Dain woke up on a soft, warm bed.

  A familiar ceiling of grey stone blocks awaited him. For a few breaths, all he did was stare at it, waiting for his vision to swim—waiting for that clenching feeling in his ribs to return—but it didn't. He wasn’t floating anymore. He wasn’t dead anymore.

  He sucked in a deeper breath, and cool air slid in cleanly. He almost let slip a tear right then and there. It couldn’t have been that long since he was dead, but it’d felt like an eternity, and now he was back in his bedroom in Brasir’s Seeker’s Guild.

  How long has it been?

  The afternoon light flooding in through the window was warm where it pooled across his skin, so he blinked slowly as he sat up straight. His hands immediately went to his chest as if his body didn’t trust his eye, but his fingers pressed where the one-eyed’s blade had found his heart. He found cloth, skin, bones, and the steady thump beneath. No hole in his chest. No creaky joints or heavy bones. Even his burnt and blistered left hand and forearm had been healed.

  His lips parted. Nothing clever came out.

  He turned his head left.

  Anisa was slumped in a chair beside his bed, chin tucked, mouth slightly open in a way that would’ve been scandalous if she’d been awake to notice. Yasmin sat beside her, straighter even in sleep with folded arms clenching her swordstaff.

  The two of them looked healthy enough but for the few bandages wrapped around Yasmin’s neck and Anisa’s forearms—which they tried to hide under their clothes—but his gaze immediately went to Anisa’s collar instead.

  No Amulet of the Stoneheart Dragon.

  … Damnit.

  Suddenly, a fluffy something smashed into his chest from the front. He hadn’t even had time to wince before his owl construct also smashed into his face, giving him a screeching performance alongside the wingcloak’s worried hugs.

  “Alright, alright,” he muttered, hands automatically going up to pat the owl and stroke the wingcloak’s feather. “I hope you two are the last sentient relics I’ll ever get.”

  The owl screeched again, then shoved its beak into his hair as if confirming he was alive. He tried to pry it off without snapping a feather. Meanwhile, the commotion did what he couldn’t—it woke the two girls with a jolt.

  Anisa jerked upright as if someone had flicked a knife past her throat. Yasmin’s eyes opened with controlled speed, already scanning. Both of them stared straight at Dain—at the wingcloak wrapped around him, at the owl flailing like a possessed beast, and then at his chest. He felt a little embarrassed being stared at so intently.

  But for a moment, nobody said anything.

  Then Anisa’s expression shifted in a way Dain recognized from negotiation tables and noble receptions: a face carefully arranging itself into something presentable, when the truth underneath was too… raw, perhaps, to show.

  Dain cleared his throat, finally peeling his wingcloak off enough to breathe properly.

  “If either of you were wondering,” he said, “there doesn’t seem to be an afterlife worth speaking of.”

  Anisa stared at him like she didn’t know whether to laugh or slap him. The look in her eyes was bright and furious and wet all at once.

  “Did you predict this?” she asked. “Did you know I would revive you?”

  Dain said nothing.

  He could lie cleanly. He could make it sound charming. He could turn it into a story that made her feel heroic without making himself feel small.

  Instead, he looked at the bare skin of her collar where her amulet used to hang, and felt something twist in his ribs that had nothing to do with wounds.

  “... I’d be lying,” he said, smiling softly, “if I told you I didn’t believe you were a good princess.”

  It was the closest he could come to thanking her without choking on it.

  Anisa returned his smile with one that was sharp at the edges—half irritation, half relief—and for a brief moment, the room felt smaller and warmer for it, as if the world had politely stepped outside to give them privacy.

  For a moment, they were all just glad they were all still alive.

  But the moment didn’t last. Dain saw the tension still coiled in Yasmin’s shoulders, and the levity drained out of him just as quickly as it had come.

  “She got away, didn’t she?” he said.

  Yasmin inclined her head once. Anisa exhaled through her nose, then leaned back and reached into the satchel at her feet, rummaging through.

  “After you died, townsguard reinforcements quickly arrived,” she said. “More than I expected, actually, and sooner than I thought. All of them poured mana into my amulet so we could revive you, but… even with so many of us there, we couldn’t apprehend her. We have tried to track her over the past week, but nothing. As far as we can tell, she has completely vanished east. It will be impossible to find her now.”

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  But then her hands emerged holding a small, cloudy orb no longer than a human head.

  A Reality Bubble relic.

  She held it up between them, her smile wider now.

  “Even still, your plan worked,” she said. “She was there, and she talked. You made her talk. As I have been told by Rena, Reality Bubbles capture the ‘objective reality’, which means—within this little orb—we have all the proof we need to claim the one-eyeds’ existence.”

  Dain took the relic from her without comment. The glass was cool against his palm and heavier than it looked. He turned it slowly, brushing a thumb over its surface, and felt the clouds inside just begging to take shape and turn into a scene.

  He didn’t smile.

  “I have also been told, however, that captured scenes within a Reality Bubble can only be released and viewed once. That means I haven’t confirmed what is actually inside the bubble, but…” Anisa glanced over at Yasmin and nodded. “Yasmin has caught wind of a peace summit that will be held on Stormearth Serenity in seven days’ time. Supposedly, High Guildmaster Cassian—the man at the top of the Seeker’s Guild—was the one who organized it. At the summit, there will be royal representatives from both Auraline and Obric in an attempt to talk things out before we tear each other apart.”

