chastity. Europe was the most compassionate place in the world and compassion doesn't just mean looking after your own guys when they fall in battle, but the other fellow's guys as well. Those hospital tents were full to the brim with troops from both the European and United Statesian sides. They were being looked after by scores of European priests, physicians, bards and alchemists, in addition to the United Statesian Medical Corps of shamans and dancers. Those tents were so busy with all the healing going on! Everywhere you looked, potions were being cooked up, Bibles were being read, leeches and brandy were being applied or something smelly was being set on fire to the accompaniment of wailing. All the wounded people were getting better or else dying. Bernadetta Leathervest was in there too, healing up real nice, getting access to the priests of the highest levels, the fattest leeches and the most magical of potions. She was being treated so well, of course, because she was a friend of the King's. This might seem unfair, since most people in Europe considered themselves a friend of the King, but everyone understood how the system worked and they were okay with it.

Because of all the smoke and bustle and noise, you might have thought that the good Colonel would have been hard to find, but Astrid only had to poke her head into a dozen tents or so before she found him. The Colonel is the kind of guy who stands out in a crowd. He is, remember, impossibly fat and even though he'd got his grooming problems more or less under control by that point, the fatness still counted for a lot. Also, he and David were popping out spells like the most fluid of the squits: mostly low level haste spells and resistances to fatigue for the hospital staff, along with a lot of confusion, stun and sleep spells to anaesthetise the patients. This was cool and modern and no one had really thought of it before. When Colonel Glowfist saw Astrid hurry up to him, he smiled and made to welcome her, for he had not seen his fellow Adventure Friend for many hours and there had been a war on and all, and he'd been a bit worried about her. But then he saw how serious and pain-stricken her face was and he had to know what could make a face look like that.
“He's in trouble,” was all she said. Colonel Glowfist knew who she was talking about – the King, of course, and all of the Europeans in that hospital tent knew it too. The noise and the bustle dropped suddenly as they all stopped dancing or praying or getting better and looked at Astrid Gimmerleck, their faces turning just as serious and pain-stricken as hers had been. Quite a few of them died right then, even if they hadn't been very ill. Colonel Glowfist wasted no time and summoned two Awesome Horses, which wasn't such a wise move because then he had to lead the demon horses carefully out of the hospital tent and try not to trample anyone or anything. But that was okay because it gave Roxy Tripfoot and Cajun a chance to find him.
“One of my informants – whose name I shall not reveal – told me there was a King Related Incident (KRI) emerging in this operational sector,” said Cajun. Roxy tried not to roll her eyes at Cajun's lamezoidness because he was an Adventure Friends now and you don't roll your eyes at Adventure Friends. It was one of the worse things you could do.
“Yes, I saw Astrid run in here. What is wrong, Colonel?”
“He's in trouble,” said Colonel Glowfist and then he summoned up a few more Awesome Horses, which they carefully led out of the tent and then they were off!

David had not failed to notice that he had not been included. He stood outside the hospital tent and watched the Adventure Friends rumble off into the distance on their Awesome Horses. He didn't think this was fair. He had his coffee tin and his invisibility cloak and he was getting better at magic all the time. He'd killed at least two United Statesians on the beach during the invasion and he didn't even feel too bad about it (though maybe he would later, in dreams), so he didn't see why he shouldn't be allowed to help his dad out if he was, indeed, in trouble. He switched his cloak to 'on,' conjured up an Awesome Shetland (he couldn't do a whole horse yet) and rode on invisibly after them. Of course, the Awesome Shetland wasn't invisible, but David was doing his best. When he arrived at the abbey he saw some terrible things. Just inside the open front doors, Cutty lay on the ground, babbling not unquietly to himself. David snuck up to to the sword, turned his cloak off and tapped him on the handle.
“- oh no, don't listen to stupid old Cutty, he -never- knows what's going on -”
“Cutty, hey, hello in there?”
“Oh, Prince David, I didn't see you. Thank heavens you're here. Now you're here, you've got to get out of here, I'm not kidding around.” There was a terrifying racket upstairs and David could hear his mother's voice.
“Cutty,” he whispered, “Is my mom up there?”
“You've got to go, David, it's not safe. Your father, the King, His Highness, the Chief – he's done for. There's nothing you can do, now get out of here, please!” But David ignored Cutty, of course, and charged inside. He found Roxy Tripfoot, his beloved, spicy, bride-to-be, lying still and beaten upon the stairs leading up to the maire's bedroom. For a strong female character, she sure was getting knocked around a lot. He wanted to go to her and touch her hair and tell her that she was all right but there were other terrible things that demanded his attention. At the top of the stairs, almost blocking his way, was Colonel Glowfist, gasping on the floor in the midst of a heart attack. David watched helplessly for two long moments as his teacher shook and grabbed at the air, then there was a cacophony of light and screams from the maire's bedroom and within that terrible blaze of noise, David could hear the King moan and his mother shriek. He apologetically hopped over the Colonel's body and ran down the hallway into the bedroom and saw the most terrible thing there was to see. Oranje was electrocuting Cajun, but that wasn't nearly as terrible as the way in which she was doing so. She was shakily suspended in the air by a pyramid of lightening, the apex of which was located just above the womb from which he himself had been formed. His father was joined to his mother at the crotch, his body rose and fell with hers, his eyes were dead and staring as his head lolled back over his shoulders. Inarticulate moans and pants escaped from his lungs with every twitch and shake of Oranje's electric supports. He was entirely naked, as was she. David had never seen the King naked before. No one had. At first he wasn't sure that the poor creature dandling off his mother's waist even was the King, but there was no mistaking that sweet face, that noble beard, that invincible wooden hand. Oranje stopped electrocuting Cajun when she saw David enter the room, which probably saved the United Statesian's life. Her eyes widened to saucers, she squeezed her hips to narrow the lightning-pyramid to a pencil-thin beam, slowly dropped to the floor and then peeled the King off of her body. He folded over onto the ground as she walked slowly over to greet her son.
“David. So nice to see you baby. I'm all finished up here, let's go fetch your sister.” David could not say anything. His mouth was full of horror. His hands were wrapped white-tight around his coffee tin. In the corner of his eye he saw Cajun, burned and weak, crawl over to the King and check his pulse. Oranje smoothly took a few steps closer. There was a crash from behind her as Cajun hurled himself and the King out of the bedroom window. She turned to look behind her, “Oh dear. Doesn't matter. David, what's important is that you're here. What's important is that I love you.” David threw his coffee tin with fortunate accuracy at his mother's head. It struck her a glancing blow on the temple, which surprised her and knocked the lid of the tin off and produced an astonishing, deafening explosion of displaced air, orange light and over a thousand hungry and terrified woodland animals just next to her face. David caught a too-long glimpse of the nonsensical folding of space as the room filled up with every kind of fur, claw, muzzle, wing and tooth and his mother was torn to confetti in the churning inferno of gore that followed the explosion with such shocking speed that it was all over even before he had run away. Later, he could not even remember his flight from the bedroom, the short scream down the hallway and the tumble over Colonel Glowfist's blubbery obstruction. He woke up with his head buried in Roxy Tripfoot's side, at the bottom of the stairs, with Father Dominoes standing over him with all the sympathy in the world vibrating through his eyes.
“My poor boy,” he said, “My poor, poor boy.”
“Is my mom okay?” asked David, hopefully.
“You get some sleep,” said the priest. He hoisted his solid gold Bible up to reading height, deftly flicked to the correct metal page, marked his place with a nimble finger and read aloud the verse that makes young boys go to sleep.

