Ni Ta Nu sat with the comfort of a queen on her throne. The chair she sat on had a raised back rest that was higher than she was tall. She had gotten it from a dead world about a year ago. During her time in it she had found a particularly nasty deadbeast. A Barcudan Marsinof. It had taken her soldiers a bit of time but they had killed it successfully. So she’d taken its carcass to a renowned smith who’d fashioned a chair from its very malleable and comfortable body.

One year now and it remained one of her best decisions.

The table in front of her was covered in different orbs, documents of reports she was to go through. Upon completion, she was to create her own summary and submit it to the council of Ethnarchs during their next convergence.

She’d done nothing physical today but her mind was tired. Ethnarchs rarely ever get tired but her duty in the council ensured she was always fatigued in mind.

One of the orbs lying pointlessly on her table had speculated the death of another world in a near future and she was duty bound to find a path where it was avoidable. The world in question was eons old and was home to a large civilization. Allowing it die was against one of her tenets. She had vowed she would allow no world die from reasons that could be circumvented. She had vowed no world under her awareness would die as hers had.

So she’d perused every detail of the orb, then cast her mind into time.

Every living ethnarch had a relationship with fate. In one way or the other, they had found ways to not just read it but walk it. Sometimes they found ways to prevent what they wished to prevent or ensure what they wished to ensure. However, they accomplished these with runescripts, writings of existence that granted them more tools than their powers did.

Each of them, bolstered by the power of their souls, walked a path of fate special to them. Ni Ta Nu, however, was not like them. She walked the path of fate under the guise of time and did so without a runescript. Sometimes, despite her strength and authority, she often wondered if this alone was the reason she had been elevated into the council all those years ago.

The knowledge of a world on the path of death had her using her ability to traverse fate. In a time unborn, she found the world, once vibrant and cultured, dead and desolate. Its bodies of water were cracked and blackening. Its luscious plant life was nonexistent. It was as weathered and decrepit as the body of an ancient elder who had never unlocked the power of their soul.

When she tracked it back, walking backwards in search of its origin, she was amazed at the countless variables that had led to its demise. She had ignored each one in search of its root. She’d ignored the few more deaths on the path to a final demise, turned her gaze from the baleful wailing and screaming. She’d cast her attention from her part in it, from the world she was forced to destroy in a bid to stop the rise of an enemy she would one day be unable to face. Each one was a cut to her skin and a tear in her eye until she found the root.

Staring at the cause in time irked her. It was not in the way a lady is bothered by something dirty or uncouth. No. It was in the way a being of great intelligence is irked by a state of dissonance.

Her study had brought forth an answer she could not understand. The death of a world full of so much life and civilization was the result of the rebirth of a dead world. It left her uncertain of what to do. Even her growing decision to bring it to the council was subject to questioning. Dead worlds were capable of rebirth, though none had found how. Every now and again, a dead world would find life. However, it was a rarity. Rarer than the dying of stars.

In the last few eons there’d only been two rebirths. This one one would make it three. But dead worlds were a dime a dozen. Every few decades a world died for mysterious reasons.

Wondering if finding the source of the dead world’s demise would proffer a possible solution, she cast herself deeper into time, moving further back, tracing a path older than the present. Soon, she waded through the past and stared at the reversal of death.

When she found the planet alive, she wept with a single tear from her fourth blind eye. She touched a gentle clawed finger to it and wiped it from her metallic skin. Even now, the words of her long dead father slithered into her mind: A Vambrath sheds no tears.

In his dying moments, he had stood a hypocrite of his own words. But she had never held that against him. He had been a powerful Vambrath in life, but her people had called him pathetic in death. In a way, they were not entirely wrong.

The dead world was nothing truly magnificent in life. In fact, it had held only the most minute number of sentient life, even then. Their population wasn’t enough to fill one of the cities of the living world their rebirth would one day kill.

In the fate of time, she walked amongst them. Her mind guided her as she did and her power suffered the strain of it. Soon she found where their death had begun.

In a place outside of them powerful beings had waged war against each other. One had emerged victorious and had cast the other from the domain where they’d fought. Still alive but heavily wounded, the vanquished plummeted to the world, and dug itself into a mountain on its fall.

As powerful as it was, its reia was wrong. This corruption of reia spread, buttressed by the death reia of the dying. Together, the power was too vast and too strong. It spread all over the world, killing all that could not withstand it.

Ni Ta Nu focused her attention on the mountain as it rose over the dying power once more and went in search of the beast. What she saw brought a terror to her. She could not see it. Neither could she sense the innate nature of its very being. In the world of time, it was covered from her. Its fate was sealed. Even in death.

