Adventurers of Elandris Book 1: Venus Vanguard

A Magical Empire

Book 1: Venus Vanguard

by John Kim

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Book 1: Venus Vanguard

by John Kim

A Note on the Timeline

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The events of this volume take place in a world that runs parallel to the Chronicles of Elandris, close enough that you will recognize its peoples and its purple sun, its dragons and its elven crystal, its long-held imperial peace.

But this is not the same timeline. In the Chronicles, the elven princess who climbed onto a dragon's back went on to build her empire in ways no historian had a name for — through unlikely friendships, through a sisterhood of advisors, through a thousand small refusals to do things the way they had always been done.

In this world, the princess made the same first choice — to bind the peoples together rather than rule them apart — but the road afterward diverged. She chose the conventional path of empire: treaties, garrisons, councils, the long patient work of statecraft as it had been done for ten thousand years before her. It worked. The peace held.

These pages do not ask whether that was the better road. They only follow what happens when a peace, however carefully maintained, begins to fray.

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Prologue

The Empire of Elandris

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Long after the Shadow Wars had faded into legend, and long after a small elven princess had climbed onto the back of a dragon and changed the world forever, there remained a kingdom unlike any other. Elandris, once the proud and isolated jewel of the elves, with its crystal palace and mushroom-houses and rivers running honey-sweet under the purple sun, had become, over the slow centuries that followed, the beating heart of an empire that no historian had ever quite believed possible.

In this world, the sun rose purple and set in long swirls of gold. Rivers carried water that tasted faintly of honey if you knew the right places to drink. Flowers sang on certain evenings, and stars, if you were quiet enough, sometimes whispered back. Five great peoples shared this world. The long-lived Elves, with their crystal cities and fireflies as bright as lanterns. The bold and curious Humans, with their kingdoms of stone and steel. The fierce Orcs of Sorath, with their fortresses of obsidian and iron. The stubborn Dwarves of the deep mountains, master forgers of impossible things. And the ancient Dragons, who ruled the skies and answered, in this age, to no one but their Mother.

There had been a time, in the long centuries before, when these peoples had hated one another with the patient generational fury of those who had long since forgotten what they were even fighting about. There had been wars without end. Forests had burned. Mountains had crumbled. Rivers had run dry from the magic spilled across their banks. Then a small elven princess had stepped onto a dragon's back, holding the hand of the Shadow Sovereign himself, and over the slow turning of years had stitched together a peace that, while perhaps not as inventive as it might have been in some other world, had nonetheless held.

Her name was Lyriana. She was Empress of the Shadow Empire, dragon mother to Tiamara's legion, and signatory of numerous treaties and de facto ruler of the Shadow Empire on this timeline. She had been, for centuries now, exactly the empress her advisors had hoped she would be: diligent, cautious, conventional. The kind of ruler who consulted the council on every weighty question and trusted the long, patient machinery of governance to grind the right answer out in the end.

Beside her ruled Amon, the Shadow Emperor himself, ancient beyond reckoning, his four mithril orbs orbiting him in slow and patient circuits like quiet moons that had decided, long ago, to follow him wherever he went. He had loved Lyriana for the four hundred years of their marriage and had never once openly disagreed with her in council. He had also, on many quiet evenings, looked out from the high balconies of the imperial palace toward the western horizon with an expression his wife had learned not to ask about.

Together they had built an empire of treaties, of careful balance, of patient diplomacy. The peace held. It always held. Whether it was the peace it might have been was a question no one in the imperial city was permitted to ask aloud.

It was into this empire of long-earned and conventionally-administered harmony that two girls were born, and grew, and became something the careful machinery of the empire had not quite been designed to account for.

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End of Prologue

To be continued…

Part One

The Errand

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Chapter One

Sword and Shield

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They had been inseparable since the age of seven, when a young Elyndra Dawnshield had climbed a courtyard oak that was decidedly too tall for climbing, and a young Seraphina Vale had stood below with her arms outstretched, perfectly certain she could catch her if she fell. Elyndra did not fall. But she remembered, forever afterward, that Seraphina had been ready.

Elyndra was half-elven, born to House Dawnshield, the elven noble line that had served Elandris since before the Shadow Empire was founded, and to a human father of the older Eastern stock who had fought alongside her mother in three campaigns before he ever asked permission to court her. The Dawnshield crest bore a rising sun cresting above a knight's helm, and every generation of the house had produced at least one warrior the bards still sang about. She had inherited her mother's silver-white hair, which fell long and unruly past her armored shoulders, and from somewhere in the deep blood of both her lines the clear pale blue eyes of a winter sky. Her ears were faintly pointed, less than an elf's, more than a human's, and she had a bearing that suggested she had been born standing at attention. Even as a girl she moved with a quiet, coiled readiness, as though the world around her were something to be protected.

Seraphina Vale was half-elven too, daughter of a human temple healer mother whose people had joined Elandris in the early days of the empire when Empress Lyriana herself had welcomed the human refugees of Sorath into the new world, and of a quietly devoted scholar-soldier father from one of the empire's older mixed houses. By coincidence or by quiet magic, her hair was the same silver-white as Elyndra's, her ears bore the same faint point, and her eyes were summer-sky blue, warm and open, the kind of eyes that made the wounded feel less afraid. It had taken some explaining, when they were small, that the two of them were not in fact sisters — a misunderstanding their mothers had long since stopped trying to correct.

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There was one part of Elyndra's childhood, however, that she did not often speak of, even to Seraphina. The Dawnshields were a famous house, but a busy one. Her parents bore the obligations of nobility and warfare in equal measure, and the years of her early life had often passed without either of them home for more than a season at a time. The warmest hours of her childhood, the ones she remembered most clearly when she was tired or homesick or afraid, had been spent in the company of her godmother.

Lady Venusia of House Brightspire was tall and bright-haired and laughed often, and was, by reputation, one of the most decorated adventurers the empire had ever produced. The court called her Lady Venusia. The barracks called her Commander. The taverns called her Venus, and her closest friends called her nothing else, because she had said, more than once, that she had no patience for titles when there was good wine on the table. Children, by special exemption, were allowed to call her whatever they pleased. To Elyndra, from the age of three onward, she had simply been Aunt Venus.

Venus had been, in her quiet way, one of those at court who held private opinions about the empire's conventional choices. She had served Lyriana loyally for nine decades. She had also, more than once, observed in private to Elyndra that an empire run by ledger and protocol was an empire that asked rather little of its heroes, and that adventurers — real adventurers — were what filled in the gaps that paperwork could not reach.

