So, the Sere Consortium ultimately refused the request of an ascendant.

Interesting.

Euryphel took all the time he needed to think within scenarios, his brow furrowed in contemplation. He wasn’t shocked by the Sere Consortium assembly’s refusal of Achemiss’s demands­­–it had always been a possible outcome, albeit an unlikely one.

What did it mean for Sere to refuse Achemiss, known to them as the recently ascended Ian Dunai?

It meant that they didn’t consider him an unbeatable threat. Sere’s Beginning practitioners must have accounted for the possibility that Ian Dunai had experienced the passage of time differently in Eternity, especially since the power of the Infinity Loop’s time dilation was on everyone’s minds. They must have considered that Dunai wasn’t the same person who had ascended a few months ago.

This didn’t prevent them from looking down on him, in a bizarre way. Before ascending, Ian Dunai was the formidable Skai’aren, a Death practitioner at the peak of power. Now, having returned, he was more powerful, but the weakest of all returned ascendants–or so they assumed. They knew he was an ascendant, on paper, but didn’t really consider him one.

Euryphel wondered if part of their skepticism was regarding his return. No ascendant had ever, in all of recorded history, returned so soon after their ascension. He didn’t know how Achemiss had first appeared to the Sere Consortium, but Euryphel could imagine the events from Sere’s perspective.

The Skai’aren–returned from Eternity–had suddenly reached out with important knowledge regarding the Infinity Loop. The fact that he had initiated contact would have been considered highly unusual. Euryphel couldn’t guess at what the ensuing discussions entailed, but the result was that Achemiss had gained exclusive access to five rifts and helped Sere with research on the Infinity Loop.

Were Euryphel an official in Sere, he would have been skeptical of Dunai’s warnings of soul corruption from the Infinity Loop, prioritizing investigations into the matter to confirm his claims. After all, Dunai had a conflict of interest–he had benefited greatly from the Infinity Loop, and was still, in the eyes of most, tightly connected to Euryphel Selejo, and by proxy the Selejo Imperial Federation. While the Federation wasn’t technically an enemy of Sere, it was a looming rival and a potential threat.

Finally, Euryphel would have considered it peculiar that the Skai’aren had requested access to rifts, as this suggested that he was in hiding, even if he claimed the rifts were for “research purposes.” The request would have made some sense–the Skai’aren had made enemies by participating in the war over the Ho’ostar peninsula. But the need for rifts suggested weakness. An ascendant shouldn’t so openly fear mortal strength. Besides, why would Dunai come to Sere for rifts rather than the Federation, where he’d established a network of support?

The Crowned Executor didn’t think that Achemiss had been incompetent in his approach–assuming as much would be terribly naïve–but the old necromancer had been forced to act from a compromised position at the weakest he’d been in a millennium, stripped of his artifacts. He truly would have been weak–relatively speaking–when approaching Sere in the hours following his forced descent to Chemissa.

Euryphel wondered how the ascendant was feeling about the negotiations. Here stood the powerful Achemiss, absent his items of power and hiding in a rift, impersonating an enemy he had recently considered little more than a pawn–the very same enemy who had deceived and assassinated him.

Euryphel felt a savage, vindictive pleasure as he considered the man’s plight. Achemiss wanted to destroy their world. He deserved every misfortune, even if–in an odd way–he was also the reason why Ari’s descent hadn’t destroyed large parts of Selejo and its surrounding territories. Euryphel recognized Achemiss’s intervention for what it was–a bargaining chip. He had bartered Ari’s life, something that had great strategic value to him, in return for blocking her strike, which required minimal effort and had little lasting significance.

That Euryphel had benefited as a side effect was immaterial. There would be no mercy for the incredibly selfish, reclusive ascendant.

Euryphel snapped out of his scenario, returning to the real world.

“Eury, run the scenario again,” Ian said. His eyes were steely, the iridescence giving them a profound intensity.

