The Gateway of the White Hole

  Before Hamiz's Departure

  Standing beside the man who would become his father, Hamiz felt the White Hole opening behind him, its light arriving at the edge of his peripheral vision with the specific quality of a doorway that has finished its patience.

  "If the Golden Dragon can create a Black Hole," Hamiz said, his forehead still warm from the Titan fight's residue, "then it can produce a White Hole. The opposite direction. That's how I get back."

  Mizi laughed. It was a short laugh, genuine rather than performed, the kind that arrives before the person decides whether to allow it. He looked at his son with the expression of someone who has just received evidence about their own future and is processing it faster than they expected to.

  "You are actually smart," he said.

  "Of course," Hamiz said. The portal was fully open behind him now, and the light from it caught his face and made the dragon mark on his forehead look like it was still active, which it nearly was. "I get it from my mother's side."

  Mizi's expression changed immediately. "Wait. Who is your mother? What is her—"

  Hamiz stepped backward into the light, looking at his father for the last time with the specific expression of someone who has calculated exactly how much information to give and found that this was the right amount.

  "One day you'll meet her. Her name is A—"

  The portal closed.

  Mizi stood alone on the mountain's upper face with the city below him and the ocean still, and the incomplete sentence, and everything that came next.

  The Ancestral Plane

  The cathedral that Lyra and Syizl arrived in existed at a scale that made cathedrals built by human hands seem like drawings of cathedrals. The architecture was functional rather than decorative in the way of things built to contain something real rather than to suggest the presence of something real.

  Armed monks moved through the columns with the efficiency of a guard that has been active for a long time and expects to continue.

  The woman who came forward wore authority the way certain people wear it, not as an addition to themselves but as a quality of how they occupy space. Her crown was the kind that has been carried rather than placed. She looked at Lyra with the specific attention of someone who has already read the document and is now meeting the subject.

  Syizl bowed. He put a hand on Lyra's head and pressed it downward. Lyra straightened it immediately. Syizl looked at her. She looked back at him.

  "I am Inako," the woman said. "Queen of the Ancestral Plane. I predicted the Destroyer's awakening in your universe. It has begun."

  "Mizi," Lyra said.

  "He has become immortal. No wound sustained in your world will hold. No weapon forged in your universe can reach what is driving him." She paused with the pause of someone who has had time to think about the next sentence. "Only my blood carries the celestial property that bypasses what his divinity has made of him."

  She drew the ceremonial blade from her belt and opened her palm with the practiced ease of someone for whom this is a ritual rather than a cost. A monk received the blood into a glass vial. Another monk sealed it.

  "There is a weapon in your world," Inako said. "The Rainbow Dagger. It lives in the Ancient Tree. When my blood is applied to its edge, it can reach the spirit inside him. Sever the spirit from the host." She looked at Syizl. "You know the tree."

  "I know who does," Syizl said.

  "Then go. The time you have left is less than you want it to be."

  The Fall of Habas City

  The League of Nations held its emergency session in a building that had been built specifically to contain emergencies, and the conclusion it reached was the conclusion that leagues of nations tend to reach when a problem has no diplomatic solution: volume. Hundreds of the world's best assassins and hitmen were given the location, the briefing, the equipment, and the clearance to use anything they brought.

  None of them succeeded.

  Mizi healed with the specific efficiency of something that has stopped distinguishing between wounded and not wounded because the Dragon Spirit had stopped making the distinction. A bullet wound closed before the bullet had cooled. Binoshi hit him from a distance that should have made the shot unanswerable and watched the wound knit itself with fire and reported to Nishimura that the hit had landed and that landing had accomplished nothing.

  Mizi looked at the tower and showed the peace sign, and the Golden Dragon Lord's light ball found Binoshi's perch while Binoshi was still deciding which building to jump to next.

  Dozens of helicopters arrived. Tanks. Armoured vehicles. The specific assembly of forces that represents a government's sincere belief that quantity solves problems that quality cannot.

  A figure stepped out of the surrounding soldiers and walked toward Mizi alone, which stopped the engagement because it was not what the engagement plan included.

  Aley had the face of someone who has lived through several versions of the same situation and knows how the versions differ. He walked toward Mizi with his hands visible and his posture communicating that he had not come for the same reason the helicopters had come.

  "I'm you," Aley said. "From a future you didn't choose. I came because this is the moment, and I know what this moment needs."

