For an eternity that lasted the slightest of instants, he didn’t exist. He drowned in a black, abyssal sea, aware yet unaware, deaf and able to hear everything in the universe, blind yet able to perceive all the secrets of the universe.
He drifted through currents of time and space, watched the universe begin and end a thousand times, and forgot after each cycle. His solitude was perfect, and his knowledge was limitless. He was a god; he was a mortal; he was both and neither at once, straddling the line between life and death with the grace of an acrobat.
Cities rose and fell according to his design—bastions of civilization in one moment, reduced to ash in the next, the slate wiped clean for whatever he deemed would replace them. Power was a thing so deeply ingrained into him within this dream sea that anything and everything was not only possible but within his grasp.
He had but to reach out and take it.
The first sign that not all was as it seemed was a low roar, a howl at the edge of his hearing that he couldn’t escape. The rustling of leaves soon became recognizable, as did rushing water. His mind reeled amidst these sensations, imposing more stoutly upon his existence than anything else in the dream sea.
Whispering soon intruded upon his perfect peace, too low for him to make out, but the voices were eerily identifiable.
Jasmine, his first wife, now long dead—when they were younger, she’d been taken by an arrogant Prince as a concubine, and when he’d attempted to stop it, he’d been beaten to within an inch of his life. He’d been spared only by virtue of his wife’s pleading. Like that, a thousand years of joy had come to an end.
Though that Prince’s Clan was eventually destroyed, he always remembered his sharp-tongued wife. The glint in her eyes when she thought of a private joke, the half-smile she wore whenever she spied him across a room, the many long nights agonizing over the names of children they had never managed to conceive together…
He’d never managed to find Jasmine, but he’d taken what little retribution he could. He’d gained a great deal of power in his time, though not enough to challenge the Prince’s Clan. Enough, though, to stomp out one of that Clan’s dying embers, ensuring that it would never rise again.
He also heard his father, and the death rattle he made protecting the family from bandits when he was young. He heard his mother scream as the bandits broke down the door and took all they could, from coin to blood to virtue. He heard his brother sobbing in one moment as he had at the age of six as he was dragged out from under their parents’ bed, and he heard his pained shout at the age of six hundred as he was run through by his opponent in what was supposed to be a friendly duel.
A thousand others he heard, and more, building until their voices blended into a deafening cacophony that demanded he wake up.
His eyes shot open, and like smoke as a fire was quenched, it all dissipated. The black sea of dreams in which he’d lived a thousand eternities was gone, and the voices stopped—at least, for a moment. He barely had time to register that he lay in a small clearing of ghostly grass surrounded by ethereal trees that cast pale light throughout his surroundings yet concealed everything from him past a hundred feet.
Not too far from him lay a river of pale water. Shadows danced about in the corners of his vision—animals come to drink at the water’s edge, small row boats setting off from the bank to cross to the other side, and uncountable legions of others lying in the grass by the riverbank, still asleep, still waiting for their turn to cross. When he turned his eyes upon them, however, they vanished.
After taking a moment to gather himself, he realized that he could hear shouting and the sounds of celebration, all in the same voices that had woken him from his deathly slumber. They carried across the wide river, across which he couldn’t see even halfway thanks to thick mist that rose from the rushing current in thick sheets. What lay beyond he couldn’t tell, but from the sounds he was hearing, it was sublime; serenity itself awaited him, if only he could cross.
A plucked string caught his attention; a lyre in the hands of a master now revealed to him, and with its reveal came the realization that it had always been there, he just hadn’t known. Another plucked string sent a pleasant shudder across all the universe, while his eyes followed the ivory hand of the master, hypnotized.
“You’re awake…” A musical voice, warm and caring, off-putting and disconcerting. The source was the master musician herself, smiling at him with a white face so beautiful that it put all others to shame, which was itself framed by black hair made of the Void itself, in which sparkled entire planar strands.
She plucked her lyre again, held tight against a svelte body clad in simple white robes, and the wondrous sound warbled through his mind, demanding his attention, focusing him upon the musician. She sat on a boulder at the edge of the water, a small boat just large enough for two on the sandy bank beside her.
“You’ve been out for a while…” she said, her voice at once that of shattering glass and musical bird song. “Do you remember yourself? You could start with a name…”
He twitched, his mind landing on a name that his tongue struggled to form. “I… am…” He paused.
“Take your time,” she said soothingly. “Few find themselves here with me with clear minds…”
He wasn’t sure what she meant by that and he couldn’t focus on parsing why. Regardless, he closed his eyes and concentrated, eventually landing on a name—his name.
