Aldric finished unrolling the scroll.
The document contained numbers.
Sales numbers, distribution routes, names of buyers, and — the detail that had made Aldric himself feel physically ill while drafting the report — a conservative estimate of how many citizens of Mahallem had consumed the product in the last two weeks.
— Three hundred and twelve new confirmed cases — said Aldric, with the voice of a physician delivering a diagnosis he himself did not want to believe.
— All presenting the standard symptoms.
Voluntary prostration, repetition of chants in the Garmanese dialect, and — this was reported by eight independent witnesses — at least forty of them were seen constructing a small altar in the central market using loaves of bread stacked in the shape of a pyramid.
Silence.
— With bread — João repeated.
— With bread — Aldric confirmed.
— Spreichem’s bread.
— Spreichem’s bread.
João stood still for a moment with the expression of a man performing calculations that were not mathematical but were equally precise — calculations of patience, of limits, of how much a person can accumulate before something internal and fundamental makes a unilateral decision.
Then he turned toward Liou.
— I need the Force.
Liou blinked once.
— No.
— Liou—
— João.
— He is converting citizens with bread.
— I know.
— Drugged bread.
— I know.
— For a rival god.
— I know.
— With pyramid-shaped loaves in the central market—
— João — said Liou, with the specific patience of someone who possessed infinite patience but used it very selectively.
— We are not deploying the Reality-Destroying and Complex-Existence-Annihilating Armed Force Against Any Being That Calls Itself a God and Also Any Entity Superior to Superiority.
— Why.
— Because it destroys realities.
— That’s literally its name.
— João.
There is a plaza.
With people.
In the city.
— Manageable collateral damage.
— João.
João opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
Somewhere inside him there was an argument insisting that a version of this conversation existed in which he was correct, and he was trying to locate it in real time.
He failed.
But he did not admit that.
— Then what do you propose — he said, with the voice of someone agreeing without using any words that would indicate agreement.
Liou did not answer immediately.
Instead, something happened.
Liou raised his hands and, with the completely calm and deliberate movements of someone performing a gesture he had clearly rehearsed exactly zero times because he did not need rehearsal because this was simply who he was, untied the hair tie.
The black hair fell.
Not randomly.
It fell in the specific way hair falls when it belongs to someone the universe treats as an aesthetic event — layered, moving, the hall’s light doing exactly what it should do with that amount of dark hair descending in controlled freefall over the shoulders of a twenty-four-year-old emperor who had defeated primordial entities before lunch.
Aldric felt he was witnessing something no one of his bureaucratic rank should be allowed to witness.
Then Liou grabbed his shirt.
And tore it apart.
Not dramatically.
Not with effort.
With the calmness of someone opening a window because he wants ventilation — a clean movement from the center outward, and the fabric simply accepted its destiny because fabric belonging to Liou learns early that its options are limited.
The imperial shirt, sewn by artisans with decades of experience using thread harvested from a region existing in three and a half dimensions, became two dignified pieces drifting toward the floor.
The physique of someone trained by bored gods became visible with the naturalness of a landscape that had always existed and simply stopped being covered by clouds.
Aldric looked at the ceiling.
For no particular reason.
He simply looked.
João observed the process with the expression of someone recognizing a signal.
— Ah — he said.
And removed his own shirt.
Not with the same ceremony — João removed his shirt the way João did most things: direct energy, no wasted time, pulling it over his head and dropping it onto the throne room floor with the level of respect a twenty-one-year-old general gives textile products when more urgent matters exist.
Eighty-four kilograms of athletic build appeared with the casualness of someone who simply existed like that and did not think about it.
João took a pair of sunglasses from his pocket.
Put them on.
Aldric looked at the sunglasses.
Looked at João.
Looked at Liou.
Processed the combined image of the two — the emperor with loose hair and a torn shirt, the shirtless general wearing sunglasses — inside an imperial throne room, before a throne occupied by an anime figurine, in the presence of a scroll documenting three hundred and twelve cases of involuntary religious conversion via baked goods.
— I will be in the hallway — Aldric said, rolling up the scroll.
Nobody heard him.
They exited through the main entrance of the Cathedral-Castle.
They did not walk.
They advanced — there is a difference, and the difference is the amount of aura moving together with the body.
Aura is not something directly seen.
It is something perceived in the periphery, in the way the air seems to hold a different opinion regarding the space certain people occupy, in the way the human eye registers presence before details.
