“Tenth God, Last Judge, First Cold, He-Who-Ends, Master of Time, hear my words and answer my prayer. Please, please just let me die,”- The final prayer of too many souls, and the first prayer of one in particular.
“You disgust me,” hissed Isabelle as she stared down at her own reflection in the lake of blood.
“How could you let yourself be outmaneuvered by that sniveling plagiarist? Has captivity dulled your wits to the point that a believable lie is beyond your faculties? To speak the truth, let alone admit weakness, before those masked egomaniacs was of the highest idiocy! At best, they’ll use false promises of aid in escaping the Tenth’s fetters as a lever; at worst, you’ve given them a damn good reason to dispose of you!”
She began pacing back and forth across the crimson pool, stirring up a wake of ripples that grew into churning waves. “Blatant lies would be more dangerous in the long term. If they learned of my bargain with Time while I was pretending to aid them, I’d automatically be a spy and a traitor. Offering an answer they could swallow was the best option available, especially since there was always a slim chance they actually would help me. Besides, it was better to keep them focused on me and continue dismissing Cole and Natalie.”
“Stop deluding yourself!” She snarled. “The best way to protect them was to feign cooperation! Why go after a god-shackled prototype and Dracon’s missing treasure when your secrets were on the negotiation table?”
“Negotiations might not be over. The knowledge I have is priceless, especially to them. Besides, I need not be the one strung along with false promises. I can wring much from them with just tastes of my secrets. Perhaps acquiring a body or even breaking the Tenth God’s hold over me?”
Isabelle scoffed at her own naivety. “You can’t actually be that deluded! The mind games you inflicted on Wolfgang won’t be enough, plagiarist or not, he’ll figure out there is no geas, just his own paranoia working against him. In fact, considering how he beat you, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already realized your oh-so-brilliant machination. Undermining the value of your cooperation is key to his survival, and the little insect has shown a remarkable skill for persisting against all odds! You need to assume he’s wheedling the Troupe into deciding you’re just another asset, not a potential partner. After all, he must be good at that sort of simpering, considering he earned some measure of Igori’s favor.”
She paused in her pacing and stared up at the empty darkness overhead. After a moment of silent contemplation, she whispered. “I don’t need to play the Troupe’s game to win, just to buy time. Cole and Natalie will find me soon enough.”
“Really? This is how far you’ve fallen? Relying on your pet project and dullest student? Face it, those two have made you weak.”
“Those two have made me a person again!” Isabelle snarled. “Without them, I’d be just like those masks in the mirror! A preening psychotic with monstrous delusions seeking the power to mutilate the world into a shape as ugly as they are.”
As her words finished ringing out across the lake of blood, a snide remark slipped past her lips and right between her ribs. “Isn’t that what you already are?”
Something between a scoff and a sob escaped Isabelle. “Except I am powerless over my own fate, let alone the worlds.”
Once again looking down at her reflection, she studied the pale wrath she’d become. How much had she struggled? How many centuries had she lived? How much had she achieved? How many secrets were hers and hers alone? How little it now seemed to matter.
Her bare feet slowly sank into the crimson pool, followed shortly after by the rest of her as she descended into the blood. Deep red swallowed her, and she knew only darkness; darkness she’d crafted as both a shield against the future and a shroud covering the past. For the lake of blood hid a secret, one she’d never told a soul, living or dead.
Mindscapes were something instinctively created, the subconscious and unconscious using the materials offered by the conscious mind to paint a miniature world within themselves. It inherently reflected the mind it represented and could tell anyone with the right understanding much about the owner of the mindscape.
As a young vampire, Isabelle refused to tolerate this weakness and, through great effort, crafted a shell around her inner world, a shell that reflected who she sought to be rather than who she actually was. An expanse of red reflection, a space of vampiric majesty that would shift at her any whim, and tell all who dared enter her mind that she was a monolith of cold crimson clarity. Now with nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to, Isabelle Gens Silva let herself pierce the shell she’d worked so hard to make, and sink down into who she’d fought so hard not to be.
The first part to return to her was the smell. Drying herbs, medicinal alcohol, and a melange of exotic substances, all layered over the ever-present odor of old limestone. Reaching out without even opening her eyes, Isabelle ran gentle fingers over a stained and pitted countertop. She knew every groove, bump, whorl, and crack in the treated wood by heart. It was afterall, the first thing she’d ever truly memorized. Taking a breath, uselessly filling her lungs with all the scents of a past she’d failed to forget, Isabelle finally looked at her surroundings.
