The aircraft hummed a steady, mechanical lullaby, an oppressive vibration that traveled up through the soles of my boots and settled into the marrow of my bones. It was a sound I had grown to despise—the drone of a machine that cared nothing for the history it was flying over, nor the wreckage it was carrying in its hold.
Outside, the jagged, smoking mountains of Spagonia were already receding, shrinking into a distant, insignificant patchwork of white stone and green hills. They were obscured by thick, suffocating clouds, as though the universe itself were trying to act as a shroud, hiding the slaughter, the broken vows, and the feast of fools that had defined the last few days of my existence.
It was a tempting illusion: that the weight of what I had done—what I had allowed myself to become—could be erased simply by putting enough distance between it and my own consciousness.
I sat near one of the side windows, my legs crossed, my elbow resting against the cool, vibrating frame. My reflection in the reinforced glass was a stranger's. My eyes, once bright with the fire of a visionary, now burned with a cold, silver lunar fire. I had spent twenty minutes in the aircraft's cramped lavatory, scrubbing my hands and fur until the skin was raw, desperate to wash away the iron-scented souvenir of the massacre.
The blood was gone, replaced by the sterile smell of industrial soap, but the reflection still lied. It showed me clean skin, but beneath the surface, my mind felt like a dark, bruised thing, stained by the lingering, maddening whispers of the Augur. That damn influence had twisted my resolve, turning my drive into something unrecognizable, a jagged, serrated hunger that I still couldn't fully map.
"What has been happening to me?" I murmured the words into the glass, the cold surface soaking up the confession. I wondered what that damn Augur had truly done to my psyche, how deep the rot had burrowed, and if the man who stepped off this plane would ever truly belong to himself again.
Behind me, the rhythmic, metallic clank of chains shattered the peace of my introspection, followed by the low, gravelly grunt of Lord Abraham Tower. He was shifting again, his heavy, muscular frame fighting the restraints that secured him to the rear bulkhead. He was testing the structural integrity of his bonds for perhaps the twentieth time since we'd cleared the atmosphere of that ruined city.
There was no desperation in his movements, no frantic, undignified clawing at the metal; he was an old soldier, a man who understood the finality of a lost cause. He didn't whine, he didn't beg, and he didn't try to negotiate. He simply shifted, sighed, and settled back into the chair with a quiet, hollow resignation, his eyes staring at the bulkhead as if he were already mentally preparing his final defense before a judge he knew would never grant him mercy.
He was the old guard, a dying species of soldier who clung to a sense of duty even as the world turned to ash around him.
Snively, by contrast, was a study in absolute, quivering defeat. The former lawyer had discovered several minutes ago that hyperventilating in silence consumed considerably less energy than the futile, frantic struggling he had previously engaged in, but that hadn't stopped his body from betraying him.
He was a fucking wreck, a bundle of frayed nerves and sweat, a pathetic smear of an Overlander, especiallycompared to Doc. His eyes darted around the cabin like those of a cornered rodent, fixated on the vibrating floorboards as if they were a portal to a merciful, dark oblivion.
He was trembling so violently that the vibrations of the aircraft seemed to amplify his shaking, turning him into a rhythmic nightmare of cowardice.
I glanced over my shoulder, catching the man in the act of wringing his bound, trembling hands together for the hundredth time. His knuckles were white, cracked and bleeding from the raw friction of his own skin rubbing against the restraints.
"You know," I said, my voice carrying a dry, rasping tone from my previous screaming putside the gates of Spagonia—the sound of someone who had seen far too much, yet still felt compelled to narrate the misery.
"If you keep doing that, you're eventually going to rub your own skin right off your knuckles. It's unsightly, Snively. Have wt least some semblence of pride, if only for the sake of the floorboards."
Snively froze, his eyes widening as he caught my gaze. I saw the reflexive, cowardly impulse to lie dance across his features, followed by a pathetic, shuddering breath. "I... I wasn't," he stammered, his voice cracking, a high, thin sound of pure, unadulterated fear.
I didn't even have to try to keep my voice flat; the sheer exhaustion of the day was doing the work for me, stripping away the need for cruelty.