  Mizi looked at him with the specific wariness of someone who can feel recognition and is not sure whether to trust it.

  "You can't control it anymore," Aley said. "You're losing. I know. I was there." He produced a card from his coat. The image on it was a watch. "Take this. It remembers what you've forgotten."

  The card reached Mizi's hand, and the headache that came with it was the specific headache of memories that have been compressed being forcibly expanded. Mizi saw himself at fourteen with the watch on his wrist. He saw Dusan and the bridge. He saw Alesten. He saw the cost of every choice he had made with full clarity, the cost to himself and the cost to everyone around him, the accounting he had not been able to do while the Dragon Spirit was running the calculations differently.

  "Come home," Aley said. "That's all it is. Come home."

  The shot came from the tower Binoshi had moved to. It found Mizi's heart while the word home was still in the air between them.

  The shock was not the pain. The pain was already fading because the Dragon Spirit was already healing it. The shock was the specific shock of someone who had, for one moment, remembered what it felt like to be human, having that moment interrupted by someone who had decided that the moment was a threat.

  Mizi stood up.

  He looked at Binoshi's tower with his dragon's eye, the right one, the one he had kept covered, and removed the patch.

  The Golden Dragon Lord appeared.

  Binoshi's speed was exceptional and irrelevant.

  Aley moved to stop the army from responding, because he understood what was coming and what it would escalate into, and he was not fast enough. The army fired. Mizi, who had been at the edge of remembering himself, had the last thread of his humanity cut by the combination of the bullet and the subsequent immediate betrayal, and the Dragon Spirit that had been partially restrained found it had nothing left to hold against.

  Mizi made the peace sign.

  Not one Golden Dragon Lord. A thousand.

  The city of Habas had been a city that morning. By the time the alliance of nations assembled its declaration of war, it had been a city recently. The front of the war that followed swallowed a million lives, which was a number that has no emotional weight at the scale it happened but has full weight distributed across every individual it contained.

  The Siege of Dusan Village

  The portal opened in front of the Ancient Tree at an hour when the village was between its night guard and its dawn guard, which was not an accident, and Idham and Azmei's response was immediate and physical, stone bindings and elongated trunks finding Lyra and Syizl before they had finished stepping through.

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  "We are not here to fight," Lyra said. The stone was around her arms.

  "Then why are you here," Idham said. His hands were in the earth up to the knuckle.

  Syizl, who had been listening to this exchange with the patience of someone who has been in worse diplomatic situations, drew his katana and cut through the stone and the wood around both of them in two swings, which was not the recommended way to begin a negotiation but was effective.

  Azmei was at him immediately, and the exchange between them had the specific quality of two people who are both very good at something testing each other's ceiling, and Syizl was better, and Azmei's shoulder received a flat of the blade rather than an edge because Syizl had made that choice, which communicated something about his intentions more clearly than the words had.

  A gunshot.

  Everyone stopped.

  Jalal was standing at the tree's base with the gun pointed at a space between them, which was the specific position of someone who wants everyone to understand that the gun exists and is not telling anyone where it will go next.

  "Talk," he said.

  Lyra talked. She told him about Inako and the blood and the Rainbow Dagger and what Mizi had become and what was going to happen to the people in his path. She told him as directly as possible because Jalal was the kind of person who receives information better when it is given without arrangement.

  He listened without moving.

  When she finished, he was quiet for a moment that had the weight of a man receiving the full account of what his son had cost the world, and then accepting that account without putting it down.

  He turned to the Ancient Tree. He placed his palm against the bark in the way he had placed it before, when the tree was deciding who it trusted, and the tree responded in the way it responds to the people who have earned its response. The roots moved. The earth parted in the specific way of earth that is giving something up rather than being forced open, and the Rainbow Dagger came to the surface in its roots.

  Syizl took it. The tree's light faded, and in the distance, past the village's perimeter, the sound of Golden Dragon Lord fire on the security forces began.

  Jalal handed the gun to Idham and looked at Lyra and Syizl.

  "Go," he said. His voice had the quality of someone using the last reserves of a kind of strength that has nothing to do with the physical. "Save the world from him. Save my son from what he's become."

  He walked toward the sound of the fire.

