The World Believes My Lies
Chapter One: Ignis Null
Ren had a whole speech prepared for the moment he was isekai'd.
He'd written it in his grimoire — a thick black notebook stuffed with prophecies, secret organizations, and a very thorough list of villain names — and he'd practiced it on the bus, in the bathroom mirror, and twice into his phone's voice recorder. The speech went something like: "So. You've summoned me. I accept. But know this: I bow to no crown, and every shadow in this world answers to me." He thought it was extremely cool.
He was running it one more time when he was hit by a delivery van.
In his defense, it was a Saturday. He was wearing the cloak — the good one, black, with the high collar he'd altered himself — because he was on his way to a convention, and in his defense, he had an audience of exactly one pigeon, and in his defense, he'd stepped backward off the curb to get more room for the dramatic reveal of his "true power level." The horn came first, then the sound of the van's driver swearing with real commitment, then the sound of a sack of potatoes hitting pavement. Ren had time to think, Oh no, my cloak, and then there was a goddess with a clipboard, and Ren understood that his moment had arrived.
She wasn't what he'd expected. No wings, no throne, no cosmic choir. She looked like someone who'd drawn the short straw in a celestial office building — a young woman in a grey suit, holding a clipboard, with the tired expression of a cashier at closing time. Her name tag read DIAPHANE, DEPARTMENT OF REINCARNATION, TERRITORY 12.
"Right," she said, without looking up. "Ren Shikigami. Cause of death: van. Time of death: inconvenient."
"Did I make it?" Ren asked. "To the other world. Do I get a cheat skill?"
"Cheat skills are out of stock." She flipped through her binder. "Popular this quarter. Everyone wants the overpowered one. We have... 'Vague Intuition.' We have 'Remarkable Hair.'"
"I already have remarkable hair," Ren said, tugging a strand of red fringe. It was true. He'd spent forty minutes on it.
"Then you're set." The goddess made a note. "Congratulations. Off you go."
"Wait. Wait. What about magic? Every other person in my position gets magic."
She sighed like someone being asked to do a second month of paperwork. "Fine. Magic. You'll land on Orbis Veritas. It runs on something called Logomancy. Word magic. If enough people believe something you say is true, the world rewrites itself to make it true. Reputation is literal power there. The more people trust your word, the more your word becomes law."
Ren nodded along, not really listening, already composing a new speech about how he would become a living legend.
"Actually," the goddess added, "for you personally? I'd be careful. Word to the wise."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means stop making things up." She handed him a pamphlet. The cover read: BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO ORBIS VERITAS. The fine print at the bottom said: WARNING: NARRATIVE CASUALTIES ARE NOT COVERED BY THE SPHERE. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM DECLARING THINGS. THANK YOU.
"Wow," said Ren. "Somebody out there is really against fun."
"Good luck," said the goddess, already reaching for her sandwich.
There was a push. A fall. A feeling like every nerve in his body plugging into a wall socket. And then Ren woke up in a field with a knight's spear an inch from his nose.
He handled it with grace and dignity. He screamed.
"A sage," said the knight holding the spear, flatly. He was a large, weathered man with a grey beard and the sort of face that had seen every lie a person could tell. "Course you are. We've hauled a hundred sages to the Capital this year. Last one told me he could see the future. Told me my left boot was haunted."
"Haunted," said Ren.
"Haunted. Pants too, apparently. The whole outfit." The knight lowered the spear a few inches and squinted at Ren's black cloak, which was now covered in grass and something that might have been old sheep. "You're young for a sage. Most of you are old enough to know better."
Ren got to his feet, brushed himself off, and took stock. Field. Dusk. Seven armored men staring at him. A walled city glinting on the horizon, white stone going gold in the last light. His cloak was intact. His hair, tragically, was not.
"I am a wandering sage," he announced, because it was the only plan he had. "I have traveled a very long way. I bow to no crown, and—" he paused, "—every shadow in this world answers to me."
Silence. One of the younger knights, a boy with a round face and a spear he carried like a broom, whispered, "Every shadow, sir?"
"It's a title," Ren said quickly. "It's— I don't literally mean— it's a thing people say where I'm from."
"Where's that?" asked the grey knight.
