The Fall of an Empire

  Once upon a time, a great empire stood at the center of a universe called Astralinum, and it was the kind of place that made people believe, without needing to be told, that it had always existed and always would.

  Alicia didn't think about any of that. She was nine years old and running through the golden rice fields with her two best friends, and the rice was taller than her shoulders in places, and the evening light was turning everything the colour of warm copper, and there was nowhere else she wanted to be.

  She was a beautiful child in the way that children are beautiful when they are entirely themselves, when nothing has yet taught them to be careful about it. Her smile had a quality that made people stop mid-sentence, not because it was extraordinary, but because it was so complete. She wore it easily, without knowing she wore it at all.

  Every day she left the palace to find her friends. The guards knew better than to make it a production. She would wave at them and they would wave back and she would disappear into the fields, and for a few hours the empire could get along without its princess.

  When evening came, her friends waved goodbye at the path that led back to their homes, and Alicia waved back, watching them go with the uncomplicated contentment of someone who knows tomorrow will bring exactly the same thing.

  She did not know it was the last wave she would ever give them.

  The spaceship appeared without warning, which is how catastrophe always appears when it intends to be thorough. It hit the ground at the edge of the city with a sound that rearranged the air and set every bird in Astralinum moving at once. The shockwave reached the rice fields as a pressure wave that bent the stalks flat, and Alicia stumbled and caught herself and looked at the smoke rising over the city walls and understood, without knowing how she understood, that everything had changed.

  The bloodshed began before she reached the city gate. Alien creatures moved through the streets with a systematic efficiency that suggested they had done this before, to other places, and found it uncomplicated. They were large, each one built with a logic that had nothing to do with any biology Alicia recognised. Six arms, each one purposeful.

  Alicia's mother found her at the edge of the square and pulled her close and ran, and for a moment it seemed like running might be enough. Then the beam found her mother and her mother went down and did not get up, and Alicia stood alone in the square with the largest creature she had ever seen filling her entire field of vision.

  She did not scream. She was too afraid to scream. She stood completely still in the particular frozen state of a child whose mind has received more information than it currently knows what to do with.

  Then her father arrived.

  Wulthen, King of Astralinum, moved through the chaos with the unhurried authority of someone who had spent thirty years making difficult things look manageable. He was known across most of the known universe as the ruler who had brought more domains under unified governance than anyone before him, not through cruelty but through the specific combination of will and patience that tends to outlast opposition. He was also, at this particular moment, a father standing between his daughter and something that wanted to end them both.

  The creature looked at him with the evaluating attention of something that respects very little but is willing to assess.

  "I am Chakka," it said, in perfect human speech, which was somehow more unsettling than if it hadn't been. "Are you the human who challenged me? The one who pushed into my domains?"

  "That was between us," Wulthen said. His voice was level. "This place has nothing to do with that. These are civilians. This is my home."

  Chakka's response was not addressed to the argument. It was addressed to the general principle of what happened when something larger encountered something smaller that had forgotten the difference. "Your universe will become a dead universe. I will leave nothing. I want you to see how thoroughly I surpass you before you stop being able to see anything at all."

  Wulthen's expression did not change. He had heard versions of this speech before, from smaller mouths, in smaller rooms. It had never become more interesting.

  He turned to Alicia. Behind her, he opened a portal. It was small and dark and it led somewhere else, somewhere that was not here, and that was the only qualification that mattered. Her two friends appeared from the edge of the square, pulled by the current of the portal's draw, and he looked at them with the specific look of a parent giving instructions that will not be repeated.

  "Take her through. Both of you. Now."

  "Papa—" Alicia said.

  "If fate allows it," he said, "I will come back to you." He said it the way he said things he had fully considered and made peace with. Not as a promise. As a statement about the future that left room for the future to be what it was going to be regardless.

  Her friends pulled. The portal took them.

  Wulthen turned back to Chakka and raised his sword and brought down everything he had in a single slash that had ended other things on other days. It passed through Chakka's field as though it were air.

