Chapter I: The Space Before
I have been told that kings are not supposed to enjoy paperwork.
This is, in my experience, incorrect. The administration of Veldran was not glamorous. It was not the subject of imperial ballads. It was tariff disputes and water rights and the occasional petition from some farmer in the outer townships who believed, with admirable conviction, that his neighbor’s irrigation channel was diverting two percent more rainfall than the law permitted. It was small. It was mine. And I liked it considerably more than I was supposed to admit.
My father had been dead for eight months. His final act as King had been to carry his morning tea to the window and watch the sun rise over Janteen Ridge, the last time he would ever do so. I was told he smiled. I believe it. He was a man who found enormous satisfaction in small things, which was probably why he ruled a planet the rest of the Empire regarded as a curiosity rather than a power, and did so with such unhurried grace.
I had inherited his contentment. I was not sure I deserved it.
The estate office was mine now, which meant the accumulated evidence of my father’s tenure had been gently replaced by the accumulated evidence of mine. His maps remained on the walls. I had kept them. They were old, beautifully rendered in the cartographic style of three generations past, and they showed Veldran as it had looked when the family first arrived to govern it. Something about the idea of removing them felt wrong in a way I couldn’t fully articulate. Removing his maps would have meant accepting that his era was fully over. That mine had fully begun. I wasn’t ready for that, and I didn’t pretend otherwise. Not in private.
“You’ve been staring at that petition for twenty minutes,” Marro said.
She was in the chair beside the window, feet tucked beneath her in the way that drove the household staff to quiet distraction, her own reading discarded face-down on the sill. She did not look up when she spoke. She rarely did when she was stating something obvious.
“I’m reading it,” I said.
“You were reading it for the first five. For the last fifteen, you’ve been somewhere else entirely.”
I set the petition down. “It’s about the Hethron family’s mining concession in the northern quadrant. They’re claiming an expansion of rights that nobody authorized.”
“I know. You told me when it arrived.” She did look at me then, the particular look she’d had since we were children, patient and faintly amused, like a tutor who expects the correct answer eventually and is simply waiting for the student to locate it. “The question isn’t what it says. The question is what you’re going to do about it.”
“I’m aware of what the question is, Marro.”
“You’re eighteen. You’re allowed to not know the answer yet.”
“A king who doesn’t know the answer to a mining petition is not going to inspire tremendous confidence in his court.”
She tilted her head. “Good thing you only have twelve people in your court, then. Including the court physician, who is ninety years old and mostly concerned with his own health.”
I laughed, despite myself. That was Marro’s particular ability: to locate the absurdity in things I was treating with excessive gravity and present it to me with such perfect calibration that I couldn’t be irritated. The laugh never felt like a retreat. It felt like a correction.
“The Hethrons are testing,” she said, swinging her feet back to the floor and sitting up, the casual posture replaced in an instant by something more deliberate. “They know your father has been dead for less than a year. They know you’re new. This petition is not about the mining rights.”
“I know.”
“It’s about whether you respond at all, and how long it takes you, and whether the response sounds like a king or a boy reading something his advisors prepared for him.”
I looked at her. Sixteen years old. Sitting in the chair beside my window with the afternoon light catching the dark of her hair, explaining court dynamics to me with the serene confidence of someone who had been studying them like scripture since before she could properly read. Her family had sent her to us when she was young, to learn the ways of a royal household. That had been the formal language of it. My father had been fond of her immediately, had called her preternaturally shrewd and never meant it as anything but praise. He had treated her like a daughter, which meant he had treated her like family, which meant he had let her say exactly what she thought, as long as she said it well.
She had never failed to say it well.
“Write it yourself,” she said. “Don’t let Harven draft it. He’ll make it sound like a legal instrument, and legal instruments are exactly what the Hethrons are hoping for, something they can argue against clause by clause. Write it in your own voice. Make it short. Make it clear. Make it sound like a man who never doubted for a second that the answer was no.”
“And if they push back?”
“Then you’ll handle that when it happens.” She rose, collected her reading from the windowsill, and moved toward the door with the ease of someone entirely comfortable in a space that was not hers. “You always overthink the contingencies, Eralius. The Hethrons aren’t going to push back. They just want to know if you’re going to fold.”
She paused at the doorway. For a moment, she was sixteen, and I was eighteen, and we were cousins in a house where we had grown up alongside each other, and the world outside the estate walls felt, as it usually did on Veldran, like something that happened to other people.