David awoke once again, this time in a comfortable bunk bed inside one of the barracks that surrounded the Tower of Super-Chastity. He was in the bottom bunk. This made him feel a bit childish. The top bunk is where the action is. He stared at the wooden slats of the top bunk and wished himself up there. Wishing made his head hurt. He touched his forehead and discovered a bandage there. He groaned and the groan summoned a face from the edge of the top bunk. The face was that of a plump girl's, quite pink, framed by a glossy bookmark of shock-white hair that dangled almost half the way down to David's bunk.
“You're my little brother,” said the face. “Daddy says I'm allowed downstairs now and my job is that I'm supposed to say when it is you're awake. They say I'm not supposed to play any of my games with you but that's -nonsense.- Oh, Father Dominoes, my little brother's awake now. Are you a eunuch? You look like one. You killed mummy, you know.”
“Princess!” cried Father Dominoes as he waddled over to the bunk beds. His sleeves were rolled up and he was sweating. He'd been praying hard. “You are to leave your brother be. He's a very brave young man. He saved the life of your father and all of his Adventure Friends and the last thing he needs now is you giving him a … ah, hard time. Let him rest!”
“Fine!” pouted Princess Princess and, with a yank of her silver mane, her face disappeared and she went back to cuddling her eunuch. Father Dominoes had not approved of her dragging Eunuchophles from upstairs into the bed with her, but she'd been more than adamant and he'd had a lot on his plate and couldn't really spare the time to argue and the King had insisted very strongly that she'd be there in the makeshift Adventure Hospital with them and, well, she hadn't done anything too weird yet so maybe there wouldn't be a scene.
“David!” came the King's voice, strangely hoarse, from behind a crowd of priests and witches that were all jostling to get their healing spells in. “Clear away, the lot of you! I'm fine, can't you see I'm fine? Let me see my boy!” The crowd reluctantly parted and turned some of its attentions to Colonel Glowfist, who occupied two beds scooted up next to each other just beside the King's. The King climbed out of bed and staggered over to David's bunk. He looked old and frightening. He knelt down and poked his head just a little too close to David's. “You did it, boy. You defeated the worse villain in European history. Even I was not strong enough to best her. She stole my Super-Chastity, you see. She took it and with it, she made herself even more powerful. It's a thing that Lady Draculas do. I should have seen it coming! But I'm glad that it was you that did her in, son. It wouldn't have been right if it had been anyone else. Do you understand?”
“Yes dad.”
“Good,” said the King. Then he brought his wooden hand up, gripped David's hair a bit too hard and shook the boy's head softly around. “Good,” he repeated. “Your sister is back with us now. She's safe from You-Know-Who and she's been through some tough times, but we'll look after her with all our might, you and I. Do you understand?”
“Yes dad,” said David, grimacing at the hair-pulling. The King took no notice.
“I can't actually look at her just yet – all things in time, all things in their time – so you're going to be the one to look after her, to show her the wonder and splendour of Europe and to protect her from -” he closed his eyes and shuddered, “-predations.” He opened his eyes. They had the old stuff in them. “The two of you are the good part of your mother. I watched it happen, when all the good came out of her. I didn't see it with Princess, but when you came out of that, of that – void, David, I could not bear the sight of it, it did not make sense. It was like watching a fish be gutted, only the offal that spilled was light, pure light, my sweet David – there you were. All the light that was inside of her was you all along. How could there be anything left inside of that … vessel that lay bleeding and spent, useless, there on the sheets? I should have killed her right then, you understand. But of course it was not my right. You. You made it right.” The King let go of David's hair. David squeaked. He wished that he was not crying. He wished that he could allow himself to exhale, or make a sound that was not a squeak. He wished that he could wish without making his head hurt. Father Dominoes appeared and placed a caring hand on the King's shoulder.
“Come now, Your Highness, I think it's time you got some rest.”
“What were you talking about just then, daddy?” chimed Princess Princess, draping silver over David's bunk again.
“Ah!” said the King, shielding his eyes from the sight of his daughter.
“Come now, we've changed your sheets,” said Father Dominoes softly. The King moved uneasily to his feet and was led across the room by some NPCs and put back to bed. Father Dominoes leaned down to David's ear and murmured, “He's really not well. He's not been quite himself since he awoke. She took away such a vital piece of him – I fear he may never be the same. Keep him company while he recovers, it's what he needs, there's a good boy.” He stood up and walked back to the King. “All right, Your Highness – you're going to need lots of rest. Weeks of it. I recommend – no, I insist – no quests, no adventures and no more wars – aha – for at least a little while yet. I'll have to be back to my duties in Hell soon and no doubt the poor Devil will need some looking after, so you won't have me to fuss over you. So, standing orders – no more adventures until you're all better, do I make myself absolutely clear?”
The phone rang. The King looked up, then leapt out of bed and poked about in his robes that lay by the bed. He held the Magic Telephone up to his head and spoke for a short while. The call was from General Majesty, of course. He had good news and bad news. The good news was that the Angel Cowboy had taken the very same United Statesian army which had attacked Normandy that morning, marched them up to the Chillinous Plains and leased the whole outfit, to a man, back to Europe for an exorbitant fee. General Majesty had inspected the troops and found them to be very impressive. Also, Fort Majesty was being rebuilt by a mysterious Engineering Corps of demons, also hired out to them by one Mr. A. Cowboy. They were reportedly doing a speedy and splendid job.
The bad news was all that, well, the reason -why- General Majesty had to resort to mercenaries to fill the garrisons was because there were no fighting fit Europeans to be found anywhere. They'd looked so hard and found nothing. He wasn't supposed to tell the King this, but Mechanicus was in the kitchen, so he thought now was the opportunity, but they'd discovered where all the able-bodied men of Europe had gone and what had happened in the years that separated the time he lived in and the time the King lived in – There had been … there was going to be a European Civil War. It would start quite shortly, relative to the time in which the King was living.

