***Tzen Chu, Imperial Prince***

“Was this jungle placed here to torment the likes of man? How can it possibly be so damp?” He pulled his chafing clothes away from him to illustrate.

He glanced over, but Llortan walked beside him seemingly without any form of discomfort.

“I’ve got air conditioning in these rags,” Llortan said, motioning to the stained cloak he wore over his towering shoulders.

“What?” Tzen asked, frowning. Llortan gave nonsensical answers a great deal of the time, but they were always grounded in something that actually existed.

“Kidding, Harbingers don’t have soft enough skin to chafe in humidity.”

Llortan took another bite of his sliver jerky as they walked down the deserted streets of Allast.

“Did you know ‘Llortan’ is a title?” He asked, cocking his head curiously.

“No.”

“Means ‘The watcher’ in my language.” He said, scanning the streets idly. “There’s a Llortan in each galaxy, to keep a lid on insurgencies, unexplained Ravager flare-ups…that sort of thing.”

“Have you ever been to other Galaxies?”

“Of course I have, I’m not a hick.”

“What’s it like?”

“Well, FTL is a thing, but it still takes an ass-ton of time between galaxies, so you spend most of it on ice. It’s an uncomfortable process where you’re stuffed onto a cramped metal tank, then stuffed into an even more cramped metal tank, then you pass out. The only thing small enough to make intergalactic jumps with any amount of promptness are tightly packaged molecules with coded messages. The energy cost of opening a wormhole for those things is…”

Llortan waggled his fingers. “Manageable.”

“Although if Vashniel knew who we’ve got running around on Marconen, he’d probably pay the astronomical cost of making a wormhole for his whole fleet, get here in a couple days instead of a couple years.”

“And that person is?” Tzen asked, motioning for Llortan to continue.

“Oh yeah, I forget you were an ignorant savage there for a moment. Greshna was a rebel leader who killed the Mad King and cast his soul out into the void, never to be seen again. The Mad King is also known as the King in Exile, by the way.

“For this crime,” Llortan continued between bites. “Greshna was sentenced to become a Ravager, to spend all of eternity getting stomped by our glorious expansion. This was when sentencing someone to becoming a Ravager really started to come into vogue.”

“If he was called the Mad King, why did anyone care that he was killed?”

“That’s…complicated,” Llortan said, frown visible under his rags. “Our civilization made enormous strides under his leadership, carrying us out into the stars. He was the first one to master Bent, and had an active hand in creating The System. He ruled for thousands of years, the closest thing we had to a god. Even if he was mad and tearing our empire asunder, he created it in the first place. You can’t just kill him and walk away.”

“Not with that kind of legacy.” Tzen said, nodding.

“Exactly.”

“Halt!” a Juntai guardsman called, raising the glowing filament on his arm to cast light on the two of them. There were four of them, emerging from a side passage like an ambush predator.

Tzen halted.

“Where are you two from?” the lead guard asked.

“I’m from Boles, He’s from Gadvera,” Tzen said, motioning between them.

“Tall one looks like a cruth,” one of the ones in the back said aloud.

“What’s a cruth?” Tzen asked with a frown.

“It’s a derogatory word for ‘mutant’ in the local language,” Llortan said in bolesian with a shrug.

“Hey!” the lead Juntai guard shouted, pointing at them. “Speak human words in our presence, anything else and we’ll consider you to be plotting against us!”

Llortan and Tzen shared a look.

“Oh gods, I think they can speak without words! Like the brain cruth.” One of the guys in the back whispered.

“Shit, just look at that one’s eyes. You don’t get eyes like that without having worms in the brain.”

Well, this took a turn for the stupid, Tzen thought, suppressing the desire to roll his eyes. These men were scared, packed with nervous energy, like devil powder, ready to explode.

Ever since they had arrived in Allast, the mood had slowly become more and more awful, like a dark shadow that hung over the entire city, pressing down on people’s shoulders, worrying at their heels.

There was some kind of hysteria building, a belief that mutants were running rampant through the streets, despite no evidence to the contrary.

Above and beyond that, the authorities seemed to be reinforcing this belief, conducting random sweeps, inspecting people’s skulls. When asked why, most people were given a cuff over the head, or a swift kick, When people protested too hard, they disappeared.

People weren’t entirely stupid.

They saw the people in charge looking for mutants in general and damage to the skull specifically, it wasn’t long before word started around that they were looking for some kind of body jumping monster that hollowed out people’s brains.

Absolutely nuts, Tzen rolled his eyes. Everyone knew the odds of surviving a mutation were low, the odds of it being useful were lower, and the odds of it being brain-sucking without any physical manifestation specifically, allowing the user to jump from body to body without consequence…astronomical.

Still, logic wasn’t something that the common folk dealt in. The mere idea that anyone might be ‘taken’ by these mutants and become one of them led neighbor to distance themselves from neighbor for fear of corruption.

And the fear kept getting worse. At first it was just inspections, but gradually, more and more people were taken away, and the people of Allast began living just as much in fear of their protectors as these imaginary monsters.

Matter of fact, Tzen thought, glancing around. The windows and doors of a dozen homes were cracked open, silently observing them as they were confronted by the guardsmen.

“I can assure you,” Tzen said, pointing to his short-cropped hair. “There are no worms. You can check for yourself if you like.

“It’s been a long while since this whole mess got started,” The leader muttered.

“Yeah, the scars could be healed already.” One in the back chimed in

“And that’s some pretty thick hair. Could be hiding them easy enough.”

Godsdamnit. All the diplomacy and charm of a born prince was worth less than shit when confronted with mass hysteria.

