Royal Reboot: Level up, Your Majesty!

Taika blinked
and the world went white.

Clean and untouched snow stretched in every direction. He walked, careful, instinctively careful, placing each foot so lightly he left no print at all.

Why is it snowing again? Is Huka nearby?

His head hurt. The last ten minutes were smeared in his memory. He remembered the doctor's hands against sternum and—

Taika stopped.

A shape lay ahead of him on the snow.

The sight tugged at his bones. His body moved closer even as his mind protested, fingers numb with more than cold.

A woman, her dark hair spread across the white, with moko on her chin.

Kaitiaki Wahine. His mother.

No.
No. No.

He dropped to his knees and, this time, the snow accepted him. His weight cut an ugly crater in the pristine surface.

Ugly. Ugly thing. What an ugly thing.

Blood began to drip from his palm, soaking into the snow. Red against the empty white, spreading and spreading and spreading. It bloomed outward in a circle until he knelt at the centre of an intricate sigil.

His mother stared up at him with glassy, dead eyes. Her mouth hung open, forming an incomplete question.

Why?

His mind completed the rest.

"E tama… why would you do this to me?"

Tears burned his eyes and he gritted out, "Make sure only the snow—"

"—remembers they exist," an amused, feminine voice finished for him. "Yes. That line. You repeat it so often it is practically a catchphrase."

He looked up.

The blizzard rose up all at once, swallowing him and the corpse and the sky in a roaring white veil. Reality tore apart.

Now, Taika was kneeling on cold stone. Polished black marble reflected his stunned face and the smear of blood on his hand.

Above him, a ceiling arched impossibly high, carved with symbols that shifted whenever he tried to grasp their meaning. Stained glass scattered colours across the stone.

Far across the chamber, a throne rested on its raised dais, studded with jagged obsidian crystals. A figure lounged on it.

Eydis.

She looked older than the photos he had seen, though not by years so much as by depth. She wore a gown that never settled into one colour, shifting slowly from violet to plum red to black, then back again.

Eydis looked as though she had simply stepped out of a myth and found the modern world mildly inconvenient. Her golden eyes pinned him in place. Eyes like Father's.

Fear did everything else.

A cold weight slid over his shoulder. A serpent. Its shimmering scales coiled around his neck, ring by ring. Taika reached for his Gift by reflex.

Nothing.

"Ah." The serpent's forked tongue brushed his jaw. "You have unsettled him again, Your Majesty. So much fear. Tasty. I wager in five minutes he'll burst out into… lullabies."

Again?

Taika swallowed hard.

Eydis rested her cheek against her knuckles, as if this were a tedious, rehearsed line. Ruby rings glinted like wet blood on her fingers.

"It is you I'm interested in, Taika. Yet you keep sending that dull, conditioned shell to stand in your place. You realise it's all rather tropey."

"Tropey?" He spoke against scales. "What do you mean? How do you know my name?"

"I thought after spending an hour stalking Natalia, you might have picked up a bit more of her teenage coded-speech, but here we are."

His eyes narrowed. "You're bluffing. I see the tactic."

"Bluffing? I could also see that cursed Father of yours, capital F, I assume. He knew how to hide. Blur the face, keep the eyes. Very hypnotic. Shame for him that golden eyes are rather… distinctive."

"What nonsense are you spouting?"

She didn't care to stop. "And there's the trigger phrase. The conditioned persona, groomed for war and groomed by War itself. Ares, the Father you never asked for, yes?"

"Don't you dare speak of Father that way."

"So it is Ares. I'm still curious about that blur effect. I do wonder what else you're hiding." Eydis smirked, satisfied, and Taika realised he had walked straight into the trap.

"It is not him." Taika closed his eyes. "Make sure the snow–"

The serpent tightened in an instant. His face turned blue. His fingers clawed uselessly at the creature's body.

She waved a hand. "Come now, Taika. You are still much more pleasant to talk to than that brute."

