Chapter 23: Praetor

Shiori locked eyes with Mores Praetor.

Wild thoughts came to her that would have been insane a week ago.

She could attack him while he was weak and disoriented. She could find a rock or something. She could even try matching her unreliable magic against his.

She could read from the book, but there wasn’t much new text. Rereading text so soon would be much less powerful.

She could run from the cave and take her chances in Kryptopeda’s early morning.

Instead she froze. She didn’t want to do any of those things. She wasn’t sure she could attack anyone, much less someone wounded and dazed from a head injury.

She didn’t want to run. She wanted to sit down and sleep for a week in her warm bed at home. She wanted to be safe and boring again.

As Mores tried to readjust himself against the uncomfortable stone floor, he winced in pain, air pulled in sharply through his teeth.

The sound almost made Shiori bolt for the cave’s mouth and the increasing light.

Mores had clearly noticed her.

Her heart was racing. She closed her eyes, trying to think.

She could run, fight, or do a thousand other things that weren’t like her.

Shiori Honjou listened and thought things through. She’d had enough of being a Princess, a target, or a victim.

“Mores Praetor,” she said carefully.

He tried to move again but winced. His forearm was clearly broken. Blood trickled from a gash on his forehead, probably from a tumble into the cave floor. Shiori was lucky to have avoided the same or worse.

His arm had swollen around the break.

“Princess.” Mores clenched his teeth. “Guess you’ve figured everything out.”

“No,” Shiori said, more thoughtful than angry. “I’ve been a gullible, manipulated, panicking fool. I’ve got no idea what I should be doing. And I’m done with that. I need answers. You brought me here at the order of your lord, Duke Praetor, yes?”

Mores chuckled. “I couldn’t carry a baby chick to the Duke in my condition.”

“Tell me the truth,” Shiori said, angrier and louder than intended. The words reverberated through the cave like a song.

Shiori might not have noticed the faint glow to Mores’ skin if the cave hadn’t been so dark. It was the same glow she’d seen with other mind magic. Tsubame and Shiori glowed like that when the mind magic broke. She had cast a spell on Mores.

“I was to give you the book, awaken your power, and let the Kryptic Umbrae pull you back to the Duke.” He answered.

Umbrae. Shiori knew that term. They were among the more organized and secretive Kryptics, born of secrets that died unspoken or crimes unpunished. Shiori nearly slammed her forehead with the book. Of course they were Umbrae.

She had seen something behind Mores through the Reverse Mirror. She thought it was a dwarf. She hadn’t realized he was in Kryptopeda then.

Kawamura’s books rarely described the Kryptic species in detail. The Umbrae crawled from the shadows of corpses with undiscovered crimes or untold secrets.

They were unusually capable of travelling between the realms of Kryptopeda and barely existed. They were like ghosts with half a body. Half shadow, half flesh. Some Speakers had used them as spies, she recalled, because they could travel easily.

Duke Praetor must be able to make the incorporeal part of their bodies manifest in the real world. It made sense that they attacked Shiori as she was pulled into a small pocket of reality closer to Kryptopeda, where they could reach her.

Mores continued. “He has enough power and sway over their realm to use them to capture you. He wants to control a living Princess to ensure his survival now that Kryptopeda is dying.”

“This place is dying?” Shiori said, looking toward the cave entrance. The early sunlight’s orange glow seemed mournful.

“Since the last Princess doomed us all,” he answered.

“She didn’t mean to doom Kryptopeda. I think something went wrong.”

“How do you know?” he said and tried to lift his head, but winced and lay back down.

“She tried to end the war. Kryptopeda was supposed to be an escape from the world’s evils and unfairness. A refuge and bastion of hope. But long ago, it birthed a terrible war after a Queen tried to make Kryptopeda perfect.”

“The Last Word,” Mores said bitterly.

It felt odd discussing Kawamura’s books as if they were real. Then again, she seemed to be controlling a boy from a noble house in a strange world with spoken magic words, so she wasn’t the best judge of ‘odd’.

“Yes, the final spell. It was meant to stabilize Kryptopeda. Instead, it unleashed the Kryptics and set all kingdoms in every realm at war with each other.”

“And the last Princess,” Mores said, continuing the tale, “tried to speak The Last Word again to undo the damage. Instead, she made it worse.”

“I guess she did. I wonder why.”

“This is the only version of Kryptopeda I’ve known,” Mores said, ruefully. “It’s been generations in this realm since the realms shattered. Perhaps a decade or two in your world since it happened.”

“This used to be a beautiful place,” Shiori said, then shook her head. “Why aren’t you trying to heal yourself?”

“I don’t know healing magic,” Mores answered.

Shiori narrowed her eyes at him. His skin was still glowing. She felt a connection to him through the spell that forced him to tell the truth. She wished she was more experienced with magic, but didn’t feel that he was lying.

“You’re a Praetor. You use mind manipulation magic like them. The Praetors invented healing magic when Kryptopeda was young. How can you not know it?”

Mores looked genuinely surprised. “I,” he paused, “I didn’t know the Praetors used healing magic. I thought they only focused on gaining power and destroying enemies from the inside. I don’t know much of my house’s history.”

Shiori thought. “How did you open a portal? I thought you didn’t have that much strength.”

“I didn’t at first, but I gained more strength every time we communicated through the Reversed Mirror.”

Shiori actually did hit herself in the forehead with her book. Of course! Speakers gained power by reading words written by Royalty. She had been reduced to writing to Mores through Reversed Mirrors. Everything she wrote made him stronger.

“How much strength did you lose when opening that portal?” she asked.

“Almost everything I got from reading your words,” he answered easily. “In the time time I had it, that power saved my life. When you first wrote to me, I had barely escaped the Duke’s wrath at losing you. He tried to kill me, to consume my soul.”

“He tried to...” Shiori stopped. A Praetor lord generations ago had learned to further bastardize healing magic for something worse than mind control. He had learned to kill others to prolong his life.

“The Duke,” Shiori asked carefully, “how old is he?”

“He is my great, great, great, great...” Mores winced, “Anyway, many generations back he’s my ancestor, but still the Duke today. His progeny that make him proud live. Those that fail him prolong his life as penance.”

Shiori was horrified. The books had mentioned the vampiric Speaker lord, but that had been books ago. How old was that monster?

She hefted the book. She needed to think.

“Mores,” she said, although she felt uncomfortable using a first name. It wasn’t very Japanese. “Heal up. We need to talk, and you are in no shape to go anywhere right now.”

“I don’t know healing magic,” he protested.

“Praetor, your magic is healing magic, just misused. Use it as it’s meant to be.”

Mores considered this. “How?”

Shiori stood carefully, a hand above her head to avoid the unseen ceiling. “The Praetors learned that healing, and all life, is basically pain. They learned to accelerate healing by accelerating the pain of a wound.”

Mores considered his mangled arm which clearly caused him significant pain.

“Don’t worry, they learned to channel the pain away, so the process was painless. It was supposed to be easy to perform on oneself, and hard on others.”

“Pain,” Mores said. As he said the word, his fine red line of snake-like light appeared, playing over his fingers. It was a pain release spell that he had been trained to use as a weapon in a fight.

In Kawamura’s books, Shiori had read about miraculous healing that had come from that red light. It seemed that every good thing in this world had been hopelessly corrupted. She felt like the whole world rested on her shoulders.

“Get to healing,” she said. “I’ve got some reading to do.”