Lily’s promised practicalities and what there is in store turns out to be a set of brackets, a set of challenges, and a disbelief at my immediate objection.

“You have a problem with the design of this tournament, Magelord?”

I’m pretty sure her use of my title instead of my name is a slight, but I ignore it. “Stars, yes. Who in the Void’s depths designed this, and what were they thinking?”

“I did.” Her voice is low, and steady. “And I was thinking that it’s a tournament.”

“A single-elimination tournament of single matches? This is absurd. It’s a literal deathmatch when it doesn’t at all need to be; the Temple has enough power, you obviously have enough power if you can build something of this size, that you can do at least a double elimination bracket, preferably after a group stage of some sort. Or you just tell people that a lethal blow is disqualifying, and if they don’t like it, they can go vent themselves; power without control is a catastrophe in its own right.”

“Spending more power than absolutely necessary is not an option.” Lily’s voice is steady, and her facial expression doesn’t move or change, but there’s a tension that ripples down her legs. The wood creaks audibly as her thighs clench, and the moment passes as she deliberately relaxes so thoroughly I wonder if I had imagined the change in the first place. “Zidanya would not be in your company if you weren’t a torch and beacon, so I’ll hear you out on the question of control, but every perat is going into running the tournament itself.”

“Why?” I adjust my body language consciously as best I can. Open, unthreatening, curious; that last one isn’t hard, I want to know has never been something I struggle to convey. It’s something I occasionally, maybe often, have struggled to convey in a socially appropriate manner, but that’s not my problem right now. “I can tell you’re serious about that, but that doesn’t mean I understand, you know?”

“Not now.” Lily grins at me, and my breath catches in my throat. “I haven’t even told you about the structure for the individual matches. I want to see the look on your face.”

“How do you do that?”

She looks at me, and her face goes studiously neutral for a moment, then breaks into a soft smile. Something in her body language changes in a way I can’t find it in me to describe, but it involves a little bit of leaning forward and a change to the angle of her body relative to me. I can feel myself go practically gooey; it’s like she’s the sun and I’m a flower, basking in the glow of her attention. “This?”

Just a look from her, a look and one word, and I feel attended to, paid attention to, and seen in a way that deftly straddles the line between friendship and prurience.

I close my eyes, taking a deep breath and letting it go. I open my eyes again to see her gone neutral again, and I smile shakily at her, not bothering to try to return to equanimity. “Question stands.”

“Can you keep a secret?”

Her voice is her weapon this time, a purr that tucks itself inside my spine and sets my legs to jelly and my heart to pounding. “Not in the slightest,” I say immediately, grinning. “Anything you tell me, I’ll share with no fewer than three people, and I won’t take any oaths to the contrary.”

“Huh.” Her voice is back to what it was before. I let the regret wash through me, the sheer desire to go back in time and say something, anything else that would get her to keep using that voice, and the feeling recedes. “Well, that nixes my line. You’re a funny one.”

“What’s the structure for the individual matches?”

Lily seems a little nonplussed. Honestly, I’m pretty nonplussed myself; that’s not actually what I’d intended to say, it’s just sort of what came out when I was dithering between fawning and threatening to kill her. “You’re a cold one, for someone who runs so hot, aren’t you.” Her eyes narrow a little. “Are you shunting?”

“He is possessed of something of a strangeness, Lady Sheid.” Amber drops into the chair next to me suddenly, to my surprise and, unless Lily is faking it, the surprise of the person she’s addressing. “It makes for amusing moments, but I might caution you against pushing too far.”

“Is that a threat, Reca?”

Amber ignores the cool hint of menace in Lily’s voice, and also the amused, almost mocking tone that comes with it. “Is the Void dangerous, Lady Sheid? Does it hunger?”

“No.” The word crackles with certainty, somehow. “The Void doesn’t hunger; only the living hunger. The Void merely is.”

“If you were to enter it, what a wondrous distinction you would make.” Amber’s tone is distant, like she’s making polite conversation with someone she’s not entirely paying attention to. “If you were to travel through it for some moments, perhaps you would hold yourself together. Perhaps you would close your eyes, and wrap yourself in your knowledge of your Self, and rebuke the encroaching formlessness, for a time, hoping for rescue.”

“For a time.” Amber’s got Lily’s attention, at least, and she’s not hiding it.

