The Roots of the World

  The fog was the first sign that something was wrong. Not the ordinary fog that sometimes crept in from the river at dawn, thin and cold and gone by midmorning, but something denser and more deliberate, the kind that pressed against the skin and reduced the world to a radius of a few feet in every direction. It had swallowed Dusan whole.

  Mizi stopped at the edge of it. Beside him, General Afamiszt's soldiers slowed their advance instinctively, weapons raised at nothing they could see.

  The Black Dragon descended from above, its tricolor scales dimmed in the grey light, its movements careful in a way that dragons did not usually move. It had the quality of something very large that had recently been made to feel afraid.

  "The Evil has arrived," it said. Its voice was lower than usual, as though speaking too loudly might bring attention from something listening inside the fog. "He came for the Ancient Tree. We tried to stop him but the fog took our sight. In the sky, we are formidable. In a cloud we cannot see through, we are stumbling and blind."

  Mizi looked into the white wall ahead of him. He could feel the shape of the village inside it. The second bridge, the path that ran alongside the elder's house, the way the ground sloped gently toward the center where the Ancient Tree stood. He had walked these paths in darkness before, on nights when the generator was out and he was late coming back from somewhere he hadn't told his mother about.

  "I don't need my eyes to move through my home," he said. "Follow me. Stay close and don't stop moving."

  They moved in a group through the white silence. Mizi navigated by instinct and memory, choosing paths by the feel of the ground under his boots, the texture of a fence post under his hand, the particular way the air changed when a building was close on the right. Around him he heard the careful footsteps of soldiers and the soft rhythmic sound of the Black Dragon's breath behind his left shoulder.

  General Afamiszt fell into step beside him. He was the kind of man who processed tension by filling silence with useful questions.

  "Tell me about this village," he said quietly. "The tree. The history. Whatever you know."

  Mizi kept walking. "My father told me pieces of it when I was small. He said that this whole area was once a mountain, and the mountain was hollow inside, with its own sky and its own light. One opening near the summit let sunlight through, and where that light fell, the Ancient Tree grew. Enormous. Its leaves produced their own glow and lit the interior like a permanent afternoon. Other trees followed. An ecosystem formed beneath the stone." He paused to orient himself at an intersection he recognised by the uneven paving. Left. "At the time, humans and dragons were at war. Humans were dying in large numbers. The tribes of the hinterland performed rituals, sacrificed what they had, asked their God of Darkness in Apocrypha for intervention. Nothing answered. Then one tribe found the mountain and went inside, and the Ancient Tree gave them something no ritual had produced: the ability to understand dragon speech. To speak it back. They were the first humans to make peace with the dragons, and the war ended."

  The language expert's voice came from somewhere behind him. "May I add something?"

  Idham's voice, dry and stressed: "We brought a historian to the battlefield."

  Afamiszt: "He has useful knowledge. Let him speak."

  The expert moved forward through the fog until he was within earshot. "The hinterland tribes who worshipped the God of Darkness carried a grudge against the mountain tribe for abandoning their faith. Civil war followed. It ran for four years and soaked the mountain in blood." His voice dropped. "My colleague and I spent two years studying a book written by one of three friends who fled when their village was destroyed. The three of them were surrounded on a hill by members of the cannibal clan. Two of the three chose survival over loyalty. They stepped aside. The third was taken. He was killed and consumed, and what remained of him was offered to the God of Darkness."

  A pause. The fog pressed in from all sides.

  "Almost immediately after the ritual, something fell from the sky. Dozens of asteroids, striking the earth in sequence. The cannibal clan was wiped out completely. The mountain itself was destroyed. Only the Ancient Tree survived the collapse, its roots too deep and its nature too old to be unmade by falling stone. The tribes of the Khusuf Empire eventually migrated here, built a village over the ruins, and called it Dusan. They didn't worship the tree. They simply lived beside it."

  Mizi said nothing for a moment. He thought of his father sitting on the porch at night, telling this story in the measured voice he used when he wanted something to be remembered.

  Then a voice came from inside the fog. Not from any direction exactly, from everywhere at once, with the particular resonance of something that had been waiting a very long time to say what it was about to say.

  "And after they betrayed me, they lived peacefully." The voice was not loud, but it needed no volume. It had weight. "I was reborn in Apocrypha. I grew up in misery. And I have had a very long time to think about it."

  The Return of the Prince

  The fog thinned in one place, like a curtain pulled partially back, and in the clearing ahead the Ancient Tree's canopy was visible above the white. Sitting in its branches with the casual posture of someone who has already decided how this goes, was Ming Feng.

