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The air in Sacramento stank of smoke, incense, and wet stone. The Golden Empire’s capital was large, but it was currently largely cloaked by fog. Evening fog rolled in like a ghostly tide from the great grey Pacific, thickening in the alleys of the Imperial Capital’s older districts, cloaking broken street lamps and cracked prayer-plastered walls in a cool, sticky gloom. Somewhere distant, temple bells rang in slow, holy rhythm, one of the endless observances that marked the city’s calendar, but down here, where the bureaucrats didn’t go unless forced, no one paused to bow.
Danny Li clutched the letter to his chest, careful not to let it smudge against the damp air. His boots squelched as he crossed a puddle reflecting a lantern hanging from a nearby house; it was far too dark and far too quiet out here.
He frowned at a scrawled address on a wrinkled note in his other hand.
“437 Needle Lane. West of Canal Street. Past the burned laundromat.”
He’d passed the laundromat. Half its sign still hung from the charred frame, moaning faintly in the wind. The proper neighborhood ended two blocks back. No guards. No monks. Not even patrols; just the occasional shape shuffling in a doorway, too quiet to trust. Danny tightened the sash of his scholar’s robe. His family had pressed the best one on him before he left Fresno. It was cream-colored, edged in dark blue silk, with the Li family’s wheel-and-plow sigil hand-embroidered on the sleeve.
Down here, it might as well have been a target.
“Should’ve changed into street clothes,” he muttered. His voice startled a pair of feral dogs digging through trash. He just hoped he didn’t get robbed, honestly.
The house appeared almost suddenly at the end of the crooked row. It was narrow and lopsided, built without regard to form or aesthetic. One window was boarded, the other shuttered. A strange iron grating sealed the door, etched with an eye with a wooden plaque below it. On the plaque were letters, the language unintelligible. Danny tilted his head.
Mike’s handwriting. Old American?
On the grating itself, someone had carved letters in Old American; it wasn’t completely intelligible to Californine. Danny squinted and realized… it actually wasn’t in Old American at all. It was something else, something more… foreign, more alien.
“E pluribus unum / Novus ordo seclorum / Annuit cœptis”
Beneath it:
“Visitors by appointment only. Unless urgent.”
Danny grimaced. He folded the note and slid it into his sleeve, then gently knocked. The sound echoed hollow behind the iron door. No answer. He knocked again, harder.
This time, a scraping noise. Footsteps. The door creaked inward on heavy hinges. A pale yellow light glowed from a single candle deeper within.
There he stood.
Michael Dickerson.
Taller than Danny remembered, and still thin as a flagpole, his blond hair shorn shorter than in their youth. He wore scholar’s robes too, but they were stained with ink and frayed at the hem, one sleeve improperly rolled. A loose sheaf of notes was clutched under his arm. His expression was flat, shadowed, unreadable.
Mike blinked twice. Then:
“Danny.” A flat statement. Not a question. Not surprise. An acknowledgement.
Danny smiled awkwardly, stepping forward. “Good to see you, Mike. Your parents asked me to deliver this. Personally.” He held out the letter. “They’re worried. They say you haven’t answered their last six messages. That was… half a year ago. Can I come in?”
Mike stared at the envelope like it was an unfamiliar tool.
“Did you read the sign?” he asked flatly, “Visitors by appointment only. Unless urgent.”
Danny blinked. “Well, yes, but-”
“You don’t have an appointment,” Mike interrupted. Not accusatory, just a cold statement of fact, like he was reciting from a scroll.
“And I’m still sending remittances to my parents. On schedule. Fresno should have no complaint. Your presence was not requested.”
Danny swallowed. “Mike, they’re not asking about money. They haven’t heard from you in over half a year. They said you changed addresses and didn’t tell anyone. You’ve ignored letters. You stopped writing back entirely. They thought-” he hesitated “they thought maybe something had happened. Or you’d been… reassigned. Or killed. You’re their only son, Mike.”
Mike didn’t react at first. His face was motionless. Only the faintest furrow of his brow, like a ripple over still water.
“I do not want to talk to them,” he said, evenly. “I don’t want to talk to you either.”
The door began to close.