“No, it’s not worth the risk. Unless you two can prove you’re here not infected, or here on official business, we’ll have to take you in. Do either of you have an I.D.?” The leader asked.

Tzen did have an I.D. unfortunately it was issued in Boles, carved from the ivory horn of a fairy beetle, and therefore completely unrecognized in Juntai.

“You see –” Tzen began, his mind whirring as he constructed a well-crafted, emotionally impactful reason why they should be allowed to go on their way.

“I have an I.D.” Llortan said, sending goosebumps down Tzen’s spine. He was fairly sure the Harbinger didn’t have one, and from the last half-year of accompanying the creature around the continent, he was fairly sure he could read the man’s tone.

It wasn’t good.

The Harbinger pantomimed reaching into his pocket, then whipped his oversized fist forward, punching through the lightly clad guard’s breastbone with a crunch. An instant later, there was a plop of snapping veins and a sickly squish as the Harbinger pulled the man’s heart out of his chest.

“Right here, see?” he said, before tossing it aside.

Grampa smoked next to the shed.*

*A Bolesian saying roughly translating to ‘All hell broke loose’.

The guards squawked in fear, backing away from Llortan. They haphazardly raised their arms and launched blistering attacks of white-hot lightning.

The lightning spattered off of the Harbinger like water off a hot stove, breaking and crackling out in every direction, catching the nearby wooden buildings.

Catching them on fire.

The next few minutes felt a lot longer than they actually were. People boiled out of the buildings they’d been cowering in, ostensibly to help put out the fire and perhaps aid in defeating the evil mutant.

Then one of the lightning bolts caught a young man rushing forward with a bucket of water. The young man went down, twitching and smoking while friends and family gathered around, calling his name at the top of their lungs. Priorities shifted.

There were still people trying to put out the fire, sure, but there were also people trying to get revenge for the young man.

They got hit with lightning, too.

The fear that had been building up or the last six months erupted in magnificent fashion as the citizens of Allast shifted from meek and cowed to bloodthirsty and enraged in a matter of minutes.

Now, there were people starting fires and people trying to put them out, guards were being mobbed wherever they showed their faces, and people rushing the gates of the palace, howling at the top of their lungs.

Tzen had expected things to turn sour after Llortan let his temper get the better of him, but the way it spread through the city like wildfire… that was above and beyond anything Tzen had ever seen.

The city’s air became choked with smoke from hundreds of fires across the city as the sun started to rise on the horizon.

With the dawn came Force.

The military diocese and his elite troops tore through the city, pacifying the people through sheer violence, breaking their morale by dropping torso-thick bolts of lightning down on the city from the sky.

The lightning was strong enough to melt stone and carbonize flesh, repeated strikes killing thousands of rioters in seconds.

“Amateurs,” Llortan said, having grabbed some crunchy fried nuts and retired to the top of one of the tallest private buildings in the center of the city, affording him an excellent view of the destruction.

“Real human diocese don’t need a lightning gimmick. On the other hand, real human diocese are too self-absorbed to be bothered with putting down a rebellion. Take the good with the bad I guess.”

A bolt of lightning sheared off a third of the building next to them, nearly blinding Tzen, who wanted nothing more than to find something sensible and sturdy to hide under.

He wasn’t afraid of these Juntai diocese in particular, but it seemed like the height of foolishness to sit under a hail of death without a good reason.

“Did you have to set off a riot?” Tzen asked.

“They would have done it themselves in a matter of days. This way we’ll get some use out of it.”

Another bolt of lightning melted a guard and the young man he was grappling with. Tzen glanced up, wondering if the attacks were basically random at this point.

“Relax,” Llortan said, waving a hand above them. A pale blue shield sprung into being momentarily at Llortan’s motion, creating a dome around them. “This building will be fine. Let’s take the opportunity to go fishing for Ravagers. Keep your eyes open for suspects.”

Tzen wanted to reply that he’d been doing it for half a year already; he knew what the creature was looking for. He didn’t say anything though, he’d already said it enough times that he was fairly sure Llortan wasn’t going to stop telling him what to do.

“You know,” Tzen said, tackling the problem from another angle “When negotiating a conflict between two or more people, de-escalation is key.”

“I like to think of it a shaking the crap slurry really hard and seeing what kind of shit rises to the top. It’s super easy to spot a Ravager when you’ve given them a stage of violence to stand on.”

What happens if there aren’t any Ravagers in this city? Did we just start a civil war for no other reason than to sit back and watch it happen?

The day wore on, and while there were heroes and villains, none of them met the Harbinger’s criteria for extermination. Besides, everyone who stood out was crushed by the diocese in a matter of seconds.

By midday, all fight had been taken out of the people of Allast, and the only thing that remained were the slowly dying fires dotting the city.

“Well, if that didn’t get the low-hanging fruit, I don’t know what will,” Llortan said, pushing himself to his feet with a sigh. “Let’s check out Boles next. I can do you a favor and kill your family when we get there if you want.”

“I’d rather take the throne by my own hand, but thank you.” Tzen said rising as well. He dreaded the chaos Llortan might unleash upon arrival in his home country, but on the other hand, after seeing what that one Ravager had done in the Den of Iniquity…Tzen shuddered.

Perhaps it would be for the best if they were culled from Boles as well.

“Hold on a second,” Llortan said, holding up a hand, his thick black nails showing through the wrappings on his hands. “You hear that?”

There was a faint hum in the distance, rapidly growing louder and louder, resolving into the buzzing whine of thousands of winged insects.