Narrator, freshly returned from a fractured battle in another kingdom, races through L.A.’s supernatural underbelly—soul leeches and guardian angels—with Detective Carnation and allies to rescue Jane from a serpent-guarded prison. Using "Emperor mode," they fight through a red tide of monsters, slaying a dragon to escape, only to flee into a police ambush where a butler assassin’s bullet is deflected back into his skull. The chase ends in a cursed forest, setting the stage for The Nightmare Feast, arriving March 2025. [Automatically generated summary]
The following contains strong language and adult themes and is intended for a mature audience.
Did I startle you?
No.
I'm just a little edgy.
I haven't been sleeping too well.
I noticed.
I, I've started to remember things.
I figured.
The people who follow you.
The phone calls when no one's there.
Do they know the truth?
I doubt it.
Look, we're almost done.
We should get going.
All right.
Remind me where we were?
I made plans to come to the prison with Detective Carnation.
Then I fought the battle for the skies over Aona.
Then, suddenly, I was back in L.A. Only time had passed, and I was in a different place.
So I called Carnation.
Another kingdom, the final season.
Written by me, Andrew Clavin.
Performed by Michael Knowles.
Episode 16, World and Underworld.
He gave me an address not far away.
I had no idea where my Priest of Death truck was, so I used my phone to summon a car.
A few moments later, a struggling actor drove up in a white Kia.
I hopped in the back seat.
The sound system was blaring, and I was immediately surrounded with what I would have called music if I were a savage and deaf.
But the semi-handsome fool behind the wheel rode the gas hard, and that was what mattered.
It was late.
Traffic was light.
We moved fast.
My heart beat faster and faster.
My emotions were still electric from the battle for the skies.
I could still feel the giant flying centipede wrapped around my arm as its harpy head snapped at me.
But even more electric was my anxiety for Jane.
Jane locked in the tower as her time ticked away.
I looked out the window, trying to think.
I could see the soul leeches everywhere, prowling on the pavements in search of food, gibbering at me through the windows of nearby cars, mocking me before they plunged their fangs back into the throats of the drivers.
I saw the bright guardians, too, a few of them.
One gray-white figure of incomparable beauty stood beside a muttering schizophrenic who was pushing her worldly goods along the gutter in a shopping cart.
The angelic figure lifted a hand to me as I went past, wishing me well.
I closed my eyes to all of it, tried to block out the horror and the crap music, tried to clear my thoughts.
How had this happened?
How had I left LA at one place and come back at another?
How had I left it one time and come back at another?
I remembered the battle for the skies, Curtin's army.
A red haze from below, but a demon throng when seen from above.
It was just like the world, wasn't it?
This world I was seeing all around me.
From one perspective, it was simply a city of men and women living, striving, worrying, dying, doing what people do.
But from another perspective, from the Emperor's perspective, it was Armageddon.
Armageddon all day long.
A civilization staggering under assault by monsters.
An epic struggle between humankind and an evil it could not even see.
Was my actor-driver just a kid with a dream and a god-awful taste in music?
Or was he the stuff of angels risking a life of beauty on a whispering delusion?
Or Roscoe?
Had he died in his bed, a billionaire surrounded by fawning attendants?
Or had he been devoured screaming by an unthinkable cosmic serpent?
Which was the reality?
Or were both real at once?
I remembered lying in my tent last night before the war, the two worlds mingling in my mind and in my vision.
All this long while I had been flashing back and forth between them, passing through doors between Los Angeles and another kingdom.
But was it possible I was, we were, all of us were, living in both kingdoms at the same time, all the time?
The imagination is an organ of perception, like the eye.
It sees as the eye sees.
I thought to myself, what power you would have if you could see, if you could know, if you could live in the whole truth every minute.
Emperor mode.
That had to be the answer.
The last level up.
The power to see into, to move into, not just one world or the other, but the whole simultaneous fullness of reality.
That had to be the power that had let me pass from one place and time to another.
So that had to be the power I could use to free Jane.
I wished I could test it, try it out, master it first.
But there was no time for that.
I had to hurry.
