The first thing Will noticed was the smell.
Green. Wet earth. Something flowering underneath it, sweet and slightly wrong, like perfume left out too long. He lay still for a moment just breathing it because his brain needed a second to catch up with the fact that he was breathing at all.
He opened his eyes.
Sky. Pale blue, enormous, crossed by birds he didn't have names for. Not pigeons. Not anything he recognized. They moved in formations that seemed almost deliberate, banking left in unison, gone.
He sat up.
The street was still there. Mostly. The asphalt had cracked into archipelagos of black rock separated by rivers of moss and root, the sidewalk completely reclaimed, the curb just a suggestion under decades of green. A traffic light lay on its side, a fig tree growing straight through its housing. Thirty feet away a car chassis sat rusted to the color of dried blood, so thoroughly consumed by oxidation and vine it had become something abstract. Something that used to be a car the way a skeleton used to be a person.
His body worked. He checked methodically — fingers, wrists, knees, neck. Everything moved. Nothing screamed. For a guy who had been facing down a monster horde approximately thirty seconds ago by his internal clock, that felt statistically improbable.
Reflex pulled up the stat screen before he'd consciously decided to check it.
PLAYER: Will Wit
LEVEL: 1
STRENGTH: 10/20
DEXTERITY: 10/20
INTELLIGENCE: 15/20
LUCK: 30/20 ← ERROR
SKILLS: None unlocked
BLOODLINE: Mongol Founder [Mythic ⚑]
That Luck number sat there breaking the interface with complete serenity. The system had stopped putting warning symbols next to it. Will wasn't sure if that meant it had accepted the situation or simply given up.
He stood and checked his actual inventory the practical way — hands moving over his body, cataloguing fast. Bow across his back. Quiver empty. Short sword gone — he'd handed it to Zeraya and she'd gone through a portal with it and he was not thinking about that right now. Belt pouch — two tutorial rations, a water skin at a third capacity, flint and steel, a folding knife.
That was it.
He turned in a slow circle and let himself see it properly.
The city was still here. Under all of it — under the green and the silence and the thick layer of reclamation — the city was still here. He could see it in the grid, the way the trees lined up in rows slightly too regular, following roads that no longer existed as roads. Buildings still stood, their steel bones too stubborn to fall, wearing vines like old men in overgrown gardens.
The 405 freeway was a river. Wide and clear and completely unbothered, catching the morning light in ways freeways historically had not.
He was looking south when he saw the sign.
Most of it. Three letters gone, the remaining ones wearing decades of accumulated green, tilted on a hillside quietly reclaiming its original slope. But still legible. Still, against all reasonable expectation, there.
HOLL W OD
Will stared at it longer than he meant to.
He'd been about to say what the hell out loud — to nobody, to the city, to the general situation — when the voice arrived.
Not from outside. From somewhere behind his sternum, settled there like it had always existed and was simply choosing to speak now. Deep. Unhurried. The meaning arriving complete before the sounds had finished.
"Out of all my children," it said.
Will stopped walking.
"Across all my bloodlines. Across eight centuries of sons and daughters and their sons and daughters and all the generations their sons and daughters produced in all the corners of the world I put them in."
A pause. Vast and deliberate.
"...The universe sends me you."
Will stood in the ruins of Los Angeles and considered his response carefully.
"Are you real," he said, "or did I hit my head."
"Both are possible. Only one is true."
"That's not an answer."
"It is an answer. It is simply not the one you wanted." A pause. "You do this frequently. I have seen your memories. You ask questions to which you already know the answer because the answer is uncomfortable."
"You went through my memories."
"I have been in your blood since the Watcher placed me here. I had time."
"That's incredibly—"
"Invasive, yes. I find this response interesting from someone whose bloodline I rebuilt from its component parts. Your concept of privacy is charming. Like a child who believes closing their eyes makes them invisible."
Will started walking because standing still felt worse than moving while being psychologically dismantled.
"Okay," he said. "You're Genghis Khan."
"I am Temujin. Genghis Khan is a title. A declaration. What men called me when they needed a word for what I had become. You may use it if you require the reminder of what you carry."
"Great. You're Genghis Khan and you've read my diary."
"You do not have a diary."
"It was a metaphor."
"I know what a metaphor is, boy."
Four steps of silence. Will was beginning to understand that four steps was approximately how long Khan allowed silences before filling them with assessments.
"You gave away your sword," Khan said.
"I know."
"To a girl you had known for the length of a tutorial. Before confirming she had any means of defending herself beyond the weapon you had just surrendered."
"She had her own—"
"The point is not the sword." Shorter pause. "You have spent your entire life solving immediate problems with no architecture for what comes after. Your father writes letters. You hand over swords. Both are gestures. Gestures do not build anything that lasts. You feel better for making them. The problem continues."
Will walked. The moss was soft under his feet.
"Are you saying I shouldn't have let them through the portal."
"I am saying that a man who intends to be powerful needs to begin thinking like one before the power arrives. You had nothing. You should have had contingencies."
"I was Twenty and facing a monster horde."
"I was twelve when I was taken captive by the Tayichi'ud. Thirteen when I escaped. I had a plan."
"Good for twelve year old you."
"Yes," said Khan, with complete sincerity. "It was."
Will walked in silence and filed it — into the mental folder he was already building labeled things Khan says that sound like cruelty and might be something else.
It was filling faster than expected.
End of Chapter 1