The food was good. Unbearably so. Provenance wasn’t the type to fall for such simple allures, but base instincts were a powerful force, hard to argue with as much as it disgusted him.

But the bird’s nest, the gold and marble perch above the squalor, quickly reminded him exactly what he would trade in to accept such luxury.

Security limited his movements to the multi-level imperial penthouse: the golden cap to the administrative complex. Expansive in scale and space, but ‘limited’ remained the most fitting descriptor. He’d lived amongst squalor before and found its anonymity comforting. Above the clouds, the angels squarely focused his attention on him.

The scraping silver armour plates, the thuds of sabatons against polished granite floors were never more than a hallway’s length away, barely in earshot. Provenance could feel the constant buzz of Aether, the current circling the entire mansion; the fuel purely to keep the suits of armour from crushing their wearers.

Heavy fur coats and sometimes even billowing black capes marked with gold insignias adorned their shoulders. Standing at doorways or roving patrols, he had counted at least twenty, possibly more.

The Empress’s message was an overtly clear one. She wanted anything but to be taken lightly.

It was a bratty way to satiate her insecurities. Aware she didn’t command the same respect, pure muscle was her answer. At least her self-awareness could count as something of a silver lining.

Spouting the type of rhetoric they taught in primary education, shallow propaganda, scapegoating. Provenance knew she was smarter than that.

Material expansion. Land, resources, money. The human nations saw a quarter of the continent ruled by Spirits and wanted to see those borders changed. If a tribe of warmongers would trade their people for money, then all the better.

Misguided as it was, Sidos’s Civil War could still claim to be a war. The Vesmosian frontline was a business, new land its product, and the country its assets. The Empress saw the buyer’s heads turning towards a new player on the scene, and there came an interest to nip any competition at the bud.

As simple as that. Gain and loss. A matter of survival.

He’d had his fair share fulfilling the wishes of empresses, kings and dictators already. Distilled into their essence, it was always the same liquor that left a foul taste in his mouth.

The thoughts kept him company, echoing through the hushed hallways until he reached the Empress’s waiting room, the same he’d first arrived in. Ever since, the door he stood before had ceased to exist, replaced by a plain wall.

Guest or not, he was still a man: sharing a room with the Empress unattended for any length of time, let alone a night, was blasphemy.

Guards aside, her quarters were hidden behind layers of polished marble and Spacehopper magic. It was hard to say she was in the same building as him at all.

Two caped knights stood by the door, arms resting on the hilts of their swords, the tips of their scabbards planted in the floor. They gave way without hassle, allowing him to announce himself.

“Enter,” came a graceful reply, harmonising with the silence rather than overruling it. Provenance pushed open the door and stepped inside, closing it behind him as he continued to face forward. As was etiquette.

“You called, your majesty.”

“I did.” She turned away from the window, sparkling eyes once again inspecting him. “Do not worry. It is not an answer to my offer I called for; it was you.”

Provenance dipped his head, only then noticing the plate of appetisers and gold-trim teacups accompanying Empress Fanreth. In a room of gold and ivory, even such luxuries struggled to stand out. Vesmosians took savoury food with their tea; it mingled better with the leaves.

He crossed the room again, taking a seat in the opposite chair. The Empress had taken her tea already, probably an invitation to indulge in it himself. Yet, in her presence, he was still reluctant.

Weeks of etiquette classes and he would still look like a slob in front of her.

“We haven’t had the chance to talk in…how many years must it be now?” she began, the steaming cup resting in her hands. “You age very little. I’m jealous.”

“High praise coming for yourself, your highness.”

“Please,” she said, a curt smile daring to cross her face. “It’s not time that ages me, it’s my husband’s mistresses.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Pretty little things.”

“Like birds in a cage, your majesty. Don’t you think so?”

He watched her out of the corner of his eye. The curt smile had disappeared, and the tea in her mug was suddenly more interesting than the view.

“Such a cynical view of things you have, Provenance. I’d fall into despair too soon if I thought as you did.”

“Cynicism is a blessing if you follow it with action, your majesty. For people like us, it’s our greatest weapon.”

“By us?”

“By us, I mean all under heaven. All of us.”

The Empress smirked, turning the teacup in her hand. “You don’t age, and you don’t change either. You must not be human.”

“I wouldn’t do what I do if I weren’t.”

The weather was cloudy, and spots of sun travelled across the city like spotlights on a stage, blessing all underneath with brief moments of sunshine. The rays, so clearly defined, looked as though they could penetrate deep into the city.

Provenance hoped that even a single, square foot of light would reach the deepest slum. But perhaps that was naïve.

