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What Yuuri first notices about the world named after the moon: the food. And, by extension, the excess. The waste. Tethe’alla is richer than the greatest merchant dreams Yuuri is familiar with from home, its grand cities spiraling and prosperous while Sylvarant’s ports and towns barely cling to the bare earth. The entire world Yuuri sees on the world named after the moon is prosperous. While Yuuri avoids the busiest routes and moves mostly by night, he still sees children at campfires snacking on what he is accustomed to an entire family sharing for a meal. He sees rich dishes he doesn’t know the names for, laid out at thriving markets in vibrant colors. He sees that Tethe’alla has so much more than Sylvarant.
It makes it that much easier to break into the home of Tethe’alla’s Chosen.
“Should we really be doing this?” Vicchan asks as Yuuri twists himself through a window he managed to find half open on the second floor. It leads into a guest room, from the looks of it. Vicchan, being smaller, went through first as Yuuri waited outside. Now, as Yuuri balances with one foot on a decorative sconce and one foot on nothing but air, is not the time to be having doubts.
“Everyone is counting on us,” Yuuri replies, trying to keep his breathing even. He slips the rest of the way into the room, landing deftly on the balls of his feet.
He waits one breath.
Two.
No sounds erupt from the rest of the house. No lights flash on. Everyone is asleep. It’s perfect. Yuuri pats the spell cards at his side. They are called Divine Judgment. It’s fitting.
Walking quickly across the plush carpet, Yuuri thinks about his next steps. He needs to head across the hall and enter the north wing. The third double door will lead to the bedroom of the Chosen of Tethe’alla, who might be alone. He might not.
He probably won’t be.
The strange woman told him to prepare himself for that possibility, and Yuuri has.
The strange woman who appeared in Mizuno three days before Yuuri left quizzed him a thousand times on the layout of the Chosen of Tethe’alla’s home. She told him not to listen to anything the Chosen said as he begged for his pathetic life. She told him not to linger. She told him this was the only way to begin the cycle of rebirth and save Sylvarant. Yuuri doesn’t know if he believes her about the cycle; he certainly didn’t believe her about the world named after the moon until he followed her instructions and found himself there.
On Tethe’alla the moon is named Sylvarant.
Everything Lilia said up to this point has been true.
She had seemed too terrifying to be trustworthy when she had first appeared in the village, with her cape made from golden swords and her rigid posture and her messages of the end of the world, but Yuuri knows appearances can be misleading. He grew up in a hidden village of ninja assassins; learning how to mislead through his appearance was a fundamental part of his education, and he excelled at the subject. He’s always been better at subterfuge than combat.
Not that he expects this to involve either.
The Chosen won’t have time for either before Yuuri kills him.
The handles on the guest room door are solid gold. The carpet barely whispers when Yuuri drags the door open and steps out into the rest of the house. The first thing Yuuri sees in the hallway is a jewel-encrusted vase that must be worth more than his entire family home. The people of Mizuno are starving. The people of Tethe’alla are arrogant, and vain, and selfish. According to Lilia their Chosen is the worst of them.
Every few strides there is another gilded work of art hanging on the wall, or another alcove filled with opulence. After a while it stops making Yuuri feel angry and only makes him feel sad. There’s nothing to this house but cold wealth. Unless the expensive trinkets he sees on display are actually beloved heirlooms, there’s nothing personal to what he’s seen of the Chosen’s home.
Yuuri reaches the third double door off the north wing. He presses a wind spell against the door to muffle the noise as he gently presses down on the handle and pushes inward. He manages to take two steps before it all goes wrong.
“Yuuri!” Vicchan whispers harshly, bolting to the side, but it’s too late.
A shadow peels away from the wall next to the high glass windows on the other side of the room.
“You’re a very lost guest,” the shadow says. “Aren’t you. The party ended hours and hours ago.” The shadow steps into a beam of moonlight. Yuuri has never seen his face before, but he has the mark of the Chosen of Mana on his right hand. This is Viktor Nikiforov, and Yuuri is going to kill him.
“Oh,” Yuuri says, slipping his hand to the card holster behind his back. He pops his hip and opens his eyes wide. He licks his lower lip. He… probably shouldn’t be bothering with any of this, because he’s dressed in obviously foreign clothing, the traditional dark blue and black his people wear when they are off to kill. “Is the party over?”
