Chapter 1

Olyrean was going to be a slave.

She didn’t know how to feel about that.

Well, alright, she knew how to feel about it–terrified, disgusted, a torrent of nightmarish despair–but, as of yet, these had remained just words, to her, abstract concepts. Great monuments, flat and far away. Vast black terrors that she inched towards, waiting for her patiently, vague and unreal.

She staggered forward, almost tripping over the heavy iron chains that bound her feet and dug painfully into her legs. There might be a reason why her mind had turned towards this particular imagery to describe her emotional state. The wretched orcs and demons that were her captors now marched her, and what remained of her race, through the burning expanse of the Desert of Madness. An endless sea of red sand and dark rock jutting upwards like enormous, clutching claws.

And there was a very real, and not at all metaphorical, vast black terror that awaited her in the distance: The castle Malbolge, which even now squatted on the horizon like a mountain of obsidian. It shimmered in the heat, taunting her with the idea that it might just waver itself out of existence, vanishing like a bad dream. Across the sands, over the scouring winds, she imagined she could hear the dread tower whisper to her…

“Ohhhh noooo, I’m melllltinnng!” it said. “Oh man, I can’t believe you fell for that. Hah! What a boob!”

Olyrean blinked. She had not expected Malbolge, Seed of Wickedness, Pit Most Vile, Maw of Terror to seem like such an obnoxious jerk in her imagination. She had been expecting something a bit more somber and terrifying, but there it was.

Probably the dehydration getting to me, she thought numbly.

Malbolge stood over the Heart of Darkness, the endless pit from which doom had clawed its way out of the earth’s fiery heart. The womb that had birthed Um’Thamarr, Scourge of Souls, the dark dragon-god that had tormented this world since time immemorial, and who had waged endless, fiery war against her people, the Sun-Elves of Rymand Vale.

For thousands of years, her brave, noble, well-tanned race had resisted Um’Thamarr. Every time the dragon had winged over their sun-dappled glades and tree-homes and sparkling fountains in which elf-maidens and elf-men frolicked, tastefully nude, her people would rally. They would grudgingly get dressed and then hop on the backs of their allies, the fabled, fierce Hippogryphs, and fly to meet Um’Thamarr in battle, piercing his black hide with their shining lances until the dragon was completely annoyed. They’d hound him until he retreated back to the desert, leaving nothing behind but the fading echoes of some choice suggestions where the elves ought to be sticking their lances instead.

After these victories, some of the Hippogryphs and more responsible elves would point out that this Um’Thamarr guy was really starting to be a problem, and maybe this time they ought to follow up and finish him off. The other elves, the vast majority of them, would point out that they’d much rather get back to lounging in their fountains. The responsible elves would then say that they could do all that without fear of interruption if they only went after the dragon and slayed him once and for all. Upon which the other elves would ask if the responsible ones had seen what the harsh desert air would do to their delicate skin, and the responsible elves would then very reasonably retort whether they’d like to see what their fists would do to their delicate noses.

After a bit of a scuffle the responsible elves, always outnumbered, would find their warnings unheeded. A few of them would venture into the desert to try to slay Um’Thamarr themselves, but they were always found raving a few days later, when it would be determined they had been driven mad by a deplorable lack of frolicking.

Hence the desert’s name.

All this was ancient history (or not-so-ancient for the elves, who lived much longer than the lesser races). Um’Thamarr had wised up after a millenium or so. He had found the nomadic orc tribes that wandered the desert and introduced them to a few troubling hobbies, like ironworking, siegecraft and demon-summoning. The flyovers he did over the elven territories became all-out warfare, and over the bloody centuries his orcs had ground the elves down. It had been a losing proposition for a while, now. The last King of the Hippogryphs had declared his ancient compact with the Sun-Elves concluded over five hundred years ago, and with his folk departed to find a new home, perhaps somewhere next to a race with a little more foresight.

Olyrean had never seen one.

And now she never would. Rymand Vale was gone.

In an apocalyptic final battle, the orcs and blood demons had crashed through their gates in a horde greater than they had ever gathered before. They burnt and slaughtered until nothing was left of the glades and tree-homes and fountains but char and mangled corpses. In the ultimate insult, Um’Thamarr had not even shown up for this final triumph over his enemy, preferring to let his minions do the work.

Olyrean had never even gotten the chance to fight back, not really. She had only just been judged old enough to hold a sword when the black horde had come, and likely only because her people had been so desperate to fill the ranks. In normal times they would have never taken her. She was small and slight, even more so than most elf maidens. And in the end a sword hadn’t done her any good. She had broken and fled when the enemy had come rushing through the forest in a seething boil, been knocked out from behind, and awoke in chains with her home burning around her and screams echoing through the night.

And now she was dragged towards Malbolge to meet her fate.

Mother and Father are dead, Olyrean thought to herself, and could feel nothing. She ought to feel something–sadness, probably–but the oppressive, heavy sun and the endless marching had baked her into numbness. She tried again anyway, since this might be her last chance.

Rymand Vale is nothing but ashes. Should probably be a bit upset about that, but no, still nothing.