There weren’t very many beings protected from fate. If she went into her encyclopedia she was certain she could narrow it down to a few possible beings, but that was not why she was here. She was here for a reason that had nothing to do with the who but the how.

So she sat before the mountain in time measured in eons and watched the being take forever to die. Rather than let death eat it away, it sacrificed its authority so that it lived longer. Perhaps it had hoped its hibernation would heal it. It had been wrong. What it had done was a complex design only achievable by the powerful.

But before it could leave the mountain, another being she could not recognize descended to it. It moved with the solemn grace of one walking to their demise. Weak and dying, the vanquished could do nothing against its companion. So it watched it. Its companion proved it wasn’t here to kill it. All it did was take a place at the mountain. It carved a crude chair from its walls and sat there. Then it blanketed the mountain in its aura, solemn and tragic. There it waited, keeping the vanquished from escape.

Slowly, the vanquished’s authority fell to dynast. In time it became a herald. Then it succumbed to death at Baron. Its death released whatever technique it had cast on itself and it died with the full weight of its authority. Whatever life was left on the planet died with it.

The one who’d restrained it in a blanket of its aura did not move, did not act. It sat there, and as its prisoner, it one day died, releasing no phantasm.

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Then, unlike it, the vanquished’s phantasm rose. This too was protected from Ni Ta Nu’s eyes and it narrowed down the suspected beings further.

After eons alone, its phantasm followed the path of its body and degraded in death. Rather than die, it slowly split apart, degrading into weaker phantasms of itself. Smaller, tinier, grotesque phantasms of lesser authorities that began roaming the world, killing whatever sentient life still remained.

She watched a man die saving his daughter. She watched the daughter grow, only to die saving a man she loved. This man went on to love another and sacrificed her just to stay alive. He died at the hands of a son who was not allowed to love another man.

It was a pathetic cycle of tragedy.

Whatever was left of the world was killed by the anomaly of phantasms of silver, gold, Baron, and even Herald ranks.

It was surprising to know that a world still rife with such beasts would be reborn in no more than three years from the present.

Something touched against the edge of her attention as she moved on in time and she paused. A herald rank phantasm had died in a single strike.

She wound time back to that point and found what had touched her attention. The fact that a herald rank phantasm had died in a single strike was notable, considering this world hadn’t studied reia enough to evolve past barony. However, the real note was in who had killed it. All she knew of it was the gender was female. But whatever she was, in Ni Ta Nu’s eyes, she was a wave of distortion so that she couldn’t pick out any distinctive features.

With a frown, she left this distortion and trailed back to the root. There she found a mountain covered in reia so thick it swirled around the mountain like water. Within it were bodies who’d ventured into it in search of things only sentients could seek. She touched slightly against their fate and found what had killed them. Their minds had eroded to the effects of the mist of reia. They’d gone mad, and their minds had broken. In their madness, they’d killed themselves.

Truly pathetic, she thought.

So this was the reason another world would die in a distant future. To prevent it, she needed to prevent this one’s rebirth. She needed to ensure this one stayed dead. As difficult a choice as she wanted to convince herself it was, it was not. If bringing the dead to life would lead to the death of a living, it was not a choice to be made between the two.

She was about to build an orb of information for the council when a voice stopped her.

“I believe the morality of that decision doesn’t matter.”

She rose from her seat with all the authority of an Ethnarch released. The shroud she’d placed over her core ripped away. The very vessel within which she and countless soldiers lived within shook at the weight of her authority and the space beyond the vessel bent and rippled.

The safety of the ship from herself was tossed to nonexistence in the face of a potentially greater threat. She was the Ethnarch of observation. There existed nothing beyond her awareness. She was completely aware of every fragment of even the space that existed outside her vessel. She knew every drop of blood flowing within every single soldier on this vessel from the strongest to the weakest. She knew the dying of an insignificant fly in a world lightyears away from her.

That someone had walked into her office—approached it, opened the door, and closed it behind them—without once registering in her awareness was terrifying.

She grit her fanged teeth in preparation for battle when the intruder did something more terrifying than their presence.

He spoke again under the weight of her aura without strain. “Are you quite done?”

Of her five eyes, only one could see. It was the consequence of a decision she’d made too many years ago in search of power. She’d thought evolution would fix her, but it had not. Even now, she had only the advantage of one eye.

The man in front of her wore a black robe of the darkest black she’d ever seen and covered his face with a blank mask of the same color. In her eyes she could see him clearly, but in her senses he did not exist.

Beside him, a child no more than twenty lay sprawled on her office floor. She couldn’t see him in her senses either but she knew he was alive, if not barely. It was safe to assume his state was due to her unshrouded core.