  He looked exactly as Mizi almost remembered him. The face that was familiar without being placeable, the particular quality of someone who had once been a person he knew before something had been done to that person that could not be undone. The X-shaped scar on his forehead was new, or rather it was old, it had been earned somewhere in a sky above a city made of clouds that Mizi could almost but not quite see when he looked directly at the memory.

  His head throbbed.

  "Hi, Mizi." Ming Feng dropped from the branch and landed on the ground without any particular drama, the way someone steps off a low curb. "I thought it might take you longer to find your way through the fog. You've disappointed me slightly." He tilted his head, one finger pointing to the X scar. "Do you remember this? I've carried it since you gave it to me. I thought it was appropriate to keep."

  "What do you want?" Mizi said.

  "What I have always wanted," Ming Feng said. "The same thing I wanted when I came to Nagnayak looking for friends. The same thing I wanted when I told Alesten how I felt and she looked at me the way people look at problems they don't know how to remove. The same thing I wanted when I was on a hill surrounded by people who intended to eat me, and the two people I trusted most in my life turned their backs and walked away." His voice hadn't changed temperature. It was the flatness of something that had burned through every available emotion years ago and was now running on structure alone. "I wanted to matter. To have the story go differently. And since it wouldn't go differently, I have decided to end it."

  He moved.

  The speed was wrong for a human being, too fast and with too little preparation, no gathering of weight or shifting of stance to indicate the beginning of the motion. He crossed the distance to Mizi and the kick connected before Mizi had finished processing that it was coming, and Mizi went sideways through the air and hit the ground rolling. Idham lurched forward and Ming Feng struck him once in the stomach without looking, still walking, and Idham folded.

  Ming Feng whistled. A single clear note.

  The fog thickened from grey to white to something that had no colour left in it at all. And inside it, from too many directions to track, came the sounds of the people Mizi had come here with, and none of the sounds were good.

  "Go." The Black Dragon's voice, close and urgent. "To the tree. I will hold this position as long as I am able. Go now, Mizi."

  Mizi ran.

  The fog was absolute and he navigated by feel and the dim pull of a single firefly that appeared from nowhere and moved ahead of him at exactly the pace he needed, just fast enough to follow, patient enough to wait when he stumbled. He followed it with both hands out and the sounds of the battle behind him receding into the white, and when the bark of the Ancient Tree came up under his palms he pressed his whole body against it and stopped moving.

  The tree was warm. Not like stone or wood retaining daytime heat, but warm the way a living thing is warm, with the specific temperature of something that has been alive for longer than the concept of cold has existed. He could feel the grain of it under his hands and the slow enormous pulse of it moving through the bark.

  "I need your help," he said. Not loudly. The tree was close enough that he didn't need to project. "The fog. My friends. Whatever power you have to give. I'm asking for it."

  The ground moved.

  A root emerged from the soil beside his feet, slow and deliberate, curling upward in the way something curls when it is offering rather than attacking. Resting in the curve of it was a knife. Not large, not ornate, but shimmering with the specific light of something that has been held in the earth for a very long time and has taken on the quality of that place, a rainbow pressed into a blade, shifting slowly through colours that had no names.

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  He pulled it free.

  The fog dissolved. Instantly, completely, as though it had been fabric and someone had pulled a thread, and then the village was visible again in all its damage and the people in it were visible too, his friends on the ground, soldiers scattered, dragons wheeling uncertainly in the suddenly clear sky.

  He saw Ming Feng.

  He drove the knife into the earth, blade-first, and held the handle. He felt the tree's connection through the metal and through the ground and through his own hands, and the last traces of fog vanished from the corners of the village like water burning off a hot surface. Ming Feng raised a hand and the fog tried to reassemble and the tree pushed back through Mizi's grip on the knife and the fog gave up.

  Ming Feng looked at the knife in the ground and his expression shifted from contempt to calculation to something that required more effort to control.

  He whistled again, a longer note.

  The sky above Dusan turned the colour of an old bruise. A gate opened in it, ragged at the edges and wrong in the way that openings into Apocrypha were always wrong, and through it came the army, the gargoyles and the spirits and the shapes that had no names that matched their forms, thousands of them pouring through in a stream that showed no sign of ending.

  The Final Apotheosis

  Mizi fired the watch at Ming Feng. The shot was clean and Ming Feng stepped around it with the unhurried ease of someone who has had a very long time to study the person shooting at him. He advanced through two more shots the same way, reading each one before it arrived, and then he reached Mizi and broke the shield with a strike that came from a direction the shield wasn't designed to handle, downward, with a force that had mana behind it, and the watch's defensive field shattered in fragments of dissipating light.

