- Chapter 062 -

  King of the Titans

  He could feel it. A nauseating shift in the very fabric of the memory. Clyde's magic had become a focused, desperate, and grinding force. A sickly, oily film scraping at the inner walls of the box Mark had built around them. The faint, green aura was gone, replaced by a sense of immense, contained power being brought to bear on a single, focused objective: freedom.

  Mentally, Mark was laughing. It was a cold and deeply cynical sound. He looked at Eric, at the man's face, still flushed with the world shattering revelation of how small he was, how small his power was when compared to a community that walked the moon. He had been offered flight. A technology that could have changed their entire world, opened up new avenues of trade, exploration, and connection, it would have only taken time and development. And Eric's first, and only, thought had been of personal power, of how he could use it to become 'the greatest'.

  Mark could only guess at the reasons for its absence on The Ark. A lack of the necessary industrial base, perhaps. The absence of the fossil fuels that had powered his own world's ascent. But the potential, the seed of the idea... it could have been a gift. And Eric, in his singular, blinding arrogance, had seen it only as a weapon for himself.

  But philosophical disappointment was a luxury. Clyde was dangerous. More so now than ever before. He had become a cornered bear, wounded and furious, and Mark knew, with a certainty that was bone-deep, that this cornered bear would chew off its own leg to escape the trap.

  He had to get his friends out. Now.

  "Let them out, Clyde," His voice a low, urgent command that cut through the tense quiet. "Leave and let them all out. Now. Before this goes too far."

  "It's already too far," Clyde hissed, his eyes wide with encroaching terror. He gestured frantically at Eric, at the cards, at the entire, collapsing fiction around them. "You know too much. About what we've been doing. You or your friends won’t let this go!" His voice cracked, the raw, selfish fear of a man staring into the abyss of his own consequences. "I will NOT take the fall for this."

  A sad, almost pitying expression settled on Mark's face. He felt a fresh, warm trickle of blood from his nose as Clyde's magic, now a raw, unfocused force of pure desperation, slammed against the walls of his mind again. It was a clumsy, brutal assault compared to his previous attempts, more a desperate tantrum from a man who had completely lost control.

  There was nothing Mark could think of to force the escape, not that didn’t hold more risks for himself. He'd already set out his goals to the others, their escape was the priority, and to do that he had to attempt to force Clyde to leave and in doing so break the link.

  With a quiet, almost mournful sigh, Mark flipped the card.

  The brilliant, silver moonlight that had been flooding the pub vanished in an instant, plunging the room into a deep, profound darkness. The patrons near the front of the pub let out a collective, ghostly gasp and scrambled away from the windows, retreating into the shadows of the bar.

  The card on the table was something that dwarfed the moon, something that carried the weight of eons and the imagination of the infinite masses. It was the ringed gas giant.

  Saturn.

  The frosted glass of the pub's large front window didn't crack. It exploded inward in a silent, impossible shower of crystalline dust.

  And through the now-empty frame, the planet itself gazed in.

  It was not a distant, astronomical object. It was a presence. A colossal, silent god of gas and ice, its magnificent, shimmering rings filling the entire, impossible vista. It wasn't just in the sky, tt was a presence. The sheer, overwhelming scale of it was a physical weight, a pressure that seemed to press down on the very air in the room.

  Everything felt heavy. The half-empty pint glasses on the bar began to slide, inch by agonizing inch, toward the edge. Plates shifted on the tables. The very floor beneath their feet seemed to tilt, a slow, gravitational surrender to the impossible, terrifying reality that now filled the world. Saturn had come to Manchester, and it illuminated the tiny, grimy pub in a symphony of vast, silent, and ever-shifting colors, judging the insignificant, panicked struggles of the ants within.

  A wet, racking cough tore through Mark. He tasted blood, hot and coppery, and wiped a smear of it from his lips with the sleeve of his suit. The effort of holding this vast gravitationally incorrect reality in place was a monumentally stupid, self-destructive act. Tori hadn’t been wrong in her explanation, dreams and memories were not supposed to work this way. But it was necessary.

  Fight or Flight. The obsolete choice, and Mark was forcing the matter, a gamble of equal odds, all to win and all to lose.

  He looked at Clyde, at the man's pale, sweat-sheened face, his eyes wide with a terror that was no longer professional, but primal and unending.

  "Clyde," Mark rasped, his voice raw. "I'd like to introduce you to the King of the Titans." He gestured with a trembling, blood smeared arm to the beautiful, terrifying vista that filled the windows. "Meet Kronos."

  He let the name hang in the air, a devastating piece of a puzzle Clyde had never known existed, and had been solved for him. "The forgotten myth behind your own civilization!"

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  Eric was gone. He had vanished from his stool, a coward retreating from a reality he couldn't comprehend. Mark glanced down and saw him, a huddled, whimpering ball of arrogance under the table.

  "Impossible," Clyde gasped, the word a breathless, strangled sound. But he knew it wasn't. Mark could feel it. He could feel Clyde's magic, his Heart of Memory, reaching out, not to attack, but to read. To verify. Automatically absorbing everything as was its nature, a hunger to know more.

  And it was all there.

  Memories of science fact. Histories of untold centuries of gods and demons, of heroes and villains. The grand and blood soaked tapestry of myth from which the names of their own cities, of the entire Titan Collective, had been plucked like forgotten flowers. It was all there, a universe of context, a history they had forgotten or never known, and it was all true.

