“Then it is agreed. House Ku’leth is to be removed, root and stem,” the grizzled head of house Kinzena said. “These ‘crypts’ that allow any common-blooded peasant to imitate an alia cannot be tolerated.”

But...Lily is a Ku’leth…

“Hey!” Grant snapped out of it and realized he’d overpoured the wine in the council member’s glass. It was Harren of House Morkel. The emaciated curse-witch eyed Grant with a contemplative gaze that sent shivers of fear straight down his spine.

“Deepest apologies,” Grant said quietly, whipping his towel out of his page’s apron and mopping up the spill with what he hoped was professional speed.

Harren grunted and waved him away. “Frankly, I’m convinced that house Ku’leth has no power, and the whole thing is a sham. The bodies of their strongest members have none of the telltale signs of strong magic.”

Grant silently backed away as rumbling agreement echoed across the table with the seven noble families, trying his best to conceal his trembling hands inside his apron.

He backed all the way to the servant’s entrance before ducking out of the room. He switched off with the next young noble scion, excusing himself by claiming he’d angered Harren and would rather not stoke her anger by hanging around.

The other children were sympathetic to his plight and offered to pick up the slack as he took some time off.

Grant thanked them, then covered up the livery of his page’s uniform with a heavy cloak he’d snatched off the rack beside the hearth.

He sprinted out into the oppressive dark of night, aiming for Lily’s music teacher.

I gotta warn Lily!

If he was fast, and she was late, there would be enough time to save her. He’d managed to intercept her carriage often enough when he hadn’t slunk away in the middle of his duties.

This time, though, he had to catch her before she left for her home, the gilded mansion on the northeast side of the city of Ka’alesh, the emperor’s seat of power.

Grant practically flew through the streets, his slender thirteen-year-old body weightless and fast as an arrow.

There she is! Grant thought, his heart stuttering in his chest as he spotted the object of his affections. The fourteen-year-old girl was climbing into her carriage, her dress clinging to her hips in a way that set Grant’s young mind on fire and left very little sense behind.

“Oh, Grant,” Lily called to him, her voice soft and sweet, her delicate face framed by her perfect, raven-black hair. “You’re early. Do you want to ride me?”

“Ah.” Grant shook his head. She obviously said ‘with’ me. “No, Lily, treachery! The council of seven has decided to destroy your family! Just now! You have to run away!”

Lily’s eyes widened in fear, looking past Grant, into the darkness of the night.

“Ah, Mirai En’hol said you would be here, Ms. Ku’leth.” A voice called from the darkness as no less than seven Vith-blooded knights in full plate armor emerged into the dim lantern light of the music teacher’s home.

“There’s been an incident at your home. You must come with us, for your own protection.”

Lily’s beautiful features went flat. “I’d rather not.”

“Then you leave us no choice but to retrieve you by force. Apologies.” The lead suit of armor strode forward, his hand resting comfortably on the pommel of his sword.

“You’ll not lay a finger on her!” Grant shouted as the power of young love flooded his veins, bursting his body out of his servant’s livery. He charged forward and ripped a sword out of the knight’s grip before expertly blocking the nearby attacker.

He sent the assailants flying with a single sweep of his pilfered sword, sending the armored, faceless figures tumbling into the darkness, never to reappear.

“Oh, my hero!” Lily said, clinging to Grant’s partially-clothed form.

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Thank you so much.”

The girl he had been head-over-heels in love with for years kissed him. She kissed him on the lips.

***Grant En’hol***

“Gah!” Grant started awake, the feel of Lily’s lips on his fading gradually, along with the wildly inaccurate dream of That Night.

The only thing that had been right was the kiss. Lily’s bodyguard, Kar’el, had disposed of the knights in short order while Grant cowered under the carriage with Lily. The two young teens had clutched each other tight, fearing for their lives while howls of rage and pain echoed through the night.

A metal hand had grasped her ankle, and he’d hit it with a rock. The rock hadn’t even dented the armor. It was Kar’el disembowling the man that made him let go.

But he’d gotten that kiss.

Grant stared up at the overcast sky, framed on either side by the impressively straight-edged brick buildings that formed the alley he slept in.

