Lord of Entertainment

Chapter 533: The World of Aeons and The Demiurge

(3rd Person POV)

Arthur stepped back into the Dionysus Palace, and to everyone else it was as though he'd been gone a single day. Firfel's face lit the moment she saw him.

"So." She crossed to him. "It seems you handled that other you after all."

"I did." He drew her in. "Very much so." And then he kissed her, deep and long, the way a man kisses someone he hasn't seen in far longer than a day.

She drew back just enough to search his face. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing." His thumb moved at her cheek. "Only tired."

That was the truth of it, if not the whole of it. He had stayed inside the True Dimension a great deal longer than a day — long enough that, if his sense of it was right, something on the order of millions of years had passed while the power poured into him and settled. Thankfully, time answered to him now. Whatever years he spent away, he could set his foot back down at whatever moment he chose, and had.

He drew Firfel toward the bedroom, and for a while the empire and the throne and the whole churning weight of two realities were left to look after themselves.

---

A month slipped by before Arthur stood out on the balcony one evening, forearms on the rail, looking down over the domain that had been Solarus's not so long ago.

The city beneath him was changing. Street by street it was pulling itself up into something sleeker and brighter, the shape of a far more advanced civilization rising through the old one. It was Earth's own work, the technology of the world he'd lived and died in once — which, he understood now, meant it had belonged to the Pleroma all along.

The panel surfaced quietly in his vision.

[Master. This Divine World is riddled with irregularities as well. Beneath the floating Divine Kingdoms of the gods there are creatures carrying impossible power, strong enough to kill a god outright. And the Divine World itself holds a sleeping consciousness — the one they call the Divine Word.]

"I know," Arthur said. "But those creatures, and the Divine Word both, sit well below the level of the Archons or the Demiurge. Those two are beyond narrative entirely. These are still inside the «Narrative»." He turned a hand over on the rail. "Which means I can simply erase them from existence and rewrite the whole story around where they were."

[Just so, master. As the Absolute Ruler of the Kenoma, you can do exactly that. But be aware — doing it may draw the eyes of the Archons and the Demiurge. They are the ones who seeded these irregularities here, a million years ago.]

"If I stand equal to the Monad," Arthur said, "then there's nothing in that worth worrying over."

And with no more than a thought, without lifting a hand, he did it. The god-killing creatures under the floating kingdoms and the great sleeping Divine Word alike — a consciousness that, roused, was prophesied to unmake the whole of this world — went out of existence together. No convulsion, no last surge of that immense buried power, nothing that ought to have marked the ending of something so vast. They were simply gone. No drama to it at all.

---

Far off, in a pocket of space walled away and cut clean off from the rest of the Kenoma, a whole world had been built inside the gap.

This was the World of Aeons. Here the Archons lived, and here their ruler kept his throne: the Demiurge.

There were millions of them in it. Some passed their days like mortals. Some worked, some threw parties, some simply amused themselves. The only difference was the scale of what those small ordinary things meant. An Archon's day of work might reshape the fate of a multitude of universes out in the Kenoma. A party might be thrown in celebration of some reality's destruction. Their entertainment was the ruin of worlds, watched for pleasure.

They played at being absolute rulers, and out in the Kenoma the pose held, because the Kenoma had no true Absolute Ruler the way the Pleroma had its Monad — and in that vacancy the Archons had grown a comfortable sense of ownership. The Archons, and the Demiurge above all, decided what would be made and what would not.

But unknown to the rank and file of them, inside the Demiurge's own throne room, something had begun to stir.

Thousands of Archons knelt before the figure on the throne.

"Lord Demiurge," one of them said, "the Monad — Absolute Ruler of the Pleroma — cannot come down here into the Kenoma and undo our work. Were he ever to try, the Pleroma itself would risk collapsing into chaos!"

The Demiurge did not answer at once.

He was a dark-skinned humanoid thing, elven-eared, with slanted eyes that sat wrong on the face, a sharp nose above thin lips, and a frame at once slender and dwarfish. He had no need of a shape at all — he could wear any he liked, or none — but he kept this one on purpose. He had been a mortal once, long ago, before he warped into an anomaly, and the anomaly into the Demiurge who ruled the realities of the Kenoma.

"Then explain to me," the Demiurge said slowly, "how the irregularities we set into a certain reality simply vanished. Gone, with no cause. I reached for them with my own power to draw them back into place. And I could not. Whatever took them, they are truly gone, past any means I have to recover them."

