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As with all good stories, this one started in a tower. 

Amongst the myriad books to be found in my lonely isolation at the end of the world was an alchemical text detailing the preparation of a certain formula, said to bifurcate the soul to achieve, counterintuitively, true freedom. 

It piqued my interest, as the author did not claim that this peace came in following one’s heart’s desire at the cost of what is responsible and proper, nor that one who experiences opposing pulls is a hypocrite. Instead it argued in eloquent longhand that assigning these warring inclinations to two separate modes of being allowed each to flourish in their own right. 

I was not fully ready to abandon my duties—in my heart there still smoldered the embers of my love for, or at least devotion to, the Empire—and so this spoke straight to the core of me. It had the feel of poetry, the symmetry and balance. Though I was no poet (not I, never I) some part of me stirred, as though waking from a long sleep.

The ingredients were fairly commonplace, so I gathered them from about the tower; some via old stores of wizardly material, some via carefully worded requests to the sprites. Guiltily, I siphoned off bits of a particular salt used for one of the daily rituals, pinches at a time, and breathed easier once it became clear the entire Empire would not crumble for lack of a few grains. 

I mixed the elixir (and wasn’t that a lovely little bit of consonance, a slowly growing part of me crowed in joy). It fizzed and hissed, all susurrusing serendipity, all inexpressible exhilaration. 

I offered a token prayer to the gods above and the Emperor across the world (that secret second part of me extolled this reckless folly to nothing but the skies) and lifted my glass of shining scarlet in a toast to myself alone. My hands were fairly tingling with rhythm and rhyme as—as you leapt toward the surface, all fury and fervor, passion and illusion. 

I drank.

The transition was—painful. I had had very little prior experience of pain, so the sensations were novel, at the very least. Regrettably, that was all that could be said in their favor: my very bones clawed against the insides of my skin like wild animals thrashing toward freedom, my head swirled and surged into a torrent of half-forgotten miserable memory, all emotion and sentiment and desire dissolved from my grasp like a trickle of sand until all that remained was ambivalent serenity, and you.

There was no mirror in the draughty room in which I had established my amateurish alchemical laboratory, so I—you; you, you, you crept along corridors, a stranger in your own home, with magic coruscating in your veins and poetry singing in your heart, and to the nearest looking-glass you went.

I looked in the mirror from behind your eyes—our eyes; our eyes, unchanged, were still the gold which I thought garish on me but on you was nothing short of glorious. I looked in the mirror and saw for the first time the appearance of Fitzroy Angursell.

You were beautiful.

You were motion and light, sparkling confidence where I had always hesitated. You were firecracker dazzling, lightning kinematics, poetry resounding in every bright quick motion of your joints. Your face lit with the joy of a thousand sunny days and you, grandiloquent and full of mirth, bowed to yourself, or to me, only for the delight of doing so. Your purpose, direction, your very will, rushed and swirled, clear as the winds. 

In you I saw no trace of the complacent young man I had been. You were not a man who would quietly complete rituals day after day for the benefit of the distant. You would be no means to an end; you were an end in yourself. You were a catalyst, a song in the making, a name and a poem and a philosophy all in one.

(And why, I wondered, had I never realized I had no name?)

You looked around at my lonely tower and the desire to leave bubbled up in you as quickly as you had known your own name, as quickly as the opening lines of Aurora, or the Peacock spilled from the first pen you touched. 

As you marked the period at the end of a sentence a bolt of lightning crashed down outside the windows. The thunder rattled every piece of glass in its pane. You looked up at it with a grin that near split your face in two, a grin I surely had never smiled, and continued to write as though your hands had never known anything else—which, I supposed, they had not.

Yet when the time ticked on toward the next of the rituals I had to complete, you sighed and put down the pen. With a salute and a smile you downed the potion to reverse the transformation, and grimaced as your fluid body unraveled itself to be, once again, me. 

I hurried to anoint myself with the proper unguent and light the candles, the words of my prayer coming breathlessly to my lips. These ritual motions settled me; they confirmed me to be myself, and dispelled the fear that the shift was irreversible.

So from then on in that tower, we were two.

Your magical talents were prodigious. In the hours you had amongst the strictures of the rites, you pored over Harbut Zalarin’s commonplace book and turned its words into action. When I, in my own time, copied what you had done to see if I too could spin fire from the air, the syllables fell flat and cold in my mouth. This gift was yours—but that was all right, for the very idea of completing one of my rituals was anathema enough to you that you gladly gave yourself over to me to do my own steady workings, in my own way.

I was pleased enough with our arrangement; there was a balance to it. Me the fixed voice of reason, you the frenzied daydreamer. With an anxious sort of thrill, I watched your exploits, as you collected cloths and keys, as you worked minor and major magics and your eyes turned ever toward what was beyond the doors and windows of my tower. I, the responsible, dutiful child of the Empire, could let you have your rebellious flights of fancy and myself return, entirely inculpable, and do nothing more or less than what I ought.

(If I, in my deepest of thoughts, wished for such frivolity as a name of my own, well, that was when I drank down a draught and let you weave my nervous sedition into your acute poetry.)

Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the specifics of your undertakings, for it was entirely a surprise to me when you left the tower.

You, Fitzroy Angursell, made a name for yourself.