Liou and João descended the steps of the main entrance in the unconscious synchronization of people raised in the same environment who developed parallel rhythms without ever discussing the matter.
The Island’s sunlight struck them with the bias of an experienced cinematographer.
The guards stationed at the entrance became very quiet.
The aura moved with them along the stone road descending toward the city.
It was not visible.
It was audible — in the silence forming ahead of them as they advanced, in conversations stopping, in the sound of pedestrians unconsciously opening space without understanding exactly why.
The Central Plaza of Mahallem on the Island was a place of generous proportions, paved with pale stones that in the morning reflected sunlight white and in the afternoon reflected the same sunlight gold.
There were fountains.
Market stalls.
The pyramid-shaped bread altar eight witnesses had reported and which Aldric had omitted from the report because he considered it a minor detail was still there, intact, with three lit candles at the base and what appeared to be an offering of grains.
And there was, in the center of the plaza, a man behind a stall.
Spreichem.
Mid-forties.
White apron dusted with flour.
Baker’s hands — broad, calloused, covered with the memory of a thousand batches.
A completely ordinary face, the kind you see and forget and then see again and still forget, the most treacherous type of face because the human mind simply refuses to retain it as dangerous.
Friendly smile.
Eyes calculating things the smile did not advertise.
On the stall: bread.
Bread in varied shapes, perfectly golden, carrying the specific scent good bread possesses and which is, neurologically, one of humanity’s oldest weapons because no one ever developed cognitive defenses against it.
The smell arrived before the man did.
The smell was probably part of the problem.
Spreichem saw Liou and João entering the plaza.
Registered the loose hair.
The torn shirt.
The sunglasses.
The absence of a shirt.
The aura moving ahead of them like a personal weather front.
His smile widened.
— Good morning, Your Majesty — he said, with the voice of someone who sells bread and only bread and definitely does absolutely nothing besides selling bread.
— May I offer—
— Spreichem — said João.
The word emerged carrying the accumulated weight of every time the name had appeared in reports, intelligence briefings, sleepless nights spent wondering exactly how the situation had reached this point.
It was the sort of name epic stories reserved for arch-nemeses, except the arch-nemesis sold bread and wore an apron.
The plaza had gone silent.
The people there recognized the universal sign of something is about to happen and redistributed themselves toward the edges with the silent efficiency of people who had already seen enough in life to know when not to stand in the center.
— General — Spreichem replied with a courteous nod.
— The bread — João said.
— Is bread.
— Spreichem.
— Wheat, water, salt, natural fermentation.
Traditional process.
Family recipe.
— Your family recipe converts people to Garmanism.
— It is a very good recipe.
João took a step forward.
And then, from the left side of the stall, from an angle nobody had been observing because until that exact moment there had been nothing particularly observable about it, a figure emerged.
Uruhm.
The most famous bald man on the Island.
Probably the most famous bald man in the World of Naicity, though that was a competitive category and the data difficult to verify.
Uruhm’s baldness was not the result of gradual loss or aesthetic decision.
It was declarative baldness — baldness existing with the same authority mountains possess, informing the world that this skull had no space for hair because other structural priorities occupied it.
The rest of Uruhm was muscle.
Not casual-gym muscle or disciplined-diet muscle.
Muscle belonging to the category implying a relationship with one’s own body most people never even consider having — physical architecture built with the seriousness and permanence of an important public building.
His arms possessed the diameter of things that should not be arms.
His neck was a column.
Uruhm’s mere physical existence in space reconfigured the geometry of the situation.
He positioned himself between João and Spreichem.
Said nothing.
Did not need to.
João looked at Uruhm.
Uruhm looked at João.
The silence had texture.
— Uruhm — said João, with the exact tone of someone pronouncing the name of a problem that is not the main problem but is directly standing in front of the main problem and insists on existing every single time without exception.
Uruhm continued not speaking.
His arms — each possessing the diameter of an extremely clear intention — remained crossed.
João looked toward Liou.
Liou was studying the bread pyramid with candles.
— That — Liou said calmly — is technically an unauthorized religious structure in public space.
— It is a bread pyramid — said Spreichem.
— With candles.
— The candles are decorative.
— With grains at the base.
— Appreciate the aesthetic presentation—
— Spreichem — said Liou, with the patience of a man who had once created a law making it illegal for him to lose arguments and therefore felt no urgency to win this one because the outcome was already legally determined.
— You are converting citizens of the empire.
— I am selling bread.