"If you think I'd ever betray my people, you are dead wrong." He wheezed.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"We can talk about you if you'd like. I must say, you do have a tragic past. Almost too easy to use."

"Don't act like… you know anything."

"Oh, but I do. You were preyed on, awakened too young, too powerful. You latched onto your groomer because survival tends to narrow one's options, then drowned in guilt while he rewrote you line by line. All to keep the snow looking pure."

"S… shut up."

"You know, I nearly killed you outright. It would have been faster." Eydis's voice turned reflective.

"Then… why… didn't you?" he rasped.

"Because she asked me to reconsider," Eydis answered, this time her gaze softened. "She does that. Sees the good in people. A baffling habit."

"Who?"

"Astra. Hard edges, economical with words. But underneath, genuinely soft. Unreasonably soft. She has the kindness I, frankly, don't deserve."

Taika snorted. "So I owe your girlfriend, is that it? You just jump when she tells you to?"

"I'm sure it wasn't you she was worried about." She sat straighter, unfolding from her languid pose, and looked at him with that pitying, condescending expression. "You, or your Father, were right about mercy. It's expensive. But curiosity, on the other hand… I wish to see how much you have already learned, and why you targeted us."

Taika bared his teeth. "I am trained to endure any torture. You cannot prise anything from me. Or touch my mind."

"But I already have," Eydis purred.

His stomach dropped.

"Your mind is very carefully layered," she observed. "Very clever. It appears to be part of your Gift itself, a distortion field around your thoughts."

She tilted her head.

"But every system breaks somewhere. For you, it's the Reaper persona."

The room trembled.

"You have learned too much, Taika. And I know you are hiding something in Aoraki."

Snow crashed back into existence around them. Blue mountains, heavy with snow, layered along the far distance. Aoraki. The exact spot he had met Huka and Ngū.

Fuck.

He needed… him.

Taika closed his eyes to summon the phrase, but a slick sensation distracted him.

Blood spread beneath his hand again, soaking the snow. The corpse of his mother lay where he had left her, eyes still filled with that frozen question.

"Fuck you!" He forced himself upright. Electricity gathered bright along the veins of both arms. He hurled it at her in a blinding bolt that cracked the air.

Eydis did not even move. A shield of violet mist blossomed in front of her and drank the lightning whole. The glow shuddered inside it, twisted and reshaped into a three-headed hellhound that dropped heavily to the marble at her side.

"What do you taste, Cerberus?" she asked.

"A feast, Your Majesty," the hellhound said. "So lost. So hungry for purpose."

She reached down and scratched behind one ear. "Look at that, Taika. Your talent for killing is almost instinctive. Yet you call yourself a guardian."

An invisible force slammed into him. His jaw snapped shut. Fine thread pushed through his lips, threading through flesh, stitching his mouth closed as he was yanked back down to his knees.

"Kaitiaki," he tried to say.

"Who, exactly, were you trying to fool? Them, or yourself?"

Eydis walked through the storm without snow touching her. She lifted one hand and translucent screens unfolded in a circle, each one a memory.

His memories.

"Did you truly think you could place all the blame on him. Father, the cruel architect. Father, who turned his son into a blade." She flicked her fingers.

The first screen lit up. There he was, younger. Eyes flat and cold, repeating Father's words to himself. The trigger. His way of staying alive under Father's hand and living up to his mother's expectations.

Every time he whispered it and let the Phantom Reaper step forward.

"Here," she narrated. "You choose him. Over and over. You tell yourself he is separate. Split the self, put the worst bits somewhere else, then you can keep looking in mirrors."

Something flickered across her mind, and she paused a moment too long at her own words. Taika didn't see it, lost in the shifting screens.

Missions. Targets. Bodies. Snow that remembered too much.

Even in memories before the code had embedded itself fully, there he was, testing the edge of that other self, nudging it awake.

Tears blurred his vision.

