Death taps its spindly fingers against the hull of my ship. It is an old creditor checking the door.

We plunge toward Earth like a fallen seraph, the atmosphere screeching around the Aphelion’s frame, but Death holds no dominion. It smears its darkness over the moon, dims the stars, and folds this planet in jet-black pitch. As I fight to steady our descent, I am acutely aware that I am dying, second by second. Like all mortal things, I am browning at the edges. I can hear each grain slip through the hourglass of my life. Once, Celestial Beings lived for billions of years. Death cut us down and, in a magnanimous mood, left us forty thousand.

I made my terms with my death long ago. To exist is to owe, and the debt is collected in full.

Piloting a Spectrian vessel demands a particular devotion. The Aphelion and I are bound mind to mind, covenant sunk deeper than bone. Death noses at that bond now, searching for the place it can pry. The fall turns violent. Sirens climb. Panels flood with emergency glyphs. I remain in the captain’s cradle, spine straight, feet braced, refusing to gift the room my panic.

The Aphelion holds what I hold.

Warnings scroll across the glass. In answer, I let my composure rise to the surface: a small, open smile—courtly and unshaking. The Aphelion reads it as a signal. Her systems soften their pitch. She retracts a portion of her fear. She has seen me afraid exactly once; this is not that.

Death and I are acquainted. Its attention settles between my shoulder blades with deliberate weight. Efficiency doesn’t interest it. It wants spectacle. It wants to watch me come apart.

In my mind, its hand closes around my throat.

I tighten my grip on the bond instead. I hold the line where it tries to fray, and I deny it an opening.

“Are you lost, Death?” I ask, and I keep my voice level for the Aphelion’s sake as much as for the thing listening. To her, my words are the steadiness she recognises: a soft signal she can lock onto. “If you’ve come looking for theatre, you chose poorly. Earth is a backwater. You’re wasting your taste on it.”

I let the exhale lengthen. The command I give is clean.

“Go.”

Impact is coming either way. That much is physics. What happens after is still negotiable.

“Emergency touchdown,” I tell the Aphelion. “Stay with me.”

My dearest girl.

Death knows what sits under manners. It has watched me sign treaties with one hand and end a story with the other. If it cannot be killed, it can still be marked. I can still bruise what it believes is untouchable.

The Aphelion shudders again, and this time it isn’t the air.

Death reaches into her structure and starts removing pieces. Molecular bonds loosen. A section of hull simply isn’t there anymore. Warning glyphs stutter across the panels; one dies halfway through its own word. The ship fractures into unstable segments, each one trying to behave as a whole while the whole is being edited out from underneath it.

Death turns my vessel into a hazard by laying a hand on her.

The crash won’t kill me. It can’t.

Being unmade at the level of my own bonds would be… undignified.

Magic wakes fully in my veins. I pull the Aphelion out of easy sight first—no invitation for clairvoyants, no neat line for a god to follow. Then I swallow our sound. I fold the impact site sideways, still on Earth, still real, but harder to catch with a wandering eye.

We hit.

Without my interference, the energy would tear a continent’s worth of consequence out of the planet. With it, Earth keeps its crust. The ground holds. The sky doesn’t catch fire. If the planet wants to be grateful, it can do so later, quietly.

“Aphelion,” I say, because routine comforts her even when it shouldn’t matter, “location.”

She hates crashing. She knows she won’t be truly harmed, but displeasure is one of her oldest habits. I allow it. It keeps her present.

“Kita,” she answers at once, clipped but steady. “One of the eleven wards in Kyoto. Kyoto Prefecture. Japan.”

“Time.”

“04:00. Earth standard.”

New panels slide open in front of me: exterior feeds, infrared overlays, a map grid trying to find its own edges again. The neighbourhood is asleep. Narrow paths. Low wooden houses. Gardens arranged with a care that makes violence feel uncouth. Roses on arbours. Willows leaning over water that doesn’t move. Maples and ginkgoes posted beside doorways like patient guards. Even the streetlights seem cautious.

“The lion kills not,” I murmur—an old Spectrian line, used for places we agree to leave alone. “The wolf snatches not the lamb. Unknown is the child-devouring wild dog.”

A place of joy without death.

