The imperial command centre lay steeped in the quiet delirium of a terminal ward. The air, thick with ozone and the sour tang of cold sweat, hummed with the low-frequencydread of a final diagnosis. Before the grand hololith, where the empire bled a continuous encroaching crimson, stood the two remaining Pillars of a broken throne.
The Carapace, a man known only by his title and his scars, stood as a monument to grim duty. His face, a cartography of old campaigns and fresh anxieties, was set in a permanent grimace. His immense frame, once the empire's unassailable shield, seemed to buckle under the weight of the glowing tactical display.
"The Labyrinth is gone from the geoscape," he stated, his voice the rumble of a distant rockslide.
"Their champions move through our Aetherium conduits unimpeded. They will test our final shields within three days. We have no emperor. We have no Scapegoat. We have no divine intervention."
Opposite him stood the empire's intellect, The Tail. She was Kaela, a woman of sharp angles and sharper thoughts, a living counterpoint to his brute mass. Her fingers, stained with ink and energy residue, danced over her data-slate with a frantic, avian energy.
"The Celestial Engines are inverting their function. The Glimmer itself is curdling in the distribution network, brewing phantoms within our citizens' very bloodstreams. The reports are psychologically untenable." Her usually precise voice frayed at its edges.
"A child in Spire Delta. A phantom did not kill him. It used him as a conduit, a loudspeaker for archived agony. He died speaking in a chorus of forgotten battlefield screams."
The space between them, where The Claw should have stood, was a profound and accusatory silence. His body was still being cleared from the throne room, the first and most literal of Lucian's rebuttals.
"The Gryphon Emperor grinds empires to dust and sifts the remains for new trophies," The Carapace said, the statement final as a tombstone sealing. "Our only remaining choice concerns the aesthetics of our extinction."
As if their shared despair had formed a summoning circle, a priority alert seared across a secondary screen. A single unarmed imperial shuttle was descending through the atmospheric poison toward the Gryphon vanguard, a speck of ceremonial grace before a swarm of locusts.
"This is madness," Kaela whispered, her voice hollow. "A performative suicide."
The hatch opened. A figure emerged, shrouded in androgynous robes of a grey so severe it seemed to devour the very light of the failing stars.
A wisp of its hair, the colour of burnt silver and strawberry blonde, had escaped its hood.
The Gryphon armada's threat-assessment scans painted a target on her forehead, but the only thing she consciously felt was the faint, irritating tickle of that single strand against itscheek. It ignored it, such minor sensory inputs were beneath the equation, yet they persisted a reminder of the fallible biological substrate that housed it.
There was an unnerving silence to its movement, an absence of the mechanical whirring that should have accompanied the hatch, a void where the planet's wind should have rustled its robes
."An offering," the voice boomed, a sound of grinding tectonic plates. "A final pretty sacrifice from a kingdom that has slaughtered its last god. Does the Scorpius Empire finally kneel? Speak, little phantom. My time has value, even if your existence no longer does."
The grey figure offered the Gryphon Emperor no acknowledgment. The data slate in their hand was a formality. The schematic of his fleet that glowed in the air between them was not intelligence they had stolen, but a structure their own mind had deduced.
They had parsed the ship formations, the engine signatures, the tactical dogma of his culture, and from these fragments, built a perfect model of his entire operation. They did not react to his threats because they already knew every move he could make.
Simultaneously, a public news feed from a spire overlooking the battlefield flickered to life on another monitor. The audio was a horrifying composition of a commentator's choked reportage and a raw, elemental sound a woman's voice screaming a name into the void.
"Leo. My Leo. They killed my boy. The pain killed him." It was the mother of the child Kaela had cited, her private grief now a public spectacle, the anthem for an empire's collapse.
Kaela turned her face away. The Carapace stood rigid, a statue of impotent fury.
On the main screen, the grey figure spoke. Its voice was a calibrated instrument, stripped of gender and emotion, a scalpel of pure data. "Gryphon Emperor. Your Seventh Talon, under Commander Vorlag, is breaching the Aetheriumconduit, Sector Theta Seven."