At first I was astonished, then I was angry, and then I simply watched, locked behind your eyes, as you did it. You gathered together the most brilliant of people around yourself, for of course you needed to complement your own radiance. You committed treason blithely and boldly, and I did not wonder at this: I knew as well as you that, if all your consequences came crashing down upon you, you could disappear into me like a stain of breath upon a mirror.

You had not forsaken my responsibilities, for you had enchanted some item in the tower or another to invoke the rituals as I once had. Nor had you entirely forgotten about me, for somewhere in the depths of your bag were, I knew, countless vials of the elixir, and—on rare nights, when all your friends of the Red Company were asleep by the campfire and yet rest eluded you—rarely, you reached into your bag and I thought, yes, now will be the time.

Somehow a vial never came to hand. 

Not until one evening in the Silver Forest, when all your consequences came crashing down.

The magic of the Empire shocked me out of the sleepy lull I’d fallen into over the years, all my underused magic faculties jarred at once like the inside of a bell as it is rung. Your friends vanished, one after another, fearful and confused. 

You reached into your bag and pulled from it a vial red as blood, and drank it down; you, too, vanished, and left me alone in the forest.

I cried aloud, “What am I supposed to do?” 

And you, traitor, were silent. 

I had thought myself the coward.

So I cut a path from world to world back to my tower, I rode across the Empire as its very foundations chased me, I bore the weight of the obligations which bound us. 

It was me they crowned, in the end. 

Thus I earned the name which would be written in the histories as that of an emperor, my very own name: Artorin Damara.

You waited, patient but certain, for me to drink myself back into you, for the first of those years in which I was Emperor. 

I did not do it. This was not our isolated tower. Attention crowded too close on to me at nearly every hour of the day, at my every move, at everything which passed my lips, that to find a moment to drink one of my carefully hidden vials and allow you to sweep out of the Palace triumphant was as likely as the rest of the Red Company breaking down the doors to steal you away themselves. 

You have never liked containment. Once you realized I would not do it you pushed. Weakened as you were by the bonds of the Empire’s magic, still you railed against me. You sung half-completed stanzas as I heard petitioners; you improvised fanciful tunes as I participated in painstaking rituals. You made a fantastic nuisance of yourself in the hopes I would yield and set you free, but how could I? How could I now see you as anything but wistful memory of a time in which I was not myself, and as the stinging reminder of what I had lost? Quiet, I told you, over and over, but you sang only louder until my head ached with it.

I began to hate you.

Still you pushed. When music failed you turned to antagonizing me with the cruelest of your talent for wordsmithing. You taunted me for my apathy, for the haze in which I spent my days, as though you could not see how hard I tried. Constantly you jabbed at my failures and eviscerated what I thought had been successes, until doubt stole half my words from my mouth and panic half the breath from my lungs. Please, I tried, have mercy, but you only twisted the knife ever deeper, your own entrammeled fire and fury distorting into sadism. 

Stop, I commanded, in my voice which resonated with all the force of Astandalas. But, of course, you had no respect for empire or emperor. 

Still you pushed.

And so I buried you.

In the dead of night I dug you a grave deep in my own mind. Atop it I built a mausoleum, stone by wretched stone, and, in case you clawed your way out of the crypt, wrapped the door with heavy chains and secured it tight with a golden lock.

Here lies Fitzroy Angursell, I said, as biting and bitter as any of your pithy song titles.

Then I, I Artorin Damara, I the Hundredth Emperor, I the Sun-on-Earth, dropped that golden key into the fire at the center of my mind and left it there to melt down into nothing.

I had your name inscribed into the throne room floor as a reminder that even you could not survive the might of empire—no. 

That you could not survive me.

And then the Fall.

And then, because the worlds had not ended, only the Empire, what came next.

In all those years I’d slept you’d been busy. It was you who awoke, not I, and you did nearly a convincing impression of me, standing tall and stiller than you had ever been, asking calmly after what had happened.

Nearly.

Commander Ludvic Omo doubted. You saw him beginning to see you, past the layers of elaborate clothes and taboos, and you swept away into as private a corner as you could manage, and your fingers, calloused from long years at the harp, brushed against a vial in a deep pocket. 

I could feel your plans crystallizing. For all that we resented each other, you knew very well that I despised my reign. You could yield to me now and bide your time until I escaped the Palace. You knew how to escape me again, how to imprison me in the tomb I had made for you, how to become once again the one and only Fitzroy Angursell.

Get us out, you snarled at me. 

You had dirt beneath your bloodied fingernails, a century of scrabbling through dirt and gravel behind you, when all I had was nebulous dreams and the vague wish for—something. 

I will, I agreed, resigned, and you drank.

I did not mean to lie. In one more circuit of the throne room I had made my peace with it. I had been locked away in towers before. Surely a crypt of my own making could be not much worse. 

I came back to Commander Omo and was so well and fully myself that I could see his doubts washed away by my unassailable serenity. In that conversation I built carefully toward the idea of my departure with all the subtlety I had, so that when eventually the idea rose of leaving it may even be Commander Omo’s suggestion. I would have done it. I would have walked out of the Palace serene and straight-backed until you tore your way back to the surface and interred me in the recesses of your mind.

I did not mean to lie.

But…

When Lady Jivane swept in with great fanfare and poise, when she offered me the lordship of Zunidh, when it became clear that a broken world hung in the balance of my decision—my decision, not yours, well.

Well.

