There was a man standing not three feet from the other end of the portal. He had a kind face and a shaved head. He was smiling pleasantly. The orange and red robe he wore did little to hide the bulging muscles of his shoulders and biceps. Upon the portal opening he brought his hands forward, one fist curled into the other, and bowed low.

It was the same kind of bow Sun Lin had approximated at their first meeting, and Willow recognized that she might have insulted the grasshopper by not returning it. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Willow, far away from her normal handshake, bent at the waist until her face was perilously close to the edge of the portal. She saw the man straighten and she followed suit.

He was standing in a room constructed of exposed wooden beams and woven mats. Sliding doors in the back were windowed with nearly-translucent paper. A low table beside the man held a lantern, and from what Willow could see of the scene on the other side there didn’t seem to be any inscripted lights or luminous bugs.

“This Master Sun Geon greets the Wraith Willow and humbly requests entrance to your lands.”

“This… Willow… allows you entrance,” Willow said. It was certainly a strange speech pattern, but it felt especially rude not to meet him halfway, at least here.

The man smiled again—a real smile that crinkled his eyes, not the psychotic smile of Andrew—and stepped through the portal. In a single stride he crossed over eight thousand miles and he took a moment to look around at the silver walls of the cell.

“Your palace is most accommodating,” he said.

“My…,” Willow looked around, then blushed. “Ah, this isn’t my palace. It’s just an experimental chamber.”

“Experimental chamber,” the man said, as if trying the words out. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of studying this phrase.”

There was something off about his accent, and it only came to her then that they might not speak the same native language. Had he studied English to prepare for this journey?

“It’s a place where the former governor of Asche performed experiments to create warbeasts,” Willow said. “This one was my chamber.”

The man took in the information without a sign of shock, then seemed to notice the small crowd on the other side of the essence barrier. Willow looked back and saw that the grasshopper alone was bowing its head to the floor.

“Master Sun Geon,” Sun Lin said.

“Your calculations continue to be sublime, Sun Lin,” the man said. Willow noticed the lack of a title there.

“Is he your master,” Willow asked the grasshopper through the barrier.

“This one has the privilege of studying at the Driving Rain sect,” Sun Lin replied. “Master Sun Geon has many more important duties than to personally train this lowly disciple.”

“After what you’ve helped accomplish today, Sun Lin,” Sun Geon said from beside Willow. “Few will view you as lowly anymore.”

Willow had the feeling she was watching a strangely moving exchange between the two foreigners, but she had no idea what to say or how to excuse herself. And there was still the portal to deal with.

“Right, well,” Willow said and turned back to the portal. But the portal wasn’t showing the wooden room with its thin paper windows anymore, lit by the gentle flame of paper lanterns.

No, the portal was a dark hole hovering in midair. As she watched, the portal twisted until its top straightened out, lengthening upwards. It grew corners, at the bottom as well, and an inexplicable feeling of dread sank into her gut as she watched it assume the proportions of a doorway. Then, a faint and faraway creaking, as of a door opening.

There was something on the other side of that door. Something which had fixed a minute sliver of its terrible attention on Willow at the opening of the door. She was rooted to the spot, staring into the abyss. She knew that if the thing fully fixed its eye on her, she would be crushed by the pressure of its abyssal presence.

“Willow,” Leopold shouted from behind her, and all she wanted to do was scream to run, but she was frozen. A sleep-addled mind at the edge of the cosmos was awakening—slowly awakening—it’s eye fixed on her.

Willow choked. Sun Geon turned, spied the doorway, and leapt forward faster than she could see. One second he was beside her, the next he was right in front of the door. He lashed out with foot and hand, blurs impacting the borders of the abyss. With each strike she sensed an explosion of essence from his body.

The rule-straight borders of the door warped, then buckled. Sun Geon was back at her side in a flash, and the darkness fell into itself and snuffed out of existence.

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Light existed once again. It had been as if the sun itself had winked out. She had woken the thing beyond, but barely.

Sun Geon turned, his hands held behind his back, and regarded her. She remembered that regardless of what had just happened, she was the leader of this city-state now, and she had a foreign dignitary as a guest. She turned and bowed again.

“Thank you, Sun Geon, for closing the portal.”

“A dangerous art, your portal-making,” Sun Geon said, and Willow straightened. “But it invariably has its uses, as I’m sure you can agree.”

The barrier disappeared with a small pop of pressure differential and Leopold rushed in first. He looked Willow up and down, then stared at the spot where the portal had been. There was nothing in the air now, not even a ripple of essence. Whatever Sun Geon had done, he’d canceled her spell.

Which was very surprising.

Sun Geon’s eyes narrowed at Leopold. “You have employed the assistance of an interloper?”

