Chapter 26: Answers

Shiori considered her next question. She would be dead in days, if not hours were she lost in the realms of Kryptopeda. While it might have been a safe sanctuary millennia ago, Kawamura’s books had told her how dangerous it had become.

It worsened when the previous Princess tried to fix everything. The book before The Last Word had ended when the last Princess rediscovered a spell called ‘The Last Word’ and tried to use it to fix the realms.

Now the realms were dying, eaten apart by shadows and nightmares that had once been kept in the forbidden places.

No, Shiori couldn’t survive alone. She needed help from Mores.

She didn’t trust him, but she needed him out from under Duke Praetor’s control and a way to escape back to Earth.

“How did you get to Earth?” Shiori asked.

“The old world? Your home?” Mores nodded. “How did you learn to Speak true words so quickly?”

This time Shiori didn’t hold back on her memories. Mores had intentionally flooded her with a long memory to distract her last time. She could do the same thing. She opened a deluge of memory, as much as she could muster.

The next memory from Mores came. She was back in the shattered old temple. The Duke stood before Mores, gesturing to the book he now held.

“That book is supposed to be the next Royal Grimoire, or one of such. It lacks both title on the cover and words inside. Bid her divulge how one might read it. I desire her true name.”

Mores nodded dutifully, but the Duke ignored the boy. He turned to Mores’ cousin’s corpse. With a murmured word he called a weak blue light to one upheld hand.

The shadows under the corpse writhed like angry snakes in the sickly light. Mores stepped backward. He had heard the stories, but had never seen an Umbrae born.

No one Mores knew would admit to understanding how the Duke lived forever by consuming the lives of those that failed him. Neither did anyone seem to know how he dominated the Umbrae shadows.

The Duke was efficient. The power from each victim held together his crumbled inner sanctum and seat of power. Their life force kept him youthful and euphoric as if by a drug.

Their regrets and bodies became breeding grounds for Umbrae. The corpse’s writhing shadows pulsed and grew, then stood. It was the same kind stocky, barrel-chested, bearded creature Shiori had seen through the mirror. Not a dwarf.

Its mottled, leathery grey skin gave it a reptilian appearance. Its mouth was a thin, lipless slit filled with needle-like teeth. Its large, glassy black eyes turned to Mores.

“Take thee a cohort of living shadows. Use this one to travel to the old world. Go quickly. I am not the only one that desires the Princess.” The Duke walked away, uninterested in Mores’ response.

Mores tried swallowing, but his throat was too dry. He had worked with Umbrae before. He had fought with them before. They may be loyal to the Duke, but they couldn’t be trusted.

The Umbrae in front of him was joined by more. They crept from the shadows like oily water poured in from every window and crack in the unnaturally suspended walls of the Duke’s inner sanctum.

The one grown from his cousin’s unpunished crimes was taller than most.

It made sense. Mores knew this cousin well. His crimes for the Duke had been many. Mores felt certain the Umbrae born from his cooling body would be at least as big.

Umbrae could travel between realms without a portal, but they didn’t survive the process. They were born of shadow with barely existing bodies. The passage between planes proved fatal to them, like a bee’s sting.

One by one, they came forward and spoke. Each hissed and Mores listened to each speak their secret names. He took command of them, a small army of Umbrae.

If he failed, his corpse would create another Umbrae. The Duke was efficient.

The tall Umbrae stood before Mores, hands at its side. It closed its eyes and waited for him to open the portal.

Mores didn’t have enough power to open a portal himself, even with the book as a guide to the Princess’s location. But he didn’t need to use his own power.

He reached forward his right hand, clasping the book in his left. He Spoke the Umbrae’s name tearing it to pieces, using its life force to break open the barrier between worlds.

He almost failed to guide the portal correctly. The Duke was watching. His life depended on success. It opened in the sky above a strange building.

A tear came to his eye when he saw the other side of the portal. This world was clean. Alive. Bright. So bright it nearly blinded him.

There was a castle with meager defenses. It was surrounded by opulent fields of grass and trees.

There were enough men and women for it to be a barracks, but they rambled and played like children instead of walking like soldiers. The building was tall and sturdy like a frontier castle, but there were no guards or weapons.

What kind of world did the Princess live in?

Mores blinked away his tears. The place’s tranquility had to be a deception. He was a master of deception and wouldn’t be ensnared by appearances.

He dropped into the portal and fell toward Shiori’s school.

Shiori exited the memory just as Mores reacted to the memory she had given him.

Could she use the Umbrae to create a portal home? No, she needed an anchor back to her world. Both Symphon and Mores had used her as an anchor. Symphon had used an ancient Royals temple, and Mores had used the book.

Mores wasn’t handling Shiori’s memory well. He fell forward to his hands and knees, even though there was no ground in the Emporia to crawl on.

She saw her memories play over him. He had wanted to know how she learned magic so quickly. Her answer had been honest and designed to break him down.

She had been accidentally learning magic for over the last year by reading Kawamura’s books. The books had given her a wide reserve of power, even if she wasn’t sure how much because she didn’t know her true name yet.

She had flooded Mores with everything she could think of from Kawamura’s books: every detail about Duke Praetor over the centuries. She included every wonder and sacrifice from generations of heroes.

She had fallen in love with those books. She knew them well.

But that wasn’t what broke Mores’ defenses. It was a distraction. It was a tempting distraction, since he didn’t know much of his world’s history. He hadn’t even known that the Praetors used to be humble healers.

The real trick came in how she revealed her earliest spells. The first time she yelled for the shadows to ‘STOP’, or the sand blasting spell that surprised Symphon.

She had accidentally cast a spell over Mores, commanding him through the Reversed Mirror to “come back to me.” She sent him her most recent, clear memory of what she felt as he ascended from the cave.

Mores screamed as the memory took hold. He squinted his eyes against the pain.

Shiori had felt spells from Duke Praetor woven over Mores. He had become a puppet, completely under the Duke’s control. But Shiori had felt those spells, and she shared the memory of what she had felt to Mores.

Now Mores, unsuspecting, had received her memory of those spells. He became aware of them. And mind control spells dissolve when the target becomes aware of them. He screamed as he felt how deeply the Duke had smothered his will for years.

Mores glowed, then shone, then burned incandescent like the sun. Shiori had to look away, the light grew so intense. As Mores lost consciousness, the Emporia broke as if shattered by the fierce light from an entire life worth of domination.