His eyes narrowed on the middle distance. "Only the Monad should be capable of such a thing. And I've felt it, besides — for well over a million years the Kenoma has been drained away by some presence, quiet enough that I let it pass. Who could that be, if not the Monad?"

"My Lord," a second Archon ventured, "if it truly were the Monad, then how does the Pleroma still stand in Pure Order?"

"Just so," a third put in, eager. "By every law we know, the moment the Monad so much as neared the Kenoma, the Pleroma would tip into chaos — exactly as we have always dreamed it would!"

"I don't know the method he used," the Demiurge admitted. "But somehow he has reached into the Kenoma without reaching in himself. The Monad's mind runs deeper than anything I, who have lived trillions of years, can follow to the bottom of. He has likely found a way to make an entity — one thing, set down here, able to erase everything we've built."

The throne room went silent at that.

Then one Archon spoke up, slowly. "Could this be tied to the timelines that disappeared, all those ages back? The ones that went out across the Kenoma?"

Every head turned. It had happened a million years ago and more, and they had all let it lie, because nothing had come of it afterward.

"Yes," the Demiurge breathed. "Very likely. The timelines that held those standout figures — the ones all named Arthur, each of them bending whatever world he stood in — every one of them was wiped away. Every one but a single timeline, left untouched among the rest." His gaze sharpened. "And by no coincidence at all, the timeline where that surviving Arthur lives is the very timeline where our irregularities just vanished into thin air..."

His eyes flew wide. "No. It was never the Monad who moved against us just now. It was that man. It was Arthur!"

A ripple went through the kneeling ranks — surprise, but no more than surprise. They were not truly afraid. Arthur might have the reach to erase things out of narrative, yes. But they stood far above narrative, past its edge, and a thing that lived past the edge did not fear the pen.

"What are your orders, my Lord?" one asked. "Shall we begin dealing with him?"

The Demiurge lifted a hand. "No. The brat carries the Monad's own power. Which makes him mine to take. He is my prey—"

He never finished the word.

Every Archon kneeling before the throne simply winked out of existence.

The Demiurge froze. In the next heartbeat he understood: the whole World of Aeons had gone empty around him. Even the living things they'd dragged up out of the unstable realities for their amusement — gone, all of them.

Then, into that emptiness, footsteps.

"The Demiurge." Arthur came unhurried across the vacant hall. "So it's you. You look like an overgrown dwarf." To Arthur's eye the figure loomed large enough — and yet against the scale of what Arthur now was, the Demiurge was something smaller than an ant.

The Demiurge had not felt him arrive at all, and that shook him more than he let show. Even so, he held himself still as standing water. "You have the power to erase the Archons as well," he said. "They are meant to stand beyond narrative."

"I do." Arthur stopped before the throne. "But then, I follow no rules. I can stand anywhere in the Kenoma I please, at any point in time I please, whenever I please. In this whole reality of irregularity and anomaly and instability, I am the one thing that answers to none of it. Nothing holds me. That is what it means to be the Absolute Ruler of the Kenoma."

The Demiurge felt the shape of defeat settle over him. There was no need to raise a hand to learn he was outmatched. He let out a long breath, and knew, with certainty, that this was his end.

"That damned Absolute Ruler of the Pleroma," he said, low. "I can't believe he schemed the whole thing under my very nose, here in my own Kenoma, and raised a creature like you to do it." He sank back on the throne, head bowed. "Be done with it, then. O Absolute Ruler of the Kenoma."

"You aren't even going to resist," Arthur observed.

"There's no point in it." The Demiurge didn't lift his head. "Whatever I did, I cannot so much as picture myself matching you, let alone surpassing you. My life is yours. You could erase me from the whole of reality as though I had never once existed. And even if I spent everything I have to resist and cling on, so long as I am bound to the Kenoma, I could accomplish nothing."

Arthur looked down at him a long moment. Then, rather than erasing him, he reached in and drew out a great share of the thing's strength — its power, its Authorities as the Demiurge — bleeding it away until nothing was left in it that could threaten anyone Arthur cared to keep near.

The power he pulled loose, for all its size, felt like a single drop of water tipped into an ocean.

"I'll let you live," Arthur said. "But there's a price on it."

The Demiurge raised his head. "And that is?"

"You work for me. You become the manager of the Kenoma." Arthur's gaze held him. "You erase whatever runs too far out of hand, and you help me drag this Kenoma of ours toward something at least ordered, at least stable. Nowhere near the Pleroma, I know. But closer than it is."