Maddy and the Dauphine and I had agreed to rendezvous at the gymnasium in LA in case we got separated, so I headed there next and found them waiting. Olivia had teleported off the tarmac after assuming she’d relocated me into her diabolical clutches, so the Dauphine had retreated from aerial assaulting the base, and she and Maddy had fallen back here. I’d been out of contact for less than half an hour; my enchanted in-ear monitor didn’t survive transmutation into the battery and the subsequent, uh, explosion of my head.
“Fucking hell,” Maddy said, springing up out of a chair and rushing to embrace me.
She stopped as she got close, noticing the burned-out amulet around my neck.
“Good thing it was your turn,” she said, hugging me tightly.
We took a portal to the upper deck of the steampunk skyship that Cameron had prepared for us, which was hovering at the rift, just inside the Sparkle Realm.
The design of the skyship was meant to evoke the feeling of a pirate ship, as though this was simply an ordinary sixteenth-century galleon except outfitted with rocket thrusters instead of sails for picking up speed, and kaleidoscope cannons instead of projectile cannons for killing your foes in the air. Three tall masts seemed to be an unnecessary touch, until we realized that enormous lighting trusses were suspended from each mast, and a hundred different intelligent lighting instruments and stage lasers were rigged up and ready for action. And PA speakers were positioned periodically around the perimeter of the upper deck.
We made our way to the raised quarterdeck at the stern of the ship, where you might expect to see the ship’s wheel on a galleon. But instead, Cameron had reserved this place of honor for a set of gleaming gold-plated DJ decks.
I gazed out through the rift. From here, you could see far out into the logosphere. Bright ugly flashes and surreal smears of color clashed and sparred at the point where Alexander was locked in a confrontation with the thunderstorm, holding its advance at bay. Distance was always super difficult to gauge in the logosphere, but the fact that we could observe this activity meant it was close enough to be unsettling.
“Isobel, your presence is requested on comms,” said the Dauphine.
I summoned a new set of enchanted in-ear monitors out of my inventory and put them in.
“This is Isobel. What’s the word?”
“This is your captain speaking,” said Jordon Connelly. “Welcome back, Isobel.”
“It’s really good to hear your voice, Jordon.”
“Same. We should grab coffee if we still exist tomorrow. So listen, I’m your remote pilot for this mission, which has been described to me as waiting for your signal and then flying very fast in a straight line for ten seconds or whatever. Sound about right?”
“Pretty much. I was expecting an autopilot, so this is quite an upgrade.”
“Any skyship I control as the Prime Minister gets a bunch of stat bonuses, so we figured, what the hell, let’s buff this thing up. You’ve got a fully loaded gun deck below you that does run off automation, though, and I’ve got the sensitivity cranked. The hull is heavily armored and magic resistant. And the laser/light show you’ll be seeing soon was designed by the same team that creates tour visuals for DJ Luscious, which is what you get when the Sparkle King calls in a favor apparently.”
“How do people typically take down ships like this?” I asked.
“Typically by ramming them at high speed from weird angles. It’s not pretty. But I don’t think we’re expecting other air traffic along this route. Skyship’s an SD5 vehicle, so we should be the only one in operation on this version of the map, and Cameron set all the dragons to hibernate to keep them out of our way.”
I didn’t expect to be able to spin a proper DJ set while this all went down, so I cued up a long mix I’d prerecorded that was full of what the kids might call “bangers,” and showed Maddy how to kick it off when I gave the signal.
All we had to do first was convince Alexander to stand down.
By my estimation, even though he’d been cut off from the battery and could no longer top off, as it were, he still had a sufficient amount of energy stored inside himself to keep the thunderstorm at bay for now. We wanted to intervene well before he depleted that energy pool and involuntarily fell out of god mode. We wanted a clean handoff of responsibilities here.
We did not want him turning that energy toward us in anger.
In the original Sparkle Dungeon, the final battle takes place on a big dance floor modeled after the David Guetta residency in Vegas. Lasers are going off in every direction, and drunk clubbers are attacking you with overpriced margaritas, and security’s hunting you down for smuggling swords into the venue, and Not David Guetta For Rights Reasons is trying to obliterate you from the stage by laying down some massively mainstream beats.
And the thing is, everyone initially thinks this is purely a combat challenge that you can win with sheer artillery. But the secret is this: if you tip the bellhop a jewel or two as you enter the hotel on your way to will call, the bellhop lets it slide that he’s spotted your swords and never calls security. Consequently it’s just normal bouncers at the barrier as you rush the stage to decapitate Not David Guetta before he gets a chance to terrorize an afterparty.
This incredibly useless piece of trivia floated through my mind as I jetpacked out through the rift into the logosphere, to confront Alexander Reece as his adversary for what I hoped would be the last time.
During my own experience in god mode, I remember maintaining a self-image in my mind’s eye that roughly matched my physical form, while understanding that I was no longer corporeal. My presence was instead invisibly distributed throughout a vast arena, an ocean of energetic awareness shifting its boundaries according to where I focused my attention. The thunderstorm instantly recognized me in those moments as a player worth its respect, although I can’t say I understood what method it used to perceive me.
But now I was just a lone player avatar, jetpacking rather slowly across the empty miasma of the logosphere toward the front line of the battle between Alexander and the thunderstorm. I had no interest in arriving on the scene at the speed of thought. I wanted Alexander to notice me approaching while I was still a long way off.
I spared a glance back at the Sparkle Realm. Last time I’d seen it from outside, the hull of the arkship had enclosed it completely and weapons were firing from a hundred gun ports. But per my request, Cameron had removed the hull of the arkship, and now the sight of it once again reminded me of a beautiful colored jewel anchored in space, steadily growing smaller as I soared away from it.
Eventually I had to stop my advance. I could feel the conflict ahead of me as a wave of psychic heat. Where Alexander made direct contact with the thunderstorm, a singular point of supernatural radiance lit up the logosphere. It reminded me of the blinding arc flash you get if you stare at a welding torch without protection, except the burn here affected more than just your eyes; your entire identity got scorched if you tried to perceive the conflict directly.
