Austin’s triumph in Shadow Wood—defeating Curtin, presiding over a double wedding—ends abruptly as he’s beaten unconscious by guards and imprisoned for two weeks. Meanwhile, Jane escapes custody, Orozgo’s empire collapses after mass graves expose child trafficking, and his allies flee or die amid scandals. Freed on Day 14, Austin learns his actions triggered a conspiracy unraveling: Orozgo’s murders, cover-ups, and the 730 Club’s dark secrets now face public outrage, though corporate media dismisses it. Now writing a book, speaking out, and raising a family with Jane, Austin fights back not with weapons but with truth—turning hatred into quiet defiance as Hollywood’s hypocrites condemn him while his legacy reshapes the world. [Automatically generated summary]
The following contains strong language and adult themes and is intended for a mature audience.
Another Kingdom, the final season.
Written by me, Andrew Clavin.
Performed by Michael Knowles.
Episode 18.
The end of the story.
It was nearly dusk again when we gathered in Toritanio's clearing.
I and Cambitis, Favian, Maud, and Natani stood together by the oak and waited for night to fall.
My weary armies were spread all through the forest.
I could see the lights of their campfires flickering among the trees, melding with the last bright rays of the setting sun.
I could hear the people singing hymns of celebration.
A strange sorrow had come over me now, a strange mingling of sorrow and of joy.
Victory was ours, but the city had fallen.
The quest was successful, but the journey was coming to an end.
As the sun began to disappear beneath the horizon, as the rays of its light receded over the forest floor, drawn back toward the edge of gathering twilight, I moved away from my companions.
I went and stood beside the river, alone.
I looked across the water into the darkening trees.
I thought about where I had left myself back in Los Angeles.
Outside the tower, unarmed, surrounded by on-rushing guards.
What would become of me?
I wondered.
I heard a light footstep on the leaves behind me.
I smiled to myself.
I knew it was Maud.
My emperor.
I turned to face her.
In the last of the light, I let my eyes linger on her elfin beauty.
How happy she looked.
How much in love.
You don't have to call me that.
But it's who you are.
I let out a broken sigh.
It's who I am for now while I'm here.
But I can already feel myself leaving.
Her lips quivered.
She frowned.
Yes, I know.
I'm going away from here, aren't I?
She nodded again, her eyes glistening.
I will miss you very much.
She reached out impulsively and rested her cool, unsteady hand on my elbow.
She said nothing.
I tried to smile at her.
I'm afraid, you know.
I'm afraid of what I'll become when I'm gone.
I don't know what I'll do without you to annoy me and advise me.
Without the emperor inside me.
I'm afraid to be alone.
Maud gave a little puff of laughter through her tears.
You will never be alone, Austin.
Still holding my elbow, she moved closer to me.
She looked up at me.
Her damp cheeks reflected the gloaming.
I've been a good friend to you, haven't I?
Always.
An incredibly irritating, incredibly good friend.
And a good advisor.
Likewise irritating, but yes, the best.
Then let me advise you now before you go.
I drew a deep breath.
I nodded.
Maud went on.
Nothing you have seen here vanishes.
Nothing you have won is ever lost.
You know the place to which you are returning.
It is a place of flickering shadows, masquerading as the real.
You know there will be trouble there, and worse than trouble, and pain, and worse than pain.
You will be surrounded by corruption always, and evil sometimes, and you will be tempted to despair.
So far, not encouraged.
Then remember this.
This, which your good friend tells you.
Despair is a delusion.
The battle is over, Ost.
You have already conquered.
Victory is yours.
Ah, Maud, can you remember that?
I bit my lip.
I shook my head.
I don't know.
Try.
Try to remember.
Then all will be well.
With that, the sun went down.
The woods went dark, except for the campfires visible in the distance all around us.
Maud took my hand and led me to rejoin our friends beside the oak.
We waited there together.
And barely had the evening spread beneath the trees when the weird sights and sounds of the forest gathered around us.
The wings of fairies humming, their colored lights.
The white of misty nymphs rising from the river and their sweet songs.
The drums of trolls, the trumpets of the centaurs, the panpipes of fawns all blending into a sweet silence of pervasive music as the creatures assembled under the branches to await their king and queen.
Toritanio and Magdala came, as they always came, on chariots of starlight.
They descended among us and sat on their moonlight thrones.
I approached the king alone.
I inclined my head first to his noble queen, then to him.
Your Highness.
He rose, taking his wife's hand, and she rose, and they stepped forward to greet me.
My emperor.
Toritanio, crowned with leaves and wreathed in smiles, lifted his voice so all his creatures could hear him, but he spoke to me.
These lands belong to you now, Emperor, sea to sea.