My people will go extinct and I will have to watch it happen. Nope.

I’ll never get to frolic again, she thought, and then let out a wrenching sob.

“QUIET BACK THERE!”

A whip, its leather woven through with jagged black stone, cracked through the air and struck her back. It was a wicked thing, designed for death and pain. As far as the blow went, by this whip’s standards, it was an almost gentle caress, which is to say that rather than ripping her apart to the bone, it merely carved a bloody gash down her back and drove her to her knees in the sand.

She screamed. Her fellow elves marching beside her were suddenly very busy looking off into the distance at nothing in particular. Terrible as the pain was, she tried desperately to struggle to her feet. The last thing she wanted right now was to see him.

On this march through the desert, Olyrean really only knew two people. Neither of them were elves. That would have been preferable, but she had not discovered any of her friends or loved ones that had survived the slaughter, and the march was killing off the remaining elves at such an alarming rate that she didn’t know whether the person she talked to in the morning (when they would be served a healthy portion of sand for breakfast) would still be there for lunch (gristle and rat marrow).

So the first person she knew, by virtue of his being consistently alive, was a blood-demon named Karthe, a nightmare of shadow and teeth and tattered red bat-wings, who was commander of this entire slave drive. Karthe made a point of impaling anyone who tried to run or escape, and did it with such stunning alacrity that his victims barely had time to say “Wait, you’re putting that where?” before the deed was done. He seemed to find no end of amusement in this. The second was an orc named Brugga, who was responsible for driving her particular section of the march.

Between the two, Olyrean vastly preferred Karthe.

Brugga stomped towards her now, a giant nearly twice her height and four times as wide. His face looked like someone had skinned a frog’s more sensitive bits, laid them out to dry in the sun, stuffed them with gravel and then punched them into a lumpy ovoid, and then as an afterthought glued a pair of yellow eyes and a line of crooked teeth on top. The rest of him was mercifully hidden beneath his black iron armor, the sort with lots of sharp bits jutting out from it so you can tell just how dangerous and wicked the person wearing it is. In one tombstone-sized hand he held a whip, still dripping with her blood.

“Oh! Olyrean!” he said cheerfully. “I wouldn’t have done that if I had known it was you.” He looked down at his whip, frowned–an expression which turned his normally very ugly face into something truly hideous–and then offered her an awkward grin. This was as equally hideous as the frown. Expressiveness was not one of his strong suits.

Brugga had taken a liking to her, which had its ups and downs. The upside was that she received far fewer whippings than her fellow elves, which was very likely the reason she still lived. The downside was, well, orcs only treated you nicely if they wanted something from you, and for the most part there was only one thing orcs wanted with elves, which was to eat them alive. They were real connoisseurs, these orcs, and to hear them tell it, it was a damn shame that these elves were being treated so poorly. The best elf-meat was raised free-range, in forests that approximated their natural habitat. A few of them had even begun drawing up plans for a sustainable ranching program and were passing around a petition.

So, on the bright side, maybe she wouldn’t end up being a slave after all. Olyrean had spurned the extra food and water the orc had offered her, and in fact had tried to make herself as unappetizing as possible. Her options were limited, but she rolled about in the sand quite often in the hopes that he’d conclude she’d be too gritty a meal. No such luck. He just wouldn’t leave her alone.

She glared up at the orc now, trying not to let it show just how terrified she was. “Kill me,” she hissed at him, bleeding into the sand beneath his shadow. “Just kill me.”

“Oho, well, we can’t have that,” he said, as if she were a spoiled child who had plopped herself down and refused to walk, and not someone who he had just nearly whipped to death in one stroke. He picked her up like a kitten, patted a moldy pouch tied to his waist that looked suspiciously like it had been stitched from elf-skin, and retrieved a small bottle of sloshing red liquid. He popped the cork with a thumb and held it to her lips.

“Drink up!” he said. “This will make you all better.”

Olyrean refused, at first. She spat at him, in the hopes that if she made him angry enough perhaps he’d just kill her, spare her the future horrors. But that was the thing with Brugga. He never got angry. Not like the other orcs, who would fly into fits of murderous rage if anyone disrespected them or tried to escape. No, while Brugga had whipped plenty of would-be escapees to death, he always did it with an apologetic air. ‘Sorry,’ he’d say while they screamed and bled and died, ‘Sorry. Nothing personal, you know. If I had my choice, I’d let you make an honest run of it. Why not, I say? But it’s in the rulebooks, you see.’

Olyrean hated him. The only thing worse than being whipped to death by an insane, raging orc was being whipped to death by one who was doing it half-heartedly. Among a race that was already truly loathsome, Brugga had managed to be particularly vile in his banality.

Eventually, as Brugga kept battering her lips with the bottle, she relented and drank the potion. It was, after all, liquid for her parched throat. The taste was pleasantly spicy. Some of her exhaustion drained from her limbs, and there was an intense tingle that ran up and down her back as her wound stitched itself together.

Unfortunately, once it was over, she quickly became aware of a couple things.

