“This way.”
And many of the objects that filled Verstael’s laboratory were admittedly striking. There was a miniature panorama fashioned after the face of the Star itself, a thing quite beyond the drawn atlases Ardyn had known in his own time. Verstael had called it a “model,” describing it as “how the gods must feel, looking down upon our world.” On examining it, Ardyn had found Angelgard. The island where he’d spent two thousand years in captivity was but a speck, hardly larger than a pebble in the grand scale of the world. The mainland shore that had seemed so impossibly far away was now separated from the island by just a thin line of blue. All the lands Ardyn had known in his own time―his entire world―occupied but a fraction of Verstael’s modern map.
Aside from the model, there were the specimens―daemons harvested for study―and great paintings, stretching from floor to ceiling on the laboratory’s vast walls, that depicted the events of the Cosmogony. The displays were all grand, but they never seemed to have visitors to entertain or enlighten other than Ardyn. They seemed to exist largely for Verstael’s own amusement.
Soon the corridor narrowed and canted downward at a steep slope. Ardyn felt as if he were walking through a giant, angled tube. It was a strange, unsettling sensation.
“Right down here,” Verstael coaxed.
They reached a dead end to the tube, and Verstael placed his hand upon the metal surface with a knowing smile. There was a shriek of shifting metal, and the dead end was no more. It was like no door Ardyn had seen before, but it was a door nonetheless.
On the other side was a vast, open space. Verstael strode in and stopped, gazing at something beyond and below. Ardyn realized the room was divided in half by a long, transparent wall. He’d seen such partitions in other areas of the facility. Usually they were placed at right angles, forming boxes to house the labs’ many specimens: creatures stripped of their flesh, bare skeletons, and other such oddities.
This one must have served a similar function on a larger scale. But there was another type of object he’d not encountered before: huge cylinders extended at a downward angle from opposite walls. They each expelled a steady stream of white mist.
Ardyn drew closer to the partition. Peering in, he discerned a large, humanlike shape lying flat on the ground, shrouded in the mist. The shape may have been human, but he’d known no man even half so large.
“Is that . . . ?” Ardyn began, only to trail off.
Verstael grinned. “Ifrit, the Infernian.”
For a moment, Ardyn thought he’d misheard. The huge figure, however, seemed of a size befitting an Astral. The being that lay there would have had no trouble crushing a man in just one of its enormous fists.
“You subjugated a god . . . and brought him here?”
“He was sound asleep, just like the legends said he’d be, so we put him on ice.”
After the War of the Astrals, the gods, having used up all their strength, were said to have fallen into a deep slumber. The spot where the Goddess of Ice lay became a region of bitter cold; the bed of the Infernian, a mountain spitting fire.
“Do you think you could turn him?” Verstael asked.
Ardyn’s eyes widened. Turn a god into a daemon? It was absurd. Beyond fantasy. Something only a madman could conceive of.
Verstael continued to probe. “You’re able to keep the memories of those you daemonify, yes?”
At some point during the many hours he’d been under observation, Ardyn had spoken plainly of his experience on Angelgard, when the memories of the daemonified soldier had flooded into his mind. Perhaps it was a detail he should have kept to himself.
“If you manage to daemonify a deity, you could learn truths no mere mortal could ever dream of knowing. It’s certainly an enticing offer, isn’t it?”
“How so?” Ardyn asked dryly.
“You’ll access two thousand years of his memories, and if you can control him, he’ll be a weapon of supreme power. Just think. You could exact sweet revenge through divine retribution!”
Ardyn cut him off. “How do you know what I want?”
Revenge? On Somnus’s descendants? The very idea was absurd.
“I don’t,” Verstael responded. “But I know you have no other options.”
Ardyn did not care. Anger and hatred still burned within him, as strong as ever. But too many years had passed. He was centuries removed from the age he knew. Nothing he did now would matter.
“Suit yourself. This was not the only thing I had to share.”
At Verstael’s urging, Ardyn proceeded down another corridor. Nothing sparked his interest. Everything was gray and bland and devoid of life. All of it had so little to do with himself. Still, this seemed somehow better than returning to his room. He half listened to the scientist’s ramblings as he slowly trailed behind.