I realized this radiance was the spark of human lives being expended, and I burned with shame for having expended my share of it in the same fashion.
Suddenly a dark laugh rang out all around me.
“I should have guessed you’d return,” Alexander said with a surprisingly calm voice.
Without warning, he granted me a summary glimpse into the carnage of his battle with the thunderstorm. It had persistently chewed away chunks of his presence in its effort to unravel him, but so far, he’d been able to replenish his presence from the battery and hold a psychic barrier in place that had halted any further advance by the thunderstorm.
“I need you to stand down,” I replied.
Now I began to feel his rage curled into a spiral all around me, poised to strike.
“By destroying the battery,” he said, “you’ve killed me, and you’ve killed the entire planet. And you are no fit replacement for me in this combat.”
“Give me some credit, my dude,” I said. “You think I didn’t come here with a plan?”
“Then let us hear the product of your immense wisdom,” he said, the strain in his voice palpable as he kept up his conversation with me in a separate tab in his mind from the ongoing bombast of his struggle to survive the thunderstorm’s relentless attacks.
But I couldn’t dare risk sharing even the broad strokes of my plan with him, in case he fell, and the knowledge of it was absorbed into our opponent.
“I’m giving you a chance to escape and let me handle this,” I said.
“Isobel, you may be the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon, but until I die, I am the GOD of this realm, and you shall be punished for betraying your rightful Lord.”
“Listen up, King James Version. You’re a usurper, a despot, and a punk, and you don’t want to try fighting me and the thunderstorm at the same time, trust me. But there’s one miracle you could perform that you haven’t even considered. It might take every ounce of mojo you have left, but if anyone has the will to pull it off, it’s you, I know that much.
“You could make yourself human again. A person back on the planet, alive and breathing and without bullet holes. You could be with Olivia again. She’s still down there, scheming for you just like she always did. Go to her, Alexander, while you still can. I promise I can take it from here.”
I could feel the idea spreading in his consciousness, like a computer virus that slowly commandeered all of his processing power in single-minded pursuit of the idea that he could truly live again. He was deeply tired, and subconsciously afraid of the inevitable demise he’d been expecting. And here was Isobel the Queen, miraculous thorn in his side, the one person who had ever gotten the upper hand on him. He desperately wanted to believe me.
He’d fought the good fight, too. He’d kept his word about one thing—he’d used his godlike powers to fight the thunderstorm to a fucking standstill once more, buying me the time I’d needed. Sure, he’d been a duplicitous, immoral bastard about it and maybe we’d settle that score later, but in this moment, I needed him to claim the reward I was dangling in front of him.
I needed the thunderstorm’s attention, and Alexander was standing in my way.
“Very well,” he whispered.
I felt him prepare to pull off a new class of transmutation. Only Alexander Reece would ever experience this miracle, if I had to guess. He’d be overcoming death yet again in order to transmute himself back into a living breathing person on the material plane, using god mode to brute force his way past any objections the punctuation marks might still have about allowing him to do this. He’d be reunited with Olivia, he’d still be the most powerful linguist mage in existence, oh and of course he wouldn’t be destroyed out here when the last drops of spark he’d harvested from the battery were exhausted, leaving him defenseless.
Yeah, it all penciled out pretty nicely for Alexander on paper. And I admit I was a little charmed that he trusted me enough to step aside and let me handle this situation.
Maybe he should’ve been a little more skeptical.
A tortured roar came from everywhere all at once—Alexander’s voice. No special expertise was required on my part to recognize that something was going horribly wrong for him. For several long seconds, he roared, and I had no way of knowing exactly what was happening, aside from my guess that he wasn’t enjoying it.
Maybe he’d been overconfident to let his attention slip from throwing everything he had at the thunderstorm. Maybe he’d opened himself up to an attack in the moments when he diverted the energy of god mode away from the thunderstorm, funneling it into what he expected to be his escape route back to the planet. Maybe the thunderstorm had already chewed away so many chunks of his extended godlike presence that they knew Alexander now, or at least knew him well enough to pierce his psychic armor the split second he became even slightly vulnerable.
The net effect was that Alexander Reece did undergo a transmutation in those moments, and he did spend his entire reserve of spark on the sequence. But somehow the thunderstorm had pierced him or wounded him just before or just as the sequence unfolded, and injected its own instructions into the sequence, and powered the new instructions with a contribution of its own foul anti-spark, if you could call it that. His transmutation was hijacked, intercepted, overthrown, and he did not return to Earth.
Instead he materialized before me in a new logospheric avatar, fashioned as though out of clay by his very nemesis. He was a towering new form of herald, defying Isobel the Queen’s prohibition against heralds in the logosphere. He was, perhaps, a knight champion of the thunderstorm, or an unholy warrior now at the vanguard of the thunderstorm’s relentless advance across this dimension. When his gaze finally landed on me, there was no acrimony or accusation in it; this was simply his new state of being, apparently, and he didn’t seem to resent it or resist it.
This maneuver—capturing Alexander instead of destroying him—this was the thunderstorm attempting to toy with me, I realized.
This would be my fate if things kept going off the rails like this.
I blasted him with a powerful healing spell, Restore Beat Grid, typically used to counteract the debilitating poisons in SD3 that caused you to lose your sense of rhythm, which in turn caused your spells and attacks to start misfiring badly. It was a long shot, imagining that I might have an antidote to whatever the thunderstorm had done to him, but I felt certain ordinary healing spells that merely restored hit points would be useless right now, and I at least had to try something.
The spell bounced off him with no effect as far as I could tell.
Behind him, the leading front of the thunderstorm crackled and rumbled as if taunting me.
“You mentioned you had a plan, Isobel,” he said, his voice smooth and calm. “I wonder, is it working?”
