There was something coming.
Murikabushi had warned them all of what he’d seen, when he was whisked away by that strange storm, and it sounded…bad. Ominous at absolute minimum, terrifying if Tianyi was honest. And, honestly, the idea of losing his new home so soon after finding it made him feel….dizzy. Sick.
Terrified.
Tianyi was not going to be useful in any kind of fight. He knew that. He could try all he wanted, but the giant monster from outer space was not going to listen to his soft little orders to stop whatever it was doing. Some flowers thrown at it, or sad eyes, or pleading was not going to make it stop in its quest to consume.
Oh, Tianyi would try, he would show up and fight and do his very best, because this was not a time for gentleness, and if he had to compromise a little—well, he’d already found some little ones. It had seemed far too rude to refuse any food given, so he’d found himself trying meat, because that was on offer, and it would have been uncountable levels of ingratitude to demand that the people giving him food and housing also alter their diets to fit his.
It had made him sick at first, and he’d come to understand that was his body not really knowing how to process it, after a lifelong vegetarian diet. But it was so good. And the more he ate it and got used to it, the more he found…well. He felt…better. Illness aside, he found that he felt less cold. Less tired, though his chronic lack of sleep meant it only made so much difference. But it felt like something had changed, and for the better.
He didn’t want to think about what that meant. What other lies it might have revealed.
But that…wasn’t the point. He was stalling, and he knew it, ruminating on everything that had changed since he’d arrived on Earth. It was, for instance, also strange to have to wander far from home to power up—but then, here, Xiulan and Tinayi had to be much more separate. And he certainly wasn’t going to risk bringing Chaos down on his beloved friends.
So, he sat on a rooftop a long ways away, because he’d gotten a little caught up in jumping from one to the other on a lovely early-spring night. The weather was beautiful, lightly breezy and comfortably warm, and he was stalling again because he didn’t want to just press the icon that would take him to his world.
He’d been staring at it for…a while. Longer than he wanted to admit. But there was no point in putting it off.
There might be something there. Some piece of knowledge that could help him. So he had to go back. Had to return to whatever might be left of the palace, see if there was anything there from…from before.
From before Chaos. From before his own cursed arrival.
Tianyi took a breath. Stared at the icon for another long moment. Then squeezed his eyes shut and pushed.
When he opened them again, he was in a familiar place.
Except it wasn’t familiar at all.
Tianyi’s phone slipped from his fingers, clattering on the ground, and he collapsed a moment after it, an agonized wail tearing itself from his throat half against his will.
He had returned to just outside the front doors of the main hall of the palace complex, and they hung open, half off their hinges and decaying. Worse, looking through them he could see the inside—ransacked, and then scarred by fire.
The people who had come for his family had looted and burned his home. And all that was left before him was the shell of what had once been.
He could remember what this place had been like before—could remember laughter and pirates and people coming and going, how the front hall had welcomed people coming to visit and how it had always been full of conversation and joy. And even knowing what that joy was built on, it wrenched something in Tianyi’s chest to see it gone.
He doubled over, hugging himself tightly, and sobbed, a hopeless wreck before the ruins of the only home he had ever known.
He cried until his eyes burned and his throat ached, until he could hardly breathe from the wrenching sobs, until he was a puddle of misery on the ground.
So utterly pathetic it could barely be accounted for. Such a miserable little thing, only good for looking pretty and wailing about the unfairness of the universe, as if he hadn’t lived his entire life in luxury except for a few awful months, and really, those awful months were just the consequence of two decades of lies and thefts and misery perpetuated by his own family on the people of the world he was supposed to protect.
If his entire life had been bought with suffering, how could he complain about a little suffering of his own? How could he grieve deaths that had been necessary to stop the Emperors’ tyranny? His fathers’ tyranny, his brothers’--
(As if Junkai had ever been a tyrant over anything, as if Haoran had ever brutalized anything but poetry, as if Hongyun hadn’t always seemed to be thinking forward, as if there wasn’t another way—)
(As if Xiulan had any right to judge what people pushed to their absolute brink would do.)