The Aphelion and I have kept this ward quiet for years. When I step out and let my weight enter full dimension, damp earth rises to meet me. Leaves hold onto their scent. Air this soft feels like it’s trying to make amends.

I memorised Earth before departure, as any Advisor worth the title would. By Spectra’s measures, this planet is ordinary. No lumens to steal. No doctrine worth fearing. No reason for Death itself to arrive in person.

Which means the reason is not ordinary.

I adjust my cuffs. The magic here isn’t ours; it leaves a thin pressure behind the eyes. I let my thoughts settle on the only asset here that could justify such attention.

The Summoner of Time. Spectra’s General. A girl capable of bending eras until they squeal.

Death and I have come for the same person.

So it becomes a race, then.

After I clear the worst of the Aphelion’s wreckage and catalogue the damage, I tap my index and middle fingers against my temple. The communicator blooms at once—light unfolding into a floating pane before me.

D’ivoire appears as if he has been waiting. His legs are propped on his desk, chair tipped back, one arm hooked behind his head. The other hand drums lazily along the armrest. That smug little half-smile sits exactly where I expect it.

“Well, well, well,” he purrs. “What do we have here? A shipwrecked Spectrian in tragic need of assistance?”

His eyes are warm brown, bright with mischief, his mouth soft and infuriatingly shapely, his shirt open just enough to prove he dressed with intent. We have known each other for thousands of years, and still he manages, with deplorable ease, to steal my breath.

“I appreciate your humour,” I say, a beat too slowly. “Was it the debris field that betrayed me?”

“You already know.” His gaze flicks off-screen, following telemetry only he can see. “I’ve never seen her this banged up. You alright down there? You love that ship more than your own life.” He winces, then laughs at himself. “And I did just call her a ‘thing.’ My mistake. Offer the lady my apology before she refuses me docking privileges forever. Think you can fix her, or am I flying out to drag you home?”

“It’s peaceful here,” I answer. “Quiet. A trip to Earth may be the vacation you never realised you needed.”

“Mm, pass.” He folds both arms behind his head and spins his chair once, letting it come to rest with theatrical slowness. “It’ll be an obscene amount of Earth days before I can leave. Commander’s going to want a full report first, so keep your channels open. I’ll track your movements in case anything tries to eat you. If it does, maybe the Summoner can bend time and drop us in faster. Prodigies are good for that sort of miracle, right?”

“The Summoner may end up saving us both,” I reply. “For the record, I did not crash the Aphelion.”

He snorts. “Hard to believe, looking at her. She’s in pieces.”

“When your ship meets the same fate and we are both stranded here, we can revisit my testimony.”

“Deal. With any luck, you’ll have her stitched up by the time I get there.”

The call winks out, leaving only the night and the faint hum of cooling metal.

I have no doubt he will come. If he must, he will rebuild the Aphelion panel by panel with his own hands.

I met D’ivoire long before the Academy tried to pretend it discovered us.

I was a boy then by our standards, sent into the Simulacrine Enclaves as an observation exercise—gold and doctrine dropped into manufactured squalor to see what bent first. The streets there were built to study desperation.

He approached me at a broken water kiosk, all sharp smile and fox-brown eyes, offering to “make it pretend” for a price. I let the kiosk answer me instead; the droplets rose and circled, hanging like a small constellation that refused to fall. He should have been impressed. Instead, he stepped back once and said, very quietly, that I did not belong there.

Neither, I told him, did he.

We never traded names. We traded something else: a kind of attention I had not yet learned to give, and he had not yet learned to trust. Later—ten thousand years later, when we sat outside the Academy interview chamber on hard benches under too-bright lights—we finally shared a language for ambition. Thousands of candidates wanted the Advisor’s post. He said he wanted it to see what lay beyond Spectra’s maps. I thought the reason frivolous. I also knew, even then, that he would not stop until he got it.

I am still thinking of that boy in the Enclaves, of the man on the other end of my communicator, when the night interrupts me.

A heavy thump cuts through the quiet, solid and close—exactly the sound a body makes when it meets pavement.

Half a second later, there is proof: a girl of perhaps fourteen summers lies flat on her back a few metres away, staring up at the sky as if it has wronged her personally. The angle of her limbs suggests a fall rather than a collapse.

I look up.

