Chapter 629: Visitor

The tall silver-bearded Ruler struck the ground again, and the radiance guttered out halfway across the ground. He stared at the dying flames at his feet in open disbelief. "It dims," he said hoarsely. "The light dims when it should not, this is my own power, it should answer me as it always has..."

"It is not that," said the eldest Ruler. He was kneeling now, blood on his hands, and he was staring into the dark around them with a look of slow and terrible understanding. "It is that the dark is drinking it. We are inside him. Everything we cast, everything we are, it is being taken. The very air feeds on our light..."

"Then we are..."

"Weakened. In the one place where we needed our strength the most." The eldest Ruler closed his eyes. "He prepared this well... He prepared it far better than we gave him credit for."

"Nrut ot wons!"

Zatanna flung out her arms, and the falcon of light that had been tearing toward her face came apart in midair, dissolving into a blizzard of soft, harmless snowflakes. The scarred Ruler stumbled to a stop, staring at the empty air in front of him. "What..."

"Dnib meht!"

The pale-eyed Ruler’s own chains of light whipped around in the air, tangled, and wrapped him tightly from ankle to chin. He toppled forward with a startled yelp, and Frost leaped over his fallen body with a delighted whoop.

"Nice one, Zee!" She landed in a crouch, and ice sprayed out from her palms in a wide silver fan, freezing the scarred Ruler’s boots to the ground. "That’s for the spears, bastard!"

"The spears weren’t even meant for you!" the scarred Ruler cried.

"I took it personally!" Frost said.

Beast Boy came through the dark like a landslide.

He had stopped being a boy and stopped being a wolf. What thundered across the dark now was something enormous and ancient and green, a stag the size of a house with antlers like the branches of a forest. He lowered his head and charged straight at the silver-bearded Ruler, and the Ruler brought up his staff in both hands and tried to hold the line.

The antlers took the staff out of his hands and threw it across the Abyss.

"I want everybody to know," Beast Boy bellowed, in a voice like a mountain clearing its throat, "that I am having a really good time!"

"This is very upsetting," said the silver-bearded Ruler.

"Good!"

He bucked his head and sent the Ruler sailing through the air. The Ruler struck the nearest clone’s waiting scythe.

Kara fought freely. She tore through the broad-shouldered Ruler’s defenses with her bare fists, each strike cracking like a thunderclap, fire streaming from her eyes in twin blasts that hammered a Ruler into the ground and left a smoking crater around him. Beside her, Raven’s magic coiled around a Ruler’s throat and wrenched him up into the air, and the two of them moved together without a word, one hitting while the other held. They had fought side by side before. They had never fought like this.

"This is for Arthur!" Kara screamed, and her fist took the Ruler in the jaw.

"And this is for the people that keep dying because of you," said Raven, very quietly.

Then the clones caught up with them, and everything changed.

The nearest clone’s scythe went through the Ruler Kara had been hitting as if he were made of paper. It opened a long, dreadful gash across his chest, and the Ruler fell backward without a sound, his robes darkening, his light flickering out. Kara watched him go. She turned her head and looked at the clone, and the clone looked calmly back.

It was the youngest Ruler who gave the order.

He had been watching, in the gaps between the blows, and he had come to a conclusion that terrified him. "Together!" he shouted, his voice cracking. "We cannot do this alone! We must do it together, now, or we fall one by one!"

The eight Rulers heard him. They broke away from their fights, bleeding, battered, their robes in tatters, and fought their way back to the center of the battlefield. They came together in a ragged ring, shoulder to shoulder, the way they had stood in their hall for ten thousand years.

"Everything," said the eldest Ruler. "Spend it all."

They raised their hands.

Eight lances of white light joined into a single pillar, a roaring column of radiance, brighter than anything the Abyss had seen since the first moment of the trap. It struck the dark above them and held, and for an instant the endless black recoiled. The ranks of clones flickered. Their violet eyes dimmed. The Monarchs threw up their arms against the blaze, and Clark shouted something that was lost in the roar.

For a moment, it seemed that it might work.

"Is that all of it?" said Arthur.

