After Parsifal, Bhoural staggered back to his apartment, not quite awake, not quite immersed in a nightmare. All he remembered of the production was being called out from the audience to be congratulated for his efforts in the anticrusade. The show’s host, Gio Nexopolous, invited Bhoural at the show’s end to come up and say a few words about being this close to defeating Oluns. Bhoural said something vague and general about the honor, maybe 5 or 10 words total, focused more on not imploding emotionally in front of the entire world.

  The room was immaculately clean, he could tell that housekeeping had made a pass over the room. He noted that Yanla’s luggage was missing. There was a rack for both of their bags (they’d traveled remarkably light), and her vermillion leather bag was absent next to Bhoural’s silver bag. She’d been here. She’d left. Bhoural felt terror shoot up his back, gutting him along his spine as though he were a hog carcass.

  Bhoural hobbled to the bathroom and filled a basin with tap water. The word “divorce” danced across his anxious psyche, digging its stilleto heels deeply and painfully wherever it cavorted. His mind was a crossfire of a million errant questions: what should he do? Is there at-will, no fault divorce in Dasostaniki? Should he scry on his wife? Was she even his wife anymore?

  Who was that man standing behind him in the mirror?

  No, this was no aberration, no distortion in the mirror, there was really a soldier type titan maybe 8 or so centimeters behind him. Bhoural studied the intruder. He was like him in every way… almost. If you quizzed someone on their differences, most people would find Bhoural and this doppelg?nger to be exactly alike. Not Bhoural, though. He noticed the way this impostor’s chin was a little too cleft, the way his ears pointed oddly downward, the high and very dimply cheekbones… Here was a caricature of Bhoural laser targeted to inflame all his deeply personal physical insecurities. And it smiled wickedly, wickedly and cruelly.

  “Suave performance tonight, B-Man,” it crowed in an oily and mocking voice. “Where’s your wife, though? Is she, you know…getting something?”

  Bhoural took longer than he’d have liked to reply: “What you?”

  “Your biggest fan. Look, I’d love to continue insinuating you might be going insane, but I’m a busy god and I have places to be. I’m Wyzzyx. I hope you’re having an awful night.” It smiled.

  Suddenly, he recognized the divine presence of the man at hand. It was childish. Silly. Completely carefree. Serious about absolutely nothing except a vast plan to make everyone and everything as upset as humanly possible. And it was powerful, blasé in its own power, yet so powerful.

  “I took the liberty of lead-lining the room while you and Yanla were looking at stupid masks or columns or whatever. Cheeth’s not watching. Come on, Bhoural, open up. I’ve finally given you your first real vacation in, what, 9 years? That’s when you enserfed your buddy Eydan, right?”

  “What for do you torment me?!” Cried Bhoural out in Greek, free from speaking in Balthi for the first time in ages.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize I was making you upset. Sorry your feelings are so fragile. I can leave if you’d prefer to remain ignorant about your nightmares. The ones where you’re in hell?”

  Bhoural froze. He made real eye-contact with the Bhoural clone now. “Why? Why do they keep happening? How do you know about them when I’ve hidden them for so long from Cheeth.”

  “Because you’re Chcurex’s Soterian.” Bhoural was speechless for a few moments. Wyzzyx sighed. “Well come on, Mr. Physician, don’t let that big fat Greek education of yours go to waste here. It’s a Greek word, break it down into roots, Soter-, what’s it mean?”

  “Soteria. Salvation.” Mumbled Bhoural lightheartedly.

  “Mm! Check out the big brain on the world’s least r*****d soldier titan. Yes. Soterian. Your purpose in life, as dictated by fate, is to reach out to Chcurex, save him from his own failure to destroy the world, and do the job for him. To claim status as a God’s Soterian is to wield their powers directly. They are immortal, they are capable of succeeding their Gods’ in ways beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, if only they surrender their souls in earnest worship. You were never meant to be a hero, Bhoural. You’re a card-carrying antichrist. See, that’s why I haven’t killed you here, you’re far more useful to me alive than dead ”

  “You’re bluffing,” said Bhoural, “you are nothing but falsehood and malice made flesh. I will never willingly serve your dark intentions.” Bhoural caught a metal toothbrush on the bathroom counter in the corner of his eyes. He looked at how close Wyzzyx was to him; gears began to turn. One well placed plunge of the brush’s head into the God’s neck would kill him, kill him permanently and leave Oluns’ crusade completely headless.

