Prince Zai exchanges no words with his father.

Even as he stands he keeps his eyes pinned forward, staring outward to the awaiting imperial aerostatic idling on the tarmac. He feels the breath of that ruler upon his shoulder, so close to some lauded Lord of the Dominion; ruler of a dying nation.

Yet here, he couldn’t even see him as anything more than that. Yes he was some commanded King from tradition and some shred of religious obligation, but as a patriarch… or even father?

He watches in his periphery as his partner finishes her ritual, that shared hug between mother and daughter cutting some deep wound held within his heart.

Even if that was some charade, a facade of familial love from the ruthless royals of House Elise, he still wanted to feel it. To even pretend to have a connection of that nature, maternal, paternal… to feel wanted by his own blood not for political purposes but for the simple sake of family.

So much jealousy that he doesn’t notice the tears forming at the edge of Lord Tianci’s almond eyes, at the soul crushing emotion emerging across the old man’s face. How, in the hours preceding this ritual, the Lord of the Dominion clutched one of his son’s coats, still draped across a chair in his abandoned guest quartering, and cried for him. How he held his son’s empty article in his hands and begged for his forgiveness in deathly solitude.

I’m sorry my son… I’m so sorry…

And he still stares forward as his son passes him without a single acknowledgement, one more trade in his awful life completed: his royal dignity for the greatest gift his love gave him.

Prince Zai had only seen an aerostatic up close just once in his life.

Almost a decade ago, in the midst of the Great Starving, he had been witness to one of the many relief efforts pouring into his country. In the frigid depths of winter in an abandoned cornfield turned airfield, he had looked up and watched quietly as these massive steel behemoths came to land. How, as the wisps of his frozen breath were carried away by their beating engines, he was stunned both in amazement and terror at the angular, brutal forms that defied even basic physics.

And since that day a part of him always wanted to fly on one; to experience the wind and freedom like the Dominion’s golden hawk, to see the world from an entirely new, magical perspective: away from the starvation, the mud, the death.

But this monster before him was no aerostatic laden with food for the starving or medicine for the sick. This animal was something more awful, bred for one purpose and one purpose only.

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Stowed, but very much visible, the long barrels of bombardment cannons stick out like the exposed ribs of a decaying skeleton. Their gunnery turrets pointed forward in innocent landing positions, but yet still a purpose for this machine was left without any sort of ambiguity to even the most uneducated observer:

Carried within its arcanite soul was atrocity. Made to soar above cities and pummel them to rubble, to burn to the ground what took centuries of civilization to build.

The rushed profile and intelligence report Dominion Intelligence had provided him (crash assembled and transmitted by radio just mere hours prior), had given him at least a cursory understanding of this vehicle that would be carrying him back home. How this state of the art aerostatic Battlecruiser was the flagship of what once was a landlocked Fourth Legion: a once less than stellar garrison transformed into some of the finest aerostatic forces under the close guidance of… what was assumed to be their Fourth Princess (her signatures were on all the documents that the Dominion had managed to intercept in recent times).

The Argent Dawn was a little over six hundred feet long and displaced what was gathered to be between twelve to thirty thousand tons of weight (estimating aerostatic weights was nearly impossible given their aerial circumstances). A narrow shape like an oceangoing vessel, but alien enough in its strange, semi-bulbous body that some instinctual part of his own psyche screams to run.

She once made the newsreels in Tianci three years ago, how this vessel’s simple shakedown run brought her through an entire circumnavigation of their world over the course of a short four weeks. Just under half a month it took for one of the most heavily armed vessels in the empire to access every corner of their world, a demonstration of both the imperium’s technological prowess and a reminder to all nations: that an incendiary bombing campaign on their cities was always at most two weeks away.

And this close, it dwarfed them all; threatening to swallow them like some filter feeding whale.

This aerostatic was a skyscraper turned onto its side, each armor plate welded onto its hull the size of entire motor carriages and gunnery turret the size of an apartment. Even the legionaries color scheme of the Fourth Legion, represented here by a dark, royal purple streak that ran diagonally across the entire hull, made it feel like the vessel was in the midst of collapsing right on top of them.

Zai’s awe is quickly tempered by his logic, and he places his vision back towards the loading ramp of the vessel.

A few steps behind his… wife (the term seemed wholly inappropriate), he was nothing more than a prisoner being led to the stockade. Hands in his formal robes held in front of his lower abdomen, bound together with interlocked fingers and a quiet contemplation.

Arriving at the edge of the cargo loading ramp the couple stops, the last moment of this rite simple and symbolic as they ascend the cold, padded steel.

Don’t look back, never look back once you have said goodbye. Spare yourself from this memory, spare yourself from the pain of reminiscence.

But Prince Zai looks back, and for an infinitesimally small moment in time he locks eyes with his father who breaks the covenant as well.

And then he continues to walk, boarding the instrument of his own death.