She stood behind the counter of an old apothecary, a cramped building with far too many shelves carrying more bottles, urns, and packages than was wise. Herbs dangled from a low ceiling stained with the residue of hundreds of noxious smoke clouds. Similarly, the stone floor was pitted and patinated by so many spills and dropped samples. A heavy wooden door with poorly kept hinges stood sentinel at the apothecary’s far end, and a few dirty windows with cloudy glass panes let only dim streams of sunlight enter the building. All together, the apothecary was a dingy, damaged, and rather disgusting place no self-respecting alchemist or herbalist would deign to buy materials from. It was also the first, and for a very, very long time, the only home Isabelle had ever known.
Over five hundred years ago, she’d been born and then discarded. Just another orphan in a time and a place where there was little enough for children that were actually loved, let alone those left behind by tragedy or simple callousness. Yet by the merit of the little kindness her hometown could spare, and her own quick wits, she’d survived long enough to catch the eye of an old fool in need of an assistant. Parzius had been his name, and he’d been a poor apothecary, a worse alchemist, but somehow an almost decent father-figure.
He’d taken her in after finding her picking some of his favored wild herb patches, and did his best to both raise and teach her. She quickly learned everything he had to offer, then started discovering by herself more about his craft than he’d ever thought possible. A feat he’d taken in stride, mainly since it let him delegate most of his work to her. Still, Parzius had been good to her, and the thirteen years she spent as his “student” and assistant had been the nice kind of dull.
That peaceful time ended when the people of her hometown stoned him to death for a crime he confessed to, but wasn’t even smart enough to commit. Parzius wasn’t even a hedge mage, let alone capable of summoning a minor demon like she’d managed to. Isabelle fled that town the next day, seeking knowledge and power until she caught the attention of another old man, this one with red eyes and the wisdom of centuries.
With a sigh, Isabelle allowed herself to slump forward, her head resting on the countertop. How long had it been since she allowed herself such a… human display? Turning her neck so her cheek rested on the old wood, she looked at the counter’s end where two objects that did not belong sat awaiting her. The first was a blood-red flower growing from a statue planter depicting a black cat curled up around the flower. Reaching out, Isabelle gently stroked the crimson lily-of-the-valley. Why had she never bothered to tell Natalie she was calling the plants within her own mindscape by the wrong name?
Looking past the flower, she saw another statue, this one depicting a pair of strong hands held out as if to offer something. Carved from precious marble, the hands looked as if they’d been shattered, only to be rejoined together using silver, which now gleamed in the statue’s sealed cracks. In the right hand was a large gemstone, a diamond, cut into an anatomically correct heart. In the left hand was a worn and dented metal hourglass amulet.
Isabelle traced the marble fingers with one hand, the red petals with another, and began to cry. She wept openly, unashamedly, like a child too young and too hurt to know better. Here in this earliest of memories, real hot, salty tears flowed down her face. Between sobs, she managed to whisper a plea she’d dare not utter outside her most private sanctuary.
“Cole, Natalie, please, please help me!”
The heavy door to the apothecary swung open with a squeal of rusty hinges, and a cold winter wind flowed into the shop. Bolting upright in shock, Isabelle stared at the door as a shrouded figure stepped inside. After shutting the door and banishing the bitter gale, the cloaked stranger pulled down their hood, revealing pale, polished bone. It was a skeleton one with silver fire in its eyesockets. More than that, it was a skeleton of her own creation: Cole’s.
“You!” She hissed, as fear and the pain of isolation gave way to the anger of the violated. “You’ve come to offer me another devil’s deal when I’m at my lowest?”
The skeleton reached up with bony hands she’d designed and stroked its chin. “I came because I was called, Isabelle.”
Master Time spoke in a strange, resonating parody of Cole’s voice, which only incensed her more.
Gesturing at the god’s skeletal avatar, Isabelle snapped. “And what is this? A further way to mock me and my work? To wear Cole’s body in death, instead of life?”
The Tenth God looked down at himself before replying. “I thought of it as a compromise. To you, I appear as Cole, but I hoped this more… featureless form would be less distressing. I apologize that it isn’t.”
Isabelle was taken aback by this, but still managed to hold onto her anger. “I called to my partners, not a cosmic force with delusions of personhood!”
“One is my paladin, the other bears my stigma, and neither is yet able to help you. In honor of all the good they do under my banner, I’ve come in their place.”
