Les phrases dans le cerveau, leurs débuts plutôt, d’un dire attendu venant du vide de soi, patienté jusqu’aux nerfs, finissent en tronçons de bois que des mains engourdies jettent au bas-côté. La ville se tient muette, à ne rien tirer d’elle, planquée, souterraine, nous laissant seulement courater sur son dos. Hors Éros, qui la guette, la pense, voudrait l’écrire ou la parler s’il savait le faire, en dépaysager l’urbain ? Et ça paraît si futile ou vain, qu’on se retient de sacrer son nom puis de maudire, outre soi-même, les gens qui vont sans voir tout du long d’elle, de son multicouloir immobile.

---

La vie solitaire de É. Sambòko prend la suite des #Didascalies de Fenêtre sur ville. Un personnage est apparu, qui déplace la perspective de la ville et de son écriteur. Sambòko veut dire “chaussure” mais aussi “énigme” si l’on oriente autrement l’accent. Où va É. Sambòko ? L’on ne sait.

#LaviesolitairedeÉSambòko

Advies van een vriend Geniet meer van het leven Het is zo voorbij.

Today I had what I consider my first real birthday party. I don’t even know where to start. I hosted a lot of different events and games, And I think overall people loved it! There were a lot of really fun moments and people kept asking me about how much effort I put into it. When it was time for cake, I went to the car to grab something for a second, and when I had come back the lights were off, and everyone was gathered around the table. Honestly, I was really afraid and I had went to the bathroom right before, and I felt like I was going to cry and I was horribly anxious. How do you tell someone who has felt like they have slipped through every crack in a room that suddenly everyone sees them? And in such a beautiful way. I felt like I was just going to cry from them singing, happy birthday, but then they told me to prop up my phone and record. And when they did that, they instead told me that they all were going to come one by one and put a candle one at a time and tell me a wish that they have for me. And my voice is breaking up because I’m going to cry again thinking about it. I think about how before this one of the greatest gifts that I have kept for my birthday was the happy birthday sign. My ex’s family had put in the cake for me. And now I have more candles that I could’ve dreamed of. Everyone took turns coming up to me, lighting a candle, and telling me something sweet and a wish for me. And I couldn’t stop crying.

So many people told me how grateful they are for the community that I have built and how thankful they are to get to be a part of it. They told me how many people they have gotten to meet through me and how many fun things they’ve gotten to do. And I couldn’t help but think about all these years that I have spent my birthday and the holidays alone. And I think about how many nights I fell asleep before college dreaming about how I would have friends that I could hang out with people that would give me hugs. I could cry and I am crying because I struggled so much and I have blindly put in so much faith along the way working at this. I always dreamed about being able to have a life like this, and I have made it in mine. I grew up without a community, because my parents kept us isolated at home. And I never felt like I fit in anywhere, with the exception of online. And I’m grateful for that in several ways, and I also think that I have become a deep and unique person because of that lack of conformity that comes with community. But I always wished that I would find my people and I have spent so many nights thinking about it and I’ve written about it so many times I’ve talked with my therapist so many times and I now have that. And I have it in such a loud way that so many of the other people in the community that I have built remind me of this fact.

I also had several people tell me about how unapologetically myself I am, and how it inspires them to feel comfortable being themselves. I had several people tell me how I am always having fun in whatever situation, and I couldn’t stop but cry because it reminded me of how fucking hard I have worked and pushed myself to learn how to be happy. I have people tell me how much energy I have and I feel so grateful to myself for trying so fucking hard through pure willpower. I think about how many days I have woken up at 4 PM because I just don’t have any will to get up.

I had so many people tell me how thoughtful I am towards my friends and how much I care about others, and how much I think about them. And I want to cry so fucking bad because I tried to be the person I needed at so many different points in my life and it feels like I have been doing pretty good in that sense. I think it is such a beautiful thing for your friends to think about you and the word that comes to their mind is thoughtful and considerate. It feels like all of the quiet little times I have accommodated someone without telling them, or made an effort to include someone slipping behind or checking in on someone has been seen.

And most of all I had a lot of people wish that I truly knew how many people around me care about me and love me. And that devastated me in the best way, because I cannot even begin to count how many times I have thought that I should kill myself. And how many times I have thought and truly believed that people would not miss me. And I know that so much of that is depression trying to trick me, but at the same time, it’s such a uphill battle to convince yourself of this so blindly when the only thing you hear is the opposite. But today I heard so many voices just telling me that I underestimate how loved I am.

And I vividly remember sitting here in the bottom of the shower writing about how it felt cosmically unfair that I have tried so hard and putting so much effort into being a good friend, and every year I would dread my birthday. And I would see other people being celebrated and even all of these sweet things like surprise parties, or people all giving wishes. And I feel that bitterness and envy, because what did I do to be doomed to not get that. And I know that it is a lot more complicated than that, and it is in no way shape or form a reflection of how much the people around me care if they did not do this. But also, I did get more than I could’ve dreamed of. And I still get to the day before my birthday as a sleepover with friends. And this is way more than I could’ve wished for, honestly, it’s more than I even feel comfortable receiving. And I guess I want to say that I want to thank the universe. And I’m also really thankful to myself for all of the things and work that I have been putting in so consistently, because things like this don’t just accidentally happen.

It’s more than everything I ever wanted.

Kurama to Kibune trail today.

I could have stayed all day. The trees, the autumn leaves; I can’t even begin to explain how beautiful it was. But it was the smell, that exact feeling of being right where I love to be. Far from the city noise. Nature calls, and it just gives me my energy back.

Hiked it with Simon, my new Swiss friend. He is a sensitive soul with so much good insight to share. The way he pays attention when you speak, not everyone knows how to do that. Most people don’t really care about people. When you find someone who actually listens, who takes a real interest in your story, they rapidly become part of it.

What a great day.

No time for the Kurama Onsen today, but the mountain gave me everything I needed anyway.

I awoke from nightmares with your lips upon my shoulder, and your hand seeking the warmth of a wanton response. There was power slinking through the quietly rumbled syllables of my name as you bid it coax chilled flesh to ripple from the kindling of your creation. I felt eternity beckon in a longing scratch of deeply buried hunger until... until... until there was naught — mere aftershocks of a vacancy pledged eternal.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=GrYnK1LkEp8&is=xZVNE4JV5BNi6tw2

FICTIONAL WHAT IF: Part VII- What if What if Conquest killed Mark and Eve when he came to Earth?

Chapter I: Fragile Things

Mark Grayson had stopped counting the bones. Somewhere over the Atlantic he had known exactly what was broken, both legs, the left hand and then the right, something in his chest that clicked like a loose tooth every time he breathed, but by the time Conquest hammered him down into the ruins of Chicago the inventory had become one long wall of pain with no doors in it, and he had stopped trying to read the labels. Chicago was already dead. Three days of evil versions of himself had seen to that, eighteen Marks from eighteen worlds where he had made the wrong choice, and the skyline he had flown past since he was a kid was a field of glass and rebar and the smell of things that had been burning for a week. It felt right, in some sick way, that this was where it would end. He lay in a crater of his own making and watched the old man come down out of the smoke the way a man steps off a curb, unhurried, gray hair slicked back with blood that mostly wasn't his, a face like a map of every war the Empire had ever fought. Four blocks east, half buried under the collapsed face of a parking garage, Oliver was still breathing. Mark could hear it if he concentrated, a wet, whistling rhythm, too fast, the sound of a kid whose body had been pulled in two directions by a man who had wanted to see how far it would stretch. Mark held onto that sound the way you hold onto a railing in the dark. As long as it kept going, he had a reason to get up.

“You know what your problem is, boy?” Conquest said, settling onto his heels at the lip of the crater like a farmer inspecting a ditch. He had been talking for most of the fight, across three continents, through the bottom of the Indian Ocean and back up again, and he showed no sign of running out. “You keep getting up. That's good. That's the blood. But then you don't do anything with it. You get up and you get up and you get up, and each time you're a little worse, and I'm exactly the same. Your father's sentiment is in you like rot in a beam. Thragg sent me to see if this planet was ready, and I'm looking at the best it's got, and the best it's got is lying in a hole crying about a little brother.” He tilted his head toward the parking garage, toward the whistling breath. “Should I finish him? Would that help? Would that make you angry enough to be interesting?”

Mark tried to answer and found that his jaw wasn't working right either, so instead he dragged his ruined right hand under himself and pushed, and something in his wrist ground like gravel, and he got exactly as far as his knees before the light came. It came down out of the smoke like a sunrise in the wrong color, a hard magenta glow that turned every shard of glass in the ruined city into a tiny pink star, and for one stupid moment Mark thought he was dying and this was what it looked like. Then he saw her. Eve hung in the air above the crater in a hospital gown and a hoodie she must have grabbed off a chair, an IV port still taped to the back of one hand, her hair wild, her face gray with weeks of unconsciousness and then, as she looked down and saw what was left of him, something else entirely. She had been in a coma since the war. She should not have been able to stand. She did not look like someone who was planning to stand. She looked like someone who was planning to make the old man regret having a body.

Conquest rose slowly, delighted. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, now who is this?”

She didn't answer him either. She just closed her fist, and the ground answered for her. The crater walls came alive, steel and concrete and asphalt rearranging themselves at a thought into chains as thick as subway cars that snapped around Conquest's arms and legs and hauled him down flat, and before he could flex free of them she had turned the air above him into a hammer, a construct the size of a city block, and brought it down. The impact shook what was left of Chicago. Mark felt it in his broken teeth. Conquest came up through it laughing and she hit him again, and again, and when he tore loose and flew at her she simply wasn't there anymore, she was behind him, she was beside him, she was turning the girders he reached for into glass that shattered in his hands and the dust he breathed into something that made him cough and spit. She wrapped him in steel and crushed it inward. She dropped the top six floors of a bank on him and then fused them into a single solid block and then dropped that on him too. When he finally caught her by the ankle she turned his hand to stone, just the outer layer, just enough, and when he shattered it off with a snarl there was skin missing underneath, raw and red. He was bleeding. For the first time since he had come out of the sky over the Pacific, Conquest was really bleeding, from the nose, from one ear, from a gash across his scalp that ran down into his eyebrow, and Mark, on his knees in the dirt with his hands hanging useless at his sides, felt something he hadn't felt since the fight started, which was hope.

“Now THIS,” Conquest roared, wiping blood out of his eye with the back of his wrist, grinning so wide his face looked like it might split, “this is a soldier! Where has he been hiding you? Do you know how long it's been since anyone made me work? Do it again! Do it again, girl, show me everything!”

She did. She built a fist out of the whole sky and threw it at him, and he met it head-on, and Mark would remember afterward, in the little time he had left for remembering, that for one long second it looked like a tie. Then Conquest punched through the center of the construct and came out the other side in a shower of pink light, and he was on her before she could pull away, and he did what a Viltrumite does when another Viltrumite tries to escape. He grabbed her around the waist with both hands, the way you would grab someone whose ribs could take it, and he wrenched. He meant to throw her. Mark knew that later, knew it from the way Conquest's face changed, from the half second of puzzlement in it, because he had used the strength he would use on Thula or Anissa or Mark himself, the strength you use on someone made of something harder than human. The sound it made was not a sound Mark would have believed a person could make. It was short and wet and it came from the middle of her, and then the pink light went out all at once across the whole of Chicago like someone had switched off the sun, and Eve came apart in his hands.

Conquest looked down at what he was holding. Then he let go, and the two pieces of her fell into the rubble twenty feet from Mark, and the old man stood there with his bloody hands held slightly away from his body like a man who had just knocked a glass off a table at someone else's house. “Hm,” he said. He sounded mildly put out. He sounded like someone who had been enjoying a show and had seen it end early. “Oops.” He flexed his fingers and looked at them. “I forget, sometimes. How soft you all are. I wanted to see what else she could do.”

Mark did not remember deciding to stand. He did not remember his legs, which were broken in four places, holding him up, or his hands, which could not close, closing anyway. There was the sound of his own voice, which he didn't recognize, a scream that went on long enough to scrape his throat raw, and then there was Conquest's face very close, and Mark's forehead going into it. He headbutted him the way you would swing an axe, once, twice, three times, and felt the old man's nose go flat and his cheekbone crack. When Conquest grabbed for him Mark sank his teeth into the meat of his shoulder and pulled, and came away with a mouthful of something he would have vomited at any other point in his life, and he spat it out and went back for more. He jammed a thumb that didn't work into Conquest's left eye and kept pushing until something gave. He broke the old man's jaw with an elbow. They went through what was left of the Sears Tower and out the other side and into Lake Michigan and back out again, and every time Conquest tried to talk Mark hit him in the mouth, and the thing Mark would remember last of all about the fight, in his final few seconds of remembering anything, was that he was winning. Conquest was on his back in the shallows with one eye gone and his shoulder torn open and his face a broken plate, and Mark was on top of him, and the blows were landing, every single one, and the water around them was turning dark.

“There you are,” Conquest said through the ruin of his jaw. He was laughing. Blood ran out of the corner of his mouth and he was laughing. “There you ARE. That's the blood. That's your father's son. I knew it was in there.”

Mark brought his fist down again and Conquest caught it, not hard, almost gently, the way an old man catches a child's wrist before the child can touch a stove, and something shifted in the way he held his weight, and the world turned over. Mark was face down in cold water with a knee in the small of his back. He could feel Conquest's hand settle between his shoulder blades, broad and warm and patient, and Conquest leaned down close to his ear, close enough that Mark could hear the wet click of his broken jaw as he spoke. “You'd have made a magnificent soldier,” the old man said, and he sounded like he meant it, he sounded almost sad. “Truly. With fifty years and the right teacher. I'm sorry nobody gave them to you. Don't worry about the little one back there. I'll let him live. Someone has to grow up remembering this properly.”

Mark thought about Debbie standing in the kitchen doorway in her bathrobe the morning after he got his powers, about his father lifting him onto his shoulders at a ballgame when he was six, about Oliver's breath whistling under the parking garage, about Eve's hand, which he could see from here, lying open in the rubble at the edge of the water, palm up, fingers curled, the last faint pink glow fading out of her skin like a coal going cold. He reached for it. He did not feel the hand go into his back, or the pull, or the sound, which was loud enough that it rolled across the empty city and set off a car alarm somewhere that had somehow survived the war. There was only the hand in the rubble, and the color going out of it, and his own fingers stretching toward it across water that went on forever, and the last thing Mark Grayson knew was that he was reaching for her, and that he was never going to get there.

Chapter II: Every Trick in the Book

Cecil Stedman watched Mark Grayson die on a forty-foot screen in a room four hundred feet under Washington, and he did not look away, because looking away was a luxury for people who did not have to decide what happened next. The satellite feed was clean. It was always clean. He had spent forty years and a black budget the size of a small country's GDP making sure that whatever happened on this planet, he could see it in high definition, and so he saw all of it: the girl coming apart, the old man's shrug, the boy getting up on legs that should not have held him and doing more damage to a Viltrumite in ninety seconds than the entire GDA had managed in a decade, and then the hand going in, and the long pale curve of the spine coming out, and the water of Lake Michigan going still. Nobody in the room spoke. A tech near the back made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth. Cecil reached into his jacket, found the pack of nicotine gum, found it empty, and put it back. “Get me Sinclair,” he said. “Get me the Guardians, whoever's still standing. Get me the Brit. Get me Zandale on whatever frequency that jacket of his is listening to. And somebody find out if the Graysons' younger boy is still alive in that parking garage, and if he is, get a team to him before that thing changes its mind.”

The thing did not change its mind. It came to Washington instead. It came to him personally, three hours later, landing on the lawn above the bunker like a meteor with manners, and it stood there in the floodlights with its jaw already knitting back together and one eye socket full of crusted black blood and the other eye looking straight up at the camera Cecil had hidden in a lamppost, the camera nobody was supposed to know about. “Stedman,” it said. It said his name like it had read his file, and maybe it had. “I know you can hear me, old man. Come up. Or don't, and I'll come down, and I'll bring the building with me. This planet belongs to the Viltrumite Empire as of about four hours ago. The boy was supposed to be preparing it for us. He did a poor job. I'm told you're the one who actually runs things here, so I'm telling you first, as a courtesy, from one soldier to another. Surrender the planet, and I'll be generous about how many of your cities I need to break to make the point.”

