“Who gave you that idea?” Manziholet’s mother said. They were eating dinner alone in their private theater, while a troupe of dozens of actors and actresses were performing Deeds of Yori Mamoto on the stage. “Of course you will get your ArchSoul encased tomorrow. I’ve waited fifteen years for it.”

She had chosen to appear very young, with her bold red lips standing out against her fair skin. Her long black hair was dressed up with intricate golden accessories resembling wings and flames, matching the shades of gold and amber of her grand silk robe. “What? Are you scared or something?” She glanced at him.

“Oh, I’m completely petrified, mother,” the boy replied. “No, obviously not. I am ready.”

“Good. With your status as a Seraphist, I can finally get that insufferable Kalo off his position and become the Chair. Don’t disappoint me.”

Arin lifted a piece of starfish roll with her chopstick, tilted it slightly to dip just a corner into the soy sauce, then brought it in her mouth. Even while eating, his mother could not help but look like one of those regal queens in ancient paintings, the type with zero tolerance for incompetence and who authorized public execution as an after-thought.

Meanwhile, the performance reached its first twist, when Yori Mamoto found out the tyrant she sought to overthrow was her father all along. His mother was very fond of the scene, so Manziholet kept his mouth shut for her enjoyment. He needed her to be in a good mood when he broached the next subject.

After Yori Mamoto decided to spare his father and accept her birthright, the boy counted to three in his head, then said, “About my marriage, mother.”

“What’s about it?”

His mother knew exactly what they were talking about. She was toying with him, which she always did whenever he asked for help. He would rather do it on his own but, for every forisma in his account, she had hundreds more. On Sui-Jen, marriage was very expensive.

“We agreed that if I graduated at the first of my Class, you would support me regardless of whomever I choose.”

“We did.”

“Well?” He gestured to the Vixtrian Rapier, which was deliberately leaned on the table in her line of sight.

“My son, I know you like the Reya girl. You practically asked for her hand in your speech.” She sighed then looked at him. “But no matter how much money or political favor I throw at her family, they’ll say no and so will she, because she has already agreed to a proposal from a Greatling.”

During his first year at the Academy, the boy challenged the chief military instructor, a strict and foul-mouthed veteran, to a war game. It took place on an open desert, with each having three thousand veteran mercenaries at their disposal. The boy had devised a dozen contingencies and arrayed his troops well. He reckoned he would emerge victorious and earn his peers’ respect for he had defeated evil. Thirteen minutes in, his left wing routed after the instructor’s troops punched a hole in his center.

His mother’s news reminded him of that memory, disorienting and humiliating. He could hardly think. “That’s impossible,” the boy found himself saying. “You’re lying.”

“Why would I?”

“Then we will change her mind.”

“Don’t make a fool of yourself, Manziholet.” She shook her head in disappointment. “Unless you can give her a legacy seraph and a ticket to Terra like the Greatling do, she’ll certainly reject you. Worse, she’ll hold it over you for as long as you live.”

If luck was capable of playing favorites, then it would choose members of the Great Lineages with their guaranteed chance of being born with ArchSouls. Reality would have fractured under their population had each Lineage managed to go beyond the hard cap of ten offspring per year, set for unknown reasons.

Even then, the Greatlings were to Sui-Jen’s residents what Sui-Jen’s residents were to those living on Promethean – distant, dangerously influential, and richer than myths. Manziholet fingers tightened around his chopsticks before he placed them down. “It’s unfair.”

“Life is unfair. Haven’t you learned about it by now, after all your little adventures to Promethean?” His mother gestured to the stage – dozens of people were performing their hearts out for only two audiences, who merely wanted to make their dinner less boring. “Ask the quadrillions who live there. I’m sure they’ll give a reply similar to yours.”

Manziholet gathered his thoughts, the same way he had managed to rally his broken army for a counterattack. “How long have you known?” he asked.

“My spy informed me two weeks ago, who reckoned she said yes five days before that. Frankly, with that much time, I’m surprised and disappointed that you didn’t figure it out on your own.”

