Chapter Four

Albrook was the exact opposite of Maranda. In the pale lamplight, its clean cobblestone streets and gothic buildings looked like the watercolor illustration of a child's horror story. Both its height and length stretched endlessly into the night, connected by narrow streets, winding stairs, and frightfully symmetric rows of street lamps. They glinted and reflected in the buildings' windows, adding even more illusionary dimension to the labyrinth.

I made my way to the docks and, ceasing a pickaxe from the tool shed, went about putting holes in the boats.

My new, revised plan didn't give me a lot of time. The continent that Albrook, Maranda, Tzen, and Vector were on was a huge island. There were only two ways off the island: ship, and airship. I was going to destroy the ships, and hope against hope that Branford wouldn't be able to signal an airship before I was able to follow Natissa and her crew into my tower, kill her, and let her crew get news of her death back to Maranda. Plus, there was always the possibility of Branford meddling. I shuddered. I wasn't ready to get into it with her. I hoped those brats she was babysitting would keep her occupied.

After hacking enough holes in the boats to sink them, I went back to the street lamps, ripped one out of the ground, broke the protective glass around its flame, and set fire to them. I did the same to the dock, walking backwards and dragging it along to make sure that I didn't miss a spot.

When I was finished, I climbed the stairs, went to the bridge, and watched the docks burn. I even made myself visible so that I could watch the flames' vaulting shadows play off my scarred forearms, which I rested on the bannister. Red, yellow, and black, rippling the sky like waves in the ocean, the blaze danced.

It was so beautiful that I almost wept.

***

By the time I was finished digging through the ruins of my tower, I was glad that my body had been incinerated in a burst of magic right after I'd fallen. Walking through the broken skeleton of my old home, seeing its rusted, crumbling supports sticking out of the ground like broken trees with flimsy roots, looking at rooms and staircases reduced to gravel, I felt the undeniable truth of my old philosophy: all human creation leads to destruction. I did not need to see my own corpse to verify my philosophies on human mortality.

Luckily, I had several things to distract me on the walk through my grave site. First of all, I had to concentrate on my limited time frame. Second, I had to try and find a trail that humans could use through the messy ruins. Third, I had to litter fresh animal carcasses in inconspicuous places on that trail, trying to attract the notice of those wild animals the salesman had been so afraid of. I hoped that, should I not find a more controllable way of offing Natissa here, a behemoth or two would do the job for me.

I was soon to get another distraction. When that Zozo salesman had said my tower was haunted, I though he was spreading the superstitions of a few treasure hunters who'd ventured too far in, let their imaginations get the better of them, and ran screaming from a resident Leafer that had hopped out at them a little too fast. I had no idea there was an actual ghost living in the place until I saw him.

It was deep into the tower's ruins, right by my dilapidated old statue of Poltergeist, that I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and came face to face with one of the dead animals I'd thrown down some ways back.

A hand pinched a dead Chickenlip between its thumb and forefinger, letting it dangle in front of my face, blood-slicked yellow feathers and all. I looked past it and saw a ghost clad in ragged black shrouds, a good amount of his body hideously mangled. His face was covered. All I could see were his raised eyebrows. He looked from me, to the dead Chickenlip, to the other corpses I'd left on the trail.

"Aren't you that assassin?" I looked over his tattered clothes and body again. "You don't look so good."

"Looked in a mirror lately?"

"What? What's wrong with me?"

He dropped the dead Chickenlip. "My dog didn't like you."

"I didn't like your dog. Now if you'll excuse me."

He pushed me back.

"I don't have time for this, Shadow!"

"You remembered my name."

"Glad I could make your day. Now move."

He poked the dead bird with his foot. "What's this?"

"Air freshener."

"Kawaii." He didn't look like he was anywhere near the point of letting me leave "I'm surprised to see you here. I thought they'd lock you up and feed the key to Cerebus."

"I could say the same thing about you, assassin."

He shrugged. "Let's just say I dug my own grave. Now I'm lost in it."

"Then let's just say that the Phantom Train, like so many before it, fell victim to my charming personality."

"I don't like the sound of that."

"You wouldn't like the look of it, either."

He took this opportunity to shift his grip from my shoulders to my throat. "I also do not have time for this. What are you doing here?"

"I live here, idiot."

He chuckled. "Death doesn't want to admit he's dead, eh. Don't blame you. When I first woke up in this wreck instead of on the Phantom Train, I tried to talk myself into believing that I'd somehow survived being buried under a tower's worth of mortar and steel."

