The Empress' Palace and the Lamb in Boots

The drug queen's arrival carried with it the scent of rain and forbidden commerce. Serena studied the shrine with the analytical gaze of one accustomed to appraising valuable contraband, her eyes tracing invisible currents that flowed through the sacred space like luminous rivers.

"Indeed," she murmured, her voice carrying the satisfaction of diagnosis confirmed. "A steady stream courses through this place. The shrine fairly drowns in concentrated starlight."

I began to pace—a restless circuit around the cramped interior that drew the stares of my assembled companions. My mind churned through possibilities like millstones grinding grain, seeking patterns in the chaos of supernatural circumstance. What did it all signify? How did energy accumulation, ghostly madness, and celestial fragments weave together into coherent threat?

The tengu spirit chose that moment to speak, her backwards syllables tumbling forth in urgent reversal. Ami nodded with inexorable understanding, translating the inverted confession.

"She confirms it—the excess energy drives her to distraction. The starlight amplifies every emotion until rage becomes consuming fire."

A sigh escaped me, carrying with it the last vestiges of hope for simple solutions. The truth had crystallized with terrible clarity: this mystery stretched beyond local haunting into realms of cosmic significance. Only one authority possessed sufficient knowledge to unravel such complexities.

"We must seek audience with the Empress," I announced, the words tasting of inevitability.

Xiao Ru's tail gave an irrepressible wag despite the gravity of our situation. "Well then! I suppose your welcome tour of the capital truly isn't complete without meeting our eternal sovereign!"

Ashley's usual confidence seemed to waver, her pale features taking on so much earlier expressions—genuine nervousness, perhaps even fear. The sight sent fresh currents of unease through my already troubled thoughts.

"Then it is decided," I said, straightening my shoulders against approaching destiny. "We go to the Obsidian Spire."

---

The palace entrance yawned before us like the maw of some architectural leviathan, its obsidian walls carved with such intricate devotion that my eyes could not find rest upon any single detail. White gemstone inlays traced patterns through the black stone like veins of starlight frozen in midnight, creating a luxury that rendered my former world's grandest chapels into crude sketches by comparison.

The Makai was my world now—this realization struck me with unexpected warmth as I watched Xiao Ru's playful eyes dance across the carved magnificence, her tail swaying with innocent delight. Whatever distant realm had birthed me felt increasingly like someone else's fiction.

A cherry carpet unfurled before us with the breadth of a river delta, its surface worn smooth by countless feet of every conceivable species. The procession of petitioners moved with cathedral solemnity through halls that dwarfed Vatican grandeur by orders of magnitude.

Serena maintained her usual expression of studied boredom, though I noticed her hand settle upon Ashley's shoulder with surprising tenderness—a gesture that filed itself away for future interrogation. Meanwhile, Yoko manipulated her translucent screen, lights shimmering.

"What exactly are you accomplishing?" I inquired.

"Reserving our position in the queue. By the time we reach the front, our appointed moment should arrive."

"How long might that require?"

"Approximately one thousand rotations…"

My jaw threatened to detach from its moorings entirely. "What? There isn't time for such—"

"Just kidding!" Yoko's laughter rang with mischievous satisfaction while Xiao Ru smothered her own giggles behind delicate hands.

Heat flooded my cheeks as I turned away from their shared amusement. Before I could retreat into proper mortification, Xiao Ru's arms encircled me with enthusiastic affection, nearly sending us both tumbling across the carpeted floor.

"Soon!" she chirped. "The Empress values efficiency above all courtly nonsense."

We approached a great archway flanked by crystals that seemed to exist in multiple locations simultaneously, creating barriers that flickered like velvet rope made from crystallized uncertainty. Before this threshold stood our guardian—a creature that combined ovine features with human form in ways that should have been ridiculous but instead projected an aura of quiet menace.

Her wool-white hair fell in lustrous waves across shoulders clad in a coat of midnight blue, complete with brass buttons and ornate trim that briefly wavered with a shift of her weight. Tall leather boots completed an ensemble that belonged to some romantic vision of royal musketeers, while her piercing gaze assessed each petitioner with the methodical focus of a surgeon tracing a line for the first incision.

