The Chorus's song was a physical force. It vibrated up through the stone dais and into Lucian's bones, a pressure built from the voices of thousands.
My father is dead. Long live the edifice.
"Chorus, your united voice sustains our world," their voices thrummed. "Our emperor has fallen. Yet today is a day of bloom. One stone is removed, but the edifice remains."
Flanking him, the three pillars that had propped up his father's throne waited.
The Claw, holding commerce and statecraft;
The Tail, wielding intellect and technology;
The Carapace, the empire's unbreakable shield.
Their stares were like hot spots on his profile. The imperial citadel pierced the morning fog like a mountain of carved obsidian through the great arched colonnades.
Through the tall windows, candlelight flickered against the cold glow of starlight trapped in crystal sconces, both trembling in the deep shadows.
The Grasp approached the dais, his fine robes whispering. His kneeling was a formality while his mind was on balance sheets.
"The trade fleets from the Kessler Ring are holding position just beyond the nebula, Lucian. They are waiting."
"They watch our comms traffic. A single day of silence from this throne, and their cargoes will be rerouted to Gryphon buyers. Our credit rates will double by the week's end."
"The empire's current peace is an illusion. It's just a pause between yesterday's crises and tomorrow's demands. Give me the authority to manage this cycle, and I will turn the fear of scarcity into guaranteed prosperity."
"Your father's life-song was the keystone that bound the central geomantic arrays. Without the unique resonance of your blood to attune the runes, the Celestial Engines that distill the Glimmer will begin brewing phantoms and toxins within two dawns."
She didn't even blink, stating the crisis as a simple fact. "The Warding Labyrinths now see friend and foe as one. The sentinel-golems stand blind. This is about preventing the unweaving of the great Tapestry. I need the seal of your lineage. Now. Or the empire's very soul will devour its own flesh."
Another round of applause.
The Warden's armor groaned as he knelt, a final, heavy sound. The man seemed carved from the same stone as the castle. His voice was a gravelly echo when he spoke, and it was full of a sincerity that was more dangerous than any dishonesty.
He started by saying, "Your father was a pillar of strength," looking intently at Lucian's raven armor as though he were looking for a picture of the former emperor.
"I served him for one hundred forty years. I saw him face down rebellions, break sieges... perform miracles of will."
In a slow, laborious gesture of sincere sorrow and wonder, the Warden shook his head.
"The fact that he was defeated by a Gryphon champion, even a lesser one, demonstrates how even the strongest foundation can be destroyed by a single, unlucky blow. Although it is tragic, it is the end of a soldier's life."
At last he raised his gaze to Lucian, his face displaying grim, unwavering devotion.
"Do not let his death be for nothing. The empire he built is his true monument. Let us be that monument's shield. Let me stand for you as I stood for him. We will avenge him, together."
The roar of the populace vibrated through the stained glass, a dull thunder from the city below.
A young apprentice of The Tail watched him, her fingers nervously tracing her data-slate. She wonders if my calm is a good sign, Lucian thought, reading the anxiety in her posture.
An old merchant shifted beside her, jewels clinking. Lucian's sharp ears caught his muttered words: 'Too calm.'
The Warden's final, loyal words hung in the saccharine air. Lucian let the silence stretch, feeling the court's expectation harden into certainty.
Then his voice, cold as glacial ice, cut through the ritual.
"How do you know?"
The word fell like a blade. The orchestral music severed.
"How do you know how he fell?" Lucian continued, his tone conversational, yet deadly.
"Did you witness it yourself?"
A profound, choking silence consumed the throne room.
For a vertiginous instant, he was a child again, dwarfed by his father's vacant throne, its cold, colossal weight an omen.
"The Gryphon champion was... notoriously cunning, my liege!" a voice called from the crowd.
His boot connected with the Warden's chest, expelling the man from the dais. The ornate armor struck the marble with the discordant clatter of a shattered chandelier. The throne room was transformed; it was now an execution chamber.
"Personally, I find it difficult to believe that my father, a man of twelve guilds, a Grade Four, was unseated by a mere Grade Two.
The gap between them is as big as a canyon. A Grade Four does not lose to a Grade Two but annihilates them.
So explain to me then..." Lucian's voice sharpened to a point.
"How did he fall to such a negligible adversary? Did he simply lie down?"
Their minds, softened by a lifetime of Glimmer, scrambled for a flaw in his logic. They found nothing.
"You ungrateful whelp!" a guardian shouted, his voice cracking with a mix of fury and fear. "Your father built this throne for you! This is your duty! How can you just... spit on his legacy?"
Lucian turned, his raven armor cutting a fierce path toward the man.
Lucian was standing nose-to-nose with the guardian and couldn't help but catch a glimpse of the trembling in his hands and the sweat pouring down his face.