  What followed was not a fight in any useful sense of the word. It was Ming Feng demonstrating what several centuries of accumulated grievance and Apocryphan power looked like when applied to a single target. He hit Mizi until breathing became a problem, until staying upright became a project that required full concentration, until the ground was the only reliable surface available. He reached down and pulled the Rainbow Knife from the earth with no particular effort and held it, and the mana that moved through him afterwards was visible, dark and enormous and restructuring the air around him.

  Mizi lay on his back and looked at the sky above Dusan and tasted copper and felt, underneath the pain, something else. Something that was not going to stay underneath it.

  He stood up.

  He did not decide to stand up. His body made the decision before his mind ratified it, driven by something that was not optimism and was not strategy, but was closer to a refusal so deep it had become involuntary. The light on his forehead was painful now, genuinely hot, and it was spreading downward through his chest, and when it reached his heart it stopped spreading and simply intensified.

  He rose into the air.

  The pulse of golden light that came out of him did not feel like a weapon. It felt like a breath held too long finally released, and it moved outward in a sphere that touched everything within its radius and left half of the spirit army as dissipating particles. The other half regrouped. Ming Feng looked at him with an expression that had finally moved past contempt into something more complicated.

  They came together in the air above the village, and the fight this time was closer because Mizi had nothing left to protect except the fact of the fight itself. No shield. No range. Only the watch sword and the anger and the light that kept insisting on coming out of him despite everything.

  Ming Feng was faster. The knife made him faster and stronger and his mana had the quality of something that had been stored for centuries, dense and pressurized. He got inside Mizi's guard repeatedly and each time he did he made it count. Mizi fell again, this time from a significant height, and the Black Dragon caught him before the impact could remove the problem from Ming Feng's list permanently.

  He hit the ground on his knees, vomiting blood, watching through diminishing vision as his friends were pressed back, as the dragons absorbed punishment from opponents their fire could not touch, as Ming Feng rose above it all with the Rainbow Knife held in one hand and the dark sphere of his gathered attack forming in the other, large enough to end every living thing in the village.

  Two cards fell from somewhere above him.

  They came down slowly, unhurried, settling into his open hands with the gentle precision of things that had been aimed very carefully from a long distance. He looked at them. On one, a sword. On the other, a face he recognised because it was almost his own, slightly older, wearing scars that hadn't happened yet.

  He held the cards and the floodgates opened.

  Nagnayak came back. All of it. The cloud bridges and the palace and the Empress laughing in the garden and the Emperor losing a sword fight and pretending he hadn't. ZaZuZ's tricolor scales catching the light on the riverbank. The undead at the gate and the soul that drifted too close to the chaos. Alesten at the pond with her umbrella tilted to cover her face, and then tilted back, and then her name spoken for the first time in that careful quiet voice. Her hand going still. Her voice: don't forget me. The verse on the burning ground: he found you lost, and he guided you.

  He looked toward the treeline. Aley stood at its edge, mask removed, wearing the face they apparently shared. He raised one hand, thumb extended, in a gesture so mundane it would have been funny under any other circumstances. Then he stepped backward into the space between moments and was gone.

  Mizi looked at the watch.

  He slotted both cards.

  "Integrity Clock: Complete Form."

  The red and blue came together through him simultaneously, not sequential but parallel, two currents occupying the same space without cancelling each other out, and the pain closed itself like a wound healing at speed and his feet left the ground and his left hand held a second sword that had not been there a moment ago, sapphire-coloured and casting light of its own. He was aware of his body in a way he had not been before, each part of it present and accounted for and functioning without the static of injury and exhaustion that had been the baseline for the past hour.

  Ming Feng looked at him. Something moved through his expression that he probably did not intend to show.

  He raised the dark sphere and let it go.

  The End of the Darkness

  Mizi moved toward it. Not away from it. Toward it, because distance from Ming Feng was a problem and distance to Ming Feng was the answer, and the only way to get there was through the thing coming at him.

  He carved through the remaining gargoyles as he went, both swords moving in the complementary arcs of someone who has stopped thinking about how to move and simply moved, and the gargoyles that connected with the blades departed from the battlefield in the particular way of things that have encountered something significantly more fundamental than themselves.

  They met in the center of the sky above Dusan, and the impact when they did was geological. The ground below registered it. Cracks ran through the earth from the epicenter in a pattern that the villagers would spend years finding new reaches of. The air between them was doing things air was not supposed to do.