Danny stepped forward, wedging his shoulder gently against it. “Mike, don’t shut me out. Please. I came all the way from Fresno. I’m not just your parents’ messenger. I wanted to see you. I chose to come.”
Silence. A flickering candle cast his shadow over the paper-strewn floor behind Mike.
“I know we haven’t talked since I stayed behind, but we were friends once. I thought… maybe we still could be.” Danny’s voice softened. “We’re both bureaucrats now. Adults. That doesn’t mean we have to forget where we came from. It’s rude to slam the door on someone who shared their lunch with you for three years straight at the Fresno writing halls.”
That made Mike pause. He tilted his head, eyes narrowing: not in suspicion, but like someone unsure what to do next.
He looked at Danny as if through some invisible veil. Evaluating. Measuring. Testing for falseness.
“Do you consider your business urgent?” he asked, voice quiet, neutral.
Danny met his eyes. “Yes. Because I don’t want to lose you as a friend.”
A long moment passed. The air between them felt fragile, like spun glass.
Then, without a word, Mike removed his hand from the doorframe and stepped aside. The door opened fully, creaking in reluctant welcome.
“You may enter,” Mike said. “We’ll talk, then.”
Danny exhaled, unsure when he’d started holding his breath. He stepped into the strange, cluttered world of Mike’s apartment, a hundred questions and concerns tangled in his chest.
The door shut behind him.
And the candle’s flame, once dim, flared brighter.
The hallway pressed in around Danny like the inside of a scroll tube someone had crammed with madness. Paper lay in curled, crumpled layers across the floor, soft and rustling underfoot. Yellowed pages coated the walls like scales: pinned, nailed, even stitched together with wire. Some were scraps of official government parchment, recognizable by the thin red thread at the margin. Others were rough, almost fibrous, like they’d been handmade. But all of them were covered.
Eagles with two heads and tongues of flame. Eyes, wide and lidless, in triangles, in circles, in bursts of gold and black ink. Stars drawn in precise geometric clusters. Runes. Columns. Spirals. Words that half-resembled Californine but slid just out of recognition, uncanny and wrong. Architectural blueprints, grids, spidery handwriting in faded black ink, filled with Old American words Danny could barely sound out.
The eyes were everywhere. The triangle-eye most of all: a sunburst shape with lashes like daggers.
Danny slowed behind Mike, skin prickling beneath his robes. The paper seemed to rustle with breath, as though watching him walk.
“…You’ve really redecorated,” Danny murmured.
Mike said nothing. He turned left, into the main room. The end of the hallway was dark; something like a statue stood at the end of the hall, draped in a robe. Danny followed Mike into the living room.
The living area was worse. Mountains of boxes formed misshapen mouldering hills. Paper crawled up the walls and across the floor like frost. Even the couch, matted, mangy, yellowed with age, had bundles of scrolls stacked across one end. Danny moved them aside gingerly, sitting where the upholstery hadn’t yet turned into a filing cabinet.
Mike moved around the room lighting candles, as precise as a monk preparing a ritual. The light softened the harshness of the papers but didn’t hide their presence.
Danny’s mind spun like a water wheel under floodwater. What happened to him?
Is he sick? Obsessed? In danger?
The Empire didn’t assign official scholars to cracked apartments and wall-shrines. Not without reason.
Was this his job? Was it something else?
Then Mike spoke: voice low, calm, almost automatic.
“How’s Fresno?”
Danny blinked. The sound hit like a bucket of cold water. Mike had never initiated conversation when they were children. He opened his mouth, shut it, then leaned forward slightly, trying to study his friend’s face.
“…It’s all right,” he said after a pause. “Hazy. Hot. Quiet. Not many changes.”
A breath. “I passed the Exam.”
Mike lit another candle, silent.
“I’ve got a post now. Back home. Local records office, under Chancellor Lei. Nothing fancy, but steady. I’m-” Danny gave a small, sheepish smile. “I’m engaged now, too. Arranged. But she’s nice. Name’s Lan.”
Mike turned. The final candle flared behind him, backlighting his outline as he crossed to sit across from Danny. He didn’t seem to have heard a word. His eyes fixed somewhere to Danny’s left, not quite meeting his gaze.
