“I’ve talked about my world,” Al said as the horses picked their way down the narrow ridge trail. “Tell me about yours.”
He kept one hand on the reins, the other resting across his thigh where his pistol holster would have been if it still existed here. Every so often he’d bring the monocular to his eye, scanning the twisting road ahead, letting the others hear the faint click of its focus ring as he swept the ridgelines.
“Like where do the monsters and things come from?” he asked.
For a while, only the wind answered — sighing through sparse pines, carrying the scent of stone and rain. Then Catrin spoke. “No one agrees,” she said simply. “The priests say they are the remnants of sin made flesh. The scholars call them echoes — failed creations left over from when the System was first forged.”
Rhyosyn snorted softly from the back of the column. “And the mages know better. They’re mana-blooms — places where wild magic festers too long without order. Give it a few decades and it grows teeth, claws, and a hunger.”
“So monsters are just… bad weather that learned to bite?” Al said.
Evan chuckled under her breath. “Something like that.”
He frowned, turning the monocular toward a dark cut in the valley below. “And they’ve always been around?”
Pryce’s tone went cool, as it often did when a conversation turned toward history. “Not always. The records speak of quieter centuries, but every few generations the balance shifts. The System… corrects itself.”
“Corrects,” he echoed, tasting the word. “Like a machine purging an error.”
The nobles said nothing to that.
He lowered the glass, thoughtful. “Hell of a world you’ve got. I thought mine was dangerous.”
Behind him, Rhyosyn leaned closer to Pryce, voice dropping to a whisper meant for the other woman’s ears. “He speaks of the System as if it were something built. He even uses its words—error, purge. Did you hear?”
Pryce’s reply was equally low. “I heard. And I saw what he summoned. That was no spell, no conjuration of mana I recognize. Whatever his American Magic is, it answers him as if it knows his mind.”
“You think it’s tied to his world?” Rhyosyn asked.
Pryce nodded slightly. “Or worse — that his world is tied to ours. We’ve seen men blessed, but never one blessed from without.”
“Should we report it?”
Pryce’s green eyes flicked toward the Marine riding ahead, scanning the trail again with that strange metal eye in his hand. “Not yet. The Triumvirate would cage him the moment they heard. Better to learn what we can before that.”
Al called back without turning around. “You two done whispering about me, or do I need to start charging rent for the space I’m taking up in your heads?”
Rhyosyn smiled despite herself. “You have a sharp ear, foreigner.”
“Comes with the job,” he said, lowering the monocular. “I’ve had to listen for things that wanted me dead before. Some of them even had better manners.”
The others laughed lightly, though tension still hummed beneath it. The trail curved again, and in the distance, thunder rolled somewhere behind the mountains.
For a moment, Al thought he could almost hear another sound riding beneath it — a deep, rhythmic pulse in the stone, like the slow heartbeat of the world.
Rhyosyn could tell the man was brooding. Her mothers had always said it was dangerous when men fell into that kind of silence — it meant they were thinking too much or not at all, and neither ended well. But she also knew the other ladies would object if she tried to wipe his bad mood away in the old ways her mothers had taught her.
A pity. It would’ve been simple, direct, and left them both smiling.
Instead, she kept her hands to the reins and her tongue still, watching the muscle in his jaw tighten and loosen as he rode. His questions kept coming — quiet, clipped things that betrayed how foreign he really was. Why did it matter to him where their ancestors had landed eight or nine centuries ago? Or why their cities still clung to the coast like barnacles on stone? The answers were common knowledge, unremarkable.
But he asked as if he were fitting pieces together — as if the truth mattered in a way it never had to anyone else. That troubled her. It also made her curious.
She studied his shoulders — broad, tense, scarred in a way no man of her world ever would be. The mark of someone who’d earned his strength rather than been chosen for it.
Perhaps she could learn something by turning the questions back.
“Tell me of your scholars,” she said at last, guiding her mare closer.
He turned slightly in the saddle, brow raised. “My scholars?”
“Yes,” she said. “You ask so much of ours — the courts, the temples, the records. What of yours? Who are the ones who keep knowledge where you come from?”
Al blew out a slow breath and rubbed at his chin. “That’s a tough one. We don’t really have ‘temples of learning’ the way you do. We’ve got universities — big places where people argue about everything from math to philosophy to why the hell the sky’s blue. We’ve got scientists too, they’re like engineers but meaner and with better funding.”
“Science,” she echoed the strange word carefully. “A kind of magic, then?”