I bowed my head and answered, And because you saved Ilinda's life, Your Highness, I grant this forest to you and your queen forever.
We will rule here as you and your queen rule everywhere.
Let wisdom reign, and each man go his way.
The strange company of the woods let out a sound that was something like a cheer and something like a choir singing.
I waited for them to grow quiet.
Then I raised my voice and said, But how then shall I reign without my wisdom, Toritanio?
The danger is finally over, my friend.
Bring the queen home.
With that, the whole moonlit forest came to a silent hesitation.
We waited.
Toritanio took one step toward the oak and lifted up his hands.
The great tree glowed and creaked and began to open at the center.
From far away came the jarring noise of traffic and confusion.
As we all stood watching, a doorway opened into another kingdom.
LA.
A moment later, Ellen Evermore stepped from the broken city into shadow wood, transforming into Queen Elinda as she came.
Her blouse and dress became a golden robe that dazzled even in the forest evening.
Her golden hair acquired a sun-bright crown that haloed her with light.
Behind her, in the blurred and fading city, I could see the mad, addicted homeless gathering shoulder to shoulder, dumbstruck, dazed, raising their hands to her in farewell.
I imagined they'd tell the world what they had seen until the doctors gave them enough medication to make them forget.
The portal closed, but the great oak went on glowing.
As Queen Elinda stepped clear, King Cambitis, the not altogether wise, cried out in happiness.
His daughter smiled and wept at once as she came into his arms and he embraced her.
He held her a long time, and then Magdala held her.
Then the queen took her by the hand and led her to the emperor, to me.
The last time I saw them, the last time I saw any of them, they were all gathered around the king of shadow wood as he performed the double wedding ceremony with due solemnity.
The fairies flashed their rainbow lights, the misty nymphs sang, and all the creatures played their instruments as King Cambitis presented Elinda to Anastasius, and Magdala stood by Maud and Natani, playing mother of the bride.
The king pronounced the rites over both beaming couples simultaneously.
I could never be quite sure when I detached from the emperor and became only myself again.
I think it was when the queen reached out to me, to him, and took his hand.
Some shock of completion seemed to dislodge me from his body then.
I felt myself reeling gently away into the night, back and away from him toward the glowing oak as it opened once again into a portal so that I could drift through it, a free spirit, alone.
The magic wood grew small and distant, then faded to darkness like the end of a movie.
The next second, everything was brain-shattering noise and blinding lights.
I was standing, goggle-eyed, within the fence of the tower compound, an army of guards rushing at me, their weapons drawn as they screamed curses and threats.
I saw at least a dozen pistols and rifles pointed at my face.
I stood there, frozen with confusion, shock, and fear, too dazed and stupid to fight or run.
Hold it right there!
Hands up!
Move and I'll blow your head off!
Their shouts were nearly swallowed by the screaming sirens.
But I understood them well enough.
I raised my hands as they surrounded me.
It was a hell of an end to a double wedding in a magic wood.
One man, a guard, a captain, stepped from the crowd and strolled casually toward me, holstering his pistol as he came.
He was taller than I was and stared down at me with eyes narrowed in disdain.
Slowly, deliberately, he drew a club from his belt and tapped it against his thigh.
He fixed his eyes on me, silently daring me to make a move.
The sirens screamed.
The searchlights flashed around us, crossing the night-shadowed compound fence to fence.
Tap, tap, tap, went the captain's billy.
A long time passed that way.
My hands still raised, I looked around me.
I tried to enter emperor mode, to see the soul leeches that fed on the corrupt, to try to open a passage into the hell beneath reality, so that I could fight my way through the devils there and escape from this place.
But it was no good.
I couldn't do it.
I couldn't see the real beneath the real.
I couldn't make a portal in the surface of the world.
I couldn't locate that level of consciousness within myself.
It was no longer available.
I felt like a character at the end of a video game who has acquired all sorts of weapons and powers and now has to start the sequel stripped of them all, with nothing left to fight with but his fists and the ability to jump up and down like some kind of idiot.
My heart sank, and a pall of sorrow draped me head to toe.
Where was my sword?
My armor?
Where were my armies?
And the voices shouting, hail!
Where were even my magic friends to encourage me?
I felt lost and abandoned on the hostile planet of everyday existence.
The sirens stopped, all of them together.
Silence.
A city silence full of the whisper and rumble of traffic settled over us as the sweeping lights came to rest on the gates where we all were gathered.
The captain went on looking down at me, went on tapping his club against his thigh.
He was a formidable figure with skin the color of dark chocolate and with a thin patina of black hair on his narrow skull.
He was tall and fit and wide and straight as a ramrod.
In the sudden quiet after the alarms, a woman's rough voice called to him, He's dead, Cap!
The captain glanced over his shoulder, and I glanced.
