Having discarded the minotaur meat a while back to look civil, I slinked into Raven’s Shade looking all regal and important and other such nonsense. I ignored the commoners, encountered no guards this time, and made my way to one of my favorite spots in the city; Café Ritan.

I have no idea why it’s called that, by the way. It’s a coffee shop that stocks a few other things like newspapers and muffins and coffee obviously. Good food and good service. At that time of day, somewhere between noon and the evening, only two customers were in the shop, and the owner.

The customers had already gotten their coffee and were sitting at a table, so I walked up the owner and said, “A cup of coffee of any kind, please, as long as it has some spiraldust in it.”

He nodded, and a minute later came back with a cup of coffee. I thanked him, and paid him a few coins. At this point, it would be sensible to wonder why I treated him with respect, while I sneered at most commoners.

The answer is quite simple; he was someone offering me a service, at a reasonable price and with satisfactory demeanor. As such, I had no reason to look down on him. Guards fulfill a service for the city, risk their lives, and have extensive training. Commoners simply walk about and be boring all the time. Useless creatures, they would be much better put to use as fodder for the military.

I picked up a newspaper and sat down at a table in the corner of the shop where I could watch everyone else without being clearly seen myself. Vague paranoia, for the most part. I skimmed through the boring parts of the newspaper, like the chimera attack on some random village whose guards all died in the war (seriously, who cares if twenty commoners died?), or the rising price of various goods, while drinking my coffee.

I’d already eaten the minimum this week, so I used the energy from the coffee to heal my broken bones from the minotaur fight. As I did that, I relaxed the pain blocking spell I had used to let me walk without screaming. The pain had already eased, so I just got a short shock and a wince.

As ever, I was thankful for the unique nature of elementals. All the animals that my people had observed in the wild operated very strangely; they ate, and then defecated unusable parts of the animal. Very inefficient system. We elementals naturally converted all parts of our food into raw energy, which allowed us to live on three meals a week, and occasionally convert that energy into healing for our bodies, such as I had done with the coffee now and the minotaur meat earlier.

Seriously though, I could always cheer myself up by looking at the animals. They had to actually defecate and eat like, three times a day… they only lived a few decades and actually aged, instead of living forever at the peak of physical maturity… and of course they actually reproduced, bringing a whole new meaning to sex and entirely more serious connotations. I’d hate having to deal with all that.

Feeling a little better, I finally found the part of the newspaper I was looking for; the war summary, a section of the paper that outlines recent developments in the wars between elements.

There are six main elements in our little universe; glorious Darkness, raging Fire, gusty Air, dirty Earth and like, uh, wet Water, and uhm… bright… Light? Each element has a natural opposite, such as Darkness and Light. There are also two other elements that are kind of weird; Frost and Storm. Frost is related closely to Water, but is different in many ways and has its own territory. Storm is in the same position, but with Air.

There are also seven ‘worlds’; six planes (vast, triangular flat surfaces with vegetation, animals, dirt, and so on) and one planet (like a plane, but spherical). The planes are thus: Darkness holds Nyx, Fire holds Ignis, Water holds Aquas, Earth holds Terra, Air holds Zephyr, and Light holds Lux. Frost and Storm are kind of weird because they have smaller, less cohesive planes that are near their planes, Frost on Glacial near Aquas and Storm on Gale near Zephyr. And then there’s the seventh planet, arguably the most important; Warfield.

Warfield is a place of change, of balance, and more than anything else of chaos running wild. It also is host to a ton of portals. Portals are interesting things; they naturally form within cities, connecting each city of an element to the other cities as long as they are on the same world. There are also static portals, ones that will always remain, and always connect between two locations. Every plane has three static portals (one at each tip of the triangle) to Warfield and the sub-planes of Frost and Storm each have a static portal to the plane they’re near.

Because Warfield has connections to every world, it’s the most fought-for location. Any side that controls Warfield controls the war.

The war summary was brutally honest in all things, which I appreciated. Firstly, it stated that Darkness held only its static portals on Warfield, and absolutely nothing else. This was the result of events a while ago, when Dark’s campaign was crushed by an alliance between Light and Fire. The campaign was officially ended when the Dark Champion was killed by the Champions of Light and Fire.

Now, things were murkier. Light was the dominant faction, having won every battle it was involved in. Water and Fire were engaged in a brutal war that Water was winning, because Earth and Air had joined Water in alliance. Rumors and espionage suggested that Earth and Air had joined this alliance in a bid to stand against Light, as a form of safety in numbers. Dark was weakest thanks to our recent losses, and Frost and Storm were once more in minor conflict with Water and Air respectively.

I had been watching parts of these wars with interest, as Fire had been doing surprisingly well despite its great opposition. A bit of strategic brilliance had just won them a battle where they were outnumbered six-to-one. Indeed, all sides had had their good moves and their bad ones, and I gave them respect where it was due, even hated Light. While obviously the other elements were beneath the glory of Darkness, and myself in particular, their militaries were dedicated and in many cases quite smart.

If that was all too much information, I’ll give you the relevant summary; there are six major elements, I’m Dark, Dark opposes Light primarily, Light was currently dominant after crushing Dark’s campaign. There’s a place called Warfield that connects every element, the elements were as usual warring with each other, and Dark was staying out of the wars because we were really, really weak right then.

I skimmed the rest of the war summary, content that I was up-to-date. Soon, I found the other interesting bit of the paper; the part that talked about the Champion of Darkness. It gave a brief blurb at the start about how the last Champion died, and that no new Champion had been chosen yet. That was old hat, but I was surprised to learn that the paper was aware of the candidates for Champion, something even I had not known.

Granted, I hadn’t read the paper recently, or paid attention to anything Champion-related that wasn’t about me, but I still should have been aware of who the candidates were. It was apparently between me (and thankfully, the paper gave my name as Shadow), a young hotshot guy named Drake, and an old veteran dude named Kymien Rathel.

That was interesting. Very interesting.

The metaphorical gears in my head began to turn as I began to work out more details of my planned deception. So far, all I had reasoned out was that it should show off my leadership ability, involve some people paid to cheer for me, and that I would have total control of the situation the entire time. But if there were more candidates than just myself…

The perfect plan would involve them dying, so that I was the winner by default. But as that was suspicious and hard to pull off it would be better to organize the death of one of them, but which one? Hmm. I’d have to see them first, and figure out which was more likely to win.

As to the plan itself, by this point I was thinking I could fake a raid from one of the other elements, or actively organize one by collaborating with them. If I could convince the raiders to target one specific elemental, they could deal with the candidate. That or I could just kill him in the chaos.

It would have to be a fairly complex, well-thought out thing, with many, many preparations to ensure I didn’t end up dead, exiled, or so forth.

With that, I came to a decision; I needed two more things in order to pull this off.

Firstly, I needed more power than I had right now. Secondly, I needed some collaborators.

And so, I walked out of the café, gathered the darkness about me, and flew once more (there are portals between cities but I honestly prefer to fly), this time in the direction of my home city, Widow’s Dusk.