Rimelion: The Exploiter

“—owned by the Twir administrative council,” Yuki finished. “Which is actually fascinating because—”

“We’re going,” I said.

“—the agricultural records show a continuous cultivation line that—wait, going where?”

“The farm. South farms. Tira.” I was already standing. “Forty minutes, you said?”

“By foot, yes, but I was going to explain about the farm’s historical—”

“Walk and talk, Yuki.”

She scrambled off the bench, satchel swinging, tails recalibrating to forward motion. The tea vendor watched us go as if she had seen queens come and go, and none of them ever finished their drinks.

We left through the southern gate; the road widening into a packed-earth path that wound between low wooden buildings before opening into the agricultural sprawl beyond the walls.

Yuki was not walking and talking. She was half-jogging and lecturing.

“So the farming enchantments,” she said, slightly breathless, one ear rotated toward me and the other tracking a bird that had no relevance to anything. “The mana irrigation lines under the fields, the ones you went into Thalvirea to repair, the Grandmasters told everyone those were their invention. It’s in their official histories, their administrative doctrine, their educational texts. ‘The great agricultural innovation of the Grandmaster era.’” She made air quotes with one hand, nearly losing her satchel strap. “It’s not true.”

“Shocking,” I said.

“The lines predate the Grandmasters entirely. They go back to the Twir.”

I blinked.

“The Twir built them,” Yuki continued, eyes bright. “The original mana irrigation network was Twir infrastructure. The Grandmasters inherited it, maintained it, built new lines, badly in some cases, and then claimed credit for it. The record-booking style is unmistakable once you know what to look for. The reporting—” She caught my expression. “It’s Twir. I’m certain.”

I let out a long breath.

The Twir. Gatei’s people.

I tried to picture Gatei, aloof, ancient, designing something as mundane and vital as irrigation lines beneath farmland. Carefully threading mana through soil so that crops would grow fast, so that people would eat, so that a city could survive.

I couldn’t picture it, but his people had once ruled the world.

Meh.

Some legacies were too big to feel real.

You just stepped on them and kept walking.

Which was literally what we were doing, walking over Twir-built mana lines on our way to deliver a dead woman’s last words to her sister about a spoon.

History was stupid sometimes.

The road narrowed as we left the main agricultural district and entered the southern homesteads. The fields here were smaller. Yuki had gone quiet, which was unusual. She was looking around at the homesteads with the reverence she reserved for things that were old and still being used.

The farm was modest.

A low stone house with a sloped roof, old but well-maintained, the mortar between the stones newer than the stones themselves. A small barn. Rows of something leafy and dark green, growing in careful lines. A wooden fence that had been mended so many times it was more patch than original.

And in the garden, an elven woman was working.

She was old. Her face was lined, evidence of sustained presence rather than decline. Dark skin weathered by sun and seasons. She wore a simple working tunic, dirt at the knees, sleeves rolled to the elbows.

She looked up as we approached. Her gaze went to me first, then to the frost that clung faintly to my clothes.

She didn’t stand. “Well,” she said, and a smirk pulled at the corner of her mouth. “The new Grandmaster herself.”

“Queen, actually,” I said.

“Mm.” The sound conveyed that she found the distinction decorative. She pulled a weed from between two plants, shook the dirt from its roots, and set it aside. “What brings the Queen to my garden? Am I behind on taxes I didn’t know I owed?”

“We’re looking for Tira,” I said.

Something shifted behind her eyes, the smirk dimming by a fraction. “You’ve found her,” she said.

I took a breath. “We were in the Thalvirea Mining Complex.” Her eyes found mine and stayed there. She knew what Thalvirea was. “We found the engineering logs,” I said. “Your sister’s logs.”

Tira pulled her hands from the soil slowly. She didn’t wipe them.

“Kia?” she said. The name came out carefully, as if she hadn’t said it in a long time and wasn’t sure it still fit in her mouth.

“Kia,” I confirmed. “Senior Artificer Kia.”

Tira nodded once.

“She stayed,” I said. “When the shutdown failed. When the machines were corrupted and the recovery teams never came. She stayed, and she tried to fix it herself.” I paused. “She shut down one overseer by hand. Four hours working alone. And then she went deeper.”

