Skyl looked at the villain before him and asked, "Before judgment is passed, do you believe you deserve a second chance?"
A deep agitation flickered in Fisk's eyes. Even his massive frame had begun to tremble.
"Which is it? Are you going to kill me, or let me go?"
"I'm not a judge, so I won't sentence you for your crimes. I'm a wizard, Mr. Fisk. Before I became one, I was an ordinary teacher, living the kind of dull, tedious life you would have despised. Those days have already blown away like dust in the wind, but the weak and hypocritical parts of my nature stayed with me. I'm afraid of getting the wrong blood on my hands, so I have never killed with my own hands."
After hearing Skyl speak, Fisk seemed to taste a sliver of hope. He slowly drew in a deep breath. When he let it out again, the trembling stopped.
He clasped his hands and bowed his head in prayer to God, a habit he had picked back up after putting on the pastor's robe.
The old Kingpin had never been willing to lay his heart bare before God, nor bow to fate.
"Because I don't want blood on my hands, I turn my enemies into animals, into books, kill them by someone else's hand, or rewrite their lives and erase their pasts entirely.
"You are one of the very few villains I have truly hated, Mr. Fisk. When I turned through the pages of your life and saw you tormenting innocents, forcing ordinary people down crooked roads, coercing minors into becoming bargaining chips in trades of sex and power, running illegal clubs and underground bars, organizing bare-knuckle fights, dogfights, and death games, trafficking addictive substances, smuggling weapons, fencing antiques, sharking loans, collecting debts with violence, selling human organs... you turned the criminal code into a business manual."
Skyl's voice remained level, but the disgust in it was unmistakable.
"You managed New York's streets far too well. Your roots and tentacles reached everywhere. Even a passing traveler like me ended up under your threat. I had originally planned to strip everything from you and cast you down to the lowest imaginable state. I was going to turn you into an immortal insect and leave you to suffer in this world, crushed underfoot, poisoned by bug spray, forced to fight other vermin, then revived again and again until your soul was tormented into total annihilation."
Fisk gave no visible reaction to any of it. He quietly recited passages from the Gospels under his breath, as if preparing for a meeting with God after death.
"Yet seeing you repent like this has reminded me again how complicated human nature really is. Mr. Kingpin, whose sins reached the heavens, who destroyed more than ten thousand families and twisted the lives of hundreds of thousands, has now turned himself into a source of spiritual comfort for the people of New York. So now that you stand before me like this, do you think I ought to give you another chance?"
Fisk stopped praying. He lowered his head and answered in a hoarse voice, "I know what I've done. I don't ask for your forgiveness. I only ask for more time. Let me settle what I need to settle. The boys at the church are a bunch of idiots. If I die suddenly and without explanation, they'll cause trouble."
"When did you start imagining that giving you a second chance meant sparing you?"
Skyl looked at the confusion on Fisk's face.
"The story of a man turning over a new leaf is timeless, but that's only because ordinary people have no choice. Once a wrong has been done, life keeps moving forward whether anyone likes it or not. When I say I'm giving you a second chance, I mean a real chance to atone."
Fisk frowned. "You can alter the past?"
"Yes. I'll use Eternal Transfiguration and the Grand Symphony to create a parallel timeline and alter the course of your life. That way, the people you harmed will receive entirely new fates as well. As for whether you live or die in the end, I'll leave that to the other you."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then our game continues. I'll carry out my original plan and let you sink deeper and deeper into suffering until the resentment of the dead clinging to your thought-form is finally satisfied."
"That is... fair enough. I accept the second chance."
Skyl raised a hand and pressed it against Fisk's broad forehead. The Eye of the Tower hanging on his chest released a stream of pure magical power, and radiant ribbons of energy coiled around Fisk.
"Wait!"
The magic stopped at once.
"Changing your mind?"
"No. I just need to make a phone call. Please." It was the first time Fisk had ever begged anything of Skyl.