He laughed under his breath. “Something like that. Just slower, with more paperwork. It’s how we learned to fly, talk across oceans, cure sickness. But we never called it magic.”
Rhyosyn tilted her head, fascinated despite herself. “You learned to fly. As birds do?”
He smirked. “As machines do. We built wings out of metal and fire.”
That earned him a long silence. She could feel Pryce and Catrin’s attention shift from behind them, the weight of it pressing between her shoulder blades. Even Evan and Idris exchanged a quick glance.
“Your people,” Pryce said finally, her tone sharp, “sound less like men and more like gods who forgot their place.”
Al didn’t rise to it. He just looked ahead again, scanning the horizon with that same calm vigilance. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s what we thought too. Right up until we remembered what it costs to play god.”
The words hung in the air like smoke — and for a while, no one spoke at all.
“And how did your people play god?” Rhyosyn asked softly.
Al didn’t answer at first. His eyes stayed fixed on the trail ahead, the reins loose in one hand. The light was fading — a low amber glow spilling across the rocks — and for a heartbeat she thought he might pretend not to have heard.
Then he exhaled, long and slow. “We forgot the important question,” he said finally. “We stopped asking should and only asked can.”
Rhyosyn watched a muscle twitch in his jaw. He was remembering something — she could see it in the way his focus drifted inward, the way his knuckles whitened around the reins. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn’t this mountain trail.
“Machines,” he said after a moment. “Weapons, engines, things that could level cities from half a world away. We told ourselves it was progress. That it would make life easier. Safer.” He gave a hollow laugh. “We got real good at killing and called it civilization.”
No one spoke. Even Pryce, whose tongue was usually sharp enough to cut steel, stayed silent.
Rhyosyn glanced toward the others but their expressions told her enough — this man’s words were heavier than they understood. They weren’t meant as confession or boast; they were memory.
When he finally looked up again, his eyes had gone distant and cold, reflecting the dying light. “You ever wonder,” he said quietly, “if the gods left because they got tired of cleaning up after us?”
Rhyosyn’s heart gave a small, uneasy twist. “In our land,” she said, “we believe the gods left because we stopped listening.”
“It’s not that God’s not listening,” the young man said. “He’s always listening. Sometimes, though, the only answer He can give is silence. Sometimes we have to be thankful for the prayers not answered.”
The words hung between them like smoke, heavy with meaning neither of them could quite name. The horses kept their slow, steady pace, hooves clicking against the stones. Rhyosyn found herself watching him, wondering what kind of prayers he’d made — and which ones he’d learned to live without.
Night settled over the valley, slow and heavy. The fire crackled low, throwing long shadows against the stones. Beyond the circle of light, the mountains swallowed every sound but the occasional whicker of a horse or the sigh of the wind.
Al sat a little apart from the others, hunched over something metallic that gleamed faintly in the firelight. Every so often there was a soft click or a whirr — the sound of pieces fitting together, of a mind that couldn’t be still.
Rhyosyn watched him from across the flames. The others had fallen into their usual rhythms: Pryce pretending not to stare, Catrin sharpening her sword with deliberate precision, the guards murmuring softly as they took first watch. But Rhyosyn’s thoughts were elsewhere.
She was turning over fragments of things the foreigner had said — stray pieces of conversation that didn’t quite fit, until now. He’d spoken of science, of machines that could fly, of weapons that could level cities. He’d said his people had built wings of metal and fire… and something else.
We made our own sun, he’d quipped once, almost offhand, back when she’d thought it was a metaphor. But now, in the quiet between heartbeats, she wasn’t so sure.
Her gaze flicked toward the faint outline of his hands working over the strange device. The light glinted off something small and round — smooth metal with markings like runes, but etched too perfectly, too evenly to be human craft.
She thought of the stories — old myths told by the priestesses of the Crown. Tales of the Fallen Sun, of a people who had burned the sky and called it glory. The myths said it was punishment, not invention.
She shivered.
“Something wrong, Lady Vaughn?” Pryce’s voice drifted across the fire, smooth and lazy but sharp beneath.
Rhyosyn blinked and forced a small smile. “Just thinking.”
“Dangerous habit,” Pryce said, poking at the fire with a stick. “Especially where he’s concerned.”
Rhyosyn didn’t answer. She looked back at Al — the soldier from another world, his eyes half-shadowed, his face lit by the slow pulse of emberlight. He looked nothing like a god. But maybe that was the problem. Maybe the last ones hadn’t either.