Game Over  •  Act 3

Krissy had just been wondering if she ought to wear gloves to school that day to hide her blackened hands when she saw the shape of Chronos reflected in her bedroom mirror.

The next thing she knew, she was thrown on the polished floor of the Metapolis council chamber, shackled. Flicker was gone from her finger. Five of the six council members—Sweet, Savory, Spicy, Bitter, and Sour—glared down at her.

“What in the Fell Reaches is this about?”

The sound of Vahaadi’s voice again after days of silence jolted Krissy. She glanced over to see him a few paces away. He was not bound like she was, but his form was swathed in smoke. A pocket of dawn illuminated the lamp in Chronos’ hand, starkly contrasted against the dark sky visible through the hall windows. Vahaadi’s glare fixed on the council.

“Don’t play coy,” Bitter said with his hands. “Lord Chronos looked through time and revealed your doing. Do you have any idea how much damage you’ve caused?!”

“What are you talking ab—?” Vahaadi snarled, but the devastating image of the leveled buildings in Gladglub came at once to Krissy’s mind.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do,” she said, speaking over Vahaadi. “It was a mistake, OK?”

“I’d say it was far more than a mistake,” Sour spat.

“I get it! What do you want from me?” Krissy’s voice broke. “If I could fix it, I would, I swear. I feel terrible about it.”

“Your actions say otherwise,” said Savory. “Elweyn trusted you.”

Sweet stood and pointed a delicate scepter at Spark. Her motherly features were hard. “You are hereby charged with rampant destruction of life and property. For your crime—”

“Wait!” Krissy said. “Maybe I can fix it. Maybe I can…wish it away.” She spoke to her lap. “I still have two wishes left.”

She felt Vahaadi’s eyes on her but didn’t meet his gaze.

“There will be no more wishes,” said Spicy. “Elweyn was a fool to let either of you have your way. We won’t make that mistake again.” He gave a curt nod to Sweet.

“For your crime, Spark, you will await trial in the Metavale prison,” Sweet said. “Chronos, return the Thrall to the pit.”

Krissy felt the air leave her lungs. Her jaw dropped, but no cry or protest emerged. The dark cavity in her chest opened wider and colder. A bailiff took her by the arm and began to lead her away. She sent a glance at Vahaadi. His expression was completely blank. There was no rage, no fear. He curled his hands into fists and let his arms drop, looking away as Krissy was taken from the room.

Two Metapolis officers led Krissy into a tiny room that proved to be an elevator. The car dropped so quickly in the shaft that Krissy thought her ears would burst from the loss in altitude.

She ought to have been screaming, hurling her mother’s choicest Spanish expletives, and otherwise putting up far more of a fight, but all she felt was a vast emptiness, like her insides had been attacked with a melon baller. All that remained was a pockmarked rind.

She followed the officers without fuss through corridors as patchwork as the rest of Metapolis, constructed from whatever materials had bled through from other canons, until they arrived at an imposing circular door. The officers pressed their palms against it, and a locking mechanism spun at its center. A sigil glowed, and the entire door rolled into a pocket in the wall.

Beyond the door stretched an inky expanse spangled with slowly shifting dots of light. Slim glittering beams flickered between various clusters of motes. It looked like the interior of an observatory large enough to have its own zip code. The officers led Krissy across a causeway bridging a massive drop down into a distant, whispering void.

“Where are we?” Krissy asked, numbed.

“Metavale prison,” replied the officer on Krissy’s left. “It’s the underside of Metapolis, directly over the Gallik Sea. You’ll be able to see the water in the morning,” Lefty said, pointing over the edge of the causeway. The whispers, then, were the crashes of waves far below.

They drew up to a pair of sentries standing at the end of the bridge. Behind them, a golden dais floated in midair. The guards exchanged curt words with the officers.

“Epsilon Scyllae, Lunaris Quadrant. 95735,” said a guard, holding a disc out to Righty that Krissy could only assume was some kind of key. She tried to repeat the syllables in her mind, but they meant nothing to her. All thoughts simply passed through her like a sieve as she stepped with the officers onto the dais.

A cell number, she decided sluggishly. Perhaps her new home address for the rest of her foreseeable life.

