King Alexander preferred to be styled as Emperor Alexander, and if any Empire King earned the title, he was it. No King expanded the Empire more, recruited more soldiers, or waged more campaigns. He left behind extensive memoirs, telling of his every crusade against barbarians, and told exactly which ruthless strategies he deployed. The inventor and sole user of Empire Total War, none of his successors ever having the gall to revive it, though its use was still officially sanctioned. His restless spirit kept any of the following monarchs from daring to revoke the right of Kings to wage total war, so they said. Nothing was off limits. Women and children fell before Empire swords and pikes. Pillage and rape was a part of many successful campaigns. He wrote with precision of the military advantages provided by the complete destruction of enemy morale. An enemy is nothing if it is not united. And when your women are raped, your children pulled from screaming breasts, there is blame to go around. When your enemy is rife with internal blame and shame and sadness and fear, they have no heart left to fight. There was no malice in his writing, no sense that he enjoyed wreaking havoc or disdained his enemies like Everard. It was something much more bleak. Emperor

Alexander believed in his right to conquer and he knew total war was a statistical success. It was why fully half of the Empire’s territory could be credited to his campaigns. To Alexander, roads first was fine as far as it went, but was too weak willed to really build an Empire. And he built an empire. Alexander was known to me before my discovery of the twenty eighth floor. He was the King who conquered Rodan. It was not something my father harped on or obsessed over, like the radical factions of Rodanians most citizens were afraid of. My father was straightforward about the situation. He told me that of course he wished so many had not died and he wished Rodanians had a homeland to go back to if they wanted. But when I told him what the radicals in the street with the signs said and how it made sense to me, he sighed.

“This is our home, Origio. All of this happened long before I was born. I live now. Why would I spend my time trying to change what I cannot? You can’t change the past. No matter how much you want to. No matter how righteous your cause, and do not misunderstand me, in many ways, they are right. What was done was despicable, but it’s done, Ori. It’s done. No amount of shouting or violence is going to change that.”

My father’s words echoed in my head as we walked. It was only a matter of time now. My estimation of the geography of the world of the twenty eighth floor put us in Alexander’s time already, but we had not seen any proof of life yet. But it was coming. I wondered if it was a coincidence that Edouard had wanted to play Chani to cool off after our argument, or if some deeper part of him, some Cortes secret chamber of the heart connected to this place had known we were entering the time of The Lion. It was during Alexander’s time that Chani first appeared. Where the game came from was never clear, but its meteoric rise to popularity was well documented. The Lion was said to have been an expert player himself, but whether or not that was his thumb on the scale of historical accounts had long been a subject of debate among Chani enthusiasts. There were few accounts of actual games he had played, and those that existed were sparse with details. Of course, his exploits on the field of battle were documented with military rigor and precision. He took copious notes on everything from losses, both men and horses, the character of the enemy, and morale in the lines. He was famous for walking among his troops in the garb of a common foot soldier, talking and laughing with the men, playing a game of Chani or dice, and getting a genuine feel for how his soldiers were feeling rather than listening to a report from an underling.

Reading about him in my chair on the twenty eighth floor, I had felt a begrudging respect for the man. In most ways, he was a deplorable human being, but the way he had chosen to be, the path he laid out for himself with his own parameters, by those guidelines, he lived true to his own code. I could not find any instance of him breaking his word, or changing his mind once he had made a decision, or going against something he had written down as an explicit part of his code. He was a man who made a decision and stuck to it. To my one people’s great dismay. He wanted the plains of Rodan to be a part of the Empire and he said so in a public address to citizens of the Empire. Once that line was crossed, there was no going back. Rodan would be a part of the Empire, no matter how much blood was spilled. And much was spilled.

“Edouard, why did you want to play Chani?”

He stopped for a moment and pulled a water skin from his pack. He took a long pull and tossed it to me. I caught it and had a drink myself.

“I hadn’t given it much thought. Why do you ask?”

“The Lion was said to be a fanatic of the game.”

“What are you suggesting?”

It was obvious what I was suggesting. That the place we were in was having an effect on us, influencing us, changing our minds in subtle ways.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“I’ve been playing since I was a small child. I was basically born into the game. Me wanting to play doesn’t have anything to do with the timeline.”

“Do you think,” I started but stopped. Edouard waited for me. He could tell from my tone that I wanted to ask him something important to me, but did not yet have the words. He maintained eye contact and respectful silence. “What do you think you’re meant to do?”

“I suppose we’ll find out like we did with the Ba-Hali,” he said.

But there was an obvious problem neither of us had brought up yet. I decided to have it out right then. Better to get it over with and make a decision before we were caught up in the problems of another past world. It was the problem of my skin. There was no more hated group during Alexander’s time than Rodanians. It was his longest and most brutal campaign. Mothers cursed the plains that took their sons from them, fathers lost their apprentices and farm hands. The major cities of the Empire were without their population of young men for years, and the birth rate effects were felt for a hundred years or longer after the surrender of Rodan. I was going to be a problem.