Tira’s eyes were dazzling and still. “She made sure people were safe,” I said. “And it cost her life.”

Tira nodded. The nod was slow and kept going longer than it needed to, as if stopping would mean something she wasn’t ready for. She reached behind her without looking and found the wooden stool near the garden’s edge, lowering herself onto it.

She sat there, hands on her knees, dirt still under her nails, looking at the ground between her feet.

I bit my lip.

“There’s something else,” I said.

She looked up.

“Kia left a message. In the last log, before she went down to face the Foreman.” My throat did something inconvenient. I pushed through it. “Her last words on the recording were a message for you.”

Tira’s hands tightened on her knees.

“She said: I forgive you for the spoon.“

Her face crumpled, not all at once, but in stages, like a wall giving way stone by stone, the composure she’d maintained through my entire visit collapsing inward. She pressed one hand to her mouth. The other gripped the edge of the stool.

“The spoon,” she whispered, and then she was crying. “The day she left,” Tira said, the words coming between shaking breaths, “we argued. It was—we were in her kitchen, she was packing her tools, and we’d gone to the market the day before and she’d bought a set of silver spoons. Plain silver. For her kit, she said, for measuring reagents. And I told her—”

She pressed her hand harder against her mouth, then lowered it. “I told her she should have gotten the gold ones. Gold was better for alchemical measurements. Everyone knew that. And she said silver was better, silver had always been fine, and I said she was being cheap, and she said I was being ridiculous, and then we were shouting.”

She stared at her hands.

“About spoons,” she said. “She was walking into that mine, and we spent our last morning shouting about spoons. Silver or gold. As if it mattered. As if anything in that kitchen mattered more than—”

Her voice broke.

Yuki was standing very still beside me. Her tails had gone motionless, hanging low, and her ears were flat. She wasn’t fidgeting.

“She tried to send a message afterward,” Tira said. “From the complex. I know she did, because that’s who she was. She would have tried to fix it immediately, the argument, the way she always fixed things. But the communications went down. The whole complex went dark.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of garden soil across her cheek. “A hundred and sixty years. I thought she died angry at me.”

“She didn’t,” I said.

“About a spoon.”

“She didn’t die angry,” I repeated. “She died forgiving you for one. That was the thing she needed to say at the end. Out of everything, the machines, the sabotage, the fact that nobody was coming to help her. She chose that.”

Tira looked at me with her red eyes. “Your sister was very brave,” I said. “And very stubborn. And apparently very choosy about cutlery.”

We walked back in silence.

Yuki’s tails hung low, swaying gently with her steps. Her satchel was closed and weirdly, she wasn’t lecturing.

We were almost back at the southern gate when she spoke.

“Charlie?”

“Hm?”

“Can you come to a café with me? On Earth.”

I glanced at her. “A café?”

“There are some friends I’d like you to meet.” She said it carefully, the way Yuki said things when she was navigating toward something she knew was complicated. Her ears were doing the thing where one pointed forward and one pointed sideways, which in Yuki body language meant I’m being brave and I’d like credit for it.

“That sounds great,” I said. “I’d love to—”

“Some of them are in Rimelion.”

“Even better—”

“With the empire.”

I stopped walking.

Yuki stopped too, turning to face me. Her tails had gone still again.

“They’re working actively against us,” she mumbled. “Not—I mean, they’re soldiers, but like they’re—” She took a breath. “They’re on the other side, Charlie.”

I stood there for a moment, the golden light doing its best to make everything feel peaceful while my brain recalculated. Friends on the wrong side of a war, people Yuki cared about.

“Okay,” I said.

Yuki blinked. “Okay?”

“I’ll meet them. At least hear what they have to say.”

Her face went through about six emotions in two seconds, landing on something bright and grateful that made her ears stand straight up. “Really? Because I know it’s complicated, and the political implications are—”

“Yuki. I said yes.”

“Right! Yes! Okay!” Her tails fanned out, immediately back to full Yuki energy. “I’ll set it up for this evening. I’ll message you the details.” She was already half-turning back toward the city, satchel bouncing. “But first I need to go back to the library.”

