Emperor

Tall and slender with a youthful face, the Emperor wears his light hair to the shoulders in soft side-parted waves, his eyes half-closed and his jaw clean-shaven. His dress uniform is long, dark, and high-collared, marked by twin rows of buttons, a sash crossing the chest, and a waist belt, the sleeves banded in a lighter shade and ending in small ruffled cuffs. Dark trousers and shoes finish the look, with a cape clasped at the shoulders falling near his ankles beneath fringed epaulettes. For ceremony he dons a rounded crown whose jeweled base sends inward-curving arches up to a central orb capped by a diamond-shaped ornament.

Unfailingly formal and even-tempered, the Emperor dwells on how nothing lasts, not even an empire of a thousand years, yet he works to secure its survival and prosperity or, failing that, a peaceful close. He can mock himself as a fool, stressing that the state's institutions are built to outlast whoever holds the throne. Little escapes him: he spots political maneuvering at once, as when Fraese quietly sidelined Denken ahead of the ball. Describing himself as conscientious, he means to reward those who have shielded the Empire, Denken and Fraese foremost. Serie pegs him as a careful, sharp rationalist alert to the weight of appearance and protocol, and flatly names him a swindler.

The current Emperor comes to the throne over fifteen years past the death of Himmel the Hero. Some three decades later, amid the National Foundation Festival, he invites the Great Mage Serie, voice of the Continental Magic Association, to a ball at the palace, intending through a prior pact with Denken to lay groundwork for a friendly treaty between the two powers.

On the eve of the ball he meets Serie and by a dream-lantern recognizes he has entered one of her prophetic dreams. This Emperor, he explains, is a conscious projection that the realm's mental defenses keep cloaked, a safeguard distilled from the heart of Imperial sorcery over a thousand years, letting him control exactly what he reveals. To stave off both the Empire's decline and a plot to murder Serie at the ball, he offers a trade of information, and she agrees; he admits his power cannot directly stop the killing, while Serie lays out how far her dream magic reaches and her hunch that a second seer is at work. Pressed for names, he can summon only Fraese, though neither thinks she commands such magic.

Once the ball opens, he asks Fraese, who commands the Magic Special Forces, to report. All is well, she says, and that Serie wants an audience; noting the size of Serie's retinue, he approves Fraese's offer of an escort and a show of authority, telling her to move slowly for effect. Then he presses what she is hiding, having marked how she deliberately removed Denken from play. Fraese owns up to acting alone and asks that her execution wait until the affair ends; he waves it off, saying he would have hanged her ages ago if he only knew how to end her, while granting that she and Denken, opposites though they are, have long kept the realm safe. He would gladly reward her as he once did Denken, but she refuses and asks him to keep looking the other way. Soon after, he steps into the ballroom under guard.