“You can spend a whole life searching for something you already have.”

– Kati Riverbond, the Last Empress of the Empire of the Three Peaks

They found me at home.

I mean, where else was I going to run to? The top of the tallest peak in the world had seemed tempting until I remembered that those mountains had been forged by other gods and magics that were foreign even to the Transcendent Realms of the Empire. I could try to hide there but the Stoneling peoples would probably take offense at that, and the last thing I needed was more enemies.

Well, no, the ‘Last Thing’ I needed was an Imperial Crown on my head. I’d broken the Empire. Putting me in charge of it was literally the worst possible idea in the world since I was beyond certain that I would break it again. 

Mysella, the former and somewhat less than Eternal Empress, had every right to refuse to take up her role as the Empire’s guiding light. She’d spent a dozen or so generations longer than anyone had any right to expect shouldering a load that even a Transcendent being like the Clockwork Cosmos couldn’t manage on their own. The truth was though that she was the only one even vaguely qualified for the job.

Three hundred years of experience, even if she wasn’t directly ruling during that time was far more than the paltry decade of sheltered life lessons that had available to draw on. That’s not me being humble either. I lie to myself a lot but for something like this, cold and brutal honesty was the only chance I had to save myself.

Save myself from what?

Mysella had frozen herself into eternal, unchanging ice, and that had been her best solution for the problems the Empire threw at her. I’d seen the afterlife and from what I could gather, it was stranger and father beyond mortal understanding than words could convey. If there was a Hell though, it would have to involve being trapped in the life Mysella had been subjected to.

So I’d run.

What other choice did I have?

“There were less dramatic ways to say ‘no’ you know,” Grammy said.

Of course she was the one who found me. It was her home too after all.

I wondered how she’d gotten back so quickly. We didn’t live anywhere near Middlerun where the Academy was and I hadn’t been flying slowly while I was dragon-shaped.

“Are any of us allowed to complain about someone else’s theatrics?” Doxle asked.

They were both outside my room, and from the scent which were leaking in, so were the rest of my housemates. Doxle’s proper husband (I guessed?) was with them, as was Enika, oddly enough. Mysella, however, was absent.

I couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or a disastrous one.

“I’m not going back,” I said without opening the door.

“It is the Empress’s prerogative where she rules over her Empire from,” Doxle said. “A bedroom isn’t even the oddest choice that’s been made.”

“I am NOT the Empress!” I probably shouldn’t have screamed. I mean, we’d won, and I had the people outside my room to thank for that.

And screaming seemed just so childish, which I hated being in front of Idrina.

Oddly, I heard an answering scream. It was short, and more a matter of surprise and protest but it still made me smile.

Someone had stabbed Doxle.

Enika.

It had to be her. 

Since no one else was complaining, and Doxle seemed to accept that as his just deserts, it had to be someone he’d accepted the he had it coming from.

“Yes, well, there is the point you are in fact correct,” Doxle said. “You are no longer the Empress. Chief Advisor Mysella formally accepted your abdication a moment before the new Council arrived.”

“New Council?” I asked, opening the door to find the assembled hoard I’d expected waiting for me.

Doxle had teleported them. It took me a second but it wasn’t that hard to figure out when I noticed the scent of his magic on each of them.

“Ula and Xandir gathered them together,” Ilyan said. “They’re the leaders of the different groups they were working with.”

“The ones were armed with the new Clockwork gear,” Yarrin said.

“I thought there was something like two hundred groups we were working with?” I asked, unclear on how anyone had managed to herd two hundred Imperial Citizens anywhere without putting a sword to the back of each and every one of their throats.

“Two hundred and three,” Mellina said. “Thirty seven chose to form their own Council.”

“Yeah, because someone asked them to,” Narla said, her gaze affixing the blame or credit for that squarely onto Mellina.

“They represent what is a mostly autonomous region already,” Mellina said. “Mysella agreed that things will be much smoother if they’re given self-governance at the outset. We’ll probably wind up with four or five other breakaways, which should pare things down to a manageable amount of complexity for the ones that remain. We will need to wrest control of the fortress on Flame Sanctuary Island from the current governor though. He’s a despot of the first order, which will definitely lead us to war if he has time to assemble his own standing army.”

I blinked.

“You saw all this coming,” I said.

“Of course not,” Mellina said. “You know precognition doesn’t work like that. What I saw was the possibility of this. All the rest was the result of some very hard work, the hardest bits of which, admittedly, you performed, but this present was never a future which was bound to come to pass.”

“She’s saying we earned this,” Narla said, translating for Ilyan’s sake I guessed?

“This and more,” Doxle said.

“But they will be able to decide what that means for them,” Enika said.

“Just as we get to decide what it means for us,” Naht, Doxle’s long lost beloved, said.