Ren had not thought of a lie this far ahead. "Far," he said, which was technically true. "You wouldn't know it."
The grey knight studied him for a long moment. Ren could feel the man filing him under "another one." That should have been the end of it. Ren should have been told to go wash his cloak and be on his way, and the story would have been short.
But the Church had been screening prophets for months, the grey knight explained, with the enthusiasm of a man describing a recurring headache. Anyone who looked interesting got brought to the Capital "for the clergy to take a look at," which everyone involved understood to mean "so the clergy could make him recite scripture until he admitted he was lying."
Ren, who did not know this, heard the words "taken to the Capital to meet the High Priestess" and interpreted them, with the confidence of a man who has never once been right about his own life, as a royal escort.
He rode into the city on the back of a supply wagon, sitting up straight, waving at no one in particular.
The Capital of Belief was not what he'd expected, which was the first and last time that sentence would ever apply. It was clean, for a start. White stone streets, buildings carved with words — not painted, not hung on signs, but cut into the stone, hundreds of years of sentences layered over each other like the pages of a book left out in the rain. Ren leaned over the wagon's rail to read one: MAY THE ONE WHO WALKS HERE WALK LIGHTLY, FOR THE CITY REMEMBERS EVERY WORD. Below it, in fresher stone: THIS INCLUDES GOSSIP. HOLD YOUR TONGUE AT THE MARKET.
"Every word," he murmured.
"Every word," said the grey knight, who had introduced himself, reluctantly, as Captain Vahn. "Reputation is power here. The more the city believes you, the more the city bends for you. The lords of the Capital can stop a falling roof with a sentence. The beggar at the gate could tell you it's going to rain, and the clouds would listen." He glanced at Ren. "That's why we're careful about sages."
"Fascinating," said Ren, who had already stopped listening, because he had just seen the cathedral.
It rose out of the center of the city like something that had decided to grow there on purpose: white towers, gold traceries, and a single enormous rose window that caught the sunset and threw it back in pieces of color across the square. Around it, the city was arranged like a court around a throne. The castle stood further back, blunt and grey and older, its towers lower than the cathedral's spires, as if it had agreed long ago to let the church have the better view.
Ren was going to live here. Ren was going to be a legend here. He could feel it in his bones, which ached from the wagon ride, but it was the good kind of ache.
The academy was a long, low building attached to the cathedral's left flank, and the registrar who processed him was a man who looked like he'd been carved from the same stone as the streets. "Age?" "Seventeen, maybe? I think. Depends on the calendar." "You'll be in history. We've got a seat in history." "I don't know any history." "Perfect. Neither does anyone else. Enjoy."
And that was how Ren Shikigami, great sage of a world he had invented approximately four hours ago, became a student.
The next morning, in Logomancy Theory 101, he learned the rules of the world he was going to ruin.
Professor Isolda was a thin woman in a grey shawl who lectured with her eyes half-closed, as if the subject bored her and she wanted it over with. "Logomancy is not energy," she said. "It is narrative. It is the ability of a statement to become true by force of belief. The mechanism is simple: a sufficient number of people believe a claim, and the world, which is neither sensible nor kind, agrees to stop arguing. Repeat after me: reality is polite. Reality is polite."
"Reality is polite," the class droned.
"Reality," Isolda continued, "is a crowded room. It cannot argue with everyone at once. If enough of you say the same thing, loudly and for long enough, it simply gives up and lets it stand. This is why the Capital of Belief works the way it does. Your reputation is the amount of weight your word carries. The more people trust you, the more your sentences bend the world. The Crown owns the whole city's ear. The High Priestess could cure a plague with a paragraph. You," she looked at the class, with the mild pity of a woman watching a litter of puppies, "could probably move a cup. Across a table. If you're having a good day."
Ren raised his hand.
"No," said Professor Isolda.
"I wasn't going to ask anything."
"You were going to ask if there's a limit on how powerful you could get if everyone believed you. There is no limit. The answer is no. Sit down. Some of you in this room will never cast a single useful spell, because you will never have the courage to be believed in, which is a harsher requirement than talent."
Ren sat down, deeply offended on principle.