“A what,” Willow asked, then she got the sudden feeling that the game had suddenly changed. There was a murderous intent radiating off the man’s body, and his smile was gone. Cords in his shoulders stood out and he shifted his feet subtly. Essence rippled down his arms to his hands and feet. He was preparing to strike.

Willow stepped between Leopold and the foreign master. “A what,” she repeated.

Sun Geon switched his focus to her eyes, and she held his gaze. He seemed to be searching for something there, but whatever it was she didn’t know. He shifted his feet back and leaned away slightly.

“This one apologizes. My home has been ravaged by interlopers for many hundreds of years. Seeing their style of dress again, which used to be the style in the Emperor’s court, upset me.”

Again, there was so much to unpack.

“Hundreds of years,” she repeated. “Sun Geon, if it isn’t rude to ask, how old are you?”

“This one has the pleasure of having passed three hundred and fifteen summers.”

Three hundred…

“And um,” she swallowed. “That’s normal, where you come from?”

“For a cultivator of my level? I can expect death only if struck down in battle.”

“And these interlopers?”

His eyes grew dark again, but she sensed as his gaze turned inward and not at Leopold.

“Foul and loathsome souls from the past who possess the bodies of our weakest citizens,” Sun Geon spat. “They bring with them both foulsome unnatural knowledge and a rapacious hunger for Qi, both as a result of their temporal misalignment. Such a beast will not be suffered to live in the Celestial Kingdom. Not anymore.”

Willow looked back at Leopold, not yet daring to move from between the two men. He was dressed in another of Andrew’s suits—nothing he had was suitable for wear anymore after so much travel, and he’d not yet plundered the evacuated houses in the city for new clothing.

“Andrew dressed like an interloper,” Willow asked, although to whom she wasn’t sure. Maybe just to herself.

“If he knew this style of dress, perhaps he was one after all,” Sun Geon said. “In which case, you have rid your land of a pestilence.”

🜛

There were quarters especially for visiting dignitaries in the preposterously-sized governor’s mansion, and Willow and Leopold insisted that Sun Geon take them. He’d brought only a single small bag of supplies which he carried on his back, and Willow immediately went out into the city to discover where, if at all, there might be edible food left.

It turned out she didn’t have to walk far. Somehow her whispered conversations with Leopold had been overheard by some of the magical creatures—no doubt those with abilities in that arena—and as soon as she set foot on the street an elf approached with several canvas bags of supplies.

She took the bags, their weight necessitating assistance from her psychokinesis.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said to the elf. “You’re not a servant. None of you are. Not anymore.”

“To be free is to choose,” the elf said, and turned away. Willow shook her head at its retreating carapace. She felt she’d never get used to the strange elves that weren’t at all like the fairy tales.

🜛

Annabelle, for some strange reason, volunteered to whip something up in the kitchens while Willow entertained her guest. She nearly pushed Willow out, muttering something about her being a sorry excuse for a governor. Willow decided to let it go, and walked to the guest suite.

Sun Geon wasn’t there, but she heard voices coming from down the hall. When she entered the large room—an entire wall of which was taken up with a multi-paned window—she saw Leopold and Sun Geon bent over a map laid on the table. When Willow entered, Sun Geon immediately turned and bowed.

“Wraith Willow,” Sun Geon said. Willow nearly corrected him, but recognized that it at least was partially a part of their language to include titles before names. Apparently though, not if they were lesser in rank than oneself, like Sun Lin.

Willow bowed back and approached the table. Between the two of them lay a large map clustered with mountains and labeled fortresses, rivers and forests. It was the much improved version of the local area map that Willow had seen before.

“Leopold was elucidating our strategic situation,” Sun Lin said, and Willow searched the features of the map. She found a fortress with a red ‘x’ through it: Durum. To the southeast, a small dot.

Bridgewater.

“Char, to the east,” Leopold pointed to a fortified city. “Nox to the north-west and Jon to the north. Those are our closest neighbors; city-states with Arcana and presumably warbeasts as well.”

“Jon’s closest,” Willow said, estimating. “Fifty miles or a little more as the crow flies. What about these mountains?”

“Difficult to traverse, but there is an old highway,” Leopold pointed. “Here, but it’s overgrown.”

“If they send the right warbeast, it won’t be for long.”

“Your old adversary at least blessed you with one thing: an advantageous position. There are few engagements I have aided which have been better defended.”

“But we’re shoehorned in,” Willow said. “We can’t leave. If we do it’ll be Durum all over again.”

“If we left,” Leopold said. “I think the magical creatures would follow us. You’re their queen.”

Willow scoffed. “Lot of good that’s doing me. And we’d just be one big moving target.”

“Better than, how do you say it, fish in a barrel,” Sun Geon said. Willow rolled her eyes. She did not need more people questioning her already shaky strategic grounds. What she needed was a plan.