The next three weeks passed in a blur. Every spare moment was filled with paperwork or helping the public rebuild their homes and businesses.

  The moment King Zer’Nack’s decree was announced—broadcast by tens, if not hundreds, of city speakers—Benedict, Marchioness Eliza, and Dralos insisted I make as many public appearances as possible. The people needed to see me laboring for them, actively healing the city. Being told someone had performed heroics and seeing it were two very different things. Every child I pulled from the brink of death with my Domain, every person I found buried beneath the rubble, seemed to raise my esteem higher than any title ever could.

  Ethan and Nida had been absent since I left her at the Healers’ Center with Nasq. I’d checked in on the wounded sorcerer a few times, but his condition had hardly changed. The healers had managed to stabilize him, to an extent, but it was as if he was in some sort of status. His health never worsened, but it also refused to improve.

  I had wanted to welcome Ethan back, to ask him about the Red Cardinal, especially with the inevitable war against the Holy Kingdom looming if Benedict’s warnings proved true. But I’d barely had time to breathe, much less greet him. And despite the King’s request that my ascension ceremony take place within the month, that had proven impossible. At best, the city council would settle the issues and delays in another month.

  Apparently, the council was split. Half wanted me throned as Duchess of Alistar immediately. The other half was vehemently opposed. I had sent Dralos to investigate those resisting my rule, suspecting another player at work. There had been little news of Morgana or Duke Goldenhearts, but I knew both were alive and scheming.

  I had tried to track the Duke’s location, to... persuade him to my side, but he had vanished from the battlefield without a trace. Part of me hoped sickness had claimed him, though I knew better. Besides, I still needed him to name me heir to his duchy. Only then would he have my permission to die.

  But what truly occupied my thoughts stood high above the bloodstained soil of the western gate.

  I had assigned Benedict and a small group of ducal sorcerers to study the portal Nasq had created with the Runic Script. But I did not trust them enough to reveal its true significance—or where it led. That was why I needed Nasq back on his feet. If anyone could unravel the portal’s mysteries, it was him.

  Lady Brie and Victor were helping spread my name beyond the walls of Elyndor and Sealrite, using various combinations of Holy Duchess and the Ducal Saintness. I wasn't sure how far the name would spread, but the House Ballenci network had quickly proven itself once again. If the reports were true, word of my new title and heroic actions spread as far as the Holy Kingdom and even the Pandorian Empire.

  Most recently, I had helped rebuild a school for the “magically gifted,” as Benedict put it. Instead of doing the work myself, I taught the students how to use mana to manipulate objects—how to shape and construct. It had been… an interesting challenge, considering I had only ever used mana for destruction.

  By the end of the third week, I had had enough.

  "Okay," I growled, slamming down the newest stack of paperwork. "This is quite enough. Call in Marchioness Eliza and tell her the rest is her responsibility. She is still the temporary matriarch until the ascension ceremony, even with the King’s decree."

  Dralos bowed, his standard smirk faint but always obvious to the accustomed eye. The draconian seemed to have some sadistic pleasure in working me to the bone.

  I wonder if his old bastard personality is still there somewhere. Is he subconsciously discriminating against me for being Lunari?

  His golden irises gleamed as if he could hear my thoughts, but he said nothing and exited, leaving me alone.

  The last remnants of sunlight streamed through the grand stained-glass window behind where I sat at my mahogany desk, casting dust motes into swirling shades of crimson, sapphire, and gold.

  Against the far wall stood a towering bookshelf, lined with dozens—perhaps a hundred—tomes I had neither read nor heard of. Apparently, it would be improper for a duchy’s heir to lack books in her office. Some pulsed faintly with mana enchantments, but I had no intention of touching them. That task would fall to Nasq—when he was well enough. It would be far easier to let him sift through their secrets than to parse them myself.

  My gaze drifted back to the stained-glass window, lingering on the intricate carving that framed it—a warrior queen, standing victorious over a battlefield of the fallen, her sword raised to the heavens. Her reflection stretched across my desk, as though watching over me, as though I sat where she once had.

  I tore my eyes away with a quiet groan, leaning back into the plush embrace of my chair. Sleep pressed at the edges of my mind, creeping in like an inexorable tide.

  If I let it take me, will I sleep through the week?

  I never got the chance to find out.

  Barely thirty seconds later, the door swung open to reveal Ethan and Nida standing at the entrance.

  I bolted upright, immediately fearing the worst. "Is Nasq okay?"

  I hadn’t seen either of them in weeks. If they were showing up suddenly, then...

  Ethan chuckled, though there was little humor in it. "He’s… the same. No worse than usual. That’s not why I’m here tonight. But," he added, his expression softening, "it’s good to see you being a bit more open with your Paragons now." His smile widened, losing some of its sorrow. "I’m happy to be back in the company of my lady and my comrades."

