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Chapter 1235: The Cloud School

Valkries made herself breathe. Made herself be still.

The Cloud School was gone. She was certain of that too. After her kind occupied the northwest of the Land of Dawn, she had returned to that mountain every hundred years — stood in the ruins of the school building, let the wind come through the broken walls, and stayed a few days each time.

Because she had once been one of its students.

On that mountain she had learned to touch the Realm of Mind. On that mountain she had learned what human beings were. Her teacher had been the Transformer, Heathtalese — an Upgraded, like Valkries, but a different kind entirely.

Heathtalese was not strong in the way the clan measured strength. In pure combat power she ranked below a moderately capable Inferior Demon. The clansmen treated her with open contempt because of it. But the upgrade ceremony had nothing to do with fighting capacity, and Valkries had understood early that Heathtalese was a genius in every way that mattered. She had merged with magic stones three times, and each fusion had expanded her in directions most of their kind never bothered to explore.

Her ability, as her title indicated, was transformation — the gift her second stone had granted her. She rarely showed her true form. Most of the time she moved through the world wearing a human face so flawlessly worn that people meeting her assumed she was one of them. She had spoken their language without accent.

The face on the television was the face Heathtalese had worn most often.

Valkries watched it and felt a thousand years collapse inward like a folded map. The clothes were different. The expression was slightly altered. But it was the same face, wearing the same bone structure, the same quality of attention.

There was nothing like it in the world. Valkries was certain.

If the founders of the Cloud School had been singular among humans, the Transformer had been singular among her own kind. Heathtalese did not covet the fighting capacity that magic stones might give her — she was devoured instead by curiosity, a hunger for everything unknown that the clan found eccentric to the point of embarrassment. She had been the first among their kind to make real contact with the Cloud School. At the time, rumors of the coming Battle of Divine Will were spreading through the clan, and every member of their race regarded the humans of the Land of Dawn as future enemies. She walked toward them anyway.

Valkries owed her a great deal. She had never looked down on the Transformer for her limited combat power, because she understood something her contemptuous clansmen did not: Heathtalese’s comprehension of the Realm of Mind and the Origin of Magic ran deeper than anyone else in the clan. She had written dozens of volumes, half of them guidance texts that the later generations depended on to survive the upgrade ceremony. In human terms, she was a mentor to most of their kind.

She was also, almost certainly, the first in the clan’s history to attempt a fourth magic stone fusion.

Had she succeeded, she would have become the clan’s first Senior Lord — at a time when Inferior Demons were still rare and the category of Senior Lord existed only as a theoretical endpoint. She did not succeed. The magic power turned on her from inside and consumed her completely, leaving nothing.

Valkries had been standing beside her when it happened. She had watched the Transformer come apart, fold into herself, and vanish. That was why the face on the television produced a specific dissonance — familiar and yet somehow slightly wrong. Over a thousand years she had never encountered anyone who looked so much like that face.

Once, long ago, she had asked Heathtalese why she had chosen this particular appearance — why a face that seemed to belong to no historical figure, no prominent ancestor, no one at all.

Heathtalese’s answer made no immediate sense.

This is the face of an apostle.

Who the apostle was, the Transformer admitted she didn’t know. During her descents into the Realm of Mind, she would sometimes brush against an entirely different strand of consciousness — whispering, distant, present without being visible. She had never officially encountered it. But she had held onto what it looked like.

She also said that if she could ever achieve stability in the chaotic layers of the Realm of Mind, she believed she could follow that whisper to its source. She was never strong enough.

Valkries hadn’t understood what it meant at the time. She had only just upgraded and knew almost nothing of the Realm of Mind’s inner structure. Heathtalese had been a pioneer in that territory. For context: the king himself had not carved out his portion of the Realm of Mind until the night before the second Battle of Divine Will.

Valkries had asked the king, later, whether he had ever encountered that apostle. He said no.

So there were two possibilities.

The first: this world belonged to the apostle called Lan. But the news broadcast had reported Lan’s death, and a territory’s creator could not die and vanish from it — that was a fundamental principle of the Realm of Mind.

The second: the Transformer, in the last moments before her magic power consumed her, had managed to return some fragment of herself to the Realm of Mind and had built a territory there. This would explain the face’s presence without raising suspicion. But it failed to explain the strangeness of everything surrounding her — the technology, the city, the vast incomprehensible architecture of this world.

Valkries had wanted nothing more than to leave as quickly as possible. Now she had changed her mind.

The Transformer had said something, in that final moment, that Valkries had never been able to set down entirely. She had said that even if their kind won the Battle of Divine Will, they would not gain the Divine Domain.

What had she seen, in those last instants, that led her there?

Perhaps this was where that answer had been waiting.

Roland yawned as he pushed the mini van through the second ring highway.

He pressed the accelerator harder and the engine roared — and he still fell behind every other vehicle in the lane, which felt about right. He was running on very little sleep. The immigration policy meeting had eaten most of the night, and since time in the Dream World moved three times faster than in the real world, he had decided to spend his day off actually sleeping — giving the ancient Taquila witches a chance to occupy themselves in the meantime. They were perfectly capable of entertaining one another.

The witches weren’t only there for entertainment, of course. Lan had told him that God watched this world, and that the most direct route to God’s territory was to eliminate the Fallen Evils and use that accumulated power to expand the Dream World. The ancient witches had taken that responsibility seriously. Roland hadn’t had to ask twice.

But Garcia had called at noon, and what she described was not optional.

“The Association wants to rebuild public confidence after the attack on Prism City,” Garcia said, watching the road from the passenger seat. Her manner toward him had shifted since the night she’d stayed at his apartment — still direct, but with less of the habitual friction. “What they actually intend is a conference this evening.”

Roland said nothing. A hospital visit wasn’t enough to do what they needed. What the public wanted was evidence of power and the capacity to strike back. The evening meeting would be about the Fallen Evils.

Which gave him exactly the opening he had been looking for.

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