The Princess had just drawn a breath to continue when someone knocked.

  Two knocks, clean, unhesitating, and the door opened before anyone answered it.

  The woman who entered was perhaps the Princess’s age, dressed in the manor's deep blue with the kind of posture that takes years to stop noticing. She looked at the room, assessed it in about a second, and directed her attention to the Princess.

  "Your Highness." Her tone was perfectly correct. "His Majesty has decided to hold a welcoming reception at the palace tonight for Sir Aurelius and the occasion of the summoning. The preparations are already underway. You may be late if you don't leave within half an hour"

  The Princess looked at me. She accepted that she was leaving. Probably the right call.

  "This is Aldrea," she said. "Head of my household staff."

  "Your Highness is very kind," Aldrea said.

  "The reception tonight, I'd like to extend the invitation to Mr. Crispin as well. As someone touched by the summoning, you would be received as a formal guest."

  I looked at her.

  She was a princess of the royal house, in a kingdom where the King could presumably have people killed for personal reasons and file it as administrative work. She had accidentally stranded me in another world and was now offering to bring me to a palace full of people with the same casual authority over my continued existence. She meant it as a kindness. It was also, from a different angle, an invitation to walk voluntarily a cave full of hungry tigers while concussed and without a plan.

  "I appreciate the invitation," I said. "I don't think I'm in a condition to be presented anywhere tonight. Not in a way that would do credit to your household."

  She accepted this without pressure. "Of course. Then you'll stay here. The manor is yours for the evening." She paused, and when she continued it had a different quality, something she'd prepared regardless of whether I came or stayed. "Mr. Crispin. The protection of my house extends to you formally, from this moment. Whatever you need – money, shelter, documents, legal standing in this city, everything will be arranged. You are not a guest here at my sufferance. You are here because we owe you that, and I intend to honor it."

  She looked at Aldrea.

  "Please explain what needs explaining, Aldrea. And…" a brief pause "take him outside. He's been in this room since he arrived."

  "Of course, Your Highness."

  The Princess looked at me once more. "I am sorry about today. I know that doesn't repair anything."

  Mage Elowen, who had said nothing through any of this, gave me a small precise nod before she followed the Princess out. The corridor outside went quiet.

  ─────────────────────────────────────────────

  Aldrea watched the door close, then she turned to me.

  "Are you hungry?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "Good." She moved the chair from the writing desk to beside the bed and sat down. She hadn't asked. "I'll have something brought up. While we wait, ask whatever you need. I'll answer what I can and tell you plainly when I can't."

  "Thank you" I said.

  ─────────────────────────────────────────────

  Before she started, I checked the bag.

  Floor beside the bed, apparently undisturbed. I went through it methodically.

  Laptop, charger, note book, gun, and the phone… still on, thirty-eight percent. Wallet, real ID inside. The printed project report I'd been carrying to campus that morning. I folded it back. First day was too early to start throwing things away.

  The gun is in the inner pocket, still loaded, 8 bullets in the magazine, no spare. I'd built it myself a few years back. There had been a period in my life where certain situations made weapons practical, and somewhere along the way the habit outlasted the situations.

  I closed the bag and left it.

  The phone I held for a moment. Today's date on the screen. Still technically today, for another few hours, in a timezone that no longer applied to me. There were flowers in the refrigerator at home, bought yesterday so they'd still be good.

  Aldrea had watched all of this without comment.

  ─────────────────────────────────────────────

  The food arrived while she was explaining the money. Simple, bread, something braised, a small bowl of something I couldn't identify by appearance. Look well made.

  We start by talking about the currency.

  The kingdom uses the common currency of the continent. A loaf of bread in the lower city costs two copper coins, or two Bits. A day of unskilled labor pays somewhere between fifteen and twenty. Ten Bits make one Grey - the silver coin. One hundred Greys make one Glint, the gold coin. If gather one hundred Glint, we have one Shade, a rare coin fashioned from something called Rift-Glass.

  Aldrea seemed to understand without being told that I needed the real numbers.

  I ate while she talked.

