Suraiya rode atop Valour with a subtle sense of unease pulling at her spirit. Her eyes roamed outward from where she sat atop her Courser, observing the faces and gazes of thousands of people while Lycinia led her and her companions through one of the main thoroughfares of Sanctuary.

They moved six abreast, and it was all Suraiya could do not to be distracted by the riot of eclectic colours, and artistic expressions rampant within the city. She was used to attention as the daughter of a King, and Princess-Royal of Stormharrow; but that was in her own home.

Stormharrow was a place of comfort, security, and inherent strength.

Sanctuary was definitely not Stormharrow, and not a place she felt in control.

Everywhere she looked, her eyes met discerning, weighing, and intelligent gazes. Every story she’d heard, every tale she’d been told, and every single legend and myth had painted Elyseans as monsters that had nearly shattered the world. They had been condemned as tyrants that had driven the people of the Prime Material into an age of hedonistic overindulgence, apostasy, and dark magic.

Yet these people, no matter how often she searched or attempted to find traces of such horror, were utterly different from every tale she’d been told. They were calm, confident, well-nourished and—perhaps most shockingly of all—healthier-looking than all but the wealthiest of Stormharrow’s citizenry.

The hardiness and grime of the working class had always been something she’d simply taken for granted, and seen as a cruel reality of their lot in life.

The lower classes toiled, and led lives of hard labour in return for grace, and favour from the gods for their services. The aristocracy, anointed by the Nine, rewarded them with coin and patronage in return for skilled work. It was a system of give and take, of effort and reward. It was, she’d been taught, a foundational aspect of the Religion that governed the largest nation on Terra.

In that moment, the once-evident merits of that very faith were shattering before her eyes.

The fundamental belief which anchored the class system in the Grand Ascendancy was a simple one: each person had a place, as ordained by the Divine, and attempting to upend or upset that hierarchy was implicitly an act of chaos. It created division, strife, and ruined the peaceful efficiency of a stratified system.

That belief, in all of its ironclad lack of flexibility, had been instilled in her from as far back as she could remember She had been taught to not only abide by it, but to enforce and defend it so as to prevent chaos and societal collapse. She had believed, with every iota of her being, that such was the only way to ensure peace, prosperity, and civil order.

In the presence of the people that walked the streets of Sanctuary, all of those points were undermined, weakened, and shown to be built on pillars of sand.

“You look troubled, Suraiya.” Lycinia said from below while holding Valour’s bridle.

“I am seeing the fabric of my belief system turned on its head.” the princess admitted. “The people here are so healthy, and clearly not lacking for funds or amenities. Certainly, there is a clear wealth disparity in the presentation of some compared to others, but there is not a single hungry or sickly person, nor any individual that looks perpetually dirtied or attired in threadbare clothing. It is wonderful, and yet terrifying at the same time.”

“Mm.” Lycinia hummed thoughtfully. “You’re talking about the comparison to the stratification edicts in the Ascendancy, I take it?”

“Yes.”

Lycinia nodded in a way that showed understanding before she spoke again.

“Elyseans do not hold to the ideas of aristocracy in the way that the Nine have demented it. We believe that a Patrician—that is a noble, in your nomenclature—holds a responsibility of noblesse oblige to those below them. It is the privilege of the superior to defend and protect the safety and well-being of those subordinate to them. The System is not forgiving, and adversity is its natural course, but that does not mean we should allow nor indulge in cruelty or deprivation.”

“It is not seen as cruelty to encourage hard work and the earning of rewards,” Suraiya said when Lycinia finished, “and it is not that I do not think there is merit to the idea of placing adversity upon the common people in order to encourage their growth, but it strikes me now that we have conflated adversity—in the context of the System—with deprivation, and by our own hands.”

Suraiya sighed quietly, and felt a mix of anxious guilt and self-reproaching nausea rising within her. “I can suddenly find no good argument as to why the lowest among my citizens must live in squalor. Two days prior, I would have said that while harsh, it encouraged their spirits to overcome, and helped bring a coldly necessary order to society. Now though…”

Lycinia merely nodded, her red hair gently tousled by the breeze in the valley. “It is the mark of a wise woman to be able to so quickly, and insightfully, pick up on the fallacies of the logic involved.”

She paused to gesture airily around them, and then continued.

“Poverty does not create drive, it merely perpetuates resentment and ferments more poverty, and more crime. We have always understood, in Elysea, that adversity can be delivered absent the need for institutionalised marginalism. Challenge does not require deprivation of personal well-being, and in fact, such circumstances can directly impede someone’s ability to properly rise to the occasion.”

Suraiya laughed mirthlessly.