The girl next to him was watching him. She had very long blonde hair, the color of straw in late summer, and sharp blue eyes that looked at him the way a jeweler looks at a stone that might be a fake. She was holding a small brass device that hummed quietly and occasionally winked with green light. When she caught Ren looking, she did not look away. She just kept staring, with the patience of someone who expected him to do something incriminating.
"Can I help you?" Ren asked.
"You have the posture of a liar," she said, "and the aura of a con artist."
"Thank you."
"That was not a compliment."
"It was to me."
The girl's mouth tightened. Her brass device flickered; Ren caught the brief pulse of green, like a light blinking in agreement. She looked down at it, looked back at him, and went very still. Whatever the device had told her, she did not like it.
"I'm Elara Vance," she said. "Royal Investigator's apprentice. If you're lying about being a sage, I'll find out."
"Elara," said Ren. "That's a lovely name for a future subordinate." He did not know why he said that. His mouth had declared independence from his brain somewhere around the fifth mile of wagon road and had never returned.
Elara's face went through several expressions, all of them variants of fury, and settled on a smile that promised paperwork. The device gave another green pulse. She snapped it shut.
Ren, who had no idea what any of that meant, decided he'd won.
After class he found the artificer's wing by following the sound of an explosion.
A boy with round goggles and singed eyebrows was standing in the middle of a workshop that looked like a clock had thrown up, waving a wrench at a gear the size of his head. "I said EIGHT, not SEVEN!" he was shouting at no one in particular. "Eight! The math doesn't— you can't— EIGHT!"
Ren watched for a while. The boy eventually noticed him, went red, and shoved the gear behind his back. "Oh. Hello. Hi. You didn't see anything. I'm Kaelo. Kaelo Vane. Everything is fine. Everything is under control. There's a small fire in the corner but I know exactly where it is."
"Nice goggles," Ren said.
"They're— thank you. They're calibrated. Very calibrated. The most calibrated goggles in the—" The boy seemed to realize he was doing a thing and stopped. "Can I help you? Are you the new student? The history one? Everyone's talking about the new history student. They said he claimed to be a sage. In front of Captain Vahn. Bold move."
"I am a sage," said Ren, because it was Tuesday and he'd committed to the bit on Saturday.
Kaelo stared at him. Ren could practically see the gears — literal ones, in the boy's head — turning. The inventor took a half-step forward. "A real sage. Like, a knows-things sage. Listen. Listen, I've been working on something, and I need an expert opinion, because it's going to change everything, and everyone says it's a waste of time, but they don't understand—"
"Keep at it," Ren said, because the boy looked like he needed to hear it, and also because Ren wanted to leave before the fire in the corner got bigger. "One day you'll build something that changes the world. I'm sure of it. Maybe a coat that eats light."
"A coat that eats light," Kaelo repeated. His face went blank. Then it went very, very serious. He fumbled for a scrap of paper. "A coat that eats light. Of course. Of course. It's obvious when you say it."
Ren left, feeling vaguely that he'd said something important, and decided not to think about it.
He found the library the same way he found most things in the academy, which was by wandering around until a room looked important. It was long and low and smelled of dust and candle wax. Ren was admiring a shelf of books titled things like THE CRYSTALLINE CONTRACT: A HISTORY OF WORD OATHS when he felt eyes on him.
He turned.
The row was empty. But a small, dark shape (a hood, a scrap of cloak) vanished around the far shelf, too fast to be a normal student, and Ren could have sworn he heard the sound of a notebook snapping shut.
He walked to the end of the row. Nobody. On the floor, where the shape had been, lay a single black quill, still warm.
Ren picked it up, shrugged, and put it in his pocket. Probably a librarian. Librarians were like that.
He was still thinking about the library when he found himself at the cathedral door.
He hadn't meant to go in. He'd meant to walk past. But a service was ending, the doors were open, and light was falling through the rose window in a way that his phone would have been extremely jealous of. Ren stepped inside, because he had always been bad at resisting a dramatic setting.
The High Priestess was at the altar.
Ren knew it was her before anyone told him: silver-white hair that reached her waist, robes the color of fresh snow with gold embroidery that caught the light like it had opinions about it, and a stillness about her that made the whole enormous hall seem like a stage built around her. She was reading from a book as tall as her forearm, its pages gilded at the edges, her voice filling the space without effort.
