One more colour. One more colour to offer the Wishbearer before he bore no more secrets. With Vesmos’s gifts laid bare, he’d be at the mercy of whatever new trick she pulled to seal the fight.

  It would then be futile. The small glimmers of hope he’d grasped at throughout the fight never changed the fact that only desperation fueled him. Josef was right. He couldn’t afford to let the chance pass him by.

  Her gold Aether, twisted into an autumnal breeze, felt as though it were trying to choke him, starve him of any defiance left in his limbs. Leave him withered, limp. It may have worked, but the Aetherologists who grafted his weapons into his chest foresaw it: a time when their human weapon would ultimately reach its human limit.

  The final colour—teal—was a failsafe he had no control over, activated when the conditions were met. Chief among them was an overwhelming magic, a draw of Aether so potent not even the four other gems and all his ingenuity combined could hope to stop it.

  A parasitic power, one that fed and drew on that excess Aether and disposed of it through light. Faced with the Wishbearer’s Mind Palace, that gem glowed bright, brighter than the surrounding gold, than the first star of the night. The ultimate check and balance churned away, sapping the power from the vines and sending them running, shrivelling the forest and draining the sky of its golden hue.

  Nair closed his eyes, letting the emperor’s will save him from his own failures.

  Those who bestowed the gems onto him spoke of it as an honour, a divine gift from his majesty, but the belief only reached so far as their flapping lips. All their eyes saw was the sorry state of an ageing man, whose tombstone would be blank.

  His majesty had never greeted him, only his empress. Her eyes had shimmered like jewels, and likewise, only ever looked at their own kind, trapped in ugly flesh.

  His alias was a serial code on a report. Nothing more.

  The golden land receded as promised, and the torrent greeted them back in full force. Dousing him in freezing water, he soon forgot the Mind Palace’s warm embrace that, in hindsight, felt too stuffy to be comfortable. He looked up again, searching the rain for the sight of the golden knight as he searched himself for any will to continue.

  But there was no golden knight, just an exhausted woman wrapped in a dripping trench coat, leaning again the broad face of a warehouse. No armour, no magic, but fiery hair that suited autumn so well.

  Nair had no time to think. As though the Vesmosian Aetherologists had hijacked his reflexes too, he reached for the handgun tucked into his beltline and fired through the veneer of water droplets.

  Red, and not her hair. The woman clutched her abdomen and slid down the wall.

  His trigger finger shook on the guard. His ears rung. One shot, and he felt as though he’d spent all his courage in one go. Josef had killed with bullets as though it were as simple as breathing, and after a while, had convinced Nair of the same.

  It was supposed to feel more grandiose. It had no sense of finality. He had just pulled one lever, and she was now on the ground, at his mercy.

  That was it. That was all his life depended on.

  “This can’t be it,” he muttered. The rain didn’t answer, nor did the Wishbearer.

  “This can’t be it!” he said.

  Vesmos’s success, the prosperity of his people, was threatened by something susceptible to a mere bullet. The linchpin, the missing puzzle piece…

  “You’re the Wishbearer, aren’t you?” he shouted into the rain, the silhouette of the dying demigod fading from the edges of his vision. “You’re the strongest…ever…”

  The Wishbearer threw her head back. The glint in her pupils peeking from behind her fringe pierced the storm. Jewel-like eyes. The Empress would have found eyes like hers worthy of attention.

  “Sorry,” she croaked. “But that title isn’t mine anymore.”

  Those words must have been some sort of spell, a miraculous command, a cue from the universe. An explosion of glass and concrete dethroned the rain’s droning beat, a humanoid figure flying through it. The debris streaked the miserable sky like a hand grenade mimicking a firework, and Nair prepared to defend himself from the shrapnel, but it never came.

  The concrete monoliths doused in tempest disappeared behind constricting plastered walls, closing in on him like the inner lining of an intestinal track. Except this was dry, square, devoid of any life or even signs it once existed.

  A hallway of doors. An apartment not out of place in a Vesmosian green district. The thought made the absence of anything with a pulse more nerve-wracking.

  The carpet bristled like a cat’s tongue; the light hurt his eyes and illuminated every pore on his body. Quiet, deathly so, but Nair could feel the environment’s hostility. Not even a cockroach could survive in it for long.

  Nair’s eyes weren’t in the best state after the fight, but even so, the corners of his vision were impossibly dark. The ends of the hallway, if there were any, were shrouded in a pitch-black fog.

  Deathly quiet. Devoid of life. Cold; colder than the storm outside. The polar opposite of the Wishbearer’s Mind Palace, but undoubtedly one of some twisted sort. He reacted accordingly, and the teal gleamed again from his chest.