Cecil went up. He did not have to. He knew what Conquest could do to the bunker, and he had calculated, very quickly, that the thing would rather talk than dig, and that any time it spent talking was time his people spent getting ready. So he took the elevator up and walked out onto the floodlit lawn in his rumpled suit with his hands in his pockets, sixty-something and tired and flat-footed, and stood ten feet from a creature that had just killed the two most powerful heroes on Earth, and looked up at it the way he had once looked up at Nolan Grayson across a conference table, back when he still thought Nolan was a friend. “Let me save you some time,” Cecil said. “You're not getting a surrender. Not from me, not from anybody I can still put a gun in the hands of. I've spent my whole life getting ready for the day one of you came down and tried this, and I am going to throw every single thing I have at you, and when I run out of things I'm going to start throwing the furniture. I will see this planet burn before I see it fly your flag. You want Earth? You're going to have to take it from me one inch at a time, and by the time you're done there won't be enough of it left to be worth the trouble.”

Conquest looked at him for a long moment. Then he started to laugh, a big, rolling, genuine laugh that echoed off the White House across the lawn, and he clapped one bloody hand down on Cecil's shoulder hard enough to nearly put him on his knees. “Oh, I like you,” he said. “I like you very much. Do you know how many worlds I've stood on and listened to some trembling little king beg for his people? Thousands. And here's this one, no powers, bad knees, smells like old coffee, and he looks me in my one good eye and tells me he'll burn it all down first. Fine. FINE. Go on, then. Throw your furniture. I'll wait. I'm in no hurry. My reinforcements are months out, and I haven't had any fun in centuries.” He lifted off, slowly, still chuckling. “Make it interesting, Stedman. I'd hate to have to kill you before you've shown me everything.”

The first thing Cecil threw at him was the Reanimen. Sinclair had been building them since before Mark got his powers, corpses stitched and wired and pumped full of synthetic muscle, and Cecil had ninety of them in cold storage under a hangar in Nevada and another sixty in a warehouse outside Baltimore, and he sent all of them at once. Behind them came the sonic projectors, the same tech that had made Nolan Grayson's ears bleed in that alley all those years ago, mounted now on drones and trucks and the noses of fighter jets, all of them tuned to the frequency Sinclair swore would scramble a Viltrumite's inner ear like eggs in a pan. For about four minutes, it worked. The Reanimen came at him like a swarm of wasps, grabbing his arms and his legs and his hair and dragging him down out of the sky over the Chesapeake, and the projectors opened up all around him, and Conquest screamed, actually screamed, clapping his hands over his ears as blood ran between his fingers. Then he stopped screaming. He took his hands away from his ears, shook his head like a dog coming out of a lake, and said, loud enough for the drones to pick it up, “Oh, that's clever. That's very clever. I didn't know about that one.” And then he went through the Reanimen like a thresher through wheat, and the projectors one by one, and when he was finished the bay was full of floating parts and the sound of nothing at all.

The second thing Cecil threw at him was the Brit. The old soldier had come in from London on a cargo plane with a face like a closed door and a cigarette he wasn't allowed to light, and when Cecil explained the plan he had listened to the whole thing without interrupting and then said, “So I'm the wrapping paper,” and Cecil had said, “You're the wrapping paper,” and the Brit had nodded once and asked what kind of yield they were talking about. They strapped a forty-kiloton warhead to his chest under his jacket and dropped him out of a stealth bomber over the Pacific where Conquest had gone to wash the Reanimen off, and the Brit fell twelve thousand feet and landed square on the Viltrumite's back and wrapped both arms around his neck, and Conquest had just enough time to say, “Who the hell are you?” before the Brit said, “Nobody, mate,” and Cecil pressed the button. The flash lit up the sky from Hawaii to Guam. When the cloud cleared, the satellites found Conquest drifting four miles from ground zero, smoking, his skin blistered and blackened down one entire side, his hair burned away, his remaining eye swollen shut. He was alive. The Brit was alive too, without so much as a scorch mark on him, still clinging to the old man's back like a tick, and he started punching him in the kidneys, which accomplished exactly nothing, and Conquest reached back without looking and peeled him off and studied him at arm's length for a while like a man looking at an unfamiliar bug. “You can't be hurt, can you?” he said, almost wonderingly. “Interesting. You can't hurt me, either, but you can't be hurt. What a strange little animal.” Then he took the Brit by the ankle and flew straight down, six miles, into the Mariana Trench, and drove him into the bedrock at the bottom of the world like a fencepost, and came back up alone.

Zandale Randolph came next, because he volunteered, and because Cecil had stopped saying no to volunteers. He had killed one of the evil Marks during the war, the only human-born hero who could say that, and the Geldarian jacket he wore could fly faster than sound and hit like a freight train and fire enough energy to level a mountain, and for a little while, over the Rockies, he and Conquest fought like two gods. The jacket's targeting found the burns from the nuke and went for them, again and again, and Conquest howled and bled, and Zandale's voice came over the comm laughing, “Cecil, I think he's actually hurt, I think this might be...” and then the comm filled up with the sound of metal tearing. Conquest had gotten his fingers under the jacket's chest plate. He peeled it open like a man shucking an oyster, slowly, while Zandale screamed inside it, and pulled the boy out and held him dangling by the collar over the Continental Divide, and the jacket, without a pilot, folded up into a cube and dropped away into the snow. Conquest did not kill him. He flew him all the way back to Washington, landed on the lawn above the bunker, and laid him down in the grass in front of the lamppost camera, both arms broken and his face swollen but breathing, and leaned down to the lens. “I like this one too,” he said. “Send me more like him.”

So Cecil sent him everything. He sent the Guardians, what was left of them after the war: Robot's army of drones swarming him over Lake Erie, Monster Girl in her full shape tearing at him with claws as long as swords, Dupli-Kate throwing two hundred copies of herself at him at once so that for a few minutes he could not see the sky for her, Black Samson, Shrinking Rae, the Immortal, who died four times that afternoon and got up three of them. He went to the bottom of the ocean and called in debts with the sea king that went back to the Korean War, and the king sent up the old things from the trenches, leviathans the size of aircraft carriers that had slept in the deep since before the dinosaurs, and Conquest fought them off the coast of Japan for most of a day while the whole Pacific turned red. He reached across the GDA teleporter into Hell itself, into a place he had sworn he would never touch again, and dragged Damien Darkblood up out of his throne-war long enough to make a deal Cecil never told anyone the terms of, and Darkblood came through with a legion of demons behind him, things with too many joints and not enough faces, and they boiled out of a crack in the street in the middle of Mexico City and swarmed the Viltrumite like ants on a dropped peach. Conquest loved it. Cecil could see it in his face on the feed, the sheer childish delight of a man who had been offered a new kind of food. He tore through demons for six hours. When it was done Darkblood stood in the smoking wreck of the Zocalo with his coat in tatters and black ichor running out of a dozen wounds, and turned to the nearest drone, and said, “This isn't my fight, Stedman. I'm sorry. I really am.” And then he went back down into the crack, and it closed behind him.

There was one thing left. Sinclair had been working on it since the war, ever since Darkwing had dragged one of the evil Marks into the Shadowverse and neither of them had come back. He had salvaged Darkwing's tech, and he had reverse engineered it, and he had a portal that could tear a hole into that black dimension anywhere on Earth for about forty seconds before the generator melted. “I don't know what's in there,” Sinclair said, hunched over the console in a lab under Arlington with his hands shaking. “I don't know what it does to someone like him. I don't know if it'll hold him. I don't know anything. I want to be very clear about that.” Cecil told him he didn't need to know. He just needed to open the door. They baited Conquest over Baltimore with the last of the sonic drones, and when he came down to swat them Sinclair hit the switch, and the sky over the harbor split open into a darkness that was not just the absence of light but something hungry, something that pulled, and Conquest looked up at it with one eye and said, “Huh,” and then the dark took him and the hole slammed shut. For nine hours nothing happened. The satellites watched the empty sky. Cecil sat in his chair in the bunker and did not move and did not let himself think the word, and in the eighth hour he looked over at the console where the encrypted line to the Coalition of Planets sat dormant and he thought about it. In the ninth hour he finally picked it up. “Allen,” he said, when the Unopan's face came up, flickering through a dozen relays across half the galaxy. “It's Cecil. I need you to listen. Mark's dead. Eve too. A Viltrumite named Conquest killed them both yesterday, and he's been taking my planet apart ever since. I've thrown everything at him. I have nothing left. I need you to tell Nolan. I need you to tell him I'm...” The sky over Baltimore cracked open from the inside. On the main screen, something came out of it, covered head to foot in black, steaming, laughing so hard it could barely fly straight. “Tell him I'm sorry,” Cecil said, and cut the line.

Conquest came down into the bunker himself that night. He did not bother with the elevator. He came through four hundred feet of reinforced concrete and steel and lead the way a man comes through a bead curtain, and he walked into the operations room trailing the Shadowverse behind him in long black strands that smoked where they touched the floor, and everybody in the room either ran or froze except Cecil, who stayed in his chair. “That place,” Conquest said, shaking his head with something like reverence. “That was wonderful. Do you have any more of those? No? Pity.” He pulled up a chair across from Cecil and dropped into it, and the chair groaned. He looked tired, for the first time, really tired, burned and bruised and torn up, the eye still gone, the jaw still crooked. But he was smiling. “That was the most fun I've had in four hundred years,” he said. “You should be proud of yourself, Stedman. I mean that. You threw it all at me, just like you promised. The bomb. The jacket boy. The demons. The hole in the sky. I'm going to tell Thragg about you. You'd have made one hell of a Viltrumite.” Cecil said nothing. Conquest leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “But you're out of furniture,” he said gently. “So now you and I are going to go on a little trip. You and me and that half-machine fellow who follows you around. We're going to make a broadcast, you and I. The whole world is going to watch. And then they're going to understand.”

Chapter III: Urbi et Orbi

Donald Ferguson had died so many times that he no longer thought of it as an event so much as a kind of weather, something that rolled in and rolled out and left him in a lab somewhere with new parts and the same old memories. The war had come closer than most. When the Brit dug him out of the rubble after the evil Marks were gone there had been almost nothing left, a skull casing and a spine and a handful of servos still twitching, and the techs had been rebuilding him ever since, slowly, the way you would restore a car you weren't sure was worth it. By the time Conquest came down through the bunker roof, Donald was about two thirds of a man. He had a head and a torso and one arm and a pair of temporary legs that clicked when he walked, and half his face was still bare chrome. He stood at Cecil's shoulder anyway, the way he always had, because that was where he belonged, and when Conquest said “that half-machine fellow who follows you around,” Donald understood with a kind of cold clarity that he was going to watch whatever came next, and that he was going to watch all of it, because his eyes did not close unless he told them to, and he was not going to give the old man the satisfaction.

Conquest carried them both, one under each arm, out through the hole he'd made and up into the night and east across the Atlantic. Cecil did not speak the whole way. Donald watched the coast of Portugal come up under them in the dawn, and then Spain, and then the long blue boot of Italy, and he understood where they were going about the time the dome came into view, rising out of the morning haze over Rome like something out of a painting. St. Peter's Square was empty. The Vatican had been evacuated two days earlier, when the leviathans started rising out of the Pacific and every government on Earth started moving its important people underground, and so the great colonnade stood around the piazza like two arms open to receive nobody, and the obelisk in the center threw a long shadow across the stones, and the only sound was pigeons. Conquest set them down on the steps of the basilica. Then he walked to the center of the square, wrapped his arms around the obelisk, and pulled it out of the ground like a weed. It was eighty feet of solid Egyptian granite that had stood there since Caligula brought it from Alexandria, and he snapped a twenty-foot section off the top and laid it crosswise over the rest and pressed the two pieces together with his hands until the stone fused, and then he stood the thing up again on the steps of St. Peter's facing the empty square, a cross of red granite four stories tall, and dusted off his palms.

“I've seen a lot of your broadcasts,” Conquest said, turning to Donald. “On the way in. I listened to them for months. Your people love this symbol. You put it on everything. You wear it around your necks. A man nailed to a piece of wood, dying slowly, so that everyone could watch and learn something. I thought that was very interesting. We have nothing like it on Viltrum. When we kill someone to make a point, we simply do it fast and leave them in the street. But I think your way is better. I think your way teaches more.” He reached out, took Donald's skull in one enormous hand, and turned it gently to face the cross. “Your eyes are cameras, aren't they? I heard the jacket boy talking about it before I peeled him. You can transmit. Every screen on this planet. Do it. Now. Or I'll start with the half of your face that's still skin.”

Donald looked at Cecil. Cecil looked back at him, and for the first time in all the years Donald had known him the old spymaster's face did something that might have been tenderness. “Do it, Donald,” he said quietly. “I want them to see this. I want them to see all of it. Every second. Don't you dare look away.”

So Donald opened the channel. He reached into every satellite the GDA had ever hijacked and every network the world still had running, and he put his own eyes on every screen on Earth, and Conquest picked Cecil up the way a man picks up a sack of feed and carried him up the steps to the cross. He did not use nails. Nails were too small for what he wanted. He tore four lengths of iron out of the bronze doors of the basilica, each one as thick as a broom handle, and sharpened the ends between his thumb and forefinger, and held Cecil's right arm against the granite and drove the first spike through his wrist and eight inches into the stone with one blow of the heel of his hand. Cecil screamed. Donald heard it go out to eight billion people at once, raw and enormous, an old man's voice cracking in half, and he did not look away. Conquest did the left wrist. He did the feet, one through the other, the bones crunching like gravel under a boot. He did it slowly and carefully, the way a craftsman works, and Cecil's blood ran down the face of the granite and pooled on the marble steps and dripped down onto the stones of the square, and Cecil kept screaming until he ran out of breath, and then he hung there with his chin on his chest, gasping, and Donald zoomed in on his face because Cecil had told him to, because Cecil had told him every second.

Conquest stepped back to admire his work. Then he turned to face the square, and Donald's eyes, and the world. “Good morning, Earth,” he said. His voice carried without effort, booming off the colonnade. “My name is Conquest. I am an officer of the Viltrumite Empire, and as of three days ago, this planet belongs to us. Some of you may have heard. Some of you may have seen what happened to your Invincible, and to the girl with the pink light. Your governments have been telling you to stay calm. Your governments have been telling you that something is being done. This,” he swept one hand up toward the cross, “is the man who was doing it. This is the best of you. He had no powers and no fear and a great many clever toys, and he threw every single one of them at me, and he made me bleed, and I respect him more than any creature on this world. And here he is.” He let that sit. “Your gods did not come. Your heroes are dead. No one is going to save you. I want you to look at him and understand that, and then I want your leaders, wherever they are hiding, to come out of their holes and kneel. I'll give you three days. I'll be making some points in the meantime, to help you decide.”

Cecil lifted his head. It took him a long time, and Donald could hear the iron grinding in his wrists as he did it, but he lifted it, and he looked straight down into Donald's eyes, into the eyes of every man, woman, and child watching on every screen on Earth, and his face was gray and wet and twisted with pain and it was absolutely, unmistakably Cecil Stedman. “Don't,” he said, hoarsely. “Don't you kneel. Don't any of you kneel. Make him work for every inch. Make him...” He coughed, and blood came up with it. “Make him earn it. Make it cost him. Somebody's coming. I made a call. Somebody's coming.”

Conquest laughed, delighted, and patted Cecil's ankle the way you would pat the knee of a favorite uncle. “You see? You see why I like him?” Then he looked at Donald. “Keep the feed on. All of it. If you turn it off, I'll take your head off and find another camera. I'll be back.” And he lifted off and was gone, east, and Donald stood alone on the steps of St. Peter's beside his dying boss and watched him go, and watched, a few minutes later, through the satellites, as London disappeared. Conquest did not bomb it. He did not burn it. He simply flew through it, back and forth, at speeds that turned the air into a hammer, row after row after row, Westminster and the Tower and St. Paul's and the Shard and four hundred square miles of houses and shops and schools, like a man mowing a lawn, until there was nothing left standing between the M25 and the river. It took eleven minutes. Then he flew to Moscow and did it again. Then Tokyo. Then he came back to Rome, and landed on the steps, and stood there sweating a little and breathing hard, and looked up at Cecil, who was still alive, and said, “How are we doing up there? Still with me?”