  The Final Stand of the L-Fighters

  The ruins of Habas were the ruins of a city that had been a city very recently, and in a city that was recently a city, there are specific qualities to the destruction that distinguish it from old ruins. The weight of the recent. The specific smell of things that were not burned things until today.

  Azraie, Ashley, Aqif, and Ruby came together in the way of people who have arrived separately and found each other without needing to arrange it, because the situation arranged it, and they moved into the ruins toward the specific gravitational pull of Mizi's presence.

  Azraie and Ashley attacked together, which was the only way anything was going to be difficult for him, and they were both very good and together they created a problem that required Mizi's full attention. Aqif found the moment that Mizi's full attention was on both of them and sent the Golden Wolf Lord at him in that moment, and the Ultimate came from Aqif's hands, and the Wolf Lord's claws found Mizi's body, and Mizi summoned three Golden Dragon Lords in response and the Wolf Lord was gone.

  Aley arrived with Nishimura and Athira.

  "We will stop you," Nishimura said. "Whatever it costs."

  Mizi looked at him with something that was almost affection, the specific regard of someone who has a genuine history with a person and is sorry that the history has arrived here. "Try," he said.

  They came at him from three directions and the combined attack was the best combination of three capable fighters working together, and Mizi summoned six Complete Golden Dragon Lords and the Dragons addressed the combination while Mizi addressed each of them personally. Jack's sniper found the space where Mizi was between evasions, and the shell detonated rather than penetrated, and Mizi had to use the Dragon Spirit's regeneration for the blast damage rather than a wound.

  The Golden Dragon Lords pressed in from every angle. Lyra's fingers were cut by Mizi's sword. Nishimura's eye was taken by a flat cut that turned edge-on at the last degree. Athira healed what could be healed and kept the others in the fight for longer than the physics of the situation suggested.

  Aley used everything he had. Every card. Every technique. He occupied Mizi the way a person occupies a problem that won't be solved but can be maintained, and the maintenance cost him, and he kept paying it.

  Ruby came through the gap.

  The Darkness Dragon Lord came first, which was the right call because the Dragon Lord could absorb more hits than she could, and it did, and Mizi killed it with the efficient brutality of someone addressing an obstacle rather than an opponent. The head came off. Mizi looked at Ruby across the debris.

  "You were the first one who betrayed me," he said. The voice was his but the quality behind it was the Dragon Spirit's, cold in the specific way of something that doesn't feel betrayal because betrayal requires caring. "It's only right that you're the first one I kill."

  Ruby looked at him. She was bleeding from where the Dragon Lord's dissolution had thrown her, and she was still standing.

  "Kill me or don't," she said. "I'm still not the first person you ever loved."

  Something moved behind Mizi's eyes. Not the Dragon Spirit's quality. Something underneath it.

  Then the sword came.

  She went down and he advanced toward her, and she was on the ground with his blade in her, and she looked up at his face from that position with the complete composure of someone who has made their peace with exactly this.

  She spat blood at his face.

  She smiled.

  "The important thing," she said, "is that I died at the hands of the person I love."

  She laughed once, quietly, and stopped being alive with the same directness she had always brought to everything.

  Mizi looked at her for a moment. Then he turned.

  Azraie and Ashley came for him with cracked ribs and a fractured shoulder between them, and they came anyway, because they were people who came anyway, and Mizi fought them with the Dragon Spirit's cold efficiency. Ashley was thrown. Azraie's shoulder was broken further and he nearly lost his head, and it was Aqif who pulled Mizi's attention to the third axis before the sword finished the swing.

  Aqif's sword broke against Mizi's.

  He stood in the space after it broke and looked at the hilt in his hand.

  "Our techniques are almost the same," Aqif said. "I nearly beat you once."

  "That was then," Mizi said.

  The flat of the blade sent Aqif down with the specific economy of someone spending as little as possible. Not the edge. Not yet.

  A sniper round arrived and detonated, which Mizi registered as an inconvenience and identified as Jack, which was the thing that made Mizi's expression change slightly, because Jack meant that the people who had been most specifically his had turned fully against him now.

  He summoned ten Complete Golden Dragon Lords.

  Lyra and Syizl arrived and found the city as it was and moved through it toward the specific convergence point of Mizi and the people who were still standing.

  The Rainbow Dagger was in Syizl's hands and the vial of Inako's blood was open, and the blade was already coated, and what remained was getting close enough to use it, which the ten Complete Golden Dragon Lords were specifically organized to prevent.

