Something was wrong with his memories.

That was the conclusion he arrived at, no matter which direction he approached it from.

Ten years inside the Ancestral Realm, every day of it, and every hour, all of it was arranged in his mind with the clarity of someone whose memory was closer to a record than a recollection.

He could pull from any of it without effort. Conversations, or battles. The particular quality of light in places he had stood only once and never returned to.

Except for the last two and a half years, the years he had lived as a madman.

Those memories existed in a different state entirely. Patchy and threaded with fog. Multiple versions of the same moment and time, stacked on top of each other like transparencies that didn’t quite align, each one slightly different from the last, none of them fully trustworthy.

He had always attributed that to the madness, the natural consequence of a mind that had been compromised, that had generated as much fiction as fact during those years and had not always been capable of distinguishing between them.

He could accept that and had accepted it.

However, he could not accept his actions concerning Sophia because they had occurred before he fell into madness.

He had no answer, so for the time being he filed it alongside everything else he couldn’t act on yet, because only two individuals had any chance of clearing his confusion.

The Realm Ruler, whom he had no path back to. And the Mad Hegemon, caged somewhere inside him, pressing at the walls of his consciousness with the patient persistence of something that had nowhere else to be and all the time it needed.

He would sooner take Ahrimon’s word, deceptive and vile as he was, than hand that cunning old monster the invitation of a direct conversation where he could plant ideas and poison his mind.

Who knew if it was not Odysseus’s doing, having cleanly altered key memories that made him not act on his sister’s condition.

He pushed the troubles back, and returned to the moment.

The car passed through the gate without slowing, the wall of manicured hedgerow rising on either side and swallowing the street behind them, the outside world disappearing as cleanly as if it had never existed.

The estate stretched beyond the green in every direction, vast, unhurried, the kind of space that didn’t announce its scale so much as simply reveal it, the grounds immaculate, the silence of carefully maintained wealth sitting over everything like a second atmosphere.

The house itself was carved from marble, gray, black, and white threaded through each other in proportions that suggested someone with both taste and the resources to fully indulge it.

The greenery was perfect. The geometry of it all was perfect. Even the light seemed to fall with a degree of cooperation that natural light rarely offered.

A man in a black suit met them at the approach without a word exchanged, and took the lead ahead of them on his hoverboard, moving directly toward the largest of the structures.

From a distance, Alex could already see him.

Magnus stood at the doors.

Tall, composed, and the kind of handsome that came with the particular confidence of someone who had always known exactly what he looked like and had long since stopped finding it interesting. His hair was a deep, living red, threaded through with the warmth of orange the way embers were threaded with fire, and it fell across eyes the color of sun at its most direct, amber and gold and utterly, unnervingly alert.

He was smiling.

Alex exhaled once, slow and quiet, and closed his eyes for a fraction of a second to bring his mind into the present, away from any worries.

The man waiting at those doors was a fox in the most precise sense of the word, not reckless, not proud, but deliberate in the way that only people who had played long games for a very long time became deliberate.

He wanted something.

That had been clear from the moment the first arrangement had been proposed, and it was no less clear now. The question was never whether Magnus had prepared for this meeting. It was what form that preparation had taken, and how many layers of it Alex hadn’t seen yet.

He opened his eyes.

The car stopped. All three of them stepped out at the same moment, and Magnus’s ember eyes moved across them, a brief, sweeping assessment, unhurried and paused.

Something shifted in them. Not surprise exactly, more the particular expression of someone encountering a fact they had already known intellectually and were now meeting in person for the first time, the knowing becoming real. Whatever he saw in the three of them, it seemed to satisfy something.

The smile widened as he stepped forward.

"Gentlemen." His voice carried the easy warmth of a man who had never once in his life felt out of place in a room. "I hope you are having a great day."

Silence answered him.

The smile didn’t waver. If anything, it settled into something more genuine as if the absence of pleasantry was itself a response he had appreciated.

"Well then," Magnus said, turning smoothly, "follow me."

He led them inside and down a staircase that descended into the basement. At the bottom, the far wall simply ceased to exist, sliding away into the sides without sound.

The room beyond was large and still and softly lit, white light diffused from sources that weren’t immediately visible, filling the space without casting shadows in any direction that felt wrong.

