Chapter I | Death of the Old King

Streaks of lightning scattered across the capital in burned flashes on steelhouse rooftops. Those who dwelled in the Endtown howled of apocalypse while those in the Hightown slept soundly in their quiet beds, up above the clouds where neither rain nor lightning reached.

Meanwhile, the highest among them, High Lord of All Purily and King of Old Luridia, sat upon his throne at the very top. Every inch of his cadaverous flesh leeched off of tubes and wires. One hundred and eighty years ago, he united the nine old kingdoms into one, and for one hundred and eighty years, he remained.

Such great time passed that many began to think he could live forever. Yet it only took this single stormy night for a single thunderbolt to cause a surge that shut off his life support for just a second too long.

The Old King was found dead at sunrise.

The storm lingered into morning.

Claude stood at the edge of the train platform, the toe boxes of his shoes teetering off of the ledge. Above him, the glass overhang drummed a raindrop beat, and the distant ironwoods sang their earthy scents.

He was surrounded by his classmates. They were all dressed the same like soldiers or like robots, and like robots, they had stiff joints and sullen faces; they stared down at their cellphone screens, unmoving and unspeaking.

Claude never could bring himself to bring his phone outside with him. He liked to watch the cityscape instead while he waited for the train. He could hear it approaching already, its pale body blazing across the tracks in the distance.

“Wait for me!” a girl cried from the end of the platform.

The train stopped in front of him and the doors opened with a hiss. On every other day, he was always the first to walk on. Today, he stepped away from the door and let his classmates enter first. The distant stranger continued to make a mad dash to catch up, storm-drenched but cheerful. Her wet sneakers slipped across the polished stones in each striding step until, with a shriek, she tumbled.

The raindrop splashes dropped an octave and lingered; his classmates froze in place.

The spark had traveled down his spine already, and time slowed to a crawl. Claude sighed, then moved to slide between the gaps of the scrunched statues of his peers. Once he made it through, he headed for the girl. Her arms were held out in front of her, hands clenched like claws like she could grip onto air.

Her hair was an unusual chestnut color and completely soaked through. The strands were stuck to her cheeks and spilled down onto her Fallryn Academy uniform. Claude found it odd. The girl’s beauty bespoke a girl born noble, but he didn’t recognize her at all.

Seven seconds of slowtime had passed, and now it finally started to flicker around him. Streaks of lightning traced his path, and his heart creaked like a slightly rusted lever as the trigger shut back off.

“Are you alright?” he said. A rush of wind followed his voice and blew the water from her hair.

Even though he appeared from nowhere to catch her fall, she smiled like nothing strange had just happened. “Looks like it,” she said.

As the words left her mouth, the little thing that she had kept hidden up her sleeve tore through the cuff of her blazer, and clattered to the stones beneath her.

Claude let the girl drop to the ground to inspect the object instead. It was a rootsteel dagger. From its tip and down its rough edges, the blade curled around the wooden handle as if eating it. A curious design, and not of military origin. He turned back to the girl. “Why do you have this?”

“Ah,” she said, rubbing her bruised bottom. “I guess the cat’s outta the bag now.”

“Where did you get this? Who are you?”

Behind him, the train doors slid shut and the beast sped forth again, faster than even he could catch up to. He didn’t care. This girl here now captured his full attention. This girl with her oversized uniform and perfect face. With her hazel eyes that glinted as her lips lifted into a smile. With the dagger she shouldn’t have had.

“I’m Lana,” she said, sweetly. “Lana Rose.”

Claude narrowed his eyes. “An endtowner? At Fallryn Academy?”

She wagged her finger back and forth. “I’m beholden now. You couldn’t tell? I tend to catch the eye of all the lords I’ve met. And I’m only fifteen. Buncha freaks, dontcha think?” Her voice had a musical rhythm to it, with an appeal lost on the young prince.

“And the dagger?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Don’t you know who I am?”

“Of course I do!” she said with a clap. “You’re the crown prince of Purily. I know all sorts of secrets about you. Secrets like all the people you’ve killed. Secrets like why someone of your standing would need to wait for the train all the way down here in Layer 3 every morning. You understand, I’m sure. I’m only strong when I know all of your secrets and you know none of mine.”

He feigned nonchalance. “What if I ask nicely? The dagger. What were you doing with it?”

“I was deciding whether to kill you,” she said. Her eyes were averted, but she didn’t seem to be lying. The wind changed and the rain stopped. Her smile seemed to be swept away with the change, and she finally decided to push back onto her feet. For only these moments, she seemed so vulnerable to him. But Claude rejected the thought. To him, there wasn’t a single living person who was not vulnerable to him. So then what was it?

“You’re insane,” he finally said, and her smile returned with a draft of wind.

“And your responsibility. Isn’t that right, my lord watcher? We seemed to have missed the train, so I’ll be skipping today, but tomorrow for certain. I do think we’ll have quite the lovely future together, my prince. And I never tell a lie.”

❧☙

Lana sat up in bed and stared blankly at nothing. Her movement had disturbed the great dust in her tiny steelhouse, and rays of artificial light shimmered through the slits in her blinds.

Claude had the sun wake him instead. He ate breakfast before he brushed his teeth, then was out of the house before he disturbed the women who lived there with him.

