Lucius staggered, his senses jarred by the violent tremors that coursed through the prison from hundreds of feet above—or perhaps leagues. Distance and dimension had warped since his arrival in the grand mausoleum. The kinetic strikes, though far above, sent ripples through the ancient stone in a testament to their destructive power.

His mind, shrouded in the disorienting fog of aetheric energy that had been slowly seeping into his consciousness, snapped into sharp focus. The threat of imminent collapse clawed at his awareness, a visceral fear that knifed through the surreal calm he had experienced upon descending into the abyss.

He refocused upon Arkaenan, and flinched instinctively at the paired beacons of cardinal power that awaited him; those twin crimson orbs that held the chill of distant stars. The unblinking stare of the Sovereign seared into him, and Lucius felt the unsteady ground of his convictions quake beneath that gaze. “They’re going to destroy this place.” Arkaenan mused, his voice a serene counterpoint to the violence that threatened to entomb them.

“You are going to die here, Lucius Argent.” Arkaenan declared in a tone imbued with the dispassionate detachment of a god contemplating the end of a fleeting epoch.

“So will you.” Lucius managed to retort, his voice a strained whisper against the sonorous certainty of his terrifying companion. The pressure of Arkaenan's mere presence was a yoke upon his soul, squeezing his Aetheric Core with an oppressive and terrible power that threatened to crush the very essence of his being.

“You mistake me for a creature that has a care for living, dear boy. I am ready for it all to end. I have been trapped in this hell of my supplicants’ devising longer than your species has known the written word.” The resignation in Arkaenan’s voice was not of defeat, Lucius noted distantly, but of a ruler weary of his throne.

“How do you know about humanity?” Lucius asked in a desperate attempt to grasp at the threads of understanding while the world and its objective truths seemed to fracture; eviscerated by Arkaenan’s mere existence.

Another kinetic strike reverberated through the structure, and he felt the brush of death's hand upon his nape. Yet his eyes remained locked with the Sovereign's, knowing that averting his gaze could be perceived as a fatal slight against such a formidable being.

“Humanity…” Arkaenan mused, the word rolling off his tongue like the taste of another age. “Your species has always been bold, Lucius Argent. You were bold when we lifted you from primordial clay and shaped you with our own genealogy, and bolder still when you dared to stand against those who gave you life and thought; all in a mad, doomed gambit for autonomy.”

Lucius’ pulse hammered in his ears as the Sovereign’s revelation clawed at his reality. Arkaenan’s chuckle was a symphony of shadows, and of power that thundered through the crumbling halls with the finality of an epitaph. “Did you think you had sprung forth of your own volition on that cradle you call Earth? You were cultivated, my child. Your species was nore more than a sapient crop seeded and tended for harvest. It is by sheer chance—or perhaps ironic providence—that we, your progenitors, were cast down before our scythe could reap once more.”

The Sovereign's words were an anathema, a poison that seeped into Lucius’ mind and corroded his understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Another strike fell, closer now that it had breached the upper levels, with a deafening roar that threatened to bury them in stone and ancient regret. Lucius braced against the tremor, and his warrior’s poise was a fragile veneer over the existential dread that clawed at his sanity.

“That… that isn’t possible. You can’t be—!”

In a blur of motion, Arkaenan was before him; a towering specter whose frailty was cast away by the overwhelming force of his aura. Lucius recoiled, spurred into instinctive retreat by a primal reaction to the raw display of supremacy. Arkaenan’s eyes were twin furnaces with his new proximity, their infernal glow reflecting legends of damnation and the conflagration that awaited lost souls in human tales of Hell.

“You presume much and know little. Listen, and do not merely hear. You were designed, child. Your species is a product honed for consumption.” Arkaenan's voice was a lash, each word a strike that flayed Lucius' illusions and left the raw and horrifying truth exposed. “Your vaunted evolution, your connection to the Aetherial Sea—mere tools of our making. All of it was devised to increase your potency, yes, but only so that our consumption could be that much sweeter for it.”