I saw Orozgo's butler assassin lying spread eagle on the asphalt, felled by his own bullet, dead in a pool of his own blood.
The captain looked back at me and scowled darkly.
I wondered what sort of demon had its teeth sunk into the core of him, but I couldn't see.
You son of a bitch.
His club stopped tapping.
I saw his fist tighten on the shaft.
He deeked me with a sidelong glance, and instinctively, I dropped my hands and reached across my body for my sword.
My hand closed on useless nothing.
No weapon at my side.
No armor surrounding me.
Of course not.
My powers.
All my powers.
They're all gone.
That was my last thought before the captain's club smacked into the side of my head.
I felt the world careen away from me.
My eyes rolled up.
My legs wobbled.
My body crumpled to the ground.
My mind was drowned in darkness.
Vaguely, I remember being hauled semi-conscious on wobbly legs to the nearby men's facility.
I gazed stupidly at one hostile face after another as they processed me through fingerprinting and mugshots and a humiliating cavity search.
I fought to regain my senses, muttering drunken nothings at one guard after another.
Bloody drool rolled down my chin as two guards shackled me, seized me by the arms, and marched me into the core of the jail.
Returned to Shadows00:10:49
We crossed a common area of open cots surrounded by yellow cell doors with plexiglass windows.
We headed toward a metal stairway in one corner.
I started to come around, look around.
What a nightmare place this was.
Full of men weeping on their cots, rocking on them with their heads in their hands.
Voices screaming from the cells.
Shadowy figures pounding on the windows with both fists.
These weren't criminals.
Not all of them anyway.
Many were simply madmen, left on the streets until they snapped and did violence, then locked up here.
The guards marched me up to the next tier, then marched me down the tier past one yellow door after another.
Prisoners pressed their faces to the windows and watched me go.
I heard them shouting, their voices muffled by the thick steel of the doors.
Hard to make out the words, but I thought one of them called out to me.
Or maybe I just wished for that in my heartbroken solitude.
We came to rest before the last door on the tier.
The latch buzzed loudly, and one guard worked the door open.
The other guard took off my shackles and hurled me, staggering, over the threshold.
Then the door slammed shut behind me.
I reeled, my head throbbing.
I blinked at the walls, at the steel toilet, at the cramped bunk bed.
To my still foggy mind, the cell seemed about the size of a shoebox.
And if that didn't make me claustrophobic enough, add to it the fact there was a humongous 300-pound beast of a lunatic evildoer sitting on the bottom bunk, his gigantic feet taking up most of the open floor space.
The monster was studying the floor and muttering when I first saw him.
Then suddenly, he raised his face.
Even with him sitting down, his face was level with mine.
A pale brown countenance of pure crazy.
He only had one eye.
The other socket was empty and wrinkled and gray.
He stared at me with his single pulsing orb.
He growled like an animal.
Easy, dude.
Apparently, that was exactly the wrong thing to say.
Maybe there was no right thing.
In any case, the moment I spoke, he leapt to his feet, enormous, roaring.
In that cramped space, there was only half an inch between his great belly and my nose.
His eye glared down at me from an unimaginable height.
He lifted a great brown fist like a wrecking ball, raised it all the way up to the ceiling, ready to drop it on top of my head.
I jabbed my hand between his legs and made a fist.
His roar changed to a breathless howl.
He doubled over, clutching himself.
I braced my feet in what little floor space remained to me, dropped my fist low and swung as hard as I could at his head.
I heard the hinge of his jaw crack as I connected.
He smashed into the bunk, then tumbled to the floor so hard the whole cell trembled.
That probably wasn't as much fun as you thought it was going to be.
I stepped over the mound of his body to the door.
I pounded on the window.
Man down!
I heard footsteps clanging on the tier outside.
The door buzzed again and opened.
The captain of the guard was standing there, glaring at me.
It was as if he'd been waiting for a call.
I glared back at him.
If you want something done right, do it yourself, you son of a bitch.
For a second, I thought he would do it, right then and there.
He went on glaring, and if eyes could shoot death rays, I'd have been Cinders.
But after a long moment, he turned away and gestured down the tier.
One of the guards who'd brought me here stepped back into the cell, grabbed the fallen giant by his giant wrists, and dragged him out.
The captain of the guard remained where he was in the doorway.
I remained where I was in the cell.
We looked at one another in silence.
The shouts and moans and wailings of the jail surrounded us.
He smiled with one corner of his mouth.
Just wait.
We have all the time in the world.
You're not going anywhere.
He slammed the door in my face, and I heard the bolt shoot home.
Breathing hard, I returned to the bed, one hand massaging the bruise on my head where the captain's billy had smacked me.
I climbed up onto the top bunk and lay down on my back.