Lana picked her skirt up from the floor and slipped into it over her white pajama shorts. Her skin caught on the zipper as she fastened it, and the pain jolted her slightly into alertness. Then without even having to think about it, she walked over to her fridge and pulled out the small pot of stew she had prepared the night before. The induction cooktop hummed when she placed the pot over it. Within half an hour, she had brushed her teeth, ironed her uniform, applied her makeup, and eaten breakfast. It took her another five to tie her collar ribbon until it was just perfect, then she set off with a bounce in her step.

Meanwhile, Claude pretended to gallavant around town before suddenly disappearing with such quickness that anyone trying to follow would have lost him. In moments, he was already flying across rooftops with a white-eyed domino mask molded perfectly to his face. His school uniform had inversed its colors into white and blue, and the collar was now twice its previous size. The flared sleeves of his outfit were designed so that when he swung his arms, the lift generated allowed him to make these great leaping bounds across the city.

“Good morning, Princess,” Lana’s neighbor said.

“Good morning,” Lana replied. She brought with her a bright smile that infected everyone she passed by across these tight Endtown corridors. There were over a hundred people living in this single steelhouse bunch alone, and she knew the names of each one. So too did she know the names of each stray cat or dog that she’d chance upon, and they all showered her with their affections each morning.

“Hand over your wallet!”

Claude was pleased to have run into such a stereotypical scene so early this morning.

“That seems like a bit of a bad idea, but hey what do I know?” he said.

Both the mugged and the mugger froze at the sound of his voice, then turned to stare at him in disbelief. Claude leaned against the alleyway wall, juggling the two steel pens he used as his weapons in one hand.

“Holy shit,” the mugged man said. “It’s Superhero!”

“What the hell is that?” the mugger said.

“To be clear,” Claude said, “I was not the one who came up with the name.”

The mugger refused to banter back, and simply swung his gun to shoot at Claude instead. By the time he had pulled the trigger, a steel pen had already lodged itself deep down the barrel of it and refused to fire, and Claude had disappeared. The mugger swung around again only to catch a glimpse of the mysterious man walk past him back the other way, dusting off his hands as the dismantled parts of the gun he was just holding clattered to the ground beside him.

“What the f–”

“Flowers! Oh, you’re too sweet, Lana.”

“Think nothing of it, Mrs. Gerber,” she said. A small field of sunflowers had sprouted in a wild patch in Layer 4, and Lana had nurtured it to be so plentiful that she felt she could pick a few for the old Mrs. Gerber’s 74th birthday. That was all the time she had left to waste, though, and decided she had to make for the train now with haste.

Once she arrived, she was surprised to find that Claude was not there yet. More surprised she was when he didn’t appear even as the train arrived and left without him.

“Absent two days in a row,” she mumbled to herself as the train trembled along. “What will your great forefathers think?”

“Thank the Lady,” the mugged man cried. “Superhero, it’s been a bit hasn’t it? I last saw you when you saved that woman from that terrible car crash.”

“Yep, been a bit busy.” He yanked on the cord he used to tie the mugger up and grinned. “Thanks for the support. Gotta dash now.”

“Wait, Superhero! It’s been a while, so you probably don’t know, but the crime has started to ramp up again lately. Another syndicate people say. If you have the time…”

Claude tapped on the side of his mask to check the time. “I’ll check it out.”

Lana had believed it wouldn’t take much to endear herself to her class, but she was sorely mistaken. She tried a joke as she introduced herself, and it fell completely flat. No matter what she did, they found little interest in speaking with her. Or rather, she found that they had little interest in speaking at all. A great disappointment, she thought.

On the other hand, there was still a delight to be had. There were only two desks without occupants when she had arrived, and the bodies belonging to those seats couldn’t be more obvious. Claude Morsylis, the Crown Prince. He was assigned to the seat of the protagonist, in the far back right corner by the window. Lana was destined to sit right next to him.

Claude flapped like a bird to stay up as high in the sky as he could to avoid being seen until he finally dove back down and slipped onto the roof of Fallryn Academy, only making a mild racket while doing so. He was late. It was the first time this ever happened. Never before did his outings as Superhero take so much of his time in the morning.

“What. In the world.” Lana had a half of a half-eaten sandwich in both hands, having clearly come to the roof to eat lunch alone. It only took a moment for Claude to revert the mechanism on his school uniform that inversed its colors and stow away his mask into his pocket. That didn’t change what Lana saw.

“You didn’t see anything,” he said anyway.

“I wish that were true,” she said. “But to be entirely honest, I’m not sure what I saw exactly either.

“It’s lunch already,” he said.

Lana nodded, taking a bite out of the sandwich in her left hand. “Didn’t bring anything? Want one of mine?”

He snatched it from her and took a bite already.

“Would you look at that? Star student, famous loner Claude Morsylis, accepting a donation of food from a poor girl. Star student Claude Morsylis, several hours late for school after already missing a day. How far thee hath fallen.”

“Meanwhile, I expected a beholden such as yourself to have surpassed already the tight cliques and tight lips of the esteemed Fallryn Academy scholars, yet here you are, eating lunch alone on the roof.”

“Isn’t today just full of disappointments?”