Chapter 627: The Abyss Has a Face

"What is going on..." One of the Rulers said.

"Where is he?" Zatanna’s voice came out of the dark, shaking. "Where is everyone?"

"I don’t know!" Frost was whispering, and it sounded like she was trying not to cry. "I can’t see anything, I can’t, I can’t, where did he go, was that, was that him, did we just..."

"No," said Clark. He had stopped moving, he stood in the dark with his fists loosened at his sides, and there was a look on his face that was not confusion. It was something closer to dawning wonder.

"No," he said again, quietly. "That wasn’t him... I think."

The darkness began to speak.

’How foolish,’ said a voice.

It came from everywhere at once. It rolled out of the ground, the sky, the air itself, a thousand layers of the same voice speaking in perfect unison, soft and calm and terribly close. It was not the voice of a dying man. It was the voice of something that had been sitting in the dark for a very long time, waiting for a door to open.

’How foolish can you all be,’ said Arthur, ’to think that Death itself could fall so easily?’

The Rulers moved as one. One of them flung up his hand, and a lance of white light shot toward the sky and vanished into the dark without so much as an echo. The eldest Ruler spun in a slow circle, and the first expression crossed his face that the Monarchs had seen all day.

It was fear.

"Leave," He said sharply. "Now. All of you, withdraw!"

They tried. Pale light flared around their robes, and their feet left the ground, and they rose. They rose a dozen feet. Then twenty. And then an invisible wall closed around them, and one by one they struck it and bounced back, crashing to the ground in a tangle of white robes.

"It’s sealed," the Ruler whispered. "We cannot leave."

’I expected more from you,’ the voice went on, and there was no anger in it. That was the worst part. It was gentle and almost disappointed. ’I truly did. I thought, after all your years of ruling and judging and watching, that you would have learned a little patience. A little wisdom. I thought you would come at me openly, face to face, with your own hands, and let the universe see you do it.’

The darkness pressed closer. The Rulers had drawn together, backs to one another, their light shrinking to a fragile ring around them.

’Instead,’ said Arthur, ’you waited for me to bleed. You watched from your high hall while my friends wept, and you crept down only when you were sure I could not hurt you. You pounced on the first opportunity to kill me easily, like the cowards you are.’

"Impossible," one of them said hoarsely. "The wound, the lance. We watched him die..."

"A construct," said the eldest quietly. He stood very straight now, and his robes had stopped glowing. "A shadow of himself. It must have been. Even the betrayal." His eyes closed, and he drew a long, slow breath. "He planned this from the very beginning. The Nidhogg fight, the exhaustion. The Monarchs turning on him. Every word, every tear was a lie."

"I told you," said the younger Ruler.

He wasn’t gloating. He was barely audible. He stood with his back pressed against the eldest Ruler’s robes and his hands trembling at his sides, and there was only terror in his voice.

"I told you it was too convenient."

Kara had stopped struggling.

Whatever had been holding her in place had let go the moment the darkness fell, and she had dropped to the ground on her hands and knees, panting. Her eyes were blazing white, and so were Raven’s, and they turned slowly in the dark, scanning the endless black for any sign of the man they had watched die.

"Arthur," Kara whispered. "Arthur."

Raven’s gaze swept across the sky. "He’s not here. He’s not anywhere. I can’t feel his..." She stopped. Her face changed. "No... I can feel him everywhere."

’Don’t bother looking for me,’ said a voice in their heads.

It was close. It was warm and low and only for them, and it was his. Kara’s hands flew to her mouth. Raven’s eyes closed, and a ragged, shaking breath tore out of her.

’I’m everything you see around you now,’ Arthur said. ’The sky, the ground, the dark. All of it. They won’t escape the trap I set for them, and neither will you, not for a while. I’ll cancel it only once we’ve dealt with them. So stay sharp.’

"Alright," Kara managed. Her voice cracked in the middle of the word. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and she was laughing and crying at the same time. "Alright. You scared me there for a second."

"You scared me to death," said Raven. She was glaring at the sky, and her voice shook. "You absolute bastard.. For a moment I thought you are actually dying."

’A construct,’ said Arthur, ’and I’m sorry. It had to look real. It had to be real enough to fool them, it’s only natural that I fool you as well.’

"Was that you who pulled us back?" Kara asked. "When we tried to reach you?"

’Yes.’ There was a note of apology in it. ’If you’d gotten to him, you’d have ruined the moment. You’d have seen it wasn’t me.’

Raven let out a short, helpless laugh. "That’s the worst explanation I’ve ever heard."

’I told you to trust me,’ said Arthur.

Out in the darkness, the Rulers drew closer together, their light flickering like a candle in a gale. And all around them, patient and silent and very, very close, the Abyss began to close its hand.

The first thing Clark noticed in himself was that he had stopped hurting.

It happened gently, one moment the Shadows pressed around him and the pain simply let go.

