Adarin studied the vault of the night sky, the three bands hugging the horizon and encompassing them, shimmering with silvery moonlight—simulating the night of Urf, the long-lost homeworld. He stepped fully onto the balcony, his footfalls near silent. He had, after all, invested time in figuring out how to move noiselessly with his new body.

  Liora was hugging her knees, sitting next to the railing, her body shaking with sniffles. Adarin walked forward and gently prodded the railing.

  It held, while giving a few centimeters. It did not collapse down into the depths nearly a hundred meters below them. We are in fucking ruins here. One can never be too careful.

  Well, at least she’s chosen a nice place to be sad about her existence.

  He looked around and became, for the first time, truly aware of what he couldn’t see. The spire—over one hundred and twenty meters—at the center of Portguard. It housed the City Crystal, the administrative palace. It was a grand cathedral, a monument to the unity of the aspects in the One. It looked out eastward, toward the Great Lake.

  Below him lay one of the two civic quarters. To the south, what Rüdiger intended to turn into the governmental and academic quarter. To the north, the port district, where rigorous industry was ongoing even at this hour, demolition crews tearing down building after building. The moonlight reflected off the great river in the distance. He could make out the many arms of the delta where it met the sea almost a hundred kilometers away. The coastal swamps. The hills to the south. Along the coast, the lights of a few settlements could be made out—yet overall, the world was dark.

  After a long while, Liora quieted down. He’d never been good at this. But what he could do was give her his presence.

  He felt her moving behind him. Getting up and walking to the railing hurt. Her hands hesitated a moment before leaning onto it.

  “Yes,” Adarin said. “I tested. It’s stable.”

  She smiled awkwardly and leaned against the railing.

  “It is a beautiful night. And the city… the white walls…”

  She looked down. The black bands of the obsidian barriers of the Holy Land. The kilometer-wide no man’s land, where anything would be burned by the pylons of arcane force—or megawatt scale laser projectors, as they would’ve called them in his time.

  Adarin smirked. To the southeast, one was cutting straight through the hills—the zone of death no one had yet conquered.

  Adarin looked. “I was told this city once held over half a million people.”

  Liora nodded. “Portguard. Apart from the Holy City, it was the main trading port of the Holy Land.”

  “Rüdiger truly got the jewel…”

  Her face darkened. “No wonder with all the jackals besides him.”

  Adarin didn’t answer, and after a while, she made a sound that was a mixture of a sniffle and a hiss as the cold breeze of wind blew her dress around her—white, reflecting the silvery shimmer in the dark night. Her long black hair blew loose, her braid undone sometime before he had arrived.

  “Do they think I do not understand that they’re mocking me? Do they think I don’t see them whispering? I know I’m out of my depth here…”

  She swallowed hard and her body shook. She fell silent again, her lips trembling.

  Adarin began to speak. “I think it would be best if you treated everyone as your enemy here. Always ask: How could they use this to hurt me?”

  Liora turned to him. “Is that how you live?”

  Adarin gave a curt nod. “It’s how any child in the military was brought up to be. After all, we were the Internal Security Service. We had to be concerned about each other, most of all.”

  She looked around. “But this pit of vipers… that can’t be all there is to life. This pointless game and struggling for superiority. What’s the point of it all? Shouldn’t there be joy?”

  Her last words trailed off as she studied the city. Studied the gate they had conquered. Studied the crater they had made.

  Adarin felt a cold chill down his spine.

  “There is a difference between how the world is and how it ought to be in our imagination. Most people fail to separate this. The world ought to be a nice and safe place where everyone can be happy. That’s what every child wishes for—and should get. Until they’re old enough to understand the harsh realities.”

  He remained silent for a long time.

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  “When I was eight years old, a group of other children went after me. The leader—a girl. I don’t know why she targeted me. I was no different. So I went to our counselors. And I was told to find the right moment. Take her alone. And make her afraid. I just had to be tougher than all of them. Barrel through punishment.”

  “…What? What did you do?”

  “During an exercise. A scouting one, in the forest. I followed her trail. I knocked her out. Bound her up. I used her jacket and water from a nearby river. I water-tortured her. Whispered that worse things would be in store if she ever tried anything against me again.”

  He inhaled.

  “After I’d made my point, one of the educators intervened. He praised me for having done exceedingly well and proceeded to berate her for a lack of watchfulness—for allowing it to happen. We were both transferred to different units after that. But I’d learned a valuable lesson.”

  Adarin was silent for a moment. And so was she.

  “I hope… that that is horrible.”

  Adarin chuckled.