Midnight was careening toward me.
If I failed or faltered, Jane would die.
I felt the car slow.
Midnight's Approach00:10:50
I opened my eyes.
Where were we?
The Kia was rolling down a narrow and deserted lane lined with small shops, all closed for the day.
No people in sight here.
Just long rows of cars and trucks parked against the curbs.
The car came to a stop at the end of the block.
The would-be actor behind the wheel said, This is it.
I looked out.
I saw one lighted storefront window.
A striped pole was rotating above it.
Gold letters on the glass spelled out the name of the place.
Prince Charming Haircuts.
I got out of the car and approached the door.
It was an old-fashioned barber shop, a little place from another century.
A flickering fluorescent on the ceiling for light.
Two old green armchairs against one wall.
A long mirror on the wall opposite.
One barber chair by the mirror, one customer in the chair.
One barber working away at him with a scissors.
Snip, snip, snip.
The barber was a stooped black man in a white coat.
He had pomated hair and a thin mustache.
A living anachronism.
I pushed inside.
I stood staring at the uncanny scene.
The customer glanced over at me.
What's the matter, kid?
You never saw a man get a haircut before?
But the barber merely tilted his head.
I followed the gesture.
There was another door in the back of the room.
A blank brown wooden door.
I walked to it, kicking through the hanks of hair that littered the linoleum floor.
I pulled the door open.
My breath caught.
I recognized the place right away.
It was the place from my dream.
If it was a dream.
After I escaped the cemetery in the forest, I had run through the woods, the leeches chasing me.
I had seen a doorway in the dark, four men playing cards in a smoke-filled room.
Here it all was.
All real.
I stepped across the threshold.
The air was gray and smelly with smoke.
The four men were sitting at a round wooden table, just like in the dream.
They were playing poker, Texas hold them.
A stack of chips was piled in the center of the table, red, white, and blue.
There was a half-full bottle of whiskey, too, and a glass for each man.
And two metal ashtrays, because they were all puffing on cigars.
The smoke rose from them in swirling lines that traced faint seraphic figures in the foul air.
Through the fog of it, I could see a calendar on the wall with a photo of a half-naked woman to decorate the mund.
As the door swung shut behind me, Detective Carnation turned a card off the deck and dealt it down onto the tabletop.
The other three men peeled up the cards that lay before them and compared them to the line of cards face up on the table.
They were three thick men, all in their 40s.
Hard men in shirt sleeves, with their ties pulled loose.
Their jackets hung from their seatbacks.
Their shoulder harnesses were showing, and so were the Glocks holstered under their arms.
One of the men was white, bald, with a scruffy gray beard.
One man was black, sad-faced.
One was Latino, with broad, flat features like an ancient Aztec in a stone carving.
All of them seemed relics of another age.
The whole scene seemed to float in some imaginary nowhere out of time.
Bitch, said the white guy and tossed his cards into the center of the table.
I'm out!
Carnation looked up at me.
Where the hell have you been, Mr. Emperor Man?
It's a long story.
Is this your army of true believers?
Carnation glanced at his pals and snorted.
A sad army, but my own.
Have you got a plan to get me into the tower?
We might.
Have you got a plan to get out?
I might.
I didn't think I could explain to him about emperor mode.
I wasn't sure I could explain it to myself.
What about afterwards?
You have someplace you can hide Jane?
Carnation looked around the shabby little room.
This place could use a woman's touch.
The black guy chuckled.
A woman wouldn't touch this place with a 10-foot pole.
The other guys smirked.
Carnation sighed.
He dropped the deck onto the table.
Guess this game is over.
What?
We're going? asked the Aztec guy.
He seemed surprised.
But Carnation shrugged and gestured toward me.
Hey, he's the emperor.
It was 9.30 by the time the five of us marched out of the barbershop and piled into the white van parked just in front.
We tore away from the curb with a screech of tires.
The van jounced on the pitted pavement.
The interior quickly filled with cigar smoke.
I was afraid it was going to be a nauseating ride.
And, oh yes, it was.
Carnation drove like a maniac.
