Words have power—over the soul, over the mind.

These are the hymns strung together for purpose, for reason: civilization built upon words.

From the truths, the facts, the lies.

Crown Prince Zai Tianci knows how to lie, knows how to see the lies: how these monsters would hold their eyes to him for a few moments too long, how their words strung together with too much formality, and how each of their ridiculous promises were always in his own favor.

The Crown Prince of the Tianci Dominion has been lied to before.

The Rebel Warlords in the Southern States, whose speeches sung with promises of peace, beseeches of aid for their sisters and brothers of the north, all came to his ears as a child. How those eyes of theirs met with his, how their words spoken of some incredulous ceasefire were joined alongside the symphonic finale of a motor-carriage bombing.

The Northern Viceroys wrote letters of jargon, of words that manipulated the very fabric of their civilization—burying a crown prince amongst their footnotes and loopholes. How, in some atrocity, these cartels would take and take from their very people; from the scraps of bread on their naked tables, the smallest motes of silver from empty pockets, to even their very lives in the dark mines and brutal factories.

But in the plains, in Landfall, the words would always come with promises.

And promises always come with pain.

Every alliance came with fragile terms, each betrayal a lesson. Every conversation with this young man, from the transcripted speeches in the High Court to the private motions in the backrooms, was a lesson.

From inside the Lower Courts the Magistrates would debate in their endless drones, from the High Court the Sages would demand things of father and him—and between their factional conflicts all they shared just one conspiracy:

Zai Tianci was never to be trusted.

A Lower and High Court rotting on opposite ends of the same fruit, a tattered royal family left in the middle, buried in the moldy pulp, pressed under weight and expectation and grudge.

These Magistrates, who spoke to this boy in their worn dialects and righteous fatigue, bleed sympathy when it suits their coin. Wearing the perfume of ambition beneath their robes of gangeringe. It's reform, or the performance of reform.

And Zai listens, calls for the people—declaring that they themselves are the future of the Dominion.

But those Sages, fattening themselves on political meat and long calcified rituals, speak not in blaring pronouncements but in the quiet obedience to their master. A council whose blood long dried from their veins, starved women and men who take governance in nano-meters of protocol and centuries of servitude.

And Zai works with them in the shadows, pushing their agendas in the promises made only by the soul closest to the one they all fear.

They all live in fear of that monster on the throne.

And the monster born of his sacred essence.

Zai Tianci, the Crown Prince of the Dominion, will always lie to them.

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Because someone has to remember the people buried beneath these ancient laws and drowning currents of tradition.

Someone has to remember that the Tianci Dominion is not the Court.

Because Zai Tianci knows the truth of the Dominion beyond Landfall:

His nation is the peasant child in Burubei, too young to work but already dying in the quartz mines.

His nation is the starving widow in the South, bartering a diamond necklace for three cups of rice.

His nation is the limbless veteran on the street corner in Honger, dying in a dumpster of rancid cooking oil.

The Dominion is the city leveled by artillery, the starving child gnawing on the bones of a dead sibling, and the unanswered prayers of a million dead.

The Dominion is a lie.

Zai Tianci, the Crown Prince of it all, is nothing but lies.

So why does this single lie hurt?

Why does this lie, spoken in this utter mess of a room, feel like a serrated blade ripping through his chest? Why does this lie feel like the chill of water entering his lungs? Why does this lie, from the Silver Demon of that monstrous Imperium, hurt him so much?

Because…

Because if there was even a single sliver of truth from her, if there was just an insignificant chance that she was telling the truth… then what does that make him?

It makes Zai a victor, a general presiding over this defeat of this vastly superior enemy. To see this young woman, this poisoned vector into his country, fall beneath him into a crumbled mess of emotional defeat. To see this Fourth Princess, a demon feared across all of Ensolia, come to him in this mess of confession and compromise—is the first step of that vast conspiratorial plan of his.

Zai Tianci was to be the martyr of this nation, to give his own life to this monster of silver. And all he needs to do is to play this last tile, corner this outsider in a cage of arcanite steel of her own heart—because if she was telling this truth then all this crown prince needed was a simple lie:

Tell her that you love her too. That poison whispers into his soul. Tell her that all she needs to do is give you kingdoms: the silver, the guns, the aerostatics, the factories and the soldiers and you will be hers. Take this piece of the great game into your possession, take this political weapon and destroy it all—let the lower courts prostrate themselves in fear beneath you, make the high court bleed across these cursed lands.

Lord Zai, take your birthright of terror and starvation. Take this weapon's hand, and become the monster you were meant to be.

But this oceanic soul, and its vast abyss, washes against the sand and tide—washes across these rivers of poison and fire for him.

Because if this was just another lie, if this was just another empty word spoken to a courtier in the grand halls of the Palatial Temple, then he would say it without question, without any hesitation.

So why do the words catch in his throat, why does the very thought of this eat at his heart, at his mind, at his very soul?

Why, when he stares at those pale blue eyes (which, as of now, were no longer looking at him but instead at the floor as far away from his gaze as possible) does he feel the blade cut into his chest?

Because you made a promise to a mountain?

Because for the first time in your life someone has come to you with a simple truth?

Because you want this?

Zai Tianci doesn't know.

And he won't know.

He can't know.

Not now.

Tomorrow they would return to Landfall, back to the murder and the death and the conspiracies and lies. Tomorrow, they would be in the Court of Monsters, of blood and blades.

Tomorrow, there would be no more truth from any of them.

But right now, they were in this room together, with nothing but the truth.

Fear, cold and absolute, crawls across his skin in a chilling frost. An emotion that freezes him in its grasp, in its absolute terror that for the first time in his life leaves him paralyzed in indecision.

And from nothing, he tells her the truth—the sickening reality destroying the Crown Prince like a sledge hammer to gypsum.

"Not now."

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