The door swung open to reveal a frail-looking woman with large, gray eyes and white hair. “Hello; can I help you?”

“The code phrase is, ‘just a traveler passing through,’” the SPU Regret practitioner reminded him over quantum channel. Ian didn’t see how the generic phrase properly functioned as a code, but recited the words exactly.

The woman nodded and gave him an appraising smile. “Alright, come on in and we'll see what we can do. I’m Jo; you are...?”

Ian held out his hand. “Ian Baldwin.”

She grabbed his hand and gave it a gentle shake. “A pleasure.”

Ian followed her inside and took off his shoes, then padded over to the small dining room where a man Ian took to be Porshek was playing a game of cards with a young boy.

“Honey, we have a traveler.” She walked over and placed her hands on her knees, bending over to address the kid face-to-face. “Bradley, you’re going to need to be patient for a few minutes while Porshek and I set things up, but you can stay if you’re on your best behavior.”

“Awe...” Bradley murmured, sighing dramatically and leaning back in the too-large chair.

Porshek grinned. “It’ll just be a minute, big guy.” He stood up and nodded to Ian. “Always a pleasure to meet a traveler. Where are you coming from?”

Ian knew that the Vindradoons were left intentionally ignorant about the details regarding their visitor, but he still worried about slipping up and giving away information that he shouldn’t. He didn’t think the elderly couple would turn traitor to the SPU, but any knowledge of his whereabouts would endanger them if Selejo managed to trace his steps.

“You can probably guess from my accent.”

Porshek raised an eyebrow. “Shattradan, eh?”

Ian cracked a smile. “That’s right.”

To their credit, neither of the Vindradoons seemed surprised at all that someone from Shattradan was coming to an SPU safehouse. Jo and Porshek began to tidy a room in their upstairs attic, leaving Ian alone with Bradley.

The decemancer sat down in Porshek’s vacated chair and eyed the stack of cards on the table.

“Hi, I’m Bradley,” the kid said, seizing Ian’s attention. Almost thought he wasn’t going to speak, Ian thought; the kid had waited a good fifteen seconds before engaging.

Ian smiled politely. “Ian.”

“Woah!”

Ian didn’t think he’d ever heard someone get so excited over his name. “Do you know someone named Ian?”

“The guy!”

Ian suddenly felt an embarrassing heat in his stomach. Why did he get the feeling he knew exactly what ‘Ian’ Bradley was going to talk about?

“He went like this–” Bradley paused and made a whooshing sound, moving his arm like a snake– “and this!” Bradley made pew-pew sounds and slammed the table, sending a few cards flying.

Ian cocked an eyebrow in amusement. “Don’t tell me you watched the Fassari Summit?”

“Yes!”

Aren’t kids too young to watch that sort of thing? Ian wondered. There’s no shortage of violence.

“Which battle was your favorite?”

“The last one, obviously. It was the championship between the two most powerful practitioners in the entire world: the Breaker, peak Regret and Mountain; and the Skai’aren, peak Death. And guess what, the Skai’aren is apparently even a half-ascendant!”

The two most powerful at the summit, not necessarily in the world, Ian mentally corrected. Seeing a six-year-old taking on the mantle of an dueling analyst was oddly endearing, Bradley’s high voice speaking with the certainty of an expert.

Ian grabbed the discard pile on the table and straightened it out, then began to absently shuffle the cards. “Could you really follow what was happening?”

“Of course!” Bradley insisted, holding up three fingers. “They always show the duel three times: the first in real time, the second slowed down and with in-depth highlight and technique analysis, and finally again at a slightly reduced speed.”

“Mhm...”

Bradley sighed and rolled his eyes, crossing his arms across his chest. “You clearly don’t watch the summit duels if you don’t even know that much.”

Ian’s mouth twitched. “What’s the point in watching?”

The kid’s jaw dropped. “How else would I see a real bone wyrm!? The difficulty in instantly composing one is supposedly ranked S, though I suppose even that would be easy for someone who’s almost an ascendant...In retrospect it’s obvious that the Skai’aren never even needed to go all out.”

