Chapter 42
YUMA
Even with its chest pierced through, the Grim King’s monster continued to attack.
Its sharp claws left large gashes on Apollyon’s body, but a machine was too different from a creature made from tendons and bones and muscle.
The monster was eventually turned into a lump of trembling flesh and was tossed aside.
The Empire’s machine, damaged in places, nevertheless continued its approach at the same pace as before.
As if the Grim King had expected this, he seemed regretful but unsurprised.
Yuma had also expected this outcome. The only thing that was left …
Just as she thought of this, Apollyon’s chest glowed red again and shot a bright beam of light directly at the gates of the wall surrounding the castle.
There was a sound like a thousand mirrors smashing at once.
“This is truly the end, Chief Herder of Danras.” The Grim King sounded wistful yet somewhat detached, like a man watching a tragic play about himself, at the end of the performance.
Yuma looked down below. The Fifth Legion was now advancing through the broken gates, and the corpse army was no match for the Imperials with their Powered weapons.
Still, Yuma felt no sympathy for the Grim King—even if he had provided shelter and food, cared for her as she gave birth to Tychon, did not so much as raise his voice to her.
For half a year of good deeds did not erase five hundred years of evil.
This ending was inevitable for the Grim King as long as he had continued on his course.
The only tragedy about it was that it would happen by the hand of the Empire and not the people of Merseh whom he’d tormented.
That the Grim King’s end did not come because he killed Jed and Rizona, nor because of his evil deeds over the past centuries.
It came only because he happened to rule over a land that was strategically important to the Empire’s conquest. If the Grim King had ruled the northern lands of ice or some faraway island in the western seas, nothing would have happened to him even if he’d dispensed the same tyranny.
The blue lightning and black rain didn’t cease, and the flashes of light illuminated the last of the battle. Apollyon bent its tall body, casting a shadow over the soldiers below, before it grabbed a section of the castle.
The dais Yuma and the Grim King stood on began to shake. Yuma almost lost her balance, holding on to the baby in her arms. Seeing this, the Grim King murmured something, and the obsidian floor rose up to form something resembling a crib. Yuma laid Tychon inside it.
Apollyon’s other hand came up to where they were. Standing on the palm was a legionary in Powered armor.
The legionary raised his visor, revealing a familiar face. “Chief Herder.” He was calm, his voice affectionate as ever, even in this field of battle where the sound of heavy rain striking the obsidian was deafening.
“Emissary.” Yuma addressed the father of her child, but she could not bring herself to show the love she still had for this man. A strike of lightning flashed.
Lysandros came down from the hand onto the dais.
The armor he wore was larger and sturdier than what he had worn when fighting Garamund.
He was carrying a large metal box in chains on his back, which Yuma recognized to be Fractica, the lead coffin, the Power generator.
The Grim King glared at Lysandros, but the armored man did not even look in his direction as he spoke directly to Yuma.
“I came here to take you back.”
Yuma looked back at him. He was as beautiful as ever, just as he had been last winter, but his eyes seemed a little more tired. Perhaps he had tortured himself with worry. Yuma didn’t reply and looked down into the obsidian crib.
“Is that our child?”
Yuma nodded.
Lysandros held out his hand as the black rain continued to pour down. “Come with me. Let’s go back together. We can still be happy. The three of us.”
“Inquisitor,” said the Grim King, “how little you know.”
“This is a family matter, Eldred. Stay out of it.”
“You think this is a family matter! It was you who called the Chief Herder the King of Danras. Do you think a king would consider words like ‘the three of us’ with anything more than contempt?”
At a speed that seemed unbelievably quick for his bulky armor, Lysandros strode through the rain up to the cackling Eldred and punched him hard in the stomach. The Grim King stumbled backward, grabbed on to his throne, and collapsed into it. Lysandros pointed a finger at him.
“You are a relic of the past. The waves of the Empire will wash you away. And I am the first wave of them all. The tip of the spear that will skewer the world into one.”
The Grim King didn’t answer, his speech knocked out of him.
Lysandros stepped up to Yuma. “I don’t know how that tyrant deceived you. But think of the time we spent together. We fought the Grim King side by side, did we not? You were the first to run to me when I fell.”
Yuma looked back at Lysandros. In the last six months, his Mersehi had become perfect. Yet he truly had not changed at all. And he would never change. She took a step closer to Tychon.