At the center, a glass tabletop floated at a settled height above the floor, its surface clear and perfect, suspended without visible support. The chairs around it hung similarly, a few feet above the ground, calm and motionless, gravity having apparently reached an arrangement with the room that didn’t apply anywhere else.

Magnus moved to his side of the table without ceremony and turned to face them, the smile now quieter, more focused, stripped of its social warmth and replaced with something sharper underneath.

"Take a seat."

Magnus gestured toward the floating chairs. Their eyes moved across the room as they settled, large, mostly empty, the kind of space that felt designed to make everything said within it feel more significant by contrast.

The floating chairs offered no resistance as they sat, holding their positions with the same quiet certainty as everything else in this room.

Magnus took his own seat across from them, unhurried.

"Tea, coffee, any other beverage, all world-class. Any other needs, say it and they will be delivered." He let the offer sit for a moment, and it was Venedikt who answered it.

"Get to the point, Magnus."

It wasn’t hostility. It was simply the most efficient thing to say, delivered in Venedikt’s particular way, clean, direct, carrying no heat and requiring none.

They all knew that Magnus wanted something. That had been established before this meeting had been arranged, before they had driven through the gate, before any of them had set foot in this room.

If all he had wanted was to fulfill the terms of the contract, the heart of a Sin General, agreed upon, already held by Alex and waiting to be delivered, he could have dropped Sir Slavik at their door and been done with it.

The fact that he had requested a meeting in person said everything about what sat beyond the contract.

"This was me getting to the point," Magnus replied, his voice carrying no offense at the curtness, his eyes moving with the particular attention of someone cataloguing everything they touched. "You know I want something."

"But I am not the type to walk into a negotiation without first understanding what the other party needs. What they want." He settled back slightly. "It’s simply how I prefer to work."

No one answered. He continued as if they had.

"Your organization currently needs manpower. The war against the Eldravian Empire is coming, and while I am still working to identify which world power sits behind you, I know with certainty that they don’t control any of the top ten guilds."

A pause.

"You are also not naive enough to believe that seven of those ten guilds will side with your cause. They serve powers like mine, and to powers like mine, this was never primarily about what we stand to gain from the Ancient World itself." His ember eyes moved across them, steady and unhurried. "It’s about what comes after."

He let the words land before continuing.

"The assimilation stages. Truly entering the Ancient World. Being reborn within it, and from there exploring what lies beyond. The cosmos." A slow exhale left him, heavy with the weight of something he had clearly spent considerable time sitting with.

"A war is simply a convenient mechanism to accelerate that process. We didn’t start it, but we were always going to be pulled into it, one way or another."

He folded his hands on the glass surface.

"Before this morning, the choice was clear. Side with the Eldravian Empire and the Demon King. They were the obvious victors, as the weight on their side of the scale was simply too great to argue with, and beyond the odds, there was the matter of efficiency. Their victory would end the war faster, and a faster end meant fewer deaths overall, however unpleasant the path to it."

His expression shifted, something entering it that hadn’t been there before. Not uncertainty exactly, something more honest than that, and harder to categorize.

"Then there is your presence."He looked at Alex directly for the first time since they had sat down, not the sweeping assessment from the doorway, but something focused and deliberate.

"You make things difficult," Magnus said. "The other side still holds more weight. Their chances of standing at the end remain higher. I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting otherwise." He paused. "But you exist now, and that changes the calculus."

He was quiet for a moment, as if choosing his next words with particular care.

"We had made our decision for a reason I still believe in," he continued. "Empress Siles will wage this war regardless. She dresses it as conquest, as unification, but the motives were always more personal than that. More singular."

"And resisting her would only delay the inevitable and fill the years between now and that end with deaths that serve no one." His voice carried something that might, in another man, have been called regret.

"So we had chosen to remain technically neutral. Aligned on paper, hands clean in practice. Because if you know the full truth of it, there are innocents caught on both sides, being moved across a board by monsters who want nothing beyond their own benefit."

He looked at each of them in turn.

"You changed that. Now everyone will be forced to choose a side, truly choose, not simply position themselves at a safe distance from the outcome."

"More people will die because the end is no longer inevitable enough for the powerful to stand back and let it arrive on its own terms." He didn’t say it with accusation. He said it the way a man stated a fact he had already accepted.

"If you win, two monsters are removed from the world, and whatever evil they carried with them ends, and that is not a small thing. But the cost will be steep, steeper than it would have been."