It was Venus who had first put a wooden practice sword in Elyndra's small hand. Venus who taught her that armor was a tool, not a costume, and that the weight of it was the price of being someone other people could stand behind. Venus who told her, on more than one quiet evening in the Dawnshield gardens, that the truest knights were never alone, that a warrior without companions was a tragedy waiting to happen, and that someday, when Elyndra was grown, she should gather around her the bravest hearts she could find and call them something worth remembering.

Venus did not live to see Elyndra grow up.

She had fallen, three winters past, on a campaign in the deep north — the kind of fall that warriors of her caliber sometimes met when they refused to abandon a wounded squire to save themselves. There had been a state funeral. There were songs. There had been, for Elyndra, a long and quiet grief that had not entirely left her even now, and which she suspected might never entirely leave.

But there had also been, ever since, a name kept private and patient in the back of her mind. A name for the company she would, one day, gather around her, when she was ready and the empire had need of her. A company worth remembering. For Venus, who had taught her how.

She had told only Seraphina. Sera, who had attended the funeral at her side and held her hand through three songs and one silence, knew the name. They never spoke it aloud in casual company.

The Venus Vanguard. Someday.

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Together, the two friends were two halves of a single conviction: that service was the highest form of power. They argued about tactics the way other children argued about games. They healed each other's scrapes with the focused seriousness of apprentice surgeons. They trained in the temple courtyards of Elandris long after their cohort had retired, the pale crystal columns throwing long shadows across the stone, neither willing to be the first to say enough for the night.

When the time came to choose their formal paths, the choice felt less like a decision and more like a recognition.

Seraphina chose the path of the Cleric, healer first, divine shield second. She devoted herself to the Order of Twilight, where compassion meets the courage to stand between the fallen and whatever darkness pressed at them. She trained with shield and mace, weapons that could turn a blade and break a threat without drawing blood if blood need not be drawn. Her calling was restoration: to be the still center that kept others standing.

Elyndra chose the path of the Paladin, holy knight first, divine healer second. She took her Avenger's Oath not out of hatred but out of absolute, uncompromising love for the innocent. She devoted herself to the great two-handed sword — Venus's weapon — the same hand-and-a-half pattern her godmother had carried for ninety years. Her calling was retribution in service of righteousness: to be the bright edge that strikes before the darkness can reach those behind her.

The difference between the two paths was subtle, and the two friends discussed it at length over many late evenings. Seraphina would say, "I heal so that warriors can return to the field. Elyndra hits so hard there is less field to return to." Elyndra would counter, "I strike so that Sera never has to. And when she must, she holds the line while I recover enough to strike again."

The symmetry was, by any assessment, remarkable. Where Elyndra could deal catastrophic damage, Seraphina was there to cover their flank with her shield raised, mending wounds with practiced calm. Where Seraphina might need a moment's recovery, Elyndra's own divine training let her extend a hand of healing to her best friend before wheeling back to face whatever came next. Each made the other more than either could be alone.

They went on many adventures together, small ones at first, the kind that barely warrant telling. A haunted mill outside the farming district. A river troll that had grown bold enough to threaten a bridge. A missing merchant caravan that had taken a foolish detour into the Mossbeck Hollows. Each time, they returned slightly wiser, slightly more seasoned, and with another shared story added to the long, comfortable catalogue of their friendship.

The people of Elandris began to know their names. Then they began to speak to them with a certain reverence that the two friends privately found embarrassing and professionally found useful. Indra and Sera, they were called in the streets — the names worn smooth with affection, like river stones.

They were, by any measure, exactly where they were supposed to be.

And then the summons arrived.

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The Imperial Throne Room of Elandris was built to remind visitors that they were mortal. It had been carved, in the old elven way, from a single vault of pale crystal that glowed softly from within, a glow that had not faded in eight hundred years and showed no sign of fading now. Its ceiling vaulted so high that swallows were rumored to nest in the moonflowers carved along the upper ribs. Two solemn rows of crystal columns ran its length, each wrapped at the base with living silver-vine that had been growing, uninterrupted, since the founding of the empire. At the far end, on a dais of three broad steps, sat the paired thrones: one of crystal and moonflower bloom for the Empress, one of black mithril and shadow-glass for the Emperor.

Empress Lyriana sat with the careful, balanced posture prescribed by the third volume of the imperial protocols, the same posture every empress of the Shadow Throne had used in formal audience for four hundred years, and which she had practiced as a girl until it became as natural to her as breathing. Her silver hair was bound in the diplomatic braid. Her circlet of moonflower silver sat precisely level on her brow. Her spring-green eyes were calm, attentive, and gave nothing away.

Emperor Amon sat beside her, and he was something else again. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his hair midnight-dark, his eyes the soft grey of a storm cloud just before it breaks. Around him, in their slow and silent orbit, the four mithril orbs of the Shadow Sovereign turned at the speeds they had turned for ten thousand years: one for defense against blade, one for striking back, one for warding away magic, one for unmaking it. He had agreed, long ago, to defer to his wife in matters of governance, and he had kept that agreement faithfully ever since, even when his own ancient instincts whispered otherwise.

Elyndra and Seraphina knelt together at the base of the dais, as protocol required, and waited.

"Rise, Lady Elyndra. Rise, Seraphina Vale," the Empress said. Her voice carried easily across the great chamber, the practiced cadence of one who had given a thousand formal audiences. "The council has reviewed the recommendations submitted by General Karkan and Ninja Master Hanzo. We have considered the relevant precedents. The matter is irregular, but the precedent of irregular missions in irregular times is itself well established."

She paused. The faintest hesitation. As if some other, less protocol-bound version of herself wanted to use plainer words and was patiently overruled.

"There is something amiss in Wyrmwood Vale."

Beside her, the Emperor leaned forward slightly. "More precisely," he said, "there is something preventing us from perceiving events there. My orbs find no resistance, and yet no answer comes back. Tiamara's scouts return without memory of what they saw. The dwarven seer-stones go silent at the Vale's borders. What lies within the Vale at this moment, we cannot say. And that, Lady Elyndra, is not a condition this throne is accustomed to accepting."

"The council has weighed military intervention against discreet investigation," the Empress continued, "and has unanimously recommended the latter. We ask, therefore, that the two of you travel to the Vale, observe carefully, and return to report what you find. Eyes we can trust, carrying heads we know will not be turned by whatever waits inside. Will you accept this commission?"

Elyndra did not hesitate for long. She glanced once at Seraphina — a glance that communicated approximately forty words in the span of half a heartbeat — and received a small, sure nod in return.

"We accept, Your Majesties," she said. "The two of us together have walked into worse places than a quiet forest, and we have always walked out again."

"So your records indicate," the Empress replied. "A contingent of Karkan's shadow-scouts will be authorized to shadow your route. They will not enter the Vale itself; the council deems the suppression effect too uncertain to risk imperial assets within. Consider them your safety net. Plan as though they are not there." "We are told, additionally," the Emperor added, "that a number of independent adventurers have entered the Vale over recent weeks and have not returned. They may still be alive inside, trapped or stranded. If they can be recovered, recover them. Add to your number if the Vale yields willing hands."