  Wyzzyx chuckled. “Am I really the one insisting on evil here? I’m not the one punching children. I’m not the one who beat my own mentor into thrallhood. And I’m certainly not the god who disgusted your wife into a divorce. Geez, I give you a get-out-of-Cheeth free card, and you’re too stubborn and cowardly to take it. Pussy.”

  The two rested in uncomfortable silence. Wyzzyx planted a warm and unfriendly hand on Bhoural’s shoulder. Wyzzyx whispered with oozing and uncomfortable intimacy, “Listen. Cheeth never took you on because of the tanzanite spearhead. That was bullshit. my demagogues never touched it. He really invited you to the Empyreans because he wanted you as far away from me as possible. If you’re fighting the Throng of Chcurex and being as indoctrinated against it as possible, you’re not thinking about joining it. Why do you think Cheeth blew up at you for even suggesting the concept of Negativism? Why do you think he took away your ability to talk, to think? He’s afraid of you. What you could be. Out of all the people in the universe, you are the best poised to take on Cheeth. You could take on the entire pantheon! You could get rid of the adventurer’s blessing for good. Oh, won’t you think about it, Bhoural.”

  Bhoural shook his head, so flustered that he was near fainting. “I gave up nearly a decade fighting you. I’m inches away from salting the earth on which your demagogues stand, my armies are this close to the fiendrift. I have to resist you!”

  Wyzzyx tutted. He leaned in yet closer, he had practically wrapped himself on Bhoural, contorted like an albatross on his neck. “Bhoural. Bhoury-buddy. ‘Doctor’ Uslagen. I’m gonna cut you in on my little secret. The only thing worth having to do is nothing. Obligation is for morons. And don’t start with that ‘duty is what makes the world go ‘round’ bullshit. You hate everything you have to do. And it’s made you miserable. It’s your biggest damned weakness. Take my advice, two words, just two little words, Bhoural: fuck it.”

  This was his chance. “Never!” Cried Bhoural, snagging the toothbrush, raising it high and threateningly, and turning to face-

  Yanla. She was right in front of him, face frozen in fear, as if she’d been the one resting on his shoulders all this time. The door was open behind her. Wyzzyx was nowhere, nowhere except in Bhoural’s mind, cackling: Nice try, cockweed.

  Bhoural’s preternatural intuition kicked in. He knew he looked terrible, sopping wet, frazzled, half deranged. He could sense that Yanla believed he’d gone completely insane, determined in jealous rage to kill her.

  Bhoural collapsed. In his meeting with Wyzzyx, he’d completely disarmed little replica of Cheeth that had dominated his conscience. That gave him the freedom to cry. This was, in fact, the first time in 2 decades he’d cried, the last time, he’d dropped some Passion Fruit sorbet onto the Bursual streets with Eydan. This tearfall was much more soulful and tender than that, though. Bhoural was thoroughly destroyed. And his wife, terrified for her life by him only moments before, pitied Bhoural and embraced him.

  That night, the truth burst like a geyser from Bhoural. A decade of regret and hatred and fear and earnesty burst out of Bhoural, unmediated by the wretched Cheeth-in-miniature that lived within him. He spoke, in beautiful and tragic and poetic Greek, to his wife, of the cruelty and despair of this life he was forced to adopt under Cheeth’s strict hand. And Yanla replied in beautiful Greek, poetic and tragic Greek, and her every word was one of earnest trust. Everything that Bhoural said, Yanla believed. She believed that he loathed his behavior towards her, the dreams of Chcurex and the truth that he was his Soterian. Even his encounter with Wyzzyx, Yanla believed. And that belief, that sweet, complete belief, was like a frigid, freshwater plunge to a man two-weeks parched by a great desert.

  Finally, Bhoural asked: “What do I do, Yanla? It feels like any step I take is a step towards disaster, I feel paralyzed. If I give up, Wyzzyx wins, our homeland is razed, the steppe falls… who knows how many more will die on the 12th crusade? But then to continue with Cheeth isn’t an option. Not for you, not for me…”

  Yanla nodded. “This is the first time I’ve spoken to you in over a decade, since you went to the Emerald Empyreans. Now I know a wicked man has impersonated him in the meantime.”

  “You were right. Cheeth won’t relinquish me, or the steppe, once he gets his hands on it. And he is only interested in stomping upon it, choking it and strangling it like…like he did with me. We fight, we die, we do not fight, we die. What do I do?”

