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Prometheus gave us the human soul, but who gave us the human heart? Who fashioned our bleeding heart, our organs, our fear of what we know and what we do not? Who gave us the human hope, the margin for error that comes with every word and choice - the chance to fail, the chance to fall?
We gave ourselves wings, and we will continue to fly like Icarus - into the sun, towards our hope.
- PROMETHUS GAVE US THE HUMAN SOUL, IMPERIAL TEXT
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THERE HAD TO BE A LIMIT, Julian Romanus thought bitterly as he was pushed backwards, on how many explosions could be detonated during a war.
(Alright, he was lying. Informally speaking, he was too busy screaming to think anything other than AHHHHHHHHHHHHH).
Everything felt like it was on fire—pain came in starbursts across the Consul’s side and face, and scarlet had leaked into his left eye, dust rendering the other useless. The flash had leeched everything of color, the latter bleeding back slowly as he struggled to get up from the ground. A grunt, and his first flailing attempt was unsuccessful—he landed back on the ground with a thud, a wave of pain ricocheting off his spine.
Several ribs broken. Left arm and left leg—he tried to wiggle the appendages, and failed—out of commission. Major injuries to spine/back from impact. Severe burns to chest and face.
He tried to breathe.
It hurt, badly, and rather than end up gasping for air he stopped. A Hero could hold their breath for longer than others, and he couldn’t fix his lungs yet.
Injuries to internal organs, Julian noted. And he felt oddly detached from the scene, but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t experienced before—he was sure that it was a benefit: if he was fully conscious of his injuries, it would be a mental hindrance.
He still needed to breathe.
Breathing turned into choking, and choking turned into coughing, and coughing made his bones seem like he was being eaten alive from the inside out.
Slow breaths. Through the mouth, since that moved his chest less.
But vague splotches of color were enveloping the horizon. His eyes were recovering, even though it hurt to blink. That was a good sign.
Everything else was not.
Julian moved his right hand. Red had pebbled over his fingers and he was sure a layer of his skin had been fried off, but they could move. His arm could somewhat support his weight, and he tried to heave himself up—his elbow slipped, and he landed down on the ground again, causing a malevolent click from his spine.
That’s bad, he hazily realized.
Still, one part of him urged. Try again.
The Hero breathed from his mouth again, slowly.
It was then when he heard steps.
“I should’ve called out,” he heard a very, very faint whisper, tight but familiar. “Fuck, I should’ve called out. I thought—my Ability—I wouldn’t have reached you—”
And then the person speaking cut themself off, before lowering themselves to the ground.
Blue rhododendrons.
The word came unbidden to his lips, as the person’s face inched closer to listen—they knew, unprompted, that he was trying to speak—and it was a fanatical order, a murderous one.
Die.
Some indistinct voice was rattling in his skull, telling him to tell them—
Die.
“Die,” he croaked, fingers twitching. “The enemy—needs to die.”
You need to die.
Julian lifted his right hand and shoved it forward in an attempt to feebly fumble for a weak spot—the throat was vulnerable—but it was clutched by cold fingers. They were wearing a metal band around their left ring finger, he thought dimly as colors blurred together. Are they married?
“I know,” said the person back, evenly but smoothly, as if the statement had been a ball and they had just expertly caught it. They sounded young—his age. “Don’t speak. It’ll hurt.”
“As if—” his chest was burning, and there was something itching at the back of his throat and he coughed, spewing scarlet, choking for a long while.
His hand was held by those corpse-like fingers all the while, as if he were a man on his deathbed.
“As if you care,” he managed viciously in the end, as if he was a child on the playground and this was a spat with his playmate. But he couldn’t properly control his words, just like he couldn’t properly control his limbs.
“Sister wants you alive, thank the Gods,” the person responded while murmuring to themselves, ignoring his statement but acknowledging it all the while, and it was such a familiar habit, that he knew—
Recognition slipped through his grasp as he drew in a slow breath through his lips, and grasped wildly with the hand in that cold grip. She (how did he know that?) unlaced her fingers automatically, letting him flail around but heave himself upwards, and he knew in the back of his head that she had moved so that she would prevent his fall if he did.