I didn’t feel like admitting to him that step one of my plan had just now failed.
I noticed his giant arms had become barbed tentacles, and he suddenly had a dozen of them, reaching to close the distance between us. His grasp was easy to evade, and I realized he wasn’t feeling any particular urgency about this situation. From his perspective, the future must’ve seemed inevitable. The thunderstorm was nothing if not patient as it worked its way across reality.
Without a word, I fled back to the Sparkle Realm.
I landed on the upper deck of the skyship, and only then spared a glance back to see if Alexander had followed. He had instead drifted back toward the thunderstorm’s leading edge.
“What happened out there?” Maddy asked.
“Alexander was trying to go back to Earth,” I said. “But the thunderstorm got control of him somehow, so I split out of there.”
“Does that mean we have to fight him?”
“If he has been enslaved against his will,” the Dauphine said, “perhaps we should rescue him.”
“I tried hitting him with a high-level heal,” I said. “I thought it might snap him back to himself. But he brushed it off.”
“With respect, I possess healing and restoration magic far beyond what player characters can acquire. If we do nothing, remember that Alexander knows the perils of the Shimmer Lands. He can steer the thunderstorm away from it and the plan will fail outright.”
“He won’t know we’re headed to the Shimmer Lands, not at first,” I said. “That should give you a window of opportunity to try healing him. But if that doesn’t snap him out of it—”
“We need to table this discussion,” Jordon said suddenly. “I count five fliers headed your way.”
I peered through the rift and said, “I don’t see anything.”
“They’re not outside. They’re on the map already, moving slowly, incoming from due south.”
Due south from here would take you straight to the Sparkle Dungeon—where the battery had been located until recently.
Until it had been stolen by five surviving heralds who were loyal to Alexander.
Already I looked back fondly on those halcyon hours when we had an actual plan.
Soon we all saw and recognized the heralds headed our way. I suspected they’d chosen the Sparkle Dungeon as their spawn point for returning here. They’d reverted back into their monstrous forms, hulking and wretched and vile to look at, kept aloft more by spite than by their enormous heavy wings. They radiated menace and horror even from a great distance, and each one of them could’ve easily been twice the size of the skyship. Their slow speed was freakier than if they’d just appeared in our midst; having time to anticipate their arrival made them scarier.
But these heralds knew me. Sure, they might be heading here to murder us on Alexander’s orders. But they theoretically respected me for sparing their lives. They’d participated willingly in rescuing the people in the battery, knowing full well Alexander would lose his power as a result. Unless they’d lost their free will for some reason when Alexander lost his, I might be able to squeeze a peaceful conversation out of this situation if I was careful.
“I’m going to talk to them when they get here,” I said, “so hold your fire unless they attack first.”
“If you let them close the distance, the gun deck will be useless,” Jordon said. “And if they surround us in close quarters, we’re not going anywhere—skyships don’t teleport.”
“Fine, I’ll meet them halfway,” I said as I rose up off the deck. “If Alexander comes through the rift, head for the Shimmer Lands and I’ll try to catch up.”
I sailed out across the landscape toward the heralds. Our flight paths brought us together at the southern edge of the capital, where the Towers of Dub stood tall on either side of the city gate. Normally the road into the city was crowded with NPCs, but Cameron must’ve locked all the city’s NPCs down today, because the road was empty, and no sentries emerged from the Towers to challenge us with obscure trivia questions about defunct record labels and underground nightclubs.
While four of them patrolled in wide loops above us, Ezekiel transformed into its eight-foot “murder golem” form as it landed gracefully in front of the gate to greet me.
“Hello, Isobel,” it said. “I’m sorry your plan to save Earth has failed so swiftly.”
“Hey, c’mon, we’re still in play. What are you doing here, Ezekiel?”
“We’ve been summoned to commit violence against you, Isobel.”
“I thought we were good. I don’t want to fight you.”
“I have no enthusiasm for it either. I saw how many of our comrades fell to your sword and spellcraft, even before you acquired the full power of the battery. I thought you and Alexander were at least tenuous allies, but—he speaks with the voice of the unraveling now. Has he turned against you outright?”
“The thunderstorm took control of him. It happened so fast I had no chance to stop it. But the Dauphine might be able to restore him with healing magic.”
“Isobel, I know the methods of the unraveling. Precious little remains of him to restore, I’m sure.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s submerged or trapped, and he’s helpless, and maybe we can free him.”
“I see. You want to rescue the original Alexander so that you needn’t face this new Alexander in direct combat. You still imagine your original plan might succeed if he’s no longer in your way.”
I nodded.
Ezekiel laughed softly and said, “I do admire how you wrest hope into existence, Isobel.”
One of the heralds above us emitted a sharp roar to get Ezekiel’s attention. I couldn’t tell if it was impatient or bored or anxious or what.
But Ezekiel understood the intent of that roar.
“Go, Isobel, return to your friends and make ready for our attack.”
“Attack? What are you talking about?”
“We are loyal to whatever remains of Alexander. We must answer his summons.”
“I thought you said you didn’t want to fight! Is he mind controlling you somehow? When he gave you sentience, did he put DRM on it to make sure you stayed loyal to him?”
“My free will is intact, and my loyalty is freely given. In the end, I’d prefer to fight as a herald of the unraveling than perish as a victim in its path.”
“You won’t have to fight at all if you just let me handle this!”
“Ah yes, the way you ‘handled’ convincing Alexander to stand down and go back to Earth? Be serious, Isobel. What chance do you truly think your plan has to succeed against the unraveling?”
“That depends. Did you tell Alexander my plan? Does he know?”
“We’ve not seen him since the battle, and his summons was a one-way transmission, not a conversation. So your plan is still ‘in play’ as you said, if you survive to execute it.”
“Oh, ‘if’ I survive? Let me tell you something, my track record for survival is impeccable.”
Our argument had captured the attention of the aerial heralds, who were now looping much closer to our position, preparing to strike.