"May the words of the faithful be true," she said, "and may the true be kind."
"May they be kind," the congregation answered.
Ren, standing at the back with his hands in his pockets, murmured to no one: "If this church knew the things I know, they'd be a lot less calm about it."
He felt the words leave his mouth and hang in the air, and for a moment something in the cathedral went quiet — not the people, but the space itself, as if the building had leaned in to listen.
On the altar, the High Priestess's book glowed.
She did not look up. But her fingers, resting on the page, went still. And very slowly, her eyes lifted from the gilded text and swept the back of the hall until they found him — the red-haired boy in the black cloak, standing in the doorway like he'd wandered in from a different story entirely.
She looked at him the way a person looks at a weather warning.
Then the doors closed behind him — a gust of wind, or nothing — and Ren was outside again, blinking in the sun, not entirely sure he'd even been inside.
Screw it, he thought. I'm going to find the knights and tell them some lies. That always makes me feel better.
He found the knights in the castle courtyard, and it was one of the best decisions of his short, illustrious career.
The castle was blunt and grey, a working building rather than a monument, and the courtyard was full of the pleasant chaos of men doing maintenance: oiling straps, sharpening spears, arguing about whether the soup in the mess hall had ever once contained a potato. Ren walked in wearing his black cloak, which had been cleaned since the field incident and now moved behind him like it had ambitions, and he announced his presence by clearing his throat in a way he'd practiced.
Captain Vahn turned, saw him, and closed his eyes for a long, suffering moment. "Sage. You're still here."
"I am everywhere," said Ren, and immediately wished he hadn't, because it was the kind of line that only worked if you had a following wind and he did not.
But the round-faced squire from the field, Tomás, was looking at him with wide eyes. "Sir, is it true what they say? That you answer to shadows?"
"No, no," Ren said. "The shadows answer to me. There's a difference." He said it to be funny. There was a difference, he thought, in the way a cloud and a weather forecast have a difference.
The squire went pale. Several of the knights exchanged glances.
Ren saw his opening. Men who were half-convinced were easier to impress than men who were fully skeptical, and Ren had spent his entire life impressing people who had no reason to believe him. He straightened, adjusted his cloak, and walked to the far side of the courtyard, where a set of enormous iron doors stood in the castle's oldest wall, sealed with script that had been worn smooth by centuries of weather.
"What's behind here?" he asked.
Captain Vahn walked over, annoyed. "Foundations. Old vaults. Sealed since the Age of Silence, and no one's opened them since. The priests won't even bless the doors. Says it's not the kind of sealed you can bless." He spat. "Probably just rust and rats."
Ren looked at the doors. They were old. Older than the castle, he realized: the stones around them had been shaped to fit, which meant the doors had been there first, which meant whatever was behind them had been sealed before the castle was built, which meant someone had built a castle on top of a sealed thing on purpose.
He knew, absolutely, that this meant nothing.
He also knew he was about to say something stupid.
"Rust and rats," Ren repeated, and then, because he could feel all seven knights watching him and because the sunset was hitting the courtyard just right and because he had never once known when to stop: "You really think that's all it is? They didn't seal anything under this castle, Captain. They buried something." He let the pause sit. "You want to know what sleeps under the capital of the world?"
The courtyard went quiet. Even the soup argument stopped.
"There's a dragon god," Ren said. "Beneath this castle. Sealed here in the Age of Silence, when belief died and the world went grey. Its name is Ignis Null — the dragon that drinks the light from the sky. And the reason no one's opened these doors, the reason the priests won't bless them, is that it's not sleeping. It's waiting."
He was improvising. He was very good at it. He had never once in his life known when to stop.
"It sleeps until someone speaks its true name," he said, dropping his voice to a murmur, the way he'd seen villains do in a hundred shows. "Then it wakes. And when it wakes, the sky turns to ash, and the first thing it burns is the city that forgot it was built on top of a grave."
Silence. Ren let it sit, savoring it. The squire had gone the color of old cheese. One of the veterans had actually taken a step back. Even Captain Vahn was looking at the doors with a new, unhappy expression.
Then the ground shook.
