In these quiet moments, it was easier to forget the viciousness of life. And my role within it. To be the calm to a storm, to be the absorbent of chaos while never being able to express it outward due to the Assigner's laws …it was devastating.
I had to remind myself that Areilycus's wellness, his happiness, was the real reason I was defying the (un) natural order.
Good leaders were not selfish. Good leaders could never inspire masses with solipsism. Good leaders brought down tyrants and installed free governments to reign in the name of liberty.
I'd never left Tripolis.
I'd never considered it a completely free world.
Then, again, no one was ever truly free.
No one knew bondage in all its ugly forms as intimately as the White Snake. He often took the form of one to see how far one was capable of remaining devoted. His heavenly and earthly subjects all knew there was a protector, but in rare cases he'd show them his face, his eyes would be blazing red, his tongue smelling their ears and his scaled white head slithering across their bodies.
Now, show your devotion. Now, bow to your God. When you see his poisonous fangs and his bright mouth opening up to swallow you whole.
When he was young - and there was, indeed, a time when he was young, and Tripolis already famous, he couldn't do any of those things. Not to change form, not to appear in elements, not to possess a soul.
But he knew he wanted to be more. Back then, the universe was still young, too. The Assigner never thought he'd help shape it.
***
A long time ago:
The kind of dense, electrical hush before a lightning storm, forever waiting to crack open the sky - that was the entire world of Hunat.
The stars hung low and predatory over it, forever looking upon it as the lesser world in the Tripolis system. Tripolitans were the center of the star system, favored by their Protectors, and because Tripolitans valued nature over everything, Hunatans would forever remain a mere 'trading entity' to them.
The wind in the North of Hunat was cold, nerve-thin. On this world, Sibelle Orlion stood on the ragged edge of what could be called morality, at the confluence of madness.
Her name was spoken in the colder dialects—Syb'el l'Orlionn, syllables dragged like static through copper coils. She had once been a child, flesh and blood, but Sibelle had aged into concept, into inevitability. Daughter of Lex Orlion, the genius architect, patron of neural lace, whisperer of early silicon, she was now the last vine still rooted in the Orlion soil. How poisoned that soil had become.
Hunat had collapsed inward like a dying star, not from war or disease but from too much knowing. The people, so consumed with the art of building minds out of code and memory, had stopped building bodies. They had turned away from flesh out of disinterest.
When silicon could offer you all the comfort, why would you bother building a relationship with a person who could misunderstand you? Then all that effort spent on that person could have gone to research and progress.
Sex became a lost language, an art to be scoffed at, a series of archaic gestures archived in forgotten subnets. Reproduction was a quaint relic, like candlelight or spoken poetry.
And so, the Council of Continuance passed Edict 117—The Familial Mandate.
"Mate with those you already love" to avoid wasting time on building relationships.
Parents, siblings, cousins born from the same neural lineages. It had worked—briefly. Pregnancies swelled. The nurseries flickered back to life.
But the children were broken. Not visibly, not always. But in the mind—where it mattered—there were skips and stutters. Monosyllabic thinkers. Algorithmic errors in the wetware.
And soon, Hunat was a planet of accidents.
Lex watched her world die in a flurry of polite madness. On her final night, with a voice stripped bare, she whispered to her daughter: Fix this.
Sibelle did.
The Orlionic Collar was less a device and more a curse. Its metal was grown, not forged, an iridescent arc-spine.
Not worn around the neck, but absorbed by it. The collar didn't scream. It emanated. It pushed out pulses that could make the air recoil from the skin. It released something fouler than scent—a memory of disgust, the idea of wrongness so thick and universal that even flora recoiled. Those who wore it became the Unbeheld.
But the brilliance—no, the cruelty—of Sibelle's design lay not in its effectiveness, but its echo. The collar remembered. It sank its design into blood, encoded itself not just in body but in legacy. If a man lay with his mother, the shame could echo for five generations. Sons born from heresy came into the world alone, their laughter unwelcome, their eyes avoided before they could even speak. The collar remained dormant, a quiet dragon curled in the genetic haystack, until the rhythm of incest beat again—and then it bit.
Some said the neuro-feedback pulse was like being struck by the Lord of Light.
Others said it was like drowning in your own childhood memories, forced to watch yourself curl inward in shame. The official documentation called it "selective neuro-correction." The people called it Writhing. It was like having your soul turned inside out, rung like a rag soaked in ancestral sin.
Sibelle wept when she activated the first one.
In her laboratory—a glass ribcage buried beneath the ash plains, she touched the first collar like it was a cradle of her own child.
The skies of Hunat turned the color of bruised steel, and the sand rose up to claw at the heavens. Her fingers trembled.
This was her lullaby, her lulla-code. The song of no more mistakes. Somewhere in the mountains, a child laughed. Elsewhere, another cried.
