It can’t all be darkness. Not according to Nove’s seventh and final principle of universal irony.
Many assumed the philosopher-scientist would be bitter and angry late in his life. After the academies banned testing on his first five principles, he penned a sixth that effectively postulated that his life’s work could never be verified. This well-documented failure ensured that Nove’s principles would never become Nove’s laws. To the people of his time, it was apparent that Nove would never join the ranks of Essenpi’s greatest minds.
That is the sort of failure that drives many almost-great people to villainy, or at least curmudgeonly hermitry. Yet Nove’s contemporaries and students found him to be cheerful, even jovial. In the forward of his ultimate work, Nove noted that many people’s surprise at his contentment was what prompted him to study and document one final principle.
Nove’s seventh principle of universal irony notes that there must be some good in the universe, because irony could not exist otherwise. Irony relies on the expectations of sentient beings. If everything was always the worst it could be, there would be no sentient beings at all, nor any expectation that there ever would be anything good to disrupt, and thus no irony. The universe is often cold and cruel, but if it was always horrible—if the worst always came to pass—nobody would have reason to expect anything else. Nobody would be around to expect anything.
In the vast emptiness of space, chemical processes began that would lead, over inconceivable eons, to creatures discussing justice and altruism and the greater good. Despite the worst instincts of humanity, civilizations rose and endured. Beauty and art, kindness and intelligence, love and life itself; none of these things should exist in an uncaring, entropic universe. And yet, against all reasonable expectations, they do—even if only for brief, brilliant moments.
For Nove, hope wasn’t a wish. It was a mathematical fact.
You have to consider the best possible scenario.
Several notable things happened as the darkness closed in over Gorm.
In Sculpin Down, the shrine of Mordo Ogg split from the top of its stone skull to the base of its throne, sending a cloud of hot steam rolling into the empty square in front of it.
In the museum of Andarun, the Spear of Issan suddenly buckled and kicked like a fish on a boat. Its struggles were brief; the ancient weapon exploded before a bannerman could investigate, embedding splinters in the glass of its display case.
In the ruined Temple of Al’Matra, the statue of Niln now looked like it was laughing with joy, his eyes upward and his hands extended toward the sky.
Any of these phenomena would have normally caused a small uproar, but save for an old priest weeping at the ruptured shrine of death, they went almost entirely unnoticed. The citizens of Andarun gazed at the center of the cyclone above the city, where an azure light hung in the air like a shooting star pausing to check its directions. A moment later, the errant glow dropped and struck Pinnacle Plaza with an incandescent explosion that threw every shadow on the mountain into stark relief and blinded citizens up and down the tiers.
Mannon shrank back from the light, from the pedestal at its epicenter. When the dazzling glare burned away, a Sten stood in the place of an ancient sculpture. He was tall and barrel-chested. Swirling tattoos and beads of sweat covered his slate skin, and his long, blue-gray beard blew in the wind. In one hand he held a blade of singing steel; the other was clenched in a tight fist. His broad shoulders rose and fell in ragged breaths as he stared in horror where his beloved lay broken and bleeding on the cobbles.
Thane, the Seventh Hero, the Dark Prince, Champion of Al’Thadan and hope of the Sten, turned to face the ancient foe with burning eyes.
“You!” the many faces of Mannon snarled in unison, his dark mass slopping away from the statue and the light that still emanated from Thane’s blade.
The Sten raised his sword by way of response, and the Felfather shrank back like a cornered rat. The wind sang through the ruined buildings, and the stone of the mountain itself seemed to thrum in harmony with the blowing storm.
“It doesn’t matter!” Mannon drew himself up again, like a swelling wave of darkness and glowing green ichor. His many faces gibbered and snarled as they consumed one another. “Prophecy or not, you cannot defeat me in the heart of my realm! Not against my full power! Not alone!”
Thane considered Mannon, whose malleable shape was marred by countless rends and tears that oozed luminous, chartreuse fluid. His middle was split so wide that he could no longer stand, and instead his remaining large tentacles dragged his bulk after him. Even as the Felfather reared up, corpulent globs of ooze dripped from his bulk and spattered on the cobblestones.
“You don’t look like you possess your full power.” The Sten nodded at Mannon’s wounds, then paused. He cocked his head to the side, listening.
“What are you—?” Mannon began, but then his faces froze in horror.
