Ev's fiancé killing him hadn’t been on his agenda for today, and it was really going to throw a wrench in his plans if this went the way he thought it was going. As he staggered backwards, hy-bow dropping from his hands, the nocked arrow going dormant in the sand, it looked like he was going to die today.
Fuck.
His anger at Kalei and his stupid temper rekindled, a bright light of malcontentment amidst the decaying, electrical feeling left behind by the poisoned shock arrow embedded in his trachea. He’d been angry before, hence the duel, but then he had been mad that Kalei was costing other people their lives with his shitty strategic planning. His resistance to accepting criticism had cost them too many lives in recent years, and Ev was done putting up with it. They had lost two tribe members yesterday alone, both pointless and avoidable losses, both people that he and Kalei had grown up with. Sasha and Noora, brother and sister, both pumped full of lead and plasma before the excursion team got anywhere near their end goal. They had retreated, leaving the bodies behind when it was made abundantly clear that the Porters were dead. By now the State had claimed them, or the forest had. When they had returned to base camp, Ev issued a duel for full control of their cell. Kalei had accepted.
And now his stupidity was going to claim Ev too.
As if from a great way off, Ev heard his fiancé—ex-fiancé, he thought bitterly—calling for the field medic positioned across the dueling grounds two hundred yards away and gurgled irritably. What good was a field medic going to do when he had a shock arrow laced with rockcrawler venom embedded in his throat? He could feel the necrosis starting already, his tongue going numb as his neck began to dissolve. He could feel it happening. He was dying no matter who Kalei called or why.
Ev’s own arrow had been blunt at the tip. Even if he had had his compound settings up high enough to puncture his opponent, Kalei wouldn’t have died. It was a dull, low-voltage plasma arrow. But Kalei had shot him with a fucking high-voltage shock arrow laced with necrotic poison.
For challenging him for leadership rights in the face of his competency.
Gods.
Ev squeezed his eyes shut, thinking of his sister, Viera, and their aunt. If Kalei really hated him this much—and had for years, if their argument beforehand was an indication—then Ev sure as hell wasn’t going to spend his last moments wasting curses on him. He looked up at the sky, at the cracks in the dimensional shell smoothed over with golden godmagic, and thought of his little sister, Veira. Her smile, how she always complained that he couldn't braid hair properly, how she still looked at him like he was her whole world when she thought he wasn’t looking. He thought of Cosanna, and everything she had taught him about fighting, death, and the gods. Then he reached for the piece of obsidian flint hanging from his neck, the tether dissolved by the poisoned arrow, and cut the exact mark on the rune she had tattooed on his chest five years ago, exactly where and how she told him.
He squeezed his eyes shut as the light from the dying sunset became too much, sharp, acrid pain spilling out of his veins and into his head, his heart, and the sand. Stars, runes, and lightning danced behind his eyes, and whispers in the old languages rushed in his ears as he heard the medic’s boots pounding down the boardwalk. He counted each one until they became slower, his own pulse skipping, fizzling out… stopping entirely.
There was a lurch, an electrifying jolt, then everything shot back into full clarity. The whiplash of it sent Ev staggering, hands flying out to stop himself before he toppled over a smooth stone ledge, the blue-green light of a courtyard swimming thirty meters below him. His hands smacked the stone and a wave of nausea washed over him.
Ev gasped for breath as his heart thudded erratically in his chest, light and pain searing behind his eyes when he momentarily squeezed them shut. He looked out at pure blue skies streaked with sunset pink and the solid stone walls of an unfamiliar military complex, taking in the sight of a world that was very different from his own. The skyline of a city afar off seemed to be nestled amidst a sunlit cluster of thick, puffy clouds. The air was clear and light, with not a trace of southern Averonian humidity to be found. As his eyes adjusted to the kaleidoscope of new colors, he realized he was no longer dead or dying.
Two gloved hands pulled him around with such force that he got vertigo. Two blood-red eyes rimmed with white burned at him from an enchanted porcelain mask, and hair glowing a bright shade of crimson barely held out of two bright red eyes by the edge of the mask.
“Are you awake now, pirva?” the man in the mask spat.
Ev didn’t know what that word meant, but he imagined it was something akin to “idiot.” He bit the inside of his cheek and frowned. He had never quite liked being called names by men in military jackets like this one was wearing. White, red, and pale blue; not Confederation colors. But a suit was a suit. He pulled his head back then slammed it into the officer's, then brought his knee up into his opponent’s stomach. The masked man stumbled backwards and Ev jumped away from the ledge, whirling around to face what sounded like a dozen warp engines firing at once, and nearly fell on his ass.