The King hung up and slumped down into his fresh sheets. He covered his eyes with his hand.
“More adventures coming, everyone!” he screamed.

End Of Chapter 93

1. He took care to not smudge the King's drying signature as he handed the copy of the contract over to Will Smith, who still had a petulant expression on his face and his hands clasped over his ears in case the King started up again. As he watched Will Smith march back into the temporary office prefab, something caught his eye. He looked around and saw a little wolf cub staring at him from the White Roost's lawn. His CIA-trained extrasenses immediately told him that the wolf cub was special, that it had a name and it would almost certainly be important later on. When he looked harder he could even see the shimmer and spatter of a very powerful spell that surrounded the tiny thing. He winked at it and then ducked behind a pile of cement bags and timber. He rolled up his own copy of the contract the King had just signed into a spindle and tucked it into his coat pocket. There was a heckuva lot of work to do and time was of the essence. With an old slave song pushing through the smile on his lips, he saddled up his trusty llama, Jake, and rode like the woolly wind to the harbour.

2. He was seasick all the way to Europe and so was Jake. He'd never been at ease on the water and, for all his talents and experience points, had never before been on a long sea voyage. His discomfort was made all the worse by Shaman Sidewinder's presence on board their flagcanoe. Oh, the shaman was a straight-up, personable fella in conversation and had proven his mettle and integrity to him as much of any of Willy's Business Partners had, but it was the way that the shaman squeezed time around the front and back of their megacanoe fleet that twisted his guts.

“The Spirits are being exquisitely generous,” intoned Shaman Sidewinder at the end of their first week at sea. It was just about all he'd said up until then. He'd heard it being intoned at him from just over his shoulder while he'd been talking with one of the captains and the shock had rattled him so much that he hadn't gotten seasick for the whole rest of the day. Not many people could get the drop on him, but Shaman Sidewinder was a special kind of guy. “The Spirits are ecstatic, overjoyed that the dragon has been humbled and are speculating abundantly about their meeting with the gods of this new world.”
Startled as he was, he had time enough during the shaman's second intonation to regain his composure. “W- Well, I aim to have a sit-down with a few of them and help pave the way there, and I'm sure that the ladies and gentlemen below decks will say their prayers every night in their new homes, sure as sugar.” He tapped his foot against the deck to indicate the two thousand, five hundred slaves that were stacked up in tiny, effluence-soaked crevices in the darkness below. A shorter, chrono-squeezed journey would mean a lower mortality rate and that was something that everyone could enjoy.

To the casual observer (probably a sea-monster or a dugong in this instance,) the vast, two hundred and twenty five-strong fleet of megacanoes whizzed across the waves at a dizzying speed. Our observer would be further delighted by the dazzling chromatic spray that lashed across the wooden edges of the flagcanoe and bathed the whole fleet in light whenever a pocket of vomit would fall over the side and burn up in the tremendous temporal torque that fizzed around the wake.

