Chapter II | Death of the Old King, Part II

Year 690 a.S., Summer | City Pyraleia, the Capital

The Duke of Vergalis left Tristan waiting alone in the Throne Hall for an hour and a half before finally showing his face. He apologized, but it was evident in the way he carried himself that he was not sorry. Still, Tristan would hear him out. This duke began by singing the lowborn’s praises. He traveled across a great stretch of ocean just to meet him, after all. He continued on about how Tristan had almost singlehandedly designed the new sea train.

“It’s nothing special,” Tristan said. “Cities Typhon and Tsuna have had trains running between them for years already.”

The duke brushed aside the feigned modesty and took a sip of what was meant to be the capital’s finest brandy. His eye had twitched with every sip thus far, but Tristan pretended not to notice.

The Throne Hall this day was quiet, a truth noticeable in the pauses between their words. Far more quiet than he was used to. The other ministers had taken the day off, the young prince had yet to be crowned, and the world still kept turning. A calm before the storm. The Old King’s Carnation had given his nephew the empty throne before anyone else could rush to take it, and they were all lucky for it. A breath in here, and one could feel their lungs fill with greed. Any who sat in this room had gained a lust for power, whether for good or for self-gain.

Vergalis was like a sister city to the capital, and her duke, Christopher March, was a man who seemed not to enjoy life. Tristan read that from him at a glance. In his middle age, his smiles had all but left him, replaced with wrinkled eyes and graying hairs. As royalty, they could afford to pay for their near-perfect genetics, but the man’s stresses appeared to have caught up to him. House March was among the most powerful, and perhaps the wealthiest of all the great houses, but Duke March was not satisfied. It was that dissatisfaction that made him dangerous.

“I want you,” Lord March finally said. The brandy in his glass had gone, perhaps into the potted plant behind him. “You won’t need to leave your job here. Your council only meets once per week. The journey by your very own sea train takes twelve hours, and you can ride it for free. Come on. Join my council and help build the trains in my city.”

Tristan blinked twice. This opportunity had never once been given to a minister before in history, and unlike him, the ministers of history had all been nobles from great houses. Perhaps that was the reason Lord March didn’t worry about offering such power. No matter how high he rose, the people would see Tristan as lowborn, through and through. They would see it every time they read his name without a house to go without it.

“You honor me, my lord.” He reached under the table and pulled out a bottle of vodka before taking to his feet. With a single swig, his nerves began to settle. “Shall we shake on it?”

Christopher rose to his feet as well. “Of course. And I have a gift for you to settle the deal as well.” He gestured to the tall twin doors at the end of the council hall. “Girl, you can come out now.”

Tristan lowered his hand since the Lord March never shook it, and wiped it on Marion—that tall black box he brought with him wherever he went—as if to rub away the lingering embarrassment. She almost seemed to hum in response.

Despite the duke’s call, no one came out. The lord muttered something along the lines of stupid girl, then stomped over there himself and threw the doors open.

She was leaning against a wall just outside, swiping through her smartphone with both earbuds in and yet to notice the duke’s fury. Her music bled faintly through, some decades-old jazz track Tristan could barely recall. And it was already evening, but she still wore her academy uniform. Fallryn’s uniform, he could tell, and two sizes larger than what fit her. Finally, the girl noticed Christopher and yanked on the cord to pull the music from her ears.

“Ah,” she said, smiling now. “Caroline texted me about ten minutes ago. ‘I need to see him right now!’ Something like that.” She mimed an ogre as she quoted his wife.

The duke pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath as if contemplating whether to hit her or not. In the end, he decided not to and simply stormed off to see his wife, leaving the minister alone with the strange schoolgirl he had apparently just received as a gift. She turned to Tristan then, smile gone, and stuffed her earbuds into one of the shallow pockets on her black blazer.

“Well,” she began. “I’m your lucky.”

“Seems so,” he said. Something about her appeared familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

She began to circle around the room, hands fiddling in her other pockets like she’d never had pockets before. “So… what happens if you want to whip me?”

“Shit,” Tristan coughed, pulling the bottle from his lips. “I’m sorry, what?”

“If you want to whip me,” she said. “Do I have to stand there and take it? Or can I run away and cry?”

“I’m not going to whip you. Do I look like someone who’d whip you?”

She smiled again. “I guess not. Minister Tristan… you drink all day, everyday, but have never laid hands on a woman. Not even once, people say. Some think you’re into guys.”

“Dunno what they’re on about,” he said, taking another swig. “I’m a big fan of big… well, you know.”

She gestured to her chest. “You must be disappointed then.”