The bare bulb in the ceiling was inches from my face.
It burned hot and bright.
I flung my arm across my eyes to shield them.
In that near darkness, with the madhouse cries crawling over the cell walls like ants and spiders, I thought back to the wedding in Shadow Wood.
I reached back for it with my whole soul.
I tried to hear the music of the creatures in the forest.
I tried to see the rainbow fairy lights under the evening branches.
I tried to see, in the red blackness behind my eyelids, the emperor and his queen, their hands linked together.
Maud and her magician lover, gazing into one another's eyes.
I tried to remember the benevolent faces of the forest king and queen as the king pronounced the words of the ceremony that would transform the two couples before him into husbands and wives.
But no.
How gone it was.
So gone.
The woods, the creatures, Galyana, and all the 11 lands.
Gone utterly.
A whole world of wonders.
A whole life of adventure, heroism, and love.
Lost to me forever.
Was it ever real?
Or was it all imagination?
Because here, here in this cell, there was no music, no light, no love.
My Jane, where was she?
Was she still alive?
Was she hurt?
Was she free?
Had Carnation and the three poker players escaped with her?
Or had the police run them down?
Had the sight of the world beneath the world driven her mad?
And even if she was sane, would she ever be able to prove her innocence?
Would I ever be with her again?
And what about my sister?
That poor drugged child locked helpless in that hellhole with Hilary Bain for an overseer?
Lying on the bunk with my arm across my eyes, I let out a trembling sigh.
I could feel the walls of the cell pressing close around me.
I could hear the cries of the mad and evil and imprisoned men.
The captain of the guard was right.
I wasn't going anywhere.
I was trapped here, helpless.
What could I do but wait?
Wait until one of my brother's minions came to put an end to me.
Hiding my eyes behind my arm, I let out a long, broken breath.
Be a man, I told myself, trying to imitate that squirrely voice I remembered, that Maud I loved.
Then I shuddered where I lay, and I began to cry.
Those hours, those long night hours in that cell.
Those were the darkest hours of my life.
I thought they were the end of my life, the end of my story.
What was left for me but the moment when Richard's killers came through the yellow door, when his ubiquitous forces hunted down Carnation and Jane, when some nurse with a tender smile injected Riley with poison and sent her into a final oblivion.
I had no other expectations.
I had no hope at all, lying there.
In Shadow Wood, if there even was such a place, I was a conqueror.
I had completed my quest.
I had crossed the Eleven Lands.
I had brought the talisman to the Emperor.
We had returned together to destroy Curtin's forces and bring down his corrupted city.
We had freed the people and the creatures from sea to sea and restored the queen to the throne of Galyana and brought together the emperor and his love.
But that was there.
And as always, now that I had returned, it seemed unreal, a mere fantasy.
Maybe my triumphs in that other country were hallucinated make-believe, a dream to distract me from the utter disaster of my actual life.
Because here, here in this cell in this material moment, the world was all Orozco, all Richard.
I was alone.
The battle was lost.
That's what I thought, anyway.
That's what I believed in those imprisoned suicidal hours.
But the truth was different.
The truth was, everything I thought, everything I believed, every little bit of it, was completely wrong.
The truth was, even here, even in this undeniably real and tragic place, the battle was over.
And I had won.
Outside my cell, the forces of the emperor, my forces, were everywhere on the march.
And Orozco's forces, my brother's forces, were collapsing into defeat and disarray.
Even as I lay there in despair and tears, my armies were taking back the planet.
Despair, as it turned out, was a delusion.
Victory, as it turned out, was mine.
Another kingdom is coming to its epic conclusion, but that doesn't mean you have to stop enjoying it because Book 2, The Nightmare Feast, releases as a novel in March.
Relive the greatest moments from Austin's clashes with Orozco'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 Orozco'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 the series finale of Another Kingdom.
Jane had escaped alive.
Carnation's Escape00:02:19
That was the first thing.
Carnation, crazy driver that he was, had pushed his old white van beyond the limits of its power, and for 10 whole minutes after streaking away from the tower, he had outstripped the entire screaming cavalry of patrol cars on his tail.
As he rocketed through the city, more cop cars raced to join the chase, and helicopters took to the sky to track him.
A few moments more, and Carnation and his crew and his sweet cargo, Jane, would all have been caught in an inescapable web of expert pursuit.
But just then, the van careened around a downtown corner onto a dark block of abandoned warehouses and sped into the deep shadows of an empty lane on which all the street lamps had gone strangely dark.
Only one cruiser was close enough to see the turn and follow.
That cruiser was driven by a young Latino so handsome, he looked like an actor playing a cop on some TV show.