3. The sickly, the weak and the just plain dead were rolled up into a pile and burned on one big slave-pyre as soon as they landed on European soil. It was pale, sandy soil that lay near the little town of Ostend, but it counted. The living slaves were divvied up into their prearranged parades, oiled up nice and shiny, chained together, made to carry foam beams between them that looked like really heavy wood at a distance, marched the forty miles or so to Brussels and then, in a genius masterstroke from Shaman Sidewinder, glamoured up with some magic-heavy blasts of smoke so that their pallid and starved bodies would appear powerful and healthy at the inspection that was planned. A state messenger boy was found and sent in to Laeken Palace and the meeting of The Big Important Council Of Europe that was taking place. After waiting a little longer than he liked, he was met by the queerest-looking monster-fella he'd seen in a goodly while. Birds had come to the United States at the same time they'd arrived everywhere else and folks there were still getting used to them. Converse to Europe, where everyone knew for damn certain that Terrorthaw had techno-magicked the birds in from one of the weirder hellmensions, in the United States the birds were just a pretty, chirrupy mystery, with no stigma attached to them. Personally, he'd always thought that the birds brightened the place up and he hadn't heard of anyone getting pecked who hadn't deserved it. So he greeted Commander Flightfeather as warmly and as graciously as he greeted anyone. There was no point in holding back the benefit of the doubt on account of a fellow looking like a bird. He led Flightfeather out to the gates and showed off the assembled slaves. He'd never seen a bird look so pleased. Soon he was sitting in one of the back rooms of the Politics Forum, hashing over the specifics of the trade agreement - and the End User Licence Agreement for the slaves – with Flightfeather and his two boorish lieutenants, Timothy Clashradish and Jacob Hillmounter.

“Impossible,” said Timothy.
“Can't be done,” said Jacob.
“There must be some trick.”
“Who are you, anyway?”
“How do we know that you've even met our beloved King?”
“We were the last to see him,”
“We spent quality time with the King.”
For the third time in the course of that meeting, he flicked his eyes over to the contract the King had signed, that now lay on the table before them all. They took up his gaze, but Timothy and Jacob didn't even bother to pretend to read it this time.
“The date is all wrong,” said Timothy.
“It could mean anything,” said Jacob. The date on the contract referred to the Vikinca calender, which was quite a bit different to the European calender they were familiar with.
“You could have met him -years- ago.”
“We were the last to see him,”
“Which makes us closer to him than anyone.”
He regarded the pair closely as he smacked his lips and made a noise that in a lesser man might have been called a grunt. He looked levelly at Commander Flightfeather and said, in a low, clear voice, “Apologies for interrupting the flow of this discussion, fellas, but it's been a long trip and well, right now I've got no choice but to ask one of you to direct me to the restroom.” Then, without pause, he added, “You'll show me where it is, won't you, Commander?”

Outside in the hallway, Commander Flightfeather obligingly tried to point out the way to the commode, but he brushed off the gesture and grasped the good Commander's shoulder, pulled him close and said, “Do those two goons in there ruffle your feathers as bad as mine? They strike a man as being the most … unneighbourly pair of bloatmouths under the sun – does that ring true with you, Commander or am I just sore on account of that long sea voyage I mentioned earlier?” Commander Flightfeather's face turned ashen as the memories of the previous week came flooding back – when Timothy had decided to replace all of the lightbulbs in the Palace with those new energy-saving bulbs. While clumsily removing all the regular bulbs - which had worked just fine, thank you – Timothy had torn the plastic fittings right from the socket so that you couldn't get another bulb in no matter how you tried and the Palace was all dark and they had to take all of the free-standing mood lights out of the Grand Hall and put them in the affected rooms and there were extension cables trailing everywhere and oh my god.
“Everybody likes them but me. Is that fair?” whispered Commander Flightfeather.
“Now, some fella named The King told me in writing that I was to deal with Commander Flightfeather – the appointed custodian of Europe, not the jackass brothers in there. I'm beginning to get a mite regretful that I didn't drop off my little 'gesture of goodwill,' standing outside there, on the Ire Lords' doorstep on the way over and saved us all a lot of inconvenient trouble. Now,” and here he put up his hand, closed his eyes and stuck his lip out, “That's not a threat, just an illustration of the kind of mood those two can put a man in.” He exhaled long and slow through his nostrils. Commander Flightfeather looked from side to side, decided to stick with what he knew and broke into a hug. He accepted the hug gladly and contributed many flat-palmed back-slaps. When the hug melted away, he produced the contract that bore the King's signature. Commander Flightfeather was sure that it had been left back on the table. “Sign here, make Europe richer than it's ever been, then walk back in there and tell them the way things work around here.” He handed it over and Commander Flightfeather signed it on his back. “Oh, and while you're at it, sign this too,” he added, producing the End User Licence Agreement from his coat. Commander Flightfeather was sure that it had been left back on the table.

4. The megacanoes were being filled with European trade goods as fast as they could unload the rest of the slaves. He watched as caravan after caravan of sheep, grain, wool, wine, tin, jewels from the realm of the Rock Kingdom, horses, cotton, dye and spice from Islamaland, magical trinkets from the Royal Vaults, sacred branches, action figures, dehydrated ice-cream, tulips, skins, furs, silver, matches, seeds, sports equipment and the most amusing Bibles of the day were all paraded in front of them on their way to the canoes. It would take days for it all to arrive and be catalogued, sorted and stowed, just about the right length of time it would take for Shaman Sidewinder to open up a doorway to the Europan Land Of The Spirits in his makeshift sweatlodge. He would go in and check on the shaman every few hours and usually all he saw in there was a lot of smoke. He didn't have a big part to play in the loading of the megacanoes so he killed time by pacing up and down and hiking through the honestly quite disappointing landscapes around Brussels until a check-up on the shaman revealed no smoke at all in the sweatlodge, but rather a dimensional portal to a molten cavern of brimstone, which was a fairly surprising thing to see.
“Didn't know it would be so quick,” he muttered.
“The Spirits of this place are effete and languid,” intoned the shaman without standing or opening his eyes. They show no diligence in keeping safe their secret recesses.”
“Is it safe for me to trespass there?” he asked.
“It is but a display,” sneered the shaman.

