The sun bore down on the mountain pass with the particular weight of a thing that had been burning a long time and intended to keep burning. Its light struck the prince's hair and turned it the color of heated metal, strand by strand catching and releasing the glare as the wind took it. He sat his destrier with the ease of a man who had grown up in the saddle, armor the white of fresh-cut bone and the deep blue of high altitude sky, and when he raised his sword the blade did not flash so much as hold the light, long and unbroken, before he let it go with his voice.
"Charge!"
The word left him like something he had been keeping. It cracked upward over the pass and the horses surged beneath it, hooves finding the churned earth and driving into it, turning blood and soil into something that sucked at the fetlocks and released with a sound like split meat. The banners above the knights snapped taut in the wind off the crags, fabric straining against its poles. The mountain threw the war cries back distorted, layered, so that the sound arrived from everywhere at once, raw and unformed, the individual voices already lost inside the mass of them.
The prince's destrier rose onto its rear legs, weight shifting back, and the animal's scream cut above the rest of the noise the way a single note cuts above a chord. The iron tang of blood on hot air, the thick catch of siege smoke drifting down from the fortress walls ahead, the sulfurous bite of something burning that had no business burning. These things pressed in from all sides, and the prince held himself in the center of them with his jaw set and his eyes forward.
This is right. This is ours. Let them see what comes for what is ours.
"Prince!" The shout came from behind and slightly left. The old general pushed his horse forward through the press of blue-armored bodies, armor dented along the shoulder and forearm in ways that spoke of long wear rather than recent damage, white hair loosened from beneath his helm and catching the same wind that moved everything else. The horse's flanks were dark with sweat.
The prince turned just enough in the saddle to see him. "Yes, General?"
"They just started, sire." The general drew level, close enough that their horses' breath mingled in the charged air. "Threading the hidden passageway through the mountain. Moving without sound, to come at the fortress from its belly."
The prince absorbed this. His gaze moved out across the field, taking in the churning mass of the advance, the distant shapes resolving into scaled bodies and furred limbs and the dark gleam of obsidian plate, and for a breath his attention drifted somewhere the general could not follow. Then it came back, settled, hardened the way cooling metal hardens, and he turned his horse forward again.
"Good. Then we proceed." He gathered the reins with both hands, the leather biting his palms through his gauntlets. "We aid our men and we diminish their numbers. It is our destiny to claim what is ours."
He spurred, and the destrier lunged beneath him, muscle and momentum carrying them both into the noise and the blood-slick ground and the closing distance.
The general watched him go for the length of one breath. "God have mercy on our souls," he said, to no one in particular, or perhaps to something that did not require a specific address.
He rode after.
The memory that rose in him as he rode was not one he had reached for. It arrived in pieces, the way memories of high halls always did when the body was elsewhere, doing other things. White marble veined through with blue. The particular quality of light in a room designed to hold it. A throne that had been built to drink light rather than reflect it, hammered gold worn smooth in the places a hand would rest. The old king filling his robes the way a man fills a thing he has worn long enough that it shapes itself to him, face carved by years of carrying a crown, hands gripping the throne's arm with the specific tension of a man who has learned to be very still when he is very angry.
And beside him, the prince, in white linen without armor, younger in the memory though not by much, fingers moving against the carved wood of the armrest in a rhythm that betrayed nothing except that he was thinking.
"It seems they truly broke our trust," the prince had said. His voice had been level in a way that required holding.
"They took my daughter?!" The king's roar had opened the room, sent the carved echoes off the vaulted ceiling, brought the kneeling knights' heads up from the flagstones before they remembered to keep them down. He had half-risen, veins rising along his neck, fists white where they gripped the throne's arm hard enough to leave marks.
The prince had turned to the arched window. Outside, the moon hung swollen and silver, its light falling in long bars across the flagstones, each bar shifting almost imperceptibly as the clouds moved behind it.
"Then the treaty is no more."
"THEN WE WILL TAKE THEM, ALL OF THEM, AND ALL THEIR LAND!"
The king's voice had come off the ceiling twice, three times, diminishing, until the hall was left with its own ringing.
The general shook the memory loose. The mountain pass received him back, blood and smoke and screaming, the hooves of his horse churning the same ruined ground. Up ahead the prince rode into the mass of it. Above them both the fortress walls ate the siege fires and gave back a flat orange glow, and somewhere inside those walls a passageway was being threaded in the dark.
Everything that followed came from that room, the general thought, and spurred harder.
In the Headquarters of the Numen of Continuity, in a place that existed between fixed points rather than at any one of them, Avry hunched over her obsidian table with her whole body in it. The table's surface held things that had no single form: records pressed into crystal, records bleeding across screens that flickered with borrowed aurora-light, papers covered in writing that moved when no one was watching it directly. Her fingers moved across the primary screen with the specific speed of someone who has learned to work faster than the situation is comfortable with, pinching lines of record, stretching them apart, collapsing others, her eyes scanning the results and moving on before the results had finished registering.
The air in the room tasted of ozone and a faint metallic note that came from somewhere deeper in the station, from the places where time pressed against the outer walls. Consoles breathed their low working-breath around her. Distant and indifferent beyond the viewport, the bodies of old light moved in their patient rounds.
"HOTSHIT!" Her body jerked upright, the word leaving her before anything else had caught up, and she wheeled in her chair to find a hand on her shoulder, warm and callused, carrying in its skin the faint smell of respair smoke.