Cecil lasted two days. Donald stood beside him the entire time and kept the feed running, because Cecil had told him to and because there was no one left to tell him to stop. People came to the edge of the square. Not many, at first, and then more, Romans and pilgrims and tourists who hadn't made it out, standing at the far end of the colonnade, staring, and some of them prayed and some of them wept and one old woman in a black dress walked all the way across the empty piazza alone with a bucket of water and a sponge on a stick, and held it up to Cecil's lips, and he drank, and Conquest, who was sitting on the edge of the fountain eating a sandwich he had taken from a cafe, watched her do it and did not stop her. “That's good,” he said, when she had gone back. “That's very good. He'd want that.” Cecil talked sometimes, in the long hours, mostly to Donald, mostly nonsense, old operations, old names, Nolan, Debbie, a woman Donald had never heard of named Rosalind. Once, late on the first night, he said very clearly, “I should have told Mark I was proud of him,” and then he didn't say anything else for six hours. Near the end of the second day, with the sun going down red behind the dome and his breath coming in small, flat, rattling pulls, he turned his head toward Donald one last time. “Did they kneel?” he whispered.

Donald did not lie to him. He never had. “Not yet,” he said. “Not yet, sir.”

Cecil smiled. It was a terrible smile, cracked and bloody, and it was the most beautiful thing Donald had ever seen. “Good,” he said, and closed his eyes, and some time in the next hour, between one breath and the next, Cecil Stedman died on a cross of granite on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica with eight billion people watching, and Donald was the only one close enough to hear the last breath go out of him. He kept the feed running for another day. On the morning of the third day, Conquest flew to Washington, and Washington was gone in nine minutes. That afternoon, from a bunker under the mountains of Switzerland, the Secretary General of the United Nations, flanked by nineteen heads of state, went on every channel still broadcasting and read a short statement in a voice that did not shake until the very last word, which was “surrender.” Conquest watched it on Donald's eyes, standing on the steps under the cross. When it was over, he nodded slowly, and something passed across his ruined face that Donald would spend the rest of his very long life trying to name, and the closest he could ever come was disappointment.

“He'd have hated that,” Conquest said, looking up at Cecil's body, black against the sky. “Wouldn't he? He'd have made them fight to the last man.” He sighed, and sat down on the steps, and leaned back on his elbows, and looked out over the empty square and the city beyond it and the long green hills of a world that belonged to him now. “Leave him up,” he told Donald. “I want them to remember what it looked like. And keep that camera running, machine. I'm going to need someone to make announcements.”

Chapter IV: The Old General

Allen the Alien had delivered bad news to Nolan Grayson once before, on a prison planet at the edge of Viltrumite space, when he told him the Empire would come for Earth whether Nolan helped them or not, and he remembered how Nolan had taken it then, with shouting and grief and a fist through a bulkhead and finally a long, ragged confession about the son he'd left behind. He had been braced for something like that again. He walked down the corridor of the Coalition flagship with Cecil's message still playing in a loop on the pad in his hand, the old man's voice breaking up through a dozen relays, Mark's dead, Eve too, tell Nolan, and he found Nolan in the training bay pounding a slab of Thraxan steel into the shape of a dented bowl, and he played it for him, all of it, and stood there waiting for the shouting. It didn't come. Nolan listened to the message twice. Then he set the pad down very carefully on the bench, as if it were made of glass, and he stood there looking at nothing, and Allen watched every bit of color drain out of the man's face until it was the gray of old paper, and then Nolan walked out of the bay without a word, and Allen understood that something had just happened that was worse than shouting.

The Coalition council met that night on Talescria. Thaedus presided, ancient and scarred, the old Viltrumite traitor who had built the whole alliance out of nothing over a thousand years, and he listened to the report and nodded slowly and said what Allen had known he would say, which was that it was a tragedy, that Mark had been a good boy and would be avenged, but that the war was not ready. The fleets were scattered. The Scourge research was months from completion. Battle Beast was out hunting Viltrumites somewhere past the Rim worlds and would not answer his comms. If they went to Earth now with what they had, Thaedus said, Conquest would be waiting, and Thragg would follow with every Viltrumite left alive, and the Coalition would lose the only ace it had, which was the element of surprise. They needed to be patient. They needed to wait. Nolan sat through the whole speech at the end of the long table with his hands flat on the wood and his eyes on his hands, and when Thaedus finished, Nolan stood up and walked out of the chamber, and out of the building, and up into the sky, without saying anything at all. Allen looked at Thaedus. Thaedus looked back at him and closed his eyes, and after a moment he made a small gesture with one gnarled hand, go, and Allen went.

It took them eleven days to reach Earth. In all that time Nolan did not speak once. He did not sleep, as far as Allen could tell. He flew in silence through the dark beside Allen's ship, and when they made stops to refuel at Coalition outposts he sat by himself on the hull and stared out at the stars, and when Allen tried to talk to him he simply looked at him with eyes that were not angry, not sad, not anything at all, and waited until Allen stopped. On the fourth day Allen woke up to find that Nolan had shaved off his beard, and cut his hair down to the scalp with what looked like a combat knife, and stripped out of the Coalition armor he'd been wearing for the past year. He wore plain black now, a Viltrumite field uniform, the kind Allen had only ever seen in archival footage from the old wars, the kind the Empire's soldiers wore when they were sent to burn a world. He looked younger. He looked older. He looked like a man Allen had never met. On the sixth day Allen watched him train against the hull of a derelict freighter in deep space, shadowboxing in the void, and the precision of it frightened him. There was nothing wasted. There was no flourish, no rage, no showmanship, none of the bluster and swagger of the man who used to call himself Omni-Man. Every movement was exactly as long as it needed to be and not one inch longer, and Allen understood that he was watching what Nolan had been before Earth, before Debbie, before Mark, before twenty years of pretending to be a superhero had softened him into something almost human. He was watching the Viltrumite general Nolan had been raised to be. And all of it, every bit, was pointed at one man.

They came in over the Mediterranean on a bright cold morning, and Conquest was waiting for them on the steps of St. Peter's. He had made himself a throne. It was a crude thing, blocks of travertine stacked and fused together at the top of the stairs beneath the great facade, and he lounged in it with one leg slung over the arm like a bored king, and above him, still hanging on the red granite cross after three weeks, black and shriveled and picked at by birds, was what was left of Cecil Stedman. A half-built cyborg stood at the foot of the steps with one glowing eye fixed on the sky, broadcasting. Conquest saw them coming from a long way out and sat up in his throne, and his face, still burned on one side and scarred on the other, the left eye socket empty and sealed over with puckered tissue, broke into an enormous grin. “Nolan!” he called, spreading his arms. “Nolan Grayson! The traitor himself! I'd hoped it would be you. I really had. Did you come to see your boy's planet? I'm afraid I've redecorated.” He stood up and came down three steps and stopped. “He fought well at the end, you know. Not at first. At first he was soft, like you. But when I broke the girl, oh, then he fought. He took my eye. Did they tell you that? He took my eye with his thumb, the little monster. You'd have been proud. I was proud, and he wasn't even mine.” Nolan landed in the square fifty yards away and said nothing. Allen landed beside him. Conquest's grin faltered, just a hair. “Nothing to say? Your son's spine is at the bottom of Lake Michigan, old friend. You don't have anything to say to me at all?”

Nolan didn't. He just came at him. He crossed the fifty yards in less than a blink and hit Conquest in the throat, not the face, the throat, with the edge of his hand, and Conquest went backwards through the throne and into the basilica doors, and Nolan followed him in, and Allen followed Nolan, and the next forty minutes were the worst of Allen's very long life. He had been beaten nearly to death by Viltrumites before. He had come back from it stronger, the way his people did, the way his body remembered every injury and grew past it, and he was stronger now than he had ever been, strong enough to stand toe to toe with most of the Empire, and inside of ninety seconds Conquest had broken his collarbone and three ribs and his left knee. But Allen's job was not to win. Nolan had made that clear without ever saying a word, just by the way he moved, the angles he took, the openings he left. Allen's job was to be the thing Conquest had to keep hitting. So Allen stayed in front of him. He took a punch that cracked his skull and kept standing. He took a knee that ruptured something in his gut and kept standing. He grabbed Conquest's arm and held on while the old Viltrumite beat him against the floor of the nave like a rug against a railing, and every time Conquest's attention was on Allen, Nolan was somewhere else, on the left side, always the left side, the blind side, the side Mark had given him.

Allen realized it about ten minutes in. Nolan was fighting Conquest with his son's work. Every wound Mark had left, Nolan went back to and opened up again. The ruined eye. The shoulder Mark had bitten into, still livid and half healed. The jaw Mark had broken, which had set slightly crooked, so that Conquest could not quite clench his teeth on one side. Nolan hit every one of them, precisely, over and over, and Conquest, who had been laughing when the fight started, stopped laughing about the time Nolan broke the jaw again. He started talking instead, the way he did, a running stream of taunts and boasts and old war stories, and none of it touched Nolan at all. Nolan did not react. He did not answer. He did not even seem to hear. And Allen watched Conquest slowly understand that the thing he was fighting was not angry, was not grieving, was not trying to prove anything, was not interested in a worthy fight or a good death or anything else that Conquest valued, and he saw something come into the old Viltrumite's one remaining eye that Allen had never seen in any Viltrumite before. It was not fear. Not quite. But it was in the same family.

They went through the roof of the basilica and up into the sky over Rome, and Conquest got his hands on Nolan for the first time and nearly took his arm off at the shoulder, twisting it until the bone came through the skin, and Nolan didn't make a sound. He hit Conquest with his forehead with the arm still hanging, and they fell together, and Allen, dragging himself up off the floor of the ruined nave with blood in both eyes, saw them come down in the center of the square. Conquest landed on top. He had Nolan pinned, and he raised one fist, and his face was a ruin, and he said something Allen couldn't hear, and Allen threw himself across the square on one good leg and hit Conquest in the side of the head with every ounce of strength he had left. It wasn't much. It was enough. It turned Conquest's head six inches to the right, toward his blind side, and Nolan came up off the stones and got both hands on the old Viltrumite's skull, one on either side, and Allen saw his face, very close, for just a moment. It was completely calm. It was the calmest face Allen had ever seen. Then Nolan pulled. It took a long time. Conquest screamed, and kicked, and tore at Nolan's arms until the skin came off them in strips, and Nolan kept pulling, steadily, patiently, without a word, until with a sound like a tree root tearing out of wet ground Conquest's head came away from his body, and the screaming stopped, and the body fell over on the stones, and Nolan was left kneeling in the square in a lake of blood, holding it.

He didn't move for a long time. Allen lay on his back on the stones of St. Peter's Square, three feet away, with his leg bent the wrong way and his ribs grinding and his vision going in and out, and he watched Nolan kneel there with Conquest's head in his hands, and he waited for something, for a cry, for tears, for any sign that whatever had been inside Nolan Grayson for the last eleven days was finally coming out. Nothing came. Eventually Nolan stood up. He walked up the steps of the basilica, past the cyborg, who had turned off his broadcast and was simply staring, and he reached up and carefully, gently, pulled the iron spikes out of the cross one by one and lowered what was left of Cecil Stedman into his arms and laid him down on the steps and closed the eyes that the birds had left. Then he sat down beside the body with the head of Conquest still in one hand, and began, slowly and methodically, to strip the flesh from it.

Allen learned later that it took Nolan the rest of that day and most of the night to clean the skull. The machine man, whose name was Donald, sat with them while he did it and did not say anything either, and in the morning Nolan took the skull, bone white and polished, and loaded it into an unmanned Coalition courier with no message, no markings, no flag, nothing but a course laid in for the coordinates of the Viltrumite homeworld, and launched it into the sky. Allen watched it climb until it was a pinprick of light and then nothing. “You know what that means,” he said finally, his voice wet and broken. “You know what you just did. That's a declaration of war. Thragg's going to bring every Viltrumite left alive straight to this planet.” Nolan looked at him. It was the first time in eleven days that Allen had felt Nolan actually see him. He nodded, once, and turned and looked out over the ruined city, and in his face Allen saw that this was exactly what he had intended, that he had wanted them to come here, to the place where his son had died, so that he could kill every single one of them on the same ground. Allen had spent half his life fighting Viltrumites, and he had seen them do terrible things, and he had never once been afraid of one of them the way he was afraid of Nolan Grayson in that moment, standing on the steps of St. Peter's in his black uniform with Cecil Stedman's body at his feet and nothing at all in his eyes.

Chapter V: The Viltrumite War

Debbie Grayson found out her husband was home the same way the rest of the world did, on a screen, watching him pull a man's head off in the middle of Rome, and for a long time after that she did not know what she felt about it and did not try to find out. She had buried an empty casket for Mark. There had been nothing to put in it; the GDA had pulled his body out of Lake Michigan before Conquest's broadcasts started, and by the time Debbie could have asked for it there was no GDA left to ask. She had buried a closed one for Eve, beside him, on a hill above the reservoir where the two of them used to go when they were sixteen and thought no one knew. She had sat through all of it with Oliver's hand in hers, Oliver healed now, or mostly, the Thraxan half of him knitting the torn muscle back together faster than any doctor could explain, and Paul on her other side, steady and quiet, the man who had married her knowing exactly what kind of life came with her. And then Nolan landed in her backyard nineteen days after the fall of Washington, in a black uniform she had never seen, with his head shaved and one arm in a sling made of torn parachute silk, and he stood on the other side of the sliding glass door looking in at her, and she looked back at him, and neither of them moved to open it.

He did not come inside. He did not speak to her, not really. He spoke to Oliver, out on the lawn, for about two minutes, in a low voice she couldn't hear through the glass, and she watched her younger son's face go from awe to anger to something stubborn and set and then, slowly, to acceptance. When Nolan left, Oliver came back inside and stood in the kitchen with his fists clenched and said, “He says they're coming. All of them. He says it's going to be soon, and it's going to be here, on Earth, because of what he did. He says I'm not allowed to fight.” His voice cracked. “He says my job is you. That's it. That's my whole job. He says he can't do it, so I have to. He says if anything happens to you, it's on me.” He looked at Debbie, and he was so young, he had always been so young, even when he was taller than her, even when he could fly. “He didn't even ask how I was.”

The Viltrumites came forty-one days after the skull. They came out of the dark beyond Mars in a single wave, thirty-eight of them, everything the Empire had left, and the Coalition fleet was waiting for them in orbit, a thousand ships from a hundred worlds under the command of Thaedus himself, and for six hours the sky over Earth lit up at night with a war that most of the people below could only see as flashes and streaks and, sometimes, falling stars that were not stars. Debbie watched it from her porch with Paul's arm around her and Oliver hovering ten feet above the roof like a sentry. Allen's virus went out in the third hour. Debbie only learned the details later, how the Coalition had spent the last year building a new strain of the old Scourge, the plague that had brought the Viltrumites down from millions to a handful centuries ago, how they had packed it into the warheads of a hundred missiles and fired them into the heart of the Viltrumite advance. What she saw from the porch was the flashes in the sky suddenly growing fewer, and then fewer still, and Oliver, above the roof, making a sound she would never forget, half triumph and half horror, as the Viltrumites started falling out of orbit. Nineteen of them burned up in the atmosphere that night. Eleven more came down alive but sick, coughing blood, and the Coalition hunted them through the mountains of Central Asia for days. That left eight who were immune, or strong enough not to care. One of them was Thragg. Another was Anissa.

Thragg killed Thaedus over the Pacific at dawn, broke his back across one knee and dropped him into the sea, and then the Grand Regent of the Viltrumite Empire went looking for Nolan. Anissa went looking for something else. Debbie understood it only afterward, when Allen explained it to her in a hospital tent with his voice gentle and his eyes full of something like shame: Thragg knew Nolan. Thragg had known him for centuries. He knew that Nolan Grayson could not be broken by pain or by fear or by any fight, but that there was one thing on Earth he had never been able to stop caring about, no matter how hard he tried. Anissa came down out of a cloudless sky over the cul-de-sac at nine in the morning, while Paul was making coffee and Debbie was standing at the sink, and she didn't knock either. She came through the roof. Debbie remembered dust, and the sound of the ceiling coming down, and Paul's voice shouting her name, and a woman in a white uniform standing in the ruins of her kitchen with blood running out of her nose from the virus and a smile that was all teeth. “So you're the one,” Anissa said, looking her up and down. “He threw away everything for you? You?” And then Oliver hit her from the side so hard they both went through the wall of the house and out into the backyard and through the neighbor's fence and the neighbor's house and three more after that, and Debbie ran after them, which was stupid, which was the stupidest thing she had ever done, and she would do it again.

