“That oversight has been the bane of my existence for five thousand years,” Gilgamesh said with a sigh. “I thought I’d scored a clean victory when my army swept through Paradise, but no matter how much the gods and I both want them to stay dead, the wheel they’d built to churn humanity’s souls keeps pushing them back up. Even after I chained it to motionlessness, the pressure never ceased.”
He shook his head at Adrian. “This is how we ended up in the situation I complained about to you before. I’m the most powerful human in the world, a sorcerer king of unrivaled skill and potential, and yet I’ve been forced to spend ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my time, resources, and magic coming up with ways to keep the wheel from pushing the gods out of their graves. All the sin iron you see before you is the reason I built the Hells and Limbo in the first place, the reason I allowed Ishtar’s demons to survive at all. Do you have any idea how much work and expense it takes to keep nine different kinds of demonsenslaved? I would’ve collapsed the Hells and crushed them all ages ago if I could have, but even when it was imperfect, the sin iron they produced was the only material capable of restraining divine creations like the gods and their wheel.”
Gilgamesh smiled at his son. “I thought I’d be trapped in that stalemate forever, but then you bumbled into the picture. Thanks to your efforts, I was finally able to produce a sin-iron alloy capable of withstanding Enki’s Forge of Creation. Ifinallyhave a weapon that can destroy the creations of the gods themselves. Not merely their children or their tools but the great works that required the full effort of their pantheon to bring into existence, the infrastructure they built to change the nature of the world itself!Thatis what I forged this blade to cut, and now that the stage has been properly set…”
He let his voice trail off dramatically, his blue-gray eyes moving purposefully from Adrian to Boston to Bex and then back to Adrian again. When the Eternal King was certain they were all watching, he swung his white sword up in a flamboyant arc.
Or so it appeared, at least. Gilgamesh hadn’t set his feet or strained his muscles. There’d been no preparation, no warm-up, nothing that made it look like he wasn’t just being theatrical. But just like when he’d blown the black desert away with a sweep of his arm, the moment he swung the white blade over his head, Adrian felt that pulse of power in his chest again right before a great arc of magic flew off of Gilgamesh’s blade and into the sky.
It rocketed upward like a glowing scythe, flying higher and higher—higher than Adrian had realized the sky here went—until it crashed into the Wheel of Reincarnation. The sky-spanning creation of the gods was so huge that the hit barely looked like it’d done anything at all. Then the air was filled with the groaning creak of breaking glass as the false cycle allthe Anchors in the world had been created to stop suddenly shattered.
Adrian hadn’t realized how big the Wheel truly was until it broke. The cycle built by the gods to control all of humanity’s deaths and births exploded like a supernova, causing the hundreds of chains that used to bind it to go spinning off in all directions. The destruction whited out the sky, raining bits of crystallized… Adrian didn’t even know what it was made of, but it fell all over them like a warm, slightly stinging blizzard. It fell on the coffins of the gods, on the shining tanks Gilgamesh had made to hold his dead sons, on the food-laden table, and on Gilgamesh himself, who threw up his arms to meet the falling debris like a child celebrating the year’s first snow.
“It’s finallydone!” he shouted into the newly empty sky. “The shackles of the gods have been broken! Humanity’s stagnant souls are once again free to keep flowing toward whatever awaits them in the great beyond!”
“Doesanything await them in the great beyond?” whispered Boston, leaning closer to Adrian as Gilgamesh waved his sword around.
“Who knows?” Adrian said. “What comes after death has always been a mystery, though what I want to know is what happened before this. If the Wheel of Reincarnation that’s supposed to churn our souls has been stopped for five thousand years, where did everyone who died before now end up?”
“Here,” Gilgamesh answered, making both him and Boston jump. Adrian hadn’t realized his father could hear them, but when he looked away from his cat, Gilgamesh was already striding over like he couldn’t wait to explain.
“Human souls were never meant to reincarnate,” the king told them authoritatively. “Our reality is just one eddy in the infinite river of time and space. That’s why the gods built the Wheel in the first place. They couldn’t stand the thought oftheir favorite pets dying and passing beyond their reach, so they trapped us here like fish in a bucket. It was their greatest crime, and for eons, I was unable to do anything about it. Humans kept being born, but with the Wheel stopped, the souls of the dead could neither move forward nor go back into the system, so they built up here. That’s what all this dust is.”
Adrian stared at Gilgamesh in horror. “I thought that was all sin iron that’d worn off the chains!”
“Some of it was. Some of it wasn’t,” his father said with a shrug. “In the end, though, it’s all semantics. Sins are just the bits of people the gods deemed unacceptable and shaved off, but it’s all the same souls in the end. Their dust is all over Paradise—here, the Goddeath Wastes, the Hells, everywhere. Now, though, thanks to me, all those fragmented souls can move on as they were always meant to.” He grinned from ear to ear. “Itoldyou I was the savior of humanity!”
