The cheers from the city
below were a distant, muffled storm, barely penetrating the smoked crystal of
the strategium windows. Inside, the silence was not one of peace, but of held
breath. The air, thick with ozone and the sour tang of cold sweat, hummed with
the low-frequency dread of a final diagnosis.
In the room stoof a
sepulcher for a dead god, and the two remaining Pillars stood vigil over the
corpse of the old world.
The strategium felt like a
tomb for a dead god, the air still humming with the broken covenant's echo.
Promethys stood with her back to the room, observing the city through a
towering pane of smoked crystal. Her form, shrouded in severe grey, was a study
in absolute stillness.
It was Karla who broke the
silence, her voice carefully calibrated between deference and desperation. "The
Gryphon fleet recedes. We have a reprieve. But an empire is not a ship to be
left adrift. It requires a captain."
The Carapace, a monument of
scarred ceramite and grim duty, spoke from the other side of the hololith, his
voice the grind of tectonic plates.
"The people, the legions,
the very Aetherium… they are tuned to a specific frequency. The Oedipus
bloodline. It is the keystone of our reality. You are an anomaly. A brilliant
one, but an anomaly nonetheless. Without that blood, you are a sword without a
hilt. You cannot be wielded, and you will cut any who try."
Promethys did not turn. Her
attention seemed absorbed by the intricate dance of alchemical smog and
sorcerous light over the city spires.
"Have you ever studied
the foundations of this citadel?" she asked, her voice calm and
conversational, a stark contrast to their tension.
"The original
architects were poets of ambition. They built a prayer in stone, reaching for
the heavens. But in their passion for height, they made a fundamental
miscalculation concerning the wind." She finally glanced over her
shoulder, her gaze cool and assessing.
"For five centuries,
every breeze has been pushing against this place, storing energy in its bones.
The structure isn't stable. It's simply been waiting to fall."
She let the observation
settle, a seemingly casual remark that hung in the air, heavy with implication.
"You speak of a lock
and key," she said, turning fully to face them now. Her face was serene,
devoid of any need to convince. "But you are trying to open a door that is
already splintered from its frame. The mechanism you wish to preserve is the
very thing that has brought you to the brink."
She paused, and when she
spoke again, her tone was softer, almost conceding.
"You are not
wrong," she said, and the admission was so disarming it felt like a
weapon.
"I am a foreign
element. To simply seize the throne would be to graft a new limb onto a body
already dying of a systemic illness. It would not be a cure. It would be a
fever dream, a different kind of death throes."
She watched them, reading
the subtle shifts in their posture. Karl, the brilliant logician, trapped by
the very rules she revered. The Carapace, the unyielding shield, loyal to a
ghost.
The Carapace let out a slow
breath. "Then what is your counsel? If you will not lead, and we cannot
remain leaderless, what path is left?"
Promethys offered a faint,
almost imperceptible smile. It was not warm. It was the look of a mathematician
who has just seen the solution to a complex problem.
"You are asking me
what I would do if I were Empress," she said. "That is the thinking
of the past. It is the question that created this fragile altar in the first
place."
She took a single, silent
step forward, closing the distance between observer and participant.
"The real question is
what we would build if the goal was not to find a new person to bleed, but to
make the bleeding unnecessary. If our purpose was to create a system so
inherently strong, so self-correcting, that it no longer required a single divine
heart to power it."
A silence followed her
words, thick as clotting blood. The Carapace shifted, the grind of his armor
the only admission of unease. Karla's mind was a visible thing, scrambling
behind her eyes, trying to find a purchase on the sheer, featureless cliff of
Promethys's logic.
They needed time to
process. For Promethys, processing was a constant, violent state of being.
The city crashed into her.
She was the bursting water
main in the sub-levels, feeling its own metal fatigue as a slow, agonizing
rupture. She was the merchant in the Ballast, the taste of his panic, copper
and bile, sharp on her tongue. She was the newborn in Spire Gamma, its first
breath a scorching intake of cold air, its future a branching tree of possible
pains.
This was the true curse. Not foresight, but
feelsight. A symphony of a billion potential agonies played out in her nerves
simultaneously.
A single fact. I need
one fact.
Her glazing eyes fixed on a
smudge on the grand crystal window. Grease, or perhaps a long-dried tear. The
morning light, fractured by the impurity, threw off a handful of tiny,
shimmering rainbows.
Seventeen.