  Lyra took four of them with everything her cybernetic legs could produce, the specific brutality of someone buying time rather than winning. Her fingers were already gone. She operated with what she had left and did not permit herself the space to register what she had lost, because there was not space for both.

  Nishimura and Athira took three more. Aley used the last of his cards.

  One burst of light from Mizi's body, released outward in a pulse, and everyone within range was still for the moment it lasted, and the Golden Dragon Lord that had been waiting hit Syizl with full speed and he went down and the world went dark.

  He came back.

  He was on the ground. The Rainbow Dagger was in his hand. He could feel it.

  Lyra was beside him.

  He reached for her.

  She shook her head. "Go," she said. Her voice had the quality of someone who has accepted the accounting and is not asking for it to be different. "Save the world. Go."

  "Lyra—"

  "Go." She smiled at him, which was the specific thing she could give him now, and she gave it fully. "It's alright."

  She breathed twice more. Then she was still.

  Syizl held her face for a moment. Then he stood up.

  Across the debris, Mizi had Aley by the throat, which was the specific image of a man strangling his own better possibility, and he was asking it if it was afraid of death.

  "Kill yourself?" Aley said. "You can't. I know. I know what it costs you."

  "I won't kill myself," Mizi said. "But you are not me. You are a version of what I might have been. That's different." He looked at the Golden Dragon Lord over his shoulder. "Finish it."

  Syizl cut the Dragon Lord's head off.

  The Lord dissolved. Mizi turned.

  He looked at Syizl with the first genuine attention he had given to a single person in this battle. The student who had learned from him and come back with a celestial weapon to use against him, and who was still standing when everyone else was down.

  "You're not afraid," Mizi said.

  "No." Syizl held the sword and the dagger both, one in each hand. "I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of letting you continue. You taught me the difference." He looked at his teacher's face, at the Dragon Spirit looking out through the eyes. "Thank you. For everything you gave me." His voice was not entirely steady. He let that be true. "But I have to stop you."

  "Then try," Mizi said, and meant it as a compliment, in the way he had always taught by demanding the maximum.

  Syizl came at him.

  The exchange was everything Mizi had taught and everything Syizl had learned and the gap between them was the gap it had always been, which was the gap between a teacher at their full capacity and a student who has internalized everything and not yet exceeded it. Mizi parried every strike and called out the errors as he found them: "Too slow. Faster. Is this everything I gave you?"

  The sword hit Syizl's shoulder, deep. He didn't fall. He leaned into the blade, which was not a natural response to a sword in your shoulder, and the momentum the lean created drove his arm forward, and the Rainbow Dagger's blade, wet with celestial blood, found Mizi's chest.

  The Golden Dragon Spirit's sound was not a sound that the ears heard. It was the specific experience of something that has existed at a level below language being forcibly returned to language, and the pain of it was the pain of a thousand years of nature being burned from a host that had been carrying it in every cell.

  The thousand Dragon Lords dissolved into light, which faded before it reached the ground.

  Mizi looked at the dagger and then at Syizl and his right eye, the Dragon eye, changed. First the colour. Then the quality behind it. The inhuman patience replaced, degree by degree, by something that was recognisably the person who had been there before the Spirit took over.

  He lay down.

  The sky opened, which was different from the sky brightening. It was the sky being opened from a specific point above the ruins, and Inako descended through it with her monks in the silent way of things that do not need to announce themselves because their presence is announcement enough.

  She did not speak. She looked at Mizi on the ground and at Syizl beside him, and she lifted both of them with the specific care of someone who handles broken things frequently and has learned the right way to handle them.

  They ascended together, the teacher and the student, into the light that the cathedral in the Ancestral Plane was already preparing to receive.

  Below, in the ruins of Habas, the world was quiet for the first time in two years. Not peaceful. Not healed. But quiet, which was the beginning of the conditions in which healing becomes possible.

  The Oneirology Universe had been saved.

  The cost of it was the city, and the million lives, and Ruby's smile in the ruins, and Lyra's hand releasing Syizl's arm, and all the specific people who had given everything they had and now were gone.

  And somewhere in the Ancestral Plane, in the care of monks who knew how to handle things that have been broken at the level below the visible, two people were being put back together.

  It would take time.

  It was enough that it was possible.