“Damn them,” the Emperor muttered. “Damn them all.”

Verune turned his gaze to Eustin, Emperor of Trenton, Protector of the Costranaks, Vanguard of the Faith. The man of one and fifty sat with his elbows pressing down ungainly on a grand tabletop, wearing his red double-breasted suit, golden epaulets dangling from his shoulders like an overburdened mantlepiece, his chest encrusted with self-awarded medals, the prizes of victories that need never have been won. The Emperor’s military cap barely contained his wild brown curls. Ambition gleamed in his eyes beneath the weight of his frustrated brow. He had a queer, bimodal personality, dominated by his fervid concern for his worldly legacy and his shameless obsequiousness in all matters of religion.

The Emperor took another sip from his wine glass.

Eustin’s wife, the Empress Phila, sat on the end of the table opposite the Emperor. Her Majesty was busily venting her stress by continuously waving her jewel-encrusted fan. The Empress was a socialite down to her bones, charming and charismatic—except when discomfited. It was the Empire’s misfortune that much discomfited her: stress, children, indolence; louts who didn’t know their place.

“This is the work of extremists, Eustin,” Phila said. “It is the enemy within. The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.” The Empress glared at her husband. “This is what you get for treating them too softly.”

“I blame my father,” the Emperor said. “This falls on his shoulders. He was a heathen in Emperor’s clothing. My father allowed the people to forget their responsibilities. To forget God!” He shook his head. “As if there could be anything of value apart from the Godhead and the Bond of Light.”

“Indeed,” another voice said, interjecting, “our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.”

The speaker was the Emperor’s brother, Quinis—the Duke of Angel’s Rest. The Duke sat around the corner of the table next to Eustin, eyes and fingers clasped shut in nervous contemplation. Quinis rarely spoke, but made up for it with a truly prodigious pen. So astonishing were his spiritual insights that the Duke had the honor of being the only member of the Imperial family to ever be elected to the College of Angelic Doctors. Verune had never been able to shake the eerie awe he felt in the man’s presence, and many were the nights when the Lassedite had prayed that the Angel might grant him a faith even half as unshakeable as the Duke’s.

Verune had once asked the Duke for his opinion on the oft-debated question of the omnipotence of Godhead. Could the Moonlight Queen create a triangle whose angles enclosed more or less than half of a full turn?

“Truth is the ultimate end of the whole world,” Duke Quinis had replied. “There does not fall under the scope of the Godhead’s omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction. Since the principles of certain sciences, such as logic, geometry and arithmetic are taken only from the formal principles of things, on which the essence of the thing depends, it follows that the Godhead could not make things contrary to these principles, such as your antithetical triangle.”

Verune’s only response had been to nod in acknowledgement. Some aspects of the faith were, by their very nature, irreducible mysteries.

Surely, the Duke’s wisdom was one of them.

Meanwhile, the Emperor’s eyes kept wandering over to the windows.

“Is something wrong?” Phila asked him.

Eustin nodded. “I fear for the people. This will stain their souls.” His voice spiked into a yell as he slammed his fist on the table. “The audacity! Do they not care for each other’s eternal fates?” He ran his other hand through his hair. “How can these damn Blueshirts stand against the Empire? My rule was ordained by the Angel Himself! Are their hearts so hardened that they would stand against God’s will?” He shook his head. “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand this at all.”

Verune sighed quietly. Biting his lip, he pressed his skullcap down on his head. He felt like a teapot that had been left on the stove for too long. It took all of his self-control to keep himself from screaming.

Damn it, Julian, he thought.

The previous Emperor, Eustin’s father, Julian, had gone to his grave convinced that Verune would miss him when he was gone. Though Verune hadn’t believed him then, he did now. He hadn’t fully appreciated Eustin’s churlishness until Julian’s passing.

Though no one outside of the palace knew it, Emperor Julian had been an unabashed apostate. The old man had made it the mission of his twilight years to challenge and belittle Lassedicy at every turn. It was as if he was trying to compensate for the false front of a faithful ruler he put on for his subjects’ sake. Every year, on Orrin’s birthday, Julian sent Verune two letters. The first would be from the Emperor himself, and would denounce the Lassedite as a child-stealer, among many other nasty monickers. The second would come from Orrin’s biological parents.

Those Sunbaskers never gave up.

They kept trying to steal Orrin away. They would defy the Angel Himself and deprive their son the Angelical upbringing his Light-baptism entitled him. Verune burned every one of the Nadkilas’ letters. Seeing them would have only upset Orrin, and he refused to cause the poor boy any more grief.