“I’m going to jail,” Krissy told herself, slowly, heavily, as if to convince herself that she really ought to be panicking right about now. She needed to be formulating an escape plan, or at least a good case for parole or something. But she just watched as Lefty pressed the key-disk into a slot on the dais and the entire chamber began to spin. The distant lights wheeled around, closer and closer as if swirling in a vortex. Constellations of spherical cells rotated past until one cell skimmed right along the edge of the dais and stopped before Krissy and the officers. At this proximity, Krissy could see that all the cells resembled glossy black spheres, etched with fractal patterns. The cell that awaited her thrummed. The glowing ring of glyphs on its face churned and then dissolved to reveal a small cave-like room, furnished only with a cot and a latrine.

Krissy’s heart began to flutter—but it didn’t come with the usual rush of adrenaline and hyper focus that the sensation usually carried. There was no fight-or-flight, no survival mode, just resigned, heartsick dread. The officers pulled her into her cell and chained the restraint binding her arms to the cot frame.

They stepped back out onto the dais.

“The restraint will release you once we seal the door,” said Righty. “The Council will deliberate on your case. Should you be found worthy of execution, capital punishment is administered by drowning. Upon such orders, the prison warden will withdraw the beams suspending your cell and your star will fall.”

Elweyn’s consciousness undulated between life and death as she floated in a synthetic womb, held aloft by a viscous fluid. Her slow breaths fogged the tube fixed around her beak. The darkness gradually retreated from her senses, and an all-encompassing (but mercifully dulled) pain took its place. She peered around, not yet understanding where she was or how she’d come to be there.

The dark blue face of a woman looked back at her through the womb’s glassy outer shell, the salt-like crystals that studded her skin refracting light. Elweyn shifted, languid.

{Councilor Carlinis?}

Carlinis responded, but the womb’s fluid warped her voice to a meaningless mumble.

Elweyn vaguely recognized the womb that held her as a regenerative machine salvaged from Carlinis’s home canon. She’d never seen the contraption from the inside before, and it occurred to her that the pod was reserved for severe trauma.

The memories came flooding back, then: the shade, the library—

The library.

Logic fled her. She thrashed around in the womb, wrenching against tubes and machinery in her struggle to get out, paying no attention to the omnipresent agony nor to Carlinis’s alarmed attempt to console her. Elweyn’s fit radiated through the channels of her mind, and the glass shell of the womb cracked under the psychic force. Elweyn and her bath of fluids sloshed out onto the floor.

“Elweyn! Be still, your injuries—”

Elweyn tottered to her feet. Three feet, to be exact: what remained of her fourth leg coiled tightly against the featherless, blistered flesh of her underside. The morbid wound frustrated her more than it harrowed her, for the moment. She took off with surprising speed toward the library, even in her drugged and hobbled state. Carlinis pursued at a trot, fretting.

“Elweyn! Wait!”

Metapolis officials dodged out of the way as the mangled creature passed, leaving a trail of stasis fluid and charred, sodden feathers in her wake. She didn’t slow until she reached the library. Another unsteady psychic blast threw open the doors, and Elweyn took in the scene.

Two smoldered stains marred the library’s priceless interior. The smell of explosives was still present in the air. Numerous artifacts, sundered beyond recognition, lay in black heaps.

“We left it…as it was,” Carlinis managed through her panted breaths. “Hoping you’d wake…and know…what to do…which canons…”

Elweyn clicked her beak. {I need every loretreader on call. We must replace the chronicles immediately—} her eyes caught on two small glints by her usual perch: her own oculus, presumably removed before she was placed in stasis, and Flicker.

{Councilor, where is Spark?} Elweyn asked, already dreading the answer.

Carlinis’s face hardened.

“She will trouble you no more, Elweyn. The perpetrator is in Metavale prison. I believe the council intends to execute her, they already have my vote—”

{Call them off at once!} Elweyn said, rounding on Carlinis and stamping her paw. A spasm of pain rewarded her. {She is innocent, and we haven’t much time to save her!}

“Elweyn, I fear you are hysterical—oh!” Carlinis gasped as Elweyn tried to vault up onto her perch, only to learn in a most inelegant manner that her wings would no longer carry her. Her claws scraped across wood and she just managed to hoist herself up.