It was not a big shake. It was the kind of shake that makes you check if you've been standing too long. A few of the knights steadied themselves. Ren's brain, which had been basking, went cold. The doors.
The iron doors were vibrating.
"Huh," said Ren, very quietly. "That's— that's just the— the foundations. Like you said. Rust. And rats."
The shaking did not stop. It grew. Dust ran out of the joints of the ancient wall like water. The script on the doors began to glow — faintly, a pale gold, as if it were being read aloud by something with a lot of time.
"What did you say?" Captain Vahn demanded, and his voice had lost all its flatness. "What exactly did you say to it?"
"Nothing!" Ren said. "I just— I made that up! It's a story! It's a legend! I invented it for the bit!"
The doors did not care. They cracked open.
Later, Ren would be asked to describe what came out, and he would be unable to. There was no good way to describe it. It was not a dragon made of scales. It was a dragon made of absence — black smoke that poured out of the vault in a solid, moving column, and burning inside the smoke, like embers trapped in a chimney, were stars. Hundreds of them. Small, distant, real, as if the vault had been holding a piece of the night sky and had finally opened it.
The smoke gathered, swelled, and formed itself into a shape too large for the courtyard to be comfortable with. A head the size of a cottage. A neck that went up and up and up. And two eyes — no, two points where the darkness was deeper, ringed with pale violet, like coals at the bottom of a well.
The stars moved inside it as it breathed.
Someone screamed. It might have been the squire. It might have been Ren. The knights had their swords out, which was like holding toothpicks up to a hurricane, and Captain Vahn was shouting orders, and the torches in the courtyard were guttering as if the air itself was trying to run away.
And the dragon looked at Ren.
He felt it like a hand settling on his shoulder in a dark room. The great head descended — slowly, deliberately, like a pendulum deciding whether to swing — and stopped a hand's width from his face, and the violet points looked into him with something that was not hunger and not recognition and not quite anything else.
It was waiting.
It wanted him to speak.
Ren's brain, which had been broadcasting pure static, managed one coherent thought: I have to fix this. And then, because the thought came with no plan attached, he added: With words.
His legs moved. He did not tell them to. He stepped forward, out of the shadow of the great head, and the knights went silent because he was still alive, and the dragon's smoke-column neck tilted to follow him.
"Okay," Ren said. His voice was embarrassingly high. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Okay. Listen. You're— you're Ignis Null. Right? That's your— that's who you are. And I'm the one who said your name." He was making it up as he went, the same way he always made it up, except the audience was a dragon. "So I'm— I'm in charge here. That's how the story goes. The one who speaks the name commands the dragon. That's how it— that's how it always works."
At his collar, at his cuffs, a faint violet light began to gather, like static. Ren did not notice. He was looking at the dragon, and the dragon was looking at him, and somewhere behind him the squire was whispering prayers in a voice that kept breaking.
"Sleep," Ren said. "That's an order. From me. The name said so." He spread his hands, because it seemed like the kind of gesture a person in charge would make. "Your vigil is over. You did good. You watched them as long as you had to. Now go back, and let the city have its night, and I'll— I'll come find you when I need you. That's a promise."
The violet light coiled up his arms and settled behind his eyes. His cloak, blacker than black in the starlight, moved against the wind.
The dragon looked at him for a long time.
Then it bowed its head.
The great head descended slowly, past Ren, past the frozen knights, until it was level with the iron doors, and for a heartbeat the whole courtyard was full of smoke and stars and the smell of cold ash. And then the dragon poured itself backward, down through the cracked doors, into the dark of the vault, the way water pours back into a bottle. The last of the stars winked out.
The doors groaned, swung, and sealed themselves with a sound like a tomb agreeing to stay shut.
Silence.
The dust settled. Ren stood in the middle of the courtyard with his hands still spread, purple light fading from his collar, and his knees chose that moment to stop being responsible for his weight. He went down. The squire caught him before he hit the flagstones.
"I made that up," Ren said, to nobody. "I made up the name. Ignis Null. I made it up just now. For the bit. I have never heard it before. That was the first time anyone has ever said that word."
The squire was looking at him with the face of a man who has seen a god and is trying to decide whether gods tip.