He looked down at his hands. The burns were gone. He flexed his fingers, and the air hummed around them.

"Arthur," he said slowly. "What did you just do?"

’What I should have done an hour ago,’ said the voice that was everywhere. ’Look at yourselves.’

They did.

Kara was the first to understand. She stood in the dark with her hands held out in front of her, staring, and the blood on her face had dried and flaked away. The cracked, throbbing ache in her ribs had vanished. There was a roaring in her ears, a rising pulse of power in her chest that she hadn’t felt in a week, and her eyes had begun to burn a deep, brilliant blue of their own accord.

"I feel," she said, and stopped. She took a breath. "I feel like I did the first day. Before any of the fighting."

"It’s more than that," said Raven. She had gone still, her head tilted, listening to something no one else could hear. The exhaustion had been wiped from her face, and her eyes had flushed to a deep, steady red.

"Is it supposed to feel like this?" Beast Boy asked. He had shifted back into a boy and was patting at his own ribs as if checking for holes. "Because I’m feeling really, really great right now. Like, suspiciously great. I could run through a mountain. Is that normal? Is that something that’s allowed to happen? Nothing bad is going to happen after this right?"

"I can’t feel the strain," Zatanna said softly. She had put a hand to her throat. Gold was pooling in her eyes, bright and steady, and when she lifted her fingers the air around them trembled with unspent magic. "I was spent a moment ago, Arthur. I was down to my last spell."

"I’m cold," Frost said. It sounded like an accusation. Pale blue light had kindled in her eyes, and the frost on her fingers had begun spreading in slow, delicate spirals along her arms. "I’m so cold. And it feels incredible."

’Listen to me,’ said Arthur.

The voice was quieter now, and nearer, and every one of them stopped speaking.

’This won’t last. I’ve lent you what I could, and I can only hold it for a little while. A few minutes. Maybe less. Whatever I’ve given you, I will have to take back.’ A pause. ’So don’t waste it. Use this. Deal with the Rulers alongside me while I hold them in here. I can keep the trap closed, and I can keep them from running, but I cannot fight them and hold the dark at the same time, they are not exactly weak.’

"You’ll hold the trap," Clark said.

’I’ll hold the trap.’

"And we’ll do the rest."

’You’ll do what needs to be done,’ Arthur said, and for the first time there was a smile in his voice. ’You’ve earned the right to. All of you, but I’m not going to stand here and let you do the fighting on your own.’

Clark looked around at the five faces in the dark, at Kara’s burning eyes, at Raven’s red, at the gold and blue and amber. Something in his chest eased and tightened at the same time. He let out a long breath.

"Understood," he said.

Out in the black, the Rulers had drawn into a tight, shrinking circle.

Their light had dwindled to a faint, silvery shimmer, like candles guttering inside a tomb. Not one of them had spoken since the trap had closed. The eldest Ruler stood at the center of the group.

"Withdraw," the eldest whispered, for the fifth time. "Try once more. All of you, together."

They tried. Light flared around them, thin and desperate, and it struck the invisible wall and splintered into nothing. A Ruler at the edge of the ring made a small broken sound.

"It is not just a wall," said the youngest Ruler. "It is everywhere, we are inside a barrier where the concept of outside doesn’t exist."

"Silence," the eldest said sharply. But he didn’t say it with any force.

"He told us," the youngest Ruler whispered. "He said it himself in the dark. I’m everything around you. This is not a place he made, it is him, we are standing inside the Shadow Monarch..."

Something moved in the dark.

It wasn’t a sound, a sudden and total silence that dropped over the ring of Rulers like a lid. The light around them stopped flickering. The youngest Ruler broke off in the middle of a word.

Then the stars came out.

They opened in the black one at a time, small and cold and violet. A single point of light, then a pair, then a dozen, then more than any of them could count, a slow, spreading constellation unfolding across every inch of the dark in all directions. It took the Rulers three seconds to understand that they were not stars at all.

They were eyes.

Figures began to step out of the Abyss.

They came out of the dark in a slow, silent tide, one after another, and every one of them wore the same face. A tall man in black armor, ashen white hair stirring in a wind that wasn’t there, a faint smile on his mouth. Each held a scythe, long and curved and black as a starless night, each one’s eyes burned the same terrible violet.

They were Arthur Blackwynd, and there were many of them.

They stood motionless on every side of the Rulers, a silent amphitheater of death, and not one of them spoke. Not one of them moved. Only the scythes shifted, each blade tilting a fraction toward the huddled ring of white-robed figures in the center, as though the whole host were turning to look.

"This is not possible," one of the Rulers said, almost conversationally. "This is not possible, no one has ever..." He stopped. "Ashborn never did something like this.."

"No," the eldest Ruler said. His voice was barely audible. He was looking at the nearest of the clones, at the calm, empty face, the burning eyes, the smile that was so very patient. "No, he didn’t."

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