More than five years had passed since his exile, but once more he stood before The Palace of Eternal Dream. All the lies, all the deceptions, all the subterfuges had made this moment worth it. To behold its majesty once more was its own reward. The sheer immensity was a wonder for the ages, let alone the workmanship.

  Situated in a muddy, wet valley, the Palace spanned the breadth of a city. Indeed, it was a city, a state unto itself, with its own ecosystem, currencies, and rules. Serfs toiled in the surrounding fields, harvesting root vegetables, rice, and lashbean for the Palace’s teeming denizens. Their toil never ceased, whatever the season. Its walls of onyx rose a hundred feet—defying all but the mad to assail it. Mists coiled around its walls, concealing the workers and the many paths that led to its gateways, only one of which—the one Quen Yu now stood before—cut right to the heart.

  Though it was not possible to see from ground level, if looked at from the eye of a bird, one would see the Palace had been shaped like a lotus blossom—a black jewel at the heart of the Jade Empire. Each petal extended like the sharpened ray of a star, housing its own district of the Palace. One of these was dedicated solely to the study of magic.

  He would not see these districts today, however. His route lay straight to the heart, to the Imperial Throne room, and all its dark splendour.

  He stood before the First Gate, an archway twenty feet in height carved out of pure jadestone. It glowed as the sunlight hit it, making it seem a doorway forged from invocatory power. Serpents and flowers adorned it, lifelike as they refracted light.

  For all its beauty, he knew that one-hundred unseen archers were housed in the black vault above. If he put one foot wrong, they would shoot him dead, their arrow-tips poisoned with the deadliest toxins from the My’ra plant. Even a sorcerer of his calibre would hardly be able to stop so many bolts. Besides, the archers were not the only defence the Palace possessed.

  Two sentinels stood at the entrance. They wore Qi’shathian steel of exquisite workmanship, painted the colours of their Empress. Their helms were carved into the likeness of serpent-heads. Scales were patterned across their breastplates, pauldrons, and grieves. They wore katanas at their waists, six feet long and capable of cutting all but the hardiest steel to ribbons. In addition, each of them wore their left hand ungloved, a symbol that they were practitioners of magic as well as swordsmen of the highest order. These were the Qith’dreyne. The Empress’s personal guard. Their true number was not known, not even to Quen Yu, though he doubted they were many.

  Quen Yu bowed before the warriors, then got to his knees, and lay his forehead on the ground in a gesture of obeisance.

  “Who comes before the Gates of Initiation?” one of the warriors intoned in haughty Qi’shathian.

  “A Seeker after the Divine Presence,” Quen Yu answered.

  He despised this lengthy ritual, but it was a necessary evil if he were to reach the throne room. He had revised it many times on the long journey south.

  “You have prostrated yourself,” the other Qith’dreyne intoned. “Through humility, one achieves bliss. You may pass.”

  The ritual was a mirror of the enlightenment journey, a mummery of The Immutable Way—all odious religion. It was not that Quen Yu did not believe in the Kwei-Shin or Fate or The Way; if anything, he believed more deeply than most, and regarded what passed these days for wisdom as bastardised dilutions of the original text and teachings.

  The First Gate represented Protestation, the profession of one’s ignorance in the face of the Mystery of Existence. The second, Humiliation. Then Sacrifice. Then Scarification. Ablution. Wisdom. And Transcendence.

  He rose from his kneeling posture, bowed, and passed between the two Qith’dreyne. They pivoted on their heels and followed him into the mouth of the Palace, their armour clinking softly.

  Used to the squelch of soft mud beneath his feet on the long pilgrimage up to the Gate, Quen Yu paused a moment in shock as the sole of his foot touched stone so cold it penetrated the leather covering and seemed to send a spike of ice through his ankle. He smiled to himself. It was the little things one forgot.

  He proceeded down a long, blackly polished corridor. Veins of ta’mahar, the specialist ore that made Qi’shathian steel, were woven like spiderwebs through the onyx. A few passages led off from the main artery, though in truth they were more like great city highways, their sides flanked by rudimentary homesteads and merchant stalls. He saw people of all shapes, sizes, and ranks scurrying to and fro, some bearing messages, others bearing ricewine and spices. There were numerous theronts, many of them assigned tasks according to their statures and characteristics. Two huge bull-men pulled a colossal tonnage of stone—evidently from some fallen sculpture—down one hallway on a small cart. In another, a reptile-scaled theront in the garments of a blacksmith stood within the flames of a heroically sized forge, immune to heat which Quen Yu could feel even fifty paces distant. They are little freer here than they were in the Old World, he thought. Perhaps that would change once he ascended the throne.