Elegant features twisted in raw displeasure. Silver-streaked curls, dark shot through with vivid blue that caught the screen-glow as she moved. Her eyes, storm-blue and sharp, fixed on the intruder with the expression of someone calculating the precise cost of what had just been interrupted.
"If Gray dies, this is your fault!" She jabbed a finger at the figure, voice gone from professional precision to bare venom in the space between heartbeats.
The hand's owner held the contact a breath longer than courtesy required, smirk settling comfortably on a face that had clearly absorbed a great many such accusations and found them entertaining. "Now you know how I feel when you do it. Annoying, right?"
Avry's jaw tightened. The flicker at the corner of her eye, there and gone, was the thing she did not allow to become anything else. Graydowle was in the blood-mire of Tartaellion, threading the pass with no memory of who he was, and she had her hands on records that would not wait and a body that had been at this table for too long to have good temperament left. She shoved the hand away and turned back to the screen.
Her fingers resumed their work. On the primary feed: blue knights pressing through the beast-hordes, the prince's blade tracing its arc above the fray, red smoke beginning to gather at the edges of the image in a way that made her stomach go cold.
The intruder leaned in over the back of her chair, elbows finding the headrest with the ease of someone making herself at home in a place that had not been offered.
Avry did not need to look. She knew the woman by the way she occupied space, by the particular quality of presence that came off her. Kaunreid. Her irises carried their luminous script at the edges, a faint ring of characters that moved when she was paying attention, and she was paying attention now. Her clothing grounded her somewhere between practical and considered: a fitted bodice of midnight blue wrapped her torso, the neckline rising to a small standing collar. White fabric crossed the front in a lattice of tight lacing, each pull deliberate. Below, the blue fabric spilled into a long divided skirt that moved when she moved, revealing pale cloth over black beneath, the whole thing having the quality of a garment worn by someone who had never seen a reason why ceremony and readiness should exclude each other. Thick bracers in worn brown leather on her forearms, boots laced to the knee with stitched crossing marks, their soles built for ground that was not flat.
She had put one hand on the back of Avry's chair and was leaning in to study the battlefield feed with the unhurried interest of someone reading a report rather than watching people die.
"I'd like to see you try, Avry." A beat, scanning the feed. "And you're so unfair. You didn't even introduce your new revisionist to us. How dare you."
"No need." Avry's hands continued moving. "You'd frighten him off."
"Excuse you? You're the one who frightened him off, snatching that nightmare mission." Kaunreid's breath was warm against her ear amid the station's low working-sounds and the crystalline chime of an incoming alert. "He'll really die there without me surprising you."
"You're underestimating him." Something shifted in Avry's voice that was not quite softness but was adjacent to it, the particular quality of a person who is certain and cannot entirely conceal the certainty. In the back of her attention, she held the shape of Graydowle moving through the carnage, wiry and wild-haired, instincts firing ahead of his conscious understanding.
He's still alive. Stay alive.
"Just wait and see." She paused, brow arching. "Wait an eon. Aren't you supposed to be with Hefbriox? He's with you now, remember?"
Kaunreid made a sound of profound suffering. "You know him and his preparations. He's off somewhere calculating things. Heard he's been called for a possible promotion. So I'm free, and thriving. At least your section isn't boring as his."
"Good for him." Avry's tone dropped into the particular register she used for things she found inconvenient rather than interesting, but her mind was already moving, turning the information over, setting it next to the problem in the primary feed. "So what do you do now?"
"Reviewing for the next respair, which I already finished, but this particular Hefbriox wants it again just to be certain. Ugh." Kaunreid's fists closed on air, silver bracers catching the screen-glow. "If our roles ever exchange, I'm shoving him straight into the pits."
"Hmmm." Avry's face changed. The calculating look that came over her was the look of someone who had been working with incomplete pieces and had just placed one that made three other pieces fit. She swiveled her chair halfway, gaze sidelong, the feed still running in her peripheral vision. "How long do you think you'll be free?"
"A long time, I think. Why?"
"Hmmm." She turned the rest of the way. "Can you do me one last favor?"
Kaunreid's eyes went wide in the particular way of someone who knows exactly what expression is being worn at them and has already begun to dread what follows it. "Oh, I know that face, Avry, and I won't like the words after it."
"Please?" The word came out with a careful calibration of vulnerability that Kaunreid had absolutely seen deployed before but that worked on her anyway, because Avry knew precisely how much to give and no more. "I'll help you deal with Hefty after this, I swear."
"Alright, fine. What is it?"
Avry's gaze moved left along the consoles, then right. The working-stations were occupied only by their own instruments. She leaned in and cupped her hand to Kaunreid's ear, words coming low and hot and swift, contraband passed between two people who had been trusted with too much and trusted each other with everything.
"N... No wa..."
Avry's finger came up and pressed, briefly but with precision, against Kaunreid's lips. The room held its breath.
Kaunreid exhaled through her nose. The resigned look settled over her features alongside something that might have been reluctant delight. "Okay, fine. But what's the situation first?"
The battlefield had passed the point where it had any organizing principle beyond survival. The prince's blue-armored knights had struck the vanguard and the vanguard had broken and reformed and broken again, and now the two forces were so thoroughly mixed that the only reliable indicator of allegiance was where a person was looking when they swung. Lizard-scaled bodies with heads that hissed when they opened, fur-eared figures with whipping tails and claws moving faster than anything that size should move, warriors in obsidian and emerald and deep red leathers carrying blades whose edges sang when they cut the air. The blood was what unified it. Blood on stone, blood in the mire the stone had become, blood on armor and leather and bare scaled skin, blood carrying its iron-copper bite up through the churned air so thick it coated the back of the throat.
