“Our emperor is always seeking new sources, for one day even the Preserve will run dry.”

“The Preserve?”

“You know it as the Blackveil Forest.”

“But it’s tainted.”

“Those who harvest it, the emperor’s artificers, claim they purify it through a filtration system. They process it somehow. Turn it into forms they can use it in—liquids, solids. As we use rivers and canals to power the machines of Mill City, so the emperor uses etherea to mold the Capital into whatever form he desires. It is said he uses it to make himself and his most special servants immortal.”

“Like Eletians.”

“Yes, like Eletians.”

One of Karigan’s ancestors, Hadriax el Fex, had been Mornhavon the Black’s closest companion, and she’d read his journal, which had survived the centuries hidden in the archives of Selium. She gathered from his writings that Mornhavon had been obsessed with the Eletians. He was both in awe of them and resented them. Hadriax had written of grotesque experiments Mornhavon performed on them to learn the source of their immortality and magical nature. It sounded as if he had achieved that goal.

“The world is much poorer for its lack of etherea,” the professor said. “Ever since your arrival, I have wondered how things might have been different.”

“Even in my time,” Karigan replied, “magic was scarce, or at least the magic users were. Very few survived the Long War and the Scourge that followed.” She believed that Green Riders survived simply because their abilities were so minor and only worked if amplified by devices like their Rider brooches. During the Scourge, the brooches were supposed to be destroyed, but the Riders of the distant past hid them by placing a spell of invisibility on them. She touched the empty place where her brooch should have been pinned, feeling only the warmth of her own flesh through her nightgown. The Riders continued to keep the secret, and it was so ingrained in Karigan to do so that she did not speak of Rider abilities to the professor. He obviously knew something of the brooches, because he had recognized what hers was, if nothing more than a symbol of the messenger service.

“Still,” the professor said, “you lived in a time and place where there were still Eletians and some magic. Magic that was not used to subjugate the populace. Wonders still existed—it wasn’t all machines. There were forests and clear lakes, fresh air to breathe.”

It was not perfect in her own world, and she thought some of Mill City’s machines a vast improvement compared to what she had in her time—the accoutrements of the privy and bathing room coming immediately to mind—but she agreed that this bleak future lacked all the richness and beauty of her time. It was drab, hard. Depressing.

“Believe me when I say,” the professor continued, “that Mill City is a paradise compared to other parts of the empire. The city magistrate does not tender abuse upon his populace to the degree it is done in other places, and the lands about us are not torn asunder and stripped for coal or silver or other minerals. Of course, the true paradise is the Capital, as artificially contrived as it is.”

“Where is the Capital?” She kept hearing about it, but if it wasn’t Sacor City, where was it?

“Let me show you.” The professor returned to his library shelves, gently sliding the diary of Seften into its slot and humming again as he gazed along the bottom shelves. Eventually he tugged out a large volume with red leather covers. In contrast to the others, it did not show damage. He laid it on his desk with a thump and beckoned Karigan to his side. They leaned over the volume shoulder to shoulder, he smelling faintly, though not unpleasantly, of earth.

“This is an atlas of the empire,” he said. “I have one in the library at the house, too, for reference.” He opened it near the beginning, and there, displayed in vibrant color, lay the Serpentine Empire occupying the continent that had once been home to several countries. She saw that those countries had become subject territories, or protectorates, of the empire. Borders were, in some cases, altered. Hura-desh, for instance, had been combined with the Under Kingdoms to form the Under Territories. Eletia was gone completely from the map, and the empire claimed even the Northern Wastes and the harsh, dry lands to the southwest of Durnesia that Karigan had known as the Unclaimed Territories, inhabited only by non-aligned tribes, and visited only by the hardiest of travelers. They were now simply labeled, “Imperial lands.”

As for Sacoridia, it was renamed “Imperial Seat.” Sacoridia’s neighbor to the west was no longer Rhovanny, but the Rhove Protectorate.

Though Karigan saw it all laid out there before her, she still couldn’t quite believe it. It was like a map drawn from some tale of fantasy, not real life.

The professor seemed to pick up on her disbelief. “It is said,” he told her, “the empire’s forces were an irresistible tide that swept the continent, all enemies falling before it. Durnesia and Bince capitulated before they could be crushed. Tallitre has never been fully subjugated and most slaves now come from those periodic uprisings as the bounty of war.”

He turned pages that showed detailed maps of each of the protectorates and opened up to the Imperial Seat. Sacoridia’s borders remained very much the same, but gone were the twelve provinces and their names, their boundaries redrawn in straight lines, and the areas numbered. Karigan’s home province of L’Petrie, or what was roughly L’Petrie, was now squared off and labeled “Section 1, the Capital,” and painted in gold leaf. She glanced at the Blackveil Peninsula, colored a bright blue, and simply labeled, “Imperial Preserve.” A city had grown about where the breach was, called, “Etherium Plantation.”