First was that during this little episode, the rest of the slave-march had passed them by. It was by now kicking up a dust cloud on the horizon, leaving Brugga and her alone. The second was that Brugga still held her in his arms, and was looking down at her with an inscrutably foul expression, which is to say he was making any expression at all at her. His grin was full of jagged, broken teeth.

She wondered if the moment she had dreaded had finally come.

Instead, the orc shielded his eyes and looked to the horizon, out towards the trailing edge of the slave drive. “I think,” he said after a moment, “I’m going to have to carry you. Doubt you’ll be able to catch up with those on.” He jangled the chains around her legs and hands with one massive finger. Then, with a grunt, he took off at a jog, carrying her. “Just don’t tell Karthe, alright?”

“Why,” she asked.

Brugga laughed. It sounded like a small dog being stepped on. “Well, I don’t know that there’s a specific rule against it, but I don’t think he’d be keen on hearing I was carrying one of you around–”

“No,” Olyrean said. “I mean, why are you being nice to me? I figured you wanted to eat me, but you haven’t tried.”

She was surprised by her own bluntness, but the days of death, the days of blood and starvation and marching, they had beaten her down and made her small. Her mind was a much simpler animal now than it had been at the start of the march. Now it only had a dim curiosity and no sense of impropriety.

“You thought I wanted to–” Brugga slowed to a stop, staring at her. Then he slapped his forehead with a meaty palm. “Of course! I’m such an idiot. Of course you’d think that! Oh, no.” He chortled to himself and wiped a tear from the corner of one wretched eye.

“Why, then?”

“Well.” He leaned in as if to tell her a secret. He smelled exactly like you might imagine someone whose face looked like a dried-out frog scrotum would smell. “It’s my kids, you see. They want a pet.”

Olyrean was very quiet.

“Now, if it were up to me, I’d just get them a good old warg, like I had growing up,” Brugga went on. “But apparently, elves are in fashion these days. I tried to talk them out of it, but the wife–ah, she took their side. ‘Elves are just so much cleaner than wargs, honey!’”

The sun, red and fat, beat down upon them, the glare blinding her. A lonely wind sent a scree of fine sand skittering across the dunes.

“You want me,” Olyrean said slowly, “as a pet?”

Brugga nodded and sighed. His breath compared disfavorably to an abandoned slaughterhouse. “Of course, I tried to tell her you can keep a warg in the yard,” he said. “Elves are inside pets. ‘Oh, but a warg will bite people!’, she says. Sure, that’s the point, isn’t it? But she put her foot down, and I, well, I sort of promised them I’d try to pick one up. An elf, that is. Not a warg.”

Olyrean felt as if her heart had frozen into a block of ice, and was, with every word the orc spoke, being slowly chipped away into shards. It is a very particular sort of feeling that one experiences when they see their awful future laid out clearly for the first time and they recognize, with complete and utter certainty, that they’d much rather be dead.

“You want me,” she repeated, drawing out the words as though the longer she put off saying them, the more she held back the future they represented, “as a pet.”

Brugga gave her a look that she just barely managed to recognize as a sympathetic smile. “I don’t get it, personally, but hey–kids these days. Don’t worry, they’re old enough to be responsible. And I’ve got a nice cage already, very roomy, and we’ll get you–what is it you elves like to eat?”

“The sacred fruit of the Galar trees,” Olyrean whispered.

“Right, those. I’m sure we can find some.”

“You burnt them all down.”

“Ah.” Brugga shifted awkwardly. “Well, we’ll get something else for you, I’m sure.” He squinted at her, giving the alarming impression that one of his eyeballs was about to pop out of its socket. “You are housebroken, right?”

She nodded dumbly at him. With that, he broke into a trot again.

A pet, Olyrean thought. I’m going to be a pet. Kept in a cage and collared, for filthy orc children to poke at and pet and lead about on a leash.

She tried to imagine a version of this future where she did not immediately go insane and failed very badly.

***

After two more days of torturous marching, they finally came to Malbolge.

The castle was enormous beyond anything Olyrean had ever seen before; taller than the tallest Galar trees, jagged and black and glittering like lava-glass. It seemed more mountain range than building, its towers scraping at the sky as if they wished to tear it open. It also seemed, strangely, to be staring at them. Set in its side was what appeared to be a pool of lava in the shape of a wide-open eye.

The approach to the castle was littered with countless bones, some orc, many elf, others the bones of terrible creatures that Olyrean would have preferred to have never learned the existence of. Past this open-air ossuary lay a wide field of filthy altars and summoning circles painted into the sand with dried black blood.

Here and there, the air boiled and screamed and vomited forth sick yellow light. Portals to the demon realms. Orc warlocks milled about, smeared in ritualistic paints, giving each other backhanded compliments on the quality of their spells. One of the portals wobbled and popped threateningly.

Then an elf shrieked in terror. Olyrean turned to see that the strange pool of lava set into the side of Malbolge was blinking. The castle was staring at them, or rather something else was.

With an earth-shaking rumble, Malbolge unfolded like a clever puzzle. Gigantic limbs and cruel claws stretched forth, trembling; a pair of jagged black wings unfolded against the sky, and Olyrean finally realized that the greater part of what she had thought was the castle was actually the dragon-god Um’Thamarr himself.