"Sir," Tomás whispered. "You spoke its name. And it knew you. It bowed to you."
"No," Ren said, "you don't understand, I invented it, it can't bow to a name that didn't exist until I—"
"Do not," said a new voice, cold and delighted, "say another word about it."
Ren looked up. A girl in a black and gold uniform was standing at the edge of the courtyard, holding a staff topped with a glowing blue orb, watching him with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and failing. She had long, straight black hair and the stillness of someone who had seen the whole thing and understood a very different story than the one Ren was telling.
"The shadows are listening," she said, and Ren could not make sense of why she was saying it, because he had never met her before in his life.
"Great," said Ren, who was past the point of asking questions. "More listeners."
The girl straightened, gave him a short, formal bow, and said, "Understood. I will begin immediately."
Cefina was her name, he would learn later, and she was the academy's top combat mage. The serious type. First disciple material.
"Begin what?"
"Training. As ordered." She looked at him with the fierce, burning conviction of someone who has just been given a mission by a god. "The shadows will be ready, Master Sage."
And then she was gone, folded into the evening like she'd never been there, and Ren turned to the squire and said, "What just happened," and the squire, still holding him up, replied, "I think you told her to train the shadows, sir."
"I didn't tell her anything."
"She heard you say the shadows are listening."
"To ME," Ren said. "They're listening to ME. I said it to be— I said it because I was—" He gave up. "Never mind. I'm going to need a lie-down. A long one. Maybe a year."
It was, by a wide margin, the worst afternoon a city had ever had while trying to be a normal Tuesday.
The crowd arrived within the hour.
Ren was installed in a chair in the castle's great hall while a procession of officials filed past him like it was a museum and he was the exhibit. The Crown's steward wrote down everything Ren said, including, tragically, "please stop writing down everything I say." A herald had already ridden out with the news: the Sage of the Black Cloak had commanded the dragon beneath the castle, and the dragon had obeyed. By the time the sun set, the city of Credence knew the name Ignis Null, and every version of the story was more elaborate than the last, and Ren, listening to his own legend being assembled in real time, had decided that the only rational response was to keep his mouth shut for the foreseeable future.
This resolution lasted eleven minutes.
High Priestess Sylvie arrived as the torches were being lit, and the room changed when she walked in. She was even more striking up close — silver hair, light blue eyes, robes that moved like water. Behind her, a huge paladin in gleaming plate armor with a tower shield, golden-haired and beaming like a man whose favorite team had just won.
And in her hands, the tall book from the altar, its pages glowing faint gold.
Ren got out of the chair, because even he knew better than to stay seated for a priestess.
"Your Holiness," said the steward. "This is the sage—"
"I know what he is," said Sylvie. She was looking at Ren like he was a sentence she had read wrong the first time. "I've been reading his words all afternoon."
"I haven't said anything since the dragon," Ren said, truthfully.
"The book doesn't care," said Sylvie. She held up the tome, and Ren saw it: the pages were covered in handwriting that was not hers, a tight dark script that matched his own grimoire scrawl, and the words were his. Things he'd said out loud hours ago. Things he'd said while no one was listening. The library. The cathedral. The courtyard. "The Tome of Echoes records the voice of the world. It has not written a single word in a hundred years. Today it wrote three hundred pages."
"It wrote what I said?"
"It wrote what the WORLD said." She closed the book. Her hands, Ren noticed, were not quite steady. "You spoke to a dragon older than this castle, and it listened. You told my paladin's knight to begin his vigil, and he began it. You told a girl to train the shadows, and she is training them. And this book, which has not heard a word of truth since the Age of Silence ended, heard you."
"That's not—" Ren started, "I'm not— the dragon was— it was a coincidence. The book's probably just— it's probably got a leak."
Sylvie did not laugh. She looked at him with something close to fear, and it was the first time anyone had looked at him with fear and he hadn't been doing a bit. "The book," she said, "does not have leaks. It has never had leaks. And I have spent my entire life asking the world for a single word, and it gave me you."
She turned and left without waiting for a response. The paladin paused at the door and looked back at Ren with the unblinking devotion of a large, friendly animal. "You are the shield now, Sage," he said. "I will make sure nothing reaches you."