— The bread converts.
— The bread nourishes.
— The bread drugs.
— The bread elevates.
João had begun circling Uruhm from the left side.
Uruhm shifted left.
João reconsidered and attempted the right.
Uruhm was already on the right.
João looked upward with the expression of someone calculating a third option involving vertical trajectory.
Uruhm looked upward too, apparently informed about the third option through whatever instinct bald muscular men who protect bakers develop over time.
What followed was not a confrontation.
It was disorder.
There was no more precise description.
The central plaza of the Island city, at the heart of the greatest empire in the World of Naicity, with both emperor and general present, transformed into disorder — the specific type occurring when two extremely capable people are determined to do conflicting things and neither is willing to behave reasonably because neither believes the situation demands reasonableness.
A stall was overturned.
Bread hit the ground.
Someone in the crowd picked up a loaf and ate it because it was free and smelled good, which was a problem for later.
Uruhm blocked João in six different ways, three of which were physically dishonest.
Liou said something to Spreichem that was legally irrefutable and Spreichem answered with an argument about commercial freedom that was factually incorrect but which Liou, for the first time in years, needed more than two seconds to process.
The bread pyramid survived the first minute of disorder intact, which was statistically admirable.
It did not survive the second.
When the dust settled — figuratively, because there was literal flour in the air, making the metaphor literal too — Spreichem had vanished.
Uruhm had vanished.
Bread littered the ground.
The pyramid was destroyed.
The candles were extinguished, which was the only definitively positive outcome of the afternoon.
João stood in the center of the plaza.
Wearing sunglasses, shirtless, flour in his hair.
He looked toward the space where Spreichem had been.
— Again — he said, to nobody in particular, with the tone of someone who had accepted a reality intellectually while his body still refused it emotionally.
Liou stood beside him, loose hair, shirt still torn, holding a piece of bread he had picked up from the ground for undeclared reasons.
He looked at the bread.
— I am not eating this — he said.
— No — João agreed.
— But it is well made.
João looked at the bread.
At the empty space.
At the plaza slowly reactivating its normal routine with the specific resilience of a city that has seen too much and understands routine always wins in the end.
— One day — João said.
— One day — Liou agreed, throwing the bread away.
Somewhere that was not the Island but maintained a relationship with it physical distance failed to fully capture, there was a room.
It was not a room of ostentatious power.
No thrones.
No banners.
No architecture screaming importance.
It was a room communicating importance the way very self-assured rooms communicate it — through the quiet quality of every detail, the dark wood walls, the lighting originating from sources not immediately obvious, the window occupying the entire wall opposite the door framing a view that made you understand whoever chose this window had chosen to see exactly what they wanted to see.
A man stood before the window.
Long hair.
Dark, falling over his shoulders with the indifference of someone who does not consider hair a matter requiring attention despite all evidence contradicting that negligence.
A suit — not a general’s uniform nor imperial robes, but a suit: civilian clothing, precise cut, fabric neither cheap nor flashy, existing to be appropriate rather than noticed.
The combination of long hair and formal suit carried the quality of a resolved paradox — two things that should not work together and somehow did with the natural ease of a choice that required no justification.
He stood with his back to the room.
Looking through the window.
From that angle it was possible not to see his face.
Only the silhouette — shoulders, hairline, hands loosely clasped behind his back with the posture of someone who thinks better when the arms have something to do that does not interfere with thinking.
He remained that way for some time.
The silence in the room was the silence of someone alone by choice and inhabiting silence deliberately — not as absence of sound, but as an active state.
Then he spoke.
To himself.
Or to the window.
Or to something outside it that understood.
There was no way to know, and there was the sense that he knew there was no way to know and was entirely comfortable with that.
— The Imperial Trio — he said.
The voice was calm.
Not the empty calm of someone hollow inside, but the dense calm of someone carrying far too much inside and who had decided at some point there was no need for the exterior to constantly reflect the interior.
A pause.
— Soon — he said — we will meet again.
The “we” was interesting.
Not “they” will come.
Not “I” will go.
We will meet again.
A word implying history.
Implying a before not yet narrated, a point of origin recorded somewhere outside this chapter.
A word placing the speaker inside the story alongside the Trio, situating him not as observer but participant — someone who had occupied the same space as them before, who had departed from that space, and who calculated the moment of return with the precision of someone who possessed time and used it differently from most people.
He continued looking through the window.
Said nothing else.
The room remained quiet.