A Bygone Era

  She's going to beat him.

  With that sudden certainty comes a rush of excitement, of anticipation, of a powerful electricity that courses all the way down to her fingertips — one that she quells at once, quite forcefully, before it can overtake her. She will not lose her reason for the sake of a prize she has not yet won. She is a patient hunter, after all; she has been told that her equanimity is her greatest strengths, and thus she has gone to great lengths to refine it.

  "Well, Hiela?" her father asks. His voice is a smooth baritone, the presence of which has always set her at ease. "Going to make a move?"

  He sits there at the opposite end of the game-board, her father — Raan Kal Volsif XCVI, lord and master of all the human race. The Gilded Emperor, the Storm-Crowned Conqueror, He Who Grasps The Lighting In His Fist. And right now, well, he looks not much like any sort of Emperor at all. He's an old man, after all, currently clad at current in little more than a simple golden robe. Yet though his face may be gaunt and his hair but a faint wisp, even still his eyes yet brim with a ferocious, hungry intellect. Even now, he looks upon this simple board game just as he would the Great Domain itself. Her father is a titan, make no mistake, the most powerful and influential Emperor in a hundred generations. Even at three-hundred-and-seven years of age, Raan Kal Volsif XCVI remains undiminished.

  "You're really trying to rush me?" Hiela smirks at him. "You must be desperate." And she does, indeed, have him well and truly on the ropes.

  "A wise general makes use of every tool at his disposal," her father intones, faux-serious, and with a small laugh Hiela reaches forward and moves her chip — and then, just like that, the game has been won.

  They do this every day, she and her father. If there is one thing Raan Kal Volsif has imparted upon his children, it is his boundless love for games of every shape and size. In his eldest son, Jaras, (later known by the epithet of Crimson Emir), he found a gifted tactician and natural-born strategist — one who, alas, far preferred commanding ships to commanding game-pieces. But in his daughter, Hiela, the aging Primarch found himself a worthy opponent — a brilliant, agile intellect, and a woman possessed with an equal hunger to whet the blade of her mind against such a challenge such as this. Such as Sarnac, a game with fifty distinct pieces and an eight-by-ten grid, via which quite literally billions of permutations were possible.

  Hiela knew that it was through these mere board games that she was proving herself to her father, day by day. Technically, the title of Emperor was Jaras's by rite of succession — but in truth, an Emperor could choose any descendant to inherit his or her throne, and the fact remained that Jaras had not returned home in well over a decade.

  Jaras was content with his fleets, his armies, his wars. Let him have them. Hiela hungered for more.

  With that, and words of warm congratulations, the Emperor rises to his feet — assisted, subtly, by an exoskeleton-framework concealed beneath his robe — and clasps his bony hands together. "He's arrived," her father tells her, with excitement twinkling unmistakably in his rheumy old eyes.

  'He.' The boy. The orphan. The mongrel. The outsider. Hiela masked her distaste perfectly, though she knew her father could see right through the facade. The boy had been her father's latest project — a starving, orphaned gutter-rat from some backwater world whose unusual (that is to say, exceptional and outright nigh-impossible) aptitude scores had raised flags in some system, somewhere. And then, somehow, word managed to reach the Emperor's ear, and then, for void knows why, the old man had become all but obsessed. Why not just have another child? Why even want another child at all, when there was already a perfect daughter sitting right across from you? Hiela knew not the answer to these questions — but she knew the outsider was a threat, and thus she well intended to treat him as one.

  Hiela had been taught by the finest in the Great Domain, after all, and they had taught her to respond to threats in a very particular manner indeed.

  "I suppose you'll want to meet him," Hiela remarks dryly, to which her father flashes an eager grin.

  "I want you to meet him," Raan corrects, pointing a withered finger. "To see what I mean, what I've been so excited about. The boy is different, Hiela, mark my words. A mind to surpass even my own!"

  Hiela turns her head and coughs into her sleeve, so that her father does not see the expression she is unable to hide.

  Minutes later, the two stand before a sleek vessel of gleaming porcelain and golden tracery. Both she and her father are shadowed by masked, gilded Se-dai warriors, and about the hangar there hovers a procession of some hundred-or-so uniformed men and women. This was no ceremony, no cause for great celebration — but Volsif XCVI is a beloved leader indeed, and so it is that the enormity of his presence tends naturally to draw in so many supplicants.

  Hiela stands ramrod-straight, the perfect picture of keen and imperious beauty. Though she is only nineteen years of age, already do men and women alike bow their heads in unconscious gesture of deference. There is an unmistakable aura about her, you see, one that can not be learned. One that can only be inherited.

  The shuttle hisses, the ramp slides down, and what emerges, then, is almost laughable.

  He is a short-statured teenager, two or three years Hiela's junior — and already his expression is one of hard determination and time-worn wariness, his eyes at once constantly moving and utterly focused. He is also quite gaunt, his azure eyes sunken deeply into the pits of his skull, and a mop of greasy black hair hangs loosely-kept about his head.

