Silver had been an exaltation, Gold was a purging.

That lightning and fire of advancement to the fourth Rank scoured the weakness from my body and soul, leaving only purity and clarity. Perfection wasn’t just making you more of what your excellence was, it was excising your flaws away with surgical precision. Beauty could be rendered hideous with only a few mistakes no matter how fantastic the rest was and so those errors had to be corrected.

Even if perhaps your Silver self had not seen them as errors at all.

This was the true nature of the Golden Imperators, not an addition as Bronze was to Copper nor a multiplication as Silver was to Bronze, but a careful subtraction designed to free you of your restraints. This psychic and physical potential had existed in me before, I had just been unable to realize it was there, let alone seize it.

Heracles’s fire ran through my veins, but it did not burn me because everything that was vulnerable enough to do so had been ripped out and replaced. The vines of Demeter, the smallest shreds of my Servi heritage remaining, snaked around me with fluid grace. Azure psychic blades scraped the marble floor, carving my name and deeds in languages that existed before the creation of mankind. I was commanding all this to happen and yet at the same time I wasn’t. My mind was fracturing into clones of itself, each willing different things to happen, all in coordination.

One Adrias charted the direction of the vines, tracing the paths they were to follow. Another Adrias shaped Heracles’s energy to make my body glow subtly, fodder for propaganda efforts. A third chipped away at the floor, strategically leaving behind markings that would scar this temple’s floor into a truly sacred place. A fourth and a fifth were together trying to wrangle my rapidly expanding senses into something that wouldn’t give me an aneurysm as the world unveiled itself to a hundred different sensory abilities piercing into the planet. And finally, I watched them all do so with more detachment than excitement.

The two mental clones of my thought processes were conveying information to me, almost hesitantly. I looked at the world through their restraining lens and found Iulius to have changed beyond the world I had left. I had assumed that I would find a war torn hellscape with Lord Fulvion’s crest everywhere.

There was a symbol marked all over, but it was made more with burnt material and ash than the elegant materials I knew Persias would have preferred for himself, and it did not match his coat of arms. The symbol was a burning heart surrounded by outward pointing swords.

“Persias didn’t defame me after my death, did he?” I said quietly to Alsig.

“No. No, he did not. He made you a whole religion, one as shining and terrifying as you are. It’s called-“

“-Lucanism.” I finished for her.

“Yes.”

“How many people did he have killed? Innocent ones, I mean.” I asked. I had specifically told him and the other Silvers that I wanted things done more morally.

“How many did you have killed, you mean.” Alsig said. That touch of madness was in her voice again. Being trapped in my skull for five months had been very bad for her.

“What are you trying to say?” I said, my fingers flexing.

“Persias convinced your armies and this planet and Apollo system that they should continue to worship you after your death, but he wasn’t the one to make them think you were a god. He couldn’t have.” She said.

“Persias is convincing, both with lies and with twisting the truth.” I argued.

“He can’t fake godhood. Or at least, he can’t fake something that approaches deity enough that people are convinced. If he could, people like him and Theseas Claudion would have been manipulating religion for their own gain long ago.” She said to me in my head.

“So it’s all my fault?” I replied, annoyed.

Fish- Antonias, rather, was staring at me with curiosity as I continued to talk aloud to my AI.

“It’s not about fault, it’s about reality. Fault implies wrongdoing, and I can’t say whether this is good or bad, or even whether it’s worse than your original plan. People were always going to die when you seized power no matter what you ordered your troops and subordinate commanders to do. There is no fault, there is only responsibility and consequences. You chose to appear divine and humans believed it. That is your reality, Adrias Lucion. And now it’s going to get more extreme.” Alsig said.

“Because I came back.” I said softly.

“Because you came back from the dead, resurrected thousands of people, and made the Nine Golden Imperators the Ten Golds now in fourteen thousand years. There is nothing you can ever do to erase who the Lucanites think you are because you’ve exceeded their furthest hopes and desires. If you told them that you were going to take Zeus’s throne and place as King of the Gods they would believe-“

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The memory that Kronos showed me of myself handing a spear to Augustas to pierce the Skyfather’s skull flashed through my mind, cutting her of.

“Oh. Oh. Oh shit. Oh shit! Gods above, oh sh-“ She swore. “You can’t! That’s sacrilege and blasphemy and treason against the heavens! You can’t!”

“I am what I am, and my grandfather is what he is.” I said evenly.

“And what is that?” She asked, sounding terrified of the situation and of me.

I remembered the future death of Zeus and the burning of Elysium and how Hades the Corspefather had been forced to back down.

“Defiers of Heaven and Hell. Those who taunt the Fates so that the Muses will sing of them.” I said.

Antonias grabbed my shoulder. “You have an audience. Remember that.”