At this, a chamberlain stepped forward bearing two scrolls on a velvet-lined tray. The first was sealed in imperial silver wax, bearing the moonflower-and-sun crest of Elandris — an authorization scroll, granting the bearers full cooperation from any imperial officer, garrison, or institution encountered along the road. It was the standard form, properly counter-signed by three council members, the chief chamberlain, and the under-secretary of irregular missions.

The second scroll was different.

It was sealed in black wax — not the dark navy of formal mourning, not the charcoal grey of military dispatch, but absolute, lightless black, the color of the spaces between stars. Pressed into that wax was the Shadow Black Seal of the Shadow Empire, the personal seal of the Shadow Sovereign himself. Elyndra recognized it at once, though she had only ever seen it twice in her life and once was in a forbidden book her tutor had pretended not to know she had read. It was a seal used so seldom across the long centuries of the empire that to see it was to understand, immediately, that the matter had passed beyond the ordinary authority of councils and protocols. The exterior of the scroll bore four words in a hand precise and deliberately unsettling: Read and Tremblingly Obey.

Elyndra stared at the scroll for a moment. Then she picked it up, without trembling, and tucked it into her satchel with a composure that earned the Emperor's barely visible approval.

The Empress, beside him, watched the gesture with something that looked very nearly like surprise.

"The Shadow Black Seal supersedes all other authority in regions where the imperial writ is not recognized," the Emperor said. "It carries no countersignature. It requires none. Use it carefully. Its existence implies cooperation from forces I would prefer to remain quiet. That is all I will say about it here."

The Empress was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter than the formal cadence she had used until now. Almost ordinary. Almost warm.

"The scroll also carries a secondary purpose. By imperial authority, Lady Elyndra Dawnshield, you are hereby granted the rank of First Captain of the Venus Vanguard, operating under the seal of the Shadow Empire. Whatever company you build along the way — those you save, those who will not let you go alone — that company is yours to command. Bring them home, Lady Dawnshield. All of them."

Elyndra did not, for a moment, trust her voice.

The Empress's spring-green eyes had not left her face. There was something in them now — something kind, something that had been waiting to be said.

"Yes, Lady Dawnshield. We know whose name you would have chosen. The court keeps records, and Lady Venusia of Brightspire was a friend of this throne for nine decades before she fell. She told me once, in a private audience I have never repeated to anyone, that I governed too cautiously. She did not say it unkindly. She said it the way an old friend tells the truth."

A pause. A breath. Something very nearly like regret moved across the Empress's face and was, with practiced discipline, set aside.

"I did not change. But I never forgot. We thought the name would suit you better than any we might have invented. It is yours, formally, from this day. Carry it well, Lady Dawnshield. Carry it as she would have."

Elyndra bowed her head — not the careful, calibrated bow of a noble before her sovereigns, but the deeper bow of a knight before something larger than herself. When she straightened, her voice was steady again.

"I will carry it well, Your Majesty. On my oath. And on hers."

Seraphina, beside her, had begun very quietly to cry. Elyndra did not look. She did not need to look. She simply reached out without turning her head and took her best friend's hand, the way she had been doing since they were both seven years old. Together, they bowed once more to the thrones, and then they turned, and then they left.

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Seraphina leaned close to Elyndra as they departed down the long crystal corridor, their footsteps echoing in the vaulted silence. Above them, faint motes of moonflower-light drifted slowly through the air, the way they always had in this palace and the way they always would.

"She named it for Venus," Seraphina whispered.

"She named it for Venus," Elyndra agreed.

"Indra. Did the Empress just admit something? In a throne room? In front of the whole court?"

"I think she did."

"You know what 'Read and Tremblingly Obey' means, don't you?" Seraphina said after a while. "That's not decorative language. That's the Sovereign's own words. He hasn't used those four since before our great-grandparents were born."

"It means whatever is in Wyrmwood Vale already knows we're coming."

"That's what I thought." Sera was quiet for a moment, then asked the question that had been waiting since they left the throne room. "Are you frightened?"

"I have you beside me, Sera. And the name of a woman who never ran from anything. There's no room in the schedule for us to be frightened."

Seraphina smiled — the particular smile that meant I know you, and I am with you regardless — and the two of them stepped out of the palace and into the purple light of an Elandris evening, when the sun rolled down toward the western mountains in long swirls of gold and the first fireflies of the night began their slow, blinking ascent into the sky.

Behind them, the great crystal doors closed with a sound like a book being shut. Ahead of them, the road curved toward a forest whose edges already felt darker than distance alone could account for.

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They rode out the next morning at first light, beneath a sky just beginning to bloom from indigo into pale violet, with the moonflower mist still clinging to the lower terraces of the imperial city. Two riders, two horses, no escort. Sera in temple-white over chain, her shield slung across her back and her mace at her saddle. Indra in platemail of dawnshield silver, her great two-handed sword wrapped in oilcloth and lashed across her own pack.

They did not speak much during the first hours. They had never needed to. A few miles past the last imperial waystation of the capital ring, where the high road narrowed and the city walls finally fell out of sight behind them, Seraphina drew her horse alongside Elyndra's and broke the silence.

"Indra. Whatever we find inside that Vale, promise me one thing."

"Anything."

"If we have to choose between the mission and each other, we choose each other. Always. We've been a pair too long to be anything else."

Elyndra was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached across the space between their horses and took Seraphina's gauntleted hand in her own.

"We choose each other. Sword and shield. As we have always done."

They rode on.

Behind them, the crystal spires of Elandris caught the late morning sun and threw it back in long rays of gold and violet. Ahead, the trees grew slowly closer together, and the road rose by gentle degrees into hills that no map of the empire described in much detail.

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End of Chapter One

To be continued…

Chapter Two

The Third Waystation

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It was one of the small mercies of the empire that travelers along the imperial high roads did not have to sleep on the ground. Every fifteen leagues or so, the Shadow Throne maintained what was officially called a Waystation of the Imperial Post and unofficially called, by everyone who had ever stayed at one, a godsend. Each was a fortified inn-and-stable combination, manned by a small garrison of imperial soldiers, stocked with fresh horses, dry beds, hot food, and — depending on the captain in residence — good wine, passable wine, or whatever the local merchants had been willing to part with that month.

For Elyndra and Seraphina, this meant they were able to travel about three times faster than they would have on their own.

By the time they had passed the first waystation, they had ridden farther than most patrols managed in a day. By the second, the high mountains of the imperial heartland were already softening into the gentler hill country of the eastern marches. By the third, the road had begun its slow eastward bend toward the wilderness that surrounded Wyrmwood Vale.