No! you howled, you who had left me alone in that forest, and I bestowed upon you my most benevolent of smiles. I was not a nameless young man with nothing but you and ritual to guide my days any longer. I was Artorin Damara, the Hundredth and Last Emperor of Astandalas. I had learned patience; I had learned subtlety; I had even learned pettiness.

Perhaps I wanted my own form of revolution, besides.

I accepted the responsibility offered to me: I traded tomb for tower, oblivion for apotheosis.

There was a poetry to it. Even you had to admit it.

When your fury abated you, too, conceded that you did not want Zunidh to fall. You might have accepted the role of Lord Magus yourself, if you had not been so entirely you. You had the magical skill, but not the patience to sit through a single day governing a court. I had the responsibility for the magic of a broken world and the guarantee that, if I disappeared suddenly, there would be repercussions for thousands of innocent people, and especially the recently returned renegade Fitzroy Angursell. 

Grudgingly we came to a compromise in our private study, you with the blood and dirt beneath your nails and me with the chosen weight of the world upon my shoulders. You would let me manage my government in the days, the daily monotony of running the world, and leave me alone for it. In return I would hand over to you the nights, after the curtains of my bed were closed behind me, when I could discreetly drink down the elixir, let you illuse your way past the guards and out one of the secret passages, and unleash Fitzroy Angursell onto the unsuspecting Solaara.

We established a small laboratory in our private study with which to mix more of the potion as needed, and three years passed in this manner. 

I found it marginally amusing, and you much more so, each time the rumors of the return of Fitzroy Angursell were brought before me. The transformation left us changed enough, let alone our distinct moods and airs and the way we carried ourselves, that no one could ever connect the two of us. As for your crimes, you were doing no worse than you had prior to my coronation, and perhaps even some better, for a world as confused as Zunidh could use poetry and light treason, so I refused to put on even the slightest show of working toward your destruction. 

I found myself, in fact, altogether indifferent towards you; I had a government to run, and it took up quite enough of my attention. Really, unless you resorted to murder, I could hardly be bothered to care what you did with the time that was yours.

Of course, when our fragile truce did begin to fracture, it was not your fault at all.

It was mine.

Cliopher sayo Mdang, the latest in a long line of secretary-candidates, was efficient and orderly. I liked him from the start; you surely did not, though as agreed you kept all commentary to yourself.

That is, until he corrected me—me, the Sun-on-Earth!—on the pronunciation of Vangavaye-ve, and I felt your spark of interest. 

As for me, as I stared at his bowed head and almost-steady hands, I felt something… new. 

I did not have a name for it; names were always more your domain.

Sayo Mdang and I continued on, and you quietly delighted in each of his discourtesies, his petty treasons. You said nothing to me, but I felt your preemptive resentment of me, your expectation that I would dismiss him in a moment for the offenses which bordered on heresy.

Fool that you were. Perhaps I was delighting in him too.

(Maybe you had forgotten, after all the long years that divided then and now, that as a young man I’d had rebellion enough in me to try out this elixir at all. Maybe you’d forgotten that I was not only duty and devotion.)

(Then again, maybe I had forgotten that too.)

To prove something—to you, to myself, even to Sayo Mdang—as he packed up his things at the end of that illuminating morning, I said something almost innocuous. It was a coiled spring, or perhaps a gathering stormcloud. Metaphors, I knew, were yours, but it was something with potential, anyway. 

Cliopher sayo Mdang released that gathered potential with one clever, witty line which broke across me, across us, like the snap of a spring and the surge of a storm. 

I said the natural follow-up, and yes, it was clever as well (for words could not only be yours; allow me that much) and Cliopher sayo Mdang laughed and—

—here is where I failed, as I had failed in so much, to avert my gaze as I should have—

—looked me right in the eyes. 

Looked… us right in the eyes?

You felt it as keenly as I did. You must have. That shock of connection, that thrill of being seen. As though I was not only an emperor but a man.

We stared back at him for the tiniest moment, the thinnest sliver of a second, until the horror came rushing in ten times stronger than joy and I tore my gaze away, my heart fluttering with elation, with terror.

Cliopher sayo Mdang, whose sight I may have permanently stolen in exchange for a moment of pleasure, fell into his obeisances and ran.

I stared after him, cold regret flooding every inch of me, and thought that a tomb locked up in gold may have been a better sentence, after all.

You went out that night with what was too poetic to call a vengeance. You dressed in the best of your scarlet sashes, embodying Fitzroy Angursell with all that you were; no part of you was in any way mistakable for the imperial. 

You sang your way through the Solaaran streets, looking for whichever of adventure and trouble found you first. Three years on the citizens were well used to seeing you. Many of them even sang along, though usually under their breath.

You strode through taverns and bars, stopping to play a short song here and there, but moving continually. I could not understand what you were looking for. I am not sure you even knew—and yet, the second or third hour after midnight, you found it all the same.

Like all the rest of the patrons, Cliopher sayo Mdang looked up as you entered the Gilded Siren. Cheers of “Fitzroy!” filled the air, but he—a mostly-empty glass in front of him beside a pile of crumpled napkins—said nothing. 

But he looked up. He was not blinded. That simple fact struck me with such forceful relief that I—I!—felt the urge to sing aloud. 

You approached the bar; approached him, though nothing in your bearing said anything but that it was incidental. You looked at him, and he slid off his stool.

Cliopher sayo Mdang met your eyes, too, with no hesitation.

And there it was again, the thrill of connection, the shock of being seen. As though you were not only a legend but a man.