The tree above us still sheds blossoms in slow spirals. Its branches shiver faintly, leaves rattling with the aftershock of being climbed. The girl’s hair buns are coming apart, threaded with petals and twigs.

I cannot help it—I smile, exhale a breath of laughter. Of all ways for Earth to greet me, it chooses a child falling out of a tree.

I did not expect anyone to be outside at this hour. It is much too late for a girl her age to be alone.

My kindness has never interfered with my work as an assassin; if anything, it has made me more efficient. I do not see mercy as weakness.

“You make the concrete look comfortable,” I remark, stepping closer. I am overdue for rest and amusement myself. “How long of a nap do you intend to take?”

Her face crumples into a cartoonish pout, lower lip quivering, brows knitting as she squeezes her eyes shut.

“Is it naptime already…?” she mumbles.

“Not quite. It is four in the morning,” I say. “An odd hour for a little girl to be roaming the streets.”

“Four in the—” She cuts herself off as her mind catches up.

Her eyes open.

They glow. Radioluminescent, bright against the dark. The colour and cut of them resonate with something in my own bones. Magic stirs in her, answering mine. I have seen many kinds of extraterrestrial eyes; these leave no doubt. She is Celestial. More than that—she is the Summoner I was sent to retrieve.

She jerks upright, props herself on her hands, and hurriedly crab-scuttles away from me. Once she decides she is at a safe distance, she points, outraged.

“You saw nothing!” she cries, then clutches her chest as if I’ve dealt her a mortal blow. “You don’t know I’m here, and you’re definitely not telling my mother about this!”

This level of dramatics at four in the morning is impressive.

“Lively, regardless of the hour,” I note. “Is it reasonable to assume you are a morning bird?”

Perhaps not the sharpest metaphor, given her recent descent from the branches.

“Yes…?” She squints, trying to determine whether my question is a trap. It is not. I am merely amusing myself. “I mean—no!” she corrects herself vehemently, then abruptly flops back onto the pavement and sighs.

Whatever she hopes to accomplish by playing dead, it will not move me along. I have crossed universes to find her. I will not be dismissed by a tantrum.

Eventually, she realises I intend to stay and laces her fingers behind her head.

“Are you sure you’re not plotting against me…?” she asks, peering at me from under her lashes.

“Merely curious,” I say. “Speaking of curiosity—how did you manage to climb this tree in the first place?” I glance up at its thinning canopy. “A moment ago it looked healthier.”

She cracks one eye. “I don’t follow.”

“This tree is ill-suited for climbing.”

“Can’t be,” she counters, utterly unbothered. “Climbed it.”

“You have the capacity to thwart the impossible, the eldritch, the beyond comprehension, the divine and the unimaginable,” I tell her. “Scaling a dying tree should be the least of your talents.”

She sprawls even further, limbs splayed like an exhausted cat, eyes deliberately avoiding mine. The long pauses, the flippant posture, the refusal to engage are all textbook attempts to irritate an adult into retreat.

She will be disappointed. I am not quick to anger.

“I didn’t hear a word of that,” she announces after a beat. “Except the last part.” Which tells me she understood enough to be flattered and not enough to admit confusion. “See, normally I’d chalk you up as some random guy out of his mind, but—” She gestures at me vaguely. “It’s four in the morning. And you’re dressed like a Victorian vampire.”

I resist the urge to straighten my coat when she looks me over like a badly dressed myth.

“If you have issues with the uniform,” I say mildly, “take it up with my Commander. I’m quite fond of mine.”

“You look like one, too,” she mutters. “And your eyes are glowing.” As though hers are not. “It’s obvious you’re not from here. Even your accent is weird. Either you fess up about who and what you are, or…” She trails off, tiny and furious. “Or…”

She is so busy winding herself up she does not feel the cold breath behind her.

Death stands at her back, skeletal fingers braiding half-dead flowers into her hair. It shows me its chosen form tonight—a gaunt woman with an expectant belly, whispering promises that the girl cannot hear.

You’ll be so tired when you’re a Summoner. I love you. Come.

The Shadow arrives first.