  Chakka looked at the sword with mild interest. "That won't help. You know what the only thing that can damage me is."

  "Yes," Wulthen said. He already knew. He had known since the creature arrived. He lowered the sword and walked forward anyway, because the alternative was standing still, and he had never once stood still in his life.

  Chakka raised the staff. The explosion that followed was the kind that doesn't leave a before and after. It left only after.

  A New Beginning

  The portal opened somewhere above a coastline. Alicia hit the sand with the full weight of everything that had just happened and lay there and the waves came in and went out with the complete indifference of water to the events of land.

  Down the beach, a couple was walking in the late afternoon. They had the comfortable silence of two people who have run out of things to argue about and found what remains to be better. The wife had just been saying something about children, about nine years of hoping and the particular tiredness that comes from hoping something very specific for a very long time, when they saw the a girl on the sand.

  Beside the unconscious girl lay a sword half-buried in the sand. The man pulled it free and read the engraving on the blade: Adelicia De Wulthane. He looked at his wife. She was already kneeling beside the girl, her hand on the child's cheek, her expression one that he recognised as the end of a very long question.

  They carried her home.

  When Alicia opened her eyes, she was in a room she didn't recognise, in a bed that was soft in a way that felt like someone had put thought into it, and two faces she had never seen were watching her with the careful attention of people who are trying very hard not to make sudden movements.

  "Where am I?" she said.

  "You're home," the woman said gently. "We're your mother and father. You had a fall. You lost your memory. But you're safe now."

  Alicia lay there for a moment, looking at the ceiling. Something in the back of her mind was moving in the dark, too far down to reach. She reached for it and it moved further.

  She nodded. "Okay," she said. Because what else do you say, when the only other option is the absence of an explanation, and you are nine years old and someone is looking at you with that particular quality of love that doesn't need to have been earned yet?

  She grew up in that house, in that town, with those parents, and she loved them with the complete and uncomplicated love of someone who has never been given a reason not to.

  Five years passed. Alicia was thirteen and attending high school in Victoria, and the school had discovered within the first week that she was the kind of student who made other students look at their own notes differently.

  She ranked first on her initial assessment without appearing to try, which was the part that bothered people most. She was genuinely diligent, not performatively diligent, which was a distinction most people failed to make, and she helped her teachers with the straightforward willingness of someone who found helping satisfying rather than strategic. They trusted her early and gave her the class presidency before the term was a month old.

  The problem was that respect and friendliness are not the same thing, and the students around her had confused them. She ate alone not because anyone disliked her but because she occupied a category that people observe from a distance, and distance is very comfortable until you realise it has replaced proximity entirely.

  She sat with her lunch and her textbook and told herself she didn't mind, which is what you tell yourself when you do mind but can't see what to do about it.

  Two girls sat down beside her without asking permission, which was the correct approach.

  "Hello! Nice to meet you! My name is Alice! What's yours?"

  Alicia looked up. The girl who had spoken had the specific energy of someone who had decided before entering a room that the room was going to be good. Beside her, half a step behind, was a smaller girl in the process of being pushed forward by Alice's hand between her shoulder blades.

  "H-hi. My name is Jasmine. N-nice to meet you."

  "Forgive her," Alice said cheerfully, "she's a bit shy. We're a pair. The question is: do you want to be a trio? We'd like to eat with you, if you'll have us."

  Alicia laughed before she meant to. It came out of her the way things come out when you've been holding yourself at a careful distance from wanting something and then someone simply offers it.

  "Yes," she said. "Please. I've never had the chance to be friends with anyone here."

  Alice looked pleased in the way of someone whose plan has gone exactly as planned. Jasmine sat down and immediately began organising the contents of her lunch box with a focus that suggested she found the arrangement meaningful.

  From that day, the three of them were inseparable in the particular way of people who have found each other at the right moment and have enough sense to hold on.

  Secrets in the Basement

  The conversation came through the kitchen wall late at night, when Alicia was on her way to get water and stopped in the corridor because she heard her name.