The wind still howled and the stone still thrummed with latent power, but the song in the air was more than just a harmonic coincidence of natural sounds. Behind the Seventh Hero, the All Mother’s voice lifted to join a chorus echoing from somewhere behind Mannon. The demon’s faces wailed, but their discordant voices were swept away in the rising melody.
Thane smiled. Blue light was spreading over him now, tracing the spiral patterns of his tattoos and the curved edge of his blade. His whisper thundered over the mountain. “And I am not alone.”
Gorm Ingerson felt the music before he heard it.
At times in his life, usually when he thought himself near its end, Gorm had become conscious of the pounding of his own heart, or the flow of air in and out of his lungs. This song was the same sound; the music had always been there—always been a part of everything—but now in the darkness it welled up in his bones and hummed in his throat and rang in his ears, sending tears streaming down his cheeks.
He opened his eyes and saw a glowmoth flapping through infinite darkness. Its shimmering blue wings flashed in the light of its bioluminescent belly as it danced before Gorm’s face. When it saw him staring at it, it fluttered a short distance away and came to rest on an old Dwarf dressed in simple robes. He held a candle that sparked to life as more glowmoths lit up around him. The old man reminded Gorm of the shrines set on the deep roads beneath the Ironbreaker Mountains, each bearing an icon of the god of light in dark places.
“Fulgen?” Gorm asked.
Fulgen smiled at Gorm, and opened his mouth as if to answer. He took a short breath, as if unused to speaking and unsure what to say. And then, without warning, the Silent Underglow roared.
The sound washed over Gorm, burning like fire and blinding like light, and part of him wanted it to stop but the other part of him was roaring, or rather singing, adding his voice to the song that had always been there, that would always be there.
When Gorm’s eyes snapped open, he saw Kaitha rising in front of him. Not standing, but rising into the air on currents of green fire and blue sorcery. The Dwarf looked down and saw that he was borne on similar strands of magic, weaving and dancing to the all-encompassing tune. The magic turned him around and gently set him down on the shattered cobblestones. When he stepped forward, he was near a tall Sten carrying a gleaming blade. Opposite him, Kaitha stepped into place. Beyond her, more figures were walking into the middle of the Pinnacle. Gorm recognized many of the figures as the marble sculptures they’d left in Kulxak’s lair, animated by the streams of enchanted water flowing through their joints and over their smooth surfaces. But the others…
Jynn and Laruna’s faces were familiar, but their robes were unlike any he’d ever seen. Laruna wore the searing light of the midday sun, lit by a brilliance that never touched the omnimancer walking beside her. Jynn’s garments were the blue-gray of a lake at twilight, and they reflected a gibbous moon from a different sky. In one hand he held the Wyrmwood Staff; the other was intertwined with Laruna’s fingers. Behind them, Gaist glided across the cobbles, his cloak as black and shifting as a shadow. Three ghostly lanterns hovered above his head like a foxfire banner. Heraldin brought up the rear, holding an unremarkable wooden staff and wearing a scowl that suggested he was aware of the discrepancy in ordained armaments.
Mannon snarled in every direction as the figures walked past him, shrinking back like a rat from a flame. All of his faces glared at the adventurers and the shimmering figures standing beyond them. “You can’t be here!” several of his grotesque mouths chorused. “You can’t!”
Yet they were. The Heroes of Destiny took up positions around the Sten in the center of the plaza, glowing water rushing around their feet. Gorm looked down and found the ensorcelled currents flowing around his own boots, and saw that the streams were connecting him with his old companions to form a perfect circle. Once the ring closed, new luminant tributaries split from the ring beneath the heroes and rushed to the center. The azure glow swirled around the Dark Prince and flowed back out to the heroes, so that he stood at the center of a great, glowing wagon wheel, with one hero standing at each of the spokes. A symbol Gorm recognized instantly.
“There weren’t enough!” screeched Mannon. “It can’t be the prophecy!”
His foul breath was wasted. Destiny flows like a river, running across the rough and uneven horizons of possibility. Its flows join and split as they make their way through time, but when probability and prophecy channel enough fates together, it becomes as unstoppable as a flash flood tumbling through a canyon.