He took a deep breath that smelled of shit and the strange fumes these carriages spewed.

A rat skittered by at eye-level.

Nope.

Grant grunted, turning over and facing the wall, dragging the moldy cardboard over his body. He still cared enough to try and stay a little dry.

He reached into the pocket of his damp plaid coat and retrieved a ‘candy bar’. The preserved rations were unbelievably sweet, and while their overwhelming one-note flavor offended his refined palate, they had enough energy in them to keep him going.

Grant chewed slowly, staring at the brick wall, idly waving a rat away from his pocket, bulging with the sweet preserved rations.

He had no reason to keep living.

But he was too much of a coward to die.

Lily was dead.

The girl he’d loved for a decade, the one he’d went to prison for, the girl he’d studied planar travel to find, the girl he’d broken into a secure facility housing the empire’s dirtiest secrets, risking agonizing death for.

She’d died the night they were reunited.

Fate was playing a cruel joke on him.

Ten years. Ten YEARS. His childhood spent swooning, his puberty spent in prison, his few years of adulthood delving into secrets that might see him hanged… All of it was for nothing.

There were no take-backs or re-dos. Those years had been spent.

Grant remembered stumbling back to the ‘car’, the fine clothes he’d stolen to meet Lily again shredded and covered in muck. A man in a strange uniform was hauling Lily’s wide-eyed, staring, bloodied body out of the ‘vehicle’.

He’d seen the crypt snare Lily’s soul. He’d turned and walked away.

That was the end of it. There was no coming back from that.

He couldn’t get back to Orsoth, either. Not without a lump of gold the size of his head, something Hal the Hairy had informed him was ‘impossible’. His bloodline wasn’t that of a Kinzena, either, so there was no chance he’d be able to hop between planes on his own merits. His En’hol bloodline had manifested strong, but uncontrolled. He occasionally had visions of the future that left him half-crazed and raving, and ironically, completely incapable of remembering them or writing them down.

His bloodline was the only reason he hadn’t been executed for warning Lily all those years ago, but here, it wasn’t worth the shit he scraped off his boots.

On Orsoth, he was a priceless asset for his House.

On Urth, he was a smelly homeless madman.

“Grant.” One of his fellow smelly homeless madmen shook his shoulder.

“Uh,” Grant grunted, thinking about Lily’s appearance when he’d finally seen her again for the first time in six years. She’d become positively radiant, a beauty that songs would be sung about for hundreds of years to come.

He always knew that she was pretty when they were children, but…he’d been floored. Still, he couldn’t help but see the slender child he’d first fallen in love with, buried beneath the skin of the beautiful woman.

“Grant!”

“Uh!?” Grant grunted, angry at Hal for interrupting his brooding. “What is it, peasant!? Can’t you see I’m brooding!?”

“Cops!” Hal the Hairy whispered before scuttling away like a crab, somehow disappearing into a grate far too small for him, like some feat of legerdemain.

“Cops?” If Hal the Hairy was concerned, they must be some kind of dangerous monster. Hal had eaten a live rat once, so Grant knew the man wasn’t easily shaken.

He sat up in his makeshift bedroll, drawing his shortsword. The insectile clicking sound down the alleyway resolved into two men wearing the same strange uniform as the man who’d failed to save Lily. They bore metallic badges on their breasts, but seemed to bear no arms or armor.

Some kind of public servants, perhaps? Street sweepers or some such?

They spotted his gilded short blade and pulled out some odd, boxy little things from their belts, holding them in front of themselves as if they could ward off sixteen inches of steel.

“Sir, put down the…sword.”

“Away, public servants,” Grant said with a dismissive wave of his blade. “I’m contemplating the horrifying meaninglessness of existence, and the folly of a life spent loving. I do not wish to be disturbed.”

“Sir, put down the weapon!” The man shouted.

“Clean the next alley down, street sweepers! Hop to it!”

“This is your last warning!”

“Or what?” Grant asked, levering himself to his feet.

“Dude, don’t!” Hal the Hairy’s whisper emanated from the grate, just loud enough to hear. Grant didn’t really care anymore. Maybe these uniformed men and women could put him out of his misery in a blaze of bloody vengeance, unleashing his ire at this world that had killed Lily.