“Come to dinner,” she said. “Dallery’s been cooking that terrible fish stew again, and someone needs to keep him from feeling too proud of it.”
She left. I sat with the petition for another three minutes and then wrote the reply myself, in my own hand, in language that was direct enough to be unambiguous and brief enough to be contemptuous. I sealed it and sent it before I could think too carefully about whether it was right, because I was beginning to learn that thinking too carefully about whether something was right was often the surest way to get it wrong.
Chapter I: The Space Before (continued)
Two days before the dream, a message arrived from the capital.
I read it three times. The first time for information. The second time for implication. The third time, because I didn’t want to set it down and have to decide what it meant.
The Emperor was unwell. This was not news, exactly. The Emperor had been unwell for some time in the way that powerful men of advanced age were said to be unwell, which usually meant their advisors were managing information as carefully as they were managing the man. But the message was from an old friend of my father’s within the imperial court, a man who had never communicated anything that was not significant, and the words he’d chosen were precise in the way that men who have learned discretion become precise. The Emperor was unwell. Succession considerations were being discussed. Several of the families most closely positioned for such a discussion had, in the last few weeks, experienced events.
He did not elaborate on what events.
I set the message down.
The succession of an empire was not my concern. Veldran was my concern. The Hethron mining petition was my concern. Dallery’s fish stew, which I was still expected to eat without complaint, was my concern. The imperial succession, by the logic of bloodlines and proximity and every reasonable political calculation, was a matter for people with far more at stake in such things than I had ever expected to have.
I told myself this carefully, the way you tell yourself something carefully when you are not sure you believe it.
That evening, Marro and I walked the estate’s outer garden as the artificial light shifted toward its amber setting. It was something we had done since childhood, a habit neither of us had thought to stop. The garden was old and deliberately wild, the kind of space my family had maintained not for show but for privacy, for the feeling of being somewhere the rest of the world could not easily follow.
“You got something today,” Marro said. It was not a question.
“A message from the capital.”
She waited.
“The Emperor is unwell,” I said. “More than the usual reports suggest.”
She was quiet for a moment. I watched her think, the way I always had, the way I had always found oddly comforting: that absolute focus, the processing of information behind her eyes, working faster than most people could track.
“Which families are being discussed?” she asked.
“He didn’t say directly.”
“But he implied.”
“Yes.”
“Your family among them?”
I looked at the path ahead of us. The silverleaf trees were catching the fading light, their leaves turning a pale, almost translucent gold at the edges. My father had loved those trees. He used to say they reminded him that everything beautiful had a brief season, and there was no point being unhappy about it.
“I don’t see how,” I said. “Veldran is a ceremonial lineage. We’re admired for our poetry.”
Marro made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. “Your family has produced three generations of kings who haven’t started a war, haven’t lost a war, haven’t leveraged their position for personal gain, and haven’t made a single significant political enemy in a hundred years.”
“That sounds like a description of irrelevance.”
“To some people, yes. To a succession council trying to find a figure that no one can credibly oppose, it sounds like an asset.” She stopped walking. “Eralius.”
I stopped too.
She was looking at me with an expression I didn’t entirely recognize on her, something beneath the usual precision, something younger and more direct. “Whatever happens next,” she said, “you are not going to face it alone.”
The words were simple. She offered them without ceremony, without the rhetorical architecture she usually built around important things. They landed the way plain things sometimes do, with more weight than anything decorated.
“I know,” I said. And I did. That was the thing about Marro, the constant fact of her: I knew.
We walked back to the house through the darkening garden, and the silverleaf trees caught the last of the artificial light, and Dallery’s terrible fish stew was waiting for us inside, and that night, at least, Veldran still felt like mine.
Two nights later, at 3:17 in the morning, everything changed.
Chapter II: 3:17
I have tried, many times since, to describe what happened in the Crown Chamber that night. I have never managed it to my satisfaction. The words available to me are the words of a man who governs planets and reads petitions and walks in gardens, and what entered that room at 3:17 in the morning did not belong to any world those words were made to describe.
This is what I recalled for the Imperial Archivists.