She counted the distinct points of light,
forcing the number into the heart of the storm. Seventeen. It was a piton
driven into the face of the avalanche
Slowly, agonizingly, she
rebuilt the dam in her mind. She forced the torrent back into channels, into
cold, logical streams. The merchant's fear became a default probability. The
infant's cry became a population metric.
The bursting pipe became a
variable in a hydrologic model. She filed the ghost-sensation of drowning in
the floodwaters of a future that would now never be into a locked archive of
her mind, another scar on a consciousness made of them.
The Carapace finally found
his voice, a low rumble that seemed to vibrate through the soles of her feet.
"This... rewriting. It cannot be bloodless."
Promethys turned her gaze
upon him. The winter in her eyes was a lie; it was the stillness after a fire
has burned everything to ash. A faint, traitorous tremor, a ghost of the
overload, tried to start in her left hand.
She silenced it by sheer
will, pressing her fingers against the cold metal of the hololith's rim.
"All creation is a
transaction of energy," she stated, and her voice was a miracle of
compression, a flat line over a seismic readout of internal chaos.
"The old contract
demanded a single, perpetual sacrifice. A beautiful, brutal simplicity an my
new world will be more... efficient. It will not ask for one heart to bleed
forever."
She paused, and for a
fleeting instant, something like sorrow touched her features, so brief it might
have been a trick of the light.
"It will ask for a
little blood from everyone."
Without another word, she
turned and walked from the strategium. The echo of her grey robes didn't just
swallow the sound of her footsteps; it felt like it swallowed the light,
leaving the two Pillars in a deeper, colder shadow.
The cheers from the city
below were a distant, muffled storm, barely penetrating the smoked crystal of
the strategium windows. Inside, the silence was not one of peace, but of held
breath. The air, thick with ozone and the sour tang of cold sweat, hummed with
the low-frequency dread of a final diagnosis.
In the room stoof a
sepulcher for a dead god, and the two remaining Pillars stood vigil over the
corpse of the old world.
The strategium felt like a
tomb for a dead god, the air still humming with the broken covenant's echo.
Promethys stood with her back to the room, observing the city through a
towering pane of smoked crystal. Her form, shrouded in severe grey, was a study
in absolute stillness.
It was Karla who broke the
silence, her voice carefully calibrated between deference and desperation. "The
Gryphon fleet recedes. We have a reprieve. But an empire is not a ship to be
left adrift. It requires a captain."
The Carapace, a monument of
scarred ceramite and grim duty, spoke from the other side of the hololith, his
voice the grind of tectonic plates.
"The people, the legions,
the very Aetherium… they are tuned to a specific frequency. The Oedipus
bloodline. It is the keystone of our reality. You are an anomaly. A brilliant
one, but an anomaly nonetheless. Without that blood, you are a sword without a
hilt. You cannot be wielded, and you will cut any who try."
Promethys did not turn. Her
attention seemed absorbed by the intricate dance of alchemical smog and
sorcerous light over the city spires.
"Have you ever studied
the foundations of this citadel?" she asked, her voice calm and
conversational, a stark contrast to their tension.
"The original
architects were poets of ambition. They built a prayer in stone, reaching for
the heavens. But in their passion for height, they made a fundamental
miscalculation concerning the wind." She finally glanced over her
shoulder, her gaze cool and assessing.
"For five centuries,
every breeze has been pushing against this place, storing energy in its bones.
The structure isn't stable. It's simply been waiting to fall."
She let the observation
settle, a seemingly casual remark that hung in the air, heavy with implication.
"You speak of a lock
and key," she said, turning fully to face them now. Her face was serene,
devoid of any need to convince. "But you are trying to open a door that is
already splintered from its frame. The mechanism you wish to preserve is the
very thing that has brought you to the brink."
She paused, and when she
spoke again, her tone was softer, almost conceding.
"You are not
wrong," she said, and the admission was so disarming it felt like a
weapon.
"I am a foreign
element. To simply seize the throne would be to graft a new limb onto a body
already dying of a systemic illness. It would not be a cure. It would be a
fever dream, a different kind of death throes."
She watched them, reading
the subtle shifts in their posture. Karl, the brilliant logician, trapped by
the very rules she revered. The Carapace, the unyielding shield, loyal to a
ghost.
The Carapace let out a slow
breath. "Then what is your counsel? If you will not lead, and we cannot
remain leaderless, what path is left?"
Promethys offered a faint,
almost imperceptible smile. It was not warm. It was the look of a mathematician
who has just seen the solution to a complex problem.
"You are asking me
what I would do if I were Empress," she said. "That is the thinking
of the past. It is the question that created this fragile altar in the first
place."