The Purpose of the Blade

  The Cathedral's training ground had its own rhythm in the early morning, the sound of practice blades and the instructor's corrections and the specific silence that follows when a student does something correctly and the correction is replaced by observation. Nana had been training for two months, which was not long, and she moved with the focus of someone who is doing something they have decided to be very good at.

  Her master watched her from the edge of the marked circle. He had been watching students for long enough that he no longer needed to say much while watching.

  "Nana," he called, signaling rest.

  She lowered the practice blade and breathed. Her breath was controlled, which was the result of the two months rather than a natural condition she had arrived with.

  "Your progress is real," he said. "Now. Tell me why. What is your purpose in learning this?"

  Nana looked at the blade in her hands. "Me? Um. Actually, I want to be—"

  "She will be the next Legatus," Syizl said, arriving from the direction of the corridor with the specific timing of someone who has been listening and has decided to participate.

  The master turned with the expression of a teacher whose lesson has been interrupted by someone who should know better. "Syizl. Who gave you permission to walk into my lesson with commentary?"

  Syizl waved a hand in the mild way of someone who is not threatened by the anger of people he respects. He laughed.

  Nana looked at him.

  "One day," she said, raising the blade again, "I will defeat you."

  The master's expression, which had been aimed at Syizl, moved toward something else. It was the specific expression of teachers who have just received the answer they were actually asking for.

  "Good," he said. "Back to your stances."

  Syizl walked away smiling in the way of someone who got the result he came for.

  Reflections of War

  The portal to the Mirror Realm stood at the threshold of the Human Kingdom's eastern district with the specific quality of things that exist at the edge of what is physically explicable. The air around it distorted in the manner of light through curved glass, the landscape on the other side present but not quite trustworthy.

  Mizi stood with Nanako and the fifteen elite soldiers she had assembled, which was the number they had agreed on and slightly fewer than Mizi would have preferred.

  Nanako spoke to him before they entered, in the low voice of someone briefing rather than warning.

  "The Mirror Realm responds to imagination," she said. "Strong imagination becomes reality inside it. This is its nature and its danger. We stay together. We do not split up for any reason. No one fully understands this place, which means the gap between what you expect and what you encounter is larger than in any other terrain you've fought in." She looked at him directly. "The moment you are certain of something in there, be suspicious of that certainty."

  Mizi nodded. He had fought in enough places where the rules were different to know how to receive this kind of briefing.

  They went through together.

  The realm presented its first problem before they had oriented. Stone robots, large and many, coming from the shadows with the specific efficiency of a defence that has been activated rather than improvised. Nanako met them with the Blade of Light, which found the seams in stone construction the way experienced fighters find structural weakness, but the weight of them pushed her back. Mizi moved to her side and together they cut through the leading formation, and the soldiers behind them addressed the flanks.

  The realm produced a second problem, which it had been building while the first problem occupied their attention. The worm came from the ground with the specific surprise of something that moves through a medium the defenders aren't watching. It went for Nanako, which Mizi noted, filing the targeting for later. He addressed the skull soldiers that were deploying crossbows along the formation's exposed edge while Nanako engaged the creature.

  "Formation," Mizi called to the elite soldiers. "Circle. Retreat toward the portal."

  They moved with the precision of people who have trained for coordinated withdrawal, which was different from running, and the movement toward the portal was organized rather than desperate.

  The second worm came from the floor directly under the formation's centre.

  The soldiers went in multiple directions. Some of them went down. Mizi started pulling them toward the portal, one by one, his strength not decreasing at the rate that the number of trips should have required. The soldiers who were still on their feet provided enough coverage for the process to work.

  He sent the last standing soldier through the portal.

  One of the soldiers who had made it out turned back at the threshold. "Nanako. The worm has her."

  Mizi went back in.

  He found Nanako being moved toward the worm's mouth in the specific grip of something that has found what it wanted and is not releasing it. The skull soldiers had been using her as a target, and the crossbow bolts in her armor told the story of how long she had been targeted while trying to manage the creature. Several had found the gaps.

  His blade found the worm's neck in a single clean stroke. The grip released.

  He lifted Nanako and assessed the route to the portal, which involved the skull soldiers who had regrouped and the stone robots that were following from the direction the second worm had come from. He set her down carefully, positioned himself between her and the skull soldiers, and worked through them with the systematic efficiency of someone who has stopped thinking about the combat and is simply resolving it. An arrow found his shoulder at some point during this process. He noted it and continued.

  When the stone robots began to reform from the rubble of the ones already destroyed, he picked Nanako up onto his shoulders and ran for the portal.

  The air outside the realm was cool and carried the specific quality of air that has not been through what the air inside had been through. Mizi set Nanako on the grass and knelt beside her, breathing hard.

  "Without you," Nanako said. She was holding her side, which was an assessment of the damage under the armor. "I would have died before now."