In the sky above the military complex he now found himself in, a portal to a dark, starry nothing swirled upward like an inverted whirlpool. It was spewing creatures of varying color and size, some with up to three heads, all of which were making a different horrible, ear-splitting noise.
“What are those?” Ev gaped, fear rising beneath his ribs. The beasts looked like rockcrawlers or coast beasts sized up a dozen times. The portal looked like it led right into his nightmares.
“That,” the officer said from behind them, “is your problem.”
“My problem?” Ev whirled back around, ignoring how his vision grayed at the edges. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, military brat. Who are you and where the fuck am I?”
The masked man stopped rubbing his bruised forehead and the cracked surface of his mask and turned to scowl at them. “I liked you better when you were in a resurrection daze.”
Then he reached out and a feeling like a cloud descending over Ev’s mind washed out the world again.
The second time he woke up, it was to the crisp, sterile smell of a medical center. He’d only been in a real one three times: once when he and Cosanna found Viera, and twice when he broke his ankle at sixteen, then again at nineteen. All three of those incidents had resulted in visits to the small emergency clinic in the city, which was neither well-equipped nor pleasant, and none of which had left him with good memories.
His first instinct was to reach for the knife he kept on his hip. He was surprised to find one there at all, given this new and unknown environment, but when he pulled it out and examined it, it clearly wasn’t his own. His knife was a scratched old thing with a chipped blade and a hilt wrapped in old shirt fabric. This one was a military-grade lightblade, some kind of blue-gray steel serving as the base, and the hilt was professional-grade silicone and black metal. The super-heated edge glowed red. He sheathed it immediately, the adrenaline rush from waking up somewhere just beginning to ebb.
As his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, he began to take in his surroundings more clearly. He was hooked up to an IV drip, the bag hanging next to his medical cot from a small, hovering droid about the size of his fist. A proper monitor on the side of his bed beeped in time with his pulse. His bed was soft, better than the cots at the base or even the more put-together mattresses they used in the village. It was lined with pale blue sheets, the frame made with the same blue-gray steel as the dagger. It was dark in whatever medical ward he had been put in, but he could make out lots of blue and white marble streaked with gold, which made up the majority of the supporting pillars and the floor. The walls were a softer off-white, or would be in daylight, and were lined with flat, fluorescent panels of lighting, dimmed to a low orange for the night shift. The rest of the medical ward was empty and the dark hall stretched for several meters to either side of him.
Ev came to the realization that this was an actual hospital. Not a dingy medical clinic on the edge of the city, not a long bunker hallway they treated like a medbay, a real treatment facility—and likely a fancy one. It felt safe in the way he always thought a medical facility should, too, but underneath the cottony, clean impression of the ward’s surface there was an undercurrent of something else. Something dangerous that warned him to be cautious, like there was still potential for an ambush.
He waited, and when nothing suspicious happened, Ev considered moving. He wiggled his toes, making sure he could in fact feel them, made to swing his legs over the edge of the hospital bed, and—
The “ambush” came in the form of a tall, lanky, four-horned woman with pinkish-pale skin who appeared out of nowhere with a holographic panel of vitals. She seemed completely unfazed by his being awake and went about her business wordlessly, offering him a curt, obligatory smile as she checked the monitor by his bed. She pulled a handheld HOLOpad out of her scrubs pocket and set it next to him to read through, evidently, although he didn’t recognize the script. She adjusted something, then removed his IV and took it and the little hovering droid with her back down the hall.
Ev poked at the pad of healing gel she had put over the IV wound—a sticker no bigger than his thumb—and marveled. In Cyresia, on the fringes of the Averonian State Trade Confederation, everyone had to know at least a little healing magic for things like this. Medics trained in it their whole lives, able to heal major wounds made by normal weapons or plasma rounds in a matter of hours. Healing gel, sometimes called bande or t’klo in Cyresian, was spread thin and used only for dire circumstances or infections. To use it for something as small as an IV wound seemed... frivolous.
While he tried to parse out where in [ x ] he could be that healing gel was used so carelessly, he was ambushed again.
“Stop poking it.”
