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January 13 - January 17, 2025
I had no reason to believe that Syriani Dorayaica, whom the Chantry called the Scourge of Earth, was the creature from my visions. And yet, I knew.
Hmm.
“I killed their prince, too.” I smiled, though it was not the whole truth. They had taken me aboard their vessel when I challenged Prince Ulurani, and the Prince had accepted, that it might avenge the death of its fellow prince, Aranata. While I’d distracted them with the duel, Pallino and Lieutenant Commander Garone had managed to place charges throughout the interior of their ship. We had held them to ransom, and they had fled. The Cielcin were not human. They could not be reasoned with like humans. I’d learned that on Vorgossos with Aranata nearly three centuries before.
This book takes place 300 years later?
Nearly three hundred years had passed—eighty for me.
So only 80 years not on ice.
“In the name of Holy Mother Earth and in the light of her sun, I, the Sollan Emperor William of the Aventine House, the Twenty-Third of that Name; Firstborn Son of Earth; King of Avalon; Lord Sovereign of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile; Prince Imperator of the Arms of Orion, of Perseus, of Sagittarius, and Centaurus; Magnarch of Orion; Conqueror of Norma; Grand Strategos of the Legions of the Sun; Supreme Lord of the Cities of Forum; North Star of the Constellations of the Blood Palatine; Defender of the Children of Men; and Servant of the Servants of Earth, call upon you to kneel.”
There is a strength in ceremonies, a power in ritual that is whether or not we believe in the principalities upon which those rituals are founded. So despite my cynicism, I could not help but feel a warm flowering of love in my chest as I stood and the swell of pride. I was a knight, and no mere knight, but a knight of the Royal Victorian Order, one of the Emperor’s own.
Rome of old was not loved for its greatness, so the poet wrote. Rome was great because men loved her, as I loved my Empire in that moment.
“I’m afraid that what they say of me is more true than not, Majesty.” “I see . . .” Her voice trailed off. “That makes you something of a rarity. Most men are smaller than the stories told about them. You should be careful. Grow too tall and someone will take an ax to you.” Warning? Or threat?
He looked round at the solarium as if he’d never really seen it before. I knew the look well. It was a look more closely kin to fear than people really believe. A fear born of the fact that though we may come back to a place at the end of our journeys, we never really return, for we are not the same person who departed.
And the boy beside me? The man? There was little of the warrior in his step, little of the commander in his bearing. How little I guessed of what he would become.
Hmm?
Beside it on the sideboard table stood a holograph depicting Valka and myself standing above the cleft at Calagah. Sir Elomas Redgrave had taken that holograph. That had been more than almost four hundred years ago. Sir Elomas was probably dead.
The false window dimmed its light so that a man might look upon its majesty unshuttered. The ancients believed that the Morning Star was a jewel carried into the heavens by a great hero who had reclaimed that star from the lord of the underworld, and that in payment for his heroism, the gods set him to sail the skies, forever carrying that gem aloft. Earth’s Morning Star was only her sister planet, Venus, but it was easy to understand how the ancients made that mistake.
Reminds me of Lord of the Rings, carrying the similarion across the sky.
What cosmic prank had brought that false sun to shine the moment I set foot on Gododdin? What irony brought that false light to mark the Sun Eater’s first visit to the world he would consume? I felt a smile pull at my lips then, as I weep now in writing. I breathed the air that two billion men and women shared. The air I burned to nothing, the men and women I washed away in fire. They cheered me as I came, and welcomed me with silver trumpets.
His was the fear of the convict before the judge, as all sons are before their fathers, all men before women, all mortals before gods.
Rank only formalizes relationships between people, Alexander. It does not create them. One has rank because one deserves it, and if one does not deserve it, he will lose his rank. Or his life. A man would do well to become worthy of his honors, else he will be deposed as a tyrant.”
To be a good knight, a good leader, a good man for that matter, you must judge a person by his or her actions. By their character.
If the dead can be said to live on at all, it is in our memories. Thus ghosts exist, though they are but a part of ourselves.
We never found out.
Dang it I wanted to know the end of that story lol
What we may become is ours to choose, and we may choose badly. I know only that we must choose—as I have chosen—and live by our choices.
So I stood, knowing the impression this would make, and moved away from the table toward the polarized window. Despite the darkened glass I could see the city of Catraeth below the mountain and the Green Sea beyond. I can see it now—though no one will ever see it again, and before long there will be few alive who remember it.
Reminiscing about Gododin, the world he destroyed.
Rian
Typo.
As a child, we believe the world enchanted because age has not killed the magic we are born with. As we grow, the simple spells of new sights and far-off places no longer work on us, and we grow cynical and cold.
Even now, in my exile here among the scholiasts, I awake before dawn and take breakfast with the brothers before coming to my cell here to work.
Exile with scholiasts?
“That was the first thing I considered, of course. But the data don’t match up.” I had been having visions of the Quiet long before I came to Vorgossos, since Calagah, in fact. Perhaps since Meidua. Whatever was happening to me, it was bigger than Vorgossos, bigger than Kharn Sagara and his pet daimon. The Brethren said the Quiet had pressed them into service, forced them to deliver the vision they had given me because the Quiet had foreseen that I would meet the Brethren, and because the Brethren—being perhaps the most intelligent creature ever to exist—had perceived the Quiet when they
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Very important recount.
