Deiry lounged on a golden cloud, his white robes and hair shaking as he laughed. Opposite of him floated a living star, its face carved from motes of light that would have been blinding if they had both not been Ascended.

“Kro’ni’khoal, I wish I had your Agents. They all seem so... Competent. And obedient.”

“Your latest pick seems to be adequately successful, Deiry. Usually your Agents are... reluctant, at best.”

“Bah. He had something wrong with his brain in his last life, made him difficult to intimidate, but he was open to a deal. I even agreed, if only to shut those Void blasted gods up. I am glad there are no Greater gods on any of my worlds, I’m not sure the headache would be worth it.”

“You should make more deals; you catch more flies with a carefully constructed honey trap than with a mass acceleration cannon.”

“That’s easy for you to say, all of your worlds share the same empire, so you can have them work together. Which, by the way, I still want to know how you managed that. Quetzalcoatl is not usually open to bribes.”

“Pure coincidence.”

“I’m sure. Either way, I prefer my Agents be self-motivated, not bribed.”

“You say that, but you either end up with people who do the least possible or people too terrified to think.”

“At least I don’t pretend to be an idiot like that damn dragon. It’s undignified.”

“But effective. She does a good job structuring her assignments to meet multiple goals, plans where she dumps her Agents in advance to give them a leg up. You can’t argue with the results.”

“Bah. She has just as much trouble; did you hear her latest acquisition has been hopping between worlds? Having our own gods chatter away at us is one thing, but can you imagine being yelled at by gods you’re not being paid by to listen to?”

“I did! He met up with part of my empire on some dead world. The local gods were so irritated by having people on their seed that they started a war. Lots of Aspirants died, the atmosphere was unbreathable. Single Coward made it through with a few Aspirants, but they mostly got slaughtered. Looks like this Agent might spark a new system, despite being picked.”

Deiry rolled his glowing eyes, annoyed that even when Xiournal got a trouble maker, they still ended up doing a good job.

“Well, my latest Agent is making great strides – coming up on Monarch in the blink of an eye. He’s just completed my first task – a major task, not the piddling things the dragoness assigns – and I’ve sent the next one. Taking out a Coward.”

“You think he’ll be able to take out a Coward? Too scared to Ascend they might be, but they’re not weak, at least on the Aspirant plane.”

“I have every confidence... And even if he fails, it serves him right for forcing me into a deal. And it’ll give the Coward a false sense of security for my next Agent. Plans within pla- BLASTED VOID, the idiot just killed himself.”

“What, he slit his wrists? Why?”

“No, the idiot tried to reach Monarch but skipped a step. Hmm. He’s dead, but he’ll probably come back in a few minutes – he seems to have taken precautions. So, not as bad as it could be. Wait, where’s his soul? There’s a link, but it stretches into the River and down past the Origin. What in the Planes is going on?!”

***

**

*

William looked down at the body at his feet, bright blood standing out in the dull night. He had been in Purgatory for ten years, the inching of energy in his connection to the body he had left behind, adding a degree of constant torture compared to what the other residents experienced. Or so they had told him.

It had been a difficult decade, fighting to escape the grim confines of a world supposedly designed to teach people a lesson. Before he had been tricked into ending his own life, William had grown by refining his control and expanding his undead army. But here in Purgatory he had no control of the dead; the dead rarely had the energy to facilitate his abilities, and when they did, he dared not use it so frivolously. Energy was life, in Purgatory.

There was a second energy in the air and earth of that bleak prison, an anti-energy that ate at the world around it, ate the energy and replaced it with its own dark weight. And weight was literal in this case. William had discovered that if you allowed the anti-energy – the Apathy as the locals called it – to fully replace your positive reserves you simply... dropped through the world.

To resist the devouring efforts of Apathy, you could either fight, to live, to feel... or you could take it from those who did. Or newcomers. This was the option William chose, in the slightly darker hours of his first night when a group of like-minded individuals had sought his own freshly arrived energy. His Soul Constructs, no-longer the sparking silver of soul-matter, now showing a dull grey, caught them unawares. The constructs themselves, though having lost both their lustre and some of their resilience, had gained something else, it had seemed; they drained a person directly.

All of his fights, over the coming days, weeks months and years had not been that easy, of course. While the Apathy dulled emotion – a sensation much familiar and strangely comforting for William – it did seem to make a person stronger, faster. It appeared to remove the mortal limits of the human – or in-human – body, even as it ate away Experience.

The former Agent was stronger after ten years in Purgatory than he had ever been, and the fresh corpse of some petty gang leader at his feet was proof of that. The man had been in Purgatory for a century, according to him, and his Apathy was vast, eclipsing the flicker of light hidden in his core.

