I blinked and one moment I was in the shrouded dome of vines with Antonias and the next I was far, far away, my mind’s perceptions of reality being ripped from Apollo system to Terra. Usually, Augustas was the one to project himself to me, but this time I was being brought to him.
Only he wasn’t in front of me, not in any form I recognized. I was not alone, but when I touched others, my hands just went through them. I could not tell whether they were real and I had merely been project invisibly or if all this was just a mirage of the Regent’s creation.
“Augustas?” I called out, passing through the inhabitants of the palace.
I said his name over and over again, quietly and loudly, with a mortal’s voice as well as a god’s. I walked through the immense castle-like complex but even with walking for hours I covered only the smallest fraction of it.
I was about ready to give up when something yanked my leg through the floor and dragged my intangible body through countless levels and catacomb systems before I was dropped at my destination, a laboratory.
A laboratory with my grandfather’s immense body of hybrid demigod and Imperator flesh towering over it as he studied what I assumed were bodies. I had to assume they were bodies because when I looked at them, they were blurry and whatever glimpses I remembered were washed away when I looked at something else.
Something else like my grandfather’s very displeased face.
“I was wandering around forever. Big place you got here.” I said, trying to lighten the mood in the air.
“I am not commanded, Adrias. Order me a second time with my father’s voice and you will lack a tongue to speak the third.” Augustas said.
“Sorry, sir.” I said, wilting under his blistering gaze. “I won’t disappoint you again.”
“Disappoint me? You’ve exceeded all my expectations for what was possible with my ring, from resurrecting to becoming Gold. What you have done now is irritate me, which is far worse. My disappointment arises from others being weak, my irritation arises from their presumptuous arrogance.”
“I will… refrain from irritating you ever again.” I offered.
He seemed less angry, so I asked a question.
“Which of the two are the Nine Golden Imperators?” I said. “Disappointments or irritations?”
“Ten Golds now, with you.” He said. “But the other nine are both weak and presumptuously arrogant so they hold both designations.”
“Why can’t I see the bodies on the surgical tables?” I asked my grandfather.
“Because I’m withholding them from you for now.” He replied.
“Until when?” I said, fascinated by what they could be.
“Until after you defeat the two Golds coming to Apollo system shortly and then travel to Terra yourself. Shouldn’t be much effort for the Burner of Elysium to accomplish.” My grandfather said, looking genuinely proud of me.
I tried not to get red. “I, uh, had a meeting with your business partner. He told me through a prophetic vision of what he thinks you want.”
“If it involved a spear going through the Skyfather’s eye, it is indeed true.”
“How are we going to do it?” I said breathlessly.
“Plans are coming together now, the fruit of millennia of work. The first part is cleaning our workspace; destroying or shackling the Nine and annihilating the two other demigods, Akhillos and Orpheas.” Augustas said.
The one demigod’s name, Akhillos, was uncomfortably close to the truly gone Achilles.
“How are you and I going to do all that?” I asked.
“We both share a flaw, Grandson, as do the other Golds and demigods.” Augustas mused. “Can you guess what that flaw is?”
It had to be something potent yet also ruinous no matter how enjoyable. Something that led to a tragic downfall. I had told Kronos that hatred was the most powerful force, and I agreed with that still, but that did not mean it was what I thought drove me. I did not do what I did solely because I hated all others or had a plan of revenge I wanted to accomplish; I had crushed the skull of the man who had my family killed already. And so, I decided to go with what I had said hatred was stronger than.
“Hunger.”
“Not quite. Hunger for what, boy?” The Regent said.
“Hunger towards glory.” I answered.
“All of us have that. Every person in the group I named to you has glory more than the rest of the Dominium combined in their little fingers. Closer, but still not right.”
“Hunger for power and authority.” I said.
“We have that as well. Each of us has ungodly physical, mental and spiritual strength in addition to commanding vast numbers of subjects.” Augustas said.
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“The Nine were under your thumb.”
“That doesn’t mean that they did not have power, glory and authority in spades.” He said.
“They were still servants or outcasts skulking around your rule. They weren’t-“
“Free.” Augustas said, folding his massive arms. “They weren’t free.”
“You’re free. You said that this was a vice all of us shared, including you, and you’re the goddamn Regent of the whole physical universe.” I said.
“Language. And yes, this is something I share as well because of the gods glaring down at me from the heavens. Something called eleutheromania.” The Regent said.
“What?”
“Eleutheromania. The obsessive desire for freedom.”
“How is that a vice?” I said.
“How is mercy not a virtue, in your own words? I can hear that sentiment echoing in your soul no matter how long ago you first spoke them and I can still smell the way the laurels burned on your skin.”
“Mercy is no virtue was how I felt at the time I told a girl why I had killed her father in vengeance for my family.” I said.
“I am your family.” He corrected me. “Your Servus self was merely the eggshell my grandson emerged from, you are superior in all ways to the Adrias that preceded you.”
“If you say so.” I said, the Regent’s thinking was slightly disturbing to hear and know that he saw me as something built from the scraps of another person rather than a continuation of the same being. I felt otherwise, had clung to the idea in the Underworld that I had always been meant for more, but perhaps he saw things with more clarity.
Was I still the same Adrias Lucion as the one that had lived as a peasant born to scrape in the mines and work the fields? What did those two persons share in common other than some memories?