“You peasants would first have to get past sixteen inches of cold steel, wielded by a trained—”

A pair of fangs popped out of the little boxy thing in the left one’s hands, darted out and struck Grant in the chest and waist.

Suddenly every muscle in Grant’s body cramped at the same time, clenching and unclenching over and over at a speed that beggared belief.

Poison!

“Gah!” Grant let out a hoarse scream and toppled to the ground like a felled tree. He tried to activate his stolen invulnerability crypt, but the fangs had simply been too quick for him to respond to, and now his body wouldn’t follow his commands.

The two uniformed men rolled him over as he continued to twitch, shoving his face into the feces-coated alleyway. They twisted his arms violently behind his back before hauling him to his feet, yanking out the fangs in his torso, and tossing his limp body into the back of their death-machine.

“No! NOOOOO!” Grant shouted, beating his feet against the flawless glass exoskeleton containing him inside the strange monster.

The uniformed person in the front opened a narrow panel in the glass, then held a tiny black cylinder up to it.

They depressed the white tab on top of it, and a stream of orange-red liquid sprayed out with great force, catching Grant in the eyes.

It BURNS!

Grant howled in pain, writhing in the back of the monster’s storage space while the two evil, evil men discussed with each other, their jargon making their discussion nearly unintelligible, even with the translation tattoos on his scalp.

“So this is the candy bar thief, huh? Man, I really don’t wanna deal with crazy tonight.”

“Same.”

“Maybe we can foist him off on Debbie. She likes crazy.”

“I’ll go halfsies on it.”

Grant gasped, trying to blink the tears out of his eyes, wondering whether he would ever be able to see again.

“Deal, but we gotta ask him about the thing first, though.”

“Ah, right.”

“Hey, Baron Dumbass, have you seen a bunch of coke hit the streets yesterday, or somebody selling a bunch of gold, anything like that?”

“I don’t know what coke is!” Grant cried.

“Wow, good answer,” one of the men said, followed by snorting laughter from the other.

Grant felt the ‘car’ come to a halt, but he couldn’t really see what was going on. A moment later, thick arms hauled him out of the strange beast and shoved him stumbling through a crowded, loud constabulary, into some kind of cell, populated by smudges of various colors, who seemed to recoil from his smell.

There, Grant was shoved into the corner by unfriendly feet, before he collapsed into a ball, resolved to spend the rest of his miserable existence there.

So tired, Grant thought as his eyes drifted closed.

“Fuckshitass!” A shout dragged Grant out of his short nap, blinking tears out of his eyes. He could see a little better now.

“Indeed,” another voice said, a dark-haired peasant standing outside the bars, peering down at a tall youth who was scrambling to his feet. The peasant outside the bars turned a cold gaze on the rest of them, thumbs hooked into his belt loops. “All you other fuckwads stand with your face pressed against the wall, hands on your ears.”

A helping hand hauled Grant to his feet and shoved him against the wall.

That youth looks familiar, Grant thought, trying to peer over his shoulder before one of the other prisoners straightened his face to stare at the blank white wall.

A few minutes later, the ‘cop’ left, and everyone in the cell relaxed, relegating Grant back to his spot in the corner, as far away from everyone else as possible.

Grant sat with his knees tucked up against his chest, trying to parse what exactly he found so familiar about this gangly ‘Urth’ human.

The Urth human’s retainer, a much shorter fellow with dark hair, caught Grant’s gaze and drew his fingertips across his throat.

Grant stopped staring, averting his gaze to the blank wall.

Still, when a Ku’leth animated skeleton freed the two young men, Grant couldn’t help but stare. To everyone it looked like a simple cat, but Grant could see the blue flicker of the spirit controlling it, as well as the intelligence behind its eyes.

Was Lily still alive? No, there was no way. Her soul had gone to the Other Side. The cat seemed to be directly under control of the tall young man.

So what am I missing?

Like most of the others in the cell, Grant took the opportunity to escape when it presented itself. He needed to learn more about this young man wielding Ku’leth knowledge.

Perhaps he could send Grant home.