  “The right thing,” replied Yanla with refreshing clarity. There was a pause. Yanla continued: “When I lived away from you, when I felt like I’d married an absent man or a cold man or a chauvinist…I reminded myself that I’d married a righteous man. A man who loved to see the right thing done. I wouldn’t have saved 1000 people without your guidance. And that night before you left for the Empyreans, you told me about that little soldier boy studying to be a doctor, like you, how you were fighting for him. Lay, right? You find the righteous in unexpected places like a ranger finds water in a desert. That’s why I believe in you, dear. It’s time you believe in yourself, it’s time you make your own path.”

  Bhoural chuckled weakly, “That’s what Eydan told me.”

  Yanla embraced Bhoural. Blessed relief. It was all so clear now. The blessing did not damn him to live as a slave to all that was wrong with the world, it chose him to do away with all that was wrong with the world. He would do right. The path forward was so obvious to him now.

  “Yanla?” asked Bhoural earnestly.

  “What, dear?”

  “I promise that when this is all said and done, you and I are going to watch that 42nd street, come hell or high water.”

  The crusade marched North, further and further North. The landscape grew at once colder and more hellish; strange black monoliths issued from the ground and vile laughter sailed on the frigid winds. Oluns was at hand, his dread legions visible on the peripheries of the horizon, mounted on unspeakable horrors, encircling the army just out of view, inviting it to decisive ruin in the unforgiving wastes.

  In short time, the grand crusade came upon it: the Fiendrift. It was heard and felt before its ugly innards could be seen. It groaned, it spewed heat and evil like a wound spews pus. There were shrines and encampments built around this vast crater, and an ocean of bodies clad in black, warped cast iron filled the rift’s valley to match the crusade. And upon the great dais at the very edge of the fiendrift, He could be seen by keen eyes and felt by all. Here he was, Oluns, in the jagged armor of perfidy, the master of the throng of Chcurex.

  The battle began. Bhoural and his closest Allies dashed straight to meet Oluns in single combat, to decapitate the army in a single, decisive swing. Like a pair of magnets, the light and darkness flew towards eachother inexorably. It took hours for Bhoural to churn through packed crowds of fell berserkers and ascend that horrid Dais.

  And there he was, in clear, dreadful view, before Bhoural and his party. A charcoal black helm, wickedly sharp and skulllike, adorned the Gocep of goceps, with his chin and mouth, a ponderous pit of gnashing teeth and open wounds, scowling at these heroes. He was a lieutenant, like Eydan, though with all the thoughtfulness and mildness replaced by the rage of a thousand black suns. He was impossibly broad, his already massive thorax and huge arms encased in what must have been a foot of gnarled fiendmetal, the sight of which alone could give one tetanus. Above all, the axe of the apocalypse, wielded eleven times before Oluns, with its shaft 7 feet in length and a 40 kg head made of the purest, sharpest steel Chcurex could offer, glimmered before Bhoural. The gocep stomped formidably, sending fissures across the Fiendrift’s edge, lit ablaze by the favor of Chcurex, the axe brandished fiercely, and Oluns taunted Bhoural: “Fight me!”.

  Bhoural obliged Oluns and beheaded him in 8 seconds.

  The world sighed as it bore witness to Bhoural, holding the bleeding head of its greatest menace aloft. From the dais, Bhoural could see the Throng begin to rout and ebb with a swiftness he’d never seen of any army. The gambit had worked. The army was decapitated.

  “Father,” asked Bhoural to the divine.

  “Yes, my son?” Replied Cheeth with pride.

  “Have you ever had a wife? Has she ever divorced you?” Bhoural spoke in Goblinoid.

  Cheeth was flatfooted, flabbergasted. “What kind of shameful question is-“

  “Yes or no. Did she divorce you? Surely, you didn’t have all your children out of wedlock.”

  There was complete silence from Cheeth.

  “Figures.” Bhoural severed his divine link, grabbed the axe and fell backwards from the dais, down, down into the heart of the Fiendrift.

  It felt something like total organ failure at first. Cheeth had vanished from Bhoural’s soul, and therefore Bhoural’s spiritual nourishment, his conscience, the skeleton that had sustained his vast and powerful soul, was also gone. His ego was on the verge of suffocating, Bhoural’s toes curled upon the fringes of death. Yet Bhoural’s new master was at hand, right there in the center of the oncoming Fiendrift. Bhoural welcomed Chcurex into his heart.