Adrian didn’t buy that for a second. He could acknowledge that, unlike the rest of Gilgamesh’s actions, breaking the Wheel of Reincarnation didn’t seem overtly evil. If his father was telling the truth when he said human souls were meant to move on, it could even be viewed as a net good. But while Gilgamesh had always been happy to dress himself up as humanity’s champion, Adrian had never seen his father do anything that wasn’t of direct and immediate benefit to himself, which made his grandiose language all the more suspicious.
“So what happens now?” Adrian prodded, sitting up straighter in his golden chair. “You finally broke the wheel that’s been pushing up the gods. What are you going to do next?”
“How many hours have you got?” Gilgamesh asked with a giddiness that felt oddly dangerous, like a happy drunk getting behind the wheel of a sports car. “Adrian, Adrian, Adrian, you simply cannot imagine how long I’ve dreamed of this day! How many thousands of plans I’ve made, revised, and made again.This is the culmination of my life’s work, what I killed the gods to achieve. Now that the force that’s been pushing them back toward life is gone, they’ll cower in those coffins forever, which means the undying gods are now fish inmybucket!”
He set his sword down on the table so he could rub his hands together in glee. “They’re my eternal source of quintessence now,” he said, smiling so widely that it was becoming slightly difficult to understand him. “No more constant monitoring, no more chain replacements, no more regulating every drop of liquid that enters Heaven. I’m free now,trulyfree to be the king I always dreamed of being!”
Adrian nodded. There it was. “You’re going to rule the world.”
“I’ve been doing that for eons,” his father said dismissively. “The difference now is that I can finally do itright. All of humanity’s needless wars, the short-sighted destruction of the environment, the enormous suffering caused by hunger and poverty, I’m finally free to fix it all! The only reason I put scales in humanity’s eyes to begin with was because my imperfect sin-iron chains couldn’t handle the tumult of a truly magical world, but that’s all over now. I don’t need to worry about chains or Anchors or anything anymore, which means I’m finally free to give itback.”
He swept his hand over the field of coffins covered in the glowing remnants of the Wheel.
“Just think about it,” he said, his voice quivering. “A worldwide magical society with me as its benevolent king. I would dole out magic only to those who would use it best, guide humanity through its follies like a benevolent father. In a single generation, I could eliminate all poverty, injustice, and violence. Not by changing human souls as the gods sought to, but by harnessing the power of mankind’s greed. The problem with the current world is that cruelty and selfishness are rewarded, but ifI grant magic only to the very best our species has to offer, then humanity will choose to become better on its own! I will usher in an era of peace, culture, and decency greater than any that has come before. I will clean up pollution, cure diseases, uplift the impoverished. I will create a paradise onEarth, not in a secret place known only to the gods.” He sighed happily and turned to beam at his son. “Can you imagine anything more wonderful?”
It did sound pretty great, but Adrian had already been fooled by his father’s silver tongue once. Gilgamesh’s ideals always sounded fantastic while he was pitching them, but Adrian had seen the Heaven his father had built. He’d met the selfish sorcerers, the slaving warlocks, all the chosen of Gilgamesh who treated everyone not blessed by Heaven as disposable. The king who’d built that abusive system, enslaved an entire race, and killed so many witches that the Blackwood coven was the last still in operation was the same man sitting here pontificating about creating a perfect world, and Adrian just didn’t buy it.
“If your goals are so benevolent,” he said, pushing away his untouched slice of quiche, “what about those who don’t qualify under your narrow definition of humanity? What about the Blackwood witches and the demons? If you’re going to be such a magnanimous ruler, what mercy will you show them?”
Gilgamesh’s dark eyebrows shot up, and then he shook his head with a long, disappointed sigh. “That’s such a foolish question, I don’t even know why you asked it. I’ve always described myself as humanity’s savior, and—as I’ve already explained to you many times—demons are not human. They’re the army of the enemy, Ishtar’sliteraltools. Just look at your pet queen.”
He pointed at Bex, who was still straining against his magic so hard that the heat from her contained fire was melting her chair.
“I know she appears beautiful,” Gilgamesh said in a hard, angry voice, “but that’s the monster who killed your brothers. All the princes you see in the Sleep”—he flicked a finger at the golden wall of corpse-filled tanks—"she’s the one who did that to them, just like she murdered my blood brother Enkidu. She’s a demon in every sense of the word, and what’s even worse is that she seduced you into helping her. That’s how dangerous her kind is. If I’m ever going to achieve my dream of a peaceful world, I can’t allow such threats to continue. It’d be irresponsible governance, just like it’d be irresponsible to allow my new utopia to be infiltrated by heartless, backstabbing, betraying witches.”
“It wasn’t a betrayal,” Adrian said with a lift of his chin. “We were never on your side to begin with.”
“I know.” Gilgamesh sighed. “But that’s why you and your charming mother and all the other Blackwoods must die. It breaks my heart. It truly does. I despise wasting such talented artisans, but you’ve proven over and over that you cannot be trusted, and a king has to put his kingdom first. I’m sure you understand.”
“I understand you perfectly,” Adrian said, putting out his arm so Boston could scuttle back onto his shoulder.