The collar would never know the difference. It only knew what it had been made to remember. And Hunat, silent, breathless Hunat, watched with blind eyes and listened with broken genes.
The age of invention was over.
The age of repentance had begun.
Sibelle Orlion no longer bled like mortals. Her veins ran clear with synth-fluid, her bones threaded with lattice-metal. They had once called her Empress of Logic, but titles meant nothing in the frozen thrum of Hunat's new order. She was the Primarch, the final deciding voice in neural policy, behavioral protocol, and—though never spoken aloud—genetic atonement.
She ruled from the Prism Hall, a citadel of refracted thought.
The air there was always too cold, too clean, like reality had been filtered for impurities. The sky above was flaked with dead satellites, orbital ghosts that blinked out only when she slept.
And yet.
When he walked into her laboratory, she got goosebumps. Not from dust or chill but from warmth, a strange and animal softness that had no place in a world like hers. He introduced himself simply.
"I'm Theron," he said with a bright smile. His posture was loose, but his eyes were alert. Like he was always listening to music that hadn't been invented yet.
He said he had studied her protocols since he was a boy. That he had memorized the blueprints of the Orlionic Collar before his first communion with the neural lathes. That her name was sung in the backchannel universities as something divine. And when he said divine, he didn't mean it like a metaphor.
"I wanted to stand where you stand," he said, one night, "because I thought the future lived in your shadow."
Sibelle did not blush. That function had been long removed.
And yet.
Theron Villeral became her second voice. He mirrored her thoughts not because he agreed, but because he understood. He challenged her without arrogance, complimented her without simpering. When he leaned in to speak, it felt like the room leaned too, like even the walls wanted to hear him better. She could not say when it happened—only that one moment she was alone, and in the next, she wasn't.
Their love only made sense inside her laboratory. It was urgent, necessary, slightly perverse.
It was forged in silence and soldered between breaths.
And then he said it.
"The collar," he murmured as they stood beneath the Induction Lights of the Southern Dome. "It should be brought to Tripolis. For study. For trade."
Sibelle turned slowly, like a statue remembering how to move.
"No," she said. "Tripolis worships their Protectors. The collar would not be seen as an innovation. Besides, you'd have to contact the Assigner for that and … well, he doesn't exactly show up often."
"But they admire strength," he countered. "And order. What if—what if the Assigner could be convinced?"
The original mind. The ur-king, whose fingers had dipped into stars and sculpted planets like wet clay. She never knew how to feel about believing in someone she couldn't see. The Assigner never bothered with Hunat; it was too small compared to Tripolis. It was not where his power dwelled, and so they left them largely to their own devices.
Perhaps Sibelle even despised him for that a little; when he saw what became of them, he never descended to help. To intervene. What kind of god doesn't care about his creations?
She stepped away. "You don't convince the Assigner. You avoid awakening him."
"He's just a man," Theron said, brushing a non-existent speck of dust from her lab coat.
"He hasn't shown his face in … well, forever. Some say he dissolved into pure thought, became karmasilica, the conscious dust between atoms. His son and daughter rule the system now. They say he left the system to build new worlds!"
Theron said nothing, but kept intently staring into her eyes. He did not blink.
And Sibelle suddenly knew. Not in her mind, but in the spirals of her ribs, in the jitter-code behind her eyes.
There was something about the way he stood, just now.
Like he had heard the Assigner speak.
Or worse—
Had once spoken back.
***
Fifteen years was not a long time to be loved.
Fifteen years meant forever when one was deceived.
Sibelle Orlion had long stopped measuring time in seconds or solar rotations. On Hunat, time felt like crystal erosion—slow, sharp, glittering with the delusion of permanence. She measured her life in pulses of emotion instead, in the narrowing silences between moments of clarity and betrayal.
Her marriage to Theron had been an avalanche made of petals: each year soft, beautiful, fragrant with trust—and underneath it all, something cold building pressure.
She had noticed the changes first in the mirror. Not her reflection, but his. Her own had begun to blur, her flesh rendered smoother by genetic augmentation.
She accepted it. Evolution was her sacrament. But he—he remained unbruised by time. No lines around his eyes, no hesitance in his stride. Just the same smile, untouched by decay, beautiful as myth, hair as white and shining as the first day she met him.
And those eyes. Bright green in the morning light, azure blue in the afternoon slump.
And still he bled. She saw him slice his fingers many time when chopping vegetables, bright red spilled across the floor like silk unrolling on the floor.
Human, she'd thought. Mortal.
She should have looked closer. By their fifteenth year of union, he had risen beyond titles. Her Theron , had become Chancellor, a position above governance, above science, above law. The people adored him.
And yet he still returned to her each night, carrying starlight in his palms, such was his love. Utter and terrifying.