  It was natural. It was so terribly natural. Whatever had replaced Cheeth fit like a glove around the shape of Bhoural’s soul, he knew instantly that he had four times the power that Cheeth had afforded him. Chcurex was absolute and coercive in the same way Cheeth was: kill, He demanded. crush he demanded. destroy, he demanded.

  …No. Bhoural would do no such thing. As he landed at the Fiendrift’s floor, as he began that rhythmic and terrible stomping and flailing and dancing, he became the master. He had usurped Chcurex’s power, and not his commitment to total destruction. He was still Bhoural.

  As Bhoural danced, as Bhoural was crowned King of fiends and the ultimate leader of Chcurex’s throng, he recognized Chcurex’s essence more and more. Bhoural asked his new master:

  “Why do you kill, Chcurex? Why do you strive ceaselessly to bring about the apocalypse? Why are you here after millennia of failed assaults on the South?”

  “you’re my soterian? wyzzyx was telling me about you.”

  “Yes. I’m your Soterian.”

  “then i command you to kill.”

  “I won’t be abjectly killing things for you.”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Bhoural could sense shock in Chcurex. “you can’t tell me no. you’re a soldier. you exist to obey my commands. you are docile. go kill.”

  “Well, I just told you no. And I can sense that I’m several degrees more intelligent than you. Now can you answer my question?”

  “what question?”

  Bhoural would have sighed if he wasn’t raving. “Why is it your mission to annihilate all of reality?”

  “the gods anger me. i am always defeated by the gods. i will keep fighting until they die.”

  “When Chcurex asked you to join him all of those years ago, why did you agree? Why did you join him in exterminating 90% of the world?”

  Bhoural could sense the ensuing silence from Chcurex was thoughtful. “i don’t remember.”

  That’s what it was. Airheadedness. Bhoural had gone in expecting a god of misanthropy and total anathema for the world. This was a god of ignorance.

  “no. i remember now. wyzzyx told me all the gods sucked. they sounded like assholes. telling other gods what they could and couldn’t do. telling us we weren’t supposed to kill the mortals.”

  In his body, Bhoural was roaring and rampaging to the cheer of an entire daemonic host. In his mind, Bhoural was calmly using every ounce of patience he had to negotiate with his new master.

  “Chcurex?”

  “yeah?”

  “Is it just about beating the other gods, for you? Do you just want to see them upset? Do you want to watch them roar and cry at you for destroying everything that is sacred and important to them while they stand powerless-“ Bhoural realized he might be confusing Chcurex with such big words. “Do you wanna win, or do you wanna lose.”

  “huh. something like that. yeah. i’m here to win. that’s why i’m here.”

  “Then if you lose every time you raise a big rampaging army in the North trying to destroy all of reality, why not try something new?”

  Gears were turning in Chcurex’s mind, gears that this god had clearly never accessed before. “like what?”

  “People Power, Chcurex. Wage a war in the name of freeing the universe from the Gods, not destroying it all. People believe in a world without deities, a world where their needs are fulfilled by the intercession of the gods rather than exacerbated by their-” Bhoural remembered who he was talking to. “Look, just let me run your wars from now on.”

  “ok. you sound like you know what you’re doing.”

  “Yes. I beat Oluns. That means I’m stronger than Oluns. Better at fighting the southerners.”

  “ohhhh. yeah. makes sense.”

  “Now when I ask you to use your unlimited power for something, can you just trust me? In the name of trying something new.”

  “uh. i guess.”

  “Good. The first thing I’m going to ask you to do is to get rid of the mental penalties that titans and beastfolk have. If we’re going to beat everyone, we need cunning titans and cunning beastfolk.”

  “uh. fine.”

  and with that, a stormcloud that had always dimmed the inner being of bhoural and thousands of other Floru natives was lifted, the Tumult of Oluns ended, and Tumult of Bhoural began.

  On the afternoon of August 5th, 1760, The armies of Bhoural the Conqueror entered the siege-broken city of Bursual. Its buildings and streets were pock-marked by craters of explosive shells, hurled klicks away by field-guns and mortars. Smoke, black and sulfuric, wheezed out of the city of Bursual. Few heroes and champions of the Balthian South stood to fight in the city on that day; most had fled, and the few that stayed were lined up, blindfolded, and anticlimatically executed by Bhoural’s Military, the RTAF (Reformed Throng Armed Forces). It was the culmination of 5 decades of fighting: The autocracy and its minions had been expunged from the jewel of the Floru Steppe, Bursual. At this point, their expulsion from the entire Floru Steppe was guaranteed, Bursual was just that important strategically.

