The Nightmare War

While Cerberus had its best people on the Ark, something opened a second front at home.

Endrass—Cauchemar, the dream dragon who had walked out of Qormuza's lair promising to be an enemy tomorrow—had spent the interval becoming a Great Wyrm and building an army out of the Underdark. He tore the ground open across the whole island and pushed Dark Youngs and giant worms up through it. He had a beholder that made more of them out of nothing, a great red dragon called Ferothar held through beholders, chromatic dragons, wyverns, and thousands of ogres. Beneath Cerberus there is a drow city with a temple to him in it.

There is also a colossal statue of Gyllyn Leblanc in another temple, surrounded day and night by priestesses in trance. Gyllyn found it himself and could make no sense of being worshipped by people he had never met. He was not being worshipped. Cauchemar wanted him caught and had told the drows to do their best; the statue is the focus of the ritual built to locate him, and the dancing is the ritual running. He climbed a wall, looked down at a room full of women trying to find him, and ran.

His stated aim was to kill Archon and the elite of Cerberus, then let a few humans serve him. He insisted he was not chaotic and would keep a magical contract. He had a point: after Qormuza, he had paid his debts in full.

The First Phantasm

The first attack brought Aldor, Gyllyn, and Frolix together against him. Frolix seized Qormuza's mind and made the beholder kill another of Cauchemar's beholders. Gyllyn survived Ferothar's fire through Armure. Cauchemar answered with Phantasm and trapped all three inside his dreams.

Aldor knew the world was false, but knowing did not free him. Cauchemar made him a fourth-class mage—someone expelled before finishing his first year at the Academy—and put him to work for Gyllyn Bardlac in a factory that made erectile potions. He spent six months measuring perfume while only moments passed outside. It was not a life of pain. It was comfortable, poor, and small. Cauchemar had learned that terror would not break Aldor, so he tried to make him forget himself instead.

The one thing Cauchemar missed was Aldor's scimitar. It had awakened during the battle against Jerax the Aboleth but had kept quiet because Fleur de Bataille was jealous. It found Aldor inside the dream and told him that Cauchemar had stolen the armor from his sleeping body. Armure had meanwhile hidden Gyllyn from a dream in which Aldor murdered Mathilde and their family. Guided by the scimitar, Gyllyn and Armure entered Aldor's false life. A chamber pot emptied onto Aldor's robe had already done more for his resistance than six months of reflection.

Together they found Frolix. Cauchemar had made him a living head sewn into Sobiesansky's body beside other trapped psychics. Aldor reminded him who he was. Frolix took control of the dream, erased it, and woke all three.

They came back with Cauchemar wearing Fleur de Bataille and preparing to flee on the wounded Ferothar. Gyllyn threw the red dragon into him. Aldor killed Qormuza, which freed Ferothar from the beholder's control, but forgot to block Cauchemar's teleportation. Six imagined months of potion formulas still filled his head. Cauchemar escaped with the armor. Aldor spent the next hour burning every Dark Young he could find.

What He Did to People

He did not simply dominate minds. Against Daviau Morin he used addiction: obey occasionally, and receive dreams so extraordinary that nothing else compares; refuse, and spend years inside a nightmare instead. Daviau took the deal, and killed Frolix with a ray of cold that left him a statue of ice. Aldor killed Daviau for it.

That fight revealed what the awakened scimitar could do: it stopped time around Daviau's spell. Aldor named it Aeternum Gehennae. The sword asked what the words meant.

Against Lucius Stoneheart he used torture until it worked, then made him stronger. Lucius fought it the whole way, warned Gyllyn that he would not be easy to beat, and told him to find his own children, because only they knew how to beat the Sphere of Destruction.

That spell is the man. Orphaned by Vlad Varanov, raised alone with parchments for friends, he had one person who ever saw past his magic—Christophe Leblanc—and then lost him too. So he decided that if reality rejected him he would reject it back, and built the ultimate barrier: a bubble of absolute nothing that unmakes whatever touches it. He taught at the Academy and sent his children there for the single reason that he had never had ties and wanted them to.

Only one thing in the world beats it. Gravity Crush, which Aldor built out of what he learned from the Minotaure, cast twice as opposing blades, crushes the sphere and the man inside it.

Gyllyn Below

Cauchemar later came for Gyllyn through Lucius. Gyllyn shrank Mathilde, threw her clear of the tower, and refused to serve. The Sphere of Destruction caught his body, destroying and regenerating it without end, until Lucius sent him into the Underdark. Lucius used his last moment of control to warn Gyllyn: Cauchemar had made him stronger, and only his children knew how to break the sphere.

