The prince and I spent the rest of the day exploring the city, continuing our pre-stakeout fun from the previous evening. I have a feeling most of the things we’re doing he’s never done before, but always wanted to do. We’ve gone into all sorts of random shops and ventured down random alleys in all manner of neighborhood. We’ve toured colorful residential areas, an open bazaar, and three different public gardens.

We’re currently strolling in a busy part of the city with a public water-fountain, the ideal place for parents to leave their children while they work a market stall or browse for goods. A veritable series of geysers jet up from the ground, misting onlooking children and blasting the ones who wait directly over the geyser hole. One child squeals and falls over, the geyser hitting him squarely in his unclothed unmentionables.

The fountain is really just the front yard of a massive building with an ancient appearance. It feels distinctly out of place, with old stone and classical pillars holding up its squat girth. The trend these days is to build up, rather than out, but this building embodies an opposite principle of design.

“What building is that?” I ask, unable to get a good look at the letters engraved over the entrance.

“The public bathhouse,” Euryphel replies offhandedly. “As you can tell, it’s an old building. Actually predates the building of the capital.” He snorts. “Legends say the first princes built the capital here because they couldn’t bear to part with this here bathhouse.”

“Is it any good?” I ask.

“It’s supposed to be excellent,” the prince replies.

I frown. “Have you been?”

The prince’s stride falters for a moment. “No. I don’t have time for bathhouses.”

“We have time now,” I reply.

Euryphel gives me a sideways glance. “I don’t go to bathhouses.”

Why not? I wonder, surprised. The prince is attractive, confident...I can’t really see him being shy about visiting the baths.

“Is it because you’re the CP?” I ask, acronyming his title. “Too conspicuous?”

Euryphel sighs, turning back to face me. His expression looks thoughtful, like he’s trying to decide whether or not to tell me something.

“It’s not because I’m the ‘CP,’” he finally says, clearly entertained by the acronym. “It’s...a personal affair.”

I can’t help but be curious–the prince is normally content to answer any question I ask regarding his life as Crowned Prime and the workings of the SPU. Still, I decide to let the matter go: if he didn’t feel like telling me, I wouldn’t force it.

We conclude the day with another excellent dinner, this one apparently suggested by one of the Prime Guard (“a little bird told me,” being the prince’s exact words). The cozy shop offers Sereish cuisine: delicious curries over a sour, thin dough and flakey, savory scones. We eat our fill while exchanging stories and discussing the things we’ve seen throughout the day.

Somewhere along the way a bottle of white wine comes out, and we start to discuss other things, like our general hopes and dreams for the future. What I want to do when I leave the loop, what he wants to do to build up the SPU. Ways we can think of working together in the future, collaborating to build a better world, and methods to stabilize the region and safeguard the SPU’s recovering relationships with its neighbors.

We start the second bottle of wine, and at this point we’re asking each other all sorts of inane questions. We talk about our astral alignments, discuss the futility of truly understanding people who aren’t ourselves, and balk at the meaninglessness of life and the reticence of the gods to do anything productive. The questions continue their downward spiral until we’re asking each other our favorite color, our favorite animal, our spirit animal, about our first crushes, about the exact moment our voices decided to unexpectedly drop...we ramble on and on.

I check my glosSword watch for the time and recoil dramatically when the time reads as a quarter past ten in the evening. We’ve been talking for nearly four hours.

“We should go back,” I say, yawning. “It’s late. I bet the entourage I came with are confused out of their minds where I keep disappearing off to.”

The prince winces. “Yes, we should go back...I’ll have a guardsman call us a coach.” Whatever method the prince uses to communicate with the Guard, it certainly works: a few minutes later, an extra-large hovergloss–almost the size of a small bus–arrives at the nearest hangar point, a tower-like building jutting up into the network of spider-thread hovergloss wires. Thankfully, the hangar point has an elevator platform, and we don’t have to climb ten flights of stairs in our...impaired state.

“We’re going to feel this tomorrow,” the prince chuckles softly as he settles onto the bench of the hovergloss, spreading out on his back and bringing his feet up. I sit on the opposite bench, leaning my head against the side of the wall.

“What was in that wine?” I mutter.

“Well,” the prince replies, smilingly dumbly. “We finished two bottles. That’s one bottle for each of us.”

“Just one bottle!” I exclaim in mock indignation. “I feel like I’ve drank ten.” I sigh and lean a bit further back, practically already feeling the headache of the hangover I’ll have in the morning.