She had never personally seen him before, and she immediately found a greater sympathy for the irresponsibility of her ancestors. Um’Thamarr was beyond enormous, to the point where it seemed inappropriate for something that large to be moving around at all. He gleamed like obsidian, and his mouth was a furnace from which long streams of white-hot magma poured. The sheer scale of him was hard to wrap your mind around, and she quickly realized that whoever Malbolge had been built for, it was not for him. He had lain curled around it in sleep, and the castle itself–still the largest building she had ever seen–looked positively puny next to him.

The dragon-god stared down at them, and Olyrean shivered as his baleful and unholy gaze passed over her. He contemplated them for a moment in a silence that was as still as it was terrible.

Then he turned to Karthe and said, with a voice like the screaming engine of hell, “Really not many of them, is it?”

“No, my darkest and most dread lord,” Karthe said, taking a deep knee.

Um’Thamarr let the silence hang just long enough for the demon to imagine how easily he could be crushed into jelly. The dragon had become an expert on terrorizing people over the millenia, and gotten very good at the timing.

“You went about impaling them again, didn’t you?” he whispered, like a scorching desert wind.

The blood demon began to sweat, which was really something, since they sweat acid. “Just the ones who ran, my lord.”

Um’Thamarr’s terrible grin was a seething, bubbling furnace. Deadly gasses hissed out from between his teeth with unfortunate consequences for a passing flock of birds. “Oh, Karthe, Karthe, Karthe,” he purred indulgently. “Just too good at your own job, I suppose. Really, I should reward you.”

Karthe, otherwise a very clever demon, smiled hopefully. Being stupidly hopeful is really the only way to stay sane when your boss could kill you with a sneeze and would find it pretty funny if he did.

Um’Thamarr craned his neck downward until his massive snout was pointed straight at Karthe. He didn’t know what a jet engine was, but staring into his nostrils was a lot like staring into one of those as it was firing up for takeoff. It did not give the impression of being a very safe thing to stare into from a close distance. Karthe twitched nervously.

“Why do you have to lie to me, Karthe?” asked Um’Thamarr.

The demon’s hopeful smile was like a crowd into which a shot had been fired: it tried to flee across his face in every direction at once. He toppled over in terror and scrabbled backwards through the sand. Um’Thamarr flicked out a claw and pinned the demon beneath it. A few bits popped and cracked, and then other bits began to sizzle, as the dragon-god’s skin was as hot as superheated magma.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, my lord!” Karthe screamed. “A thousand pardons for my impertinence! PLEASE RELEASE ME IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS AHHHH–”

Um’Thamarr chuckled at the demon’s petulant begging. And then, abruptly, he seemed to lose interest, like a cat toying with a mouse who, upon breaking its spine, suddenly finds the idea of a nap much more important than putting the creature out of its misery. Dragons are, after all, much like cats with the power to realize all their worst and most cruel whims; they both share that rarefied sort of arrogance that comes from a lifetime of having other people quite literally pick up their shit.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Oh, whatever,” he rumbled, “it’ll have to do.” He lifted his claw and flicked bits of stuck-on demon from it.

“Thank you, my most gracious and forgiving lord,” wept the smear in the sand that had been Karthe. It would be Karthe again momentarily. Regeneration was one of the demon’s more useful tricks.

Olyrean stifled a scream as Um’Thamarr swung his head to the warlocks milling about behind them–it was like watching a mountain careen through the air. “What do you guys think? Will it be enough for the sacrifice?”

The warlocks muttered amongst themselves for a few moments before one of them gave a thumbs up. Then one of the portals wobbled and twanged and they scattered to cast spells and get it back under control.

It was at that moment that an elderly elf staggered forward from the rest of his people.

He was withered and gray, ancient even by elven standards, having lived long enough to remember the days before Um’Thamarr had taken the orcs into his service. His name was Marius the Cracked, and he had once charged into the desert alone to try to slay this evil dragon; he had failed, of course, and it had taken nearly a whole month of frolicking with many grateful elf maidens who found his tragic bravery extremely exciting in order to recover.

Alone among the elves Marius was actually delighted to be here, because it afforded him that opportunity that everyone most dearly relishes as they get older: The opportunity to tell all these young idiots who had never listened to him just how badly they had fucked it up this time.

“Well, well, well,” he began.

“Shut up, old man,” someone called.

That someone was Um’Thamarr, and the dark god’s command would have been terrible enough to strike any other elf dead on the spot. But Marius was in the rare position of actually being correct when he berated the younger generations for destroying civilization, and some God of the Old Cranks (Rupert, as it was, though Marius neither knew nor worshiped him) glanced his way and lent him divine strength.

“Well, well, well!” he repeated, to the dragon’s astonishment. “Look where we all are. I told you all that we should have gone and killed him while we still could, didn’t I? Told you that it would have just taken a quick little jaunt out into the desert, didn’t I?”

“Yes, Marius,” the remaining elves chorused numbly at him.

“You could all be home frolicking each other’s brains out right now, but you were too damn lazy and look where it got you. Straight into a sacrifice, didn’t it? Half of you strung out along that desert with a spike up your bum, didn’t it?”

