The battlefield burned beneath me in slow, furious tides-seven thousand square kilometers of ruin smothered by smoke and the stench of Dominion ambition. Flames unfurled like banners in the wind. Steel glimmered where it was broken, shattered, or still weeping heat from plasma strikes. They had named this war my exile, branded me traitor to the throne I was born to inherit. They will learn it was their miscalculation.

And they will learn it written in ash.

Nightfall descended through the clouded dawn with the solemn elegance of a blade long denied its rightful throat. The fighter's engines sang-a low, predatory hum that resonated in my sternum like a second heartbeat. Through the cracked canopy glass, the air tasted of superheated metal, cinders, and the copper-sweet reek of old betrayal. Below us, the Aerlian plains-once soft with golden grain, once ripened under the breath of warm rivers my father swam in as a boy-lay buried under trenches and armored columns. Their serenity had been consumed by Dominion geometry: perfect right angles, mathematically optimal kill zones, the cold beauty of bureaucratic murder.

It was a desecration performed with forms in triplicate.

I knew the shape of this land better than my own face. These fields had fed three million souls before the Consolidation Wars. My father used to walk them at harvest, counting grain into the calloused hands of farmers who never met his eyes-not from fear, but from a reverence so deep it hurt to witness. A king who served without requiring worship. The Dominion accused him of sedition when he refused to seed their surveillance spores in the soil. Their signatures turned his execution into an administrative resolution. Case file #4457-Regicide, Justified.

I had been twelve. Silent. Powerless.

I am neither now.

"Aster," I said, voice flat as a blade's edge. "Status."

Her response threaded directly into my auditory cortex through the Nexus lattice-no lag, no distortion, as intimate as my own thoughts. "Lattice coherence at fifty-eight percent and degrading. Northwest flank overrun-Draven's company reporting sixty percent casualties. Encirclement probability: definitive within four minutes. Hull integrity down by two percent. Minor breach in starboard cooling. Heart rate elevated to one-twenty. Adrenaline spiking. You're bleeding again."

I glanced down. Blood seeped through my flight suit where shrapnel had kissed my ribs three hours ago. The pain was distant, muted by combat stims and the Nexus node embedded at the base of my skull. "My pulse is not your concern," I said. "Keep the lattice stable."

"Yes, Atherion."

That name-my name-carried the weight of sovereignty even across neural static. Not "General," not "Commander," not "my lord." I was what the lattice had named me when I synchronized at age sixteen: Nexus Prime, the anchor point of a distributed consciousness that bound three hundred soldiers into a single tactical organism. Even in exile, stripped of crown and country, the title clung to me like gravity.

Some things you cannot abdicate.

We banked left, Nightfall responding to my thoughts before they fully formed. The neural interface made flying less like piloting and more like remembering how to walk. Fire stitched the air in jagged arcs-anti-air plasma, beautiful and murderous. Two Dominion cruisers rose through the haze like iron monuments, their shields pulsing with predatory promise, gravitic fields warping the smoke around them into spiral patterns. Each vessel outmassed Nightfall by a factor of thirty. Their captains thought themselves hunters.

They were wrong about that too.

Nightfall slipped between them in a breath, stealth cloak bending light around us like water around stone. For three heartbeats we were invisible, a ghost in their formation. Heat rippled against the canopy, threatening to warp the glass. Targeting reticles bloomed across my vision-Aster's calculations overlaying reality with mathematical certainty. I dropped a clean, unbroken particle beam across the nearest cruiser's spinal plate, directly into the reactor housing.

Its hull ruptured with a roar that shook the sky. Metal blossomed outward-red, molten, exquisite in its destruction. The secondary explosion vaporized the bridge crew before they could scream. Debris rained down on Dominion ground forces like judgment.

I felt nothing. I had learned not to.

The cockpit flushed orange with reflected fire. My reflection stared back from the canopy: pallid cheeks dusted with ash, sharp cheekbones my mother used to trace with worried fingers, the faint inner halo burning behind my irises like an ancient star waking. Starlit filaments threaded my temples-visible manifestation of the Nexus, silver-gold lines that pulsed with each heartbeat, each tactical calculation flowing through the lattice. Exile had hollowed the gentler parts of my expression long ago. What remained was sharper, colder, and far more honest.

My father would not recognize me. Perhaps that was mercy.

Draven's voice crackled through comms, struck through with grit and adrenaline and the particular exhaustion of men who have been killing since dawn. "My king-the west line is breaking. Casualties mounting. We can't-"

"You will hold the northern ridge," I said, each word precise as a scalpel cut. "Or bleed on it. Choose quickly."

A beat of silence. Static hissed. Then the oath that had anchored our youth, spoken in the dialect of the old kingdom: "The shadow follows the moon, Atherion."