  Bright; brighter than ever before, blinding, singing his skin and cooking the scarred flesh around it. The heat burrowed into his chest until he collapsed, teeth shattering as he tried to bear the pain, let the crystal run its course.

  But the crystal did. The burning stone fell from his chest and rolled along the barbed carpet. He didn’t bleed; the heat from the gem having cauterised the wound entirely, crusted black flesh where it had once sat.

  Nair slowly picked himself up, the carpet tearing tiny cuts into his palms as he did so. He faced the indeterminable nothing at one end of the hallway—choosing which being like the flip of a double-headed coin—and, with much hesitation, began trekking down it.

  Doors. Door after door. Blast of air, puncturing vine, even when reinforced by further magic, did nothing.

  Not a dent.

  Not a scratch.

  Yet it was wafer thin. Plywood. A set in a theatre.

  The sense of constriction was no longer a matter of space, but of indestructibility. The size of the prison cell was the same, only now the walls were of cold steel rather than concrete.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Trapped thoroughly, he’d only walked further into the leviathan’s digestive tract.

  And amidst the vague dark, the deep shadow, was the faintest outline of something.

  A sharpened, purple maw, and the glint of its sculpted teeth. A twisting pattern of scales. Puppet strings hanging the apparatus from a ceiling he couldn’t see.

  Nair chanced a glance up but saw no puppet master. Only its toy watching him, making no effort to advance or retreat, as though it were simply there to observe him as he clawed for an escape.

  He stepped back, but for each foot in retreat, the predator equally gained; just as fast, just as far, as though it were moving in time with him.

  Nair ventured another step, then another after that, his eyes gradually convincing him it was an illusion, a fixture of the hallway. He lashed out with a single vine, probing the new danger.

  But he felt nothing snag his line. Whether to feel relieved or terrified, his mind couldn’t quite decide. But the outline, whatever it was, didn’t have the patience to wait around and find out.

  Black was once again nothing but black, the strings leading to heaven cut off from the mortal again. With nothing else to do but ignore the searing pain in his chest, he dragged his feet forward, towards whatever had been waiting in the dark.

  The hooks dragged at his shoes, their prolonged collective will slowing him down to a painful limp. His body was on fire, fighting for every gained inch as the carpet sapped him of his energy.

  His eyes lost their focus, and in a blur, the entity at the end of the hallway returned.

  Silent. Observant. Commanding his attention.

  He blinked, and it was closer.

  Nair turned tail, the prolonged skip in his heartbeat giving him the last shot of energy his body had in reserve. Still, he was dragging his feet, but dragging them faster, pulling them over the hooked braids of the carpet and past door after door.

  The thing chasing him was faster than that. It was toying with him; everything was toying with him.

  His heart didn’t let up, the energy coursing through his body still fresh, but already he felt his own steps slowing down, the resistance against his tattered shoes mounting.

  Nair looked down to see hands replacing hooks.

  Rotten hands. Decaying limbs both human and Spirit in various stages of mortis, after various methods of death. Blood loss, Aether deficiency, disease, hypothermia, burns, injury. An array of what possibly awaited him, vying to be the first to drag him under.

  They arrested his feet, even as he tried desperately to keep them at bay, every remaining crystal firing at all cylinders, mowing grass that grew infinitely. He knew his fate wasn’t a preventable one the moment the first disease-ridden finger touched him.

  Then something tugged at his tattered coat-sleeves, lifting them upward before he could react. To his left and right were hooks dug into the fabric attached to the end of long, hair-thin wires.

  More came, this time offering him no such mercy and sinking into the thin flesh above each joint of his fingers, pricking and tugging at his aged skin, testing its elasticity as it pried the fibres from the bone.

  Nair felt his voice box vibrate. He was screaming, but his ears said otherwise. The walls, the fake plywood flats, fell away and revealed nothing. Nothing for the sound to travel through, nothing for it to echo from.

  Nothing but a shimmering suit of purple armour, the predator in the darkness wrapped around it like a living fox skin.

  Nair felt his voice box plead. He was asking for his life rather than preach of the Empire, but his ears thought otherwise.

  The armour didn’t rattle, its footsteps didn’t pound against the ground, and yet he knew it was heavy.

  The beastly familiar travelled the armour’s path before it, wrapping its slender, scaled body around his own immobilised one. Its skin—like knives against his own—dragged across his neck as the suit of armour stopped right before him, his exposed chest to its eyeline.

  The armour reached out and plucked a crystal from his skin.

  Nair screamed, watching the blood-soaked stone drop to the ground as the suit of armour reached for another. He pleaded, but he saw no mercy.

