Elara.
My hand went to my hip.
There was no sword.
My fingers closed around empty air, and I half rose from the chair before I understood what I was doing. Across the table, the woman watched me with her porcelain mask hanging from one hand.
The same dark hair. The same sharp face.
But a scar crossed her face.
It began above the left eyebrow, cut through its outer edge, and ran diagonally across her cheek to the corner of her jaw. Pale tissue pulled against her mouth. When she clenched her teeth, the scar tightened.
The Elara I knew had no scar.
"Elara?"
The name came out like a question.
"It has been a long time since anyone called me that."
I remained half out of my chair.
"You're Elara."
"I was."
"What the fuck does that mean?"
She set the mask on the table. The painted mouth faced upward.
"I was an Elara."
The mist moved around the legs of my chair. Across the table, the featureless mask continued snoring into the stone.
"One of the bitches who helped humanity finish itself off," Pride said. "She sacrificed almost everything just to reach ten Circles. Only to figure out she couldn't save anyone by herself."
Lust turned toward him.
"As though you helped. Everyone here has fucked in one way or another, the only thing we have is magic and even that couldn't save us or humanity."
The skull inclined.
"I have never claimed otherwise."
I looked between them. The scarred princess. The skull with coins in its eyes. The four silent figures who hadn't spoken since I arrived.
"What is happening?"
Lust pulled her chair closer and sat.
"I am Elara," she said. "But I am not your Elara."
"There aren't two Elaras."
"There are considerably more than two."
I stared at her.
Nothing in her expression suggested a joke. There was exhaustion around her eyes.
"The woman in your capital is not me," she said. "I don't speak through her. I don't borrow her face. She has made her choices without hearing my voice."
"Choices like yours?"
Her fingers tightened.
"Almost the same."
"How?"
Pride leaned back in his chair.
"Your world isn't the first those creatures have entered, Kaspar. Nor is it the first dimension."
I looked at him.
The gold coins didn't blink.
Lust looked down at her mask.
"The story changes from place to place. Sometimes they arrive starving. Sometimes they bring gifts. Sometimes a war is following them." She lifted her eyes to mine. "Yet in all instances, they will always conquer."
I remembered the children's book in Grenzheim. Refugees becoming occupiers across a few paragraphs.
"Other Earths?"
"Other dimensions. Other human worlds," Lust said. "Many close enough to yours that you would recognize their cities, their governments, sometimes their names and faces."
She touched the scar beside her mouth.
I lowered myself into the chair.
"So they finish one world and move to the next."
"Not necessarily finish," Pride said. "That would require patience they could spend more profitably elsewhere. They take what interests them. They establish their holdings. When expansion becomes inconvenient, they find another population willing to open a door."
"Humanity possesses a remarkable talent for making its own extinction convenient. One government believes it can use the newcomers against another. One merchant believes he can secure the first contract. One scholar believes understanding excuses whatever was done to acquire the knowledge."
His skull turned toward Lust.
"One princess believes she can hold the leash if she's powerful enough."
Pride let the silence sit before continuing.
"The elves don't require every human to cooperate. They need enough of you to disagree about stopping them. Then the other parasites will infest and destroy any defenses you have."
"How many?" I asked.
Pride said nothing.
Lust rubbed her thumb along the edge of the porcelain.
"How many human worlds?" she asked him. "A hundred? Two?"
"That we know. We don't know when they started conquering, nor how many civilizations they have already taken," he replied.
The stars above us remained perfectly still.
I looked up at them.
There were too many.
"And you're hiding here."
Lust followed my gaze.
"Among other things."
"While it keeps happening."
Her jaw tightened along the scar.
"We are trying to find a way to make it stop."
I gave a short laugh.
"By sending me into it."
Pride laid both hands on the table.
"We have tested armies. Institutions. Exceptional individuals placed at what appeared to be exceptional moments."
"Tested."
"Would you prefer a kinder word?"
"No."
I looked toward the silent figures.
Lust spoke before I could ask.
"We look for someone who can keep humanity from falling. Someone who can survive long enough to change more than a single battle."
"You offer them curses."
"We offer them power, but every power has drawbacks."
My mouth had gone dry.
"You said 'someone.'"
She held my gaze.
"I wasn't the first."
Pride laughed.
I turned toward him.
He shook his head, almost gently.
"Not even close."
The sleeping figure breathed against the stone.
"What happened to them?"
"Which ones?" Pride asked.
I leaned forward.
"Don't."
His amusement thinned.
"Mages. Soldiers. Commanders. Generals. Scientists. We have tried brilliant minds with frail bodies and violent men who understood almost nothing beyond the weapon in their hands."
"Did any of them win?"
"None."
Lust looked at the empty space between my hands.
"Some accomplished more than we expected. Some died before they could accomplish anything. Others grew powerful enough that they no longer cared what happened to the people they had been sent to save."
"And the rest?"
"They broke," Pride said. "Sooner or later."
"Then why me?"
"You are a surprise," Pride said.
I looked at him.
He continued before I could.
"Hundreds of deaths. Pain carried across the boundary each time. Memories that should not fit inside one life. Your mind has bent under it."
"And you think that means I'm doing well?"
"Good enough."
Lust shifted beside me.
"There is another limit."
I kept looking at Pride.
"There always is."
"A mind can learn to endure experiences it shouldn't have survived. A soul can still fail under what we put into it."
I glanced down at my intact hand.
"The curses."
"Our powers were not made for a human soul," she said. "One can damage it. Several can tear it apart."
"You gave me three."
"And you held them."
Pride tapped one finger against the stone.
"Before today, three powers with very different appetites occupied you without splitting what you were. That isn't common."
"And today you added a fourth. What would have happened if it hadn't worked?"
She took too long to answer.