He sped through the busy streets, running red lights as horns honked all around us.
I watched him nervously from the passenger seat.
He leaned in hard over the steering wheel, his face close to the windshield.
He stared at the road like he could burn holes in the pavement with his eyes.
He chomped on the end of his cigar like it was gum.
As air blew up through the vents, sparks flew off the lit end of his stogie.
When we pulled onto the freeway, he pushed the rickety machine up to 80.
What's the matter, Emperor? said the black guy from the seat behind the driver.
You look a little green.
You got something against green people?
The bald guy laughed.
Scotty's with the FBI.
Carnation gestured with a thumb over his shoulder, but I couldn't tell which one of the men he was pointing at.
He's got our ID papers.
Pauli's from Corrections.
He'll pave the way.
They'll be expecting us.
Expecting us?
I had been focused on not puking, but that last statement got my attention.
I turned to Carnation.
Why would they be expecting us?
But then I got it.
You mean they'll think we're the assassins?
Well, they don't know they're assassins, right?
They've been told a team from DC is coming to ask Jane questions about a connected federal investigation.
And that's who they'll think we are.
Carnation nodded.
If we're lucky, yeah.
That's how we'll get you in.
But how you get out?
Well, you're on your own.
I blew out a long breath.
I swallowed, nauseous.
I coughed as the stinking cigar smoke filled my lungs.
If I don't.
If you don't what? said Carnation, chewing his cigar.
If I don't get out.
Yeah?
What then?
Go find my sister.
She's in the Orozgo retreat.
The crazy house?
Yeah.
What's she doing there?
She's crazy.
Oh, he shrugged.
Well then.
But you have to get her out.
Why's that?
They'll kill her once they realize how much she knows.
If I don't make it out of the jail, you have to get her.
He eyed me sideways, but did not slow the van.
It continued to dodge and weave, bump and roll nauseatingly through the traffic.
How much does she know?
Everything.
Really?
In her crazy way, yeah.
She's how I found you.
Her and her friends, they told me about.
The van hit a bump and rose and fell in a slow rolling motion.
At the same time, it continued its headlong plunge.
I swallowed a throat full of vomit and groaned.
What?
What did they tell you?
I breathed deep, trying to soothe my stomach, but inhaling cigar smoke only made it worse.
The forest.
They told me about a forest.
In fact, I had forgotten about the forest until now.
It was the one part of the mad girl's chant I had not yet decoded.
I'm supposed to bring you there.
Handling the steering wheel with one hand, Carnation plucked his stogie from his mouth with the other and spit loose tobacco at the windshield.
The gob hung there a moment, then dribbled down the glass.
Makes sense, Emperor Man.
What forest?
Where?
I thought back to what the girls had said.
The forest is all one tree, they told me.
They told me, plant the carnation in the earth beneath.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
The forest is all one tree.
My nausea forgotten for a moment, I stared into the clouds of stinky smoke surrounding my head like a cowl.
The forest is all one tree, I thought.
What was it supposed to mean exactly?
Then I remembered the priest of death driving me to the killing place.
I remembered him saying, I always prefer it when people disappear.
Then I and the black poker player in the back seat spoke at the same time.
Aspens, we said.
I glanced at the black poker player.
What?
What about aspens?
He pointed at me with his cigar.
An aspen forest can be all one tree.
Each tree is a clone of the other with one big root system beneath the earth.
Pondo, they call it.
It's Latin for I spread.
How do you know that?
The bald poker player asked him.
I read books.
You should try it.
It's where I left the priest of death, the assassin Richard sent to kill me.
I think it's his place.
The place where he makes people disappear.
That must be what Alexis knew, how she blackmailed Solomon Vine to get the part in my movie.
That's why they didn't bury her there.
She was too famous to disappear.
Someone would have always been looking for her, and they might have found the forest.
So they killed her and framed Jane, in case Alexis had told her too.
Once Jane hanged herself in her cell, that would wrap up all the loose ends.
There'd be no reason to go on investigating.
That's what the mad girls were telling me.
To plant you, Carnation, in the earth beneath the aspens, to tell you to dig up the forest and find out what Alexis knew.
