Personal System Calendar: Year 00015, Day 1-28, Month VII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6859, 1st to 28th day of the 7th Month
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Arrival
Day by day, the Free-Reigning Kings and Queens from across the central subcontinent of Arkanus arrived at the end of their journey to the Imperial Capital of Aethelgard, their gathering set to be hosted directly within the Emperor's throne room.
Formal discussion wouldn't begin, though, until every representative from the Free-Reigning kingdoms had actually arrived.
As discussed before, the distance between the Empire and the rest was quite enormous; it would take them months to a year to arrive at the Western Subcontinent if they took the normal route. The fastest way had always been to use those Imperial Portals that had been placed on important allied kingdoms, that hosted those Imperial Garrisons. The kingdoms the portals sat on had no access to those sites themselves; they merely hosted them; those from that kingdom could arrive earlier, but their peers would still have to travel to get there. Thus there were still several who were still making their way toward those portal waypoints that would carry them directly to the Western Subcontinent of Arkanus. They wouldn't arrive at the capital itself, not directly, but through various controlled Imperial sites, mostly inside an Imperial Garrison.
Those Portals are always positioned some distance away from the capital center, and only a couple of designated allied cities within the western subcontinent could act as the last barrier before they're able to reach the capital of Aethelgard itself. At this point, they could only land on the Outer Pillar Walls. Once you arrive there, like how August and his people arrived before, you'd have to ride the Magically Enhanced Interconnected Wagons called Trains that connect to various areas within the Capital, before you would arrive at the emperor's throne, the very heart of the Empire..
The system existed for a reason: should any of the Imperial Portals ever be attacked, seized, or left unsealed during an attack, the enemy still wouldn't gain direct access to the Empire's heart. That distance bought precious time, enough to mount a proper defense across the nearby cities and fortresses. Whenever someone made the jump, they were routed specifically toward those Imperial Fortresses built to house these portals, never anywhere else.
Once these leaders arrived at the western Subcontinent on those designated points of entry, they were escorted onward by imperial forces alongside their own retinues, a clear signal of their standing as honored guests of the Empire.
By now, most of the arriving leaders had already settled in, some having reached the capital a full seven days early, depending on how close their assigned portal happened to be. At present, roughly 90% of the expected representatives had arrived.
Only a handful remained, most notably from the Federation of El, in the western half of the central subcontinent, and from the Kingdom of Rolin, further west still, the reason was because they were currently caught in the grip of its own civil war. Rolin's leadership had at least been proactive about it, moving quickly to contain the conflict rather than let it spiral, while also keeping a close watch on the unfolding situation in Ogind, which had let them prepare countermeasures well ahead of time.
With that in mind, the meeting would likely open formally sometime early next month.
For now, the assembled leaders busied themselves with what they did best: politics. Both the good and the considerably less good sides of it. Ask any common villager, though, and they'd likely tell you there wasn't much good in politics at all, not from where they stood. It was rarely viewed kindly by the people it governed. The old saying held here as much as anywhere: politics only looked good from the inside, to whoever happened to be playing the game, and even then, most called that particular flavor of "good" corruption by another name.
These leaders, or their appointed representatives, spent their days trading views and grievances, some clearly avoiding each other's company entirely. Exactly what one might expect from a gathering like this.
The noise of powerful people filled every hallway: power inherited through noble blood, power seized through conquest, power stolen by usurpers, power earned through raw strength, power claimed through deceit. All of it gathered here, wearing the faces of kings, queens, and representatives from every corner of the continent. And yet, for all their talk, most of it circled back to their own kingdoms' internal politics. Precious few seemed genuinely troubled by the larger crisis gripping the central subcontinent as a whole.
In one corner of the antechamber, a young queen from one of the smaller river kingdoms spent an entire afternoon fielding questions about her recent tax reforms from a cluster of older, more established rulers, half of them genuinely curious, the other half clearly hoping to find some flaw to exploit later. Elsewhere, two dukes who'd been feuding over a shared border for the better part of a decade managed to occupy opposite ends of every room they were both assigned to, an impressive feat of choreography that everyone around them had quietly learned to accommodate without comment. A representative from one of the smaller free kingdoms, sent in place of an aging king too frail to make the journey himself, spent most of his time simply listening, taking careful note of who spoke to whom, and for how long, information that would no doubt find its way home in a very detailed report. It was, in every visible way, business as usual among people who governed for a living.
