For the sixteenth scenario, Euryphel walked through the sun room and stood just behind its sole entrance. When Urstes knocked, rather than opening up like he normally would, Euryphel exploded the door outward with a wind-empowered kick.

The decemancer flew backward into the courtyard, reeling and bleeding from a head wound, but clearly still conscious. As Urstes hadn’t been given the order to attack, he stood down, watching the scene with interest.

The decemancer cradled a hand to his bleeding temple while hovering slightly off the ground. He groaned and shot the prince an inscrutable look, all while ignoring the panicked reactions of servants and other passersby in the immediate area. He didn’t bother giving Guardian Urstes another glance, his attention fully focused on the prince.

The decemancer then bowed his head and quietly remarked, “It’s a pleasure to meet the Crowned Prime.”

Euryphel stared intensely at the floating figure. What was this man, a pacifist? Whenever he engaged Julian directly, the decemancer avoided fighting back.

A single question bubbled unbidden into Euryphel’s mind.

“Have we met before?”

The decemancer’s feet touched back down on the courtyard’s pale stone, his wind-shorn hair sticking up awkwardly. He looked around uncertainly, then back toward the threshold where the prince was still standing.

“Can that door still close?” Julian asked.

Euryphel glanced at the somewhat-caved-in door. The hinges looked fine. “Yes.”

The decemancer massaged his head, wincing slightly. “We should probably talk inside.”

Euryphel figured that they probably had about fifteen seconds left in the scenario. “Come in, then.”

The decemancer walked forward and into the sun room; Euryphel closed the door behind him.

“Well?”

Julian smiled weakly. “I know you, but you don’t know me.”

Euryphel could feel the scenario counting down to its last few seconds.

“Why have you come here?” the prince blurted.

“To talk.”

“About?”

The decemancer paused, wasting precious seconds. Euryphel felt his patience fraying.

“...the Infinity Loop.”

Before the prince could fully process his words, he was once more snapped back to the divan.

He sighed into his hands, contemplating whether it was worth continuing to confront the decemancer outside. The seconds ticked down, and soon enough, Euryphel saw the fate arrows of Urstes and the decemancer appear behind the door temporarily linked to the sun room.

“Urstes, leave us,” the prince called out, opening the door with a gust of wind.

When he heard the decemancer step onto the aged stone floor, Euryphel shut the door from afar and started a new scenario. He lounged on his divan while waiting for Julian to approach the main chamber, fiddling absently with the sapphire-socketed hair ornament cresting up over his ear.

The decemancer entered the sun room; dark, slightly-disheveled hair and circles under his gray eyes conveyed a sense of fatigue. While the man’s eyes scanned the room, Euryphel set his recursion checkpoint.

Without warning, Euryphel flung the decemancer across the room with a sudden wave of wind, catching him off guard. Ian caught himself before slamming into the wall; he seemed fraught but unharmed, floating gently above the stone tile.

“Why are you here?” Euryphel asked again.

“I need your help.” He looked as though he was about to say something else, but Euryphel was unrelenting.

“Who told you to come?”

“You did,” the decemancer said without hesitation. He paused, smiling knowingly. “Don’t test me, Eury.”

Eury?

Why had the foreign practitioner called him Eury, of all things? The number of people who dared be so informal with the Crowned Prime of the SPU could fit on one hand, and this stranger didn’t count among them.

And his tone of voice…

The prince felt bits of gleaned knowledge fall into place: The mysterious decemancer could be a product of the Infinity Loop. The idea that a regular man two days prior had become a peak practitioner overnight was nearly impossible to swallow, yet that would explain why he claimed to know him, or at least one version of him, and why he mentioned the experiment.

Euryphel decided he needed to do significantly more digging.

“Who are you?” he asked; he got up from the divan and sat on the window sill, warm sunlight falling on his back.

“Ignatius Julian Dunai,” the decemancer replied.

“A member of the Dunai practitioner bloodline?” Euryphel asked.

“The very same.”

Euryphel narrowed his eyes. “I don’t believe anyone from even your extended clan to be a peak decemancer. How long have you been a practitioner?”

Julian snorted. “222 weeks.”

222 weeks...? Euryphel spent a moment trying to calculate the conversion to years and months.

“It's over four years,” Julian added.

“What have you been doing before now?”

“Attending school.”

The prince frowned. Peak practitioners didn’t attend school: they taught school.

“Where?”