“I came here on my own two feet. Of my own free will. Our child has aptitude in sorcery. If I stay with you, he will be wrapped in bandages and turned into a Power generator. And Merseh will belong to the Empire forever. But if I stay here—”
“Chief Herder. There is no more ‘here.’ This castle has fallen. That thing—” He pointed to the Grim King. “That thing will die here and his body will be taken to the Capital. Whatever you were thinking, this place, in one hour, will become as much a part of the Empire as Danras.”
“Is it wise to keep me alive for as long as a whole hour, Inquisitor of the Empire?” said the Grim King, taunting.
“Indeed, an hour is too long.” Lysandros strode up to him, picked him up by his robes of shadow and fire.
Eldred’s crown fell off his head and rolled on the dais.
Carrying the Grim King, Lysandros jumped up to Apollyon’s hand, Eldred’s feeble resistance doing nothing to slow him—the Grim King was exhausted from the last grand summoning he had performed.
Without any more ado, Lysandros climbed up Apollyon’s arm and then impaled the Grim King on the long spike on the gigatherion’s shoulder.
Instead of a scream, the tyrant sighed long and deep, and his struggling ceased.
Centuries of abject tyranny, millennia of peerless sorcery, ended with the subtlest of sighs. That sigh was Eldred’s final gift to Yuma.
The sky crackled with lightning. The black rain intensified, as if mourning the death of the Grim King. With the thunder, the floor shook. The throne of bones crumbled first, and the crown slipped off the dais and fell into the depths below.
Yuma walked backward until she stood at the very edge of the dais. Hearing her footsteps, Lysandros turned and saw her.
“Yuma!”
“Lysandros. You said you were the first wave, and I’m going to be swept away like everything else here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tychon will become King of Merseh … if the prophecy comes true.”
“Those prophecies are just nonsensical poetry! Step away from there!”
“If you hesitate now, you won’t be able to save Tychon. Don’t do that to me too.”
Lysandros shouted, “Of course I will save him! He’s mine. And so are you.”
He leaped from Apollyon’s shoulder to the dais, which tilted like a spinning top. He quickly regained his balance and strode to the obsidian crib. Watching him, Yuma took another half step back.
“Yuma, no!” shouted Lysandros. “If you still have the nullstones, use them now. You said they could stop Powered machines, right? You can’t stop the Grim King’s defeat, or the liberation of Merseh. But if I have done you wrong, if I was ever untrue to you, I shall rightfully die here and now.”
Before she realized what she was doing, her hand went to the stones inside her hat. But there was nothing she could use them for now. Not even for revenge. For what was there to avenge? Merseh was finally free of the Grim King.
“No.” Tears welled in her eyes. “You’ve done nothing wrong. And that is the problem.”
“I don’t understand. Please just talk to me,” said Lysandros, taking another step forward.
“We’ve freed Merseh together, haven’t we?” Yuma said, taking one final glance at her child.
“We have. Now we get to live in it, if you would only—” Lysandros kept walking toward her.
Yuma fought back the urge to just give up and go to him, embrace a new life, maybe as the prefect of Mersia, perhaps as the councillor for Mersia in the Imperial Capital, or even just a wife to an inquisitor of the Empire.
“No, Lysandros. You get to live in the world. I don’t.
There is no more Danras, no more Merseh.
There is only the Imperial province of Mersia.
I’ve created a land where I can’t be what I am meant to be.
The Host—” Yuma swallowed her tears. “There is no room in this new world for the King of Danras. I’ve lost the war, as much as Eldred did, and I didn’t even know it. ”
She took one final step back.
And fell. She closed her eyes. Her hat flapped in the wind, but she had secured it tightly with its string. Lysandros’s shout, the roar of the soldiers, the unearthly ringing of the castle as it mourned the death of its master, all of it faded in the sound of the wind flapping the brim of her hat.
The wind hit her face. It reminded her of the steppe air when she rode her horse. If only she had ridden with Tychon, just once. On the beautiful steppe, in the sunlight, forgetting the Grim King and the Empire.
Perhaps the prophecy that the Grim King’s apprentice would become King of Merseh was just nonsensical poetry as Lysandros said.
Maybe Tychon would turn out just like Lysandros had said—he would grow up, fall in love, lead a happy life, then die and become a Power generator, just as his father would want for him.
But she had felt it when she’d given birth to Tychon.
This child was special, prophecy or no prophecy.
Maybe it was only because he was her own—but what did that matter?
Yuma believed in Tychon. That someday, he would return Danras and Merseh to what they always had been.
“We shall meet again someday.”
She said this to her already faraway child as she fell deeper and deeper into the Grim King’s lair.