When he announced his plan—to offer the Orlionic Collar to Tripolis, expanded now not just for incestuous prevention, but to flag all violent behavior—Sibelle's core split like overheated alloy.
"You can't punish them for merely exhibiting aggression. People's emotions sometimes run high, they say stupid things–do you really mean to put a collar on someone for shouting at staff?"
Her voice was not anger, but ache. "It was forged for one purpose. You twist it, and you twist me."
He listened. He always did. Then he smiled that same damn smile.
"Let them choose, then. Let them reject us. But offer it."
And she—fool, wife, architect of sorrow—she agreed. On one condition. It would not be altered, not without her control.
That night he touched her like a man returning home from exile. There was reverence in his hands, desperation in his breath, as though some part of him were mourning her already.
As though in the act of love, he was sealing a farewell into her skin.
She should have known.
Tripolis was a world of light and stone—domes carved from reflective crystal, songs sung in celestial hymns. Sibelle stood behind her husband, hands folded like contrition in front of the leaders of the planet.
They assured them that the Assigner's children were aware and watching.
The offer was presented. Rejected.
Not just denied. Condemned.
"Your invention is cruelty pretending to be logic," they said. "Our people do not fear shame. We only fear disconnection from the divine."
And with that, it was over.
Theron did not argue. Did not flinch. He bowed, turned, and returned to Hunat.
For a week, he did not speak.
And then the stars fell.
They came down as Diamond Storms—a phenomenon no model could predict. Tripolis fractured. The temples of light were devoured in radioactive bloom. Rivers turned to crystal slurry.
The heavens turned black.
Sibelle, mouth dry with dread, watched it all from the Prism Hall on her monitors.
When she turned to her husband—her lover, her betrayer—he was already watching her.
"Serves them right," he said.
His voice… it had changed.
When his eyes lit red, like bioluminescent coals embedded in the hollows of a starship's engine, she couldn't breathe. When his skin shimmered into scales—white as chalk, she knew.
Not a human.
Not a myth. Not a god. Not gone. She recoiled.
"You…" Her whisper cracked. "You killed them."
"I offered them salvation," he said. "They chose mockery. How can they be trusted? Criminal acts on Tripolis have risen tenfold since I stopped showing my face. Is that really how their devotion works? They only believe when they see me. When my back is turned, they overhunt, overfish, overkill. I offered them a solution and they declined."
She couldn't move. Couldn't scream.
The first noise she made was a choke of laughter three days later during a routine checkup.
She was pregnant.
***
And still the man before her—the thing before her—spoke with her husband's voice.
She left Hunat. Took a vessel born of outlawed tech. With Tripolis buried under diamonds and radiation, Hunat stopped sending trading ships, and their isolation became severe. The hope of leaving unnoticed was small.
But what was a mother to do?
Left behind her titles, her labs, her legacy. And she carried with her two horrors: a child she did not understand and a body that would not die.
Somewhere along the flight, in the middle of a cold belt of dead stars, she woke and performed a checkup on herself, only to find a glowing sigil inside her spine. Her cells no longer aged. Her blood shimmered with quiet music. The gift had already been given.
Immortality. Without consent. Without mercy.
"Fucking bastard," she yelled. She lay back in the dark and cursed the day she fell in love with him.
***
Twenty years. Twenty years on the edge of the universe, on a world with no history and no hunger for it. The planet had no name in any databank, no trace in any starmap. The locals called it Valorian, though no one remembered why.
It was a place the stars had turned away from, a forgotten blue sphere where gods outlived kings, and saltwater carried memory better than code.
Sibelle Orlion had burned her past—literally. The starship that had carried her and her daughter away from ruin sat as ashes beneath the tide, bones of metal rusted into coral, weeping circuitry buried in sand. The ship had died, and so too had Sibelle. What rose from the waves was someone simpler, someone smaller, someone named Bonnie. A woman of tangled hair, quiet songs, and grief so old it had gone gentle.
Griselda, her daughter, had grown wild.
She was nineteen, and already more legend than girl—taller than any human should be, with eyes like polished bronze and laughter that shook the trees. Her skin glittered in the sun sometimes, when she thought no one was looking. But Sibelle always looked.
Griselda was perfection.
Until he came.
He arrived with the wind on his back and the tide pulled wrong. The sky went green, and the birds fell silent. Sibelle knew before she saw him. The way you know when a nightmare walks into the daylight.
She stood on the jagged cliffs of their island, her hair caught in Neptune's kiss, and watched him approach. Still beautiful. Still wearing her husband's face, that infuriating contradiction of tenderness and terror.
"I can't believe you would leave me!" he raged. His gaze slid to Griselda. "You don't belong here."
He spent his life creating things out of nothing; she was the one thing created from his flesh.
Griselda's nostrils flared. "You cursed us," she said. "I can't get hurt, I can't die! I can't do anything but hate you!"