Verune had cheered at the news of the old man’s death, thrilled by the thought of finally getting an Emperor who actually professed the one true faith. Now, he was pining for the days when the closeted apostate on the throne had been the worst of worries. Yes, Julian might have been a heretic, but at least he didn’t chase after war like it was a naked woman. Also, Eustin’s father had had an unreasonably sharp wit for an Emperor. Meanwhile, Eustin was a dour, humorless spirit who went about enforcing the Bond with all the subtlety of a medieval inquisitor.

He’d purged the universities of anyone but believing Angelical Lassediles. Neangelicals—Sunbaskers, Irredemptists, Oatsmen, and the rest—had their property confiscated and their bodies sold into slavery, to man the steel mills and mechanical looms, alongside the pagans—the Costranaks, the Maikokans—and political dissidents. The Imperial bureaucracy accepted these “reforms” without complaint, as did the Emperor’s cabinet of ministers. Outside of the government, the Trusts adored slavery; the Rousas Trust, General Oil, and the Five Slaughterhouses all cheered the early years of Eustin’s reign. Unpaid labor was quite a boon to the economy. And, though Eustin’s methods were somewhat excessive, Verune had to admit they kept the non-believers in line.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

Still, it would be better to keep the people in chains than to allow Hilleman to trigger the end of the world.

The common folk barely had the capacity to determine right from wrong; they had no business on deciding policy. Unfortunately, wealth—as always—was toxic to faith and righteousness. The Trusts and the ministers all sided with the Blueshirts. In the battle between money and God, money would always win. War with Polovia would cut the Trenton economy off from the rest of the continent, and the Polovians were infamous for keeping grudges—maddening nationalists, the lot of them.

They’re still upset about Princess Biluše, and that was in the First Crusades, over a thousand years ago!

Verune had tried to talk Eustin down from the warpath, but the Emperor was nothing if not hot-headed. The man had been blinded by his own piety.

For Verune, the biggest shock was learning the moneyed elites had thrown their lot in with Hilleman. The nouveaux riches could have had Eustin killed, just like they’d done with Julian’s father, but, apparently, they’d decided the Empire simply wasn’t worth the trouble. Hilleman’s plan to free the slaves would raise the Trusts’ profits more than the continuation of slavery under the Eustin’s rule.

Eustin’s finance minister—a man by the name of Bork—had explained it to Verune when he’d dropped by after breakfast to gloat at the Imperial family.

“It costs more to feed and clothe slaves than it would to pay workers a meager wage.”

Verune looked out the window once more.

Greedy devils all…

“How can they do this?!”

The yell came from a man pacing in a tight, frantic loop in the space between Verune and the Emperor’s table. This was Salman Staples, the Archluminer of Elpeck.

The Archluminer gesticulated wildly.

Like all clergymen of his august station, the Archluminer wore the bluejay robe: a white cassock with a gold skullcap atop his head, and a sea-blue pellegrina perched on his shoulders. The cyan sash around his waist fluttered as he paced. Staples had hung his black stole on the back of a chair after the stole kept sliding off while he stormed about. And even if you didn’t remember the robe classifications—for there were many—the holy sigil embroidered on Staples’ cassock, above his chest, signified to any who saw it that its wearer was part of the clergy’s upper echelons.

“Have they taken leave of their senses?” Archluminer Staples said, throwing his hands in the air as he turned around.

Verune sighed. Staples had been rambling on that subject for a while now, and the Lassedite’s patience was wearing thin.

“Calm yourself, Archluminer.” The Emperor cleared his throat loudly. “Doubtless, you are disturbing the Holy Lassedite.”

Ordinarily, it would be beneath Emperor Eustin’s station to instruct his subordinates on matters of propriety. But these were hardly ordinary times.

To Verune, it seemed like it had only minutes ago since defiant Blueshirts had stormed into his chambers in the Melted Palace, yanked him out of bed and frogmarched him and his most sycophantic Archluminer to the Imperial Palace, to join Emperor Eustin and his family in house arrest while the revolutionaries went about re-ordering the world in defiance of God. The blasphemous rebels had nearly shot him dead then and there when they’d mistaken him walking to his dressing room as an attempt to fetch a weapon.

“Throw me in the street if you so desire,” he’d told them, “but, so help me, I will not let you defrock the Angel’s ordained minister on this earth—not so long as I draw breath! You will see me as I am,” he’d said. “Let this sin be burned into your memories.”