His partner, the husky red-haired Oaf in the passenger seat, radioed their location to the cars behind them, then whoofed with glee as the scream of their siren was joined by the scream of their smoking tires taking the corner in the van's wake.
But the next second, the patrol car seemed to fly out of control.
It skidded, the body rocking and turned sideways.
The handsome young Latino wrestled the wheel and hit the brake until the cruiser jolted to a stop sidelong, blocking the street.
The next three cruisers came around the corner fast and had to swerve to miss the first car where it sat still, its flashers making the night go bright and dark.
One cop car hopped a sidewalk, smacked into a fire hydrant, and stalled as a jet of water shot up into its engine.
Another cruiser turned full around so that its headlights blinded the driver of the next.
That driver was forced to swerve right, and the two cruisers scraped metal before both came to rest at angles, fully stopped.
Carnation's white van disappeared down the dark street as more and more cruisers piled up behind it.
In the lead patrol car, the car that had caused the jam-up in the first place, the handsome Latino driver watched Carnation vanish, then turned to his partner and shook his head ruefully.
I guess he'll go his way.
Following The Chief00:16:08
The red-haired Oaf nodded solemnly.
Let wisdom reign.
Minutes later, Carnation's van parked beside an idling escalade.
The Escalade's driver threw open the door, and the Aztec poker player, with the bloody, unconscious Jane in his arms, hurried from one vehicle to the other.
Carnation, the bald poker player and the black poker player, followed after quickly, and off the escalade raced.
When Jane awoke, she was in the cigar-stinky little poker room behind the barber shop downtown.
The barber had set up a cot for her against the paneled wall under the girly calendar.
He had called in two women, a doctor and a nurse.
They cared for Jane's wounds and dressed her in fresh clothes while the men waited in the shop outside.
When the doctor allowed the men to come in, they found Jane sitting up on the cot and looking around her, faintly mystified.
The nurse, who objected to the calendar, was in the process of pulling it down and tossing it into the wastebin.
Hey, said Carnation, annoyed.
She gave him a look over her shoulder.
She had creamy caramel-colored skin and just the sort of compact, busty figure Carnation always fancied.
He decided to stow his objections for now in the hopes he could make a play for her later.
The doctor, meanwhile, explained that Jane's wounds were mostly just scratches, though there were a couple of ugly gouges on one of her thighs.
It looks like an animal attacked me, Jane said, peeking under one blood-stained bandage.
But I can't imagine how something like that could have happened.
She fell silent, and her gaze grew distant as she tried to reason it out.
The men and women in the room hovered over her with concern.
Then she came back to herself.
She smiled up at them, a bright, angelic smile.
They were all surprised at how beautiful she actually was when she wasn't trying to hide it.
Austin came to rescue me.
That's the last thing I remember.
That same night, almost that same hour, death.
Death, its mighty self, death, that unwitting servant of creation, also became my ally.
The news had reached the media.
Arazgo was gone.
And my brother Richard was discovering that taking over his global enterprise was not going to be as simple as he'd hoped.
The people the old Russian had put in place around the world, the company heads and media moguls and politicians and investors were, after all, wealthy and powerful creatures in their own rights.
They did not see why the apparatus of communication and control should fall into the hands of an upstart intellectual like my brother just because the old man had taken a liking to him.
The old man was dead.
That was the whole point.
Death had erased him and all his influence.
He no longer had anything to say about what happened here in the land of the living.
Richard had spent every moment since his patron's passing contacting the leaders of his organization around the world, trying to bring them into line with his new regime.
Some of these calls went unanswered, and that alone made Richard suspicious.
But then, ah, then, the story exploded on every media.
Jane Janaway, the killer of Alexis Merriweather, had escaped from prison.
And who had helped her get away?
Reportedly, it was Richard's annoying brother, namely, me.
Now, this was unhappy news for Orozgo's minions around the world.
Hadn't they been promised Jane would be taken care of?
And wasn't Richard's brother supposed to be dead by now?
Like, dead three times over?
The minute he heard about this, Richard knew he was in trouble.
It made him look incompetent and weak.
And that, in the current crisis, was dangerous.
Sure enough, as midnight passed into moonless morning, four of the gunmen who had served as Orozgo's bodyguards, now secretly in the employ of the motherly tech mogul Susan Roth, moved quietly through the hallways of Orozgo's mountain mansion.
Two of them entered the guest room where my mother and father were sleeping.
The two others crept down the hall toward the small study where my brother was pacing the floor.
If the gunmen who went after my parents had not fired their weapons a few seconds early, Richard would have been caught off guard and assassinated where he stood.
But even through the suppressors, the gunshots that killed mom and dad were loud enough to be heard through the house.
In a panic of sudden fear, Richard escaped through a window and managed to gather the remaining loyal bodyguards around him for protection.
