The Pendragon and the Law

  Three months in the Empera Universe passed the way months pass when they are full: quickly in retrospect, dense in the living of them.

  Mizi had taken the Pendragon Ruler position with the specific pragmatism of someone who has been handed a responsibility and decided that the only version of holding it that he could tolerate was doing it properly. He attended the councils, learned the kingdom's structural problems, and addressed them in the order of their urgency. He commissioned roads. He reformed the Cathedral's intake process for students who arrived without family resources. He met with the elven leadership three times in the first month and twice in the second, which was more contact than the two peoples had maintained in the preceding decade.

  The proposal he brought to the joint council in the third month was specific and workable: half-elves were to be protected under human law. No execution, no forced exile, no classification as misfortune. They could live in the kingdom freely. The one condition, which was the concession to the law that existed, was that they could not marry humans. It was not a perfect law. Mizi knew it was not a perfect law. It was the law that was achievable.

  The elven leader agreed. The council agreed. The documentation was prepared.

  Inako did not agree.

  She received the proposal at the Ancestral Plane with the expression of someone who has anticipated a problem arriving and is now watching it arrive in the shape she predicted. "The laws of the Ancestral Plane govern matters of union between races," she said. "Those laws cannot be changed by human governance. They are not within your authority, Pendragon Ruler."

  "The law I am enacting is human law," Mizi said. "It says nothing about the Ancestral Plane's laws. It says that humans may not execute half-elves. That is within my authority as Pendragon Ruler."

  Inako's expression did not change. But she did not argue further, which was a different kind of answer.

  The law was enacted. Mizi did not announce a victory. He wrote the legislation, signed it, and moved to the next thing on the council's agenda.

  The New Family

  Nanako's residence was large in the specific way of homes that have been built for a family rather than a person, with more rooms than the current occupants needed and a kitchen that was designed to produce food for gatherings. The family that lived there had the quality of people who have chosen each other as much as they were assigned to each other, and they received Mizi and Nana with the specific welcome of people who have decided that the adoption is complete and the provisional period is over.

  The grandmother called Mizi by name at the first dinner and asked about his sword training. The uncle moved Mizi's belongings to the better room without being asked and did not mention it. Nanako's younger brother challenged Nana to a practice match three days after they arrived and received a surprise that he talked about for two weeks.

  Mizi sat at the table on the seventh evening and looked at the specific ordinary scene of a family eating together with the easy noise of people who are comfortable, and felt the specific thing that has no exact name, which is the feeling of a space you did not know you were missing becoming present and filling itself.

  He helped with the dishes afterward without being asked, which was something he had learned at his grandmother's hut a long time ago.

  The Prophecy and the Buffalo

  Inako called him to the Ancestral Plane on a morning in the middle of the third month. She had the expression she wore when a prediction had arrived, which was different from her administrative expression and her diplomatic expression — more inward, as if she was reading something that existed below the surface of the visible.

  "The Supreme Lord," she said. "My prediction has clarified. He will move on the Oneirology Universe. There is a source of power there that he has not reclaimed yet — the roots of the Ancient Tree. If he takes them, the consequences extend beyond your old universe."

  Mizi stood with this.

  "I want you to go back," Inako said. "Protect the Oneirology Universe. Stop him before he reaches the tree."

  "Yes," Mizi said.

  "I'll assign elite soldiers—"

  "No."

  Inako looked at him.

  "The Empera Universe needs them," Mizi said. "I know my way around the Oneirology Universe. I know its people. I'll go alone." He paused. "But I'll need a mount."

  "A mount."

  "The best buffalo in the Empera Universe. Male, full strength, peak condition."

  Inako looked at him for the specific moment of someone deciding whether to ask the question they are thinking or accept the answer that has been given. "For what purpose?"

  "A horse breaks under extended combat conditions," Mizi said. "A buffalo has three times the endurance, a lower centre of gravity, thicker skin, and the ability to carry more weight at speed. I've been looking at the military records. The cavalry uses horses because they're traditional. But a buffalo in the right hands is better."