His eyes went wide with what looked like utter surprise, and he broke the contact this time, shifting his gaze downward.

“My lord,” he said, and if you had been me, court-trained, you would have noted the shame and anxiety in the timbre of his voice, would have used that to guide your response.

But you were not me. 

You were no one’s lord.

What? I thought—you thought—we thought in one perfectly confused unison. 

In all our years of transformation no one had ever looked at you and seen me, or at me and seen you. Alchemy and magecraft together formed an impenetrable disguise that had lasted through all our years.

Until Cliopher sayo Mdang.

What?

He shifted to a posture that was unutterably familiar to me, and you by now had seen enough times, even hardly paying attention, to recognize as the beginning of the obeisance. 

You—I—did not know what would happen if you, Fitzroy Angursell, were given a formal obeisance in the middle of a Solaaran bar, whether this would break the masquerade and render you forever recognizable as me, and never free.

Before he could kneel you reached out, lightning-fast as only you and your quicksilver motion could be, and seized his shoulder.

Your fingertips extended past his collar. They lay against the bare skin of his neck.

We—you, I, Cliopher Mdang—froze.

Neither you nor I had touched another person since I was crowned Emperor. 

For a moment I despised you more than I had through all the years of the Empire in which you had tortured me. You had always fully meant everything you did, and so I could see in this nothing but a vindictive grasp at revenge: you would destroy him, and for what, simply because I liked him? Simply because I dared to joke with him, and you hated me? Simply to protect your own interests? 

—but then you flinched, drew your hand back in a motion even quicker than the one with which you’d seized him, and the fear iced your veins as it had mine earlier. 

Nothing… happened.

Sayo Mdang pulled himself out of the start of his bow. 

At the lack of lightning and fire to punish you for breaking the taboos—my taboos—you clapped him on the shoulder again, delighting in the feel of skin on skin, and laughed.

I had spent years hearing your laugh. I knew when you were forcing it, even if Cliopher sayo Mdang did not—though he saw, it seemed, quite a lot. The edge of your laugh was frantic in the way it always was when you were sorry but felt you shouldn’t be.

“And who do you imagine I am, then?” you said. “Aurelius Magnus?”

The watching crowd laughed. Sayo Mdang laughed too, roughly, a few moments too late. 

“Of course not,” he said. 

Then—then! after everything!—he lifted his gaze from the floor and met your, our, eyes again, a glow of secret wonderment behind his, the light of magic in ours.

You left. Abruptly, without another word, you swept out of the Siren in a manner that may have been considered fleeing except that Fitzroy Angursell never fled from anything.

(That was how the stories and songs would have it, at least, but I knew you, you who had left me in the Silver Forest with an empty vial and an empire.

Somehow I suspected Cliopher Mdang would not be so easily transformed away.)

When you drank the elixir to become me once again, safe behind the bedcurtains, I awoke slowly, staring at my hands. 

I had none of the calluses or scars you’d obtained through your years of adventuring. These lacquered hands were mine: the hands with which I made a thousand useless daily gestures at the court, the hands whose touch had burned a woman alive.

Your hands had touched Cliopher Mdang directly and he had come away with nothing but confusion. 

I was jealous. Dreadfully, deeply jealous.

I had never wanted to be you. I, in my own comfortable corner of rituals and rules, had in watching you all the variety I needed. I was happy to let you be the adventurer, you the poet, you the rebel, you the hero of a thousand stories. 

Until Cliopher sayo Mdang looked into my eyes and saw you there as well. Until he looked into yours and saw me.

By the gods, I wanted more. I wanted adventure and music, stories and friendship. I wanted the boundless joy and the awed fear of the unknown, the glee of discovery, the uncertainty of what tomorrow might bring. I wanted the freedom to choose for myself who I was.

I thought of brown eyes, of the way your fingers had looked against his skin, and I wanted—

I wasn’t used to wanting things. That had always been your domain. It ached more than I expected.

Well. Well, the uncertainty I did have, at least for tonight. I had no idea what to expect if Cliopher Mdang chose to attend me tomorrow.

Nothing happened.

Almost nothing.

First: when he entered, he performed the obeisance smoothly, though he looked overtired. When I gestured him to rise, he met our eyes fearlessly, smiled, and said, “Good morning, my lord.”

The shattering anxiety I’d been harboring since first meeting his eyes eased.

(The morning’s work was faultless. I wondered if he dismissed the previous evening as a drunken hallucination; but surely Sayo Mdang—Cliopher, I was already calling him in my mind—surely Cliopher was not inclined to drinking to excess. He had not been that drunk, when you had seen him and he had seen us.)

Second: once I had concluded the morning’s dictation, as Cliopher copied over notes into a clean page, he hummed quietly, and I stared.

He hummed Aurora. 

Of course. He knew of you, of your songs, of your deeds. Our masks were invisible to him; of course he would see only you pretending to be me. I could understand why he returned today: for you. To see you.

I felt—only the simple pleasure of a good morning’s work, I told myself, and remembered not to want things.

It was several nights later before you dared to return to the Gilded Siren. 

Cliopher was there when you arrived. 

(Had he been waiting there every night?)

You did not approach him; before you had the chance to determine how to do it, or whether you even would, he approached you. 

“Sayo Angursell,” he said to you, with all the calm rightness with which he said my lord to me, “I’ve been hoping to see you again.”

