The ice struck Arthur in the chest.
It went through him, there was no other way to describe it. It punched out through his back in a spray of blood and shattered shadow, and the sound of it, the wet and terrible crack of it, rolled across the World of Chaos. For a moment, the hole in Arthur's torso was big enough that Kara could see sky through it.
Her eyes went wide. The scream rose in her throat.
She was moving before she knew it, a streak of red and blue tearing across the sky toward him, and a hand closed around her wrist and stopped her.
"Kara." Clark's voice was low and rough and absolutely steady. "Kara, look at me."
"Let go!" She twisted in his grip, and her whole body was shaking. "Let go of me, he's, he's..."
"If you go to him now," said Clark, "It's over. Everything he did, everything he's bleeding for. It's all gone. They'll know." He held her wrist so tightly his hand trembled.
Her breath caught in a sob, she stopped struggling, she hung there in his grip with tears streaming down her face and her eyes fixed on the broken figure falling through the air, and the sound that came out of her was a thing no one on that battlefield would ever forget.
Arthur fell.
He dropped out of the sky like a stone, trailing blood and black smoke, and hit the dead earth hard enough to crack it. For a moment he lay there, still. Then, slowly, he pushed himself up onto one knee.
The wound in his chest was still open. The edges of it were struggling to knit together, thin black threads reaching across the gap and failing, reaching again and failing, and every breath he took came out wet. Blood ran from his mouth. His spear lay a few feet away, its violet lightning guttering like a candle in a draft. His eyes, those fierce violet eyes, were barely lit at all.
The battlefield had gone completely silent.
The Marshals had stopped. Bellion had halted in midair, wings spread, his blade slack in his hand and his face drawn in absolute horror. Beru was hovering in place, mandibles trembling. Galatea had dropped her hands. Even Doom stood motionless, his head turned toward the kneeling figure on the ground.
"There," said the eldest Ruler, very softly. "There."
And the sky split open like a curtain drawn aside, and a light poured out of the gap that was nothing like any light the World of Chaos had ever seen, pale and brilliant and cold, so bright that the soldiers below threw up their arms to shield their eyes. The clouds fled from it. The lightning died. And out of the blazing opening came a hundred spears of pure white radiance, falling like rain.
They hit the ground in a ring around Arthur and the Monarchs, one after another, driving deep into the earth with a sound like struck bells. Kara threw herself sideways. Raven's power wrapped around her like a wing, and a spear passed through the space where they had been a moment before. Zatanna flung up a shield of golden glass that shattered on impact. Beast Boy shifted into a swallow and dodged between two shafts with a shriek. Frost hit the ground rolling, and a lance buried itself to the hilt a foot from her head.
Clark didn't dodge. He caught a spear in both hands, a hundred feet from the ground, and held it with his teeth clenched while the light of it burned his palms.
Then the first of them descended.
They came down out of the open sky one by one, tall figures in robes of white and silver, gleaming with a light that hurt to look at, their faces calm and cold and terrible a way.
The Rulers looked down at the Shadow Monarch, kneeling in his own blood before her, and her face did not change.
"Arthur Blackwynd, Monarch of Shadows" said the eldest Ruler. "It is over." and he raised one hand, and the battlefield went white.
The light came down on the Monarchs in a wall, a pressure of pure judgment that fell like a hammer, and where it landed the dead earth turned to glass. Clark was the only one fast enough to meet it. He hit the wall of radiance with both arms crossed in front of his face and held, his boots driving long, smoking furrows through the glass, his teeth bared.
"Spread out!" he roared. "Don't let them pin us!"
Nobody needed to be told twice.
Zatanna went up in a spiral of gold. "reirrab evitcetorp!" she shouted, and the sheet of glassed earth beneath the Rulers cracked and bucked, splitting along a thousand lines. The ruler who had been standing with his white hands clasped lost his footing, and his concentration wavered for a half moment. It was enough. Frost's ice came screaming in under his guard and wrapped his ankles in frozen chains.
"Not so tall now, are you!" Frost yelled, and then a spear of light struck the ground an inch from her face and she screamed in a very different tone and flung herself backward. "Okay! Okay, that one was a little close!"
