“Diana,” Ian bellowed, teeth chattering as he landed on the ship.

Lanhui climbed onto the deck behind him and grasped onto his shoulder. In a moment, Ian was dry.

Diana was standing on the boat’s bow, her eyes narrowed and gazing out into the dark, mist-cloaked surroundings. She turned and sprung back, releasing her hold on a pair of ropes tied to the boat’s second level. She stepped before Ian and Lanhui, holding out her hands to disperse blessed warmth.

“Thank you both,” Ian smiled halfheartedly. He looked down and nudged a corpse resting on the deck. Laying to its side were four others.

Lanhui inclined his head. “Thank you for carrying them back.”

Diana craned her neck. “Are those three still alive?”

“Yes.” Unless my vital vision is malfunctioning.

She directed one of her hands in the direction of the unconscious bodies. “They might not have been for much longer if I didn’t warm them up. Euryphel, what are your plans for them?”

The prince’s disembodied voice whistled over the wind. “Bring the corpses to Shivin’i. The rest...bring them to me.”

Diana gave Ian a look. “You heard him, right? Shivin’i and Euryphel are both on the second level.”

Ian nodded and elevated the bodies off the deck, each silhouette bobbing ominously behind the next like a string of drowned captives. He flew up to the second level and noticed the first and fifth princes’ vitality signatures on opposite sides of the deck, Shivin’i actually waiting in his own room.

“Prince Shivin’i?” Ian called out.

The fifth prince opened the door and pointed out the two dead bodies among the five. “Can you send them over onto the bed?”

I guess Shivin’i’s not planning to sleep here tonight. He made a small gesture with his hand and the corpses floated past the doorway and onto the comforter, dripping water on the rug. One seemed as though asleep, while the other looked as though in agony, one of his eyes sliced halfway through and leaking fluid, his mouth frozen in a rictus.

“Good luck,” Ian said, shutting the door and heading to Euryphel. The first prince was on the deck, several sharp implements arrayed before him along with a stretch of rope and three neat sheets of thick paper.

The prince turned, his sapphire hair ornament glistening in the moonlight. “Can you prop them up on the side of that wall?”

Ian nodded, then positioned the unconscious captives next to one another, keeping a foot or so of distance between them. While Ian kept a firm hold over their bodies, he gave them enough leeway to breathe, their chests rising and falling in slow rhythm.

The prince walked over and began to inspect the captives, pulling up the robe of one of them and rubbing the fabric between his fingers. “Bring me a sheet of paper and the third scalpel. I’m going to show you a new way to weaponize End.”

Ian’s hair rose. With grim steps he fetched the prince’s requested reagents, then stepped aside limply, the auburn soul hovering next to his head like a balloon.

The man on the far right of the lineup was fair skinned, his black robes contrasting with ginger curls. Euryphel stood before him, scalpel held aloft. He breathed in deeply, his hand steady and poised over the man’s exposed neck. When he breathed out again, he cut into skin.

The wound was shallow, non-lethal. Ian watched as the man’s blood dribbled onto his dark robes, dyeing them with graying vitality. Euryphel pressed a button on the scalpel, causing it to click. A small thread of red spooled from the dripping blood to the scalpel’s butt...and Euryphel began to write on the sheet of paper.

Blood Oath:

Until the drying of this wound,

Bind this fate to truth.

Though the oath wasn’t very long, it seemed to have an effect: As Euryphel penned the last letter, the unconscious captive shuddered against his restraints, his pulse increasing.

“Blood oaths are quite weak, though they have their uses. They can be fixed while unconscious...and are non-consensual. All the same, they fade as soon as the blood clots.”

Without warning, the prince slapped the red-headed captive across the cheek. The man opened his eyes and recoiled back slightly, teeth clenching together, though Ian ensured his motions were restricted. If the man tried anything, Ian intended to knock him unconscious.

The prince leveled a cold gaze at the captive, though didn’t say anything out loud. He began to circle the captive like a prowling panther, his gaze growing in intensity.

After a minute, the prince sighed and turned toward Ian. “Clot the blood and knock him out.”

The red-headed man’s eyelids barely had the chance to widen before drooping shut.

The prince repeated his oath with the other two captives: first a man with arresting eyes the color of a pale sky, then a petite dark-skinned woman with a golden oath inscribed across her neck. It tugged and asphyxiated her repeatedly during Euryphel’s uncannily silent interrogation, but based on how long the prince stared into her eyes, Ian figured he found a method to make her talk.

When the woman at last fell unconscious, Euryphel groaned and collapsed to his knees, squatting on the deck. A strong breeze swept past and wiped his brow of sweat, but the prince seemed exhausted, his eyes squinting painfully.

“Eury,” Ian exclaimed, stepping to the prince’s side. Euryphel shook his head and stood, rebuffing Ian’s attempt at helping him up.

“I’m fine, just a bit overtaxed, especially after the last one.” Euryphel’s pallid lips curled into a smile. “I’ll save you the trouble of asking: The only one with useful information was the woman.”

“What did she know?”