“Who—” everything unfocused, but he could see a full moon, pure white “—are you?”
She had indistinct bronze features, with dark hair that was vague in shape, but a lithe figure that he knew.
“Who are you?” He was up now, and he fought a wince as his injuries flared.
A small laugh, from the other—but at herself, not him.
“The enemy,” she replied, simply. “And that’s all that matters.”
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When I got back, riding in the carriage next to Marius’ blood body, I felt sick.
“Bucket,” I said, and it was handed over to me as I heaved.
It was in the privacy of my tent that my bloodied hands—from when I’d helped carry Julian to the Healers’ tent—continued to shake.
“The Healers are calling for you, My Lady,” Mercy said, and she sounded anxious, almost desperate.
Xandros was holding my hair back as I lurched again, and something flickered at the edge of my vision, and I snarled at those blue eyes. “Enough,” I said, and I jerked my head away from the ghost of Caspian Nameless as he reached for me, Xandros yelping as I launched myself backwards and slammed into his legs.
I could see him reach for me, but in my state of semi-lucidity images overlapped and I saw the Tutors again, and Vivianna and Jonas and Caspian and even that stablehand at Azareth and I slapped it away—
“Don’t touch me—”
I drew a staggering breath in as I saw Xandros’ eyes widen. I crumpled to the floor.
Mercy knew what to do—she automatically hissed out something that made him step back, and the two backed away as I clutched my chest and gasped for breath. Clear vision slowly came back to me as I drew breaths in, shakily, and I reached out. Mercy automatically handed me what I was asking for. I palmed the blade’s hilt and looked at the knife carefully, focusing on nothing else. My grip was firm but my hands were not, and rather than stab it through my thigh or do something equally foolhardy, I looked at it.
A silence as I calmed myself down, grasping desperately for my Ability to feel that sharp coldness in my chest. It came—slowly, but it came.
My hands stilled, and I blinked the hallucinations away.
“Help me up,” I said tonelessly—trying for a smile would make it seem forced. “The Healers’ tent, right?”
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Arathis watched his sister cut out the burned skin.
It was a methodical process: she put a small thin blade through the flame of a candle, and then sank it in alcohol, using it to cut away at the dead burned skin and revealing gaping red and bone. There were patches of pink that she bandaged carefully, the boy’s left arm put in a sling as she worked on the burns on the leg. Moments were present—breaths where the process was paused, in favor of those blue eyes skimming up and down the body as if reaffirming its identity—where there were breaks, but otherwise it was almost like seeing an artist at work.
But, as close to life as everything was, everything was dull and wooden and dead.
(The Forsaken confessed that he’d always favored the arts over the sciences.
But then again, he supposed reviving a person using one’s own hard work and skill was more commonplace than using a Gods-given Ability.)
Greta is close to error.
People could be restrained and objectified and used, but Greta’s main weakness—aside from her greed—had always been underestimating the component of humanity. Yes, forcing Seraphina to swear an Oath and then making her work the war would forge her into a better heir, but it was easy to see that she was close to breaking. Pressure would force a diamond out of coal, but it could just as easily make a lesser gem snap. (And it wasn’t that Arathis thought that Sera was a lesser gem: anything but. But diamonds were sharp and shiny and immaterial—they were like Margaret, the forty-year-old Empress, not a seventeen-year-old girl who sometimes pretended to be more than she was.)
A country wasn’t the same thing as a person, either. This move…
She was going too far.
As the pale devil watched his youngest sister at work, he let his fingers dance on the canvas of the tent.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
He would have to make a move.
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It was a bloody and arduous labor, and when the Empress entered the tent I knew it was going to be worse.
There was a silence, before she spoke.
“Do you know what I see?” her sister said.
"Not particularly," I said with a sigh. "So yes, do go on."
A wrinkle caught at the Empress' brow, as if a net had snagged on a fish, but she continued.
“A girl who wants to be loved above all else but has forced herself to only know fear, Seraphina.”
Greta looked at me.
“You are a glass ornament on the precipice of falling and breaking. Rather than be a sword, as you have promised me, you seem content to stay on the sidelines and remain a decoration. Tell me, is that behavior worthy of a so-called vassal?”
