Our legacy... the legacy of the Imperial Xie Empire, might fall with me.
Murad Xie stood in the dead of the coldest night before the tomb. It was built of metal, and the gravestone was no stone at all but an alloy, flecked with remnants of gold deep within the sanctuary's core. Carved into its face was the name Muzair Xie. There had not been a time before the last harvest when his face looked this dull. His face had never looked weak, but that had not held true for the past eleven years. Cold winds combed through his hair and the striking of metal against metal rang out in an uneven rhythm across the yard. This was the graveyard owned by the Raityors and the priests.
Murad stood there with both hands on his cane, whispering nothing. The yard was devoid of any other life but his own, dimly lit by a scatter of bluish electrical bulbs hung here and there, something rare enough elsewhere in the sanctuary to still draw notice.
"Fewer graves are built day by day."
The voice belonged to a young man carrying similar agony in his chest. His footsteps were heavy and gentle at once. It was Klein, but Murad Xie did not acknowledge his presence.
"I would thank you for reminding me to visit," Murad said slowly, turning his head. "But do not think I would not punish you for the betrayal."
He noticed Klein's hesitation. It was not the hesitation of a guilty man but of someone who had hidden the culprit. "If you mean Syuri's unexpected arrival, then you are wrong to accuse me, Chief." Klein said. "I would have had no time to tell her. I had a duty to bring the monsters of the sanctuary together and seat them at a single table."
Murad was a man who could tell apart those who lied from those who did not. Klein's words held against what had come before them. Not guilty, certainly. But not innocent either. An accomplice. A chief must not show weakness, however, even when the person accused is essential to the sanctuary's survival.
"You of all people should know better than to trust her," Murad said, his tone filling with authority. "We were there, in the last expedition, eleven years ago when we found her. She is someone who had seen the outside world."
Klein clasped his hands and smoothed the front of his long coat. "Seen the world outside, yes!" Murad continued. "But false. Her words are draped in fear and soaked in old trauma."
"Chief," Klein said, "I had always respected you, your brother, and your son. I had fought for you." He paused. "But, sire, she may not be the only one carrying trauma. You have lost many, and that is clouding your judgement."
Murad did not move an inch, and he was not angry. He understood Klein. Anyone who had watched the past decade unfold could look at the last of his bloodline and read loneliness there. But Murad felt that was a public reading, not his own.
"I had hoped to name you my heir, Klein," Murad murmured.
Klein went still with surprise.
"There was a firm belief in your abilities, and I held the belief that we shared the same thinking." Murad held his gaze. The cold between them, colder than the floor and the grave beside them, stretched the short distance into something that felt vast. "My judgement was never clouded. It was clear as day." He glanced at the grave. "When Muzair Xie died." His eyes moved to the empty plot beside it. "When my son Rais Xie went missing." He looked back. "And when the creatures slaughtered so many in today's harvest, my mind was perfectly clear." He raised the hand bearing the gauntlet. "Every decision I made was made to protect humankind."
Klein's face opened into something readable. Murad could see that he had understood. Klein had always felt like a second son to him. He had known the boy since he ran through the sanctuary in barely enough clothing, shorter than any twelve-year-old had a right to be. Murad knew Klein was in pain, the same pain he carried. But something had shifted between then and now. Klein was no longer that boy. And the sanctuary had not known attachment or love in centuries.
"Drop the effort to close the gate," Klein said, already turning to leave. "And release the corpse of the boy. The death of a child stirs talk, rumors, and rebellion." He stopped without looking back. "Do not make the same mistake as eleven years ago. Running away when everyone else had already sacrificed."
For the first time in years, Murad's eyes widened. He felt called out. It was unpleasant and it was true.
He could recall the exact weight of Klein's words and what they reached toward. When Syuri, the sanctuary's mad woman, had urged people to abandon everything and flee to the surface, she had not been the first to push such madness. Murad knew someone just as reckless, someone who had ignored logic and rational understanding and clung to faith, to religions, to invented gods. It had been him. The one who had led the expedition eleven years ago. He could still feel the routes they had taken, the long descent, the creatures rising from nowhere, and finally the power. He knew that without Muzair's sacrifice, he and the others would have died there. And without Syuri, that foreign girl, their expedition would never have stopped when it did. The gauntlet would not have fused to his hand like a parasite. Some part of him had always blamed her for that. But he was the one who had brought them all outside in the first place.
