The Sparring Ground

  The Cathedral's training ground in the early morning had a specific quality to it that Syizl had come to recognise over the months, which was the quality of a student who has stopped being a student in the way that students are students and has started being something harder to categorise. Nana moved through the sparring session with the focus of someone who had stopped thinking about the moves and started thinking about the person.

  She read his attack before it landed. Three of his most reliable combinations, deflected in sequence, with the specific economy of someone who has studied rather than simply practiced. Then she reversed.

  Five-hit combination. Syizl lost her in the third one, which was the point she had been building toward, and the sword swing that followed had Mizi's signature on it — the particular arc that came from the shoulder rather than the wrist, designed to unsettle a blade rather than block it. Syizl's sword left his hand. He hit the ground.

  Nana stood over him and began to say the thing you say when you believe the contest is concluded.

  Syizl clapped.

  She looked at him. He produced the second sword from behind his back with the speed of someone who has been hiding it since the beginning of the session, and he was already moving before the clapping had finished, and Nana's deflection was good but his momentum was better, and she found the ground.

  His sword at her throat. Her admission of defeat.

  The sword master's walking staff found the back of Syizl's head with the specific force of a teacher communicating something that words would be insufficient for. "You fell first," the sword master said. "And you're the one pointing a sword?"

  Syizl held back his laughter with the specific effort of someone who is choosing to preserve a relationship.

  "Her progress is real," the sword master said, looking at Nana. "Whatever she's doing in the evenings, keep doing it."

  The city guard arrived at a run, which was the kind of arrival that ends training sessions.

  The Doppelgangers

  Thirty figures moving through the city wearing the faces of city guards was the specific problem of an attack designed to cause confusion before it causes damage, and it was working. Citizens were not running from guards, which was the normal response to something threatening, because these things looked like guards.

  Syizl and Nana cleared the first group with the efficiency of two people who have been training together long enough to not need to communicate the distribution of targets.

  Then Syizl's own face walked toward him.

  The specific experience of being confronted with your own face in an attacking posture is not one that training prepares for, and Syizl found himself in the gap between his reflexes and his comprehension while the doppelganger closed the distance.

  Three electric spheres came from above. Not from the doppelganger. From the building's edge, where an elf crouched with the face that belonged on a different kind of creature, the demon-face quality that was not cosmetic damage but structural, built that way. Syizl recognised the face from the three monuments that had appeared the previous morning, the elves elevated to Highest Spirit.

  He filed this.

  The doppelganger pressed him while he was filing it.

  Nana stepped in and deflected the doppelganger's attack from the angle that would have reached Syizl, which was the right call and cost her three electric spheres directly, and she went down hard.

  They were losing.

  Nanako arrived from the market road with fifteen elite soldiers in the specific formation of a force that has been running toward a sound rather than toward a position, and they hit the doppelganger mass from the rear while Syizl and Nana were still absorbing the fact that rescue was happening.

  The demon-faced elf on the building watched this development and made the assessment that city guards were beneath commentary.

  "Human leader!" he called, with the specific cadence of someone whose grasp of the language is functional rather than fluent but whose contempt crosses all language barriers. "Not strong! Fight, lose! Lose! Hahahaha!"

  Nanako looked at him.

  She drew her sword and brought the triangle light blade to her gauntlet, and the dragon helmet deployed over her face and the gold-plated armor found its full configuration, and she looked the way a ruler looks when she has decided that the performance portion of the engagement has concluded.

  She went for the Syizl-doppelganger.

  The demon-faced elf sent three electric spheres at her, which Syizl and Nana intercepted from either side, taking the hits to give Nanako her approach. The doppelganger fought with Syizl's technique in Syizl's body and Nanako found the specific edges of the technique that were Syizl's weaknesses rather than Nanako's, which she knew because she had been watching Syizl train in her courtyard for months.

  "You underestimate the former Pendragon Ruler," she said, which was not a boast but a technical note. "You don't know the true power of what it means to rule the human kingdom."

  She stepped back. The helmet glowed with the specific quality of something that has been charging rather than activating. She moved forward in the burst of speed that the armor's full engagement produced, surrounded in the aura of light that took the shape of a dragon as it moved around her, and she hit the doppelganger's weak point with the precision of someone who has been studying weak points since before Syizl learned to fence.

  The light at the tip of her sword found the doppelganger and the demon-faced elf simultaneously, two targets at two distances, one shot.

  The doppelganger dissolved.

  The elf dropped into the portal that opened beneath him with the speed of someone who has assessed the situation and chosen continuation over pride. Syizl and Nana couldn't follow. The electric blast residue in their legs was still deciding whether to allow movement.