“Ghoulshit! You’re here to use my moment of weakness as leverage!” Isabelle spat. Then, with a sneer, she added. “Fell, fair; they’re just labels you happily supply mortals with to hide that all of you gods are the same!”
Cole’s skeleton held up a finger. “Firstly, this is anything but a moment of weakness. To me, you seem stronger now than even when you were at the height of your material and magical power.”
Master Time held up another bony finger. “Secondly, I have come to continue our negotiations, but not because I think I’ll find an advantage. In fact, it's quite the opposite, I’ve come when circumstances give you the upper hand.”
“What? Why?” She asked with uncharacteristic confusion.
“You are one of the few mortals I struggle to be impartial with. But out of empathy for your current sorrow and to respect the genuine love you share with two of my favored, I am willing to make the effort.”
Isabelle scoffed. “So that's it then? Pity for a sobbing weakling and the need to appease two favored tools is enough to get the so-called Last Judge to coddle me?”
The skeleton shook its skull in clear annoyance. “You misunderstand me. The extenuating circumstances are not enough to sway me in your favor, but merely enough to let me overlook how much I am disgusted by you.”
Venom strong enough to leech into the world’s bones filled the god’s last statement. Pointing an accusatory phalange at her heart, Master Time growled like an approaching avalanche. “I have seen the totality of you and your work, Isabelle, and I find both utterly abhorrent. So much pain, so much suffering, both past, present, and future, all tracing to your avarice. Was it not enough that you extended your own allotment of life by stealing from others? Did you really need to take the perverse scheme of a treacherous tyrant and turn it into an excuse to meddle with the nature of death and souls?”
Isabelle could not remember the last time she’d been chastised like a foolish child, and the shock of a god speaking to her so was almost enough to stifle her anger, almost.
“What I discovered will free humanity! ” She seethed. “Let us evolve into something greater, something no longer shackled by you or the rest of the gods! We’d be lords of the Aether, not slaves of the Beyond!”
Master Time icily replied. “Mortals are far from enslaved by the Beyond. But since you’ve broached the topic of that particular sin, must I point out what Flavius Gens Dracon originally commissioned from you? What you were happy to make for him before your own hunger for perfection got the better of you. That crimson-marked usurper and kinslayer wanted better livestock. Immortal slaves who could be devoured by him and his vassals over and over, existing solely to be victims of fell hungers.”
Isabelle flinched, but recovered quickly. “It would have stopped the Duchies from preying upon mortals. Besides, I realized the true potential of my research, how it could be used to make not just Dracon but the entire curse of vampirism obsolete. Surely that is sweet enough fruit to erase its original bitter seed!”
“Fruit that never came close to flowering, let alone forming. But Dracon’s desire did, at least for a while. You never did tell Cole that what he experienced in Igori’s larder was the fate you planned for him. That he and how many other homunculi you made were meant to be tortured, broken souls robbed of even the freedom to die.”
That stung like a silver blade to the gut, but it didn’t stop her from trying to shift things back in her favor. “My plans had grown far past that before the bones you’ve stolen were even designed! In fact, why are you focusing on crimes not committed instead of services rendered? You owe me for both the cure I created and all my greatest creation has done for you!”
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The temperature in the apothecary dropped so harshly that Isabelle’s throat nearly froze shut. As she coughed up icy shards, Master Time stepped towards the counter with all the irresistible force of a glacier carving apart a mountain range. “Do not dare to even imply that the credit for Cole’s deeds belongs to you. Neither should you assume I am blind to your machinations. I am fully aware of what you slipped into your cure.”
Isabelle hid her surprise behind a sneer. “It’s harmless! The inoculated won’t even notice when it's activated.”
“That may be so, but it doesn’t change the fact that you put a weapon inside of medicine. Medicine meant to stop a plague that you are partially responsible for, mind you. So if anything, your efforts with the cure merely lessened your moral debt.”
The high-handed judgment in the god’s words rankled Isabelle. “A weapon for your war! One you’ve so eagerly fed my darling into over and over! Tell me, how many times has he died in your name?”
“Less than in yours.” The god replied dryly.
Isabelle flinched. “That’s not what I-”
“You made him your champion, which in the Duchy terms means a magically-enhanced gladiator, one condemned to endless pit fights against myriad necromanctic constructs,” snapped Master Time. “A fate admittedly more preferable to what he faced at Igori’s hands after the consequences of all your choices fell upon him. Can you even comprehend what he experienced? To be forced to suffer and die again and again, denied the one true freedom all mortals possess?”
