The Tyrant, the Imperator, His Majesty, sat in repose in his meditation chamber. His mind trembled with far too many ideas, wrestled with conflicting thoughts and desires. It has been thus ever since he was Chosen.

His mind was a battlefield. Of strength warring against weakness, or knowledge against ignorance. Of his consciousness against another.

The battlefield was vast, but the light encroached against the darkness. The shadows of his former self slowly gave way, and some times, he wondered if he should just give in, surrender everything for the greater good. If only he could trust the unthinking light.

The power was flawed, that he knew. Something was missing, worn away by the changing eons, before he ever got a hold of it. He didn’t know for sure, but if he gave in, if he surrendered, then not only would his personality die, but he wasn’t even sure if what replaced it would be a true consciousness rather than a mass of instinct.

Still, he made his bed and he had to lie in it. And despite the drawbacks, the advantages were more than worth it.

Time lost meaning while he was in a trance. The darkness of his original self fought hard to overcome the searing light. He wasn’t sure which side he rooted for, and most times, he didn’t know which one he was. The former self? The new self? The latter was impossible considering the light didn’t have a personality, so perhaps as he was now was an amalgam of both. He wasn’t sure how he really felt about that, but the impassiveness and current apathy meant that he really couldn’t feel anything.

His body was locked in a seated meditation pose while light circulated within. It wasn’t just any light but a rarified form that was the primordial version. He didn’t know what or what separated it from normal light, and he was well versed enough in Occult Resonance techniques to call upon any classical element. Just that the rarified light…the Radiant Light…trumped everything else.

That was what was inside of his mind, slowly scouring away the shadows of self. And after slow decades of progress, he knew he was doomed. He couldn’t fight it, not effectively. And if he failed, then everything he built up would fall down with him.

Worse, he wasn’t sure if things would actually fail. His body might be puppeted by whatever took over, and he wondered if the empire would continue on, slowly dying under new management as all empires eventually did.

No…he couldn’t allow that to happen. He couldn’t win against the light, but maybe, he could improve it. It was an epiphany that he came across years ago, but there had been nothing to do. He knew the light came from a shard. But where did the shard come from? His only real clue was the light itself, and the only clue he had about that were old training films that came from the Karcellian Isles. He’d watched and studied everything he could of those films, how that impossibly beautiful girl taught Occult Resonance in a systemic, and more reliable way than what the warlocks of old did.

He noticed that it was the same Light that came from within her. The light that was anathema to the shadows of self. There was the clue, the source of light.

If only he knew where she was now.

It had taken years afterwards, as well as old records spanning back to the Great War before his scholars determined that she’d left the world through a portal. One that had long since melted down and gone inert. Decades were spent researching the deeper layers of reality, and the discovery of the underbridges that led to the sealed portion of the world, perhaps she was there.

If she had the Light, then she would be ageless like he was too. And if he managed to seize her light, then his version might be fixed. It was his only hope.

It was in the midst of such pondering did he receive word from his soldiers. An Anathema had been found across the bridge.

The emperor grinned and forced himself out of his self induced trance. All doubts fell away, and the battle within his mind, his Anima, fell into the background. He clad himself in his vestments and exited the room, then declared, “Ready my praetorians. Ready my legions. We move.”

___________

‘…Meet up with us once you have them.’

Desire sighed as the connection narrowed to a close. Her bond with her Master was such that it could not be severed, at least not without killing Desire’s mind. The flow of thoughts between the two of them could either be allowed or choked off, and while she wanted nothing more than to bask in her Master’s mind’s closeness, it was rather distracting. Especially now that the Master ran two instances of her body and her mind was unusually active.

Desire’s countenance was masked by a glamour, an illusion that painted her as human rather than Chaos Lord. Most of what it did subtly wore down the flawlessness of her features. Her perfection wasn’t quite the same as her Master’s. No, Yuriko’s beauty looked entirely natural taken to extremes, while a Chaos Lord’s looks triggered something primeval in mortals. She’d always had her glamour up when walking the prime material, if only to prevent harm to the mortals. For her current guise, she had to tone down her looks even farther since the soldiers had been giving her strange looks when she woke up.

At the moment, she was being led, in chains, out of the stockade. The chains were infused with enchantment, though they were meant to weaken Occult Resonance, from what she could figure out, hence, completely useless to the purpose of suppressing Desire. She was escorted by two soldiers, one ahead of her, and another behind, down the hallway. The only words said were upon their entrance to her cell,

“Follow.”

A couple of minutes later, her escorts merged with another set that were bringing other prisoners along. A pity they weren’t Brilliance and Speedrun.

Still, she bided her time. From what she overheard earlier, all of the prisoners would be brought to a ritual ground in order to perform whatever it is that the soldiers needed. While she could just as easily break free, this would consume less time. Her Chaos reserves were full, and at the very least, the interstitial space didn’t siphon Chaos out of her. It also didn’t allow her to passively regenerate, but that was much better than what she experienced in the prime material.