  With little effort and no hesitation, another gem dropped to the floor. His body writhed as much as it was permitted to, before the cold, metal digits of the armour brushed against his skin, and another gem came away.

  He hung from the puppet strings as the hands below him waited like hungry sharks for a meal. Stripped to his last straw—his final, useless card, he muttered his praise and apologies to the emperor; words that would follow him into the hungry hands of history’s forgotten. History’s powerless.

  Long live the empire.

  His body couldn’t mask the pain forever. His arm burned, the pain coalescing right above his elbow. Everything below the wound was attached but unresponsive; too severe to pass it off as a scratch.

  Crestana rushed to his side, wrapping an arm around his torso and taking half his weight. He indulged her offer, feeling the first signs of fatigue and blood loss setting on him fast.

  The weather was turning a new leaf, and the tempest eventually eased into a dribble. Water yet ran through what remained of their surroundings; a hellscape quenched of its fire.

  Nestled in the rubble, body strewn across broken concrete, Moira’s first and last memory looked towards the sky. Now that fatigue had caught up, he almost looked at peace with himself, resigning wholly to whatever was past the night sky he gazed at.

  At least, it felt kinder to think of him that way.

  Every inch of marred skin at ease, every muscle relaxed, an expression utterly alien to him. Resignation in such a way one would only feel once they knew for certain there was nothing left to prepare for, nothing left to fight for.

  The rubble his gravestones, the pattering rain his funeral speech.

  If Alis was going to feel something towards his enemy for the first time, it might as well be something kind. And if he was going to say something towards his enemy for the first time, he knew it ought to have been about Moira, about the one person it should have all come down to.

  Maybe it could have been had he tried a little harder, believed a little more.

  But if that man really were at peace, staring into the night sky as his extremities faded into golden dust, then Alis thought it best to believe Moira was the only and final thing on his mind.

  So, he watched the man die, and the memory fade, the last sparks drifting up against the rain.

  “What should we tell her?” Crestana whispered.

  “I don’t know. At least that…she won’t see him again.”

  A bright blue light exploded from just outside his vision. Alis braced for another attack, but found a portal instead, the world inside the rippling blue borders hazy.

  “Hurry. Hardridge is wounded badly.”

  It was a royal command. Without another word, they stepped through the portal. Emerging from the other end, they were back in the Great Library. Bustle amongst the bookshelves, just as there had been when they’d left it; of course, now there was no reason for there to be.

  Hundreds of people all working towards a coherent cover story, the scars on their bodies the only evidence left that his enemy—a man who went by a name he did not know—ever existed, ever held a vendetta, a burning desire for revenge.

  The only evidence left of the dream he once held. Alis looked at the gash across his arm and understood the reasoning behind it all, wondered if he would do the same.

  Probably. The answer was probably.

  “Let’s get you somewhere fast,” Crestana muttered, frantically surveying the crowd, slowly growing privy to their sopping presence. She seemed to perk up to someone’s cry. A girl’s cry.

  “There’s Iris. Come on.”

  Alis dragged his feet behind hers, but they felt just as immobile as his arm. He looked at Crestana’s; both were furiously quivering at the knees as though she’d collapse at any second. Still, she forged a path forward.

  “Are you okay—”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m just—”

  “Don’t. I might collapse.”

  He brought his eyes back to her face, the damaged shutters showing little sign of stress or strain. Alis didn’t need to read an imitation face; he could feel the emotion radiate off her body.

  “You helped a lot.”

  “Not enough.”

  “Anything is more than what you need to do.”

  “You’re going to finish teaching me how to throw a punch. That’s final.”

  The door to the rest of the conversation slammed in his face. He smiled, getting the sense that for as long as he’d know her, he would never win an argument against her.

  By the time they’d regrouped with the other party, first responders were loading Hardridge onto a stretcher, pressing a bloodied bandage into her side. Iris was right by her face, her distraught pleading barely keeping Evalyn’s eyes open. Her hands were covered in blood, too.

  Iris’s purple eyes caught theirs. For a moment, she looked torn, indecisive feet pointing both towards them and her mother as the stretcher disappeared further into the crowd.

  Alis shook his head, and Crestana gave a wave. Iris looked no more reassured, but their input seemed to help her decide. She turned tail, diving back into the crowd after the stretcher.

  “Thank you,” Crestana muttered.

  “That was all Iris.”

  “But you grew a bit of a heart. Give it some time, and we might meet halfway.”

  It wasn’t a fiery determination that fuelled the statement, but one already left the furnace. Cooled, hardened, unbreakable.

  “If that’s what you want,” he said, the leftover responders from Evalyn’s case calling attention to the blood on his sleeve. The flow of bodies lifted their weight off their own legs, and the fatigue finally hit him.