She tried to muster up enough rage to answer these accusations, but the cold truth carried in them fell upon her temper like wet snow. “But… but you did the same, you turned him into your paladin and…”
Her words sputtered out as Master Time came to stand directly opposite her, his skeletal form casting a long shadow over the stained countertop. “I will not deny that I’ve gained much from him accepting my mantle and following my creed, as has your world and the billion souls inhabiting it. But the good that an unmortal paladin could do was not the original reason I offered him a piece of my own power.”
Bony hands settled on the countertop, and the pale fire in the skull’s eyes bored seared into Isabelle’s mind. “When he first came to my shrine, Cole was a haggard and hopeless creature. A broken soul in every sense, marred both inside and out by all he’d suffered. He came to that mountain-top holy ground seeking a boon from me, one he feared I would never give him.”
Guilt pressed down on Isabelle until she could do little else but stare at her own feet. “He wanted you to save me, either by freeing my soul or properly resurrecting me.”
“That is the lie he lets everyone, including himself, believe. No, Cole came to me to die, to have me end his existence once and for all.”
“W-what?” she managed to rasp.
“He was tortured by his past and terrified of his future, convinced that he was condemned to an eternity of just more pain and loneliness. So he asked me to be merciful, to end the unnatural existence you’d shackled him with.”
Master Time looked down the countertop to where the small statue representing her love for Cole sat. “What he is, is an abomination, but who he is, is remarkable. A true artificial soul, one created with corrupt intentions and crafted through foul methods, yet somehow managing to become a truly good person. I could never blame him for his existence, nor bear the idea of destroying a soul of such beauty. So instead of giving the gift he sought from me, I offered him a purpose, a reason to stay alive long enough to find another of his own choosing.”
All of this settled on Isabelle, and she half-slumped against the bottle rack behind her. A deep, bitter pain lanced through her heart as if she’d been staked. The idea of the first person to truly love her in such a long time, the one who helped her start becoming more than an avaricious monster obsessed only with knowledge and power, had sought annihilation, was almost too much for her to bear.
“Can you understand now why I look upon you with such disgust, Isabelle Gens Silva?” The Tenth God asked. “The spiritual vivisections and other crimes you committed in this pursuit were wretched enough. But so much personal tragedy, so much sorrow has metastasized out of your actions in creating an unmortal homunculus, and yet you still want to continue down this path, thinking that somehow the final results will justify all this suffering.”
Backed into a corner and faced with a god’s judgment, Isabelle couldn’t help but fall back on a familiar mix of pride and denial. “Things should have been different. If Igori and Dracon hadn’t interfered, none of this would have happened! My work can still reshape the world and make it better! I can’t discard all the progress I made just because events unfolded so terribly!”
Even to her, these words sounded more like an arrogant child’s excuses rather than the truth, but she just couldn’t stop herself from digging herself deeper. “This isn’t my fault! If anything, it’s yours! Without death, without entropy, without you, my work would never be necessary!”
A silence heavy as permafrost settled on the apothecary, and Isabelle briefly wondered if Master Time might just decide smiting her was worth the gate debt. But instead of sending her soul screaming into the Infinite Hells or just erasing her from existence, the Tenth God merely shook his borrowed skull and sighed in weary disappointment.
“It seems words won’t be enough to convince you. I’d imagined they’d be insufficient, especially from me, but I had hoped your intellect might triumph over your pride. But it appears I must dispense with the pretense of debate and instead show you the truths behind my actions.”
To Isabelle’s surprise and horror, the apothecary of her inner mindscape melted away, leaving her and the god standing at the foot of the Thoas Citadel. They were at the scene of her death, where she’d been impaled and burned alive at Dracon’s orders.
As Isabelle stared up her worst memory, Master Time gestured at the unfolding horror. “You speak of things only going wrong because of the ambitions of others, but when has that ever not been the case? Brilliant ideas and high ideals are rarely enough to protect against the darkness in mortal souls. Especially when the powerful covet or curse what another has. So let me tell you this with brutal honesty, the ways these events unfolded is practically the best possible outcome. All other paths led to destinies that would make you claw your own eyes out.”
Her instinct was to deny his words, but pure curiosity triumphed over spite. “You can see the different outcomes? The different futures that might have unfolded?”
“Yes,” he replied simply. “But I wouldn’t even need to in this case, as I’ve seen this scenario many times already.”
“What?!”
