15[20:15] The red star rises, staining the empty channel crimson. Where the shadow's light falls, blank space is replaced with rough, painterly fields of green and brown smoldering beneath a black-red sky. The memory of thistledown drifts through the sulfurous air like snow. Acrid and metallic notes overwhelm all the senses as the shadow resolves into Prince Balor, sword and steed. [20:15] 14Mmmmm. 15[20:16] Cethleann sits sprawled on the ground behind him, the battlefield stopping at her fingertips, a great gray emptiness beyond. 15[20:17] "I cannot speak the name. I cannot speak the name--" [20:18] 14Mildly: "I can." [20:18] 5The corner of Xu Sim's mouth twitches. [20:19] 10Jai swallows. Throat gone dry, it makes a faint click. [20:21] <@Ferrinus> 12Thrumming with essence, Keldar's sword and shield make faint vwhim noises as they swing through the air. The Dawn Caste squares up. [20:23] 14Stranger looks out into the emptiness, still sitting next to Cethleann, not turning to face Balor. "And here...we...go." [20:30] <@Ferrinus> 12As the shadow of Balor reveals itself and assumes its full height, Keldar's brow burns and his eyes flash. A phantom knight, heavily armored and bearing a great shield, rises in red-orange flames behind him, but Keldar finds himself twisting his hands past each other on the recombined hilt of a grand daiklave. 15[20:41] Stranger and Xia Lan take Cethleann's side while the rest of the circle prepares to face down Balor's memory. His voice is unmistakably familiar, disregarding the acoustics of the field. "Treason's heavy hand shall raise no prosperous blade against the wicked!" [21:04] <@Ferrinus> 12The mercenary-adventurer-guard captain's the first into the fray, and he and Balor are immediately exchanging momentous, thunderous blows. Keldar roars as Terminus kicks blood-red sparks off wooden armor, then snarls as the raksha prince's own sword kicks sparks off - Keldar's bare flesh? Each combatant only looks bigger and meaner, Balor's shadow stretching even longer across the [21:04] <@Ferrinus> 12expanse and Keldar releasing gusts of short-lived solar flame with every exhalation. 15[21:18] While Balor's blade dances among the Solar warriors, Cethleann clenches her fists. "He turned his back on us. He abandoned us for power. For safety." 15[21:20] Stranger and Xia Lan can feel betrayal well in their hearts... [21:22] 14Stranger, unperturbed: "Power and safety are compelling things. Was it against his nature to choose them? Did he change as well?" 15[21:23] Cethleann: "A conqueror! A king! Turned away by fear." [21:24] 14Stranger: "Yes. Such has happened before, and will happen again. I wonder, though: has the steady gaze you've levelled on him made you overlook yourself?" [21:26] 13Xia Lan thinks of corpses in the desert, now long picked over by other bandits and bleached by the sun. "Fear of what? To abandon you, to change..." [21:30] 10Jai finds himself in the middle of a vicious four-way tussle, and it's all he can do to keep up with Keldar's mastery of the blade and Xu Sim's flowing Crane stances. The most he can hope for is to keep this shadow of Balor distracted long enough for one of the others to strike a telling blow, or wait for an opportunity to present itself like with the Mask...  [21:39] 14Stranger: "You've been holding on to a lot for a very long time. Center to it, I think, is -- and this isn't going to sound very romantic -- the idea of accounting. There is a specific debt you're owed from his betrayal, both in thought and deed, and it has been, let's say, gaining interest. And there's a certain sort of fairness to that. But fairness isn't the be-all, end-all of [21:39] who and what we are; a fanatical devotion to fairness can, in the end, trap us. And usury can hurt the lender as much as the buyer. Even if they get their due. Perhaps especially if they do. If you don't want to be this person anymore, you're not only going to have to rethink love and vengeance -- you're going to have to rethink time, and debt." 15[21:46] Cethleann: "You would have me abandon justice for peace?" [21:48] 14Stranger: "First, and far more importantly, I'd have you think more