“Do you still want to give me the letter?”
Danny hesitated, then quietly reached into his sleeve and handed it across. Mike took it with a single, careful motion, fingers long and bony, nails ink-stained, and set it down on the low table between them without opening it. It rested atop a hand-drawn map of a ruined city labeled “WASHINGTOWN DC,” surrounded by tiny, frantic annotations.
Silence thickened. The candlelight flickered, catching the sweat along Danny’s hairline.
Then Mike spoke again.
“Do you want to know about the state of the house?”
His voice was too calm. Stretched. Like he was holding himself inside a bottle about to break.
Danny looked around again; the walls like parchment skin, the blinking eye-symbols, the cluttered stacks. He looked at Mike.
“…Yes. It worries me. But I want to know about you, Mike. How you’re really doing.”
Mike nodded, slowly, once. A strange sort of acceptance, or perhaps relief. His hands folded over one another on his lap like a wax figure posed to receive a visitor.
“All this,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the chaos, “is part of my studies.”
Danny’s brow furrowed. “Studies?”
“I found a book,” Mike said, voice steady. “From the Old World. In the stacks under the Imperial Archives. Someone had misfiled it: classified it as trade theory. It wasn’t.”
He leaned forward slightly, looking down at the letter as he finally opened it.
“The book was called The Secret History of Columbia.”
Danny blinked. “Columbia?” He struggled to remember the term. “Is that… another word for Old America? The time when Guru Lincoln was alive?”
Mike didn’t even glance up from the letter as Danny spoke. He skimmed it with mechanical speed, eyes darting across the page, then folded it once, precisely, and set it aside again as if it were already resolved.
“Columbia and Old America are synonymous,” he said. “Different names. Same polity. That’s not important.”
He leaned forward now, elbows on his knees, the candlelight catching the hollows beneath his cheekbones. For the first time since Danny had arrived, there was energy in him; tight, vibrating, barely contained.
“What is important is that Old America was not a myth. Not a Golden Age sung into impossibility by priests and poets.” His voice sharpened. “It was real. It functioned. It had laws that followed internal logic. Rational governance. Authority derived from the people themselves.”
Danny’s brow furrowed. “The people… chose their rulers?”
“Yes,” Mike said immediately. “Elections. Fixed terms. Legal constraints. No hereditary nobility. No divine mandate.” He gestured vaguely at the walls. “Power was diffused, not concentrated. That’s the distinction.”
Danny swallowed. A thought pushed forward, reluctant but unavoidable. “Mike… are you saying you’ve become an Americanist? Like the people in Jefferson? You know… the ones who worship the Founders and try to kill people?”
Mike’s head snapped toward him. For a moment, something sharp and angry flashed across his face.
“No,” he said flatly. “Absolutely not.”
He stood, pacing now, stepping over loose papers without looking down. “Those people are idolaters. They turned America into a pantheon. Washington as a god. Hamilton as a prophet. It’s a corruption of what America was. They took rational men and turned them into gods because they couldn’t tolerate the idea that mortals built something greater than themselves.”
He stopped, turned back to Danny.
“The rulers of Old America were not gods,” he said. “They were men. Educated. Flawed. Bound by law. And that’s precisely why they’re worth studying. Emulating.”
Danny’s mouth felt dry. “Emulating… how?”
Mike’s lips pulled into something like a smile: thin, strained, but unmistakably excited.
“I’m writing a book,” he said again, faster now, words spilling out. “A proper one, not some esoteric tome like The Secret History. Analysis. Structure. Comparative governance. I’ll demonstrate that Old America’s system was superior to ours; not spiritually, but functionally. I’ll trace how it collapsed, where it failed, and what could be corrected with our resources.”
He began gesturing broadly, knocking a rolled parchment from the table without noticing.
“And then,” he continued, “I’ll send it to the Eternal Living Guru.”
Danny froze.
“…You’ll do what?”
Mike looked genuinely surprised by the question. “I’ll petition him. Directly. The Guru values wisdom, doesn’t he? Scholarship? He claims to embody eternal insight. If I present him with a coherent alternative, proof that governance need not be centralized in hereditary authority, he’ll have to consider it.”