“You can’t really imagine you’re the first in all the infinite multiverse to make these discoveries? While I admit it is vanishingly rare, even in parts of the cosmos richer in magic, it does happen, and it almost always ends poorly for everyone involved, and by everyone, I mean entire cultures and worlds. Sometimes the secrets of unmortality are kept to a select few, and that just inevitably ends in constant calamitious power-struggles between insane post-humans. Other times, the knowledge is spread freely and eagerly. Mostly, that ends with life just becoming the cheapest of resources, that is, until that world learns the true importance of soul hollows, but by then it's already too late.”
“That… that’s impossible.” Isabelle rasped, as her mind grappled with these revelations. “There should have been evidence in the Beyond, signs of similar constructs and their numen.”
“Yes, there should be.” Master Time replied dryly. “Which should tell you much about the long-term viability of your plans. One or two stable unmortal homunculi isn’t much of a problem, but once that power falls into the wrong hands, or even too many hands, calamity is practically inevitable.”
The ugly scene of Isabelle’s execution faded away, leaving them standing back atop her lake of blood. Black ice spread out from where Master Time stood in a crude snowflake pattern, and he stared at her like an expectant teacher. “Now do you understand?”
Cold logic and fiery defiance warred for dominance in the former countess. She could understand the Tenth God's reasoning now, but didn’t want to. Jutting out her chin, she spat one last piece of defiance. “Do you? Do you understand what all these struggles mean? Across countless worlds and countless peoples, there is a never-ending war to defeat you. To escape the chains of mortality and be free of the inevitability of entropy!”
Master Time folded his skeletal hands behind his back and stared up at the empty void overhead in an unmistakable sign of exhausted annoyance. That a god was willing to adopt such mannerisms because of her brought Isabelle a strange sort of pride.
After a moment of silent contemplation, the god of death and time met her gaze and said. “I could cite the arguments made by millions of my priests over millions of years. I could try to explain how beginnings require endings, or how the pressure of my existence is what spurs on evolution and change. Perhaps, if I thought it would be in any way productive, I’d speak to how death can be a mercy. But I know none of that will be sufficient, so let me show you what ‘freedom’ from my presence means.”
The empty sky of Isabelle’s mindscape turned a dull white, and she instinctively flinched away from the uncanny glow. When she reopened her eyes, no longer did she stand amidst a lake of blood, but instead hung in a grey expanse that expanded in every direction far past the limits of her senses. Everything was a static, undifferentiated void of milky vagueness that pulsed slightly with a constant thrum of dim light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
Master Time stood at her side and reached out with one hand to gently flick what she’d thought to be empty air. Long, spindly cracks spread out in three dimensions from where he’d touched, creating a strangely symmetrical sphere of damage. After a moment, the cracks started to recede, the imperfection in endless grey dwindling away to non-existence. This strange sight offered a modicum of context, and Isabelle looked at her surroundings with mild understanding.
“We’re inside a crystal, a perfectly formed crystal of incredible size.”
“Yes, but also no, simply due to your words being insufficient.” The god replied. “I am showing you a universe where my presence is virtually non-existent. Here, entropy and even time are pitiful, alien forces that merely brush against this firmament instead of being core elements. What you see around us is not so much a crystal as a cosmic totality. Bereft of my influence, this universe is a place of static order. All that it contains is more of what you now see, an unchanging, sterile infinity that is so uniform in its content it might as well be empty. There is no death here, no endings, just a quiet nothingness content in its empty perfection.”
Isabelle stared out at the milky grey expanse, her normally unflappable intellect struggling to comprehend the sheer scale and bizarreness of what she was being shown. Still, an argument was slowly percolating in her brain; a refutation to the god’s argument, of how such cosmic extremes had little bearing on her situation. But before she could marshal her thoughts, Master Time snapped his fingers and the crystalline infinity shattered.
In its place was the night’s sky in its purest glory, the sort one only witnessed from atop the highest peaks. Yet as Isabelle stared at the uncountable stars in every direction, she quickly realized this wasn’t her night sky; the constellations didn’t match, and the great celestial river that cut across the heavens was tinged red. Looking away from this uncanny sight, she found a pink and grey marble floating just out of reach. As she started to examine its small blemished surface, the marble suddenly started growing, and fast. It went from a mottled dot to a melon, then a looming presence rapidly filling her vision. This wasn’t a small object growing, but a colossal one getting closer.