They had passed, at the noon halt before the third waystation, a roadside tavern called The Crooked Hawk. Elyndra had slowed her horse to look at it without quite meaning to. Aunt Venus had drunk there, more than once — had once won a wager with a Sorathi caravan-master concerning the number of arrows that could be balanced on a tankard before the tankard tipped, a wager Venus had won by means that were, in retrospect, almost certainly cheating. Elyndra rode past without dismounting. But she touched the pommel of her sword as she went, a small unthinking habit, and Seraphina, who noticed everything, said nothing.

It was after that third waystation, on an evening when the purple sun was already low and the moonflowers along the road had begun to open for the night, that they decided to call it a day.

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The third waystation was set on a low rise overlooking a meandering river. Its walls were stone, its roof slate, and its pennant — a moonflower-and-sun on a field of imperial silver — caught what was left of the evening light. A pair of garrison soldiers waved them in through the outer gate without ceremony. A boy took their horses to the stables. A second boy led them inside.

The captain on duty was a human of perhaps fifty, with the squared shoulders of a man who had spent his entire adult life standing at attention. His name, according to the brass plate over the duty desk, was Captain Holvar. He took one look at them as they entered and did not, as so many waystation officers did, demand their business immediately. He simply waited.

Elyndra produced both scrolls from her satchel and laid them on the desk. The first was the imperial silver-sealed authorization. Captain Holvar examined it with the practiced attention of someone who had checked thousands. He nodded once, satisfied. Then he reached for the second scroll.

What happened next was very subtle. To anyone watching him casually, nothing changed. But Elyndra was not watching him casually, and she saw the precise moment his eyes registered what was pressed into the black wax. His shoulders, already squared, became somehow squarer. The muscles in his jaw tightened, just slightly. His careful neutral expression became, by some craft she could not have named, even more carefully neutral.

He set the second scroll down with both hands. He did not break the seal. Only a fool would. But he had seen enough of the exterior to understand what he held. He looked up at the two of them with the kind of attention a man pays to objects he suspects might explode.

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Captain Holvar cleared his throat.

"Forgive the intrusion, my ladies," he said, and his voice was very careful indeed. "I do not wish to impose on travelers carrying documents of such weight. I would not normally ask. But I wonder, before you retire for the evening, whether one of you might happen to be familiar with the healing arts."

He had, of course, already noticed everything that needed noticing. The plate armor with the rising-sun-and-helm of House Dawnshield. The two-handed sword wrapped in oilcloth — the one Elyndra wore not because she could not afford its own scabbard, but because the cloth had belonged to Venus, and Elyndra had not been able to bring herself to replace it. The temple-white over chain. The shield with the moonflower-twilight crest of the Cleric orders. The mace at Seraphina's saddle, kept ready but never drawn in a waystation. He had been a soldier for thirty years. He knew exactly what he was looking at.

But he had also been a soldier long enough to know that asking imperial agents for favors was something one did with great care, if at all. So he had phrased the question in a way that allowed them to refuse without anyone having to acknowledge that a refusal had occurred.

Elyndra and Seraphina exchanged a glance. They both nodded.

"Captain," Seraphina said gently, "we are here to serve those in need. Tell us what is wrong."

The careful neutrality of Captain Holvar's face cracked, just slightly, into something that looked a great deal like relief.

"We have a gravely ill mage in the clinic, my lady. He arrived three days ago, half-collapsed against the saddle of his horse. An itinerant scholar, by his papers, traveling east from Veilmere on independent business. He fell unconscious within an hour of his arrival and has not woken since. Our station healer has done what she can. Light Heal, Light Cure, the usual restorative rites. None of it has reached him. He has only grown weaker."

He hesitated.

"My lady — this is not an ordinary illness. There is something wrong with his magic. Our healer says it is as if something is feeding on him from within. She has done what she can, but she is one woman with a country priest's training. She cannot reach whatever is doing this."

Seraphina's expression had gone still and focused — the expression Elyndra had learned, over many years, meant that her best friend had stopped, for the moment, being her best friend and become instead what she had trained for two decades to be. "Take us to him," Seraphina said.

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The clinic was a small white-walled room at the back of the waystation, lit by two oil lamps and one low fire. The station healer, a tired-looking elven woman named Sister Oma, rose when they entered and nodded once, professionally.

The patient lay on a narrow cot under a thin grey blanket. He was a man of perhaps forty in human-reckoned years, though the unmistakable elven cast of his cheekbones suggested he was at least three times that. His skin had the pale, drawn quality of someone whose body was burning through reserves it should not have been touching. His breath came shallow and irregular. There was a faint purple shimmer in the air around him — not the pleasant glow of a healthy mage's working, but something thinner, more frayed, as though the natural arcane currents around him were being slowly siphoned away.

Seraphina sat down on the stool beside the cot. She placed two fingers, very lightly, against the man's wrist. Then against his temple. Then she closed her eyes. After a long moment she opened them again.

"It isn't a sickness," she said. "Not a natural one. There's something attached to him. Something feeding."

Elyndra had drawn closer and was studying the air above the cot. Her own training as a paladin gave her a different kind of sight — less precise than Sera's clerical reading, but more attuned to the moral character of magical things.

"It feels old," she said quietly. "Whatever it is. And it does not belong here." Sister Oma nodded slightly, as if her own suspicions had just been confirmed by witnesses she trusted more than herself.

"Can the two of you do anything?" Captain Holvar asked from the doorway. Elyndra looked at Seraphina. Seraphina looked at Elyndra.

"We will need to work together," Seraphina said. "Whatever has hold of him is beyond a single caster's reach. I can hold the channels open and feed restoration into him, but I cannot break what has fastened itself in. Indra, if you can lend your light to mine, your fire to my mending, we may be able to draw it out without breaking him in the process."

Elyndra nodded once. "You hold him steady. I will pull."

"Slowly," Sera said. "This isn't something to rip free. Whatever it is, it is wound through him. We bring it out the way you draw a thorn, not the way you pull a weed." "Slowly, then." Elyndra rolled her shoulders once, the small habitual gesture from a hundred other dangerous moments — the one Venus had taught her, the one Venus had used at every doorway she ever crossed. "Sword and shield."

"Sword and shield."

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They knelt on either side of the cot. Seraphina took the unconscious man's left hand. Elyndra took his right. They closed their eyes, breathed together once, the way they had learned to breathe together as girls in the temple courtyards under torches that had long since gone out, and began.