“It wasn’t that many,” Karthe whined, wringing his sickle-clawed hands together, which he had just managed to get back.

Marius shook a sun-spotted head to which a few errant strands of hair still desperately clung. “I told you,” he said, relishing each word, “I told you that–”

Um’Thamarr was annoyed by all this, if also a little amused. He definitely was not above watching a doomed people tear itself apart with self-hatred before they all died, but he didn’t really have the time for this sort of thing. “Look, enough already–” he began, but didn't get much further before the old elf wheeled on him.

“And you!” Marius snapped. “What could you possibly need to sacrifice all of us for?”

“Yeah!” called Brugga. “I wanted to keep one as a pet!” He ‘called’ this in the quietest manner possible, by whispering it under his breath quietly enough that it went completely unheard. Still, he gave Olyrean a furtive little thumbs-up. She felt like vomiting.

Um’Thamarr was taken aback by the strength of the old elf’s words (Rupert was paying closer attention now, and had grabbed the godly equivalent of a bucket of popcorn and sat down to watch). “Um,” he said, caught off-guard, “Well. I need some more demons. You know how it is. Fresh blood for the demon portals.”

“More demons!” Marius scoffed in that supremely condescending way in which it is only possible for your elders to scoff. The way that makes you angry and dismissive in the moment, but when you lay down to bed at night you think about it and wonder if maybe your life really is going wrong. “You’ve already captured all of us, what do you need more demons for?”

Um’Thamarr bristled like a mountain-sized hedgehog. Very literally: spines the size of spears rose on the back of his neck. “Oh, so you think you’re the only ones who matter, do you,” he told the elf, wondering why he was bothering with this argument and unaware that Rupert was the reason he didn’t just incinerate this elf with a cough. “The world doesn’t revolve around you. There’s the dwarves in the Mountains of Uld to the north that I’ve been meaning to go after next, and I’m pretty sure one of the human kingdoms just invented gunpowder–”

“Oh, well why haven’t you done something about them then,” Marius snapped. “You weren’t even there for this last war. What did you do? Just curl up and sleep the whole time?”

The elves tittered amongst themselves despite it all. When you know you are going to die at the hands of your enemy and there’s nothing you can do about it, there comes a curious point where being obnoxious to them becomes an almost holy mission, and there was none amongst them more suited for that task than Marius.

Um’Thamarr stirred uneasily. He was beginning to feel like things really weren’t going as he would have liked them to, despite the fact that he had won the war, and it wasn’t just this backtalking elf. The truth was that he shouldn’t have needed more sacrifices. But the damned portals had been acting up lately, wobbling and cracking and even at times burping and farting, which were noises he had never heard them make before, and lay beyond even his considerable knowledge of dark magic.

Even now one of them was groaning and warping alarmingly. He very much would have preferred just to have some elves as a light snack, sent the rest off to be slaves, and then gone to sleep until his warlocks summoned some burrowing deathworms to deal with the dwarves. Instead he was going to have to redo all his portals and he’d be lucky to have any elves left over after that.

He was about to give Marius his retort (crushing him to death) when one of the portals, which had been particularly flatulent over the past hour, suddenly swelled and ballooned to five times its original size. The screaming hell-lights that poured forth from it faded to a flat and quiet black. Um’Thamarr groaned like a mountain cracking apart. “Oh, will someone fix that damn portal!”

Orc warlocks swarmed forth with dark magic crackling from their fingertips. The portal, unfortunately, was not fixed. In fact, the situation got much worse, mostly because as soon as the warlocks got within a dozen feet of the portal, they disintegrated.

Lances of red boiling light shot out from the empty blackness that lay beyond, and wherever these touched an orc, there was a flash and then they were dust. A still silhouette hung in the air for a fraction of a second, like the orc’s shadow stuck behind wondering exactly what had happened to the body. More of the killing red light hissed and crackled from the portal as the survivors ran screaming.

That, Um’Thamarr knew, was really not supposed to happen.

“Looks like you can’t even do your dark magic correctly,” Marius said with a tone of utter disbelief. “Blessed skies above. We lost to you?”

Um’Thamarr beat back his wings and roared, which had the immediate effect of toppling Marius over and stopping all his orcs from running away. He was pleased by this, though a bit less pleased at the fact that, even as he watched, another warlock disintegrated.

“What is going on,” he grated, gobs of magma oozing from his jaws. “Fix this! Someone get back there and fix this, now!”

The warlocks and the demons and the orcs all stared at each other uneasily. Their employment history had taught them that this sort of moment was pregnant with possibility. If someone managed to step forward and provide a solution to this crisis, they’d rise in their master’s esteem. If they bungled it, however, they’d also rise, but as fine ash carried on the thermals of dragon fire instead.

Karthe decided he’d roll the dice. He’d mostly repaired himself by now, and he knew he needed to redeem himself for his over-enthusiastic bout of impaling.

His lips peeled back from his snout in an awful bloody snarl that contained more teeth than it seemed would strictly be possible, given its size. “Alright, you wretched maggots, listen to me! You’re going to get back there and get that portal under control, under pain of impalement!” He was a very singular demon.

