“He’s here alone,” Jeremy snarled, and faster than she could stop him he coiled his legs and shot off like an arrow toward the emperor.

“Long have I sought you,” Jeremy thundered as he rocketed across the empty arena. He moved so fast Willow had trouble keeping up with him. He reached the emperor’s box in the blink of an eye.

“Really? How droll,” the emperor said. Jeremy moved to attack, but the emperor swiped at him lazily and the interloper’s body sprayed across the other half of the stadium in a mist of blood and bone. The emperor checked his nails, then looked down at Leopold and Willow and smiled.

“You speak the king’s, I take it,” the emperor called down to them. Willow was still in shock from what had just happened. Where had Jeremy gone?

“I don’t know what that means,” Leopold called back up. “But we can understand you well enough.”

“Good. Well, come on through when you’re done mourning.”

With that, the emperor turned on his heel and retreated through the twisting, leaking nexus of essence which seemed to function as a crude portal.

“W-where is Jeremy,” Willow stuttered. Half of the seats in the arena had been misted with red and there were glimmering shards of bone embedded in the wooden columns.

“I don’t understand.”

Leopold took her hand and squeezed. It wasn’t until she looked in his eyes that she knew what she thought she’d seen happen had really happened. Jeremy was just… gone.

🜛

“We could just run,” Leopold said. “Open a portal here back to America and close it before he comes through.”

“He’ll invade at some point,” she said. “If that’s what he wants to do. I suppose he can do anything he wants.”

“We can’t face him,” Leopold argued. “Maybe if we got enough Arcana together they could work a spell that might slow or stop him, but we can’t. Not on our own.”

“Leopold,” she said, still breathless from the casual display of power and brutality. “At this point I think we may be stronger than a few cities put together. If we’re not up to it… I don’t know who else could be.”

He clenched his jaw and in his eyes she saw the future they’d talked about evaporating. The small house in the woods, being together and that being enough. If they couldn’t counter this threat, if they couldn’t stop the invasion, then that future was all but lost.

“We’ll go through,” Willow said. “What’s the worst he can do?”

“Kill us,” Leopold added unhelpfully. “He can kill us. Or maybe torture us into spilling some state secret.”

“If he wanted to do that,” Willow said. “I think he could have just grabbed us right after Jeremy. Why does this feel like an invitation and not a trap?”

“Feels like a trap to me,” Leopold said, and shrugged.

They climbed the rows of seats until they were level with the emperor’s viewing box. It was easy to step inside over the shattered remains of the facade, and at the back of the box rested the portal in full view. Unlike Willow’s portals which were clean cuts in space with very little distorted lensing around the perimeter, this one’s border seemed to be unstable and churning with darkness. Every few seconds the portal interior would flash black, just for a moment, and give her a surge of that dread she’d felt across the ocean.

“It’s not stable,” she said, getting as close to the edge as she dared. “He’s pumping essence into it to keep it open. I don’t even think its a very long-range portal.”

“It’s not,” the emperor said from the other side and walked back into view. An attendant followed at his side. He dismissed the man with a nod and the attendant bowed low and shuffled backwards out of sight.

“One thousand, two hundred and fifty three li between the viewing box and this laboratory in the capital,” the emperor said. “And yet I’ve accumulated barely enough qi to maintain this tear in reality. If you’re going to step through, now would be the time.”

With a last glance between them Willow and Leopold stepped through the portal, which promptly closed with a thunderous boom. The shockwave ruffled Willow’s gi and rattled some of the shiny metal equipment in the laboratory, but nothing crashed over. Whoever this emperor was, he’d been prepared for all eventualities.

“Well, well, if it isn’t the biggest thorn in my side in a hundred years,” the emperor said and set a slate down on a polished metal table. “I send Sun Geon to America to prepare the way for invasion, even to gather vital information on your portal magic, and then what happens? You open some sort of doorway into who knows where which threatens the very fabric of reality.”

“You know about that,” Willow blurted. “But how?”

“You don’t think I can sense the sheer wrongness of the door even from here,” the emperor asked. “The void to which it leads? Its very presence causes the pillars of creation to tremble. Such a thing was never meant to exist on this plane of reality.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“You… don’t care about the invasion anymore,” Leopold asked. “You’re just trying to shut the door?”

The emperor sighed as if he was dealing with a simpleton.

“You people are too much trouble to be worth it. Keep your unwashed masses. All I ask is that you not ruin the planet for the rest of us.”

“And what would that entail, exactly,” Willow said. “Ruining the planet for the rest of us?”

The emperor turned with a flourish that whipped his long coat out and walked swiftly across the room to a bank of dials. Willow looked uncertainly at Leopold, then they both followed.

“These readings have been increasing since the moment you opened the portal,” the emperor said. “Local spatial distortions. Something’s knocking at the barrier between this world and the next. And it’s quite insistent.”

“They’re trying to open up more doorways,” Willow asked. There were dozens of dials mounted in the metal wall, all with needles swinging right and left. It meant nothing to her—except that the laboratory looked suspiciously like Andrew’s.

