“Fire, why does it always have to come back to fire with you?” Livia muttered as she stared at graffiti made with a blowtorch rather than spray-paint. It was meant to display a flaming heart ringed by swords pointed out to resemble sun rays. It was the symbol the Lucanites had chosen for their fallen leader and the entire planet was being branded with it. Doorways, bridges between skyscrapers, subway stations, teleportation chambers, and stairwells were all being marked.

Thinking back, she guessed the fire at the theater she had brought Adrias to was a sign from the gods that smokes and sparks were always in his wake.

“Everything you touch turns to ash.” Livia said, though quietly to avoid attention from the zealots. Which could very well be unnecessary, they might take those words as a compliment. Her words weren’t as much bitterness as they were simply a realistic look at Adrias Lucion. He was like the sun, his gravity ensnaring you the moment you entered his orbit and his presence searing you the moment you came too close. He ripped her from Lavinius, poor deceased Antonias from Sunburst Station, and now the entire solar system was warping around his presence even after death. How long until they all went up in smoke?

Livia had been left on Iulius with Junia while Adrias went off to war, kept safe in an apartment that was palatial by the standards of any Servus, and when news came spilling back weeks later of the events of the war, she was probably the only person on Iulius who didn’t feel shock at his apparent divine ascension and then killing of Theseas Claudion. What had surprised her was his death. After all the things that had happened, it almost made more sense to her to imagine a divinely cursed blade cracking against his bare skin than it was to see video of him dropping from the sky with a knife of ice in his heart.

Few mourned her friend’s death here on the capital planet, they were too distant from victories and his light had gone out too quickly to really feel the heat of his deeds, and the leadership declared that the situation would soon resolve itself and all would be well.

And then…

And then Persias Fulvion’s fleet of rage filled zealots had descended on Iulius like a swarm of locusts mere weeks after Adrias’s death, raving and roaring into commlinks and networks about holy wars and divine judgment. They had intended on landing on the lands their allied Great Houses controlled and then attempting to burrow through the surface with cloaked drills. Word on the networks was that it would have worked if it wasn’t for a traitor. And so, locked in the seven estates of Houses Fulvion, Surion, Cheravion, Obrallion, Thorion, Kerberion, and Horation, Adrias’s avengers had seethed.

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Throughout all of the first stage, the House Claudion controlled government of Iulius had released propaganda that assured its myriad citizens that the mad dogs would be unable to leave their cages and their resolve would crack. It was true that the defenses surrounding all of the rebel Houses never faltered, but neither did the invading force’s will. Still, the Iulian government was convinced that there was no way anything physical could slip past their barricades.

“And they were right.” Livia whispered, leaning against a wall. She watched as the ceremony began and a crowd of Servi gathered around the crimson wearing priests.

They were right that it wasn’t bodies or bullets that crossed their lines, instead it was ideas. Words and videos and images of Persias Fulvion ranting and preaching in front of a shining corpse god, of handprint burn scars on the chests of exalted Silver Imperators, of the battles their deity had fought, of miracles they claimed to have witnessed.

As she peered over the crowd, she saw as a man, gagged and in chains, was dragged to the priests, along with canisters of fuel.

A religious movement had built in those caged soldiers, a berserker band of those who worshipped someone she had once driven around because he was too big to fit into a Lavinian’s car. Those zealots called themselves Lucanites and like any blaze Adrias caused, it spread as a wildfire. The authorities had viciously cut off even clandestine communications, but the damage had been done. The Lucanites were winning the war and none of Persias Fulvion’s men had even had to step foot on the rest of the planet.

In the end, it hadn’t been some brutal call to violence from Lord Fulvion’s sermons that started the unrest, but rather him telling the entire population that their “corrupt” government was keeping the only god they would ever see in their lives from them and calling on them to make a pilgrimage to see the heavenly tomb. Livia didn’t like how slick Persias was, but he almost seemed genuine to her in his devotion, a devotion that made the populace increasingly driven to understand why the coldhearted Silver felt so passionately.

A strong smell filled the air as one of the priests poured the fuel on their struggling captive.

With them convinced that her dead friend was a god and infuriated by continued reign of the Claudion dynasty that could be blamed for any societal ill the Iulians had, the world had gone up in flames of religious fervor. She watched grimly as one of the men in red robes dropped a match on a gas-soaked man who had been found out as a Claudion informant. The robed clergy officials chanted her dead friend’s name with a savage adoration that made her shiver.

Lucanism was in the hearts of all the Paths in Apollo system, and under it you were either the arsonist or the firewood.