"Tell me, who declares I must become the leader of this empire?"
The room's chatter was extinct. But Lucian could still hear someone say something along the lines of "He's your father!".
"So what! But my line? We are raised to be leaders, and leaders alone. A single son, a single heir, a tradition to concentrate the pain. A cathedral does not choose its cornerstone. Yet it is cursed to bear the spire's weight for eternity. Am I just a stone? One you decided to carve a crown into?"
As he spoke, his left hand, completely of its own accord, drifted up to his own right sleeve and began to scratch at the fabric in a slow, rhythmic, nervous pattern.
He stopped it immediately, clenching his fist. The action was utterly alien to him. It felt like someone else's anxiety.
You could hear the strain of a thousand minds. A lifetime of inhaling Glimmer, that sweet, azure vapor for manufactured clarity, had softened their thoughts.
Now, their own brains failed to process a truth it was designed to censor.
The chorus's very biological programming rejected the premise. He had infected their sanitized reality with a logical pathogen.
You could see it in the wide, glassy eyes of the aristocrats, their prescribed serenity now working against them, hindering the panic to a thick, confused dread.
"Can't you see that the man you put on a pedestal was feeding you, lies for your whole lives? The medication they advised you to take isn't any different from the foul pastes and vapors smoked in the gutters of the Ballast. In fact, it causes even better brain harm than that."
Lucian towered over the shuddering Warden. 'Get up,' he commanded, the words devoid of all reluctance.
Lucian then mandated the Warden to strike him as hard as he could or be stripped of his status. The Warden's onyx gauntlet connected with Lucian's jaw.
But in the split-second of impact, a tiny, perfect spark, bright as a miniature sun,flared at the point of contact on Lucian's skin. It was there and gone so fast the court likely dismissed it as a trick of the light.
As the Warden's fist recoiled, a scream tore from him. It was a raw, unfiltered sound, a conduit for every suffering his body had ever archived.
The polished onyx of his gauntlet seemed to drink the light as his hand contorted, the bones within remembering the precise splintering fracture of a fall from a high spire in his youth.
The other arm clutched his abdomen, where the ghost of a Gryphon's talon, a wound long healed by the empire's best chirurgeons, now eviscerated him with the same clinical brutality as the day it was inflicted.
And the Initiate's Brand upon his shoulder, a mere silver scar for decades, its searing heat a counterpoint to the bone-deep chill of the childhood plague whose memory now froze his very marrow.
The Scapegoat's Guild had functioned, a transaction as merciless as a mathematical proof. The Warden had offered a drop of violence and received an ocean of past pain in return.
A profound stillness settled upon the Warden. This was the quiet of a decision made long ago, finally reaching its hour.
Lucian knelt, as a scholar examining a text. His fingers, pale against the black of his armor, did not touch the Warden's twitching form, but hovered just above it, tracing the invisible contours of the agony he had unleashed.
"I have memorized the lexicon of this pain," he murmured, his voice almost absorbed by the Warden's whimpers. "The grammar of a broken bone. My father and his predecessors always had only one son. My cradle song was the echo of a million such moments, passed down the bloodline as a hereditary disease you all call divinity."
Lucian rose. The motion was fluid, a phantom pain lanced through his jaw, the memory of a dozen past injuries he had reflected onto others but never truly felt himself.
For a heartbeat, he was a library of archived agony, a living ledger of his lineage's suffering. Then he locked the feeling away.
"You built your peace upon a single, fragile altar," he said, the words simple, clear, and final. "And you demanded a perpetual sacrifice. You asked for a god who would bleed forever so you would never have to scratch your perfect skin. A better architect would have distributed the load."
He turned from them, his focus shifting to the colossal, stained-glass window that depicted the first Scapegoat Emperor accepting his thorned crown.
As Lucian walked toward the stained-glass window, an ancient, forgotten priest of a dissolved cult, kept for ceremonial ornamentation, began to chant in a cracked voice, his eyes milky with cataracts:
"The stone falls, the fire sleeps in ash… the crown is not lost, it awaits the second breath…"
A guardsman quickly hushed him, but the words hung in the air like a curse.
"I don't care about any of those specialties, I do as I desire merely for myself. A chain only needs one link to break."
With an economy of motion that belied its significance, he drove his elbow through the stained-glass saga of his father's coronation.
The shattering cry of it swallowed the gasps of the crowd.
A merchant mutters, "The ledger is unbalanced. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something will fill it. Something always does."
Beyond the citadel, the city sprawled in impossible architecture, alchemical fires and humming spires beneath a bruised sky.
The wind howled through the breach, whipping tapestries into frantic specters.
Lucian leaned into the waiting sky, his arms spread wide like a falling stone rejecting the architect's hand.
His final silence was a more devastating critique than any shout.
And he fell.