“… My greatest achievement and claim upon the awed notice of posterity consists not of my having set the continent awash in blood, for countless warlords great in arms but petty in ideals have done the same; it is not to have ruled by force, for many an iron-fisted tyrant can make a similar boast; no, it is to have had my men do so willingly, under no coercion greater than the disciplinary measures which are ordinarily meted out and needed for the smooth operation of an army. I did not rule by fear, but by love; love is the force by which I exercised my sovereignty. But what kind of love? Of myself? No. In contradistinction to the monarchs of yesteryear, never did I appeal to my own personage: before a battle never did I say, ‘soldiers, die for me this day’—rather, after it I said, ‘Men, today you have died for yourselves,’ and they were content, as were their fathers and mothers and sisters, who likewise sacrificed their blood and livelihoods for a universal cause freely embraced…”

Quill pen in hand, Zephyrin looked out the window of his humble dorm room. Though elevated, the view was cramped and inward facing, offering no perspective on the sweeping urban panorama lying tantalizingly out of reach beyond the lyceum’s walls. It was now early November, the season equidistant from the autumnal equinox and winter solstice, and the lofty parabolic arc traced by the sun had flattened down to a rainbow’s curve. The shadows cast on the academy’s confines had noticeably lengthened since his arrival, and as the darkness spilled over the courtyard and seeped into its recesses, Zephyrin couldn’t help but identify a parallel with the obscurity that had been growing in his mind these past few days. Lowering his head again, he resumed writing.

“The chief mistake of the monarchs, of the popes, was to raise their fingers to a solitary figure and say, ‘Him you must follow; Her you must obey’… I on the contrary pointed to the people, to their collective heart, and being thus roused and called to render an account of themselves with the sinews of national industry and arteries of commerce, it was needed only to await their realization that they could not otherwise worthily acquit themselves if not in the service of a benevolent master, which function I gladly acquiesced to assume as a devoted husband undertaking an onerous but necessary obligation for the sake of his spouse and children... all the nation needed was a catalyst, one occupying the potent interveniency between actuality and myth, able to shake her from her apathy and inspire her to reassert her claim over history, therewith to revive the vanished glory of her first emperor, whose legitimate heir and successor I am…”

The Memoirs of Emperor Narcissin Aléri. Volume IV, Chapter XXIX. Zephyrin remembered the passage unerringly. While he had devoured each line of every single Gaulyrian book his mysterious sympathizers had managed to smuggle into his hands, it went without saying that his most assiduous efforts at memorization had been reserved for his father’s memoirs. To assure himself of having properly inscribed every word into his memory, he had even gone so far as to translate the entire corpus of the emperor’s writings into Elysian, the tongue of his archenemies…! A smile rose to Zephyrin’s lips at the recollection of Anato’s flabbergasted expression when he had gleefully relayed this deed to his friend, only to fade again as he recalled his recent and disastrous interaction with Narcissin. He expelled a soft sigh, then continued:

“… Gaulyria has too great a thirst for glory to not exhaust herself and her whole substance in its pursuit. A saint will die for the goddess, a knight will die for a king, but to compel an entire people to drown itself in an ocean of blood it were needed that destiny should provide a glorious mirror to reflect to it its own will, and that is what I was, am, and shall be, until the consummation of the ages. I foresee my example kindling intermittent outbreaks of passion, when the Gaulyrian dam bursts anew and the people's thirst to consume itself reawakens with a vengeance. Yet will Gaulyria slake her thirst as fully in those days as she did under me? She will not, unless she sights a meteor whose vehemence and velocity rivals my own. For the waves of public sentiment must follow the celestial object attracting them ever upward if they are to attain the heavens of imperishable glory; otherwise, they can only crash futilely against the shores of implacable fate...”

“… As my first and last love, Gaulyria has always occupied a preeminent place in my heart, and I have ever lived with her everlasting welfare as my beacon in the midst of this era’s turmoil. Where other men reserved a place in their heart for their wife, I did so for a country; where a place in their affections for their children, I for my subjects. It was by transcending blood that I made the blood of all Gaulyrians mine, and mine own their common property…”

“… The old order has been swept away, and though naught remains now of my empire save its glory, still I believe my star has heralded the dawn of a new age, one for the world and even the very consciousness of the human race. Gaulyria, if she be but favored by destiny with a champion to further my legacy, will assuredly lift herself like a queen over her fellow nations to enthrone herself in the luminous annals of history. May she find such a one in my son!”

Zephyrin’s pen slowed, then hovered uncertainly over his notebook. Yes, the words were indeed those of Emperor Narcissin. They were seared in his memory, graven in his heart; he doubted he could forget them if he tried. And yet, that being so… what accounted for the discrepancy between the Gaulyrian sovereign he had never met but in whose mind he had so intimately penetrated, and the young boy whose troubling attitude and words were completely at ends with the man he should—he would—grow up to be?