It spears the ground where her chest was a heartbeat ago; she flings herself back on instinct, palms skidding, fingers digging so hard into the dirt that the earth cracks under her nails. The creature drags itself out of the dark after its failed strike—an eyeless mass of slick black, faces blooming and dissolving across its surface, tendrils lashing and leaving slime that sprouts new mouths.

She stares at the Shadow, a shrill scream tearing itself out of her body.

I do not move. The Shadow knows better than to test my composure and pretends I am not here. The girl notices.

“You must stand,” I tell her, my voice cutting clean through the Shadow’s shrieks. “Your planet will not protect you. Be strong.”

It rips its arm from the ground. The recoil is a wave of death—flowers disintegrate, birds drop like stones, the tree she fell from crumbles into nothing. Within a half-mile, life goes out like snuffed candles.

“It is preparing another attack,” I observe. “This is a test. For both of us.”

She tears her gaze away just long enough to look at me—eyes wet, furious, already demanding answers from a monster that will never give them. She is all offence, even now. Good. I am counting on that.

“Come now, girl. This is a matter of life and death.” Her tears do not move me. They do, however, delight the Shadow; it shivers, mouths grinning. “You have to save yourself.”

Her mouth twists into an ugly snarl. Fang tips flash beneath the plush flesh of her lip, and her cat pupils thin into sharper slits.

“You really think I believe you can’t help me?” she snaps. “When this thing isn’t even looking at you?”

The Shadow raises its arm, and the limb unspools. The primordial void it hails from becomes a long haft. The head thickens into a world-cleaving crescent; debris rises from the ground, the fragments of the street orbiting the weapon.

It tests the arc once, barely a rehearsal, and the world answers like a guilty thing.

Then it brings the axe down.

Any ordinary being would die on impact.

She throws her arms over her head with a squeak, bracing for a death that doesn’t come. The blow lands with the force of a meteor. The ground splits, buildings buckle, vehicles pitch and explode along the shockwave—but she remains, half-sunk into a widening chasm, arms unbroken, skin unmarked.

She is, as promised, nearly impossible to kill.

The Shadow is delighted. It hammers her again and again, the other arm also blooming into an axe so it can strike from both sides. When brute force fails, it changes tactics, seizing her by the shirt with tar-dark fingers and hauling her up to its many faces. Her hands slip clean through its insubstantial wrist; she flails, kicks, screams, buns coming undone as it lifts her higher, mouths opening below.

“This is your fight,” I say. She whips her head toward me, outrage incarnate. “The first of many. It would be rude of me to interrupt.”

“Our fight!” she yells. “Don’t think you get to worm your way out of this! I’m dying”—her voice drops into theatrical despair—“and you’re just standing there!”

She may be the most dramatic child I have ever encountered.

“When you are older,” I reply, “you will thank me for not getting involved. You will understand then. I do not fault you for failing to now.”

“Oh, you’re one of those people. ‘Too young to know what’s good for me,’” she mocks, wagging a finger even as the Shadow hoists her higher. “I’ll have you know”—the finger keeps time with every word—“that I know that you know that I know you don’t know that I think someone who can save me saving me is a better option than whatever you think I’d prefer when I’m older—”

The Shadow flips her upside down, catching her ankle with a single tendril. She dangles over a forest of mouths as it widens, body turning into a drooling cavern.

“Don’t let it eat you,” I advise. “As durable as you are, being consumed by a Shadow will kill you.”

To her credit, she listens. She curls up, performs an inverted sit-up, latches onto the tendril and tries to climb. The Shadow only laughs, lowering her slowly toward its maw.

“Perhaps your talent lies in enduring the worst rather than dealing it,” I muse. “I am running out of time to confirm which.”

“You’re wrong,” comes her voice from somewhere inside that mess of limbs and teeth. She should not be audible, but she is. “I can fight.”

“Prove it,” I say, because she seems to respond best to provocation.

She vanishes.

For a moment there is only Shadow—heaving, triumphant, folding in on itself like a closing fist. I turn, ready to leave. An unfortunate loss, but not the last Summoner in the Multiverse.

Then the creature explodes.

Light spears out from its centre, ripping it apart in skewed, brilliant wedges. Bits of gelatinous dark rain down, clinging to the girl’s skin like ticks as she stumbles out of the collapsing mass, scowling. She flicks a gob of Shadow off her forehead with brisk disgust, pupils narrowed to slits.