The pillar flickered.

The dark closed over it like a great hand closing over a candle, and the light went out, all of it, in a single, silent instant. The Rulers fell to their knees. The eldest Ruler dropped his hands and stared at them, gray-faced, as if he had never seen them before. There was no light left. There was nothing left at all.

"Now," Clark roared.

It ended in a handful of seconds.

Clark’s fist found the eldest Ruler’s chest and drove him through the floor. A clone’s scythe took the silver-bearded Ruler through the ribs. Frost put a lance of ice through the scarred Ruler’s shoulder and pinned him to the ground like a butterfly. Raven’s magic closed around the pale-eyed Ruler’s throat and dropped him on the ground. Kara’s heat vision punched a smoking hole through the broad-shouldered Ruler’s side, and Zatanna’s spell flung a Ruler across the dark and slammed him into a waiting clone’s blade. Beast Boy’s antlers caught a Ruler in the back and pinned him to the ground.

The youngest Ruler fell last, with a scythe across his side and a look on his face that was almost relief.

And then it was quiet.

The eight Rulers lay in a rough ring on the dark floor, their robes soaked in white fire gone dull and red. Their light had gone out. Every one of them had taken a wound that should have killed him, and every one of them was still breathing, held in a narrow place between life and death by a power none of them could resist. No one had died, not yet.

The Monarchs stood over them, panting, bruised, burning. Frost leaned on her knees, laughing breathlessly. Beast Boy had shrunk back into a boy and was staring at the nearest Ruler as if he couldn’t quite believe what had happened. Clark’s chest rose and fell. Kara had her arm around Raven’s shoulders.

Slowly, the ranks of silent clones began to move.

They flowed in toward the center of the dark, one after another, a vast silent tide of black armor and violet eyes. The Monarchs stepped back to give them room. The clones swept past the fallen Rulers without a glance and merged, all of them folding into one another like rain pouring into a river.

What stood at the end of it was only one man.

He was no taller than he had ever been. He wore the same torn black armor, and his ashen hair stirred in a wind that wasn’t there. But the Abyss itself seemed to lean toward him, and every scythe that had ever been raised in that dark was now one single blade, longer than any weapon had a right to be, curved like the edge of a moon, trailing darkness like a river.

The eldest Ruler, lying on the ground, turned his head and looked up at him.

"Finish it," he whispered.

Arthur looked down at him. His eyes were quiet, and very tired, and for a moment there was something in his face that was almost sorrow.

"You wanted a better ending," he said. "So did I. I gave you every chance, I really did."

He raised the scythe.

The darkness gathered along its edge. Kara looked away, and behind her, Clark’s eyes closed. The blade reached the top of its arc, and trembled there, poised over the eight fallen Rulers like the last second of a long and terrible day.

And then a crack of light split the dark.

It was thin as a hair. It ran from the top of the sky to the bottom of the world, a single bright line, perfectly straight, drawn as if by a careful hand. Nobody moved. A tiny sound, like a bell struck very far away, floated through the silence. The crack widened and a seam of pale gold opened in the Abyss, and a hand reached through it and pushed the dark aside like a curtain.

Someone stepped into the trap.

Nobody knew who he was.

The Monarchs stared. The Rulers on the ground lifted their heads, blank with astonishment. Even the dark seemed to draw back, rippling. The man walked out of the light into the Abyss with no hurry at all. His face was hard to hold in the mind. His footsteps made no sound on the ground. A faint warmth moved before him, like a summer morning in a cold room.

"Who," Kara whispered, "is that?"

"I don’t know," Clark said. "I’ve never seen him before in my life."

"Neither have I," said Raven. Her eyes had gone wide and white. "And I can’t feel anything. Nothing at all. It’s like he isn’t even there.."

On the ground, the youngest Ruler had begun to tremble, and the eldest, for the first time, looked genuinely afraid.

Only one person in the entire Abyss did not look surprised.

Arthur stood very still, the scythe still raised over his head, and he looked at the figure walking toward him through the dark.

Slowly, he lowered the scythe.

"So," Arthur said quietly. "You finally came for me."

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