  "Is it to your liking, Mr. Crispin?" she said, at a pause.

  "Yes, thank you."

  We continued.

  "The Pillars," I said. "She mentioned them in connection with the ritual. What are they… not the ceremonial version."

  "There are seven Pillars," she said. "Life, Death, Creation, Destruction, Light, Darkness, and Time" She considered how to continue. " Ordinary people like us cannot fully understand them, but in general, I can say that each of the seven holds something the world needs to keep being what it is. Life tends everything that breathes and grows and continues. Death receives what ends, without exception. Time holds the flow of before and after so that one moment actually follows another. Creation is the force that makes new things possible at all. Light and Darkness together hold the shape of the world's visible existence. Destruction ensures that what has finished its purpose actually clears the way for what comes next." She paused. "That's the short version."

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  "So they are Deities people worship?"

  "Yes, and they walk among people. They have places where their presence is strongest, like shrines, territories, certain cities, but they move. They've been seen in markets, in fields, some of them is very famous. The Pillar of Life once spent three days in the eastern provinces helping a farmer repair a collapsed barn. The man didn't recognize them up until they leave."

  "Did she help well?"

  "The barn is still standing. That was sixty years ago."

  I thought about that. Beings holding the world's essential mechanisms in place, and one of them had spent three days on a barn. A barn was not an essential mechanism. I set the discrepancy aside.

  "The Pillar of Death" I said. "Her domain borders the living world?"

  "It does. Although, as far as I know, not many people worship them in this era, alongside Pillar of Destruction and Darkness."

  That was understandable.

  I thought about the Pillar of Death briefly, then moved on.

  We talked about the city, its districts, its character, where a person without established history fit most naturally. The lower city. Busy, self-sufficient, not particularly interested in anyone's origins as long as they contributed and caused no problems.

  "One more thing. Every person the summoning touches receives an ability unique to them, aside from the language ability. Sir Aurelius has already been assessed." She waited. "What is yours?"

  A summoning drops you into another world and gives you a special ability. My sister would have recognized this immediately. She'd catalogued enough of these stories to write the index.

  "I don't know"

  "Then, tomorrow I'll arrange for someone to help you assess it properly. For tonight…" she stood, " You may want to see the city. You've been in this room since you arrived and that's long enough."

  She wasn't wrong.

  I take my bag.

  ─────────────────────────────────────────────

  The path from the manor opened onto a wide avenue already transformed. Lanterns strung between buildings, stalls laid out, people moving through it all with the ease of a city that had done this before and knew how.

  Aldrea walked beside me and pointed things out as we went. Guild markers carved into building corners. District lines invisible to the eye but real in how the streets changed character every few blocks — the texture of the cobblestones, the spacing of the lampposts, the way the noise shifted. Where things were genuinely good and where they only looked it. She walked like someone who wanted me to actually understand the place, not just be introduced to it.

  "How old are you?" she asked, at a break in the conversation.

  "Twenty-six."

  She filed this in whatever she was building. "Her Highness and I are both thirty-two," she said. "In a country where sixteen is the age of marriage. Sixteen years of being, as she puts it, very busy. Not a single suitor who survived a third meeting."

  "You have a family, then?"

  "I am also very busy"

  Leaving it at that, I continued walking. The streets widened as we moved further into the city's center, and the festival widened with them. More stalls, more light, more people moving.

  "The people seem very excited because the Representative was summoned."

  "They are relieved. After all, a Lunar Eclipse is very dangerous if left unattended."

  "How dangerous?"

  "When a lunar eclipse occurs, it releases thousands of unnatural monsters, Dark Dragons, across the world. They don't eat, they don't rest, they just spread. Their presence causes all sorts of strange disasters, lightning strikes when there are no clouds, fire burns on water, the sky shakes, causing everything to collapse, and more. Leave them for one week and a country become a dragon’s dens, for they multiply by corrupting every living being near them. So yes, quite dangerous, I would say."

  "Can't the Pillars deal with them directly?"

  "Their authority somehow doesn't work against the Dark Dragons, so they cannot exterminate those monsters effectively."