  “The Empire was built on the idea of no illusions. Only the truth. And the truth is that children are horrible monsters before they’re fully socialized. And nothing could have gone wrong there. The educators were watching the whole time.”

  A long silence settled between them as the cold wind blew. It picked up and bounced against the white spire—as if shivering from Adarin’s story.

  Soon Liora began speaking again.

  “The things I’ve done ever since we met in Northguard… ever since—” She swallowed. “Ever since we were captured, and the orcs tried to rape me and my sisters and—”

  A long silence.

  Adarin felt the tension in her body. Her knuckles grew white as she gripped the railing of the balcony.

  “I killed them.”

  The words hung in the air.

  Liora continued, and suddenly the words were spilling out of her like a waterfall.

  “The people I killed. The corpses I desecrated. The Hollow Ones. How I… how I just enjoyed getting good at creating them, despite what doing that entailed.”

  Her gaze fell down to the city again, toward the labor around the gatehouses, toward the crater.

  “And what happened with the prisoners… how I ordered the abomination to slaughter them. I wanted them dead. After what they’d done to Rihanna. She was nice to me… and my decisions… she’s dead now. Just one more corpse shambling about. Do you know they do that—when one of the mages dies? They’re turned into one of those black metal skeletons.”

  “She is a Pseudolich now?”

  “Rüdiger says that if he grows powerful enough, he can maybe make them bring their minds back again.”

  Adarin tilted his head. “So in death they get to serve in what they served in life. There are many fates worse than that, believe me.”

  “I don’t know what I’m becoming here, Adarin. This power… those moments where I just use it… and this cold, calculating darkness in my mind. It feels—” She paused, swallowed, and looked down at her feet. “It feels like your mind, Adarin.”

  Adarin nodded to himself in the privacy of his mind-space. So she is aware of Yara.

  What do I do now?

  “No matter how it feels,” Adarin said, deciding on a direction, “has that cold ever failed you? Or is it protecting you?”

  Liora tilted her head. “It’s kept me safe… even though it’s so brutally efficient in doing that.”

  “Is that not good? Would you rather be dead than safe?”

  “But it isn’t me. It’s something else. And I feel it gets more powerful every time… every time something bad happens. What if it’s the badness itself that’s taking me over?”

  Adarin remembered the presence of Yara—the girl who had apparently become Empress—viewing the world with no illusions. It would feel like something evil to someone who didn’t understand the truth of the Imperium.

  What is my duty? Adarin mused, studying the lake in the distance as a silver shimmer played on its waves. Do I owe this entity that claims to have been married with a downstream version of myself anything? But what about Liora?

  She had been his battle-brother for a while now. Camaraderie and duty—two values he was all too familiar with.

  Adarin remained silent until it became obvious that he would defer the decision.

  Maybe that’s what I want. Maybe that’s what is needed. Or maybe… It is my cowardice.

  Adarin cleared his throat.

  “Liora. I can help you with this. There will be lessons—maybe even up here on the balcony—in how we talk about how to best behave in an environment full of vipers. That, I can teach you.”

  He raised a hand to forestall her protest.

  “That doesn’t mean you have to become one. Vipers fear the eagle, for it swoops down on them. But the eagle must understand the viper—if only so it knows where it is safe to land, and where not. I can show you how to soar past them, if that’s what you want.”

  Liora studied Adarin, her eyes awkwardly running over his body. Maybe I should really develop some eyes… It shouldn't be too hard to find some well-made crystals here. But— He smiled evilly. I kinda like that people have a difficult time making eye contact with me. I never give up an advantage.

  His attention snapped back to Liora as she began speaking again.

  “Very well. Let’s do this.” She yawned. “It’s late. I’ll find my way to my chambers, I think.”

  “Chambers?”

  She smirked, suddenly wearing the smile of a young girl again. “I never had a room to myself, did you know that? And now I’m living in this suite, with a balcony and a great view.” She wrinkled her nose. “If it just wasn’t smelling of orc…”

  Adarin chuckled. “I’m sure they’ll get around to cleaning the castle of whatever filth those creatures left in here. If I see one more fur decorating a corridor—”

  She chuckled and walked off the balcony.

  Adarin remained for a while. As he got ready to leave, something—a subroutine—compelled him to look up into the sky.

  At first it was just a single flash of silver. Then—white hair.

  Adarin focused his Thousand Eyes skill into a telescope and found what he was expecting: Rüdiger, three hundred meters in the air above the tower, studying the land upriver. Studying the west.

  Yet the man had the air of a man who had moved a heavy burden, but was only done with the warmup.

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