Oliver fought her for ten minutes. He should not have lasted ten seconds. Anissa was centuries old and half again as strong as Mark had been, sick or not, and Oliver was a child who had been alive for less than three years, and Debbie stood in the wreck of the Johnsons' living room and watched her son fight a Viltrumite soldier to a standstill through sheer refusal. He bled. He broke. Anissa tore his ear off and cracked his ribs and put her knee through his thigh, and every time she turned toward Debbie, he was in front of her. He never attacked. He had stopped trying to attack after the first minute, Debbie saw, because he understood that he could not win, so he simply stood between them, over and over, taking it, getting up, standing between them again. “Move, boy,” Anissa snarled, finally, her white uniform splashed red to the elbows, her breath coming short and wet from the virus. “Move and I'll let you live. I don't want you. I want her.” Oliver spat blood on the grass. “No,” he said. He said it the way Mark used to say it, flat and simple and final, and Debbie had never loved him more. Anissa's face changed. She drew back one fist and drove it forward, not at Oliver, past him, at Debbie, at full Viltrumite speed, faster than any human eye could follow, and Debbie never saw it coming, and Oliver did. He moved. He didn't block it. There wasn't time to block it. He just put himself in the way. Anissa's fist went in through his back and out through his chest and stopped an inch from Debbie's face, close enough that she felt the wind of it in her hair, and Oliver's blood sprayed across her cheek, warm, and he made a small surprised sound, and looked down at the arm coming out of him, and then up at his mother.

Nolan arrived four seconds later. Debbie did not see where he came from. One moment Anissa was standing there with her arm through Oliver's chest, staring at it, her mouth opening, and the next moment she wasn't there anymore. There was a black blur and a sound like a thunderclap and then she was in pieces, actual pieces, scattered across three backyards, and Nolan was standing in the Johnsons' living room in his black uniform with his hands red to the shoulders, and Debbie was on the floor with Oliver in her lap. She didn't remember sitting down. She didn't remember catching him. He was heavier than he looked. He was so heavy. There was a hole in him she could have put her hand through, and his breath was going in and out of it in small bubbling gasps, and he looked up at her with his strange lavender eyes, Nolan's eyes, and he was smiling. “I did it right,” he whispered. “Didn't I? I protected you. He said it was my job. I did it right.” Debbie said yes. She said it over and over. Yes, baby, yes, you did it right, you did it perfect, you did it so perfect, and she smoothed the hair back off his forehead, and Nolan knelt down beside them in the wreckage and reached out one bloody hand and put it on Oliver's shoulder, very lightly, and Oliver looked at him and said, “Dad,” just that, just the one word, and then he didn't say anything else. Debbie held him until he was cold. Nolan knelt beside her the whole time, and he didn't say anything, and he didn't cry, and when it was over he stood up and wiped his hands on his uniform and flew straight up into the sky so fast the windows in the next block shattered, and Debbie understood that he was going to find the others, the six who were left, and that he was not coming back until they were dead.

Battle Beast found Thragg first. He had been hunting the Grand Regent across three continents for two days, following the trail of wrecked Coalition ships and dead heroes, and he finally caught up to him in the ruins of Chicago, of all places, in the shallows of Lake Michigan near the spot where the boy had died, where Thragg was standing up to his knees in the water looking down at something below the surface as if he were trying to read it. He was enormous. He was bigger than any Viltrumite Battle Beast had ever fought, scarred from crown to waist, his white uniform torn and blackened, one cheek still oozing from where the virus had tried and failed to take him, and when he turned and saw Battle Beast standing on the broken shore with his axe in his hand and his mane full of wind, he smiled. “The beast,” he said. “I've heard about you. You killed one of my soldiers, in the Gelran system. Clean work, I'm told. Where is Grayson? I came for Grayson.” Battle Beast hefted the axe. “Grayson took my fight,” he rumbled. “He took Conquest from me. I have waited my whole life for a warrior like that, and he took him and broke him like a toy, and he did not even enjoy it. That was a waste. So I am taking his.” He grinned, and his teeth were very long. “You will do.”

They fought for three hours. Battle Beast would remember all of it for the rest of his life, every blow, every inch of ground, the way a man remembers the best day he ever had. Thragg was everything he had ever wanted. He was faster than Battle Beast and stronger than Battle Beast and he had a thousand years of war behind every move, and he fought like an artist, and he never once held back, never toyed, never talked, never treated the fight as anything less than what it was. Battle Beast opened him up across the chest with the axe in the first ten minutes and Thragg broke the axe over his knee in the next ten and they went on with their hands. They fought through the drowned streets of the Loop and up the ruined spine of the Magnificent Mile and out across the prairie, gouging trenches in the earth a mile long, and back again into the lake, and the water around them boiled. Thragg broke Battle Beast's left arm in three places. Battle Beast took two of Thragg's fingers off with his teeth. Thragg drove him into the bed of the lake so deep the water closed over them both in the dark, and Battle Beast got his feet under the Grand Regent and kicked him up through a hundred feet of water and into the air, and came up after him roaring, and the roar was laughter. He had never been so happy. He had never been so close to death. He could feel it in him, everywhere, the cracked skull and the punctured lungs and the blood filling up his chest, and he could see it in Thragg too, the Regent's breath coming harder, his steps less certain, one eye swollen shut, his right side caved in where Battle Beast had pounded it again and again with a fist the size of a boulder. It was perfect. It was exactly the way he had always imagined it. Two warriors at the end of everything, on a dead shore, under a gray sky, and only one of them walking away.

In the end it was not Battle Beast. He went down on the shore at last with his legs gone out from under him, his ribs caved in, his mane matted with blood, and he could not get up. He tried. He tried three times. Thragg stood over him, swaying, bleeding from a dozen places, his chest heaving, and he looked down at Battle Beast with something that might have been respect, or affection, or something older and stranger than either, and he raised his one good fist. “You were magnificent,” the Grand Regent said hoarsely. “I want you to know that. You were the best I have ever fought.” Battle Beast bared his broken teeth up at him and waited for the blow, and he was ready, he was more ready than he had ever been for anything, and he was smiling.

The blast came from behind Thragg. It came from a small, needle-nosed racing ship that had been hovering, unnoticed, five hundred feet above the lake for the last ten minutes, piloted by a little alien in an oversized helmet who had been told very clearly by Allen to stay out of the fight between the big ones, and who had stayed out of it for almost three hours, and who had decided, watching the Grand Regent of the Viltrumite Empire raise his fist over a dying friend, that he did not care very much what Allen had said. The beam took Thragg square between the shoulder blades. It was the ship's main gun, a weapon built to crack asteroids, and it went into Thragg's back and out through his chest and left a hole there the size of a dinner plate, and the Grand Regent stood there for a moment with his fist still raised, looking down at the hole with an expression of profound and almost comical surprise. Then he fell forward, face first, into the shallow water at the edge of Lake Michigan, and did not move again. That was it. That was all. A thousand years of war and conquest and the greatest warrior the Viltrumite Empire had ever produced, and he died face down in two feet of muddy water with a hole in his back, shot from behind by someone he had never even noticed, the way a deer is shot from a tree stand.

Battle Beast lay on the shore and stared at the body for a long time. The little racing ship came down and settled on the sand a few yards away, and the canopy popped open, and Space Racer climbed out and stood there awkwardly in his big helmet, looking from Thragg to Battle Beast and back again, his small hands fidgeting with the strap. “Sorry,” he said finally. “I know. I know you wanted... I know it wasn't, you know. Honorable. Or whatever. I just...” He gestured helplessly at the body. “He was going to kill you.” Battle Beast did not say anything. He lay there and felt the rage come up in him, enormous and black, the rage of a warrior robbed of the one death he had wanted his entire life, and he wanted to get up and tear the little pilot in half. Then he felt something else come up underneath it, something he did not have a word for, and to his own enormous surprise he started to laugh. It hurt. It hurt more than anything Thragg had done to him. He laughed until he coughed up blood, and then he laughed some more, lying on his back on the dead shore of a dead city under the gray sky, and Space Racer stood there staring at him like he had lost his mind. “Little man,” Battle Beast wheezed finally, “you have stolen the greatest kill in the history of the galaxy. You shot him in the back. You shot him in the back like a coward.” He coughed, and grinned, and his eyes were wet. “Thank you.”

Nolan found three of the remaining Viltrumites over the next nine days, one at a time, in the Andes and the Sahara and finally on the dark side of the moon, where the last of them had gone to hide, and he killed every one of them, and he did not say a word to any of them. The other two did not wait for him. When the news reached them that Thragg was dead, shot in the back in a muddy lake by a creature the size of a child, they flew to the Coalition flagship in orbit and landed on its hull with their hands open at their sides. The nine plague survivors the Coalition had dragged out of the mountains, coughing and chained, did the same from their cells. So did the handful of governors and garrison commanders still holding the Empire's far-flung worlds, one by one, over the weeks that followed, as the word spread across the stars. They did something no Viltrumite had done in recorded history. They surrendered. And then the Viltrumite War was over.

Chapter VI: The Hollow Crown

There is a law on Viltrum older than the Empire itself, older than the Scourge, older than any of the surviving Viltrumites could remember, and it is very simple. The strongest rules. There had never been any need to write it down, because there had never been any doubt about who the strongest was, and when the twelve surviving Viltrumites were brought before the Coalition council in the weeks after the war and asked who would speak for them, who would sign whatever terms the victors set, they looked at one another for a long moment and then said, almost in unison, that it was not their decision to make. Thragg was dead. Conquest was dead. The man who had killed Conquest with his bare hands, who had killed Anissa and three others besides, who had sent a skull across the galaxy and called the whole Empire down onto one small blue planet to die, was the strongest Viltrumite alive by any measure that mattered to them, and so by the oldest law they had, he was their Emperor. They would sign whatever Nolan Grayson told them to sign. They would go wherever he told them to go. That was the law. Allen sat at the head of the council table in the chair that had belonged to Thaedus, wearing the old man's sash because the Coalition had asked him to and because there was no one else, and he listened to them say it, and he closed his eyes, and he thought: of course. Of course that's how it ends.

Nolan did not want it. Allen knew that without asking. He had stopped speaking entirely after the moon, after the last Viltrumite, and he had come back to Earth and sat for nine days on the hill above the reservoir where Debbie had buried their sons, three stones now instead of two, in the rain and the sun and the dark, without eating, without moving, and Allen had sat with him for some of it and said nothing either. But when Allen finally told him what the Viltrumites had said, Nolan was quiet for a long time, and then he stood up, and looked down at the third stone, the small one, the one that said OLIVER GRAYSON and nothing else because Debbie had not been able to think of anything else to say, and he nodded. Allen understood. If Nolan refused, the twelve would choose another, and that one would remember Thragg and Conquest and the glory of the old days, and in fifty years or a hundred the Empire would rise again, and somewhere another boy would be sent to some soft little world to prepare it. If Nolan accepted, it ended with him. Nolan had made that choice for Earth once before, a long time ago, and he had chosen the Empire. Now he was making it again, from the other side, and the price was the same. It was always the same. It was everything.

They held it on the steps of St. Peter's, because Nolan wanted it there. The basilica was a shell. The dome had cracked in the fight with Conquest and half of it had come down into the nave, and the facade was scorched black and pocked with craters, and the red granite cross still stood at the top of the steps, empty now, the holes where the spikes had gone in still stained dark. Cecil was buried in Arlington, what was left of it, under a stone that Donald had paid for himself. The square below was full. Not with crowds, there were no crowds, Rome was mostly empty and the world was still too afraid to gather in large numbers anywhere, but with the people who had earned the right to be there. The Coalition delegates in their strange armor and stranger bodies. What was left of the Guardians, Robot and Monster Girl and the Immortal and Dupli-Kate, standing together at the edge of the colonnade. Zandale Randolph with both arms still in casts and a new jacket waiting for him on Geldar. The Brit, who had walked out of the Pacific onto a beach in the Philippines three days after the war ended, covered in silt and sea life and furious that he had missed it all, and who stood now near the front with his arms folded and an unlit cigarette between his teeth. Donald, his rebuild finished at last, wearing a black suit and a black tie and standing exactly where Cecil would have stood. Battle Beast, propped on a pair of crutches made from ship's struts, his ribs bound in silver cable, glaring at everything. Space Racer beside him, small and nervous and trying very hard not to be noticed, with one of Battle Beast's enormous hands resting on his helmet like a man resting his hand on the head of a favorite dog. And the twelve Viltrumites, kneeling in a line at the foot of the steps in plain gray, their heads bowed, the last of a race that had once ruled half the galaxy.

Debbie did not come. Allen had asked. She had looked at him across her kitchen table, in the new house Paul had found for them on the other side of town, and she had said, very calmly, “No,” and then she had asked him to leave, and he had.

Nolan came down out of the sky at noon and landed at the top of the steps, beneath the empty cross, in the same black uniform he had worn since Talescria, and he stood there looking out over the square, and he did not look like an emperor. He looked like a man at a funeral. His arm had healed crooked where Conquest had broken it. There was a long white scar across his scalp, and another down his throat where Anissa's nails had caught him in the last second, and his face was thinner than Allen had ever seen it, the bones standing out under the skin, the eyes sunk deep and dark and very still. The crown was in Allen's hands. It was not really a crown. The Viltrumites had never had one; Thragg had ruled from a chair and a uniform and the fear in other people's eyes. So the Coalition smiths had made one, at Nolan's direction, the only instruction he had given anyone in weeks, written on a scrap of paper in his blocky, careful hand. It was a plain circlet of dark iron, rough and unpolished, and it had been forged from the four spikes Nolan had pulled from Cecil Stedman's body on these steps. Allen climbed the steps one at a time on his bad knee, and stopped on the step below Nolan so that their eyes were level, and held it up between them, and his hands were shaking.

“I'm supposed to say something,” Allen said quietly, so that only Nolan could hear. “There's a whole thing. The Coalition wrote me a speech. About peace, and a new age, and the end of a thousand years of war. It's a good speech. Thaedus would have liked it.” He swallowed. “I don't think I can do it. I'm sorry.”

Nolan looked at him for a long time. Then, for the first time since the training bay on the Coalition flagship, for the first time in nearly four months, Nolan Grayson spoke. His voice was rough and cracked from disuse, barely more than a whisper, and Allen had to lean in to hear it. “It was supposed to be his,” Nolan said. He looked past Allen, out over the ruined square, out toward the north, toward the sea and the far-off country and the little hill above the reservoir. “All of it. That was the plan. That was always the plan. I was going to give him the Empire. I was going to give him the stars.” He was quiet for a moment. “He would have hated this. He would have hated every second of it. He would have stood right here and told them all to go to hell, and then he would have found a way to make it work anyway. He would have been good at it. He was always better than me.” He closed his eyes. “Do it.”

Allen did it. He lifted the iron circlet and set it on Nolan's shaved head, and it sat there crooked, too big, the rough metal catching the noon light dully, and at the foot of the steps the twelve Viltrumites pressed their foreheads to the stones of St. Peter's Square, and Nolan Grayson was Emperor of what was left of Viltrum. Nobody cheered. Nobody made a sound. Somewhere out past the colonnade a church bell that had survived everything began to ring, slowly, one of the old Roman bells that had rung for the deaths of popes, and nobody had told anyone to ring it, and nobody ever found out who did. It rang for a long time. Nolan stood beneath the empty cross with the iron on his head and let it ring, and his face did not change at all.

They signed the accord that afternoon at a folding table someone had set up in the shade of the colonnade. It was short. Allen had insisted on that. The Viltrumite Empire renounced all claims to every world it had ever conquered. Its garrisons would withdraw within the year. Its breeding program, the one Thragg had built on Thraxa and a dozen other worlds, the one that had made Oliver, was ended, and the children it had produced were free to stay where they were born and live as they chose. The twelve surviving Viltrumites, and their Emperor, would be given a world of their own at the edge of Coalition space, a cold empty planet with no native life, and they would stay there, and they would leave it only with the Coalition's permission, and they would never again set foot on Earth uninvited. And in return the Coalition of Planets would recognize the Viltrumite people as a sovereign nation, and would not pursue them, and would not finish what the Scourge had started. Nolan read it once. Then he took the pen and signed it, in the same blocky, careful hand, Nolan Grayson, nothing else, no title, and handed the pen to the first of the twelve, who signed below him, and then the next, and the next, until all of them had signed, and Allen signed last for the Coalition, and the war was over on paper as well as in blood.