  Dain’s eye lifted slightly at that. Stormearth Serenity. That was the infamous island on neutral waters between Auraline and Obric where the peace treaty was tentatively signed twelve years ago. Even he had heard of the name before.

  “As far as we know, the Third Prince of Auraline will be attending,” she continued. “It is likely that originally, I would have been sent to represent Obric given my proximity to the island, but as far as father is concerned… well, I am still missing, so they are sending a Minemaster in my place.”

  He tightened his lips. “But you’re not letting a random Minemaster negotiate the fate of Obric, are you?”

  “Of course not. Which is why I plan on arriving quietly at the very last moment,” she said proudly, one hand on her chest. “I will avoid notice from any one-eyed lurking on the way, and at the summit, I will present the scene within the Reality Bubble to the crowns.” She leaned forward then, eyes intent. “You must come with us. You and Yasmin. We will clear your name properly, and you will stand before the crowns to testify everything you have seen. No longer will you have to keep looking over your shoulders.”

  Dain’s thumb stilled on the glass as he looked at Anisa sternly.

  “And… we will find a way to handle the explanations,” she added quickly. “We can make up a new story to explain how you survived. We can hide your relics. We can even say I supplied you with your relics and Title while we were hunting the one-eyed together. The main focus of the summit will be on the Reality Bubble, not on—”

  “I can’t go with you.”

  Anisa stopped mid-sentence. Yasmin’s eyes sharpened at once. The silence that followed was heavy, and neither of them spoke as Dain lowered the Reality Bubble back into Anisa’s waiting hands, his expression already set.

  “... Why not?” Anisa finally asked.

  “Before I died, I managed to throw a Darkmind Key into her,” he said, putting a hand on the back of his right shoulder. “The key’s a relic that lets me see someone’s darkest core memories over a period of time. I only saw half of them before I woke up, so I’ll probably see the rest over the next few days, but… her codename is ‘Stonewraith’, and before she killed me, she said she was going to Karatash to finish her mission.”

  Anisa frowned. “Okay. I understand. Even still, the peace summit—”

  “How long will it take to get to Stormearth Serenity?”

  “Six days,” Yasmin answered immediately. “But that’s only if we ride hard, and if we don’t stop any longer than necessary. We don’t want people—and the one-eyed especially—to know the Second Princess is traveling.”

  “So by the time you get there, the peace summit will probably have already started?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s been a week since I died,” he said, “which means Stonewraith already has a week’s head start on me. By the time we reach Stormearth Serenity and make the crowns sit still long enough to watch our Reality Bubble, Stonewraith will have had two weeks to complete whatever she’s trying to do. Hell, she could already be in Karatash. What’s to say she’s not already carrying out her schemes?”

  “Karatash is not Granamere, and it certainly is not Braskir,” Anisa said. “It is the capital city of Obric. My father is there. My elder sister is there. There will be Minemasters and generals and armies, so many of them that one person cannot possibly—”

  “What happened to Mountain Marshal Rashan and the other two men Stonewraith attacked?”

  The air in the room changed. Anisa’s jaw clenched so hard the tendons in her neck stood out. She didn’t answer—not immediately—but the silence was answer enough that Dain felt his stomach turn even before Yasmin spoke.

  “Rashan didn’t survive,” she said plainly. “Neither did the two men the one-eyed ambushed. The others are alive—Ilvaren, Kargun, Sahlir, Rena, and the rest of the townsguard who were with us that night—but some are heavily injured and will have to spend several more weeks in bed.”

  “And what’d you tell them about what’d happened?”

  “My lady had to reveal her identity to them to revive you, and she’d used her authority to bind them to complete silence until the summit.” Yasmin’s mouth tightened. “As far as Braskir’s concerned, the stampede was caused by a natural mana fluctuation that scared the beasts down to the northern walls. The investigation into the mana fluctuation turned sour when a stray herd of beasts attacked, causing the deaths of Rashan and the other two men. That’s the story we’re going with right now.”

  Dain stared at them for a long moment, his thumb rubbing absently at the edge of his blanket.

  Rashan. Two more townsguard. Names that wouldn’t make it into any glorious report, but only into ledgers and quiet funerals.

  Bitter heat rose behind his ribs.

  “… See?” he said at last. “This is exactly my point.” He lifted his eye, fixing it on Anisa sharply. “We haven’t won yet. Not even close. A single one-eyed baited the entire town into having to defend the northern wall, lured all of us out into her territory, overwhelmed multiple seasoned soldiers and adventurers, killed me outright, and still managed to slip away from dozens upon dozens of reinforcements. These bastards aren’t reckless zealots swinging relics around hoping for the best. Even just one of them, left unchecked, is capable of doing more damage than you or the crowns can think.”

  He glanced at the Reality Bubble in Anisa’s hands, then away, looking east through the window, past the stone walls and distance he couldn’t yet cross.

  “Here’s my plan,” he said. “You and Yasmin go west as fast as you can. You take that Reality Bubble to the summit and put it in front of every pair of eyes that matters. You tell the world what these one-eyed have done—and I’ll go east to Karatash to stop Stonewraith before another catastrophe makes it so there won’t even be a peace summit for you to go to.”