“PORTAL INTERCEPTED,” declared a smug voice from beyond the portal. “REROUTING COMPLETE.”

“Oh shit,” said Karthe, for whom the day was going very poorly and was only about to get worse.

The voice behind the portal took on a grand, bombastic tone now. It was the voice of someone, Olyrean thought, who was supremely confident about what was going to happen next.

Some wild instrument (that she’d only learn later was called an electric guitar) began to shred magnificently.

“CITIZENS OF UNIVERSE JJ-42-DELTA-GAMMA-N27H-PHI,” the voice declared, “PREPARE TO BE LIBERATED.”

“Oh, and what the hell do you think you’re doing,” Marius snapped at the portal.

What it was doing was blowing up into a portal larger than Olyrean had ever seen, a portal larger than Malbolge and Um’Thamarr combined, and streaming out of it came thousands of metal men. In their hands they held curious silver devices with lots of odd prongs and spikes from which screaming heat and light poured.

Rupert must have looked away for a second, because one of those lances of light touched Marius and he immediately turned to dust. Orcs and demons rushed screaming at these invaders. A few seconds later and half of them were a fine cloud of ash drifting away on the desert breeze. They decided that discretion was the better part of valor and rushed screaming away instead.

Olyrean was lying prone on the ground, shaking. By lucky chance, that was what the metal men–each of which was painted a garish red, white and blue–were shouting for everyone to do, but she had not heard that over the din. Instead she had dove down because she had seen other things pouring out of the portal, great roaring contraptions that looked like giant flying bugs the size of houses, and the earth around her had begun gratuitously exploding.

These machines had been followed by a humongous metal titan larger than Um’Thamarr himself. A colossus of silver and red and blue, festooned with stars innumerable, whose every step shook the earth and flung orc and elf both to the ground. The dragon roared and from its jaws issued a stream of molten lava at the giant’s chest and Olyrean screamed, terrified she was going to be blown up or buried in molten slag or stepped on, and her last thought was that at least Brugga was going to be killed too.

Um’Thamarr was thinking that this really had gone too far by now. He had been birthed in the center of the planet, the son of the forgotten powers there, steeped in dark magic and the knowledge of the demon planes, and whoever these guys were–these metal beasts gussied up like a circus tent–he had never heard of them. They had already killed most of his best warlocks, and those weren’t easy to replace. Now he was going to have to get up and destroy them all.

He was telling himself this right up until the point where the metal titan stepped through the portal, at which point he immediately switched gears and thought: Ah. The jig is up.

Size, as it’s so often hoped, really isn’t everything, but there comes a point where sheer scale clues you in about the sorts of powers you’re messing with. You simply did not become as big as that titan was without knowing how to tell some of the more fundamental rules of the universe to go sit in the corner. And one of the ways that dragons are different from cats, as it turns out, is that while cats have the courage to bully creatures larger than themselves, dragons most definitely do not.

It was time to go, decided Um’Thamarr.

Drawing in a mighty breath, he belched forth a stream of lava at the titan. He did not think this would be very effective; he merely hoped that it might serve as a distraction as he flew away.

Unfortunately, the titan shrugged off the lava even easier than he thought it might. It seemed to simply spatter against an invisible shield in front of it, sending gobs of superheated liquid flying everywhere. Before he knew it, the giant had strode forward and seized him by the throat. It squeezed, and his obsidian skin spiderwebbed and then shattered. Magma oozed between its fingers.

“DEATH TO TYRANTS,” it screamed in a metallic ringing buzz, an impressive trick when it had no mouth. Its eyes were full of stars.

Um’Thammar struggled and screamed in the titan’s grip. His tail lashed the ground and carved a small canyon into the dust. His claws flexed and broke against the titan’s chest. “Who the hell are you?” he gurgled past his ruined throat.

The titan managed a mouthless smile, an even more impressive trick than screaming.

“WE’RE THE AMERICANS,” it told him.

Then it ripped off his head.

***

Karthe had, the moment the metal men came through the portal, fallen to the ground and buried himself in the sand. He didn’t like to think of himself as a coward, but he liked thinking of himself as a corpse even less.

Soon he saw the body of his erstwhile boss collapsing like a slow avalanche, lava fountaining from the stump where his head used to be. Being a demon who knew on which side his bread was buttered, he thought that the time had come for him to be switching sides. He pulled himself out from the dirt and knelt low as two of the metal men approached.

“Oh, thank you, thank you for killing him!” he cried. “Oh thank you, our saviors, you have freed us from–”

“DOWN ON THE GROUND!” screamed one of the metal men.

“Of course,” said Karthe, deciding not to mention that he was, in fact, already there.

A small metallic beetle crawled out from the seams of the men’s armor and buzzed around his horns, then shone a harsh blue light on him. “He’s clear,” said the metal man.