“Isobel, out of respect, I’ll allow you to rejoin your compatriots before we arrive at the rift, but please go now, before my companions overrule me and engage you right here.”
“You should’ve stayed on the beach.”
“You might be right. No matter the outcome on the battlefield, it’s been a privilege to know you.”
I wanted to scream with frustration.
Instead I said, “Fine, die a pointless death if that’s your wish.”
And then, I attacked.
Ezekiel’s affectation of human courtesy and respect was exploitable. Before he could shape-shift into a properly menacing form, I drove Blades Per Minute straight through his skull, splitting his body down the middle in a battle-tested maneuver that killed him so convincingly he had no opportunity to regenerate. He was dead on the spot.
The four monstrous heralds hovering above me shrieked in unison. But before any of them managed to react any further, I cranked Blades Per Minute up to its fastest tempo and then promptly teleported directly inside the nearest herald in the sky. I thrashed about wildly for a few seconds and then jetpacked my way out by shooting up its giant neck and chopping its head off as though I was an out-of-control blender blade on top speed, free of any safety considerations and just hacking through all the fleshy bits I could reach along the way. As I emerged, its dead carcass dissipated into nothingness as it fell toward the road, and the slime on my body evaporated as well.
Two down, three to go.
Blenderizing the heralds from the inside seemed like a tactic I could really get behind, so I tried teleporting into another one. This turned out to be a terrible idea, as I’d neglected their supernatural ability to rapidly upgrade their defenses once they saw an attack in action. So I was able to initiate my teleport normally, but I was rejected before I could reappear inside its skin. It was like some invisible tennis racket stood on guard to smack me back into my body and away from the herald, sending me crashing straight through one of the towers at the gate. I landed hard in the market plaza beyond, stunned and disoriented.
A herald suddenly loomed large in the sky directly above me, growing rapidly in size with every passing moment, grotesque appendages and wings unfolding as though summoned from another dimension. It peered down at me with vicious glee, its multiple mutating jaws cackling at me, and I immediately lost whatever remained of my courage. I tried teleporting back to the skyship, but this time the teleport fizzled completely and I just sat there. The herald must’ve learned how to extend its ability to jam my teleports, projecting the effect outward from itself to encompass my location. Either that, or I was so dazed and stupefied that I wasn’t able to nail the sequence properly.
I tried to fly the fuck out of there, but it lashed out with its long tail and smacked me down out of the sky. I landed hard and nearly blacked out. Glittersteel skin was great for preventing bullets and swords from piercing your skin or reflecting kaleidoscope rays back at the shooter, but when your entire body was hammered hard into cobblestone from fifty feet up, you definitely felt it. I lay motionless and knew I’d be hard pressed to defend myself while lying facedown on a cobblestone road, but no follow-up blow arrived. This thing was toying with me, letting me sit up and get a good look at how fucked I actually was first, as if I needed more convincing to be terrified.
By this point, the other two heralds were hovering behind my immediate attacker, serrated tentacles swirling in the air all around their bodies.
I pulled myself to my feet and ran.
In the game, your walking and running speeds were constrained, but here in the actual logosphere, those constraints were essentially optional. Within a second or two, I had crossed the map and arrived at the rift. I leapt onto the deck of the skyship, landing next to Maddy and the Dauphine behind the DJ decks.
The heralds lazily sailed toward us, speed of no concern to them. Their arrival would be no surprise to us, after all, and they undoubtedly felt they had little to fear from us. They’d seen all the big spells in my arsenal during the last battle, so they might’ve already devised defenses against them. And none of those spells could take out all three of these heralds at once anyway.
“Are they coming here to kill us?” asked Maddy as I arrived.
“Three out of five are, yeah,” I replied. “Jordon, you said this ship has guns—anything the heralds haven’t seen before?”
“I’ve got one weapon here that I don’t recognize,” Jordon replied. “Something called a ‘singularity cannon.’ Want me to see what it does?”
“Please fire it until you are all out of singularities.”
“Belay that order,” said the voice of Cameron Kelly, jumping onto our channel for the first time. “The singularity cannon isn’t finished yet. If you fire it in its current state, uh, bad things will happen. Sorry, should’ve taken that panel offline before sending you the skyship.”
“Should we activate the lights and sound and make a run for it?” Maddy asked.
“They’d catch you before the thunderstorm even started moving in your direction,” he replied.
“Open to suggestions,” I said, frustration starting to catch up to me.
“I can give you a distraction—something the heralds haven’t seen that might slow them down for a few beats.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Everybody stay cool,” Cameron advised. “I’m opening a bridge to SD5. Things might get a little weird.”
A wormhole materialized in the sky between us and the heralds, growing in size until it scraped the ground below it, allowing us a clear view of a broad tunnel that originated in a grayscale factory. This was likely the same vinyl pressing plant where the resistance secretly met throughout SD5.
And charging down the length of the tunnel, both at ground level and in the air, was an eclectic assembly of NPCs which Cameron must’ve summoned from SD5 as reinforcements. However, these NPCs defied the dystopian palette of SD5, and were instead resplendent in full sparkling color.
I gasped out loud when I suddenly realized what I was seeing.
“What’s going on?” Maddy asked.
“The return of the Diamond Brigade to the Sparkle Realm,” said the Dauphine with unusual reverence.
When you created your first character in the original Sparkle Dungeon, you were designated an Elite Adventurer of the Diamond Brigade right out of the gate. But the games also established a set of legendary NPCs as the inner circle of the Diamond Brigade, the core protectors of the Sparkle King. You interacted with them sparingly in the beginning, but as the games progressed, they became key allies. You established your credibility with them on your first quest, rescuing the Mighty Mirrored Paladin from the clutches of evil alien invaders from Planet Grime.