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  Her mother's voice, quiet and careful: "How long do we keep this from her? She's such a good child. I don't want to lose her."

  Her father, steadier: "Maybe she'll find it herself one day. She's going to be someone great. I believe that."

  Alicia stood in the corridor for a moment longer than she needed to, and then walked back to her room without the water. She lay on her bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about the basement door her father had pointed at once when she was nine and said, simply and without elaboration, "Not that one."

  She had not questioned it at the time because nine-year-olds take the shape of the rules they're given without examining them closely. She was thirteen now and the shape of that rule had a different feel.

  At two in the morning, when the house had settled into the specific silence of people in deep sleep, she went downstairs. The basement door opened with the careful slowness of someone who has thought about which direction to turn the handle to minimise the sound. She went in.

  It smelled like old things and time, and in the dark the shapes of stored furniture and boxes made angular shadows. She was about to conclude that it was exactly what it appeared to be when she saw the light.

  On the far wall, a sword was mounted at a height that required a chair to reach. It was not glowing in the way that electrical things glow. It was doing something older than that, producing a light that had no obvious source, as though the metal itself remembered something luminous.

  She dragged a chair over, climbed up, and lifted the sword from its mount with both hands. It was heavier than she expected and lighter than it looked, which was a paradox she didn't have a word for. She turned it and found the inscription on the flat of the blade.

  Adelicia De Wulthane.

  She had been reading the name for perhaps three seconds when the light appeared on her forehead. Not from the sword. From her. She felt it as warmth before she saw it reflected in the blade's surface, and the surprise of it caused her to lose her balance on the chair and fall sideways, and the sound of her hitting the floor with the chair on top of her was unfortunately significant.

  Above, she heard the sounds of her parents waking.

  She left the sword on the floor, took the stairs two at a time, and was in her bed with her eyes closed and her breathing carefully measured before her parents' door opened.

  In the morning, her mother sat beside her at breakfast with the expression of someone who had heard something and wasn't certain what it was. "Did you hear a bang last night? Something downstairs?"

  "Nothing," Alicia said, looking at her toast. "I didn't hear anything."

  Her father said he'd probably imagined it. Her mother accepted this in the way that parents accept explanations that are technically possible. The conversation moved on.

  Alicia looked at the time and discovered she was going to be late, and adopted the slowest possible version of her morning routine in response, which was not a strategy that made logical sense but felt necessary. Her mother, eventually and with theatrical suffering, resorted to tickling, at which point Alicia was laughing too hard to continue being slow and the morning got moving.

  She fell asleep at her desk during third period. Her teacher pulled a light blanket from the supply cupboard and draped it over her shoulders and told the class to keep the noise down, assuming correctly that no student who ranked first and served as class president was falling asleep from anything other than excessive effort.

  At lunch, Alice arrived to find Alicia working with the focused urgency of someone compensating for a large deficit.

  "How much of that is there?" Alice said, looking at the stack.

  "I forgot it all yesterday and the teacher gave us more this morning." Alicia's eyes were the particular red of someone who has not slept adequately and is running on principle. "I need to finish it before tomorrow."

  Jasmine peered at her with the careful concern of someone who expresses care through practical questions. "Are you hungry? You should eat something."

  "I'll eat at home," Alicia said, which was what she said when she didn't want to stop moving.

  After school, Alice refused to let the day end there. She had something to show them, she said, and the specific confidence in her voice suggested it was the kind of thing that didn't benefit from being described in advance.

  The Summoners and the Nightmare

  The clearing was on the edge of a commercial district, between two buildings that faced each other across more open space than the neighbourhood would suggest. A crowd had gathered in a loose ring around two men standing at opposite ends of the space. The men had the stillness of people who had already had the argument that leads to this and were now past the talking part.

  "From today on," said the first man, "I'm going to beat you."

  The second man smiled with the specific pleasantness of someone in possession of information the other person lacks. "Let me give you a warning before we begin. I'm not here to fight. I'm here to kill."