about the nouns than the verb." [21:55] 13Xia Lan simply watches and listens. How she speaks is more important than what she's saying, right now - and she can get something to work with this soon. Regrets, not - this twisted shape of... [22:13] 14A wave of...weaponized fear?...washes over them, and Stranger simply rolls his shoulders. "I believe that we will win," 14he says, squinting off into nothing. "And I include you in the 'we.'" [22:15] 5Xu Sim sidesteps "Balor's" great attack - landing on the great warrior's very sword, for a single heartbeat. "You are projecting," 5he observes - directed at Cethleann - "You have always been projecting." 5Xu Sim completes his remark with a kickflip to the warrior's face. "The people of Creation are worthy. Consider Great Crane's lesson in true love." [22:28] <@Ferrinus> 12As Cethleann's fury breaks like a wave against Keldar's sword, the warrior takes a deep breath. It's innervating, causing a halo of golden essence to manifest briefly behind his head as his lungs fill. Then his eyes fill with flame and he's in motion. [22:41] <@Ferrinus> 12It's not so much a warrior as a five-haloed sun that goes barreling into the faerie lord. For about two seconds, there's genuine back-and-forth - strike and parry and ripose and counter-parry - but then some kind of balance tips and Keldar's just sawing through the great antlered-shadow, sending sprays of red-burning blood in every which direction as he bears the memory of Balor [22:41] <@Ferrinus> 12to his knees. The Dawn looks almost spent; even his anima's merely a crimson blaze that covers him from head to foot rather than a pillar looming across the entire battlefield. [22:42] 14Conversationally to Cethleann, as the Sun rises: "He's a difficult man to like. I suspect he's a very difficult man to love. It's fitting that they're fighting, I think." 15[22:51] Cethleann: "They should strike each other down." [22:51] 14Stranger: "And but for a single sliding blow, they might have." [22:51] "And that's the difference between the past and the future." [22:52] 5Xu Sim smiles at Stranger's banter - faintly audible over the din of battle - and his eyes go wide as the Burning Star of Balor, the cursed elf-gaze, turns its way. He's faced it before. This time, he leaps over the scything torrent of fiery unreality, as it doesn't so much as singe his pants. 15[22:53] Cethleann: "Bullies and braggarts and thugs." [22:54] 14Stranger: "Rogues and heroes and kings." [22:54] "They say coins have two sides, but really, they have three." [22:54] "You just need to practice the edge case." [22:55] 13Xia Lan: "Slim as that edge can be." 15[22:55] "I don't reside on the thin line between love and hate. We must be all one thing, or all the other." [22:56] 14Stranger smiles softly. The small victory here is in the 'we.' [23:03] 10Keldar's on Balor with an impossible assault, Jai can barely follow their motions, the attack and counterstrike, counter-counterstrike, counter-counter-counterstrike. It's Creation's fastest game of Gateway and it's being played for what might well be the fate of a nation. And Jai sees an opening, a hole that Keldar can't exploit alone, but with a little help— A shout forces its way out of his mouth as he charges in. "I'LL [23:03] 10 PLUCK OUT YOUR EYE!" [23:04] 10But as quickly as the window opened, it closed; Jai was a moment too slow on the attack, and he's locked in a clash with Balor. "XU SIM! WE HAVE HIM ON THE ROPES!"  [23:22] 13She abruptly changes tack. "I don't think we've spent much time speaking of Creation, here. Not recently, not in any way that counts. But the coin - it reminded me. And Xu Sim's words reminded me. I believe you once referred to it as - a "shit lagoon"? Or similar? Even the land can change, given time." [23:23] 14Stranger: "She's right, you know. As the learned raksha said, 'there are other worlds than these' -- and that cuts both ways." [23:23] 14He pauses and leans forward. "That's not what I really want to talk about, however." [23:24] "Balor. [23:24] "I can say his name. And I am sorry, but you will have to hear it. [23:24] "Balor has died, and Balor has changed. The two were