“And getting close to it,” the emperor said. “I doubt they have the same grasp of portal magic that you do, but eventually they will tear the curtain and I suspect that those tears will be much harder to repair than this one. If we can somehow—”

“Sun Geon closed the first doorway,” Leopold interrupted. “Right after he came through, the portal destabilized into a door. He hit it a few times and it closed.”

The emperor turned and a smile crept up the side of his mouth.

“I did not know this. So your big boy wasn’t the first? Perhaps Sun Geon attempted to block its qi. I’m interested in seeing this thing up close.”

“You shouldn’t be,” Willow said. “The very presence of it brings one to their knees. We barely escaped the door when I opened it and tossed Sun Geon in.”

The emperor’s face darkened for an instant before he returned to geniality. “So you did kill Sun Geon.”

“I certainly hope he’s dead,” Willow said. “For his sake.”

The emperor moved instantaneously—Willow couldn’t perceive any intervening motion between him standing there and then him three feet closer with his hand around her neck.

“Listen little girl, Sun Geon—”

Leopold’s sword sang a high note as he held it a hair’s breadth from the emperor’s neck.

“Don’t think I don’t know you can kill me in a heartbeat. I know that,” Leopold said, his voice steady as a rock. “But I won’t stand by and watch you kill Willow.”

“You have a very loyal companion, Wraith Willow,” the emperor said and released her throat. There hadn’t been any pressure in the grip—she was sure if there had been he would have just snapped her head clean off. Nevertheless, she cleared her throat.

“It’s just Willow,” she said. “And he’s my husband.”

“A matched pair,” the emperor said, then walked toward a set of metal stairs leading up.

🜛

“I suppose we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” the emperor said as they all three sat around a low table in a gilded room. Servants whose essence was many times more powerful than the cultivators she’d killed the night before entered silently and poured them tea, then retreated without even once raising their eyes.

“We’ve been looking for So Buhi—or as you might know him Jeremy—for a long time. I was surprised when I stepped through the portal to an absolute graveyard, and even more surprised to see him there. The fact that you two were also there, who I have been pondering for many weeks, should have tempered my actions. I responded to his aggression… regretfully. I do not wish for this to be your first impression of me.”

This had to be the strangest conversation Willow had ever been a part of. If he was to be believed, he’d known about them for a long time, or at least her. He’d been appraised of Sun Lin’s reports on Andrew’s efforts to create a wraith, but what he hadn’t expected was for the doorway to open shortly after Sun Geon passed through the portal to America.

He’d been looking for the reason ever since, and had strongly suspected Willow as the cause. Leopold seemed to be a total unknown to him, but he treated him with the same level of respect as he did Willow, unlike Sun Geon.

“Jeremy told us that for a long time you were looking for the interlopers. That you tortured them to gain information from the past,” Willow said.

“And he would remember that, wouldn’t he,” the emperor said. “I was young then, much younger. Unaccustomed to the burdens of rule. I was still obsessed with advancing—I thought that given enough power I could bend the country to my will. What a blasted fool—I’d never even met a capital bureaucrat. The gods couldn’t bend the spine of such a creature, and the formalities must always be observed. So over time I stopped my hunt, stopped chasing cultivation and the gods and all that, and settled down to rule as best I could.”

“But you obliterated him with a single blow,” Leopold said. “Cultivators roam your country killing for sport. Those you call mortals are less than human to them, how can you call that just in any way—”

The emperor held up his hand and Leopold stopped his deluge of accusations. She’d noticed that his voice had raised higher in pitch toward the end. Did he still have that acceleration spell active?

“You come from a very different country. Jeremy came from a very different time. It wouldn’t take long for me to find things about your… lets call it a ‘nation’… that I find distasteful as well. You forget that we have always lived this way. For a thousand years at least we have worshiped the strong and at best ignored the weak. To change that culture, even if I wanted to, is not such an easy task.”

“Jeremy said you were looking for a substance from the past. Something to make a pill from,” Leopold accused.

The emperor smiled mirthlessly and raised his hands to his elaborate hairdo. He raised it straight up, displaying a completely bald head.

“An unfortunate side effect of ingesting radioactive elements, even in a refined pill form,” the emperor said. “So he guessed it in the end. I wondered how many other interlopers would.”

“And that’s how you got so strong,” Willow said.

The emperor sighed.

“That’s how I remain so strong. There is no time to train, no time to cultivate. As much as I speak of bureaucracy, if there was one stronger than me they would slay me as soon as they were able. With that pill my strength exceeded all possible limits, but at least in my senescence that strength has remained above all others’.”

He placed the hairpiece back on his head. “Now, any more questions about my bodily functions? Perhaps you would like me to disrobe entirely. I’ll do it too, if it means we can have a civil conversation afterwards.”

Willow and Leopold shook their heads and the emperor took a sip of tea.

“Now, onto business. We are going to travel to America and close that door, before whatever is on the other side breaks through.”