Graydowle ran through all of it.
He had borrowed rags from a dead man's back and they clung to him now with sweat and everything else the air carried, wild hair plastered to his forehead, chest heaving with exertion that his legs refused to stop demanding. His mind ran separate from his body, the two things only loosely agreed on what was happening.
Where am I? What is this? What-
He ducked under a sweeping axe that passed close enough to take the top three inches of his existence with it. He went right to avoid a snap of jaws that belonged to a face currently attempting to be directly in front of his face. He kept running, the words tearing out of him between gasps. "No no no, where am I?"
"Great! You're still alive!" Avry's voice arrived inside his skull, crisp and steady and edged with the particular energy of someone who has been watching a dangerous thing and is relieved it has not yet become a worse dangerous thing. "Hi, Gray. Can you hear me?"
He wheeled behind a falling body, using the gap it left to gain three strides. "Avry! I'm going to die!"
"You're not." Her certainty had the specific quality of a person making a professional assessment rather than a promise. "You're doing well already. Though I can't see what you see, or feel what you feel, or taste or hear... but of course you can do this."
The assurance arrived at a bad moment, catching him mid-sprint between a corpse and a thing that was deciding whether he was worth the effort. The confidence in her voice when she had openly admitted she was operating blind scraped something in his chest that was not quite gratitude. "Can't you help?"
"Sadly, no. I can only speak to you at intervals, to provide information you need as a navigator. It requires synthesizing all records of this world's previous history against your current position, it takes time."
He went low, sliding under the arc of a blade, came up running. "What? Then why did you put me here?"
"It's the ideal opening. Every combatant is occupied with every other combatant. No one notices a new presence arriving in the confusion. If anyone had seen you appear, as an anomaly of reality simply materializing, you would need to remove their memory of it. Or remove them."
"You're serious."
"Yes. And this particular war draws the targets of royalty into the field, where they are reachable in ways they wouldn't be otherwise."
"This war? With the targets? Avry, where am I, and who are they?"
Her voice steadied, taking on the particular cadence she used when she was drawing from records rather than reacting to the immediate moment. "Welcome to the Kingdom of Tartaellion. You're here to stop the Adopted Prince."
"Stop the Prince? Who? Why?"
"The records indicate he will release this world's most destructive power. Blood magic of sufficient concentration to take and hold every living soul in the territory. The weight of that unbalances the surrounding reality. The Void takes hold."
"Alright, that's a lot. But I have no choice. Avry, how do I stop him if he's that powerful?"
"That I can't answer at this moment. It's a long account, and you'll understand it soon. What matters is that your presence here changes things. You are a variable the records never accounted for, which means every choice you make creates a path the old records cannot predict. We adjust as those paths open."
"Wait. So what's the point of you?"
A brief pause. "I'm a navigator. I study the old disasters, and I carry what I learn into your circumstances, where I use it to help you make the choices that rewrite what comes next. You're the revisionist: the independent factor, adaptable in any world, who takes what I give you and carries out the work of making things right."
"Oh no, making things right? Everything's going wrong right now!" He vaulted a fallen knight, came down badly, caught his footing. "Things are going wrong from the very start. You really leave me no choice, Avry. You said I'm the ripple of change. Alright, tell me everything about that Prince. Let's find him."
"Now we're talking. He's striking in appearance, long gold hair past the usual cut, pale-skinned, tall, lean in the way of someone who has trained since they were old enough to hold a blade. Being a prince, he's easy to place in a field."
"Easy to place. How?" Gray craned his head above the press, trying to read the field for anything that matched the description.
He didn't need to look long.
The sound arrived before anything else, a deep vibration that moved through the stone underfoot and up through his legs and into his chest, something between a tone and a pressure, the kind of thing that made the body want to be elsewhere. Gray's gaze lifted and found the prince ascending.
Oh.
White-and-azure armor catching the last of the field's diffused light. Gold hair lifting free and spreading in the thermal currents above the field. The face tilted skyward, jaw set, eyes not yet burning. The surrounding combatants slowed, blades dropping or freezing mid-swing, heads turning upward with expressions that mixed reverence and terror into something that had no single word.
Arms spread wide. The face tilted back. The eyes ignited, red, the particular red of something that has been burning from the inside long enough to show through the surface.
"This is a battle of power!" His voice carried down with the specific quality of a thing that has height behind it. "And the power of my blood is the strongest!"
His palms came together at his sternum and the red formed between them, small at first, a compressed point of light and heat that immediately began pulling at the air around it. It swelled, veined, pulsed with the rhythm of something alive that had been put to a purpose it had no feeling about. He raised it above him and held it there, and the tendrils reached down to his palms and his arms opened wide and he released it.
The wave came down.
It moved the way smoke moves, low and patient and filling every gap, and where it touched people they seized. A warrior in gray chainmail took it first: the body locked, shuddered with the specific violence of muscles overriding each other, and then the blood came from every opening the face provided, and the body went up, shriveled, feeding the pulse above them all. A woman in iron plate went next, hewing the air from reflex as her body dessicated to dry angles, her essence drawn up and in. The smoke kept spreading. The screams changed quality from pain into pure flight-panic, the kind that has no origin left to run from because the threat is already everywhere.