  "And without you," Mizi said, "I couldn't have held the formation long enough to get the others out." He looked at the portal. The blue light was there, deep inside, pulsing at a frequency that was too regular to be ambient.

  "I have to go back," he said.

  "Mizi." Nanako's hand found his arm. "The risk—"

  "If I don't come back," he said, standing, "bring more troops. Better troops. Because I think what's in there is the beginning of something larger." He looked at her. The smile he gave her was the specific smile of someone who has accepted the probability of a bad outcome and has decided to go anyway. "Don't wait too long."

  He stepped back into the portal before she could stop him, which she understood he had calculated for.

  The Mirror and the Shadow

  The stone robots, which had been relentless in their engagement of the formation, did not look at Mizi. He tested this by walking near three of them, and they tracked the portal's threshold behind him without redirecting toward his position. He filed this. They had been configured for Nanako specifically, which meant the threat intelligence inside the realm had a specific target, which meant the King of Venom had specific information.

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  He followed the blue light.

  It moved through the realm with the specific directness of things that are leaving a trail rather than moving randomly, and Mizi followed it through the Mirror Realm's dark forest, where the trees had the quality of trees that have been imagined rather than grown, their proportions technically correct but their weight somehow absent.

  The light gathered at a clearing and became a man. Not fully a man. A figure that occupied the space of a man while being made of something that light is made of, unstable in the way of things that exist at the edge of their own duration.

  "The Chosen One," the figure said. His voice had the quality of something being said through a medium it was not designed for. "Save the humans. Save the elves." He flickered. "My existence is fragile. I cannot remain long in one place." Another flicker. "Seek the real truth. And trust no one except your own family."

  "Wait," Mizi said. "Who are—"

  Blue smoke. The clearing was empty.

  Mizi stood in the clearing for a moment and thought about what he had just been told, which was cryptic in the way of things said by people who don't have time to be specific, and then he turned to leave and found that the forest did not cooperate with the direction he was walking in.

  He walked for what felt like an hour and returned to the same gnarled tree at the same junction three times. The Mirror Realm's architecture had a quality he recognised from Nanako's briefing. He was not lost in the physical sense. The place was responding to something.

  He sat down.

  Figures appeared from between the trees. Pale-faced, carrying glowing coals, their heads moving with the specific twitching quality of things that have been constructed to approximate a behaviour without fully understanding it.

  "How could you get lost, young man?" they said. The voices were synchronised in the way of voices that don't have individual sources. "Come. Come to our city."

  Mizi followed them, because the forest was not offering alternatives and following people who emerged from mirrors had a specific logic in places where imagination was the organizing principle.

  The city they led him to was the Human Kingdom's capital reproduced in Mirror Realm stone, proportionally correct, architecturally exact, with the Cathedral at its center and streets that had been paved with the right material and the wrong intention. He walked through the gate and the pale-faced people were gone, all of them simultaneously, as if they had never needed to be present for anything other than the leading.

  The silence that followed was the silence of a space that has been prepared for a specific thing to happen in it.

  The figure came from the shadow beside the Cathedral.

  He was wearing Mizi's clothes. He had Mizi's face. The face was wrong in a way that took a moment to locate, and the moment you located it you couldn't unlook at it: it was horizontally flipped. Every feature in the right position but the directionality inverted, a reflection given depth and intention.

  "Here he is," the doppelganger said, with the specific pleasure of someone who has been waiting. "The Destroyer of the Universe. You've been quiet, haven't you. Why haven't you destroyed this one yet?"

  "I'm not the Destroyer," Mizi said. "That's not what I am anymore. That was something that happened to me. It wasn't me."

  "Then who are you?"

  "I'm Mizi."

  The doppelganger laughed, which was Mizi's laugh with the frequency inverted. "If you're Mizi, what am I? I want freedom. I want your world." He raised his left hand in the peace sign. "I want to know which one of us is real. Silver Dragon Lord. Summon."

  The dragon that appeared had silver scales with the specific quality of polished metal, large and moving with the Mirror Realm's strange weight. Mizi stared at it. The Golden Dragon Spirit was gone. Dead. The realm had produced a version of his own summon.

  The Silver Dragon lunged.

  Mizi ran, which was not cowardice but the appropriate first response to a dragon that is not yet understood. The city's buildings dissolved behind the dragon's claws as it tracked him through the streets, and each destroyed building changed the city's navigation in ways that the retreat path did not account for, and Mizi found the dead-end alley by arriving in it.

  The Silver Dragon's claw pinned him. The weight of it was the weight of imagination given physical mass.

  The doppelganger appeared above him, crouching on the rubble.

  "When I leave here," it said, "I will wear your face. I will find everyone you care about. I will tell them what they want to hear and then I will remove them from your life permanently." The voice had no heat in it. "Starting with the girl. The sister."

  Mizi felt something shift.

  He thought about Nanako's briefing. Imagination is reality in this place. He thought about the Golden Dragon Spirit being dead, which it was, which was a fact. And then he thought about the fact that facts were not the organizing principle here. Belief was.