Mannon fought back. His thick tentacles whipped in vicious arcs, sending horrible, leering faces screaming toward the heroes. Other faces detached themselves from his viscid mass and scuttled forward on thorny legs. A face like an oil-drenched vulture emerged to consume Mannon’s dominant visage, its beak opening in five different directions to swallow its predecessor. Three crowns of black iron perched upon its head, a yellow flame hanging in the air above each one. It opened its star-like mouth to loose an ear-shattering scream, and choked on the silver shaft of an arrow protruding from its mouth.
The being that was both Al’Matra and Kaitha nocked another arrow as she darted over the broken stones. The Felfather’s tentacles swatted at her, but they may as well have tried to catch the wind. She leapt and danced as she dodged away, and another volley of her arrows found their marks in several of Mannon’s free-roaming, ambulatory heads.
The shots cleared a path for Heraldin as he danced over the battlefield. Flames billowed from his staff wherever it struck, whether he was bashing one of the faces pursuing him or planting the staff into the cobbles to vault over incoming strikes. He supplemented these bursts of fire with a barrage of glass spheres that exploded into clouds of brilliant smoke, choking and blinding the foe until he was away.
The smoke also concealed the shadow that was Gaist. The weaponsmaster emerged from the mists in flashes of steel and crimson silk. He sliced limbs and screeching faces from the black morass of evil, then melted back into the shadows before the severed blobs splattered against the cobblestones. His blades burned with a ghostly light during their brief appearances, and the wounds they left in Mannon’s side glowed like heated metal.
These smoldering wounds marked targets for Jynn and Laruna’s sorcerous strikes. The mages stood at the outer edge of the battlefield, launching spells into the fray. Encroaching tentacles and creeping heads groped toward the spellcasters, but sending swarms of expendable troops to battle a pyromancer is as effective as using snowballs to hunt a Flame Drake. Laruna seared Mannon’s progeny to a screaming crisp with one hand, while her other clasped Jynn’s palm and channeled power into the balls of fire and shadow he wove. The omnimancer’s potent spells bloomed into flame wherever they slammed into Mannon, and as they burned away they left violet hooks of shadow embedded in his viscous flesh. These sorcerous hooks seemed to hamper Mannon’s motion, as though tethering him to the stone, and his movements became slow and uneven as the barrage continued.
Sluggish movements and uneven strikes are fatal mistakes, and Mannon paid for every one. Gorm Ingerson sang through the air all around the demon lord, his axes carving through tentacles and sending spouts of glowing green gore skyward. He felt something like the berserker’s rage, but there was no red mist, only the music. Its rhythm pulsed in Gorm’s heartbeat, his muscles vibrated with every chord, and his axe struck with the rhythm. Gorm’s onslaught reached its crescendo in time with creation’s symphony, just as Thane reached Mannon’s dominant head.
Flashes of desperation played over Mannon’s faces as he tried to stop the Seventh Hero’s advance. A tentacle like an oak tree swung at the Sten, its faces’ opening maws filled with oily teeth. Thane’s blade flashed, a stench of ozone filled the air, and the limb fell wailing into a limp puddle. The tattoos on the Dark Prince’s skin glowed with power and anticipation, and his eyes burned with raw fury.
In the face of such an onslaught, Mannon fled.
He didn’t get far.
The Felfather convulsed and shook in a manner that suggested he was trying to fly away and shrink into nothing at the same time. A moment later, his amorphous bulk splattered back onto the ground. “What?” his mouths shrieked as he convulsed again, but this time Gorm could see the hooks of shadow embedded in his flesh glow more brightly as Mannon strained against them. The sorcerous tethers held and dragged Mannon back to the ground with a wet thud. His manifold eyes flashed with budding horror, and then they all rotated to stare at the omnimancer across the plaza.
“I first saw that binding when my father tried to pull you from Johan,” Jynn called. “Later, I found I could even kill a demon when it is so restrained. I doubt that even you have a way to leave the mortal planes now.”
Laruna grinned wickedly. “Although, there’s always the standard route. The one that mortals use all the time.”
“Wait!” Mannon cried with a cyclopean face. Several of his smaller heads echoed the plea. “Wait! We can make a deal!”
Gaist emerged from a cloud of turquoise smoke, his hard eyes set in a way that said that heroes did not, as a matter of policy, negotiate with interdimensional manifestations of evil, and that even if they were open to such discussions, the current conflict was too far along for a peaceable resolution. It was a very succinct and effective facial expression, and the other heroes let it speak for them as they advanced.