  Inako sent the order.

  The buffalo they brought was from the Supmylo Mountains, which Mizi learned about from the handler who delivered it and who told the story with the particular relish of someone who has told it before and enjoys the part where the fire wizard is gored. The Supmylo buffalo had skin that treated extreme temperature as weather rather than threat, stamina that had no recorded ceiling, and a temperament that the handler described as "decisive," which was a careful way to say what the animal was currently demonstrating in the courtyard.

  It had already broken one of the fence posts.

  Mizi watched it for a moment. He climbed the fence, dropped onto the buffalo's back from above, and held on.

  What followed was not graceful. The buffalo expressed its position on the situation comprehensively and at length. Mizi held on with the specific stubbornness of someone who has decided this is not the thing that defeats him today, and used his weight and his hands and the patience he had developed over years of situations that required being worn down before they could be worked through.

  The buffalo stopped. Then it stood. Then it breathed.

  Mizi sat on it and it permitted this.

  Inako watched from the courtyard's edge. "That buffalo gored a fire wizard to paralysis," she said.

  "The fire wizard fought it," Mizi said, settling the weight on the animal's back. "I didn't fight it."

  They equipped the buffalo with the travelling gear, which the animal accepted with moderate suspicion. Mizi loaded his supplies. At the portal, with the Empera Universe's skyline behind him and the Oneirology Universe's coordinates ahead, he looked back once at the city, at the direction of Nanako's residence.

  He went through.

  Welcome Home

  The arrival in the Oneirology Universe deposited him at the edge of a field he recognised, in the general vicinity of PaP Town's outskirts, at a time of day when the light was long and specific. The doppelganger was there almost immediately, which confirmed that it had survived the Mirror Realm by finding its way through a portal, and it had approximately three seconds to register the buffalo's trajectory before the buffalo made a decision about obstacles in its path.

  The doppelganger ceased to be a presence.

  The buffalo looked at the aftermath with the specific expression of an animal that has resolved a minor inconvenience and is ready to continue.

  Some boys who had been watching from the road answered Mizi's question without hesitation: yes, they knew the Jalal family, and the house was that direction. They watched the man on the buffalo ride away and told each other about it for the rest of the afternoon.

  Mizi knocked on the door of the house he had grown up in from the back of the buffalo, which he tied to the fence post with a length of rope that the animal examined and decided to accept.

  His mother opened the door.

  The moment she took to understand what she was seeing was brief, and then she moved toward him with the specific urgency of a parent who has spent months in the not-knowing and is now done with it. She held him without saying anything for a moment, then pulled back and said, "Where have you been? Where did you go?" with the voice that parents use when relief and anger are operating simultaneously and the relief is winning.

  "It's a long story," Mizi said. "I'll tell you everything."

  His father was inside. When he saw Mizi's face, he sat down in the specific way of people whose legs have made a decision ahead of their minds. He gripped Mizi's hand with both of his and held it, and his eyes were doing the thing they do when a parent has held a version of their child in their mind as something gone wrong and is being confronted with the fact that the wrong thing has been undone.

  "You came back," his father said.

  "I came back," Mizi said.

  His brother asked three questions before Mizi had finished sitting down. Mizi told them everything, in the way you tell your family things: starting with the parts that matter most and filling in around them, watching their faces for the points where understanding arrives. His mother and father asked the right questions. His brother asked how strong the Supreme Lord was and what his weak points were.

  "I don't know his weak points yet," Mizi said honestly. "That's what I have to find out."

  "When is he coming?" his brother asked.

  "Soon," Mizi said. "I need to find the others first."

  The Strange Visitor

  At the hospital in Habas City, the room that Azraie and Aqif shared had the specific quality of rooms where people who have survived serious things are waiting to be well enough to do the next serious thing. Ashley and Athira had come to visit, which was an act of care complicated by the fact that both visitors were also healing, which gave the visit the quality of a gathering of people who are all checking that the others are still present.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  They were all still present.