At least he thought they were loyal.
He hoped they were.
By the time the sun rose, everything had changed.
My parents had been found dead in their bed.
Richard had vanished.
Gerald Hannity was said to have handed in his resignation at the cable news company he ran and gone on indefinite vacation to Venezuela.
A United States senator had overdosed on sleeping pills.
It was said he might suffer brain damage, though it was uncertain whether he would lose his job.
Hillary Bain left home for the Orozgo Institute that morning a full hour early.
As her BMW sped up the road to the forbidding mansion, she saw the police cruisers gathered in the lot outside.
She brought her car to a jolting stop.
She stepped out and looked over the rise.
Grim-faced law officers were leading her patients, gaping and stupid with drugs, out of the mansion into the bright new day.
Hilary Bain jumped back in her beamer, turned the car around, and sped away.
No one knew where.
By the next day, even at the media outlets where Orozgo had handpicked the leadership, journalists were beginning to ask questions.
Editors and publishers were trying to distract them by calling for more stories about Jane, more stories about Alexis.
Get me more on the big Hollywood murder, they were saying.
Bring me more on the trial of the century.
But the reporters couldn't help noticing that that story was beginning to seem part of a bigger story.
Much bigger.
CEOs who had been members of the 730 Club were resigning or issuing statements through their PR departments full of vague apologies and excuses.
Law officers in big cities around the country were suddenly calling press conferences to demand investigations into the systemic corruption within their own departments.
Heads of news operations and even heads of whole TV networks were being accused of financial and sexual malfeasance that had been hidden for decades.
What the hell, some journalists were wondering, was going on.
Then, a day later, in a whispering aspen grove in the mountainous wastelands just outside of Los Angeles, the morning quiet was disturbed by the grind of engines and the thunking of vehicle doors being swung shut.
After a long moment of breeze-blown stillness beneath the trees, a small army of federal and local law officers came marching up the hill toward the woods.
They were carrying shovels over their shoulders.
Two backhoes followed after them like pet dinosaurs.
These, it soon became known, were members of a task force that had originally been formed two years before to investigate the trade in sex slaves out of Mexico.
Apparently that investigation had changed direction.
No one knew who had given them the order to start digging in the aspen woods, though later many of their bosses would take credit for the decision.
No one knew either who sent the four policemen to waylay Solomon Vine's private jet as it tried to take off from the airport in Burbank.
Vine's lawyers were on the phone to the police chief almost immediately demanding to know why their client had been led away in handcuffs.
What was the meaning of it?
Who was this detective Ahmadi's carnation?
What the hell did he think he was up to?
Was he unaware of who Solomon Vine was and how many buildings had been named after him?
The chief of police said he would check it out and get back to them.
He never did get back to them.
Not long after, the endless stories about Alexis' murder and Jane's escape quite suddenly ended.
They were replaced first by rumors, and then reports, and finally official announcements that Solomon Vine had been charged with multiple counts of murder and that he was negotiating a plea deal and naming names.
The nation's business seemed to stop for a moment as people gathered around their devices and watched the videos of the little bodies being carried on stretchers down the hill from the aspen grove to the ambulances waiting on the road below.
It was shocking how few of these showbiz children had been reported missing.
Shocking how many of their parents, while disappointed to have fallen short of the grand prize of celebrity, had settled for the consolation prize of cold hard cash.
It was shocking too, how many of Orozgo's most influential associates had used their money and power to indulge this one particular sexual predilection.
And shocking finally, how many of them had been willing to have their victims killed to keep that predilection a secret.
Try as they might, even Orozgo's news media could not hide this story forever.
The whole internet had it now, and the truth came out.
Over the following days, the Aspen Grove came to be known as the Children's Forest.
All this time, I lay in my cell, despairing.
Day after day, two whole weeks.
The guards would not let me out, even to exercise.
They would not let me communicate with the other prisoners.
No visitors came.
No news reached me.
I heard nothing about Jane, nothing about Riley.
I did not know if they were dead or alive.
I feared the worst.
The fear ate at me.
When the guards brought me food, I demanded a lawyer.
When the lights went out at night, I waited for an assassin.
No lawyer arrived, and no assassin either.
Even the captain of the guard was gone.
I never saw him again.
I had no idea what was happening or what would happen next.
Then, on the 14th day at dawn, I was awakened by the jarring buzz of the cell unlocking.
I rolled off my bunk and landed on my feet as the door swung open.
I saw a single guard standing outside on the tier.
At first, I just stared at him, gormless, and he stared at me.
Then it occurred to me he was waiting for me to step out of the cell.
I stepped out.
He shut the door and walked ahead of me.
After a moment of hesitation, I followed.
Jail, as I had noticed over the last two weeks, was a remarkably noisy place.