  The street settled. Citizens who had been pressed against walls began to remember that they had been going somewhere before this.

  "Thank you," Syizl said to Nanako.

  "Be careful," Nanako said. She looked at both of them. "There is an enemy inside our situation, not just at its edges. I don't know the shape of it yet."

  "The elves," Syizl said. "Are they turning?"

  "Maybe," Nanako said. "Maybe not. What I need is to know what the elf leader is doing. Specifically and currently." She looked at the space where the portal had been. "And I need Inako to listen to me."

  The Long Journey Through the Forest

  The forest at the edge of the Empera Universe's settled territory was long and the portal had deposited them at the beginning of it rather than the end, which meant travel, which meant time, which meant Waz had opportunities.

  "What do you like to eat," Waz said.

  Mizi walked.

  "What is your favorite color."

  Mizi walked.

  "Do you prefer coffee or—"

  "Stop," Mizi said.

  "I'm just curious about—"

  "Waz." Mizi looked at him with the expression of someone who has decided that looking is more efficient than explaining. "Stop."

  Waz stopped asking for approximately four minutes, which was the duration of his stopping.

  Mizi broke the silence himself, which was something he regretted immediately in the specific way of people who ask questions they should have anticipated the consequences of. "You're from the future. You've met me from the future."

  Waz looked at him.

  "What am I like," Mizi said.

  Waz said, with the specific satisfaction of someone waiting for exactly this opening: "Shut up! I'm stressed answering those questions!"

  Mizi looked at him.

  Waz laughed. Mizi hit his head, which Waz absorbed without breaking the laugh.

  "Alright," Waz said, when the laugh was finished. "Yes. I've met you. What do you want to know?"

  "What am I like."

  Waz was quiet for a moment with the quality of someone deciding how to frame something. "Strong," he said. "Very strong. Invincible, by most measures. You rule across multiple universes. You've seen things that no living person has seen. Everyone is afraid of you."

  Mizi walked. "And the people?"

  "What people?"

  "The people in those universes. Under that rule. Are they well?"

  Waz didn't answer immediately.

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

  "I want to meet him," Mizi said.

  "That is a very bad idea—"

  "I want to meet him," Mizi said again. "I want to ask him directly."

  Waz looked at him with the assessment of someone who has been told no by people with power before and is measuring the current situation against the memory of those times. He did the magic that moved them through time.

  The throne room they arrived in was the specific kind of vast that communicates absolute authority, the dimensions of a space designed to make the person at its centre the only relevant point. The figure on the throne had Mizi's build and Mizi's posture and a face that the room's specific lighting made difficult to read directly.

  Mizi walked toward the throne.

  "Why are you doing this," he said. "What happened to peace? What happened to protecting people?"

  The figure on the throne looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone encountering a question they gave up finding an answer to a long time ago.

  "I have nothing to discuss with you," the future-Mizi said. The voice was his own voice with something removed from it that Mizi couldn't name exactly. "Go back to your time."

  He raised his hand and the pressure arrived before Mizi could respond to the gesture, and the portal that received them deposited them back in the Empera Universe's forest with the specific abruptness of being ejected from a place.

  Mizi stood in the trees.

  "I want to go back," he said.

  "No," Waz said. He was sitting on the ground, breathing with the quality of someone who has had something pressed out of them. "Not until you have power that he takes seriously. The version of you I showed you does not negotiate with people who cannot threaten him. You are currently not a threat to him." He looked up. "I am sorry. But this is the honest situation."

  Mizi was quiet. He looked at the trees.

  "Alright," he said. "Then let's go."

  The Ancestral Plane

  The conversation between Nanako and Inako in the Ancestral Plane had the quality of a conversation that has a clear import and a mismatch between the people in it regarding what that import requires.

  Nanako told her about the demon-faced elf. About the monuments that had appeared. About the specific quality of an elf who had the face of the three people who were supposed to have been elevated to Highest Spirit status and instead had demon faces and electric weapons and were coordinating with doppelgangers attacking the city.

  Inako listened with the specific quality of someone listening in order to give the appearance of listening.

  "Improve your defenses," Inako said. "That is the appropriate response."

  "I'm telling you that the elves—"

  "I heard you." Inako's eyes, when she turned them on Nanako, had a quality that was not warm. "I am not prepared to accuse the elves of anything on the basis of what you've described. Improve your defenses. Go."

  Nanako left.

  She stood in the Ancestral Plane's corridor and looked at the wall and thought about the specific difference between a person who leads and a person who holds power, and whether those two things had ever been the same person in Inako's case, and when exactly she had stopped assuming they were.