  Witnessing the carnage from the the precipice of Yaiglath Convent, Yanla, a crone well past the age that most soldier type titans died, felt a tug at her shoulder. It was a commissar of the Reformed Throng of Chcurex. Her husband sought an audience with her. She was escorted to the convent’s main cloister, and there she found, flanked by fearsome fiends and overwhelmingly armed bodyguards, a ten-foot, white metal sculpture. It had a geometric figurehead where its face should have been, resembling an open book, or was it an axe and a torch? In its hands was the axe of the apocalypse. It bore no resemblance to her husband, except for its single brown eye in the sculpture’s face, or the synthesized voice which called out to Yanla: “Dearest! I’ve returned! It’s been too long!”

  Bhoural, or what remained of him, knelt down to embrace his wife. His massive armspan could not completely wrap around Yanla. “You’re cold,” she announced.

  Bhoural let out a rattling, static sigh, “I know I am cold, darling, I regret that. I died at the hand of the Southern hero Pask Tereal, and this metal, Kavuran body is what my entourage offered me to resurrect me. Yet I am stronger than ever, in death I gave Pask a small victory, and seized a bigger one. His adventurer’s cause is exhausted against me. Now there is no hero that can defeat me. You’re completely safe now.”

  Bhoural unhanded Yanla. He looked at her downcast gaze, her arthritic hands clutching the sides of her arms, her dissatisfaction. “We’ve won, Darling!” he cheered, “This is what it’s all about! Cheeth is gone! The Floru natives reign sovereign over their own steppe now, not the Autocracy. The future is at hand! Shelter, food, water, education and plumbing for everybody. The virtues and dignity of the commoner will eclipse those of the hero. You slumbered in a backwards monarchy and awoke in a brave, new world!”

  “You sound like a propaganda poster.”

  Bhoural sighed, “I kept the monastery intact. I got you evacuated. Nothing’s changed, darling, if anything, you’re better poised than ever to practice medicine.”

  Yanla scoffed. “You bet I’m better poised to practice medicine. All morning I’ve been treating the people your armies have wounded, or killed! All the people those terrible artillery guns of yours have blown the legs off of. Friends of ours. People who visited me and kept me company when you were off in the North.”

  Bhoural searched for the right thing to say: “This is war, Yanla. If there were a way for me to restore Bursual to the Floru people without bloodshed, I’d have taken it. But we’re dealing with Cheeth here, the Balthians, warfare and combat is the only way to deal with their kind, Would you rather I’d left you here, for an Ursa Legionnaire to hold you ransom? It had to be done! This is-”

  “Had to!” cried Yanla, “Those words! Those words I hoped you’d never use again when we last spoke in Palladia! There they are!”

  Yanla recoiled from Bhoural, hiding her chest and front from him as though Bhoural had scarred it. “When they told me you’d embraced Chcurex, that Evil deity, I kept faith in you. I believed you had your reasons, I believed your side of the story, that you’d tamed that God. I believed the stories of scorched earth and warcrimes and fiendish magic from the RTAF were just exaggerations, rumors spread by the Southern Coalition. And when the refugees came streaming in from the Northern front, I ignored the horror stories I heard second hand, I assumed that there was something lost-in-translation. But look around you, Bhoural,” Yanla’s eyes were rheumy, her mouth puckered, “Look in the clinic. Look in the streets. Look in the mass graves. This is not war. This is genocide. This is the work of Evil.”

  Bhoural called to mind how Eydan once said: To embrace a God is to become their simulacrum. He was Chcurex’s. “I-I can’t be accountable for every misstep of my subordinates, but I assure you Yanla, I’ve done just as you asked of me, I tried to do the right thing!”

  “And you’ve failed,” said Yanla. “I can’t-I can’t lie to myself anymore, Bhoural. That if only you weren’t being coerced by circumstance, that if only you were really free from Cheeth or Url-Rafam, or…or whoever that you’d be doing the right thing. You and you alone are responsible right here, for the patent atrocity that you inflicted on our own home! And you still claim you have to do it all! You robbed me, Bhoural. You robbed me of the one handle I had to cling to in six decades of marriage, your righteousness.” Yanla’s voice curdled into sobs, she began sniffling.

