The Angels of Nagnayak

  The Angels of Nagnayak submitted to Lavinia the way a city submits to its rightful ruler after a long absence: not with fanfare but with the specific quality of things that have been waiting in the correct position and are now released from waiting.

  Aley stood at the throne room's edge and watched it happen with the expression of someone who has been working toward a particular moment for a long time and is now watching it arrive and is not entirely sure what to do with his hands.

  The truth of what he had been doing in Nagnayak was simpler than most of what Aley did, which made it unusual. After the Oneirology Universe's recovery, when the Empress of Desire and the Emperor of Deity were both absent and the city had no one to answer to, Aley had stayed. He had walked the streets and attended the councils and made the decisions that kept a city functioning, without a title, without a plan to be remembered for it. Atonement, when it is genuine, does not require an audience.

  The timeline where Lavinia lost against the Apocrypha forces existed in the past, which was the specific kind of past that Aley could reach. He had found Lavinia at the moment before the loss became permanent, pulled him out of it, and brought him here, where the throne had been empty long enough that the city would welcome anyone who was supposed to sit in it.

  Lavinia sat in it with the specific gravity of someone who has returned to something they did not choose to leave.

  "Earth needs Nagnayak," Aley said. He stood before the throne with the directness he always used when the thing he was saying was important. "Not immediately. But soon."

  "Then we prepare," Lavinia said. "The troops first. The city's strength needs to be stable before I send any of it elsewhere." He looked around the throne room, at the Angels who were already turning toward the logistics of what he had just said. "How much time?"

  "Less than you want," Aley said. "More than nothing."

  He glanced toward the throne room's far archway. Something moved in the shadow there, a presence that was watching with the specific quality of watching that was neither hostile nor accidental. He noted it and returned to the conversation, because some things are worth acknowledging and some things are worth letting declare themselves in their own time.

  The Living Forest

  The trees moved through Dusan Village with the patience of things that have been given an instruction and have no other commitments. They pulled themselves by their own roots through the soil and the streets, and the specific problem they presented to the military was the same problem that deep roots have always presented to forces that address surfaces: cut them down and the roots remained, and from the roots, more trees.

  Ashley's students had been preparing for something since the moment Ashley had arrived back in Dusan, because Ashley's students had learned to read when preparation was required. The Monster Army they deployed formed the front line, and the defensive work was brutal and continuous and effective in the way of things that are effective only as long as the people doing them do not stop.

  Athira worked the communications with the efficiency of someone who knows that the battle at the front and the battle for resources behind it are the same battle, and losing the second one makes the first one irrelevant. Defense vehicles to Habas City. Ammunition resupply. Medical. She moved through each item with the specific focus of someone who does not have enough time and is choosing to spend it precisely.

  At the Jalal house, Mizi rode the buffalo through the trees that had surrounded the perimeter and released the aura of light that was the one weapon he had left, the infinite mana that Inako had told him about and that he was still learning the shape of. The light reduced the trees, which was not the same as destroying them, but smaller trees were slower trees.

  Then the buffalo made a decision.

  The buffalo's tolerance for living trees that moved toward them had been declining throughout the engagement, and it reached its limit at a moment Mizi was not positioned for. The animal moved in a direction that was not the direction Mizi's weight was ready for, and Mizi found the ground, and then there was a tree above him that was very large and moving with the specific purpose of something that has found an obstacle it intends to remove.

  A root came up from the ground and caught the tree's trunk.

  Large rocks arrived at the trees on either side from a direction that resolved, when Mizi looked, into Idham and Azmei, standing at the edge of the road with their hands in the positions that meant the earth was listening to them.

  They had come back.

  Azmei looked at Mizi on the ground and did not say anything, which was Azmei's version of a greeting that contained all the necessary information. Idham's rocks were already in the air. Together the three of them worked through the trees around the house in the efficient way of people who have fought together before and remember each other's range.

  The United Nations

  Athira had been in emergency sessions before, but an emergency session where the emergency involved living trees and an entity the size of a building had its own specific quality. She stood before the assembly and presented the situation with the calm of someone who has understood that the people in this room need to see composure before they will provide resources.

  She asked for assistance.

  The responses were what they were. Most countries moved toward yes, which was the result of the satellite footage that the session's opening had displayed, footage that made what was happening impossible to characterise as exaggeration.

  Victoria's delegate presented Victoria's position.

  Aid, yes. But the aid had conditions. Vincerist soldiers who entered the Habas country's borders were to receive relief provisions equal to what Habas forces received. This was the condition, and it was not negotiable.

  Athira listened to the condition and to the sound of the other delegates moving toward agreement with it, and she looked at the numbers available to her if Victoria abstained, and she considered.

  She tabled the vote.

  In Ninobe City, which had become the last functional centre of defense when the Army retreated from the ground they could no longer hold, the wall that had been built against one kind of threat was discovering what it could and could not do against another kind. Trees do not use doors.