You grinned. You said something grand and witty and full of innuendo. A hundred people on half a dozen worlds would have fainted in ecstasy to hear it.

Cliopher, steady as a rock in a river, said, “If it pleases you, could we speak privately?”

“Certainly,” you said, in a tone that nobody but me could have heard the trepidation in, and you leaned over the bar to ask the keeper for a room, in your sultriest voice. She handed over a key in exchange for the promise of a song “when you’re done,” and her smirk said that she and all the patrons would spend the interim visualizing exactly what Fitzroy Angursell might do with a mild-mannered bureaucrat.

When you looked back at Cliopher he had flushed slightly, but there he stood. I admired him for his unwillingness to let embarrassment sway him from his aim.

(Unless, of course, he too was visualizing exactly what Fitzroy Angursell might do with a mild-mannered bureaucrat. What did I know of what my secretary desired?)

The room was no Imperial Bedchamber, but you had seen worse. You stretched yourself across the bed, languid—were you trying to discomfit him? No matter; he stood in the middle of the room with a solid patience I had spent years learning, and he bowed. Not the full obeisance, but a bow which may be considered polite when meeting someone of unknown rank.

“What may I call you?” he asked. 

“Oh, whatever you like,” you said carelessly. You were not meeting his gaze, only eyeing him at an oblique angle. I wished I could see his face better. “Fitzroy will do. Sayo Angursell is fine. The titles, ‘my lord’ and such, are—amusing, but they aren’t mine.”

“Aren’t they?” Cliopher asked mildly, and you barked a laugh.

“Oh, no.” You leapt from the bed in one smooth motion and began to pace. You never paced like I did; you wandered in random spirals as caught your fancy. “Those are all,” you waved a dismissive hand, “my other self. Though he doesn’t appreciate the titles much, either.”

“I am not sure I understand,” Cliopher said slowly, though I suspected he understood more than he would admit.

“Long ago,” you said, in the tenor of a story, “there was a tower and a book of alchemy and a young man without name or purpose.” 

You still were not looking at Cliopher.

“One day the young man, having nothing better to do aside from completing his esoteric rituals, mixed a potion from the book of alchemy. When he drank it, the true destiny of his life was written, for I stepped from his mind and from the tower, and set about on my own life’s work.”

Will you look at him? I asked, tentative, breaking my silence, but then, you were breaking ours.

You walked your haphazard circles around the room and did not look up from the floor. “For fourteen years I roamed the Nine Worlds, drawing adventure and poetry from all I saw, and he had no part in it. For fourteen years I made my name, until the death of Shallyr brought him here to be crowned.”

Please look at him. I want to know what he thinks.

“He imprisoned me through his years as Emperor, so I bided my time until the upheaval brought on by the Fall. Now he spends his wearisome days in the Palace until nightfall, when he at last leaves his tawdry existence to transform into me, the one and only Fitzroy Angursell.” You came to a stop across from Cliopher and gave an actor’s bow, overdramatic, hardly sincere.

I will find a way to give you a day outside the Palace, if only you stop avoiding anything that you fear will not fit your neat little narratives, and look at Cliopher!

You said nothing to me, but when you straightened out of your bow you, for once unsmiling, met Cliopher’s eyes.

Cliopher Mdang was not confused or judgmental or doubtful. He looked straight through to the heart of us and said, without heat or pretension, “May I see?”

You looked at him a long moment, and I shivered under his gaze. 

“Fuck it,” you said, “why not.”

And quick as a rhyme you upended a vial.

We had never transformed before anyone. I came shuddering and gasping out of it, mortified at what you had said, at what Cliopher must think of me. 

He had moved forward as I’d hunched over in the pain of the transition, his hands extended toward me in concern. The taboos still kept him at a firm distance, though, and even as I recovered he was already stepping back to a safer range, out of arm’s reach.

I said, “I… apologize on Fitzroy’s behalf.”

Only Cliopher’s eyes betrayed anything but utter calm, but those eyes churned like the sea. “There is nothing to apologize for… my lord.” The title came out almost like a question. “What would you like me to call you?”

“I…” 

You had answered that question with the same flippancy with which you had always known your name and your purpose. 

No one had ever asked me—me—what I might like to be called. They had given me a name, and ten thousand titles so they need never use it, and not a single one of them felt like me.

“I don’t know,” I said. 

He took this in stride—perhaps after breaking one of the great taboos, meeting Fitzroy Angursell, determining the rebel poet and last emperor to be two halves of the same man, and seeing the transformation before his very eyes, all in the span of a week, nothing else could possibly faze him.

He only said, “Very well,” and fell silent.

I could not think of what to say, what to do. I fell into pacing almost instinctively. The room was too small for fifteen, twenty-five, ten steps, so the pace was all wrong. I felt equally as ill-fitting here. 

“I did not see the difference at first,” Cliopher admitted into the quiet, “but I see it now. Fitzroy holds himself differently, and he shows more of what he is feeling. I see why he is considered to be the poet. You are—”

“—the Last Emperor, and underneath that, nothing,” I finished bitterly. 

“My lord!” he said in protest, and then bit his lip and looked down. “I apologize. But you do yourself a disservice by speaking so.”

“Do I?” 

I, I, I the still nameless and purposeless man, I who had no ambitions of my own, I with no flair for music or magic, I the friendless faraway idol, I who was no poet, no adventurer, no rebel?

