Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

think he went a little mad, then, at the thought of how much he'd lost, at how all his plans had gone so horribly wrong.
    He sent assassins after his son Dram, tidied up the last of his affairs, and vanished his castle into the thick, deadly jungles of Shandrakor. There, he set up a conspiracy of his remaining Family and friends and allies, to slowly and carefully plot a foolproof rebellion against the Iron Throne. This time, everything would be planned in detail. Nothing would be allowed to go wrong. But it would take time. So Giles programmed the Last Standing's computers to take care of things while he was away, and put himself in stasis, to wait however long it took. Wait for some distant descendent to awaken him. And tell him that, finally, he would be able to overthrow the Iron Throne, make himself Emperor, and put everything right again.
    But he never got the chance. The descendent who awakened him, murdered him.
    But, meanwhile, back at Court… Dram killed his mother Marion to prove his loyalty to Ulric, to demonstrate how distanced he was from his treacherous father. He didn't want much from the Emperor, in return. He just wanted to be the new Warrior Prime. But the Emperor had had enough of murderous Deathstalkers. He named the son a monster like his father, put a death sentence on Dram and a bounty on his head, and Dram was forced to flee. His father's conspiracy would have nothing to do with him.
    Ulric gave orders for all the main members of Clan Deathstalker to be put to death. Many died, many more went underground. A distant cousin of the Emperor's choosing became head of the new Deathstalker Family. Giles's conspiracy survived, but it was never the same after that. Ulric would have liked to stamp out the whole line, root and branch, but the name, the heroic, already legendary
    name, had been useful before and might yet be again. The people did so love their precious heroes.
    Dram determined to find and kill his father, for many reasons, only to discover that Giles had escaped his reach, disappearing down the corridor of Time, into the future. So Dram put himself into stasis too, using an old secret bolthole on Golgotha that had once belonged to his father. I'm sure the irony pleased him.
    He didn't know more than nine centuries would pass before a team of engineers, excavating the depths of Lionstone's new Palace, found something entirely unexpected. Lionstone awoke Dram, probably not with a kiss, and found a kindred spirit. Monsters always recognize their own kind. Together they set in motion plans that would destroy young Owen Deathstalker's comfortable life, and send him off in search of his famous ancestor Giles. All they had to do was wait, and follow, and eventually Giles and the Darkvoid Device would fall into their hands. And then… power and revenge and punishment on a Humanity that had never really loved them.
    But during those nine centuries and more, rumors had persisted that a Deathstalker had been personally responsible for the creation of the Darkvoid.
    That the Device was just a convenient fiction, to hide a more terrible truth; that a man had somehow gained the power of such destruction. Leaks from inside the ongoing Deathstalker conspiracy seemed to confirm something along those lines. So when, some time later, the espers began secretly investigating their own powers and nature, the name and legend of what a Deathstalker might have done suddenly seemed entirely possible. Those rumors inspired what became the super-esper program, that led to the creation of the Mater Mundi. The search for individual super-espers produced only freaks and monsters, so the esper
    underground made contact with the Deathstalker conspiracy, and after that they worked together, each thinking it was using the other for its own purposes. But the inclusion of espers and later clones meant that the course and nature of the Deathstalker conspiracy was changed forever. Giles couldn't foresee everything.
    None of these people knew that really they were little more than puppets, their strings pulled, however distantly, by the Madness Maze.
    "It took me a long time to piece all that together," said the Wolfling. "But I've been in contact with the various conspiracies and undergrounds for centuries, via the computers Giles left me, and I've had a lot of time alone here, with nothing to do but think."
    "Giles never really cared about the people or the rebellion," said Owen. "It was all just a plan to put him on the