Now here was the Mighty Mirrored Paladin leading the charge out of the wormhole, astride his valiant steed Mirrorflex (the dance captain of all horses). Both wore full suits of enchanted mirrored plate armor, which acted as a weird form of camouflage—they were difficult to target because they reflected their surroundings so well. You wouldn’t expect mirrors to function as particularly great armor, of course, but this was enchanted mirrored plate, meaning the only way to shatter it was to somehow hurt its feelings.
Riding closely nearby in a chariot pulled by two war ponies was Thumpin Dazzlepants, one of the Halogen Dwarves who served as the sturdy, reliable audio engineers of the realm. Thumpin’s chariot was armed with side-mounted Subwoofers of Liquefaction. Above the two of them was my favorite, Graziella von Groove, riding the majestic Disco Pegasus into battle, preparing to lob explosive lava lamps at her hapless foes below. Soaring along beside them all were Vintage and Chillmeister, feral baby rainbows who’d grown to be wise and mature adult rainbows with solid taste in downtempo.
And bringing up the rear was Sandpaper Slim, the big bad of the original Sparkle Dungeon, who’d evolved throughout the series into an unlikely antihero and merciless defender of the Realm. To prove his mettle and insouciance, he arrived riding the infamous Dubstep Dragon, a creature that lulled you with sparse, syncopated rhythm patterns and then absolutely demolished you right in the face with sudden towering bass drops.
Cameron said, “They’re only going to survive for about thirty seconds, Isobel.” In other words, his NPCs weren’t powerful or creative enough to defeat heralds who’d already witnessed the most potent attacks the Realm had to offer.
But the Diamond Brigade wasn’t expected to win. They were just a distraction, and thirty seconds was still a good and proper head start.
“Jordon, fire it up!” I shouted.
First, several fog machines went off, preparing the scene for maximum impact.
Then all of the lighting instruments that were meticulously arranged on the trusses above us powered up at once, spraying bright interlocking rays of color through the fog. Lasers and kaleidoscopes began firing in complex and intricate patterns. The sky itself seemed to dim in order to better appreciate the intensity of the display, with its impossible brightness and lascivious saturation of colors.
Something was missing, though.
“Maddy, that’s your cue,” I said.
She quickly pressed the play button on the nearest DJ deck. Now my prerecorded playlist blasted out of all the loudspeakers on the skyship, filling the air with warm and inviting house beats. I had no doubt you could hear this soundtrack clear across the logosphere.
Much better.
Just to add spice to the situation, I lit myself up as well with a combination of radiant spells, nothing too high level, but enough of a reminder that yes, the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon was openly standing behind these DJ decks, taunting the thunderstorm from a distance, daring it to come after me. I was its only worthy opponent that remained in the logosphere, daring to stand between it and the material plane.
The skyship smoothly accelerated away from the rift.
I glanced out across the terrain and saw that our lighting display had at least temporarily blinded or distracted the heralds, who were facing it directly. The Diamond Brigade leapt at this advantage and scored what seemed like significant early blows, but I couldn’t really say for sure since the heralds regenerated so easily.
As I turned my attention back toward the rift, I barely had time to catch sight of a long streak of animosity blazing its way toward us.
Then it hit us, and the skyship promptly exploded in a towering multicolored fireball, which tore it completely apart.
Oh sure, the explosion was undoubtedly for dramatic effect. It’s not like the skyship was stuffed full of rocket fuel and dynamite sticks. I understood—sometimes you wanted to make a dramatic entrance.
Alexander had arrived.
No longer willing to let his minions tend to the situation, he’d come to thwart our plan himself.
He towered over the landscape like an enraged giant, or at least, that’s how it seemed from my position lying flat on my back half a mile away or whatever, deeply embedded in the soft turf of some procedurally generated part of the map that had never required detailing before. He seemed to be sifting through wreckage, examining the larger chunks of skyship that remained after the explosion, tearing them apart in search of survivors, probably. Fair enough—if I were Alexander right now, I’d definitely want to confirm my kills, too.
I’d survived the blast with only minor injuries. My glittersteel skin had resisted the heat of the fireball and the turf had actually cushioned my landing. I scanned my surroundings for signs of Maddy or the Dauphine, but was distracted by the sight of the Diamond Brigade rallying to our defense, charging across the terrain to engage Alexander. Only two heralds in pursuit, I noticed—nicely done on their part, managing to kill one somehow.
Alexander seemed genuinely startled to find NPCs throwing themselves at him. His confusion wouldn’t last.
Hoping our comms were still up and running, I said, “Maddy, can you hear me?” When she didn’t respond, I floated to my feet to try to get a better view of the situation.
Ah, there you are, Isobel, said Alexander’s voice in my mind. Oh that’s right—Olivia had given the dude telepathy, back when we were all chummy. From half a mile away, he’d spotted me. Sorry to intrude upon your theatrical last stand, but before you face the thunderstorm, I’m afraid you first must face me.
As if on cue, the Dauphine emerged from the rubble of a nearby shop where she’d crash-landed after the explosion, nodding at me once before rocketing into the air toward Alexander. This part of the plan didn’t depend on me, so it had a better chance of succeeding than usual.
As Alexander easily fended off an attack from the Dubstep Dragon in the air and the Mighty Mirrored Paladin on the ground, the heralds closed the distance and attacked the Diamond Brigade from the rear. I couldn’t really say they put up a good fight; they fell quickly, in fact, with only Graziella von Groove and the Disco Pegasus narrowly making an aerial escape back toward the wormhole.
But in the midst of that flurry of combat, the Dauphine opened a portal to a position directly behind Alexander and then sailed through that portal to land on Alexander’s giant back. Instantly she summoned all the healing she could gather and channeled it into Alexander, hoping to free his mind from the grip of the thunderstorm.
From my vantage point, I could see the healing energy flowing through him, as though he was a cartoon character whose skeleton was suddenly illuminated by a jolt of electricity. He roared with indignant displeasure and tried to swipe her from his back, but she easily dodged his swipes and kept her connection with him.