"Stay behind me!" Beast Boy shouted, and shifted into something enormous and winged and green, a creature with the wingspan of a cargo plane and a head like a great horned owl. He folded himself around Frost and Zatanna as the next volley of spears hit, and the rain of light rang against his feathers like hail on a tin roof.
"Gar, you're glowing!" Zatanna said.
"That's, ow, that's not on purpose!"
The Monarchs fought back. They were exhausted, bruised, running on nothing but stubbornness, and they fought back. Clark went through the Rulers guard with a roar and drove a fist into the center of his chest that cracked the ground for a mile, and the tall white-robed figure folded around the blow and staggered backward three full steps, light spilling from his mouth. One of the Rulers struck at Clark's back with a lance, and Clark twisted out of the way and took the glancing blow across his shoulder. He grunted, and then hit her too.
Kara and Raven didn't stay with the others.
They had been looking at the same thing from the first second. The eldest Ruler had turned his back on the fighting without so much as a glance. He had walked, slowly and without hurry, across the shattered earth to the place where Arthur knelt in his own blood, and he had stopped before him, and he was looking down at him with an expression that was almost grief.
"Arthur!"
Kara threw herself toward them with everything she had left. Raven was a breath behind her, her soul-self already unfolding, her eyes blazing white. They covered half the distance in an instant, a streak of red and a streak of black, and Kara stretched out her hand toward him.
Something took her.
She felt it close around her like a hand. There was nothing there, nothing she could see, nothing she could strike, and still it dragged her backward through the air, gently as if the sky itself had decided she was in the wrong place. She twisted, kicked, struck at nothing. It didn't give. A few feet away Raven hit the same invisible resistance and bounced off it like a wave off a stone wall.
"What is that?" Kara gasped, her heels skidding through the dirt. She threw herself at it again, and again it pushed her back. "Raven, what is that?"
"I don't know!" Raven's voice was raw. She spread her hands, and the dark light poured through the air like water into a sieve. "It's not their power and it isn't magic, not any kind I've ever felt, it's..."
She stopped.
"It's what?"
"It feels," Raven said slowly, "familiar."
Kara's eyes went wide. But the thing around her didn't loosen, and she hung there at the edge of the ring of fallen spears with her hands curled into helpless fists, forced to watch.
The eldest Ruler stood very still above the kneeling man.
"Why did it have to be like this," he said, and his voice was low and quiet and almost gentle, "Ashborn's successor?"
Arthur didn't answer. His head hung forward, and his breathing came in short, rattling pulls. Blood dripped slowly from his chin to the ground.
"We wanted a better ending for all of this," the eldest Ruler went on. "Truly. I want you to understand that. For a very long time we believed you wished for the same ending we did, and we held back, and we waited, and we hoped. But you have done exactly what you wanted. You have taken what you pleased and answered to no one. And now the war that we all knew was coming will be fought on your terms, for your reasons, over your family's bones." His eyes closed for a moment. "For your own selfish reasons."
He bent down and picked up the spear that lay beside him, the one that had carved through the skin of Nidhogg, its violet lightning guttering dully along its length.
"Forgive us," He said.
She drove it into his body.
It went in just beside the wound that Frost's lance had torn, and the force of the blow lifted Arthur an inch from the ground. He made a sound, a thick, wet gurgle that might have been a gasp, and blood poured over his chin. Kara's scream split the air, and it was a long moment before she realized that it had come out of her own throat.
Arthur lifted his head.
His eyes were barely lit. His face was gray. He looked up at the Ruler who had come here to kill him, and slowly his mouth curved into a smile.
"I'm the one," he whispered, "who should be saying that."
The eldest Ruler's brow creased. "What?"
The sky went out, it ended, all at once, as if someone had reached up and closed a hand around every light source.
The darkness that fell over the World of Chaos was not the dark of night. It was the dark of the Abyss, the light of the spears went out in the ground. The glow of the Rulers' robes died to a faint, sickly gleam, and every shadow soldier on the battlefield vanished. The ranks of violet-eyed warriors, the Marshals in the air, the dragons overhead, all of it folded away into the black like ink dropped into water, and then there was no army at all, only the vast and empty dark.
The Arthur kneeling on the ground gasped one last time, then he fell apart.
He came undone in a gust of shadow, a long, curling plume of smoke that streamed away across the glass and vanished into the air. The spear clattered to the ground where his body had been. The blood on it was already gone.
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