It was like the city itself, never really silent.
Voices, ventilation, metallic bangs, and buzzing locks were always filling the air with discord.
Guards shouted commands.
Prisoners shouted curses.
Worst of all were the madmen in their misery who cried out against the demons no sane man could see.
But now, now as I followed the guard down the stairs into the common area, there was a strange quiet in the place.
There was a man standing at every cell window, peering out.
The men on the open cots were sitting up.
Even the madmen seemed to have paused in their tormented soliloquies.
No one was saying anything.
All of them were watching me, watching me go.
More doors unlocked, and I was led out into the processing area.
And there stood a tall, gangly, and goofy-looking fellow, blinking behind his large glasses and clutching a battered briefcase in his two hands.
Phelps!
I cried in amazement.
For so it was, Jane's lawyer, Roland Pheltz.
A guard stationed in the cubby hole in the wall handed me a plastic bag.
Phelps gestured at it.
Your street clothes, put the bod.
As I dressed, he brought me up to date.
The arrests, the discoveries, the suicides, the escapes.
The corporate news media, the core of Orozgo's enterprise, was doing everything it could to keep the public from connecting all these incidents together.
Elected officials were appearing on TV to make mocking, dismissive comments about conspiracy theories, and the social media sites were quick to ban anyone who tried to link numerous disparate events to the death of Serge Orozgo.
We will not allow the voices of hate to speak on our platforms, said one social media CEO.
But the independent websites were beginning to put the picture together.
Obscure legal blogs were filing Freedom of Information Act requests with reluctant law enforcement agencies.
Angry citizens were calling talk radio.
The kooks and cranks were ranting on their podcasts.
On one block in Manhattan, an anonymous street artist papered a construction barrier with images of my face and the blood-red words splashed across it.
Free Austin lively.
I tried to take all this information in as Phelps escorted me out through the security gates.
By then, he was explaining how he had gone before a judge to demand I be arraigned immediately or released.
The district attorney had tried to oppose him, but her office was, it seemed, in a chaos of confusion.
First, they accused me of murdering Orozgo's butler assassin.
But that charge was mysteriously dropped after it turned out the butler assassin had been employed by a Razgo and had no business being on the scene in the first place.
On top of that, he had been killed by a bullet from his own gun.
And how had that happened?
Reports that I had deflected the slug with some kind of high-tech weapon were dismissed with ridicule, especially after the security tape, albeit weirdly digitalized and blurred, showed nothing of the kind.
The DA then tried to hit me with aiding and abetting an escape, but those charges too fell away after a closed-door conference between the prosecutor and the chief of police.
The chief was a much-celebrated local character who had enjoyed the glamorous perks of his job, like photo ops with movie stars and consultations on television shows and parties with Hollywood luminaries such as Solomon Vine.
Lately, however, he had begun to complain to friends that he'd been lying awake at nights.
He said his conscience was eating at him.
It felt, he said, as if a gigantic leech were sitting on his chest, sucking out his soul.
He was ready to make a change.
In any case, the escape charges against me were also dropped.
In fact, the new official line was that Jane hadn't escaped at all.
She had been released after her innocence was established by conscientious police work.
The confusion arose because our heroic DA had had to act quickly to save Jane from a conspiracy to do her harm in jail.
Pheltz rattled all this off with such breathless rapidity I could barely take any of it in.
But as we began walking together toward the glass doors that led out of the jail and into the open air, I turned to him, blinking stupidly in my confusion.
Done Jane Confirmed00:10:07
You mean I'm free?
He held the door open for me.
You are free, Austad.
And he smiled broadly.
Go your way.
I stepped through the door.
And if ever there was a portal that transitioned me from one world into another, it was that one.
Because there was Jane waiting for me.
Jane, surrounded by Carnation and the other poker players.
And before I could even comprehend the reality of it, she was in my arms.
My own most girly of girls.
And I was pressing her against me as if I could meld her body wholly with my own.
I rested my cheek against her silken hair and turned my face up to the sky.
I was still trying to understand what Feltz had told me, what was happening here on the outside, happening everywhere, what it all meant.
But I couldn't.
I was too dazzled by the rapid flow of events.
I couldn't make any sense of it.
It would be a long time, a long time, before I would begin to comprehend the reality.
That, with the information I had gotten about Orozgo's obsessions, with the names and histories I had gathered from the 730 Club, with the things I had seen at Solomon Vine's party, and the things I had deduced about what lay beneath the aspen trees, I had all but single-handedly unraveled a vast conspiracy to lead the world into blithe, unwitting slavery, and I had given the forces that opposed that conspiracy the upper hand.
At least for now.
But while I didn't fully grasp all that until much later, even then, in that moment, standing there outside the jail, holding Jane so close and loving her so much, I did have my first small intimation of the truth.