There was, suddenly, a crack of thunder, and Tianyi jolted from his position, looking up at the sky—and felt a sinking sense of horror.
The sky of Tianyi never changed color, no matter what. It was always an awful red, with the eclipsed star hanging in it. But now, there was a strange purplish tinge to it, and he could see clouds moving in the distance and the crack of lightning through them.
His stomach dropped.
It was here, too. Whatever it was, it was—it was already here.
He scrambled to stand up.
He couldn’t…he didn’t have time to…
Surely he had already mourned enough. Surely he needed to just…get past it. There might be something, in the old archives or in the family studies or…somewhere. Something that would give them another hint about whatever this creature was or whatever it had done in the past. Not that he expected to find anything truly helpful, but he couldn’t just...sit here and cry like he didn’t have real problems that were far more immediate than something he’d already known had happened.
(Why did it feel like hearing it all over again? Like when Yongsheng had gripped his chin and grinned in that awful way of his and told him that he was so lucky he was here, because the executions had happened today in the capitol, and wasn’t it funny, didn’t that sort of make Xiulan the new Emperor.)
(They’d called him “your imperial majesty” for a while, after that. Mockingly, to lord their power over him.)
Tianyi turned away from the main hall. There were records there, certainly, but.
Well.
On the one hand, he didn’t want to step through that door. Didn’t want to see what it looked like on the inside. It made him a coward, he knew, made him sad and pathetic and a thousand other miserable things, but he simply couldn’t face the evidence before his eyes of the destruction that had been wrought on his home, and whatever abandonment it had been left to after his family’s execution. After…all of it, everything terrible that had happened here.
He wondered, briefly, where they’d died, as he walked down the grand staircase and into the central courtyard. Had it been here? If so, there was no evidence left. He could see bloodstains on the stones, but it was hard to guess what those were from—a battle had been fought here, after all, and maybe there had been more violence after. But there was no instrument of execution, no gallows stand or executioner’s platform, so if it had been here it had been disassembled.
Perhaps it was elsewhere, and if he kept exploring his world, he would eventually come across a gallows somewhere in the capitol and he would know. Or perhaps the executions had stopped and the violence had slowed sometime in the years he was asleep, and so all evidence of the violence was long gone, rotted away and discarded like the whole world. He doubted it, but it was….a possibility, he supposed.
And really, it wasn’t as if he knew anything about anything that had happened, except for the blood and violence and the time he’d spent in that hidden away villa in the woods, wondering when it would all be over.
Sometimes, he wondered if it was even over now, or if…well. If some part of him would always be trapped there, desperately trying to escape. If it would haunt him forever, and he would jolt awake in the middle of the night forever.
Nightmares were better than it still happening, at least. Nightmares ended when he woke up.
His feet carried him where he needed to go almost automatically, and he tried to ignore the signs of violence as he went, but the further he got from the main hall the fewer there were. THe sacking clearly hadn’t been terribly complete—the royal offices and the archives weren’t of much interest. There was hardly anything valuable there except for knowledge, and clearly no one had thought it go through the papers for evidence of the crimes they accused the royal family of.
Perhaps they hadn’t needed evidence. Perhaps it had simply been so utterly evident that no backing was needed. Or perhaps, at that point, no one had even cared who was guilty of what.
He wondered if anyone had ever discovered that the Senshi was not among the dead. If they’d lived long enough to hope he reincarnated. If they’d been afraid, as the Chaos encroached farther.
There was a part of Tianyi that hoped they suffered. He did not like that part of himself. Surely they had suffered enough, before everything came apart. And yet he couldn’t help but hope the universe had taken some small vengeance for the people he loved.
Useless and monstrous, all in one. Tianyi was certainly not a Senshi to be proud of.
But he had a theory. A suspicion. He remembered, when he thought about the weeks leading up to everything going wrong, hearing Hongyun and their fathers discussing reviewing old reports of strange phenomena, things that might help them better understand what was happening to Tianyi the world. They’d stopped talking about it when they saw him—more work done to keep him from knowing how bad things really were, to spare him the pain or keep him in line, he still wasn’t sure and which he leaned towards depended on how he was feeling—but he’d heard enough. And he hoped, against hope, that the fact that the building that housed the archives and the private royal studies still stood meant that whatever records Hongyun was reviewing were still there.