“What I decide is that this house isn’t enough to entertain this many guests,” Grammy said. “There’s a nice Inne in town. Go there, freshen up, and contact anyone you need to. My granddaughter and I will be along for the feast before they bring the first course out.”

“Feast?” I asked.

“You gave everyone new magic,” Grammy said. “They’re all drunk on wonder and hope for the future so what did you think they would do but throw a party?”

“Why?”

“Because you gave them a whole new world to make for themselves,” Idrina said.

———

At Grammy’s “suggestion”, folks exited our house and made for the Inne where a feast was apparently already being setup (yet another thing we Mellina to thank for), leaving two of us alone.

“Where’s everyone else?” I asked, noting the complete absence of the household staff.

“At the feast,” Grammy said. “And all looking forward to seeing you again. I thought we’d need to wait to Winterfest at the earliest.”

“Do they know?” I asked.

“That you’re back?”

“That I’m not who they thought I was.”

“And who might that be?” Grammy asked, looking faintly amused.

“I don’t know,” I said. Even with the reassurances she’d already given me, I still felt like any moment the rug was going to be ripped out from under me.

“Do you want to be my granddaughter?” Grammy asked, like it was just that simple.

“Yes! Of course!” I said, terrified at the notion that any other answer would lose me the one bit of identity I’d clung to years.

“Then you are. Anyone who says otherwise is gonna get the back of my hand and if I’m in a good mood it won’t have a blade in it.”

How do you answer that?

I usually default to silence, but in this case I was locked into wordlessness rather than choosing it. 

And Grammy was okay with that.

She sat with me for what felt like an hour but was probably closer to a minute and a half while I pulled myself together. 

“How long did you know?” I asked, wondering if I’d ever had her fooled.

“A few years now,” she said. “I didn’t see it at first. You’re very good and I was very willing to not see what I didn’t want to.”

“I didn’t want you to have to know she was gone,” I said. In hindsight it seemed like such a clumsy, ill-thought out reason, but it was all I had.

“That helped,” Grammy said. “It kind of crept up on me gradually, and by the time I had to admit it to myself, it felt like something I’d known for a long time.”

“Were you mad at me?” I asked, sounding like the tiny child I’d been all those years ago.

“I was afraid you’d leave if I knew,” she said. “I thought this was just a kindness you were gracing me with and that if I admitted anything you’d vanish like the morning dew.”

“I wouldn’t, I couldn’t!” I said, horrified at the notion. I’d read of children who longed to run away from home, often for what seemed like very good reasons, but I’d never felt like that. Home was always with Grammy. It was always where I ran to when the world was too overwhelming.

“I know,” Grammy said. “It took me a long time to figure that out, and, well, by the time I did, it was…what we had was comfortable.”

“Could we have that again?” I asked.

“Why would we want it?” Grammy asked. “Things change. I think we need to as well. For the better. You’re my granddaughter. That will stay true for the rest of our lives, but what that means? It can grow. I don’t need to pretend your Trina. I don’t want to. I want to know you for who you are, and maybe together we can remember Trina for who she was.”

Epilogue

The feast turned out to not be limited to our little town. With new magics coursing through the Empire, teleportation magics became vastly more common, literally overnight, so while we started our tiny nearby Inne by the next morning we’d wandered through a few dozens different cities turning the entire rest of the celebration into something of a mad blur.

Doxle, Naht, and Enika were the first group I stumbled on. They were, predictably, discussion marriage.

“I never actually signed those annulment papers you know,” Doxle said. “So technically, all you need to do to annul the annulment is burn yours up.”

“And why would I do that now that the love of your life is back?” Enika asked.

“Naht always wanted a big family,” Doxle said. “Why do you think I’ve been collecting spouses for the last three hundred years?”

That Doxle was going to wind up getting stabbed again seemed to be a certainty, but I suspected it wouldn’t bother him. He was shining with delight and for the first time, I knew I could smell his real emotions radiating off him, because there was nothing but joy there.

———-

I remember speaking with Narla, Yarrin, and Ilyan for a while after that, mostly because they dragged me into the group hug which seemed to have become their natural and permanent state.

“The Great Houses are gone,” I said. “We actually did it!”

“They’re not in charge anymore – or at least they won’t be once the new Council gets things sorted out, but I don’t think they’re going to just vanish,” Ilyan said.

“The Empress, sorry, the Empress before you,” Narla said. “Transferred their Imperial Accounts to a Common Holding, so all the treasure they’ve amassed belongs to the Empire as a whole now. The Houses may not vanish but they’re not going to have much of a powerbase. They’ve got nothing to hold over people’s head anymore.”

It was not going to be that simple. Power comes in many more forms than wealth and military might. That said, wealth and military might are fairly persuasive tools when the negotiations over what the Empire’s future would look like.

Not that the worst of the Great Houses were likely to be a part of those negotiations. For a variety of reasons. Some of which weren’t even lethal.