The Emperor, for his part, listened from a distance, through his own personal shadows, the kind that lurked even beneath the brightest light. There was little within the capital that Emperor Janus Cornwall couldn't see, hear, or feel, if he cared to. Every remaining pocket of corruption still hiding and working within the capital's walls remained firmly within his grasp. He simply hadn't chosen to erase them yet. He let them roam a while longer. He wasn't the type to snatch up the small fry while leaving the larger predators untouched. Given the choice, he preferred to catch everyone in a single decisive sweep.
He had no real interest in dragging small fish in for torture and half-answers. Instead, he'd let them move freely, watch them long enough to map out the full shape of whatever organization they belonged to, and only then send his hounds to deal with the rot all at once. To properly purify darkness, one needed both light and darkness working in tandem.
For now, he let the assembled lords and ladies gossip among themselves in their private little circles. How any of them chose to govern their own territories mattered little to him, personally. But loss of life, in general, was something the Emperor took seriously, almost personally. To him, it represented the destruction of civilization itself, technology, wisdom, culture, everything that made a kingdom worth calling a kingdom in the first place, rather than simply a place where people happened to exist. He was, after all, only half human. Somewhere beneath that, he was also something closer to a god. Some part of him looked on these mortal creations with real fondness, even without holding official standing among the gods of the highest heaven. Still, some instinct in him acted the part regardless, a shepherd, a guardian standing watch over what mortals had built.
There were, of course, gods born of pure corruption too, twisted by the endlessly expanding darkness at the edge of the cosmos. But generally, or so his foster father, the Dragon King Ignis, had once told him, most gods were born of light first. Which made this particular cabal, one he himself hadn't even known existed until recently, all the more irritating. They'd hidden themselves well enough to slip entirely past his notice. If they'd grown this large without him catching wind of it sooner, he had to assume they'd already worked their way into every corner of civilization by now, burying themselves deep, patiently planting the seeds of ruin, waiting for the right moment. Which meant he also had to assume they'd already found their way into the Empire itself.
His hands tightened at the thought. Enemies within his own walls, watching his every move. A purge would be necessary eventually. But he could afford to wait a little longer, gather more before he acted. He'd already begun moving his own pieces across a board where he couldn't yet see the enemy's moves clearly, like playing chess through a heavy fog, catching only the occasional glimpse when a piece shifted. A knight, recently, had taken one of his own. That fog of war ran only one direction, though. He couldn't see them clearly. There was no reason to assume the reverse was true.
That was precisely why gathering these lords and ladies here mattered so much right now. He needed to determine, as best he could, who among them had already fallen under the cabal's influence. His people had already recovered King Justavous's remains, quietly taken from Arwen for study. Those who examined the body, dissecting it in full, found unmistakable traces of alchemy and magic, compounds that appeared to have been fed to him steadily over a long stretch of time, long enough to degrade not just his physical health but his sense of self and his broader mental faculties. That kind of prolonged corrosion would easily explain the string of poor decisions that had ultimately doomed his kingdom, especially compounded by the likelihood that several people closest to him had themselves been planted as tools, further accelerating his unraveling from the inside.
One of the alchemical compounds recovered from his body traced back to a flower of legend, barely known in the west, though the central continent carried scattered fragments of its story, dozens of variations across different cultures, each claiming it as a cure, a bringer of dreams, or something stranger still. One of the researchers assigned to Justavous's remains happened to have some prior background in exactly this kind of legend, having studied it independently years before. Deep in his notes, one name kept surfacing, close enough across different regional dialects and old translations to suggest a shared root beneath all of them.
He'd seen the name before, though not in any medical text, and not in any formal alchemical catalogue. He'd seen it in an old treatise concerning the Walinga, a flower said, according to legend, to cure the incurable, to grant prophetic dreams, and, in the oldest surviving accounts, to let the dead speak once more. Every surviving translation rendered the name slightly differently: Walinga in some texts, Valinga in others, Vhalinga and Walynga elsewhere still, the Flower of a Thousand Dreams in the oldest religious writings, the Sleeping Star in the north, the Dreamflower further west. But strip away the regional dressing, and they all traced back to the same root.
And now, staring down at what remained of Justavous, the researcher finally understood why.
The legends, as it turned out, hadn't been entirely wrong either. The Walinga really had once served as a genuine cure. It really did induce vivid, prophetic dreams. It really could trigger visions beyond what any ordinary mind produced on its own. What the old cultures had gotten wrong wasn't the flower's power, only their understanding of why it worked the way it did, a distinction that mattered a great deal once someone started weaponizing it deliberately, the way it had clearly been used here.