The light that rose from Seraphina's hands was the color of a winter morning sun. A clean, warm yellow-gold — the color of hearth-light and harvest-light, the color of every Cleric's blessing that had ever called the wounded back from the edge. It spread up the mage's left arm in slow, patient pulses, like the slow climbing of dawn across a mountainside. It was not a light that hurried. Healing, Sera had been taught, never hurried. Healing was patience.

The light that rose from Elyndra's hands was a different color entirely. It was blue. A deep, clear, almost-violet blue — the color of an evening sky just before the first stars, the color of the great two-handed sword her godmother had carried for ninety years before she fell. It was the color of a paladin's holy fire, of vows taken and kept. Where Seraphina's light was patience, Elyndra's was conviction. Where Sera's said come back, you are safe, Indra's said get out, you are not welcome here.

The two lights met above the unconscious mage and braided together. Yellow and blue. Patience and conviction. Healing and holy fire. They worked their way slowly inward, threading along the lines of the man's failing body, searching for what did not belong. They found it.

It was a thing of black thread and patient hunger, anchored deep in the mage's mind, wrapped along his arcane channels the way a creeper vine wraps around a dying tree. It had been feeding slowly. Patiently. The way certain old and clever predators feed. It was small, by the standards of such things. Almost trivial.

Almost.

It also bore the unmistakable signature of something that had originated, very recently, in the direction of Wyrmwood Vale.

Seraphina's eyes opened first. She looked across the cot at Elyndra. Her face had gone a shade paler than it had been before.

"Indra. This is not random."

Elyndra had felt it too. The blue light around her hands had gone, for a moment, very steady and very cold.

"No," she said. "It isn't."

They began to draw the thing out.

It would take most of the night. By the time they finished, the unconscious mage would be breathing easily for the first time in three days, and Sister Oma would be openly crying, and Captain Holvar would have given up pretending he was not watching from the clinic doorway.

But that was still to come.

For now, in the light of two oil lamps and a low fire and one blue-and-gold working that lit the small clinic like a sunrise indoors, the paladin and the cleric began the patient and dangerous work of pulling something foul out of a stranger they did not yet know.

The empire's quiet errand, it seemed, had just become considerably less quiet.

✶ ✶ ✶

End of Chapter Two

To be continued…

Chapter Three

The Mage and the Warrior

☙ ❧

~ ❧ ~

The fire had burned low. The oil lamps had been refilled twice during the night. Outside, the first thin grey light of dawn was beginning to mark the eastern horizon — that hour when night and day exchange custody of the world.

For the first time in three days, the unconscious mage drew a full, unconstricted breath. His eyelids fluttered. Opened.

Aetherion Sol — what would have been a man of perhaps forty in human years, though the elven cast of his cheekbones told a different story — looked up from the cot and found himself being watched by two pairs of pale eyes.

His voice was hoarse from disuse.

"Thank the Gods for healing," he said. Then, with the careful precision of a man who had spent decades being scrupulous about credit where credit was due, he added, "And thank you, my ladies, for the work of saving my life."

Seraphina, who had not moved from her stool in seven hours, set two fingers very lightly against his wrist, found his pulse steady for the first time since they had begun, and only then allowed herself a small, weary smile.

"You have been to the Vale, Master Mage," she said. "I saw your memory fragments while we were drawing the thing out of you. They were not the memories of an itinerant scholar."

It was not, strictly, a question. But she had given him room to answer it as one if he chose.

Aetherion Sol closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, something old and tired moved behind them.

"You saw correctly, my lady. The papers are not a lie. I am, by license, a Master Mage of the Imperial Magic Academy, and I do travel under a scholar's commission. The deeper truth is that I was investigating the silence around Wyrmwood Vale, on behalf of a small circle of mages who had grown concerned that no farseer could pierce its borders. I was not alone. We were a party of two."

He paused. His breath hitched, and not from physical weakness.

"What of my companion? Valerius Drakon. Where is he?"

✶

Captain Holvar had been standing at the clinic doorway since just before the mage's eyes had opened, with the patient stillness of a man who had been a soldier long enough to know that some conversations were not meant to be interrupted. Now he stepped forward, carefully, and bowed his head once.

"Master Mage, our scouts found you alone. You had ridden out of the southern woods slumped against the saddle of your horse, and the horse had carried you to the edge of the imperial road before its strength gave out. There was no second rider. There was no body. We have searched a half-mile in every direction around the spot. If Valerius Drakon was there when you fell, he was not there when we arrived."

The mage absorbed this. He did not look alarmed in the way a man looks alarmed when he has been told a friend is dead. He looked alarmed in the way a man looks alarmed when he has been told something that does not yet make sense.

"That," Aetherion said softly, "is not nothing."

"Valerius Drakon is, by reputation, not a man easily killed," the captain said. "It is told in the garrisons that he once held a bridge alone against an army for nine hours. He will not be so easy to kill. What is your last memory, my lord?"

Aetherion was silent for a long moment, gathering the shards of three lost days into something he could speak.

"We had been ambushed," he said at last. "Not by men. By presences. A circle of something that moved like wolves and watched like priests. They surrounded us in a clearing perhaps ten miles south of where your scouts found me. Valerius drew his sword and put himself between them and me. He told me to weave a portal. I tried." His mouth twisted with the faintest bitterness.

"I am, by some measures, one of the better mages of my generation. And in that clearing I could not pull enough threads of the weave together to make a doorway the size of my thumb. The Vale was suppressing my magic. I felt my mana draining out of me like water from a cracked vessel. I remember Valerius shouting something. A command, I think. Then nothing."

He looked at the two healers with the expression of a man who has, very calmly, accepted the worst possibility of his calculation.

"If I lost consciousness, then he was overrun. And if he was overrun, then I do not understand how I am here speaking to you. He must have sent the horse away with me on it. Which means he chose to stay."

Elyndra and Seraphina looked at each other across the cot.

Forty words in half a heartbeat.

If a Master-at-Arms of Valerius Drakon's caliber and an archmage of Aetherion Sol's had been overwhelmed badly enough that one fell unconscious and the other became separated, whatever was in Wyrmwood Vale was not a problem two riders, however gifted, were going to handle with a sword and a mace alone.

But they had been given a mission. And there was a man missing.

"Captain," Elyndra said quietly. "Take us to where you found him. At first light." Captain Holvar nodded once — the nod of a man who had been expecting that request before it was spoken.

"First light it is, my lady."

✶

They rode out beneath the same pale violet sky that had received them four days before. Captain Holvar rode ahead with two of his scouts. Elyndra and Seraphina followed in close formation behind. Aetherion Sol, who had insisted on coming despite three days of unconsciousness and the strong objections of Sister Oma, rode at the rear on a borrowed horse, looking like a man who had decided that the only thing more dangerous than what waited ahead was the alternative of staying behind while it happened.

After a half-hour, Holvar raised a gloved hand. They stopped.