“Well, this is what one bottle will do to you,” Euryphel grunts, adjusting his position. He keeps slipping, and his alcoholic-incoordination prevents him from properly fixing his position. Every little adjustment is made clumsily, as though his limbs are lined with lead.

I’m similarly impaired, but at least I’m in a more secure position nestled in the corner. Poor Euryphel almost rolls off the bench with every acceleration of the hovergloss coach. Envisioning the SPU’s Crowned Prime, this is definitely not the image I’d think of.

“Speaking from experience?” I ask, tilting my head slightly more toward the back wall.

“The experience of others,” Euryphel quips. “I’d never do this normally, you know. Too many things to do.”

“I wish the real you could do things like this,” I murmur. “Why not just rent out a dilation chamber?”

Euryphel frowns. “People would watch the footage later. They’d wonder why I wasted a national resource on loafing around like a common man.”

That gets a rise out of me. “Hah! I knew it! I knew people would be watching this, me!”

“Well, they’re not watching you now, whoever ‘they’ is. The dilation factor is too strong. They’ll use a team of experts to parse the recording into a reel of highlights, since nobody has time to watch all the footage–years of footage in your case–on their own.”

I deflate like a popped balloon. “So they’re not really watching me...”

“No.”

I hiss softly. “There’s a way to destroy the recording after I exit the loop, isn’t there?”

The prince nods, or rather, rolls, his head horizontally across the seat. “I’ve been debating whether it’s best to destroy it. And on that note, I’m counting on you to do a few things.” The prince’s words are serious, but their delivery is lilted and slurred.

“You are?” I clearly haven’t heard any of them.

Suddenly, the coach decelerates, marking our arrival at the Palace of Fortitude’s hovergloss hangar. It’s normally used by tourists coming to tour the outer palace, but this late at night it’s deserted. The prince and I stagger to our feet, our limbs like gelatin as we exit and make our way into the elevator and down the street. The prince squints his eyes and flails his arms, picking up a small gust.

“This door,” Euryphel grunts, ambling forward towards a random door in the alley. He rests on it for a second, then turns the handle. The door leads directly into his bedroom. He breathes a sigh of relief and ushers me in behind him. The two of us kick off our shoes, strip off our outerwear, and collapse onto the bed and the couch, respectively.

When we wake in the morning, the sunlight reveals that we’re both in the clothes we wore last night. I’m surprised to find no sign of a hangover, the sun shining through the prince’s window calming rather than disorienting. And here I was worried I’d have to do a few “modifications” to get my body functioning normally again.

I check my watch and grimace at the time: 10:15 am.

“Eury,” I bark, eyeing the mountain of covers on the bed. “Get up.”

I walk over to the side of the bed, surprised that the prince is in such a deep sleep. Sure enough, his head is poking out of the covers, his eyes closed and a bit of drool pooling onto his pillow.

“Hey,” I say, leaning in. I reach my hand out, stopping just before the prince’s covered shoulder. I’m not sure how the prince will react to being woken up. What if he lashes out with his elementalism? At this range, wind blades would be difficult to stop completely. I decide to step back a few paces, then look around for something I can manipulate with decemancy. I see a leaf on the ground, probably tracked in by one of us last night. At my command, the leaf whips through the air and lands on Euryphel’s face, brushing against his nose.

The prince awakens with an explosive sneeze, his drool flying off his jaw and onto his comforter, the comforter subsequently blowing off the bed and onto the ground. The force of the sneeze almost knocks me over.

“I’ve never seen a wind-empowered sneeze before,” I say drily. “Good morning.”

“What time is it?” The prince asks, frowning even as his cheeks turn red.

“Just after ten.”

He rubs his palms into his face. “It’s possible to salvage the day. Y’jeni.”

“Why don’t I feel hungover?”

Euryphel waves his hand dismissively as he gets out of bed. “Life enchantments in the ceiling.” He turns around to look at me, giving me an appraising look. “I’m not supposed to do this,” he says, “but I’m going to send you back to your room directly.”

I shrug. “Alright with me.”

“It’s ready for you now,” Euryphel adds, gesturing to the door.

“I’ll see you...when?”

The prince looks thoughtful. “When?” He raises an eyebrow. “When the bait has been swallowed.”

—

The diplomatic trip ends the day after I last have direct contact with Euryphel. It is only on this last day that I am able to see most of Jairinka and Ajun’ra’s contacts, but none of my meetings significantly change my view of Hashat.