"You fucking were, and you know it," I replied, turning back to the window. He opened his mouth again, his mind likely spinning through a dozen pathetic, legalistic excuses, before deciding that honesty—or at least, the cessation of his internal collapse—was the better part of valor.
He slumped, his shoulders rounding as he retreated into himself, utterly defeated by his own nerves. He wasn't a man; he was a failing legal brief, crumpled and discarded.
I turned my attention back to the clouds. It had become strangely, almost laughably easy to distinguish between fear and guilt. Fear was an outward projection, a desperate need for the predator to acknowledge the prey, a clamoring for attention even in the final moments.
Guilt, however, was a hollow thing. It was a vacuum that forced men to look at everything except the face of the one who had caught them. Snively was all fear; Tower was a man trying to make peace with the hollow illusion.
A soft, delighted giggle rippled through the cabin, cutting through the droning hum of the engines like a discordant, mocking note in a symphony. I closed my eyes for a single, long second, bracing myself for the sheer, grinding psychological turbulence that was Victoria Pavlov.
"Victoria," I said, not even turning around.
"Yes?" she chirped, her voice hitting a register of cheerfulness that felt entirely disconnected from the reality of the blood we had both seen, the blood that still seemed to stain the very air we breathed.
"Why are you still smiling?" I kept my head turned toward the horizon, sensing the way she blinked. She was genuinely surprised that the apex predator in the room was bothered by her mood.
"I'm traveling," she answered, as if that were the most profound, self-evident statement ever uttered in human history.
"Yeah, I noticed," I replied dryly.
"With a maker history, an Anarchy Titan, no less," she added, as if that clarified everything. She seemed to delight in the opaque nature of her own mind. I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling the all-too-familiar, throbbing ache of a headache beginning to bloom behind my temples.
"That doesn't answer my question, Victoria."
She didn't hesitate. "It answers all of them, just not obviously."
I finally looked over. She was sitting across from me, her posture a masterpiece of regal composure. For three full, fleeting seconds, she looked like a completely normal, rational monarch, a woman who understood the weight of a crown.
I felt as though she were trying to dissect my soul with her stare alone.
"Do you know how exciting this is?" she asked, her voice cracking into a high, hysterical screech that carried a strange, jarring undertone. It was a sound that made my skin crawl with visceral, biological disgust.
"I... have several guesses," I replied, my voice devoid of any real enthusiasm, only barely covering my mounting nausea.
"I've spent years reading about history," she continued, her hands beginning to claw at the fabric of her gown, shredding it rhythmically with her fingernails as if she were trying to skin the very cloth she wore. "Now I'm sitting across from the Anarchy Titan who's writing it."
I stared at her, genuinely struggling to comprehend how a human mind could operate with such complete disregard for context, for morality, for anything resembling stability. "You really don't hear yourself, do you?" I asked.
"Hear what?" She tilted her head again, the bones in her neck clicking like dry, snapping twigs.
"The part where that sounds incredibly concerning."
"It does?" She asked, her pupils dilating and contracting with dizzying, nauseating speed.
"It really does," I assured her. She frowned, furrowing her brow until the skin looked like it might tear, before shrugging with a carefree, twitchy dismissiveness that sent a cold shudder down my spine.
"Hm. I still don't see it."
I sighed, the sound escaping through my nose in a sharp, impatient hiss. I wasn't dealing with a performance; I was dealing with a fundamental, ontological misalignment of reality. Victoria simply was this way—a volatile, fracturing force of personality that viewed diplomacy as a hallucination and chaos as a comfortable blanket.
I was getting too old for this shit l, and I was only a week away from turning Six in this life.
"I've been meaning to ask," she said, her tone suddenly dropping to a low, guttural whisper that seemed to vibrate the very frame of the aircraft. I felt a spike of immediate, instinctive suspicion.
"That's never a good sentence," I muttered, waiting for the inevitable.
"What's Terminus like?" she asked, her eyes darting to the corner of the ceiling, then back to my throat, then my eyes, in a frantic, uncoordinated dance that made her seem like a caged animal testing the bars of her own consciousness. I turned back to the window, the image of my capital rising in my mind, a cold, metallic fortress of my own design.