Her eyebrows were raised in a question, head tilted.
I spoke only after a long silence.
“You showed me the place where you came from.” My voice was bland and even. “Mine…was different. Everyone’s is. But you can’t really say that I forced myself to only know fear when I never had a choice in the first place, can you?” I lifted my head in a feat of uncharacteristic daring. “My original drive came from a desire to not be forgotten, not a desire to be remembered. The nightmares—I couldn’t drink, I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t sleep. The Duke and Duchess were more worried of needing to birth another heir than me dying, I—”
I pressed my lips together, chuckling. It was a morbid thing.
“I keep talking about them,” I said aloud. “I couldn’t care less about them, but I still keep talking about them. Why is that?”
The last bit was more for myself than anyone else, but Greta still spoke.
“You were a child,” she responded, not as if she believed it, but as if she was reciting something someone else had told her. Nikephoros, probably.
“I am a child,” I amusedly corrected. “It felt like Tartarus. The thing I hated most wasn’t just the fear, though. It was the fact that my hands kept shaking. I couldn’t throw knives, I couldn’t hold plates—I couldn’t open the door to escape. And then I was Chosen right after that.”
I shook my head.
“I always knew that I had power, and if I accumulated enough of it I could escape, but it—like on the Cage, we managed to break the bars in the end. And they were right, we could’ve swam for it, but we didn’t know how the Gods would retaliate, and in the end—like it always, always does—it came down to what we knew and what we didn’t. And which of the two we use as an excuse for our own actions.”
And that was that.
The ‘knowledge is power’ thing was an excuse.
Saying that ‘it wouldn’t have mattered in the end’ was also an excuse.
Greta cleared her throat, uncharacteristically gently. “You do realize, sister, that whatever care you harbor for us, it is one developed under…less-than-ideal circumstances?”
I laughed.
“I hope you don’t think that I'm a fool just because I’m stereotypically sentimental,” I responded amusedly. “I do know that anything I feel for you all, the root cause might be a yearning for human connection and understanding, not you as people.”
And forgetting that would be somewhat fatal.
“But,” I conceded, “I can guarantee that I don’t want you all to die. Just because you can’t prove that the fact’s unrelated to my childhood experiences doesn’t mean you can, either. And if I don’t want you to die, then I’ll make sure you won’t.”
It was then that I tilted my head and met those green eyes.
“But just because I don’t want you to die, doesn’t mean I don’t think you deserve to. I’m hypocritical that way.”
Greta met my grin with a wry smile.
“I suppose I deserve that,” she admitted evenly. “At least, in your eyes.”
The air wasn’t cleared, but it didn’t deserve to be. It wasn’t right that way.
(Well, well, look what we have here, Seraphina, I thought mockingly, since when did you care about what’s right and what’s wrong?)
My self-mocking was interrupted by my sister speaking.
“Yet everything I do, I do for the Empire,” Greta the Great filled the silence, looking me in the eyes carefully. Under the light, her own were buried emeralds. “I ask you to remember that.”
Everything? I wanted to ask. No human, or even machine, was infallible, not even Greta the Great.
Yet the terrifyingly firm way she’d stated the words, as if she believed it fully and would make it so—as if her Wish was who she was, and she was nothing more than her desire to change the Empire—was absolutely petrifying.
And the fact that it was petrifying—the fact that her determination scared me—was what made me stop.
“So, you’re asking me whether I’m fighting for myself or the Empire,” I guessed, before sighing. “You really don’t mince words, do you?”
A pause.
“The short answer is, and always has been, myself.” The answer was prompt, and there was a thrill that shot through me at the fact that I was certain in what I said. “Yet it is likely that our goals will align for a long while, and I will fight for them as long as they do. I will be by your side, Milord, through glory and ruin, until the end.”
Sunlight was streaming through the gaps, and dappling the side of Greta’s pale face like warm paint. Her gaze was searching, but as it left my eyes it apparently had been satisfied.
“That will be enough,” she decided, getting up from her seat.
I stayed, smiling. “For now?” I asked, and she responded, surprisingly, with a grin.