“Academia Hector,” Julian replied.

Euryphel suddenly snapped back to the recursion checkpoint. So far, what Julian Dunai had told him seemed to support the claim that he was an Infinity Loop subject.

Ian was now back at the center of the room, unharmed.

“Who are you?” Euryphel asked, shifting his position on the divan.

“Ignatius Julian Dunai,” Julian said.

“And why have you come?” the prince said coolly.

The decemancer frowned. “Technically, to see you.”

Euryphel froze. To see...me? That answer isn’t exactly consistent. If the prince recalled correctly, the decemancer had previously said he came to get help.

“And why would you seek out the Crowned Prime of the SPU directly?”

Julian sighed. “Have you heard of the Infinity Loop experiment?”

Euryphel inclined his head. “Yes.”

“Well, I was a participant, and within one of the dilation loop layers...I met you.”

Euryphel still found the story hard to accept: If Julian really was a graduate of the Infinity Loop experiment, then he’d exceeded the affinity gains from all previous trials by an enormous margin. It wasn’t impossible, but it was highly unlikely. But so far, his story had been completely consistent on that point.

“I’m not surprised that I featured within the Infinity Loop, though I can’t imagine it was in a particularly positive light. Why did you come here, then, after meeting me?” the prince asked, resting his head on a palm.

Julian paused, as though considering his words. “To be blunt, you told me that you’d welcome me. I didn’t know what would happen when I left the Infinity Loop, but at the very least I didn’t plan to stay in Selejo.”

“Why not? Are you not thankful for the fruits of the experiment? You seem to have awakened a potent latent affinity inside the Infinity Loop; many people would die for such an opportunity.”

The decemancer closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “Thankful?” Suddenly, he began to laugh. “The power I’ve gained is more calamitous than beneficial. I met you in the Infinity Loop, told you about my struggles, and in the end, you extended an invitation for me to seek you out when I returned to the real world. Here I am.”

Euryphel snapped back to the recursion checkpoint.

It seemed like Julian really traveled all the way from Selejo because of him.

—

One of the pitfalls of Regret affinity was its frustrating time limit. Since the prince was limited to approximately one minute per scenario, he spoke quickly; thankfully, Julian seemed to entertain his odd, rapid-fire questions, as though expecting them.

“You were in the Infinity Loop for 222 weeks.”

Julian’s face lit up in surprise. “How did you kn-“

“And while you were in the loop, you met me.”

“Yes,” Julian said, no longer questioning the Prince’s reasoning.

“And you met me while visiting the SPU on a diplomatic convoy?”

Julian laughed quietly. “It’s a long story.”

Much too long to get all at once, Euryphel thought to himself as he snapped back. He continued with the next scenario, urging both himself and Julian on with the mental mantra, Keep going.

“The experiment ended yesterday?”

Julian nodded.

“And yet you’re already here. Why the rush to leave Selejo?”

The decemancer smiled bitterly. “Let’s just say the experiment was a bit too successful.”

Euryphel snapped back to his divan, dissolving the recursion checkpoint. The real Julian scratched his head, his mouth open as if he was about to speak.

“Don’t,” Euryphel said softly. “Don’t. Say. Anything.”

Euryphel had lost count of the exact scenario number, but thought it must be over sixty. Even though that only equated to around an hour of time, Euryphel felt mentally exhausted. It was far easier to probe people that he knew well, such as the members of his court. He wished he knew the right questions to ask, rather than spitballing and fishing for interesting responses.

He decided to give himself a bit of a break, so to speak. Rather than asking the decemancer a question, he sent forth a flurry of wind blades. The decemancer jerked out of the way, narrowly avoiding them, but Euryphel continued his assault, dashing around the room and sending out blades of wind from every direction. Despite the furious, mindless onslaught, Julian stayed on the defensive, either dodging, blocking, or simply taking Euryphel’s lacerating blows.

Euryphel felt the kindling of fury stoke in his chest: a stranger–at least from his perspective–had come into his city, into his sun room, and defended against him with impunity. While Euryphel couldn’t claim to be the most powerful wind elementalist in the SPU, he wasn’t weak. So as the decemancer repeatedly dodged and deflected his wind blades with the touch of an oil-coated hand, the prince felt a sense of confusing despair: His killing intent had never been so thwarted by quizzical indifference.

“Are you satisfied?” Julian asked.

“Not even close,” the prince grumbled.