“Obvious” seems like a rather strong word, Ian thought dryly. And what’s with this kid’s vocabulary?

“Have you ever met a decemancer before, Bradley?”

The kid shook his head.

“Do you want to?”

Bradley’s eyes widened. “Obviously.”

Ian snorted and set the shuffled deck of cards down on the table. “Most are unremarkable; I’m sure you’ve met one without even knowing it.”

Jo ventured down the set of stairs and called out to Ian, saying, “The room’s ready; come up the stairs and we’ll show you around.”

“Nice to meet you, Bradley,” Ian said.

He nodded his head with a serious bearing. “Just you wait; I’m gonna awaken a powerful affinity one day.”

As Ian walked over to the stairs, he gave Bradley one last glance. “Best of luck with that.”

—

It was almost dark by the time Ian settled in, so he decided to order food, and stay inside the rest of the evening. The SPU didn’t know when Descendant Ari was coming, just that Ian needed to accumulate power and avoid assassination before her arrival. The soonest she’d likely arrive was in one month, but it could be upwards of three.

While Ian felt the oppressive weight of the looming deadline upon his back, he was exhausted enough to give himself the night off. After eating, he almost immediately fell asleep.

Ian woke a few hours later in the middle of the night. He rubbed his eyes and groaned, cursing the time difference between the SPU and Gnoste. Getting up early wasn’t necessarily a bad habit to get into, so Ian washed up, got dressed, and went downstairs.

He was up before his two hosts, but figured he could probably scrounge one of the flakey pastries they kept covered on a kitchen countertop. As Ian bit into the savory strudel, he decided to leave behind a note saying that he was going out: He didn’t want the couple to worry that he’d been kidnapped under their watch.

Ian closed the front door behind him, pushing it ever-so-softly until it clicked shut. He took in the dark streets, the pair of dim streetlamps hovering above the walkway barely enough to see the way forward. As he ventured further into the street towards the hovergloss station, he passed through an entire block without a working lamp, relying on his vitality vision to guide the way.

Words streamed unbidden over the quantum channel. “You’re up early.”

Ian kept walking. Since quantum channels transmit thoughts as words rather than sound, he couldn’t easily recognize the person on the other end of the line; even so, he didn’t think a normal SPU agent would start making smalltalk.

“Is this the Crowned Prime speaking?”

“Technically nobody speaks over quantum channel, but yes, it’s me.”

A laugh bubbled up in Ian’s chest. “It might be early here, but it’s starting to get pretty late over there. How have things been since I left?”

“The Eldemari doesn’t seem to have noticed your absence yet; we spread a rumor among the servants that you’d gone below ground to work on a new technique, which would explain your absence on the surface.”

Ian nodded. The Eldemari’s agents would undoubtedly notice that the fate arrows of someone influential had significantly dimmed or gone missing, but Ian venturing far underground was one explanation for the phenomenon.

“She will find out sooner rather than later, but by that point the trail should be cold. You left almost no trail to begin with, voyaging by wyrm and then by lighthouse, of all things.”

“She will go East,” Ian replied, “But she won’t know where to go exactly. She saw me looking at Kurin Ventrebel, but that won’t be all that useful.” The Eldemari would be consulting with her Beginning practitioners to analyze Ian’s most likely path; coming across Ventrebel’s exhibit at the Fassari Summit museum wouldn’t be enough evidence to suggest Ian would seek the man out.

“Are you willing to try another strategy to find Ventrebel?” Euryphel asked. Ian could imagine a mischievous grin spreading across his face.

“Not one of the ones we carefully-planned and agreed on before I left?”

“‘Carefully-planned’ my foot; we scarcely had twelve hours to decide on a strategy.”

As the hovergloss terminal came into sight, Ian crossed his arms. “What plan?”