  The sheer, alien scope of it was too much. The truth, delivered not as a story, but as a raw, unfiltered data-stream of a thousand forgotten myths, broke him.

  Mark had gambled, and came out wrong. Pushed to the edge, Clyde had failed to take the easy option.

  Clyde erupted.

  The vast and utterly indifferent god of a planet staring in at him, and the confirmation from his own magic that this impossible reality was a truth deeper and older than any he had ever known... It was too much. The professional, the specialist, the man with the Jade Heart of Memory, he was gone. In his place was just a terrified, cornered animal, one that chose to lash out with everything it had left.

  His magic, the once sickly, oily green that had been scraping at the walls of the pub, turned to fire. A pale green flame utterly without control, it tore through the memory-space, not as a tool, but as a weapon of pure, nihilistic destruction. He wasn't trying anymore. He was burning everything to ash.

  The walls of the pub smouldered, the old, familiar wood dissolving into plumes of emerald flame, each layered memory stripping away to a cold white stain. The phantom patrons cried out, their forms flickering and distorting as they collapsed in silent agony. Clyde was tearing the memory apart, burning the stories, the histories, the very identities of the ghosts that populated this place in a desperate, frantic attempt to destroy the source of his own terror.

  But Saturn held.

  The silent planet remained, its judging glare boring into Clyde as the specialist screamed his defiance at a god he hadn't known existed. Flames jumping from the window frame only to die against a concept so huge.

  The ghostly flames continued spreading. Mark felt it, not as a physical heat, but as a searing, mental agony. His mind was burning. Fragments of his own history, the small, quiet moments that had made up his life, were shattering, consumed by the cold flames. The uncontrolled burn started with the pub, but from there it was spreading, a wildfire of destructive magic tearing through his patrons, each moment with then, then outwards towards his memories of Manchester.

  Mark collapsed. The strength to hold himself upright was gone, the effort of maintaining the impossible gravity of Saturn a monumental, self-destructive act that had left nothing in reserve against Clyde’s fiery panic. He slid from the stool, his body a dead weight, and hit the sticky, burning floor with a dull, final thud.

  Through the haze of his own burning mind, through the shimmering void-cold flames that were now consuming his world, he saw them, he had tried and was failing, failing them.

  The frosted glass of the booth at the back of the pub shattered, and his friends stumbled out into the chaos. He saw them gasp, their faces a mixture of terror and absolute awe as they, too, looked up and saw the terrifying reality of Saturn.

  The results were unexpected.

  The freezing, pale fire, which had been consuming the very fabric of his memory, sputtered and died. The agonizing, mental torment receded, leaving a dull, throbbing ache in its wake. Through the shimmering, heat-hazed air of the ruined pub, Mark saw Clyde's body, a puppet with its strings cut, just fall. He hit the floor with a wet thud, a dark pool of blood beginning to seep from the back of his head.

  Mark pushed himself up, his arms trembling with the effort, his mind a chaotic swirl of confusion. He saw Dawn and Tori, their faces pale with shock, trying to pull Valerie back.

  She was screaming. A raw, hysterical sound of pure, unadulterated horror. In his hand, Carl held a heavy, wooden barstool, which he had clearly just wrenched from her grasp.

  Mark’s mind, battered and bruised as it was, made the connection in an instant. He scrambled for the table, his hand slapping down on the card. He flipped it, the terrifying visage of Saturn vanishing, replaced by the swirling pattern of silver and gold on its back.

  The colossal planet faded from view. Through the shattered, empty frames of the pub's windows, the mundane, grimy reality of a smoldering, damaged Manchester street returned.

  Valerie had done it.

  In the chaos, in the moment when everyone, including Mark, had been consumed by the grand, cosmic spectacle, she had acted. The quiet healer, the woman who had spent a week painstakingly rebuilding his broken body, had picked up a barstool. And with the cold precision of a surgeon who knows exactly how a person is built, she had walked up behind the man who was tearing the world apart and hit him, once, at the base of the skull.

  Then she had broken down, the brutal horror of what she had done crashing over her. She was alternating between screams, a desperate, keening sound that was part apology, part accusation.

  "The pain... I couldn't... I could have ended it!"

  A manic laugh cut through Valerie's hysterical sobs. Eric Chambers emerged from the safety of the table, brushing a phantom speck of dust from the sleeve of his immaculate suit. He looked at the scene, at the unconscious form of Clyde, at the screaming, broken healer, at the small, stunned group of survivors. He was a broken man attempting to claim back a fragment of sanity as the situation progressed downhill.

  "You stupid, stupid children," he gasped, his once smooth voice, broken. "Did you really think it would be that easy?"

  He gestured with a dismissive wave of his hand toward Clyde's unmoving body. "He was our only way out. The only one with the ability and the anchor to navigate this... pathetic little fiction of yours."

  Pulling on a stool, he took far longer to sit than he should, his gaze always avoiding the sight of the broken window. "You've either trapped us all here, your delightful little family in your own private hell."

  "Or," he mused, his gaze settling on Mark with a look of between fear and malice, "if he dies here, his last, desperate act will be to pull himself to safety. But the rest of us… of you... the backlash... Coma patients at best."

  He paused, letting the full, horrifying implication land before he cupped his face in his hands and sobbed between broken laughs. "Until, of course," he croaked, "a tragic, and entirely unavoidable, accident is arranged… He… can… He will still save me… He won’t be paid…"