When the structure groaned, on the cusp of yielding to the relentless assault from above; Lucius’ attention was torn between the immediate threat of the kinetic bombardment and the existential maelstrom Arkaenan had unleashed upon him. The grand chamber, once a construction of aetheric might and runic matrices strong enough to imprison a living god, now echoed with the cacophony of its demise.

And Arkaenan, Lucius railed against accepting, was a god in every way that mattered. He was a Cultivator, one of a power and majesty that dwarfed into insignificance any power Lucius had ever heard of. The Sovereign was an apex predator, as far removed from mankind as a dragon was removed from a gnat. Perhaps not a deity in the biblical sense, but in comparisons of power there could be no doubt: Arkaenan was transcendent.

Madness clawed at him when the realization of such settled upon his mind.

How many assumptions and understood truths could he endure being shattered?

“I…” Lucius’ voice faltered, strangled by the tumultuous confluence of fear and revelation that even then continued to rage within his mind. He was silenced by a gesture from Arkaenan before he could continue, and made mute by a simple movement that commanded absolute attention.

“Consider the legends of old,” the Sovereign said with the patience of an adult to a lost and confused child. “Think back to the tales of beings that mirrored your form, yet were exalted in their predation and terrible majesty. Your history whispers the truth of your lineage, my child. It sings to you a legacy of blood and servitude. You are prey, Lucius Argent. Your species has always been prey.” Arkaenan intoned with dread finality, his proximity oppressive and his breath a gale that bore the weight of uncounted millenniums.

Lucius felt the foundations of his world crumble, and not just the physical stones of the prison as the bombardment continued to shatter its foundations; but the bedrock of his very identity as well. He was a warrior honed by decades, a man of power and control who had mastered one of the most esoteric and dangerous of aetheric powers. Yet now, in the presence of such an ancient and transcendent force, he was reduced to the role of a bewildered child—powerless and adrift in a reality that was unraveling before him.

“What are you? Truly?” he asked with a last vestige of defiance flickering within him, and a final current of courage trickling into his faltering spine.

Arkaenan’s response was a tapestry of emotion—amusement, contempt, and an echo of affection for a creature so far beneath his consideration as to be almost unworthy of his notice. “You know the name. It is etched into your being. Speak it. Acknowledge your genesis.”

Lucius’ resistance was crumbling, eroded by the relentless tide of Arkaenan’s will. He was a man who had faced down death and emerged victorious on a dozen worlds across a hundred star systems, and yet here he was ensnared by the inexorable gravity of Arkaenan’s presence, and compelled to concede to a truth he had never dared to contemplate.

“Vampire,” he uttered hoarsely at last in a threadbare whisper.

“No,” Arkaenan corrected patiently, his whisper a thunderclap that resonated through the disintegrating chamber. “Not the myth. The truth. Speak the true name, the one that is a brand upon your very essence.”

The prison was breaking, its demise a dirge that sang of endings and beginnings. Lucius felt the final shreds of his resistance evaporate, and with it, the last barriers to his comprehension fell away. He was not simply a man, not merely a fugitive. He was a piece of a grand, horrific design, a pawn in a game that spanned the immutable passage of time beyond reckoning.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Methuselah.” he conceded with a breath that left his body feeling empty of power to resist. The word was a primal surrender to his lineage, a capitulation to the horror and the majesty of the venerable ancient who stood before him, and demanded recognition by mere force of existence.

“Yes.” Arkaenan affirmed in a voice that resonated with regal approval and patronizing benevolence. “I am Methuselah, Lucius Argent. Your creator. And you are here for a singular purpose.”

The realization was a blade through Lucius’s heart, leaving him paralyzed and cold. The truth was not just a physical force bearing down upon him, but a metaphysical one as well, severing him from his past and casting him into an uncertain and terrifying future.