“Not at all. Better for nothing to tempt me. Isn’t that right, Marion?” He poured the rest of the bottle over his black box and belched. “So what’s your name?”

“Lana,” she said, with a touch of distaste.

“Well, Lana, you’re quite in luck! I don’t really need a lucky, but since you’re a gift I can't refuse, it’d be great if you could just kindly piss off on your own now, thanks.”

“I hear that luckies can receive their own hall.”

“I’m no lord, so I have no halls to offer. At best, you can take my guest bedroom.”

Lana brightened. “You live here, in Layer 1?”

“In this very building.”

“That’s…” she trailed off, her smile gone again. “An old dream. I have a home in the Ends.”

Tristan stayed silent and the conversation ended there in an awkward sort of stasis until the doors opened again. The two expected a larger figure, like the Duke of Vergalis or another minister to have entered, but it wasn’t.

It was only me, little Annamarie. Barely five-years-old, sleeves flecked with blood. I walked in confused and afraid, eyes darting. Tristan and Lana stared at me, shocked at my sudden appearance. My eyes settled on those stares.

“Pretty girl,” I pointed. “And ugly man. You two were in my dream.”

❧☙

In time, the two overcame their confusion and ushered me into one of their large council chairs. My eyes were barely lifted over the lip of the table.

“You’re the baron’s daughter, aren’t you?” Tristan said. “Can’t mistake those scarlet eyes.”

I wrinkled my brow, not understanding a single word he said, so instead I gripped the cup Lana had fetched for me and sipped on it. The water tasted of lemons.

“Where are your parents?” Lana asked. I shook my head, almost as if to forget the answer, and instead tried to remember what these two had been doing in my dream. I often had trouble separating dream from reality, and this didn’t make it any easier. Then it clicked for me. Not the exact contents of what I’d dreamt, but instead a thought I wished I could say to them in my sleep. They couldn’t hear me back then, but now…

“The King,” I said, standing on the chair. “He’s in danger.”

Tristan narrowed his eyes at me, an almost-glare I froze at, but Lana only laughed. “The King’s already gone,” she said.

“No, you don’t—”

“Annamarie.” An exhausted voice called out from behind the twin doors, which opened right after. A young girl with white hair emerged. 10-year-old Jericho March. “Father’s going to yell at me if I let you run away like that again.”

It was an odd sight. I couldn’t remember having known Jericho back then in Year 690 at all, but here she was. Maybe it was because she seemed so solemn at this age. The Jericho I knew was fiercely bombastic, her white hair more like flame than the mop it was here.

“I’ll watch over her,” Tristan said, leaned back in his chair. “Could you do me a favor, young Baronness? Escort my lucky back to her home in Layer 6.”

Jericho seemed about to protest, but when she realized that Lana there was who she needed to escort, her face brightened right away. “Such a pretty girl,” she gasped, hands pressed against her lips. “It would be my honor.”

“Hey,” Lana said to Tristan as she took to Jericho’s side. “Don’t forget about me.”

The two left through the same twin doors once more, and Tristan leaned so far back in his chair, one could worry he might fall back and hit his head and die. “You can come out now, Timothy.”

Sir Timothy Tom emerged then, a man no one had yet noticed there in the Throne Hall despite its many visitors. He had been standing behind a pillar, silently listening to the conversations of the day. His formal clothes had been left open to reveal his rippling torso, muscle carved from flesh like it would from marble. “The peasant life seems to be treating you well.”

“Do please button your shirt up,” Tristan said.

Timothy ignored him and turned his attention to me. “You said the king is in danger. Do you mean the Crown Prince, Claude Morsylis?”

“Claude,” I confirmed, smiling at having someone finally understand me.

“What danger?” Tristan pushed.

That was a more difficult question for me to answer. My dreams faded fast and I could scarcely recall what it was. Just one more word managed its way to my tongue, and I spoke it aloud for them to hear. “August.”

❧☙

Jericho had taken Lana’s hand and refused to let go since. Even as they walked onto the train together and the busy car became less crowded with each layer they descended, she kept it wrapped in hers. Seats opened up, but they remained standing in the rumbling and falling.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” Lana murmured.

Jericho swept her hair back to reveal her bright green eyes. “I’m told that often. Feels nice to not care for once.”

Over the past few years, Lana had spent much of her free time in study. She memorized the name of every member of each founding house, their retainers, their armies, their temperaments, and their affiliations. Jericho’s name only ever came up once. A daughter that House March seemed to want to forget. It was not uncommon for the great houses to name their lastborn as a baron rather than a count, but House March had not once in history done this before. One need not look further than Jericho herself to see why that may be. Her white hair and green eyes were traits that no one else in her family shared. Everyone knew that hightowners carefully constructed the genome of their children, so everyone figured Jericho must’ve been a bastard child.