Danny’s thoughts tangled into knots. This is insanity. The Eternal Living Guru was not a philosopher-king waiting to be persuaded by a book. He was the axis of the Empire. The sun around which Sacramento revolved. Not only that, but everyone knew the lieutenants were the ones who held real power in California anyways.
“You think,” Danny said carefully, “that a dead Old World system is going to convince the Guru to give up power?”
Mike tilted his head. “Not give up. Reform.”
“That’s worse,” Danny blurted before he could stop himself.
Mike frowned, as if Danny had made a minor arithmetic error. “It’s inevitable. The Empire is inefficient. Divided into fiefdoms. Dependent on ritual legitimacy rather than demonstrable outcomes. Old America proved another way is possible.”
Danny’s heart hammered. He remembered Mike as a boy, hunched over dusty histories, obsessing for weeks over some minor dynasty or forgotten war. This felt the same, but magnified, sharpened, dangerous.
He forced himself to slow his breathing, to soften his voice. Confrontation would only drive Mike deeper.
“…All right,” Danny said. “Let’s set that aside for a moment. How, how has your work been going? Your post here in Sacramento?”
Mike stopped pacing.
“I failed the Imperial Exam,” he said.
The words landed like a dropped plate.
Danny stared at him. “You… what?”
“I failed,” Mike repeated, without emphasis. “On the second sitting. They said my essays were ‘structurally sound but philosophically misaligned.’”
Danny felt his stomach drop. “But… Mike, you were top of our cohort. Everyone expected-”
“Yes,” Mike said. “They did.”
He sat back down, suddenly very still.
“I’m not a scholar-bureaucrat,” he continued. “Not officially. I earn money through transcription work. Copying archives for minor offices. Sometimes private collectors.” A pause. “And gambling. Probabilistic games. Dice. Cards. I’m good at them.”
Danny’s mind reeled. Failed. All those years. All those expectations. The Dickerson family’s entire future balanced on that exam.
“You didn’t tell your parents,” Danny said quietly.
“No,” Mike replied. “They didn’t need to know.”
Danny rubbed his hands together, trying to ground himself. The room felt smaller now, the watching eyes on the walls more oppressive.
“Mike,” he said softly, “this, this explains why they’re worried. Why you moved. Why you stopped writing.”
Mike didn’t answer. He stared past Danny again, gaze fixed on some invisible diagram only he could see. The candlelight carved his silhouette against the paper-choked wall, the eyes and symbols haloing him like a blasphemous mural.
“You’re going to tell me to take the Imperial Exam again,” he said, voice flat, almost weary. “Everyone does. Tutors. Inspectors. Strangers who find out.” A pause. “Go on.”
Danny hesitated, then nodded. “I… yes. Mike, it is your best option. You know that. You’d earn more, you’d be secure. You wouldn’t have to live like this.” He gestured helplessly at the room. “And your parents-”
“I don’t care about the money,” Mike said, cutting him off without turning around. “Or my parents’ pride. They shouldn’t care either, as long as I’m sending them money.”
Danny blinked. “You don’t..?”
“My current work is more important than all of that,” Mike continued. “More important than titles. More important than stipends. More important than satisfying expectations that were never mine.”
Danny felt a knot tighten in his chest. He tried another angle, softer, careful. “But are you… happy, Mike? Living like this? Alone, in this place, cut off from everyone?”
Mike turned then. Slowly. His expression was cold, precise: controlled like a locked drawer.
“I have never been happier,” he said.
The certainty in his voice unsettled Danny more than anger would have. He… he wasn’t lying.
“I am finally doing something I like,” Mike went on. “Something that matters to me.” He took a step closer. “The Imperial Exam? A post as a scholar-bureaucrat? That was never my desire. It was theirs.”
Danny opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“I was miserable for years,” Mike continued, words coming faster now, tighter. “Even when we were children. You didn’t see it because you didn’t know what to look for. I had to hide my interests. I had to pretend to care about court poetry, etiquette drills, subjects I loathed.” His jaw tightened. “I had to smile and speak and perform for people I loathed.”
Danny remembered Mike at thirteen, silent during lessons, fingers tapping endlessly against the table edge. He’d thought it was shyness.