“To serve.” Arkaenan concluded, his declaration an epitaph for the world Lucius had known—a world now as shattered as the prison that entombed them.

A warped pleasure filled him at Arkaenan’s words, and Lucius only had time to enjoy it for a few brief moments before horrified understanding replaced it once more. The joy had not been because of any other reason than a genetic impetus to please. The Sovereign had praised his supplication, and given him a chance to be chattel; and his very genealogy had responded to the patronizing benevolence with unbridled pleasure.

Lucius' voice was quiet when he finally spoke, a departure from the commanding tones that had once been as natural to him as breathing. It was a voice that seemed foreign to his own ears, and carried with it the weight of his vulnerability. "Are you going to kill me?"

The question hung between them, resigned, and stripped of the armor of bravado he no longer felt.

Arkaenan regarded him with a look that mingled curiosity with a hint of compassion. "No, my child." The words were laced with a gentleness that belied their speaker's formidable presence. "I am going to offer you purpose." It was a promise, or perhaps a premonition, spoken with the certainty of one who had shaped destinies with a thought.

The kinetic strike that shattered the silence was a thunderclap of inevitability.

Lucius felt the vibration through the soles of his boots moments before the ceiling above them yielded to the relentless assault. The world erupted into chaos, a maelstrom of steel and stone that descended like the wrath of the heavens themselves.

In any other circumstance, Lucius would have reacted with the honed instincts of a warrior, his body moving with precision in response to the sudden calamity. The aether would have responded to his call, forming a barrier of Force with a gravity shear to ward off the fatal blow. But instead his limbs refused to obey, and the command from his mind was lost in a labyrinth of shock and revelatory supplication.

The sharp clatter of rebar rang out as the metal rods, liberated from their concrete moorings, became spears hurled by an unseen force. Time seemed to stretch, a cruel dilation that allowed Lucius to sense his end approach with crystal clarity. His eyes were held irresistibly to Arkaenan's, and in their endless red blaze he saw no trace of malice—only the impassive observation of an ancient entity witnessing the closing act of a play eons in the making.

Lucius' body convulsed as the first length of rebar struck him.

Its cold, iron bite was a cruel contrast to the warmth of the blood that began to pool beneath him. More followed the first as the grand mausoleum was torn to pieces by kinetic bombardment, each one a punctuation to the sentence that had been decreed by his fate.

At the last when he was pinned to the ground, the foundation of the ancient stone became his altar—and the rebar his sacrificial spikes.

The sounds of destruction were a distant symphony to his ears, the final notes to the overture of his new existence. He lay there, impaled and immobilized, and his life's strength ebbed away amidst the ruins of a bygone epoch, while Arkaenan's unchanging gaze watched him with quiet assessment.

“Are you content with this?” the Ancient asked him with an unbothered tone, while the world crumbled around them and somehow seemed to miss the Sovereign entirely. In his addled state, Lucius almost thought he saw debris as lethal as what had felled him warp away from Arkaenan, as if it were afraid of offending him with its impact.

Now firmly in the throes of death, whatever spell had paralyzed him seemed to have lifted—and Lucius responded with a bitterness and furore he felt to his core.

“No! Of-of course I’m not c-content with this!” he rasped with blood-stained spittle, and the thunderous beat of his own heart resonating in his ears. “I was b-betrayed by my homeland, cast out and framed for sins I d-didn’t commit. I was forced here, to this decrepit hellscape, to die in fr-front of an uncaring immortal. How can I be content with that?!”

Distantly he realized that, given the extent of damage to his body, he should have already been long dead. That thought, and the subsequent bewilderment at his own steady heartbeat, was softly dismissed under the quiet ministrations of a subtle influence he was too dizzy and addled to properly grasp. It didn’t matter why he wasn’t dead, only that he wasn’t.

“If you had the chance to do anything,” Arkaenan said with the same wearily regal inflection, “what would it be? One thing, and one thing alone.”