"And the moon commands," I answered, completing the ritual. I severed the channel before sentiment could intrude. Sentiment is a luxury of men who expect to survive, and I had stopped lying to myself about our odds three campaigns ago.

Below, the ridge held. Barely.

### The Fortress

Bastion Hyr rose from the smoke like a revenant-once a granary of unmatched abundance, now a Dominion detention facility specializing in political prisoners. Its towers stood gaunt against the sky, stripped of the azure-and-silver banners that once honored House Kaelithar, the family I was born to. Stone that had once heard the laughter of harvesters now held only the echoes of interrogators and the long, low thrum of suppression fields designed to break Nexus-augmented minds.

My childhood memories of Hyr were almost tender, preserved in amber while everything else burned. The morning winds heavy with chaff and promise. My father's voice counting grain, his hands steady and certain. A king who understood that sovereignty meant service. The Dominion had accused him of treason for refusing to implement their Citizen Compliance Algorithm-a neural monitoring system that would have turned every augmented citizen into a potential surveillance node.

He had called it slavery with extra steps.

They called his execution justice.

I had been silent then, a boy hiding in ventilation shafts while soldiers dragged my father away in neural dampeners. I am not silent now. I am the sound his death made, given form and purpose.

Nightfall struck the courtyard with a scream of tortured metal. Dust billowed. I dropped from the cockpit before it settled, boots hitting stone with enough force to crack it. The impact jarred my wounded ribs. Pain flared white-hot. I welcomed it-pain meant I was still alive, still capable of making the Dominion regret my existence.

Aster followed me into the corridors-not as a body, but as a presence, a sharpened intuition overlaying reality with tactical clarity. "Three hostiles behind the left arch," she said, her voice calm as deep water. "Pulse rifles charged. Tripline set across the threshold-anti-kinetic filament, lethal radius two meters."

"I see it," I murmured.

Stormshard slid from my gauntlet, the sword humming with anticipation. Old metal forged before the Consolidation Wars, before the Dominion wrote themselves into history as saviors. Old vows etched in its fuller: Mercy is the luxury of the strong. We are not strong enough yet.

I crossed the corridor with anatomical precision, movements so controlled they looked almost slow, almost lazy. The first soldier died before his finger found the trigger-throat opened, arterial spray painting ancient stones. The second managed to fire. The bolt went wide. Stormshard took his head. The third tried to run. I let Aster guide my throw. The blade punched through his spine and pinned him to the wall like an insect in a collection.

The tripline dissolved under a focused EM pulse from my gauntlet. I retrieved Stormshard. Blood ran down the fuller in thin streams, following the etched words like punctuation.

I moved like a verdict made flesh.

### The Descent

The stairwell spiraled into darkness-seventy-three steps, each one worn smooth by centuries of feet. Cold breathed against my skin, carrying the mineral taste of groundwater and the sour tang of unwashed fear. My breath fogged-the one flaw in an otherwise immaculate presence. The Nexus could regulate my heartbeat, my pain response, my emotional affect. It could not hide the simple fact that I was human, and humans breathe, and breath betrays.

I ignored the betrayal and descended.

The Nexus lattice at my nape sparked as I expanded my consciousness. My awareness unfurled outward through the distributed network, touching each of my soldiers across the battlefield. Serin, wings battered by flak fire, spine reinforced with titanium he chose to install himself rather than accept medical discharge. Draven, humming an old harvest song as he dropped countermeasures with stubborn hope. Mira, her hands steady on the artillery controls despite the mortar fire walking toward her position. The faint, collective fear of three hundred souls pressed against my mind like a tide.

I steadied them. Not with warmth-kings do not soothe, cannot afford the weakness of comfort. I steadied them as a hand steadies a blade before a killing stroke. I fed them certainty through the lattice: We will survive this. We will make them regret this. Follow me.

The network hummed with renewed purpose.

Above me, thunder rolled. Another cruiser dying. I did not look up.

### The Cell

The lowest chamber waited like a tomb.

Iron stench. Silence. Fear clinging to stone even after the prisoner's absence, soaked so deep into the walls it had become part of the architecture. Shackles lay shattered on the floor-each link as thick as my wrist, each one snapped with such force the metal had crystallized. Bolts torn from their sockets, leaving craters in the wall. Blood dried in a perfect circle on the floor-an execution ritual that did not finish, interrupted by escape or rescue or something I could not name.

"Father," I said.

The word fractured in my mouth. I did not let it live long.

But the silence held it anyway, turned it over, examined it for truth. How many times had I rehearsed what I would say when I found him? How many nights had I composed speeches in the dark, words shaped like weapons and apologies in equal measure? None of them survived contact with reality. They never do.