Fighting and searching would just waste time and Chaos, so she was fine with playing along. And besides, Master told her to rescue as many as she could.

After about twenty minutes, the entourage exited the stockade. The one she had been imprisoned in, anyway. She noted another set of buildings fifty paces away wherein another group of soldiers escorted a bunch of prisoners. That group had her Master’s friends.

The distance between Bril and Speedy’s group and Desiree’s was too wide to bridge easily unnoticed. She was still curious where the ritual would be done and what it was supposed to accomplish. And while Master didn’t state it outright, Dee was sure the command extended to preventing it from happening with a different set of prisoners.

She caught Brilliance’s eye, and the young girl, who couldn’t be more than fifteen, possibly a year younger than that, blinked in confusion. She looked worse for wear, had a broken arm, and wore some kind of collar.

Desire glared at the thing. Everyone of the prisoners, including herself, wore one. A suppression collar that worked by hindering the accumulation of energy. It did nothing to what was already present, but the enchantment pushed away anything but inert particles.

It didn’t work on her, of course. Chaos cannot be chained in such a manner, and the collar’s enchantment didn’t work against Chaos notes either. Since it didn’t affect what was already inside the body, it couldn’t prevent her from creating Chaos from raw materials. But it was effective against Altered Humans, apparently, and probably the Irvallan version of Magi. The thing wouldn’t work against Animus since that was intrinsic to a person, although an environment bereft of Chaos would neuter Animus production anyway. It didn’t need to be said that such things wouldn’t even inconvenience someone with an awakened Anima.

She saw Speedrun tottering behind his cousin and was in even worse shape. Half of his face was covered in bandages and he had a broken leg. The army’s field medic gave him a splint and a pair of crutches to make do with. The other Altered prisoners in that bunch were in similarly bad shape.

Brilliance’s gaze slid past Desire’s. The girl didn’t recognise her…ah, she still had her glamour up, the stronger kind rather than her Prime material version. They wouldn’t be able to coordinate, but considering their shape, and the rest of the prisoners for that matter, she would have to use her healing hymn before any escape would be possible.

Ancestors, she hoped she’d have the chance. Hopefully while the soldiers leave them in a holding. Area before sacrificing the prisoners to their fell gods.

The prisoner group moved around the main camp instead of through the central area. She spotted a curtain wall some distance away, and there were watchtowers every twenty paces along the wall, as well as…turrets?

The prisoners with her group didn’t look like Altered. Civilians? Their faces were strangely blank, with empty eyes. They weren’t visibly injured, at the very least, even if their clothes looked grungy. All of them wore the suppression collars too.

About ten minutes into their travels, she heard a loud hissing sound, as well as a low pressure shockwave. She blinked and liked around, but didn’t see anything initially, until she caught a flash of light out of the corner of her eye. Then she felt more thumps from the same direction and saw vapour trails reaching up to the clouds at an angle directed towards where she felt her Master was at.

‘Master!’

She felt the connection widen for a moment, then snap shut as Yuriko focused on protecting Scarlett. Dee clicked her tongue, but was forced into inaction.

The bombardment continued for several minutes, then, the guns on the wall turrets started to fire. Soldiers from the main camp rushed towards the wall, but the prisoner guards didn’t falter. Instead, they were prodded to hurry. Another few minutes and they arrived at what See supposed was the ritual site. Except it wasn’t a building or open ground.

She only noticed the railways once she was a dozen paces away, mainly due to the things being sunk into the ground, and being underneath the locomotive engine and the trains, as well as her general unfamiliarity with them.

Ah, weren’t trains and railways in common use in Astoria? She hadn’t had the chance to use them yet. Either way, these ones were half a dozen paces wide and each carriage looked at least twenty paces long. They were led to one of the cars down the railway and this one was even longer than the average.

To her frustration, they were then made to fall in line, though the guards moved to the side and prodded the prisoners closer together. At least the numbers matched up to what she guessed.

There was a rising sense of anticipation from the soldiers and Dee felt it as strings of unheard melodies that carried emotional undertones. She bent her ear towards the nearest soldiers and tried to interpret what she could hear. Yup, the anticipation of what they could see as an ending to a long wait.

She’d hoped that the prisoners would be closer together, or that she could more easily reach Brilliance and Speedrun, but she was half a dozen prisoners away from them. And when the train opened to let the prisoners in one by one, she thought she wouldn’t get a better chance. And if the soldiers hadn’t been distracted by the cannons and the fighting at the perimeter, she’d have to manufacture her own distraction.

She’d just started humming when her Master prodded her, and she could only send back and offhand reply lest she lose control of her Chaos, but she’d make it up to Yuriko, preferably in bed…

She snapped the man

acles off her hands, and a moment later, covered the field with a cloud of multi-hued light.

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