A cold smile quirked the corners of William’s mouth as both rushed into him. He knew he was walking a tightrope, but as long as he kept absorbing positive energy, it should be enough to prevent whatever process dragged people down. At least according to the amount of thought he and his Manifold Mind had been able to put into the matter, using all available information. Nobody actually knew what was happening when people dropped, but there were rumours of things occasionally rising, darker than night to rip and tear before being dragged back below. Demons, they called them in huddled whispers, crowded around the tenuous torchlight of bonfires in a desperate attempt to drive back the pervading cold and the crawling dread.

Purgatory was meant to be a lesson, and it was one William was learning – or re-learning – well. It may not have been the lesson the place was meant to teach, but as the instructions provided were limited to a single plaque and vague rumours, the former Monarch felt safe enough.

Turning from the body, William walked away, the ragged layers of stolen robes girding him against the cold. The world he found himself on was cold during the day, but it was freezing at night; enough to kill the unwary. Fresh residents often died on their first day, either through being caught unawares by the setting sun or the various forms of... predation. It seemed a person lost their need to eat if they reached high enough levels of either positive or negative energy, but before then, those that did survive the first night – the first few nights – tended to eat those that did not. The dim red light and frequent drops below freezing were not, as it turned out, conducive to growing food.

As he turned a corner, the body vanishing from sight, William heard the tell-tale patter of rag-laden feet followed by the distinctive wet tearing of ripping flesh. He remembered doing the same thing on his first night, before he had drained sufficient quantities of both energies. He recalled the taste of cooling flesh and congealing blood. He had learned his lessons, but they were not all quite as enjoyable as others.

It took an hour to make it back to the building William and his gang had taken over, the time spent traveling filled with hungry or assessing gazes as those they passed tried to judge how easy he would be to kill, and how worth doing so would be. None of them attacked; to most of them, the mental chill that came with the influx of Apathy was a new thing, but William had been born with it, and while he had been having... issues before he died a second time, here in Purgatory, he felt like himself again.

The building they had settled in was relatively small – much smaller than a gang of their size would normally settle on – but what it lacked in size it made up for in defensibility and heat. The squat cube of glossy stone stood wedged between other buildings, surrounded on three sides with thick walls, and the only entrance being down a long alley with no other doors or windows. The surrounding buildings were both taller and overhung at strange angles, each filled with thousands of people, all running bonfires.

As he approached the narrow alley, William heard a commotion coming from up ahead, strangely muted echoes breaking out and bouncing around him; the sound of fear filled yells. With a raised eyebrow, he broke out into a jog, pushing through the reinforced wooden door hard enough that it cracked against the stone on the other side.

There was nobody on the ground floor, the room lit by a single torch of bone and rendered fat soaked into a rag. The smell was disgusting, but it was something you grew used to in Purgatory. Running now, William dashed up the steps, past three floors until he reached the highest, the floor where they kept a fire burning all through both day and night. Dozens of people normally huddled in that room, but as he emerged into it, he saw that most of those were now bodies, broken and scattered across the floor, which was a dark, muddy red. By the fire, a cloud of darkness roiled silently, the faint outline of a person – or something shaped that way – at its centre.

Without a sound, the obscured figure turned, the black cloud eddying and somehow reaching towards him. William felt the moment his eyes met the gaze of... whatever it was. As the black surged in his direction, his two minds raced and almost as a reflex, he manifested a dull spike and accelerated it towards the demon. It could be nothing but a demon; in the decade William had spent eking out an existence, he had never seen anything like it, nor heard such a thing described. Something like that could not remain a secret, as least as long as any who knew of it remained amongst the living.

The spike struck the cloud at the same moment it reached him. There was a feeling like being drained, and for a fraction of a second, William wondered if that was what the people he killed felt as they died, but then, as a vast empty void filled him and he felt his reserve of positive energy vanish, the floor beneath him fell away and he dropped.

***

**

*

The world was gone and William was blind – or so it seemed at first. He floated within a void, rocks the size of planets littering the distance, only perceivable to him as black on black. Not quite sight, but somehow sensing them. He felt a hunger gnawing at him, the need to eat something as if he had not eaten in years. It was a pain both physical and spiritual.

Sensing a presence nearby, William lashed out without thought, his body no-longer solid but amorphous and changeable as it stretched across the distance, moving through the emptiness like a squid as he wrapped himself around another shape - just like himself – and began to rip it apart, the flicking silver light of its soul buoying him in the infinite black.