"Of all the worlds you could have picked, why this one in particular?" I challenged my liege, several of his staff glancing with disapproval at my seeming insolence. The man standing at my side was, after all, the emperor of Ardais, the largest empire in human settled space—and my closest friend.

I looked across the containment shield to the life form within, gossamer wings wrapped around its slender frame.

"Because there is none other."  Karron transfixed me with his cobalt blue gaze. "I would not presume so much as to play god without paying the price."

I have long given up trying to decipher his cryptic remarks. In the years I have served Karronen Ardais IV, I knew that he would reveal what he meant in due time. And now wasn't the right time. Even in a room surrounded by his most trusted subjects, one can never be sure the place was entirely free of spies.

"Take care of him, Gerrian," said my liege, and as he turned to leave he whispered softly, "He is our only hope."

 I stared at the being within the shield, the medics preoccupied with stabilizing its, or rather, his—vital signs. It was nothing short of a miracle that he had survived the transport through time and space.  A mathematical genius and physicist in his own right, Karron's obsession with discovering the key to alternate worlds had finally paid off,  but the odds against finding this one individual among a hundred different universes had been so great that I had doubted my friend. Not until I saw the being's still face, my breath catching in my throat, that I started to believe. Or so I thought.

The following day had me storming angrily at Karron's office, daring his elite force of bodyguards and aides to stop me, but my royal standing as Lord Chancellor kept them at bay.

Karron looked up from a holomap he had been studying. "Did we have an appointment?"

"I don't think I need an appointment for this, when your protégé has just turned your most expensive lab into a mess as we speak!"  I gritted my teeth, then added, belatedly, "Your Highness."

"Did he now?" A spark of interest lit up his eyes.

 I glanced at him accusingly. "Why did you not tell me he can manipulate energy flows?"

"I did tell you that world and its inhabitants live and breathe on magic, but you had been skeptical about it," Karron said calmly. "While our plane of existence took the path of science and technology, theirs branched into sorcery and wizardry."

"Sorcery!" I scoffed, the scientist in me rejecting the idea almost as it came. But the image of so much valuable machinery laid to waste, not to mention half the emperor's lab personnel floating helplessly in mid-air, was hard to explain. "If I hadn't explicitly ordered the guards not to touch him, all our efforts would have been for naught. How can we control something we don't understand?  We can't keep him sedated forever."

"As I said the day before, I'm willing to pay the price." With a gesture, he dismissed his staff. "Leave us."

And so it was that Karron, sovereign of a thousand worlds, laid out his plan, my blood turning cold at the sudden realization that what I feared the most could come into fruition.