I almost saw a hint of the old him in those scarlet eyes. It made my heart hurt. I had gotten my friend back in glorious fashion, we had advanced in Rank and he was so close to joining me as Gold as we had said, but at the same time it was like I had lost him all over.

I put my arm around him and teleported us above the temple to its roof for privacy.

“Onlookers could still use recording equipment, auditory sensors or lipreading to spy on your conversation if you want to say something you would rather be hidden.” Alsig said, sounding more out of it from the revelation of Kronos’s schemes now than unstable from my absence.

One of my copied selves devoting their temporary existence to monitoring my environs informed me that there were in fact a very large number of viewers looking to spy on me at this current moment. The fifth concurred with the fourth mental clone, adding that he thought they might be even moving a satellite into position above.

Remembering how Persias Fulvion had used psychic abilities to obscure outside vision and hearing with a bubble of silence, I tried to manipulate the air with telekinesis, but making a film of air distorted and blurry did not prevent higher caliber monitoring equipment from piercing my clumsy veil. Whatever Lord Fulvion did, it was something different.

“What’s wrong?” Antonias said, his red and Silver eyes scanning the Fulvions’ massive estate that the temple that had held my coffin was on a portion of.

“We’re still being watched.” I said.

“I can see that. Literally so for some of them.” He said, squinting. “Fix it then. You’re you.”

“I’m trying to put up a bubble of silence.” I explained. “I just never was taught by Persias.”

Antonias shrugged. “So kill all the watchers.”

My countless perceptive powers showed tension and fear run through those who weren’t using automated hardware remotely controlled by them.

“I won’t do that.” I said aloud, mostly to assure those listening in.

Frustrated with my lack of success with the bubble of silence making, I improvised.

“Hide us.” I commanded with Heracles’s divine voice.

Nothing happened.

“You need something to act on, something to listen to you even if its inanimate.” Antonias said. “That vial of blood the Larua had taught me that much.”

He was clever enough not to name the blood as being Kronos’s.

The cognitive copy controlling the vines my bloodline gift from my dwindled Servi heritage made the verdant cords spasm out and weave themselves into a dome around us, roomy enough even for two seven-foot-tall Imperators.

“Conceal us from onlookers, hide both sound and image.” I ordered the vines and the outside world receded away to almost all my senses.

“Good enough.” I sighed. “So… you were with me since the beginning, my very first boat ride across the Styx.”

“Yes.” Antonias nodded. “I didn’t remember you fully, obviously.”

“How is it possible that you and I and Pollixa all ended up together?” I asked.

“How is it possible that Pollixa and I followed you into rebirth so strongly that our coffins were ripped from our tombs and brought to yours? We’re connected in more ways than one.” He said.

“You, I get, but Pollixa? How is she as tightly bound to me as you are?” I said.

The Leechling Imperator shrugged. “You failed to save both of us and she and I died as a result.”

“That’s not fair.” I whispered.

“It’s true.” He said. “I don’t blame you, but it’s true.”

“How much did you remember? When we were down in the Underworld.”

“Just your face sometimes. Little things every once in a while like the dragon man who killed me and the theater I set on fire that you saved me from. Being a Blur was like being a different person, like I had parts of my brain scooped out, and it got even stranger when I started drinking blood.” Antonias said, inspecting his talon-like fingernails.

“I’m so sorry that you became a Leechling to protect me.” I said. “I really, really am.”

“I prefer this.”

“What?”

“I like being a Leechling. I don’t want Shine or the bottle anymore. I feel cleansed.” He said with a fanged smile.

“You were looking at the congregation members like they were snacks.”

Antonias said nothing.

“Which they are not, to be clear with you. We will get you cloned or donated blood to drink, I’m not going to let you tear into my subjects for meals.” I said.

“Asshole.” He muttered with a slight smile, like I had just told him he needed to not eat all of a cake rather than not brutally murder and drain someone of everything that ran in their veins.

“You just traded one addiction for another. This hasn’t changed anything, you aren’t cleansed.” I said. “Look, I will find some way to fix you.”

“You can’t.” Antonias said firmly. “And I wouldn’t want you to anyways. This isn’t the same thing as Shine and I am cleansed. Drugs made me weaker, damaged me. The more blood I drink, the stronger I am.”

“Gods above.” I said.

“I thought you were defying those.” My AI said.

“Quiet, Alsig.” I snapped. It did put an idea in my head though.

“What’s up?” Antonias said with a smile, equal parts the old him and the new him combined.

“I need to talk to my grandfather.” I said. It was time for answers.

“Oh, goody.” The Leechling replied, rubbing his hands together.

“Augustas, I need to talk to you.” I said, waiting a moment. “Augustas. Augustas. Augustas.”

Antonias laughed. “Leave a voicemail, maybe? Looks like he’s not going to respond to you asking.”

“I wasn’t asking.” I said coldly.

“Augustas.”