A strange ritual, but Karthe was hardly some ignorant provincial. They hadn’t killed him, that was the important thing. “Look,” he said, as the two metal men bound his claws and wings, “I just want to thank you for what you’re doing here. I was bound by dark magic to do Um’Thamarr’s bidding.” Not technically a lie. No need to mention that he had enthusiastically leapt at the opportunity for bloodshed. “I hated every moment of it. I don’t know who you are, but I can probably help you out with hunting down the rest of his servants.”

The metal men glanced at each other. “Who’s Um’Thamarr?” one asked.

“Uh,” Karthe said, “He’s the, um, god you just killed?” He was suddenly uneasy with the idea of these men who might so casually hijack a portal and kill an immortal. They seemed utterly uninterested with any information he might give them. Perhaps a bribe was in order. “Here, as my thanks–you see those elves, over there? All yours.”

That seemed to catch their interest. “Oh?” said one. “All of them?”

“They belong to you?” said the other. “They’re yours to give away?”

“All of them,” Karthe confirmed. In truth they had belonged to Um’Thamarr, but he didn’t think such a technicality applied anymore. “They’re my slaves. Unbind me, and I’ll help you round them up. What do you say?”

He never heard their reply, on account of being blasted to his constituent atoms, but what the metal men said in response was “Death to slavers.”

***

Olyrean’s heart soared as Um’Thamarr’s massive corpse crumpled to the ground, sending a plume of sand soaring into the sky.

Within a minute it was already over. These metal men and their chariots and giant metal bugs and…and...to be frank, there were some things coming out of the portal that Olyrean had no way to describe. Regardless, they had within mere moments vanquished her ancestral enemies and slain the god that had tormented her folk from the dawn of history.

It didn’t really sink in. There was a part of her that was screaming with the sheer joy of it, but it was a relatively small part. Much more of her attention was on the chaos and carnage that still surrounded her.

Many of the elves and orcs and demons had been hit by gobs of falling lava when Um’Thamarr had his head ripped off, and those that still lived lay on the ground writhing and bellowing and screaming in awful cacophony. The metal men moved among them, fading in and out among the cloud of dust and sand tossed up by that battle. Olyrean tasted that dust on her tongue, and remembered that some of it was disintegrated orc. She gagged.

An elf staggered by, missing both of his arms. He glanced at her and opened his mouth, as though he were about to ask her if she knew where they might be. Then he thought better of it, and then wandered off back into the dust. There was more hissing and screeching that she recognized as the sound of the metal men’s lances of light. Some of it crackled just overhead, carving a clear tunnel through the dust that was quickly filled in again.

And then, suddenly, one of the metal men came for her. She backed away, screaming. They might have slain Um’Thamarr, but as far as she could tell they might kill her, as well. They had disintegrated poor Marius, after all.

“Please! Please! Please leave me alone!” she cried, and even as she did she knew she hated the helpless sound of her voice, in that moment.

To her surprise, the metal man stopped in its tracks. “Hey,” it said, as soothing as a faceless interdimensional invader who shot disintegration rays could be. “It’s alright, I’m not here to hurt you.”

Then it reached up and pressed something beneath its jaw. Its head–its helmet–popped off with a click and a hiss. Beneath it was the face of a bright-eyed man with bedraggled, sweat-plastered hair that carried a dash of gray. Grizzled stubble lined his jaw.

“See?” he said. “I’m human, like you.”

This was a statement of such profound confusion that Olyrean could only gawk at him. “I’m an elf,” she managed. “A sun-elf.”

The man laughed. “Well, humanoid. Close enough. My name’s Jack. Are you hurt? Can you walk?”

She didn’t know what to think. The humans she knew were…well, they were definitely nothing like these. The humans of her world gathered in petty squabbling kingdoms and waged war amongst themselves, inordinately concerned with who was supposed to be King or Queen, and could barely practice magic at all. They definitely couldn’t hijack a portal or disintegrate people. No, this man was not a human from her world. He had come through the portal from Somewhere Else.

“I’m…I’m not hurt,” she said, struggling to her feet. This was not strictly true. She was half-starved and delirious with dehydration, exhausted from forced marching, but she was doing better than most.

The strange human who called himself Jack held out a gauntleted hand. “Come with me,” he said. After a moment’s hesitation, Olyrean took it. She could feel it humming beneath her touch.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Somewhere safe.”

He led her away, picking his way carefully across the battlefield. Pained screams echoed to them through the dust, and she was glad she couldn’t see very far.

Eventually they came back to where the portal stood. More of the metal men–or humans in peculiar armor, she supposed–had formed a large perimeter around it. Through the use of some humming black boxes they had set up some sort of magical barrier that prevented anything from passing through, so that when she and Jack crossed over, through a little tunnel bored in the invisible field, she found the air beyond fresh and clear of dust.

But this was really the least of the curiosities. She boggled at what she saw.

In the few moments that they had been here, these humans had set up what looked like an entire small city on the other side of the portal. A city that was almost entirely alien to her. It seemed to be built of metal boxes, some hundreds of feet tall; glowing signs flashed strange lights, spelling out a strange language in a strange alphabet. Other humans had their helmets off here, and they were talking to each other in a language she didn’t recognize.