"Busy," I said.
She waited, as if expecting the rest of the sentence, her fingers drumming a frenetic, irregular pattern against her own skin that made me want to grab her hands just to make it stop. "That's it?" she pressed.
"You asked what it was like," I replied.
"I expected something more poetic," she complained, puffing out her cheeks in a theatrical pout that looked less like a pout and more like a grotesque, contorted grimace.
"I wasn't feeling poetic today; besides, I have a speech planned tomorrow; you and Ciara and her kids are invited, of course," I answered, revealing only the most broad, sanitized parts of what I was planning.
She let out a laugh that sounded like dry leaves being crushed under a heavy, iron-shod boot. "As exciting as that is, you're making this very difficult," she said, sounding genuinely aggrieved, her eyes flickering with a sudden, violent anger before returning to that vacant, glassy adoration.
"I wasn't aware I was supposed to make it easy," I retorted.
"No, but it'd be appreciated." I couldn't help it; a quiet, involuntary laugh escaped me—not loud, not forced, just a single, sharp breath of amusement at the sheer, suffocating absurdity of the woman.
Victoria's eyes widened, her entire body freezing into a statue of rigid, trembling tension. "So you do laugh," she whispered, her voice trembling as if I had just performed a miracle.
"I've done it before," I said.
"I wasn't sure," she murmured, a single drop of saliva trailing from the corner of her lip, which she ignored completely as if she hadn't felt it.
"You've known me for less than a day," I reminded her.
"I know," she whispered, nodding solemnly, the motion stiff and unnatural. "It feels longer."
"That's probably not a compliment," I said, the mental exhaustion beginning to take its toll, pressing down on my temples like a physical weight.
"It wasn't supposed to be," she countered. I shook my head, a thin, tight smile lingering on my face. She was exhausting—not dangerous in the way a soldier or a spy was, but exhausting in the way a broken circuit breaker is when it's trying to hold back a surge of raw, destructive power.
Behind us, Tower finally broke the silence. "If you're quite finished making jokes..."
I turned around, moving with a calculated, leisurely grace. Tower met my gaze with an even, unflinching stare; he possessed a residual dignity that Snively had abandoned hours ago, a grim resolve that I found almost admirable, given the circumstances. "You intend to put us on trial," he stated.
"Indeed I do," I replied.
"You've already decided we're guilty."
"I've decided you'll receive a trial, where you will be guilty unless proven innocent," I corrected him.
He studied me for several seconds, weighing the man he saw against the legend that had been forged in the red mud of Spagonia, before giving a single, clipped nod. "I suppose that's more than most conquerors would've offered," he conceded, his voice heavy with the weight of a life spent in service to a kingdom that no longer existed.
My expression hardened, the smile vanishing as I pulled myself back into the role that demanded total, uncompromising clarity. "I'm not interested in being 'most conquerors,'" I finished bitterly.
The cabin fell silent again, save for the rhythmic drone of the engines and the faint, unsettling hum of Victoria's rhythmic, involuntary twitching.
Outside, the sun was sinking toward the horizon, bleeding orange and crimson across the sky in a way that looked disturbingly like the bloodstains I had left behind in the valley.
Ahead lay Terminus, my fortress, my home, my design; behind lay the ruins of Spagonia, a kingdom that had dared to think it could stand against the current of history.
Somewhere in the middle, I found myself traveling across the continent with an imprisoned conspirator who had lost his war, a disgraced lawyer who was losing his mind, and a queen so spectacularly unhinged that she made the criminals look like saints.
I wasn't entirely sure which of them worried me the most, or if it was the fact that I actually found myself almost enjoying the company of the madwoman. Regardless, the horizon was waiting, and I had a future to keep building.
One way, or another...
-------
The landing gear soon slammed into the reinforced concrete of the Terminus tarmac with a shock that buckled the structure, the impact throwing us forward against our constraints like meat against the butcher's block. The engines screamed a final, dying mechanical moan before cutting out, leaving the cabin in a sudden, suffocating vacuum of pressurized silence.
