Zarkus did not like parties.
He liked results.
Unfortunately, the Emperor liked both.
The great plaza below the citadel glowed with lantern light and wardfire, banners of red and bone-white hanging from every arch. Demon nobles in polished armour and embroidered coats clustered around long tables, laughing too loudly, pretending the war wasn't chewing through their borders one village at a time.
Up on the raised stone terrace overlooking them, Zarkus stood with three other generals and a tight jaw.
"…I am telling you," one of them was saying, "the northern coalition is already cracking. They don't need ghost stories; they need rations and burned farms."
"And they are getting both," Zarkus replied, voice smooth. "But fear travels faster than any supply train. A burned farm is a point on a map. A rumour is a shadow in every campfire."
He let his gaze drift down, past the nobles, to the lower tiers of the city—dark roofs, jagged alleys, the faint glimmer of shields along the outer walls.
"Across five fronts," he went on, "they whisper the same thing now. That the humans tried to build their own weapon from a corpse. That it broke. That it walks with us instead."
"The 'metal demon,'" another general said, making the phrase sound like a bad joke. "You really believe that scares them more than a siege tower?"
"It scares them differently," Zarkus said. "You can see a siege tower. You can run from it. You can aim at it. How do you kill a story that says the enemy took one of yours and made him better?"
"Better?" the scoffing general snorted. "It's unstable. Barely controllable. You lost an engineer, half a division, and a laboratory to that 'better.'"
"I lost assets I can replace," Zarkus said. "In exchange for something our enemies cannot copy."
He let the words hang.
The oldest general, a scarred demon with one horn shaved down to a blunt stump, narrowed his eyes.
"And if it turns on us?" he asked. "If your experiment decides it prefers human stories to demon chains?"
Zarkus smiled without humour.
"Then it will still be useful," he said. "As an example."
He didn't add: and as data. As proof. As a step toward the thing Arvan reached for and missed.
Below, a cheer went up as the Emperor rose from his place.
When he stepped forward onto the central dais, the plaza changed.
He wasn't gigantic. He stood only a little taller than most of his generals—lean, precise, with the kind of quiet balance that came from never needing to rush. Lacquered armour in deep crimson and bone-white fit him like a second skin, plates shaped in long, sweeping lines rather than spikes. A cloak of dark cloth, trimmed in thin gold runes, moved behind him like poured ink.
A smooth, stylised half-mask covered the upper half of his face, painted pale with narrow, watching eye-sockets. Beneath it, his mouth was visible: calm, unreadable. From the mask's edge into his hairline, two short horn nubs swept back, subtle enough to miss if you weren't looking.
When his boots touched the engraved stones, the plaza glyphs brightened in a slow ripple, the light spreading out from him as if the city itself were exhaling.
Conversations stuttered and straightened in the same breath.
"Morale is not an indulgence," Zarkus said quietly, eyes on the Emperor. "It is a resource. Tonight's spectacle reminds our own that we are inevitable. The rumours I've seeded remind the humans that they are not."
One of the generals snorted.
"You give too much credit to tavern talk," he muttered.
"Do I?" Zarkus asked mildly. "Border scouts report deserters from three human units in the last month. Each report mentions the same phrase on their lips as they fled: 'We don't fight metal demons.'"
"They were going to break anyway," the man said.
"Perhaps," Zarkus replied. "But I prefer to be the one who decides where the cracks run."
The scarred general folded his arms.
"And where is your pet now?" he asked. "Your… metal demon."
Zarkus's gaze drifted northward, toward the unseen line of the border.
"Busy," he said. "Doing exactly what we need him to do."
The plaza runes underfoot vibrated faintly.
No one else seemed to notice.
One of the younger generals leaned on the terrace rail, watching the dancers spin in the open space near the dais.
"You feed stories to the humans," he said. "What stories do you tell our own?"
"Truth," Zarkus said. "Mostly."
"Mostly," the man echoed.
"That we took a human soul off their path," Zarkus said quietly. "That we burned away the weak parts and stitched the rest into something that doesn't die as easily as they do. That it has killed for us, bled for us, broken cities for us."
"You make it sound loyal," the scoffer said.