"You weren't certain."
"No."
"Why not choose people from this world?" I asked. "You have mages who can break mountains. The Sultan. My father. People who already understand the war."
"Souls shaped by mana rarely accept us," Lust said. "Their structures have settled around something else. What we introduce meets resistance, or finds paths that cannot bear it."
"So choose someone from before."
"We do."
"Further before."
"Those souls fail for the opposite reason. Too little compatibility. Too much change, too quickly."
Pride spread his hands.
"The distant past gives us souls that crumble. The mana age gives us souls that resist. Between them lies a very narrow interval."
"People who died shortly before the first opening," Lust said. "Before mana reached them, but close enough to the change that the transition remains possible."
I looked from her to the skull.
Something didn't fit.
"I died years before that."
Neither moved.
"I was a firefighter. There was no magic. No portals. No elves appearing on the news."
"I know."
"The histories put the discovery before their arrival. Experiments. Research. That didn't all happen in an afternoon." I rubbed my forehead. "Ten years. Twenty. Perhaps longer. I don't know how much time passed after I died, but it wasn't—"
"Moments," Lust said.
My hand stopped.
"What?"
"The first opening came moments after you died."
I couldn't make sense of the sentence.
"The elves came through the first portal humanity discovered," Pride said.
I looked at him.
"Who came before them?"
"No one."
"Which civilization?"
"No civilization."
He leaned forward.
"The first opening was ours."
My hands went cold.
Nobody at the table interrupted him.
"We put mana into your world."
The sleeping figure exhaled against the stone.
"You did what?"
"We opened a passage and began feeding mana through it."
I stared at Pride.
"Why?"
"So humanity had a chance against the parasites."
Lust's voice was low.
I turned on her.
"The mutations. The things in the forests. Children born with—"
"Yes. We know."
"Do you?"
Her face hardened.
"Yes. Do you? Mutants are stronger than a common human."
I pushed away from the table.
The chair scraped soundlessly through the mist.
"Were they following you? Did you open the way for them?"
Pride's fingers went still.
"Their expansion did not begin with our intervention."
"That isn't what I asked."
"No," he said. "Our opening was not an invitation to them. They had already sent probes long before we opened the first portal. Why do you think our culture knows about elves or orcs or any other shit the portals spill?"
Lust leaned toward me.
"When they take the mineral veins, when the power grids fail, when the machines cannot be repaired, humanity needs something left to fight with. Something its enemies cannot remove merely by occupying a mine or destroying a factory."
"Mana."
"Mana in the air. In water. In living bodies. Enough that what survives the first collapse can learn to use it."
"You gave us a chance to keep losing for longer."
Pride tilted his skull.
"A small chance."
Lust looked at him sharply.
He didn't soften it.
"Longer means children who would not otherwise have been born. Cities that would not otherwise have survived. Time in which an answer might be found."
I pressed my palms over my eyes.
My right palm fit against my face.
"It's too much. The worlds. The souls. The portals. I can't— What do you want from me?"
Pride's head turned slightly toward Lust.
"There is something you need to know before you return."
"Another countdown."
"A limit."
"You do enjoy those."
"We have learned what happens when they are ignored."
I waited.
"The elves have holdings across hundreds of planets. They have armies you have not seen," she continued. "Armies that make your southern front look like child's play."
I lifted my head.
"But they cannot move those armies freely," Lust said.
Pride rested his elbows on the table.
"Distance remains a problem even more when the distance is between realities."
"They came through once. Why not keep sending people?"
"Because the crossing must accumulate enough power to carry them," Lust said. "Maintaining the connection doesn't open it for transit."
"How long?"
"Close to a decade between transit windows."
The camps I had just attacked had been thinly held. Their experienced troops might have been fighting elsewhere on the same planet.
"How much time?"
"Roughly seven years until the crossing serving your world is ready again," Lust answered.
My throat tightened.
"What happens when it opens?"
"That depends on what their command believes your world requires," Lust said.
"Say it plainly."
"If humanity remains a declining nuisance, they may send what they have sent before. Administrators. Replacements. Whatever serves their other wars."
"And if I succeed?"
"Then you give them a reason to send something larger."
"You're telling me progress makes the next invasion worse."
"I am telling you that progress without a plan for the crossing gets crushed," Lust said.
I leaned forward.
"Then give me the plan."
"We cannot give you everything you want from this table."
"You tell me there are hundreds of worlds. Hundreds of failures. Then you tell me I need to solve the same problem with less information than you have."
"The histories of those failures are not a reliable map of your future. You have already departed from most of them."
"Then give me what is reliable."
Lust held my gaze.
"The capital," she said.
I waited.
"You have to reach the elven capital. You need to find their crossing and close it before the next transit window."
I thought of the distance south. Elven cities. Their armies.
"You want me to invade."
"You need to prevent reinforcement."
"Close it how?"
"You have already heard humans discuss severing dimensional connections," Pride continued.
"The banishment matrix."
"A larger answer than the immediate problem requires," Lust said. "But you understand that a connection can be broken."
"And if I don't reach it?"
"When the crossing opens, they can send armies whose size alone will undo what you have built. Your new weapons will not remain a surprise forever. Your strongest soldiers will not be able to stand what comes next."
"Seven years," I said. "That's impossible."
I shook my head.
"The cannons." I kept my hands on the table. "Just developing them will take two years. Crystals we don't have. Metals that fail. A proving ground we haven't built. Two years if nothing goes wrong. You can't expect me to fight elves with pistols and unfinished guns. They adapted to the rail-pistol in minutes."
"You won't have time for that," Lust said.
"Then what?"
"You need to rediscover what they left." She held my gaze. "The old world did not vanish empty-handed. What they built is still buried."
"Dungeons."