The Crown Chamber was a room I rarely used for anything practical. It occupied the estate’s highest floor, its walls inlaid with the historical record of House Veldran in carved relief, portraits of kings, records of governance, a genealogy stretching back to the family’s first grant of authority on this planet. I used it mostly to think. I was alone, having dismissed the last aide. I sat thinking of recent events, mindlessly shuffling requests and petitions around the desk in an attempt to prioritize them. My eyes stopped on a second message from the capital, more urgent than the first. The Emperor wasn’t doing well at all. Staring at the mountain of paperwork I began to feel drowsy, catching myself before my head hit the desk.
Then the air changed.
Something was there. Something ancient, somehow I could sense it. It had existed long before the Empire existed, before this planet had a name anyone remembered. The lamps dimmed, not extinguished, deferring to an entity that shone with its own light. I saw a set of great scales made of gold, shining with a light almost unbearable to my eyes. And there was a voice, booming:
I remember the mighty and the petty.
I remember the birth of all kings, and the death of every last one.
I remember when your Empire was founded, and I remember the silence that will end it.
I froze. “What are you?” I asked. It was all I could muster.
The scale turned, just slightly, so that its surface no longer showed my reflection, but a table with a map upon it. I knew, without knowing how, it was called The Board. It glowed. Vast. Endless.
I am the memory that lives at the edge of endings.
I am the hand behind the wager.
The silence behind the oath.
The consequence beneath your empire.
You will move the Seat of Power to Cetia-243... to The Board.
I struggled to find breath.
“How could I move the Seat of Power? I…” My voice caught in my throat. And my protest was cut off.
It is the only place where truth is still made.
Not written.
Not debated.
Made.
“And what do you gain should I obey?”
There was a pause. Then, the weight of the answer:
A remembering.
You will become what I remember.
And I will remember you as Emperor.
But refuse…
…and your empire will pass into forgetfulness.
Your enemies will not need to conquer you.
They will simply wait until no one recalls your name.
I awoke. I’m not sure if those are the correct words. But I had been kneeling long enough for the first gray quality of early dawn to begin at the edges of the high windows, and then long enough for that gray to give way to the particular shade of amber that Veldran produces in the first hour after dawn, the light the planet makes when it is not yet fully committed to the day.
I rose. I walked to the window and looked out over Janteen Ridge.
Before the sun was fully up, there were already whispers.
Chapter III: The Tidal Wave
By midmorning, I had stopped counting the messages.
I sat in the ordinary office with my father’s maps on the walls and the Hethron petition on the corner of the desk, the one I had sealed four days ago in the confident hand of a man who governed one small planet and intended to keep doing so. Outside, Veldran was going about its morning. Inside, I was understanding, slowly and without any of the drama I might have expected, that I had not been dreaming.
The dream had known their names before I did.
Marro came in without knocking. She had the look she wore when she was thinking very fast and had decided that the thinking was more important than decorum, which meant the thinking was urgent.
“You know,” she said.
“I know.”
She sat down across from me, not in her usual chair by the window. She took the chair directly in front of the desk, the one meant for petitioners, and she looked at me with an expression that was carefully composed and almost succeeded at hiding what was underneath it.
She leaned forward. I could tell she was hoping for clarity. “What do you think is happening? Three. Dead or missing, all of them in direct succession. It doesn’t seem coincidental.”
“Three that I’ve been informed of. I suspect there are more I haven’t been told yet.”
She was quiet. The silence she produced when she was working through something serious had a different texture than her ordinary silences. Denser. More directional.
“Marro, last night. I was in the Crown Chamber. I was working. I was alone, having dismissed the last aide. I fell asleep — at least I think I did.” I could feel the difficulty of it on my face.
“And?” she asked.
“After that,” I said, and paused, because I had not planned how to say this, and was not sure there was a good way to say it, “I dreamed of something that called itself Arath-Bar. Gods, at least I think it was a dream.”
The room was very quiet.
“It appeared as a scale,” I continued. “Golden. Enormous. It told me I would be remembered as Emperor, and that I was to move the Seat of Power to a place called Cetia-243. If I ignored its instruction, then I would be forgotten. Who or what would forget me, it didn’t say, history, I guess.”
Marro did not speak. She was looking at me with an expression I could not read, which was unusual. She was almost always readable to me.
“Now the day has come, and in its light, the ridiculous idea that I would be the next in line to wear the Emperor’s diadem appears to be becoming more and more possible. And, now I question. Was it a dream?” I paused, searching my meager knowledge of religious history. “I’ve never heard the name Arath-Bar. Not before last night. Not in any state record or religious text or passing conversation.”
“Neither have I,” she said softly.
We sat with that for a moment.