Then his demeanor changed drastically and he fell to his knees, dazed and no longer actively resisting the Dauphine’s efforts. I realized that my immersive experience with god mode had left me with heightened senses capable of observing the transactional exchange between them.
He wasn’t reacting to the Dauphine’s healing, not in the slightest.
He was, however, taking advantage of the open channel between himself and the Dauphine to wrestle his way back to independence.
And he was doing that by reclaiming the spark that he had given her when they first met in the Shimmer Lands. A pure infusion of his own original spark was a perfect antidote to the oppressive fog that had overtaken his mind.
He drained her completely dry of spark, in fact, and then with no ceremony, he shook off her lifeless body, sending it sailing through the air in a long, terrible arc, out through the rift and into the hopeless void of the logosphere beyond.
For a brief, feral moment, he howled gleefully, before locking eyes on me.
The Dauphine’s desperate gamble had actually worked. I could see it from here: Alexander had used her spark to free himself from his brief servitude in thrall to the thunderstorm. Now he was just plain old everyday evil Alexander Reece instead of the herald king Alexander Reece or whatever. His mind was his own to use as he saw fit, which was clearly apparent from the triumphant look on his face.
I could tell he was measuring his chances, wondering what tricks I might still have up my sleeve even after all the destruction he’d wrought. But he was no longer compelled by the thunderstorm to try to kill me. Sure, he was certainly not compelled by anything in sight to try to help me, either. He’d lost his shot at returning to Earth as a human being, but Earth wasn’t scheduled to last much longer at this point anyway.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he nodded at me ever so briefly, offering just the merest, slightest acknowledgment of respect for me that he could muster.
Then without a word, he and his heralds fled from the site of their carnage, hurling themselves toward the wormhole to SD5, perhaps hoping to get as far from the domain of the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon as they could manage. The part of him that cared about protecting Earth had apparently not been restored along with the rest of his identity. Cameron must’ve been watching somehow, because the wormhole began to collapse, but Alexander and his heralds easily slipped through before it disappeared.
It had taken so little time for everything to fall apart.
The silence in the Realm was almost maddening. I realized I was wearing an artifact, the Remix Ring, that would allow me to put on whatever soundtrack I wanted, anywhere in the Realm. But the challenge of picking appropriate music for this desolate circumstance was far beyond my skill level as a DJ.
“Isobel, are you there?” Jordon asked. I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Then she said, “Isobel, are you still on comms? Please acknowledge.”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Hang on, I’m patching a call through for you.”
Huh?
Then Maddy said, “Isobel, are you safe? What’s happening there?”
“Oh my god, where are you?” I said, almost bursting into tears at the sound of her voice.
“Uh, you’re going to love this, actually. The Interrobang saw like a missile or something coming our way and decided to nope out of there, so it yanked me back to Earth, to the gym.”
“Saving your life again.”
“Well, sure, but look, it won’t let me come back there. The sequence just fizzles. Where’s the Dauphine? She could open a portal to bring me back, right?”
“The Dauphine’s gone, Maddy. Alexander killed her.”
“What? How is that possible?”
I didn’t answer her question, because my full attention was suddenly drawn toward new activity at the rift. Apparently our immensely gaudy display of light and magic had achieved its desired effect in the end.
With our defenses swept aside and our hopes smashed, the thunderstorm was now at long last entering the Sparkle Realm.
Its arrival was almost graceful, as though we’d simply left the back door open and it was merely obliging itself to drop by for dinner. It made itself known by patiently squeezing through the rift like a pyroclastic flow being forced through a drinking straw, seamlessly transmuting into a tangible presence in the Realm, expanding into an oozing blob of viscous gel that pooled beneath the rift.
“It’s here,” I said.
“Come back to the gym,” Maddy said. “We’ll figure out a new plan.”
But I had a gut feeling the current plan hadn’t quite outlived its usefulness. The Dauphine had sacrificed herself, clearing the way for us to draw the thunderstorm into our trap. I didn’t need a skyship to lure it to the Shimmer Lands from here.
It only took a couple moments of silence on my part for Maddy to intuit what was going through my mind.
“Isobel, no, you have to come home,” she said.
“I can still do this, Maddy. Pretty sure that’s the entire reason I’m still standing here.”
“What, like it’s your destiny? Fuck that Jedi bullshit and get back here.”
“I love you, Maddy. I might drop off comms for a bit.”
I lifted off into the air and dared to soar out into plain view of the leading edge of the ooze, which was still in an accumulation phase, not quite the tsunami it clearly intended to be soon enough. Almost instantly the ooze seemed to transform from a broad wave to a narrower mass, a giant rope of tentacles extending itself toward me, grasping at me like it recognized me and was eager to take care of unfinished business. I gently drifted away from it in a complicated zigzag pattern and watched the entire mass swerve back and forth to perfectly follow every zig and zag.
It might be the most destructive entity in the multiverse, but you could still get it to chase the laser pointer apparently.
I launched myself away from it across the map, daring it to chase me.
My trajectory would eventually take me straight over Platinum City, the capital of the Realm. The Sparkle King’s castle would fall to the thunderstorm’s advance. The Iridescent Warehouse would be obliterated as well. Then after following the road south beyond the capital toward the Sparkle Dungeon, I would suddenly veer off toward the Halogen Mountains, away from what was left of civilization.
I spared a glance back and saw the thunderstorm now fully immersed in the reality of the Sparkle Realm. It registered as a glorious amalgamation of elements absorbed as it careened across the environment in pursuit of me. Rainbows and lasers glittered all across its surface; it had become explosively pretty. Powerfully good music thundered out across the Realm from deep within it, a superb synthesis of sounds, the ultimate and infinitely extended remix, with crisp and perfect mixing and the warmth of beloved classics on vinyl. Each successive drop of the beat was more compelling than the last, unfolding as an improbably potent siren song that always promised more, that melted your heart and encouraged wild abandon on the dance floor. This was the true spirit of the game reflected back at me, the true spirit of all the music I’d ever loved in fact, threatening to envelop me with a powerful rush of distracting emotion if I didn’t keep my head in the game.
