Delilah sat, speechless, head bowed, for the remainder of the Daybreak Council. To some, it likely looked as if she’d been sufficiently chastised, a child too young for her new role sulking over a well-deserved putdown.
But if she gave off that impression to some, that was a boon, in her opinion. It meant they were underestimating her. And being underestimated was something Delilah was very used to.
Sitting silent, she did what she always did — she listened, and she thought. Not a single word that was shared in the Council went past her, went lost or forgotten or ignored. There were more than a few Paladins who spoke up with big words, flowery language, and complex terminology. Every now and then, Delilah swore she could feel their eyes on her — as if they were showing off, using their words to evade understanding by a mere child.
Joke’s on them. My vocabulary’s excellent.
But while Delilah took in all that was being said, she also constantly thought back to Lady Kodoka’s reaction to Delilah’s proposal. It had been so sudden, so extreme, that at the time Delilah had been too stunned to process it.
She didn’t even allow me to speak. As soon as I said…
Her eyes widened in realization.
As soon as I mentioned the Key of the World, she rose. She wasn’t thrilled to hear what I had to say, but she was at least willing to let me speak… until that.
But… why? Is it fear? Or…
What could it be?
Her hand occasionally went to her shirt, to where her own Key rested beneath the fabric. This precious treasure, this piece of hope for the entire universe, was something she wouldn’t give up on.
We’re onto something. Lady Kodoka… she’s completely opposed to the Key of the World. As much as I want to just race ahead with this plan anyway…
I want to understand her. I want to know her… fears? Concerns? Whatever it is that puts her opposed to my plan, I need to know. With all her knowledge, she must know something we don’t, some piece of the puzzle that makes pursuing the Key of the World something not to be taken lightly. There must be some danger to it, but…
Is there really a danger that rivals the Endless Night?
The Council took many twists and turns, and often came back to the issue of Alexander Salazar Greyson. Also known as “Sal.”
Also, perhaps not known as, but heavily presumed to be…
The Lord of Night.
What do they do about him? Having heard the report from Princess Garnet, of Mister Midnight and Blaise’s former Shadows being powerless to even attempt to fight Sal…
Just how powerful was their enemy? And what would it take to fight back against him?
We’ve fought the Sons of Night, seen their powers firsthand. But Sal is so far beyond them… how? He’s a Halfchant, he’s a mortal, he’s from Grimoire…
What makes him so powerful? And what power do we have to oppose his?
The largest wrinkle in that web of conversation was the fact that Lady Kodoka, the Prime Paladin, the most powerful person in the entire room, had not been able to directly oppose Sal. All of her daughters had been stolen away from her in various ways — several still presumed dead, like Sarabelle had once been — by the Sons of Night, primarily by Dullan. And in the end, Lady Kodoka had chosen to imprison herself at the heart of the Storm, containing a vast, raging vortex of dark power, preventing it from being used by anyone.
And yet that had not checked Sal’s power. It had not checked the advance of the Endless Night.
One great gambit had failed. So what could they do now?
A major issue was the fact that the Daylight Bastions were all designed for defense. Paladins and Sub-Paladins, too, were trained for defense. They weren’t in any way an army, a force that was trained and designed to be mobilized and fielded against a specified enemy or target. And yet the simple fact was that the defensive aim of the Bastions had failed. Even the Library of Solitude had fallen, once, and while it had been reclaimed, the damage had been done. The Library of Solitude was the Darkness’ gateway to the wider universe, and it was because of the Library’s fall that other falls had arisen. Delilah thought back on the Abyssal Sanctuary, the horrific massacre that Sen had perpetrated there.
Even Sen can wipe out dozens of Paladins and Sub-Paladins all by himself. If all four Sons of Night stand united, along with Jormungand, commanded by Sal, and with the vast horde of dark monsters alongside them?
What can we possibly do to stop them?
That was the question they kept coming back to, the great debate that struggled to find a proper answer. Some — nearly half, by Delilah’s estimate, at least at the start of the Council — of the Paladins thought this was the kind of situation that called for defenses being bolstered. “Call on every Paladin and Sub-Paladin there is!” one Paladin cried out, fear evident in his voice. “There are plenty who have taken leaves of absence, or have retired and left their charges to successors. We must bring everyone together, and split them evenly among the Bastions that are most properly poised to stand against Darkness’ advance. What of Mister Midnight? We must round up the more rebellious, arrogant elements and have them stand united with the rest of us!”