"I'm guessing it didn't work?"

"While I was talking, I walked through a wall. Someone once told me that suicides can't leave the place of their death; guess he was right."

"Suicides? You helped kill me, then you killed yourself? You're awfully dedicated to your job. Don't suppose you could lend me a hand?"

Even though I'd mumbled the last part, Shadow picked up on it. "Lend you a hand doing what?"

"Nothing. I was joking."

Shadow released me. Both of us instinctively stopped talking as a pack of Vector Lizards walked through us and began to fight over the Chickenlip. It was a funny scene. Here we were, two hardened murderers, both already dead, hushing down so that a pack of carnivorous reptiles wouldn't notice us. I snickered. But not loudly enough for them to hear.

I was interrupted by Shadow. "As I was saying, lend you a hand doing what?"

"And I said I was-"

Voices.

"-Dammit, she's here! Turn invisible!"

He shot me a quizzical look, but faded.

Thanks to Shadow, I hadn't had time to come up with a concrete plan, so I had to hope that the Vector Lizards would do their jobs. Thanks again to Shadow, they didn't.

He looked back to the reptiles, who were still tearing the Chickenlip into fleshly strings, then to the direction the voices came from. "Suppose I've got more grave robbers to chase away." And he proceeded to make some goofy-looking movements with his arms.

"What in the hell are you doing?"

"If I were in Hell, I wouldn't be doing anything." He did one final twist, then yelled. "ZINGER!"

If his disembodied yelling hadn't frightened Natissa and her crew away, what happened afterwards would have. In a blur of red, he flew backwards toward the Poltergeist statue. And the statue, the corpse whose former spirit had been permanently evicted, whose once-powerful frame had been incinerated to the point of being dust and rubble from the waist up, began to fly back together like a reversed Meteor spell. The dust rose furiously, forming a mist. The mist cleared, and I got my first good view of the creature that would soon considerably change my outlook on my fight with Wrexsoul. Tattered shrouds sculpted in onyx, black wings nearly as big and not near as shredded as my own, Shadow hefted Poltergeist's spear and stood between Natissa's crew and the Vector Lizards.

Natissa had been struck speechless and, for once, so had I.

She hadn't been struck motionless, though. The second Shadow hefted the spear and threatened to throw it at her, she and her entire group turned around and began to run.

Things started to go by in a speeding blur. Natissa tried to turn and run the way she'd come, but thanks to my "decorating," a behemoth was now blocking her path. She and her crew rerouted, scaling a bit of wreckage. The behemoth got a few of the stupid Bedivire-clones she'd brought with her, but Natissa made it to the top and fell down the other side. Ignoring Shadow-geist, I flew through the wall and followed her down a dark, narrow corridor of twisted steel supports. She dashed across a broken conveyer belt, Bedivire and a few others in tow, and found herself on the edge of a collapsed, rotting monstrosity.

One of my monsters, and one I remembered well. My Organic Tower.

After staring at its rotting, misshapen half-bone, half-steel skeleton, Natissa excused herself behind a bit of rubble and vacated the contents of her stomach. She was even cute when she was retching. After digging into her backpack and using the contents to scrub her face, she came back out and began to examine the surroundings more closely.

"What is this place?"

"It's... it's Kefka's..." Bedivire shook. "...Inner Sanctum!"

I expected Natissa to follow Bedivire's example and start panicking, but she didn't. Her eyes widened, and she began to dart around the room. "Really? The man himself lived here?" She grinned. "And, oh Bedivire, we've seen it! I'll bet we're the only ones other than his killers who have!" She went back to the skeleton that had inspired her to vomit up her guts two minutes earlier and began eyeing it with voracious interest. "What a hideous monster! He must have used magic to make it. I wonder what it looked like when it was alive?"

"L-let's find a way out of here, all right? If there are ghosts like that out there, just think of the ghosts that must be hiding in here."

I considered laughing loudly, just to get a reaction, but I refrained when Natissa, enraptured, moved toward a glint of metal in the corner.

"You three! Over here!" She knelt down and began to pull rubble off the metal. "Help me dig."

They obeyed her command. In about a half-hour, they had unearthed It. The machine I considered my greatest achievement of all time. The machine at whose name people still trembled. The machine that could wipe out an entire town of people from half a globe away.

The Light of Judgement.

"The Light of Judgement," Natissa breathed, in the same tone another woman might speak the name of Draco, the annoyingly popular pretty-boy Opera star. "I'm actually touching the Light of Judgement! It's in such perfect condition, too. Kefka must have outdone himself on this; all that weight on top of it for all this time, and it's barely dented! If magic were still around, I'll bet we could make it work. That would give Edgar something to chew on!"

