Chapter 606: The Worlds

It didn’t have a proper shape. It looked like a man seen through thick, bubbly window glass or a smear of grease on a mirror, present enough that the light bent around it, but not occupying the dirt the way a stone or a horse does. It had no shadow on the red moss."You again," the voice said. The sound had no heat in it, no anger or surprise. It was just a statement made by something that didn’t know what it felt like to be startled by a man in the woods. "You have wandered far from your cold."

The blue frost rose instantly across Soren’s knuckles, his magic waking up before his brain could give the order. The air between them turned white with his breath.

"What are you?" he asked. He didn’t ask it the way he had in the grey void, with his head spinning and his knees weak. He asked it straight, his hand steady on his pommel, his eyes fixed on the center of the smear.

The thing seemed to lean back against the air, considering him through its light-like skin.

"One of many," the voice whispered, the sound like dry leaves sliding down a roof.

"Who maintain the laws under which worlds run. Who ensure that what is designed proceeds as intended, for the consumption of those who observe."

Soren felt the words sink into his ears, heavy and useless as lead shot. His teeth ground together. "Worlds."

"Every world," the thing said, the light shaped shifting as if it were nodding, "is designed for a specific purpose. And yours has deviated. Significantly."

"And you are here to correct it," Soren said, his boots shifting on the loose gravel.

"We do not correct," the voice said, and for the first time it sounded almost bored, like an old clerk explaining a rule to a traveler who couldn’t read the signs.

"We simply observe and abide by the rules. The world corrects itself. What you have been watching... the fractures in the dirt, the beasts in the woods, the line in the sky... is the world is giving you a warning of it’s attempt to restore what has been twisted."

The blue ice on Soren’s hands flared bright, the cold spilling off his fingers and hissing against the hot vapor coming from the crack in the flagstones.

It wasn’t a threat; he knew his blade would go through the thing like smoke. It was just the only way his body knew how to answer a lie that big.

"What happens if the world is never restored?" he asked.

"The world continues to unravel," the voice said, flat and sure as an axe coming down. "Until there is nothing left of it. Everything in it unravels with it."

"And if it is restored?"

"Then," the thing said. "... everything continues the way it is meant to be."

The silence came back between them, thick and sour with the smell of the burning dirt. A fire beast snapped a branch in the red woods, a sharp crack that sounded like a pistol shot in the quiet yard.

He opened his mouth to ask about the three-pointed mark on the chain, to ask where the mages had found the iron to bind a god, but the light was already fading. The shape of it was straightening out through the purple air, the statues showing through the thing’s ribs.

"What you are looking for is not in this temple, neither is it in this " the voice said from nowhere and everywhere at once, the sound dying out like an echo in a well. "Return to your empire, Emperor. While there is still an empire to return to."

Then the path was empty.

There was nothing between the two fallen figures but the red moss and the gray dust.

The courtyard stayed quiet, the great crack in the flagstones still breathing its oily heat into his face, the sky still cut by that long black thread at the horizon.

In the woods, the scaled creatures kept up their blind, frantic scrambling through the brush, their claws clicking against the dry pine needles.

Soren stood by himself in the middle of the ruined temple. He was an emperor without an army, standing in the weeds of a fire kingdom, carrying an old silver disk in his pocket and a head full of riddles that didn’t buy bread or put out fires.

He had the pendant. He had the memory of the little girl screaming on the stone. He had the shape of the three-pointed symbol from the chain.

He didn’t know what any of it meant yet. He didn’t know how a choice could stop a world from turning into smoke, or how an old bit of silver could help a woman whose breath was growing shorter with every sunset.

But he knew one thing as surely as he knew the cold in his own bones, he wasn’t going to find the answer by staring at the dead mages’ temple.

He needed to move.

He turned his face toward the north, where the grey mountains hid the road to his own gates, and began to run through the trees.

Soren did not stop to rest his horse until the gray stone towers of Nevareth rose out of the morning fog. He had spent days in the saddle, the miles blurring into one long, cold road that felt five times longer than the journey down.

He rode with the reckless haste of a man who had heard a cry for help from a great distance and had nothing to do but kill the space between them as fast as the beast’s legs could move.

The heavy iron gates of the outer wall began to swing inward before his horse’s hooves even hit the wooden drawbridge. The sentries had spotted his grey banner from the ridge.

Aldric was already waiting in the cobblestone courtyard, his wool cloak tucked tight against the pre-dawn chill.