  Beside him, there looms a dark-skinned, bald-headed woman whose gorget reads ANANSI, shadowing her charge's every move as she sweeps the room for potential threats. So the little rat has already been assigned a Se-dai, then. What a monumental waste of resources.

  "Doss Ken Vessholt," her father calls out, with a dramatic sweep of his arm and a tongue-in-cheek little bow at his waist. "I bid you welcome, my son, to Holy Mercury."

  Raan starts forward, then, and to his credit the boy — 'Doss', apparently — does not flinch as the Emperor of the known universe rests a hand upon his shoulder. Hiela is astonished to see the way the boy looks up at her father — as though he is an equal! A peer! There is neither fear nor reverence in the young man's voice as he replies, quite flatly, "Thank you, Lord Emperor."

  "That's father, now," Volsif grins, squeezing the boy's shoulder. "From this moment forth, you are Doss Ken Volsif, bearer of my Blessed Name and member of my most-sacred Dynasty. From this moment forth, my son, you are Highborn." Hiela know that her father and the boy had met twice before, of course — but to see such open familiarity between the two of them is disconcerting to say the least.

  Once again, Hiela smells a threat.

  She stares young Doss right in the eyes, now — and the bastard lowborn, who is now her own half-brother, dares to meet her gaze in turn. This infuriates her to no end.

  "My name is Hiela," she says, abruptly, as she steps forward and extends a hand. Her father steps back, in turn, moving to grant them a modicum of space. The Incipitor-Princess throws on a warm, congenial, and entirely false smile. "It's good to meet you, Doss."

  "Same to you," the boy replies, after a reluctant moment, and so he shakes the proffered hand. His palms are coarse to the touch; Hiela's, by contrast, are smooth and entirely unblemished. "I'm guessing you're my new sister, then?"

  He still speaks like a filthy Lowborn; that, Hiela knows, will soon be trained (and beaten) out of him. Nevertheless, she just smiles as she looks down at this pitiful young specimen — whom she knows, at the end of the day, can never truly challenge her — and tells him, with only a trace of irritation leaking into her voice: "That is correct."

  The Panopticon; Present Day

  They had the Emperor by the throat.

  Kore saw it in the corner of her eye — though, hunched behind a cabinet and nursing a las-wound to the gut, there wasn't really a lot she could do about it.

  It was all one hell of a mess. After thirty minutes of the most intense fighting Kore had ever experienced in her life — aided, on and off, by Centurions and Praetorians who inevitably died around her — someone had finally gotten lucky, and so she had gone quite firmly down. It was just her, Jaheed, and Sekhmet now; the former beside her, staying entirely quiet and still, while the latter was hiding at the opposite end of the room. Sekhmet, Kore knew, had reached her limit and then blown clean through that limit, void help her. When last she had seen her, the Se-dai was but a panting, shuddering mess, and in absolutely no condition whatsoever to fight. This, obviously, posed a significant problem.

  In the center of the room, a towering Death Knell warrior held the Emperor by the throat, hoisting him aloft as though the Grand Architect weighed nothing at all, whilst two more cyborgs and a dozen-or-so shock-troopers combed through the archive halls in search of their elusive prey.

  "You are lucky they want you alive," she heard one of the Death Knell rumble, in that jangly nightmare-voice they all shared.

  "And you are lucky, indeed, to lay hands upon the flesh of a living God," came the Emperor's cheerful reply. "I wonder what punishment the universe shall heap upon thee, for apostasy such as this?"

  "Shut your mouth, or I'll pull your head off," the cyborg told him, in clear contradiction of his prior statement.

  Kore, meanwhile, was fumbling around in her belt-pouches — not this one, not that one, this one. She found what she was looking for and withdrew a narrow hypodermic needle, one swirling with grey-green fluid, and one that she jammed into the side of her neck with grit teeth and a hiss of pain. What flooded her veins, then, was a cocktail of her own creation: teramoramphylax to dull the pain, keremenosis to sharpen her awareness, and dentetanamophoryaxis to get her heart pumping just right. All three carefully portioned out, all three checking one another so that she did not lose herself to delirium, or suffer a fatal embolism, or have her heart simply explode inside her chest.

  A few seconds passed and then, like magic, Kore felt just how she was supposed to. Alert, eager. Energetic. Alive, which was a marked improvement. Her consciousness was honed now to a fine point, and thus she shouldered a commandeered disruptor-rifle and ensured that it was set to maximum discharge. She did the same with her pistol, then her melt-blade. Then she tucked her cap low over her eyes, as had long become unconscious habit, and prepared to leap out into the face of certain death — just as Jaheed rose to his feet beside her and called out "Finally!"

  A dozen gun-barrels were on him at once — but fortunately, his presence was so unexpected and so entirely harmless that nobody bothered to actually shoot him.

  "The fuck are you doing?!" Kore hissed, but Jaheed was already circling around the cabinets, hands clasped behind his back while he strutted about like he owned the damn place.

  "Face-down, on the ground!" one of the shock-troopers barked out. "Now!" This, by all measure, was a borderline-kindhearted response.

