The Road To Hell

Well.

It wasn’t the tag title match, but it was nice for me and Dan to pick up a win at long last!

Now, what to do about the remaining Amoralists…

It had been, to put it mildly, a strange couple of weeks. Between discovering that my half-sister was still alive, only to very rapidly see her die, and then to see Urquhart become king, then for Urquhart to die, only for my fucking cousin to become king…

Still. I took some solace in the fact that I was fairly certain that my victory in the Infernalia tournament, winning over the Children, was instrumental in brokering a compromise; had they been the hardliners that Future Eris had originally intended for them to be, led by Elijah, I had an uncanny feeling that there would have been bloodshed. As it was, they had been willing to accept Mark’s kingship, so long as he continued to personally fight the Amoralists.

Speaking of Mark…

‘Well done, cousin,’ he said as we passed in the hallways and I dried the sweat off my brow.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You ready for your match tonight.’

Mark’s nostrils flared. ‘Hm.’

‘What? You okay?’

‘No, I’m just a little bit absolutely livid. That bitch double-crossed me.’

‘And would “that bitch” be payback? You know, for double-crossing me?’

… I might not have fully forgiven him for the World Title thing.

Mark snorted. ‘No, the usual bitch. AnHellica. She’s changed the rules of the End Games match. So now instead of the setup where I fight the other Amoralists upon defeating the Major Arcana…’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘can we talk about the fact that a team called the Major Arcana left me – the fucking High Priestess incarnate - off their roster in favor of Silas fucking Artoria?’

‘… not right now. The point is, I’m now simply fighting for the Amoralists! In direct contradiction of what I told my people.’

‘...you actually care about this,’ I said, surprised.

‘Caledonia,’ he said, his expression serious, ‘I know that… I haven’t always been the most responsible person.’

I snorted. ‘Yes. I know. I once had to come and rescue you because you got your dick stuck in a hot tub drain. In Alaska. In February. Really, you’re lucky you didn’t get frostbite…’

‘My point,’ he said, ignoring my hilarious anecdote, ‘is that I’m genuinely trying to put those days behind me. And I know you think me being King is a big lark, but… well, it matters to me, and I want to do best by the people. I told them I’d be taking down the Amoralists, and yet…’

Huh. ‘Mark… what happened to you?’

He shrugged. ‘Adulthood.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘good luck. And remember… there’s more than one way to skin an Amoralist.’

He chuckled. ‘Fair point. Well. Be seeing you.’ He stalked off.  

I returned to our locker room – Dan had taken another path to get there and was emerging from the showers. He had already applied a bandage around his ribs from where Frederickson had given him a pummeling. He winced as he put his tank-top on, but still grinned. ‘So,’ he said, ‘victory.’

I smiled. ‘Indeed. Though the question of what’s next is – ’

Suddenly Eris burst through the door. ‘You guys! I’m seriously! Gotta go! Gotta go fast!’

‘Eris,’ smirked Dan, ‘what did we tell you about those future energy drinks? You know they’re not designed for our primitive metabolisms.’

‘No talk time! Back to E.R.I.S., now!’ And with that, Eris grabbed both of us by our scruffs – despite my protests at not yet having showered, and dragged us to the exit, where their time capsule was waiting.

‘Seriously, Eris, what the fuck is going on?’ I said.

Now that we had reached the capsule, they seemed to calm down. ‘Okay. So. Been talking with Discordia, and there’s…’

‘A great disturbance in the Force?’ asked Dan with a smirk.

‘Not far off, Maynard!’ spat Eris. ‘There’s… a button.’

‘A button?’ I said.

‘A big red button,’ said Eris, ‘and it’s going to… well, we don’t know for sure, but it’ll be bad.’

‘How bad?’

‘Worse than The Rise of Skywalker as directed by Tommy Wiseau,’ said Eris. ‘As far as I can tell, it’s going to cause this timeline to collapse, and anyone who’s still here is going to be… somewhat violently ejected. I’ve already gotten everyone from the Academy out, but…’

‘What about Nia and the other Eris?’ I asked.

‘They’re from this timeline, so I think they’re okay? At any rate, I couldn’t reach them; hopefully Discordia can protect them from the worst of it.’

As if in response, a localized instance of Discordia appeared in E.R.I.S.’ central console. ‘It is about to begin,’ said Discordia. ‘Would you like me to send the Paper now?’

Eris nodded. Discordia winked out, and a viewscreen came up, showing Miataxia’s transformation into Amelia. She and AnHellica faced off, and…

‘Wait, isn’t this where -’ said Eris.

And then there was a mighty flash of light, and we passed out.

---

I awoke feeling somewhat groggy after an indeterminate amount of time, and feeling rather uncomfortable – though that might have been the result of both Dan and Eris being on top of me, each of them similarly passed out. I attempted to wriggle my way free, and realized that we were inside E.R.I.S. – but without its dimensional expansions. It was the original E.R.I.S. that Eris had built to take us into the future in the first place. The sigils they had painted were still there, but I no longer felt any power radiating from them.