Ev jerked his head up to see a man about his age standing in place of the ward nurse. He was clad in a dark blue military-issue jumpsuit, armored from the waist down with gun holsters on each hip. Vitiligo spread unevenly around both his eyes, and down his cheeks and sharp jawline, and Ev saw pointed ears poking out from around thick, curled horns that protruded from the front of his head. He had yellow-gold eyes like jasper and a shock of plasma-like blue-green hair that came to a widow’s peak between his horns.
“Hi,” Ev said dumbly. He had no idea who this man was, but he was pretty.
Something like amusement flickered over the man’s face. “Hi,” he repeated. “Larrah said you’re cleared to leave. Have you read the file on that ‘pad yet?”
Ev looked down at the HOLOpad still glowing in his lap and shook his head. It wasn’t East Coast Tribal Cuneiform code, nor was it the Common Tongue alphabet. He knew those perfectly well, and even a little bit of Southern Cunic Script and a dash of Base Tartarun, but he didn’t know this.
“I can’t read it, I don’t know this language script.”
The man asked him something in another language and Ev frowned at him. Ev was going to call him Golden Eyes until he got a name.
“You don’t speak or read Aetherian?” Golden Eyes asked in Common Tongue.
Aetherian. A shiver ran down Ev’s spine. He was in the New Em pire ofAetheria, not even some other country in [ x ]? When did that happen? How? He had died in Cyresia, the little strip of coastal land that the Averonian State Trade Confederation hadn’t claimed yet (not for lack of trying). He’d seen the military complex below him when the masked man woke him up on the roof; he knew he wasn't in Cyresia, where it was all sand dunes, pine trees, myrtle, and broken old cities. But if this was Aetheria, then that meant he was on an Imperial Aetherian military base.
Golden Eyes inhaled sharply, eyes pinching. “Wow, projection times a thousand, hello." He pursed his lips. "Are you okay? I’m getting the sense you didn’t take that revelation well.”
Ev frowned at him again and lied as his heart tried to pound out of his chest. “I’m fine. Just- tell me how I got here?”
“‘Here’ as in the barracks medical bay?”
“Sure.” (This was the medical ward of their barracks?)
“Councilman Shas knocked you out with the weird control magic trick he used to try and get you to close the portal. Said something about you shutting him out?"
Shas. That name was short for a type of hawk in Cyresian. It must belong to the masked man he met on the roof.
“Okay, that makes sense,” Ev said slowly. "What about ‘here’ as in... Are we in Aetheria right now, or somewhere else in the Empire?”
All he knew about the New Aetherian Empire was that it was supposed to be dedicated to neutral interference and arbitration, and it was huge, and it had never come to help anyone in Averon.
Golden Eyes’ face quirked again, more towards a frown this time. His composure was slipping in light of their confusion. “This is Aetheria centra, the hub of the Empire. We’re in kes Pal’eca de-Rêve, or ‘the Palace of Dreams.’ Do you- do you not remember the last two weeks at all? You seemed to know your way around before tonight, or at least knew what dimension you were in.”
He winced and Ev figured that that wasn’t supposed to come out the way it did. Accusatory. But that time frame…
“I’ve been here for two weeks?” he asked.
Golden Eyes closed his eyes and sighed. “Yes, you’ve been here for two weeks.” Under his breath he muttered something about having to go through the introduction session all over again. “Two weeks ago, you won the final round of the bicentennial tournament for the Crowns, defeating Emperor Tainnos II and claiming the title of Emperor.”
Emperor. The word bounced around in his skull like a ping pong ball. “Of Aetheria?”
“Yes,” Golden Eyes said exasperatedly. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”
“The last thing I remember before waking up on the roof is dying on a beach in southern Averon, [ x ] in mid-January,” he said. “It’s February now, right?”
Golden Eyes stared at him. “It’s March on the [ x ] Standard Calendar.”
“Of?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Of 1906, Era 10. Do you want the date too? It’s the twentieth.”
March 20th, his aunt Cosanna’s birthday. That couldn't be a coincidence.
“Catch me up to speed,” Ev requested.
“On?”
“Everything you know about the past two weeks and how I got here.”
Golden Eyes sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. He glanced out the window, which rattled with vibrations from some subsonic noise outside. “Fine. But we have to move and talk.” He pulled one of his blasters, checked it over, and handed it to Ev grip-first. “You know how to use one of these?”