“You must think me an air-headed fool for never seeing this before,” the princess said with quiet shame burning in her breast. “I feel so blind, Lycinia, and so stupid. It is so reasonable, when confronted by it, to realise that a basic subsistence encourages the pursuit of greater accumulation of luxury. A small bit of aid on a harsh path often encourages someone to take another step by their own merit, after all.” Suraiya shook her head in a mix of disbelief and bitter self-recrimination. “Why is that so obvious now, and not before?”

“Because those with privilege rarely comprehend the lack thereof,” Lycinia answered simply, “and those without it cannot imagine the reality of having it.”

The Elysean woman glanced back to meet Suraiya’s gaze, and her jade eyes were intent and focused. “The gods have tied all of you into a neat little cycle of targeted repudiation, with each stratum of society believing the other to be so far removed as to be, in essence, separate existences.” Lycinia smiled sadly and looked back at the passing faces. “You have no more evident relation to the beggar in the street, Suraiya, than a cutpurse has to your royal father. And yet…”

“...we are all fundamentally the same when given identical, or even similar circumstances.” Suraiya finished with quiet shame. “What truly sets me apart from a weaver’s daughter, or a pretty tavern maid? Nothing.” the princess admitted while fighting against slumping in self-recrimination in her saddle.

Only her training and instinctive understanding of a need to project confidence, grace, and some measure of control kept her back straight, and her expression somewhere between thoughtful and placid. “In what I wager would be many cases; I am more plain, less learned, and far more naive to the truths of the world.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Lycinia disagreed, with a mischievous smile evident in her tone. “You are plenty gorgeous, princess. Even I am not so callous as to rob you of that truth. No matter where you go, you would be considered a rare beauty.”

Suraiya felt a blush warm her cheeks. “You are teasing me.”

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“A little.” Lycinia admitted with a musical laugh. “But it’s also the truth.”

“Thank you for your kind words, Lycinia.” Suraiya said with another genuine rush of appreciation, and further warming of her cheeks. “I will endeavour not to let it go to my head.”

“It’s not your head I’m worried about.” the redhead replied cryptically.

Suraiya could hear that laugh in the words, but they made no sense to her.

She simply attributed it to some unknown element of Elysean humour, and instead turned her gaze from the mildly discomforting and world-shattering appearance of the crowd, and toward the approaching gates of the valley’s citadel. Lycinia had told her it was called Last Hope by the denizens of Sanctuary.

A fitting name given the remnant’s dire situation.

They might have been thriving in their isolated pocket within the Desolation, but it was only by the measurement of a civilisation that should have been dead. When compared to the Grand Ascendancy and its myriad of subordinate Kingdoms and Principalities, with whom Lycinia had made it clear Sanctuary considered themselves at war; there was no comparison.

The denizens of Sanctuary were puppies in conflict with a Wyvern, by comparison.

When they ascended the slow incline from the main thoroughfare, and toward the first of the three main gates leading past the triplicate walls and into the citadel’s massive bailey, Suraiya found herself tracing her eyes over the walls themselves. They appeared to be seamless and solid, with no markings for joinings, nor signs of worked stone.

In fact, and much to her hidden surprise, the citadel’s fortifications weren’t stone at all; they were metal. Reinforced, heavily layered, and massively high sheets of pure alloy that ever-so-slightly shimmered with runic choirs spread like dancing sparks across their surfaces. The sheer scale of it made her feel faint, and she struggled not to gape like a country girl seeing a city for the first time.

Such a feat of construction would have had every noble house in the Ascendancy in an uproar. It defied everything they knew of plausible building methods.

The only thing like it, the only thing close to it, was the Lunar Gate, and the walls of Holy Solarium itself; the Capital City and Seat of the Grand Ascendant. Only there could she imagine such mastery of craft being matched, or even exceeded. This citadel, Last Hope, was something out of legend. It was something out of a time long lost, and believed myth by her peers and tutors. Her lessons had taught her that the Lunar Gate, and Holy Solarium itself, were a work of the divine.

Yet this citadel was Elysean, and there was no way the Nine had built it for them.

Lies. She realised with mounting uncertainty. My whole life has been based on lies.

She could feel the same unease spreading among those behind her like a wave, and crashing through their understandings of what was and wasn’t true. It was one thing to refute words and ideas as heresy or madness, and Suraiya knew some of her Knights would have stubbornly done just that; but it was wholly another to be confronted by evidence.

Certainly, she could have deluded herself into an argument that turned the entire scenario into some ostentatious tale of theft and skullduggery by the Elyseans, but Suraiya had never been one to wallow in denials.