  He closed his eyes.

  He did not imagine the Dragon Spirit returning. He did not pretend it wasn't gone. He found something more specific: the memory of every time it had responded to him, every time the warmth behind his sternum had activated, and he held that memory with the same quality of attention he had used to build the robotic hand in the rice field, not wishing but constructing.

  Light from his forehead.

  He did not make the peace sign. He opened his eyes and the Golden Dragon Lord was there.

  The Dragon kicked the Silver Dragon off him and Mizi stood. The two summons found each other across the mirror-city with the specific recognition of reflections meeting, each movement answered by the other, each attack cancelled by its mirror.

  "It's useless," the doppelganger said, watching from the rubble. "You can't beat me here. I am you. Every attack you make, I cancel. Every technique you use, I have."

  "There's one difference between the original and the copy," Mizi said.

  "What?"

  "The original is always stronger."

  The Golden Dragon Lord built the Blaster Light from the precise reservoir of whatever the Mirror Realm had allocated to Mizi's imagination, gathering it rather than generating it. The Silver Dragon Lord's throat opened and produced nothing, because the copy had the shape of the technique and not the depth of it, the mechanism without the source.

  The beam went through the Silver Dragon.

  The doppelganger shrieked once, a sound with the specific quality of something that was only ever a reflection losing the surface it needed, and vanished into the shadows with the immediate completeness of things that have no independent existence.

  Mizi stood in the mirror-city and felt his imagination receding, the edges of the Dragon Lord becoming less defined. He let it go. He oriented toward the Cathedral at the city's center.

  The Falling Mask

  At the Cathedral's courtyard, Nanako had arrived back through the portal with the injured soldiers and the specific expression of someone who has accepted that doing the right thing and doing the safe thing were not aligned, and was choosing the right thing.

  The Masters listened to the briefing and assembled their response: twenty students, each selected specifically, their names read from a list that reflected considered judgment rather than availability. Nana's name was on it.

  When Nana heard where Mizi was, the fear was immediate and total, which was the fear of someone for whom a person has become family in the specific way of chosen family, which is the kind that holds. She stood in the courtyard fully prepared before the briefing had concluded.

  The Monks from the Ancestral Plane arrived with the specific timing of people who had been monitoring and had determined this was the moment to appear. They moved through the injured soldiers with the efficient care of healers who understand that time is a component of medicine, and the wounds that had been managed rather than treated began to close properly.

  Inako came behind them.

  She looked at Nanako.

  "The Chosen One," she said. "Where is he?"

  Nanako met her eyes and told her plainly. "Inside the realm. He went back alone. I couldn't stop him."

  The slap landed with the specific sound of something that has been building behind it. The courtyard heard it.

  "If you fail to bring him back," Inako said, in the voice of someone stating a legal fact rather than making a threat, "your descendants will be stripped of their leadership. Your name will not be in the history that follows this."

  Nanako stood with the mark of it on her face and did not look away.

  "I understand," she said.

  She turned to the twenty students. "We go now."

  The Mirror Realm's entrance received them the way a place receives people who have already come once and were not adequate to the situation: without ceremony and immediately with everything it had available. Hundreds of skull soldiers. Stone robots formed from the terrain. The defensive response of a system that has been informed about the intrusion and is not in any way less prepared for the second entry.

  The elite students engaged with the discipline of people who have been trained at the Cathedral's highest level, and the engagement was sufficient for the first three minutes and became increasingly insufficient after that.

  Two worms came from the ground and found Nana, which was specific in the way of the realm's targeting that Mizi had already noticed. Nanako threw herself between Nana and the first one, which was a choice made in the fraction of a second available, and took the impact that would have been Nana's.

  "Retreat," Nanako told her, from the specific position of someone who has absorbed a significant force and is still operating.

  "No," Nana said. She raised the blade. "I am helping."

  A skull soldier with a greatsword, significantly taller than any of the soldiers in her fighting range, brought the sword in an arc that Nana saw and ducked under. The duck was correct. The helmet was not designed for the specific angle of the blade's edge on the follow-through, and the metal sheared away with a sound that was distinct from all the other sounds in the engagement.

  Nana's face.

  The pale skin, the human-proportioned ears, the specific combination of both that said exactly what it said.

  Nanako saw it. Several of the soldiers saw it. There was nothing to be done about this in the current moment because the second worm arrived and found Nana with its teeth before the first moment's consequences could be processed.

  The forest took her, the worm moving with the terrible efficiency of something that lives inside darkness and knows its geography. The trail of blood on the forest floor was real and immediate.

  Nana was conscious for the first part of the dragging and then for only part of the second part and then not for any of it. The blood loss had its own specific arithmetic and the arithmetic was arriving at a number.

  In the dark of the forest, in the moment before the number arrived, something caught her.

  Arms. Strong, certain, present.

  "I've got you," a voice said.

  She let the darkness take the rest of it.

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