The voice proceeded to dissect the Gryphon war machine with terrifying placid precision.
It detailed the exact structural fatigue points of the conduit, the precise isotopic concentration of the unstable Glimmer within, the mathematical countdown to a cataclysm that would annihilate his finest troops. It then outlined, in the desiccated language of a corporate audit, the systematic financial takeover that had, hours before, severed his entire supply chain.
"You are a conqueror without a supply line," the voice stated, its logic an inescapable geometric proof.
"A weapon without a logistics train. Your reputation is cunning. Therefore, calculate my next variable. In the next thirty seconds, will I remain inert and allow the immutable laws of physics and capital to dismantle your invasion, or will I offer you a conditional retreat? This pathway preserves your military assets while cementing my political necessity."
The Gryphon Emperor's laughter was a short, harsh burst, devoid of true amusement. "You think to frighten me with ledger books and engineering reports, boy? I have shattered systems that believed themselves eternal. You have fifteen seconds to name your tribute before I burn your city to its foundations."
The word "boy" was a grain of sand in the machine. In a nanosecond, a million retaliatory scenarios flashed by.
But one useless, persistent memory surfaced alongside them: the taste of a specific, cheap nutrient-paste from her childhood, the kind sold in the Ballast. It was a taste of shame and survival. She used its sharp, metallic tang as an anchor, a fixed point to prevent her consciousness from dissolving entirely into the storm of probabilities. Focus, bargain, not obliterate.
For Promethys, those fifteen seconds were an eternity of damnation.
Fifteen Seconds
In one branch, I see his pride breakc He accepts, The retreat is orderly. A million lives continue. I feel the gray peace of my rule settle in my own bones, a dull, metallic taste of stability that will linger on my tongue for decades.
In another, he refuses. The conduit breaches. Vorlag's Talon is unmade. I feel the silent, beautiful bloom of plasma as a sudden, searing heat across my own skin, followed by the profound cold of the crystallized city, a chill that will haunt my marrow like the memory of a grave. It is... aesthetically coherent.
The math is perfect.
The sensation is unbearable.
A third path: he feigns acceptance. My shuttle is destroyed. As the hull tears apart, I feel not pain, but the phantom weight of five million future graves settling upon my shoulders, a density that would crush a planet.
This is the true curse. I am an empathic singularity. My consciousness is a nexus where every possible agony and ecstasy converges. The logic is just my desperate dam against the flood. To choose one future is to be forever haunted by the ghosts of all others, their sensations etched into my being like scars on a universe.
The most terrifying part? The optimal path is always the one that scars me the least, not the one that is morally right. There is no morally right. There is only the calculus of my own endurance.
"Just to let you comprehend, I am female," Promethys stated, her voice level, a miracle of compression over the screaming galaxy of outcomes in her mind. "The conduit will breach in four minutes and twelve seconds."
"Your window for a structured retreat is three minutes and forty seconds. You have just spent 12 seconds posturing. The offer remains active for twenty-seven more. The laws of physics are indifferent to your reputation."
A deep silence fell, cutting off the last note of the orchestra. In that sudden quiet, the gaze of the entire court felt like a swarm of insects crawling on his skin.
"What are your conditions," he finally growled, the words forced out like a confession.
She listed the terms without inflection. The point was not a negotiation, but a presentation of the only viable conclusion. Their gaze was distant, fixed on the inevitable future these terms would create.
"The immediate and verifiable retreat of all Gryphon forces to the pre-war borders of the Meridian Belt. The public relinquishment of all claims to the Kessler Ring trade routes. The formal recognition of my sovereignty over the Scorpius Empire and its protectorates."
"Impossible," the Gryphon Emperor snarled. "The Meridian Belt is mine by conquest. The Kessler Ring is the lungs of my war machine."
"Then it will suffocate," It replied, their composure unbroken.
"Without our refineries, the Belt is a toxic ruin. Without my authority, the Ring is a scrapyard. You are not negotiating from a position of power. You are debating an equation, and you are wrong." She allowed a single, calculated beat of silence. "You pride yourself on your cunning. Exercise it. This is the only path that ends with your army intact."