  Both of them made movements with their hands that had the quality of language without being language, and the air responded. Two shapes tore themselves out of some other layer of reality and became present: a bear the size of a building, covered in scars, with claws that swept the ground just by existing; and a creature that was a dog from the waist down and a human from the waist up, carrying an axe that it handled with the ease of something that had been carrying axes its entire life.

  Alicia stepped back involuntarily. Alice caught her arm.

  "It's called Lfight," Alice said, with the authority of someone who has been here before. "Summoner versus summoner. Only certain people can do it, people who have whatever it is that makes this possible. It's famous. Competitions happen all over the country." She watched the monsters circle each other with genuine enthusiasm. "They're something, aren't they?"

  The fight was short and conclusive. The dog-creature's wielder read the bear's attack patterns quickly and exploited a gap that appeared on the third exchange, and the bear went down in a way that bears don't go down in nature. The crowd made the sound crowds make when a thing they were watching ends.

  The losing summoner stepped forward with his hand extended. He was smiling in the specific way of someone who has lost cleanly and is fine with it.

  The winning summoner looked at the hand. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun and shot the other man through the chest.

  The crowd's sound changed entirely.

  Alicia didn't process it for a moment. She watched the body hit the ground and said, very quietly, "Alice. Is that a rule? Is that part of it?"

  Alice had gone completely still. "No," she said. Her voice had lost all its earlier warmth. "No, that is not a rule. That's murder."

  They backed away carefully, the way you back away from something dangerous when sudden movement seems like the wrong choice. Jasmine had already taken three steps backward and was pulling at Alice's sleeve. Alicia was last to turn because the man's eyes had moved across the crowd and found her, specifically, with the directional certainty of someone who doesn't look at things accidentally.

  She ran.

  She didn't stop until she was home and in her room with the door locked and the blanket pulled up past her ears, which solved nothing but was the only available action that involved being covered.

  Her parents asked why she looked pale. She said she was fine, which was what people say when they have decided not to explain something.

  That night she dreamed the kind of dream that has the texture of memory rather than invention. She was somewhere dark and running, and the darkness had a shape she almost recognised, and somewhere behind her was the man with the gun, who in the logic of the dream became the dog-creature from the fight, and it was faster than she was. She was going to be caught, and she knew she was going to be caught, and then a man appeared from her left carrying a sword and removed the dog from the situation in a single clean motion.

  She wanted to thank him. She gathered flowers from the ground around her, which was possible in the dream in the way things are possible in dreams, and she chased after him. He turned when she called. He saw her. He took the flowers from her hands with a gentleness that surprised her.

  Then he was gone.

  Her mother's scream woke her.

  The Awakening

  She came out of her room already moving, because her mother's scream had been the specific pitch of something real, and Alicia had spent enough of her life being alert to that distinction.

  The man from the clearing was in her living room. He was not large, but he occupied the room the way dangerous things occupy spaces, filling more of it than his physical presence should account for. He had her parents in front of him and a gun in his hand and the easy patience of someone who has done this before in enough places that the variations no longer interest him.

  "Tell me where your daughter is," he was saying, "and we can skip the part where this gets worse."

  Her parents said nothing. Her father's jaw was set in the particular way of a man who has decided he will not be the one to make the next thing happen.

  "No!" Alicia said.

  The man looked at her. His expression suggested mild interest, the kind you feel when a complication resolves itself by arriving.

  He moved toward her. Her father caught his ankle and held it for exactly as long as it takes for someone to kick a man in the head hard enough to leave him unconscious, which was not very long.

  Alicia ran for the basement.

  She locked the door behind her and stood in the dark breathing hard and listening to the sound of him on the other side of it, testing it with his foot, once, then again, then deciding the methodical approach and working through the frame. She looked around the room in the dark and her eyes found the sword on the floor where she'd left it the night before.

  The door came open.

  "Forgive me," the man said, stepping in, his voice carrying the specific courtesy of someone who has rehearsed their manner of doing things they've decided to do regardless. "I kill for fun. Nothing personal. I just enjoy the work."

  He raised the gun and fired.