“I’ll have to be your slave,” I said.

“Origio.”

“Tell me you see another option, another way forward, and I’ll listen. But what is it?”

He was quiet for a long time. We were in a deep, dark part of the forest. The floor of the forest was a reddish moss that grew from ground up the trunks of trees. A chill breeze swept through the dead branches that clacked like tapping fingernails on marble. The sun had begun its descent and without direct light from above on the tangled mass of trees it was getting dark. The undergrowth was thick and our boots were covered in burrs and dew from cutting through it. There was no animal life to be heard. No chirring of squirrels or cheeps of birds. No soft padding of a fox or quick rabbit dashes. We were alone. The world of Alexander was closing in on us as we stood, unmoving.

“Know thy enemy, Edouard.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Isn’t it? What did you tell me is the most important thing? Knowing what your opponent expects of you, what you know about them. What do we know about this time period? What would they expect of a pair like us?”

“We’re not playing Chani.”

“Aren’t we? Think about it, Edouard.”

For the first time, I saw it clear as day. We were the Blinds on the Chani board of history. Here we were, moving about through established time, unnoticed by posterity, effecting change. Whether that change was real or illusory was still to be seen, but the role we were playing was not hard to distinguish once you put your mind to it, and I could see Edouard had put his mind to it. His hands ran through his hair, stringy with sweat, and he took several deep breaths. It was not a truth he wanted to think about. Our first brush with history had been straightforward in its morals. It was clear that Everard’s greatest blunder had been his misreading of the Ba-Hali and the unnecessary loss of life he caused, but it was not at all clear that our imperative in Alexander’s time was going to align in such a neat fashion for us. As Edouard’s father had told him, the Empire comes first, always. We did not learn from Everard’s mistake for the benefit of the Ba-Hali, but for the Empire. Whatever we were about to embark upon in this stack of the twenty eighth floor was not going to be for the benefit of those who looked like me. I saw this, and it was important that Edouard saw it too.

“The Blinds, Edouard,” I said. “We’re the Blinds.”

He nodded and closed his eyes, pointing his face upwards at the darkening sky.

“I won’t let you be mistreated.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I can keep it.”

I sighed. Why was I the one doing the mental work here?

“Edouard, if you’re going to be a King, you can’t prioritize the life of one over the many. Your Uncle Cortland certainly understands that. Do you?”

“Don’t bring up Cortland.”

“It’s important, Edouard! And this isn’t an argument. We’re not talking about Elisha. I’m serious. We’re about to walk into a situation where you’re going to need to have your head on straight and I want to make sure it is. For both of us. But I’m the guide here, don’t forget. And I’m telling you what’s what. You need to appear ruthless and uncompromising. This is not about weaseling your way into a King’s confidence like it was with Everard. Alexander is not a weak man. If you show him weakness, whatever we’re here to do won’t get done.”

“Tell me we’ll get it done,” he said, looking at the ground.

“We’ll get it done.”

My words of confidence were what he needed to hear. When he looked up from the ground, his eyes shone with the royal prerogative I had seen in them when we first met in the library. There was an arrogance to it, but that is what he needed for the moment. I needed him to believe in his own royalty, his own divine right, because Alexander certainly did. He squared his shoulders and adjusted his cloak, pinning the clasp at his navel with care. He held the signets in his fist at his chest and took a deep breath.

“We’ll get it done.”

“Good.”

We were done for the day. We did not need to discuss why. We did not need to discuss how each of us knew that tomorrow was going to be the day we began a dark journey together, darker and more difficult than anything we had yet accomplished. We had no evidence to prove tomorrow we would find representatives of Alexander’s timeline, but we both knew we would. We spent the evening without a fire, sitting on our cloaks in the dark eating dried meats and fish, and what nuts and berries we had left. I spoke in a monologue about Alexander’s reign and in particular his longest campaign, that against Rodan. I spoke to him from the Emperor’s point of view, what The Lion had written in his long and detailed campaign books, and I also gave him the radical point of view of the Rodanian rebels so that he could know best how to discredit them and paint them as absurd. My heart burned at my actions; I was unsure if I was doing the right thing. I felt like I was committing a betrayal of heinous proportions. But I had started to believe in Edouard. I liked that I had to force him into the mold of King, that his first instincts were moral and not royal. He was my friend and how could helping my friend be a betrayal? I spoke long into the night, pausing only when Edouard asked me to clarify, or to input a difference in what a tutor had told him from what I said. As usual, his tutors had erred on the side of the royal point of view. As he had learned from the game of Chani he played with his father, so I taught him the fallibility of his tutors and their words.