Eldrin's hand hovered over the Heart of Valoria for a long moment before he finally lowered it the rest of the way. The soft light flared brighter at his touch, spilling shadows across the stone walls of the chamber in shapes that didn't quite match anything in the room.
"It only shows this to the village leader, and only rarely," he said quietly. "The Heart remembers everything that presses against it with intent to harm. Malakar's creatures left something behind last night."
The light above the Heart folded in on itself, then unspooled into something almost like smoke given shape — a symbol, hanging in the air. A crown, cracked down the middle, wreathed in curling grey mist. Beneath it, fragments of a word flickered in and out of focus, as if the Heart itself struggled to hold the shape of it.
"...overeign," I read aloud, the rest of the word refusing to settle. "Sovereign. The Grey Sovereign?"
Eldrin's face had gone pale. "I have heard that name exactly once in my life, from my own grandmother, on the night she told me why our family has guarded this Heart for six generations. She said it like a curse word. Like something you weren't supposed to say twice."
I reached for the Crystal of Eldoria, still tucked away in its pocket of space, and pulled it free. Its knowledge had already saved me from a dozen small, embarrassing mistakes in this world — a wrong greeting here, a misunderstood custom there. It had never once mentioned a Grey Sovereign, but I'd learned by now that the crystal only held what it had held before its bearer found it. Maybe if I focused the question hard enough, something buried deeper would surface.
I closed my eyes and asked it, the way I might have wished for a status window. Tell me about the Grey Sovereign.
For a moment, nothing. Then, faint and distant, like a page found stuck between two others in a very old book:
...cast out from the Court of Heaven, three centuries past, for a crime the Court itself refuses to name...
...banished to a realm without sun, stripped of court and title, left only the crown he broke on his way out the door...
...presumed sealed. Presumed. Not confirmed...
I opened my eyes. Eldrin was watching me carefully.
"The Court of Heaven," I said slowly. "That's a real place. Not just a phrase."
"You didn't know that?" Eldrin asked, surprised.
I thought about the three choices I'd been given at the end of my training — Earth, this world, or ascending to build a heaven of my own. I'd assumed that last option was mine alone to take or leave, a private reward for finishing an absurd task. It had never once occurred to me that there might already be an entire government up there, with rules, and history, and apparently at least one very disgruntled ex-employee currently squatting somewhere in the dark with an army of shadow creatures and an unhealthy interest in me specifically.
"I didn't know," I admitted. "But I think I need to find out fast."
"There are records," Eldrin said. "Not here — Valoria keeps oral history, not libraries. But Kaldrath, the capital of this kingdom, has scholars who study things like this. Old wars. Old names. If anyone outside the Court of Heaven itself has written anything real about the Grey Sovereign, it'll be there."
I turned the crystal over in my hand, feeling its faint warmth against my palm. A trillion years of training had prepared me to survive almost anything the universe could throw at me physically. It had done absolutely nothing to prepare me for politics, or scholarship, or the particular headache of realizing that the being hunting a small hidden village for its relic might actually be the least of my problems.
"I'll need to leave Valoria," I said, and the words tasted strange in my mouth. In the short time I'd been here, this valley had become the closest thing to a home I'd had since the accident that started all of this. "Not forever. But I can't fight something I don't understand, and I don't understand this at all yet."
Eldrin nodded slowly, though I could see the reluctance in it. "The village will hold. You've already given us more of a fighting chance than we've had in generations. But Lukas — whatever the Grey Sovereign truly is, please be careful. My grandmother didn't fear many things. She feared that name."
I slipped the crystal back into its pocket of space and looked one last time at the fading crown of smoke above the Heart before it dissolved entirely.
"So do I," I said. And meant it, for the first time in longer than I could remember.