"I make it sound inevitable," Zarkus said.
He watched the Emperor raise a cup, the crowd below echoing the motion. Laughter and applause rolled across the plaza.
Beneath all that, the leylines hummed.
Wrong.
A faint dissonance slipped through the wards, like a note out of tune.
Zarkus stilled.
The scarred general's head tilted.
"Did you feel that?" he asked quietly.
"Probably another storm at the front," the scoffer said. "Arcanists like to—"
The second surge hit like a heartbeat misfiring.
The plaza glyphs flared, then flickered. Lantern flames bent sideways, tugged toward a point in the air above the Emperor's dais.
Conversations faltered.
The Emperor's hand, halfway through a toast, slowed.
"What is this?" one noble demanded. "Who's casting?"
No one was.
That was the problem.
Zarkus's eyes snapped to the sky.
The air above the dais thickened.
It didn't glow or crackle at first. It sagged, like invisible fabric suddenly holding too much weight.
The jester started laughing before anyone else reacted.
He'd been lounging on the edge of a carved pillar near the Emperor's seat, one leg swinging lazily, bells on his twisted hat chiming off-beat. His mask—white, painted with a permanent grin—tilted back as his shoulders shook.
"Oh," he said, voice high and delighted. "Oh, this is going to be good."
"Explain," the scoffing general snapped.
The jester slapped his hands together.
"Zarkus dropped a seed in their stories," he sang. "And now the sky's bringing back the harvest."
Above them, the sagging air tore.
It didn't open like a gate.
It ripped like skin.
Stone showed first—a familiar, hated curve of cracked circle stone, hanging in nothing for a heartbeat before gravity remembered its job.
Then the rest of the town square came with it.
A slab of human city—street, fountain stump, a section of wall, two leaning houses still mostly intact—erupted into existence ten spans above the Emperor's dais and dropped.
Screams split the plaza.
The first impact was sound.
A thundercrack of stone meeting stone, loud enough to punch air from lungs. The central dais vanished under a shower of cobblestone and dust. Tables flipped. Nobles went down under flying debris.
A broken house slammed onto the edge of the plaza, its roof folding in like paper. Demons at the nearest table didn't have time to move; one vanished under a collapsing wall, another's body pinwheeled into the air and landed on a banquet, scattering meat and glass.
The carved rim of the human fountain sheared off mid-fall, spinning. It clipped a support column and shattered, sending chunks of rock through a trio of lute players.
A twisted lamp from the human square speared a banner and dragged it down, red cloth torn and smeared with someone else's soot.
Zarkus barely kept his feet as the terrace shook.
"Shields!" the scarred general barked. "Raise—"
Half the ward-mages were buried.
The other half fumbled for focus and found the leylines thrashing.
They weren't being attacked.
Reality itself had just been told to make room.
Through the rain of rubble and dust, figures fell.
Some hit and stayed.
Some rolled, coughing, bleeding, already half-dead from whatever had happened on the other side.
Demon soldiers in border leathers. Human rebels. Civilian shapes. One man in torn guild robes landed badly on the lip of the shattered dais and didn't move again.
At the center of the human stone ring, where the gate had been, a crater yawned, still flickering with the last shreds of teleport light.
In its depth, sprawled on cracked rock, lay Kaiden.
For a moment, all Zarkus could see was the profile from his reports: metal jaw, false eye, demon-forged plating under torn cloth.
Then Kaiden coughed, rolled to one elbow, and dragged in a breath like he'd just hit the station floor again.
He looked wrong.
Not in the way he always looked wrong—too much metal, too much demon glyphwork under human skin—but in the way of something that had just been used as a wire for too much current.
His Core's glow showed faintly through the seams in his chest plating, brighter than it should. Smoke curled from one shoulder. Blood—human red, demon dark—spattered his torn coat.
Around him, his squad moved in varying degrees of broken.
Sylen pushed herself up from a heap of rubble, ears flat, one side of her face smeared with dust and blood, eyes already scanning for exits. Rein rolled to his knees, coughed a curse, and used his hammer as a crutch to stand. Mara lay on her back, staring at the torn sky, lips moving around numbers only she understood. Jex clung to the edge of a cracked stone slab, eyes wild.