I who was in all ways the palest shadow of Fitzroy Angursell?

“Then tell me who I am!” I cried.

I expected stammered apologies or another lack of answer, but the response was only a calm, “I would be glad to.”

I looked at Cliopher. His shoulders were set. His back was straight, and his gaze was steady; under its weight I fell still and waited, hardly able to breathe.

“I have known you personally for a week and by reputation for nearly two decades. By reputation I know you to be vastly more well-loved than your predecessors. I know that you were brave enough as emperor to judge based on rightness above precedent, and that you care about all the people within your dominion, not only those with money and power. By personal experience? You sent my writing kit after me: you are considerate even when you need not be. You capped my joke: you have a sense of humor. You ask after details of the world’s problems rather than broad strokes: you find it important to understand the entirety of a situation before acting. You have a talent for composition and none at all for mathematics. You have an appreciation for aesthetics, but cannot abide perfect order. You prefer tea to coffee. You have, to my great admiration, persisted in the slow and difficult process of bettering the world, day by day, step by step.

“You are Artorin Damara, the Hundredth and Last Emperor of Astandalas by birth, and the Lord of Zunidh by your own choice. It is you, not him, whose picture I saw once, across the world in the Vangavaye-ve, and immediately I knew you to be the guiding star of my life.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. Cliopher Mdang did see me.

Not Fitzroy Angursell. Not even the Emperor.

Me.

“And—” Cliopher met our eyes, but he was looking only at me, with a fire kindling in him that I had never seen before; I could have spent a lifetime watching the fire in his eyes. 

You laughed at my romanticisms, the weight of your scorn heavy against my mind, a pressure so familiar I often could not discern it from my own thoughts. 

Adamant, passionate, steady as the rock upon which the world turns, Cliopher said, “If it is Fitzroy Angursell who has made you believe that you are nothing, he is not worthy of the legends.”

You recoiled in shock. My head swam with the sudden lightness.

“Oh,” I said, a foolish and empty half-syllable, half-breath. 

Cliopher Mdang saw me more clearly than I had ever seen myself.

I, the Glorious and Illustrious One, the unshakeable Serenity, sat down on the edge of the bed, put my head in my hands, and cried. 

If you had any commentary, I did not heed a word.

When I gathered myself, Cliopher was kneeling beside the bed; it was not in the manner of an obeisance but as one sits near a friend to provide comfort via proximity. 

(I: one who could be considered a friend?)

I supposed his reaction was appropriate. It was doubtful that the Palace’s etiquette lessons covered these circumstances. I made the gesture for him to rise, and he did so smoothly. If he felt anything about my terribly embarrassing show of emotion, he did not show it on his face.

“Thank you,” I said, rather roughly, as though the simple platitude could possibly be enough praise for what Cliopher had given me. 

“I am glad to be of any assistance, your Radiancy,” he said easily and with apparent sincerity. He must have picked that particular epithet up from my household; it was rarely used otherwise. 

“Please feel free to return to the Palace, Sayo Mdang. You have already far surpassed any obligations of duty.” 

“If you desire me to go, of course I shall,” he said, but he did not move. “Is there any way in which I can help you to return as well?” 

Ah. Well, that was an issue I had not considered. Perhaps you had not either, but as I recalled the nonchalance with which you had drunk down the vial—the only vial you carried upon you—perhaps abandoning me outside the Palace with no skill at illusions to conceal myself was in fact quite intentional. Certainly I would not be barred entry from my own palace, but I did not relish the idea of explaining to my guards how I had vanished from under their watch.

(I: a poor liar?)

You gave me your most sardonic of smiles—as though you too would not suffer from increased protections! But what a poem you could write about the mysterious translocation of the Last Emperor to a Solaaran tavern.

Cliopher must have seen my worry in my face, for he said, “How may I assist?”

“I cannot ask more of you.”

Of course Cliopher would not take that as an answer. “At least tell me what is needed, so I may know whether I can be of assistance.”

I sighed. “I have more vials of the elixir in my private study. I would require two, one to become Fitzroy to pass through the city and back into the Palace unseen, and one to return to myself before morning. The vials are not large; the difficulty lies in you entering my private study, a threshold no one else has ever been allowed to cross, within the most heavily guarded apartments in Zunidh. I can provide you with a writ in my own hand that grants you passage, but I do not have my seal to formalize it. You may be stopped and heavily questioned, and likely barred from continuing until the guards are able to confirm the writ’s veracity with me directly.”

An impossible task, for an impossible secretary.

When he replied, “I will do this for you,” somehow I was entirely unsurprised. 

 (I: a giver of quests?) 

“That is, I will try,” he amended. “If I do not return before the second hour before dawn, please assume that I have been waylaid, and do what you must to return yourself.”

“Very well,” I agreed, and wrote out the note. As I handed it to him, I said, “Use caution. I… I do not wish to return to hear of your execution.”

The understatement was so extreme as to feel like perjury, but Cliopher smiled as though I had given him the highest of compliments. “It would be a shame to put the Master of Offices through finding you another secretary, certainly.”

I laughed, tremulous but honest, and Cliopher bowed and took his leave. 

Again I was alone, with only you lurking in my mind as company.

(I: not only the shadow of you.)

It’s like that, is it? you whispered, lyrical and severe.

Maybe it is, I said, serene.

Cliopher sayo Mdang returned from his impossible quest three hours before dawn with five things: two vials of the elixir, a book, a mirror, and a cup of tea. 