He wished he were dead. Or empty. Or anything that did not have to keep watching this.

"Tell me, you were just about to call for him again, were you not?" she taunted.

"No. Stop it!" His words stayed mangled.

Eydis watched it all with faint amusement. "Astra sees the good in people. I look and see this. You are tragic, I will grant you that. No child should be built for killing. Your past explains you. It does not excuse you, and it does not undo what you have done."

Her voice dipped, losing its lazy humour.

"Especially when you nearly killed my friends."

The serpent's coils loosened and Taika dragged in one hard gulp of air. The stitches unthreaded themselves from his mouth as neatly as they had formed, as if Eydis had invited him to speak.

"How the fuck are you going to kill me?" he taunted, chest heaving. "The sun will rise and I will wake. It always does. I always do."

A bird of shadow swooped from nowhere. He ducked, swearing, as the raven skimmed past where his throat had been and flared out into wings. It landed with lazy grace on Eydis's shoulder and seemed to speak to her without a sound.

Something darkened in her eyes. "Of course. Electromagnetic Gifted."

How? No. That could wait.

"EM Gifted like me do not simply die, and certainly not because of your foolish mind games," he snapped.

Something in her gaze clicked. As if he had finally given the correct answer to a question she had never asked out loud.

And he realised his mistake.

Eydis's smile widened. "Oh, I assure you, the mind can be terribly powerful. You of all people should know that, Reaper."

"Don't fucking call me that." He spat.

"You really should examine why that name bothers you more than the corpses attached to it," she said lightly.

The words rooted him to the spot.

"But fine. Throw tantrums if it helps, you know I am all for self-soothing. And make no mistake, I have reconsidered. Because she asked me to."

In a blink, she stood before him. "I am still not going to kill you."

The serpent uncoiled. Its obsidian body flashed across his vision and plunged into his mouth. Cold scales scraped his tongue, his palate, his throat.

Taika gagged.

"That would rob you of the one choice you have left." Eydis turned and began to walk away, the hellhound and the raven eagerly followed behind.

Red-plum colour bled from her dress onto the snow, fizzing lightly before drifting up as languid steam. It coalesced into a black silhouette, its features lost to shadow save for the eyes.

Father's gold.

No.

Taika choked. "I'm sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sor…"

"You are a danger to Natalia," Eydis murmured to herself. "Do you truly think I could invite you to keep breathing near her and call myself anything but a fool."

Her next words were soft, carrying a tone he recognised too well. Father's cadence. Father's authority.

Eydis spoke, and the black figure shaped like Father moved its mouth in perfect time. Their voices laced together and echoed through his skull.

"Learn to make the world stop insisting you are real. Not me. Not even nature itself."

She paused and turned just enough for him to catch the knowing smile cutting across her profile.

"Not even yourself."

The new command matched Father's frequency exactly, as if she had studied him forever.

How?

Perhaps she had.

And he realised it was all in his mind. That was the only logical possibility.

His body lifted from the snow. The screens circling him flared bright and clear, all of them showing the memories he had chosen to forget. The Phantom Reaper. Killing. Killing. Killing again. Snow that remembered.

Nothing here… is real. All in my mind. All in my mind. I can control this. I need to turn to the Reaper aga—

A screen lit up.
White at first, then red.

The first time his Gift woke, when he was eight years old and frightened and his mother reached for him and then stopped, mid-heartbeat. Everyone he had ever loved collapsed into one question in his mother's eyes.

He screamed, but the serpent burrowed deeper, ramming itself between his teeth.

Fear shredded his mind.

Father's voice echoed in his head, the familiar command looping, louder, harsher. "Learn to make the world stop insisting you are real."

Stop.

"Not me."

Make it stop.

The serpent mouth opened wide, fangs bared.

"Not even nature itself."

STOP.

It sank its fangs into his neck.

"Not even yourself."

Something in him obeyed.

Taika winked out of exis–

—and there was no one left to finish the thought.