  Mizi had arrived with the others through the movement of people who flee together and find each other on the other side of the fleeing. The city held, which was the word they used for the process of defending something while the thing being defended shrinks. The dragons came and burned the trees and more trees arrived at the rate of something that has no limit on the rate.

  When the gate came down under the weight of a root system that had been working on it for six hours, Aley arrived.

  The ice that shot from his cards hit the gate's gap and spread in the specific way of things that become barriers by freezing into the shapes available, and the wall re-formed as something the trees would need to defeat again before they could come through.

  Aley looked at Mizi with the expression of encountering a variable he had not fully prepared for.

  Mizi looked at him with the expression of someone about to say something preemptively. "I don't have the Dragon Spirit anymore. I'm not going to go berserk." He paused. "I'm happy to see you."

  Aley's expression settled. "Help is coming," he said. "From the clouds. Minutes."

  The Angel Cavalry

  In Nagnayak, the Angel troops that Lavinia had assembled were the specific product of three months of work: Angels of War, equipped and mounted on the winged cavalry horses that existed only in Nagnayak, their swords carrying the light of the realm they had been forged in. The number of them visible in formation on the cloud-city's launching field was the kind of number that makes a person go quiet for a moment.

  A boy came to Lavinia before the launch. He had been brought from the previous timeline, one of the lives that Aley had gathered along with Lavinia, a child named Avalot whose specific quality was the specific quality of children who have seen enough that they are no longer entirely children.

  "Brother," Avalot said. He looked up at the cavalry behind Lavinia and then back at Lavinia's face. "Is it true? That this world will be peaceful one day?"

  Lavinia looked at him. He put his hand on the boy's head.

  "I promise you," he said. "I will do anything for that peace. Everything I have."

  He turned to the cavalry.

  He told them what day this was, which was the day that would end the evil that had been accumulating in this world since before any of them were born. He told them about the world below, the humans, the city that was being defended, the people who had been running and needed to stop running. He told them about the dream of a world where humans and Angels lived together without the barrier between them.

  The cheer that came from tens of thousands of mounted Angels carried across the cloud-city in the way of sounds made by people who have found the purpose that matched what they were built for.

  They descended.

  The World War

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Mizi saw them come through the clouds the way something that is not possible becomes possible, the specific quality of hope arriving in a form larger than expected. Tens of thousands of winged cavalry swept out across the living trees with glowing swords that the trees had no response to, the light working on roots and wood the way it worked on all things that had been given wrong instructions.

  And then the warships appeared.

  Military ships, large ones, coming from a direction that was not Nagnayak's direction, their markings resolving as they descended into the range where markings become readable.

  They were not there to help.

  The bombs that fell hit the city, and the cavalry, and the trees without distinction, because bombs sent to eliminate a threat address geography rather than allegiance, and the geography contained all of them. People scattered and the specific panic of an attack from above in the middle of an attack from the ground created the specific confusion of a battle that has become two battles simultaneously.

  Mizi pulled citizens toward cover. Aley ran beside him. The Lfighters deployed their summons forward and the monsters became the front line, absorbing what the front line was supposed to absorb. The dragons found the warships and the warships found the dragons.

  The Lavinia cavalry hit the ground forces that had come with the warships, because those forces needed to be hit, and the war expanded with the logic of wars that expand.

  Mizi saw the numbers.

  He had been doing the mathematics of combat since he was fifteen, which meant he knew when the mathematics had shifted. They were losing the arithmetic.

  Then the water at the horizon changed.

  The Panja military came from the sea with the specific speed of forces that have decided the answer is yes and have been moving since the decision was made. They hit the flank of the forces that had been pressing toward Ninobe's walls, and the forces that had been pressing toward Ninobe's walls discovered that being pressed from a different direction changes the calculation entirely.

  The war continued to expand, which was the thing that world wars do, the size of them reaching a scale where the word war becomes inadequate and you need more words.

  Lavinia whistled.

  The clouds that responded to him gathered above the battlefield in the specific way of clouds that have been given purpose, thick and lowering, and from within them the Angel troops released heat in the precise way of weapons designed for discrimination rather than area, the arrows and the light finding the people who were there for the wrong reasons with a targeting that had no natural explanation.

  The Vincerist forces began to fail.

  The Vincerist president's hand found the button, which is the thing that presidents who are losing find when the losing becomes undeniable, and the button sent the nuclear weapon on the trajectory that such buttons send things.

  Mizi felt it before any instrument could register it. The mana in his body knew the shape of something catastrophic at a distance, the specific way a body knows weather before the weather arrives. The trembling that started in his hands moved up through his arms and into his chest, and the aura came out of him with a force he had not used before in this universe, a force that did not push but enveloped, and time in the battlefield stopped and rewound in the specific way of things that are not possible and are happening.

  When he became aware of where he was in the moment, he looked at Aley.

  "I need to get to the Vincerist president," he said. "Now."