The bottommost level was a large hangar area. From its size, Ardyn guessed it was used not only to store but also to test the weapons and large mechanized suits Verstael adored so much. It stretched on and on, several times the size of the room housing the dormant fire god. The ceiling, too, was several times higher, and in that vast space, Verstael’s animated voice began to echo, much to Ardyn’s annoyance.
“Do you spend every waking moment thinking about daemons?” he asked the man.
Ardyn had meant it as a jab, but Verstael responded with a broad smile and deep nod. “Aren’t they wondrous creatures? I adore their strength! So utterly does a daemonified entity surpass the pitiful constraints of a human. I envy you.”
“You envy me?” Ardyn asked.
“A human life is too short to truly understand all there is to know about the world. If my time on this star spanned millennia like yours, oh, the things I would do!”
Ardyn would have gladly handed over the burden of eternity if he could. But scarcely had the thought formed in his mind before it was disrupted by a crashing sound and the sudden sight of several black shapes dropping to the ground. The intruders rose, and Ardyn knew them for what they were: the same forces that had attempted to intercept his extraction from Angelgard. The Lucian Royal Guard. Soon more were arriving in the hangar, warping in one by one from somewhere outside.
“Lucians! But how?!” Verstael spat, face twisted with malice, but the soldiers ignored him.
They moved quickly, surrounding Ardyn.
“So you’ve come to kill me, have you?” he asked. It was a question that hardly needed an answer; he remembered the words of those he’d encountered on the island. Get it back in the cage―no matter what.
“Or die trying,” a woman’s voice answered all the same. Her features were obscured, and she resembled Somnus not in the slightest, yet suddenly Ardyn found himself staring at Somnus’s face.
Maybe the association was logical. She was, after all, a Lucian―a subject of the kingdom established by Somnus and watched over by his successors.
But it was more than that. Though the weapon she brandished was a far cry from a longsword, her movements were strangely familiar. When she rushed in to strike, he saw his brother’s footwork. His brother’s hands. Why? Why did she seem like . . . ?
“Because it is me, Brother. I’m here, come to kill you.”
It was Somnus’s voice. Again. The same voice that had taunted and tortured him in the depths of Angelgard.
“Just as you would kill me. Right, Brother? Well, I’m afraid to say you’ll never know the satisfaction of taking my life.”
“Silence!” Ardyn screamed.
He raised his arm to block the incoming blade. Pain ripped its way through his flesh, but he did not care. The wound would close soon enough.
“I’m already dead, and have been for some time,” Somnus continued.
With a violent shake, Ardyn dislodged the sword from his arm. It went clattering across the floor―along with its black-clad wielder. She still wore Somnus’s face.
“Though I may be gone, my legacy lives on in Lucis!” his brother taunted. “It lives on in the minds and hearts of the soldiers before you.”
“Enough of this! Begone!”
Ardyn’s red blade flashed into his hand, and he slashed at the soldier. From her chest―from Somnus’s chest―came a fountain of blood, and then she lay in a heap on the ground.
Another Somnus rushed him from behind.
“While you were lost in slumber, I was busy building a kingdom! What sort of legacy have you left behind, Brother?”
“Silence! Away with you!”
He matched blows with Somnus after Somnus, blade swung with such ferocity that it lodged in the floor at his feet and gouged chunks from the walls. Still his brother would not disappear. “Where’s that backup?!” a voice shouted, far away and faint.
An explosion roared through the facility. The lights went out, but the darkness was momentary, soon dispelled by the glow of red flames spouting through a great hole in the far wall.
“Blast! The cooling unit!”
Light from the flames flickered across Verstael’s anxious expression. His eyes were wide, and for a moment, Ardyn forgot about the soldiers all wearing his brother’s face. He followed the researcher’s gaze.
There was something unnatural about the flames. Pouring through the gaping rent in the wall, they were now scorching the high ceiling of the hangar. They twisted and writhed as if they possessed a will of their own. The black smoke billowed upward, filling the room, and as the flame and smoke intertwined, they formed the nebulous shape of a giant arm.