I cannot help the small swell of pride in my chest.

“You are learning,” I tell her. “Your refusal to die is important.”

The Shadow howls, trying to reconstitute itself, but it can’t hold shape; it slumps and sloughs apart, distraught.

“Finish it. While it is weak.”

It lashes out in desperation, firing chunks of itself like bullets. Her body answers before her mind does: time thins around her, her perception stretching out. She moves through the barrage with newly-born grace, sliding out of each impact arc like water flowing around stones.

When the assault stutters and fails, she plants her feet, one arm drawn slightly back, chin lifted.

“I’m not going to pretend I know what you mean,” she says, eyes fixed on the Shadow. “But if it means I can beat this thing, that’s good enough. How do I do that, exactly?”

“I will not explain your abilities while something is still trying to eat you,” I say. “There is magic in you. Use it.”

“Oh? With magic?” Her shoulders relax, as if this simplifies matters. “Why didn’t you say that?” A beat passes. She turns, glares. “Wait. What do you mean, with magic?” She shakes her empty hand at me. “Hello? What magic? I don’t have any magic, and as you mentioned”—she tosses her fingers in sarcastic quotation marks—“there’s this thing conveniently ignoring you and trying to kill me. You do something. You clearly have enough magic for both of us.”

“Is it so impossible,” I ask, raising a brow, “to imagine that you might be the one who casts, when a Shadow that may very well be your own is razing everything in its path?”

“Yes.”

The Shadow lunges—one last, ruthless attack, every remaining scrap of mass thrown at her.

The Summoner I was promised steps forward at last.

She closes her eyes. Inhales. Reaches inward. When she exhales, the world answers.

Earth buckles. Chunks of ground lift and hang weightless. Pressure rolls out from her like a shockwave; the sky tenses, clouds shudder. The Shadow is almost upon her when she flings her arms wide and shouts:

“Freeze!”

Reality obeys.

Time locks around the Shadow, catching it mid-lunge. Ice flowers instantly over its surface, sealing it into a howling statue. The temperature plummets. The ground still floats. The sky still roars.

Chronokinesis alone does not do this. Interesting.

She pads up to the frozen monstrosity and squints.

“Woah…” She straightens, sets a hand on her hip, then crouches to examine a jagged, frozen maw. “I did this?” She points at herself, then at me, smile growing wider with each pass.

Her delight is contagious. I allow myself a matching curve of the mouth.

“Yes,” I say. “You stopped time. Which confirms my suspicions. You are the Summoner of Time and Space, and we”—I gesture around us—“have a great deal of work to do.”

“We?” she echoes. “Hard pass. I’m going home.”

“You misunderstand. I did not mean we would clean together.”

She has already started to walk away; I only realise because she stops and looks back over her shoulder, eyes narrowed. Fast and quiet. Assassin’s footsteps. It reminds me unpleasantly of myself.

“I’m listening,” she says.

“We are partners, you and I. There is much to discuss.” I study her face. “Although I am curious why you are not more shocked.”

“To be honest?” She stares down at her nails, feigning disinterest. “I kind of already knew how this goes. Let me guess—you’re some kind of alien?”

“I hail from another universe, yes,” I reply. “From you I can keep no secrets.”

“Ha! I knew it!” Her excitement spikes, then abruptly folds in on itself. “Ahem.” She clasps her hands behind her back, gaze dropping. “Well… where do we go from here?”

“I need to tend to this mess before your planet panics,” I say. “Then I must resume repairs on my ship.”

Her eyes light up at the word ship. Interesting.

I take the opening.

“My name is Hiroyuki D’Accardi,” I tell her. “Feel free to call me what you like. And yours?”

She bites her lip, considering.

“If…” Her attention is still hitching on the idea of a vessel. “If I tell you my name, will you show me your ship?”

“Perhaps,” I say. “Weren’t you going home?”

The mention of home sobers her at once.

“It’s Ohuang-Zhùróng Kohana!” she blurts. Then she spins on her heel and bolts down the street, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be back tomorrow after school, looking for you in this exact spot! Don’t forget!”

I watch her go, petals still stuck in her hair, Shadow-ichor drying on her sleeves.

I doubt I could forget her if I tried.