-[Act 3 * Epilogue]-

With the curtains closed and magic lights dimmed, the Admiral’s cabin was shrouded in dusk. The gin in Razazil’s glass swirled around, following the motions of his ship as it sailed out of Port Malus. He reached over the desk to pour a drink for his guest, a short, gray skinned dwarf. The old dragon-kin sailor then raised his glass in a toast, setting the tone for the conversation to come.

“To Basil von Doom,” he said.

“To Basil!” Drum replied. The old engineer of House Doom then poured the gin down his throat and slammed the glass against the table, nearly shattering it.

Razazil once more filled their cups, placed the empty bottle on the cabin floor and let it roll off towards a dark corner with the next turn of the ship. The sound of glass striking glass echoed through the room as it hit another empty bottle.

Drum observed the drowsy Admiral from the corner of his eye while fiddling with his golden chains. “It was time,” he said with a tint of stupor in his voice. “Whatever… Well, it’s done now. Can’t go back…”

“But did we do the right thing?” Razazil asked. The whiskers of the old dragon-kin sailor had grown limp as a result of his inebriation.

“We did what we could,” Drum answered. “I gave him a new dungeon core to hide him from the eyes of the Guild. You provided Basil with a place to look for his father’s trail. His fate is in his own hands now.”

Razazil shook his head. “This will not end well,” he pointed out. “Not for me, not for you… not for him. The number of Guild regulations we have broken; the crimes we have committed—nothing less than a tabula rasa awaits us!”

“We did it because it had to be done,” Drum pointed out. “If not us, then who?” he asked.

The old Admiral counted on his fingers. “Chronos? He could have provided Basil with the information.”

“Not him,” Drum said. “Chronos would rather see the boy kept safe. By the Oblivion, Basil’s like a son to him! He would never have agreed to send him into that abyssal place in search of answers.”

“Gaia?” Razazil suggested.

“No,” Drum replied. “Next.”

“Scarlet and Schwartz, then?” Razazil asked.

“Those two understand even less than we do,” Drum answered. “Besides, they are unreliable. If anything, they might turn on each other, rather than suffer the indignity of reconciliation for the sake of Basil’s legacy.

“No, it had to be us,” the old dwarf concluded.

“It’s a death sentence!” Razazil said. “To send him down the path his father took—what good will come of it? We don’t know of half the things his father did and what we do know is pure nightmare fuel. And now we have set Basil on his trail. To what end? His own demise?”

Drum slammed his gin glass against the table, this time shattering it. “Enough! It is done!” he declared. “Whatever we did; whatever we could have done… To have done nothing instead would have condemned him either way.”

“Why?” Razazil asked. “He’s at the peak of his power! What more does he want? To prove himself—”

Drum interrupted him with a sharp flick of his bleeding hand. “On this path or not, Basil is running out of time! He is dying!”

Razazil visibly recoiled following the old dwarf’s statement. “What? Why?”

Drum drunkenly tapped his fist against his chest. “It’s the heart,” he said. “The Mansion—it’s failing.”

“But you can fix that, right!” Razazil said. “You built it, didn’t you? What’s wrong with it? It’s a thing… you fix things. ”

“It’s not—” Drum shook his head. “It’s not a simple construct of cogs and screws. It is flesh and metal and magic, all bound up inside of him. And it is failing.”

“Well, fix it then!” Razazil said.

Drum jumped to his feet. “I SAID I CAN’T, DAMN IT!”

Razazil backed down from the confrontation with the old chaos dwarf and leaned into his chair as he processed this new information.

Drum was holding onto the edge of the table as he spoke. “His body is rejecting it,” he said. “The Mansion—his heart—it’s not broken. It’s just… slowly fading.

“It can’t support his body anymore. The contradiction of his existence, it is killing him.”

“He looked just fine to me,” Razazil noted.

Drum shook his head. “But I’m telling you he’s not!” He clutched at his shirt as he spoke. “I don’t know if he suspect it yet, but his spirit is beginning to unravel. The threads that his parents spun are once more fighting each other for dominance. And if either is purged—if the weave of his soul unravels—Basil dies.”

“But what can we do to help?” Razazil asked. “In my long years traveling the Astral Sea I have seen things that most monsters would not believe, yet this thing is beyond my understanding. Basil’s very existence should be impossible, yet he still lives.”

“You are correct,” Drum said. “Basil should not have been born, and yet, he was.

“I don’t know how or why, but those questions are no longer mine to ask. Now it is time for Basil to look upon his father’s work and despair; let him discover the truth. Maybe he will find the answers he seeks. All we did today was to set him on that path.”

“Maybe,” Razazil remarked. “Maybe we set him on the right path. We don’t know, Drum! We don’t know…”

The old dwarf nodded. “Then trust in Basil. Trust that his desire to understand his legacy will save him. Oblivion knows, we sure couldn’t…”

-[END OF BOOK ONE]-