  "It's me, you idiots," Jaheed scoffed, and not for even one second did his air of casual indignity fade. "Jaheed Vell!"

  When nobody gave an immediate response, Jaheed rolled his eyes and let out an exasperated, long-suffering sigh. "I'm the traitor, damnit — the one who's been working with Hiela. You all should know my face and my name, yes?"

  "I don't fucking know you," one of the Death Knell growled. As he spoke, a chunk of gore slipped free from his glaive and hit the floor with a meaty smack. At that, Jaheed just sighed and pinched his brow.

  "Did you even read the briefing?" he demanded, after a moment.

  "What briefing?" one of the soldiers shot back.

  "Shoot his ass, already!" another shouted. "He's just another loudmouth fucking Highborn!"

  "What did you say?" the Emperor interrupted — and everyone fell abruptly and utterly silent, then, because the Grand Architect's voice was brimming now with rancor the likes of which not one of them had ever, ever experienced. Even whilst held aloft by his metal throat, the Emperor's face was a frigid mask of sheer malice, of loathing beyond compare — of a wounded and vengeful God, of a higher being whose eyes were black holes that swallowed all light, all sound, all color. All hope. And even Jaheed, who had come to knew Doss Ken Volsif exceptionally well, visibly paled at the Emperor's thunderous demand.

  "You heard me just fine," Jaheed managed, forcing his voice into some facsimile of defiance. "You're supposed to be some void-damned super-genius — and you really thought you could keep me under your thumb forever? You really thought you could keep poking and prodding and-"

  "I do not think," the Emperor declared, his voice going from a delicate hum to a bassy, full-throated roar that boomed out from speakers unseen. His emerald eyes were wide with fury. "I do."

  "And how's that working out for you?" Jaheed scoffed, weakly, gesturing at the hand around the Emperor's neck.

  "I offered you charity!" the Emperor bellowed, his voice growing so loud and so terribly all-encompassing that three of the Emir's men put palms to ears in sheer desperation. "You dare spurn me thus? You dare provoke my enmity? You would dare stand in defiance of the will that eclipses all will?!"

  And then, abruptly, the Death Knell had heard enough. "I told you to shut up," the cyborg said, simply, and with that he flung the Emperor aside. Thus did the Grand Architect impact hard against the wall and slump down in a broken, sparking heap of ruined metal.

  All froze, for a moment, at the sight of such a thing — at the sight of a living god with a trickle of genuine blood running down the side of his face — and then the Death Knell's umber eyes locked onto a flabbergasted, utterly bewildered Jaheed Vell. "You," the cyborg grunted, jabbing a finger. "Come with us. We'll take you to the moon, and then we'll find out if you really are who you say you are."

  Jaheed regained his composure at once. "Thank you," Jaheed replied, with exaggerated faux-deference, and thus did Kore watch with rifle tight in hand as the Jade Wolf crossed over to the cyborg's side.

  Jaheed raised his arm, then, and there came a momentary popping and whirring of machinery as a boxy little las-pistol sprung into his waiting hand. The barrel went against the cyborg's head — those demonic eyes flicked to the side, his nightmare of a mouth opened in surprise — and then, simple as that, Jaheed pulled the trigger.

  A las-pistol shot was a bad bet, when it came to downing a Death Knell cyborg — but when the weapon in question was that close, death was all but a sure thing. The bolt carved right through the back of the warrior's metal skull, was stopped by the front of his faceplate, and thus was the interior of said skull melted down to a molten slurry that dribbled out the back of the Death Knell's head.

  The cyborg dropped like a stone. Every gun turned on Jaheed, again — and then it was too late for any of them, because Kore was already vaulting over the cabinet with rifle in hand and the so-called 'Exilir of Life' pumping through her veins. Every gun was on Jaheed, and not a single gun was on her, and in current form that really was all she needed to massacre the lot of them. She shot the closest soldier right through the head, then pivoted smooth as silk to shoot another. And another. And another. And in the span of an instant six were dead, and now Kore was wrestling with a seventh, smashing the butt of her rifle against his throat and killing him instantly. An eight came at her, melt-blade in hand, but Kore just unholstered her pistol and shot him once in the knee, then once through the top of his skull.

  And then, inevitably, the Death Knell joined the fray. The only thing Kore could do was drop straight to the floor, narrowly avoid a sweeping glaive, then roll immediately to the side as an augmented fist smashed into the floor and kicked up a spray of broken tile. She rolled again, dodged another punch, then raised her pistol and fired six, seven, eight times. The weapon clicked empty, the knight staggered back — and Kore used the opportunity to roll away, snatching up a nearby rifle and dropping to one knee as she sighted in once more.

  This was hardly the time for single-fire precision. There were a thousand pounds of meat and armor and rage barreling towards her and so Kore thumbed the weapon to full auto and squeezed down the trigger, hosing the Death Knell with a storm of blistering heat. A storm that he was enduring, somehow, and then he was upon her and backhanding the rifle away, the force of the blow all but snapping the weapon in half. Kore's hand darted for her knife — and then, just like the Emperor, Kore felt far-too-cold fingers close around her throat, and moments later she was up against the wall and struggling for dear life against impossible strength.