  "So if the kingdom fails to summon the Representative for the ritual, the world is done for?"

  "The summoning circle never fails, though there has been a tragedy before. One hundred and twenty years ago, during the last summoning, a war killed the Representative before the ritual could begin. Two-thirds of the world's population was wiped out before humanity and the Pillars managed to exterminate the Dark Dragons. Afterwards, the remaining nations gathered on the largest continent, which became the unified continent of Auren. The remaining seven kingdoms have not fought a single war ever since."

  At least I don't have to worry about war in the feudal world.

  “The ritual is performed to prevent the Dark Dragons from appearing during a lunar eclipse, right? How is that Aurelius guy handling it?"

  "He seemed to understand what was being asked of him. He took the briefing seriously. By the way, his power can create swords from light, and can be controlled according to his will. While it doesn't have a huge impact on the ritual, it's a very useful ability. He even expressed his wish to hunt some famous beasts before performing the ritual."

  "Good for him."

  "Indeed." She glanced sideways. "The summoning selects for someone appropriate. Every time in the record, it's chosen well."

  "And then occasionally grabs whoever was standing nearby."

  She said nothing back.

  Along the way, we somehow forgot about formality.

  I can't help but notice that this is quite a laid-back person

  "You're remarkably relaxed compared to when you were in the mansion." I remarked

  “It's basically a workplace, I feel like that's the way it should be, even though the Princess says I can relax with her. There’s a difference between being told you’re safe and actually being off the clock. Beside, you don’t mind, right, Mr. Crispin? Through Sir Aurelius, I know you and him are not built for this kind of polish.”

  “You can call me Vane, then.”

  “Only when there are no people nearby.”

  “You are weird.”

  We continued walking and joking around for a while.

  At one point, I stopped.

  Not a decision. Just stopped.

  At a square where several streets came together, six musicians had set up. Strings, percussion, and something I had no name for - an instrument that made sound like sustained breath given a direction to travel. The crowd around them had gone quiet in the specific way that meant the music was worth it.

  There was a structure to it, a logic in how the parts related. Call from the strings, answer from the breath instrument, the percussion underneath marking something larger than rhythm. I stood at the edge of the crowd and listened with a part of myself that hadn't listened to anything in a long time.

  The city got denser as the evening went on. More people, more light, more sound coming from every direction at once. Stalls selling food I couldn't identify and things I could. Children with lanterns. A group of older men arguing pleasantly about something outside a tavern. Somewhere a different set of musicians playing a different piece, audible only in pieces through the crowd.

  I saw two men performing something near a stall. One seemingly teaching the other, raised his hand and recited a series of chants in a language that I - with the language ability given to me when summoned, could not understand, and then his hand glowed, then the other man tried recited a few times, and also succeeded. So it was magic.

  Then a procession crossed through the intersecting street. Ceremonial, banners, a column of people moving in formal order, and the crowd shifted toward it in a body, reorganized around it, poured into the gaps.

  When it settled, Aldrea was no longer beside me.

  I looked back. The crowd had thickened and rearranged itself and she was somewhere in it, but not anywhere I could immediately see.

  I considered going back to find her.

  But I kept walking.

  The festival thinned at the edges of the lower city. The lanterns became fewer, the streets narrowed, and the noise became something people carried with. I walked without a destination because I didn't need one.

  I found a small square at the end of a quieter street, a fountain at the center, a bench, a tree that had been allowed to grow large enough that someone had made a decision about it a long time ago and the tree had honored that decision. I sat on the edge of the fountain.

  Today's date. Still technically today, for a few more hours, in a timezone that no longer applied to me. The flowers in the refrigerator will wilt eventually. An apartment I wouldn't see for almost three years.

  I sat with it for a moment.

  Then I set it down. The thinking didn't change the shape of the thing. It just kept me in the room with it longer than I needed to be.

  "I do not recognize you."

  Suddenly, someone said.

  I looked up.

  An old man sat on the bench across the fountain. I was not certain when he had arrived. And it was strange because I was not certain when he had arrived.

  “Good evening.” He said.