Euryphel’s blue green eyes glowed with the power of Regret. “What should I change?”

Ian shook his head. “Change nothing. I need to try something.”

The Crowned Executor kept his expression neutral, but inside he wrestled with Ian’s statement. What did Ian want to try? Was he going to do something drastic, like seizing the transmission artifact to appear in the assembly room and confront Achemiss directly?

Despite his confusion, Euryphel answered without hesitation. “Of course.” He started a scenario and gave Ian a look. “You can go ahead.”

“Just do everything the same as you did before,” Ian instructed.

Euryphel drummed his fingers across the transmission artifact. He recursed, setting a new checkpoint just before triggering the artifact and sending himself to Clara’s side.

He immediately snapped back, waited for a moment, and set another recursion point. He repeated this over and over, gaining fragments of seconds to stitch together into a cohesive whole.

Ian thinks it’s painstaking to sort through these memories, but it’s even worse to collect them. Euryphel wasn’t used to such short, repeated scenarios. He already had a headache from their jarring nature.

He watched carefully for any deviation from the metaphorical script, but there was none. Achemiss was refused yet again.

“Again,” Ian commanded. He ground his teeth, one fist clenched around a bone bracelet.

Euryphel dismissed his mental fatigue and the pain behind his eyes. He began again.

Nothing seemed to change up until the end. The silent discussion between the members of the assembly–the one undoubtedly conducted in a series of chained Regret scenarios, with memories relayed by Remorse practitioners–didn’t end after fifteen seconds. It went longer.

What has Ian done? Euryphel wondered, intrigued. It must be related to Clara.

Euryphel knew the bracelet was an object of power connecting Ian to Clara but didn’t know much else about it. Ian simply claimed it allowed him to maintain control over her oaths. This prevented her from sharing information… but perhaps it could be used in other ways. Maybe to force her to share information, making it so she was unable to say anything except for what he desired?

It wasn’t that much of a stretch for the ascendant. What would Clara be able to say to make a difference, though?

Euryphel waited with anticipation until finally, after thirty-five seconds, the members of the assembly appeared to have reached a decision. That wasn’t a long time, but assuming the 89% affinity Regret practitioner in the room was the one running the scenarios, Euryphel bet that each scenario lasted around forty seconds. Even if the Regret practitioner were slow, he could probably still run at least two per second. At two scenarios per second, for thirty-five seconds, that meant seventy scenarios… and at forty seconds a pop, that was 2,800 seconds, or around forty-five minutes of scenario time.

Euryphel imagined spying on forty-five minutes of discussions. Maybe it’s for the best the talks happened in Regret scenarios, he mused. If he really needed to spy for that long, he would be forced to find a way to slip his body into the walls or floor and eavesdrop.

With anticipation, Euryphel ran repeated scenarios to hear the new response of the speaker of the assembly.

“Ascendant Dunai, we agree to your terms. We will discuss the details on the classified subject’s delivery later, to minimize the number of people who must subject themselves to memory removal. Doctor Clara Belvaire will be in charge.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Euryphel balked.

“Excellent,” Achemiss said, his lips curving into a small smile. “I shall speak to Doctor Belvaire about the classified subject. But what of the rifts?”

“You may also speak to her about them. She will handle delivery of everything we promised.”

“Then I’ll be in touch.” With a small flourish, the ascendant disappeared, leaving the assembly chamber in silence.

Euryphel stuck around for a bit longer, but after it was clear Achemiss wasn’t coming back, he killed the scenario.

“Ian, what did you do?” the former prince asked.

“Let’s talk about the outcome first,” Ian said. He kneaded his fingers into his temple as he took in Euryphel’s recent memories. His expression turned thoughtful, and he studied the bone bracelet. “That actually worked. Cool.”

“Just, ‘cool’?” Maria asked. “You completely changed the outcome by influencing Clara with your necromantic oath. It’s an amazing first application.”