"Here," he said. "This is where he was found. His horse standing over him. The horse not letting any of my scouts come closer until I myself walked up and put a hand on its neck. He had come from the south, by the broken branches and the print of the hooves." Aetherion looked south. So did Elyndra and Seraphina. The woods in that direction were thick, the canopy low. Light fell through it in fragments. Even at full morning, the spaces between the trees were the color of dusk.

✶

Seraphina dismounted. So did Elyndra.

"We need a prayer that will find a living man," Sera said, half to herself, half to Elyndra. "Not a rite I have ever needed for someone I have not met. The orders teach it, but it does not come easily."

"It comes easily for two," Elyndra said. "It has always come easily for two." They knelt on the ground at the spot Captain Holvar had pointed to. Seraphina drew a slow circle on the earth with her finger. Elyndra placed her left hand over the circle and her right on the hilt of her sword.

Before they began, Seraphina paused, the way she sometimes did at the start of a working she was uncertain about, and named the dead. Three names. A grandfather she had never quite forgiven for dying before he could see her ordained. A patient she had lost in her first year. And Venus. Always Venus, when the working was important. The order called it dedication. Sera called it asking permission. Elyndra had stopped asking what the difference was years ago.

They prayed — not aloud. Sera prayed in the Cleric's silent rhythm, the patient breathing of someone listening for an answer rather than demanding one. Elyndra prayed in the Paladin's way: a held conviction, a vow renewed at every breath, an oath that the world would yield up its missing if she asked it properly enough. The two prayers reached out from them and found, slowly, each other. And then they found something else. A thread.

It rose from the earth where Sera had drawn her circle and braided itself together in the air above their joined hands. Gold and blue. Patience and conviction. And then, slowly, the braid uncoiled in one direction, pointing the way a compass needle points when it has at last remembered what it is for. South. Into the woods.

An arrow of light, hanging in the air, pointing very steadily into the trees. "He is alive," Elyndra said. "The prayer would not have answered if he were not." "Then we follow," Sera said, rising.

✶

They moved through the woods at a brisk walk. The arrow of blue and gold light kept pace with them, hovering always at the height of their hands, always pointing forward, sometimes shifting slightly to account for fallen logs or thickets that required a detour. Five minutes. No more.

They found him in a small hollow between two great oaks, the kind of natural shelter a wounded man might crawl to if he could not walk and could not bear to die in the open.

He was alive. Just.

Valerius Drakon lay on his side, his armor torn in three places, his sword still in his hand though his fingers had gone too weak to grip it properly. There was blood on his temple, blood at his ribs, blood pooled beneath one thigh where something had bitten or cut him deeply. His breath came shallow. His eyes were closed. His chest moved, but only barely.

Elyndra knelt on one side of him. Seraphina knelt on the other.

"Mend the Wound," Sera said — beginning where any cleric began, with the simplest of the restorative rites. Yellow-gold light, warm as harvest sun, settled into the warrior's worst gashes and began to close them.

"Mend the Wound," Elyndra echoed, the same prayer in her paladin's voice. Blue light met gold above the wounded fighter and braided into him from two sides at once. The closing of his wounds accelerated. The breathing steadied.

"Knit the Flesh." "Knit the Flesh."

"Restore the Whole." "Restore the Whole."

Bones aligned themselves with the gentle, patient insistence of healing magic at its fullest. The man on the ground was no longer dying. He was now merely badly hurt, which was, in the trade of healers, a vast improvement.

"Bless him," Sera said. And they both spoke the blessing together — the divine rite that opened a body to receive what came next, amplifying the healing already given by half again its potency.

Valerius Drakon, Master-at-Arms, who had held a bridge for nine hours and walked alone out of three campaigns, opened his eyes.

✶

"…Am I dead?"

"Not anymore," Seraphina said.

"Imperial?"

"Of a sort."

The warrior considered this with the calm of a man who had, by appearances, expected nothing in particular and was prepared to revise his expectations as the evidence came in.

"Aetherion?"

"Alive," Elyndra said. "Recovering. He gave us your name. He gave us, more importantly, the direction of the woods."

Something moved behind the warrior's tired grey eyes — something that was not quite a smile but was nevertheless almost certainly relief.

"Then I have been very lucky," he said.

"We have been told you are not, in fact, a man for whom luck does very much of the work," Elyndra replied. "But yes. You have been lucky today."

✶

They got him back to the third waystation by midday. He could walk by then, with help. He could speak. He could not yet fight, but he was already, by the squared way he carried his shoulders even when leaning on Elyndra's, the kind of man who was going to be ready to fight again much sooner than anyone with sense would advise. That evening, in the clinic, Aetherion Sol and Valerius Drakon sat across from each other in chairs that had been pulled into a small circle. Seraphina and Elyndra sat with them. Captain Holvar stood by the door, having decided, on balance, that there were some conversations he was now formally a part of whether he wanted to be or not. It was Valerius who finally broke the silence.

"You owe me a flagon."

"I owe you my life," Aetherion replied.

"I'll take the flagon. The other can be settled later."

The faintest smile crossed the warrior's face. The same faintest smile crossed the mage's. Whatever bond ran between these two men had survived the Vale, had survived the loss, had survived the long passage of unconsciousness, and was now, with the quiet humor of veterans who had done this together before, picking up exactly where it had left off.

Elyndra glanced sideways at Seraphina. Forty words in half a heartbeat. The Venus Vanguard had, in the space of a single day, grown from two to four.

✶

It was Aetherion who, after a long pause, addressed Elyndra directly.

"My lady. We were not adventurers passing through. We were sent. By a council that does not wish to be named in waystation clinics. And we were not the only such party. There are at least three more, somewhere inside or around the Vale, who have similarly failed to return. If your imperial commission gives you the standing to find them, I would suggest, with respect, that finding them is now the most useful thing two such gifted healers in the empire could do."

Elyndra met his gaze. Then she met Seraphina's. Then she nodded.

"Then tomorrow," she said, "we ride."

Captain Holvar, at the door, said nothing. But the very careful neutrality on his face had become, by some small craft, even more carefully neutral than it had been before.

✶ ✶ ✶

End of Chapter Three

To be continued…

Chapter Four

Ambassador Lyriana

☙ ❧

~ ❧ ~

The next morning, the waystation woke at the kind of pace that only a place expecting guests to leave can produce.

By the second bell after dawn, the four of them stood in the courtyard with their horses already saddled and their packs already lashed. Aetherion Sol looked considerably better than a man who had nearly died three days before had any right to look. Valerius Drakon stood with the slight stiff favor of his right leg that would, in a week, be entirely gone. Indra and Sera were ready, as they had been ready since they had decided to be ready.