But this was swiftly shot down. “The Darkness has spread too widely,” Maribelle said. “And we have seen how they can bypass our defenses. Light Catchers have failed, not just here in the Library of Solitude, but in other Bastions far and wide. We’re working on new measures, combining Daybreak Engines with the Light Catchers, but these will be effective as preventative measures for future advances of the Darkness, not as instruments to push back the Endless Night. That’s why we need a different approach in this crisis.”
That was one interesting thing that Delilah hadn’t heard anyone else say before this Council, but it had come up multiple times so far. The Endless Night was a great spread of the Darkness, a spread that would swallow all life and light if not defeated. And yet preventing the Endless Night and pushing back this vast wave of the Darkness would not eliminate the Darkness entirely. The Bastions would still need to stand vigilant, even after the Endless Night was overcome.
The Endless Night is just the greatest play by the Darkness, their most vicious and powerful advance. If we prevent it, the future will be easier and more manageable, but Darkness doesn’t just vanish. It exists not just as those monsters and beasts we’ve fought, or as the Sons of Night, but… in the heart of every mortal.
There’s Darkness inside me. Inside all of us.
But we can conquer our personal Darkness. We can mitigate its spread. And we can use the Light, and Relays, and other tools and abilities, to eliminate infestations of Darkness.
The Endless Night is different. That’s why this is so dire. And worse…
It’s been building a lot longer than we realized.
It was because of Lady Kodoka’s gambit, her self-imposed imprisonment at the heart of the Storm. Because of that, because of how dire things had been and her having no one to send to deliver the knowledge she’d attained at the time.
No one who knew about the Endless Night and Sal when they’d first arisen as threats had been able to tell the wider universe early enough. If they’d known centuries ago when this had first been discovered, or if Lady Kodoka’s plan hadn’t failed…
Things would have been very different. And the situation wouldn’t be nearly as dire, nearly as urgent.
The Council’s direction eventually shifted more towards a unified directive of discussing offensive approaches. How best can we strike at the heart of this new evil and destroy it?
Their greatest failure was one of information. They knew too little, even with what Lady Kodoka had discovered. Because even she didn’t know how Sal had acquired his powers. Or, most importantly, the full extent of those powers. And on top of that, could they say definitively that he was the Lord of Night? They could not. And even the slight possibility that he wasn’t the Lord of Night was terrifying — because it meant that there was some being behind all of this even more powerful than Sal.
The Council did, eventually, reach a decision. It was faster than Delilah had expected, and a more amicable discussion than she’d expected, too. Her distant familiarity with politics on Earth had brought her to expect deadlocked debate, everyone looking out for their own self-interests at the detriment of actually serving those they were sworn to serve, and rampant corruption. Not to mention a hefty dose of bad-faith arguments and personal attacks rather than actual debating of the issues at hand. The Paladins and Sub-Paladins were, for their scattered faults, united in purpose and focused on what actually mattered.
The decision they’d come to was to bring the fight to Sal, to fight openly and aggressively against the spread of the Darkness and the oncoming Endless Night. To that end, they decided to split into three groups. One would focus on intelligence gathering, and would be headed by Maestro Siegfried, Paladin of a Bastion known simply as “The Crown.” He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a grizzled, scarred face, his eyes like steel, the scuffed and worn white armor he wore all speaking to his many centuries spent actively fighting the Darkness and its horde of monsters. He was the only Paladin in attendance to have fought Sen in single combat and come out of it with nothing more than a faint scar that wrapped around the edge of his right eye, looking rather like a crescent moon.
“Our focus,” Maestro Siegfried said in his deep, gravelly voice, “will be on going where all others rightly fear to tread. We will wade into the darkest parts of the universe, and root out all we can about the Sons of Night, about Jormungand, about this Sal, and the powers they command. It will be the most dangerous mission any Paladin has ever undertaken, and I will not accept volunteers. I will handpick all those who partake in this mission, and we will depart within half a cycle’s time.”