All the same, it felt wrong to disown them.
“You are my family, but so are they.” I said. “A man can have many family members and rarely do they all like or approve of each other.”
He grunted. “To move back on track, why did the girl ask why you executed your… birth family’s murderer when the reason is clear?”
“I had taken my Copper Imperator’s form and was far anything Gavias Cantion or any of his men had ever dreamed of. The girl said I was so beyond them, a lesser divinity in her mind, that I could have simply let them go or punished them like an adult would a disobedient child.” I said, remembering.
“And your argument for withholding mercy’s gentle touch? On why what most would see as a virtue is nothing more than a vice in your opinion?”
“Again, it was how I felt then at the time. Whether I was merciful or cruel, my parents and brothers were and would remain dead, but Gavias was not a kind man himself and any mercy I gave him would only let him continue to be the trash I had always known him as.” I said.
“Would you still kill him if you could slip back through Chronos’s grip on time?”
“Yes. Though I wouldn’t have done it in front of his daughter if I had known she was there, and I would not made the death so gruesome. Not out of pity for the man but for his daughter’s sake to have an intact face to say goodbye to.” I said.
“Admirable, I would suppose, adding restraint and kindness to blunt anger’s keen edge just enough. The point is that you can understand why something that sounds pleasant or even is useful, such as driving all of us to success and renown, but still make itself a flaw if unchecked.” Augustas said.
“Yes. I understand. This… e-el. Eleu-“
“Eleutheromania. This desire for freedom is what forged you and me and the others. To be weak is to put your neck in another’s hands and hope they won’t snap it. Only by surpassing all others can one be truly free because there is no one to take their liberty away from them. Autonomy is born of leaving a trail of your enemies’ corpses behind you.”
“Grisly.”
“But true.” He agreed.
“What then makes it a flaw? These all sound like things we want.” I asked.
“The desire for freedom made us, but it can break us too. When someone like us is unable to advance either literally in Rank or in status, eleutheromania rips our minds to shreds even as our bodies live on because none of us can bear being in chains. The Nine wished to be free so they could ravage my empire have an illusion of liberty, but they only accomplished their temporary escape because Ahkillos Alastorides and Orpheas Phoebides’s wills. They serve two masters whether they admit it or not and inevitably Akhillos and Orpheas will come to blows until there is only one demigod in charge of the Dominium again.” Augustas said.
“How can we use this vice to beat them?” I said. “They’re beyond your authority now.”
“One can only know how free he is when he tests his limits. Consolidate and then expand and they will be drawn out. It is in their nature to chafe under my rule even when they think they have escaped it.”
“Why are you telling me this? If I have this eleu- this so-called vice as well, and the other Golden Imperators went insane because they couldn’t escape your reign, then why let me know that I will come to hate you?” I asked.
“We all share the vice of eleutheromania, but all of us have a different virtue.” My grandfather said.
I froze, remembering what the Oracle on Sunburst Station had said.
Three sons of gods lie ahead of you, their knives at each other’s throats. Only one may you help. Choose wisely, for while all will know your vice, only one will bring you your virtue.
“And what is your virtue, Grandfather?” I said.
“Temperance. Voluntary self-restraint so that the chains of others cannot bind your thoughts as they do your body. It is what allowed me to spend fourteen thousand years under the watchful gaze of Zeus without going mad. And if you internalize it, you will be able rule the Dominium in my stead when I seize the throne of the heavens.” The Regent said.
It was hard to focus on minor details like the empire someday being handed to me when we talked about deicide and rebellion against Heaven itself.
“You’ll finally become a god without opposition.” I said in wonder.
“No.”
“No?” I asked, bewildered.
“I have no interest in merely being a god, I find it beneath me. I intend to go beyond.” Augustas said.
“To being a titan?” I guessed.
“Beyond all that has ever existed, beyond gods, beyond titans, beyond primordials.” He said.
“What is further than all of that? Of everything that has ever existed?” I said.
“Platinum.”
“What?”
“The fifth Rank.” He said.
“There is no fifth Rank.” I said, flabbergasted.
“I assure you, Grandson, there is. I’ll forgive your lack of faith though.”
“Why had no one ever gotten it ever? Out of all the Paths over all the thousands of years, no one has done it, not even you?” I said.
“They lacked the necessary catalyst, not even knowing it existed.” Augustas said, smiling.
“And what is the missing element?”
“Webs.”
“What?” I said, wondering if he was somehow senile. “What, we need to wrap ourselves up in cocoons to gain unlimited power?”
“No.” My grandfather said, very amused now. “How well do you remember the tale of Arachne?”
“She lost in a contest of weaving or something to Athena and got turned into a spider as punishment.” I said, trying to recall stories treated more as children’s fables than history.
“No. Arachne, a mere mortal, won against the goddess by weaving a more beautiful tapestry than Athena’s divine hands could, surpassing a deity in their own domain. After being attacked by Athena, Arachne hung herself and the goddess made the girl into the first spider.” He said.
“You have to challenge a god and win.” I said, realizing the connection.
“No, you have to challenge the god of your Path and win. No one has made Platinum Rank because the gods have been very careful never to fulfill that, but I intend to draw them out of the heavens.”