"It was right to stop any further expedition," Murad whispered. "The sanctuary is what we need." He repeated it the way a man repeats something learned by heart. Again and again. My age is catching up. It was my body first, and now my mind. For a moment he felt an enormous emotion he had not felt before, something that ached behind his eyes and made his heart move too fast. But the chief of the sanctuary, the dreamer of Idris, straightened himself. He swallowed it, the way others had done, the way he had done for years.
***
The warmth of the next cycle arrived earlier than expected. The lifting cold gave way to a suffocating press of heat that hung over the bright new sanctuary. The harvest was long behind them and its dead already forgotten. People ate rations made from their fallen and went about their business. Merchants ran their stalls. The women of the Breeders took men who were strong and fertile. Children returned to their schooling now that Bayt al-Idris had reopened to the public.
That day, the crowd inside the Ashkyn Forge was larger than usual. It often swelled when the chief or other royals paid a visit, and Murad Xie had come, seated on his own throne, or rather the throne that Dicardys had ordered cleared as custom demanded of all the families when the chief was present. It was not Murad alone but Maemir Askardya and Irwana Harshir who had joined him. He had invited Fatema Kynegas, but she had sent her apologies. Her family had come under greater threat than before, and her son was not the kind to take risks. He was six years old.
The heads of the families and the chief had gathered to discuss the closure of the gate. Murad was firm on it. He had given Dicardys the order before the last harvest, even while grieving his son. That grief had been an attachment. Better to be rid of it, he had decided.
Plans for the gate were spread across the table. Old papers, new ones, metal sheets with inscriptions near Dicardys's elbow, and books from ages past, some from the time of Idris Xie Ryukzen or Rainne Xie Ryukzen, the ones who had built the sanctuary from nothing. Murad had requested them specifically.
"The pulley system for the gate had many flaws," Dicardys said, without grief, with sheer loyalty, though he stumbled on certain words. "The gates were built from lighter materials so they could be moved, but they absorbed far more damage than they were designed for. The metal walls that serve as the outer border carry countless wounds, splits, and crumbling gaps." He pushed one of his designs across the table toward Murad. "This is one improvement. Using the hardest metals we can find, we reinforce the floors and the structures themselves throughout."
Murad studied it and nodded. His voice, when it came, was still heavy. "This will not be enough."
Everyone at the table stiffened. The plans Dicardys had laid out were among the most sophisticated ever drawn in the sanctuary, bordering on imaginary in their ambition, and still it was not enough.
"We are not closing a tap so the water cannot get out," Murad said, moving through the designs and pointing to where each foundation fell short. "Once the creatures begin to accumulate, they will simply push the gate down." He set the paper aside. "We cannot engineer our way through this alone. The ancestors of the sanctuary may have left answers we have not found."
He signaled Maemir, who opened the books as directed, particularly those from the last two centuries when the sanctuary was still being driven underground. Murad stopped at a specific passage and spread the page flat.
"Here. The creation of the walls." He tapped it. "Our ledgers read this as the construction of the walls, but the materials and the method are still unknown."
Dicardys looked it over carefully. "Forgive me, Chief. I cannot decode this. My family has always known how to make war through weapons, not through words."
Murad stroked his beard and held the cane out before him. "Do you know the name of this cane?"
Dicardys nodded. "Rite Rebirth."
"And do you know who made it and for whom?"
"Yes. My ancestors. The Ashkyn. For Idris Xie Ryukzen."
Murad's voice gathered weight. "The Ashkyn served well beyond measure. Legends say this cane won Idris Xie Ryukzen many wars and accomplished things unknown to science or man. I am asking you to work that craft one more time."
Dicardys shook his head. "We are not mages from a children's book, sire. We are builders."
"Then build the walls. It was not just the cane. The entire sanctuary was raised on the orders of King Idris Xie Ryukzen, by the sweat and blood of all eight families." Murad patted Dicardys on the shoulder. "Though the Ashkyn hold the most credit, if anyone is being honest about it." He continued, "Try decoding the script alongside the recipes within your family's heirlooms. Perhaps the Edenic script of the old world can be broken open."