Skyl gave a silent nod.
With two thick fingers, Fisk carefully pinched an old Nokia flip phone from the inner pocket of his robe. He opened the contacts and dialed the only number in it.
When he raised the tiny phone to his ear, it looked absurdly small in his hand, like a child's toy. He waited patiently for the line to connect. He didn't glance at Skyl even once. Right now he was calm and intent, as though he were carrying out the proudest task of his life.
He waited a long time. It might as well have been seven years.
At last, the call connected.
Fisk's whole face changed. Warmth spread through it, and he smiled.
"Vanessa, it's me... yes, I know you didn't want to be disturbed... listen, Vanessa, I'm in New York right now... no, no, I'm not doing any of that anymore. I became a pastor. Ha, I knew you wouldn't believe me, but it's true. Pastor Wilson. The neighborhood likes me pretty well. Every day I hand out bread, clean up trash, help people with whatever they need..."
He rambled on through everything that had happened over the last month. His tone was gentle and bright, paced almost like a stand-up comic working a room. Before long he was laughing, and the woman on the other end was laughing too.
"...Right, I didn't call for any special reason. I just missed you, Vanessa. This may be the last time we ever talk... no, no, it's not cancer. I got myself into trouble and I'm about to die." Fisk calmly glanced at Skyl. "...There's no need. You don't have to come looking for me... all right. I'm in Brooklyn, near the waterfront museum... hey, I've always been sorry about Richard... I love you... goodbye."
He ended the call, his expression relaxed and strangely at peace. Then he nodded to Skyl.
"Please continue."
"You don't want to see her one last time?"
"There's no need."
"Then why tell her where you are?"
Fisk bared his teeth in a smile. "Because I can't say no to her."
Skyl accepted that answer.
He resumed the spell. The Eye of the Tower flared with pure magical power. It was a degraded byproduct of divine force, but it still retained an eternal quality, something that could spread upstream and downstream along a timeline, turning Skyl's transfiguration magic into something closer to a god's command over fate and history.
At the same time, the Book of Mora slowly extended a tendril and pressed it against Fisk's chest.
"Ah!" Fisk grunted through clenched teeth, sweat breaking out across his face.
A blazing mark was branded into his chest by the tendril, a pattern like twisting roots. It was the imprint of divine Law.
Using Eternal Transfiguration, Skyl forced the power of the Law backward into Fisk's past.
The Book of Mora slowly opened. The magnificent score of the Grand Symphony began to flow like a rising tide.
...
Wilson's father had been an ambitious gang thug, a man whose every act stood outside law and morality, robbing banks, stealing whatever he could, taking on whatever dirty little jobs came his way, all in the hope of fighting and clawing his way into the local gang world.
Years later, he got his wish and joined one of New York's criminal outfits. Not long after that, he died in a street shootout.
Before that, though, after failing to make anything of himself, he had turned to drink. Whenever he got drunk, he beat his wife and son. Wilson's memories of childhood were the crack of a leather belt, his mother's screams and sobbing, and the burning pain across his own body.
Whenever his father sobered up, he cried and apologized to them. When the man wasn't home, Wilson's mother would pull him close and pray to God, begging for her husband to stop drinking.
As a child, Wilson never understood why his father became such a different person before and after alcohol. Later, he came to realize that maybe the fire had always been there inside him, a furious, violent blaze always waiting to destroy himself and everyone around him.
Because of his natural bulk, Wilson was mocked and pushed around by the other children in the neighborhood. No one gave him any approval or acceptance. His family also couldn't afford a proper education, so he spent his days wandering the streets alone.
One by one, young men from backgrounds very much like his drifted into crime and became the neighborhood's local toughs.
Wilson had once tried helping his father commit crimes, carrying an extra bag of stolen money and the like. But the moment he took part in any of it, he started vomiting uncontrollably. It was a condition he'd had since childhood.