“It was a dream,” I said with finality. “Strange, vivid, the kind that feels like something more. But a dream.” I straightened the papers on the desk, a small, purposeless gesture. “We do nothing. There’s nothing to do.”
Marro looked down at her hands. When she looked up again, the expression was still unreadable, but there was something else beneath it, something I couldn’t name. A private quality. As though she was holding something separate from the conversation we were having.
“Nothing,” she said. “Of course.” But I could see on her face that she didn’t believe that.
Chapter III: The Tidal Wave (continued)
Over the next four days, the tidal wave arrived.
Two more deaths. One more disappearance. An Archon from House Othalei who had been considered a strong candidate for regency withdrew from all consideration, offering no explanation, citing personal reasons in language so deliberately vague that everyone who read the statement understood that something had frightened him badly enough that he preferred the appearance of cowardice to whatever the alternative was.
The messages from the capital came faster. Less formal. The official language of imperial procedure began to give way to something more urgent, more personal, the actual voice of people who were trying to understand what was happening and finding that their frameworks weren’t adequate to the scale of it. A court that had governed itself by precedent for generations was discovering that its precedents had not anticipated this particular situation.
House Veldran. The name appeared in more and more of the messages, always careful, always hedged, always surrounded by the diplomatic language of inquiry rather than declaration. But it was there. A minor lineage. A ceremonial house. A family admired for poetry and poise. A King who had been governing quietly for eight months and had, by all available evidence, not started any wars, not lost any wars, not made any significant political enemies.
Marro managed the incoming correspondence with a focus that bordered on ferocity. She organized, synthesized, flagged the most significant, and prepared briefs that reduced hours of reading to the essential architecture of fact and implication. She had been doing this since we were children, in different forms, at different scales. The form had changed. The instinct was the same: to take the chaos surrounding me and translate it into something I could act on.
She slept less. I watched this without comment because commenting would have been an acknowledgment that I was worried about her, which would have been an acknowledgment that I was worried about everything, which I couldn’t afford to be. Not visibly. Not yet.
On the third day, she came to me with a document she had prepared, one that reduced the state of the imperial succession to its essential reality. She set it on the desk in front of me, stepped back, and watched me read it.
When I finished, I looked up at her.
“There’s no one else,” I said.
“No one credible. No one without significant opposition, or significant liability, or a claim that someone hasn’t already moved to contest. Your claim is clean because no one expected to need it.”
“I’ve been King of Veldran for eight months.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never been to the capital.”
“I know.”
I set the document down. The maps on the walls watched from their careful cartography of a world that had made sense three weeks ago.
“Marro,” I said. “I don’t know how to be Emperor.”
She was quiet for a moment. The window behind her showed the garden, the silverleaf trees, the ordinary world of the estate that had been my world my entire life.
“You didn’t know how to be King either,” she said. “Eight months ago.”
“A King of Veldran handles mining petitions.”
“And an Emperor handles the things that mining petitions become if no one handles them correctly.” She tilted her head slightly. “You’re the same person, Eralius. The same qualities that make a good king are the ones that make a good emperor. The scale changes. The person doesn’t have to.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her. I suspected she wasn’t entirely sure she believed herself. But there was something in the way she said it, steady and certain on the surface, that I chose to hold onto.
“You’ll come with me,” I said. It was not a question.
She held my gaze for a beat. A brief, private expression crossed her face, gone before I could name it. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
We left Veldran six days after the dream. I stood at the upper windows of the estate for a long time before we departed, watching the ridge and the silverleaf trees and the garden where we had walked on the last quiet evening.
I had not said goodbye to the office, or the maps, or the Crown Chamber where everything had changed. Goodbyes felt wrong. They felt like an acknowledgment of loss, and I was still working out exactly what was being lost.
I had hastily appointed a regent, a cousin I trusted to watch over Veldran until my return. I had no doubt I would return, this was certainly a mistake. Or a dream. How could I, Eralius Veldran, not even a member of a Great Family, be going to my coronation as Emperor?
Marro appeared at my side without announcement. She looked at what I was looking at.
“It will be here when this is over,” she said.
“Will it? I hope so, exactly as it is now.”
She didn’t answer, which was its own kind of answer.
I turned away from the window. And we boarded the starliner, bound for Thesius.