"Avry, how do I stop that? That is a monster."
"You kill him."
"Easier said than done."
"Necessary, Gray. Regardless of the cost."
"But he's killing everyone with his red, just with the spread of it. How powerful is he exactly?"
"Red. Blood magic." Her voice had sharpened to the edge she kept for things that mattered more than they seemed. "Whatever happens, Gray, you kill the Prince."
He ran without answering. The red smoke's leading edge was twenty strides away and shortening. The screaming had become ambient. The people running alongside him had stopped being his concern the way specific faces stop being specific when survival crowds out everything else.
"Avry! Can I outrun that?"
"You're not outrunning his power. You're outrunning the people around you." Her voice had gone cold, the navigator's calm returning through whatever feeling she was suppressing.
"What?" The realization arrived in his legs before it arrived in his mind, in the sudden clarity of what it meant that the bodies around him were pressing harder, elbows finding his ribs, boots catching his heels.
"Die for me!" The prince's voice, from above, arms thrusting downward, eyes blazing fresh red.
"Avry, get me out!"
He went down. Face to stone, hands scrabbling at slick rock while bodies moved over and around him in the blind surging panic of people who had left reason somewhere behind them on the field.
"No, Gray. I'm sorry. But you'll thank me for this. I have ideas."
"Ideas? Tell me right now, I'm going to be..."
The red reached him.
Vision drowned in it. The iron-blood smell became everything, total, replacing all other sense with one overwhelming note.
He blinked, and the blue halls surrounded him.
Azure cloth hanging in long panels from high walls. Marble beneath his feet, blue veins running through the white like rivers seen from distance. A throne at the end of the hall, hammered gold worn smooth where hands had rested for years. Light falling from high arched windows in bars that moved almost imperceptibly with the clouds outside.
"Now everything is mine."
The voice arrived before the speaker resolved, resonant, shaped for large rooms. The prince sat alone on the golden throne, long gold hair loose around his shoulders, the armor gone, white linen taking its place. His face held the open surprise of a man who has been certain he was alone and has just discovered he was wrong.
"You."
"What?" The prince came to his feet. "You're here?"
"Where am I? What is this?"
"This cannot be. You're immune?" The prince's palm came up, and the light gathered between his fingers with the particular purpose of something called rather than created. A blade of red light solidified in his grip, the weapon's heat visible in the air around it. "Die!" He crossed the distance in two strides, blade coming down.
"No!" Gray flung his arm up.
Dark took everything.
He blinked again, and the field surrounded him, the smell of it hitting first, the particular layered assault of a place where many people had recently died. He was on his knees in the corpses. Across the field, at the distance that a man with a sword full of red light had last been when reality reset, the prince descended from his float, feet finding the churned earth, eyes fixing on him with an expression that was very precisely controlled rage.
"What's happening?"
"Gray! You're alive, you absolute madman, you disappeared for a full minute, I had nothing." Avry's voice arrived at a higher pitch than her usual register, the professional surface cracked through.
"Avry, something happened, something strange..."
"It's starting. Every combatant left standing on that field is going to be trying to kill you now."
"You're joking."
"Run. Again."
The bodies around him moved. They moved the way bodies move when something is inside them that has no interest in what bodies were originally built for: jerky, the joints overextended, the posture wrong in the specific way of things that have no pain to respect. The faces were hollow where they had been full. Their eyes opened to red, the same red as the prince's eyes from above, and they fixed on him with the attention of instruments pointed at a target.
"Shit." He found a sword, gripped it, the weight of cold iron in his palm the only certain thing in his current inventory.
"Run to the Prince. Kill him. Whatever it costs."
"That's your idea?"
"Yes. And the reason I dropped you here."
"He's too powerful!"
"He burned his power. Every last bit of it. He's out, and you're standing, and he stopped when he saw you. You can do this."
"But that's..." He looked across the field, where the prince was closing distance, stride purposeful, the red-light blade in his hand drawn from some reserve the rest of his power had not apparently emptied. "That's impossible."
"You have better options? Besides the obvious one of not dying?"
He picked up a second sword. The weight was different in each hand, the balance on the left one poor, but his hands knew what to do with them and that knowing was enough. Me or him. Free them all. He dies. Now.
"Good. Do what you do. I'll observe and adjust."
He moved into the dead.
A corpse-lunge came high and he parried it, the impact jarring up his forearm, and shoved the dead weight sideways. The second came from the left and he brought the off-hand blade across in a tight arc, the skull splitting along the crown. He went low under a clawing reach that had been a man's arm, spun to gut a third through the torso where the dead thing's forward momentum carried it past him, came up with both blades ready and the prince ten yards away.
The prince's aerial lunge came without warning, height giving him reach that defied the distance, blade coming down with godlike certainty.
Gray crossed the swords above his head and the strike caught in the cross of them, the impact driving him to one knee, his off-hand blade's tip punching into the chest of a headless corpse behind him and sticking there.
"Who are you? Who are you to defy what I've built?" The prince's weight was behind the push, forcing the crossed blades down, face very close, eyes red and furious.
"I don't know!" The honesty of it came out raw. "I don't even know you!"
"Then why are you doing this?!" The pressure released, the prince stepping back into a fresh strike, and Gray got sideways of it, the blade passing close enough to score the leather across his shoulder, the pain arriving hot and immediate.