Because of that bizarre affliction, Wilson had no choice but to withdraw from the criminal path in defeat. A future underworld superstar died in a pool of his own vomit before he ever got started.
On the night his father died in the street, Wilson felt a segment of chain snap loose in his heart.
He stopped praying to God.
Good for nothing in the usual sense, Wilson changed his name. From now on, he was Fisk, and he would use that name to build an entirely new life.
Unable to make a living through crime, Fisk did not decide to walk the straight path. Instead, he set out to find loopholes in the law and use them to bypass his condition. So he began studying law and legal theory.
It turned out he had a remarkably quick mind. That helped him enormously. Even though he had missed the ideal years for learning, Fisk still mastered a great deal of specialized knowledge in a short time. He became highly skilled in law and computer technology, and he possessed a natural instinct for finance and capital.
Fisk discovered that the most profitable business in the world really was still illegal activity. But unlike the petty hustles of neighborhood gangs, the truly great criminals worked out of luxury office towers on Wall Street, city hall, and the White House. They exploited legal loopholes and made, in a single deal, more money than an ordinary minimum-wage worker could earn in a lifetime.
In the 1990s, the ambitious Fisk tried short-selling stocks. The result was that several factories collapsed and tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
That day, Fisk suffered the most violent bout of vomiting in his life.
For a long time afterward, he couldn't eat. Only after donating every cent of his ill-gotten gains and helping the unemployed workers get back on their feet did he finally recover.
Fisk kept trying. He kept failing miserably. Eventually he lost heart and drifted through a long stretch of numb aimlessness.
Then he met a woman named Vanessa.
At the time, Fisk was working as legal counsel for an ocean-shipping company. Vanessa had run into debt trouble after the company maliciously withheld her pay, and she came to him for help.
To be honest, because of his size, very few people were ever willing to get close to Fisk. But Vanessa was the sort of office worker who was so optimistic it almost seemed foolish. She had probably never truly been hurt in life and didn't know how to stay guarded around people.
Not long after they met, Vanessa recognized Fisk's astonishing talent. They started dating, then entered a formal relationship.
After one intimate night together, Vanessa learned about Fisk's condition. At the time, she laughed openly and brightly.
"Are you laughing at me?" Fisk asked, half joking, half testing her.
"No, of course not, darling. I think it's wonderful. I feel awful for what you've gone through, but maybe this proves that deep down, you're actually a man with a very strong sense of justice." Vanessa affectionately stroked the huge curve of his head, like petting a very large bear. "Maybe God is waiting for you to do some good in the world."
Fisk had never once imagined that he could do good.
The lesson he had grown up with was simple: people who obeyed the rules were weak and easy prey, while people who challenged the rules were strong and worthy of respect.
Under Vanessa's encouragement and guidance, Fisk slowly began to see how most ordinary people really lived. They survived by working within the rules. That was not weakness or shame. If anything, there was something astonishingly resilient about it.
So he began taking cases for farmers and workers. Land seizures by corporations. Pollution. Exploited overseas labor. Unsafe goods and unsanitary production practices. The cases were exhausting, time-consuming, and completely devoid of any easy profit.
Thanks to Fisk's hard-edged methods, his brilliant mind, and his uncanny sensitivity to wrongdoing, he won again and again in court. Many ugly injustices of the age were dragged into public view through his efforts and the efforts of his colleagues, then corrected through the legal system.
He became known as the kingpin of the firm, the indispensable pillar at its center, and led a group of justice-minded lawyers in fighting social injustice.
Fisk and Vanessa supported each other, married, and within a year had a son, Richard Fisk.
As his career advanced, more and more companies and politicians began to see him as a thorn in their side. Threats against him, his wife, and his child never stopped.
At one point, Fisk wanted to abandon his work altogether and disappear with Vanessa and Richard. But by then, he could no longer let go of the poor and powerless people spread across the country.
In the end, things turned ugly anyway.