Elweyn was audibly panting, but her telepathic voice remained clear and urgent. {I assure you, I am not! Now go, I implore you, before it’s too late! Call them off!}

Carlinis bowed and all but ran from the room as Elweyn pulled her oculus around her neck. It chafed painfully against her burned skin, but she ignored the sensation and activated the communication links.

Every call to the loretreaders returned nothing but the strange, watery interference. Only Flicker responded with its gentle hum. Elweyn growled. This would get her nowhere. Only one feasible option remained.

She collected Flicker and the chronicle for the Gladglub canon in her beak and made for Metavale Prison.

Krissy lay torpid on her cot and watched the slow, mesmerizing lights trailing around the interior of her cell door. She had no sense of time, no sense of anything…just a dark, cold void. The blackness had spread all the way up her arms, and small flecks broke off from her fingertips like the cinders of a burning log. Her breaths were slow and shallow.

An uncomfortable jerk and sudden weightlessness in her stomach indicated that her cell was moving. She wondered if she had been convicted and was plummeting to her death, but she felt no fear.

Serves you right, said the voice.

The elaborate pattern traced by the light on the cell door shone, and the door dissolved. Krissy sat up and stared at her visitor in dim horror.

Elweyn was almost unrecognizable. The once soft, pristine owl-cat was mottled black in places and had bare, red-seared flesh in others. A thick fluid matted the remnants of her feathers down, revealing a delicate, emaciated-looking body in lieu of her usual plush silhouette. Her wings and tail trailed limp on the floor, and her eyes and beak looked startlingly oversized in her bedraggled face.

And yet, Elweyn’s first words were, {Oh, Spark. Look at you.}

Krissy couldn’t care less about herself, but the sight of Elweyn was enough to shock some semblance of feeling back into her.

“Look at me?” Krissy said, sweeping her bangs back from her face as she gaped. “Look at you! Holy fritz, Elweyn. What happened to you?” She clambered off the cot and knelt in front of Elweyn. Elweyn shook her head and deposited Flicker and what appeared to be some kind of video game cartridge on the floor between them.

{We haven’t much time, so I’ll be brief. The Stranger you encountered in Gladglub is a spirit called a shade. It copied your likeness, and now it’s on a rampage. It gains power from inciting people to hate you.}

“Turns out, I don’t need that much help,” Krissy said in a low, dark voice.

{This is the shade’s curse, don’t you see? It’s consuming you. You can’t let it win!} Elweyn impatiently shifted her weight between her three legs, glancing around the cell. {Ugh, where is the Thrall? You’d believe it from him; you believe anything he tells you.}

“News flash, he hates me too! He’s been trying to get me killed! And that’s not doppelganger juju talking. Chronos is throwing him back into the inescapable pit. He’d rather rot in oblivion forever than have anything to do with me. He knows I’m stupid and useless!”

Elweyn’s ears swiveled back and her hackles rose up. {That’s enough,} she said firmly. {The longer you feel sorry for yourself, the more power that fiend gains to lay waste to Gladglub wearing your face. If you want to be a superhero, now is the time to prove it.}

Krissy picked up Flicker, turning it over in her hands. The black flecks from her disintegrating fingers fluttered across its surface, and, in the reflection, she caught a glimpse of what she had become. She looked like a husk. Encroaching patches of blackness crept up her neck and ringed her face.

“I can’t, Elweyn. I’m done,” Krissy whimpered. “I’m not strong enough. Just look. I’m literally crumbling to ash.” She dropped her hands into her lap and stared at them in despair through the blur of tears.

Elweyn stepped closer, ducking to meet Krissy’s eye.

{Perhaps you aren’t strong enough,} Elweyn said. Her voice was gentle—a soft lapping wave against Krissy’s tormented mind. {But I know you’re brave enough.}

Krissy met her gaze. Elweyn was hard to look at, even gruesome. The charred edges of her wings resembled Krissy’s fingers, and that gave her pause. Whatever apathy Krissy felt for her own fate, Elweyn certainly hadn’t deserved this mutilation. And somehow, Elweyn was still standing, while Krissy, with her limbs still intact, was moping on a cell floor.

She had wished for her superpowers to save the day, and the thought that those same powers were being used to torch innocents like Elweyn kindled the tiniest flame of vigor beneath her turmoil.