She instead had to face a sudden and inviolable truth: the world was not as she had believed.

Which begged another question: how much of what she had been taught was a lie, and how much of what Lycinia had said was complete truth?

The thought of how terribly the Nine might have fooled every soul in the Grand Ascendancy, and for how many countless centuries, left a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had prayed to Solarius every week of her life since she could remember, worshipping the God of Light with duty and devotion. She had offered her faith to Him and granted Him her benediction and reverence. She had dreamed of becoming a Paladin one day, and riding at the head of a host of the Anointed.

Now the very idea of it left a cold fear at the base of her spine.

What if Lycinia was right? What if the gods were immortal despots?

And if so, how many of her people were already irrevocably enslaved?

Suraiya let the chilling thought flow through her, and then pushed it aside a moment later—determined not to let the weight of that consideration distract her. Lycinia had told her that they were to see the ‘Regent’, who was the apparent leader of the Sanctuary, and the one that would decide the fate of Suraiya’s entire convoy.

It would be a disservice to those that had joined her on the expedition if she were too distracted, or too shaken, to properly represent them in a negotiation with the mysterious ‘Regent’. Every attempt at prying any information out of Lycinia about the Regent’s personality, capabilities, or even their name had proven unsuccessful. The grinning redhead had simply referred to them, again, as ‘Calamity’ and left it as such.

When asked what the name even meant, Lycinia had just winked in a knowing way.

Sometimes, for all that she was beautiful and clearly intelligent, the redhead had the recalcitrance and mischievous humour of a child.

Suraiya put that frustration, too, aside and focused on the path ahead.

Onward their journey took them, through the first of the three gates and past guards attired in brilliant golden platemail, the ornamentation and decoration of which was a shocking blend of practicality, and salutary extravagance.

Suraiya had never seen such a seamless blend between ceremonial armour and practical wargear, and had almost stopped Valour mid-trot just to gawk at the elegance of the plate. When questioning Lycinia about the warriors, she had been told that they were part of the ‘Aegii’, and no more.

The word had no context to Suraiya’s mind, and when she had covertly attempted an Analyse, she had been met by a saturation of question marks and a shifting of the full-faced plumed helmet of the unidentified warrior she’d attempted to assess. The Princess had ducked her head in contrition under the guard’s veiled gaze, and as if satisfied at the gesture, the golden warrior had returned to their eyes-forward vigil without incident.

The blush of embarrassment when Lycinia had chided her afterward was almost worth the information even a veiled set of details offered.

Gorgeous and practical armour, information that cannot be Analysed, and a clear position of reverence among the Elyseans. Suraiya listed off mentally. There is a symbolic importance to these warriors. I’ll have to find out more.

She filed the task away under ‘future efforts’ while being led further in, through the layered gates, and up the rising incline.

When at last they reached the citadel’s bailey, Lycinia looked up at her and nodded to the ground. “Here’s where you walk, princess. Having you on your horse so far was good for people to get a look at you, and that’s why I let you stay—but there’s no sense in traipsing a bunch of excrement emitters into the castle proper. The stablehands will take care of your mount, and those of your companions.”

Suraiya glanced back at her Knights, the adventurers, and the civilian support staff before nodding once to Lycinia. “Alright. Where should we—?”

“They’re already coming to collect the horses. They will handle them as well as I do, worry not.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that actually,” Suraiya said while swinging her leg over Valour’s saddle and dropping to the ground, “since Valour was trained as a warhorse, nobody but myself and his trusted handlers have been able to approach him.”

“It’s a thing of Soulforce.” Lycinia replied without obfuscation. “An easy enough trick to learn, and one which deals with Animal Empathy. I’ll teach it to you later, assuming…” she trailed off and smiled enigmatically. “Well, let’s just say I’ll teach it to you later.”

Suraiya felt herself grow wary at the implied end of Lycinia’s words—the several possible implied endings—but was committed to her path by that point. It was hardly as if the remnant were just going to let them all walk out, after all, after discovering the illicit Elysean hideout in the middle of the Desolation. Suraiya had realised upon entering Sanctuary, and with some trepidation, that she might be lost to her old life entirely.

She still hadn’t even begun to truly process that, but it might have been because having an existential crisis, or panicked meltdown in the middle of what was essentially a diplomatic envoy—in her eyes, at least—was outside of her scope of ‘good life choices’.

The convoy was counting on her. Tempered strength had taken them as far as it could. She might have been a novice in the battlefield, but this scenario was wholly different to the Desolation and its myriad nightmares.

Now was the time for diplomacy, oratory, and leadership.

And Suraiya had been trained in all three since birth.