The bread was still warm when Kai pressed the last bronze coin into my palm.
"For the crossing," he said quietly, closing my fingers around it. "Yaheed gave me two—one for you, one for me. He wanted Jin to have the third, but…" He trailed off, crimson eyes distant in the late-evening gloom of our inn's lobby.
The coin - Zephyrian bronze, worn smooth, worth almost nothing in any market I knew. The metal was still warm from his pocket—and for one strange, fleeting moment I felt something underneath that warmth. Not memory exactly. More like the shadow of one. The shape of a man's hope pressed into cheap metal. I had been doing that more lately: feeling things in objects that no one else seemed to notice. Touching a door handle and tasting someone else's impatience. Running my hand along a stone wall and catching, faint as smoke, the grief of whoever had laid it.
I didn't tell anyone. I hadn't found the word for it yet.
"Why does an exile give away his last coins?" I asked.
Kai's smile was small, sad. "It's his way of blessing someone—giving something of great value to him to wish someone well."
"Go to sleep," he said. "We'll have to wake up early tomorrow."
He stayed in the lobby after I went upstairs. I assumed he went back to his room after that. Or so I thought.
*
My name is Petras Alexandros, fifth prince of Garvos, son of King Ricardo and his Kanlian wife Mei-Lin. I was thirteen years old the morning I left the only home I had ever known, and I was terrified.
Not of the portal itself—though the idea of stepping through a mirror into another continent should have frightened me more than it did. Not of Kanlia, exactly, though I had never set foot on my mother's homeland and knew it only through her lullabies and the maps Jin studied with obsessive devotion.
I was afraid of who I might become on the other side.
The boy who loved books and libraries and quiet corners—would he survive in a land of ancient ruins and martial academies? Or would I have to kill him myself, piece by piece, to become whoever a fifth prince was supposed to be?
*
"Ready, Petras?"
Jin—Aurelia-Jin, though I had never called her that in my life—closed her book with a soft thump and looked up at me. In the lamplight her face was all sharp angles and patience, the grey robe with its Hannian embroidery making her look like a sage from the old scrolls. Her metal staff leaned against the table.
She had been pressing her free hand against the inn's stone wall just before I came down the stairs. I'd seen her do it before—that still, listening posture, like someone holding a seashell to their ear. Geomancy, my mother had explained once. The earth remembers everything that has touched it, she had said. In Kanlia, we know how to listen. Jin wasn't just reading direction or depth. She was reading time. The wall was telling her how old the inn was, who had built it, whether the stone would hold.
As I watched, she nudged her glasses back up her nose without lifting a hand—a tiny flex of the same gift, so casual it seemed like breathing.
I wanted to say no. I wanted to say give me another year, another month, another day.
Instead I said, "What about Kai?"
She didn't answer with words. She just tapped her staff against the shadowed floor beneath our table.
The ground lifted.
"OWW!"
Kai tumbled upright, hood falling back, crimson hair wild. For a part Kanlian with Bravossi blood, he looked remarkably undignified when woken before dawn. He blinked at us, bloodshot eyes struggling to focus, then snapped to attention with the kind of perfect formal salute that made the three other people in the lobby glance over.
"GOOD MORNING, FIFTH PRINCE!" he bellowed.
Two of the early travelers looked away immediately. Royalty in Ramos was common enough to ignore—every portal city attracted princes and diplomats like moths to flame. The third, an elderly Thalanossian woman, just smiled into her tea.
Kai dropped the salute and extended his fist toward me, grinning. "Morning, Pete."
I bumped it, grateful for the familiar contact. For a heartbeat we were just cousins again, not prince and royal guard.
"You slept here?" I asked.
"Got back late. Didn't want to wake you." He rubbed his face, yawning. "Met an old friend from the Guild. Talked too long. Lucky he's a devout Zephyrian—no wine, just grape juice and bread. Otherwise, I'd still be unconscious."
"Good morning as well Ji- I mean Lady Aurelia." Kai smiled at the geomancer.
"You were unconscious," Jin said dryly, standing and slinging her pack over one shoulder. "And you can start calling me Jin now. We're close enough to the portal that formality is pointless." Jin isn't fond of the name Aurelia, especially when coming from Kanlians. It was given to her purely out of diplomatic necessity—a title to make her useful to people like Pavlos, who thought of noble women the way they thought of territorial rights.