“The library.”

“There might be more on Kia. The administrative records only covered her professional file, but there could be personal correspondence in the auxiliary archive, and the auxiliary archive has a secondary index that I haven’t—” She caught herself. Smiled a little sheepishly. “I just want to make sure I found everything.”

“Go,” I said. “Find everything.”

She grinned, turned and jogged toward the gate, tails streaming, satchel bouncing against her hip, one ear already rotated toward the library as if she could hear the books calling.

I watched her go.

Then I was alone.

The square opened around me as I passed through the gate. Merchants, stalls... Normal sounds in a normal city.

I wasn’t sad, exactly. But the conversation with Tira had done something; reached in and rearranged furniture in a room I hadn’t realized was messy. A woman crying in a garden about silver spoons and a sister who never came home. A hundred and sixty years of thinking she died angry at her.

The feeling sat behind my ribs like a stone.

Elven emotions.

If this had been my old body, my human body, my John body, I could have stuffed it in a drawer. Filed it under things to process later and moved on.

But elven emotions didn’t have drawers. Elven emotions were the full ensemble again, and right now the ensemble was playing something in a minor key that made my eyes sting and my chest ache, and my hands want to hold something.

I needed to calm down.

Options. I could meditate. Go back to Earth, sit cross-legged, find stillness, do the breathing thing Irwen taught me.

Or.

I glanced toward City Hall.

The straight-lined, column-heavy, aggressively bureaucratic building that housed approximately nine hundred clerks, ten thousand documents, and one Lola.

My girlfriend.

The word hit me in the chest like a small, warm hammer, and I nearly laughed out loud in the middle of the square. Girlfriend. I had a girlfriend. Me. Charlie, formerly John, the alcoholic who couldn’t hold a relationship or a single coherent plan for the future, had a girlfriend who was brilliant and beautiful and got flustered when I called her sweetie and organized entire cities while looking mildly disappointed in everyone around her.

I was going to go see my girlfriend.

The giddiness was extremely undignified for a queen.

I walked toward City Hall, then past it, ducking into a narrow alley between the hall and a neighboring building. The alley smelled of old stone and parchment dust, City Hall’s natural perfume leaking through the walls.

I closed my eyes and thought about Earth.

Specifically, about the outfit. The one Lola always wanted me to wear. The business clothes, the tailored blazer, the skirt, the blouse that sat just right. The outfit I’d worn to the meetings, the one where Lola had looked at me and her professional mask, had slipped for exactly half a second before she’d picked up her tablet and pretended to read something that was definitely upside down.

She really likes that.

My clothes shifted. The frost-touched queenly layers dissolved into the clean lines of my business outfit. I rolled my shoulders and tugged at the collar.

Good.

Then I reached up and hid the tiara with a thought.

“I really need to upgrade this to a proper crown,” I muttered, turning it over. “A visit to Twir is in order.”

I checked my reflection in a window. No frost aura visible. No queenly anything. Just a woman in business clothes with pointed ears and an expression that was trying very hard to be professional.

Now.

I pulled a blank document from my inventory, one of the standard administrative forms Vessith had given me a stack of for “emergency authorizations,” which I was fairly certain she hadn’t intended to include this, and began writing.

To the administrative staff of City Hall:

This document certifies that PARLIE—

I paused. Parlie. Was that convincing? It sounded like a name. Mostly. It sounded like a name someone would have if their parents couldn’t decide between Charlie and something else and split the difference badly.

It was perfect.

—that PARLIE has been assigned as a new assistant to Administrator Lola, effective immediately. Parlie is to report directly to Lola and should be given full access to her office and workspace.

I stared at the document. Added an official-looking seal with my sigil. Then added a second seal, because one seal looked suspicious, but two seals looked bureaucratic.

I held it up. Read it again. Nodded.

“I’ll go undercover,” I whispered to myself in the alley, and the giddiness was so intense that the stone behind my ribs finally, mercifully, began to dissolve.

This was either going to be the funniest thing I’d ever done or the fastest way to get Lola to murder me with a clipboard.

Either way, I was going in.