“For now,” the Empress agreed.
I laughed.
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There was—someone laughing.
Julian opened his eyes to a throbbing headache and dulled pain. The world tilted on its axis and he winced, but then snapped back to blurs of colors that focused as he squinted.
What—
Memories of the explosion caused him to wince again, and then his ribs clenched in pain as dry hands immediately stabilized him.
“Don’t move,” said someone by his ear, mildly exasperated and equally amused. “Gods, Mari, I’ve seen go-getters and I’ve seen go-getters. I just cut out some of your skin—your injuries aren’t anything to scoff at, even for a Hero.”
It was a couple minutes before he groggily processed the voice.
“Sera?”
It was a few minutes before he could blink properly, and he came to a bloody tent. Bandages were wrapped around his chest and left leg, his arm in a deftly tied splint—crimson imprints of bodies on mats were next to bowls of muddied water and a table with glinting knives was beside him.
Seraphina’s face floated inches above him, and he grimaced as he leaned back, eyes flickering to the blob next to her that he was sure was a person. He squinted, and as the blonde hair—Cecilia?—and green-grey eyes came into view, he instantly tried to rise.
“At ease,” the enemy Empress said evenly, with remnants of glittering amusement that was shoved down in favor of neutrality. “Consul Julian Marius Romanus, son of Marcellus, son of Octavian. You are currently in the custody of the Empire Eoina as a captured enemy leader. Will you surrender?”
It was at that moment that Seraphina looked at Greta with undisguised—and surprisingly vulnerable—pained-ness, and then it was shut down in the favor of raised eyebrows.
“You shouldn’t be doing that to a newly recovering patient, Sister,” scolded the Princess. “You’ll tear his stitches.”
He didn’t feel any, Julian thought idly before he pulled himself back to the present. She was lying, because she isn’t joking. Why?
“I will not,” he bit, “surrender until I am able to consider the current situation properly. As of now, I am in no shape to do so, and of no use formally.” He met the Empress’ eyes with as much of his trademark stoniness as he could muster, but all he met was staunch coldness in turn.
“All of your troops are dead,” Greta responded bluntly, as if stating an observation. “Your Republic has almost fallen. The fire we have started will inevitably reach Honos’ walls, and there will be more losses if this continues. It wasn’t your choice to continue this fight.”
“It was,” he corrected, “maybe not like this, but I will take accountability for my actions, as is honorable.” The dig implying that Imperials were not didn’t affect Greta externally, but Greta was sure it hadn’t gone past the sharp-eyed Empress. “And so will Cecilia,” he added, “for those future losses you mentioned. But Roma will not surrender.”
“Not yet,” Greta acquiesced, “but soon. Will I have to drag every corpse on that battlefield before you to prove my point, boy?”
“And now we have been reduced to petty digs and statements of disdaining legitimacy,” responded Julian with a forced sigh. “How predictable.”
He ignored his injuries and leaned back, watching every minute reaction from the Empress’ person. There were none.
“I’d like to thank you, actually,” he continued, unfaltering like his father had been before him. “If the patricians are dead, then half of the work cleaning up has been done for me. It’s only a matter of time before Cecilia manages to supplant those in Honos and seize back power. We’ll fend off your flock of magpies, as we’ve done time and time again.”
There was a small snort.
“All bark and no bite,” observed Greta, tilting her head. “I have to say, I expected more from someone my younger sister praised to high heavens—you were much more tolerable in our Dayhepts together back in the Eternal City. Bluster and bluff don’t suit you.”
“Spite and pretentiousness aren’t a good look on you, either, Your Highness,” Julian agreed. “But, as they say, ‘how the mighty fall.’ If we’re both disappointed by each other, then we have nothing to blame but our own expectations.”
There was a moment as the Empress snorted again.
“I can see why Cyrus likes him,” she said, before shaking his head.
Likes. There was no pain in that expression, only distant stone and a spine of steel—a monstrosity of a human shaped as a vase or a tool of some sort, bent on only one person. Julian would’ve argued that the Empress knew nothing but conquering, but that statement would be inherently wrong: she knew nothing but moving forward, taking her Empire with her and dragging it in whatever direction she wanted to go. There would be no weight on her—no loved one, no armor, nothing to burden her shoulders—as she moved the Empire Eternal like a Crownpiece on a board.