Elyndra had risen before any of them, in the grey hour before dawn, and walked alone in the small kitchen yard behind the waystation. She had drawn her great two-handed sword once, slowly, the way Venus had taught her — not for practice, only to remember the weight in her hands. Then she had sheathed it again and gone in to wake the others. She did not tell Seraphina she had done this. Seraphina, on the way to the horses, looked at her once and said nothing about it. There were some things that did not require saying.

Captain Holvar had assembled a small contingent of scouts to ride with them part of the way to the next waystation south. He was standing at the gate, conferring with one of them, when the commotion began.

✶

A green portal opened in the middle of the courtyard.

This was not, by itself, impossible. Portals of various sorts were a part of magical commerce in Elandris; mages of sufficient training could open and close them by appointment, and certain members of the diplomatic corps moved between distant cities by means of portals registered at official mage-stones. But green portals were rare. Green was a druidic color, the color of nature-magic, and there had been no druid of any standing recorded in the imperial registries for over a hundred and twenty years. The portal grew in the courtyard like an opening flower. It rose from the ground in a tendril of green light that unfurled into a circle the height of a tall woman. And through it stepped a tall woman.

A wood elf.

Wood elves, the textbooks said, had been extinct for two centuries. The last of their kind had withdrawn into the forests that no longer existed and had not been seen since. This wood elf, however, did not appear to have read the textbooks.

She stepped through the portal as if it were a door she opened every morning. She wore long greens and browns in the cut of a druid, with a circlet of living vines woven through her hair. The vines were still growing. Her hair was silver. Her eyes were spring-green. And she was, except for the faint antler-patterns traced down her temples, except for the way the moss seemed to gather at her footsteps, except for the way the courtyard's grass leaned faintly toward her as she walked — except for these small particulars — the exact image of Empress Lyriana of the Shadow Empire.

✶

Captain Holvar, a man who had been trained to handle the unprecedented by treating it as merely uncommon, stepped forward, hand near but not on his sword, and bowed. "My lady. You are welcome in the imperial waystations. I am Captain Holvar of the third post. May I ask your business?"

She returned his bow with the precision of a diplomat.

"Captain. I am Ambassador Lyriana. I have come from the Shadow Empire of another timeline, with greetings and with urgent news. Your world is facing an extinction event. I would be most grateful if you would take me to your leaders."

✶

Aetherion Sol moved first.

He did not move toward her. He moved toward the empty space between her and the rest of them, with the careful deliberateness of a man who had been an active emissary of high powers for longer than he had been a scholar. His hand rose. His lips shaped a word — a Spell of Verity, a working that in its more polite forms was used in court to detect lies in formal testimony.

A faint silver thread of light reached from his hand toward the wood elf. And then everything green in the courtyard moved.

The grass at the Ambassador's feet rose in a circle around her, blade by blade, each blade lifting as if called to attention. Pollen rose from every flower along the inner wall in a dense, soft, ascending cloud. The ivy that grew up the gatehouse pillars uncurled itself from the stones, slowly at first, then faster, in long ropes that arched into the air. And from beyond the wall, from the forest that pressed against the eastern side of the waystation, there came the deep, almost inaudible groan of trees beginning to lean. All of it — the grass and the pollen and the ivy and the unseen trees — oriented itself toward Aetherion Sol. Not threateningly. Not yet. Watchfully. The way an army watches a stranger who has just drawn a knife in front of a queen they happen to love. The wood elf raised one slender hand — not gestured in any obvious magical way, simply rising, palm out — and then lowered it again, and smiled.

"Mage Sol," she said. "I am Emissary of the Shadow Sovereign. You are amongst friends here. Please put away your spell of verity. You will find it tells you what you already know."

The grass settled. The pollen drifted back to the flowers. The ivy returned, more slowly, to its proper place along the gatehouse pillars.

Aetherion Sol's spell had not detected falsehood.

"…You know me, my lady," he said quietly.

"I know many things about your timeline that I would not, in another circumstance, claim aloud. But the introductions can wait. Time is of essence."

✶

Elyndra had been silent through all of it. So had Seraphina. They had been silent in the particular way that two people are silent when their minds are moving very quickly and the world is suddenly arranging itself into a pattern they have been looking for without knowing it.

And then Aetherion Sol, who had been studying the wood elf with the careful attention of a man whose only remaining defenses were the ones inside his own head, turned to Elyndra.

"My lady," he said. "Forgive me. The scroll you carry. The black-wax one. Bound with the Sovereign's personal seal."

Elyndra had not mentioned the scroll to him, or to Valerius. She had not mentioned it to anyone since the throne room. She blinked once.

"You can see it through the satchel?"

"I can feel it. Mages of a certain seniority can. It is — it is humming, my lady. Since the Ambassador arrived. The seal recognizes her."

Aetherion turned back to the wood elf. "The Shadow Black Seal," he said. "It does not, as the common histories suggest, command merely the Shadow Sovereign's discreet assets. It is a covenant. It binds the Sovereign's personal word to the bearer, across every authority in any region where the Sovereign's writ extends — and there are, by certain old accounts, more such regions than the imperial atlases acknowledge. I have read the records that exist. They do not entirely make sense. Until today."

He looked at the Ambassador with the steady regard of a man rearranging his understanding of the world in real time.

"You are one of the authorities the seal commands. Aren't you, my lady?" "I am," the Ambassador said. "Or — more precisely, my husband is. The seal's covenant network includes the unified Shadow Sovereign of my timeline. It was put in place four hundred years ago. Your Emperor and my husband negotiated the terms personally. They have not had cause to invoke them in three centuries. But the seal does, indeed, hum in my presence. It is doing so now."

Aetherion drew a breath that was not entirely steady.

"Then the Emperor knew," he said. "Today's arrival was not unanticipated by the throne. The scroll the Empress gave you, Lady Dawnshield, was prepared for this contingency long before either of us was born."

Elyndra was very quiet for a moment. Then she pressed her palm briefly against the satchel at her hip, the way one presses a hand against a horse's neck to feel that it is breathing.

"Then we ride to the capital," she said. "We have an ambassador who looks like our empress, a seal that has been waiting for this hour for four hundred years, and a world that is, by her account, ending. We do not take that to the next waystation. We will take her home and make our first report."

She turned to the wood elf.

"Ambassador Lyriana. We are imperial agents under the seal of the Shadow Sovereign himself. Will you ride with us to the imperial capital? We can guarantee your safety and your audience."

The wood elf inclined her head with the same diplomat's precision.

"I would be honored, Lady Dawnshield."

"…You know our names also."

"Of you in particular, my lady, I know a great deal. We will speak of it on the road if there is time. There may not be."

✶

They departed within the hour.