Soon, the pink and grey sphere took up half the sky, and staring at it, she realized what exactly the Tenth God was showing her. It was a world, an entire planet viewed from the cosmic void, the realm of the stars. She’d read accounts of those daring and mad spellweavers who’d found ways to get a similar view of Vardis. Accounts that spoke of the world as if it were some great blue-green jewel that shone beautifully in the firmament. But the celestial sphere laid out before her was a far cry from those poetic descriptions. In place of oceans or land were mottled sheets of ugly pink that stretched the length of continents. Lesionous canyons and wrinkled deserts filled the hearts of these sheets, but at their edges, where they clashed with their fellows, scabrous mountain ranges of grey and yellow deformation pressed up into the sky. No white clouds swam over this malformed surface, nor were there glowing pinpricks to mark the greatest of cities, instead sections of the land visibly wriggled, opening up and squeezing shut nation-sized wounds in the world’s surface.
As Isabelle drank in this alien vista, her centuries of anatomical study and flesh crafting framed this planet in a context she wouldn’t allow herself to accept. To her trained eye, this world looked like a tumor, a metastasized mass allowed to grow well past the point where its host should have expired. Yet that couldn’t be the case, could it? No process or phenomena, magical or otherwise, would result in something a millionth the size and complexity on display before her.
“Come and see, come and see a world that has banished me.” Echoed the distant voice of a god.
“Death has no hold here, so life is left to its own devices. Growing, spreading, consuming, mutating, and… degrading. The people who ruled this plane were greater masters of magic than even Iskandar’s kingdom at its height. With every turning of the age, they grew and grew, in wealth, power, and every other criterion except those that bring happiness. But as they rose to dizzying and increasingly unstable heights, the inevitability of a collapse became ever more evident. So they put all they’d amassed, all they’d learned, to ensuring not even I could take what they coveted.”
As the full horror of this tumor world sank into Isabelle’s mind, the vision melted away, leaving her once again back at the lake of blood. Master Time awaited her, his silver-fire eyes reflecting in the crimson mirror upon which they stood. “Do you see now? I am not a collar around life’s neck but a necessity for there to be life.”
Isabelle silently stared at the dancing stars within the skull’s empty sockets for a long moment before rasping. “I do, but that doesn’t change that you are a collar around mine.”
Her eyes narrowed into a glare. “You said you’d come here to help me, but so far all you’ve done is castigate and criticize. If that’s all you have to offer, then get out of my mind!”
Master Time shook his head. “I was also offering context, so that you might better understand the stakes regarding the creation of unmortal homunculi, and realize how accommodating I am willing to be despite your actions.”
The shock of so many revelations had passed enough for Isabelle to bristle at this ridiculous statement. “Accommodating? Accommodating! In what way?!”
“In the deal I came here to strike with you.”
A hiss escaped Isabelle’s bared teeth. “So you did come to offer a devil’s deal.”
“Yes, but as I have been trying to say, one that favors you immensely.”
Crossing her arms before her, the furious former countess then spat. “Well? What are the terms?”
“Help me ensure nothing like Cole is ever created again, and in exchange, I’ll give you the same accommodation I offer him.”
She scoffed. “The mantle of paladin? You think that’s compensation for giving up my greatest research?”
Master Time stared silently at her until tightly replying. “No, not the mantle of paladin. I mean, ignoring the fact that you should not exist, and offering you my protection and patronage.”
Isabelle spat. “That’s even less of a reason!”
“I’m offering you a choice, Isabelle. Either you cling to the work that could doom your world in hopes that the Troupe proves to be trustworthy allies, and that your partners will forgive such madness, or instead you finally commit to your new path and have a chance at happiness.”
The idea of how Cole and Natalie might react if she really did manage to strike a deal with the Troupe was painful. Clearly seeing an opportunity, the Tenth God continued. “I’ve been seeking an accord with you, Isabelle, not as a way to control you but to simply obtain guarantees that you’ll stay the course your partners have set you on. There is much good you can do with their help, and I wish to see your brilliance shine unblemished by the monster you once were.”
Isabelle let out a bitter sigh before asking. “What does your ‘protection’ and ‘patronage’ look like?”
“To start, I’ll tell you that Cole and Natalie are close. They are both facing great challenges, and it will take much for them to rescue you, but they are coming.”
A great weight fell from her shoulders, and a shuddering exhale escaped her before she collected herself to ask. “Why tell me that? We’ve not struck our second deal?”
Master Time simply replied. “Because you’ve already made up your mind.”
The former countess snarled. “Damn you for being right.”
“I usually am.”
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