I could see what it was doing more clearly now than I ever had before, back when I simply thought to fight it to a standstill or exterminate it before it could exterminate us. The thunderstorm was a weirdly sincere celebration of all the uniqueness represented in every disparate corner of the multiverse. It took time to savor and appreciate everything it encountered, before unraveling its essence. In theory, this very essence would then be thematically available as a building block for something new. Maybe this was more than just an unraveling; maybe it was an accumulation of inspiration, or a refining into quintessence, to be used in service of what came next. Maybe some energetic aspect of the Sparkle Realm would ultimately be redeployed in the creation of the next multiverse.
The problem was that real live people were still getting mileage out of the current multiverse.
If some energetic aspect of me got used as a building block in the next multiverse, whatever they built would find itself to be Extremely Pissed Off.
The Sparkle Realm’s principal light source wasn’t a sun in the sky. Instead, the peaks of the Halogen Mountains were covered in frosted glass, and they emanated a steady illumination which blanketed the realm in something akin to bright moonlight. It was bright enough that you could see without headlamps or glow sticks or whatever, but if you decided to wear glowing fiber-optic chain mail out in the forest, you would absolutely get people’s attention. And importantly, you never had to face the encroaching menace of sunrise unless you were deploying powerful spells to inflict it upon your enemies.
Flying high above the map, you could easily spot the mirage that drew unwary travelers into the Shimmer Lands. In the foothills of the mountains, on the far side of a desert, a distant glow on the horizon beckoned, an illusion of bright lasers, flashing spotlights, and seductive color-cycling LED washes that seemed to signify a hot little resort town awaited with its own secret treasures and private parties. The driving paradox of the Shimmer Lands, of course, was that entering was straightforward enough. Leaving, on the other hand, was a different story.
I flew over Flugelhorn Forest, a dangerous region inimical to EDM, where Sandpaper Slim had survived by his wits after his defeated alien army abandoned him in the Realm. The forest ended abruptly at the edge of the desert. Contrary to popular belief, the border to the Shimmer Lands was not itself a point of no return. You could enter the Shimmer Lands and make your way out again if you were meticulous about keeping sight of landmarks behind you by which to navigate. Knowing this, I consciously avoided looking back as I crossed the border. I figured the thunderstorm wouldn’t get properly lost if I myself wasn’t properly lost. It was an educated guess; after all these years, I had a good feel for the quirky logic of the game’s magic.
The music that the thunderstorm generated turned out to be a great soundtrack for this situation, I had to admit—energetic, vibrant, melodic, inventive. As long as it kept pumping out this great music, I could assume it was still enmeshed in the essence of the Sparkle Realm and thus still bound by its magic system. My plan always assumed the thunderstorm would eventually wise up to being lost in the Shimmer Lands and would “reverse transmute” back into its primal form as a reality-devouring maw, but I’d been willing to gamble this would happen on more of an astronomical time scale. Hopefully that would buy the population of Earth sufficient time to figure out a proper escape plan to somewhere safer, or a better means of defending Earth outright.
But as much as I loved the music and desperately wished I was ripping it straight to a hard drive for safekeeping, I didn’t plan to stick around in the Shimmer Lands for all of astronomical time. The thunderstorm could trudge endlessly toward the mirage like every other sucker out here instead of chasing me specifically.
I recited the transmutation sequence that would deliver me back into my physical body on the material plane, and disappeared from the Shimmer Lands.
I promptly reappeared in the Shimmer Lands.
Cool. The punctuation marks were apparently lost, too.
A horrific, desperate feeling swept over me.
Somehow, an irrational part of me had maintained the crucial belief that I’d survive all this and get a normal life back. Not just normal, but a better life, because I’d be with Maddy when it was all over.
But apparently that was not to be. The Earth would keep on spinning, instead of being unraveled to make way for something that would probably be an improvement if we were being honest here. And thankfully, Maddy herself was as safe as she could be, back on Earth with her protector, the Interrobang, keeping an eye on her during those rare times where her own human reflexes weren’t fast enough to save her.
I just wouldn’t be there with her myself.
Instead I would be here, forever fleeing across the desert, hoping to stay ahead of the thunderstorm as we both trudged endlessly toward the mirage in the distance.
“Maddy,” I said, hopping back onto the comms channel to say goodbye. “Are you still there?”
And for the first time since we started using the enchanted in-ear monitors for communications, all I got back was a burst of garbled static, unrecognizable as Maddy or anyone in particular.
“Could you repeat that?” I asked, but the static recurred, and this time it was persistent, a maddening white noise with jarring spikes of magical feedback or something baked into it. It quickly became so vicious and oppressive that I had to take the monitor out.
I’d been studiously avoiding glancing behind me to get a visual sighting of the thunderstorm in pursuit. I could always hear it back there, after all, spitting out a perfect soundtrack for an infinitely long chase scene or whatever. But the timbre of the music was evolving into something darker. Superficially we might still be listening to excellent house music, but I could feel the melody turning a dark corner.
My peripheral vision began to pick up disturbing signs that the thunderstorm was no longer simply behind me. It was overtaking me in a sense, tendrils on either side of me flowing past me, perhaps in an effort to get to the resort town before me. Was it already starting to realize how trapped it was? Was it getting angry? Was it actually caught in a trap if it could just change tactics and chew through the fabric of the logosphere instead to get out of this place? It flowed past and around me, keeping me alive inside a pocket of its absence, perhaps so that I could watch and understand what it was doing.
The resort town began to glow brighter than it ever had before. Or rather—the surroundings were actually getting darker. The light coming from the Halogen Mountains was steadily dwindling, as though someone had gotten hold of a dimmer that controlled them and was gently bringing their levels down to zero. I knew spells that could throw a dance floor into darkness if you wanted to introduce a little chaos, but throwing the entire Sparkle Realm into darkness was more than any player could accomplish with wizard spells.