He went over his past interaction with Aezixia during that time, the words she said, her body language, how she asked him for things knowing he had no choice but to accept, or the way she smiled at him. He must have been a pet in her eyes, one that she had extracted the maximum amount of loyalty out of. He stood up.

“Leaving so soon, my son? There’s a good plot point coming up.”

“I’d rather spend time alone, if that’s alright.”

“I won’t keep you, though do remember to stop by my office later. We should go over your choice of seraph and Circuit, as well as your preparation for the Studium’s Proving.”

“I will, mother.” He turned around to leave, as the Deeds of Yori Mamoto was approaching its next major twist, when the female lead found out her beloved cook had been feeding her poison because he had once been a victim of her father. She should have killed the tyrant, the cook cried out in rage. She let him go in the end, however, just as she did with her father, even though both had left permanent wounds on her body.

Despite its brilliant dialogue, like all works written by Kyshimura, its main theme was to end the cycle of hate, which Manziholet always found rather dull and impractical. In his opinion, like the stars, grudges should be eternal. And forgiveness, above all, was merely a failure to finish what your heart set out to destroy.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The next morning, Manziholet took a Ring Runner to get to another Sui-Jen’s District, where the Guild of After-Death had established a branch office. In contrast to the opulent high-rises that surrounded it, the building was a bland blackstone pyramid over five hundred feet tall, with its square base's side length precisely designed to be twice as long as that.

The boy walked into the pyramid alone. His mother could not be there with him, too busy gathering votes in her Committee to get its Chair, although she did transfer him fifteen millions forisma as a token of love.

He could not care less. The encasement was supposed to be a quiet, private ritual between the After-Deather and their ArchSoul anyway. There was no need for a whole audience to watch the latter bare their soul out and go metaphysically nude. Death was an intimate affair.

A handful of receptionists were waiting at the first chamber, where Manziholet’s eligibility to receive a seraph was confirmed, which mostly meant he had been educated and civilized enough to not abuse his reality-reshaping power. Encasements of younger ArchSouls had been tried before, with memorable and disastrous results.

Then came deciding his After-Deather, who would hold total control over his ArchSoul during the process. They would also work together until the end of time, even when the Seraphist rose into the highest Sphere. Therefore, that person had to be as dispassionate of the wider affairs as a rock in the middle of the desert and held to the highest standards of ethics.

Every After-Deather, understandably, must therefore be carefully chosen through the hands of fate: The Guild’s receptionists went outside the building and had a random mortal roll three 20-sided dice. The tally told them which wheel of names to pick out of the available fifty-eight. Having mounted the wheel on a metal frame, one of them solemnly spun it up. When it stopped, fate revealed who would be his eternal mechanic of the soul.

When Manziholet walked into his workshop, the After-Deather was hunching over his desk and carving into a plank of wood with long slender needles. Vines that produced shining flowers crept up the blackstone walls to provide light. Strange pieces of machinery, presumably running on Miracles or dissonant material, scattered around the room.

The man, dressed in a thick leather coat, turned around and lifted up his protective glasses as the boy got near. His eyes were entirely black, as if light around them had been sucked away, while his head was devoid of any facial hair. His skin was gray, like the upper side of a shark, and looked quite smooth.

“Greetings, my name is Manziholet Claisara Sylvektor. You will work with me from now on.” The boy extended his hand out with a request for the Oculon System in his mind. “I’m looking forward to our collaboration.”

“Of course you are,” the man said with a grunt, before receiving his hand with a dirty leather glove.

Manziholet, not wanting to give the man the satisfaction of seeing him bend, gripped it firmly without caring about the oil and sawdust.

[You have exchanged sigil with Nat’Seax (21-30-Mortavia-88674249).]

“Let me see it.” Nat’Seax disengaged and snatched away a paper that the receptionists had given the boy. He either skimmed through the information or read it carefully (pretty hard to tell due to the black eyes), crumpled it into a ball, then tossed it into the corner of the workshop, where it joined the growing collection of scrap metal and half-eaten meals. “What I want you to do,” the After-Deather said, “is to sit down still at that seat over there and be quiet for fifteen minutes. I’ll serve you after I'm done with my work.”

