Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

a simple scene showing Giles Deathstalker in what appeared to be a family group. The woman at his side was presumably his wife; a tall, slender blonde dressed in flowing white. Her smile seemed forced, and she looked into the camera as though pleading for help or rescue. Beside her stood the man who would kill her; her son. Dram. He looked a little younger than Random remembered him, but just as intense, even then. They should have known there was something wrong with that one. It was in the eyes, and the smile that wasn't a smile. But the one that really caught Random's eye, and kept pulling it back, was the final Family member. A tiny baby, laid on a stool before them, wrapped in a very familiar cloak. Random had seen that baby, in that cloak bearing the Deathstalker Family crest, once before. On the Wolfling World, in the very center of the Madness Maze.
    At the time, Giles had said the baby was his clone, produced by him, and gifted with terrible powers. A baby who had put out a thousand suns in a moment, murdered billions of people, and created the Darkvoid. A baby supposedly destroyed when Captain Silence destroyed the Madness Maze, but Random wasn't sure he'd ever really believed that.
    Random continued skimming through the letters, and slowly put together a picture of the truth. The truth Giles had kept from them, hidden behind a curtain of lies and half truths. The baby wasn't a clone. It was Giles Deathstalker's bastard son. Giles had had an affair with the then Emperor's wife, the Empress Hermione. And somebody wasn't as careful as they might have been, because the Empress became pregnant. The Emperor Ulric II just assumed it was his, but soon after the birth the truth came out. Giles snatched the baby, to protect it from the Emperor's wrath, and went on the run with it. There was no legendary
    conflict between the two greatest men of their age; never had been. Just the rage of a cuckolded husband.
    Random and the others should have known Giles was lying. The baby couldn't have been a clone. The science of cloning didn't arise until centuries after Giles's time. But the baby's powers had so impressed them that the issuing of cloning had been taken for granted, another part of lost old Empire tech. Why had Giles lied? To protect his reputation, or that of his bastard child? Certainly the truth of the baby's parentage had infuriated Dram. His letters became almost incoherent with rage on the subject. He fully expected to be passed over, disinherited, forgotten, in favor of this child of a Deathstalker and the Empress. He didn't believe the child to have been an accident. Dram saw the baby as part of a plot to put the Deathstalker Family on the Throne.
    And maybe it had been. Certainly Giles had proven himself capable of such a thing.
    But if the baby wasn't an experimental esper clone, as Giles had claimed, where had its powers come from? What had turned a baby only a few weeks old into the single most destructive force the Empire had ever known? Random worked his way through the rest of the letters, but found no answer. It was possible Dram had never known, and that was why he'd pursued his father to the Wolfling World. And died there, still unknowing.
    Random put aside the last of the papers, and shook his head. He'd come looking for answers, and found only more questions. And nothing he could use against his enemies. So he stood up, concentrated, called up the fire within him, and let it loose inside the crypt. Flames sprang up everywhere. The letters blackened, curled up, and were consumed, their ancient truths perhaps lost forever now.
    Enigmatic machines sparked and smoked and blew apart. An acrid black smoke began to fill the chamber. And then the tech maintaining the stasis field finally gave up its centuries-old ghost and blew apart, and the stasis field collapsed.
    Lionstone's Palace immediately appeared outside the chamber, and Random ran out into the metal corridor, the thick black smoke billowing out after him.
    What have you done? said Lionstone's voice loudly in his ears. Damn you, Jack Random, what have you done?
    "What I had to," said Random, coughing at the black smoke. "We were never allies, Lionstone. I might be an outcast, I might even be crazy, but I'm not stupid. Better that it all vanish in the flames, than you should use Humanity's lost tech against itself. How does it feel, knowing I used you for my own purposes?"
    You are more like us than you care to think, said Lionstone. And we