The Walinga appeared to be the core compound behind whatever slow alchemical process had been used on Justavous. The rest of the ingredients involved were more mundane by comparison, though several remained difficult for an ordinary person to access, at least not without knowing exactly where to look. The black market, predictably, could supply nearly anything, quietly and without an obvious paper trail, at least on the surface. But nothing ever moved entirely without leaving some trace behind eventually. And when a trace didn't exist on paper, there were other ways of digging up the truth. A mind, no matter how thoroughly ruined, still held onto memory somewhere within it, even buried deep beneath layers of damage. All it took was the right kind of mind manipulation magic to pry it back out. Even a severed head, remarkably, retained usable memory for roughly five minutes after death, before the last of its neural pathways finally stopped firing entirely.
That kind of technique carried real ethical weight, though, and was generally frowned upon precisely because of how invasive it was against a living person's basic rights. Justavous, being already dead, fell outside that particular concern entirely. Imperial spies had moved quickly to secure his body and extract what they could before the window closed for good. It wasn't an easy technique to perform correctly either. Only someone sitting at the very top of the Master rank, bordering on low Grand Master, could reliably manage it. Fortunately, one of the Emperor's own Aninos had personally witnessed the final battle between Justavous and the two other kings involved, and happened to carry exactly this rare skill.
The process itself wasn't gentle, even performed on the dead. The Anino had described it afterward as something closer to wading through water clouded with silt, every memory she touched stirring up a dozen others alongside it, unrelated fragments of a life lived, arguments with advisors, a childhood memory of his father, the particular smell of rain over Arwen's old capital before any of this had begun. She'd had to sift through years of noise just to isolate the handful of moments that actually mattered, and even then, some of what she pulled back arrived broken, half-formed, images without sound or context clinging to them. Through her, they'd managed to glimpse not only Justavous's final memories, but fragments belonging to the other two kings as well, though Justavous's own recollections had taken clear priority throughout the process.
What they found painted a partial picture. They could see who Justavous had made deals with, though sorting out which of those contacts actually belonged to the cabal, as opposed to simple political allies, proved difficult. For now, everyone who'd stood close to him during his final years counted as a prime suspect by default. With the other two kings, Zapata and Kirios, the picture came in clearer: both had made arrangements with the same merchant, one known in underground and merchant circles alike by the moniker the Greedy Golden Pig King, almost certainly hired as a third party working on the cabal's behalf rather than a true believer himself. He wasn't an easy man to simply remove either. He kept a mercenary company loyal to him personally, one that made any move against him considerably more complicated than it should have been. A manhunt for him was already well underway regardless.
---
The Grand Advisor Solomon
"Hmm. Solomon, as my longest-serving advisor, what do you make of this current era of humanity?"
The Emperor asked the question almost out of nowhere, his thoughts having finally drifted away from matters he still didn't fully understand.
"In what context would you like me to answer, Your Majesty?" Solomon asked, seated beside him, occupied with his own share of the day's work.
"However you'd like to answer it."
Solomon set down his pen and paper entirely, giving the question his full attention. In moments like this, thinking deeply, his old habit surfaced without him quite noticing, one hand drifting up to stroke the long white beard he'd carried for longer than most kingdoms had stood. After a stretch of real thought, he finally answered.
"For this current era, Your Majesty's peace has become the defining feature of it. By peace, I mean specifically that we haven't seen many wars fought under your rule. The Empire, for instance, has grown remarkably, its foundations and its advancements anchored solidly to the ground beneath it. And yet, I sense a genuine unease building at the edges of this era, as though some darkness once cast out is preparing to close back in over all three continents, worse this time than whatever came before it. But I see light beyond that darkness too. The Empire Your Majesty rules will remain standing, I have no doubt of that. And there's another light growing brighter by the day, that settlement, in the forest, the one Your Majesty already knows well. It seems to me they may end up playing a genuine role in keeping the world in balance, one way or another. That's only a passing thought, mind you, I haven't seen the place myself, only through reports, but even secondhand, what I've read of how they live is something truly extraordinary, unlike almost anything else in this current age, or the ages before it. So, Your Majesty, if I had to name this era plainly, I'd call it an age of destruction, rebirth, and harmony, all at once."
The Emperor took in his advisor's words carefully. None of it landed as straightforward, exactly, but he understood there was more beneath the surface than what could be fully grasped on first hearing.