“My husband would be pleased to see you still so devout. The Imperial Court has been especially volatile as of late; allies are growing fickle, and so are enemies. Keeping control over every house is proving a challenge. I see it in his women.”

“How so?”

“They come and go quickly, provided my husband doesn’t spend the night with them. In the little time they spend in his service, they’re more brash, ruthless than I ever was.”

She turned to Provenance, regarding him with a modicum of fondness, perhaps even respect. “You are much like him. He never wavers either.”

Perhaps she meant it as high praise. But from the woman who saw everything through the Emperor’s silhouette, the obsession sparkling in her eyes, it only left him with pity to return.

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“What you do. How has that treated you? Last time you spoke to my husband it…I’m sorry if I offend, but it sounded quite foolish.”

“None taken, your highness,” he assured her. “It sounds foolish to me, sometimes.” He picked the teacup’s handle and brought it to his lips. Grassy, tones of earth and…

“Petrichor.”

“Good guess.”

“Oh…thank you. Progress…perhaps more than all the years before combined.”

“Goodness.” The raise of an eyebrow, the same tone she might talk to a child with. She was willing to entertain him, nothing more. He continued regardless.

“The Spirit of Destruction is alive.”

Even the Empress gave the statement its due respect. She paused, mouth slightly agape. Her head turned, and their eyes met.

“You’re sure?” she asked.

“As sure as I will, or anyone else will ever be.”

The Empress pursed her lips, turning her attention back to the city. “I must say I’m shocked. Unless your delusions have finally gotten a hold of you.”

“I’ve endured too many roadblocks for that to be the case,” he said. “I believe it’s in Excala.

“Excala?” The eyebrows crossed. The name, the name alone, tempted her wrath.

“It’s the last known location I can find. And…I remain incredulous…but a Witch may be involved in…some capacity.”

The delicate fingers tightened around the cup; the statuesque face could no longer hide the scowl.

“Do you know any more?”

“No, your majesty.”

The sparkle in her eye shone brighter than ever. Threat and opportunity, risk and reward.

A ray of sunshine peered through the window. A blessing from the heavens.

Painfully ironic, at least from his perspective.

“Then perhaps our interests align closer than I originally thought,” she concluded, the window once again dropping into clouded shadow.

Shallow propaganda and scapegoating. Perhaps the noble words passed down from the child of heaven weren’t so insincere coming from her mouth. Provenance was quick to assume the infatuated could tell the Emperor’s truths from his lies.

Love was a mystifying tonic, but Provenance suspected that whatever had ensnared the Empress was a far more toxic poison.

When half-rusted buses struggling over cracked and overgrown highways were the only route into a country, Iris felt a dread pool at the bottom of her stomach that she otherwise never felt, no matter the danger that lurked on the other side of the border.

“Are we going to have beds?” she asked, tugging on Evalyn’s sleeve. Her mother’s head violently bobbed along with the faults in the road, and she was developing a nasty tick in her left eyebrow.

“Hard to say,” she admitted. “I came here years ago. Colte and I just found an old inn and stole a room. It still felt like we were camping.”

Evalyn had called it Anarchism. Spirits, with little need for food or water, would pool their energies into creating civilisations. Without an intense need for anything material, economies often surrounded shelter, entertainment, more recently human luxuries, if not outright humans.

Fadaak was an exception: closely intertwined with human society. Old Thoruway was the exact opposite.

“It’s hard to expect a decent bed when you don’t have a half decent society.”

Humans once settled the fertile river basement, and the ruins of their civilisation, now husks of their former glory, were home to a concentration of Spirits.

A country by technicality for the sake of borders on a map. A dream landgrab for Vesmos if they weren’t separated by a country or two.

“Those bastards really chose a brilliant spot to set up shop, huh? It’s a miracle we even tracked an Aether line into this hellhole.”

Iris sank back into her chair. The view from her seat only served to further justify Evalyn’s moaning. There really was very little.

Towns on the horizon were dilapidated, the roads leading to them barely still trodden paths. She held onto hope, praying that their current vista was simply the most morbid out of a succession of livelier ones.

“I already have people in the capital,” the Queen whispered. “You won’t be sleeping so rough.”

“Mum, the Queen said—”

“I heard. Thank you, your majesty.”

“It isn’t in my best interest to sleep in the open either,” Queen Amestris said. She fell into a short silence, as though surveying the landscape. “This is a Spirit land. Ancient. I could be…recognised.”

The creaking chassis forever filled the silence. Iris couldn’t shake the feeling she was heading for nothing but eternity.

The ground she first set foot on was muddy. Sweeping clouds coloured the sky, threatening another torrent at the drop of a hat. Iris held onto her own luggage as Evalyn organised her own inside the bus.

The road was no longer paved. It looked as though it hadn’t been for the last hundred years.