Julian moistened his lips.
“If you Imperials even manage to take over our country,” he rasped, attempting to sit up and ignore the pangs in his lungs, “you’ll destroy it. Consume our culture and way of life until there’s nothing left—no more Twin Wolves, no more Curia, no more Senate. There’s a reason why we’re the balancer of the continent, the country with both Anothen and Kato. If you destroy our laws and our people, you destroy the peace. The Balance.”
A pale brow arched.
“It demonstrates much more of your nature than ours that the first thing you expect of us to destroy,” the Empress responded.
The bloodied tent flap fluttered in the horizon, and Julian’s gaze seared the muddied pails of water and soiled bandages. He could catch a sliver of night sky in the gap between translucent canvas, and the tangy flavor of smoke—it was noxious, like a cross between a cough and a poison, and as he felt the flames (internally, almost like a sixth sense) spread further, he lifted his chin.
“You already have,” said the boy, and rather than a ripple of dissatisfaction or any reaction, the former First Princess and Major of the Imperial Army merely blinked.
“Yes, I do suppose so,” Dionysus’ Chosen agreed, and in the background Seraphina with her ever-watchful eyes met her sister’s gaze.
There was a moment—a silent exchange—where a faint smile was on the Princess’ face, residual and ghostly, and then Greta’s lips quirked as if Seraphina had said something funny.
“Very well, we’ll let you rest,” the Empress decided, as if acquiescing to an invisible request. “Since you must be tired after taking care of His Consulship, Third Princess, I’ll send the Second Prince to look after Consul Romanus. I’m sure they’ll get along perfectly.”
Julian had two thoughts simultaneously—he fought back an internal grimace, for one, because no one could ever get along perfectly with Arathis Delawar; and watched as the Empress left the tent and thought faintly of what other plans the enemy would have.
All of that was overpowered by a sense of shame.
When he was younger, he’d had a phase where he read those philosophical books that talked about everything and nothing, and those descriptions of empty cups and empty souls had always made him pause for longer than he needed to.
If he wanted to, Julian vaguely thought, he could’ve broken free from constraints like pride and honor and loyalty. He could’ve thrown his purple cape to the wind and became like those flighty scions on the street, drinking wine from the amphora and paying courtesans to feed him grapes. He could follow the wind, chasing even a whisper of that thing everyone called ‘true freedom,’ but rather than fear, it felt like the boy named Julian Marius Romanus had been born with a grim sort of resignation in his heart.
A resignation that, as the only child of Marcellus Romanus, he would be the praetor, and after that the Consul, and after that have a child who would be the next praetor and the next Consul. Anything else would be a fundamental betrayal—dishonorable.
And if he didn’t have his honor and his country, what would he have?
His thoughts were interrupted by the drip-drip of water, and he dimly registered Seraphina sinking her hands in a pail and drying them off before replacing one of the lit candles with another one.
It was almost sunrise, and Julian wished his fiancee would put her hands around his neck and strangle him already, because the thought of failing his country was worse than death.
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War was war.
Cecilia watched the fire come closer with her fists tightened, watching from the balcony as people swarmed with their bags and carriages. They were like ants climbing over a piece of dripping sugar—bait—as they rushed to move outside the city.
And where?
Gloria, likely, she thought. Julian’s Stronghold, the home of the wave of monsters that the Union of the Forbidden had been struggling with at the Source—it was trading in a rock for a hard place, out of the metaphorical pan and into the fire. But there was no other choice.
It’s a choice and they’re making it, the first thought she summoned was.
But then Cecilia saw a girl sitting in front of her.
If you had the choices I did, she said, some sort of fire stirring behind her eyes, every choice you would make—every road you would take—would be bad ones to you.
They had no other choice.
She had no other choice.
Cecilia’s fingers tightened as she turned around and faced the two large doors of the makeshift Senate hall.
And then she took a small breath in, adjusting the Consul regalia on her shoulder, and kicked the door open before the herald could begin the first syllable of her name.
War is war, after all.
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