Kai scooped up all three of our knapsacks—his own pack plus sword and shield, my smaller bag, Jin's gear—and settled the weight across his shoulders like it was nothing. Forty kilos, maybe more. But he carried it the way some men carry a cloak.
"Can't delay Jin from her duty," he said lightly, but something in his voice had gone tight.
Duty. That word again. The word that had shaped my entire life, though I still did not understand what my duty was supposed to be.
*
A bell tolled from the city center. Fifteen minutes until the portal opened.
Yam. Third day. Garvos to Kanlia.
My stomach dropped.
As one of the four portal cities, Ramos was made up of four quarters radiating out from the central plaza where the mirror-like portal stood. The layout was based on the four great continents. North was Astaria, where the Scholars' League kept their archives—the only continent sealed behind mountain ranges that no ship had navigated and no road had crossed, accessible to the rest of the world only through the portals they had gifted and the memory-transceivers they sent with their diplomats. East was Garvos—my father's people, with their eastern palace gleaming like a crown above the diplomatic district. West was Zephyria, all sun-bleached stone and market squares, the desert continent from where all exiles came and to where they wanted to return. South was Kanlia—or rather Han, the sovereign kingdom within what old maps called the Kanlian continent—where my mother's people had built their own enclave, complete with tea houses and training grounds and the small inn where we had spent the last three days.
We could have stayed in the Garvossi district, in the state palace itself, but my father—King Ricardo—had been firm. Stay with your mother's kin in the Kanlian quarter. See the world outside Garvos before you drown in the politics of Dreanos. Even at thirteen I understood it was good advice.
*
We walked north through streets still half-dark, past shuttered shops and sleeping fountains. Jin walked ahead, staff tapping a quiet rhythm against the cobblestones. Kai fell into step beside me, silent now, his earlier cheer replaced by something watchful.
"Your friend," I said quietly. "The one you met last night. Was he the one you served with in the Guild?"
Kai nodded. "Yaheed. Good man. Better than he knows." A pause. "Saved a village from fel-beasts two years ago and got exiled for it."
"Exiled for saving people?"
"Politics." He said it like a curse. "He broke some law his country cared about more than the lives he saved. Now he can't go home. Can't come with us, either—Zephyrian exile. The Han portal in Huanan won't admit him. Zephyrian exiles cross north to Astaria or south by ship." A beat. "He gave me his last coins anyway."
I thought about that. About doing the right thing and losing everything anyway. About how the world punished people for caring. A man who could not go, giving everything he had to the people who could.
"What does he do?" I asked. "The Guild work—what kind?"
"Acquisition, mostly. Finding old things in ruins and getting them back to scholars without losing anyone." Kai's expression shifted—something complicated passing over it. "He has a gift for ruins. For knowing which walls are going to fall." A pause. "He mentioned something last night, actually. Said the Guild has been hearing strange reports from the Strait—old Celestian ruins near the southern coast, past Huanan. Something about ley lines behaving wrong. Nexus readings that don't match the surveys." Kai shrugged, but his eyes were somewhere else. "He said: 'The ground doesn't usually speak that loudly unless something is waking up.'"
I filed that away. I was learning to do that—file things away in the part of my mind that knew it would need them later, even if I didn't understand why yet.
"He gave you the coins," I said.
"Yeah." Kai's hand went to his pocket, where I knew the second bronze piece rested. "Told me to go to Kanlia in his stead. Said…" He hesitated. "Said he hopes the young prince does great things as he comes of age."
The weight of that settled over me like a cloak I wasn't ready to wear.
"What if I don't?" The words came out smaller than I meant them. "Do great things, I mean."
I reached for the coin in my pocked, hoping to touch the faint warmth of hope again.
Kai looked at me—really looked, the way he did sometimes when he forgot he was supposed to be my guard and remembered he was my cousin. "Then you'll do good things instead. That's harder anyway."
*
The central plaza opened around us like a held breath.
The portal dominated the square— with a diameter of five hundred yards of alloy ring, its surface shimmered at the crown as the activation hour approached. Celestian metal, black at the base where the original frame still held: stone carved with symbols no living scholar had fully translated. Not Garvossi script. Not Hannian. Something older, from before the four continents had divided the old empire into separate nations and separate memories.
I had read about them in the palace library. Everyone had. But reading didn't prepare you for the sound—a low, bone-deep resonance that you felt in your back teeth before you heard it with your ears—or for the way the air tasted different this close. Ozone, sharp and metallic, like the moment before lightning.