"Destruction, rebirth, and harmony. Interesting words, Solomon, the kind you might use to describe the birth of worlds and universes themselves. Thank you, for your insight, as always."
Even after this many years, praise like that still warmed something in the old man's chest. They'd stood beside one another for longer than most people managed to live at all, and it still meant something to Solomon, hearing words like that from Emperor Janus directly.
"I remain endlessly grateful for Your Majesty's continued rule."
With that, both men returned to their own private thoughts, and shortly after, back to the endless business of running an Empire. Even these small, quiet moments existed only because the Emperor never truly stopped working. Maintaining an Empire this vast, keeping it functional and whole, wasn't a task any single mortal could ever fully accomplish alone. That was precisely why Solomon had remained at his side for so long, the longest-living advisor the Empire had ever known, and the one person most capable of following, even partially, how Janus actually thought and ruled. Whenever the Emperor was away, it was Solomon who inherited stewardship over the entire Empire in his place. Solomon himself remained mortal, technically, though he stood close enough to the edge of transcendence to be considered something like a demi-god, a mortal man who'd climbed that particular mountain almost entirely on his own effort. Janus carried that same status by birthright, simply by virtue of his birth. For a mortal man to reach anywhere near that height through nothing but his own effort was, by any measure, worth real respect.
It made sense, then, that he'd become the Emperor's right hand. No one else could realistically fill that role. If both the Emperor and the current Grand Advisor vanished at once, the Empire's finely balanced machinery would grind to a halt almost immediately, plunging quickly into disorder and, eventually, collapse. That, at least, was what most experts believed. It wasn't entirely true, though it wasn't entirely false either. In some very real sense, the Empire had, for a long while now, come down to just the two of them holding it together. If the Emperor served as the innermost pillar, with Solomon supporting him directly, then the twenty most trusted ducal houses stood as the next ring of pillars beneath them. Should both the Emperor and Solomon disappear, those twenty houses had standing instructions, sworn vows they could never break except in death, dictating exactly what came next.
In that event, the Empire would let go of every territory too distant to hold securely. The Imperial Portals would be destroyed outright. The entire Western Subcontinent would be sealed off entirely, trade cut, its remaining forces consolidated inward, and from there, tasked with expanding the existing capital walls to eventually encompass the whole of the west. That wall alone already stood as humanity's greatest feat of engineering: spanning some 410 million square kilometers in length alone, standing 300 meters tall, and measuring 100 meters wide at its thickest point. It would, under this plan, expand further still to eventually cover the remaining 700 million square kilometers of western territory already under imperial dominance, a project that would likely take decades even with the Empire's full might behind it. Those were simply the standing orders, meant to buy the Empire time to consolidate itself after losing its head. Territory abroad, after all, could always be reclaimed later, whether by force or by the stroke of a pen.
Solomon himself sometimes wondered, quietly, whether he'd ever truly earned his place beside a being who was, by birth, already something closer to divine, or whether the Emperor simply tolerated his presence out of decades of habit and familiarity. He never voiced that thought aloud, not even once in all their years together. Some doubts, he'd long since decided, were better carried alone.
For now, though, both men remained exactly where they were, waiting on the last of the arriving leaders, and continuing their work in the meantime.
---
Meanwhile, in Lonelywood Forest
Back in the Lonelywood Forest, preparations continued for the village's own expansion, centered now around the new road network. They couldn't lean on Kirka's port facilities forever. Sooner or later, they'd need to send people to actually settle the three locations of interest already scouted along the great river. That land route, running from Zone Four all the way out to the imperial highway, represented a genuinely important milestone for the village's future. August, for his part, remained visibly uneasy about the broader state of the world, though there was little enough he could personally do to change any of it right now.
So he did what he could. He gave the order to increase training intensity across every branch of village security, and for anyone else capable of bearing arms besides. Drills grew noticeably harder almost overnight, longer hours, fewer breaks, instructors pushing recruits and veterans alike past what had counted as standard just a few weeks earlier. A few grumbled about it privately, wondering what exactly had prompted the sudden shift, since August hadn't offered much explanation beyond a general sense that the world outside their borders had grown considerably less stable. Most simply trusted him enough not to ask twice. The village needed to keep preparing itself even as it continued pushing forward with its own growth, since neither could really wait on the other. There was still so much left to build, so much still worth achieving. None of that mattered much, though, if the wider world kept spiraling the way it currently seemed to be. All they could really do, for now, was prepare everyone as best they could for whatever came next.