  Jaheed was firing every shot he had into the knight's back — but a low power las-weapon wasn't doing a damn thing, and all the while the third Death Knell was grabbing the broken Emperor by the collar and hoisting him over one shoulder.

  "Little mouse," the Death Knell rumbled, leaning in close. His breath reeked of char and decay. "I think I want you to die slowly."

  Kore didn't answer — she just jammed her knife straight through his forearm, to which the towering cyborg let out a harsh chuckle.

  "Kill that asshole," the Death Knell said, then, jerking his head towards an increasingly panicked Jaheed.

  "Why don't you do it?" the Emperor-toting knight demanded, from behind.

  "I'm still having fun with this one," the first replied, grinning and exposing a row of pointed, brown-stained teeth. "Just deal with it." It was around this point that Kore's vision was beginning to go faint, and her thoughts were becoming subsumed by an ocean of sheer nothingness. And it was right around that time, too, that there came a flash of onyx-black — and then, miraculously, the tension was released, and Kore was on the floor, and the Death Knell was stumbling back with his left arm flying end-over-end in the opposite direction. Between them stood Sekhmet — a heaving, panting, steam-breathing Sekhmet, her sword sheathed and tightly in hand.

  "Motherfucker," the Emperor-carrying Death Knell said. And then, to Kore's disbelief, the cyborg knight actually turned around and ran.

  "No, you don't!" Sekhmet snarled, leaping forwards — and, in turn, the one-arm Death Knell intercepted her with a titanic bodyslam, knocking the both of them to the ground as his companion tore off. Sekhmet handsprung, leapt to her feet, reached for her sword — and then, following a flash of something too fast for Kore to see, the Death Knell simply fell into seven neatly-dissected pieces.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  That was, of course, The Fourth Vile Art - L'art Du Tirage D'éclairs. The Art of the Lightning-Draw, an old technique now long-forgotten by all, save for the most fervent adherents of the Sword. In an instant, the Death Knell was dead, and Sekhmet's Ker-sot appeared to have never left its sheath at all.

  Now, the rogue Se-dai shot across the room, trailing steam that was beginning to look more like smoke, and leapt high with sword in hand and prey in sight — just as a pair of enormous doors slammed shut before her.

  And just like that, the Jade Emperor was gone.

  "Shit," Kore coughed, forcing herself onto her feet. "Oh shit. Oh shit." The words seemed inadequate, in the moment, and yet also entirely appropriate.

  "He-Sekhmet!" Jaheed was sputtering, in panicked disbelief. "Do something!" But he needn't have said a word. Sekhmet was already unleashing upon the door a flurry of bullet-punches, the result of which was little more than a bit of shuddering and buckling on the part of the door. Whatever it was made from, the damned thing held, even against the strength of a Blessed Executioner, and so it was with a ragged cry that Sekhmet slammed a final fist against that impossible obstacle, shredding the very skin from her knuckles — and accomplishing, unfortunately, absolutely nothing else.

  "No-" Sekhmet choked out, desperate and defiant all at once — but she was spent, and thus she could only collapse to her knees in a glowing-eyed heap. By that time Kore was by her side, trying and failing to help the thousand-pound woman to her feet. "No! Anansi trusted me! She trusted me!"

  "Give it up!" Kore snapped, a great deal harsher than she had intended. It was perilous work, after all, trying to restrain a woman who could easily break every bone in your body, and the last vestiges of her patience had been taken out back and shot. "Stop it, Sekhmet! He's gone!"

  "Are you out of your mind?" came Jaheed, wide-eyed and looking more than a little numb. Disbelieving, perhaps, the reality that the Jade Emperor had just been erased from this world. That the Jade Emperor, a supposedly all-powerful and all-knowing deity, had actually just lost. "That is the Emperor of the entire Great Domain! Get this damn door open, now!"

  "And how in the void are we supposed to do that?" Kore demanded, rounding on him rising sharply to her feet. Again, this came out quite a bit harsher than intended, though this was largely a byproduct of the compound currently wreaking havoc on her blood chemistry. Her blood was hot in the most literal sense one could imagine. "Sekhmet can't open it! I certainly can't fucking open it! And I've got the map, Jaheed, so believe me when I say this — there is no way around! You hear me, damnit? There is no fucking way around!"

  "Without him, I am nothing!" Jaheed roared, and the bit of spittle that impacted against Kore's nose served only to heighten her already-considerable ire. "I grovelled at his feet for five years, Kore, for fucking nothing!"

  "Oh, poor you!" Kore shouted back, making her voice a thin and reedy impression of his own. "Poor Jaheed, forced to live an opulent and perfect life with servants waiting on his every command! With people like me and Sekhmet fighting and dying for your sake!"