  In the eye of it, Mizi became aware of a presence beside him. Not a weight or a sound. A warmth and a direction, a guiding pressure against the angle of both blades, small adjustments made by hands he couldn't see that each moved his attack slightly more toward the centre of Ming Feng's gathered darkness than he had managed alone.

  Alesten.

  He had not forgotten her voice, or the way her laughter sounded, or the exact expression she made when she was deciding to say something true that would embarrass her to say. He had been carrying all of it under the fog of the amnesia, and now he had it back and the weight of it was considerable and the warmth of it was more considerable still.

  "For freedom," he said. It was not a speech. It was the only sentence that covered everything he meant.

  Both swords went forward at the same moment. The light they carried met Ming Feng's darkness and for a long second they were equal, the two forces pressing against each other with the precise and terrible equality of things that have been building toward this moment for a very long time. Then the light found the edge of the dark and followed it inward, and Ming Feng's expression in the last fraction of the last second was not rage.

  It was the face of someone who had been waiting for something to end and was finally receiving that.

  The explosion that followed was not experienced by anyone on the ground as an explosion. It was experienced as a sudden vast quietness, a held breath released, and then a light in the upper atmosphere that lingered for several minutes after, and then the return of ordinary sound, birdsong and wind and the specific creak of the Ancient Tree's branches settling.

  Ming Feng was stardust somewhere beyond the edge of the atmosphere, scattered across the dark between the earth and the next nearest thing, finally at a distance from the world he had spent so long trying to break.

  A New Beginning

  Mizi fell from the sky like something that had given everything it had to give and had nothing left to argue with gravity about. The Black Dragon rose from below and caught him with a gentleness that its size made improbable, and carried him back down through the clearing air to where the villagers stood in the wreckage of their home, too wrung out to cheer and too relieved not to try.

  They set him down in the grass. His family came close, and his friends, and the soldiers who were still standing, and General Afamiszt who stood back a little and looked at this boy who had just restructured the upper atmosphere with his bare hands and said nothing because there was nothing adequate to say.

  Mizi's eyes opened.

  He looked at the faces around him. His father's face. His mother's hands folded in her lap. Idham, whose expression was doing several things simultaneously. Azmei, whose eyes were red in a way she would later deny.

  He looked at all of them with a quiet and genuine confusion that had nothing performed about it.

  "Who are you?" he said. His voice was soft. Not frightened. Simply asking. "Where am I? Why am I here?"

  The silence that followed had weight and texture. Maryam made a sound she pressed her hand against immediately. Jalal's jaw moved without producing words. Idham looked at Azmei and Azmei looked at the ground.

  The Integrity Clock had taken what it needed to complete itself. It had not asked permission, and it had not left a receipt. The boy who had wielded it was whole, and breathing, and alive, and had no memory of the reason any of this had been necessary.

  They took him home. What remained of it.

  Years Later

  Habas City had become a different kind of place. The Vincerist towers had been dismantled over three years and the cleared land had become gardens and schools and open markets where people traded things they had made rather than distributed things they had been permitted to have. It took longer than anyone hoped and shorter than anyone feared, which was generally how recovery worked when the people doing it had survived something that gave them perspective on the difference between hard and impossible.

  In the town of Central PaP, a teenager walked to school with a backpack slung over one shoulder and the particular unhurried gait of someone who has nowhere pressing to be and is taking the long route because the long route passes the things worth looking at.

  He did not remember Nagnayak. He did not remember a city built from clouds or a palace at the center of it or a garden where an Empress laughed. He did not remember a girl with an umbrella who looked at him directly and said things that were true even when they were embarrassing. He did not remember a man with a scarred face who looked like him and left before saying whatever it was he had come to say.

  He lived quietly and ate dinner with his parents and went to school and came home and did his homework at a table by the window that caught the late afternoon light in a way he had always found, without knowing why, particularly good.

  But sometimes, on days when the rain had just stopped, he would be walking somewhere and a rainbow would appear in the gap between two clouds, and he would stop. He wouldn't know why he had stopped. He would look at the light moving through the water in the air and feel something in his chest that was not quite memory and not quite feeling, but occupied the space where both of those things met.

  He would stand there for a moment longer than made sense.

  Then he would smile, in the specific private way of someone who doesn't know what they're smiling at but trusts, without being able to explain the trust, that somewhere in another life, it had already been worth it.

  And he would keep walking.

  Lembran?a: Bravest Fire From Astralinium. In this chapter, I’ll be introducing a girl named Alicia and showing her progression before she eventually meets Mizi."

  "Remember to Keep Supporting me!"