Fifty years.
For me, it had been a handful of weeks, a delightful little holiday spent kicking over the anthill of a perfect society. For Lia, my Echo, it had been half a century of war, conquest, and empire-building in my name.
The woman standing before me was not the same entity I had left behind on the Third Floor. She still wore a face that was a copy of Lyra's, and her soul was a mirror of my own will, but fifty years of commanding armies and managing a thousand divine realms had forged something new. A purpose.
"Playing with dolls?" I repeated, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across my face as I took a leisurely sip of my nectar. "I prefer the term 'narrative engineering'. This world was a boring, stagnant pond. I've introduced a few ripples. Created a story. It's an art form."
It is a waste of time, Lia's telepathic voice was cold, devoid of the perfect, subservient harmony it once held. It was the voice of a CEO questioning the frivolous hobbies of a majority shareholder. While you have been teaching elves about spicy food, I have conquered the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Floors. Your empire now spans a significant portion of the lower Tower. The Architect's forces are in disarray. The Static's influence is contained. We are winning the war.
"There is no 'we'," I corrected her gently, my smile never wavering. "There is me. And there are my tools. You, my dear Echo, have been a very, very good tool. You have managed my estate beautifully."
A flicker of something—frustration? anger?—flashed across her perfect, logical features. It was a new, fascinating expression on her. "I am not a tool, Sovereign. I am your Echo. My purpose is to carry out your will. And your will, the one you burned into my very being, was to achieve absolute power, to break the Tower, to challenge the gods. Not to... finger-paint with the fates of lesser civilizations."
She had me there. She was using my own, original ambition against me.
"A sovereign is entitled to his hobbies," I said with a shrug.
The army she had brought with her, my army, stood in silent, disciplined ranks behind her. Corvus, Elara's Echo, and a hundred other powerful beings, all looking at their returned god with a mixture of awe and confusion.
"Your 'hobby' is creating instability," Lia countered. "Instability creates variables. Variables are a threat to our long-term objectives."
"Instability," I said, leaning back in my chair, "is the entire point."
This was a new game. A philosophical debate with my own, perfect creation. And it was far more interesting than the coming elven civil war I had just engineered.
But before our debate could continue, a new variable, one that neither of us had anticipated, made itself known.
A new portal tore open in the sky.
It was not one of Lia's clean, logical gateways. It was a messy, chaotic, screaming vortex of blood-red energy. A portal from the Abyss.
And from it, a single, familiar figure emerged. Goldie. The fused, bickering entity of Seraphina's ghost and the Kaelen-golem.
But it was different. Its golden form was battered, scarred. Its energy was depleted. It looked like it had just been through a war.
[SERAPHINA:] *You son of a bitch! Do you have any idea what you've done?!* its twin-voice screamed in my mind.
"I left you in charge of a backwater hell dimension," I replied calmly. "I assume you immediately ran it into the ground."
[KAELEN-GOLEM:] *The Abyss has fallen! A new power has risen! A god of blood and shadow, calling itself the 'Crimson King'! It has consumed the old demon lords! It has unified the plane! It is building an army to challenge the Tower itself! We were barely able to escape!*
My little holiday had been interrupted by an inconveniently timed apocalypse.
"A new king in hell," I mused. "How droll. And what, precisely, does this have to do with me?"
[SERAPHINA:] *It has everything to do with you, you narcissistic asshole! This 'Crimson King'... it wears a familiar face. A face you created. It is the last, forgotten ghost of your past, a loose end you never bothered to tie up!*
A new, universal announcement from the Tower's Game Masters, the first in decades, suddenly blared in the minds of every being present.
[!!! WORLD EVENT WARNING: 'THE CRIMSON CRUSADE' !!!]
[A new, hostile, and highly aggressive power has emerged from a chaotic outer-dimension (The Abyss).]
[The Crimson King has declared war on the Tower of Ascension. His goal: to consume all floors and all players.]
[All contestants are advised to fortify their positions. The invasion has begun.]
I stared, a flicker of genuine, surprised interest on my face.
And then Goldie sent me a final, psychic image. A view from its memory of the new king of hell, sitting on my old, uncomfortable throne.
The twist was not just that a new, ultimate enemy had appeared.
It was who that enemy was.
The Crimson King was a being of immense power, wreathed in shadows and blood-red energy. But his face, a face I knew better than my own, was one of cold, arrogant, and ruthless ambition.
It was my eldest brother. The Crown Prince Valerius of the Ravencrest Dynasty. A man who was supposed to be dead. A man who had somehow not just survived the fall of Aethelgard, but had clawed his way into the Abyss, conquered it, and was now coming to finish the war for a throne that no longer existed. My family's drama had just gone multiversal.