"That's Marilamba," Xiao Ru explained in hushed tones. "One of the five royal guards. She observes everyone who seeks audience with the Empress."

Under that unblinking scrutiny, I felt distinctly like a specimen awaiting classification. The lamb-woman's fencing sword hung in the air, and somehow, I knew naught that I might befall its blade’s striking potential.

As we waited, Xiao Ru settled onto the carpet with casual comfort, patting the space beside her in invitation. My concern for palace etiquette warred with exhaustion until practicality won—though the thought of what manner of creatures had traversed this path made my skin crawl.

Without warning, our section of reality seemed to detach itself from the surrounding architecture. Crystal walls materialized around us, suffused with white radiance that transformed our mundane wait into something approaching religious experience.

"The elevator!" Xiao Ru announced with delighted recognition.

"Ah…" I settled beside the others as understanding dawned.

"Mari activates the transport once she's completed her assessment," Serena explained, her gaze tracking the luminous quantum streams that flowed past our crystalline capsule. "We're tunneling through folded space toward the throne room proper."

"A pocket dimension held in temporal suspension," Yoko added with academic cadence. "The queue progresses outside normal time flow."

Ashley nodded sagely. "Duration passes slowly here, though not due to space-time curvature. Normally space follows Riemannian geometry, but this system employs teleparallel distortion instead."

My university physics felt woefully inadequate for comprehending such casual explanations of complex systems. The word Reiman seemed… strange, as that was a human name… perhaps it was the mere analogous thing for me to understand as my brain processed what Ashley said. In fact, the manner of speech spoken seemed far less complex as time wrought on… as if I had grown accustomed to it in a naturalized baptism of semantics.

As our crystalline capsule tunneled through the quantum streams, a disturbance rippled through the luminous aether surrounding us. The light itself seemed to fold and compress, birthing a figure from pure possibility.

She materialized like a child’s idea of a court’s jester—her form cobbled together from fragments of digital starlight and distant carnival nightmares. A harlequin's cap adorned her head, its bells presumably chiming with unheard sounds… I might assume, that existed only in the spaces between dimensions. Her costume bore details hard to understand, as if her form flickered the dialiance between skin and costume too readily—an adorned bodice with the diamond patterns of traditional motley, yet rendered in colors that had no names in any mortal tongue, along with what seemed the spandex of a wonderful woman’s superhero abdominals. Most unsettling were her eyes—twin voids that seemed to peer through the fabric of reality itself.

The apparition floated before us with the weightless grace of a thing unbound by physical law, her gaze lingering on each member of our party with curious intensity. When her attention settled upon me, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature—as though she were reading the very mathematics of my being.

Then, as suddenly as she had appeared, she dissolved back into the flowing streams of light, leaving behind only the faintest echo of ethereal laughter… if that’s what her smile meant in any case.

"What in all the hells was that?" I managed, my voice barely above a whisper.

Xiao Ru's tail had gone rigid with unease. "The Digital Clown—one of the royal guard's most enigmatic members. She exists only in the aether, the realm between worlds where space folds upon itself."

"What manner of being is she?"

"Nobody knows for certain. Some say she was once mortal, transformed by prolonged exposure to quantum warmth. Others believe she is but a construct of pure information given consciousness by the Empress. She replaced the royal tree…" Xiao Ru shrugged, though her ears remained flattened with nervous energy. "She appears when the Empress requires surveillance in impossible places—the gaps between reality's threads."

The thought that we had warranted such otherworldly scrutiny sent fresh currents of apprehension through my already troubled mind.

Before I could voice my confusion, a melodious chime announced our arrival. A perfectly square aperture materialized in our crystal prison.

"Time to disembark," Xiao Ru said, rising with practiced ease. "Perhaps two hours elapsed in the external timeline, though it felt like mere moments to us."

I stepped through the opening and immediately regretted it—vertigo seized me like grasping hands as my inner ear struggled to recalibrate. But such discomfort became irrelevant as the throne room revealed itself in all its overwhelming splendor.