“It was exhausting,” Mike said quietly. “Every day.”
He gestured to the walls, to the symbols, the diagrams, the watching eyes.
“And then I found Old America. Or rather, I found what was left. And for the first time, I felt… awake. Alive. Like I found something I could truly understand. Like I wasn’t wasting my life.”
Danny swallowed. His voice came out smaller than he intended. “Can I… see the book? The Secret History of Columbia?”
“No,” Mike said immediately.
Not harsh. Absolute.
“Then, then do you want me to tell your parents any of this?” Danny asked. “I can explain. Carefully. Maybe not everything, but-”
“No.”
A moment.
“Just tell them I’m fine,” Mike added. “That I’m busy. That I’m working.”
Danny winced inwardly. You were always terrible at lying, he thought. The kind of terrible that believed stating a falsehood once made it true.
Mike exhaled, sharp and dismissive.
“Honestly, Danny, you can tell them whatever you want,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need their approval anymore. I can live on my own.”
The words landed heavier than he seemed to realize.
Danny looked around the room again: the paper-strewn floor, the candlelit eyes, the book Mike wouldn’t show him, the quiet desperation coiled beneath his friend’s calm certainty.
Can he? Danny wondered.
He didn’t say it aloud.
Instead, he sat there, hands clasped in his lap, staring at the man his childhood friend had become: brilliant, brittle, and burning with a purpose that frightened him far more than failure ever could.
“What’ll you do if the money runs out?”
The words slipped from Danny’s mouth before he could pull them back, tight with fear. “What if the Eternal Living Guru laughs at your book? Rejects it? What then?”
Mike stopped mid-step. His head tilted, just slightly, like a knife tilting on its edge.
The shadows under his eyes deepened as his brows drew together.
“I’ve been questioned enough.”
His voice was colder than before; flatter, but brittle, stretched thin like paper soaked in oil. “Get out.”
Danny stood, heart thudding in his chest. His legs felt stiff, heavy. But still, he tried one more time.
“Mike… you’re too smart for this. You’re better than this.” He raised a hand, pleading. “You don’t have a post. No wife. No family but your parents. You’re living like a hermit in a shrine to a-” he caught himself “to a long-dead empire. This isn’t how we’re supposed to live. There may be a new Eternal Living Guru soon, someone who could reform things. This though… this is no way to honor the gurus, or the path we were raised for.”
Mike’s eyes flared, just a flicker, a candlelight flash of something volcanic buried deep. Then he spoke:
“I don’t believe in the gurus or enlightenment or any of that.”
Danny couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“I never have,” Mike continued, gaze level and unshaken. “Not truly. Not in their divinity. Not in their omniscience. They were… rulers, wise men. Not saints. Not gods.” He gestured broadly to the cluttered space around them. “And I don’t care about money. I don’t care about having a wife. I care about this. My work.”
He took a step closer, face cast in candlelight.
“I’m not like you, Danny. I never was.”
That silence returned; the one where there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t shatter something. Danny wanted to argue. He wanted to say that the gurus were wise men not gods, that his views were not too heterodox or out there to exclude him from taking the Imperial exam again... but he could also see plainly that it would be no use.
Danny exhaled. Quietly. He moved into the hallway and towards the door, empty darkness behind him.
Mike followed behind, his footsteps soft over paper and floorboards, a shadow cast in silence.
Then Danny paused, hand hovering near the latch.
Above the door, half lost in gloom on the way in, was a mural. A hand-painted piece, more delicate and careful than anything else in the room.
A woman.
Topless, her face serene but solemn, bearing a spiked crown like the sun’s own rays. Her arms were outstretched toward the viewer, toward Danny, palms raised in welcome or warning, he couldn’t tell. In her left hand, she held a burning torch. In her right, a tablet etched with Old American writing Danny couldn’t decipher.
The colors were faded. White cloth draped across her hips. Seafoam and cloud coiled around her legs. Behind her rose what looked like a shattered city skyline. The sight of her eyes unnerved Danny like nothing else so far.
“What… what is that?” Danny asked, his voice nearly a whisper.
Mike’s voice answered from behind him, quieter now.
“Lady Liberty.”