It was also safe to assume he had come with the man. If that much was true, then his death would ensure a fight. And a fight would cost her the lives of her soldiers.

She withdrew her aura and contained it. The aftermath was the stillness of all things. Still, the boy did not rise.

“Do not worry about him,” the man said. “He’ll wake up. Eventually.”

The fact that he was unperturbed by any of what had happened bothered her. She was aware of every thing alive that could oppose her will. Including those whose will she could not oppose.

But she knew nothing of this man. More terrifying was the fact that her senses could not pierce the mask he wore to see his face. There was nothing without life in existence that she could not look beyond, not when it was in her very presence.

The only such things that existed were crafted with the strongest material at the hand of the greatest soulsmith she knew. The Ethnarch, Masamune. The Soulsmith of Existence.

However, Masamune only crafted weapons. A mask did not fall under his purview. Perhaps the concealed existence of another powerful soulsmith was something he would need to know of. It was possible he might have an idea. If he did, it would bring her a step closer to learning who this man was in the near future.

“Who are you, and what has brought this disrespect?” she asked calmly.

“The boy’s name is Nan,” the man said, disregarding her question. “He is of gold authority, and from this moment forth, he will be in your care.”

Ni Ta Nu narrowed five eyes. “A gold would be dead from my very presence.”

“And yet, he still lives.”

There was a nonchalance in the way the man spoke that irked her. He didn’t speak as though he were talking to someone beneath him, neither did he speak as though he were talking to someone weaker or even a peer.

He simply spoke.

“And why would I agree,” she asked.

“Because it is time to pay what you owe.”

A touch of fear held Ni Ta Nu. “I owe no one,” she said.

“The observer soul fragment that has helped to make you who you are is what you owe. Training this child is the payment.”

“No,” she challenged. “I don’t owe you. You cannot collect.”

“Perhaps. But I know who you owe, and I am here to collect.” The man paused. “Or would you rather he come himself.”

Even now, even at the authority of Ethnarch, the very idea of him threatened her. She had come a long way from the simple silver mage who’d stolen an observer fragment meant for another. Yet, she feared the very idea of the man who’d caught her. The man she still couldn’t find with all her power and authority.

“So be it,” the masked man said in her silence. “I will return the child.”

“No!” she refused a little too hastily. She forced herself to some modicum of control before she spoke again. “I’ll take the child.”

The man nodded once. “Good.”

“I take it I am to train him and ensure he lives long enough to be powerful and useful,” she spat the last word with derision.

“No,” the man answered. “He is merely to live as one of your soldiers. All that is expected of you is that you do not kill him. None of yours will take his life. And you will not put him in a position beyond his capability. He will grow under your watchful attention, and that is all. Should any of these be the cause of his demise, you will pay a different price for what you owe, as well as another for his life.”

The man turned to the door she hadn’t felt him enter through and she stopped him with her words.

“Is he like me? An Observer?”

The man turned to look at her. “You, Ni Ta Nu, Ethnarch of Time, are not an Observer. Merely a being gifted by a fragment of one.”

She already knew this, yet hearing the words from him—whoever he was—stung her. Belittled her. Observers were a long dead race. And all she’d ever found of them in her research spoke of only eighteen ever existing.

Whatever time they’d lived in was far beyond what her abilities could reach. Whatever they truly were, no one truly knew. It was why many in the council remained wary of her. She not only bore the gifts of such an enigmatic race but also a touch of the power of time, a gift of the only other known race that had been powerful enough to oppose them. Sworn enemies to the Observers, they were called Time Lords.

There remained rumors hidden within their myths that they were the reason for each other’s extinction. All that was left of them now were fragments of their souls scattered across the cosmos.

“Also,” the man continued. “You will leave the dead world alone.”

“How do you know about—”

“You will find a different way to save the world you wish to see live or you will be met with an opposition.”

“Does he have an interest in it?” she asked with a frown that reached all her eyes. She’d often been told it made her terrifying.

“It does not matter,” the man replied. “All that matters is that you leave the world alone. Its rebirth is necessary.”

Then the man opened the door and left.

The child remained sprawled on her office floor. She would need to find a place for him to stay amongst her crew.

Until then, she stepped around her table and approached him. She knelt beside him and reached a gentle claw to his face. His skin was brown, almost red, and he had soft blue hair, like silk.

Gently, she touched her senses to him and found the answer she sought. He was as much an observer as she was. Perhaps even more than she was. Whatever fragment had gone into him, it was more potent than the one she’d taken.

She rose from him and returned to her table with only one worry.

What did the supervisor want with the child?