The hour moved in pieces.New information arrived in batches, each batch making the shape of the problem clearer and the options within it fewer. Dante stood at the edge of the evacuation zone and assembled what he had.Six days ago the crack had opened. The Rank A corruption beast had come through immediately, moving toward the nearest settlements with the directional certainty of something that had been behind a barrier for a long time and was done being behind a barrier. The Eltonaro Empire's response team had mobilized within hours. Proper, professional, exactly what the situation required.Two days later the silver figure had emerged from the same crack.And positioned itself between every weapon and the beast.Every separation strategy failed. Every containment approach failed. Every attempt to draw the beast away from the figure's proximity failed. Every approach to either of them that got close enough to matter ended the same way, and the way it ended had produced a casualty l

The ceiling was white and had nothing interesting about it.Dante looked at it for approximately four seconds before his brain finished the process of coming back online and he understood where he was.A bed. Clean sheets. The particular smell of a medical facility, antiseptic and something herbal underneath it, the combination that meant someone had been keeping infection out of wounds he apparently had. Bandages across most of his body, tight and professional, and underneath the bandages a deep aching quality that covered everything from his collarbone to his knees.Atlantis was sitting in the chair beside the bed reading something that had the density of official reports, his white hair catching the room's light, his neat beard in order. He glanced up when Dante moved."The idiot wakes up," he said."Where am I," Dante said."Royal medical facility. Eltonaro Empire capital." Atlantis set the reports on his knee. "Don't sit up."Dante had been starting to sit up. He stopped because

The Empress smiled.It was a genuine expression, the first one Dante had seen from her, and it sat strangely on a face that had spent the whole conversation carrying nothing at all."Training begins immediately," she said. "You'll be housed in the capital. You will not be permitted to return to your world for at least two years."Dante's jaw tightened."That's a problem," he said. "I have responsibilities. A mother. A sister. People who are expecting me to be somewhere in the near future, not absent for two years without explanation.""Your mother will be informed and provided for," the Empress said, with the flat efficiency of someone who had already considered every objection he was about to raise. "Your sister will be protected under imperial mandate for the duration. Your friend will be briefed on the situation in whatever detail is appropriate for someone outside the training itself." She paused. "Everything you currently care about will be maintained in your absence. That is not

Eighteen months in, holding a human form had stopped being an effort.Dante noticed it the way you notice a habit you no longer perform consciously. He walked through the tower's corridors without the constant low-level maintenance of pulling his shape back into place, without the small internal adjustments that had governed his first year here. He spoke the Mother Tongue when the training called for it and the First Keeper stayed where it belonged, present but not overwhelming, a voice beside him rather than a wave through him.The integration had become something closer to a second nature than a controlled discipline.The Empress noticed too. She began allowing him out of the tower for short stretches, an hour here, an afternoon there, and he walked through the capital and found it subtly different from the city he remembered arriving in.More guards at the intersections. More barriers around the palace district, some visible and some not, the kind that hummed faintly if you knew to

Augusto's office felt smaller than Dante remembered it. Not physically. The proportions were the same, the desk in the same place, the same stack of files leaning slightly on the corner. But the conversation waiting to happen in it made the walls feel closer, the ceiling lower, the whole space pressed in around what was about to be said. "Full briefing," Augusto said, sitting down across from him. "Everything." Dante told him everything. The Empress. The tower outside normal space. The First Keeper, the training, the two years of deconstruction and reconstruction. The barrier maintained by ancient agreement. The silver figure and what it had actually been. The threat behind it, patient and pressing, waiting for the moment the agreement finally broke. Augusto listened without interrupting once. When Dante finished, the silence in the office lasted a long time. "We suspected something like this," Augusto said finally. "Multiple intelligence sources have flagged increasing d