Raising his head from his writing once more, Zephyrin glanced at the neatly made bed of his dormmate. Though it was the evening premeal period typically used by the students to read, study, or respond to correspondence received from home in their quarters, Roger wasn’t in the room with him. He was in the infirmary, resting. It hadn’t taken Zephyrin long to perceive that the boy wasn’t blessed with a hale constitution, and that nosebleeds were in fact the least of his concerns. More seriously he suffered from an irregular heartbeat that made participation in his beginner’s magic class a risky affair, to the point of occasioning additional trips to the infirmary when he exerted himself too vigorously.

Feeling a twinge of sympathy at his plight, Zephyrin had lent him the little book he had brought along with him—The Life of Marinna of Vex, he remembered the title was. The boy was well-pleased with it, and Zephyrin had left the infirmary with Roger already deeply engrossed in the peasant girl’s life. If nothing else, the young Alérian’s precarious health offered Zephyrin the opportunity to work in uninterrupted silence… and without having to worry about an intrusive pair of eyes as he undertook a sensitive task. Momentarily regretting the gold-nibbed ebony fountain pen from his first life, Zephyrin dipped a poor goose-quill equivalent in his student’s inkwell and carefully penned a string of letters:

Nllj Uxbrjd VLT zc nsr wr ghdrf rq Ghfhpehp 98wk, ilth bcyuv ipmp qrz.

Zephyrin double-checked his jumbled handiwork by reversing the encryption, only proceeding once it was clear that he hadn’t completely lost his touch. Though little more than a basic shift cipher and far from the most complex he had ever devised, it still required a fair amount of concentration on his part to write at a steady pace in this manner. At least the health of his restored body and the absence of chronic pain allowed him to write for much lengthier durations than he had been able to withstand in his first life.

Zephyrin knew he was taking a risk. He deemed it an acceptable one in light of the outrageous nature of his entries. Even if an adult were to find his journal and break his cipher, the person in question would be tempted to see it as part of a game between nobles’ sons endowed with overactive imaginations—after all, who in his wildest imaginings would find it credible that in a decade’s time, Gaulyria and the very continent’s geopolitical landscape would be altered beyond recognition?

In the end, more than a prefect stumbling across his journal, Zephyrin feared crucial details about the future slipping away from him, especially as time passed and his academic obligations put an increasing strain on his memory. To a much greater extent than his formidable mana reserves it was his foreknowledge that was the key to changing the future, and if he didn’t adopt this measure historical fragments lingering around the edges of his mind would eventually fall out of sight, pushed out by relatively useless rhetorical flourishes and grammatical distinctions. Slowly, meticulously, Zephyrin recorded the pivotal moments of a world that as of yet only had substance in his memories.

974AUC: N’s birth, my rebirth. FBR. Sporadic fighting; Rudolf XIII fled the capital. Royalist forces soon restored order. Unrelated localized violence? (Estrelti riot).

975-982AUC: “The Great Calm.”

983AUC: The present year. Imperative: warn N about AP.

984-5AUC: SBR. In this era referred to as “The Bloodless Transition”, “The Cleansing”, “The Nation's Lustration”; etc., etc…

986AUC: Commonweal Constitution. GNC.

987AUC: Suppression of the Liberationist and Firebrand factions. Execution of Fulgurin, “The Child-Martyr”.

988AUC: Night of the Bonfires. Exsanguinarian folly; public opinion shifts.

989AUC: January Reprisals. February Convention. Rise of the Accordists.

990AUC: N graduates and joins army at 16; 2nd Lt. Try to join same unit.

990-4AUC: N climbs the ranks; conquers Doëndessa…

Cipher nonwithstanding, Zephyrin’s pen glided over the page with surprising fluidity. He felt his fingers relax, his mind becoming clearer, as if a heretofore unsuspected tension was dissipating with each event transcribed. In however piecemeal a fashion, perhaps there was something cathartic about letting out these secrets, these vague allusions to a future he couldn’t permit himself to share with another living soul, and which he prayed would never come to be. He continued jotting down encrypted messages:

AUC1021: Empire’s zenith, then inexorable decline…

AUC1022-6: Loss after loss; Alliance cowardice pays dividends.

AUC1027: Despite E’s advanced age, birth of the “miracle child”.

AUC1029: N’s final defeat.

AUC1031: N succumbs to disease.

AUC1049: Death of the “Golden Gryphon”.

Zephyrin found himself able to compose this final line easily, with a detachment unshadowed by any looming sense of fatality. Zephyrin dy Aléri had died at twenty-two, but Zephyrin Calon—or dy Valensis—was a new being. He had similarly recorded the collapse of the former Gaulyrian Empire without emotion, animated as he was by the unshakable certainty that the world would go down a better path. There were two pressing matters: the future emperor’s state of health and the present anomaly of his inexplicable conduct… but as the sonorous call for the evening litanies broke into his musings, Zephyrin rose from his desk with the conviction that the goddess’s generosity would extend not only to him, but also to Narcissin and all his countrymen.