The tea he presented to me first, as he said, “I have a report on the fulfillment of your request, if it pleases you to hear it, my lord.”

The formality was undercut by the humor shining brightly in his eyes. I smiled, and took the proffered tea. It was, incomprehensibly, one of my teacups: it was perfectly within the bounds of taboo for me to drink, but I could not begin to imagine how he had acquired it.

The tea was still hot.

What had Cliopher Mdang done in the span of two hours?

“Please proceed, Sayo Mdang,” I said.

He bowed, smiling, and began, “As requested, I have acquired two vials of your elixir, which I obtained from your private study after a suitably proper negotiation with the guards. Their loyalty is commendable.” 

He handed over the vials. Small though they were, our fingers did not meet.

“Commander Omo is excellent at his position,” I murmured.

“Indeed, my lord. The elixir aside, I bring you also a choice.”

He said this in the same light, formal tenor, but his face tightened fractionally, as though anxious to see how I would take it.

“Go on,” I said neutrally, spinning one of the vials between my fingers.

“After the first day of my service, in which I met both you and Fitzroy, I… had questions. In my free time this past week, I began my own private research in the Imperial Archives—I hope I did not overstep, I did not mention anything about the situation, even as I understood it at the time, to anyone—”

“I trust in your judgment.” My heart was racing; Cliopher had spent his—surely limited—free time researching this, for me? “Continue.”

“At any rate, the research was less than illuminating. There are many similar conditions, and I had no further basis with which to focus my research. However, with the further details Fitzroy provided this evening, in only a few minutes in the relevant section of the Archives I was able to find this alchemical text.”

I tucked the vials away into a pocket to take the book Cliopher handed to me. It was thicker than I recalled.

“I believe it may be—similar, to the one you used as reference in your tower, but this version is bound alongside a second volume by the same author. It seems the second volume was only discovered recently, hence its exclusion in older editions.”

“A… second volume?” 

“It speaks to the reversal of the original process, my lord.” There was no humor in Cliopher’s voice any longer, but the title sounded natural, gentle even. “A method for reunification.”

Reunification?

Reunification? you echoed.

Cliopher Mdang had reached directly into the fire at the heart of me, unafraid of its burn, and pulled out intact the golden key with which I had once locked away half of myself. 

You with the dirt under your fingernails. Me with the weight of the world on my shoulders.

Cliopher Mdang was offering us the means by which to unravel the chains, raze the mausoleum, unearth the tomb, and be… what? 

What would this make of us?

I took a sip of tea to hide my shaking hands. “What… does this reunification entail?” 

Cliopher spoke with more confidence now, given my lack of disapproval. “It is not an alchemical process, but largely a magical one. The components are only a tiny amount of one of the elixirs, and a mirror, which needs to be of certain dimensions, and backed in pure silver. Hence—” He gestured to the mirror, full-length and framed in bronze, which he had set against a wall.

“And how, Sayo Mdang, did you bring that from the Palace?”

“Actually, my lord, this came from just down the hall,” Cliopher said. “The barkeeper kindly allowed me to borrow it from another room.” He was blushing faintly, and I could not keep a wry smile from the corners of my lips as I considered what use the barkeeper might have been imagining for the mirror. “It only needs to be anointed with a few drops of the potion.”

I considered the mirror for a moment. I was unused to seeing myself in your clothes.

(It looked… less wrong than I might have expected.)

I turned back to Cliopher. “And then?”

“You look into the mirror, and…” He made a vague sort of gesture. “I have no magical knowledge, and the passage is rather ambiguous. You look into the mirror and, via some internal means, complete the process.”

“Hm.” Well?

You scowled. I suppose we may as well see what this is all about.

“We will try it,” I told Cliopher, and unstoppered a vial.

When I looked into the mirror, instead of my own reflection, I saw you: the specter which haunted my nights.

You looked back at me, and I wondered what your sight made of me.

I will not let you bury me again, you said.

I am as likely to be buried as you, I replied, and then shook my head. No, I believe both of us will survive this, in some form. I promise you: there will be no more graves.

As you promised to leave the Palace? Why would I trust you? Despite your words, you did not seem to actually disbelieve me. You seemed…

I asked, Are you scared?

You scoffed. I? Fitzroy Angursell fears nothing.

Well. That was simply untrue. 

You transformed into me rather than face the might of the Empire in the Silver Forest. You forced me to handle Commander Omo’s questioning after the Fall. You even ran from Cliopher the moment he looked too close. 

I…

And you are scared now, aren’t you?

Yes! you cried. Fine, yes, I am scared! I do not have your patience and your diligence. I am afraid that I will be subsumed into the tedium of the ordinary, with all my deeds and dreams utterly lost! Scattered to the winds with the rest of the Red Company! Aren’t you afraid too? 

I am, I admitted. For so long I did not dare to dream of anything myself, because I had you, through whom I could live vicariously. I have no experience with adventure or friendship or poetry, but even if I fail, I want them. 

Then make a name for yourself! What claim have you to mine?

Don’t you want to try something new, too? Those common ordinary goods of the everyday?

You stared blankly back at me, and with a sudden shock I realized that you, who had written so persuasively about common and ordinary goods, had no idea what that meant. 

I was not the man with nothing underneath the facade, you were. 