Meanwhile, Lady Kodoka would be in charge of training the second group, made up of the remaining Paladins and Sub-Paladins — or, at least, as many as could be spared, for the Bastions that hadn’t fallen still needed to be manned, at least enough to be vigilant of further infestations of Darkness — in the Library of Solitude, using the massive Prime Bastion as a training grounds to prepare as many as they could for the inevitable battle to come. This would be a volunteer effort, though Lady Kodoka seemed loathe to specify that. But it was clear that, despite their shared goals and mission, the Paladins and Sub-Paladins were used to autonomy and freedom. Still, nearly every Paladin and Sub-Paladin in attendance had volunteered straight away, while many others had offered to travel far and wide to seek out every extra volunteer they could find.
Lady Kodoka’s gaze fell hard on Delilah and her group when she hadn’t volunteered to be part of the training and preparations for the great battle that was planned. Though, surprisingly, the clockwork doll beside her, Twelve, had also refrained from volunteering. As if taking a cue from Delilah, Isabelle and Maribelle had also not shown signs of volunteering.
They’re all focused on going to war. And I get that.
But I’m not giving up on the Key of the World. I can’t. And if Lady Kodoka won’t pursue it, someone has to. I at least need to know if it’s something worth pursuing, if Lady Kodoka’s opposition is well-founded or not.
And if it is, and she still won’t sanction a mission revolving around the Key…
Then that’s where I need to step out and do what no one else will.
The third group was the smallest, called a “coordinated mobile strike force.” It was made up of just two dozen Paladins hand-picked by Lady Kodoka and Maestro Siegfried, and their objective was simple. They would move around the Enchanted Dominion far and wide, as fast as they could, root out infestations and encroachments of Darkness, and strike them fast and hard, eliminating them and — hopefully — slowing the advance of the Endless Night. They were specifically instructed not to engage any of the Sons of Night, or Jormungand, or Sal, if encountered. They were focused on the Darkness monsters, the possessed Hollows, and the living Darkness itself as it spread and festered throughout the universe. “Darkness will take advantage of this crisis,” Lady Kodoka said, “and advance far and wide, destroying and infesting as it always desires to. The Bastions cannot fully detect all of these scattered spreads, and so your strike force will be, for all intents and purposes, mobile Bastions, roaming far and wide to see what the rest of us cannot, and to eliminate Darkness wherever it is found.”
On top of that, the Council was not fully dismissed, but called to “an indefinite recess.” Essentially, all attendees should remain prepared to reconvene the Daybreak Council when new information arose, when plans needed to be changed, or when it was time to move forward with the final battle.
Everyone rushed around to their duties, which made Delilah’s group, along with Twelve, some of the few outliers in the vast Council Chamber.
“Why didn’t you volunteer, Twelve?” Delilah asked.
“Oh, I’m not meant to fight,” Twelve said, his mechanical voice tinged with amusement. “And my primary purpose, no matter the crisis, is to look after my Bastion. But I will spread information, and try to bring forth more volunteers, if they can be found. And I will do research of my own. In point of fact, I’m quite intrigued by your own proposal, Delilah. The Key of the World… have you learned everything? Or is there more left to uncover?”
“A lot more,” Delilah said, and Alice nodded beside her.
“I’d be more than happy to assist you,” Twelve said, metal lips curving upwards in a slight smile.
“We’d be incredibly grateful for your help,” Delilah said. Twelve bowed elegantly, surprisingly graceful for having such a round, squat body.
“But before I leave, I must explain my workings to Alice,” Twelve said. “After all, I did promise as much.”
“Oh yeah!” Alice said, grinning. “I forgot about that. Sure, yeah, spill the beans!”
“You asked how I was able to have ‘personality and stuff’ when I am just a, as you said, ‘robot’,” Twelve said. “The answer starts quite simply: magic. But it’s a special form of magic, one my creator invented and perfected, and one that, at least for now, has died with him.” Twelve unbuttoned his jacket and the shirt beneath, pulling them aside to reveal a glass hatch on his chest, through which could be seen a gleaming aquamarine crystal. The crystal shone with bright light, light that refracted in marvelous ways as the crystal spun rapidly within its casing. “This crystal is what you would call my ‘heart.’ Its color denotes my purpose — intelligence, data, memory, and research. There are numerous symbols engraved on and within the crystal, which you cannot see with how fast it spins. But these symbols are glyphs, each one denoting different aspects of my personality, temperament, abilities, and so on. It is not just my heart — this crystal defines my being.”
