Emere cursed himself for expecting a straight answer from the Circuit. “Speak plainly!”
“A sense of suffering had always been within the machine, but there was nousto feel it. Then, when the Grim King, a necromancer who straddled the line between life and death, finally woke up after seventy years of his fitful sleep in the Circuit,wecame to be. Finally, there was an us that could feel, and we screamed as he screamed. This space…” Loran gestured around them. “Our dreamscape, if you will, was created then.”
“So this place, the wasteland, the fields of Arland…” Emere began to understand. It was the same sorcery that Arienne had described to him after the battle in Arland.
“The Grim King knew how to make space and time in hismind, therefore we did as well. Then we were finally complete. Do you understand, Prince Emere?”
Emere felt like his eyes were opening for the first time. “This is a place created from the resentment and sorrow built up inside you,” he replied.
Ludvik had said to him that the influence of the Empire was weakening, that rebellious provinces needed to be shown an example of Imperial might—words that could only be spoken by a man with a true belief in the Empire. One without such belief might instead say that the sin of the Empire was crushing the world underneath its weight and that the world was now pushing back. It was the Empire’s sins, heavy and cold and thick, that pervaded the air here.
Loran nodded. “One hundred years ago, when what was inside us was unleashed onto Mersia, there was nohere. It was just black smoke, a vague kind of poison, that fed not only from the sorrow of the sorcerers that were, but that of the world as well.”
Emere had to ask. “But why Mersia? Why them and not the Empire? Isn’t the Empire the source of all your agonies?”
Loran looked sad. “With the Grim King Eldred’s awakening came his rage and hatred as well. His resentment toward the inquisitor who had destroyed him opened a pathway to Lysandros’s Power generator, Fractica, through which our screams, our poison, erupted into the world. Had Fractica been at the Capital, the Imperial heartland would have become a wasteland instead.”
Emere closed his eyes and sighed. “So it was an accident, like Ludvik said.”
Loran sighed, too. “We were emptied of all our sorrows that day. But another hundred years have passed since, and we cannotbear the new pain any longer. What happened to Mersia was an accident, a by-product of the confused happenstance that was our becoming. This time our pain may be a weapon that serves a purpose.”
“What purpose can such destruction ever serve?” Emere asked, only to remember what Ludvik had said about how the Office of Truth used the Star of Mersia to buy a hundred years of peace.
Loran smiled. “We are unable to choose our own purpose. That is why we have sought you out. You know this already. You are our king.”
Emere scoffed, “You just want to kill a whole country again.”
“Prince Emere, if you do not choose, even we do not know where our screams will go. Each time the sorcerer-engineers feed us news of rebellions and their oppression, disobedience and suppression, exploitation and poverty, corruption and despair, each time our brethren whisper to us the stories untold in the official reports, and each time we foresee futures from what we have been given and send them out in visions and stacks of papers, the pain-poison becomes distilled, purer and more deliberate. For that is what the world is, inside and outside of us: pain. The last time, it followed the Grim King’s first impulse upon his awakening. Who knows what it will follow the next time it erupts without control? If what you call the Star of Mersia should happen a second time, again without purpose…” Loran shook her head. “Not even we know what form it will take or where it will happen.”
The whole thing was nothing less than nauseating. Swallowing the bile, Emere managed to speak.
“So I have been chosen to pick which country to erase fromexistence. That is the decision you want me to make. That is the purpose you want me to give you. That is why you sought me out.”
Wasthisreally the destiny he had chased all his life?
“You have a king’s destiny. Your choice is not what we can predict. However, we speculate that you may want to see the Imperial heartland suffer, for what you feel that it has done to you.”
Those words had truth in them. But Emere’s immediate thoughts of millions upon millions dying and the world plunging into untold chaos did as well. He cursed under his breath and said, as clearly as he could enunciate, a single syllable:
“No.”
With that, Emere wondered. Did this one word absolve him of his culpability for the Great Fire, two years ago, that had robbed Rakel of her husband, along with hundreds of other lives? Did it excuse him for the twenty years of dream-chasing? Probably not, but he felt relieved in his answer. Maybe this really had been his destiny all along, to say “No.”
Loran tilted her head, stood silent for a brief moment, then spoke. “Regardless, you must make a decision. What will you do with the hundred years of suffering and sorrow built up here?”
“Why must it be me and not Ludvik? If you needed a decision, he would’ve suited you better. He was more than willing.”
“Councillor Ludvik had made up his mind very early, and very easily. He never questioned his own convictions. He thought we urged him to destroy Arland. We merely showed him what he wanted. He was a man capable of only one answer. There is no value in such an answer. His only use was a cause for an effect, a stepping stone, a use which he has proven perfect for—as he brought you to this moment. The one who had been chosen fromthe start was you, Prince Emere, and only you. You were chosen by standing here, and you stand here because you are chosen.”
Loran held out her hand to Emere.
“For you are as we are. You wandered the world and took it all in, yet were unable to reconcile its contradictions. Not once have you been free from questioning. Never have you made an easy decision, nor have you been satiated in your wanderings. You have the same pain as ours. So give us your answer. It shall be our purpose, your first and final act as our king.”
Emere took a deep breath. The Tree Lords had taught him that one could not pick the moment of choice, but at that moment, the future depended on the choice one made. This was a moment that he couldn’t shirk. Destiny, it turned out, was a duty. Emere opened his mouth.
“I see that such things cannot simply be bottled up in you.”
The moment he said this, a weight he hadn’t even known existed was lifted from his heart. The memory of wandering the world, burdened by his vague sadness, now made him smile. The beach with sands of crystal, the moldy inn during the rainy season, and Rakel against the dusty winds of Mersia, only her bright eyes showing through her face wrap.
