The sky over the last kingdom was on fire, and it had nothing to do with the sun.
Rivelius Kane sat astride Malachar, watching the capital of Vesk Adar burn along its outer walls, and felt nothing that could be called satisfaction. Satisfaction was for men who still had something left to want. He had conquered everything else. This was simply what remained.
The black dragon beneath him didn’t so much fly as displace the air, wings the size of siege sails cutting through the thick smoke. Behind him, strung out across three miles of scorched farmland, forty thousand men advanced in the terrible, unhurried rhythm of an army that had never once needed to hurry. Cavalry on warhorses. Beastriders on wyverns and armored tuskbeasts. Siege engines dragged by things that had stopped being entirely animal several campaigns ago.
Nine kingdoms had fallen to reach this moment. Nine crowns melted down or worn as trophies, nine armies broken and absorbed or annihilated outright. Vesk Adar was the tenth and last; the final resistance on a continent that had run out of continent. Beyond its walls, there was no more world left to conquer. Only this.
He drew his staff from its harness across Malachar’s back; twin blades of black steel fused to a haft of gold-plated iron, a weapon built for a man who had never needed a second one. Even now, even here, at the literal end of everything he’d set out to do, his grip on it was unbothered. Almost bored.
"Signal the final advance," he said. His voice didn’t rise. It never needed to.
The horns answered from a hundred throats at once.
That was when the light came.
There was no warning tremor, no divine trumpet, no villain-appropriate monologue building toward it. One moment the world was smoke and horns and the promise of a throne with no one left to sit on it beside him. The next, everything — the dragon, the army, the burning capital, the sky itself — dissolved into a white so total it had no texture at all.
Rivelius did not panic. He had conquered a world; he was not about to be impressed by a light show.
"Rivelius Kane," a voice said from everywhere and nowhere. "Conqueror. Tyrant. Breaker of nine kingdoms. Your armies have salted fields that once fed millions. You have shown no mercy, sought no redemption, and expressed, at any point across your entire campaign of conquest, not one moment of genuine remorse."
Rivelius said nothing. It was, as far as accusations went, entirely accurate.
"For crimes against the natural order of your world, you have been selected for judgment."
A pause, deliberate, theatrical in a way that suggested the voice enjoyed this part.
"Unless you—"
"Get to the point."
A pause. If the voice had eyebrows, it would have raised one. "You will be given a task. Upon its completion, you will be returned to this exact moment, in this exact world, with everything you currently possess intact — your army, your strength, your—"
"I accept."
A pause.
"But you haven’t even heard the terms—"
"I said... I accept." He had not survived nine kingdoms’ worth of betrayals, ambushes, and men who talked too much by listening to all of it. "Whatever it is, I’ll finish it the way I finish everything else. Send me."
The voice made a sound that might, in a being with vocal cords, have been a sigh. Or possibly a laugh.
"...Very well."
The white light did not fade so much as invert, and Rivelius Kane, Conqueror of the World, felt his own weight vanish out from under him entirely.
He opened his eyes to candlelight, incense, and several hundred strangers staring directly at him.
He was standing. He was upright. He was — he registered this a full second too late — wearing robes so heavily embroidered they weighed more than his actual armor, in a hall he did not recognize, filled with nobles he had no memory of ever meeting.
Somewhere behind him, a priest was finishing a sentence.
"—and so, before gods and empire, the union of House Kane and House Virellon is sealed."
The hall erupted into applause.
Rivelius Kane stood very still, staff-less, dragon-less, army-less, in the middle of what he was rapidly and furiously piecing together was his own already concluded wedding.
As if that weren’t enough, he looked down.
The woman he had, apparently, just married was seated in front of him in a wheelchair of dark polished wood, her spine straight, her eyes fixed forward with the particular composure of someone who had long since stopped letting a room see what she felt. She did not look at him. She did not need to. Every noble in that hall was already looking at both of them, and she had clearly had years of practice being looked at.
His own hands, he realized, were also, already resting on the chair’s handles.
Is this a joke?
The words had barely finished forming before the air in front of him rippled, and a single pane of translucent text unfolded where only he could see it.
[Main Objective Received.]
[Ensure the physical and emotional well-being of your wife.]
[Current Wife Status: Crippled. Recovery: Slow. Recommended First Action: Do not, under any circumstances, let go of the wheelchair handles.]
Rivelius stared at the notification the way a man stares at a battlefield report claiming his entire army has surrendered to a single unarmed farmer.
He had bargained with a cosmic voice to avoid erasure. He had agreed to a task rather than be unmade. He had assumed, reasonably, that the task would be worthy of the man agreeing to it. A war. A trial. A monster. Something with the decency to be difficult.
Instead, he got a wife, a wheelchair, and a set of instructions that currently amounted to don’t let go.
Somewhere, very far away and yet entirely too close, he could have sworn he heard that same voice, distant, yet unmistakably laughing.