Kross. Ren would file him under walking wall, do not antagonize, and he would never once update the file.
"I don't need protection," Ren said, "I am the shield." He said it to be dismissive, a throwaway, the kind of thing you say when a giant paladin is staring at you.
Kross's face went very still. Then very moved. "You would make yourself the shield. For all of us." He pressed a fist to his chest. "I will not let you down, Sage. I swear it on my oath."
He walked out, and Ren was left in the great hall with a steward writing down the phrase "I am the shield" in a serious official ledger, and Ren decided that he was going to stop talking entirely, forever, starting immediately.
He lasted until dinner, where he made a joke about the bread, and the steward wrote it down, and a courier rode out to tell the city that the Sage had blessed the evening meal.
The next morning, Ren woke in a guest room in the academy, stared at the ceiling, and tried to put together what had happened.
Ignis Null. He'd made up the name. He'd made up the dragon, the seal, the Age of Silence business — well, the Age of Silence was real, the professor had mentioned it — but the dragon, the name, the whole legend, that was his. Five minutes of improv in a courtyard had produced a real dragon. A real, ancient, catastrophic, looking-at-him-like-it-recognized-him dragon.
He got out of bed. He pointed at a chair. "That chair," he said clearly, "is a chicken."
The chair remained a chair.
Ren waited. Nothing happened. The chair did not even look shifty.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Good. That's fine. That's normal. The dragon was— the dragon was probably real and I just happened to— I read about it somewhere and forgot. That's the reasonable explanation. I forgot I knew about a dragon god sealed under the capital." He said this out loud, to the chair, and the chair did not become a chicken, and Ren felt the universe was finally making sense again.
He was very, very wrong, but he didn't know that yet, and for the next few hours he was almost happy.
The city wanted to celebrate him, the academy to teach him, the Church to consecrate him, all three at once. And the Crown, after a long and confusing meeting that Ren was not invited to, decided the safest course of action was to keep him in the one place where everyone could watch him: the academy.
So Ren went to class.
He walked through the academy's main hall with his cloak, which had somehow acquired the habit of moving when he moved, and people got out of his way. Not out of fear. Out of the specific way people move for something they've decided is important. The girl with the black and gold uniform, Cefina, saluted him from across the courtyard with a fist over her heart, and Ren waved back awkwardly, and she held the salute until he was out of sight, which he found deeply uncomfortable.
In the artificer's wing, the boy with the goggles, Kaelo, was visible through a window, surrounded by bolts of black fabric that seemed to swallow the light from his workshop lamps. He was muttering to himself: "A coat that eats light. Eats light. How do you make cloth that eats light. Need a material that—" He looked up, saw Ren, and went so red that his eyebrows, where they existed, turned pink. "Master Sage! I'll have it ready! I'll have it ready, I swear, the coat that eats light, it's coming, I've got a prototype—" He held up a swatch of fabric that seemed to drink the glow of the candles behind him, and Ren's brain, which had been avoiding the subject, offered: that's impossible.
Ren smiled and kept walking.
In the library, he thought he saw the small dark shape again — the hood, the notebook — ducking behind a shelf. This time, he stopped. He turned. He waited.
A girl emerged, very slowly, looking at the floor. She was small, with short messy black hair, and she was clutching a notebook to her chest like a shield. "Um," she said. "Hi. I wasn't— I wasn't spying. I was— I was making sure you were okay. Because you know everything. So if you weren't okay, I'd need to know, because that's my job now." She said this last part with the solemnity of a sacred oath.
"Your job," Ren said.
"Yes. To know everything. So your words stay true." She peeked up at him from behind it. "You said you know everything that happens in this city. So I'm learning everything, so nobody can make you a liar. That's important. You can't be a liar. You're the Sage." She said the word with the weight of a title, and Ren felt something cold go down his spine, because for a moment the girl had sounded almost exactly like his own grimoire talking back at him.
"Right," Ren said. "Good. Keep up the good work."
"I will," said the girl. Her name, Ren found out later, was Lia Moonwhisper. "You can count on me, Master Sage."
She slipped back into the shadows and was gone, and Ren stood in the library, surrounded by books about the power of words, and felt the world slowly turning into a novel he hadn't asked to write.
