“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Jason Asano.”

  Jason’s feet lifted off the ground as he floated forward, io eye with the much taller man. His friends watched warily from behind.

  “Why are you here?”

  “These are not the circumstances under which I hoped we would meet. I am here to apologise. I won’t pretend that the people who died here matter to me. That I care about the homes they’ve lost or the impact this will have on their entire lives. But those things matter to you, and that matters to me.”

  “If you think ay apology will make me less angry instead of more, you have made a dire miscalcution.”

  “I do not intend it to be empty, but we discuss that in a moment. You and I will know each other for lohan time measure. This first meeting is no small thing, and I would like to do it properly. When I said these are not the circumstances I hoped for, that was not just a glib line.”

  Jason stared at the messenger for a long time.

  “Who are you, Jamis Fran Muskar?”

  “I am a member of the cil of Kings, as you have most likely guessed. Some sider me the leader of it, although it has no such thing.”

  “Why do I get the feeling that it does?”

  A flicker of a smile teased the messenger’s lips for just a moment.

  “A first amongst equals, perhaps. Do not expect me to repeat that in other pany, however. Sometimes, to lead means standing behind. You are just beginning your political education, but I have no doubt that time will see you master the nuances.”

  “You know me.”

  “You first came to my attention during your flict with Vesta Carmis Zell, whose influence has sharply diminished after her failures here. Pursuing her own objectives while the rest of us moved with shared purpose was a dangerous move for her, politically. Failing was disastrous. She was he most iial member of the cil, and now even her position on it is in danger.”

  “Will she be back?”

  “No. Her objective was lost to you, and to join the rger cause now would look like crawling back. She o cut her losses and rebuild her power base with other endeavours.”

  “Then I don’t care.”

  “No? In time, she will e at you again.”

  “Let her.”

  A smile twitched on Jamis’ lips again.

  “Good,” he said. “Dwelling oed enemies is not the way of one who stands at the pin is the attitude that an inal should have. Do you know much about the inals?”

  “No.”

  “I know this is far from an opportuime, but would you like to?”

  Jason frowned. He gnced back at his panions, their expressions all saying no. Even Clive, information hungry as he was.

  “It’s fine,” he told them, then turned bais. “Let’s take a walk.”

  He drifted to the ground a off, across the curved base of the massive hole. He walked through the space where the mountain of messenger corpses had been, but no trace of them remained. Every scrap and stain had dissolved into rainbow smoke. The crater was barely curved at the bottom, being the size of a city. It was barren and smooth, sealed by the power that hollowed it out.

  “The inals are like you,” Jamis said. “Those who were not messengers yet became astral kings anyway, except they were never just astral kings. You, the astral nexus, blend elements of gods, astral kings, and great astral beings. The astral colossus has a prime avatar rger than most ps. He spends his time drifting through the void of various universes for reasons I could never determihe astral beast has no prime avatar, as you and I would uand it. He possesses armies of living creatures, spawned from his astral kingdom.”

  “You’re not an inal. You’re a normal astral king.”

  “To my envy, I am not of your kind. I told the fools who attacked you that they were not like you and I, but the truth is, I am closer to them than you. Messengers and astral kings are obsessed with superiority, but the truth is, you stand above us all. We tell ourselves differently, but those of us who remember the inals know. Even the name we ged. You were called inators, at first, but it didn’t fit with the myths we built around ourselves.”

  “inators. The inals were the in of the messengers?”

  “Yes. We were your messengers. But, over time, the inators retreated into obscurity. More rose, from time to time, but few are like you, Jason Asano. Left to our own devices, we started telling ourselves stories. That we were the prime species of the essengers of the ic will. Our inators became the inals, not our makers but merely the first of us.”

  “But you know all this.”