For a fleeting second Yuuri thinks about how else he could have handled this. He could have pretended to be a guest at the party, wearing a Tethe’allan suit stolen from one of the nearby mansions. He could have sauntered into the Chosen’s peripheral vision, tantalized the edges of his awareness until he could focus on no one and nothing else but Yuuri. They could have danced. Yuuri could have poisoned him with a kiss, or taken him back to the gardens and stabbed him in the heart. He could have placed his hands on the Chosen’s pale throat in one of the secluded alcoves and pressed and pressed until Tethe’alla’s mana flowed back into Sylvarant as the Chosen’s life flowed out of his body.
“They always finish without me,” the Chosen says, tossing his long silver hair over his shoulder. He’s wearing an elaborate suit. He’s alone. Yuuri shouldn’t talk to him. Yuuri should just kill him. “And from the sounds of it they’ve all left. But you weren’t one of them, were you?”
“No,” Yuuri says.
Yuuri lifts a single Divine Judgment and holds it between two fingers at eye level. Beneath him, a complicated mana circle begins to glow. He waits for the Chosen to beg for his life. He waits for the chance to deny him. The Chosen doesn’t say anything. Yuuri gives him extra time.
The Chosen closes his eyes.
When he opens them again he has a thin sword in his hand, faster than Yuuri’s own eyes could track. “I can’t say I’ve never thought about swordplay as foreplay,” the Chosen says with a cold smile, “but magic pieces of paper have never before factored in.”
“I can’t say I’ve never used swordplay as foreplay,” Yuuri quips back. He can almost hear Vicchan behind him rolling his eyes. Yuuri isn’t a swordsman. Yuuri has never used swordplay as anything. Yuuri should have already cut down the Chosen. Yuuri has lost his handle on this situation.
To get it back, he casts a rapid fire series of elemental spells, lightning and fire, careful to focus them on the Chosen so as not to destroy the house along with him and accidentally trap himself inside. The Chosen’s face goes blank and he turns and dodges and deflects everything Yuuri sends at him, neutralizing the destruction with his own spells. Against his better judgment, Yuuri finds himself impressed. The Chosen clearly knows how to fight.
“I don’t know which faction sent you,” the Chosen pants as he turns a spell deflection into an attacking thrust. Yuuri dodges with a force seal. “But they should know better by now. Tethe’alla needs me alive.”
“Sylvarant needs you dead,” Yuuri replies through gritted teeth.
The Chosen pauses. “…The moon?”
The most important thing, Lilia had said before giving Yuuri the craft that could take him across dimensions into the other world, was to ignore everything the Chosen said, because it would never be anything but calculations and lies. But now, standing in the wreckage of the moonlight-filled bedroom, Yuuri isn’t so sure. The Chosen is looking at him like he’s speaking a completely different language.
Like Yuuri just told him he traveled here from a different dimension.
Yuuri licks his lower lip, dry from the winds generated by his mana circle, and tells him he traveled here from a different dimension.
The Chosen looks down at the crystal embedded in the back of his sword hand.
And in that moment Yuuri makes a decision.
“You really think we can recombine the worlds?” Viktor asks. He’s since removed his dinner jacket and braided up his long hair. It looks nice, but Yuuri misses the way it spilled over his shoulders earlier, back when he was fighting for his life. Possibly Yuuri’s sexual instincts have been irreparably tied up with his mission training. It doesn’t matter. Viktor has already said he likes the way Yuuri’s traditional clothing peeks open when he fights.
“I do,” Yuuri says. “Lilia said Tethe’alla and Sylvarant were joined by a mana linkage, that one must always wither while the other prospers. But why should they only be joined by a mana linkage? If they were the same world everyone would benefit.”
“And so you’re proposing to marry the worlds.”
Viktor places his hand over Yuuri’s. They’re sitting on Viktor’s expansive bed. It was the only thing in the room not singed by the time Yuuri and Viktor put their weapons away. At its foot, Vicchan sleeps softly, exhausted by all the mana Yuuri depleted in the fight.
“I am,” Yuuri says. “Will you help me?”
“I’ve been ignoring what I’ve been chosen to do for most of my life,” Viktor says, “because I never wanted it. It has never brought… Yes. Yes, I will help you until the worlds are one.”
Sylvarant the moon has already set by the time Yuuri falls asleep.
Next to him, the Chosen breathes softly with the life Yuuri chose not to take.