  More open? I wondered, tilting my head in confusion at the paragon's words.

  "I think you are mistaken, Ethan. I am always open with my thoughts unless there is need for discretion," I replied, offering the large berserker a welcoming smile. "In any case, it is good to see you again, my first paragon."

  Ethan bowed his head slightly. “I fear our reunion comes with far more troubles than I would have liked. You won’t like what I uncovered during my mission. I had hoped to wait until your grace had a moment of respite, but unfortunately, my news is… urgent. Even three weeks may have been too long a delay.”

  “I assumed as much,” I said. Before he could continue, I shook my head. “But not tonight. Tonight, I want to see the portal. I want to see what it can do. We’ve waited three weeks—we can wait another day. Tell me tomorrow morning. First thing, if you must.” I knew it was perhaps a mistake to push Ethan's news out another day, but my exhausted mind simply could not deal with anything else tonight.

  “The one Nasq created?” Nida asked, running a hand through the white streaks in her hair. Though we’d both bathed and scrubbed away the grime of war with magic and water, my own hair refused to take on that same luscious gleam. Nida claimed it was part of her tigerkin genetics. I wasn’t so sure.

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  “The very same,” I confirmed. “I want to go through it. To see if the world on the other side is truly Ordite—or something else entirely.”

  I pushed myself up from my chair, its plush form shifting as it rolled slightly back. Stretching my arms, I willed the tension of the past weeks to leave me, though I knew it wouldn’t.

  “Something else? As in another world?” Ethan raised an eyebrow. “There are more than two?”

  I could only shrug. “I have but an inkling.” I sipped my coffee, only to find it had turned into a cold, bitter sludge. I put it back on the table. I wasn't that tired. “I met Orpheus again. He mentioned something about his world. So that makes at least three, but I suspect there are many more.”

  Briefly, there was a poignant silence that followed my words.

  Then Nida shattered it.

  “YOU MET WHO?” she sputtered, nearly shouting. “How? Didn’t you kill him?”

  “It’s a long story,” I admitted, surprised by the sheer force of her reaction. “I’ll tell you on the way.” I was tempted to reassure them that it hadn't been as bad as the previous time, but that’d be a lie. If anything, my most recent encounter with Orpheus had been worse than the first. A lot worse. “Come,” I said, turning toward the door. "No time like the present."

  On a passing thought, I grabbed a parchment and pen from my desk. If something happened to me when I stepped through the portal, Dralos and Benedict needed to know where to find me.

  I jotted down a quick note:

  - Going to the portal. Checking out what’s on the other side. Elyndor sorcerers are taking too long to send someone through. Going myself. Be right back. -

  I didn't sign it.

  When we reached the outside, leaving the fancy Duke Spire behind us, I learned that Ethan hadn’t learned to fly yet. Even during the battle against the Hydra, he'd been jumping. Not flying.

  I wasn’t in the mood to carry both of them the twenty-something miles from my office in the Duke’s Spires to the Hydra’s grave so we walked. Faster than any mortal could run—but walked nonetheless.

  As we traveled, I told them what had happened in the mindscape after the Hydra’s attack on Nasq and Nida, though I spared them the more gruesome details.

  “Wait. You’re telling me you didn’t know how to use energy properly either?” Nida’s face lit up with a rustic laugh. “After that whole lecture in Sealrite about trusting you, you actually had no clue either?”

  “My heart energy knowledge was sufficient,” I retorted, then grumbled, “it was all the other stuff I didn’t know.”

  Nida laughed again.

  Ethan just scratched the back of his head. “Does that affect us?”

  “No, Paragons don’t have cores. Your power comes from the Desire System…” I shrugged. “Somehow.”

  “Will you be teaching all this?” Ethan asked. "I assume you will be."

  I nodded, having already discussed it with Benedict and Dralos. We’d be implementing mandatory “new era” training lessons for every soldier. Eventually, I wanted to extend it to city guards and even the peasants of my duchy, but that wasn’t feasible just yet. “We need to get stronger. Much stronger. If we hadn’t been able to use the Dash’Ora to poison the Hydra’s core, this entire city would have been wiped out.”

  No one pointed out that, technically, the Hydra had been my doing.

  “The people in Ordite deal with the Dash’Ora regularly,” I continued. “Everyone there knows how to protect against core poisoning. It’s one of the first techniques children are taught when they awaken to heart energy. Once we cross over, we don’t get that shortcut anymore. Either we can kill them—or we can’t.”

  I didn’t mention that there were poisons in Ordite, an abundance of them, that could weaken, perhaps even kill, those in the early diamond realm stages. The poisons were exceedingly rare and I’d only ever seen one during my time as Queen. It had been used to weaken me enough that my betrayers had been able to capture me and seal away my energy.