Serpent Guard's Gaze00:15:33
Carnation shrugged again.
All right.
I'll dig the place up.
Where is it?
I gave him directions to the Aspen Forest where I'd buried the Priest of Death.
Then, to my enormous relief, we came bouncing off the freeway and headed for the jail.
Another kingdom is coming to its epic conclusion, but that doesn't mean you have to stop enjoying it because Book Two, The Nightmare Feast, releases as a novel in March.
Relive the greatest moments from Austin's clashes with Orosco's assassins and his struggle through Curtin's haunted mansion, all in glorious hardcover.
In the second book of the trilogy, Austin must traverse the 11 lands to find the Emperor and restore the Queen to her throne, all while trying to track down his kooky sister in California before Orosco's assassins get to her first.
Pre-order it now on Amazon and dive back into the story on March 3rd.
And now, back to Another Kingdom, the final season.
The tower compound was lit with spotlights now.
The beams cut through the drifting tendrils of night mist.
The weird lopsided jail looked even more like a gothic ruin in the semi-darkness than it had when I visited during the day.
I could picture Jane in her cell in the upper stories, locked away, waiting for me, waiting for her assassins, wondering who would get there first.
You're sure about the time, I said, looking up at the high dark windows.
The time when the killers come.
You're sure it's midnight.
That's what my informants told me.
But no, I'm not sure about anything.
So we could get there and find her already hanging in her cell.
He didn't answer.
The van bounced over the spiked security barrier and pulled through the compound gate.
I was sick and dizzy from the ride, and my chest was so tight with suspense I could barely breathe.
There was a guard in a booth here.
Carnation showed him a handful of IDs.
The guard was a tall, unfriendly-looking Latino guy.
He had intelligent eyes, and he studied the IDs carefully for a long time.
He shined a flashlight on them, then shined it through the van's windows over each of our faces.
I held my breath.
I squinted through the glare at the guard.
I caught a glimpse of some slithering something peeking up from the back of his shirt collar.
It had a strangely human face.
It grinned at me.
Then it ducked back into the guard's clothes.
Kill the Stogies, the guard said then.
He handed our papers back to Carnation.
This is a no-smoking facility.
He waved us through.
The journey into the belly of the jail passed in a dream of fear.
What if they stopped us before we reached Jane?
What if the real assassins arrived and cut us down?
What if they had already been and gone?
The image of that sweet girl strangled in her cell haunted me every step of the way.
Carnation and the three poker players surrounded me as we came through the metal detector and entered the tower halls.
We stopped at checkpoints.
We climbed upstairs.
One guard escorted us for a little distance.
Then another guard took us further on.
We strode past tiers of cells above a central courtyard filled with cots.
Our footsteps thumped on the concrete walkway.
Aside from us, it was all women here, a purgatory of women.
There were the rough, thick-set guards with their doughy faces.
Their expressions were watchful and combative.
Their aggressive figures jutted and bulged.
They wore heavy, walky talkies on their belts and heavy clubs that looked like they could crack an elephant's skull.
And then there were the prisoners in their yellow shirts and blue sweatpants, sitting on the edges of their pallets or lying on their backs.
Tough, frightened, angry, despairing women, dragging their asses through one more shitty moment of their shitty lives.
And then there were the creatures.
Oh, it was bad.
The soul leeches were everywhere, crawling out of the guards' collars to gnaw their way into the flesh of their necks, writhing under the prisoners' shirts to latch onto their breasts and suck their spirits like mother's milk.
Some were planted in the open on top of the poor women's heads, their claws sunk deep into their scalps and their fanged mouths grinning gorily.
They recognized me now.
These demons.
Somehow word had traveled between the worlds and they knew I carried the emperor inside me.
They squealed and gabbled at me with indescribable malevolence as I passed by them.
They promised me death with their yellow eyes.
You cannot save her, they hissed and whispered.
She is ours.
We reached the last door, a thick metal door with a thick plexiglass square of a window in the center of it.
The guard on our side pressed a buzzer.
A guard within looked out at us.