Afterward, when the delegates had gone back to their ships and the Guardians had gone home and the square was empty again except for the pigeons, Allen found Nolan sitting alone at the top of the steps, his back against the base of the cross, the iron circlet in his hands. He had taken it off. He was turning it over and over, slowly, running his thumb along the rough edges where the spikes had been hammered together. Allen sat down beside him. The bell had stopped ringing a long time ago. The sun was going down red behind the broken dome, the way it had the evening Cecil died, and the long shadow of the cross stretched out across the square and over the stones where Nolan had knelt with Conquest's head in his hands, and neither of them said anything for a long time. “I won,” Nolan said finally, very quietly. He was looking at the crown. “I got everything I was ever supposed to want. Earth is safe. The Empire's done. Thragg's dead. And I'm the one on the throne.” He set the circlet down on the step beside him, carefully, as if it might break. “I won, Allen. I won.” He put his face in his hands. And Allen, who had known him for a long time now, and who had seen him rage and grieve and break and rebuild himself and break again, sat there beside him on the steps of the ruined basilica as the dark came down over Rome, and listened to the Emperor of Viltrum weep.

Epilogue: Three Stones

Debbie Grayson went up the hill above the reservoir every Sunday morning for the rest of her life, rain or shine, and she was there on the morning Nolan came to say goodbye. It was early spring by then, almost a year after Conquest, and the grass on the hill had come back green and soft over the three graves, and someone, William probably, had planted a row of daffodils along the edge of the path that had just started to open. She had brought a thermos of coffee and a folding chair and a book she wasn't reading, and she was sitting there with the book in her lap looking at the three stones, MARK GRAYSON, SAMANTHA EVE WILKINS, OLIVER GRAYSON, the way she did every week, not really thinking anything, just being near them, when the wind picked up all at once and the daffodils bent flat, and she knew who it was before she turned around.

He landed at the bottom of the hill, the way he used to land at the bottom of the driveway when Mark was little so he wouldn't scorch the lawn, and he walked the rest of the way up. He wasn't wearing the uniform. He was wearing jeans and an old gray jacket she recognized, one he had left in the closet of the old house twenty years ago, that she had never gotten around to throwing away, that must have been in one of the boxes Paul had moved into the garage. It didn't fit him right anymore. He was thinner. He stopped a few feet away from her and stood there with his hands in the pockets, looking at the stones, and for a long time neither of them said anything. There were birds in the trees down by the water. Somewhere on the other side of the reservoir a dog was barking. “They told me you'd be here,” he said finally. His voice was still rough, still quiet, like something that had been broken and set wrong. “I leave tonight. The new world's ready. The others are already there. I just...” He stopped. “I wanted to see them. Before I go. I won't be allowed back. That's part of the accord. I wrote it in myself.”

Debbie looked at him. She had thought about this moment a great deal over the past year, in the long nights after Paul fell asleep, lying in the dark of the new house and staring at the ceiling. She had thought about what she would say to him if she ever saw him again. She had imagined screaming at him. She had imagined hitting him, which would have hurt only her. She had imagined forgiving him, and she had imagined telling him that she never would, and some nights she had imagined both in the same breath. Now he was standing in front of her on the hill above their sons, the man she had married, the man who had lied to her for twenty years and murdered the Guardians and beaten Mark half to death and come back, the man who had pulled a monster's head off for Mark and torn Anissa into pieces for Oliver and knelt beside her in the Johnsons' ruined living room while their son died, and she found that she did not have anything to say to him at all. All the words had been used up. There was only the hill, and the stones, and the daffodils, and the two of them, and the plain fact that they were the only two people left in the world who had loved all three of the people buried there.

“Sit down, Nolan,” she said finally.

He looked at her, surprised. Then he sat, on the grass beside her chair, with his knees pulled up and his arms around them like a boy, and they sat there together in the spring sun and looked at the graves. She poured him a cup of coffee from the thermos. He held it in both hands and didn't drink it. After a while she started to talk, not to him exactly, just out loud, about Mark when he was four and wanted to be a garbage man, about Mark at sixteen bringing Eve home for dinner the first time and being so nervous he knocked over the gravy, about Oliver learning to ride a bike in an afternoon and then learning to fly the next morning and coming in through the kitchen window to tell her, about Eve sitting at this same spot a week before Conquest came, telling Debbie she was going to marry Mark someday whether he got around to asking or not. Nolan listened. He didn't say anything, but he listened, and once, when she told him about the gravy, he made a small sound that might have been a laugh, and once, when she told him about Oliver at the kitchen window, he put his face down against his knees for a long time and his shoulders shook, and she didn't say anything, and she didn't touch him, but she didn't stop talking either.

The sun was well up when he finally stood. He set the full cup of coffee down carefully on top of the thermos and stood looking at the stones one more time, one by one, the big one and the second one and the little one, as if he were trying to memorize them. Then he reached into the pocket of the old gray jacket and took something out and knelt and laid it in the grass in front of Oliver's stone. It was a circlet of dark, rough iron, too big for anyone's head. “I don't need it there,” he said quietly, without looking at her. “They know who I am. And it doesn't belong to me anyway. It never did.” He stayed down on one knee for a moment longer, one hand resting flat on the grass over his youngest son. Then he stood. “Goodbye, Debbie,” he said.

She looked up at him, squinting into the sun. “Goodbye, Nolan.”

He walked down the hill. At the bottom he stopped, and turned, and looked back up at her for one long moment, a thin man in a jacket that didn't fit him anymore, standing at the edge of the water, and then he lifted off, slowly, gently, so gently the daffodils barely stirred, and went straight up into the clear blue morning until he was a speck, and then not even that. Debbie watched the empty sky for a long time. Then she picked up her book and opened it to the page she had been on for the past eleven months, and poured herself the last of the coffee, and sat there on the hill above the reservoir with her boys and Eve in the spring sun, and the iron crown in the grass at her feet, and the birds singing down by the water, and the whole wide quiet world going on around her the way it always did, the way it always would, safe now, and empty.

There is a twenty-four-year-old on my screen right now, filmed in crisp, golden-hour 4K, solemnly unpacking a canvas tote bag as if she were defusing an unexploded ordnance from the Cold War.

She pulls out a paperback novel with a cracked spine. She pulls out a disposable Kodak camera, a tin of peppermint lip balm, a half-finished crochet square, and a folded newspaper crossword. She looks into the lens with the grave, missionary zeal of someone who has just discovered fire, and announces to four hundred thousand strangers that she has finally conquered her screen addiction by inventing what TikTok now calls an analog bag.

My grandmother carried the exact same collection of items in a leather purse from 1954 until the day she died, and she never once felt compelled to film an unboxing video about it.

Yet before we roll our eyes too hard at a generation rebranding carrying a book in a tote as a radical lifestyle movement, look closer at what is actually happening here. Cambridge Dictionary has already flagged friction-maxxing and analogue bag for the lexicon of 2026. Millions of people who grew up inside the warm, frictionless womb of the algorithm are suddenly, desperately trying to make their own lives harder on purpose.

They are paying with crumpled paper bills instead of tapping a watch. They are shooting thirty-six exposures on 35mm film and waiting a week to see if the light was any good. They are boarding morning commuter trains with a heavy tote slung over one shoulder and their phones buried at the bottom like contraband—all to engineer a few inches of resistance between an idle thumb and an infinite feed.

For twenty years, Silicon Valley preached a single, relentless gospel: the elimination of friction. Every startup pitch, every interface update, every generative model promised the same salvation—no waiting, no effort, no awkwardness, no snag between desire and fulfilment.

One click to buy. One swipe to date. One prompt to draft the condolence email you couldn't bring yourself to write. Convenience was crowned the supreme moral good, and any task that required patience, callouses, or mild discomfort was treated as a design flaw to be engineered out of existence.

We got everything we asked for, and it hollowed us out.

When every surface of daily life is sanded glass-smooth, nothing pushes back against the hand—and when nothing pushes back, the hand forgets it is holding anything at all. Convenience didn't liberate our time; it liquefied it. It turned afternoons into mist, conversations into transactions, and attention into a twitchy, half-starved animal pacing behind a pane of glass.

Even our rebellion has been trained to perform for the feed: we film our screen-free Sunday mornings and upload them to the very casino we are trying to escape, hoping the algorithm rewards our abstinence with engagement.

Still, you cannot fake the hunger underneath the performance.

Watch someone sit on a crowded subway with an analog bag in their lap. At first, their right thumb twitches against their thigh—the phantom limb of a decade spent scrolling through six-second dopamine hits. Five minutes pass. Ten. Slowly, the shoulders drop. The eyes settle onto ink pressed into rag paper.

A knit stitch is dropped, cursed at, and pulled back by hand.

That tiny, exasperating snag—the dropped stitch, the seven-letter crossword clue that refuses to yield, the ink smudging the side of a palm—is the whole point.

A machine can spit out three thousand fluent words before your coffee cools, and an algorithm can serve an endless parade of effortless entertainment until the day you die. Ease is cheap now; automation has flooded the market with it.

What remains scarce, stubbornly expensive, and unmistakably human is friction—the deliberate choice to wrestle with something physical, slow, and uncooperative until it answers back.

Call it friction-maxxing if you need a hashtag to smuggle it past the gatekeepers of the feed. Call it an analog bag if a canvas tote feels more heroic with a modern name.

Underneath the internet slang is an ancient, unglamorous truth we nearly engineered out of our bones.

A life without resistance leaves no trace, and the things that actually tether us to the world are always a little too heavy to carry in a pocket.

The email looked like a revenue opportunity. In early June 2026, some developers whose Android apps had been downloaded millions of times received an invitation from Google to “join a confidential content offer pilot”. The pitch was simple: “Get paid for sharing the code powering your apps, as well as your archived projects.” The reassurance came straight after: “This is non-exclusive. You keep 100% of your IP.”

The message, first reported by Jason Koebler at 404 Media and then widely picked up, never used the words artificial intelligence. It said the code would help “improve Google's developer tools and products”. A linked page was more candid, describing “partnerships to improve our AI products”. Nobody outside the pilot knows what Google was offering to pay.

Earlier in the year, a founder named Keelan Miskell had been closing down his crypto startup. According to MIT Technology Review, he netted roughly $25,000 for his codebase, with a further payment, probably around $15,000, pending for the company's workspace data from Google, Notion, Figma and Slack. “At least all that stuff we were doing for two and a half years is worth something to someone somewhere,” he told the magazine.

Then, in August, came the deal that made everyone look up. In the bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines, which stopped flying in May, Google won an auction for the carrier's corporate data with a $10 million bid. TIME's Billy Perrigo reported that the cache held 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages and about 30 million lines of code. A court filing released in November put the volume far higher: about 1.9 billion internal emails, 664 million Teams items, 91 million SharePoint and OneDrive files and roughly 30 million lines of code.

Taken together, these episodes describe something new: a market in which the private working record of software (the code, but also the commit history, the pull requests, the arguments in review threads, the tickets and the design documents) is being bought and sold as AI training material. What ethical, legal and security problems arise when that record changes hands? How can a buyer prove a seller had the right to sell it, when dozens of people wrote it? And does the money now flowing into this trade create risks that existing safeguards were never designed to catch?

Why the Messy Middle of Software Became Valuable

For a decade, AI companies trained on the public internet, and code was one of its richest seams. Public repositories on GitHub and elsewhere supplied billions of lines for the first generation of coding assistants. That seam is thinning. Epoch AI, a research group that tracks the inputs to machine learning, estimated in 2024 that the effective stock of human-generated public text was around 300 trillion tokens, and gave an 80 per cent confidence interval that it would be fully used at some point between 2026 and 2032.

Private code is the obvious next reservoir. It is not one that platforms can simply tap: when GitHub updated its terms in March 2026 to let it train on Copilot interaction data from individual users who do not opt out, it stated plainly, “We do not use private repository content at rest to train AI models.” Private repositories have to be acquired from whoever controls them, and they are valuable for reasons beyond volume. A finished public library shows what working software looks like. A private repository, with its full history, shows how software actually gets made: the false starts, the reverted commits, the reviewer who points out a race condition, the ticket that explains why a strange workaround exists. That is precisely the material that the newest training methods crave.

Turing, the AI training and talent company, made the case explicitly in its AGI Advance newsletter of 24 December 2025, announcing a programme it called Project Lazarus. “We're acquiring full private repositories, design docs, testing logs, infrastructure manifests, and internal wikis from defunct startups,” it wrote, naming fintech, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and software as target sectors. Existing datasets, the newsletter argued, “fail to capture the texture of real work”. The stated aim was to “preserve the complete operational history of defunct companies”.

The appetite is driven by reinforcement learning. Rather than simply predicting the next token of text, AI agents are increasingly trained in simulated environments where they take sequences of actions and are rewarded for good outcomes. TIME reported that gains from this approach have been largest in coding, where results are easy to verify. Surge AI builds such environments, which it calls reinforcement-learning gyms, and Nick Heiner, who leads that work, told MIT Technology Review he wants archives that capture varied situations, disagreements and judgement calls. Speaking to TIME about the Spirit acquisition, he said the purchase makes sense “if you believe that your agent is going to generalize into the rest of the economy.”

There is also a quality argument. In a widely cited 2024 paper in Nature, Ilia Shumailov and colleagues showed that models trained recursively on the output of other models suffer “model collapse”, progressively losing the rarer parts of the original data distribution. They concluded that data about genuine human interactions will become increasingly valuable as AI-generated content floods the web. A repository written by humans, before coding assistants were commonplace, is that kind of data.

A Market Assembled in Under a Year

The supply side organised itself quickly. Startups fail constantly; MIT Technology Review cited estimates from Carta and AngelList showing shutdowns rising by between 26 and 56 per cent a year recently. An “end-of-life” industry has grown up around them, and part of that industry has discovered that the corpse has value.

SimpleClosure, a service that handles the legal and operational wind-down of startups, added data sales in April 2026 through a platform called Asset Hub, where closing companies can list code repositories, Slack archives, emails and internal documents. In April, Forbes reported that the company had handled nearly 100 such deals, with sellers typically receiving between $10,000 and $100,000; heise online, summarising that report, quoted chief executive Dori Yona describing “a feeling of a gold rush from these companies trying to get their hands on real-world data”. By October, MIT Technology Review reported more than 150 deals, an expectation of returning more than $10 million to startups by the end of 2026, and Yona's estimate that 47 per cent of SimpleClosure's deals now include code or data sales, once rare and “somewhat taboo”.

Competitors followed. Brendan Mahony, chief executive of Sunset, another wind-down firm, told MIT Technology Review that his company values assets by headcount, years in operation, data volume and how the team used its tools. “This operational exhaust data is like the wood shavings that everyone thought had no value, but it actually has a ton,” he said. Brokers now publish buying guides. One, run by Human Union Data, lists Project Lazarus as paying between $10,000 and $100,000 for legacy code; that figure is the broker's own claim, and Turing does not publish its prices. Dan Novaes, chief executive of the data broker Mode.Inc, told Business Insider, as reported by IBTimes UK in October, that “the demand is just astronomical.”

The buyers are foundation labs, vendors that build simulated workplaces for training, and established technology companies building their own models. What they want is completeness. The Human Union Data guide tells sellers that buyers are after “real production code, internal documentation, and development history”, listing “pull requests, design docs, incident notes” as the material that makes a package whole. The completeness that makes the data valuable is exactly what makes it legally and ethically fraught.

A Repository Is a Crowd, Not a Possession

Start with the most basic question: who owns a git history?

The instinctive answer is the company. In many cases that instinct is broadly right, but only broadly. Under section 11 of the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, “The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it,” with an exception: where a work is made by an employee in the course of employment, “his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work subject to any agreement to the contrary.” The United States reaches a similar destination through the “work made for hire” doctrine, which covers “a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment.”

Now look at who actually appears in the commit log of a typical startup. There are employees, certainly. There are also freelancers and agencies, whose work is not automatically owned by the client in either jurisdiction; in the United States, commissioned software does not fall within the nine statutory categories that can be made works for hire by written agreement, so ownership passes only through an explicit assignment. There are co-founders who wrote early code before the company was incorporated. There are interns, advisers and contributors from partner firms. A repository that has run for five years may contain the work of dozens of people under a dozen different contractual arrangements, some of which were never written down.

Then there is everyone else's code. Private repositories are full of open-source components, vendored libraries and snippets copied from elsewhere, each carrying its own licence. Black Duck's 2026 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis report, which audited 947 commercial codebases across 17 industries, found licence conflicts in 68 per cent of them, up from 56 per cent the year before; one codebase contained 2,675 distinct conflicts. The report links part of that rise to AI coding assistants reproducing material derived from copyleft code without the original licence information, a phenomenon it calls licence laundering. A seller who cannot say which open-source licences govern the files in a repository is in no position to warrant that those files can be licensed onwards for training.