He snapped back to the divan, then started the next scenario.

“Who are the two women you came with?” Euryphel asked.

“My mother and aunt.”

And the next.

“You learned decemancy from a single book, on a ship in the middle of the Illyrian Ocean filled with a host of half-dead, chained captives?”

“That’s a fair summary.”

“...and you never thought to ask them why they were there? To talk to them?”

Julian groaned. “I did, but...they weren’t in their right minds, and usually talking to them only served to excite them and make them waste energy, causing them to die early.”

And the next.

“What did you do to pass the time, aside from practicing decemancy?”

“Not much,” the decemancer admitted. “Getting too off-task, so to speak, tended to force early restarts. I did like to make bone and shell constructs while waiting for the boat to reach the city.”

And the next.

“You went to school to study glossy programmatics?”

“A terrorist organization named Hashat?”

“You gave the Selejan researchers a potentioreading!?”

—

Eventually, the prince was satisfied. As far as he could tell, the decemancer had been truthful. His answers deviated slightly, but in Euryphel’s experience, this was a marker of genuine speech: only something rehearsed would be the same time after time. And even though he wasn’t able to hear a single long explanation of events from the Selejan escapee, he was able to gather a lot of information through sheer volume of questions.

Julian was honest, meant him no harm, and even had cause for a grudge against Selejo. He was like a gift sent from the heavens.

“Ignatius, Julian, Dunai,” Euryphel said, putting space between each word. “You are the most fascinating creature I’ve met.”

—

The first prince often tested those around him, gauging their ability to defend themselves, or their loyalty. People had a habit of revealing their true allegiances when pushed to the brink of death, or upon seeing a loved one or ally endangered. He ran scenarios as often as possible, probing both new and old faces alike. He tested his guardians each at least once a month. He usually tested his fellow princes whenever they entered the room.

If the people around him knew the extent and frequency at which he secretly attacked others, Euryphel knew that they’d deem him paranoid. That’s why, of course, he didn’t tell anyone.

A long since passed Selejan general claimed that victory followed when one knew the enemy as intimately as oneself, and saw oneself as though reflected in a cloudy mirror. It was important to understand, but equally important to recognize the uncertainty of perception.

Euryphel liked this saying, as it meshed quite well with his own philosophy on life: everyone is to be trusted until they aren’t. Probe, and probe again, until at last they reveal their true intentions. The visible world is but seen through a cloudy mirror: patience, and multiple perspectives, are required to make out the complete picture.

Euryphel sighed. He knew he wasn’t being quite honest with himself: He’d been relieved when the decemancer first entered Zukal’iss, long before he had even laid eyes on the man.

He turned over onto his side and rolled over, burying his cheek into a pillow. He then extended his left hand, staring at his gold-coated index finger. A transparent arrow flowed from his fingertip over the bed, draping over the comforter before disappearing behind the wall. Off in the distance, he could see the faint point of the arrow: a single large spike like a shark tooth, flanked by a set of symmetrical, curving thorns. Perhaps he couldn't see the arrow so much as feel it, sensing a sharp tri-pronged indent beyond himself.

But on that same hand from which the arrow extended outward, on his index finger’s knuckle joint, was an identical golden arrowhead pointing into his hand, its curved tines reaching around his finger like an insect’s mandibles. The head of the arrow was sunk deep into the space between his middle finger and thumb, peeking out of the flesh where it connected to those two crescent-moon, rose-thorn tines. He stared at the almost-ring, thinking that its near-opaque surface glinted brighter than the crystal chandelier overhead.

His arrows usually pierced other people, indicating those individuals with whom he was destined to have business. In essence, the arrows identified enemies and friends. But there were a handful of times when the arrow’s sting was returned back to its source; and each of those occasions was when he was much younger, his destiny beyond his control...before he became the Crowned Prime.

He didn’t know exactly what it meant that this time, the arrow had latched onto his finger and sank into his hand. From a symbolic standpoint, regardless of whether Julian was friend or foe, he apparently wasn’t someone Euryphel could easily get away from.

Euryphel lay on the bedspread, trying to rest, but found himself restlessly turning over the same question in his head: What exactly had happened in the Infinity Loop that led Ignatius Julian Dunai to seek him out?

He bit his lip. The Infinity Loop research group should have the loop recording, he reasoned. A recording that has surely spread to the Eldemari and her supporters. If only I could get a hold of it…