She looked Jericho in the eye. The girl was only ten, five years her junior, but they stood shoulder to shoulder. She was abnormally tall, but sunken like her soul had been stolen.

“Let’s get off here,” Lana said, when the doors hissed open at Layer 4. She still lived a further two layers below, there beneath the sea where the sun could barely reach and the fish stared through glass at. But the highborn fared poorly deeper below.

“But Mister Tristan said—”

Lana dragged the young baroness outside with her, finally treating her as she would a child. “Don’t you wanna see the beach with me?”

Jericho had never seen a real beach before. In Vergalis, there were many artificial lakes and ponds and such with sands galore and fancy shells to adorn them. But a real beach with ugly grey sand that scraped the bottoms of your feet and an ocean that beckoned you into something dangerous and unknown—those were decades extinct, and she wanted to see one very badly. So Lana took her. Between remote bikes and automated trolleys and cabs, they made their way across an entire radius of Layer 4, from center to edge to the beach she promised.

But of course, this beach wasn’t real either. Any real land long since sat far undersea to drown in salt and water, so the sand here was naught but a dumping ground of various plastics broken down so small you could barely tell. In truth, places like these were never meant to be beaches. They were but the result of an attempt to clean up our old oceans of plastic. In a way, that made them quite beautiful. The commercial manufacturing of plastics had been banned since before I was born, and what was left remained here, in grains on beaches. And while these beaches may have been artificial, the ocean spray was real. Real, too, was the smell of the life below and in the kelp that washed ashore, with crabs and turtles and the random little critters that found home here.

Jericho released her grip on Lana’s hand and stared out at the sea and its horizon. Far into it and past what the eye could see, she stared.

There was a little girl here at this beach too, playing at the shoreline before she spotted Lana and dashed then across the plastic sands to meet her. Her long blonde hair trailed behind her like the soft gold banner of House Calista, and her smile glowed like stars.

Lana lit up at the sight of her and caught her by the hips to lift her way up high, above her head to swing wildly and hear her laugh.

“Who is this?” Jericho asked.

The girl tapped Lana to indicate she wanted to be let down, and with her feet planted on the sand, she placed a hand to her chest and declared her name, bright as the sun. “Alina di Luca!”

“A foreigner?”

“An endtowner,” Lana said. “Like me.”

“Sandcastle!” Alina said, grabbing her hand.

Lana followed the girl back to where she played. A sad grey lump was all that remained of what must’ve been a glorious castle, taken by the tide as all things were destined to. “I’m sure it was lovely,” she said, but Alina was verging on tears, so Lana distracted her. “But hey, what do you think about my new school uniform? Pretty cool, huh? Worked my butt off to get this thing. I’ve always wanted a nice pleated skirt like this.”

Alina gripped the hem of the skirt and lifted it to inspect it at every angle. “It’s all black. Not cute at all.”

“Is that so?” Lana said, crouching down to grab the girl’s doughy cheek. “And here I thought you were a big fan of the night sky, all black though it is. I had just found the perfect viewing spot in Layer 1 to take you to see, too.”

“Night sky has stars too!” Alina argued. “Not just—”

“I’m the star,” Lana said. “The uniform was made to show me off. If it were anything but black, it would be too much cute, you know?”

The girl opened her mouth in wonder as if the counter-argument made sense.

Jericho, who had followed lazily behind, tapped Lana on the shoulder, her eyes focused somewhere in the distance. “Is that a shipwreck there? That brown splotch.”

Lana followed the line of Jericho’s gaze, from her emerald eyes to the brown splotch she described, and realized that she was right. There in the distance, a little rowboat was shattered into pieces at the shoreline, splintered in a manner ironwood could never. The little trio inched toward it, apprehensive at first until a pair emerged, mother and child. They looked nothing like anyone either Lana or Jericho had ever seen, with skin like tempered chocolate and irises the same.

Only Alina, the tiny girl who could barely speak Purilyn Standard, seemed unshaken by the sight. “Iralia?” she said.

And the other little girl, close to Jericho’s own age, only shook her head as she lifted her mother onto her back and pulled her from the wreckage.

200 years ago, when Finryd Morsylis gave the call to unite the Old Kingdoms into one beneath his banner, Iralia was among the three that refused. These two were the last survivors of that kingdom, and the little girl who hauled her mother up from their shipwreck would one day grow up to become Paris Astrantia, the Half-Queen of Sialta.