“Could you stare, as my lord did, into the Void? Find the least shadow of a glimmer of a path and give it chase? Not to close your eyes but to hold them open and forge your own path, week upon week, until arriving here?” Amber smiles, and I shiver at it, for more reasons than one.

“Alright, alright, cool your tits.” Lily slouches, not quite pouting. After a moment, she perks up again. “Zidanya, how did you even—”

“Lily.” Zidanya smiles faintly. “Shall I tell you, dear Lily? Is it writ in your heart, that you should wish to know?”

“Hm.”

Zidanya gives it a beat, smiling at Lily. “I lost.” A shrug. “That is all. I was beautiful, and I danced with the Magelord; I sought his end, and he found my beginning.”

“That’s not quite fair.” I poke Zidanya under the ribs, and then wince, rubbing my finger; she’s a lot less squishy than she used to be, and less pokable thereby. “You ceded enough ground that I could backlash the scenario instead of just killing you, not that you knew.”

“I hearkened to you; your body aflame, you were yet not lost.”

“So you danced.” Lily leans in, smiling a little at me while my stomach does flips. “Did you lead or follow, I wonder, Adam?”

“Do you really.” I try my best to keep my words flat.

“No.” Her eyes sparkle and gleam, somewhat literally, which is more disconcerting than anything else. “I don’t.”

“Are we done here?” I can feel the heat rushing to my face, and that entirely pleasant tingling sensation down to my toes. I’m not used to how piercing her gaze is, and there’s an itch in the back of my mind that suggests there’s some kind of magic going on. It’s an active act of willpower not to have anything fire, but I’m fairly confident that she’s not trying to enchant me or whatever; magical perception is probably impolite, but I’m not going to try to kill someone over it.

Especially not someone who might be out of my league, murder wise.

“The individual brackets are mass melees.” Lily slouches back in her chair, tilting her head up as if to look at the ceiling. “We’ve got well over a thousand people who are entering the free-for-all, which is about average. Pull a hundred names, an hour later we throw them into the arena; last ten standing pass the round, all day long for two days. That’ll get us down to a hundred and twenty; we’ll give them a day to rest and then throw them into the arena all together, top ten pass through.

“Rei’s team gets a bye.” She glances at me, gauging my reaction. “You do too. Having both of you here is ridiculous; what did you do to piss off the Overseer that badly, anyway?”

“Solved a ridiculous, over-constrained puzzle sequence without solving any of the puzzles. Deployed forbidden magics.” I flick open two fingers with my opposing thumb, then flick open the other two. “Subverted rune matrices to do my bidding in manners deleterious to the environment and not in keeping with the manner I was intended to solve things. Subverted Zidanya.”

“That’d do it. Besides, you shattered Ty, for the hand-trick.”

“Heh. So that’s what happened.” My lips quirk despite myself. “They call it the thumb-trick, where I come from. So why is having us and also Rei around such a problem?”

“Kinda fucks me, by fucking us all, doesn’t it.” She stares up at the ceiling, and there’s a bitterness in her voice as she says it. “I can send two teams up. No more than ten people. It takes more than a century of accumulation, plus everything we generate, plus the entry tax and the bleedoff and more, to run the scenario; and it doesn’t cost any less or more to send a surfacer on than it does a Temple-bound.”

She goes quiet, but I can put two and two together. “You can resurrect… ah. You built this tournament to centralize the excess, every fractional bit of mana you can pull in, and free as many imprints as you can?”

“Doesn’t matter. I wasn’t gonna let you get fucked by the Overseer, not when Zidanya’s with you. So you’ll walk, and Rei will walk, and I’ll look bad but people will understand. You’ll get a bye until the semifinals; one fight, win or die, and then you’ll showmatch against Rei’s team, since you’re so confident in people having control.”

“Your hands are clenched real tight,” I say quietly. “Doesn’t sell it not mattering super well.”

“Hey.” She turns to look at me, and I have a hard time meeting her gaze. “I appreciate your concern. It’s sweet. But if a lady tells you it doesn’t matter, it’s not polite to disagree.” There’s a beat, a weird-feeling beat, and then she smiles at me, like I’d done her the most marvelous favor, like she appreciated me more than she appreciated a safety cable on a spacewalk. “Thank you, though.”

“I really would prefer,” I say, as if to myself, “knowing how you’re doing that. Do it again in, like, eight seconds, alright?”

I push my mana through [Conjure Visor], and an almost-imperceptible span of time later, maybe a tenth of a second, my vision explodes in brightness and fire.