The prince’s eyes fell back to the woman’s prone form. He pointed at the golden choker still visible on the woman’s neck, its surface visibly frayed. “She nearly died telling me the name of the Eldemari’s fourth-ranked general, Lias Grevald. She was unable to say more than half a syllable before her oath destroyed the ability to speak.” Euryphel stepped forward and pulled back the woman’s sleeve. “Even when asked to write the names of her superiors, shackle-like bracelets appeared on her wrists.”

No wonder Euryphel spent so long interrogating her.

“Eury...are you alright? You were interrogating them for a while.”

The prince sighed and ran a blood-caked hand through his hair. “I’m fine.”

I’m not so sure you are.

“You should wash up and get some rest. I’ll keep watch this time in the event that there’s another attack.”

Euryphel looked at him blankly, then began to chuckle softly. “Ian, it won’t do you any good to simply watch. I need to be looking into the future to vet our path. Everyone here is lucky I wasn’t complacent.”

“Eury, if I stay awake and put in the effort to actively defend us...I’m confident I can keep us all alive until the break of dawn.”

“...”

“How much have you slept throughout the entire summit?” Ian murmured, brows furrowing.

“I’ve slept,” Euryphel retorted weakly.

“Of course you sandwiched your room between the two Life practitioners...”

“I slept!”

The more the prince denied it, the wider Ian’s cold smile. “You almost had me fooled. Euryphel Selejo...you must know that you can’t keep yourself awake for too long, even with vitality infusions.”

Euryphel groaned. “I really did sleep, Ian. And I didn’t position my room between the Life practitioners; stop mixing up Jazeera and Veronica. They look nothing alike.”

“Why sleep soundly then but refuse to sleep now?”

“Because we were all under Shattradan’s protection, Ian. If anything happened to our delegation...it’d be unthinkable. In the grand scheme of things life would move on: The globe wouldn’t mourn too long for a loss from a small, friendless state. But if the Fassari Summit lost legitimacy and states refused to attend...Stewing tensions might erupt and cause widespread chaos in both the East and West.”

“Are rifts and naturally-forming dilation caves really so valuable?” Ian asked, naming the top two tournament reward categories.

“They’ve been worth going to war over, yes.”

Ian shook his head and pointed back towards Euryphel’s room. “Enough beating around the bush. Get some sleep and I’ll keep us safe. You’ve exhausted yourself orchestrating a united defense and conducting the interrogation.”

Euryphel’s eyes were unbendingly defiant.

“Do you trust me?” Ian asked, voice barely a whisper.

The prince’s gaze held steady for another moment before faltering. “Y’jeni, Ian.”

Ian followed him back to his room. “I’ll wake you in a few hours, alright?”

“Fine.”

Euryphel closed the door with a gust of air, leaving Ian out alone in the cool ocean breeze.

He sighed and turned back toward the stern of the ship, flexing his fingers. “I better start preparing for the worst.”

—

Eury awoke in a cold sweat. He shivered and sat up, placing his head between his legs.

You need to sleep, he thought to himself. Ian and the others are awake so you can rest.

Knowing that he needed to sleep and actually sleeping were two different things. The prince knew he could reasonably blame a confluence of factors for his insomnia: the unfamiliar location, the rocking of the boat, leftover adrenaline from the attack, and fear of further assassination attempts.

Just so...he knew the real reason lay elsewhere. He tightened his grip on the sheets and exhaled a shaky breath before flopping over in the fetal position, legs curling against his stomach.

The scene that dominated the prince’s nightmares was an old, indelible scar on his memory. The nightmare was always the same, and all the more terrible for it. In a way, it was the worst kind of nightmare for a Regret practitioner: Euryphel knew what the future held...and knew that there was no way out.

In the nightmare, his parents were still alive. He and his mother observed from the balcony of the arena in their own private box. Father didn’t often have challengers: He was strong, and well-liked. If someone wished to join the Princes Council, they could just challenge another one of its members.

But on that day that never ended, Father had a challenger, a young man in his early thirties by the name of O’osta Kestrelius Selejo from the up-and-coming Kestrelius clan. Little was known about him other than that he was a talented water elementalist.

Euryphel remembered his father speaking before the duel to Mother. She’d been upset, but father had refused to step down. Euryphel knew that his father had trusted his Regret affinity to deliver one-sided victory.

The duel commenced without theatrics.

After a minute of fighting, O’osta nicked Father with one of his many watery knives. The wound was shallow and non-vital, though Father increased his wariness moving forward.

Roughly a minute and thirty seconds later–the limit of his father’s Regret scenario length–Euryphel’s father began to move much more frantically, like an insect caught in the web of a spider.

Euryphel’s Mother began to weep.

O’osta’s watery knives flared and Euryphel’s father grunted in pain. The knife blades had only made purchase three times since the start of the battle, but each wound began to widen.

Through the largest hole, just above Father’s stomach, O’osta began to pull.

And pull.

And pull. Father watched, face agape with horror, as his organs began to tear and squeeze through the wound in his skin, turning it from a cut into a massive, weeping hole.

...And that was the point at which Euryphel woke up. He thought the memory might grow less potent over time, but it still ate at him, even after killing O’osta with his own hands.

In a way, killing O’osta had almost made the nightmare worse.

Sleep, Euryphel commanded himself, squeezing his eyes shut. Please just sleep.