We reached the catacomb entry point he had marked in the planning. A maintenance access beneath the old temple district, the kind of entrance that appeared on no official map and was therefore, by the particular logic of occupation, the kind of entrance that no occupation thought to seal.
He found it in the dark without looking for it.
The passage ran north from the entry toward the central plaza, the mana increasing as we moved. Not gradually.
The portal's output was significant enough that the mana density in the underground passages had changed the air, a thickness to it that pressed against the skin, the contamination riding alongside the raw mana output in the particular combination that demon portals produced.
I felt my illusion spell flicker.
The kind of flicker that happened when the ambient mana was dense enough to interfere with sustained casting. I had maintained the illusion through significant mana environments before. The portal's output was in a different category. The interference wasn't consistent. It came in waves with the portal's pulse, the illusion holding between pulses and thinning during them.
We were thirty meters from the nexus chamber when it dropped entirely.
Not gradually. Between one pulse and the next, the illusion simply wasn't there.
I was wearing my own face.
Aldren was two steps ahead of me. He turned to check our positioning and stopped.
He looked at me.
The torchlight in the passage was dim but sufficient. Sufficient for a man who had stood over a battlefield in Branklore's north and looked at the body of Crescentine Fleur and called for a council of kings.
Sufficient for a man who had confirmed the hero's death with his own eyes.
The silence in the passage had a specific quality.
Aldren looked at my face for a long moment without speaking. His expression moved through several things, none of them fully completing before the next one arrived. Recognition. Disbelief. Recognition again, more certain this time. Something beneath both of those that didn't have a clean name.
He looked at the passage around us. At the mana density in the air. At the portal's pulse moving through the stone beneath his feet.
Then he looked at me.
"The Hero of Medalline." He said. Quietly. The way you said something when you were confirming it was real.
"Is dead." I said. "You confirmed it yourself."
He didn't say anything.
"You rode to the battlefield personally." I said. "You stood over the body. You sent the messenger to the emperor. It's time for a council between kings, you said."
His jaw was tight.
"You were there." He said.
"I was watching from a tree." I said. "The body was a clone. The whole engagement was staged."
He looked at the passage floor.
"Two and a half years." He said.
"Almost three." I said.
He looked up.
"And the settlement." He said. "Eryndor. You built it."
"Yes." I said.
"After we." He stopped.
"After you conspired with every king in Philantria and the emperor to have me killed." I said. "Yes. After that."
The portal pulsed again. The mana density surged and ebbed. My face stayed my own.
He stood in the passage looking at me with the expression of a man reassembling something that had been constructed on a false foundation and finding the reconstruction difficult.
"You healed me." He said.
"Torra asked me to." I said.
"You didn't tell me." He said.
"No." I said.
"Why." He said.
I looked at him. At the king of a fallen kingdom standing in the catacombs of his own capital, having walked through an occupied city in the dark, having brought me to the door of a demon portal because it was the only thing of value he had left to offer.
"Because it didn't matter." I said. "What you were three years ago. What you did. It doesn't change what the portal is or where the entry points are or what needs to happen tonight."
He absorbed that.
"You could have left me in the marketplace." He said.
"Yes." I said.
"But you didn't." He said.
"Torra asked me to help you." I said. "I already told you that."
He was quiet for a moment.
"The other kings." He said. "If they knew you were alive."
"They won't find out from you." I said.
It wasn't a question. He heard it as the statement it was.
"No." He said. "They won't."
I looked at the passage ahead of us. At the light coming from the nexus chamber thirty meters north, the portal's output visible even at this distance, the mana density thickening with every step we took toward it.
"The chamber." I said. "How many entry points."
He straightened. The reassembly completed, or set aside, or folded into somewhere he would take out and examine later when this was finished.
"Three." He said. "The one we're using. One from the east district, one from the temple's main floor above. The demons will have the upper one. Possibly the east."
"Then we stay low." I said. "Move."
He moved.
I followed.
The portal's light grew as we went, the mana pressing against us like weather, my face staying my own in the dense air, the illusion having found no purchase and given up trying.
Behind us, the passage we had come through.
Ahead, the chamber.
And in the chamber, the thing I had been patient about for long enough.