He wrenched the off-hand sword free from the corpse-chest with effort. A dead thing closed from behind and he reversed the blade, drove it back without looking, the weight confirming when it found resistance.
"Because you have to stop!" He turned, thrust forward, the blade aimed at the center of the prince's chest.
The prince deflected it. But his attention moved, just for a breath, above them both, drawn by something Gray had not calculated and could not have calculated because it required a field full of decapitated bodies and an instinct for angles he apparently possessed without being able to explain it.
The heads fell. They had accumulated at some height in the combatants around them, the product of Gray's clearing work through the shambling dead, and gravity was indifferent to what they had recently been attached to. The first one struck the prince's helm with a sound like a hammer on a bell, staggering him back. The second caught him below the sternum, and his eyes went wide with a surprise that had no performance in it.
Gray closed the distance in two steps and drove the blade into his chest. The prince's mouth opened, breath escaping with a rattle, red light dying in his eyes as the red light died in the blade. He went down.
The corpses collapsed everywhere, simultaneously, as if whatever had been inside them had departed through the same door.
Gray went to one knee in the blood-mud, both swords still in his hands, lungs dragging air with the specific urgency of a body that has been told it doesn't need to sprint anymore and isn't sure it believes it yet.
"Avry. It's done."
"Wait, what? Already? That was quick, nice, okay, now you need to..."
The arrow found his shoulder.
The pain arrived in a bright clean line from the impact point to his spine, and he turned toward it on instinct, already knowing the angle, already knowing there was nowhere to go. The old general stood forty paces back, bow lowered, more archers behind him, the expression on his weathered face something between professional and personal.
"Bring them all in!" The general's voice, dry and command-certain, the voice of a man who has been giving this specific type of order for a long time.
Gray looked at him. He was very tired. His shoulder had blood running down the inside of his sleeve and he was kneeling in the prince's blood and the general's expression said the arrow had been deliberate and considered rather than reflexive.
He found something that was almost a smile, let it settle on his face, and let the darkness that had been waiting at the edge of his vision move in and take the rest.
The headspace received him the way it always did, without transition. One breath he was falling in the field's dark, the next he was standing in the boundless expanse, nebular light in long diffuse curtains behind him, crystalline spires from the Headquarters rising at angles that obeyed different rules than stone usually did. No pain. No arrow. No blood soaking steadily through borrowed rags. His body felt the particular unreality of a thing that knows it is between states.
The floor, where it registered at all, had the quality of cooled mercury, surface tension without substance.
"Gray? Gray!" Avry materialized from the direction of the spires, her navigator's leathers crisp where everything else here was insubstantial, continuity runes alive along the stitching. The worry on her face was the real kind, the kind that forgets to compose itself.
"A-Avry?" He straightened, legs finding their footing on nothing in particular, her voice grounding him more reliably than the floor did. Something in him recognized her the way a body recognizes its own heartbeat, present before it's consciously noted.
She exhaled, stepped back, the professional bearing reasserting itself over the relief the way a tide comes back over exposed rock. "Great, you're not dead." A beat. "Now how did this happen?"
"There was an arrow." Fragments of the field arrived in his mind at odd angles: the prince's face at the end, the head striking the helm, the smell of blood-mud. "Wait, how are you here? Where am I?"
"Your headspace." She gestured at the expanse around them, the particular gesture of someone pointing at the room they're standing in. "When you're unconscious and not dreaming, this space opens and we can use it. I'm only here as a projection, the Headquarters is connected to it."
His face changed. The wonder came through the confusion like something breaking a surface. "That's extraordinary! Now tell me why we don't have the same ability for respair?"
"Because we can't, you impossible person! And besides, tell me what happened. How did you do it? Were you very heroic? Did you jump and spin above him? Did you anticipate his moves? Did you kiss him or something?" The professional composure cracked entirely and her voice shot upward, hands coming together, eyes bright with a specific excitement that had been held under pressure for however long the battle had lasted.
He laughed. It was a warm sound, genuinely there amid the cold of the void, his hand going to the back of his neck in a gesture that felt habitual even though he couldn't remember where it had come from. "I wish I'd kissed him, but... I threw their heads at him. From above."
Avry's jaw dropped. Then her eyes closed, briefly, the expression of a person absorbing information they find personally offensive. "Ugh! That's creative, it is, but that's completely uncinematic! You could have at least..." She waved a hand through the nebular air. "Forget it. And then you were struck by an arrow?"
"Yes. And now we're here." A pause, brow furrowing with the particular look of someone following a thought they weren't expecting. "Can you put me into a lucid dream? I think that would be worth experiencing." The frown deepened. "Wait. How do I know what lucid dreaming is?"
The question hung between them.
Avry's face shifted, the excitement replaced by something more considered, her gaze going steady in the way it went steady when she was about to give him something he needed to hold carefully. "Alright, Gray. Listen to me now." She let the brief solemnity breathe before she continued. "You did a great thing. Even if it was anticlimactic in method, you stopped the hundred-year invasion that the records showed was coming. Every race in this territory was going to feel the weight of that war for generations. You changed that."
"So the war is over? We saved the world?"
She laughed, low and knowing, and the mercury floor rippled faintly under it. "Wars don't end in single acts. They extend into old hatreds that respawn across years like the void consuming light, each one feeding the next before anyone has named what's happening."
He absorbed this, the truth of it settling in him without needing argument. "I see. What do we do now?"
"The Prince's forces, specifically his five lieutenants, will carry forward what he began. They all hold their own powers of control and manipulation, and the records call them capable of considerable damage in his absence."