He knew it was not the strongest plan. He had hoped it might be decoded before the next harvest, which was drawing uncomfortably close.
"No."
A sudden shift in the air. The burning smell of the forge sharpened. Murad's eyes narrowed, not in anger but surprise. "Dicardys, how dare you openly..."
"Forgive me for wearing a mask this long, Chief," Dicardys said steadily. "But I have read the documents and papers from the Chromskt family, the ones that woman spread among us. If she and they are right, the gates everywhere will burst open like a pressure cooker, and no wall we build will hold them."
Murad's eyes cooled and reddened at once. "You believe her over your own chief?"
"Not that, sire. But the evidence carries weight. There is a burden of proof. I cannot build something that will not hold." Dicardys steadied himself and looked back at the books. "Perhaps you had already thought of that. Perhaps that is the very reason you asked me to build something as strong as the original walls."
Murad could no longer hold back against the accusation. He felt his control giving way, decaying, rusting the way unattended iron rusted.
"Yes," he admitted. "So read it and save the sanctuary."
He walked away from the throne that had been provided for him. He could sense it coming off his peers, the vassals who had bound themselves to the empire for generations, now releasing something altered, something he could not name. With attachment stripped away, what was left in these people was greed and pride, he told himself, careful not to look at his own reflection in that observation. As he moved through the crowd he felt the cold edge of the Askardyan presence pressing against him, and then he heard it.
"You killed Deinne! Get away from here, you false dreamer!"
The shout tore through the crowd from somewhere deep inside it. Murad turned sharply. Dicardys was on his feet immediately. "Coward! Who accuses the chief? Come forward and I will deal with you myself!" But Murad raised a hand and made him sit. He turned to leave.
The shouts multiplied from different mouths, different corners.
"Stop closing the gate!" "Let us reach the lands above!" "Free us!"
None of the speakers hid themselves. "Deinne was precious. He was the heir to the Ashkyn name and forge." "You murderer."
Murad did not answer. He readied his sword.
"You killed Muzair Xie. You are a kinslayer."
He stopped.
He lifted his left arm slowly, the gauntlet arm. "Step forward and I will be kind." No one moved. Then it came again. "Rais did not go missing. You abandoned the boy when you fled, and it is what killed him."
The sword left his hand before thought could follow. Blood broke across the crowd. Rather than silence, the noise grew louder and more volatile, and Murad did not stop. When the sword left his grip he called it back through the gauntlet and let the memories surface without pushing them away. Seven men had gone down and three women from the crowd when Dicardys threw himself at Murad's legs and gripped him hard, begging.
"These are my men, Chief. Have mercy!"
"These were not your men," Murad said, not slowing. "They are the children of faith. Of Syuri." Is this why Fatema refused the invitation?
He could feel Dicardys holding something back, pressing it down beneath the surface. The Askardyan youths aided him. Irwana Harshir wore a smirk Murad would have sworn to in any court in the sanctuary.
Before he raised the gauntlet again, he spoke. "My son, Rais Xie Ryukzen, is dead. There is no heir. But I will rule as I choose, and perhaps there will be no need for one, or perhaps I will produce one. Either way it will remain within my blood, the blood of Idris Xie Ryukzen." He turned to one of the Askardyan boys. "Close the empty grave and fill it with Rais's belongings."
Dicardys knew exactly what was about to happen. He had seen those same burning eyes on that same face before, when the hair above them was black instead of grey. He had known Murad Xie Ryukzen from the beginning, or close enough to it. Murad had been there when Dicardys's father died of a rare heart disease, barely speaking through the grief. He had been there when Dicardys's wife took her own life the moment she heard what had happened to their son. Dicardys had stood beside him through the expedition eleven years ago. Murad looked at him now with a feeling he could not place, something the chief had perhaps never felt before or something he had long since lost. He could not explain it, but the gauntlet answered for him. It began to glow, slow and bright, and the crowd drew back. Those who had lived through a harvest already knew to give it space. Those who had not held their ground.