“I’ve got to stop this,” she murmured, closing her hand over Flicker. She took a deep breath, trying to fill out the empty space in her chest, and forced a shadow of her signature grin. “Elweyn, book me a flight to Gladglub.”

Elweyn seemed to smile.

{I hoped you’d say that.}

Vahaadi followed Chronos silently up the jagged ridge that led to the inescapable pit. Purplish clouds churned overhead. The wind howled, and the air tingled with the djinni’s own fell magic, maintaining the curse on the blasted landscape. This place had been a flat stretch of wasteland before Ali Sahin ordered Vahaadi to build his own prison. Now it was a small but looming mountain, forever besieged with storms to warn would-be travelers away.

Anxiety tugged and bit at Vahaadi’s insides. He couldn’t take a full breath. He wasn’t even in the pit yet and already he felt the darkness and pressure closing in on him. Unable to lash out at anything around him, he took his stress out on himself, raking his nails deeply in his arm as Chronos led him closer to his centuries-long cell. Drawing blood and inflicting pain was a long-standing nervous habit of the djinni’s. Were it not for his rejuvenating curse, he would have mutilated himself by now. Maddeningly, he could only inflict lasting damage on others who were unfortunate enough to cross his path.

The memory of Spark’s crestfallen expression haunted Vahaadi’s mind. The darkness closed in ever tighter, constricting his chest. At a different time, he might have found brutal satisfaction in that look of devastation. Now, he only felt despair. Yes, he’d certainly caused lasting damage there, and all Spark had ever wanted was to be his friend. The absurdity of it all made Vahaadi want to laugh and scream at the same time. She would die for the sake of a wish of friendship that he’d never even granted. It was hilarious.

He bit into his hand so hard that tears sprung to his eyes.

“You are curiously reticent, Thrall,” Chronos rumbled over the soft ticking sound that emanated from his chest cavity. Unable to see Vahaadi, Chronos spoke to the lamp in his hand. “No pleas for respite? No temptation of wishes?”

“Do not mock me,” Vahaadi hissed, but his voice hitched. “I will not give you the satisfaction of hearing me beg.”

Besides, he didn’t need to beg, Vahaadi tried to assure himself. Mr. Sabo would free him. Vahaadi need only wait until Spark…until…she…

Mr. Sabo’s ploy had not managed to kill Spark, though she’d surely looked like something in her had died. How long would Vahaadi have to wait in his prison before Mr. Sabo could make good on his promise? It could be years. It could be never.

The thought incited panic.

Vahaadi had gambled the life of a young girl who’d loved him for the mere possibility that a man like Sabo would set him free. Vahaadi couldn’t begin to imagine how Mr. Sabo had come to possess the key to his shackle, but did he truly believe Mr. Sabo would release him after he’d gotten whatever dark wish he craved?

Spark was going to die over this.

He skidded into Chronos’ path, now nearly at the lip of the terrible chasm.

“Very well, you shall hear me beg!” Vahaadi burst in such a rush of urgency that it all came out slurred into one word. Chronos stopped in his tracks, his pendulum swinging hypnotically.

“It will do you no good, but, as I will be the last to ever hear your voice, I will at least permit you.”

“Mr. Sabo,” Vahaadi spat. “He offered me freedom in exchange for Spark’s life. He has the key to my shackle. I don’t know how he got it, but—it was he who set Spark up for failure, I’m sure of it. She’s innocent. And she’s in terrible danger,” Vahaadi said wildly. He spoke so quickly, he wasn’t sure if he was even intelligible. He could only hope Chronos’ power over time could help him comprehend the deluge of speech. “If she dies, Mr. Sabo will take the lamp for himself. I can’t begin to guess what he wants, but it can’t be good, and I won’t be able to refuse whatever he requests.”

Chronos’ eyes flickered incredulously. But as he moved to respond, a chess-piece knife blossomed from his neck and his gaze went glassy. The lamp tumbled from his grip as he began to sag forward. Vahaadi backed away, then, despite his lack of physical form, instinctively dove and rolled out of Chronos’s path.

He could do nothing but watch in helpless horror as a grinning Mr. Sabo wrenched his knife from Chronos’s neck and shoved the eidolon into the inescapable pit of Ali Sahin.