More human shapes were scattered among demon bodies—smashed, twisted, some still gasping.
"Archers!" a surviving officer shouted. "Kill—"
"Stand down," the Emperor's voice cut through the chaos.
He didn't shout.
He didn't need to.
The word carried weight like a blade.
He stepped out from behind a fractured column, dust sliding from his armour. A thin cut traced one cheek below the mask; a single line of dark blood marked his otherwise composed face. The runes on his cloak still glowed faintly where a ward had flared.
As he walked, the plaza glyphs brightened around his boots, a slow wave of light following his steps. Demons instinctively straightened, some flinching despite themselves.
The plaza stilled, as much as it could with people moaning and stone sliding.
Zarkus stepped to the front of the terrace, dust settling on his coat.
He and Kaiden saw each other at the same moment.
For a heartbeat, the world narrowed to a line between them.
Kaiden's human eye sharpened.
Recognition. Calculation. And something like resignation.
"Commander," the scarred general said quietly. "Is that—"
"Yes," Zarkus said.
"The experiment," the scoffer breathed.
"The weapon," Zarkus corrected softly.
Below, Kaiden tried to stand.
His right leg obeyed.
His left wobbled, then caught.
He came up to a half-crouch, one hand pressed to his chest, breath ragged.
Demons around the crater drew blades.
Humans who could still move grabbed whatever they could as weapons, eyes wild at the sight of demon banners.
The jester dropped from his perch with an acrobat's ease, landing lightly on the fractured dais a few paces from Kaiden.
Up close, the bells on his hat chimed out of sync, some not at all. His mask's painted grin was wide enough to be unsettling even before he tilted his head.
"Well, well," he said, voice lilting. "Look what the tide dragged in."
Kaiden stared at him, still catching up to the fact that the sky had changed and the air tasted of demon forges, not human dust.
"Who," he rasped, "are you supposed to be?"
The jester put a hand to his chest in mock offense.
"Supposed to be?" he echoed. "I am exactly what I am. No more, no less."
He skipped lightly over a fallen demon noble, boots barely scuffing the stone, bells jingling.
"Tearing, ripping, painful as it was," he sang under his breath, stepping onto the human stone of the imported square. "Vines and streets gave way easy just because…"
His gaze swept the mangled mix of bodies, the snapped houses, the smashed tables.
"All that's left in this scene is decay," he murmured happily. "And a very rude surprise in the middle of our day."
He turned his mask toward Zarkus, tilting his head.
"Your rumours have such a sharp bite, little Zarkus," he called. "You whispered of a metal demon in their heads, and now—"
He flung his arms wide, indicating the carnage.
"Now the sky delivers one to our doorstep, wrapped in rubble and red."
Zarkus's jaw tightened.
"This was not the plan," he said.
"It's better," the jester said. "Plans are boring. This is funny."
He crouched beside the lip of the crater, peering down at Kaiden like a child inspecting a new toy.
Up on the terrace, one of the generals hissed, "We should kill it now. Before it finds its feet."
"Try," the jester said lightly without looking back. "I'll watch. It will be hilarious."
The Emperor lifted one hand.
"Silence," he said.
The murmur died instantly.
Dust motes seemed to pause mid-air.
Zarkus stepped down from the terrace, boots crunching on fallen stone as he crossed the ruined plaza toward the crater. Demons parted for him. Humans flinched back.
Kaiden watched him come, shoulders tensing out of habit.
"Stay down," Sylen hissed at his side. "You're in no shape—"
"Standing looks better," he muttered.
He forced himself fully upright.
He would not meet Zarkus on his knees.
Not yet.
Zarkus stopped at the edge of the torn human stone.
Up close, the smell of burned mana and blood was stronger.
"Report," he said.
Kaiden's laugh came out as a scrape.
"You first," he said. "Did I interrupt your party?"
Murmurs rippled through the demons.
Zarkus's eyes flicked once to the wrecked dais, then back.
"You activated a compromised human engine," he said. "You tore a section of enemy-held town through our wards and dropped it on royal heads."
He let that list hang for a heartbeat.
"Explain," he finished.