Open-source projects have built some machinery for this problem. Many use contributor licence agreements or the Developer Certificate of Origin, a short statement in which a contributor certifies that “The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the open source license”. Private companies rarely have anything comparable. The rights in their repositories are inferred from employment contracts, many of which predate the idea that internal engineering discussion could become a product.

Nor is copyright the only right at stake. Review threads and commit messages are written conversation: explanation, critique, sometimes humour or irritation. An employer may own the text, but that does not settle whether selling it is fair to the people who wrote it, or lawful under data protection law.

Possession Is Not the Same as Ownership

The Spirit Airlines auction has become the first public test of these questions. Mercor, an AI data company, was named backup bidder at $7.5 million, and another firm, micro1, later filed notice of a $12.5 million offer. The approval hearing was adjourned repeatedly through the autumn before being set for 17 November, and the objections filed in the bankruptcy court in White Plains read like a checklist of what can go wrong.

Springshot, a software company that ran operational tooling for Spirit, objected that the dataset could include its own intellectual property. Its filing cites a contract clause giving it rights to “any data or information generated by the Service or Software.” Chief executive Doug Kreuzkamp put the distinction plainly, according to an account published by The Next Web: “The distinction is between the information Spirit supplied and the proprietary outputs our platform generated.” Explaining why the company had not objected earlier, he told the Miami Herald, as quoted in the same account, “we had no reason to believe that Spirit would sell property that wasn't theirs.”

International Aero Engines, the engine manufacturer, filed its own objection arguing that its proprietary commercial, technical and financial information may have been copied into Spirit's internal communications, and that, in the words of its filing reported by ComplexDiscovery, “deidentification is insufficient to ensure that the IAE Proprietary Information has been removed.” Navitaire, Spirit's long-standing reservations platform provider, joined with Amadeus in a limited objection.

These objections expose the central weakness of the market: a company's systems hold far more than the company owns. Repositories routinely contain material supplied under non-disclosure agreements, vendor documentation pasted into tickets, customer configurations and code written under licence. In a working company, contractual confidentiality keeps that material in place. In a sale, it travels with everything else unless someone takes it out.

That matters to buyers, not just sellers. The EU's Trade Secrets Directive of 2016 makes the acquisition or use of a trade secret unlawful when the person “knew or ought, under the circumstances, to have known that the trade secret had been obtained directly or indirectly” from someone using or disclosing it unlawfully. A buyer who acquires a repository full of third-party confidential material without asking reasonable questions may not be able to claim innocence later.

There is now a striking precedent on the cost of careless acquisition. In Bartz v Anthropic, Judge William Alsup held in 2025 that training on lawfully acquired books could be fair use, but sent the claims over pirated library copies towards trial. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, covering roughly 480,000 works, and the settlement received final approval in July 2026, according to Jurist. The lesson for the code market is not that training is unlawful. It is that how training data was obtained can matter enormously, and that a court may look past the model to the provenance of the inputs.

The People Who Live Inside the Diff

Every commit in git carries an author name, an email address and a timestamp. Under Article 4(1) of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, personal data means “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person”, and an identifiable person is one who can be identified “directly or indirectly”, including by a name or an online identifier. A git history is therefore, among other things, a structured personal data set: a record of when named individuals worked, what they worked on and, in review threads, what their colleagues thought of their work.

That last part deserves attention. Code review is one of the most socially charged activities in software engineering. A 2020 study by Carolyn Egelman, Emerson Murphy-Hill and colleagues at Google, presented at the International Conference on Software Engineering, surveyed 1,317 developers about negative experiences in review, which the authors called “pushback”. They found such experiences relatively rare but harmful when they occurred. A sold repository carries all of that: the blunt rejection, the apologetic reply, the thread in which someone was told they were wrong. These people wrote for colleagues, not for a model.

European regulators have started to address the training side. In Opinion 28/2024, adopted in December 2024, the European Data Protection Board said that whether an AI model can be considered anonymous must be assessed case by case, set out a three-step test for relying on legitimate interests, and indicated that unlawful processing at the development stage may affect the lawfulness of later deployment, with remedies that could in serious cases include deletion of the data or the model. The opinion did not contemplate a secondary market in staff conversations, but its logic applies.

American law offers less. Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University and author of The Quantified Worker, told MIT Technology Review that “Employers should have express consent before selling workers' data,” noting that no federal law bans such sales. She described the proceeds, which typically flow to creditors and investors rather than to the workers whose words are sold, as “captured capital”. Greg Ewing, an attorney who advises AI startups, called such data “legally radioactive” and described “a Wild West of AI training”.

Sellers and brokers insist that personal information is scrubbed. SimpleClosure says it removes personal data before sale. The Spirit deal shows what a serious attempt at scrubbing looks like: according to chapter11cases.com, the parties adopted the California Consumer Privacy Act's de-identification standard, appointed Tonic.ai as an independent de-identification agent for unstructured data such as email, made certified de-identification a condition of closing, required re-identification testing before each transfer, and obliged the buyer to commit publicly not to attempt re-identification. Those protections originally covered customers rather than staff. After unions led by the Association of Flight Attendants objected, Skift reported in November that revised terms require Google, still paying $10 million, to cover the cost of de-identification as well and to commit publicly not to knowingly re-identify the data, while employee medical examinations, payroll records, drug testing, crew pairings, biometrics and union grievance filings are excluded from the sale altogether. “Without our union, there would have been no one to speak for workers in this fire sale of their private information,” said Sara Nelson, the union's president.

Even that may not be enough. In a letter dated 8 October 2026, more than a hundred members of Congress led by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Steven Horsford warned that “Removing names, email addresses, or other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous.” The point applies with special force to code. Writing style, working hours, the modules a person owned and the distinctive way they phrase a review comment can identify them as surely as a name. And a git history without its authorship is a much less useful training asset, which creates a quiet commercial pressure against thorough scrubbing.

Secrets That Travel With the Code

The security problem is more concrete still. Developers routinely commit things they should not: API keys, database passwords, cloud credentials, private certificates. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 report, published in March, counted about 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets added to public GitHub commits in 2025, a 34 per cent increase on the year before. Internal repositories, the kind now being sold, were roughly six times more likely than public ones to contain hardcoded secrets. More than 64 per cent of secrets that GitGuardian confirmed as valid in 2022 were still valid when retested in January 2026. And about 28 per cent of incidents originated entirely outside repositories, in collaboration tools such as Slack, Jira and Confluence, precisely the systems now sold alongside code.

Deleting a secret from the current version of a file does not remove it from git. It persists in history unless that history is rewritten. A buyer who values complete history is therefore buying, by design, every credential anyone ever committed and later regretted. Some will have been rotated. Many, on GitGuardian's evidence, will not.

The risk does not end at transfer. Language models can memorise and regurgitate their training data. In a 2021 paper presented at the USENIX Security Symposium, Nicholas Carlini and colleagues extracted hundreds of verbatim sequences from GPT-2's training data, including personally identifiable information and code, and found that larger models were more vulnerable. A credential that survives into a training corpus could, in principle, resurface in a model's output. A dead startup's cloud account may be closed; its partners' shared keys may not be.

Provenance Tools Built for a Different Problem

If the market is to function legitimately, buyers need something like a chain of title for code: evidence of who wrote what, under which agreement, and with whose permission it is being sold. Some of the tools exist. None was designed for this job.

The most rigorous work on dataset provenance comes from the Data Provenance Initiative, a collaboration led by researchers including Shayne Longpre at MIT. Its audit of more than 1,800 text datasets, published in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2024, found licence omission rates above 70 per cent and error rates above 50 per cent on popular dataset hosting sites. If carefully curated public datasets are that poorly documented, the documentation that comes with a hastily sold startup repository is unlikely to be better. Industry groups have tried to standardise the metadata: the Data & Trust Alliance, a consortium of large companies, published data provenance standards covering source, legal rights, lineage and intended use. Such standards help only if someone fills them in truthfully.

Git itself offers little assurance. Its documentation is candid: the author name “has no effect on authentication”, and options such as —author and —date allow anyone to set the claimed author and timestamp of a commit to whatever they like. A git history is a record of what someone typed into a configuration file, not a verified log of who did what and when.

Cryptographic signing can change that. Sigstore's gitsign tool lets developers sign commits using an OpenID Connect identity rather than long-lived keys, recording the signing event in Rekor, a public transparency log, so that the signature can later be checked with git verify-commit. The Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts framework, known as SLSA and part of the Open Source Security Foundation, describes how to generate verifiable provenance for build artefacts. Software bills of materials, which the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency describes as “a nested inventory, a list of ingredients that make up software components”, can document which third-party components a codebase contains.

The trouble is timing. These tools establish provenance going forward. They work when commits are signed at the moment of creation and builds are attested as they run. Almost none of the repositories now being sold were built that way. A five-year-old startup history consists overwhelmingly of unsigned commits, and no amount of tooling applied at the point of sale can retroactively prove that a commit dated 2021 was really written in 2021 by the person named on it. SBOMs describe components, not the employment status of the people who wrote the glue code. Even the media world's answer, the content credentials standardised by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, attaches provenance to finished objects rather than to an evolving, many-authored record.

What Brussels Now Asks to See

Regulation is starting to demand some of this documentation. Article 53(1)(d) of the EU AI Act requires providers of general-purpose AI models to publish a summary of the content used to train them. In July 2025, the European Commission's AI Office published a mandatory template for that summary. According to the Commission's own guidance, it requires providers to list their data sources, including private datasets licensed from third parties, and to describe relevant processing aspects such as respect for copyright. The obligation has applied since 2 August 2025 for new models; models already on the market before that date have until 2 August 2027. The AI Office's enforcement powers began on 2 August 2026, with fines of up to 3 per cent of worldwide annual turnover or 15 million euros, whichever is higher.

That is real pressure: a lab that buys a startup's codebase must at least acknowledge publicly that it trained on licensed private data. But the template has limits. The Commission has said it will not audit content at the level of individual datasets, acting instead on complaints or qualified alerts from its scientific panel. And a summary of sources is not a chain of title. A provider can accurately state that it used “private datasets licensed from third parties” while knowing nothing about whether the third party had the right to license them.

Incentives That Reward Forgery

The most troubling feature of this market is not any single legal gap but the way money changes behaviour around them.

Begin with what buyers prize. Sunset values assets partly by headcount and years in operation; broker guidance stresses development history and pull requests; Turing wants the “complete operational history” of a company. Buyers want long, busy, human histories because those are what make a codebase useful for training agents. Those are exactly the properties that git makes trivially easy to fake. Dates can be backdated with an environment variable. Author names can be set at will. Language models can generate plausible commit messages, review comments and tickets in volume. A fabricated five-year history, populated with synthetic engineers who argue convincingly in pull requests, is now a technically modest undertaking.

There is evidence that metadata on code platforms is already gamed when it has value. A study by Hao He, Bogdan Vasilescu, Christian Kästner and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University and the security firm Socket identified around 4.5 million suspected fake stars on GitHub, with fake-star campaigns increasing by two orders of magnitude in 2024, largely to promote short-lived malicious repositories. Stars are a crude signal. Commit histories are a far richer one, and they now carry a price tag. If buyers pay more for histories that look human and long, some sellers will manufacture them, producing exactly the synthetic contamination that real-world data was supposed to avoid. MIT Technology Review noted that no company has published tests comparing training on real archives with the alternatives, so buyers may struggle to tell the difference.

The second incentive is laundering. A repository containing third-party code, an ex-employer's proprietary modules or material taken under NDA becomes harder to trace once it passes through a broker, is scrubbed of identifying metadata, and is merged into a training corpus with thousands of others. De-identification, presented as a privacy safeguard, also strips away the authorship information that might reveal where code came from. No such case has yet been documented, but the structure of the market rewards anyone who can present tainted material as clean.

The third incentive is insider exfiltration. Developers routinely have access to code they do not own. Until recently, the main buyers for a stolen codebase were competitors and foreign rivals, and the cases that reached court were dramatic. In January 2026, a federal jury in San Francisco convicted Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, in a case in which prosecutors said he had stolen more than 2,000 pages of confidential material about Google's AI infrastructure. That was a case about geopolitics. The new market creates a far more mundane temptation: a departing engineer, a disgruntled contractor or a founder in a dispute with co-founders may now find a ready, apparently respectable buyer for a private repository.

That is not hypothetical. According to IBTimes UK, citing Business Insider, Surge AI's Nick Heiner said someone had approached him offering a large company's codebase for millions of dollars, and he concluded that the seller did not have the rights to sell it. A less careful buyer, or one under competitive pressure to acquire data faster than its rivals, might not have asked.

The final incentive concerns who gets paid. In the startup wind-downs described by MIT Technology Review, proceeds typically go to senior creditors and investors. The engineers whose judgement, arguments and late-night fixes make the data valuable receive nothing and are usually not asked. Ryan Lock, co-founder of Polyshares, compared the offers to those of early oil prospectors buying land from unaware farmers. People with no stake in a transaction also have no channel through which to object, so the safeguard most likely to catch a bad sale, the knowledge of those who were actually there, is switched off.

Building a Chain of Title for Code

None of this means the trade must stop. A failing company has legitimate reasons to recover value from its work, and AI developers have genuine reasons to want realistic engineering data. The question is what a legitimate transaction would look like. The Spirit proceedings, existing law and the tools described above suggest a working standard.

Sellers should map every author in the history to an employment contract, a contractor agreement with an assignment clause or a documented licence, and remove whatever cannot be matched. The labour of that mapping is the provenance. Former employees and contributors should be notified and given time to object; the Spirit case surfaced vendors, unions and lawmakers only because a bankruptcy court made the sale public, and private startup deals have no equivalent forum. Vendored code, NDA material and partner data should be found through software composition analysis and contract review, then stripped out or separately licensed.

De-identification should follow the Spirit model of an independent agent, certification and re-identification testing before transfer, and should address the stylistic signals that identify developers even without their names. Every commit and every attached collaboration archive should be scanned for credentials, with live secrets revoked rather than merely redacted. Buyers should demand warranties of title backed by indemnities and escrow, so that the cost of a bad sale falls on whoever was best placed to prevent it. And companies that want their engineering record to be worth something later should sign commits and attest builds now, which would also make fabricated histories easier to detect.

The Record Belongs to More Than One Person

Return to that email from Google: “You keep 100% of your IP.” For a solo developer who wrote every line of an app, that may be close to true. For almost everyone else, it is a simplification that the new market quietly depends on. A codebase with a real history is a crowd of authors, a web of contracts, a store of other companies' secrets and a diary of working lives. It can be sold as a single asset only by ignoring most of what makes it valuable.

The AI industry has discovered that the most useful training data is not polished output but the visible process of people working things out together. That process was never created with a buyer in mind. If the market is allowed to treat possession as ownership, and a git log as proof of anything, it will reward forgers, launderers and insiders. At least one buyer has already recognised an offer that looked too good to be legitimate. A market cannot rely on its buyers happening to be careful.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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I’ve been accused twice this year of being too “black and white” with my thinking. The last time was while discussing my stance on being a non-voter. I was attempting to convince some people of the idea that it is better to not consent to the political system by voting especially if voting for the “lesser of two evils” or even voting third party. You can read my last post here if you want more details on some of my viewpoints on all of that.

Well since then I’ve been thinking a little bit more on the idea of black and white thinking. In my view I have a wide spectrum of ideas in my thinking. I don’t express them all because I enjoy talking about the extremes which I believe is where many solid truths are found. I used to dwell on the gray thinking for about two decades of my life. In hindsight that is fairly boring to me now. It seems to be avoiding convictions and beliefs sitting around in the gray zone. Now I feel like I’m full of a wide range of color, not just black and white. Black and white, red and yellow, and more.

Perhaps it’s not a problem at all to have some black and white thinking. I think we all do and it is likely unavoidable. Where are your convictions? Many of those things are somewhat binary. The people I was discussing the political voting system were fairly black and white with their convictions that it is an overall benefit for all of us to go out and vote. My arguments against it looked like black and their positive beliefs for voting looked like white to them. In my view it was the opposite, they are upholding corrupt systems that subjugate us all with violence and coercion – which would be black in my view. I support disengaging from that and laboring on alternative voluntary systems and if you believe in the Messiah, have Him as your King. If not at least promote good and non-violent things in place of violent extremists, aka governments.