I noticed something at the gate: Guild handlers were turning away a family with young children. A boy of maybe nine, pulling at his father's hand, clearly not understanding why he couldn't cross. The father was explaining in low, urgent tones. The handler's face was apologetic but firm.
"Why can't children cross?" I asked Kai, keeping my voice low.
"The portal pulls," he said. "Not physically—through memory. The portal amplifies it. For someone trained, shielded, it's manageable. For someone young—" He hesitated. "Children haven't lived long enough to know what belongs to them. Or who they are. They can't tell the difference between their memories and everyone else's. The crossing opens something – makes us remember something. Feels worse the younger you are."
I was thirteen. Technically old enough.
I held the bronze coin tighter.
*
That was where Pavlos found us.
He came from the direction of the eastern quarter—the Garvossi district—and he was already wearing the expression he wore when he wanted something. My second-oldest brother – half-brother - was handsome in the way that portraits are handsome: all clean lines and careful angles, nothing out of place. Even at dawn in the portal plaza he looked assembled. That's his Thallanosian blood in him. Charismatic, performative.
"Little Petras." He smiled. "Up early."
"Pavlos."
He didn't look at me after that first moment. His eyes went to Jin, and they stayed there with the particular quality of attention that made Jin's face go flat and expressionless in a way I'd learned to read as anger held very still.
"Aurelia-Jin." He inclined his head. "Safe travels. Father asked me to remind you—the arrangement in Huanan is still open. The diplomatic office maintains the position. You'd be back on your family estate, near your own kin. It seems a shame to spend years abroad when—"
"Thank you for passing on the message," Jin said. Her voice was perfectly level. "I'll keep it in mind."
Pavlos's smile thinned—just for a heartbeat, just enough to show the blade beneath the silk. Then it was back, smooth and brotherly. He looked at me, and something shifted in his expression—the polish thinning just slightly. "Study well, Petras. Remember who you are. The blood of Dreanos runs in you. Try to make it count on the other side."
He turned and walked back toward the eastern quarter.
The three of us stood in silence for a moment.
"What arrangement?" I asked.
"A marriage proposal, dressed up as a diplomatic post," Jin said. She picked up her staff and started walking toward the queue. "Your father is not involved. It's entirely Pavlos."
I glanced at Kai. His fist had clenched around the knapsack straps, knuckles white. He was watching the space where Pavlos had been with an expression I couldn't name—something between anger and helplessness that he was working very hard to make look like nothing at all.
I did not ask anything else.
*
The line moved forward.
People streamed toward the portal in steady currents: merchants with laden carts, Scholars' League archivists with book-stuffed packs, Kanlian soldiers in deep green and silver returning from diplomatic rotation. A few adventurers with weapons strapped to their backs and the particular alertness of people paid to have their alertness on display. A Guild envoy in travel-worn gear—leather vest —who glanced at the ring with the casual appraisal of someone who had crossed too many times to be impressed.
"First time?" An old man with a Guild pin smiled at me as we joined the queue. "Don't worry. It's just like stepping through a doorway. You won't feel a thing."
I nodded, too nervous to speak.
Jin glanced back at me. "Ready?"
I swallowed. "Not really."
Her smile was small, unexpected. "Good. Neither was I the first time."
Kai bumped my shoulder—gentle, grounding. "You've got us, Pete. Whatever happens on the other side."
I clutched the bronze coin in my pocket, feeling the edges bite into my palm. An exile's gift. A stranger's blessing. May the young prince do great things.
The couple ahead of us stepped through the mirror and vanished—not dissolved, not faded, just gone, like they had never existed at all.
My turn.
I looked back once. At Ramos. At the white palace gleaming in the east. At the Kanlian quarter in the south where I had spent three days preparing for a moment I would never be ready for.
At the life I was leaving behind.
Then I looked forward. At Jin's straight back. At Kai's broad shoulders. At the rippling surface of the mirror, dark as still water, that would carry me to a continent I had only ever dreamed about.
I thought about my mother's lullabies. About the ruins I wanted to chronicle. About the boy who loved books and the man I was afraid of becoming. About Yaheed, who had given away his last coins so that someone else could go where he couldn't.
I thought: I don't know who I'll be on the other side.
I thought: I cannot stay who I am.
I stepped forward.
The mirror swallowed me whole.