That is, until I speak with General Hor’well.

The general is a middle-aged man with thick, bronze hair and a firm jaw. He has a strong Sun affinity, and the seven scarlet stripes on his uniform speak to his proficiency as a fire elementalist.

The first thing that most people probably notice about him is his missing right eye. A large scar crosses from his nose to his eyebrow, leaving no question that his eyepatch isn’t for show.

The first thing that I notice about him is the swirling orb of death energy behind the leather eyepatch. Very interesting, that. Who gave the general his artificial eye?

I sit down on a plump silk cushion at the quarter table in the general’s office. General Hor’Well joins a few seconds later, sitting down across from me after setting down a pot of tea and two tea cups. He pours us each a cup of tea in silence, his movements deliberate and controlled.

When we each have a steaming cup of tea, the man speaks: “It’s not often I get the chance to speak to a Godoran, much less serve one tea.”

We say a few pleasantries. Eventually, I just have to ask. “I don’t mean to intrude, but what happened to your eye?”

Hor’Well blinks once, then frowns. “That’s an oddly relevant question. When I was much younger, about your age, perhaps, I went on a campaign in Luxelles. What do you know of Luxelles?”

“I know the province is in Sere.” Luxelles is a distant province with little global relevance.

He nods. “It’s a remote province. Lots of land, but most of it desert. Do you know why we campaigned there?”

I wait in silence, feeling that speaking would only emphasize my ignorance of the region’s politics.

“To put it bluntly, we were there to interfere with negotiations between Selejo and the Adrilli Isles. From what I understand, Selejo was interested in borrowing one of the Adrilli Isles’ governors to complete a task. The governor of Thakka, to be precise.”

I ponder this bit of information. The governor of Thakka, a few decades ago, before I was born...I have absolutely no idea who the general is talking about.

“The Adrilli Isles thought the request was overreaching, and didn’t agree to send their governor. However, we were unaware of this falling-out and continued on with plans to destroy the diplomatic convoys from both Selejo and Adrilli. I lost my eye to one of the Adrilli guards.”

“It sounds like you believe the engagement to be a mistake,” I say quietly.

Hor’well nods slowly. “Oh, it was a mistake. Attacking the Adrilli caused them to change their position on aiding Selejo. While the assembly never sent over the Thakkan governor, they did send some of his pupils. It was almost good enough”

“Almost good enough for what?”

“You’re here to talk about Hashat, aren’t you?”

I nod.

“They’re trying to succeed where the governor of Thakka’s students failed." The general sips his tea, then looks out the window.

"There are tales of a monster lurking between the Adrilli Isles and Selejo, as well as a monster just past the banks of Godora, in the depths of the Jermal Trench."

"Monster, General?"

Hor'Well grimaces. "After five years, the Adrilli took back their students and called the attempts to wake the western monster a mistake.” His lips purse into a sneer. “Or rather, they failed to find the rift that supposedly spawned it.”

“You think they were after a rift, rather than a monster?”

“A monster has little value on its own unless it can be controlled. What better way is there to control a rift beast than with energy stolen straight from its birthplace? Moreover, as the esteemed Corona would know, the rift itself would have other valuables.”

“So you believe that Hashat are trying to wake a monster in the Illyrian Ocean?”

“I do.”

“And you also believe that Selejo and the Adrilli tried something similar in the past, but failed?”

“That is correct.”

I narrow my eyes in contemplation. “Why does Hashat believe it can succeed where both Selejo and Adrilli failed? Have they discovered a rift, giving the rift beast theory credence?”

His expression turns guarded. “I don’t trust the wards on this room. The problem with Hashat is that they have members everywhere, at every level of power.”

This doesn’t feel like new information, though I can’t ignore the intensity of the look the general is giving me.

I ask him a few more questions, but don’t receive anything more than cryptic replies. He sidesteps around answering whether a rift has been discovered, shaping the conversation instead toward the intricacies of military officer politics.

“I want to pivot and return to my first question, General Hor’well. I originally asked you how you lost your eye, but I am quite curious...who gave you a new one?”

“You are a practitioner of the Dark art,” the general says, lips curving into a slight frown. “I suppose you would be able to sense this eye of mine.” He takes a sip of tea, only to find his cup empty. Pouring himself more liquid from the pot, he states, “the person who gave me this eye died eight years ago.”

Still not really what I was asking.

He narrows his good eye. “Thank you for joining me,” General Hor’Well says curtly. “But I think I’ve said all there is to say.”