Duke Corvath's letter arrived unsealed, deliberately, a small insult all its own, delivered by a rider in Eastland colors who waited in the Ember Works' courtyard with his hood up until Remus came out to read it personally rather than through Annabelle.
You have built a railroad that reaches every corner of this kingdom except the one that actually holds its coal and iron, it read. I would speak with you about that, in person, at the fortress on the border road, before you decide you no longer require what my hills produce.
Remus went alone, save for Andrea, three days later, along a road that hadn't existed in any usable form until his own survey crews had graded it flat the previous season. The border fortress itself sat squat and grey on a low rise where the Southlands' forests finally gave way to the Eastlands' bare, coal-blackened hills, a building that had clearly been designed, generations ago, to remind travelers exactly whose territory they were entering rather than to make them comfortable once they'd arrived. No banners hung inside its cold, undecorated hall, no tapestries, nothing but bare stone and a single long table with no place setting laid at all, a deliberate omission Remus clocked the moment he crossed the threshold. Duke Corvath sat at the head of it already, a broad, grey-bearded man with the particular stillness of someone who'd spent his whole life being underestimated for his size and had long since stopped correcting people about it out loud.
"You're younger than the stories claim," Corvath said, by way of greeting, echoing Tacitus almost word for word without seeming to know it. "I confess I expected someone considerably harder to underestimate at a glance."
"I get that a great deal," Remus said. "You wanted to talk about the railroad."
"I wanted to talk about what it means," Corvath said, and pulled out a chair for himself rather than offering one, the deliberate discourtesy of a man reminding a guest whose house this still was. "Do you understand, Master Draymoor, what actually holds this kingdom together? Not the King. Certainly not that boy on his oversized throne. What holds it together is that whoever sits on coal and iron and grain holds something the rest of the kingdom cannot simply do without, and every duke, myself included, has spent generations quietly, patiently converting that fact into the only kind of leverage a regional lord can actually keep."
"And the railroad threatens that," Remus said, not a question.
"The railroad ends that," Corvath said, and for the first time something raw slipped through the careful stillness of his voice. "Once you can move coal from anywhere to anywhere, cheaply, quickly, on rails I don't control and didn't build, my hills stop being leverage and start being merely a resource, indistinguishable from any other hillside in the kingdom that happens to have coal under it. You haven't just built a faster cart, boy. You've made every duke in this kingdom, including the one currently offering you tea, structurally unnecessary. I am not angry that you're clever. I am telling you, plainly, that clever men who dismantle the only thing that makes men like me matter tend not to be forgiven for it, however useful the invention turns out to be for everyone else."
Remus sat with that a long moment, turning it over with the same careful attention he gave every rule the System itself had ever handed him, because underneath the threat sitting openly on the table between them was an argument he found, uncomfortably, that he couldn't entirely dismiss.
"I built it to move grain to people who were starving and iron to people who couldn't afford the trip to buy it," he said, finally. "I didn't build it to strip you of anything. But I won't apologize for the fact that it does, either. You're describing a system where a handful of men stay powerful specifically because everyone else stays a little bit desperate. I don't think that's a system worth protecting just because you're currently one of the men it protects."
"No," Corvath agreed, and something almost like respect moved behind his eyes even as his jaw stayed hard. "I don't imagine you do. Remember this conversation, Master Draymoor, the day you find yourself wondering why I stopped being reasonable with you. I gave you the chance to understand, plainly, exactly what you were taking from me before you took the rest of it."
He offered no threats beyond that, and no violence, and Remus rode back toward Autumnshade with Andrea silent at his side for the better part of an hour before she finally spoke.
"You believed him," she said. It wasn't a question either.
"I believed that he believes it," Remus said. "That's a different thing. But I don't think it makes him wrong about what's coming."
The alliance with the Drowned Faith took him considerably further from home than the border fortress had, three days east of Ibdan into a swamp thick enough that the roads leading in flooded on a schedule Remus never fully learned to predict, low wooden causeways the only dry footing between one stilt-raised building and the next, the whole city of Fenmarsh rising up out of black water on legs like some enormous, patient wading bird that had simply decided, centuries ago, never to leave.
Pilgrims moved along the causeways in plain brown robes, each one wearing a small brass lantern no bigger than a thumbnail strung on a cord at their throat, and one of them fell into step beside Remus almost the moment he set foot on the first plank.
"You've come a long way to seek enlightenment," the pilgrim said, not quite a question.
"I've come to find the High Priest," Remus said.
"Then he will find you," the pilgrim said, "if it's truly your destiny to."
It took most of a day and a second pilgrim's guidance before Remus was finally led through a huge bronze door carved with animals no naturalist would have recognized, down dim, water-slicked halls to a central chamber where a waterfall spilled endlessly into a still, black pool, and there, waiting with his eyes closed and a beard longer than any Remus had yet seen on a living man, sat Raasmus, High Priest of the Drowned Faith.
"Are you Raasmus?"
"I am."
"I've come to ask for-"
"It doesn't matter why you've come," Raasmus said, without opening his eyes. "If you want my alliance, walk into that water and tell me, afterward, what you learned there."
Remus crossed the narrow bridge spanning the pool without letting himself hesitate long enough to think better of it, and stepped straight into the falling water.
On the other side was only a cave, and when he turned to find his way back out, the waterfall had vanished entirely, replaced by a sheer, silent drop that hadn't been there a moment before.
The hand that landed on his shoulder a moment later belonged to a face he hadn't seen in years except in the mirror, back when the mirror had belonged to somebody else entirely: his own old face, dorky hair and all, wearing the exact easy grin Yoshi Yoshimura had died with on the last night that name had meant anything at all.
"It's been a while," Yoshi said.
"I'm dreaming," Remus said, though some old, cold certainty in his chest already knew that wasn't quite the right word for whatever this was.
"Not exactly," Yoshi said. "This place shows people their own hell. Sit with it. That's the whole exercise."
What followed wasn't pain, not in any sense Remus had braced himself for. It was worse than pain, in the particular way only a good life he'd never gotten to live could be worse: himself in his own thirties, accepting a prize for a unified theory of matter he'd never finished proving; himself walking a factory floor watching the first commercially viable reactor his own designs had made possible spin up to full output; himself on a suburban lawn with a woman whose face he recognized with a lurch, Maggie, the girl he'd carried a quiet, unspoken crush on his entire childhood and never once told, laughing at something their child had just said. Every vision carried the same warm, unbearable glow of a life fully, safely lived, and every one of them dissolved, eventually, into the same handful of images he already carried with him everywhere: a tank's blueprints handed across a table to a woman with a soft laugh and cold eyes; a date he should have cancelled the moment his own instincts had first gone quiet and watchful around her; a gunshot he never saw coming because he'd trusted the wrong person with the one thing he should never have let out of his own hands.
"I think I understand," Remus said, hoarse, once the visions had finally stopped. "Hell is watching what I could have been."
"You got another chance," Yoshi said, quieter now, none of the old grin left in it. "Don't waste this one the same way."
He surfaced choking, two of Raasmus's own attendants pounding water out of his lungs with rough, practiced hands, and Raasmus himself stood over the whole scene with the same closed-eyed calm he'd shown before any of it started.
"What did you see?" the High Priest asked.
"Hell," Remus said, and found he didn't have anything else in him yet to add to that.
"Good," Raasmus said, and something in his tone suggested this was, genuinely, the answer he'd been hoping for. "You came seeking my alliance, and you have it. This kingdom's current bloodline would never have risked what you just risked for a piece of wisdom this small. I think it's past time this throne belonged to someone willing to bleed a little for what he wants to understand."
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