He bid farewell to the shaman and entered. He found the interior of the dimension to be quite balmy and humid, but not nearly as fierce as it looked. Almost immediately after he had taken survey of his surroundings was he beset by piles of the dead. They touched him and called out to him. They all wanted to know one thing:
“Do you know the King?”
“The King?” he said gingerly, pushing them back so they wouldn't crowd him so much. “About yay high, big scraggly beard, voice like the Mississippi River? Sure, I know him.”
“Tell us! Tell us everything!” screamed the crowd.
“Whoa now, keep it civil, keep it down, what business do you good departed folk have with hearing about him? I mean, he's a straight-up customer but -”
“You have to tell us!”
“We have to know everything!”
“We have to love him!”
“We want to love him!”
“If we love him we can leave!”
“That so?” he said. “Same apply to everyone here?”
“Yes!” screamed the crowd, in its way. He smiled. His smile warmed even the spectral hearts of the damned.
“Cut you a deal – You take me to the highest authority in this place, let me jaw with him a while, then -”
“Then?!” shrieked the crowd.
“Then I'll spill my guts to the lot of you.”

“I have to say,” he did say, leaning against the giant water cooler in the Devil's office, “This isn't what I was expecting.” The journey through Hell had taken over a week. He'd met all kinds of dead people and had heard more stories than he was sure his head could hold. He had a pretty solid of idea of what angle he'd be working on this pitch.
“What were you expecting?” asked the Devil.
“Sir, forgive my naivety, but I'm not from around here -”
“I know where you're from, United Statesian,” said the Devil.
“Well then surely you know what I'm talking about. Don't mind me asking, but where are all the other Spirits? By that, I mean gods.”
“This is Europe. It works very differently here. The Kings rule the Heavens and I am indentured to them, while the former gods serve as my demons. Some still roam Europe above, but they are diminished and usually of little concern. They add flavour and adventure to the world and when they become a nuisance they are dealt with.”
“By you? You seem like a capable guy in a tussle, am I right in saying that?”
“No, not by me,” said the Devil heavily. “My domain is the dead.”
“And I hear that you're looking to make yourself redundant.”
“It is the talk of every street corner and hang-out in Hell, yes.”
“How'd you like some assistance with that?” The Devil paused.
“We have teams of missionaries that tour the planes of Hell, spreading the news of the King and releasing souls wherever they meet them.”
“Yeah, I met those fellas. Good people, good people. Can spin a yarn better than most anyone, but I'm talking about tackling the problem at the surface level. I'm talking about making sure that not a soul gets here in the first place.” The Devil tilted back in the huge swivel chair while locking his hands together behind his horned head. The chair rolled backwards and collided gently with the drywall, causing the empty coffee cups of the windowsill to chink. “Do go on,” said the Devil.
He clambered gracefully up onto the chair opposite the Devil and scaled the desk. He stood there beside the Devil's calculator and looked him right in the eye. This was his favourite part.
“We've got a storyweaver or two on our team, yes we have. I know fellas back at home who could have a Thunderbird and a host of Wendigos bawling their eyes out on the floor with a simple knock-knock joke if the critters were around to hear it. All they'd need to captivate the folks above would be their voice, a fire playing 'cross their face and the right story – most important part. Now I would put good money on the notion that our mutual friend, the King, leaves enough of the right kinds of story in his wake to keep us all in the business of telling them from now till the hereafter.”
“And how will your storytellers be of any use to me? The people of the United States do not come and stay with me when their lives are over with.”
“Haven't you heard? The good people I'm representin' and the Kingdom of Europe have just entered into a lucrative and long-standing trade pact. The megacanoes are getting loaded up with fine European goods as we sit here yakkin'. Why, I can picture it now in my mind's eye – clear as day – megacanoes and sailboats, riding low over the emerald waves, heavy with precious cargo but still with more than enough room for a yarn-weaver or two to come and go as they please, once we've trained them up to satisfaction.” The Devil smiled once again then straightened up and said,
“And what would you ask in return for this arrangement?”
“What would I want for hastening the Devil's ascent to Heaven? Well, stands to reason that the price of such a thing would have to be high indeed, wouldn't it?” He reached into his overcoat and produced the contracts he'd prepared on the journey through Hell. “But I'm in a generous mood, sir. All I'm asking for is for this to be an exclusive contract 'tween just us, and for sweetheart rates on the hiring out of your demons on long or short-term contracts for security and labour. Also – and you're gonna love this,” he chuckled, “How about I take a few of them souls off your hands?”

When he emerged from the Devil's office, with freshly signed contracts in either hand, he was met by the throngs of the dead who had led him there. He found a little out-of-the-way ledge, sat them down and told him everything he knew about the King. When the glowing had stopped and he was left alone on the ledge, he found his own way out.

5. Half of the megacanoes were on their way back to the United States and the other half – empty, save for the heaps and heaps of Vikinca gold they'd brought with them and the skeleton crews they carried, set sail to the rendezvous point on the coast of Normandy under the guidance and protection of Shaman Sidewinder. He was on his own on this leg of the journey. At least he would be if Jake wasn't with him. But that was for the best. He had one more errand to run before the invasion and it needed to be done quietly.