As soon as I saw this last guard's face, I knew she was trouble.
It was a nasty pie plate of a pasty white face with flattened features.
No trace of femininity, of kindness, or of grace.
I think that's what set off the alarm bells in my mind.
Not to mention the enormous serpent that had already melded with most of her broad body.
I felt the blood drain from my cheeks when I saw it.
I must have turned white as paper.
She and the serpent were almost one thing, their faces a single human-reptile amalgam.
I turned to Carnation.
I saw the tension in my own heart reflected in his expression.
Go back.
He blinked, startled.
Go back?
I'll meet you on the northeast corner outside the fence.
He stared at me.
I nodded.
After a moment, he nodded back.
He turned to the others, made a gesture with his head.
Let's get out of here.
Just then, the door buzzed so loudly it made me catch my breath.
My heart started fluttering.
The door swung open.
The serpent guard eyed me across the threshold.
I think she could see how rattled I was.
One corner of her mouth lifted in an ugly smile.
The serpent that was consuming her hissed with glee, its yellow eyes wide.
What are you looking at? The guard said to me.
I kept my mouth shut.
I glanced back at Carnation.
We'll be waiting for you.
Come on, boys.
The four men turned away and headed back down the corridor with their corrections officer leading the way.
I turned and stepped across the threshold into the final passage.
I was alone there with the serpent guard.
She made me show her my idea again.
She studied it for what seemed like an hour.
All the while, the serpent part of her writhed and glared at me, drooling venom.
It knew who I was.
The guard part of her sensed something was wrong.
I could tell.
But she was uncertain.
She had been expecting Jane's assassin.
She was the inside woman who was going to let him in and look the other way while Jane was strangled to death.
So she figured I was the guy.
She saw the assassin she was expecting to see, even though the serpent tried to warn her that the emperor had come.
All right, the guard said finally.
Follow me.
I met her eyes.
It wasn't easy since her eyes and the snake's eyes kept blending together and coming apart.
I nodded.
She turned and led the way down the hall.
We came to the end of the corridor.
There was a heavy door there that had no bars or windows.
This was solitary.
They must have put Jane here to make it easier to murder her in secret.
The serpent guard punched a coat into the lockpad by the jam.
The door buzzed.
The latch slid back with a loud metallic snap.
The serpent guard hauled the heavy door open.
I saw Jane dangling there from the light fixture, her eyes bulging, her tongue black.
But no, that was just fear.
A vision of fear.
In fact, she was still there, still alive.
She was standing in the middle of the tiny cell, small and vulnerable looking in her papery jail outfit.
Her little cot was beside her and her pitiful steel toilet and sink behind her to her right.
The expression on her face when I first walked in was both calm and ferocious.
She wasn't expecting me.
She was expecting her killers.
She was ready to meet death with serene defiance.
She was going to show them how to die invincible.
In the next second, she recognized me.
She caught her breath and only just stopped herself before she cried out in joy and gave the game away.
Behind her, behind and just above her, I saw one of the bright guardians hovering in the light from the bare bulb, almost indistinguishable from the light.
As I lifted my eyes to it, it blended with the light entirely and was gone.
I turned to the serpent guard.
Give us a few moments.
The guard hesitated.
The serpent was whispering in her ear, but she couldn't quite hear it.
Finally, she said, I'll be right outside.
I nodded.
The guard left the cell and shut the door.
She worked the keypad, and I heard the lock snap back into place.
Jane let out a whispered, oh, and threw herself into my arms.
Even then, even full of fear, I reveled in the feel of her body against mine.
It filled my heart.
She drew away, her hands on my shoulders.
She looked up at me, her eyes brimming.
What are we going to do?
We're going to get out of here.
How?
How can we?
I didn't answer.
I just put one arm around her and pressed her against my side.
With my other hand, I reached out into the empty air.
I remembered how Maude had taught me to suspend my thoughts and rise above my fear.
I did that now.
And more than that.
I suspended myself entirely.
I made my own ego shrink into nothing and let that other self inside me take over.
As smoothly, as simply as gliding from sleep into awareness, I entered Emperor mode.