Below Cerberus, Gyllyn found the rest of Cauchemar's army. Thousands of Dark Youngs waited around the beholder that made them. He also found Glandir, who had spent a year looking for a cure to his daughter's sleeping sickness. They entered the drow temple together. Gyllyn accidentally killed its high priestess, Adraya, then Armure restored her with the diamond she happened to be wearing herself. Adraya gave Glandir the cure and asked Gyllyn to return as their ruler once Cauchemar was dead. He declined. They took Cauchemar's own portals back to the war.

What It Cost

Ferothar burned the capital. The barriers of Cosimo Leblanc and Lucius Stoneheart did not cover the poor quarters, which was a decision and not an oversight, and Gyllyn walked into those streets the next morning to find children with burned-off arms.

He gave Armure the whole of his mana and let it work. Limbs grew back. A woman whose face had melted got it back. A man suffocating on smoke stood up with clean lungs. It went on all day, and by evening the crowd was chanting his name in the street, and he told them the day was theirs and to go home and rest. That is the moment the armor had been building toward.

Perennus Albion drove off Ferothar that night while the capital was burning, and the council seat left open by Gérard Alois went to him instead of to the contest that had been promised. He is entirely aware of what that looked like.

Ivana Varanov died on the ramparts of Vlad, pushing Aldor out of the path of the Sphere of Destruction and taking it herself. Nothing was left.

The Battlefield of Weapons

Aldor answered the invasion by going back to the elemental cave and asking for an army.

Elementals do not think like people. They do not want to dominate and cannot be bought with sacrifice, which is what he assumed for years and why he got so little. They respect power and authority, and what they want is to be associated with something powerful. The rest is showmanship, and Aldor is good at that. Three nested triangles of Wall of Fire, nine words of power at the nine corners, a lake of liquid fire he walked into naked because no protection is allowed, Soul of Fire in the middle of it, and ten million gold pieces melted into the lake. He came out with a legion, and Igni for its general, and slept fifteen hours.

Cauchemar finished it on a dimensional battlefield of his own: a small dark world littered with the weapons of every era and race, where picking one up feeds him. He had Cerberan wizards standing behind a barrier there, hollow-eyed, each holding a weapon, red mana running out of them into him.

Three things broke him. Glandir got out of a phantasm by pure reasoning—the first person ever to do it—then took Cauchemar's own realm away from him, because a realm made of shadow answers to a master of shadows, and every shadow the dragon conjured joined Glandir's side instead. Gyllyn fought Fleur de Bataille, who had taken the shape of a woman—the war armor against the life armor—and when she pinned him with her own lance he broke it and put the piece through her throat. And Aldor arrived overhead as a sphere of fire and burned the dragon out of existence, steering the rain around his friends.

Fleur de Bataille was left on that field as broken black plate.

Back at Vlad, Aldor gathered the frozen fragments of Frolix. He spent his last diamond and lent his mana to Armure, which restored the psychic to life. Frolix returned stronger, and not quite the same.

Ivana did not remain dead, and Fleur de Bataille did not remain on the field: Ivana is beside Aldor in the Free Era, and Aldor wore the armor against Archon. How either returned is not recorded.

Armure

Cauchemar asked Fleur de Bataille what the other armor was, because he could not understand how Gyllyn had lived through a dragon's fire.

It is the armor of Antoine de Cerberus, the most powerful paladin Archon ever had, and the man who then made the Great Refusal and founded a country with a vampire. It is an armor of regeneration. It is called Armure because conscious objects name themselves at their first breath, and that is the name it picked—which Fleur de Bataille finds appropriately unimaginative for something so powerful.

Antoine was not its first bearer, only its most famous. It is Manatar's armor. It comes from above Archon, from the god who remade humanity and handed it red mana, and that is why nothing Archon built ever had a counter for it.

It has never before given a bearer all of it. It gave Gyllyn all of it, and it had already been teaching him for years as Tristan Longuepée. What it wants is a king. It is the only thing in the world that still remembers Antoine de Cerberus's swordwork, and it has been quietly teaching that too.

It also brings back the dead, and this is where the age's habit of surviving its own deaths comes from. It cannot do it alone. It needs mana lent to it by a living caster, and it needs a rare diamond, which the working consumes. What it does not need is a body. Resurrection builds one out of what a place remembers, so it has to be cast where the person died; anywhere else it is a long shot with one attempt in it. The diamonds cannot be manufactured and are not reliably for sale, so the number of returns available to anyone is simply the number of stones they are carrying. Aldor spent his last one on Frolix.

Armure is the only source of that spell in the world. No formula for it exists in Cerberus, in the Ark, or in Askenon; nobody has reconstructed it and nobody is going to. The dead of this world stay dead unless they were standing near a god's armor when they fell. Whoever holds Armure holds the only exception, and everyone opposing them is playing for keeps whether they like it or not.