Somewhere along the road to Normandy, his way became blocked by a soup of goats that had seemed to come out of nowhere and would simply not move from his path. The road was framed on both sides by steep ditches that looked like they would hurt Jake if he tried to get around them. The goats had picked on hell of a spot to be obtrusive. He sighed and looked around for the goatherd. Finding none, he scanned the herd itself, dismounted Jake, waded into the soup and tapped a likely goat on the shoulder.
“Excuse me friend, but you kindly move your little critters here off the road? I don't know what you'd call them, but I need them out of the way. The hurry I'm in is a fierce one.” The goat he'd tapped literally jumped right out of its skin and proceeded to stand there amongst the other goats, listening to his request while looking exactly like a shrivelled, highly embarrassed old man. The old man did not respond. “Oh don't get sore. I can spot a skinwalker at a hundred paces. Where'd you pick up a trick like that anyway? Was under the impression that it hadn't occurred to you Europeans.”
“I cannot let you pass. I have something to tell you.” muttered the old man, slipping back into his goatskin, but still retaining the shape of a man.
“And what would that be?” he said, helping the old man back into his goatskin coat.
“I must tell you about the consequences of your actions. They will be nothing less than the destruction of Europe! The blood!” he piped.
“Now now, I think you've got it all scrambled up there, grandpa. I'm aiming to save Europe, not the opposite. The way my intelligence puts it, your boys don't stand a 'coon's chance in a cougar factory against the forces coming for them. That is - “ at this point, he tapped a cigarette out of his case and lit it from a tinderbox, “-unless your friend and mine, the King, can pull off something tremendous in the very final hour.” He took a long, hard drag of Vitality. “And I don't doubt that he could. But I gave him my word that I'd help out, and that's more important to me than anything you could say to me.” He stood there and smoked a while in goat-filled silence. Presently, he looked up at the old man, who was tugging at his fingers. “Tell me, grandpa, have you met a King? Seems to me that he'd be the man to speak to on the matters of Europe and destruction and such.”
“Not directly,” said the old man after some finger-tugging. “But he is in my dreams every night. I try to warn his friends of what is going to happen. I told his General, I told the gypsy woman.”
“Did they listen?”
“No.” said the old man, blankly.
“And you can't talk to the King because you can't look at him,” he said carefully. “Because there's too much to look at. Too much destiny.”
“Are you a wizard?” said the old man.
“I guess so. I trained as a shaman – that's what he call a 'wizard' where I came from, though the terms aren't exactly interchangeable. I know the basics, but I ain't got the gift.” He finished his cigarette, spat, then got back on his llama. “Got plenty of friends who do, though. Fella I came here with – I don't expect to see power the likes of his in this world or the next. Just a little while back, he used a hide tent, some smoke and some weeds he found – punched a hole right through the world, took me to see that big composite Spirit you got looking after your dead folk.” You could almost hear the old man's eyes widening.
“The Devil?”
“That's the old boy. Me and him had quite a pow-wow, let me tell you. C'mon Jake.” He rode the llama on a few steps. The goats stepped aside without a fuss. Then he stopped and turned to look back at the old man. “Hey,” he said, “How'd you like them to believe you?”
“Who?” croaked the old man, lost among the goats.
“The King's friends. The King. Hell, everybody.”
“It would mean everything. It would save my beautiful Europe.” Jake trotted back to the old man.
“Seems to me that you're jumping the gun, so to speak, with all the doom and calamity and have you. Stands to reason no one's gonna listen to you if you come out swinging all like that.”
“But – that's what I see... chains of events that -”
“Yeah, yeah, I sympathise, I do. But there's a done way of building up to it. Here -” he handed a small box to the old man, who examined it carefully. “It's a Magic Telephone. I've got the other half of it. When it's on, I can use it to jaw at you no matter where I may be. Now I'm going to pass my half along to my powerful friends I mentioned – they might see some things, little things perhaps – that you might necessarily not see. Once you've passed on enough of the little things to the King's friends, they'll be ready for the big stuff.”
“The Traitor.” said the old man.
“Exactly,” he said, then made his goodbyes.

6. Deep below the cathedral of La Havre, he brought Jake before the Big Rocks of that region of the subterranean Rock Kingdom.
“Try it,” he said, offering his towards the oblivious llama. “You'll find it's just as good as a horse, if not better.” The Big Rock of La Havre rumbled off his mossy crag, heaved up its silicate strength and smacked Jake right in the skull. Jake fell to his knees and managed one faint bleat before another blow silenced the poor llama forever.
“Softer. More satisfying.” grated the Big Rock in his metamorphic voice, nodding to him approvingly. He looked away from Jake's still body. He'd seen much worse, but all the same he was glad it had been quick. He forced his face into Pitch Mode and drove the deal home.
“My people can provide twice as many llamas as the Europeans offer horses. And that's an ongoing deal – whenever they splash out some more, we'll double their figure, every time, for the same load of jewels and ore that you give to them. And, for the long term, we'll bring you enough maps and demonic diggers from Hell itself to pave the way for you to come by the United States, set up shop by us. I look forward to a long and fruitful friendship between our two peoples.” He winked a produced a contract from his coat. The Big Rock, with paws still bloody from the insides of Jake's head, plucked it from his hand and then scrawled that friendship into being.

7. He'd emerged from the Rock Kingdom a little later than he'd have liked, and that mistake was compounded by the fact that he longer had a mount to ride. He estimated that he didn't have the time to travel to the Abbaye-aux-Dames on foot, so he chartered a little sailboat and was sick all the way to mouth of the Orne. When he arrived, the fracas had already begun. He'd hoped to have been able to avoid as much bloodshed as possible but it looked like things had become very bloody indeed. He tried to ignore the terrible waste and steered his little sailboat around and met the Shaman Sidewinder and the gold-filled megacanoes at the rendezvous, an uncomfortably close distance from the battle on the shores. The megacanoes had been nibbled slightly be demonds, but the shaman had kept the falling Rock People at bay with his own mysterious methods and, thankfully, all of the gold and most of the crew remained safe. He'd only just made his hellos and how-are-you's to the typically unresponsive Sidewinder when they all heard the King's voice.
“It'll be over in one hour, my people! Till that promised time, waste not one more breath, spill not one more drop of sweat on these curs, rest instead within the walls of the Tower! We can totally relax there”
He smiled at the shaman, who had never once smiled in all his adult life and wasn't about to begin now, and said,”Reckon we should do what the man says.”