  Perhaps not.

  He reached the Second Gate, the Gate of Humiliation. Here, he was stripped off all his clothes and stood naked before invisible watchers. After an agonising length of time and silence, a bell was rung, and he was allowed to reclothe himself and proceed.

  At the Third Gate, the Gate of Sacrifice, he sliced his hand and swore a blood-oath never to harm the Empress and to always serve the Empire. The Immutable Way is a law of giving and receiving. He found this demonstration puerile, a literalisation of the metaphorical sacrifices one had to undergo along the Way. Blood offerings? These were the domain of bloodthirsty Yarulians, with their obscene Arena of Death, and their apish understanding of divine machinery. Not of Qi’shath, which had retained nuance and deep wisdom.

  But he made his offering and moved on.

  Deeper in the Palace, he saw more wonders. A procession of sorcerers, all robed in ethereal colours, and hooded so that their faces could not be known, moved like multicoloured clouds across his path, their passage trailed by pungent incense swung from a censer. They chanted under their breath. Prayers. Adorations. Quen Yu felt the hum of their power calling to his own, but he held himself in check.

  The Fourth Gate was the Gate of Scarification. No journey along the Way could be complete without scars. This was one of his favourite Gates of the Way, for to him it spoke of the hard way progress and learning were won. It grounded The Immutable Way as a work not written by some absconding monk with no sense of the world, but by someone who had truly lived.

  At the Fifth Gate, the Gate of Ablution, he washed himself in waters so cold he nearly passed out.

  At the Sixth Gate, the Gate of Wisdom, a silver door barred him. He was questioned by an unseen voice. It asked him who he was, over and over again, never accepting any of Quen Yu’s answers, until finally he burst out, “I am impatient, that is what I am!”

  Silence followed, and he feared he had overstepped. To have come so far, through so many rigours, and to throw it away with one moment of uncontrolled temper… But no. The answer, it seemed, was satisfactory, perhaps because it was true and of the present moment. Rather than present vagueries of his name and birth, abstractions all, he had cut to the immediate.

  The doors swung open and he proceeded.

  The journey to the Seventh Gate dizzied him. Here, the Palace no longer resembled a city or a labyrinth. It resembled a carnival. There were lithe dancers, freaks of nature, and seemingly endlessly feasts. Unlike before, where he had merely observed the workings of the Palace at a distance, these people acknowledged his presence. They approached him, danced about him, begged him to stay. Women and men called from the hazy slits of tents. Magicians dazzled him with displays of artful invocation—pageantries of magical light that wove the ancient histories. What could I learn, he thought. Is there yet more? He shook himself. Knowledge had always a great temptation for him, even more so than women. Eunuchs assailed him, clamouring about him like a crowd of starved birds. They gabbled and gossiped about the court and the palace, as though trying to drown his mind with their squawking.

  At last, he reached the Seventh Gate—The Path to Transcendence. Not unmolested, but unmoved. He stood before it and spoke out in a voice as clear and ringing as thunder.

  “I have come now, to the final and ultimate Gate. The whirligig of time brings all things to completion. All illusions are banished. I have come! Open!”

  A terrifying silence fell. All at once, the jabbering of the inner court fell mute. When he turned, he saw them all arrayed, all the eunuchs and freaks and dancers and theronts and madmen and magicians, staring at him, all their artifice shriven. There were dark smiles on their lips, smiles of triumph and mockery in equal measure. Then, all at once, sardonic applause rang from their hands, and with a grinding shriek the Seventh Gate opened. The Qith’dreyne, who had accompanied him the whole miserable way, now bowed and retreated from the open doorway, which belched forth a frigid air more harrowing than the cold of Anpa’s ghastly peak. Wind struck Quen Yu and he was nearly blasted back, but he grit his teeth, dug in his heels, and held firm until the great outpouring had subsided. Taking a last deep breath, he turned away from the throngs of cavorting serfs, and stepped forward into a blackness deeper than night.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  ***

  He had almost forgotten the beauty of the throne room, if room indeed it was. Sometimes, he doubted such a thing could exist, such were its dimensions. The ceiling was invisible, so dark it might as well have been a night sky. Only the threads of ta’mahar running through it winked, like stars streaking across the canvas of sky. He walked forward a few paces and nearly fell off a ledge. He gasped and threw himself backward. The lake.