—

The challenge of seeking out Ventrebel was that the man had put decades of effort into not being found after he fell into disgrace. Wherever he lived was likely remote and covered in all sorts of obfuscating arrays. All the same, Ventrebel was one of Gnoste’s most powerful practitioners, if not their most powerful; he’d come to Morinapol’s rescue if something unfortunate were to happen.

Or so Euryphel hoped.

“I’m standing on a snow-covered outcrop of rock to the East of Morinapol. The city’s skyline is hazy in the emergent rays of dawn, its glassy skyscrapers scintillating like the scales of a carp.”

Euryphel chuckled and rolled around in his chair. “So flowery.”

“It’s not like I can send a picture,” Ian replied hastily.

“Anyway...are you ready?” Euryphel asked.

“Just tell me when I’m in a scenario.”

“Alright, you’re in a scenario.” A few seconds passed. “Ian, what on earth are you doing?”

“Oh, right, you can’t see what–anyway, I’ve formed the wyrm from the void storage and I’m riding it into the city. Whatever people say about Gnoste, its capital is gorgeous...though less so now that I just slapped at a tower with the wyrm’s tail.”

Euryphel rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Ian, please describe in more detail what’s going on.”

“Okay. After slicing the building, its upper half begins to plummet to the ground; I see two guards down below trying to protect the civilians with a barrier of ice and earth, but I can’t imagine it’ll be particularly effective given the height from which the building is falling.

“I continue forward and ram the wyrm over the tops of several historically-relevant-looking buildings; one of them I think is a bank.”

Ian snapped out of the scenario a second later.

The prince found Ian’s descriptions...lacking. “Can you try being more flowery again?”

“Sure. What did you see? Or hear?”

Euryphel placed a finger upon his lips in contemplation. “Very little, honestly. You seemed to have no trouble toppling buildings and generally causing serious property damage. I can’t tell if Morinapol didn’t send anyone to stop you because they had no one to send, or if it was because they recognized your identity and knew they’d be unable to stop you.”

“Let’s go again, then,” Ian replied. “No wyrm this time.”

Euryphel snapped his fingers. “You’re in a scenario.”

“Excellent. I rip myself off the ground and throw myself forward, building up speed; I protect my face against the whipping wind with my winter scarf. It’s taking longer than if I had a wyrm, but I’m almost to the city, it’s buildings growing increasingly clearer as I cut through the morning fog...and I’m finally in. Seconds remaining?”

“Twenty-three,” Euryphel breathed.

“It’ll have to be enough. I begin combing through the main thoroughfares and start killing half of everyone I see indiscriminately, breaking their necks. I turn the fallen against the living, each dashing forward to rip out throats and hearts at my behest. Despite the early hour, blood creates a slick on the dawnlit walkways, red mingling artfully with the sun’s golden yellows.

“There’s obvious panic, but nobody seems to know what to do,” Ian observed. “People are screaming and running, diving into the canal to escape...ah, finally, a practitioner. He’s asking who I am and why I’m here. I tell him that I’m challenging Kurin Ventrebel. Time?”

“10 seconds remaining.”

“Damn. He’s just started attacking me; he’s powerful enough to wield the wind nearly as well as yourself, lashing it toward me like a whisk spanning the breadth of the sky. I surge forward and the wind breaks on my reformed bone shield, leaving the man unknowingly in my range. I kill him and...well, nobody else seems to be coming to face me.”

The scenario snapped back.

Euryphel leaned back in his seat and tried to process what Ian had just described. His mind filled in the blanks with scenes of Menocht, the decemancer sweeping through the city streets like a silent terror, corpses falling wherever he passed.

“What happened?” Ian inquired.

The prince sighed and adjusted his hair ornament. “That time you killed civilians and faced off against a wind elementalist. Still didn’t seem to glean any new information.”

“Is coming to Morinapol a good idea?” Ian asked. “I’m not feeling confident.”

“No, I think we’re on the right track. Let’s try again. I’d hope we could get something useful out of Morinapol by the afternoon.”