He stepped through the door, and let out a relieved breath. It was dark, yes, but he produced a box of Earth matches from his subspace and went to one of the lamps on the wall, striking the match to light it.
There was still oil. The flickering flame cast dancing shadows on the floor and walls, and revealed splashes of blood on both.
The archive-keepers, perhaps, or some of the palace staff who hadn’t joined the revolt.
But the building itself seemed relatively undamaged, so perhaps—
He walked past the first few rooms—Hongyun’s was further back, across the hall from the one that had once belonged to Xiulan. He’d used it as a reading room and for music practice more than for the work his eldest brother did, but then, Hongyun had always shouldered the lion’s share of the administrative work as the heir. And that was why it was his office that Tianyi went to.
The door was damaged, but still locked. Someone had clearly tried to break in, but failed.
But Tianyi knew a secret. He’d always been allowed into Hongyun’s office, even when no one else might be; his brother had always said that his presence made solving problems much easier. Which meant that he knew how to open the hidden compartment carved into the doorframe, which popped open to reveal a small brass key.
He unlocked the door, stepped in, and nearly collapsed with grief all over again.
Hongyun’s office hadn’t been touched. There was no blood here, no damage—just books and scrolls stacked on the side of his desk, the way he must have put them away at the end of his last day here. It looked as if he’d just stepped out, or hadn’t yet arrived for the day, not like it had been abandoned for centuries, never to be touched again.
Tianyi took a shuddery breath, and moved to the desk, lighting the lamp that sat on it and beginning to read the last records his brother had been exploring.
He wasn’t sure how long he was there, flipping through trade agreements and old records, and much of what he found made him wince. He couldn’t say that he was perfectly educated in trade or economics, and yet even he could see how much unfair leverage was hidden in clever wording and careful bargains. It made him feel a little ill, and more than a little stressed. But there had to be something. He needed any fruits of this trip, or it would have been an exercise in simply ripping himself apart and a complete waste of time.
But there was a book at the bottom of the pile. Perhaps Hongyun hadn’t even gotten to it, or perhaps he’d discarded it in frustration, Tianyi couldn’t be sure—certainly, most of it was a simple business record. A ledger of accounts, with some asides from whoever it belonged to. Tianyi had to admit, some of them were quite clever, where he could still read them—some of the characters were smudged or sloppy, as if the writer was hasty.
And in that simple little ledger, on a single page, he found a gem.
He couldn’t read the name of the planet the report was about—sloppy handwriting and sloppier handling had rendered it, and a few other characters on the page, smudged and unreadable. But it had been a trading partner. One that postponed an exchange because of strange electrical storms.
Then, when the Tianyian delegation had finally arrived, they found no sign of the planet, as if it had simply been erased, leaving only a strange dust cloud behind that forced them to turn back.
He flipped a few pages forward, and spotted the same half-smudge of a character that he was pretty sure was the world’s name, and a mention that another trip found nothing but a debris field, and, scribbled in the margins, a mention that a friend of the writer’s had lost some vessels in that area around the time, but that there was nothing else the writer could find.
Tianyi slammed the book shut and jolted to his feet. This. This was what he had been looking for. It was small, just a tiny piece of evidence, but it was evidence. Of what, he wasn’t entirely sure, but someone smarter than him would probably be able to figure out how it fit into the bigger picture. And it gave signs to look for. Warnings.
He clutched the ledger to his chest and pulled out his phone. However harrowing this trip had been, he had gotten something from it.
He paused, for a moment. Drew his fingers over the polished wood of the desk.
“Thanks, Hongyun,” he said, softly. “I’ll try to use this well.”
Hongyun had, he was sure, wanted to save their world. Maybe Tianyi couldn’t do that. But he could try and help save Earth.
[wc: 2683 words]