… nor did I feel the essence of the High Priestess within myself.

Eris, groaning in recovery, opened the capsule door, and the three of us collapsed in a pile, panting from what would not ordinarily have been particularly exertive, but given how much everything hurt at that moment…

‘It’s…’ grunted Eris as they rolled off Dan, ‘just like my recurring dream…’

 ‘Shut up,’ moaned Dan, rubbing his temples. Well, if he had half the migraine I did right now…

‘What happened?’ I asked, looking around. We were clearly in the Vault beneath the Academy; the spot where we had left 2026 and gone to the future.

‘The timeline collapsed,’ said Eris, ‘but we were inside a magic circle at the time, so we can keep… most of our memories.’

‘Most?’

‘Well, there’s the night that we got into the future-absinthe…’

‘You got into the future-absinthe,’ said Dan, ‘we abstained.’

‘I… might have had a couple glasses after you went to bed,’ I said. Dan scowled.

‘Point is, most of the people who got transported back are going to remember this kind of the way you remember a dream. Some are going to remember more than others, same way different people remember dreams differently. But we… well, let’s just say we’re fully lucid.’

‘So…’

‘So,’ said Eris, ‘we have knowledge of both the future, and of the way the world works. But… unless my calculations are off, none of us will have magic anymore.’

‘I never had -’ said Dan.

‘Shut it, Starchild,’ interrupted Eris, ‘it’s not our fault you wasted your time on that Fart instead of awakening to your personal Justice.’

Dan seemed to have nothing to say to that. Eris continued. ‘So essentially, we’ll remember everything that happened as clearly as we would any other memory. Others… well, as I said, it depends.’

‘And of course, there’s the historical records,’ said Dan. We looked at him. ‘I mean… did you guys not catch the fact that CWF 2326 was being broadcast as a show here?’

 … somehow I had forgotten that.

Suddenly the loudspeaker in the Vault sounded. ‘Pardon me, my liege,’ came the voice of Discordia, notably less transcendent now that it was merely a well-trained AI, ‘but there is a press conference currently ongoing that may be illuminating with regard to your present discussion.’

We took the lift up to the Academy’s main room. It was surreal, being there again so soon after we had left the future version of it; so different and yet so similar, the couches only slightly less worn-in and the air significantly less laced with magic. It really was one of those things you only noticed once it was absent.

By the time we arrived, Discordia had already activated the TV and tuned it to Amelia’s press conference. It was indeed illuminating; the creation of the Chaos Division certainly was a wrinkle. And now…

‘Golden Intentions,’ said Dan.

‘Golden Intentions,’ I echoed. ‘I’ve forgotten, did you ever win that one?’

‘Nope. I think I entered one, but I wasn’t much of a contender at that point. You?’

‘I think I entered one once,’ I said, ‘but maybe that was one of your other timelines.’

‘… huh. Kind of surprised I can still remember that. I thought I could only remember the existence of the Council because of the future magic…’

‘Maybe it’ll fade into your subconscious?’ I said. ‘Though, who knows, maybe you’ll be getting another irate dream tonight!’

‘Don’t even joke,’ said Dan. ‘Is the roster up?’

I pulled out my phone, and noticed that Eris was already on theirs. ‘Eris, you see anything?’

‘No… although for some reason #marielledonia is trending like crazy again.’

‘Oh, not the bloody shippers again…’ I growled.

‘Shippers?’ asked Dan. ‘Wait, “#marielledonia”? I don’t remember that one…’

‘Long story,” I growled. ‘I wish my bloody cease-and-desist suit had gone through.’

There was a silence, and Eris, whose eyes widened upon clicking a link, scurried upstairs, saying something about being in their bunk. ‘You’d better not be reading erotic fanfiction about me again!’ I yelled.

‘No promises!’ And then the door slammed.

Dan had his phone out. ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!’

‘What?’

‘Carlton! Fucking Carlton gets a World Title shot!’

‘Well, it is his turn,’ I said. ‘You and I’ve each gotten shots. Hell, two shots each. Let Mark have this one.’

‘Ugh,’ he said. I think Dan was even more annoyed with Mark than I was… but then they’d never really gotten along. The two of us scanned the Golden Intentions lineup – a whole lot of people I didn’t know, really, but there were some of the classics scattered in there.

‘You know,’ I said after a few minutes, ‘I wasn’t expecting CWF to come back. I wasn’t expecting it to keep going past the tournament. And I really wasn’t expecting it to come back to the present. But now that it has… do we stick with it?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Dan.

‘Well, we set up a life together,’ I said. ‘Sure, it’s a tad nomadic, but that’s just who we are. Do we really want to disrupt what we have going on at the Academy and return to CWF full time?’