I had carved out a part of me to be only magic and adventure, so that I might choose to diligently carry out my duties rather than walk alongside legends and gods—and I so chose, every day. But for you it had never been a choice at all. You had never known conflicting desires. You were only ever what you seemed to be: Fitzroy Angursell, poet, rebel, wild mage; nothing less, and nothing more.

And I had been jealous of you?

I was struck with a deep and searing pity, and I put my hand up against the mirror. You looked at it dubiously, and I remembered how beautiful I had once found you.

Come, I said, almost lovingly. Let us find what goods we can together.

Our eyes met in a shimmer of gold.

Slowly, as in a dream, you lifted your hand to meet mine, on the other side of the mirror.

The mirror shattered. 

It all imploded in a rush of light and sound: starlight poetry, lyrical magic, gold-glittering music, thunder-strike adventure. I—you—I—felt like we were drowning and burning and flying all at once. For a moment I lived in a world of nothing but metaphor and narrative, ocean foam of a slant rhyme, sable star-edge narration, woodpulp concertos devouring feline syllabics; was this how you had always seen the world? 

An instant, a lifetime, passed. 

Everything went pure white.

“I will have to apologize about the mirror,” I gasped when I awoke. 

The floor was littered with its shards, shot through with droplets of the bloodred potion. It resembled a slashed purse of rubies, or a deep sunset scintillating off a wind-tousled sea. It would be an awful mess to clean up.

I was lying on the bed, and was not sure if I had stumbled there myself, or if—unthinkably—Cliopher had helped me to it.

“I am sure they will forgive you,” Cliopher replied as I gathered myself to my feet, amusement warring with concern in his voice. “Are… are you…”

I reached out for you, and found no second voice. 

In your place was a host of gifts you (I?) had left behind. First and foremost, magic which surged so eagerly to my fingertips I gasped aloud. Simply to see if I could, I flicked my hand, and I could; a magelight glowed obediently before me. And so finally, after three years, I might achieve what a Lord Magus ought to—no, I might do more.

Next, an overflowing stockpile of words, some already attached together into phrases, with a rare few half-sonnets in the mix. Snatches of tunes drifted through them, catching on where they would, or evaporating. Delight welled up in me; I looked forward to digging through these with almost as much eagerness as the magic. 

Love seized me next: an overwhelming torrent of love for the rest of the Red Company. Perhaps my guards would have heard rumors where to find them. Perhaps they would even like me, as they had liked Fitzroy Angursell. If not, I could surely make new friends of my own.

In a shadowy corner behind all this light lurked a sizable pit which seemed to contain nothing but self-loathing. Ah, I thought, and carefully stepped back from it; there would be time in the future with which to work on clearing out that particular cesspool.

For now I drew myself out of myself and to Cliopher I said, “The reunification was successful.”

He met my eyes, and, with a widening smile, asked, “What may I call you?”

I considered. “‘My lord’ will do for now, Sayo Mdang.” I liked how it sounded from his lips. 

“Cliopher, please, since we are to work together so frequently, my lord,” he said, then added quickly, “that is, if I am not to be executed or dismissed for the countless treasons I have committed tonight.”

I had the strong impulse to clasp his arms, to embrace him, anything to stop his doubts, and stopped myself sharply. There would be time too to test the taboos, or indeed unravel them, but words would need to suffice tonight.

“In the former case, I believe I may be able to arrange for a pardon,” I said loftily, “though no warrant can be issued if the crime is unreported, and certainly I am too anarchical to bring mere issues of treason to a guard. As for dismissal, Cliopher, even if we set aside how tonight you have given me the greatest gift I have ever received, you are the only competent secretary I have ever had.”

Cliopher broke eye contact to lower his head in abashed pleasure. “Thank you, my lord.” 

“I will expect you tomorrow at—” I yawned, which was very un-emperorlike of me, and amended the rest of my sentence to, “—the first bell after noon.”

“Very good, my lord. There is one small matter of note—”

“Yes?”

“You… Fitzroy Angursell did promise a song in exchange for renting this room.”

“...Ah.” So I (you?) had. 

Well.

Well, I did have your (my) harp, and oh, there was music in my mind. 

“I suppose that, if my hands fail me, I did not promise a good song.”

“I am sure you will perform admirably.” Cliopher made a valiant effort to school his expression into solemnity, and almost succeeded. “Perhaps a second song will make amends for the mirror, my lord?”

“I hope you are a talented negotiator, Cliopher, for I will delegate convincing the barkeeper of that trade to you.”

Cliopher bowed, not in the court style, but hand over fist, his eyes gleaming. “Of course I will serve you to the best of my ability, my lord. Shall we?” 

I paused at the threshold of the door, anxiety gripping me. “Won’t they notice that I am the Emperor, and not the bard?” 

Cliopher thought about this with the careful consideration with which he weighed everything. “In my experience, my lord, people see only what they want to see.”

Cliopher Mdang, of the Vangavaye-ve, the Last Emperor’s personal secretary, surely knew this.

(And—he had seen me.)

What did I want to see, when I looked in the mirror?

I wanted—

Clothes well-worn in every color of the rainbow. Hands that were calloused and scarred. Crow’s feet. Gold eyes full of mirth and magic. All the signs of a life well lived and a soul fulfilled. 

(And maybe, just maybe: a competent, clever, daring secretary at my side.)

“Well, come along then, Cliopher, and let us put on a show.” 

And out the threshold I swept in search of everything I wanted.