“You can take all the time you need. I’ll be right here.”

Nat’Seax muttered a curse in reply and returned to his plank of wood while Manziholet settled down on a tiny stool next to the wall, between a shelf of glass jars storing fetuses and a scaled model of TerraSol with its three ringworlds, which was placed high on top of a tower made from all seven volumes of Mechanisms of Valor written by Orin Draymir.

The After-Deather was being rather polite compared to his fellow guilders, who all had a reputation for being impossibly insufferable. Some claimed it was because they were holed up in their pyramid all day, or that uncovering the secrets of the soul had somehow fried the part of their brain responsible for politeness, or perhaps they just had no regard for the living. In Manziholet’s opinion, they did it because they knew they were indispensable. He respected them for that.

The clock provided by his Oculon System told him exactly fifteen minutes had passed before Nat’Seax rose from his desk and approached a wall. The blackstone on it shifted to the sides, revealing an entrance to a demiplane filled with different chests, which promptly sealed shut once he stepped inside.

Moments later, Nat’Seax returned with two chests in his arms. He carefully placed them on the floor, then gestured for the boy to come over to a reclining chair at the center of the workshop. A series of bronze rings engraved with cryptic glyphs encircled the chair, making it look like a cage.

Nat’Seax rummaged through a nearby drawer and took out a dark purple berry as well as a rusty knife. He presented it to Manziholet. “So, boy, how do you want to off yourself? Poisoned or bleeding out? Personally, I’d go with the knife, although the berry is much more painless, if that matters to you.”

Manziholet unsheathed his Vixtrian Rapier, revealing its aeon blade. “I want to go with this.”

“Fancy.” Nat’Seax brought his face dangerously close to its temporal field. “Why not?”

“Are those exactly what I requested?” Manziholet gestured to the chests.

The man nodded. “A seraph of Mist Domain and a Ribbas-pattern Circuit. I can open them for you to check, but it won’t be good for your mind.”

Manziholet relaxed himself and took a deep breath, before pointing the Rapier’s tip towards his stomach. “So,” he said, “do I go now or…?”

“You can take all the time you need.” Nat’Seax leaned back against the drawer with his arms folded. “I’ll be right here,” he repeated what Manziholet said before.

That made the boy laugh quietly, before focusing back on the task. It would be alright, Manziholet told himself as he re-gripped the weapon with both his hands and hovered its tip over his shirt. After he died, Nat’Seax would gain access to his Archetypical Soul, install the Circuit and the seraph, and then begin the revival process.

He would come back to life as good as new along with Miracles of his own. His first Miracle would put any mortal weapon to shame, whereas those of higher Spheres would give him the authority to bend the fabric of space and mastery over flow of velocity. Despite that, his hands trembled and disobeyed his order to proceed.

“It’s alright, boy,” Nat’Seax said. “You can come back tomorrow or whenever you’re ready, like most do. There is no shame in that.”

Why ArchSouls must take their own lives, the boy reminded himself. The Academy had taught him that during Philosophy. The archaic tradition began with the Defiant Path and was preserved by one of its successors, the Guild of After-Death. The reasoning was pretty straightforward.

Mortals were forever bound within the narrow bracket between life and death. Their experience was capped by the limits of human biology. To transcend past those lowly confines and prove themselves worthy of Miracles, ArchSouls must first demonstrate their readiness to proceed beyond mortality itself.

The After-Deathers would simply refuse to move forward with the encasement otherwise. Some ArchSouls could never do it, too afraid of biological death, hence denying themselves of great power. Many could only tame the nerve after more than one attempt. They were ordinary, and therefore failures.

Manziholet plunged the Vixtrian Rapier deep into his stomach, feeling the time acceleration ravaged his organs and the blade erupting out of his back. It hurted much more than when the spear had pierced him. His vision dimmed as his body collapsed.

On [Furder 14, 1920, 9:17], a boy named Manziholet Claisara Sylvektor officially died, and in his place–