It would be a glorious republic. Every man and woman would choose someone to represent their interests, and those interests would be debated against the interests of everyone else in the land. No more mini despots ruling over their slice of land at the point of a sword. Decisions would be made on the merits of those interests: a great debate full of ideas and figures and diction. No one would need protection from the law anymore; the law would protect each and every citizen from injustice. This was the world Kalsang was building, even if right now it existed only in his head. But slowly they were coming to see the truth of it, each new recruit convinced of the beauty of a future world where the strong protected the weak.

Kalsang had seen enough of the world, as it existed, to know that the one they dreamed of could only be built if it was protected by a strong fist. And his fist was the strongest in this corner of the world. His only shame was that this Shuli Go did not know it yet.

He’d taken it easy on her during their first battle as he’d considered recruiting her: a Shuli Go’s strength would make her a valuable asset. Perhaps even a lieutenant of sorts, if she could be persuaded to support his vision. His hope had been strong: if anyone knew the persecution of the Empire more than Keepers and peasants, it was Shuli Go. He’d been impressed with her skill, and had been close to offering her a chance when she’d used that forbidden Shei magic to escape. The incident had piqued his interest even more, but now that she had clearly aligned herself with the Imperials there was no chance of mercy. She would be dealt with.

He had already recited the chant of inner connection and cleared his mind of everything but the coming battle by the time they neared one another on the plateau. The great Tiendu opened itself to him as it always had, each particle in the air and each blade of grass twinkling and curving over themselves into intricate patterns before his eyes, as if some sort of abstract painting made real. They gave themselves to him willingly, offering up their energy to supplement his own. It would take only a few words and a deep inhalation, and it would all course through his body, giving him even more strength than a Shuli Go.

She stopped ten feet away and stood, one of her swords already drawn. She said nothing. Kalsang dismounted his horse and pulled down his heavy staff. It was too dense to use with any agility in his normal state, but once he’d invoked the Strength of the Keepers, it would feel like no weight at all. He held one end out in front of him and planted the other by his feet. He smiled at her.

“We could have been allies, I thought,” he said in his accented Imperial. “I’m sad that it’s come to this.”

She said nothing, just watched him wearily. Her face had no visible scars, but her eyes spoke of a lifetime of battles and wounds, some of them never fully healed. The Keeper in him wanted only to heal those wounds, but the man in him – the man who had been scorned by his own people for his politics and persecuted in the land of his wife because of his religion – knew some wounds could never be healed. Just excised from the body.

“You might think I don’t have the fire to draw on this time, and that puts me at a disadvantage,” he explained. “But that’s why I chose these mountains as my base. Fifty feet down there is a hotspring along the entire length of this land. And all its energy is mine at a moment’s notice.”

He enlightened her as a final offer of salvation. If she backed down there would be no need for her death. No need for anyone to die other than the few Imperials she’d mustered against him.

She looked him straight in the eye and settled into an attacking stance.

“Fine,” he sighed, the decision made for him. “Then you die.”

He picked up the heavy staff and slammed it into the ground, then reached deep below the surface to the geyser-fed waters rippling through metal veins, and shouted out in Zhosian: “Great Tiendu, feed me your strength!”

The energy entered him at once and coursed through his body, every muscle fibre coming alive: expanding, flexing, the power almost overwhelming. He drew on as much as he could possibly handle – he wanted to make this quick – until he felt his very bones quake under the pressure of all of his newfound strength. Then he cut it off, having tapped only a limited amount of what was available.

It was an incredible strain, and he could only fight at that potential for a few minutes at best before his body would need to expel the energy or start to destroy itself. But he had no concerns: it would last barely a minute this time.

He was right.

He attacked quickly, sprinting towards her and twirling his heavy iron staff as if it were a child’s baton. He could see the surprise in the Shuli Go’s face as she narrowly avoided his first attack, then her utter concern as she met his second with her sword, being knocked to the ground from the force of it. He almost had pity on her as she rolled away and drew her other sword. He knew neither would help her.

He moved to begin a series of attacks that would limit her ability to dodge – he was sure one would make contact along the way and break her bones – when she struck the two flat edges of her blades together. He paused, but it was too late. She once again shouted out her ancient Imperial and his world once again inverted itself in an instant.