  “We are immortal. Records are almost as easy to find as wilful ignorance, and I am a student of our history. And we do enter them, from time to time. Stumble into whatever ihey’re pursuing. Sometimes we even fight them, as we are fighting you here. Most are older than us. Your youth is part of what makes you such a tentious figure for us.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “My i here is iure. You and I will still know each other when this p has been swallowed by its sun. Our retionship will be so much more than this world. This war. I want you to uand what you are, and what we are. That there are those, like me, who uand that the inals are more than just astral kings. That you stand above us.”

  “Most of your kind don’t see it that way.”

  “But they feel it. That is why their rea to you is so porised. Yer an instinct within us, to fight you or obey you, because you make us want to kneel.”

  “But not enough that I make you leave this p.”

  “Instincts be overe.”

  “Why do you his? What makes the Purity artefact so precious you would spend lives by the tens of thousands to obtain it?”

  “Because of you. The inals. You e from every species except the messengers, and I want to ge that. To be like you. More than just an astral king. But that is not something one bee from simple desire. It takes the right circumstahe right opportunity, and this relic is the beginning of that for me.”

  “You want to be an inal.”

  “Yes. You are eaique. All of you reached that point in different ways, and I would do so as well. But to snatch that ce, it takes a resolve that never wavers. Whatever the damage, whatever the cost, you must seize the opportunity when it appears. You are one of the few who truly uand this.”

  “Then you know me less well than you think. I don’t do what I do for power. That came as a sequence of fighting for the things you dismiss. The price of your power. To you, the lives of i people are a cost. To me, they are the entire point. I am not an astral king first, or an inal. I’m an adventurer.”

  He moved in front of Jamis, staring up at him.

  “And adventurers staween i people and things like you.”

  “Yes. I know that what has happened here will only further poison you against us. My hope is to ameliorate that damage. You and I are eoday, but eternity awaits us. I hope that one day, you and I be friends. Amongst my kind, such se is sidered a warning sign of Unorthodoxy sympathising.”

  “I am going to burn down your entire civilisation. Do you think we be friends after that?”

  “I do. Perhaps we even ge things together, but that is for another day. On this one, I have e to make an apology. Not ay one, although I know there be no true restitution for what my people have done here. Turning the power you use to proteto the on that killed a city. It was not the cil’s iion, for what little that is worth. The cil’s directive to not target you was explicit, but those instrus were defied. The pn to attack you was not saned.”

  “What was the pn? Use the on to kill me and the city, then occupy the rubble with their army?”

  “The iion of your power with the on was unanticipated. The pn was for the on to weaken you, then for the messeo strike. Kill your avatar and make an example of the city.”

  “Where did the on e from?”

  “Some group that has been giving us trouble for years. Energy vampires. Their powers are required to make their ons work, but they have only used them on messengers, to my knowledge. They have never used them on a Voice of the Will, let alone a prime avatar before. No one knew what would happen, but while the means of the city’s destru was actal, the destru itself was not. The messengers would have razed it to the ground anyway. Sughtered or ehe popution.”

  Jason didn’t respond, but his expression was answer enough.

  “I know you will never overlook what has happened here,” Jamis tinued. “And I know what happens if you go tainst us in ear, here on this p. I think you see this hole where a city oood, and you know it too. You attack our forces. Drain them for the power to use that bird form to resurrect your avatar. We escate with high rankers ialiation, creating a cycle ering your resurre and you sughtering us with it. Our search is slowed to a crawl as this p is ravaged by our battles. We astral kings are forced to intercede with our prime avatars which, in turn, allows the gods to act more directly. I don’t knoins all that, but I know who loses. The i people of this world as our war escates until craters like this are scattered across it like sprinkles on a cake. That doesn’t matter to me, but it matters to you.”

  “You want us to be friends?”

  “I do. I hope that happens someday.”

  “It won’t. Not until those people you don’t care about start to matter. Earth has its share of monsters, but they are nothio you. Their atrocities st decades at worst. How long have yone on already? turies?”

  “Millennia.”