“There’s magic like that…?” Delilah murmured, gazing at the spinning crystal. She’d never heard of anything like that, but she’d heard enough from Gwen and other Enchanted to know that they used magic in ways Humans couldn’t conceive of within their own classification system for magic.
“As I said, it was invented by my creator,” Twelve said. “So you will not find anything like this crystal elsewhere.”
“Is your name significant?” Delilah asked. “Twelve… are you the twelfth doll your creator made?”
“An astute observation,” Twelve said, nodding. “I am the twelfth, and the only one that remains.”
“What happened to the others?” Alice asked.
“They ran out of time.” Twelve tapped on the glass, indicating the many moving parts, gears whirring all around. “We’re clockwork, you see. Even with magic, we cannot keep our parts moving forever. Eventually, my heart will stop spinning, and I will cease to function.”
“But can’t you just wind back up?” Alice asked.
“I cannot,” Twelve said. “The crystal’s revolutions cannot be altered — say, by winding in order to extend my lifespan — or it will shatter. It is a delicate thing, my heart.”
All hearts are, aren’t they?
“So how much time you got left?” Alice asked, so nonchalant in the face of these revelations that Delilah would have been appalled, if she wasn’t so used to it by now. Instead, she could only sigh.
“Unclear,” Twelve said. “I have been running for four hundred and eighty macro cycles. You can see my name and activation date are engraved just below my heart.” He indicated two bronze plates beneath the glass hatch. The first said “Twelve,” but the other had a series of numbers that Delilah couldn’t make any sense of as a date or time to give her proper reference. She didn’t know what “macro cycles” were, either, except that they must be a larger unit of measurement in Universal Time. “My predecessors all lasted a little bit longer with each one. Eleven wound down in four hundred and seventy-nine macro cycles. My time is likely coming close to its end, but I have a fair bit of life left in me, still. My revolutions will start to slow when the end is properly nearing, and they haven’t slowed a single tick yet.”
“Well, keep on ticking as long as you can,” Alice said with a grin. “If you’re gonna help us with our research, then we’ll need you ticking along at full speed.”
“Thank you for your encouragement,” Twelve said, bowing. “I must see to a few matters. Are you returning to Revue Palace? I should like to know where to send any queries I have or discoveries I make regarding the Key. And perhaps I will come visit, if circumstances allow.”
“Yes, we’ll be going back to the Palace,” Delilah said. “But if we do end up going elsewhere, I’ll make sure to leave information so that we can still communicate.”
“That is much appreciated,” Twelve said, with another bow. “Farewell for now, Delilah, Alice.”
The clockwork Paladin headed off, and Delilah and Alice joined Marcus and started making their way out of the Council Chamber.
“Back to Revue Palace, huh?” Alice asked.
“Of course,” Delilah said. “It’s our Bastion. And besides… we have work of our own to do.”
Alice grinned, her white eyes flashing. “Not listening to Kodoka, of course,” she said. “I like it. But Marcus, why are you coming with us?”
“I am as drawn to the Key of the World as you are,” Marcus said. “I won’t abandon it, not now. And certainly not when I’m the one who first placed the Key in your hands, Delilah. After all I’ve done to see it this far, I’m not about to walk away.”
“We’re glad to have you,” Delilah said, smiling.
“Me too, me too!” came a familiar childish voice. Up ran Isabelle, Teddy’s head flopping as it poked out of her backpack. “I wanna stay with Delilah!”
“Not with your mom?” Alice asked.
“She’s got super important things to do,” Isabelle said, shaking her head. “And I’m not allowed to join any of the three groups. So I’m gonna go where I can do my best.”
“What about Maribelle?” Alice asked, looking back over her shoulder.
“Mommy wanted to speak to her in private,” Isabelle said. “But I think she’ll come join us when she can. We’re a team now. She’s not gonna abandon her team.”
Back to Revue Palace they went, and Alice walked close to Delilah. She looked a bit nervous, hands shoved in the pockets of her skirt, and after some time, Delilah finally spoke. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, fine,” Alice said, waving her off. “Only, um… well, I just thought, you know… you wanna chat a bit? Just me and you?”