This time though her little Shei trick wouldn’t work – she gave no hint of escape, and he knew what to expect this time. He closed his eyes to avoid the spinning that would give him cause to lose his stomach. Even then the nausea started to arrive, as his senses instructed him he was actually upside down and spinning in a tight circle. He fell to a knee and placed his left hand on the earth so that he had five points of contact with the ground. He forced himself to breath and meditated, pushing away the incorrect sensations. He had clarity of mind enough to admire her decision – it had extended the time he had to carry the Keeper’s Strength, and turned it into a race against time as to which of the two of them would recover fastest. But it was a race he was sure to win. He forced his breathing to return to normal, and instead of relying on his senses, he opened himself to the great Tiendu once again, feeling the various pulls of the air, the earth, and the woman, in order to re-orient himself. It would only take a few seconds before he could open his eyes and finish his attack.

Then something went wrong. His left arm suddenly gave out, as if all the strength had been drained from it. He collapsed face-first onto the ground and his staff slipped from his grasp. The sudden motion and surprise re-asserted his nausea, but after a second into the dirt he felt well enough to open his eyes to check what was wrong.

What he saw was enough to make him sick.

His left arm had been severed, above the elbow, and his blood was pouring out. He felt nothing. No pain, but also no loss. On instinct he tried to move his fingers, and the strangest sensation came back to him. He felt the fingers moving, but it was like they had been delayed, as if they were on strings a mile away, taking their time to act on and respond to his requests. He looked up and saw the severed hand and the fingers were indeed moving, curling inwards one final time before their messages were lost entirely.

Kalsang screamed and rocked himself back up to a kneeling position, as panic quickly took over his mind and the inner calmness that had been keeping his dizziness at bay broke, flooding his brain with yet another sensation of sheer terror. He heaved and threw up his breakfast from that morning’s first ride, then kept heaving and heaving, the muscles he had charged into a state of superhuman strength convulsing and spasming, their incredible force breaking his ribs one at a time as he shuddered on the ground. By the time a pool of frothing stomach acid bubbled beneath him, he was completely defeated.

The dizziness began to abate and he rolled onto his back and looked up. The Shuli Go stood over him, blocking out the sunlight and casting a silhouette over him. He watched her remove two spongy fungi from deep inside her ears. She casually mentioned, “Calcium Weitong. I’ll have a terrible rash for a week, but you can’t ask for better earplugs.” Her voice was distant though, hazy and echoing.

His dream of a great republic lay in the distance between his face and hers, and finally he saw it as just that: a dream. As ephemeral and make believe as every other dream he’d ever had, every other fantasy he’d ever concocted in his life: juvenile and selfish. Except, he reminded himself, I’m not the only one who believes it. The dream would continue, even if he did not. He smiled.

“What’s funny?” Lian asked, towering over him.

Kalsang could feel blood entering his lungs, but for a few moments he could talk at least. “My men. They will come and finish what I started.”

Lian shook her head. “Your men are already dead.”

He coughed, a great, heaving pain that split his insides apart, causing him to gasp and moan. In spite of the pain, he needed to know. “What do you mean?” He asked in a whisper, the blood now at the back of his throat, inching its way up. “How big… of an army?”

“No army,” she informed him. “Just my son.”

“Shuli Go don’t have…”

“No. We’re not supposed to. And his father was a Shei Chaste, who also aren’t supposed to have children. And he’s been raised as a Keeper his whole life. So he doesn’t need an army. He only needs himself.”

As the blood began to dribble out of his mouth, Kalsang pictured this creature, this amalgam of the three most powerful magic users in the world. He imagined what strength such a man would possess. And at once the dream in front of him became a vision. It adjusted itself in tiny, almost insignificant ways – a color there, a face here, a feature there – and the path to it became as clear and real as he’d always hoped it would be. A great nation, rising out of the ashes of a corrupt one, protected by the strength of a Keeper: punishing the wicked and protecting the innocent. Only he was no longer that Keeper. He was not the centerpiece of the vision, but a minor player on the edges. One of the wicked, who had believed the evil he’d done to be good. This Keeper was someone else, someone brilliant and powerful and unsullied by poor moral judgement. Someone who could forgive an impatient man for his faults as easily as he could punish him for them.

Kalsang smiled. Lian looked down at his blood-covered teeth and put him out of his misery. A sword, straight up the jaw, into the brain. That last sensation a strange one: more pain. A new pain, intense and profound. If he’d had the time, he would have shrieked: the incision into the soft flesh, the forceful entry through vocal cord, tongue, then brain stem each more heinous and distinct than he’d imagined possible. But there was no time for a shout or a scream, just one final reach for the great Tiendu. He took hold of it with his mind and hoisted his vision into it: a painting into a roaring fire that would never burn, but one day shape the fire into its own image.

One day, when the people ruled themselves, and justice was not handed out at the point of a sword.

And then he was gone, another intricate swirl in the universe’s unending tapestry of pain, love, life and death. But his vision lived on.