  "Watch your mouth!" Jaheed snapped — to which Kore actually snarled at him, and the Jade Wolf immediately took a step back. It must be stressed, one final time, that Kore's entire being was still skewed heavily towards fight over any and all other modes of existence, and that at current a great many repressed emotions were taking this opportunity to spring free, out into the open, where anyone and everyone could see them. It was fortunate, then, the momentary flash of genuine fear of Jaheed's face served to sober Kore quite harshly. Immediately, she relented.

  "Look, I'm sorry," she offered, a hair gentler. Sekhmet, all the while, was still gasping in pain between them. "But Jaheed, we gotta go. This entire place-I mean, for fuck's sake, we're all gonna die if we stay here!"

  "But the Emperor-"

  "He's dead!" Kore insisted. "He was very impressive, and very very smart, and now he is really, definitely, entirely, utterly fucking dead! So forget him, and let's go!"

  It was Sekhmet who spoke first, then, clawing to her feet with a hand against the nearest cabinet. "Okay," she breathed, apparently too exhausted to argue any further. Physical ruin had overrode the shame of her failure — and much of the defiance inherent in her once-fiery temperament. "You still have the coordinates to that stealth-ship?"

  "Right here," Kore tapped the side of her head. "We can go right now."

  "And you can fly it?" Jaheed asked, quietly. The reality of his situation — of the upending of the entire Domain, really — was falling quite heavily upon him, and he was indeed experienced a certain warped sense of grief, at that moment.

  "I can fly anything," Sekhmet confirmed, in a weak voice that hardly inspired confidence.

  "Can you walk?" Kore asked, stating the obvious.

  "I'll crawl if I have to," Sekhmet huffed, rolling her shoulders. Kore heard each of the joints loudly pop.

  The three of them took one long, last look at that featureless black door — and then, indeed, they took off, abandoning the Jade Emperor to his fate.

  A Critical Moment

  Hiela watches, in disbelief, as Doss beats her father at Sarnac again. And again. And again.

  He wasn't just winning, oh no. He was demolishing the old man, in a fashion the likes of which Hiela could hardly even understand. His early moves were chaotic, random, seemingly without any sort of unified purpose or grander strategy — but by the endgame, his boards were suffocating and inexorable deathtraps, dominating the field from each and every possible angle. Again, and again, and again did this scraggly little Lowborn defeat the Emperor of the Known Universe — and worse, Hiela could see that her father was delighted by all of this, relishing the challenge and holding nothing back as he pitted his mind against an opponent one-twentieth his age and lost.

  Doss, by contrast, was silent and intensely focused all the while, muttering occasionally to himself as he pondered the board below. It was as though the young lowborn were in a trance, calling upon some higher power to guide his hand to seemingly-impossible victory.

  By the end, Hiela is absolutely furious. And so, when finally her father bids his young opponent adieu, Doss makes it just ten steps down the hallway before Hiela grabs him by the arm and yanks him — gently, but also quite inescapably — into an empty, adjacent room.

  She locks the door, cues on a sound-dampening field, then towers above the young adoptee and demands, with hands perched on hips: "How did you do that?"

  "Do what?" Doss replies, eyes on the floor. Refusing to look at her.

  "You just beat the Emperor of the Great Domain fifteen times in a row!" Hiela exclaims. "Your strategy was completely incomprehensible — and somehow it actually worked! Don't play dumb, Doss. You're going to explain it to me. Now."

  This time, the boy's head does rise, and now Hiela finds herself facing a pair of steely azure eyes. His gaze is immediately disconcerting, though she would never dream of actually being intimidated by a mere adolescent lowborn.

  "Why should I?" Doss shoots back, wary and blatantly defensive. He is a scavenger, after all, a hunted thing born into a world where the only way to survive was to fight. Hiela has a distinct impression, then, that she has just backed a wild animal into a corner, and she understands at once that pushing him will only have him pushing her right back. Very well, then. She will favor an alternate approach.

  "Because I'm your older sister," Hiela tries, her voice softening to that musical chime she has spent so long perfecting — to which Doss just gives an irate little snort.

  "You're not my sister," he scoffs, to which Hiela's anger flares wildly. She is now considering strangling him. "My sister's been dead for a whole year."

  And that...actually gives Hiela pause, strangely enough. Because despite it all, despite everything about him, she is somehow genuinely curious about the bizarre little specimen in front of her, and curious doubly so at the nature of such a sudden admission from such a closely-guarded creature. And so she asks him, quite plainly: "What happened to her?"

  "She cried, a lot," Doss says, after a moment's consideration, with a sad little smile. Slowly, Hiela lowers herself into a nearby chair, and now the two sit roughly face-to-face. She studies the lowborn carefully, as he speaks. "That sound always pissed mom off right off. When I was a baby, of course, Dad was pretty good at keeping her calm. Once he left, well..." He trails off, his eyes tracing a ring around the ceiling above. "One day mom just stomped her head into the floor, to shut her up. Simple as that."