This fight might well go on forever, but the day was mine.
I pressed my face against Jane's and touched her ear with my lips.
Let wisdom reign.
So what now?
Well, here's what I can tell you.
There is a house on a cliff above the ocean, a rambling old cabin battered by the wind.
I bought it outright with the last of my movie money and lived there quite comfortably off the advance from a book contract, plus a surprisingly large inheritance which Riley and I split between us, with a portion set aside for Richard should he ever show up to make a claim.
The house has three large bedrooms, one for my wife and me, one for Riley, and one we're preparing for the baby.
Eventually, I guess we'll need a bigger place with more bedrooms for the rest of the babies.
Because there are going to be a lot of babies.
A lot.
A lot of babies.
Riley spends her days by the seaside.
She walks along the sand and sings sad songs into the wind.
Sometimes she returns to the house and goes into her bedroom and records one of her videos.
She explains how the Illuminati and the space aliens have been dispersed but not defeated.
that they are regrouping even as the authorities pretend they were never there.
She doesn't post the videos online, which is just as well.
Because I suspect she's right in her own crazy way, and it's best her enemies don't find out how much she knows.
I don't know whether Richard is alive or dead, but a lot of Arazgo's other disciples are plenty alive and even thriving.
Their news outlets and entertainment studios and experts and politicians have done a marvelous job convincing the public that, as an editorial in the New York Times put it, the exposure of isolated areas of corruption should not be allowed to undermine our faith in our institutions.
It's only the usual cranks and crazies who keep insisting those areas aren't isolated, that the arrests and murders and suicides and disappearances are all one story, and corruption is the very soul of the machine.
So the time goes by, and it will be as it will be.
The world belongs to the people in it.
You can't force them to accept the truth.
You can't chain them to their freedom.
Riley is healthy and even happy sometimes, and that's the important thing.
And Jane is happy.
Happier than I've ever seen anyone be happy, in fact.
Taking care of her house, her house instead of some movie star's mansion.
Taking care of Riley, taking care of me, feeding the life inside her.
All this gives her enormous joy.
Plus, she spends a lot of time reading books about babies.
I guess she will have to know a lot about babies.
We are going to have a lot of babies.
Have I mentioned that already?
Well, we are.
As for me, I write my book in the morning, how I expose Darazgo's enterprise, the philosophy he tried to sell through my brother and his other minions, the threat to our freedom he created, and how that threat can be opposed and maybe even destroyed.
In the afternoon, I do research and interviews.
And I travel occasionally to make speeches to anyone who will listen.
In the evenings, I relax on the deck outside.
Jane brings me a glass of wine and we sit together and watch the sun set gloriously behind the red waters.
And when we fall silent, just before twilight, I sometimes think back over what happened.
What really happened, I mean.
I remember Bethyray, her rose and ivory body beautiful in my arms.
I remember the squirrel girl Maud coming to my cell to rescue me, and the young woman Maud, and that heart-wrenching sound she made when her lover stepped out of the lake.
I remember the monster in the nightmare mansion.
I remember Curtin vanishing amidst the flames.
And I remember the Emperor Anastasius in a forest full of glittering music.
In that moment, he took the hand of Queen Elinda and made his wisdom his bride.
I often remember something else too, when dusk settles over the ocean.
I remember myself.
Myself as a child.
Playing with plastic figures against a backdrop made to look like starry space.
Moving my little knights and alien monsters into battle against each other.
Creating tableaux.
Whispering dialogue.
Making movies of the mind.
I remember the stillness that was in me then.
A perfect stillness of creation and delight.
And I feel that stillness come upon me again as I turn and see Jane in the last glimmer of sunset, her hand resting on her belly.
And sure, I have to admit, there are times I miss the excitement of Hollywood.
I always loved the movies and wanted so much to be part of the business, and now I don't think I ever will.
There are a lot of people in that town, a lot of powerful people who used to love to attend Solomon Vine's glamorous Malibu parties.
These days, they give interviews about how much they hate him for the terrible things he did.
But the truth is, as much as they say they hate him, they know I helped expose him for what he was.
And for that, they hate me more.
As I said, it will be as it will be.
I don't really know what will happen next, but I am confident.
Confident all will be well.
I hope for the best because I know despair is a delusion.
Victory is already mine.
For now, I am content in my house on the cliff above the ocean, writing my book in the daytime, drinking wine with Jane as evening falls.
It's a good life.
A beautiful life.
My sister walks by the sea and sings.
My wife keeps house and grows our baby.
The glorious darkness comes, and then the glorious morning.
And I, I have no sword.
I have no shield, no armor, no magic power left to me.
I continue the fight with the only weapon that remains.