“Here?” Delilah asked, looking around for a place in the Library to sit and talk. It was a huge place, with plenty of private alcoves and study areas. “Or back at Revue Palace?”
“Back at the Palace,” Alice said. “It feels more like home there.”
Delilah smiled. That it did, even though it still needed so much work. For her, the Library of Solitude was a treasured place, a place she’d fought so hard to save with dear friends, and a place she’d spent quite a lot of time in. But for Alice, of course there wasn’t that connection.
Back at Revue Palace, Marcus and Isabelle headed inside to the entrance hall while Delilah stood with Alice on the terrace, looking out at the marvelous, multi-colored void.
“So, I was, um…” Alice started, shifting from side to side. Her black eyes reflected the colors of the void. “I was pretty angry back there. When Kodoka smacked us down. And even smacked Marcus down. What the heck was that? We went to all of this trouble, and she wouldn’t even hear us out.”
“Yeah, I was confused,” Delilah said. She’d been upset, but her confusion and tendency to try and listen and think, searching for answers, had left it difficult for her to be angry.
“I… felt some of my old tendencies coming around,” Alice said. “I kind of… ah, how do I…? Never mind, never mind.” She shook her head furiously. “The thing is, I started thinking of ways I could deal with Kodoka. Like… how I could get her alone, so I could chop off her head. The, uh… old way of doing things.” She looked at Delilah, black eyes anxious, and Delilah stared back at her. She didn’t break away from that intent gaze, and after a moment, Alice chuckled, looking down.
“See, that’s the thing about you,” she continued. “You showed me… I mean, you were never afraid of me. Even Addie was afraid of me sometimes. But you never were, even when you didn’t know a thing about me. You invited me to help you save Solla and all these other adventures… you gave me a chance, without even thinking or asking or anything. You just went for it. You let me be your ally in all this heroic stuff, all this stuff I was completely unworthy for, and you didn’t even mention that, didn’t even care who I was. You let me… be your sister.” She giggled, shaking her head. “And I just… well, I knew I couldn’t kill Kodoka. I can’t deprive Belle-Belle of her mother. She’s not a monster, just misguided and domineering and idiotic.” She sighed, gazing out at the void. “And besides… I promised myself I wouldn’t kill. Not anymore. Except the Sons of Night, of course. I just mean… I won’t kill people anymore. And I won’t try to pretend a person is a monster just to justify my own desires.”
“When did you decide on that?” Delilah asked.
Alice shrugged. “Dunno,” she said. “Just… somewhere along the line, I realized that I… don’t want to be the Alice that kills anymore. I don’t like her very much.” Her eyes flickered to white, and she smiled. “I’ve started to really like this Alice, you know?”
Delilah smiled with her, nodding. “I do, too.”
Alice was positively beaming as she continued. “In all these adventures and things, with you, I just started to realize, as crazy and weird as it sounds… I only got to do all these amazing things, meet all these amazing people, go to all of these amazing places, because of your kindness, and because it started to rub off on me. You can do so much more with kindness than violence, and that’s just… really, really cool. You know?”
Delilah nodded emphatically. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
“It sort of… seems like a Paladin kind of thing,” Alice said. “Don’t you think? Kindness and… love… they’re things of the Light, right? If we’re fighting the Darkness, then that’s what we need more of, as much of as possible. So I wasn’t gonna go along with the Council’s stuff anyway, regardless of the Key of the World. Kodoka’s plan is to just throw all we’ve got at Sal and the Sons of Night? I get that she’s gathering information, and sure, maybe war is inevitable or whatever, but ‘inevitable’ feels like a Dark word, one of those words people use to justify the hard decisions they make. It’s like ‘I don’t have a choice.’ One of the stupidest phrases out there.” She groaned, rolling her eyes. “You always have a choice! Don’t cop out of choices by pretending you don’t have one. It’s so… stupid.” She sighed, leaning against the terrace’s wrought-iron wall.
“Violence is gonna be necessary,” she continued. “I know that. And it’s not like I’m opposed to a good fight. I’ll fight Sen all day, I’m looking forward to round two with him. But… war? Just throwing people at the bad guy and blasting him with all our powers and strength? That’s something you do against normal villains, against normal armies. But we’re fighting the Darkness. It seems like we need more of the Light, stuff that really embodies that. We had to fight to save Lunos, but the main reason we were able to save him in the first place, and what really anchored that whole mission, wasn’t the fighting. It was kindness. It was you seeing what I couldn’t, getting the full picture of what Solla needed, and stepping out to help her reunite with her lost love. And even against the Sons of Night and Jormungand, during the Revue of Night, our fighting skills and strength isn’t what won the day.”