  The man arrived without announcement. He wore a scarf across his mouth and carried a staff, and he moved through the hospital corridor with the specific ease of someone who knows where he is going and does not need anyone's permission to go there. He set the flowers on the table beside the beds and looked at the room's occupants with an expression that contained something private.

  "Destiny is true," he said. "My king will meet his old friend again. And one day he will find his real power — his true power as the Chosen One."

  Ashley looked at him. "Who are you?"

  He was already at the door. He looked back once with the expression of someone who has said exactly what they came to say, and then he was gone, and the corridor outside was empty in the specific way of places that someone left a moment ago and has already completely vacated.

  The flowers remained.

  The Queen's Coronation

  In the Empera Universe, Inako was crowned Queen on a day that the Ancestral Plane's light made exceptional by default.

  She descended to her people after the ceremony and spoke, which she did in the specific voice of someone who has spent years understanding what the moment required and is now standing in it. The elves in the crowd heard a Queen who was addressing them as subjects of equal status to the humans, which was new in the specific way of things that have been needed for a long time and are now happening.

  Her proposal to the elven community was practical and visionary simultaneously: build a Cathedral. Connect the elven Kingdom to the Ancestral Plane. Receive the goddess's blessing through the same structures that the humans used. She framed it as inclusion rather than assimilation, which was the difference that made most of the elves present nod.

  Three did not.

  They stood in the back of the gathering with the specific posture of people who have decided that this public moment is the right moment to be the ones who say what others are thinking. They said it. Inako was being unfair. The elf people had been oppressed for generations. The new laws were a facade. The Queen was performing care rather than providing it.

  Inako listened to them fully.

  Then she walked toward them with a smile that the people who had known her a long time would have recognised, if any of those people had been close enough to see it clearly.

  "You want justice for your people," she said. "Truly. I understand that." She looked at each of them in turn, the smile remaining. "I want to offer you something extraordinary. I want to invite you to become the first elves elevated to the highest Spirits of the Ancestral Plane. To be the guardians of your people from the highest position available. To be honoured above every elf who has lived."

  The three of them looked at each other. The offer was exactly what they had been asking for, which was the thing that should have given them pause and did not.

  "Come with me," Inako said, opening the portal. "Right now."

  They followed her through.

  What happened in the Ancestral Plane, the three of them experienced fully and Inako's people did not speak of afterward. The bed that was not a bed. The blanket that became restraint. The platform that absorbed from the feet upward while they were still conscious, still screaming, still alive in the specific way of things being consumed rather than killed. The pool that remained when the platform finished its work.

  Inako immersed herself in it with the calm of someone performing a practice they have performed before, and the mana absorbed into her was the mana that had lived in three people who had cared about their community enough to speak publicly against power.

  She emerged.

  Three statues appeared at the Ancestral Plane's viewing platform: elves with wings, rendered in the stone of the highest plane, positioned to look benevolent and watchful. The elves who came to see them saw the people who had spoken at the gathering, elevated exactly as promised, exactly as they had asked to be.

  The name they called her was the benevolent goddess.

  Nanako watched the statues from a distance that she had positioned deliberately. She looked at them for a long time. Then she went to find Nana and told her they needed to speak that evening, privately.

  The Falling Meteor

  The tremor that preceded the Supreme Lord's arrival hit Dusan Village with the specific violence of a meteor rather than an earthquake, the impact localised and sudden rather than rolling through the ground. The villagers came to the edges of the cleared area around the Ancient Tree and found something that the security forces were already forming a perimeter around, something large enough that "entity" was the word that arrived before any other.

  It sat behind the tree as if stunned by the impact, its size resolving as they looked at it from being large to being very large.

  Ashley and Athira had arrived with the security forces, both still moving with the specific careful quality of people whose healing is recent. They assessed the situation from the perimeter, and then Ashley saw the man across the field.

  She saw Mizi's face.

