"Chorus, your united voice sustains our world. Our emperor has fallen in the southern war against Gryphon. Yet today is a day of bloom, one stone removed, but the edifice remains."
The Chorus's united song wasn't just a sound. It was a physical pressure against Lucian's skin. The deep vibration traveled up through the stone-cold floor of the dais, shaking the very bones of his ceremonial armor.
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 its towering, lancet windows, the guttering light of a thousand candles warred with the cold, sorcerous glow of captured starlight, trapped in crystalline sconces, their light trembling against the fathomless shadows.
Exquisite robes whispered of secret dealings as the Grasp walked toward the dais.
Kneeling was a mere formality, his mind clearly on balance sheets and shifting markets.
"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 present satiety is a transient illusion, a mere interlude between the gnawing exigencies of yesterday and the voracious appetites of tomorrow. Cede to me the sovereign prerogative to manage this perpetual metabolic cycle, and I will transmute the base anxieties of scarcity into the gilded assurance of a pre-ordained 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 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."
One more applause.
The sound of the Warden's armor groaning as he knelt was final and heavy. The man was fashioned 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 massive shouting of the populace vibrated through the stained glass.
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 air, a saccharine eulogy. Lucian let the silence stretch, feeling the court's expectation harden into certainty. Then his voice, glacial, cleaved the ritual. "How do you know?"
"Did you witness the event yourself?"
A profound silence ensued, the orchestra's final note severed in its decay. In that acoustic void, the gaze of the court felt like a swarm of agitated insects.
A guardsman's finger spasmed toward the emitter of his energy blade, this was the precipice.
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 thinned to a blade. "How did he fall to such a negligible adversary? Are you sure he didn't simply lie down?"
Their minds, softened by a lifetime on Glimmer, scrambled for a flaw in his logic.
"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?"
It was the audible strain of a thousand minds, their cognitive pathways softened by a lifetime of Glimmer ingestion, that sweet, azure vapor inhaled daily for manufactured clarity, now failing to process a truth for which their own neurochemistry was the primary censor.
The chorus's very biological programming rejected the premise. He had introduced a logical pathogen into their sanitized reality.
You could see it in the wide, glassy eyes of the aristocrats, their prescribed serenity now working against them, hinderingthe 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 vaporssmoked 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. The sound, a dull percussive note, was the last discrete event before the universe collapsed into a single point of retroactive agony.
The Warden's scream began as his fist recoiled, a sound that tore through the ceremonial silence as a raw, unfiltered conduit for every suffering his body had ever archived.
The polished black gauntlet seemed to drink the light. His hand contorted, bones remembering the precise snap of a long-ago fall from a high spire.
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 performed its function, a transaction as elegant and merciless as a mathematical proof. The Warden had offered a single drop of present violence and received in exchange the entire ocean of his past.
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 hispredecessors 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, the mind became a library of archived agony, a living ledger of a lineage's suffering. Then the feeling was locked away.
"You built your peace on a single, fragile altar," he said, each word a final nail.
"You demanded a god who would bleed forever. All so you'd never have to get a scratch on your own perfect skin."
Turning from them, his focus shifting to the colossal, stained-glass window that depicted the first Scapegoat Emperor accepting his thorned crown.
"I don't care about any of those specialties, I do as I desiremerely 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.
He stood framed in the jagged maw, and for the first time, the true city was revealed: a breathtaking, terrifying panorama of alchemical forges belching multi-hued fire, crystalline spires humming with latent power, and vast, ancient aqueducts channeling rivers of raw, shimmering aether, all sprawling in a canyon of impossible architecture beneath a sky bruised with sorcerous light.
Wind howled through the broken window, whipping the expensive tapestries into frantic, trapped ghosts.
Lucian leaned into the waiting sky, his arms set apart like theposition of a crucifixion. A stone rejecting the hand of the architect, his final silence a more devastating critique than anyshout.