“You can spend so long believing that you will never get what you truly want that when it’s finally handed to you it can be almost impossible to believe you are worthy of it.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame, in the first prayers he spoke in over three hundred years.

I was in trouble. Worse, I was in trouble with the most powerful magic wielder in the world. The good news was that while I’d been worried before about whether the High Council would be able to kill me, I wasn’t worried about that at all with the Empress Eternal. There’s no sense worrying about something that’s absolutely certain you see.

“It was so nice of the Speakers to give us the privacy of the High Council hall,” the Empress said.

That she said it while gazing directly at the half dozen Speakers who remained in the hall sent a message which even the understandably overwhelmed Great House Speakers were able to interpret correctly. In something like two to two and a half seconds, all of the people with official positions had vacated the Council’s chambers, leaving only my housemates and a few others to watch as the Empress inflicted her punishment on me.

Why would she punish me you might ask?

I had literally bet the existence of the world on what was little more than a hunch and the power of positive thinking – and I am not especially talented at either.

Oh, and I’d done that without letting her or any other person who was in a position to stop me know. So their only warning that the world was about to fall completely to pieces had come as magic which had been immobile for centuries suddenly began to shift and drop onto the material realm.

Lastly, even though the world had survived, it was irrevocably altered and I’d put power into the hands of people who were definitely going to misuse it. Not everyone, or even most people (I hoped), but when you give something to ‘everyone’, well, everyone includes people who aren’t going to use it for things you don’t approve of.

People have called the Empress Eternal ‘heartless’ for sacrificing those who were closest to her to the spell of Eternal Ice. They were drastically wrong about that but given that she hadn’t experienced acute heart failure the moment she perceived what I’d done could be taken as evidence that her detractors claims were literally true.

“Empress, can we speak on Kati’s behalf?” Ilyan asked.

“Yeah. If there’s blame to go around, we were all working on this,” Narla said.

“No,” I said, meeting the Empress’s curious gaze. “I’m not protecting them here, but they didn’t have anything to do with what you’re really angry about here.”

“Am I angry?” the Empress asked. I couldn’t tell anything from her scent, but despite the glee in her eyes it was impossible to imagine she wasn’t furious with me.

“You would have every right to be,” I said.

“We did help her though,” Yarrin said. “So we do share a measure of whatever blame is due to her.”

“No! They didn’t know!” I said. “They still don’t know what I did. Not really.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Idrina said, stepping up beside me. My heart dropped into my feet at the gesture. It was so brave, and so loving, and so terribly terribly stupid. Idrina, of all people, did not need to get splashed with the blame for my actions. “The others weren’t privy to her plans. I was. I could have stopped her last night. I chose not to.”

“No! She didn’t know,” I lied, knowing the Empress would see right through me (she could probably do that literally as well). “Not really. Not the worst that could happen.”

“But you did?” the Empress asked and I felt like a fly which had landed on a web which the spider was continuing to spin. Whatever I answered would be another strand binding ,e ever tighter to the doom that awaited me.

“I spoke with two of the Transcendent Realms,” I said. “They were pretty clear on what they wanted, and it wasn’t exactly hard to see where that could go wrong.”

I switched back to honesty because if I was going to be hung by a damning set of words, they should at least be my own.

“And you chose to go ahead with it anyways? Why?” the Empress asked.

It was the best question she could have asked, and the hardest one to answer, mostly because there were so many reasons for doing what I’d done and being sure which had really motivated me was something I’d refused to let myself consider up until now.

“Because I hate the Empire,” I said, starting with what was absolutely the worst reason of all. “Not the people – or not all of them anyways – and not you. I hate what its become. You sacrificed yourself and endured centuries under the weight of the Worlds Beyond for something that should be so much better than what the Great Houses have made this place to be.”

Ilyan and Narla both had pained looks on their faces. Like I was making the biggest possible mess of things and that I should just shut up before the Empress got really creative with how I was going to suffer for my hubris.

“I could say I did it for my sister. To claim vengeance for what the Great Houses did to her,” I said, plowing on clumsily towards the truth rather than falling silent and accepting my fate. “She wouldn’t want that though. In fact, she’s a large part of why we’re all still here. She didn’t want to see people destroyed, she wanted to see them lifted up.”

Trina hadn’t been entirely happy with what I’d done but she hadn’t been terribly surprised either, which was how she’d happened to have an entire army of ghosts available when they were desperately needed. 

In the worst case, where I managed to get my corporal form obliterated, I at least could look forward to spending more time with her, though she’d promised to come visit once we had the immediate catastrophe dealt with even if I happened to be alive still.