That night, he couldn't sleep.
The academy was quiet. The city was quiet. The dragon was quiet, which was the only quiet he'd ever be grateful for. Ren walked the empty streets of the Capital of Belief, past buildings carved with centuries of sentences, and tried to get his head around the fact that he, Ren Shikigami, seventeen years old, recently deceased and not at all magical, had apparently told a lie so convincing that a dragon god had taken it personally.
He stopped at a night market stall that was still open, selling masks for an upcoming festival. They were painted things — animals, spirits, a white one with a wide, calm smile.
Ren bought the white one. It was cool. He didn't know why he'd bought it. It was cool, and he was having a crisis, and he'd spent his whole life buying cool things to distract himself from crises, and this was no exception.
He put it on.
The mask felt like it had been made for his face, which was a thought he decided not to examine. He walked to the outer wall of the city, climbed the steps to the top, and stood looking out at the Capital of Belief spread below him — a thousand lights, a thousand roofs, a thousand people who tomorrow would all believe in him.
It should have been the best moment of his life.
He was standing on top of the world with a cool mask, and everyone thought he was a legend, and it was all completely fake.
Ren looked at the city. He thought about the dragon, and the book, and the paladin who wanted to shield him, and the girl who wanted to know everything so he'd never be a liar, and the boy who was building him a coat that ate light, and he said, to the night, because it sounded like the kind of thing a villain would say and he was feeling sorry for himself:
"Destruction is the only true creation."
The wind moved. Below him, in the shadow of the wall, a figure in a hood (not the small one from the library; a different one, taller, stiller) watched him, and then was gone, carrying the words away like a message.
Ren took the mask off, rubbed his face, and walked back down.
On his way through the old park, he passed a stone gargoyle crouched on a plinth, its head bowed, moss growing out of its ears. It was a decorative thing, one of a dozen scattered through the park, and Ren, because he was tired and because the night had made him careless, pointed at it and said:
"That one watches us all."
He laughed at his own joke and kept walking.
Behind him, very slowly, the gargoyle's head began to turn, its stone eyes following the red-haired boy in the black cloak until he was out of sight.
Ren did not see it. Ren never saw it.
But the statue of judgement had heard its first command, and somewhere in the deep dark beneath the city, in a room lit only by a single brazier, a man with slicked-back black hair and eyes like embers listened to a whisperer's report and began, very quietly, to smile.
"The Sage of the Black Cloak," Lord Malakor repeated. "He commands the dragon by name. He wears a white mask. And tonight, standing above the capital he means to shape, he spoke of destruction and creation."
"Only once, my lord," said the whisperer. "Just the once. He was alone."
"Alone," Malakor said, "is when a founder speaks most truly."
The whisperer hesitated. "My lord, the stories said the founder vanished. They said he was a myth—"
"The stories also said he was a legend," Malakor said. "The night he left, he told me the world would forget to fear, and that when it did, he would be its reminder. He was wearing the white mask. He spoke of destruction and creation. And now, five years later, a sage appears in the capital who commands a dragon with a name no one has ever heard, and he wears the mask, and he speaks the words." Malakor stood, and the braziers guttered. "He's not returned. He never left. He was waiting for us to become worth his time again."
He turned to the shadowed room.
"Find the Sage. Tell no one. And prepare a welcome worthy of a founder, because if he's come back to shape the world, we will be the hand that helps him shape it."
The whisperer bowed and was gone, and Malakor stood alone in the dark, thinking about gods who come back, and about all the things a founder might ask of his oldest followers.
Somewhere above him, in a warm guest room in the academy, Ren Shikigami lay on his bed, stared at the ceiling, and had one final thought before sleep took him.
He got up. He found his grimoire. He opened it to a fresh page, wrote at the top, in careful letters:
IGNIS NULL — the sleeping dragon god. Password: "Ignis Null." DO NOT FORGET. DO NOT SAY IT OUT LOUD.
He looked at the page. He looked at the ceiling. And then, because he was Ren Shikigami, and because he had never once in his life learned a lesson, he added, in smaller letters:
Tomorrow I'm going to say something cooler.
The World Believes My Lies
End of Chapter One