  The Reunion

  The Cathedral's training ground again. Nana was making Syizl work for his survival, which was the accurate description of the state of the current session. The new move she had developed involved an attack that was not the attack, the sword swinging left with enough commitment to pull the defensive response, and then not being there — the real blade arriving from the right with the specific speed of something that has been moving since before the other thing finished moving.

  It almost found Syizl's face.

  He caught it. The impact knocked him down.

  Mizi arrived through the training ground's gate while Syizl was still on the ground.

  He clapped. "My little brother is terrifying with a sword now."

  Nana saw him and abandoned the training ground's gravity entirely, crossing the distance with the speed of someone who has been waiting for something to come back and it has come back, and she held him with the specific grip of younger siblings who have learned that people can disappear and are communicating their position on this.

  Mizi held her back. He rubbed her head. "How is the kingdom?" he asked. "What did I miss?"

  Syizl told him about the doppelgangers, the demon-faced elf, Nanako's intervention, the monuments. He told it efficiently, the way he told most things.

  Mizi listened. "The King of Venom," he said. "The Mirror Realm's corruption was his work. This feels like the same signature."

  "Wan promised," Nana said. She turned to look at Mizi with the specific expression of someone who has been thinking about this since the incidents happened. "He promised not to attack humanity again. We cannot accuse someone because of a pattern that might belong to someone else."

  "When I was in the Mirror Realm—"

  "I know what happened to you in the Mirror Realm," Nana said. She took his cheek between her fingers and held it with the affectionate pressure of someone who has decided that the argument requires physical emphasis. "That doesn't make it his doing. If Wan was actually controlling the doppelgangers, then Syizl and I would have been his first targets. We weren't."

  Mizi endured the cheek-grip and made the face of someone conceding a point they find uncomfortable. "Okay," he said. "I hear you."

  Waz appeared beside them with the timing of someone who has been just out of the conversation and has chosen this moment to enter it. He looked at Nana with the expression of a person reading something they have been waiting to read.

  "The younger sibling of the Chosen One!" he said, to no one specifically, in the manner of a person narrating to an audience that exists in a timeline other than the present one. "One day she will change the future of the Empera Universe and become a just ruler! Let us witness—"

  "Who is this," Syizl said.

  "Waz," Mizi said. "He's a wizard from the future. He says he's my loyal follower." He put his hand over Waz's mouth. "He also talks constantly. Tell Inako he's here. I'll go ahead."

  The Zither

  Inako was playing when Mizi arrived, which was the specific activity of someone who uses music for thinking rather than for music. The zither's sound in the Ancestral Plane had a quality that the plane's specific acoustic contributed to, something older and more resonant than the same instrument anywhere else.

  She heard him and startled, and it was a genuine startle, which was unusual for Inako.

  "You scared me," she said. And then she looked at him, at the specific quality of someone she had sent into the Oneirology Universe and has not stopped thinking about since. She crossed the room and held him.

  Mizi held her back. "You look well," he said. "And not like a princess anymore, apparently."

  "Queen," she said, with the specific satisfaction of someone who has been working toward a word for a long time. She sat beside him and returned to the zither. "Are you well?"

  "I'm well." He watched her hands on the strings. "The Supreme Lord is coming here, Inako. He told me himself before he left the Oneirology Universe. He wants the Ancestral Plane as his throne."

  "I know," she said. "I've predicted it. We are prepared. You don't need to worry."

  "I'm not worried," Mizi said, which was mostly true. "I just need to know the situation."

  Inako set the zither aside. She looked at him for a moment with an expression that had layers in it. "Mizi," she said. "I want to marry you."

  Mizi looked at her.

  "I love you," she said. "I've known it for a while. Just give me a date."

  He thought about it with the specific seriousness he gave things that deserved seriousness. "Next week," he said. "As long as the Supreme Lord hasn't arrived."

  Inako agreed. She smiled with the warmth of someone who has been holding something and has been given permission to put it down, and she took his hand and led him to the room where the large bed occupied most of the wall.

  She pushed him onto it with the playful force of someone who has decided to be direct rather than oblique.

  "What are you doing," Mizi said.

  "I want love before the wedding," she said. "Is that unreasonable?"

  "It's irregular," he said. But he was laughing. He pushed back, reversing the position, and looked at her. "I should tell you that inexperience and ignorance are not the same thing."

  Inako looked at him with an expression that moved through surprise and landed on something warmer.

  What followed was between them and the room.

  The Dream of Aldrien

  In the specific way of dreams that arrive with the quality of messages rather than experiences, Mizi found himself in a blue light that had the warmth of something deliberate rather than ambient.