“I still need to make it happen in reality, too,” Ian reminded her, his subdued elation fading to cold focus.

Thankfully, that didn’t prove difficult. Less than a minute later, the trio breathed easy as Achemiss departed the assembly room having established the deal with Sere.

—

Clara Belvaire

This was Clara’s fifth time sitting on the assembly as a representative. Full meetings with the entire body weren’t common, but the presence of an ascendant more than warranted everyone’s attendance.

The last time the assembly convened, she remembered being still as ice, intimidated into silence.

It had been her first time around an ascendant, and the ascendant hadn’t even been there in person… but that hadn’t mattered. It had been monumental for everyone present, even if their guest was only the recently ascended Ian Dunai. Or so they had thought.

She had been in the presence of the closest thing she knew to a god. Someone who had transcended the limits of this world.

Someone who, less than a year ago, had been like her. Powerless.

This time was different.

Whatever reverence she felt for the imposter Ian Dunai was gone. If she was being honest, her whole world view regarding ascension had been upended. She’d seen behind the curtain.

She knew now that ascendants really were just people, not gods, not creatures beyond her understanding. They were just people acting on yet a greater scale of power.

To Clara, a regular, what made them so different from the peak practitioners she regularly worked with? Their age and experience were all she could think of. She could respect both, just as she respected the opinions of the family elders, but living longer didn’t make people better. It didn’t ensure that their decisions were superior or just.

In the case of the Ian Dunai imposter, Achemiss, the years spent in Eternity had left him so disconnected from the world that he chose to end it, seeing the humans living there as inconveniences rather than valuable lives.

Or maybe he had always been that way from the beginning, viewing people as ants, Clara thought coldly. Some practitioners–even some in the assembly chamber now–were like that. They tended to reveal their true colors more easily around those they considered worthless.

They knew when the false Ian Dunai was coming–a wind elementalist whispered it to them, carrying the tidings from their most powerful Regret practitioner. They waited in silence, no one in the mood for chatting.

He appeared before them without fanfare as a projection. Clara didn’t know how he’d first made contact with Sere’s leaders–she’d heard rumors it was through a dream–but he had a proper way to call them now, a special glossY that could function in a rift but could only connect to a single, pre-registered location.

She mechanically followed the motions of everyone else as they paid the expected courtesies. Eventually, it came time to introduce herself. Those seated at the dais were all required to.

That was when she first felt the active pull of the necromantic oath. She could vaguely sense that it was warning her to not introduce herself as a spy.

Hilariously blunt. As if she’d even consider it.

With introductions out of the way, Clara resigned herself to being a wallflower. She’d already given everything important over to the speaker of the assembly so he could inform Achemiss about their efforts.

Rather than focusing her gaze on Dunai’s impersonator, Clara looked beyond his projection at the walls. They were covered in murals of the Sere Consortium’s greatest innovations and commercial successes. There were no portraits, save for that of the Consortium’s four founders, each placed in one of the cardinal directions. It was symbolic of their insights preventing Sere from losing its way.

Clara nearly jumped out of her seat when, unexpectedly, Ian Dunai’s sinuous voice called out her name.

“I would prefer to hear the head of research talk herself,” the imposter said, pointing a finger at her.

Clara’s mind buzzed. Achemiss had asked for a status update on the research efforts on combating soul corruption. I can just recite the report I sent to the speaker of the assembly.

She felt the piercing stares of everyone as she stood and smiled. She hated that her body trembled. She wasn’t a teenager. She was forty-four. She had deep experience in academia. You couldn’t survive there as a regular without being exceedingly sharp and capable, never ceding ground, while still remaining self-denigrating and obsequious when the moment required it.

But this wasn’t academia. She wasn’t in a lab, lambasting her practitioners on problems with their rhetoric or presenting a novel finding to a board.