“It was our promise,” Delilah said, heart soaring at the memory. “We won by rejecting the Darkness, by giving our best for each other. And…” she chuckled, looking aside at Alice, “by putting on a pretty great show.”
“A really great show!” Alice said, grinning. “And there’s other stuff like that, right? We didn’t beat the Darkness under Grimoire by punching it in the face. We figured things out, we thought it through, and we planted a Relay and then protected it so it could do its job. Remember Maribelle’s story of how she saved Sarabelle? It was by breaking the Contract that forced her to serve the Radiant King guy. I mean, if we can beat Sal and stop the Endless Night by cutting his head off, I’ll jump right in and do it. But I feel like… that’s just not how we win against the Darkness. That’s not how we’ve won against the Darkness so far, you know?”
“So even if the Key of the World isn’t the solution we’re looking for,” Delilah said, “you’re still going to chase something different than Lady Kodoka’s plan?”
“Aren’t you?” Alice asked, grinning.
Delilah laughed. “Yeah. And hopefully we can find the right path, and the proper plan, before Lady Kodoka gets everyone caught up in a battle they can’t win.”
“And hopefully she’ll listen to us when the time comes,” Alice said with a sigh, her eyes flickering to black and then back to white.
“We’ll find a way to get her to listen,” Delilah said. “Somehow.”
The space at the edge of the terrace, the entrance to Revue Palace from other Locations, rippled, and Maribelle passed through, stepping onto the terrace. Her expression was hard, her eyes narrowed, but she softened slightly when she saw Delilah and Alice.
“What happened?” Delilah asked.
“Come on inside,” Maribelle said. “I’ll explain to everyone.”
Inside, everyone sat down in the lobby, and Maribelle prefaced her statement with a heavy, exasperated sigh. “Mother has tasked me with ensuring you two,” she nodded to Delilah and Alice, “don’t do anything foolish. Which is, of course, whatever she doesn’t like.” She sighed again, leaning back in her chair.
“Why are you being mean to Mommy?” Isabelle asked, pursing her lips.
“Mother doesn’t always make the right choices, Belle-Belle,” Maribelle said. “She’s the Prime Paladin, and she is tremendously wise and knowledgeable, but she has a tendency to be ruled by that vast wisdom, thinking she always knows what is right. But she isn’t always right, and in this instance, I’m fairly certain she’s wrong.”
“But then… what do we do?” Isabelle asked.
“Do you have any idea why Lady Kodoka is opposed to the idea of the Key of the World?” Delilah asked.
“I wish I did,” Maribelle said, shaking her head. “But I do think our search should start with those warnings we found in the book. The Key can be used for evil purposes, if turned by someone with evil intent, or so it says. I think we pull on that thread more than all the others and see where it leads.”
“So you’re with us in the Key of the World mission?” Alice asked.
Maribelle chuckled. “Of course I am,” she said. “If nothing else, for curiosity’s sake — it’s simply too fascinating a topic to ignore. But thankfully, there are plenty more reasons to be invested in this. After all we’ve seen and heard… I have no faith in any strength of arms we can bring to bear against Sal. But there are many other ways to conquer the Darkness, many other ways to defeat evil. We seek out those possibilities, and we trust in hope that we will find our answer.”
“So we just ignore the Council and Mommy completely,” Isabelle said, with a sigh, shaking her head. But she smiled. “But that’s a very Mari thing to do. You always did go your own way.” She giggled. “It’s kind of fun being around you guys. I like this team a lot.”
“As do I,” Marcus said. “And worry not, Isabelle. Nor any of you. We will find answers. Here in Revue Palace I’m sure there is more to be discovered, now that we have the time to keep searching. But if our answers don’t lie here, I know the next place to start a search.”
“Where’s that?” Delilah asked.
Marcus smiled, a far-off look in his eyes. “If our search here doesn’t turn up enough answers, then we should go to the land of my people. Though now in ruins, there are things that time and decay cannot erase.”