  Aley had a card for this. He had a card for most things. The speed it gave them was the speed of people who are somewhere and then are somewhere else, and the somewhere else was the command room where the Vincerist president stood with his generals and the knowledge that the weapon had been sent.

  Mizi's sword found the president's throat in the specific position of a blade that is making a request rather than a statement.

  "End this," Mizi said.

  The president laughed. It was the laugh of a man who believes that the situation is beyond the point where a sword at his throat changes anything. "Even without the weapon," he said, "your country is finished. You can't—"

  Mizi stepped back. He turned the president by the shoulder to face the screen that the president's own command room had been tracking.

  The entire Vincerist fleet was gone. The specific quality of gone that means not retreated, not damaged, not reorganised. The cloud-city troops had come down into Vincerist's own territory while Vincerist had been bombing Habas, and what was on the screen was the territory's status.

  The president looked at the screen for a long time.

  "Kill me," he said.

  "No," Mizi said.

  The Panja elite team came through the command room door with the timing of people who had been positioned for exactly this. They put the handcuffs on the president with the efficient care of people who do this for the job, not for satisfaction, and Athira arrived behind them with the expression of someone who has been working toward this moment for longer than the current war.

  "You have proven," she said, looking at the president, "exactly what dictators prove. That time takes everything you built and gives it back to the people you built it on." She looked at him with something that was not cruelty but was not mercy either. It was the specific look of history being accurate about a person. "Take him."

  They took him.

  The Chosen One

  Mizi walked back into Habas City through streets that held the specific mixture of damage and survival that cities hold after the war has finished and the accounting has not yet been done. Buildings that had been buildings were buildings in a different configuration now. There were people on the ground in both senses of the phrase.

  And then the bowing.

  It started near the gate and moved outward through the crowd in the way of a wave that knows its own direction. People who had been defending and people who had been sheltering and people who had been doing both, bowing toward the man on the buffalo.

  Mizi stopped the buffalo.

  "No," he said. The word was not loud but it carried, because the crowd had gone quiet in the specific way of crowds that are listening for the next thing. "Without Aley and Lavinia, the person I came from, we would have lost this day. Without every person who stayed. Without every soldier who didn't run when running was the reasonable choice. Without the dragons and the Lfighters and the people who built the wall and the people who held the gate." He looked at the crowd, which was the specific look of someone who is actually seeing the people they are looking at. "I thank you. All of you. Finally — all of us, together — we are free."

  The cheer was the specific cheer of people who have been holding something in their bodies for a long time and are releasing it.

  The mysterious man appeared behind Mizi while the cheer was still filling the street. He had the quality of someone who has been arriving at various moments and has decided that this is the right one to be seen in.

  "My king," he said. "You have led them to victory."

  Idham, who was standing nearby, looked at him. "My lord?"

  The man turned to address the crowd as if he had been invited to address the crowd, which he had not, but the crowd was listening anyway because the crowd was still listening.

  "In front of you is the king from another world," he announced, with the specific energy of someone who has been preparing this speech. "The people of the Empera Universe call him Pendragon Ruler II. But destiny calls him the Chosen One. He is Mizi."

  The crowd cheered again, which was not necessarily the endorsement of the specific framing but was the endorsement of the man.

  Mizi laughed, which was genuine. "I'm not a king," he said. "Who are you?"

  "I am Waz," the man said, with the satisfaction of someone who has been waiting to say their own name to the right audience. "The greatest wizard of the future. Your loyal follower. I came to tell you that your next challenge is already waiting."

  Aley looked at Waz with the expression of someone who has met versions of this kind of person before and is assessing which version this one is. "Your purpose," he said. "Specifically."

  "To help the Chosen One reach his destiny," Waz said. "The Empera Universe needs him. The Supreme Lord has not been stopped."

  The Supreme Lord. Mizi had been holding that in the back of his awareness since the moment the entity had flown away from the Ancient Tree, and the battle's demands had kept it there. He reached into the bag on the buffalo's side and found the tool that Inako had given him for exactly this, and when he pressed it the portal opened with the specific quality of a door that has been waiting for the right hand on it.

  He looked at the crowd. He looked at Azraie, who had come through the gates with the others and was standing with his arm in a sling that didn't stop him from standing straight.

  "Manage this country well," Mizi said. "Don't let anyone take what these people just gave their lives for."

  He looked at Lavinia, who had descended from the sky with the cavalry and was standing at the crowd's edge with Avalot beside him.

  "Protect this universe from what comes from outside it," Mizi said. "You know what that means better than anyone."

  He found Idham and Azmei. "Tell my family that I'm well. Tell them I'll come back when it's done."

  He turned to Waz. "Get on."

  Waz looked at the buffalo.

  "I'm a wizard," Waz said.

  "Yes," Mizi said. "Get on."

  Waz got on.

  They went through the portal together, and it closed behind them, and the street was quiet in the specific way of places that have watched something depart and are holding the space of it.