“Here is the kingdom of Death,”
Book Four's title.
Looking up I saw myself reflected in the mirror, armor so black it gleamed. I looked much as I had in my vision—was it a vision?—in the Howling Dark. A demon in black. The armor was not the same, but the resemblance was there . . . a shadow on my heart.
From the vision.
CHAPTER 23 KINGDOMS OF DEATH
A foretelling of things to come?
The vat contained what looked like bloated white worms writhing over one another.
Same worms from Queen Amid Ashes?
I have a clear vision still of that moment: the junior officer and his trias standing in the circular arch at the end of the hall, backlit by our suit lights, framed against the dark.
Would make a great picture.
“That,” I cleared my throat and—answering both her and the others—said, “was one of the demons of Arae.”
I'd like to know more about them.
“They will die for this,” I swore, and clenched my fists. “By Earth, I swear it.” And for the first time in my life, I think I truly meant that oath. By Earth.
There! I let out a wordless hiss of anger. Our enemies had banded together, indeed. Just as Kharn Sagara had dealt with the Cielcin, other elements among the Extras had aligned with the xenobites against us, rebelling against the Empire and the humanity it fought for. And for what? Politics? Not even politics. Profit.
The word had an ominous sound even to my human ear. I did not then know it, but the Vayadan were the sworn protectors of a Cielcin Aeta, his last line of defense, his closest counselors, and his concubines—the fathers of his children.
THE VAYADAN
This is a result of sharing Tanaran's blood.
For the Legions, it was like rushing to put out fires as they were lit against a city palisade . . . but only one fire at a time, or two.
Interesting because the palisades are burning in L.A. while reading this.
I unkindled my blade and lowered myself painfully to one knee, the better to listen. And what I heard froze every drop of blood in me. “He has seen it, hurati. He has seen your death. The sacrifice . . .”
The Triumph of the Devil of Meidua.
I do know that the triumphal arch erected to my victory over Iubalu still stands on Nemavand, though by Imperial decree my head was chiseled from the monument and cast into the desert, where I don’t doubt it remains to this day, resin untouched by the etching sands.
Damn.
I felt my breath catch. In the Imperial hands was a wreath, a crown of living gold. The Grass Crown. “For your bravery on the field of battle, by our own hand, we set upon your head the Grass Crown! The highest honor we may bestow.” He approached and set the wreath upon my head. It was far heavier than I expected, and when I would remove it later I discovered that it was—in truth—wrought of living gold. The leaves and wood of it were laced with metal. How such a thing can be I do not know, and yet I tell you it is so. “You rode at the head of your army against the Pale, saving not only your
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The Grass Crown.
“Sir Hadrian, Lord of the House Marlowe Victorian, Commandant of His Radiance’s Red Company, and escort!”
“There are two sorts of people in the world,” I said, leaning one shoulder against a carnelian pillar. The chandeliers above our heads filled the heavenly vaults like constellations of shattered crystal. “Those who accept reality as it is, and those who force reality to be what they will.”
Lord Andrew cut in, “Oh, he’s one of the old Lions, you know! Stodgy old bastard.”
Lions.
Talk of the Lions recalled the banners I had seen that same day, the ones that had not bowed with the others in recognition of my triumph. Bourbon. Mahidol. Hohenzollern.
Archduchess of Shakespeare,
What?!
The best of these was called The Demon in White, which showed a highly fictionalized account of my battle with Iubalu intercut with footage of the triumph in the Campus Raphael. The footage from the triumph, at least, was entirely genuine, and I was delighted to see that—though they had not been permitted to enter the Peronine Palace—Barda, Udax, and the other Irchtani had not been omitted from the war films.
There's the book title.
But then, I’d felt old before I was thirty, as so many do. It is a folly all of us commit. We imagine youth old age because we cannot imagine age.
The words I’d spoken to Lorcan Breathnach echoed in my skull. I do not have visions. And yet I had seen her, had I not? Had seen Princess Selene seated at my feet in a gown of living flowers. Had felt her move beneath me and her warm breath on my skin. I’d worn a silver circlet upon my brow, and a white gem—the very piece of shell that hung about my neck on its chain, I realized—had shone in its center like a star, like a third eye.
Vision realized.
And I had garbed myself in white—even if it was not my color. Dimly I was aware of the fact that I had been silent a long time. It was not the time for silence. Sitting there, trapped, I opened my mouth and said, “I would be honored, Radiant Majesty.”
The Demon in White.
Who was it said that our being only what we are remains our chief and unforgivable sin?
Such relativistic thinking is always attractive to the young. Despising their parents—and through their parents all authority—they decide there is no authority but themselves, and therefore all knowledge which was and came before them is evil, and they alone wholly good. I had despised the Empire because I despised my father—who was its chief representative in my young life. Seeing his authority as unjust, I had decided there was no justice save that which I might make myself. I had believed that I alone had the wisdom to set the world to rights, not knowing then that true wisdom lies in
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It was not grief that pained me then, but love. Love consumes, so the aphorism goes. I have not found it to be so. Love is not a burden—though it is a responsibility. A duty. Love is an honor—an office we hold. An oath.