“There were a lot of other reasons too,” I continued before the Empress grew tired and passed her final judgment on me. “The Transcendent Realms collapsing had to happen someday, and I knew I could offer a unique solution to the problem with my connection to two diametrically opposed realms.  And three hundred years is just too much to ask of you, or Doxle, or anyone. You all deserve a break and someone should have been working to help you a long time ago. Not to mention the fact that the Great Houses could have figured out what I did at any time and talked the realms into merging for only their benefit, giving them absolute power with no oversight whatsoever.”

“And were any of those reasons the truth of why you did what you did?” the Empress asked.

“Yes,” I said but my earnestness faded, “and no. I thought of all those things, but if I dig down deep, I think I risked the world for one reason above all others. I risked it for myself.”

Which was the worst reason to risk a world full of people, but I’d never claimed to be a good person. No saints here. I was just me.

“And what did you get out of it?” the Empress asked.

“I guess that remains to be seen,” I said. “I think what I hoped for was a home. Was somewhere that I belonged to be, rather than a world that I felt like I snuck into and whose nature was anathema to my own.”

“So you would have us all live in a world of your design then?” the Empress asked and I really hated that I couldn’t understand her at all via scent.

“No! No, that would be so much worse,” I said. “I wanted it to be a world designed by everyone and not just the few people in charge of the most powerful groups in the world.”

“Do you think that’s what you’ve gained?” the Empress asked.

“I don’t think anything is settled there. I don’t think it can be until you decide what my punishment is going to be.”

“Not just hers. What all of our punishment is going to be,” Mellina said, with a disturbingly unconcerned look on her face.

“Why, I thought that would be obvious,” the Empress said and gestured to my hand.

I was puzzled at first. Did she plan to chop them off? I’d just grow new ones if so, but maybe that hadn’t occurred to her?

Then I noticed what I was holding.

The Imperial Crown.

“Oh! Oh no! I’m sorry!” I said and tried to hand it back before it came alive and bit me or something.

The Empress, evil meanie that she is, chuckled at me.

“Are you under the misapprehension that I want that vile thing back?” she asked, all sweetness and light.

I stopped.

Not paused.

Not wondered.

I stopped.

And I wasn’t the only one.

Everyone in the room froze as the Empress’s words sank in.

Everyone except Mellina who gently guided my arm back to my side, Imperial crown still clutched in my hand.

“Don’t…don’t you need it back?” I asked, dumbfounded by where the Empress’s refusal might lead.

“I’ve worn that for the last three hundred years,” she said. “In what circle of Hell would I need to be entombed to be sentenced to bear it for even a day longer?”

“But…the Empire needs you?” I had no idea if any part of that was true.

And the Empress laughed again.

It wasn’t a little laugh.

Or a subtle one.

It shook her, from belly to brow.

There were tears in her eyes. I hoped they were tears of joy, though madness was seeming a lot more likely.

“You thought I was going to be angry with you?” she asked. “For doing what I’d most hoped to be able to do since before I even put that horrible thing on my head? If there wasn’t a woman I’d spent the last fifteen generations pining for waiting back in my former palace, I would marry you on the spot you beautiful, wonderful, delicious creature you. You have freed me, you freed her, you freed Doxle and all of our closest friends.”

She spun in a circle and motes of light showered the room.

“But you’ve done so much more than that. The Empire, my Empire is free now. My people are as unfrozen from the shackles of the centuries as surely as I am. You’ve given them the chance to forge their own world. For better or worse. It’s all on them now. I would never have had the courage to do that.”

“A lie if I ever heard one,” Doxle said, reappearing in a flash along with a group of people who looked suspiciously like the ones I’d seen frozen into ice statues in the Empress’s chamber. “You were attempting to do that exact thing before you were so rudely interrupted.”

“Perhaps, but she succeeded where I failed,” Mysella, the former Empress?, said.

“We could always adopt her,” a woman who grabbed Mysella’s hand and refused to let go said.

“Uh, uh, nope. She’s mine and you can’t have her,” Grammy said, sliding between us defensively.

“I suppose that’s not really our choice at this point,” Mysella said. “After all, one does not give orders to the Empress.”

I looked around, for who she was referring to, my denial impulses going into overdrive in a futile attempt to save me from a fate worse than death. Sadly those impulses were not up to the job.

“Oh. Oh no. No, no, no, no, no, NO!” I said.

I wasn’t sure if I still had my magic. Given what I’d been through, there was a very serious possibility that I’d burned out my ability to manipulate the power within me forever. In that instant though, I simply did not have time for that.

Faster than even Doxle could follow, I burst from the top of the Council Hall in the form of a Clockwork Dragon and made for the open sky.