“I know one House that won’t vanish,” Yarrin said. “Assuming you’ll still have us.”

“I…I wasn’t sure you’d want to be tied down to something like a House,” I said. “Not after all you’ve been through.”

“It’s not being tied down, it’s been tied to,” Narla said. 

“We can do great things together. We proved that,” Ilyan said. 

“So, yes, we want to stay with you, and House Riverbond,” Yarrin said. “If you’ll have have us?”

“All of us,” Narla said. “We’ve decided that we come as a package.”

I managed to extricate myself from their embrace before they got any mushier, but I was happy for them. They’d found something I’d never thought I would.

Though maybe I had more to hope for myself there too?

—-

Before I could investigate that however, I ran across Mellina.

She was embroiled in the sort of discussion Heads of State had and her audience was, indeed, the other new Heads of State who’d been selected by their various groups and concerns to represent them on the Imperial stage.

I tried to avoid disturbing her, but the moment she caught sight of me, she excused herself and dragged me to a back corner.

“Did you get to talk with your Grandmother?” she asked me, right away, without preamble.

“I did, but is that important?” I was comparing it to the sweeping changes which were washing over everyone’s lives.

“Of course it is!” she said. “I want my friend to be happy.”

“Oh! I thought it might be some ‘destiny’ kind of thing.”

“Your destiny is, and always has been, your own. I…you’re just important to me. I don’t have a lot of friends, and you’ve been a really good one.”

“You’ve been a better one than I have,” I said. “I almost destroyed the world with you on it.”

“I don’t think so,” Mellina said. “I don’t think you could have done any of what you did if you didn’t love this world with all that you are. I’m just happy I’m a part of that.”

“You are, and you always will be.”

“Good. Now go have the other conversation you need to have tonight.”

—-

I knew exactly who Mellina was referring to, but I had the hardest time finding Idrina during the celebration. 

I didn’t think she was hiding from me.

Not at first anyways.

After a few hours though, I began to wonder.

By the time the sun sank below the horizon, I’d started asking everyone I could find if they’d seen her as the idea that she’d been some figment of my imagination chilled my heart despite how utterly irrational it was.

In the end, I did find her and it was of course in the last place I expected her to be.

My bedroom.

“I’d like to talk with you if that’s okay?” she said, standing up from the desk she’d been reading at as I opened the door.

“I..yeah..I was hoping we could,” I said, looking for where we could sit down together that was somewhere other than the bed. “I didn’t know you’d come back here. I…” I didn’t want to explain what I’d been through, or the worry that had gripped me for no good reason. What I wanted was to listen to her.

“I’m sorry,”  she said. “I don’t do well with crowds. And I didn’t want to try talking to you with the others around.”

“Oh,” I said, renewed and still irrational terror squeezing the air out of my lungs.

“I’m sorry,” Idrina said.

“For?” I asked. We were talking but we weren’t communicating. I drew in the scent of Idrina and the fear drained away. She was here, she was real, and we had a chance to be…well, whatever she wanted us to be.

“For kissing you without asking,” she said. “I…we haven’t talked much yet about, anything. I…losing you, it wasn’t something I wanted to do. I still don’t. But I’m not good at this. Still, I shouldn’t have done that. It sent a message that I don’t know you wanted to send.”

“You saved the world with that kiss,” I told her. “I’m not kidding. After I, uh, exploded, what was left of me spoke with the Transcendent Realms. I did okay with the two I knew but the only reason I was able to survive when a third one showed up was because I held onto that kiss long enough for help to arrive. We came within about five seconds of all the Realms crashing down and obliterating everything.”

“Oh,” she said.

“For the record, the message you sent there was one I’ve been wanting to shout from the rooftops from the first time we kissed.”

“Me too,” she said. “But I don’t understand any of this. I’m not…”

She struggled to find the right words and I let her search for them for a few moments before stepping in close enough to take her hands in my own.

“I’m not a lot of things,” I said. “What I do know though is what I am, and that is in love with you. If you’re not, or not yet, that’s okay. I…”

She kissed me again.

She kissed me and I kissed her and the world melted around us into a haze of warmth and comfort.

“I am,” she said when we finally pulled apart. “I’m in love with you too. I didn’t think I could. I didn’t think anyone could love me. I didn’t think I was good enough yet.”

I kissed her again.

“Take me for who I am and you always will be more than good enough for me,” I said.

And then we did the most intimate thing two people can do; we sat together for the rest of the night and talked about who we were, and who wanted to be. We talked about the things that hurt us the worst, and the things we were most proud of. We talked about silly, stupid, little things, and the deep hungry passions that drove us. We gave as much of ourselves to each other than we could, and built enough of our future together that we could share even more the next day and more the day after and so on and so on, through all of our days to come.

~Finis~