Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

ROC
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LAST NIGHT I DREAMED OF LEWIS DEATHSTALKER.
    He never wanted to be King. He never wanted to be the Champion. He only ever wanted to do his duty: to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. But he fell in love with his best friend’s fiancée, and was in turn betrayed by another friend. They took away his good name, and made him an outlaw.
    Deathstalker luck. Always bad.
    I saw him gather friends and allies, and set out to raise an army to overthrow the forces of evil, like another Deathstalker before him, and I wanted to warn him that heroes have a tendency to die young, and bloody. I saw old friends return from the past, and legends walk in history once more. Stories left unfinished have a way of enforcing their own endings.
    In my dream I saw planets burning in the long night, and armies of the dead overrunning the cities of men.
    All in a dream . . . and all so very long ago. Or maybe it was just yesterday.
    All stories come to an end, in Time.

CHAPTER ONE

    DEALING WITH OLD BUSINESS, AND NEW
    O wen Deathstalker was in a coma, and everyone else was panicking.
    On the planet Haden, deep down in the man-made crater called the Pit, in the steel corridors men had built to surround and contain the Madness Maze, a lot had happened in a short time. That renowned hero and legend Owen Deathstalker had returned from the dead, walked out of the Maze with his descendant Lewis, worked a number of quite remarkable miracles, and then gathered up the minds of everyone present to take a fast trip across space in order to observe the Terror close up. Unfortunately, that most ancient and awful destroyer of worlds and civilizations turned out to be, in some as yet unexplained way, Owen’s long-lost love, Hazel d’Ark. Now everyone was back in their right bodies again, but Owen was curled up in a fetal ball, eyes squeezed tight shut, dead to the world and floating about three feet above the gleaming steel floor. Everyone else had since given themselves up to alarm and confusion and trying very hard not to wet themselves.
    As Jesamine was fond of saying: Some days things wouldn’t go right if you put a gun to their head.
    The AIs of Shub were the only ones