Ev took the gun and looked it over. “This is an ARC-5 D-class hyperpistol.” This was the kind of weapon the Averonian elite carried. Sleek, lightweight, but packed a hell of a punch.
“Yeah, I know it’s old. Picked it up in the Outskirts after an op went wrong and I lost a good contact, but it still works. Can you use it or not?”
“Of course.” He’d stolen dozens off of downed Confederacy officers over the years, even kept a couple. But he’d always thought they were newer tech.
“Great.” Golden Eyes pulled his other blaster and pressed a few buttons on the steel bracelets on his wrists. Full vambraces formed around his forearms out of the bracelets, nanotech expanding outwards to complete the set. Shield magic washed over his uniform. “And stop calling me ‘Golden Eyes’ in your head. My name is Talis Errison, and twelve hours ago you acted like you knew me.”
Ev flushed, sliding out of bed as Golden Eyes—Errison—started walking down the wide aisle in the same direction the nurse had gone. “Did... you just read my mind?”
“I’ve been reading your mind,” Errison corrected over his shoulder. “Over seventy-percent of Aetherians possess some level of telepathy. Get used to it now.”
He gritted his teeth and caught up with him. Errison was a good three inches taller than him, over six feet at least, and had long legs.
“Gods, I’m going to have to teach you how not to project aren’t I?” Errison muttered.
“Just talk,” Ev grumbled, checking his pistol.
While Errison led him across the courtyard he’d seen from the roof, he explained to the best of his ability the events of the past two weeks.
In short, Ev was found on a beach by some locals on an isle across from Rêverelle, the capital island, which hosted kes Pal’eca de-Rêve. The locals apparently brought Ev to the nearest fighting ring, where the initial rounds of the Tournée de Coronae was happening, and entered them in a fight as a joke. Errison explained that he didn’t know much of what happened between then and the final rounds of the tournament, which took place in the capital, but that he had watched the final three rounds while on shore leave.
“You’re terrifying,” he confessed. “I didn’t root for anyone, but by the end you at least had me impressed.”
Ev had rolled his eyes. He’d impressed some random Aetherian soldier evidently assigned to his person—great. Errison just shook his head and continued shooting at the three-headed space monster pinning them down.
That was the most relevant part of the conversation: the horde of creatures from a place called zio’cerual, the blue void, that were attacking the Imperial Palace. Errison called them Starspawn.
After Ev killed the previous Emperor by putting a plasma arrow through xer skull and being crowned Emperor in xer stead, (Errison shuddered as he recalled watching it on a screen in the East District, where a lot of his division hung out on leave, and hearing the plasma tip burn through Emperor Tainnos II's skull) Ev had been led through the paces for a week and a half. His role within the Imperial Council, his new schedule around the palace, training regimens, and the like. Then Errison explained that, about two days ago, he’d started to act strange.
“It was like you were drifting in and out of a sleepwalking trance,” he said. They were catching their breaths behind the shattered stone roof of a guard station. “You’d zone out for hours at a time, then snap back into the conversation like nothing happened. Sometimes your eyes would glow, or that rune on your chest… It was weird.”
The rune he mentioned, which his eyes kept drifting to, was the one Cossanna had tattooed on him when he turned seventeen. It was black the last time Ev saw it (in the mirror above Viera’s dresser, right next to his, the morning before the duel) but now it was a vibrant electric blue. It glowed in the midnight purple light of Aetheria centra.
Errison said his “spells” had gotten worse and worse until tonight, approximately six hours ago, when he had wandered right out of the barracks talking about his aunt, his sister, and cyresia-hagé.
“Home,” Ev said when Errison asked him what that meant. “I wanted to go home.”
Errison gave him a before they had to move again, and Ev thought it might have been one of painful sympathy.
After he had walked out, Errison said he made his way to the roof where he opened the wormhole that was still whirling above their heads. The Second Councilman, Shas, the masked man he headbutted earlier, had come after him and tried to use control magic to get them to close the portal twice. Once, before knocking him loose of the sleepwalking trance—Errison called it a "battle trance," since he’d apparently died in combat, been shoved into arranged combat (and survived), and been awoken into a combat-like situation—and again after Ev headbutted him. Nothing had worked thus far, and now they were heading back to the roof of the citadel proper, where Shas and the First Councilman, Heiro, were still trying to close the portal.
“The working theory is that if you can’t close it yourself, you can allow Shas to access your memories to make you close it,” Errison explained.