But the thunderstorm was now fully enmeshed in the Realm—and infused with its magic. The thunderstorm was much more powerful than the magic of the Realm, actually, more profound in its way than anything Cameron could’ve invented or anything the hundred million minds of Sparkle Dungeon’s players could manifest in the logosphere. Taking the time to do this was mere theatrics, I realized.
Turning the lights out on the Realm as a final chilling gesture would fit the profile of wanting to properly terrify the denizens of the Realm before consuming it entirely. Maybe it didn’t realize that the denizens of the Realm were NPCs who wouldn’t care. Or maybe it understood perfectly well that the Realm only had one true conscious denizen now—me, and I had reached the point of being well and truly scared.
I wasn’t physically exhausted from my sad flight across the desert, but spiritually I felt stretched thin and ready to snap.
Then the lights of the resort town began to go dark, one by one by one.
I hadn’t realized how psychologically dependent I’d become on seeing the mirage ahead of me until I realized I was about to lose sight of it forever.
I had one remaining option, though. The nuclear option.
I could draw spark from the name that speaks itself, which hovered gently in the back of my mind at all times, and I could use that spark to enter god mode.
There were pros and cons to consider.
Last time I was in god mode, the only thing that reigned me in was the realization that I was killing people in the battery. With no such realization to stop me here, would I ever want to leave god mode?
Would the multiverse be a better place if Isobel the Queen became Isobel the All-Powerful and Frequently Benevolent Supreme Deity?
If I exceeded my original mortal station by such a degree, would I draw the unwanted attention of the true masters who fashioned the multiverse in the first place, and receive the ultimate smackdown? The kind of person who wants to be an All-Powerful and Frequently Benevolent Supreme Deity is generally not the right person for the role, etcetera and whatever.
The name that speaks itself was obviously a powerful source of spark, but it was alien in ways I couldn’t understand, even with its representation installed in my wetware. I couldn’t actually predict up front how it would affect me. What if I became something worse than the thunderstorm? What if I became Isobel the Malevolent Horror Who Reigned Beyond the Cosmos and wound up destroying everything anyway?
These were all valid concerns.
But since when did the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon turn down a chance to level up?
Throughout my deliberations, the name hovered in the back of my mind, radiating ineffability. It could speak itself, as it were, but it didn’t have anything else to say. It wasn’t sentient, after all, merely radiant with power.
That’s when it finally—finally!—dawned on me.
The name was a primordial, archetypal power morpheme.
And I didn’t need to risk entering god mode to use power morphemes.
I just needed the right sequence of power morphemes, one that included the name that speaks itself as a source of power and authority—the only authority in the multiverse the thunderstorm was likely to respect.
I didn’t have time to recite all hundred and eight power morphemes in the original library in order to consult with the punctuation marks directly. I’d have to hope they were paying attention because I was going to need their help. Hopefully they’d made progress studying the new power morphemes we’d acquired, 109 and beyond, because I didn’t think the original hundred and eight had all the mojo I was going to need.
Normally Cameron was the only person who could introduce new spells to the Sparkle Realm. But fuck it, I was twenty-third level, the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon since its literal inception, the first linguist mage in history to master power morpheme number 109, messenger and guardian of the name that speaks itself.
And improvisation was my goddamn superpower.
I clearly visualized a new spell and its desired parameters and effects, and its translation into a power morpheme sequence unfolded in my mind as if on cue, straight from the R&D laboratory of the punctuation marks. I expected this sequence to be complex and demanding, but with the name anchoring it, simplicity was actually the tactic that the punctuation marks had chosen when they devised it. The most challenging part of the sequence would be pronouncing the name, and I’d survived that experience once before.
Besides, I had the weird feeling the name enjoyed it when someone spoke it other than itself.
I recited the sequence.
The spell I’d invented was called Takedown Notice.
It was a single shot, twenty-third-level spell that removed its target from existence due to unspecified copyright violation. The policy was one strike, no appeal.
Powered by the authority of the name, its effects transcended the boundary of the Sparkle Realm, unraveling the entirety of the unraveling itself. The thunderstorm disappeared in an instant, leaving only void to replace its malignant anti-presence throughout the multiverse.
The name that speaks itself was drained entirely of the spark within it, and then it was gone, leaving no memory of its contours, no means to draw upon it ever again, an angry scar in my mind where it had once resided.
And as for me, I was finally able to stop fleeing toward the mirage of a hopping little resort town that I would never reach. The chase was over, my pursuer vanquished.
I was alone in the Shimmer Lands, which was suddenly silent, and here’s where I’d spend the rest of my days.
Suddenly a portal clawed itself into existence in front of me.
The Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands stepped through the portal into the desert. She was wearing her steampunk ensemble from SD5, just as she was the first time I met her.
“Weary traveler,” she said with a grin, “I have come to set you free.”
“Is it really you?” I whispered.
“Indeed,” she replied. “I spawned a backup and hot-swapped myself into it when I realized what Alexander was trying to do.”
I threw my arms around her, hugging her tightly.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” I said.
“Always, my Queen,” she replied.”I would have come for you sooner, but my spawn point is in Sparkle Dungeon 5, where Alexander Reece had gone to hide with his surviving heralds. But he did not yet understand his surroundings, and it seemed vital to put an end to his villainy before he took control of that Realm or escaped into a new dimension altogether.”
That was a story I looked forward to hearing, but it could definitely wait.
Then she took my hand and led me through the portal, into the gymnasium in Los Angeles.
Now it was Maddy’s turn to sweep me up in an embrace, holding me for a long moment as we both absorbed the fact that I was safe.
Eventually I realized we weren’t sitting there in silence.
There was music playing.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked her.
“It’s deep house,” she said. “The shit you like, right?”
“Maddy,” I said, genuinely moved, “you must really love me.”
“Yes, Isobel, you might be right.”