I unbuckled my harness with a sharp, crisp click, rising to my full, imposing height. My muscles felt like coiled steel cables, ready to snap at the slightest provocation. I felt the familiar, grounding shift of the city's atmosphere—the sharp, acrid, metallic tang of ozone, cooling oil, and unbridled industry.
It was the smell of my domain, the incense of the empire I was building from the ruins of the old one.
I didn't wait for the ramp to fully extend; I paced toward the hatch, my hand ghosting over the release lever, already feeling the unmistakable, heavy-gravity presence waiting on the other side.
The hatch hissed open, exhaling a cloud of stale, recycled air into the crisp, industrial chill of the hangar. The artificial glare of the high-intensity lamps flooded the cabin, bleaching out the interior and casting long, skeletal shadows across the floor.
Standing at the base of the ramp, his arms folded across his chest, was Doc. He looked exactly as I had expected—weary, his eyes rimmed with the exhaustion of a man who had been holding the world together in my absence.
He didn't look at me with judgment, but with a deep, aching concern that felt like a physical weight in the cold air. He had been waiting, calculating, hoping against hope that I would find my way back before the darkness took me completely.
He looked up, his gaze sweeping over my face, searching for a trace of the person he knew, and he let out a short, hollow, relieved exhale.
"Hello, Arthur."
"Hey, Doc, what's up?"
"Just rebuilding, you know how it is."
"You know I do."
I stepped onto the ramp, my boots striking the steel grating with a deliberate, echoing thud. A faint, tired smile pulled at the corners of my mouth—the smile of a wanderer who had finally reached the threshold of home.
"And I see you finally did the math, Doc," I said, my voice carrying a note of genuine warmth that softened the edges of the silence. "I figured you'd know me better than to think I'd come back empty-handed. I'm actually glad you've realized that by now; it saves us both the tedious burden of surprise."
I stood there, expecting a familiar, biting retort, but my attention was diverted by a sudden, jarring shift in the air behind me. Victoria had followed me onto the ramp, but the moment her eyes locked onto Doc, her erratic, frenetic twitching ceased. Her face, which had been a mask of unhinged, glassy adoration mere seconds ago, transformed into a sharp, bitter, snarling scowl.
She glared at Doc with a primal, territorial hostility, her lip curling back to reveal teeth, a predatory display that looked as if it belonged on a starving wolf defending its kill. It was a bizarre, jarring shift—a display of raw, inexplicable animosity that didn't fit the reality of the situation. It was as if she recognized in him a fundamental, ontological threat to the strange, twisted power dynamic she was desperately trying to force upon me.
She hissed, a low, guttural, serpentine sound, her eyes narrowing into slits as she tightened her grip on her shredded gown.
*What was this bitch's problem now!?* I wondered, my irritation mounting. I had enough to deal with without her territorial displays.
Doc didn't even acknowledge her existence. His eyes had drifted past me, past the twitching, snarling queen, and fixed on the cargo I had brought along for the ride. The air in the hangar seemed to grow thick, freezing into something dense and suffocating, weighted with a history that had nothing to do with the present and everything to do with the long, agonizing shadows of the past.
He looked at Tower, the old soldier, then at the trembling, shattered frame of Snively—the man whose betrayals were etched into the very foundations of the wreckage we had spent a lifetime trying to outrun—and the expression on his face hardened into something I hadn't seen before.
It wasn't anger. It wasn't even disappointment. It was a deep, resonating sense of dread, the grim recognition of a ghost returning to haunt a house that had barely finished burning down.
His hands uncurled, dropping to his sides, and he took a slow, heavy step forward, his feet dragging slightly on the concrete. He didn't look at me anymore; he didn't care about the victory, the conquest, or the queen.
He only saw the lawyer, the living witness to every sin, every error, and every tragedy we had fought so desperately to leave buried.
The silence stretched, long and suffocating, a vacuum that swallowed the hum of the city, until Doc finally spoke. His voice was barely a whisper, a strained, fragile sound, yet it rang through the vast, empty hangar like the tolling of a final bell.
"Collin..."
He said the name, and in that single, fragmented syllable, I heard the collapse of every ounce in disappointment a younger brother had for the older one.