Lord of Entertainment

Chapter 521: Changing World

(3rd Person POV)

It had been a year since the Origin was submitted to Arthur, and Eisen City had not stopped changing. Since Hellfire took root, the streets stayed busy from morning on — electric light, cars running down the wide roads, and people who looked happier than they had in a long time.

At the center of it all stood the statue of Dionysus, the rising deity of Entertainment, Wealth, and Invention. The dwarves who passed it praised his name as the one who had changed the world and put an end to the wars.

Profellie walked the avenue with his hands behind his back, and his chest felt tight with something he couldn't name. He drew his fingers through his old, snow-white beard and glanced at Saza.

"I never thought I would live to see this," he said. "I always knew Arthur would change the world — sweep it clean and remake it. But I never once imagined he would do it so quickly." He shook his head. "I had made my peace with dying before it ever came. And yet here it is. He rooted himself in a world that was never his, broke the Five Heavenly Pillars, and bent the Origin itself to his will."

Saza kept pace beside him, her eyes moving over the crowds. "I did not believe it possible either, Profellie. All of it, so fast." Her mouth tightened. "I doubt there is another god alive who could have managed it. No — there isn't." She shook her head. "Do you remember, centuries ago? Solarus spent decades throwing himself at this world, desperate to take it, and all of it came to nothing."

Profellie sighed and lifted his eyes to the great statue. "Indeed. And for all that we hated the Five Heavenly Pillars — every war they started, and the Origin sitting above it, indifferent — I would not have wished this world into Solarus's hands." He kept looking up at the carved face. "We still don't know what it means, letting something as terrible as Arthur claim this world for his own. But I can already see it is better than any of us feared. The wars have stopped. The nations are learning to sit at the same table."

Saza smiled. "Don't trouble yourself over it. You forget — I carry a Skill that lets me glimpse what is coming. And everything I see tells me the same thing. Arthur will not rule this world the way the Five Heavenly Pillars did, or the Origin, or Solarus. Whatever comes, this world is going to flourish."

"Then I am glad you carry such a thing," Profellie said.

A voice broke over them before he could go on — a vendor leaning across his stall and waving them down.

"Oi — you two! Come here, come and have a look!" The dwarf slapped the counter beside a squat contraption of copper and brass. "Newest invention in the whole city, this! They call it a coffee machine — Lord Dionysus himself put the notion in my head, I swear it. Come, come, have a look!"

Both of them slowed, their eyes settling on the strange little machine with plain interest.

"Coffee?" Saza tilted her head. "Well — that does sound rather nice. Let me see what it does."

Profellie shook his head and let out a low chuckle.

Inside Hellfire HQ, from the tallest tower in Eisen City, Arthur looked down over the city. It had grown out around him, buildings rising in the same style as his own tower — as a Deity, he had given this world the architecture and engineering to build them.

Firfel stood at his side, watching his face rather than the city.

"It has been more than a year since you bound yourself fully to the Origin," she said. "I can feel the power in you now — it's grown past any edge I can find. Is it time? Should we return to our world and finally deal with Solarus?"

Arthur's eyes had changed long ago. Stars turned inside them, whole galaxies drifting across his irises, and there was little left in that gaze a mortal could hope to read.

"There's no hurry." His voice carried the flat, far-off weight of something speaking into empty space. "I can already see his end in the palm of my hand. It isn't far off now."

Firfel took his arm and held it, her grip soft. "That puts my heart at ease. We went through so much to get here — conquering an entire world, only to keep our own safe."

Arthur smiled and brushed his knuckles along her cheek. "I'd hardly call it trouble. The pressure of it made us both stronger. Look at you now — you've settled fully into being the Deity of Art and Fate. I'd wager you've outgrown the Moon Goddess Luna herself."

"Flatterer." Firfel's smile softened. "I worked for it, you know. Though I'll admit it came easier once the world learned whose wife I was. Dionysus's wife." Her smile thinned. "And I am happy — I am. But I keep wondering when we'll go home. I miss how simple things were there. Back when I was only an actress, and nothing more."

"Then why not go back now?" Arthur said. "Chronette can swallow the timelines of whole worlds these days. We could step into any version of our world we liked, just to amuse ourselves —"

"No." Firfel cut in. "I've no interest in going back into the past. It never sat right with me — hopping forward and back through time like that."

"Really? I always found it convenient." He turned the ring on his finger. "With the Devourer Ring I've walked a thousand years in an afternoon and picked up all manner of things along the way. I even slipped into a parallel line of time once and ran into Solarus there. Beat him bloody in the Divine World and left."

Firfel's head came around. "Don't tell me you crossed into another timeline and meddled with a different Arthur."

Arthur said nothing for a breath. Then: "Why not? You weren't there to see it — but Chronette and I have met some truly vile versions of me. Evil down to the root. One of them had enslaved his whole world and turned it into entertainment."

Her eyes went wide. "Truly?"

He nodded. "In those timelines, Arthur is a greedy thing. Keeps a harem of wives." His voice cooled. "He took your sister Sylwen. Your friend Vivienne. He even took my own sisters — Apollonia, Lucy — and made them his wives as well."

Firfel's eyes went wider still. "What? Is that the truth?"

The ring on Arthur's hand stirred, and Chronette poured out of it into the air.

"Every word of it, Lady Firfel." The serpent's voice was cold with distaste. "Every other Arthur we have found — every one but my master — is wicked, and without shame."

She coiled closer. "In some of those timelines they do not stop at a single world. They conquer a new one and bend all its power to rewriting the story of everything in it. There was one — I will not forget it — who, only to craft a more convincing tale for his own amusement, reshaped a world and drove its people to act as he pleased, then loosed a plague of the walking dead across it and filmed the living as they clawed to survive."

Firfel's breath caught. She knew of the dead that walked — Arthur had made a film about them in this very world half a year past.

"That's monstrous," she whispered.

Arthur nodded. "Those other selves choose one man to be the hero of the tale, then twist his whole life into something thrilling to watch." His jaw set. "Some of them take world after world for no reason but this — bending each one into the shape of whatever 'story' they've decided to tell."

Firfel had gone pale. "So they've lost themselves to it. To entertainment. So drunk on the realistic performance, on the perfect scene, that —" She stopped. "It's the same as that dome you wanted to build. Trapping a man inside it without his knowing and calling it The Human Show."

He was glad she remembered. The Human Show had been his own answer to the old tale of the Truman Show, and he had put it to death only after Firfel talked him back from the edge of it.

"That's it exactly, darling." Arthur's mouth curved, without much warmth in it. "That's how every one of those Arthurs began — with their own Human Show. And then the Pandora world, where the Children of the Forests live. My other selves broke the Great Mother there and enslaved the whole race, all so they could shoot a properly authentic Avatar."

Firfel shivered. "C-couldn't the other Firfel have stopped him? Pulled him back, before —"

"I told you." Arthur's tone did not shift. "Those Arthurs were never truly hers. He keeps other wives. They were rotten from the very start."

Firfel's hands closed into fists. She turned to look up at her husband, and her voice came out sharp. "You — you won't go looking for other wives, will you?"

Arthur laughed. "Are you serious? I've told you before — for me there is only you. One and only."

Something loosened in her, and she pressed herself against him and held on tight.

Off to the side, Chronette flushed and slipped back down into the ring.

Arthur patted Firfel's back. "You see now? This is why the other Arthurs have to be dealt with. Every last one of them." His hand went still. "And it runs both ways. Somewhere out there, another version of me may already be deciding to come and put an end to this one."

Firfel jerked upright. "What?"