"His necromancy wasn't the end? What the hell?"
"I came here to show you this." She opened her palms between them, and the light that gathered there was not the warm light of the spires but something else, something that absorbed what it touched. A shape formed between her hands: a necklace, black cord, onyx at its center, the jewel's facets pulling at the light around it with a patience that suggested it had been doing this for a long time.
"The Necklace of Armageddon." Her voice dropped. "It forms when the five lieutenants meet and share their power. You're immune to it, as you're immune to his blood magic. Your work is to destroy it, because its purpose is to return the Prince, with all their combined power feeding him."
"Five lieutenants. Where are they?"
"They were supposed to converge a hundred years from now, once the invasion had finished. Since the Prince is dead, they'll be called together immediately. They'll be in the Castles of Royalty." A brief pause. "Where you, and the other immunes, are almost certainly being held right now."
"Other immunes? Are there other revisionists like me?"
"No. I hope you're able to meet them and perhaps work alongside them before the royalty has you all executed." Her smile had the specific quality of someone who is genuinely hoping for an outcome they wouldn't place money on.
"I killed the Prince. But tell me about the others! Maybe they can handle the more physical parts of things, because I am not particularly skilled at those." He said this with the earnest candor of someone reviewing his own ledger without embarrassment.
"About that... they had no record. The old history omitted them because in the previous turn of events they were found and killed immediately when the Prince located immunes. They were considered inconsequential. But now things have shifted, and the royalty wants to study you all before the execution, especially you, who killed their heir."
"I see. I hope they're easy to get alon..."
"It's getting cold. You're waking up." Avry stepped back, her form already beginning to lose its edges, the nebulae behind her brightening where she was thinning. She waved, the gesture warm despite the efficiency of the departure, and the cold moved in from every direction at once, and the headspace pulled away from him like a tide going out.
Stone pressed into his palms. That was the first thing, the specific cold roughness of dungeon floor against skin, real in the way that dream floors are not. He sat up, chains registering against his wrists as weight and sound before they registered as restraint, rusted iron that carried damp in its pores. The cell was tight around him, bars close enough that he could have reached through them if he'd chosen to, torchlight coming through the gaps in uneven bars of orange that moved with the draft. The smell was mildew and old iron and the deeper note of stone that had absorbed water for a long time.
From somewhere in the dark beyond his cell, other voices moved, low and formless. Grief without objects. Pain that had been going on long enough to lose its specific character.
So she was right. Of course she was right.
"Greetings, prisoner."
The voice arrived from the gloom with the natural authority of something that has never had to raise itself to be heard. Gray turned his head. The general stood beyond the bars in full armor, the silver etching on his plate gleaming in the torchlight, white hair free of its helm and lying across his shoulders. His eyes were the particular shade of dark that makes a person difficult to read, and he was reading Gray without difficulty.
"What..." The word came out rough, his throat dry.
"Or should I say the prince-slayer?" The general's arms crossed over his chest, unhurried. "Tell me. Who are you, that you could do such a thing?"
He's already decided I'm interesting. That's not safe. Interesting things get studied.
"I... I don't know," Gray said. The honesty of it came out before he'd finished deciding whether to deploy it.
"You don't know." The general repeated this without inflection, setting it down between them as something to be examined. "Then why kill the Prince in the first place?"
Gray's mind moved through his available pieces with the speed available to a person who is chained and being studied by someone who has been doing this for decades. "I think I... I know, sorry, I'm an orphan who was hired to kill the King. I make my living at it."
The general's eyes narrowed, just briefly. The jaw settled slightly in the way jaws settle when they've detected something that requires closer attention.
He knows. Or suspects. Either way, the lie was too quick and too easy.
"An assassin? What fool immediately announces that?" The general's voice had sharpened by a degree, no more. "I don't believe you. Let me ask it differently." A step closer to the bars, gauntleted hands finding them without gripping them, resting there. "What are you?"
"And if I don't answer?"
"Executed, immediately." The general said this the way a man states the boiling point of water. "Cooperate, tell me what we need to know, and there's a small chance your life continues a little longer. You murdered royalty, which means execution comes regardless, but the shape of the time between here and there is still open." He let this settle. "You have no useful options besides this."
Gray turned away from the bars, back to the general, feigning the specific posture of a person yielding a point they'd rather not yield. Chains clinked against stone. The single barred slit near the ceiling let in a thin column of blue moonlight, landing across the floor in a pale bar.
Alright. A half-truth, then. Something true enough to hold weight, something strange enough to be believed.
"Alright. I'll answer. It's more interesting that way." He turned back. "I'm a messenger of the Gods."
"A half lie to be more convincing. I like that, Gray." Avry's voice arrived in his skull, warm in the cold of it.
"I'm immune to his power because I'm not of this world. You're well acquainted with myths and with magic, and if you find that hard to believe, that difficulty belongs to you." He held the general's gaze, level.
The general studied him. Gray let him.
"I'm also... rewarded for certain work that the Gods assign me. So what I said before was... true. In the essentials."
"If you're a divine messenger of that power, why allow yourself to be taken so easily? A divine messenger wouldn't be a fool."
"I allowed it." Gray gave the word its weight, let it sit there. "To deliver a message to this kingdom when the time is right."
Something moved in the general's expression. Not belief exactly, but the precursor to it, the internal reordering that happens when a story that should be dismissible keeps not being dismissible. "Can you tell me the message now? A prophecy? A warning?"