‘I mean, what’s changed since… three hours ago?’ he asked.

‘Everything!’ I said. ‘Three hours ago we were in an existential fight for the future of the world, taking on demons and Orbs and fighting with freaking superpowers; now, as far as I can tell, I’m just a thirty-seven-year-old woman who hasn’t fought professionally in the better part of a decade. I’m not the High Priestess, and you’re not the accumulated belief over hundreds of years in the prophecy of the Starchild. We’re damn good fighters, but… is that still what we are?’

‘I mean, we have been for the past three months,’ said Dan.

‘Yeah, but… well, it’s not like the Amoralists were beaten, but we’re not fighting them anymore. We’re not trying to take the world back from the brink of utter ruin – well, I mean, we are, but through firmly worded and thoroughly cited journal articles, not by being lone heroes who save the world by beating Amoral villains in the wrestling ring!’

Dan looked pensive for a moment. I let him think; he wasn’t immediately deflecting a serious conversation with humor, which more often than not meant he was actually going to say something smart. He finally spoke after about a minute. ‘Look… who says we can’t fight to save the future?’

‘We don’t have a time machine anymore.’

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that… look. You know how they say that the best time to take action was yesterday but the second-best is today?’

‘Yeah?’

‘This is yesterday. When we fought Lionheart, you pulled him back to the point before he became a full blown Amoralist. He was just another guy. The same guy that we… well, not that we knew, but that we knew of. We know how things are going to go, maybe we can stop them from happening before they even get a chance to?’

I nodded. ‘So what you’re saying is…’

‘We can still save the future. We’ll just be doing it from the present. But you know the best way to do that?’

‘What?’

He put his hand on my knee. ‘By going into this goddamn Golden Intentions Rumble. And winning it. And – whichever of us wins – kicking the crap out of Gordy King or that clown thing – ’

‘What about Mark?’

‘What about Mark?’ I shoved him playfully. He continued. ‘And returning to the top. Being the symbols that they thought we were in the future. Because we can absolutely fucking do this, babe. I’m the man who retired Alex Cain; the man who beat Jarvis King for the Paramount Champion; the man who fought AnHellica to a fucking stalemate.’

‘And I’m the woman,’ I said, ‘who won fourteen consecutive matches. I beat Silas Artoria. I beat Freddie Styles. Dorian Hawkhurst. Elisha. Omega, Amber Ryan, the Shadow, Duce Jones. Everyone that federation could throw at me.’

‘Oh, so,’ said Dan. ‘I was deep in the Order’s rehab program when you actually won the title. Who was it you fought?’

I leant back, more than a little wistful for one of the best damn matches I ever fought. ‘MJ Flair. That was a good fight. Paradise 2018; we went to war right there on the Jersey Shore. She was tough, damn tough… but in the end I took everything she could throw at me, and I threw back a little more.’

‘There you have it,’ said Dan.

‘Oh, speaking of,’ I said. ‘Who did you beat for the World Title?’

To my surprise, he blushed. ‘Um. Well, it was… Shane Wynters.’

‘… who?’

‘Look, Valentine had been the champion, and I beat Amber in a Number One Contender match, but then Valentine got into a car wreck, and…’

‘I… vaguely remember that,’ she said. ‘Must be the timeline clearing up.’  

‘Point is,’ said Dan, moving hastily on, ‘that the two of us are the best damn people in this thing. The Ripper? You took him once, and that was without me watching your back. Dangerous Dan? Sure, a little more dangerous than he used to be… but still, how many times did you and Eris crush him and his brother? We’ve fucking got this, babe. One of us will win this thing; and then we’ll go on and win the World Title, and then we’ll stop that awful future from ever happening. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ I said. ‘Now… oh God, what time even is it?’

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Does it count as jet lag if you’re arriving from a literal different time zone?’

‘I’m gonna go shower, and then we should try and catch some sleep. Training begins tomorrow.’

‘No argument from me,’ he said, yawning. ‘Cripes, I think I’ll need to sleep for three bloody days…’

He slouched off to bed, and I got in the shower. As the water got all steamy, I began to think.

Golden Intentions… one of the great laurels in the crown of any would-be CWF legend. It was a laurel that had eluded me, but who knew? Maybe this was my year.

Talent new and old was coming to CWF, but I’d beaten talent new and old before. My Bed of Roses stranglehold had been called the deadliest move in CWF; not that there’d be much call for choking out in this match! But still. I was a damn good fighter, and… the more I thought about it, the more determined I was.

I had lost the World Title once on this run. It was partially complacency, partially exhaustion, and a hefty dose of cousinly betrayal; the irony was not lost on me that said cousin was now getting his own shot at my title.

A legend of the past, Nia had called me when we went to the future; enough of a legend that she took on my name.

Well.

Now was the time that I forged my legend in stone.

I was ready to walk the road to hell.

I was ready to win Golden Intentions.