Imposter or not, she was being directly addressed by an ascendant. One who sought to end the world–if she could trust the words of the supposedly real Ian Dunai and Euryphel Selejo. Despite the bizarre, uncomfortable, painful, and mildly traumatic nature of their first encounter… she did trust them. Or at least, she trusted their overall motives.

Facing down the imposter, nerves twisting her stomach, she reminded herself of what she’d already accomplished. You’ve spoken face-to-face with the real Ian Dunai. You have an important role to play, more important than these people could ever know. Swallow your fear. Your uncertainties.

When she spoke, wind elementalism projected her words to all. Thankfully, she’d mastered herself enough to keep her voice steady.

“We have not yet been successful in finding a powerful enough necromancer to accelerate our research. We’re expanding our search radius into adjacent nations, like the Selejo Imperial Federation, but those efforts have been met with external resistance.”

“You haven’t found anyone? Not even necromancers who evaded recruitment?”

Clara felt the compulsion of the necromantic oath again as she considered her response. She spat out something about necromancy being illegal and the difficulty of finding any. It seemed to be enough, for the ascendant replied without obvious animosity. After, the speaker of the assembly took over and discussed what the false ascendant desired.

After a minute of haggling out loud, the speaker called everyone aside from the ascendant into a dilated deliberation–in other words, a string of Regret scenario bridged together by Remorse.

Only the full assembly would have practitioners of a high enough caliber to facilitate discussions in Regret scenarios. She knew her family always conducted proceedings in the real world, verbally, though in spaces with arrays to prevent spying.

The seconds ticked on as the deliberation ensued. Throughout, Clara felt a flickering, powerful compulsion. Whatever they were deliberating, it involved her. Are they actually asking me for an opinion?

And then it was over, and the memories came like a flood. Clara inhaled sharply. The memories of the proceedings were fluid, as though she had experienced them all uninterrupted. The Remorse practitioner responsible, Practitioner Shuma, had sublime skill transmitting memories covering long stretches of time. She had stripped the memories of her personal emotions and opinions, leaving only what she experienced visually from an impartial viewpoint.

Despite Shuma’s skill, seeing the deliberating from another person’s eyes was disconcerting. She saw herself sitting at the dais with the others. Normally, as the token regular, she kept quiet unless called upon. That might have grated on her if she weren’t so used to it everywhere else in her life. Only in her labs, where she was the highest authority, could she forget about her deficiency of birth.

Clara didn’t know what had come over her in Shuma’s memories, even if she felt the vestiges of the compulsion fading now.

She was talking.

A lot.

She almost wanted to slap her own forehead and leave the assembly in embarrassment. It was as though all respect had flown out the window, the filter over her thoughts destroyed.

She spoke her mind unrelentingly. She called upon all her knowledge of their rifts, pointing out the five that they could afford to sacrifice. She argued that the rifts would only be given up temporarily. She persuaded them that the soul corruption risk was real and that they would be lost without Dunai’s help. It was as though a fire were lit under her, forcing her to run her mouth and say whatever necessary to approve the agreement.

And when it came to the classified subject… she had outright lied. That shouldn’t have been possible unless Dunai’s necromantic oath superseded her other oaths.

I suppose… it must.

She’d claimed that they’d already conducted all the experiments they needed to, and that the degradation of the classified subject had proceeded past a point of no return. She’d argued that it was worthless to them.

All of that was extremely untrue. But everyone trusted Clara–or at least, they trusted her oaths. And in the moment, with the eyes of an ascendant on them, they couldn’t afford to double check her claims.

As she processed the last of the memories, she crossed her arms and looked around. The members of the dais looked at her a bit differently than they had before.

So this is how you get ahead here, she thought absently. You lie, you cheat, you bluster. You tell them what they need to hear. You empower them to make an easy choice.

Clara could only plaster on a cool smile as the speaker of the assembly conveyed their decision.

“Ascendant Dunai, we agree to your terms.”

The next part, however, caused her stomach to drop.

“Doctor Clara Belvaire will be in charge.”