Chapter IV: Voice Ascendant
The night before, she had been entirely herself. She had sat in the chair by the window of her chamber at the palace, feet tucked beneath her in the way that drove the household staff to distraction, eating pastry she had acquired from somewhere without explanation and offering half of it to me when I arrived to talk. We had talked for a long time. Not about the ceremony, not about the succession, not about the empire. About the garden at dusk, Dallery’s honey cakes, and how my Regent was handling the Hethron mining concession. About small things. The shape of ordinary life held up briefly against the extraordinary and found, in the comparison, to have been worth considerably more than either of us had ever explicitly acknowledged.
She had said, toward the end of the evening, with the particular quietness she reserved for things she wasn’t certain she should say: “Whatever happens next, you are not going to face it alone.”
The same words she had spoken in the garden. She offered them again, here, in a different context, as though they bore repeating. As though she needed to say them again as much as I needed to hear them.
I had nodded. I had not said enough in return. I have thought about that since.
The Imperial Crown Chamber on Thesius was enormous compared to my own on Veldran. Larger and more deliberate in its grandeur, every surface was selected for the impression it would make on the person standing at its center. The robes were heavier than I expected, but I guess the mechanisms that allowed them to change color and tone in response to my emotional state would make that inevitable. I wriggled my shoulders trying to make them sit more comfortably, but there was no use.
The Diadem came last. It was carried on a cushion by an attendant whose hands were visibly trembling, and when the attendant raised it toward my head, it rose the last distance on its own. It did not rest. It suspended itself, and when it found its position, it began to orbit, and when it began to orbit, it began to hum softly. A layered chord, it sounded slightly off. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the tone sounded wrong to me.
In the reflection of the preparation mirrors, I looked like an Emperor.
I must admit, I did not feel like one. I felt lost and alone. I wondered, not for the first time, where Marro was.
Attendants fussed about me, straightening this or adjusting that, until everything was just right. Then “Your Highness?” and they motioned to the doors leading to the Chorus Chamber.
The coronation was nothing like what I had expected.
I had expected ceremony, and there was ceremony: vast, elaborate, the kind of spectacle that had been designed over generations to communicate divine sanction and imperial inevitability through every sense simultaneously. An attendant had told me that the Chorus Chamber was full, meaning the largest gathering of the empire’s significant houses in recent memory was arranged in 360-degree tiers around the chamber, all of them there to see me. I think he said it in an attempt to improve my self-esteem and to bolster my confidence, but what it really did was frighten me.
When I entered, I was immediately struck by the enormity of it all. The room, the sheer number of people crammed into seats, all hoping to witness a historical event. The crowning of an unknown as Emperor.
The ceremony was long. This is the honest truth of it: the coronation of an Emperor is very long, and most of its length is composed of ritual that has been sacred for so long that no one remembers why the specific words are the specific words, only that they must be said in the correct order, by the correct parties, while everyone stands in the correct configuration. I said what I was supposed to say. I moved when I was supposed to move. I sat on the Celestial Throne for the first time and felt the weight of it not as a physical sensation but as something that settled into the spine and didn’t leave.
The throne was not comfortable. I had expected comfort. But maybe the old Emperor’s rump had found comfort in this design. I smiled inwardly. I just needed to get through the coronation. Maybe then, I could sit down and process all that had happened. Marro would certainly help, I found myself scanning the crowd looking for her.
She was in her usual position, the seat to the side of the chamber. How had she managed that? A front row seat in the first tier, sitting amongst the highest nobility of the Empire. But then I remembered that day in Dallery’s kitchen, of course she would be sitting there. She probably could have talked her way into any seat she wanted. She was watching the ceremony with the focused, assessing look she wore when she was thinking three things simultaneously, and when my eyes found hers across the chamber, she smiled broadly and gave a slight wave. Acknowledgment. A brief, private understanding between the two of us that whatever was happening in this room, we would face it together. She would be there for me, and I for her.
The ceremony reached its final stages. The formal proclamations. The responses from the assembled houses. The moment when the psychochromatic robes definitively shifted their hue to deep violet, and the chamber recognized it, responding with the sound of several hundred people breathing in the same held rhythm.
I sat on the Celestial Throne and was the Emperor.
A cheer went up in the chamber, and there was loud applause. I glanced over at Marro, and her smile had gotten even wider, if that were possible. She clapped enthusiastically and stood, motioning to those around her. In moments, she had the whole first tier on their feet clapping. I smiled back. Maybe this wasn’t a mistake. Maybe this would be better than I imagined.