  Without it, even with Kyros, I could have razed the entire kingdom before they so much as laid a hand on me.

  Though that poison had only weakened me, limiting how quickly I could kill them, if something like that existed, I was certain there were worse toxins.

  We came to a stop beneath the glowing red portal Nasq had torn between Graedon and what I suspected was Ordite.

  It shimmered in the twilight of the setting sun and the rising moon—like a reminder of home and all I had been forced to leave behind.

  “Are we ready for you to return to Ordite?” Ethan asked. Nida said nothing. She didn’t even look at us. She just stared up at the portal, eyes wide.

  “No. Not really,” I admitted. “If we cross over and land anywhere near a Sect or an Awakened group, we’ll be annihilated immediately. Hells, high-stage gold-realm warriors aren’t even uncommon in Ordite. We could stumble into a lower-stage platinum awakener who could kill us in a few bursts of energy.”

  Ethan eyed me warily. “Then… shouldn’t we wait?”

  I shook my head. “I need to know, Ethan. I need to know if this is my way home or not.” My voice faltered as an image of Taen, the capital of Aedronir, surfaced in my mind. My home. “I need to know.”

  Nida finally broke her quiet spell. “What if it takes us somewhere else? Another world?”

  “Then we leave. Fast.” I met her gaze, my mind replaying conversations with Orpheus. “And we figure out how to close it. No matter what.” Because if Orpheus had been telling the truth—if this portal led to one of those educated worlds he spoke of—we’d all die. Brutally. “We absolutely cannot fight against those from the advanced worlds Orpheus mentioned. If they have even half the knowledge he imparted to me on dantians and have also achieved diamond realm…” I trailed off, but we all knew what that situation would mean.

  If, on the other side of the portal, there were individuals who wielded Shen energy at the level of its diamond realm equivalent —we wouldn’t even die. We’d simply cease to exist. I’d fought a half-step diamond core Hydra to a standstill using only my knowledge of combining gold realm heart energy with third-realm mana to create Shen energy. And that had been barely enough.

  And what if they'd figured out a way to reach a realm beyond the diamond realm?

  A shudder ran through me at the thought. At that level of power, they would be the closest thing to a God I could imagine.

  No. I had no interest in those other worlds. I didn’t need their wars, their power struggles, their cosmic games.

  I just wanted to go home and take back what was mine.

  If my betrayers still lived, I would deal with them. That was my right.

  Everything else? None of my concern.

  Ethan’s voice brought me back to reality. “And if it is Ordite?”

  I exhaled. “Then we act with caution.” I met both their eyes, my voice steady. “I can’t go back yet. If this portal leads to Ordite, I will follow up with scouts to figure out where and when we are. For all I know, decades could have passed since I…” I hesitated. “Since I left.” I let the words settle before continuing. “Either way, we’re nowhere near strong enough to invade Ordite. To them, we’re little more than children as we are now.” I glanced at the portal. “If Kyros kept improving as I suspect, he would be in the diamond realm now. He’d wipe the floor with our entire world.” I clenched my jaw. “No. If this is Ordite, we proceed carefully. We find a way to seal and unseal the portal from our side. Since they have no knowledge of mana or magic, I believe that’s something we can pull off.”

  They both nodded.

  I took a deep breath, my gaze lifting to the swirling crimson tear in space.

  “Alright.” I pulled mana into my lower dantian while my middle dantian stirred and circulated heart energy. As the two fused, Shen energy flooded my upper dantian, filling me with raw power.

  And then I launched into the air like a bolt of lightning, streaking toward the portal.

  Nasq and Nida followed, leaping rather than flying, but refusing to leave me behind. I didn’t bother stopping them. If there was danger on the other side, their strength would become mine.

  The moment my body touched the portal the world exploded into an abyss of red Nothingness. An unknown force gripped me, yanking, stretching, and pulling me in every direction. And then that same force, that ancient and incomprehensibly powerful force, ripped me from Graedon.

  There was a pop, the sound of suction releasing its prey, and suddenly—

  — suddenly I was falling.

  Wind howled around me, sharp gales lashing against my skin. The air was dry, too dry. Heat rose in waves beneath me, rippling against the momentum of my fall. My mana core hummed in protest, irritated by the thin, weakened mana in the air.

  But my heart energy danced inside my chest. Restless. Recognizing something I hadn’t yet seen. The energy deep within my heart, that energy which had followed me to Graedon, squirmed with excitement. With familiarity.

  I looked up, still plummeting.

  And there, staring down at me from the heavens were two enormous suns. One a burning scarlet. The other a brilliant gold.

  And between them, hidden by the brightness of the daylight, was a moon.

  Larger than the one in Graedon. A luminescent, beautiful moon I thought I’d never see again.

  Tyroph.

  Ordite’s moon.

  I was home.