“Triyr,” he said. “Triyr Herren…”
“Good…” the musician almost cooed. She turned her black eyes to the river and the opposite bank, obscured by the thick curtains of mist. “Are you ready to cross?” she asked. “Many await you there…
“Many…? Who?”
“Jasmine,” she said, and Triyr’s focus sharpened. “She’s there with your family. Your family is there with your Ancestors. With a word, I will take you to them. Are you ready?”
Moisture gathered in Triyr’s eyes, bringing with it a burning feeling he hadn’t felt in a long time. “If… if I’m not?” he asked.
“Then you’re not,” the musician said with a shrug. “You have an option available to you that others seldom have. If you wanted… you could wake up. You are not dead, though you could be, if you wished. You could join your family and your Ancestors.”
Triyr gaped at her like a fish. “I…” he murmured.
“A heavy decision, I know,” the musician said as she plucked another string, and the sound resonated in Triyr’s mind, banishing some of the mental fog that afflicted him. “So few are ever given the choice once they find themselves here. You ought to consider yourself lucky.”
“If… If I want to go, then I would go?” he asked as he struggled to his feet and ambled down to the riverbank.
“Yes,” the musician confirmed with a warm smile.
“And… if I didn’t… then…”
“Then you will wake,” she said. “You will live. For how long, I cannot say, but given how you wound up here, I can’t say I’d be surprised if you found yourself back here sooner than anyone might anticipate…”
Triyr was far too preoccupied with the choice placed before him to feel in any way annoyed at her candor. Instead, he curled his toes in the sand of the riverbank, quietly listening to the distant chatter of his Ancestors echo across the water.
They were waiting for him, calling for him, and all he had to do, was…
“I… have children,” he said.
“Yes,” the musician said.
“I have… not been kind to them…” No consort or concubine had ever replaced Jasmine in his heart, and as he stood on the riverbank, he wondered if he hadn’t let his quiet resentment out on his children. He had many, but none had made as much of themselves as he’d managed.
“No,” the musician agreed.
He could leave right now, removing himself from his children’s lives forever. ‘Would that not be the best thing? What do they lose in losing me? What do they gain in having me around?’
Tears finally began to fall from his eyes, and before he knew it, he’d taken several steps forward. The dreadful water of the river swept up to within several inches of his toes, and his tears were taken by the wind as they fell from his cheeks and splashed into the river.
‘Jump in,’ he thought. ’Do it. What have you managed? What have you accomplished? A Basileus, and your greatest feat was to kill an eleventh-tier scion of the Thunderbird so young that he couldn’t even grow a beard. The universe gains nothing from having you in it. People would celebrate your passing. They would cheer your absence. Take one more step and be washed away. Trouble no one with your presence, especially not your family. They do not need you. They do not want you.’
Despite his thoughts, his feet remained on the riverbank, unable to take that final step.
“You are conflicted,” the musician said.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Then… might I offer an opinion?”
He inclined his head. His tears flowed freely so he couldn’t quite see her, but he turned in her direction anyway.
“True death is permanent,” she stated as if it were some profound truth—which could be the case for all he knew, for what did he truly know about death? “Once one passes beyond this river, there is no coming back. But life… life is full of opportunity, isn’t it?”
Triyr slightly cocked his head, a silent acknowledgment of the rightness of her statement.
“In life, one can find much. Joy, fulfillment, purpose. If one finds themselves here missing any, then they have lost their opportunity… but you have the option to return, to be better than you were, to make some kind of difference.”
“You advocate I return?” he asked. He glanced at the boat beside her, the rickety wooden thing looking both sturdier than either of Khosrow’s Pillars, yet also like it would fall apart the moment it was placed in the ghostly water. “Is it not your job to ferry people across?”
“Is it?” she cheekily replied. “If it was… you’ll be back. Death is patient. Death is inevitable. No matter how long one lives or how powerful they are… death will come for them eventually. What is another day? What is another eternity? Why should I rush you when you do not have to be rushed?”
Triyr closed his eyes again, squeezing the last of his tears out of his eyes. He thought of his family, both those on the other side of the river and those in the living world, waiting for their father to come home. He thought of the actions he’d taken in life, of the lives he’d ruined to climb the ranks of power, of the lives he’d ruined after the climb simply because he could, or because he’d wanted to.
More than that, he thought of how he’d found himself here, on the edge of truest death, of greatest oblivion, and how that one action would come to define him if he allowed it.
‘Storm Herald, what an ark,’ he thought. ‘But what need do I have of it? What arrogance was it to think I could take it?’
A thousand such questions raced through his head, and eventually, his thoughts turned to Leon, the man who had sent him to this desolate river.