Aetherion Sol and Valerius Drakon, both still recovering, rode at the steady relay pace that ordinary waystation horses would carry them, with Captain Holvar's contingent of scouts as their escort. They would arrive at the capital within four days. Elyndra, Seraphina, and the Ambassador rode on the imperial express line — the small set of mage-bonded horses kept at each way-substation for the very rare emergencies that justified moving faster than nature had intended any rider to move. At the gate, Captain Holvar stood at attention as the three of them mounted. He had not, in all his thirty years of service, escorted a green portal across his courtyard. He had not, in any of those thirty years, written a duty log that included the phrase "extinction event." He had a feeling he was going to be writing one tonight, and that he was going to spend the rest of his career, however long it proved to be, not entirely explaining to himself what he had seen.

Elyndra paused her horse at the gate and looked down at him.

"Captain Holvar."

"My lady."

"You took us in. You asked us to save a stranger's life. You stood in a doorway through which two imperial healers performed a working you were never going to write about correctly. I want you to know that we noticed."

Captain Holvar, for the first time in their acquaintance, allowed his very careful neutrality to slip. He bowed his head — not the bow of a man to a superior, but the bow of a soldier to fellow soldiers who had passed through his post and were now going somewhere he could not follow.

"Ride well, Lady Dawnshield. Ride well, Lady Vale. Ride well, Ambassador. I will keep the lamps lit, in case any of you come back this way."

"We will," Elyndra said.

And she meant it. There were some debts the Vanguard would owe, and the third waystation, with its captain who had asked the right question at the right time, was already one of them.

✶

By the second waystation, the rolling hills of the eastern marches had given way to the long western road that led toward the heart of the empire. By the fourth, the high crystal spires of the imperial capital were beginning to be visible on the western horizon. By the sixth, they were inside the outer ring of the city, and the moonflowers were beginning to open for the night.

They reached the palace gates at the third bell of evening.

✶

Lady Elara was the senior consultant to the Empress and had been so for sixty-three years. She was a tall and slender elf of imperturbable composure, fine bones, and the kind of quiet competence that ran the imperial household in ways that ordinary nobles never quite understood. When the three of them were brought to her chambers under escort, she looked at them, looked at the Ambassador, looked at the Ambassador again, and said only: "Their Majesties will see you now."

It was the fastest audience Elyndra had ever heard arranged in her life.

✶

The Crystal Throne Room had been lit, even at this hour, for what was clearly an unscheduled state matter. Empress Lyriana sat in her formal posture. Emperor Amon sat beside her, his four mithril orbs in their slow patient circuits, his storm-cloud eyes set somewhere between the door and the floor, as though he had been waiting for something he had hoped would not arrive.

Seraphina and Elyndra entered first, bowed, and stepped to one side.

The Ambassador entered next.

She did not bow. She walked the length of the great chamber with the unhurried tread of a woman who had been in this room before, in another life, on another day, and remembered the rugs.

Empress Lyriana's spring-green eyes followed her down the chamber, and the very careful neutrality of her face was for the first time in Elyndra's memory entirely insufficient to its task.

The Empress went pale.

Emperor Amon rose from his throne.

He did this so seldom, in a formal audience, that the gesture itself caused the assembled clerks at the back of the chamber to set down their pens.

He walked down the three broad steps of the dais. He stopped at the bottom step. He inclined his head.

"Lyriana," he said. "Ambassador Lyriana — daughter of Federation Queen Ilaria in the unified timeline. My sister-in-law. You are welcome in this house and in this hour, though I had hoped, for many reasons, that the hour would not come."

✶

Empress Lyriana did not, for a long moment, move.

"Amon," she said. Her voice carried the diplomatic cadence she always used in audience, but there was a thin tremor running underneath it that Elyndra had never heard before. "You know her?"

"I know her, yes."

"She is me."

"Yes," the Emperor said gently. "And no. She is you, and she is not you. She is from three timelines interconnected. She has been my sister-in-law for longer than any treaty in this hall, though you have not had cause to meet her until now."

✶

And then a voice spoke that did not come from any visible person in the chamber. It came from beside the Empress's throne — from a thin pillar of pale light that, in the moment of its arrival, had not been there at all, and in the next moment was. The pillar resolved itself, with the unhurried elegance of a presence that had decided to make itself seen for the duration of a conversation only, into the figure of a very tall, very old, silver-haired elven woman in robes of indigo and starlight.

Queen Ilaria. The Federation Queen. The mother of every Lyriana that the cosmos had ever produced.

"Amon," she said, and her voice was the voice that the cold winter mountains might have used if cold winter mountains had ever chosen to speak. "These are things we do not speak of."

The Emperor turned to her without flinching.

"Lyriana," he said, "we have spoken of them before, between us, on quiet evenings when no one was listening. We have not spoken of them in this hall because you have preferred it so, and I have honored your preference for four hundred years. I have limited the interdimensional travels. I have kept the borders quiet. I have done what you asked."

A pause. Then, softly: "But I have been feeling, for some time, that things are coming to us that we cannot avoid. Today, they have come."

✶

Ambassador Lyriana looked, for one long moment, at her counterpart on the throne. The two Lyrianas — one in the diplomatic braid of an empress who governed by protocol, one in the living vines of a druid who governed by something else — regarded each other with an expression that was on neither of their faces, exactly, but was somewhere in the space between them.

Then the Ambassador spoke.

"Empress Lyriana of the Empire of Elandris. I bring the formal greeting of my husband — who in our timeline holds the office that your husband holds in yours, the Shadow Sovereign of our unified empire. He invites you, by his own seal and his own word, to visit our timeline. I am here to guarantee your safe passage. I will travel with you, and I will return you, and no harm shall come to you in any region under the Shadow Emperor of nine known worlds — now including the Shadow Empire and the Light Empire."

A pause.

"And there are things you should see, Empress, before any of us can decide what is to be done about the extinction event that approaches us all."

✶

Empress Lyriana looked at her husband. Her husband looked back at her. For perhaps the first time in their four hundred years of marriage, neither of them spoke first. The Empress finally spoke. Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.

"I will need a night to consider. And, Ambassador. Sister."

She tried the word once, carefully, the way one tries a word in a language one has been told all one's life one did not speak.

"We will speak privately. Tomorrow morning. In the moonflower garden." The Ambassador bowed.

Queen Ilaria's pillar of pale light wavered — neither approving nor disapproving, simply present.

Emperor Amon returned slowly to his throne.

And Elyndra and Seraphina, who had departed the imperial city six days ago with two scrolls and a quiet errand, found that they were now, for the second time in a week, standing in a throne room that was rearranging itself around them.

The Venus Vanguard had its leader, its heart, and its four. And now, somehow, it had stepped into the center of a story none of them had been told they were in.

✶ ✶ ✶

End of Chapter Four

To be continued…