In just under forty-five minutes, the megacanoe crews had loaded as much gold as they could onto the Recruitment Barges and he himself had ducked through the chaos and confusion of the battle and made it to the front gate of the Tower of Super-Chastity. He jogged up the steps, where he was in full view of the incoming United Statesians, shook the King by the hand and after the King had told everyone to quiet down, he said his piece.
“Fine evening to you all, it's a pleasure to meet some fellow United Statesians out here on this here foreign beach. Tell me, Your Highness,” he said, turning to the King, “Can't you make it just a touch less cold?”
“I'm working on it,” said the King. The United Statesian warriors around the walls and the main gate paused nervously and then a laugh rippled through them. It died quickly, but there was encouragement there. He licked his lips and pressed on.
“Bet you are, Your Highness. Bet you are. Now folks, I know you came here looking for a fight and I respect that. I've been in a ruckus or two in my time and I know how invigoratin' they can be – sure has been a long time since you guys went out and really mixed it up, hasn't it?” There were some shouts of agreement from the crowd. “Yeah, I know. Sittin' around, waiting for the old dragon to start some beef with somebody sure can frustrating. I mean, the rumbling's where it's at, am I right? That's what you signed up for, to protect our great nation by bringing the fight, and this one is real overdue.” The crowd was cheering in parts. They were warming up, it was nearly time for the pitch. “Well, it just struck me that I have been the rudest of customers and have not yet introduced myself to you good folk – hope you'll find it in your hearts to forgive me, I was just taken aback by how well you fellas have been doing against these Europe boys that I must have forgotten the manners my mother taught me – I'm the Angel Cowboy, gentlemen, and I've come all this way – I nipped at your heels all across the ocean, yes I did – on behalf of the Smith Dynasty (Ah yes, you've heard of that outfit) to ask you a question. Now I know that sounds crazy, but this is a real important question to you and me both. -The- most question if you don't mind me saying so, but I think you'll agree. You sir,” he pointed to a blood-stained, bare-chested warrior in the front row of the crowd. “I'll ask the question to you, you speak for everyone. Now, here it is: How much do you get paid?”
“Three dollars twenty five a week.” the warrior said the warrior.
“Three dollars twenty five a week!” he shouted back emphatically. “You came all that way, you fought through who knows how many European boys and you made it right here to their central command tower for three dollars twenty five a week? I'm sorry son, it's not my intention to make fun, I apologise for my tone, but something aint right here. You know your average Senator gets paid five times that much, and to do what? Sit around all day and tell you fellas how you should be doing -your- job protecting -them?- Something aint right, I tell you.” He appeared to have a new thought. He turned back to the warrior he had addressed. “You get paid leave on top of that?”
“Leave is only half-pay,” he said, sneering at the comical levels of injustice that were active in that statement.
“Half pay? I knew you guys were brave but that's something else, that's what it is. It's a miracle you fellas aren't all half-starved out there – matter of fact, you all look beefier than a ton of bison, each one of you. Wish I could be carved like you guys!” He slapped his belly at this point and thousands of people laughed. “So I guess you get by, but I'll bet your families could do with a little more sent back home, am I right? I bet you'd like to treat them with one heck of a Soyal this year, right? Spend some time with em, tell em all the stories you've worked so hard to pile up? Can't do that so good on three dollars twenty five with half-pay leave, not when you're scraping to keep them fed on last year's Maize harvest.” The crowd was cheering with him now. He rose his hand to quiet them. “Say,” he said. “Ever thought about providing your time and the inestimable worth of your service to someone else – now, I know what you're thinking, there's a thought that jumped up in your minds then like you stepped on a rattlesnake – I'm not talking about treason here. I'm not suggesting that you good patriots defect to some foreign power and bow to someone like this fella here,” he pointed at the King, who looked like he wanted to say something but then decided not to. “I'm a Smith Dynasty man, a Texan man, about as United Statesian as smoking, Maize and wild syphilis, and I would not do one thing to hurt it. Not one thing. In fact, I want to help it – by giving her brave warriors who fight and win and defend her every day with every inch of their might and who will never falter, never fail and never lose – I'm going to offer all of you, every last one, the respect and pay and action that you deserve. Three dollars twenty five a week? How about thirty five dollars a week? How about fully paid leave? How about shorter tours of duty, more time with your family, the chance to serve your country better by being dropped right where the action is, all for ten times what you're getting now?” The crowd was wild. “That's what I'm offering, folks. Come work for the Smiths and we'll look after you while you look after your country. Fifty dollars – that's right, fifty dollars of gold, right in your hand, when you sign up. There's space for everyone, just mosey on down to the beach and the Recruitment Barges will – he said a few things more, but the sound of his voice was drowned out by the thrill of the crowd as it surged towards the beach and the waiting barges. Those who weren't convinced by his offer were soon left standing scattered at the walls and were soon killed by the Europeans. The Angel Cowboy took off his hat, mopped his sweat-drenched brow and looked over at the King. “One invasion averted, Your Highness, looks like your daughter's safe and sound.” The King nodded. He didn't know how the Angel Cowboy knew about Princess Princess but right then he wouldn't have been surprised if the United Statesian had brought his father back to life right there at the foot of the Tower and then hired him as a consultant.
“I must check up on her!” he said suddenly and then was gone.