Lucius opened his mouth to say ‘survive’, and then closed it before he did.

Was that really all he wanted? To survive?

The question posed seemed far more important than so flippant or evident an answer, and for all that he was distantly aware of his impending death and theoretically limited time, he found himself able to stop and think about it. What did he want? What did he truly want? Redemption, perhaps? To return with triumph, clear his name, and resume decorated service once more among mankind’s paragons?

The thought stirred some measure of appeal with him, but that lasted only long enough for bitter realization to sweep it away. Even if he could return and prove himself innocent, he would never be able to be what he once was. He was stained irrevocably, and even if retractions were made and apologies give, he would always be the soldier that fled—that ran from justice, and murdered those lawfully sent, falsely led or not, to return him for trial.

Instead of trusting the system he had sworn to uphold, he had fled from it. The circumstances wouldn’t matter, and neither would his reality. They would say he should have fought. They would say he should have called in help, pleaded his case, gone to the media or tried to expose the corruption. They would say he didn’t try hard enough, that he defaulted to killing and fleeing instead of exposing the truth because he was a brute, a savage, and incapable of true reason.

They would say he had killed his own selfishly, and for his own gain.

Lucius Argent would never be seen as anything other than a traitor for that.

All thoughts of redemption died, and the word—so close to being uttered—became ash on his tongue. So then what? What was left for him? To save his comrades, who already might have been dead or forever missing? To find a life of peace, away from every luxury and accolade he’d spent his four decades of service achieving?

Lucius’ lips downturned in anger, and he felt the bitter rage at his situation—the injustice and lies and absolute mockery of his oaths—flare up inside of him. No, he didn’t want redemption, or a life in peace, or the chance to simply go out in a blaze of glory. He thought of Leopold Garvin, of the man's father Alexander, who had once been an Aether Elite like Lucius—a member of the same fraternity. Once he had thought that was supposed to mean something. He had reported Leopold’s crimes with the faith that the United Defense Minister’s oaths and loyalties would trump any familial weakness.

The oaths hadn’t been worth the blood spilled to enforce them.

Every person complicit in Lucius’ betrayal had to have known it was wrong. His commanding officer, Colonel Joust, had to have known. The Commissioner of the Star Marshals, Johnathan Michaels, had to have known. The President of the entire fucking Republic, Melissa Anders, had to have known. They all had to know, and even if they hadn’t had explicit knowledge, had to have suspected. They had access to his psyche profile, his service records, and every holovid showing his heroism.

Bitter tears, sourced from rage instead of woe, rolled down his grizzled cheeks.

They all had to have at least suspected, and yet not one of them had lifted a finger.

Every one of them, and every person in-between, had to have been complicit in his damnation.

The only people who had believed in him were his team, and they had all likely died for that faith. Robert, Tony, Cassidy, Lenore, Alexei, Siobhan, Michael, Kara, and Brunhild had surrendered the lives they had built without a second thought the moment that he, their Captain, had been imperiled. They were the only family he’d had in a world that had taken everything from him already, and it was their fidelity that had spared him an ignoble end.

And for their valor, their courage, their loyalty; they had been hunted alongside him. Hatred and soul-deep resolve filled him with a certainty, a desire, and a burning fury that—had he been of a clearer mindstate—he may have wondered at the intensity of. It had come boiling up from seemingly nowhere, and yet he embraced it like a drowning man clinging to the flotsam in a tempest-roiled sea.

Before he even knew his own mind, his soul knew its desires, and his lips formed and spat the word with all the anger, all the grief, and all the hatred that had been summoned to the fore.

“Revenge.” Lucius declared without any lingering doubt. “I want Revenge.”

Arkaenan’s smile, when it came, was one of deific majesty—and for a moment, the ancient Sovereign’s pale and austere features melted into something Lucius could almost call beauty, if not for the desiccation that plagued his form. “Then allow your creator a moment of indulgence, my child, to offer you a chance to gain that very thing—for a price.”