  “Remind me,” stifled Yanla, “you died facing Pask, and now your soul is piloting this new Kavuran body, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then grant me this: Grant me widowhood. Let me pretend that my husband is dead, that he was never responsible for all this. Never visit me again.”

  Yanla walked off to face the wounded and infirm. Bhoural realized that this was so much worse than divorce.

  Chairman Bhoural walked the streets of old Bursual with a gaggle of foreign business magnates and scholars. It was a part of the 1794 detente between the new Floru Federal State and the Double Kingdom of the Plane of Fire, an expression that the two nations were putting mutual business on the table, and were willing to signal their commitments to Capital E Evil. It would signal to the world that Evil nations would increasingly ally in their opposition to the orthodoxy of Good. The visits’ theme was the progress the Bureau of Industry had made in refurbishing the old city into the Federal State’s industrial heart (and, crucially, opportunities to import raw materials from the Double Kingdom). The group walked through a jungle of construction, where the great beasts were the efficient excavators and pile drivers that Chairman Eydan had developed, and its many insects were the proud working people of Bursual, models of the new Steppe ideal.

  “All of the machinery here,” began Bhoural in exquisite Balthi (the language the whole universe could save face in), “has implanted within it modular, 3.5 centimeter Urthan stones that completely alleviate the adverse effects of rhyman’s tattering at a local level. You are at liberty to walk up to any of the engines here and cast detect tatter, if you have it so prepared. Rest assured, these machines are all as clean and agreeable to the fabric of reality as the magical laboratories that you ladies and gentlemen oversee the Double Kingdom. A commitment to the long term health of reality is the first, second, and third thing in my state industry. The fourth thing is our production targets.”

  The crowd chuckled affably. That was a risky joke, thought Bhoural, sensing that everybody liked it, these people think our factories are unproductive.

  “I jest, I jest,” said Bhoural, gesticulating with his big metal arms, “Here we are coming upon one of the most essential parts of the rehabilitation project: our robust logistics system. If you look here, you will see that efforts are underway to build the Protho line, part of an ingenious system to resupply the new city center with both people and raw materials. The same track being laid here will carry worker and cargo trams using a sophisticated, divination-augmented scheduling system developed by my own Eydan. It will feed directly into the Sister’s Forge, and we’ll be taking this road that feeds directly…”

  Bhoural realized he recognized this plaza.

  “...Into the Southern gate…”

  As he looked into the center of the present plaza, he recognized the dilapidated sandstone obelisk. He recognized the little stakeholders in the ground where merchants once pitched their stands. He recognized the view that Eydan had showed him, all those decades ago, into the Southern Gate of the old city. The whole market was being completely razed and rebuilt.

  …

  “Ahem. We’ll soon arrive at the citadel’s Southern Gate, the very heart of our operations here in Bursual, home of our essential Kappa Core. The Kappa Core is an innovation of…”

  And the drabble to investors went on as rehearsed, but the plaza stayed with him. He even thought briefly about vetoing Marham Bazaar’s destruction, before deciding that it was more necessary for citizens to have an easy commute than to preserve such a frivolously sentimental memento of Bursual.

  10 PM in Bhouralhaz. In the Concrete Garden, the capital palace of the Floru Federal State, Bhoural dwelt alone. He sat quietly upon his concrete throne, next to which a concrete desk where piles of reading material were heaped. Reports, Throng newspapers, fiction and non-fiction of every variety, Bhoural was reading and transferring all the material from the “unread” pile to the “read” pile at about 10 novels-worth a minute. Behind him, a morass of wires fed into the Concrete Garden’s central orb superframe. The wires were essential; it would be a waste if Bhoural, a man who had developed past the need for sleep, the 2nd or 3rd strongest mortal in reality, weren’t constantly monitoring and adjudicating his nation’s government. He was reading, but he was also fed a deluge of information and statistics about the Floru Federal State. 112 megabushels of barley harvested in some subprefecture of the state. 13 Sergeants dead in the Atlarcku affair. A calculated 62% chance that he would be needed on the East coast to address an amassing of pirates 45 knots off the coast of the city. All of these tiny whispers were dealt with instantly by Bhoural’s vast capacity for judgement. Something about the constant sight of the FFS navy sailors in the reports annoyed him. Maybe their outfits needed updating?