  Oh, fucking hell. Every one of Hiela's preconceptions about the 'Lower World' are coming true, right before her eyes — that idea that it is a violent, lawless place where murder and rape and sin abound, a true living hell above which the Highborn were overwhelmingly fortunate to dwell. And this scrappy young man has survived, she is now certain, only by fierce intellect and a truly indomitable will. He has clawed his way out, despite it all, and somehow made his way to the very heart of the Great Domain. To her surprise, Hiela actually finds herself admiring him — and pitying him, in equal measure.

  "I thought you were an orphan," she remarks, lacking a better response — Hiela has lived a life well insulated from any tragedy or violence or even hardship, after all — to which again, Doss gives a dismissive snort.

  "Every orphan had parents at some point, dumbass," he tells her, which...yeah, okay, he's got her there.

  "Don't call me a dumbass," Hiela shoots back, on reflex. Nobody insults her, not in the perfect little bubble that has been constructed around her life. The idea is...oddly thrilling, if eminently irritation. "Okay fine, smartass — what happened to them? How'd they die?" Not the most polite phrasing, perhaps, but Hiela was feeling a tad bit overeager to strike back.

  "I killed my mom," Doss says, calm and casual as can be. No. Wait. Not calm, and certainly not casual. Heila detects a hardening in his words, in his eyes. A coldness. A complete and total lack of remorse, of anything and everything at all. There in his words was the assurance that he would do it one thousand times again, if need be. "She knocked me down one day, sent a bunch of plates crashing to the floor. And...I dunno, I just got tired of it. So I picked up a shard, hid it in my sleeve, and when she leaned in to start choking me-" He tapped the side of his neck. "I just stuck it in, right here. And then I watched her bleed for a while, until she died."

  Hiela was silent for a very long time.

  "Holy fuck," she blurted out, finally, an expression that would have earned her hours of verbal lashings and a half-dozen physical lashings to boot from her myriad tutors.

  "My dad left years ago," Doss goes on, unexpectedly, before she can say anything more. The words are just spilling out now, all at once, and it is clear that he has never spoken any of these things aloud. "Just walked out, one day, when nobody was home. He left a note, I saw, though mom never let me read it." He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm going to kill him one day, too." And that last statement, delivered with such terrible certainty, chilled Hiela right to the bone. No ambiguity, no expression of hope or a future plan. The young man stated it as though it were simply inevitable. As though it were outright fact.

  What Hiela feels, now, at the apex of it all, is something she had truly never expected to feel for a filthy, uneducated, borderline-feral lowborn teenager — kinship. And she understands, finally, just why her father has been so keen to bring this stranger into the fold. Her older brother, Jaras, has always been of a different breed — a distant and oft-absent figure, one nearly two decades her senior. But Hiela and her father had always been cut from the same cloth, one soul divided amongst two bodies. And here, now, she realizes, is a third. A true addition to their family.

  Hiela realized, abruptly, that she wanted very badly to have a younger brother.

  And so she reaches out — and reflexively, Doss pulls away, fixing her now with a wary gaze. Hiela, understanding, just nods and leans back, allowing the boy his space.

  "My mother was..." she trails off, then, because family is on her mind now. And because, well, she's never said any of this to anyone either. It has been grasped tight-fisted within her, growing and seething like a tumor. "Beautiful. I'm sorry, that must seem like such a shallow descriptor. But she really was, in every possible sense of the word. The way she laughed, the way she smiled. The way she smelled, when she would cradle me in her arms. She was so perfect, so ephemeral, it felt like...I don't know how to describe it. But even as a child, I had this feeling like she couldn't possibly last. And, well. She didn't." Doss is watching her intently, now, silent all the while. Just observing. Just listening.

  "Jaras, my older brother," Hiela goes on. She can't stop herself. Something has been uncorked within her, and the tide can no longer be staunched. "He's been gone for nearly a decade now. Mother died and he just...disappeared. Threw himself into deep space, into his wars and his campaigns. It's just been me and father here, alone, in this-" she gestures around, "-this miserable, empty fucking place. And I'm-" Her voice breaks. "Void, I admit it. I'm so fucking lonely here."

  Abruptly, she cuts herself off, because she feels now a sudden and acute sense of shame at having unveiled a part of herself that had for so long remained hidden — but all her iron discipline is shattered when this time, Doss reaches over and lays a hand overtop her own. He does not smile, when he meets her gaze, nor does his expression soften. But she sees it in his eyes, anyway. Sees his evaluation of her shift from potential threat to...safe, for the time being.

  "I don't know much of anything about this place," he tells her, quietly. "But I know it's dangerous, and I know that it's a different kind of danger entirely — the kind I don't know how to fight. Not yet."

  "Yeah," Hiela just nods her head.

  "So," Doss goes on, and then — incredibly — one corner of his mouth actually tilts up, in the faintest impression of a smile. "Truce?"

  Hiela just smiles and nods her head. "Truce."

  She has never had a brother, not really, and she has certainly never been an older sibling. But now, here her younger brother sits, and now it is suddenly her duty to protect him, to guide him and nurture him and support him, above everything else. What galvanizes Hiela, in that moment, is one of the oldest human instincts, one that had the early hominids gathering together around a shared fire. One that overrode nineteen years of Highborn training and conditioning. Kinship.