Kaiden swallowed.
"Lost control," he said. "The gate grabbed my Core and ran. I tried to cut it. It didn't care."
"Convenient," one of the generals muttered.
Zarkus didn't look away from Kaiden.
"Intention," he said. "Did you mean to bring it here?"
Kaiden hesitated.
He thought of the two skies.
Of the demon presence his Core had locked onto.
Of wanting, at one terrible, honest moment, for the decision to be taken out of his hands.
"Yes," he said. "And no. I aimed. Then it pulled."
The jester clapped slowly.
"Such a lovely little accident," he cooed. "You broke their town and our floor in one stroke. Efficient!"
He leaned closer to Kaiden, voice dropping to a whisper only a few nearby could hear.
"With a newfound memory after rest," he murmured, "you felt something bubbling in your chest. Soon you'll feel yourself losing control…"
He giggled.
"…peals of laughter ringing from your soul."
Kaiden's lip curled.
"Get out of my face," he said.
"Oh," the jester breathed, delighted. "He snaps."
"Enough," the Emperor said.
He stepped forward, cloak brushing debris, every movement precise. Up close, the mask's eye-sockets shadowed his gaze, but a thin red ring glimmered around his pupils beneath. The blade at his hip—a long, slightly curved sword with a pale edge and dark, rune-bitten spine—rested untouched, and somehow that made it worse.
His gaze swept the ruined plaza, the fallen demons, the scattered humans, the torn piece of foreign city lodged in his own.
Then he looked at Kaiden.
"You killed my people," he said calmly.
Kaiden held his gaze.
"Yes," he said.
"You killed enemies," the Emperor continued. "Brought me a gate and a piece of their stronghold. Dragged their civilians and soldiers into my capital, where I can see them, interrogate them, display them."
"Yes," Kaiden said again.
The Emperor's mouth moved in the smallest suggestion of a smile.
"You survived," he said.
Kaiden didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
The Emperor turned his head slightly toward Zarkus.
"You were right," he said. "It is messy. It is dangerous. It is useful."
Zarkus inclined his head.
"Majesty," he said.
The scarred general frowned.
"You can't be proposing—"
"I can," the Emperor said. "And I am."
His attention slipped back to Kaiden, weighing, clinical.
"You are not a soldier," he said. "You are not a citizen. You are not even a proper demon."
He let the words sink in.
"You are a story with teeth."
Silence stretched.
"Chain it," the Emperor said to Zarkus. "Sharpen it. Point it where I want it to bite."
The jester giggled.
"Your marionette needs a tinker, little Zarkus," he sing-songed. "Not an alchemist."
Low, nervous laughter rippled among a few of the demons, quickly swallowed.
Zarkus's jaw flexed.
"Then I will find him both," he said.
He met Kaiden's eye.
"This is not mercy," he said quietly enough that only Kaiden and the jester could hear. "You failed to control yourself. You cost me assets. You embarrassed my Emperor."
Kaiden's Core thudded dully.
"Kill me, then," he said.
Zarkus's lips curved in something that wasn't quite a smile.
"No," he said. "You just proved you can do something no one else in this plaza can."
He stepped back.
"Get him chained," he ordered. "And get the human filth out of my Emperor's sight. We have a new front to plan."
Demons moved.
Heavy boots slid on dust and blood as elite soldiers dropped into the crater, chain manacles in hand. Sylen's fingers brushed Kaiden's arm once before they dragged her away, a quick, sharp contact that said everything words couldn't here.
Then Kaiden was alone amid the rubble, ringed by steel and sigils.
One elite grabbed his right wrist, twisting the arm behind his back with practiced, unnecessary force. Another reached for his left, gauntlet digging into the seam where metal met flesh at his elbow.
"On your knees," the first snarled.
Kaiden didn't move.
The gauntlet on his arm tightened.
"You heard the Emperor," the soldier growled. "Down."
Something in Kaiden's chest, already raw and overstretched from the jump, snapped on a smaller, pettier axis.
He was exhausted.
Burned out.
Dragged sideways through two worlds.
But they were not going to drag him down like a dog without at least one of them paying for it.