The surrounding city, as tall and wide as Excala itself, was half in ruins.

The apartment blocks around her were punctured with gaping holes in their brickwork, shoddy roofing, supported by half-rotting wooden beams.

“Is there a tree growing out of that one?”

“You would be correct,” the Queen said. “It looks decrepit to the human eye. Amazingly so. But…the air.”

Aether. So much Aether. Magnitudes more than Fadaak.

Spirits of every conceivable shape and size roamed the street level, flew between the city blocks and floated high above their heads. A precession of golf ball-sized creatures daisy chained their way over rooftops six storeys high while underneath them, a ghostly thing—half deer, half whale, although Iris was unsure which side was which—sauntered past.

“It’s a trip and a half, that’s for sure,” Evalyn sighed, eyes already exasperated. “Where are we headed next, your majesty?”

“Follow Iris. Talking to both of you at once uses more Aether than I’m willing to draw.”

“Lead the way.”

As promised, Iris followed the single word orders she received at every junction. The city stayed much the same, most of it a snapshot of the last days of its human rule. Overturned carriages missing their horses under mounds of rubble and ivy, a commune of Spirits living out of a bakery, the family’s name now faded from the wooden sign.

“I learnt about it when I was homeschooled. My father put an…emphasis on the collapse of Thoruway. I know now a lot of what I learnt was probably exaggerated…but still.”

They were walking through the remnants of a war: the last day of many lives. Such a clear post-mortem over a century later indicated a swift death.

Maybe that was for the better. Iris couldn’t say for sure, nor did it feel right to do so.

Aether forced her eyes open, head spinning as though she’d inhaled gasoline fumes. While she tackled her nausea, she noticed the looks they attracted from the Spirits capable of such a thing, but none turned into aggressive advances. They would stomp, drift, waft, or fly past, sparing them little more than a second thought.

They were only short, no more than a head-turn or a hushed glance. But to the F.S.A., those moments were a symptom, part of their purpose. Otherwise, to bother with such a place besides to conquer it was an utter waste of time.

“Here,” the Queen whispered as Iris’s feet stopped in front of a particularly dilapidated apartment. The second-floor wall was largely caved in, the damage extending to the roof, which was covered by a thick sheet of khaki canvas.

The front door was bolted shut; the locks were new. Iris craned her head and saw a telescope peering out of the hole in the wall. Muffled thumping from inside approached, each small sound sharp, and accompanied by a satisfyingly hideous groan.

The door opened, and a younger man, perhaps mid-twenties, opened the door, a small grin stretched across his freckled face.

“Get inside before the rain starts.”

Iris obliged, the man stepping aside as she and Evalyn entered. The door squealed again as he worked the hinges and redid the bolts.

“It’s been pissing rain for the past week. The tarp’s soaked too. What can I get you? Tea?”

“Tea would be nice,” Evalyn smiled, and the man nodded in return, running up the steps with the same thumping creaking as before.

Evalyn put a hand on Iris’s shoulder, leaning around the staircase and peeking down the hallway.

“It’s a mess of cables,” she said. “Communications?”

“Primarily, yes. It works as an embassy on occasion, although it’s rare.”

Evalyn took charge up the stairs, although her steps were more sceptical of the wood’s integrity than their host’s. The wind greeted them again after their brief parting, along with something new—the sound of a small fire.

A small Aether burner sat underneath a pot of water, held up by a chain and a pyramid of three sticks.

“I hope you’re okay with rainwater,” the young man said as he clawed open a black tin. “There’s been an abundance, not that the nearby river’s water is bad.”

“No,” Evalyn smiled. “I’m not a stranger to it, at least.”

“No? That’s good. What about the young one there? She’s awfully small, ain’t she? Can’t say I was expecting that.”

Iris’s eyes flicked between the fire and the hole in the tarp. The wood beneath her feet had a nasty bounce to it, and what little of the wall remained was ready to fall apart.

“I’ll try,” Iris muttered quietly.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, well. Beds are downstairs. Taken care of them as best I can. Doubt you’ll be here long, though.”

“What makes you say that?” Evalyn asked, placing her briefcase down by the door. “Finding the F.S.A. in a wasteland like this sure doesn’t sound that easy.”

The water slowly came to a boil as the man sprinkled tea leaves into a pot. “Bollocks. It’s a piece of piss.”

He dipped his pinky into the pot for a second or two before shaking off the water.

“Anywhere the slave trade travels through, an entire network pops up around it. Somewhere like this, the buyers and sellers get careless. Open radio, Aether lines.”

He stood and walked over, extending a hand to Evalyn and then to Iris.

“Terrence Hotherland. Geverdian Federal Police.”