Suddenly, there before me was the secret substance of the air.
The movement of matter, the fabric of energy, the weird material of time all moving in the silence of a living music that even here in this solitary cell left traces on my consciousness of a vast and breathless joy.
I reached into the whirling dance with my extended hand and pouring all my will into my fingers, carved a doorway out of the nothingness.
A glowing portal opened on the unknown.
Jane gasped.
My God, Austin, what is it?
It's just the world, Jane.
It's the world as it really is.
Can we go in?
We haven't got a lot of choice.
Either we go in there or we die in this cell.
I glanced from the glowing opening to her.
Her gentle face was taut and grim.
I'm afraid.
Hold on to me.
Don't let go.
I braced myself.
I drew breath.
But before we could escape through that glowing portal, the cell door buzzed loudly again and came crashing open.
Orozco's butler assassin charged into the cell.
Two fire-breathing bats were perched upon his shoulder, screeching like demons.
He was there to murder Jane.
The serpent guard was right behind him, glaring at me, hissing.
Get away from her!
The butler and the two bats and the serpent guard all shouted at once.
The butler brandished his weapon, a deadly knife of thick plastic, a killer's blade meant to be smuggled through the metal detectors.
He grinned eagerly and stepped toward me.
You're a dead man.
I drew my sword and placed the point beneath his chin.
Shocked, he stopped cold.
He stopped grinning.
He stared as my armor rose to the surface and covered me, my imperial insignia on my breastplate, my red cape draped down over my back.
What?
He cried out.
Tell my brother I'm coming for him.
Then, as he and the serpent guard looked on in shock and wonder, I carried Jane through the glowing portal into the mad depths of reality.
Jane let out a fearful cry.
Don't look at them.
Look at me.
The beasts were everywhere, a nightmare sea of creatures seething with red death.
We were drowning in their slithering bodies, choking on the green stench of them, deafened by their gibbering and hissing.
I felt Jane's body shudder in my grip.
Oh God, Austin.
Oh God.
Don't look.
What are they?
Oh God, they're awful.
It's just the world, Jane.
Just look at me.
I kept my left arm around her.
I pressed her hard against my chest.
My right arm was raised before us, my sword in my hand.
I was fully covered in my armor now, my cape fluttering behind me.
But Jane was all exposed, dressed in nothing but her papery jail outfit.
Her shuddering grew more intense.
Her stuttered breathing shook me to the core.
But how else could she react?
Even I, who had seen a million horrors, had never seen anything like this.
Who knew such an ocean of evil surged beneath the surface of the everyday?
We had entered that space beyond space, that time beyond time, where things are what they are, and there are no masks of matter to disguise them.
Somewhere, I prayed, there was a heaven as sweet as this was hideous, but not here.
Not here beneath the jailhouse.
This was the undersurface of the worst of the world, and it was all monsters.
No one, no mortal man or woman, could have seen that sight and kept his sanity.
But I could, because back in the shit-filled sewers of Galeana, Maude had taught me how to let myself disappear, and I was gone, gone, gone.
Only the Emperor was in my mind now.
Only he, his vision, his perfect imagination, was looking out through my eyes.
And only he could bring us through this place alive.
The sea of creatures shrieked and gibbered.
Emperor's Vision00:12:01
They knew me.
They knew him, that is, the emperor, on sight.
At first, they recoiled from him in fear, opening a narrow space for us to move among the squirming waves of them.
I felt them touch us as we passed.
They slithered over us, spat at us, and threatened us with dripping fangs and snapping claws.
But still, they knew that I, he, the emperor, had slaughtered an army of their kind in the skies above Aona, and they hesitated and drew back.
I kept my sword raised and pushed my way forward.
The beasts parted before me, but a filthy slime lingered in the air and clung to us.
Their black breath became our only atmosphere, a whole environment of malignant emptiness, a fathomless cancer stinking of despair.
Jane held on to me so hard I thought she would become one with my armor.
I could feel her trembling violently.
I could hear her fighting to draw breath.
I was afraid I was losing her.