The second elite stepped in close, hand coming up toward Kaiden's head to force it down.
"Don't make this worse for—"
Kaiden moved.
He twisted just enough to throw the angle off, yanked his captured arm against the first soldier's grip to pull him closer, and snapped his jaw sideways into the exposed seam of the second's wrist.
Metal teeth met demon flesh.
The bite wasn't elegant.
It was savage.
His plated jaw crunched down, servos straining. Blood burst hot against his tongue, copper and ash. Bone gave a little. The soldier screamed, ripping his arm back on instinct—too late to keep a chunk of meat from tearing free.
Kaiden spat it out.
It hit the cracked stone with a wet sound.
For a heartbeat, the plaza froze.
Then everything tried to happen at once.
The wounded elite lurched away, clutching his ruined wrist, howling. Two others raised weapons. Someone shouted to stand down. Someone else shouted to kill him.
The Emperor did not raise his voice.
He didn't need to.
The jester was already moving.
He flowed off the broken edge of the dais like spilled ink, bells chiming out of time, landing in front of Kaiden with a delighted little clap.
"Oh," he breathed. "He bites."
Kaiden stared back, breathing hard, blood on his lips, Core still thudding from the surge of rage.
"Stay away," one of the elites warned the jester, half-panicked. "He—"
"He what?" the jester asked lightly. "Eats hands? How dreadful."
He crouched, mask tilted, studying Kaiden's jaw like a craftsman inspecting a flaw.
"Your toy needs an odd-job man, not an alchemist, little Zarkus," he sing-songed. "You stitched such pretty metal in there and forgot to file down the teeth."
"Jester," Zarkus said, a warning in his tone.
The Emperor said nothing.
His silence was permission.
The jester's gloved fingers shot out faster than Kaiden expected, snapping around the edge of his metal jaw. There was strength there that didn't match his slight frame; the grip bit into plating, locking Kaiden's head in place.
Kaiden jerked back on reflex.
The jester's other hand came up and slammed into the side of the jaw assembly with a precise, practiced strike.
Pain detonated along every anchor where metal met bone.
Something cracked.
Servos squealed, then cut out.
The jester wrenched.
The left hinge of Kaiden's jaw snapped with a shriek of torn alloy. Plates buckled. One of the metal teeth sheared off entirely. The whole lower frame twisted sideways, half-dislocated, leaving his mouth hanging open at a crooked angle that wasn't meant to exist.
The sound he made wasn't a scream, exactly.
More a strangled grind, half-human, half machine, all pain.
The jester let go and leaned back to admire his work.
"There," he said brightly. "See? Already less uppity."
Blood—his and the soldier's—dripped from warped plating. When Kaiden tried to close his mouth, the jaw caught and scraped, moving only halfway before jamming with a painful click.
"Consider that a reminder," the jester went on, turning his mask toward the Emperor and Zarkus. "If you give a marionette teeth, it will chew its own strings. If you want it to dance instead…"
He flicked the bent jaw with one finger.
"…you call a tinker, not an alchemist."
Uneasy laughter rippled through a few nearby demons and died quickly under the Emperor's gaze.
Zarkus's expression didn't change, but something cold settled deeper in his eyes as he studied the damage.
"Chain him," he said again, voice flat.
This time, when the elites took Kaiden's arms, he didn't fight.
Couldn't, not properly.
Every movement sent another spike of pain through the ruined joint; every breath scraped against metal sitting wrong in his face. When they forced him down, one knee first and then the other, his body obeyed more from overload than submission.
From the terrace, the Emperor watched a moment longer, unreadable behind the half-mask and the calm line of his mouth. His hand rested lightly on the hilt of his curved blade, but he didn't draw it.
He didn't need to.
He'd already made his decision.
Kaiden knelt amid stone from two worlds, jaw hanging crooked, blood on his coat, chains biting into his wrists. The jester's bells chimed softly as he stepped back, pleased. Zarkus turned away to begin the practical work of turning catastrophe into advantage.
Above, the torn patch of human sky was already fading, edges knitting into demon night.
For the border town, the monster was gone.
For the Empire, the Emperor, and his laughing jester, it was finally exactly where they wanted it:
On its knees.