  Her hand moved. Not in response to a decision. In response to something older than decision, something that had been in her arm longer than she had been conscious of her arm, and the sword was there and the bullet was not, and Alicia looked at her own hand as though it belonged to someone she was just meeting.

  He fired again. Her hand moved again. The bullet went somewhere that was not her.

  The man's expression moved from professional courtesy to something more interested. He stepped back and made the gesture and the dog-creature came through from wherever it had been waiting, and it destroyed the basement door completely on its way in and half the surrounding wall with it.

  Alicia moved on instinct and managed to be where the axe wasn't, twice, three times, and then the man shot her in the left hand. The pain arrived a moment after the impact, sharp and clear and total, and she went down on one knee and the monster raised its axe above her.

  The light appeared on her forehead. She felt it as heat and intention simultaneously, and it moved down through her arm and into the sword, and she swung.

  The sound was not a sword sound. It was a lion, or something that had never been a lion but had discovered it could make that sound, and the pressure of the swing severed the monster's hand at the wrist and sent it fifteen feet in the wrong direction. The creature reeled back.

  The man came at her directly. She met him with one good hand and one that she could feel but not fully trust, and she parried what he threw at her with the particular focus of someone who has run out of options and found, in the running out, a strange quality of clarity. The police arrived. Then the military. The man looked at the number of people entering the space and made a calculation and left through the same gap he had entered.

  Alicia sat down on the ruined floor. She had been planning to sit down before the last of her balance went, but the last of her balance went slightly faster than planned, and she was unconscious before she finished the motion.

  The Truth Revealed

  She woke up in a hospital bed with her parents on either side of her and Alice and Jasmine in chairs against the wall and her class teacher standing by the window with the expression of someone who was not sure whether this was an appropriate place for a teacher to be but had come anyway.

  She looked at her left hand first. The wound was gone. Completely and entirely gone, the skin smooth and unscarred in the specific way of skin that has never been broken. She looked at it for a long moment.

  "You gave us a considerable fright," her father said. His voice was doing several things at once.

  The government provided a new house. Larger than the old one, in a quieter street, with a room for Alicia that had a window that caught the afternoon light in a way the old one hadn't. Alice and Jasmine lived three houses down, which Alice announced with the satisfaction of someone who had arranged it personally, which she had not, but the coincidence had the same energy.

  When the unpacking was done and the house had settled into the particular quiet of a place that is becoming a home, Alicia sat her parents down. She sat across from them and looked at them with the directness she usually reserved for examinations.

  "I need you to tell me what you've been keeping from me. I promise I'm not going to be angry. I promise I'm not going to stop loving you. But I need to know."

  Her parents looked at each other. There was a whole conversation in the look, the kind that has been happening between two people for so long that it no longer requires words. Then her father exhaled and told her.

  They had found her on a beach. She had been alone and unconscious and there was a sword beside her with a name on it that was not a name from any language he recognised. She hadn't remembered anything when she woke up. They had told her she was home because they wanted it to be true, and then they had made it true, and nine years had passed.

  Alicia sat with this for a moment. She looked at her hands. She looked at her parents, at the specific texture of their faces, all the mornings and dinners and homework sessions and illness and arguments and ordinary Tuesdays accumulated in the lines around their eyes.

  She stood up and hugged them. Both at once, with both arms, for a long time.

  "You raised me," she said into her father's shoulder. "You are my parents. That is not a smaller thing because of what you just told me. It is exactly the same size." She felt her mother shaking against her and held tighter. "You don't have anything to apologise for."

  They stayed like that until the crying had gone through its course and come out the other side into the quieter country that exists beyond it.

  Later, when the house was dark and her parents were asleep, Alicia lay in her new room looking at the ceiling and turned the name over in her mind. Adelicia De Wulthane. She said it quietly, once, and it sat in the air of the room with the weight of something that had been waiting to be spoken for a long time.

  She did not know yet what she was going to do with it. But she knew, with the particular certainty of someone who has just learned the shape of the question they are going to spend their life answering, that she was going to find out.