  …If Bhoural were a normal man, he’d be granted some reprieve from being constantly barraged by all of this. The notifications. The reports. The overwhelming evidence of the iniquity and evil and oppression that could be traced directly back to him. There was an updated directory of persons of interest, the people his bureaus were spying on. He passed through them quickly and thinned them down as much as he could, he knew that half the names in the directory were there due to mortal error or for things that were utterly innocuous, failing to show up for rallies of the Reformed Throng, for instance. But there were some people who his political commissars were eager to stalk, to harass, to choke and strangle in the same way he’d been strangled by Cheeth so many decades ago. And no matter how he fought against his nation’s worst offenders, the people who had failed to rule with the mercy and benevolence that Bhoural had demonstrated in his rise to power, there would always be imperfections. There would always be people snatched up and chewed by the gears of the glorious Floru Federal State. There would always be unavoidable of people that Yanla could point to and say “this is why I can’t stay married to-

  Anway, revolution was a boy’s game. Oppression was a man’s.

  Bhoural felt terrible.

  Bhoural felt like hurting himself.

  He bid the attention of his librarian on call: “Theidha,” he called out, “Comb the archives. Do we have 42nd Street on record?”

  “Err,” began Theidha in the back of Bhoural’s mind, “For surveillance? We don’t have any scryfeeds in any major cities yet, sir.”

  Bhoural sighed, “No, that’s not what I- 42nd Street the operetta. The musical. It’s a play production that was in Palladia briefly. I believe the Akademia has a preservational archive of all the shows ever produced in the city?”

  “Was it off-hill? I think that might affect whether they have it.”

  “Just look for it. Look for it and let me know what you find,” and wordlessly, Theidha got to work.

  In 35 minutes and 42.7894 seconds exactly (precision rounded), Theidha replied: “Found it. Do you want it sent your way?”

  “Of course.”

  Among all of the other things Bhoural was obliged to keep his attention on, Bhoural watched the 42nd street recording. The female lead, a woman named Peggy, looked different in the recording than on the poster Bhoural had seen in Palladia. this was probably not the show he would have seen with Yanla. It dragged on. It was a stupid play about plays, and about some forget-about-it-city in a world that was clearly dreamed up for the conceit of the show. Bhoural didn’t dislike it per se, but it all felt very silly. Was this really what frightened him all these years?

  And then, unexpectedly, as often happens with dreams, Bhoural found himself in-media-res of one. A dream. The first real dream he had in, what, two decades? The environment of this dreamscape was pitch black. Suddenly, flash, lights cascaded on him as he clumsily rotated to face the source, and in the distance, walking over from wherever the lights were coming from…

  Yanla. As pretty and as ready as she looked on her wedding night, in a glimmering, red-sequin dress. Immaterial horns swelled dramatically and romantically as she looked at him with longing. Bhoural was drawn towards her. Naturally, as if he knew exactly what the moment called for, he knelt, and put his giant, iron hands out for his beloved to rest upon.

  “Bhoural, honey?” she asked,

  “Yanla, dearest?” he replied.

  “Wanna come out of there?” she invited.

  And with a quiet nod, Bhoural emerged from his metal body like he’d been buried in silk sheets. Tap tap went his two feet as they collided with the infinite floor on which the two stood. He was in a sailor outfit. He just knew he was wearing one, with a little white hat and ascot.

  The rest of the dream occurred in the third person, a constantly shifting 3rd person, especially as the dancing picked up. Bhoural and Yanla were always making wonderfully acrobatic poses, or bold embraces, every single thing Bhoural saw in that dream was brilliant and wonderful to behold. The two sung a bawdy duet, gradually intensifying as Bhoural became more comfortable in the old, soldier-titan physique he possessed at the time of his wedding. The violins and horns of the accompanying orchestras rose and escorted the couple in all the right ways. Elements of the physical space were added or subtracted as necessary. There were Vast, concrete staircases that the two cavorted off of; they appeared as they became useful and disappeared accordingly. Their foxtrots, and the constant rhythmic tapping of their shoes, earmarked their travels across vast, white, geometric temples to the art of dance.

  It was wonderful. It was so totally out of character for Bhoural, and yet so completely natural. It was a mouthful of chocolate after decades of gruel. It was fun. It was like Yanla was alive. It was like he’d never gone off to the North. Bhoural looked at Yanla in his arms. He considered kissing her, but sensing a climax in the distant future, he decided to save the kiss. That night, Bhoural dreamed a pleasant dance, a phantasm of a dance that he welcomed. The Chairman danced a new dance.

  FIN