I was not sure her sanity could survive the sight of this place.
But now, as I edged ahead, as I forced my way step by step through the swelling mass of pulsing forms and malevolent faces, I saw a sight in the distance that gave me hope.
Two sentinels of a higher power were posted on the far side of the living darkness.
The swelling tide of slithering red degradation broke against them, but could not overwhelm them where they stood.
Their arms were raised.
Their golden white drapery was blowing in the foul wind.
Between them, their robes formed a passage into some bright somewhere I could not quite see.
They were far away.
God, they were so far.
And I sensed the monsters, who until now, had feared to come at me, were gathering their courage, getting ready to attack.
I held the shuddering Jane against me and made my way through the half-parted tide of crawling horror, my eyes trained on that swirling passage between the guardians.
One step, then another.
Then the beasts surged over us.
One of the braver serpents started the assault.
It broke from the impenetrable tangle of the rest.
It darted its enormous open mouth at the side of Jane's face where it was bare above my protective arm.
It almost plunged its fangs into her, but I plunged my silver sword through its neck first and then tore upward.
The thing's head fell limp, half severed but still snarling.
Green, smoky, acid blood gushed out of the writhing body.
I threw my sword arm over Jane's head, muffling her scream.
The serpent's blood poured over my armor and sizzled and bubbled on the surface of the magic mercury.
The rest of the monsters saw their chance and the writhing tide closed over us.
Jane and I were both engulfed in a swirming, hissing, hellish wave, unable to move or breathe.
The things tried to bite at me, but my armor repelled them.
Their teeth shattered on my shoulder and sides, and their heads whipped back and away as they shrieked in agony.
So they went for Jane instead, wriggling under my arm to get at her.
I pressed forward, sucking in their unholy stench, shopping, stabbing, slashing at anything that got close to Jane's exposed face and neck.
But it was no good.
There were just too many of them.
A centipede with a hag's face squirmed up from below us and bit into the inside of Jane's thigh before I could stop it.
She cried out as if she felt it latch onto her very soul.
I stomped on the thing's body with my armored heel.
Once, twice, then the third time I crushed it.
But even so, I had to flick the head out of Jane's leg with the point of my sword.
And by then, a bat had latched onto her neck so that she let out another wail and I knew it was feeding on her.
I tore the thing off, still pushing forward, every minute pushing forward and fighting to keep myself, my own cringing fear, my own trembling spirit, from rising into my mind and crowding out the Emperor.
I knew if even for a second I allowed my own ego to see through my own eyes, I'd be lost as Jane was lost, and I'd lose Jane too.
Both of us would become so much meat and drink to these devils.
They would devour us in this nether realm until there was nothing left.
I had to let the Emperor have all of me.
All.
I punched some gibbering demon in the face with the fist that gripped the sword, then jabbed the point of the blade into a hovering serpent who was searching for a spot to strike.
Jane had suddenly gone dreadfully silent.
Her clothes were sopping with blood.
Her face was smeared with it.
I only knew she was still alive because I could feel her trembling.
I knew I was losing her, though.
The snakes were slithering past my defenses.
They were wrapping their hideous bodies around her limbs, climbing up her to nose at her face.
They were everywhere.
I couldn't keep them all away.
But I shouted and struck out with my sword and shouldered deeper into the monster ocean.
And now I could see again, just barely see, the draped and lovely guardians making a space for us before them and holding a portal open between them, a door back into the life we knew.
The portal was closer now.
The sight of it so near gave me fresh strength.
I roared and somehow yanked my arm free of the tide, free enough to slash to left and right.
Surprised and wounded by the fresh assault, the red waves pulled back from us.
For a moment now, there was a passage up ahead, a free path to where the angels held the exit open.
I thought I could almost see the world through the portal, the spotlights of the tower complex glaring in at us.
Four steps across the open space, maybe five, and we'd be through.
I charged the portal.
I didn't make it.
Before I could reach the twin guardians who stood like columns at the portal's sides, the red tide broke between us.
It spilled down into the space before me.
