LANYA STOOD ON THE BALCONY OF CENTRAL AKUNI’S MAIN HALL, her greyish-blue eyes gazing at the night sky. As she gazed out into the stratos, her attention was slowly drawn to the buildings over which the night sky blanketed itself. The last few lights in numerous houses were being turned off as the people of the town went to bed. She knew that it was likely time for her to go to bed as well, but she felt restless that night. Her father, Yukan, entered the balcony from the doorway behind her.

“Is your insomnia acting up again?” he asked as he joined her on the balcony.

“I guess so,” she responded. “For some reason, it’s been really bad as of late.” Ever since she’d turned sixteen a couple of years prior, she’d found it progressively more difficult to get enough sleep. Perhaps she had begun to let the responsibilities of being next in line for the throne of both Aotoshi and Akuni sink in. She might not feel that she is not yet adequately prepared to take the reins of a country, let alone two of them at the same time. Despite this, her concerns with knowing how to lead were all that she had in terms of taking the torch that her father would inevitably pass on to her, as she felt that her teachings in humility and virtue at a young age had prepared her to at least put up the guise of being a confident queen.

Yukan understood this. It was only about as long as Lanya had been alive that he’d taken the throne, all the while only being eighteen-and-a-half years old. He was hesitant to take up the mantle of being the leader of two different nations, but he knew that the resulting power vacuum, should he have rejected the throne, would have been catastrophic, likely resulting in a bloodier civil war than that which had occurred after the end of the Banme Dynasty.

“I understand how you feel,” Yukan confided within his daughter. “When I first took the throne, I hardly got any sleep for the first few years. Granted, part of it was due to you-” He was cut off by Lanya playfully jabbing his shoulder. The two shared a laugh before Musuko emerged from that same entrance.

The 17-year-old son of Yukan and Ite Kenshi bore much more of a resemblance to his father, save his green eyes. He wore a pair of sleek black bifocals to combat his astigmatism that had begun developing when he was nine. Unlike most people his age, he held a great value on rest. To him, it was the second most important thing in life, with the first being knowledge. He walked onto the balcony to hurry their conversation up, as it was disrupting his rest.

“I don’t understand how you aren’t prepared to rule yet,” he remarked. “Just don’t be a Kunshu and you’ll at least avoid being the worst in the history of Aotoshi.”

“Now, Musuko,” the king began to tell his son, “ruling a country should not require you to compare yourself to those of the past. If you can’t view yourself in a good light without precedent, then how can you say that you have truly succeeded?”

This caused Musuko to stop where he stood. His father’s outlook on leadership was incredibly humbling. He’d only ever looked at leadership from the eyes of context rather than focusing on the objective qualities that make a leader proper. He possessed, Yukan noted, remnants of Kadaina’s spirit. And yet, the outlooks on leadership between the two of them were conflicting. He turned back to Lanya.

“As I was saying,” Yukan continued, “you shouldn’t need to worry too much about what to do when you’re in a position of power. It will come to you naturally. All you need to do is make sure that you start on the right foot with the people and everything will feel natural from there. After all, the first step to being a great leader is to be good.”

This statement helped lighten up Lanya’s burden. She now knew that even somebody like her father, known for being one of the strongest people in Crenon and king of both Akuni and Aotoshi, is not truly confident in their abilities to lead. Yukan did not often show this more vulnerable side of him to people outside of his family. As a result, each time he put his facade of being a powerful figure aside, there was an intimate feeling that would be created during such a moment.

As the three of them went to return to bed, Lanya blew out the candle that she’d brought onto the balcony. Yukan returned to the master’s chamber at about the same time that Lanya and Musuko reached their room.

The room was kept in impeccable shape and not one of the room’s beige walls had any chipped spots or cobwebs. The bedrooms, unlike most other rooms in the house, were neglected care from the maids and butlers of the kingdom. Yukan and Ite decided on this as a way to teach their children responsibility and prevent the possibility of becoming entitled. Lanya had to do fairly little work for her brother, as Musuko was fairly straightforward in his routine and always tidied up after he finished working on his novel for the day.

The two crawled into their beds and began to fall asleep. Musuko’s bed often tended to creak loudly as he got into it, the springs within the mattress crying out more and more as they aged. After a few minutes, however, the cracking of the bed that came from even the slightest movements ended up mattering very little to either of them as they dozed off into their dreams.

Lanya’s dream that night was not quite as vivid as she would like. She could only remember a few vague details about the dream. Of those details, she recalled only one individual shot as being vivid enough to stick with her after waking up in a cold sweat. She saw herself, the Fabled Swords in tow, about to be killed in battle against a man she did not recognize. Musuko, who had been fighting alongside her in the nobility’s villa using Brildingjr and the Nukenai Bow, was barely hanging on to his life. Yet, in the final frame of the nightmare, she saw him muster up enough strength to take the Nukenai Bow and fire a shot. As for whether the shot would hit the man, she could not tell as she had awoken before the arrow made an impact.