Things got considerably stranger when a woman spontaneously popped into existence in front of them. While these metal men were very fond of the red, white and blue coloring scheme, this woman took it to a whole new level. Her frilly dress, her hair, everything about her was some blend of these three colors. Even her lips were painted red and blue.

“Oh, are these the first survivors? I’m so happy to meet you!” she cried. Hers was the voice, Olyrean noticed, that had come from beyond the portal. “My name’s Libby, and–oh dear, I’m sorry, there’s so many things taking up my processing power right now. I’ll give you a proper hello later!”

She winked out of existence again. And then three copies of the same exact woman went running past. One, apropos of nothing, grew to be suddenly fifteen feet tall. They vanished into the dust of the battlefield.

Olyrean’s mind reeled.

“What was that?” she gibbered.

“Uh–well, don’t worry about it right now,” Jack said. “You must be hungry, right? Here, have a burger.”

He handed her a gob of meat and vegetables stacked between two buns so large that it probably could have fed her for a week. Olyrean’s stomach practically roared at her, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat. A steady stream of the injured were arriving from the battlefield, orcs and demon and elf alike, floating by on strange beds that had apparently decided that they didn’t need to obey the law of gravity. Many of them looked completely beyond the point of saving. None of them were moving.

“Are they dead?” she whispered.

“Just sedated,” Jack told her. He took her hand and led her away from the gruesome train. “We’ll get them the help they need.”

A fiery rage built inside her, and she gripped her burger so hard that grease and ketchup squirted between her fingers. She dropped it. “You should just let the orcs die,” she hissed. “The demons too. They deserve it. They…”

But then she stopped. They had come to the edge of the portal. This was not really significant, because someone had cast some sort of spell on it so that you could not see what was on the other side; rather all across its edge lay a soupy fog through which only vague shapes and dim lights could be seen.

But next to the portal the humans had planted a banner.

It was like none Olyrean had ever seen. For one, it was nearly the size of the tallest buildings in this city. It flapped majestically on a nonexistent wind.

But more than that, it glowed, it breathed. It seemed to have been woven from magic itself, despite the fact that Olyrean could sense no magic about it. In one corner there was a field of stars winking in and out, an endless field of them, innumerable, the grandest expanse of the most heartachingly beautiful night sky that she had ever seen. From the stars descended beams of red and white fire, roaring with terrible intensity. Very intense orchestral music was playing somewhere nearby.

She was utterly captivated by it. Perhaps it was the exhaustion or the dehydration; perhaps it was the fact that she had been yanked from the jaws of certain death into such strange circumstances, but the sheer beauty of the flag overwhelmed her. These stripes must represent some fundamental cosmic law of the utmost truth and beauty, these stripes were star-fire trammeled, forged and fettered to serve man–

She boggled for a while, lost in such grandiose thoughts and not really knowing what they meant, only overwhelmed by the feeling of utterly humongous being that the flag instilled in her. She felt hot tears on her cheeks and didn’t realize she had been crying.

Looking to her side, she saw Jack gazing resolutely at the flag, his hand over his heart.

“What is this?” she asked hoarsely.

“Our flag,” Jack said proudly.

What sort of place, what kind of people would have such a flag? “Where are you from?” she asked.

She half-expected him to say that he had come from the realm of the gods, that he was a servant of heaven and the creators. But instead he just said, “I come from a place where all men and women are free and equal. Where there are no kings or queens or dragons. No slaves, either. Only citizens, and those elected to serve them as leaders of a democratic republic. A place where you can always speak your mind and pursue your happiness. A place where there’s freedom. A freedom we’ve decided to share with your world.”

It sounded holy beyond holy to her. She looked at the flag, and it seemed to her that the fires that burned in it burned in her heart as he spoke. Then something nudged at her hands. She looked down and saw that Jack was handing her another sandwich.

“Please,” he whispered. “Eat your burger.”

She took a bite. It was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.

“Would you like to go there?” he asked her.

She looked at him in shock. “I can?” she mumbled out past a full mouth.

“You can more than go,” he said, “You can become a citizen. Though, really, right now I just want to get you off the battlefield.” He nodded toward the portal. “It’s set up much nicer on that side. And you can come back once things here have been cleaned up.”

She was too emotional to understand half of what he was saying. All of the death, and the grueling march through the desert, only to be saved at the last moment by these people she had never seen, then to be bombarded with the sensory overload that was this flag whose every glowing thread seemed to impart some sense of enormous significance. Part of her thought that she must have died; this was death, and this kind man was her strange transport to heaven. The world’s religions had really gotten it wrong.

“Of course I’ll go,” she cried, and then she clung to him and buried her face in his shoulder and wept. The flag had given her the first beautiful feeling she had since her family had died, and she had no idea why. She was lost and empty and she just wanted to be away, away from the awful nightmare behind her. With utmost care, Jack led her, still weeping, to the portal. She didn’t even notice when they stepped through.

“We’re here,” Jack murmured to her.

She looked up then, and gasped.

At the utter immensity of it all.

At the lights, the sounds, the people, the endless being of it.

At how red, white and blue everything was.

“Welcome,” said Jack. “To the United Worlds of Infinity America.”