Another silence, shorter, tighter. She could hear the Gryphon Emperor's measured breath, a man realizing the board had been flipped and he was standing on the wrong side. "You ask for everything."
"I am offering you the chance to keep your army. A simple transaction. Fifteen seconds."
From the open city feeds, a sound began to rise, a ragged, disbelieving roar that swelled from a murmur to a seismic wave of relief. It was the sound of a reprieve, a gasp from a continent pulled back from the abyss.
She turned and re-entered the shuttle without a backward glance at the saved city.
The strategium doors hissed open. A figure stood there, but it was not the grey-robed envoy from the shuttle screen. This one was different, its form shimmering with a latent energy that seemed to draw the very light from the room. It was taller, its features both more severe and more polished and beautiful, carved from a living, pearlescent material that was neither flesh nor stone.
Where the shuttle envoy had been a scalpel, this was the hand that wielded it. This was not Lucio, nor his proxy or consciousness. Lucio was, at that point, reading a book in the shack. So, it is highly improbable and downright blasphemous to say it is connected to him.
Its androgynous beauty was severe and absolute, its grey robes seeming to devour the very light of the room. The two Pillars stared, minds reeling, unable to categorize this third, unforeseen variable that had entered their endgame.
The figure turned fully, and the ambiguity of its form crystallized into a terrifying, singular authority. Its gaze, the colour of a winter sky before a storm, was not on them, but on the grand hololith itself, as if it could see the flawed code of the universe written in the glowing lines.
"The Gryphon Emperor believed he was writing a story of conquest," the voice announced, a physical presence that filled the chamber and stole the air.
"He saw the final page, his banner flying over your spires. He never considered that the book itself was flawed, its binding already broken. I did not read his story. I assessed the integrity of the pages."
The figure's hand rose, not in a gesture of blessing or threat, but as a conductor silencing an orchestra. On the main hololith, the frantic, bleeding crimson of the Gryphon advance winked out, replaced by a serene, topographical map of the empire, rendered in cool, analytical blue and white.
"Your own strategists saw a sequence of defeats leading to an inevitable collapse. A logical conclusion from flawed data. I saw a structural weakness in the narrative. A single variable, inserted at the correct point, that would cause the entire edifice of his ambition to obey a new, more stable equation."
The silence that followed was the weight of a world being unmade and remade.
"Do not speak to me of gods who bleed. Do not ask me to bear your pain. I am not a character in your tragedy, nor a deity for your worship. I am the one who has seen the script, and I find it lacking. I am here for the rewrite."
The Carapace, a man who had stood firm against armies, found his voice, a thin, awed thing. "By what name do we know... our savior?"
The figure regarded him, and in its eyes, a cold fire ignited, the genesis of a star in an airless void.
"Salvation is a subjective byproduct, I am the process. You will call me Promethys."
Then Kaela understood and reached to one knee. The Carapace followed, a mountain bending.
Inside the shuttle, Promethys did not move. As the cheer reached its peak, a single, perfect tear traced a path down her impassive cheek.
The somatic echo of a billion other timelines where that cheer was a scream, where the relief was terror. She had chosen the path of least collective suffering.
A specific, ghostly echo lingered: the sensation of a child's hand, one who would now never be born in a different, harsher peace, slipping from her own. The feeling was cold, and small, and infinitely sad. She let the tear fall, a tribute to the ghost, then systematically purged the emotion from her biosystem.
From the open comms, the sound began - first from the command staff, then spreading through the city, a chant rising from the streets where moments before had been only despair:
"Promethys the Great! Promethys the Great!"
She saw, with perfect clarity, a future where she walked anonymously through the celebrating crowd, where a woman would press a warm, spiced cake into her hand, where she could simply smile and say "thank you" and be a person, not a process.
The vision was so vivid she could smell the cardamom. Then it was gone, archived and locked away. That future led to a 2.3% higher instability rate within a decade.
The somatic echo of a billion other timelines where that cheer was a scream, where the relief was terror. She had chosen the path of least collective suffering.