‘Was I but a stone on the path of the Thunderbird Clan’s restoration? One of many corpses Leon Raime stepped over on his quest to reclaim his Clan’s old glories? One hundred thousand years of life… was that all that I amounted to?’
Grim sadness struck him, and he again felt the urge to dive into the waters and be lost forever, to never feel again what he felt in that moment, for the shame of his life to vanish along with all that he was and ever would be.
And then a spark illuminated his dark thoughts.
‘No,’ he thought. ‘I can be more. I… just have to be more…’
“I am not ready for death,” he said aloud—as much as ‘aloud’ meant anything in this place. “I have unfinished business in the universe. How might I return?”
The musician smiled as she dipped her toes into the ethereal river. She plucked another string and said, “Wake up.”
---
Triyr’s eyes split open and he attempted to sit up. Power flooded through his body and pain wracked his senses, but he was alive, and what a joy that was.
A hand on his shoulder kept him down, however; for however much he felt energized by the simple fact of his continued existence, he was still weak as a kitten compared to the usual state of affairs.
“Basileus Triyr,” a smooth, feminine voice whispered, a voice far more conventional than the contradiction of the musician. “You’ve finally woken up.”
It took a moment for his eyes to focus, but Triyr eventually realized that he was in a private room of what was likely a healer’s center given the complete lack of decoration. More concerningly, the hand on his shoulder was attached to none other than Anassa Britta, who stared sternly at him from beside his bed.
“… What…?” he gasped, his voice coming out as raspy as if he’d not used it in a century.
“Are you of sound mind?” Britta asked. “Do you remember your duel?”
Triyr nodded.
“You’ve been out for several hours,” Britta stated. “I have not encountered someone so difficult to heal in a long time. What can you tell me of your current condition?”
“Well enough…” he rasped.
“You can answer some questions, then…?” she asked, her carefully neutral voice slipping into something more insistent, more forceful…
Triyr could feel his weakness; he doubted he was currently able to fight a sixth-tier mage, let alone a fourteenth-tier Anassa. With origin power, he felt that he ought to regain his strength quickly, but to what end?
He kept his eyes on the Anassa, but he summoned a hint of his origin power and, ignoring the pain it brought to him as it raced through his body, used it with a wisp of Mist of Chaos to form a leather-bound journal in one of his hands. Britta’s eyes snapped to it, especially as ink began to form on the innumerable pages—inscrutable runes, or at least runic script, raced along the pages. Triyr would not speak of what he had seen to anyone, but he intended to record it for his own eyes. He ensured that it was written in a language almost no one else knew, but even then, he could see how Britta watched the characters fly across the page.
“What questions?” he asked in a successful attempt to shift her attention.
“Leon Raime,” she said, “intrigues me, and for not entirely good reasons. His power was of the Thunderbird Clan—I remember it well enough to recognize it. But… he demonstrated other powers, too. What can you tell me of him?”
Triyr almost rolled his eyes. Leon Raime was not someone he wanted to concern himself with. If he was to make his life mean something, then he had much to do—enough that he was already considering abdicating his Basileus title. For the moment, though, he simply said, “A rising star in the Storm Lands. I know little else.” It hurt to speak, but origin power was starting to soothe his pain instead of causing it now that his natural healing abilities were kicking in. Britta may have healed him, but some aches ran deeper than flesh…
“Really?” she pressed. “He used a kind of lightning during your duel I didn’t recognize—one black in color. Does this not concern you?”
“No,” he immediately replied, speaking no lie. Black lightning or silver-blue, it no longer mattered to him. Leon Raime was no enemy of his—time was. He would one day find himself on that riverbank again, and he had many regrets to handle before then…
Britta asked him several further questions, but he barely responded, speaking only as much as was required. Throughout it all, he kept writing in his journal, ensuring that every detail he remembered from that place—that Aesii—was committed to paper.
Eventually, the Anassa left, clearly frustrated, but Triyr didn’t care. Only once she was gone did he realize what a mistake it was that he’d just made.
He’d forgotten to thank her for saving his life.
’Just another thing to make up for…’ he thought. In a life as regret-filled as his was, one more mistake to fix was hardly a monumental thing…
---
As soon as she was alone, Britta let her regal demeanor drop. She slammed a fist on the office’s table, smashing it into splinters with ease. It wasn’t her desk; she didn’t care about it. Administering Voidshore, necessary though it was, wasn’t even close to her main concern.
Rather, it was the image of Leon Raime with red-orange eyes that wouldn’t leave her mind, nor that horrifying black lightning. She’d need to look further into him, but eventually, she had to go to Anushirawan with this. If she was right, then the implications were dire, and could only be handled by the Sun King himself…
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