  “I’ve made a lot of glib ents in my life about fighting evil. But you’re it. The real thing. I think you’re right in that you and I will know each other for a long time. And I’ll be fighting you for all of it.”

  “I live with that.”

  Jason scowled.

  “You have a proposal. You said restitution.”

  “I did. I want to blunt your fury against us. Avoid the destru I described. In short, to have you tinue as you were instead of fog your as on us. This event will only reinforce those of us who uand the threat you pose. I want you to go about as you have been. Fight our messengers as they e across your path, but don’t actively campaign against them. Iurn, I have been empowered by the cil to offer you the withdrawal of a signifit number of our occupying forces from areas around the globe. Every location in which we have pleted our search operations but still hold territory, we will abandon. Immediately.”

  Jason rose in the air, his feet leaving the ground as he came eye to eye with Jamis.

  “Your proposal is that you abandon the areas now useless to yer goal. The ones trolled by those who, like the astral kings that attacked me, have lost focus? Freeing them up for you to retrate your resources on your actual objectives?”

  Jamis smiled.

  “I should have been hoping you wouldn’t realise that part, yet I find myself gd that you were not so easily deceived.”

  “You expect a teroffer.”

  “I do. But it ot be to give up and leave. I will not surrehis opportunity, even for you. We are eoday. But if I settle some of your enmity over what has happened here, I will. I know the price will not be cheap, but greatness es from the resolve to pay the price others won’t. You cim that we are not alike in this, but we both know what it is to push ohose around us falter and lose their resolve.”

  Jason stared at Jamis, his nebulous eyes burning.

  “Abandon all the occupied territories?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Jamis said.

  “That could be acceptable, but you don’t get the messengers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The messengers in those territories. You don’t just get them to redeploy. They e to me. Their astral kings set them free of their marks and I take them.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “That would require getting numerous kings to give up the ey of their forces on this p. What happened here already demonstrates that the cil of Kings is not absolute in its power. Even if it was, I ’t sell this to them. I’m not a dictator, and trolling the cil is a delicate affair. You uand that blunt solutions like this only cause trouble.”

  “Yes, but it’s your politics. Your troubles. You wao be an enemy and not a nemesis? Then you have to hurt for what your people have done here.”

  “The cil will see it as handing an army to the Unorthodoxy.”

  “Killing and draining the life force from that many messengers would restore my power to use the ghost phoenix form. That is what was taken from me here.”

  “I have studied you closely, Jason Asano. You don’t want these messeo kill. You want to set them free.”

  “Has the rest of the cil of Kings studied me closely as well?”

  Jamis blinked.

  “No,” he said. “No, they have not. And sughtering quarter of a million messengers for personal power is exactly the kind of thinking that makes seo them. Setting them free on moral principle is what they would find outndish.”

  He turned from Jason to paptively. Jason hat it was a very human behaviour, pared to the imperiousness of normal messenger body nguage.

  “You would have to take them into your astral kingdom,” Jamis reasoned. “And not let them out again, at least not here. A not at all, until our operations on Pallimustus are done. And you couldn’t use that time to turn your astral kingdom into an Unorthodoxy training camp. If you unleashed a quarter-million strong Unorthodoxy army on the os, the full force of the cil would e after us both. You aren’t ready to ehat. Yet.”

  “I’m not looking to turn sves into soldiers. Their choices will be their own, and some will want to join the Unorthodoxy. I will hold them until your people are doh this p, but if they want to fight you when that time is over, I won’t stop them. But I have a little experien this. Most messengers aren’t ready to escape the indoation. It will be hard on them. fusing, rage indug. Some will even want to go back to your side.”

  “We wouldn’t take them.”

  “I know, and that only frustrates them further. Again, I have no i iing soldiers. Not for the Unorthodoxy and not for the astral kings. I want to let them be i people. The kind that were killed and dispced here today. Anything else is for them to choose on their own.”

  Jamis turned back to Jason who had again floated to the ground.

  “I ot promise anything,” he said. “I will do what I .”