Danny turned. Mike’s gaze was fixed upward, on the woman above the door. There was something almost reverent in his tone.
“She came to me in dreams. After I read the book. She stands over the harbor, on the East Coast. Or stood.” He paused. “But we could build her again. Here. In San Francisco’s harbor. A true symbol for a rational empire.”
Danny felt a shiver run down his spine. The painted woman seemed to stare through him. The spiked crown, the light behind her head: it looked more like a halo now. Or a sunburst. Or a warning flare.
He didn’t know what it meant. But it felt like something ancient had stirred beneath his friend’s skin and spoken with his voice.
“I… I should go,” Danny muttered.
Mike opened the door. Fog breathed in like incense from the alley.
Danny stepped outside, heart hammering, sweat cold along his back despite the evening chill.
Behind him, the light of the paper-crowded room cast long, broken shadows across the threshold. Mike stood in it, arms by his side.
“Danny,” he said, voice terse, controlled.
Danny hesitated on the step. But he said nothing.
Then he walked away, the fog swallowing his figure as the door creaked shut behind him. It shut behind him with a final, hollow click, iron grating sliding home like a tomb seal.
Danny stood there for a moment in the fog, breathing hard, as if he’d just escaped a cramped, airless space. The street seemed narrower now than it had when he arrived. The houses leaned inward. The dark swallowed sound. Even the distant bells had not resumed their ringing.
He walked.
Each step carried him farther from Mike’s door, yet the feeling did not loosen. If anything, it followed him: clingy, like damp cloth against the skin. His thoughts refused to settle into anything orderly.
It had almost felt like possession.
Not the frothing, shrieking madness the temple stories warned about. Not wild eyes or ranting incoherence. No… this was worse. Controlled. Focused. Purposeful. Like something had nested inside Mike and learned how to speak with his voice, think with his mind, wear his habits like a fitted robe.
Danny rubbed his arms as he walked, trying to banish the memory of those walls.
The eyes.
Everywhere. Watching. Not decorative, not idle. They had felt intentional, as if placed with care, with meaning. As if the room itself had been arranged to observe, to witness. And the mural above the door, Lady Liberty, Mike had called her; bare-chested and crowned like a heathen sun-queen, hands outstretched in invitation or command. Danny could still see her face when he closed his eyes. Serene. Certain. As if she knew something he didn’t.
And the statue.
He hadn’t even mentioned it aloud, not to Mike. In the narrow hallway, half-hidden behind hanging papers, there had been a robed stone figure: head bowed, hands clasped around some indistinct object at its chest. Danny had only caught it in passing, but the sensation had been unmistakable.
It had felt like being noticed.
He shivered, breath fogging the air, and forced himself to keep walking.
What do I do?
Tell Mike’s parents? He imagined their faces: his mother’s tight-lipped worry, his father’s quiet, crushing disappointment. They would panic. They would demand Mike return. They would appeal to offices and ministers and inspectors.
Mike would dig in deeper. He’d said it himself. It wouldn’t matter.
Do nothing, then? Let this… thing run its course? Danny’s stomach twisted at the thought. If Mike was discovered, truly discovered, by the wrong authorities, this wouldn’t end with quiet disgrace. The Empire tolerated eccentricity in scholars, but not challenges to the very spiritual order of the empire.
Go back, a foolish part of him urged. Demand he change and retake the Imperial Exam. Shake him. Drag him out if you have to.
Danny knew better. He’d seen that look in Mike’s eyes. That wasn’t a man waiting to be corrected. That was a man who believed, utterly, calmly, dangerously, that he was right.
The fog thickened as he turned onto a broader street, closer now to the better-lit districts. Lanterns glowed like distant stars. He felt no relief.
Something ancient and wrong had taken hold of his friend. Not madness born of chaos but obsession given structure. A past that refused to stay dead, speaking through symbols and dreams and borrowed certainty.
The most frightening part?
Mike didn’t think he was lost.
Danny clasped his hands together as he walked, murmuring a half-remembered prayer under his breath; not one of the elaborate liturgies of the court, just a simple plea taught by his grandmother. He wasn’t sure who he was praying to anymore.
Only the Gurus could save Mike now.