  "Sorry for, uh...earlier," she says, rising to her feet and jerking a thumb over her shoulder. "Come on then, I'll show you around."

  The real apology would come later that night, unbeknownst to anyone — when she picked up her comm and called off the assassination-attempt.

  The Depths of The Panopticon

  There it was, waiting patiently for their arrival. A bizarre little ship, what looked like a bulbous collection of rounded edges peppered with porcupine-quills jutting out at every angle, sitting there amidst a darkened hangar in which Kore was certain that few, if any, had ever set foot. They were deep in the heart of the labyrinthine Panopticon now, deep enough that even the war raging within had quieted to a dull throb. They had not encountered a soldier of the Emir in nearly twenty minutes; that was an overwhelming relief, because Kore's Elixir was starting to wear off and Sekhmet was near the point of total collapse.

  "So this is really it?" Jaheed asked, one last time, just for posterity. "We're really just going to abandon everything?"

  "Don't have any other choice," Kore grunted. And with that final and solemn declaration, the three of them boarded the shuttle, stepping now onto a darkened onyx bridge. Sekhmet slumped at once into the pilot seat, her hands a blur as they raced across a vast instrumentation panel, and soon the entire vessel was buzzing in a way Kore had never heard a ship buzz before.

  "So, uh...how do we get outta here, exactly?" she mused, glancing around and taking in her surroundings. Everything here was smooth and jet-black and all vaguely organic, illuminated only by dim strips of jade light. The interior felt less like a bridge and more like a womb, and Kore found herself profoundly uncomfortable — and missing the Cloud Gorger a great deal.

  "There's an elevator, apparently," Sekhmet explained, distracted — and then a moment later she added, "Sorta. More like a railgun, I guess."

  "And we're the projectile?" Jaheed remarked. "Lovely."

  "What the fuck, sure. Why not," Kore shrugged. She was exceptionally tired. "There are dumber ways to die, I guess."

  The buzzing was growing louder by the minute. Sekhmet was keying something up, her hands still racing as she blitzed through pre-flight checks on this truly baffling machine.

  Kore cast Jaheed a sidelong glance, whilst they waited. Her ire had faded entirely, ceding the floor to a heavy guilt, and she just couldn't quite get the image of him flinching away out of her mind. He had been scared of her — of course he had! She was twice his size, not to mention a hardened killer who had just outright snarled in his face! Kore prided herself on her ability to be an advisor for her liege, to provide him with the perspective that he wasn't always capable of seeing. But this time what she had done, essentially, was simply bully him into acquiescence. And so, with all that in mind, she opened her mouth to apologize — right as Sekhmet cut in with a half-muttered "Que diable?"

  "Lemme guess. Out of gas?" Jaheed sighed.

  "Hangar's locked? We're trapped inside?" Kore chimed in, joining in at once on the ol' communal pessimism.

  "Non. There are...coordinates here, already plugged in," Sekhmet told them both, tapping insistently at the viewscreen. "And I mean, like, ready to go the second we breach atmo. And there's...oh quesquecette merde, there's a fucking message here. 'Go and find them' — what the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

  "Was he..." Jaheed trailed off. He and Kore exchanged a bewildered look. "Was the Emperor planning on not making it to his ship?"

  Kore had that terrible feeling, once again, that she was caught in the palm of some vast and inexorable hand.

  "Where do the coordinates go?" she asked, because obviously someone needed to, and because she would rather focus on something tangible than Things Beyond Her Control.

  "That's the weirdest thing," Sekhmet replied, over her shoulder. "Nowhere. These just go straight into deep space — and I mean deep space. Like, entirely uncharted territory. This ship is tiny — I dunno if it'll even make it that far out."

  "Doesn't matter," Jaheed cut in quickly, shaking his head. He stepped forward, now, commanding the floor at once. "This is surely an instruction from the Emperor himself. 'Go and find them.' No matter the situation, no matter the odds — as servants of the Domain, we can do nothing less." He looked at Sekhmet, then at Kore. Sekhmet, in turn, shifted to face Kore as well. "Well?"

  Damn it all to the void. Why did it always come down to her?

  "I mean, what else are we gonna do?" Kore said, finally, even as her life with Sekhmet — the imagined one, the dream that had played in her head when Diesch was making his offer of escape — was flashing vividly before her eyes. Wait. Shit. Diesch. Abel Diesch, who, along with Sen Tarsus, was now almost certainly dead. Two people she had considered family, had lived with for half a decade now. Gone like they had never existed at all. The realization hit her like a disruptor-bolt to the brain.

  And suddenly Kore was very, very tired.

  The End of an Era

  Hiela is running as fast as she could.

  She is currently in a state of sheer disbelief. Her father had access to the most advanced medical care in all the Great Domain — how could he possibly have taken such a sharp and sudden turn for the worse? How could he suddenly just have hours left to live?! Yet still, the message from Doss had been explicitly clear and exceptionally dire and so she has raced across half of Mercury to be here, in the Gilded Palace, running for dear life.