  The centre of the throne room was dominated by the presence of a vast and utterly still lake. Jade blossoms grew on its mirror-flat surface, floating like miniature citadels of viridian quartz. On the far side of the lake, he saw two other shapes, one larger and one smaller. He headed towards them, careful now to skirt the edge of the vast body of water.

  His heart began to beat heavy in his chest. He had never truly doubted he would reach here. He knew his abilities, and he knew well the machinery of the Palace. But this moment here was what he could not prepare himself for, a confrontation with both his mother and with the object of his deepest, darkest desire.

  The Jade Throne.

  The throne rose on the other side of the lake, overlooking it from a small dais. While the dais was black, the throne itself was carved from a single slab of jade of gargantuan size. The story went that Lileth had gifted the throne to the very first emperor of Qi’shath, having fallen in love with him. Their children were the first Sumyrians, or so the story went. Of course, other nations told stories of how their forbearers had been the ones to sire the great half-divine race of Sumyr, but only Qi’shath claimed that their empire had remained continuous since that time.

  His mother did not sit upon the throne. She knelt by the side of the lake, attending to a blossom. She was clad in a simple robe of green, yet that belied everything. As she rose, she lifted her eyes to meet his. He felt his throat tighten, his limbs go weak. He bowed, as deeply as he had ever bowed. When he raised his eyes, she was stood before him, smiling.

  In the blackness, she shone with the aura of a god. The same dreadful light of limitless potential lived in her eyes. Infinite cruelty and infinite blessings balanced on the knife-edge of her razor-sharp nails, which bit gently into his flesh as she touched his cheek—as tender a gesture as she had ever made. And one he knew was meant to frighten him.

  She was worse than any god, for the Kwei-Shin were said to follow rules. But the Jade Empress obeyed no law but that of her own whim. To displease her was to incur Heaven’s wrath. To fail her was to be cast into the abyss: erased from grace, from history, even from memory. The families of those she castigated in this manner were forbidden from mourning, or even acknowledging the person who had once been.

  There were few gravestones in Qi’shath.

  “Here you are at last, returned to me,” she whispered. She crooned like an ancient, but wore the face of a seventeen-year-old girl. Quen Yu was only twenty-seven, but time and life had been hard on him, had moulded his features into a prematurely hard cast. He looked more like her father than her son. He wondered, sometimes, whether the magic that preserved her looks had also frozen her in time emotionally, hence her wild moods and obscene passions.

  “It is… good to be back, Dearest Mother,” he managed. “I missed this place.”

  She sneered at him. Taking her hand away, she turned her back upon him and returned to the blossom. He thought for a moment about how it would feel to conjure a blade of magic and drive it through her spinal column, but he knew eyes watched him. They were not alone here. Even if he had wanted to drive a knife into her back, assassins would be on him before the deed was seen through.

  “I thank you, dear son, for notifying me of the treachery of your sister,” the Empress said, mildly. She spoke about the event as though it’d happened earlier that week, not three years ago.

  Quen Yu bowed.

  His sister’s betrayal had shocked him to his core. He had never loved Qala; she had been an unkind older sister, always reminding him of his faults, never believing he had any virtues worth mentioning. But she had always been loyal to their mother, and loyal to Qi’shath. Or so he thought. When he had intercepted the missive by chance, and notified the Palace—and then the name that’d spilled forth from his lips under interrogation had been Qala’s—he had been stricken like one who had lost a limb. Then rage had filled him. Rage for vengeance. And also hope—that he might finally obtain the throne he so desired.

  When Qala Jin had been exiled from Qi’shath, he had expected to receive a summons immediately to the Palace. But his mother, ever stingy with her affections, had made him wait—and wait. Perhaps in compensation, or perhaps as another test, she had notified him via messenger than he was to inherit greater dominions and prefectures. He had clearly passed that test, or else the chaos of the outside world had forced her hand, for now he was here.

  “There is still the question of my brother, Dearest Mother.”

  “Jan Jin has fled to the mountains,” she replied curtly. “I have not yet decided what to do with him.”

  “Let me—”

  “Enough on this matter, we will speak of it anon.”