Several swords rose from the floor as Murad lifted his arm. The molten ones stayed where they were, too hot to respond. But those that were polished and cold enough climbed above the crowd, and his own swords led the rest, circling one another in a slow orbit that matched the movement of his hand.
Maemir Askardya watched it all with the feeling he usually reserved for gritmaws and mawtorus just before they began their massacres. He said nothing.
"If only you had obeyed at the start," Murad said. "Regrets. That is weakness."
He clenched his fist.
Several men were torn from the crowd and dragged into the circle around him, ripped out of whatever cover they believed they had. All of them bore the same mark. Fresh wounds already blooming from the swords thrown before. Good of them to make their disobedience visible. Their own voices signed their end.
"Finished slandering your chief?" Murad said.
Seven men and three women stood before him. Some wept. Some stood in shock. Others kept the anger steady in their jaws. One of them, a man with a balding head, spat at Murad's feet.
"I will slander you again. You are not our king, Chief. You lied to us about the sanctuary. You said we would be safe inside it, and then you dragged civilians into the harvest." He looked around him, pulling others into the weight of his words. "You will die a painful death for keeping our children from ever seeing sunlight."
Murad let him finish speaking.
Then a knife moved of its own accord and pressed into the man's lower back. Not deep enough to tear through flesh, but enough to steer him exactly where Murad wanted him to go. The crowd watched as the floating blade guided him toward one of the anvils, the one beside the molten sword that had not answered the gauntlet's call.
"Sunlight," Murad said. "You want a beautiful piece of fantasy for your children."
"No! Chief! They are watching!" Dicardys said, his voice breaking.
Murad took up the molten sword with the gauntlet and drove it against the man's groin. The scream that followed was not the man's alone. Every man present felt it move through them like current. "Chief, pull it back!" "Forgive me, liege!" "It was her. She told me to do this. Free me, Chief!"
With what little mercy still lived in him, Murad ended it. His own sword came down across the man's neck. He pressed the head against the heated surface of the anvil. There was a crack, and the screaming was gone.
"This is for the Syurists," Murad said. "I have indulged you all for far too long." He raised the severed head and held it high so that the entire forge could see it. "That woman is a liar. Her lies are born from her own fear." He looked down at the remaining nine. "A single word from me sends a blade through your kidney, or somewhere worse. Bend the knee, bow, and repent."
One by one they dropped to the cold metal floor before their chief. Some quickly. Some slowly. But all of them eventually.
Murad threw the head aside, wiped his hands clean on the nearest man, and walked. The swords followed at his back like obedient shadows. "The sunlight you dream of was stolen from us a long time ago," he said without looking back. "Consider this sanctuary a mercy."
He glanced at Dicardys, who had already lowered his head and begun to pray over the dead man. "What do we do with the body?" one of the Askardyan boys asked.
"Feed it to the Dain."
"Understood, sire."
The smell of ash and cooling blood spread through the neighborhood, outpaced only by the rumors. Murad heard them drifting from the next crowd over but did not stop. "The last Ryukzen chief has gone senile." And the older one, louder since the morning's announcement about Rais. "Who will take his place?"
****
***
**
Murad's home was among the largest buildings in the entire sanctuary, ranked just below the Dain by the estimation of lesser men. But unlike Bayt al-Idris, it had been built for function rather than ceremony. Twenty elite guards held watch through the night and rotated at first light. The walls rose taller than most civilian structures around them. Several isolation chambers had been built into its interior in the event of a breach. The exterior was painted charcoal grey, maintained every other day, with red patterns running across its foundation and beneath the roofline. Eight rooms in total, four above and four below. Even at its fullest, there had never been quite enough people to fill them all. Now only a single room stayed lit.
That night, cold and silent, one of the lower compartments held a single burning light.
Murad lay on his leather bed, shirtless, staring at the ceiling. His eyes were not tired. A glass of water sat on the table beside him next to a few medicines the Harshir had prescribed. There was no cure among them for what he felt.
The loneliness of being the last Ryukzen.
He went back through the day's events in his mind. Pathetic, he thought, turning the word on himself with full force. All of that to hide his own pain. I lack attachment. So why does it still reach me?