related. They weren't your fault. He is not the creature looming behind us, about to die to three men that, let's be honest with each other, you don't respect. I do, but I don't blame you. That creature no longer exists. And, I think, you wouldn't love it if it did. It's over there for a reason. It's not over here. [23:24] "Creation is...well, there's a lot to say. You are drawn to it even if you destroy it; I am fated to be reborn into it even if I have no interest in such a thing. He's the Emissary now; he died, he changed. You might hate him or love him for it -- or both -- and I encourage you to judge him for it. But you can't make him the entirety of your story. You can't have him be the thing that [23:24] shows up in the dreamscape with a burning roar. You especially can't have it be this version of him. He is the Emissary now. He is not Balor. [23:24] "What I'd ask you to understand, here, at the possible end of the world, is that regret can be a good thing. Regret can be something to embrace. Regret means moving something that's your present into your past, passing judgment on it, moving on, evaluating yourself in the exchange but refusing to live only in that moment forever. [23:24] "Regret isn't fun, and I'm not going to pretend it is. But it's preferable to loving and hating someone whose name you can't even say. And it's preferable to being someone you can't live with. [23:24] "I have experience with that." [23:26] 14Behind them, an eye closes. [23:27] 5Xu Sim extends both arms and flexes each muscle in his body as he prepares to deliver the decisive blow. He reaches back and then forward again, straight into the face of the fiend with his fingers arrayed in a crane-talon strike. Xu Sim cries wordlessly as he delivers the blow. 15[23:31] With a single fierce blow, Xu Sim gouges out Balor's terrible eye. He howls in pain, the sound shattering the fire-razed field around him and leaving him staggering over blankness. He falls to one knee, sword piercing nothing, and opens his mouth to speak. No words come; Balor dissolves upwards into emerald sparks that float on an invisible updraft. 15[23:31] Soon Keldar, Xu Sim, and Jai do the same, dissolving into motes of pure golden light. [23:31] 14Stranger smiles. Good. 15[23:32] "Death is change," muses Cethleann quietly, her face upturned, motes of light dancing in her eyes. "Is it too late to change back?" [23:33] 5It's never too late, un-thinks the un-Xu Sim. [23:34] 14Stranger takes her hand. "Someone once said there are no second acts in mortal lives. But neither you nor I are precisely mortal. And even if we were, they were wrong." 15[23:42] Cethleann: "What makes you so sure?" [23:49] "The Sun. [23:49] "Not his blessing or his power or his kindness; certainly not his exaltation. At least not directly. Do you know what I was before I was this? Before I was vanquished from Creation for so many years. I had my name written on stones, but I had no statues built of me. People whispered my name. Oh, fear, I do recall that this shade of Balor wanted to instill fear. Stranger-Visits-Heaven [23:49] knew fear well. He revelled in it. Many died. Almost as many as in this war of ours, if not so quickly. [23:49] "So what did the Sun do? When Stranger-Visits-Heaven died, he changed. This time he was bonded to a river boy who knew fishing and gossip, and a quiet family life. An agreeable creature. A creature who wasn't beholden to grinning incineration. And Stranger-Visits-Heaven, whose name marks him not as a traveler but as a tyrant, became what I am right now. But will that stick? The next [23:49] time Stranger-Visits-Heaven comes to Creation, will he be like me, or will he be like my death rictus predecessor? I don't know. All I know is that I can be different the next time I see myself. And if I can be so, mired as I am in some great cycle, you can be more. That is my great argument, Cethleann, Primrose Duchess -- if that's what you still wish to be. [23:49] "I hope you change." 14He squeezed her hand. "I hope we both change." 15[23:53] They're already dissolving into light when she replies, "So do I." 15[23:54] NEXT TIME: The death of the Emissary