That's because I, unlike the Empire, pride myself on building machines that don't collapse under the stress of a well-aimed fart. The Light of Judgement was a cylindrical Magitek polylueridia bitch; a flawless piece of art that frequent use, destruction of its home, reconstruction of the world, and a month's worth of corrosive conditions couldn't irreparably damage. Natissa had every right to be impressed. I'd built that thing to last.

So why was I so horrified to see it sitting there in near-mint condition?

"Your ladyship, if you would-" Bedivire tugged at Natissa's sleeve. "We must find another way out of here!"

"Find another way out? Whatever for?"

"We can't go back the way we came! That winged statue ghost is still out there!"

Natissa was still staring dreamily at the Light. "Oh... all right. I think I saw a tunnel there, on the other side of the conveyor. Let's explore it."

Casting one last look over her shoulder, Natissa led the group out of my "Inner Sanctum."

I should have followed her. I probably would have been able to kill her right then if I had. But I couldn't move. Like Natissa before me, I was glued to the spot, mesmerized by the slightly dulled gleam of the Light of Judgement's polylueridia casing. The building had collapsed, but it survived.

Something survived.

That was more unsettling than any of the destruction I'd witnessed, and when I made my way out of the tower hours later, it was still gnawing at me.

***

Let him do it, I told myself.

Let him try and end the world and see if he gets any freaking further than I did.

Let him beat his thick head against the wide-as-it-is-high wall of eternity in a pathetic attempt to crack it.

Sitting in Natissa's room, watching her delicately flip through the pages of a fashion booklet, I found myself edging dangerously close to another breakdown. I'd received my first taste of fear when, lying broken and bleeding on the operating table I'd defected trying to avoid, I saw the hollow-eyed, nearly-dead Esper with whose magic powers I would soon be infused floating eerily in a jar of bile-colored jelly. My first taste of sense-stealing anger had come to me on the Floating Continent, when my dear Emperor thanked me for years of loyal service by trying to kill me because I'd outlasted my usefulness. Now I was getting my first taste of depression. I didn't like it.

There was no way I could have been wrong about everything. Death was still the inevitable outcome of every birth. Eventual corrosion the outcome of every human creation. But it survived. Something I made had contradicted everything I stood for, and barring tearing the Light of Judgement to pieces, there was nothing I could do about it.

I worked too damn hard on that thing to destroy it.

But that was the point, wasn't it? That even my work was futile? That even my life, as full of fun experiments and treacherous emperors as it may have been, would be forgotten by time, remembered only by pompous historians who found broken and inaccurate records of my deeds in the crumbling pages of forgotten books?

But it survived.

And as long as it survived, I survived.

When I'd welcomed the sixteen people who'd come to kill me into my home, I thought we'd had an agreement. They'd kill me, proving that even the struggling of someone endowed with all the magic of the world was fruitless. In the process, they'd destroy magic. They'd destroy my tower, erasing all proof of my being from history. Eventually, they'd die, leaving nothing behind to certify that any of us had ever been here. My monument to nonexistence would be completed in my absence.

How could those unfathomable morons have neglected to break my deadliest weapon!

If I was as wrong as I feared, it meant my bet with Wrexsoul was a sure win. If his goal was to start a war that would end the world, and the world couldn't be ended, he'd backed himself into a narrow, inescapable corner. No matter what the smug bastard did, he and his war wouldn't do any lasting damage to anybody. In a few years, or maybe a few centuries since it didn't really matter, Figaro and Jidoor would be on good terms again, bad feelings forgotten by all but a few overzealous citizens. So my pride was safe, and my self-concept was evaporating faster than my corpse.

Crud. What a mess.

I wasn't about to let Wrexsoul win the bet. The last thing I needed right now was someone else boasting victory over my sinister ideals.

But if he lost, it meant everything I believed was groundless.

I clenched my ghostly fists and began beating my wings so furiously that Natissa felt the change in temperature and put on a sweater. Right now, my mind was as blurry as her distorted painting of Figaro desert. One thing, and one thing only, was clear. I wouldn't have gone anywhere near that tower if I hadn't made that bet with Wrexsoul. I never would have seen any of this. I probably would have still been in the Phantom Forest, sitting against a tree and laughing my fool head off... if it hadn't been for Wrexsoul. This was all his fault.

Wrexsoul had to pay.