“Yes! The man in a dress wins a prize!” Armes pounced happily. “Just as, with more dimensions than the map, we can view it, understand it as a whole, amend it and fold it as we please, so I could stand and view the world as if it were that map. I gained complete knowledge of the world. I learned the secret names of all things—all laid out for me. And I brought that knowledge back to the world, to help people. As the lump in the armor recites, I brought Light into the world.”

Dion’s face was as stone.

“And Dark, of course,” their antagonist added, offhand. “Light and Dark, the knowledge of them both.”

“Why?” Dion whispered.

“What’s Light without Dark?” Armes shrugged. “But seriously, the world was in a mess. People fought each other, enslaved each other, stole, raped, and lied to each other. And I thought to myself: what’s the real problem here? It’s that people need help to tell right from wrong. Plainly they do, or else everything wouldn’t have been so fucked up, am I right? And so I came back to the world, from my ‘mountain,’ and I made them all creatures of the Light. And I made most of the rest, all the subhumans and monsters, creatures of the Dark. And I set out some doctrine for how the Light should live. And I gave them the Dark to go work out their frustrations on. It should have worked.” And for a moment the mirth dropped off Armes’s face like shed skin. “It should have worked. I’d thought it all through. I was going to save the world. I gave you brutal apes everything you needed for paradise. And you wasted it, you stupid, ignorant barbarians.”

“You set up a system of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and you wonder why it didn’t make people nice?” demanded Lief, wheezing a bit around his injured ribs.

“It should have worked!” Armes snapped at him. “But people just went on doing things to each other. Some of them even went over to the Dark, because there was power there to be had, power to balance the Light. Nobody did what I wanted them to do. The whole thing, all that work, it was a waste of my time. And there I was, immortal, powerful beyond the dreams of an archmage, and sick of you mewling, backstabbing, ungrateful maggots. And bored. After the first hundred years you can’t imagine how bored. And when did the first Dark Lord show his face? Yes, you at the back in the mail!”

“About… a hundred years after Armes brought the Light,” muttered Harathes sourly.

“First prize,” the man-god applauded. “You’re helpful. I’ll enjoy wearing your face. I bet you get all the girls, too.”

Harathes took that badly, and said nothing.