As for Verune himself, he wore the Hummingbird Robe—the garb of the Lassedite. The robe was an echo of the sacred bird, wrapped in a lustrous golden cope—a semblance of the Sun’s holy Light—matched to his golden skullcap. Verune’s vestments were iridescent. Cerulean, emerald, and teal formed a scallop pattern on his cassock, scintillating beneath the ruby red pellegrina pleated over his chest and shoulders. Yet—as Staples loved to tell him—the robes were mere embers next to Verune’s brilliant green eyes.

All he could do now was hope that some faction of Imperial loyalists would rise up and quash the rebellion before it was too late. Otherwise, the Templars would have to get involved.

“Please, Archluminer,” the Empress groaned, “cease your yelling.” Her fanning quickened.

“Mother, please,” Prince Gus said, “we cannot presume to know the Archluminer’s thoughts. His vision of the faith goes deeper than anyone else in this room, save for the Holy Lassedite himself.”

Verune didn’t bother acknowledging Gus’ complement.

The Crown Prince Gus was his father’s shadow; he had a glass conscience, one as fragile as it was clear. Gus spent several hours each day sequestered away in prayer. As an adolescent, one evening, Gus summoned Verune to his private chambers, and when the Lassedite arrived, he’d found the Crown Prince standing stark naked, still covered in his own fluids, fresh from his discovery the sin of self-pleasure. The only reason Verune got any sleep that night was because he’d managed to convince the Prince that having himself executed as punishment for his bodily sin would constitute suicide in the Moonlight Queen’s eyes, and therefore posed an even greater threat to his soul than mere masturbation.

But that was just Gus being Gus.

Not a day went by where the Crown Prince wasn’t convinced the Moonlight Queen had finally condemned him to Hell. No one in the world—not even Verune himself—viewed the Primordial Sin with as much dread as Eustin’s eldest child did. Gus believed that mankind’s defiance of the Angel’s will at the dawn of creation had so corrupted the soul of the race that human beings were incapable of willing good, save for with the intercession of the Angel’s grace.

Much like his father, the Prince loved nothing more than to share his faith with the masses. Most infamously, the Prince had ordered the liquidation of every poorhouse in the capital, for the edification of the destitute. Gus aided the poor by giving them what he felt they truly needed: a spiritual intervention. Instead of food and wages at the poorhouse, he prescribed the poor a strict regimen of prayer, fasting, and scripture, with rounds of vigorous flogging to soften the hearts of the more obstinate among them. So long as evil dwelled within their bodies, sustenance would only encourage their sins.

“Sinners are quite obdurate, as I’m sure you’re well aware,” the Prince had once said. “They need to see what I have seen and understand the depths of their depravity and brokenness before they can truly accept the Angel into their hearts. Only then will the understand that the Angel is their only salvation. As the Elder Voices say, He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent.”

In truth, the Prince wasn’t wrong. But, speaking the naked truth as he did frightened the secular mind. Had Gus been more tactful, perhaps the ministers might not have sided with Hilleman.

Verune sighed.

“Open a window, would you?” Empress Phila said, addressing one of the family’s servants.

The two elders—George-Donald, and Madeleine—would be going down with the rest of the ship of state.

“No, Mother,” Gus said. He turned to the servants. “George-Donald, Madeleine: keep them closed.”

For a moment, the Prince looked reverently at Verune.

“The songs of the rabble would harm the Lassedite’s ears,” Gus said. “It is pollution, and Church and State should be guarded from it as much as possible.”

And so the foyer would remain stuffy—though it was little trouble to Verune. Years of breathing in thick, incensed fumes from swinging thuribles had built up his tolerance to minor discomforts, as had his exposure to the Imperial family. Maintaining close personal ties with the Imperials was part of Verune’s charge as the leader of the faith. Many were the dark nights when he prayed to the Angel for strength and guidance for dealing with them. They were merely human, just like Verune himself, with all the foibles that came with it.

The Empire rose and fell with the quality of its rulers, and—like any crop—humanity was by no means guaranteed to produce a good harvest. Was it the ideal system of government? No—but, so long as man sinned, no form of government would be ideal. All would fall short of the Angel’s expectations. But Empire was their only option. The Godhead had proclaimed it so, and no man had the right to question that, not even a Lassedite.

That is why the Empire must endure.

And it was why Verune had faith the Angel would not allow His chosen government to fall, not after having raised it back up from the ashes of the Munine Interregnum. Indeed, the Church had planned for all contingencies.

Even revolution.

O Holy Angel, guard Thy servants as they do Thy holy works.