8. He'd calmed the King down and he'd run up the stairs but he was nearly exhausted by the time he'd reached Princess Princess' room at the top of the Tower of Super-Chastity. He had not slept since he'd entered the Rock Kingdom and the glue that had bound the usual day's reserve of strength to his soul had dissolved when he'd watched thousands upon thousands of the United States' finest warriors line up to sign the contracts and get their fifty dollars. His assignment in Europe was over and some deep set, administrative part of him was adamant that it was time to sleep and then hopefully he'd wake up back at home. All that changed when he reached the top step and the open door and he saw the princess, curled up into a ball with her many skirts wrapped tight around her ample frame, crying her dear little eyes out. He moved softly towards her, crouched down and gently placed a hand on her shoulder, which she'd managed somehow to make damp. “Hey there, Princess,” he whispered. “I'll leave if I'm disturbing you. Your daddy sent me up to talk to you,” at that, Princess Princess yanked her face, all mud and aubergine, up to look a this stranger. It was the first man she'd seen apart from her father since she'd hit puberty.
“Where did daddy go?” she said, quite clearly. Then – surrounded in sobs - came the words, “Why did he run away from me?” Her head flopped down onto the floor again. He carefully brought his other hand to her other shoulder and slowly put her the right way up. She sniffled but cooperated.
“There. There, there you go. Now I can see you while we talk.”
“What did he say to you? Did he say why he went?” she mewled.
“Princess, hush now on this notion of him meaning to hurt you. The King's not like that – you know that better than I do. What he is... he's an emotional man and he's had a day today like no other. Seems to me that he was just surprised to see what a beautiful young woman you've become. You're growing up so fast, you'd be surprised yourself if you saw how much you've changed in the last little while.” She sniffed and nodded. He reached into his pocket and brought out a golden wheel no larger than his thumb. He pressed it into her hand. “Now here, try one of these. It'll make you feel a whole lot better.” She looked puzzled. “You can eat it. Take that there wrapper off and then -” he made a 'gobble' motion with his hands and mouth. She unwrapped the gold foil and gave the little brown button an experimental sniff. Her pupils dilated and her mouth flooded with saliva. She gobbled it up exactly as he'd shown her. She moved it all around her mouth and let it melt under her body heat. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets and her whole head likewise pivoted back on her neck while sounds reverberated from deep within her throat and her chest flushed to a most becoming shade of pink.

“You sure took to that. Doesn't surprise me, most folk do. It's called chocolate. My friends the Vikinc-” he was interrupted by a primal scream and a wild-eyed lunge from Princess Princess towards his personage. He swiftly brought his hat in between his chest and the red-faced girl then reversed backwards into a standing position. “No no, I'm sorry Princess, but I'm not altogether comfortable with where this situation is headed,” he said, bowing his head to avoid eye contact. Princess Princess flopped back onto her royal booty, panted heavily through her nose, rolled her tongue furiously around the inside of her mouth to absorb the last few particles of flavour to be found there, while glaring up at the Angel Cowboy disapprovingly. “I apologise – I don't mean for my actions to be a slight on fine looks or high breeding, Princess, let me assure you on that.” He swallowed, “I had a wife -” he paused for some time, thinking of the right words to say, then, said simply, “She passed away.” Princess Princess crawled over to him and threw herself at his legs and hugged them with animal strength. He put his hat back on. After a long time, a small, muffled plea rose up from his shins,
“Can I have another chocolate?”
“I'm all out,” he said, shrugging elaborately.
“All out!?” clucked the Princess. She was not used to the concept of exhaustible supplies.
“That was the last one,” he said. She dropped her head, straightened up and lay face-down on the floor with her legs kicking up and down in the air.
“No nono no no no!” she wailed. “You must get me more of them, you must!” The Angel Cowboy crouched down again and touched her hair.
“Aw hell, I'd love to, sweetheart, but all the other chocolates are far away over the ocean in the United States. That's the place I call home.”
“Bring them to me!” said the Princess in a voice like iron lightning.
“I'm sorry Princess, but I just can't -” he started, “Well, not unless you add a shipment of chocolate to the Formal Trade Agreement I signed with your daddy not long ago.” He produced a contract from his coat. “Here, sign this and I promise I'll bring you all the chocolate you could ever want.” He offered her a pen and she marked the pages he showed her with her signature and a smear or two of tear-diluted make-up. He hugged her goodbye, kissed her lightly on the hair and made his way down to the base of the Tower. The King was nowhere to be found. The view outside was an absolute mess. He started out towards the Recruitment Barges to see if he could make himself useful. He hated to stand still.

9. It was the first time he'd seen them all together since that day on the beach in Normandy. Oh sure, he'd seen a lot of them when he'd dropped by to check up on their training and he'd yakked it up with enough of them on the journey back to the United States and on the way to the Chillinous Plains, in the time he didn't spend vomiting, but it stirred him tremendously to see them all before him again, their numbers swelled by the demons he'd hand-picked from Hell's impressive rosters of labourers, craft-gods and tinkerers. He said a good many words to them, how he was proud of them that they'd made it this far, that they were the best chance their country had at keeping the world safe, that soon they'd be taking part in what would be the most important campaign in their lives and possibly the lives of everyone. Then he told them to stay put. He didn't want to spook the clients. He trudged forth through the frozen mud until he came to the ruins he'd hoped to find and two men in finery sitting in a ditch. He smiled and doffed his hat at the general and the engineer and said, “Hiya folks. Friends call me the Angel Cowboy. I was just passing on down the road – thought maybe you'd like a little helping hand with your construction project I see here.”

Mechanicus and General Majesty accepted his offer in no time at all.

End Of Chapter 92