  The last time she had seen Mizi's face it had been attacking her and it had not been Mizi, which was a fact she had processed intellectually and not entirely physically, and the physical processing expressed itself immediately: monsters deployed, combat posture, the specific forward movement of someone who has decided not to wait for confirmation.

  Mizi avoided the monsters with the reflexes of someone who is used to combat and is not trying to escalate it. He parried without attacking, deflecting with his sword flat, moving out of lines of force rather than through them.

  "Guys! Calm down! This is me! this is Mizi!"

  Ashley came in with the katana, which was not the monster and was therefore harder to be gentle about. "How are we supposed to believe that," she said, parrying hard enough that the contact said what her voice was saying, "when you attacked us three days ago and put me in the hospital with my leg barely functional!"

  Mizi parried and looked at the bandaged leg and said, "Who attacked you? I just arrived in this universe. Today."

  Ashley stopped.

  "You just arrived," she said.

  "I came through a portal an hour ago," Mizi said. "From the Empera Universe. I've been there for three months." He looked at the bandage, at the specific location of the wound, and something in his face went through a calculation. "The doppelganger. From the Mirror Realm."

  "It followed you back?"

  "Not anymore," Mizi said. He glanced in the direction his buffalo had come from. "It was here when I arrived. My buffalo resolved it."

  Ashley looked at him for the specific moment of someone deciding whether to believe a sentence they just heard. Then she put the katana away, adjusted her weight off the bad leg, and extended her fist.

  "Welcome home," she said.

  Mizi met it. "Good to be back."

  The entity behind the Ancient Tree moved.

  The security forces' rifles produced the specific sound of many weapons deciding the same thing simultaneously, and the rounds hit the entity and did what rounds do when they encounter something that has existed long enough to have skin that human weapons were not designed for. The entity reached for the tree's roots without particular urgency, the way you reach for something you own, and began to pull the energy from them.

  Ashley's summon hit it. Athira's summon hit it. The entity looked at them with the specific expression of something that has been inconvenienced.

  "Stupid," it said, and the word carried a force that was not volume but something deeper, and the summons froze.

  The tree's energy was moving toward the entity in visible streams, and the stream was not thin.

  Mizi stepped between the entity and the tree and released the aura, which was not the Dragon Spirit but was the residual warmth that had lived in his body since the Ancestral Plane, the infinite mana that Inako had described and that he had only partially understood, gathered and directed outward.

  The entity was pushed back. Not thrown, not destroyed. Pushed, the way you push something that is very heavy, with the maximum force available and the specific outcome of it moving a smaller distance than you intended.

  The entity rose to its full height.

  It looked at Mizi.

  "You," it said. The voice was not loud but was present in the specific way of things that have existed for long enough that presence is simply a property they carry. "You are my great-grandson. How are you here?"

  "I am not your great-grandson," Mizi said. "I am a human. You are something that is not from this planet."

  The entity's expression, which had been cold, became something colder.

  "I AM NOT A DISGUSTING CREATURE AS YOU SAY." Each sentence landed with the weight of something that is used to being the authority on its own definition. "I AM THE AUTHOR. I AM THE RULER OF SHADOWS AND DISASTER. I CREATED LIFE ON THIS PLANET. I GAVE THE POWER OF DESTRUCTION. I AM THE TRUE CREATOR OF APOCRYPHA. I AM THE DARK IMMORTALITY SUPREME LORD. KNOW YOUR POSITION."

  The energy gathered in his hands and his skin brightened with it, the damage of the landing healing as the stolen mana from the roots integrated into his body. The horns that had been brittle from the meteor's impact straightened.

  Mizi moved toward him.

  The Supreme Lord slowed time. Not stopped it. the quality was different from stopping, more like thickening, each second expanding while the things inside it stayed partially present and the blaster attack that came from his hands arrived through the thickened air and hit Mizi with the full weight of something travelling through slowed time, which was paradoxically heavier than normal.

  Mizi hit the ground.

  The Supreme Lord looked at the people still standing. "I will go to the next Universe after this," he said

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