Zai could barely even comprehend what was the most haphazard briefing he’d ever sat through; eight minutes in the back of the motor carriage with Sophia spitting forth sentences punctuated with only panicked breathing.

  No structure to what was just words, no logic to even prepare him for this most terrifying encounter.

  “... you got all that?!” Sophia breathes finally, stopping herself.

  No, I got nothing. Prince Zai Tianci wants to reply, but instead just dumbly holds onto her shoulder. “Take a breath Sophia.”

  “No! No, you don’t understand!” Sophia almost begs him, begs the universe. “Please don’t let him… don’t let him…”

  “It’s going to be ok.” Zai lies, keeping an eye on the road and the approaching mansion grounds.

  He was here alright.

  A single guard posted right at the front door stands with near-supernatural stillness; the ceramic body armor of a hulking demonic mass broken by the heavy storm rifle it held in its hands, now pointed towards the approaching vehicle.

  Different from his wife’s living weapon, the supposedly human body beneath the armor expanded in certain areas to create something more akin to a brick than the other’s more humanoid appearance.

  “Shit…” Guardsman Fushimi murmurs, stepping out of the vehicle with both hands raised.

  An appropriate usage of language from his personal guardian.

  Because he was here.

  Zai had been in the listening rooms, alongside the spymasters as they read the transcripts of those weekly radio broadcasts. Zai had himself, when possible at five o’clock on the fifth day of the week, sat alongside one of the old radios in the Palatial Temple and listened to that voice that was casted over the Wailing Fang. And this Prince had, for a good portion of his life (almost his entire post teenage years), listened to that inflection of tones, accented imperial; delivering the will of the people across the air itself. How this man, in what seemed like every word, brought forth emotion and courage smooth enough to grind down even the most stern of granite.

  Prince Zai Tianci’s analysts all decidedly pointed towards pre-made scripts, read like some kind of stage play within radio booths in an ultimate deception of their own people. That this man’s hosts and guests that he brought into his fold were simply all actors, doing their part to play out some vast conspiracy hidden within the halls of Immortal Hill in a distant Capital.

  Zai never believed them, himself feeling that through the transmitted voices the genuineness of spontaneity, the shock of surprise, and the flowing path of natural conversation like a raging river through vast canyons.

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  And that man was here.

  The Crown Prince of Tianci had been briefed on him. Intelligence reports recounting, in scattered detail, how this second child of a lowly Viscount from some barely relevant province in the bitter north of the Imperium had somehow seduced the sole heir to a vast, terrifying empire.

  Through either some sequence of honeyed words, a terrifying coup from the lower classes, or some terrible, ancient magic this (charming) young man had brought himself beside the Empress of the Imperium; and from his own sacred essence he had given her line five of the most ruthless, terrifying children on the Ensolian Continent.

  That man was here.

  There were warning signs in his every move, the markers of an internal takeover that were constantly being pinned by the Dominion’s spymasters onto him. How with each passing week, month, year they would await the inevitable assassination of Empress Annia the Second, Ascendant Regent of the Ensolian Imperium by her very husband. They foretold that through a swift flick of the blade he would sit upon the Silver Throne, completing some vast conspiracy buried over the course of decades; from a eighteen year old high school student to a middle-aged consort.

  He was here.

  The man who had survived attempted assassinations by his own children and wife; the very same blood that tied them spilled again and again in proxy wars fought within that vast Imperial palace. The man who had played that ruthless court of blood, the man that somehow could stay alive despite being in the very same rooms as the Commandant of the First Legion, the crushing wealth of the Merchant Mind, the hidden smiles and blades of the Crimson Butterfly, the Silver Demon whose hand slipped poison into the mouths of nations (who, conveniently, was Zai’s wife), and the utterly unknown variable of the youngest child.

  This man, this father of monsters… was here.

  The Crown Prince of the Dominion takes a deep breath, calming himself before putting his hand onto the cold, brass door knob. Swallowing saliva and terror, closing his eyes momentarily as he slowly and ever so gently opens the door to the living room.

  The man had two of those Ceramic Demons with him, those Impericutta legionaries immediately stiffening at a new arrival to this Court of Consorts. Nothing behind those ceramic faceplates, no emotion or humanity except the blank, bone white armor of the Imperium’s living weapons.

  Zai catches his form just out of view as he tries not to make eye contact, this young prince trying to establish himself in the suffocating pressure of this mountainous presence.

  Just out of the corner of his eye, Zai Tianci could see the loose, short-sleeved button-up shirt of light linen in faded pastel pink, the loose khaki trousers with multiple pockets on their seams. Zai Tianci could observe the stubble growing on his slightly unkempt face, at the graying streaks that ran through his slicked hair, at the cold brown eyes that measured the long look he gave at this Prince, and how beneath his clothing there was musculature that seemed to bulge out from the smooth cloth.

  The Crown Prince of Tianci finally makes eye contact with the man sitting on one of the living room’s sitting chairs, legs crossed over and leaning back on the padded seat. He smells the fresh cup of brewed coffee atop a small serving tray, its accompanying setting of sugar and cream completely untouched. He sees the chest rise as air is brought into the diaphragm, and he listens as those words, once listened to over the radio waves, speak to him directly though the flesh itself.

  “Yo.”