A premeditated car crash took Vanessa and Richard from him. Gravely injured himself, Fisk dragged his wife and son from the wrecked car. Only Vanessa still had a final breath left in her. And even then, she smiled with that same open, untouched brightness, as if life had never once bullied her.
"Promise me, darling... never... stop fighting."
From that day on, Kingpin crawled out of the hell of that burning car and became a cold, incorruptible enforcer. By day he kept fighting cases for the poor. By night he put on a tactical vest, loaded up on guns and ammunition, and used iron and fire to scour the city clean of the filthiest crimes.
He had a very distinctive style. Before executing a criminal, he would first serve them with a legal notice and then personally recite their crimes to their face.
Even when he used vigilante justice, he never vomited, because he knew he was innocent.
Kingpin built an underground court and recruited many violent antihero vigilantes who, like him, believed that evil should be eradicated by force.
He walked in both light and darkness. Kingpin would bear New York's sins himself.
Then one day, Kingpin's underground court received a new case.
A young man had brought a pastor to trial.
The plaintiff recited the defendant's crimes before Judge Kingpin. The list was thirty feet long. Even the antihero jurors clicked their tongues in shock.
"The defendant claims he has already repented and is willing to spend the rest of his life atoning," said the plaintiff, who was also serving as the defendant's counsel. "Your Honor, how do you judge this man?"
Kingpin looked at the defendant.
The pastor was built like a grizzly bear, and he wore a face that felt strangely familiar.
But Kingpin could not remember where he had seen it.
The pastor looked back at the judge with a sorrow that felt almost unnatural.
For a moment, the iron-faced Judge Kingpin found himself unable to rule.
Reason told him that this kind of man deserved a bullet and nothing more. But just as he was about to bring down the gavel, a powerful unease rose in his heart.
The raised gavel froze in midair.
The pastor watched.
The young man at the defense table watched.
The jurors watched.
Before Kingpin's eyes flashed Vanessa's bright smile and his son Richard's tender face.
They looked at him with hope and encouragement.
A vast courage surged up in him and blasted the unease away.
"I find the defendant guilty!"
Bang!
The gavel came down.
Kingpin saw the pastor smile, bitter and relieved at the same time, and then dissolve into bubbles and vanish.
The courtroom around him collapsed with a roar. The young man from the defendant's table walked toward him, holding a black book.
"You have delivered the final judgment. Mr. Kingpin, congratulations. Your sins are paid in full. Go in peace."
Kingpin looked around. The wind off Upper New York Bay blew past him. He saw his hands gradually turning pale, like burned incense, with ash constantly falling from them and scattering in the wind.
"I... what is happening to me?"
"You're being erased by the timeline," Skyl explained simply.
"I'm going to die?" Kingpin looked startled. In his mind, two lives were overlapping, one as the emperor of the underworld, one as a righteous lawyer. "So that's all that stood between me and a completely different life, a single thought. Wait, what about Vanessa and Richard?"
"Their lives changed too. They're both alive and well now."
"That's good." Kingpin smiled, truly at ease at last. "That's good."
A red car pulled up at the curb and Vanessa stepped out.
She was beautiful and intelligent, with a head of glossy black hair, except for one streak at the front that had turned silver-white, marking the uniqueness of her style and temperament.
She ran to him at once.
"No... don't..."
But Kingpin's body was already mostly ash. His face began to crumble as well. He gave her one final smile, and in his fading eyes her face was the last thing reflected there.
Vanessa stared at the now-empty pastor's robe for a long time.
At last, she smiled too, with a kind of release.
Later, Skyl attended Kingpin's funeral. The cemetery was packed solid with mourners. There was a group of gangsters in monk-like robes, many lawyers, one of them blind, several hard-faced mercenaries, farmers and workers from all over the country, and countless ordinary New Yorkers.
People couldn't clearly explain what relation they had to the dead man.
But for some reason, all of them felt that he had mattered to them.
Kingpin's epitaph was written by Vanessa.
"Here lies a true villain, and a true good man."
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