As I’ve been lightly thinking of this idea, I think anyone with strong beliefs and convictions would have some black and white thinking in their mind, for example those who believe climate change is the biggest threat to mankind versus those who believe climate change is a hoax agenda created by the round table groups to manipulate and control mankind. There are many in the gray zone with climate change, but many have solid convictions on it. Those who believed that the COVID-19 thing was a legitimate pandemic and that those who didn’t “believe in the science” were threatening us all versus those who did not is another example. There are countless examples of this. Belief in the government (and political parties) and belief in some sect of religion are some of the most intense black and white thinking areas but most people have some black and white thinking. Playstation vs Xbox, Apple vs Microsoft or Google, Ford vs Chevy, Israel vs Gaza. Lots of it is just opinions that don’t matter much, but some are life and death type of situations.

I took a long break from politics and religion and it was very helpful. I had to deprogram my mind and clear it up from the constructs that were programmed into me from birth. I’m sure some of that remains but as I’ve come back at reconstructing my reality with a somewhat blank slate it has been pretty amazing. Reading scriptures without holding onto what I was told to think about it has given me a very different perspective on it all. Now it looks like a bunch of people showing what not to do with God patiently giving advice on a better way while watching everyone reject that. Politics are just comedy to me now, I don’t see how people can keep being pulled into whatever party they latch onto. All these systems of control are corrupt; organized government and organized religion are pretty repulsive overall – full of error. And the good, honest, sincere people trying to live according to truth are scattered and divided. Divide and conquer, the elitists are well practiced at this and seem to be winning.

Don’t really have a major point here. Just expressing some thoughts. I’d suggest we all try our best to stay open minded. Yet as you come to find amazing information that you feel and understand through your entire being – stand up for those principles and convictions. But please don’t force them on others with coercion and violence. Realize that is what governments do. So if you press your views through the government system it will more likely than not become a matter forced on everyone.

made with my own game engine. still <4k lines of code. i learned quaternions this time.

keep dreaming. 🤍🩷🩵💚

see video

The tram to Stephansplatz broke down in the December slush, which seemed to surprise no one except me.

We filed into the wet cold, a procession of puffy coats shuffling toward the cathedral spire that punctured the gray sky. My socks were already damp. The tourist ahead of me dragged a suitcase through black puddles, spraying my shins with grime.

I wanted to kick it.

Then the bells began their evening choir as I entered the square—that ancient conversation between bronze and air that has marked Vienna's evenings for eight centuries. The Christmas market spread before the cathedral like a medieval fair reimagined. From Stephansdom's tower, a cascade of bronze notes fell through the sleet, each one finding its place in a melody older than anything my country had built. The tourist with the suitcase stopped dragging it. Stood there. Just listened. We all did, this sudden congregation of strangers, while Vienna's medieval heart beat above us in D minor.

But.

The moment passed, and we resumed our march toward what Instagram had promised us—the authentic Austrian Christmas experience, now with contactless payment and QR codes for mulled wine. The market sprawled before Stephansdom like a fever dream of capitalism dressed in pine boughs. Hundreds of wooden huts lined the square, their peaked roofs heavy with artificial snow that would never melt. Strings of lights crisscrossed overhead—warm white bulbs that turned the falling sleet into ten thousand tiny stars. The smell of cinnamon and diesel exhaust. Of roasting almonds and wet wool. Of Lebkuchen and strangers' perfume.

Everything was ten euros.

“Traditional handmade ornaments,” said the girl behind the stall, holding up something clearly stamped in Guangdong. Her German accent was Russian. Her smile was professional. She'd already identified my ethnicity from fifty meters away—something about the face and the shoes—and switched to English. “Very special price for you.“

Three accordion players worked the corner where Graben meets the square. They weren't together—just landed in the same lucrative spot by the invisible economics of busking. Romanian, probably. Maybe Bulgarian. They played “Silent Night” in competing keys while their cup-bearers worked the crowd. One accordionist had rigged LED lights to his instrument. It pulsed red and green with each squeeze. Tacky.

And yet so brilliant.

I wanted my mulled wine in those ceramic mugs everyone clutched like prayer books. The deposit was two euros. The wine was five. The vendor poured it from a vat that could have supplied a battalion. Steam rose. Cloves floated. It tasted a bit like sweetened cough syrup.

I drank it anyway, needing the heat more than the authenticity.

The market's lights created a peculiar democracy of beauty. Under their glow, the cathedral's Gothic severity softened, and the faces of strangers took on the warmth usually reserved for paintings of saints. A group of Syrian refugees had set up an informal gathering near the Graben entrance—I recognized the cadence of Damascus Arabic. They shared a single order of sausage, cutting it carefully with a pocket knife, making it last. One of them caught me looking and raised his paper cup of wine in a toast that needed no common language.

The food stalls celebrated every German-Austrian cliché imaginable. Bratwurst thick as a baby's arm. Sauerkraut that could strip paint. Potato pancakes crisp as currency, served on paper plates that wilted from the grease. A Turkish man at the potato pancake stand had developed a rhythm—spread, flip, drain, serve—that matched exactly the time needed for each customer to find their money. His economy of motion spoke of years perfecting this dance. “Twenty-three years in this city,” he said. “My children speak better German than they do Turkish. This is how it goes.”

From the cathedral steps, I watched the choreography of commerce. Sellers called out in four languages. Tour groups followed umbrellas held high like battle standards. A pickpocket worked the crowd with moves so smooth they seemed rehearsed. Everyone photographed the same wooden angel. The lights above turned every face golden, forgiving, like a Baroque painter's trick for making peasants look holy.

Still.

In the hut selling wooden toys, an old man carved a nutcracker with hands that shook from cold or age or both. Real shavings curled from real wood. His granddaughter translated prices into currencies that didn't exist when he'd learned his trade. He wasn't performing craft for tourists. He was just carving, the way his father had taught him, before the EU, before the euro, before any of us had decided Vienna needed to be preserved in amber.

I bought nothing from him. Too expensive. But I stood there watching until my fingers went numb around the ceramic mug I'd eventually have to return.

The Pakistani man selling roasted chestnuts had been here for fifteen years. “Every December,” he said, working his coal fire with practiced indifference. “Same spot. Same chestnuts.” His children were in university now. Medicine and engineering. They'd never work a market stall. “This is good,” he said, wrapping my chestnuts in yesterday's newspaper. “But also sad, yes?“

Yes.

By evening, the sleet had turned to snow—the kind that makes everything postcard-perfect and twice as slippery. The market lights blurred into halos. A brass quartet had set up near the Plague Column, their cheeks red with cold and effort, playing Strauss waltzes that nobody danced to. Their open trumpet case collected euros and snow in equal measure. Tourists posed with giant pretzels they'd never finish. The bells rang again, marking time that meant nothing to anyone except a photo opportunity.

The crowd had thickened into something organic. Friends met friends at predetermined huts—”by the one with the giant wooden spoon”—and performed reunion scenes for each other. Air kisses. How long has it been? You look wonderful. They congregated in circles and claimed those standing tables, their ties loosened, their hair down, their laughter too loud. Their third round of Glühwein had turned the cold December evening into a slightly intoxicated reverie of spontaneity. Tomorrow they'd be hierarchical again. Tonight, they shared Käsespätzle from a cardboard boat, sharing pretzels and gossip, their breath making clouds that rose and vanished like conversations that would be forgotten by morning.

I found myself by the Glühwein stand again. Different vendor, same vat. She was maybe nineteen, nose ring catching the Christmas lights, pouring wine with one hand while texting with the other. Her grandmother had probably stood in this same spot, selling something else to other outsiders, back when the cathedral's shadow was more sanctuary than selfie backdrop.

“Another?” she asked without looking up.

I held out my mug. She filled it. Neither of us pretended this was about Christmas. It was about warmth and mild intoxication and the peculiar comfort of transactional relationships that asked nothing beyond exact change.

A violinist—conservatory-trained by the sound of it—played Bach near the tourist information booth. His case contained more coins than bills. Talent doesn't always translate to tips. Behind him, a man spray-painted silver stood motionless on a box, being Mozart for photos. He made twice as much by doing nothing perfectly. The violinist kept playing anyway, each note precise and ignored, while the human statue blinked for five-euro bills.

The market would close at ten. The stall owners would count their euros. The tourists would upload their photos. Tomorrow would bring new crowds, same chestnuts, same wooden angels, same bells marking hours in a city that had learned to perform its own history. The lights would blaze again, turning commerce into magic if you squinted hard enough and had enough Glühwein.

But what the market truly sold was not ornaments or sausages or mulled wine. It sold the ancient comfort of gathering, of voices mixing in the cold air, of light shared against darkness. Vienna had been doing this for a thousand years, adapting her essence, turning strangers, locals, and passersby into a tradition that could warm Syrian refugees, Japanese tourists, and Tyrolean woodcarvers alike.

I returned my mug, got my deposit back, and walked toward the U-Bahn, the smell of cinnamon and woodsmoke in my coat. Behind me, Stephansdom disappeared into the snow, and Vienna continued her ancient tradition of remaining heartbreakingly beautiful. The accordions played on, three different versions of “Jingle Bells” bleeding into each other like currencies in a border town.

The tram was running again. Of course it was

In Summary: * I've just taken the first round of my night meds, and am listening to the IU / UCLA game, with IU leading 20 to 13 early in the 4th Quarter. It's been a gray, rainy day here, with off and on showers all day long. But no big, scary thunderstorms. Yet. They're still threatening those for later tonight and tomorrow.

As has been my pattern for the last few nights, I'll take the final round of night meds later, finish the night prayers after the game, and head to bed early.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 217.38 lbs. * bp= 158/71 (62)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 07:30 – 1 banana * 08:10 – fried rice * 10:00 – snack on little cookies * 11:15 – 1 and ½ pb&j sandwiches * 14:00 – fried chicken * 17:20 – 4 little cookies

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 06:00 – wake * 07:15 – bank accounts activity monitored * 07:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 11:18 – tuned into the Northwestern Wilcats College Football Team playong the Ohio St. Buckeyes, broadcast live by the Ohio State Athletics Network, early in the 1st Quarter of the game, no score yet * 13:30 – while continuing to follow the score of the Ohio St. game, I've now tuned to the pregame broadcast of this afternoon's IU /UCLA game * 14:29 – Ohio St. wins over Northwestern, 28-19 * 14:30 – now listening to IU Hoosiers Football vs USC Trojans

Chess: * 10:30 – moved in all pending CC games

I adore Moneyball—both the film and the concept itself. I relish delving into data and pondering visualisations. The prospect of analysing data to uncover talent that meets specific criteria at a lower cost for a higher return?

Sign me up and take my money.

But does it lead to a dilution of essence?

Let's begin with the game where it all started: baseball.

Undoubtedly, Moneyball has led to more efficient team-building and game strategies. Teams can now optimise their resources to maximise wins, much like corporations streamline operations to boost profits.

But at what cost?

The essence of the game—its unpredictability and moments of inexplicable magic—is eroding. We're witnessing longer games with less action, more strikeouts, and fewer balls in play. Between 1981 and 2021, the average MLB game stretched from 2 hours and 33 minutes to 3 hours and 10 minutes (a 24% increase), while strikeouts per team jumped 53%, from 5.8 to 8.9.

Games haven't become more “interesting”; they've become more similar, pattern-oriented, and tactical. Small players, indie outfits, and sudden upstarts are becoming irrelevant—a cultural inequality mirroring the economic inequality outside the stadium.

As ideas percolate, the commoditisation of entertainment spreads.

What can work for baseball surely can work for music?

Mixtapes and Sunday RJs are gone. Algorithms now shape our playlists. Listening habits are dissected at a chord-structure level, serving up compositions built on the exact same skeleton ad nauseam.

70% of today's “hit” songs share the same 4-chord structure. That means you basically never listen to anything fundamentally new.

The same predictive models have conquered cinema: a laundry list of Marvel and DC Comics sequels, prequels, and pre-prequels, surging from 17% in 2000 to 80% in 2019, while studio appetite for mid-budget films ($20–100 million) are down from 64% to just 32%.

Even runtimes have converged: a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study of over 30,000 films showed major-studio lengths clustering tightly around a “safe” window—a sanitised, dry-cleaned version of creativity.

The result is a monoculture: efficient, predictable, boring, and lacking vibrancy.

In economics, short-term thinking breeds bubbles and crashes. In culture, quick hits and easy wins sacrifice enduring art and timeless sporting moments. We're all being TikTok-ed into the challenge of the week.

Even globally popular games like football are becoming tired and jaded in their search for predictability.

In 2008, an unknown coach named Pep Guardiola took over FC Barcelona and created the greatest symphony of art in world football. It was so good that everyone tried to copy it. Over the last decade, virtually every major club has become a carbon copy of the others—employing inverted wingers, false 9s, and patient build-up play.

In the Premier League, average possession for the top six clubs has climbed from 53.7% in 2010/11 to 59.2% in 2020/21. According to Opta, long passes over 35 yards have dropped 17%, while short passes have jumped 22%—trading unpredictable, end-to-end chaos for methodical control.

Player profiles have converged around ball-playing geometry over raw physicality, and expected-goals (xG) analysis has taught strikers to abandon audacious long-range strikes for high-probability tap-ins. Average shot distance has shrunk from 18.4 yards to 16.8 yards, goal-scoring variance has fallen 15%, and the points gap between the Premier League champions and 10th place has widened from 40 points to 52.

The game is becoming robotic.

Guardiola's approach has been templatised to the T, but the players who painted that symphony cannot be replicated. What it has left behind is a sanitised, geometrical, and homogenised landscape of football tactics eulogised by tactical experts on Twitter, yet bereft of the magic that gave us the Pelés and the Maradonas.

Try watching Arsenal play for 90 minutes.

It has become the age of the average—a monoculture of rectangles and infinite scrolls. A world where everything is optimised, yet nothing is truly excellent.

Resistance is emerging at the margins. Baseball teams are rediscovering human scouting. Analog photographs are back in vogue. Independent musicians are bypassing algorithms to reach fans directly. Filmmakers are betting on new formats over predictable returns.

We need to nurture this resistance to stop our decay.

This is what will create that something magical we desperately need. Templatised uniformity is not what got us here. It was intuition, creativity, and serendipity.

Moneyball is great—needed, even.

But not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts

Went to a book event earlier. or whatever they’re called. a place where people gather to buy books i guess. my housemate wanted to go, and i wasnt interested in leaving the house, but i figured that maybe ill find a book ive been looking for. spoiler, i didnt find anything interesting if im being honest. there were people walking around with flowers, a lot of people actually, handing them to writers. i found that odd. flowers? really? what are we celebrating here? just read the damn book and fuck off. what difference does it make who wrote it? unless they’re writing for the attention, in which cas, by all means, bring them a whole garden, im sure they’lll apreciate that. anyway, i wasnt in a good mood to begin with, nor am i still. i slept rather late, had a headache most of the day, and with my injury i can hardly walk or move. my housemate and i decied to go to a thai restaurant afterwards. thought some food might improve the night. it didnt. there was a man sitting a couple of chairs in front of me, towards the back of the restaurant. it was practically empty. just him, my housemate, me and two waitresses. lovely. now, this man. what a character. i dont know how else to describe him except that he looked like a white american man who wouldnt need to pull an id to prove it. and i mean that in the most unfortunate sense possible. he kept loking at the waitresses in a rather peculiar way. not ordering anything, not asking for anything, just looking. every time one of them walked past, he’d turn his head and follow her with his eyes. a man so desperately committed to being noticed that hed forgotten he was in a restaurant. the waitresses looked uncomfortable. i noticed them smiling awkwardly at me whenever they walked back past my table, which was unfortunate for them because i wasnt interested in being part of whatever was happening there. eventually, i had enough. i got up and walked over to him and asked if he was planning on staying much longer. i wont get you bored with how it went but he didnt seem pleased. he paid and left afterwards. alright, problem solved. or so i thought. while i was busy paying attention to this mans pathetic existence, my housemate had been talking to me. quite a lot, actually. i hadnt heard most of it. didnt even realise they’d finished eating until afterwards. we argued on the way home. something about me not listening, being distracted and blah blahs whatever else. i dont remember every word of it. i was still annoyed, and probably wasnt making things any easier.

Maybe shes right, though. maybe i do argue a lot maybe i have a habit of turning every little disagreement into something bigger than it needs to be. i dont know. its not as tohugh i go out of my way to aruge with people. ir at least, id like to think i dont. i shouldve listenend. anyway, nothing seem to get any better.

Sincerely, Socially exhausted and unnecessarily argumentative.

A Visit: Remere & Alexis

The below passage contains light descriptions of blood and sickeningly flirtatious tomfoolery. Do take care.