Then she changed.
It started at her hands—nails lengthening, skin shimmering, smoke pouring from her lungs. She cried out, and the air bent. Fire erupted along her spine and curled into wings. Wings of copper and rage. Her voice cracked the cliff face.
She became flame and fang, her roar a curse that rippled across the seas. Perhaps he knew he deserved it.
But Sibelle moved. Love makes cowards. It also makes shields.
She stepped between them and flung her arms wide. Griselda's fire struck her. She screamed as her child's heartbreak seared her skin. But she held. Because she had held her as a baby. Because she had held her while her wings came in. Because she would hold everything for her.
She turned to the Assigner, body scorched, heart breaking.
Theron, horrified, a rare sight, dragged his dear wife into the sea. They fell like stars into Neptune's realm, into cold so deep it became silence. And silence answered.
Gorgo, the king's sister, found them first.
"Theron?" she uttered. Their old language rubbed against his ears like sandpaper despite the soft caress of the waters.
"Gorgo! It's my wife. She was burned by-by- I don't know what that thing is! I can't heal her! Please, help!"
Gorgo took Sibelle into her arms and brought her to her brother.
Neptune was vast.
His eyes were whirlpools that had seen every drowned city and mourned none. He sparkled, much like Theron, with fair skin, green eyes in the morning, blue in the afternoon. He was young, powerful, beautiful. So was his wife.
"Are you seriously considering helping this… this …demon?!"
Neptune looked at his brother. His little fallen brother and his little burned wife. He imagined what he'd do if fire managed to turn Salacia into something so unseemly as what Gorgo was holding in her arms.
"Regardless how we feel about him," the princess spoke, "this woman has done no wrong in our realm. She's lived peacefully, cultivating the witch art with the Vlachy."
Theron fell to his knees before his brother. His kneecaps were buried in the sand, awakening algae that curled up around him, recognizing their old friend.
Neptune considered, then nodded once.
When Theron woke on the shore, Sibelle was already gone.
A tail now curled where legs once were.
She danced with dolphins and sang to shipwrecks. Griselda remained in the world above, reborn again and again—her daughter, her dragon, her goddess. Sibelle watched her each time from the shallows.
"I'm sorry, but you cannot set foot here again," Gorgo said. His sister, the mediator between the brothers who never loved more than she loved the other, was now telling him that he'd been banished.
Well, that's just fine. He chose to leave once of his own accord; he would survive leaving again. As long as Sibelle still existed in this world.
He had another world to return to.
And there would be change.
***
A thousand years passed and grief aged even immortality. Sibelle, weary of watching her daughter die and rise like the sun, shedding skin, dying, being reborn again, cursed by her father's gift to her, knelt before Neptune once more.
"Give me legs," she said. "And with them, let me end."
Sibelle had seen Neptune love so many. He had never chosen any of them to give immortality to, but she suspected he could. What he could give, he could take away.
She considered him family. No matter how convoluted, how unlikely they became one, Neptune was her brother-in-law. She would beg him to release her from the seas and back to land, where she would live her one, final life.
Neptune sighed, and the sea sighed with him. But he obeyed.
And so Bonnie washed up on the shores of Aazor Isla Rhea, a young girl once more. A child with no past, only aching dreams of flame and stars.
And one day, the sea brought her him. His father died during an expedition to find a famed island where a dragon sojourned, according to pirates claiming to have seen one flying high above the Seventh Sea. His mother disowned him. Sibelle never really learned why.
He had one friend and one friend only, an orphan named Nestor. She joined their little ragtag group and hoped to forget her old life. Edward Kinsley.
He did not promise love. He did not speak of destiny. One night, when he were both nineteen and incredibly stupid, he offered her a mug of tea, a place at the fire, and a story of a sailor who found someone to live for.
"He works at the docks," he smiled at her. "I don't know his name."She said nothing at first, seeing that familiar dopey smile on his face, the glint in his eye.
Then, at last: "I know what that feels like."
When Edward introduced them, the 'fisherman' smiled brightly and kissed her hand. Edward hollopped off with Nestor to see the newest catch of the day and Sibelle stayed behind to chat with him. She recognized the eyes that saved her instantly and feared they would burn her young friend to a cinch.
Neptune had loved so many.
"He is smitten," she said.
"I am too," Neptune smiled, burying his carving knife into the guts of a salmon.
"Neptune."
"Sibelle."
Neither liked their names. That day, they promised never to use them around each other again.
***
In these quiet moments, it was easier to forget the viciousness of life. And my role within it. To be the calm to a storm, to be the absorbent of chaos while never being able to express it outward due to the Assigner's laws …it was devastating.
I once thought I could remember everything.
What if there were things I had forgotten?
Things that my Lord Father made me forget?