"When the other immunes are with me."
The general was still for a moment. "You know of the others."
"I do."
"Which God do you serve?"
"Zu..." The name arrived in his mouth before his mind had reached for it, already formed, arriving from somewhere he hadn't been looking. "Zeus. The God of Thunder. And weather. And... calamity."
Zeus. I know that name. How do I know that name. Where does that name come from.
Gray? What is happening. That name is not from here.
The interior question opened and stayed open, unanswered, while the general responded.
"Zeus." The general said the name carefully, testing it. "Then I hope your God understands why we must hold you here. We have our own God in this dominion. But we'll abide by your request. You'll meet the others soon."
"I see." Gray let a breath go, and the spite came up through it like something that had been waiting below the surface of the practical performance. "And I hope your God forgives you for the innocent lives you've taken. And for that senseless war you started."
The general did not flinch. "Your name?"
"Gray. Yours?"
"Kinston." The name arrived flat and final, the name of a man who has long since made his peace with being known. "It's interesting to meet you, Gray. I'll see to it that you regret those words when our judgment for your murder arrives." He said this with a particular smile, the smile of someone who has already made peace with the outcome and is simply informing you of the schedule.
"You know what you all did," Gray said. "Monsters."
"Mm." Kinston turned, armor catching the torchlight in long creases as he moved. His boots were steady and evenly spaced on the stone, the walk of a man who has never rushed toward anything he wasn't certain he would reach. He went without looking back.
Interesting to meet me. That's what he said.
Gray slid down against the wall, back to the cold stone, and turned to look at the other cells. Bodies in the dark, shapes of people reduced to their essential minimum by captivity. The chains on their wrists catching what little light filtered through. Above him, through the narrow slit, the blue moon sat in the sky with the patient indifference of celestial bodies that have been watching worse things than this for longer than this kingdom has had kings.
"This cannot be it. Avry?"
A chime, crystalline and immediate. "Yes, Graydowle? Are you hurt? What's happening?" The professional edge was back in place, but under it the same warmth that never quite left.
"I'm held prisoner. Kinston said execution comes. Do you have records on how executions work in this kingdom?"
"Of course. Public ceremony, with other prisoners of the same category of crime. I knew it would come to this, but have you met the other immunes yet?"
"Not yet. Why?"
"I see. Then you'll just have to wait unti..."
The explosion arrived through the floor first, a concussive pressure that moved up through stone and into his bones the way deep sound does, and then the floor itself went wrong, and the wall to his left became a falling thing, and Gray went with it, chains and all, into the dust and the dark and the sudden arrival of open air where closed space had been.
He opened his eyes to the ceiling in a different position relative to himself than ceilings should occupy. Rubble covered his legs, the specific weight of it not pain yet but the precursor to it, the body cataloguing pressure before it decides how to characterize it. The air was full of pulverized stone, thick enough to give the torchlight a diffuse, ambient quality. Noise came from everywhere with no organizing source: the crack of stone continuing to settle, the shouts of people who were either escaping or chasing those who were, the specific high sound of someone in immediate distress.
"Shit. What now..."
"Hey!" The voice was close and urgent, and the face that went with it appeared in the gap between two fallen blocks, sweat-streaked, young, wearing the expression of a person who is frightened and functioning anyway. Brown tunic. Bare arms working at the stone across Gray's legs with the specific effort of someone who has already tried this twice and is not going to stop. "We have to get out of here!"
"Thank you..."
"Thank the heavens you're still alive, prince-slayer. Urgh!" The stone shifted and went, dust rolling out from under it in a low cloud, and Gray's legs were free, the absence of pressure arriving as a specific relief. The young man got an arm under his and pulled.
"Can you walk?"
Gray tried the leg, weight settling onto it carefully. It held. "Yes. Let's go."
They moved into the chaos, the young man bearing the weight Gray was still sorting out across his shoulders. Bodies moved around them, some running with purpose, some running without it, chains trailing from released manacles, voices mixing with the clang of distant guard-boots on stone.
"I'm Pergfian. I was captured alongside you." The young man's breath came in the specific rhythm of controlled exertion, his grip steady. "Thank you truly for what you did. What do I call you?"
"Gray. And thank you for this." He found his footing as they ran, the leg accepting more weight with each stride. "You're an immune?"
"Yes, I am, and..." Pergfian's grip tightened, the shift happening before his words caught up to it. "No, no!"
Gray looked up. Iron guards, six of them at the end of the corridor, spears leveled, moving with the steady speed of people who have been told to stop specific things and are carrying out that instruction.
They turned hard, direction reversing, pace climbing, the corridor offering itself in the other direction with equal hospitality. The guards' boots were louder than their own.
"Who did this?" Gray asked, not slowing.
"I don't know. I don't know where we should go, but..."
"There." Gray caught the shape of it at the end of the hall's next turn, a room that had been a library before the wall had come in, shelves toppled, scorched volumes scattered across the floor in a way that suggested the explosion had reached here before the fire. A breach in the rubble, big enough.
They went through and the library closed around them, cool and close and reeking of old ink and ash, the sounds from outside filtering through stone that was still largely intact. No guard-boots. The pursers had either lost them or gone a different way.
They dropped onto the nearest surface that would hold weight, a couch that had survived everything the room had been through with the specific indignity of furniture that has outlasted its context. Their chests worked in unison. Dust settled from the air in long slow columns through what little light came through the breach.