Remere had spent the better part of a week preparing this ritual. Guests were not something they had frequently, save for The Groundskeeper, so conjuring lodging as they had originally planned was out of the question. It was much easier to attune their newfound guest to their dwelling instead, and allow them to come and go as they pleased. Not only was it more efficient, but it was less draining.

They had opted to meet with Alexis the same place they had run into one another prior, by the ruins that surrounded them when they had a scythe to their neck. Their only demand was that Alexis take their hand.

When they find Alexis again, he is restlessly pacing about the immediate area near the ruins, brows knit in deep contemplation. This time, he does not sport his usual armor and leathers, and instead wears a white shirt and black gilet, rosary framing the sharp planes of his chest. His signature scythe is likewise not present; then again, hunters are known to be able to summon their weapons at will, so perhaps he is not as vulnerable as he appears.

He consents readily to Rem’s offer to take their hand—not without a snide comment of “this relationship is moving rather fast, isn't it?” But then his fingers, skin warm to the touch, interlace with Remere’s. Once they appear near the glowing crystal, Alexis slips his hand free of Rem’s to step forward and casually examine the area.

In a blink of an eye they surfaced beside a towering red crystal, levitating above a golden basin containing a red liquid. The contents were left no mystery—the renowned Witch practiced dark magic, here.

Remere turns to Alexis, gloves having been discarded prior to their trip to reveal vein-like scars upon their person. They extend a clawed hand, the one unoccupied by a rose that was much an accessory as it was a comfort object, and wearily exhale. “Apologies. I was unable to arrange lodging, but this should suffice, instead. Will a pin-prick bother you?”

“Darling, I’ve been attacked by all manners of creatures,” he answers, finally glancing back toward Rem, practiced charm in his smile. “I hardly think such a thing would bother me at all.”

Remere says nothing in response to Alexis’ blatant flirtation. At least, not aloud. There’s something in their expression that shifts, a softness in their eyes and a raising of brows that is swiftly concealed by a clearing of their throat. Their mind ponders the warmth that lingers on their slightly cool skin, waiting for Alexis to orient themselves before they proceed.

“Lovely. You are about to be attacked by another.” They reach clinically for the hand that had just slipped away, pressing a pointed nail into Alexis' index finger to puncture the skin, and hold it above the pool. A drop was all they needed, and it glistened as it landed within.

Remere pauses for a moment, in contemplation.

What was the harm in sampling the goods, as it were?

They brush their hand along the wound, closing it with some manner of sorcery... and allowing the contents to smear upon their own finger, before they bring it to their lips to clean it. A pleased hum, musical and somewhat decadent. Definitely part of the ritual, and nothing more.

“Ground yourself and think of me, and you may come and go as you please. Think of leaving, and you shall return where you last were. Are you ready for the tour? Questions, concerns?”

Rem’s warning lands on ears connected to a skull devoid of rational thought on the best of days. Alexis does not perceive the remark—you are about to be attacked by another—as anything more than some manner of strange humor. There is only wordless obedience as Alexis permits Remere to claim his hand, his own comfortably and willingly relaxed in his companion's grasp.

Such cold hands, he thinks, but gives the observation no more consideration than that.

The sound that escapes him as claw pierces flesh is interesting, to put it simply. It’s something like an inhaled gasp, sharp and shaky, and it exhales into something like a muted whimper. Blue eyes avert from the sight, cheeks flush with color, and Alexis feels his heart thump insistently against his ribs for a moment. He shifts his gaze back just in time to catch his own essence ripple into the pool surrounding the crystal, and finds himself too transfixed by the morbid sight to notice Rem lick their own finger clean.

He feels his heart finally slow back to a languid pulse when Remere speaks. “Concerns? Well, you’ve already taken my blood for ritualistic witchcraft, so I don’t see what worse you could do.” The smirk that punctuates is reassurance that he's merely teasing. “Please, lead the way.”

“Ritualistic witchcraft? You make me sound so... gauche.” A frown, subtle though it may be. They don’t seem to notice any shift in Alexis’ heartbeat or otherwise, mind occupied as it was. “I merely invited you into my home, and gave you access to bypass the enchantments that prevent others from entering. The only blood in this pool is my own, and a drop of yours.”

They start walking out of the overgrown cemetery, slipping between the crystal, Alexis, and any headstones present. As they round a corner a silhouette can be seen maintaining the fuchsia bushes at the base of the house, clad in a hat that obstructed their features. They seemed more focused on making sure what bloomed there overtook the property more than trimming it in any capacity.

“Good day, Groundskeeper. Thank you for helping me with my composition last evening. Please rest soon, yes?” Remere’s words fall upon deaf ears, a disgruntled huff the only response they are granted. A soft laugh follows from the Witch’s lips.

“He came with the home, you see. Maintained it before I came here. Anything you might need, The Groundskeeper can help with.”

Patiently, Alexis waits for Rem to step forward first, and then he maneuvers carefully alongside headstones with many curious, unspoken questions of who slumbers beneath. Those don’t seem like the things one ought to ask about on a second meeting.

As they pass The Groundskeeper, Alexis offers a polite wave, acknowledging the figure with no indication of unease; whatever chill of death hangs around him falls just short of Alexis’ awareness. Perhaps getting subtly aroused by Rem drawing his blood a moment ago has dulled his senses. Besides that, something seems to suddenly draw his gaze as they begin to ascend the steps to Rem’s house.

Alexis pauses finally, squinting through the trees ahead. His head tilts as he closely analyzes the sight, and then he relaxes with a laugh. “Well, isn’t that something? It seems we’ve been neighbors all this time.” He nods toward the trees, lining the perimeters of their properties. “You see, just there ahead, there's a path cutting between the trees? That’s my cottage.”

Remere pauses, taking a moment to peek towards the trees separating his home from the neighboring cottage. Their expression shifts, and the rose they were holding flitters to the ground. They bring their hand to their forehead in exasperation.

“One week... of preparation, and you were my neighbor. I think I might like to die.” Nearby, The Groundskeeper barks a laugh before resuming their examination of the blooms surrounding the home.

There’s a small delay before Alexis follows. He idles with a raised brow and amused smirk at Remere’s theatrics, not to mention the laughter that resounds from The Groundskeeper just nearby. Alexis may not notice that he’s literally dead, but he can detect the subdued mockery toward Rem’s suffering. There’s something almost familial about it. Curious.

He promptly crouches to seize the forgotten rose before half-jogging up the steps behind Remere to enter the house.

Remere sighs, not unlike a tired maiden, before ascending the uneven stone stairs. The welcome mat at the foot of the door was certainly welcoming—‘something rotten lives here’ written in some manner of blackletter—as were the scratches upon the wood of the front door.

Upon entering, it became apparent the taste in attire certainly extended to their decor. To their left was a small ritual station, with candles and cauldron alike, and further within was ample space to lounge. Remere points towards the cabinet in the far left of something that resembles a kitchen table, without a designated area for meal preparation.

“I’ve all volumes of Encyclopedia Necromancia, should you need to access them, from Alchemy to Ancients through Zealotry to Zombies. Black to Blood Magic might be the most helpful for our shared quarry, but if you are seeking anything else... it is likely on my shelves. My study is currently being renovated, but I’ve plenty of resources here for your perusal. I’ve ample seating, a fire... The Groundskeeper sometimes lends his hand to play the harp nearby, if silence bothers you, but I also have a music box for when he is occupied.”

They do not at all mention the skull upon a pile of books behind them.

He gently pushes the door shut behind him as he steps forward and examines its casual extravagance; the eccentric ones dabbling in taboo magics always seem to secure the most lavish adornments, he notes with a touch of private bitterness.

Interesting how being tasked with slaying literal monsters leaves one moonlighting as a bard to get by.

For now, he shoves his idle jealousy aside and turns toward Rem, stepping a touch closer. His free hand seeks one of Rem’s to gently lift, and the rose is returned to its grasp. Alexis’ hands cup lightly around Rem’s for a brief moment before he moves to examine the books nearby. “You’re rather accommodating,” he comments, dragging a finger along the spine of one of the books. He glances back to Rem. “I have to wonder, Witch, what led you to such peculiar areas of study?”

Remere stills as the rose is returned to them, the warmth of Alexis’ hands upon their own. Their mind is frazzled once more by the contact, and they still in a manner not unlike that of a frightened deer.

They can’t help but smile as Alexis releases their hand, gazing upon the rose and fiddling with the petals momentarily. After a moment they move to place the rose on the nearby table, and then return to Alexis’ side. “I don't often have guests, but I am glad to be accommodating.”

The question is met with a moment of silence. “I... do not recall.” They answer, honestly for the first time. “Last I remember I was at a memorial, the next I was here. I imagine a ritual must have gone awry. The furniture seemed lived in, and it was all placed as I myself would have placed it, so I imagine I lived here prior. The Groundskeeper was more than willing to answer all my questions. He might be able to answer yours better than I.”

Remere does not delve further on the topic. “Do you need anything to drink while you browse? I’ve a well nearby. The water is clean and comes from a fresh source, I am told. Should it not be, I can purify it for you.”

“I see,” Alexis says simply in response to Rem’s lack of cohesive memory; it’s the first remark stated without any dryness to it. The understanding is genuine. No snide comment follows as he turns to face Remere, seemingly finished with his inspection of the books in their collection.

“Must be very delicate magic you work with, that you’d forget so much. Must leave you wondering to what end you were taking such a great risk?” Alexis is unsure if his own question is rhetorical; there’s curiosity, but he knows Rem likely has no answer to provide. “If The Groundskeeper has already answered all of your questions, then how might he tell me anything you have not already explained?”

The question of water is met with a small, dismissive wave, and blue eyes remain fixed on Remere. Clearly, Alexis is more interested in the topic at hand than any of his human needs.

The shrug that Remere offers in response is uncomfortable in its resignation.

“Perhaps, but I have learned to take precautions in the years that followed. I would not have become... famed, as you so aptly put it, if I did not learn from my mistakes.”

They move to seat themselves on the chair nearby, and blue phantom butterflies take the veil away and drape it over the couch nearby as if beckoned by an unseen command. “There are certain things he withholds, as per my instructions. I am sure he would be more than willing to accommodate a guest. I am not one to question my own judgement, even if I do not remember.”

Their hand drifts restlessly past the golden candelabra towards a half-finished composition. “Oh, I had almost forgotten. There is a volume on undead, as well as a separate volume containing information on the unholy. Should you abide by faith of any kind…” They drift off, not willing to comment again on how the rosary upon Alexis’ person proved to be decorative at best.

“It might be useful to you.”

There’s something almost naturally magnetic in the way Alexis casually turns to follow just behind Remere's steps. With a few short steps, he leans himself against the same chair, half seating himself against the back of it.

That look of deep thought settles into his features again, drawing an intensity to them that seems out of place given his sarcastic, almost indifferent demeanor. It seems, briefly, as though he might press Rem with more questions, but he finally shifts his attention at the mention of books of undead, and holy things, and whatever else they had said—oh, yes, another passive comment on his superficial expression of faith.

“I don't believe in anything,” he says very plainly, not apparently offended, but the flatness of the statement suggests there is nothing to elaborate, or perhaps he does not wish to be questioned further. There’s something about the topic that’s obviously sour to Alexis. A small smile follows, and his voice softens. “But it's beneficial to me that my colleagues think I do—and the things I’m meant to kill, besides.”

Remere does not shift as Alexis settles in closer to lean against their chair. There is a certain comfort in the proximity of another person, one that the Witch is not willing to take the time to analyze. The one thing they elect to is the steady beating of Alexis' heart, content and gentle in the way that it thrummed in his ears.

There is no judgment in the words that follow. It has no place to.

“We are of similar mind, then. As far as belief, or the lack thereof. I draw power from within. From my heart. Sometimes I take from others, but only as is necessary. Consent and autonomy are very important when it comes to practices like these.”

Their expressions shifts, brows furrowing in something akin to sadness. “Yes. I had almost forgotten. You folk feel you are ‘meant’ to kill. No matter. I hope what I have to offer here is... useful to you.”

Alexis frowns at Rem’s comment; in fact, he’s certain he actually feels mildly offended—not enough to warrant anger, or bitterness, or a sharp retort. If any feeling echoes in his words, it’s a faint sense of remorse.

“I don’t feel I’m ‘meant’ to kill. I never particularly asked for any of this.” He distracts himself with the rosary hanging from his neck, lifting a hand to restlessly fidget with it. Aside from that small detail, he’s otherwise calm as ever. “Change is... kind of a strange thing. I could just give up what I do entirely, but there’s a whole code to it. I’d be killed for treachery. I can’t do any good if I’m dead.”

There’s a pause as he lifts a finger to punctuate his next words. “But! Sometimes change for the better means willingness to compromise one’s own values here and there. I mean, you can find a fucked-up way to justify it to yourself.” He shrugs a shoulder and glances toward Rem. “If I tell myself I only kill the ‘bad’ monsters, then I can pretend I’m not just a murderer with a fancy title, yeah?”

Remere had anticipated disappointment, only to be meant with a profound sense of self-awareness. There’s a warmth that blossoms in their chest, a tingling in their fingers. They shift in their chair, turning to face Alexis with those doe-like eyes of theirs.

They cannot conceal their smile, enamored as they were by the answer. “How succinctly put. Your flexibility in your craft is admirable. I... regret that I doubted you. Pardon my judgment.” A carefully worded apology—habit given their regular visitation of the realms of the fae-folk.

They clasp their hands in their lap. “I would spare you of my curiosity, but…”

A golden plated fang, or the mimicry of one, bites at their lower lip. Its voice lowers in cadence, just a smidge. It was perhaps the first time Remere had decided to return Alexis’ flirtations since their meeting.

“...What do you consider ‘bad’?” Something glistens in their eyes. Witch, indeed.

Alexis smiles promptly at the question, the expression natural and honest; in fact, it’s evident he’s quite flustered, given the way color blossoms across his face to match him perfectly to Remere’s elegant scarlet decor.

He continues to fidget with his rosary, idly tapping the cross against his bottom lip. His position shifts a bit closer to his companion then, body turning more toward Rem as though that innocent, wide-eyed stare had enchanted him to draw nearer to his inevitable doom. His voice echoes to match the same cadence when he speaks.

“You wanna know the truth?” His next words follow with a purr, no pause left to let Rem answer. “We’re all bad. The problem isn’t being bad, just how many consider themselves above their nature. I, for one, am at peace with what I am.”

Remere looks up wordlessly at Alexis and blinks, equally in infatuation and admiration. They are just about to open their mouth to speak when the bell at the door rings, cutting through whatever words happened to be formulating inside of that pretty head of theirs.

Their crimson gazes fell upon the door, then back upon Alexis. An apologetic smile crosses their features before they speak. “Yes?”

The door opens, and The Groundskeeper invites themselves in with the tip of a hat towards their shared guest. “I believe I should take you up on your offer to rest. I do not see a crisis befalling the fuchsia for the foreseeable future.”

A pause, and then the tall figure’s lips curl upward into something of a lopsided smile. “That is, unless you were... engrossed in discussion?”

Remere, now flustered, stands upright, brushing invisible dirt from their skirt. “No, um. No. If you need the space to rest, you need the space to rest. It is quite alright.” They look up to Alexis. “Do you need me to see you off? I know you don’t live far from here.”

Such mesmerizing eyes they have, Alexis thinks as he and Rem seem to incline closer yet into one another's proximity. But then he jolts just the same when the doorbell resounds. The pleasant, heart-fluttering moment deflates with The Groundskeeper’s presence, but Alexis manages to find amusement in the idle misfortune. Soft laughter escapes him, and he presses knuckles lightly against his lips in a half-assed effort to smother the sound.

“No, no, I think I can manage the brief trip in one piece,” he says to Rem. It finally occurs to him to stand upright, that he was still leaning casually against the chair, inclined into Remere’s space rather intimately. He lightly clears his throat. “You’re likewise welcome by any time. Until then... sweet dreams, my dear Witch.” A wink follows before he turns to take his leave.

As he passes The Groundskeeper, there’s a fleeting pause. There it is finally; a chill ripples over him as Alexis brushes by. He stills too quickly for the hesitation to be readily apparent, playing it off with a polite nod of acknowledgement. “Rest well, Groundskeeper,” he says politely, before he pushes the door open and promptly departs, wandering on the path toward his cottage.

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The above was conjured at my home in Lunamere, a realm of enchantment and mystery. Thank you for indulging us in a safe haven for queer and neurospicy writing shenanigans!

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