Serpents and bats and centipedes and goblins all spilled down and curled up in front of me in the form of a single creature, an immense dragon with leathery wings spread wide as the open sky.
It reared high, snarling.
It opened its enormous fanged maw.
I saw the flames gather at the back of its throat.
Jane!
I wrapped both arms around her and turned my back so that my body stood between the dragon and Jane.
The dragon spat a stream of fire.
We were bathed in flame.
My armor kept us alive.
Even my cape protected us.
It could not be burned, but I could feel the hot death closing in around us.
Another moment and we'd be cinders.
I roared in pain.
I pressed Jane close to me with one arm.
With the other arm, I drove my sword backward, blind.
The Emperor guided my hand.
I felt the blades sink deep into the belly of the beast.
The stream of flame became a coughing spurt, then stopped.
I turned, using my full weight to drag my sword as far across the creature as I could, ripping its guts open like cutting through leather.
I tore the sword free, and the beast split open.
The creatures that had poured into the making of it started pouring out again, climbing, twisting, falling out of its stomach.
The whole tide of red death, the whole black atmosphere of infinite murder, spilling over my feet and rising up my legs to smother me again.
I gave another roar, as loud as the beast had roared.
I waded into the center of that surging red-black tide.
There, yards away, was the gleaming portal open between the guardians.
I fought toward it, reached it, and holding tight to Jane, I hurled myself through.
Then there was only noise, a high, shattering alarm enveloping us.
We were outside the tower, on the street just beyond the compound fence.
I was still in my armor.
Jane was still in my arms.
Someone had set off the jail's alarm.
The compound spotlights were sweeping the night territory, looking for the escaped prisoners, me and Jane.
The alarm was deafening, and sirens were growing as loud as the alarm as the whirling red blue of police lights whipped the dark air and a cavalry of LAPD cruisers came speeding down the street to join the hunt for us.
Guards were pouring out of the tower, guard after guard charging at us in a thick wedge across the compound.
They were armed.
Some gripped pistols, some rifles.
The fence gate was swinging open so they could get at us.
As they came closer, I caught sight of the butler assassin among them.
He was running at us too.
He was carrying a rifle.
His eyes were bright with murder.
Under the sound of the alarm, under the sound of the sirens, there was a wild screech of tires.
My emperor!
It was Carnation, Carnation in the white van.
With Jane unconscious and bloody in my arms, I spun to him.
The van had pulled up alongside us.
The Aztec poker player was holding open the side door.
Get in!
I swept Jane up into the air.
Blood dripped from her onto the macadam.
I handed her body through the van door.
The Aztec took her.
He started to pull her inside.
Come on!
The bald guy shouted from the van's depths.
He reached out for me.
I was about to leap into the van myself when I saw the bald guy and the black poker player both looking over my shoulder.
I saw them both go wide-eyed with fear as they stared past me.
I turned around to see what they saw.
The army of guards was still charging at us, but the butler assassin had come to a stop.
He was standing on the far side of the open gate.
He had lifted his rifle to his eye.
He was pointing it straight at the van, straight at Jane where the Aztec was trying to maneuver her inside.
Go!
I shouted at Carnation.
Carnation didn't hesitate a second.
He hit the gas.
The van sped away even as the police cars came racing down the street after it.
At the same moment, the butler pulled the rifle's trigger.
I wheeled my sword up in front of me in an arc so precise, only the emperor within me could have made it.
I saw a flash of flame as the bullet ricocheted off the blade.
The assassin looked up from his rifle, as if startled.
But he wasn't startled.
He was stone cold dead.
The emperor's perfect swordsmanship had sent the killer's own bullet bouncing back to hit him in the center of his forehead, smack between the eyes.
It was so sudden that Butler's corpse actually stood erect another second before collapsing to the earth.
By then, I was already charging straight at the army of guards all around his body.
I rushed through the compound's open gate.
An instant later, I was in a forest full of dead men.
Another Kingdom, the final season.
Written by me, Andrew Clavin.
Performed by Michael Knowles.
Voice work for the secretary, Caitlin Maynard.
Episode 16, World and Underworld, was directed by Jonathan Hay.