  The wait in the elevator is the worst torture imaginable. Hiela can only stand there in the middle of that cramped, stark-lit little prison, packed in with a looming Se-dai protector on either side. She has always found the Blessed Executioners strangely disconcerting; as such, she has nothing to say to them, and they have no comfort to offer her in return. And that is horribly unfortunate, in this particular moment, because right now Hiela desperately needs someone to talk to.

  The doors hiss open, and Hiela is now sprinting down the halls of the Most-Sancrosanct Infirmary (void, all these epithets made her so fucking tired. It was just The Place Where Her Father Was Currently Dying, nothing more and nothing less), with Odin and Nyarlathotep keeping effortless pace beside her. She passes by a dozen different faces; all are just blurs, just smears of paint as she races ahead. Her vision has narrowed to the darkest of tunnels, to a mere pinprick before her.

  And then she skids to a halt.

  She sees him there, horribly, in the very back — her beloved father, Raan, laying back in his bed with dull and glassy eyes. Dead as history. Her father, the titan, the most powerful Emperor in so many centuries; he has been reduced now to little more than a shell. An object. A thing. Grief catches in her throat, and abruptly, she is unable to breathe.

  She sees Doss, too, sitting beside him, hands overlaid over those of his adoptive father. Anansi, his silent and ever-watchful companion, perches at his left like a bird of prey. And the light is hitting in such a way that Hiela can see faint, infinitesimal specks of dust twirling in a strange little dance as they descend down, down, down.

  All around, doctors and guards and Se-dai and various Highborn nobles are all prostrate, all kneeling not in grief but in reverence around that narrow doorway.

  Hiela doesn't understand why, not at first. But then Doss looks up at her and says five words that she will never, ever forget.

  "It's me," her little brother tells her. "He chose me."

  Time stops. The universe stops. Everything stops, just to drag out this miserable little moment.

  Hiela remains standing as all those around her kneel in worship and fealty to Doss Ken Volsif XCVII — the new Emperor of the Great Domain.

  She thinks, then, of her entire life. From the very beginning, Hiela was told that it would be her. Not Jaras, oh no. Her. And so she sacrificed everything, everything to mold herself into that which she would one day have to become. There was no childhoo, no adolescence Certainly no innocence. From the day of her birth, Hiela was an Empress-to-be, and day after day she had languished in silence beneath the impossible, crushing weight of those terrible responsibilities. Her father, void bless him, had never truly understood — never truly been able to help her, like she so desperately needed. But then...Doss. Her little brother. Her best friend, whom she loved so dearly. Her comfort, her strength, her sole confidant. They had faced those responsibilities together.

  And now?

  Now it is all over.

  He has simply gone and taken it from her.

  What a ridiculous waste of fucking time.

  Hiela doesn't say a word. She couldn't have, even if she wanted to. She just turns and walks away — and feels the Jade Emperor's gaze upon her back, all the while.

  Hiela Kor Shemeshlah, the Usurper

  He's in sorry shape, when finally they present him before her. When one of the Death Knell drops him at her feet, like an eager feline with a mouse in its mouth. One of his sleek metal arms has been brutally wrenched out of shape; his chest is partly concave, and his shoulders are now terribly uneven. His head — the only organic part of him — is caked with lines of dried blood; his hair is now a sweat-drenched mop. His nose, too, has been smashed to one side. Yet even still, his eyes glimmer all the same, and a grin spreads across his face from the moment he lays eyes upon her.

  "Hiela," he says, with all the love in the world. "Don't tell me this was all your idea."

  "Doss," she greets him, coldly. She wants to strike him. Wants to see him hurt. He has kept her like a caged bird for so many years, and now she is finally the one standing outside the bars. Finally the one looking in.

  She wonders if he even understands, truly, just how badly he betrayed her. She wonders if a warped mind such as his can even comprehend. And she decides, then, that she truly does not care.

  "Of course it was," she snarls, packing her words with a decade's worth of simmering bile. "From the moment you stole my birthright, all of this was being set into motion. You understand, Doss? Jaras couldn't possibly have orchestrated a plot such as this. The Sovereign is a babbling old fool, barely even capable of coherent thought." She draws now to her full height, and the halo orbiting her head glows brighter, somehow, framing her countenance in lines of thick shadow. She is a towering, terrifying figure as she jabs a thumb against her chest and tells him the words she has been waiting so many years to say: "It was me."

  And Doss, in reply, just hangs his head. And shakes. And for a moment, Hiela believes he is sobbing, that the enormity of his despair and the collapse of his Empire have finally overtaken him. Then she realizes that he is chuckling. Laughing! And for a moment, then, Hiela is seeing a ghost — her father, arms spread and laughing uproariously, for she has just beaten him in Sarnac for the very first time. His eyes alight not just with pride, but with excitement, in true recognition of a worthy foe.

  Doss looks up at her and grins. "Oh, Hiela," he sighs, happily. "It's magnificent, isn't it? This great game of ours."