  He bristled to be so dismissed, yet he swallowed his tongue. This was not his brother, after all, whom he could best in a game of discourse. The Empress could not be bested, not within her own Palace, not in the very epicentre of her power and mystery.

  She turned to face him, smiling again with a smile that did not reach her eyes. Despite the perfection of youth, he noticed that some of her veins were very prominent indeed, as though bursting at the seams with blood. Or perhaps rage, he thought, concealing a smile.

  “What would you like to discuss?” he offered.

  “Rumours of the outside world, Quen Yu. Stories that I can hardly believe.”

  “Such as?”

  “That two of the Kwei-Shin are dead. Tell me, is this true?”

  He had not been beyond Qi’shath’s borders in all his life, but he had spent the last five operating out of Xi’ten, a port-town. He had learned that as fanciful as the stories of sailors were, often they contained a degree of truth.

  “It would seem so, Mother. It appears that somewhere in Aurelia, Beltanus was killed and buried. The body was seen to be of Kwei-Shin proportions. The tale of Lileth is more hazy, coming from Memory. Some explorer seems to have started a story, whereby he witnessed a…” Quen Yu coughed. “...confrontation between Lileth and some kind of other. Perhaps also a god. But then Lileth was… destroyed, in such a way that her body cannot be recovered.” The story was so wild, so outlandish, that he was forced to conclude it was unlikely anyone had ever made it up. “May I ask, Dearest Mother, what does this mean?”

  She sighed, biting her lip. It was like an axe through his brain to see the young girl before him, biting her lip with concern, but to know of the ancient power behind it, the thing wearing her face.

  But I, too, have a secret, Mother, he thought.

  As soon as the thought came it was gone—and it troubled him, for he did not know what it meant.

  “It means the world is changing,” she said, and the authority in her voice made the colossal chamber ring. “It means that the Way is changing. The gods will likely choose candidates to replace those they have lost. They will announce themselves in time. Temples will have to be rebuilt. Festivals re-imagined. Magic formulas thousands of years in the teaching will have to be re-formulated. It will be a strange time. But Qi’shath will endure. Qi’shath always endures.”

  To Quen Yu’s mind, she spoke only of the surface. What were a few words, a few statues? He wanted to know what the world would look like, whether nations would accept their new gods or reject them, and who would be left after the inevitably bitter feud. Another example of her lack of vision—but hold such thoughts, they travel here!

  He smiled vacantly, bowed. The Empress had long ago lost the art of good conversation. She spoke to her subjects, and they were ultimately either receptacles for her monologues, or there to confirm what she already knew. He had grown tired of such games, and that is one of many reasons he had been exiled from the court. Shia’sha had been merely the final, breaking timber of the collapsing house. But lo, my house is remade.

  “Your brother, then,” she said, sounding weary, but he knew this was the true reason she had summoned him. “In his disgrace, he has fled to the mountains of Wuzin. I want him brought back here to receive public condemnation. If he will not come, then by all means kill him.”

  This surprised even Quen Yu. He wondered, then, at why the Empress was so enraged with her youngest son. He had only, at the end of the day, stolen tax funds and accepted bribes—hardly great sins in the lands of sorcery and falsehood. But then he considered that perhaps their pettiness was precisely why they disgusted her so much. Had he stoked a rebellion, or indulged in titanic appetites, or sinned against Heaven, it might have been admirable, if hubristic. But Jan Jin simply did not have the stomach for greatness, and that was a greater sin in his mother’s eyes than any shocking crime.

  Quen Yu smiled, bowed again.

  “I will take my men into the mountains and return either with Jan Jin in chains, or with his head. You have my word.”

  She smiled, but she was already turning her eyes away from him—even as she had done when he was a child—back to the black lake, back to the stillness, back to the jade blossoms floating over the sightlessly deep waters. He was dismissed. He turned and withdrew from the throne room, towards the Seventh Gate. At the threshold, he turned back once to see her—a lone figure in the immense blackness, tending her flowers as though she were some mere gardener. He could have almost pitied her then, almost turned away from his path. He saw not the figurehead, but the woman, bowed by time, by endless intrigue, and by the betrayal of her children.

  She was Empress to millions.

  And utterly alone.

  Are you sure this is the Fate you want? a voice said within. He turned away as the Gates began to shut behind him, concealing the dark smile that threatened to form across his mouth.

  But I shall never be alone, shall I?