Ev shuddered at the prospect of letting someone telepathically breach his mind, let alone control him to do anything, but if it prevented more lives from being lost and closed that terrifying portal into void hell, he’d do it. Errison took that moment to remind him, telepathically, that he’d already let someone breach his mind. He managed to convey it with such flirtatious double meaning that it got Ev to laugh.
The rest of the way across the courtyard, Errison explained the terms he had accepted by becoming Emperor. He was sworn to Aetheria’s neutral interference and arbitration, had a designated rank outside of the Imperial Armed Forces (AI-E, Ae’teria Imperialis Empera), and had accepted the Rules de Empera.
“So I don’t know what you went by before, but you’re to be referred to only with gender neutral pronouns,” Errison said. “You chose ‘they/them’ while in your weirdass battle trance, and I’m not sure the Council will let you change ‘em now that you’ve gone public.”
Ev had apparently given a very eloquent speech at their official coronation.
They accepted the new pronouns with nonchalance. They could always tell people the real ones in private. Right now, it seemed more important to keep themselves in compliance with whatever role the Bloody Empire had dropped them into. Their Imperial name, though, Razienne, “one who destroys,” was a bit over the top.
“They really care that much about neutrality?” Ev asked. It was kind of funny, going so far as to declare yourself neutral right down to your name, pronouns, and publicly gender when you became Emperor. (Although “one who destroys” didn’t seem particularly neutral to them.)
Errison just shrugged. “The founders of the New Empire did, anyway."
They got inside the citadel proper eventually. Ev didn’t have time to marvel at the grand arching ceilings, or the sleek light panels built into the walls, or the vines creeping in from a small courtyard with a warp pad in it. Once they were through the gatehouse, Errison had them sprinting through the halls and up staircases, and Ev was glad their new body (healed body? Resurrected corpse?) was as endurance-capable as their first one. They barreled through the metal door to the roof after him, shield spells raised against any lurking Starspawn, and met the First and Second Councilman, Heiro and Shas, near the ledge.
“Good work, Errison,” Shas shouted over the howl of the vortex. “Razienne, are you going to let me in this time or am I going to have to ask your SIC to knock you out properly first?”
Errison was, as he explained, Ev’s new second in command. The exact term he used in Aetherian was emperade, “little emperor.” His new official rank was AI-ED, Ae’teria Imperialis Emperade. Before their coronation and his selection to be their right hand, he had been commander of the 7th battalion of the Imperial Aetherian Vanguard. Now he was the holder of a strange external rank like Ev's, which he seemed to have as many questions about as Ev did.
“You won’t have to knock me out,” they said firmly, glancing at Errison. They had committed to letting the Councilman in on the way through the palace; there was no way in hell they could remember how to close this portal on their own.
“Good.” Shas raised a gloved hand and Ev watched his mask, noting that the crack was gone. (Self-repairing material?) “Hold still and relax. Think of something peaceful.”
Ev thought about stargazing with their sister.
The cloud-like feeling descended over their mind again, but this time Ev tried not to fight it. It must have worked, because in no time at all the feeling was gone and their hands were falling back to their side, stinging from a powerful spell they didn’t remember the cast sequence for. When they looked up, the portal had closed and more than a few bisected Starspawn bodies were falling from the sky.
Everyone on the roof let out a sigh of relief.
“Now all we have left are the thousands of Starspawn in the streets,” the other Councilman said lightheartedly. Heiro, also clad in a mask. Ev took note of the differences between their masks: Shas’ was bare, all gold-white except for four pointed stripes that came up from his jawline and red flecks around his eyes. Councilman Heiro, head of the Imperial Council, had purple tear tracks under his mask’s eyes and everything below the curve of his cheek was a matte gray. He also wore a four-pronged crown and a hood, whereas Shas had a cape that clasped over each shoulder.
Shas muttered something under his breath that they didn’t catch, then turned to Ev and Errison. “Serg—” he caught himself. “Emperade, take Razienne down to the armory, then catch up with your old battalion at the skydocks. You’re both shipping out to join the containment perimeter around Rêverelle. The Council will contact your flagship for a report every three hours until we get this under control. Understood?”
Errison gave the affirmative and Ev heard themselves echo it. Then Shas and Heiro were stepping off to the side and Errison’s hand was pulling them back towards the stairwell, muttering something about coffee and stim packets. They got back to the main floor and started towards what Ev assumed was the armory.
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