  The man in the light was composed of it in the way of people who exist in the space between presence and absence, present enough to communicate and no more.

  "You are the one Inako chose," the man said.

  "Who are you," Mizi said.

  "Aldrien. The true prince of the Ancestral Plane. The former one." He looked at Mizi with the expression of someone who is spending a limited resource carefully. "I am here because I cannot stay long, and what I have to tell you cannot be delayed. Inako is not what she appears to be. Find Wan. Ask him who Inako is. Wan knows."

  "Why don't you tell me directly," Mizi said.

  "Because if I tell you directly, you are in danger," Aldrien said. The light around him was fading at the edges, the specific quality of something running out. "The truth needs to come from someone who is still alive. Someone who can protect you while you process it." The light was nearly gone. "Wake up. Get ready."

  Outside the dream, in the room with the large bed, Inako was looking at the sleeping Mizi with an expression that the dream could not have shown him.

  "He has so much mana," she said quietly, to herself. "More than I've encountered in a single person. If I take it now—" She paused, calculating something. "No. If I kill him now the mana disperses. I lose everything. Better to absorb it gradually. Build toward the Supreme Lord with his power as the base." She looked at his face. "He'll serve me better alive, for now."

  The aura came out of him before she had finished the thought.

  It was not the Dragon Spirit. It was the residual power that the Ancestral Plane had described as infinite mana, moving without his direction, the body's response to proximity to a threat the conscious mind had not yet registered. Inako was off the bed and on the floor before the aura had fully extended.

  Mizi woke. He found her on the floor and helped her up with the immediate concern of someone who believes what he sees.

  "Are you alright? Did you fall?"

  "I slipped," she said.

  They sat together and Mizi asked, in the way of someone bringing a topic up carefully because he does not know what he is approaching, "Do you know the King of Venom? Wan?"

  Inako looked at him. "My former brother," she said. "I found him during the human-elf war, nearly killed by humans. He was the son of the previous elven king, the one known for the Venom Attack. I raised him. He changed, and then he changed again, and the second change was into a rebel who wanted the old war back. He's been our problem since." She paused. "Why?"

  "I heard the name," Mizi said. He watched her face, which was giving him nothing. "And Aldrien — your brother who passed. I heard that name too. From the locals. He was a good person, by all accounts."

  The movement was very fast and would have been invisible to anyone not watching her hands. The knife that had been behind her thigh found her grip and then, in the moment that Mizi looked at her with the expression of someone who just asked an innocent question, it stopped.

  She looked at him.

  He looked at her, as if waiting for the answer about Aldrien.

  She put the knife away. "Yes," she said. "He was a good person. The best person I knew." She looked at her hands. "You're making me sad by asking about him."

  "I'm sorry," Mizi said, with the specific earnestness of someone who means it. "I'm thoughtless sometimes. I'm sorry." He began pulling his clothes back on with the sheepish efficiency of someone making their exit. "Forgive me. I should go. I'm probably not—" He looked at her with the expression of someone deprecating themselves sincerely. "A man with my history isn't really what you should be marrying. I should—"

  Inako came from behind him and held him, her arms around his chest, her face against his back.

  "Don't go," she said. The voice had the specific quality of something genuine underneath the layers, the part of Inako that existed before the Ancestral Plane and the throne and the pool of blood and the three monuments. "Please. Don't go."

  Mizi put his hands over hers.

  "I'm not going anywhere," he said.

  The Second Attack

  The doppelganger attack the following morning had a different character from the first, which Mizi noticed while dispatching the third one with a burst of light aura — these ones were faster, less confused, more targeted in their selection of victims.

  He came around a market corner and found the second elf. This one wore green and had the same demon-face quality as the one from the previous incident, but the face was different. A different person, which meant a different monument.

  Syizl confirmed it immediately. "Not the same one," he said, from the other side of the approach angle. "Different elf. Same origin."

  The elf produced a spear with the specific confidence of someone who expects the weapon to explain the situation without further conversation. He came at Syizl and Mizi together, which was the decision of someone who has assessed both and decided the solution is speed rather than strategy.

  Syizl and Mizi's combination was the product of the Empera Universe's months, the training ground and the missions and the specific way two people learn to occupy space together when they have been in danger together enough times. They found the elf's defensive gaps in the exchange, and when they closed simultaneously the spear met both swords at once.

  The spear became two spears.

  The elf became two elves.

  Two of the same face, two spears, both of them moving now with the specific coordination of a single mind operating two bodies, and Syizl and Mizi found themselves in the arithmetic of a fight that had changed its numbers without changing its territory.