"We can't stay here long," Gray said, pressing a hand to his arm where something had opened during the fall. "And I'm sorry for slowing you down."
"It's alright. Give me a moment." Pergfian rose, crossed to the breach they'd entered through, and put his back into the largest block of rubble near it, face clenched, arms braced, driving it across the gap with grinding effort until it seated against the opening with finality. He came back, settled, dragged a breath in through his nose.
"There. We can at least take a moment now."
Gray laughed, low and genuine. Pergfian laughed with him, the specific laugh of two people who have just escaped something and are not yet sure the escaping is done.
"Where are you from..."
The air changed.
It went wrong in a way that Gray felt in the skin before his mind named it, a pressure building from no specific direction, and the light bled out of the room in a slow drain, color going first, the scorched volumes going gray, the walls going gray, Pergfian going gray, everything surrendering its particularity until only the shapes remained, and then the shapes went too, and there was nothing.
The headspace arrived around him. The nebular light, the crystalline spires, the mercury quality of the floor. His hands before him, whole and clean.
"What? What the..." He turned, taking in the familiar expanse, mind moving through the specific logic of impossible things. The library had been there. The rubble had been there. Pergfian had been there.
A point of light ignited in the void ahead, the same single point it always began as, and then the threads came off it in white lines that built upward and outward, fractal and purposeful, Avry's form assembling from the Headquarters' borrowed light until she stood before him in her leathers with her silver-streaked curls and her eyes that were never not paying attention to something.
"Gray?" Her voice held a quality it didn't usually carry.
"Avry?"
"You slept again?"
"No! I was talking to someone. I was sitting right there and..."
"Someone? Who?"
"Pergfian. The immune who helped me out of the rubble. We'd sealed the room, we were safe, it's impossible that I just lost consciousness."
She went quiet in the way she went quiet when she was working through something, arms crossing, the continuity runes on her leathers moving faintly in the void-light. "That's strange. You're certain he did nothing? No casting, no gesture, nothing unusual before it happened?"
"Nothing. We were talking. That was all. He must be very worried now, me going limp without warning."
"Hmmm." Her fingers drummed against her arm, the sound it made in the void not quite sound. "Then he should have been waking you immediately. But you're still here."
"Maybe he's kind enough to let me rest."
She was quiet for three of her breaths. The considering kind. "Something's not right. Hold on. I'm going back to HQ."
Her form dissolved into the single point of light and was gone, and Gray was alone in the expanse with the old light of distant bodies and the crystalline humming of the spires.
Not right, he thought. What isn't right.
The point relit. The threads came back faster this time, Avry reassembling with less ceremony, and before her face had fully settled he could read the expression on it.
"Tell me," he said.
Her hands were fists at her sides. "There was a glitch. A phenomenal one. Gray, we might be in serious trouble."
"What kind of glitch?"
She looked at him with the specific steadiness of someone who is being very careful about how they give information, which meant the information was the kind that required care. "A loop. A reset. You went back in time."
The words arrived in the correct order and made the correct sense and he stood with them in the void for a moment before he answered. "How?"
"A regression. An act of bending time and space that no worldly creature and no revisionist can perform. Only one type of being has that ability."
"Which type?"
"Saboteurs. Void-forces, with powers over chaotic reincarnation. One of them died at the moment you were with Pergfian, and the death triggered the reset." She said it with the precision of someone who has been reading records and following threads and arrived at a conclusion she would rather not have reached. "This was not supposed to be possible. But it happened, which means one of them is present in Tartaellion. And since you mentioned an explosion before the reset, they were with you."
"Why didn't you tell me things like this existed?"
"They're genuinely rare. They appear only when a reality is already collapsing, as a last action of the void before it consumes what's left. This should not be occurring here." Her voice had a quality he had not heard in it before, something close to frustration with the situation rather than with him. "What matters now is that you find and stop this one."
"Another anomaly of reality, loose in the same place I'm in. I just started!"
"I know. But hear me. You carry your memories intact from the previous turn, as a revisionist. The loop doesn't erase what you know. That's your advantage. Use what you learned. Pergfian helped you. The explosion happened. The Saboteur was present. Work from there."
"I'll be in a loop I can't control."
"The Saboteur will likely hunt you now, as the Prince-slayer. You've made yourself visible in a way the void tends to find inconvenient." She put her hand on his shoulder, a gesture that was brief and deliberate and mattered. "That Prince, with his blood magic, was no match for you. This is not impossible."
"He was a worldly creature! This is something else entirely!"
"And we'll determine what exactly it is, and how to stop it." Her voice had the quality of certainty that comes from having worked very long on very hard problems. "But right now, it's getting cold. You're waking up."
The chill came in from the edges of the expanse, the nebular light contracting, the mercury floor losing its surface, the spires dimming. He felt his eyes beginning the motion of closing, the headspace pulling back like a tide.
White light flooded across his vision.
He blinked.
Stone ceiling. Cold floor pressed into his palms. The rusted weight of iron manacles against his wrists, damp smell of old stone and mildew, the distant low voices of other prisoners in other cells. Torchlight through the bars in its familiar uneven bars of orange.
The dungeon, intact.
No rubble. No explosion. No library.
He sat up.
The general stood beyond the bars.
The same armor. The same white hair. The same eyes that had already decided he was interesting.
The cold moved up Gray's spine from the base of it, a precise and thorough cold.
"Fuck. Avry, you were right."