He resisted sleep. His body was still solid for someone in his sixties, the muscles holding their shape, his torso crossed with scars, nearly all of them the kind a man should not have survived. The more recent ones from the harvest sat on top of older wounds like insults added to injuries. None of it had ever reached him the way the words of a handful of lesser men had today.
It is the gauntlet. It is feeding me something, the same as it did before.
He turned over onto his side.
Then the knock came at the great door connecting to the hallway.
"I demand peace!" The words came out before he had thought them through. Strange, he caught himself thinking. Only someone willing to stand at the edge of a death sentence would disturb him without a reason of life or death.
"Sire. My liege. Waeyn Nithefort requests your presence."
The door had not opened. Murad stood, pulled a heavy fur coat over his body, and called out. "Send him in."
"Life and death, sire. It is worse than that."
The door still did not open. Waeyn had already come in, through the window by Murad's guess. His voice emerged from the dark corner behind the curtain. Only the sound of it confirmed he was in the room at all.
"Speak," Murad commanded.
He opened the door himself and walked out into the hallway, where the walls held the painted faces of every Xie chief before him. Kings before chiefs. Emperors before kings. Waeyn Nithefort stepped out of shadow and into the corridor's light, falling into stride alongside him.
"There will be war," Nithefort said.
Murad did not ask why. Waeyn continued regardless.
"The Krovnics are frightened. Closing the gate will cut their meat supply and collapse their monopoly over the Dain. Aaron Krovnic has decided to destroy Hyrae's algae reserves and possibly the entire Kynegas farms if he feels cornered enough."
They passed the portrait of Murad's father, Ismet Xie Ryukzen. "Is that why Kynegas refused to attend?" Murad asked.
"Yes," Nithefort replied.
"The Askardya are playing it carefully, but their wealth now exceeds yours, Chief." Waeyn kept his pace. "They intend to control the movement of goods, women, and rumors. The Syurist rumors in particular, the ones promising humanity a return to the surface, are being fed deliberately to hold the lesser men in a state of fear and restless wanting, while Maemir waits for the moment your throne becomes available."
"Maemir's calculations are never wrong," Murad said. "But his instincts have fallen."
They passed the portrait of Medher Xie Ryukzen, the chief before Murad's father.
"The Raityors have been swallowed by the priests," Waeyn said. "The worshippers of the Triune Goddesses. And the priests no longer favor you. Like the Askardya, they command substantial food stores."
"Limitations and sanctions do not hold against fanatics," Murad said. "Are you a believer, Waeyn?"
Nithefort smirked in the low light. "No. If there is a god, then this is hell, and I did not agree to sit the test."
Murad laughed. It surprised him. They passed the portrait of Marvin Xie Ryukzen, distorted badly over years but the face still recognizable if you looked long enough.
"As for who will actually begin the war," Nithefort said, and stopped walking. Murad continued two steps before realizing and turning back. "It will not be the Krovincs or the Askardya."
"Walk with me. Who else?"
Nithefort rejoined him. "Chromskt. Voldomir Zodchiy. They have already sent a warning strike, Chief."
Murad looked at him with disappointment settling into his face. "I specifically ordered you not to interfere with them."
"I did not do it for you, Chief. I did it for duty to my family. Dogs must sniff, or the itch takes over."
"Then I consider you in breach of my order?"
Murad raised the gauntlet hand slightly. Waeyn held his ground without flinching. "Forgive me, Chief. My loyalty belongs to you. But sire, nothing I did provoked this. When I was watching their territory, I saw her." He paused. "Tall. White. Foreign."
Murad went still. The corridor felt smaller suddenly.
"The mad woman of the sanctuary," Waeyn said.
"Syuri."
"Her. But the one who sent the warning strike was none other than your own apprentice."
"Klein," Murad said.
The portrait Murad stood before now was the largest in the hall. Decayed at the edges, the image distorted past recognition in places, and yet its presence was heavier than all the rest combined. Rainne Xie Ryukzen. Not a chief.
"What are they planning?" Murad asked, and something in his voice had not been there all evening.
"To break the sanctuary," Waeyn said. "And rebuild it from nothing. With a new..."
He let the silence hold for a moment.
"King."