A glimmer caught my eye-a small metallic sphere half-hidden beneath a broken chain. Palm-sized, surface dulled by dust but unmarked by time. Faint etchings curled across its surface like forgotten script, symbols that predated the Dominion's forced linguistic standardization. It pulsed once with green-gold radiance, ancient enough to ignore our machines, our categories, our confident explanations.

"Aster," I murmured. "Analysis."

"Unknown artifact. Pre-Dominion manufacture. Possibly pre-Empire. Material composition beyond current scanning capability. Resonance patterns consistent with navigational keys used by the Predecessor civilizations. Energy signature stable but unreadable. Atherion-this should not exist. The Predecessors died out three thousand years ago."

"If he left it for me," I said, fingers closing around the sphere, "it is significant."

"I agree. I recommend-"

The wall erupted.

Stone exploded into flame and shrapnel. Dominion troopers swarmed through the breach, armor painted in the flat black of kill teams, masks blank as eclipsed moons. Rifles lifted in perfect unison-trained, disciplined, expensive soldiers who died like everyone else.

My mind sharpened to a point. Time dilated. The Nexus flooded my system with combat stims and tactical data. I saw the angles, the trajectories, the precise moment each soldier would fire. Aster filled the gaps in my perception, overlaying my vision with threat assessments and targeting solutions.

Stormshard danced.

The first soldier's rifle discharged into his own squad mate-my blade had severed his trigger finger and redirected his aim in a single motion. The second died with his throat opened, blood misting the air. The third managed to fire a burst that caught me in the shoulder. Pain exploded. I ignored it. Adrenaline, fury, and pharmaceutical chemistry kept me moving.

Bodies fell. Aster conducted me through the chaos like music, each movement flowing into the next with terrible efficiency. I carved through them without indulgence, without satisfaction. Efficiency is its own brutality.

"Aster-Nightfall. Status."

"Engines compromised. Cloak intact but power reserves critical. I recommend immediate ascent or we're trapped."

"Then we ascend."

The fortress became a blur of heat and motion. I reached the courtyard, vaulted into the cockpit, and Nightfall obeyed me even in her brokenness, engines coughing to life with a sound like metal coughing blood. The sky opened-a mercy too brief.

Alarms screamed. A stabilizer blew, catastrophic failure sending us into a spiral. The cockpit slammed sideways. Pain cracked through my ribs where the old wound lived. Blood filled my mouth. My vision tunneled.

"Hull breach critical," Aster said, voice tight with something that might have been fear if AIs could feel fear. "Life support failing. Oxygen at forty percent. The artifact-Atherion-it's responding to the hull breach."

The sphere blazed in sudden, furious life, brighter than plasma fire. Symbols spiraled across its surface, rearranging themselves into geometries that hurt to perceive, dimensions folding into configurations that should not exist in three-dimensional space. Reality around it began to warp.

"A corridor is opening," Aster whispered, and for the first time since I had known her, she sounded awed. "Not ours. Not Dominion. Not any technology in our database."

"Close it," I said through gritted teeth.

"Impossible. I can steer us into it, nothing more. Atherion-this is a spatial fold. A wormhole. If we enter, I cannot guarantee where we'll emerge. When we'll emerge."

"Then steer. We pass through."

"Atherion-"

"We pass through or we die here. Choose."

She chose.

Reality tore apart like wet paper. Light fractured into threads, each one a different frequency, a different possible timeline. Space constricted into a single impossible point. Gravity bowed, reversed, lost all meaning. My bones felt briefly like memory, like the idea of bones rather than the fact of them. The Nexus screamed in my skull as it lost connection to the distributed network, three hundred minds severing simultaneously.

I heard Draven's voice, distant: "My king-"

Then nothing.

"Aster-"

"I remain," she said, her voice flickering like a candle in wind. "Hold to me. Hold to me and do not let go."

Then we fell through the space between spaces.

### Landfall

Cold-clean and merciless-swallowed us.

Water crashed into the pod, black and freezing and thick with silt. Metal screeched. I tore free of the harness, fingers numb, lungs burning. When I broke the surface, air tasted of river silt, lamp oils, and the faint sweetness of unfamiliar flowers. Not the chemical tang of Dominion terraforming. Not the burnt-plastic reek of war.

Bells rang-a gentle, human sound that should not have survived in a universe with men like me in it. Clear and bright, calling faithful to evening prayer in a language I did not know but somehow recognized.

"Aster," I said, treading water, one arm cradled against my chest.

Her voice was tired steel, but present. Alive. "Engines dead. Power reserves at eight percent. Cloak stable but failing. Shore nearby-fifteen meters northeast. I'm detecting structures, heat signatures, but no technological emissions. Atherion-wherever we are, they don't have radio."

"Hide us."

Nightfall slipped beneath the water, stealth cloak bending light and sensor sweeps alike. Anchors locked into stone with quiet clicks. She vanished beneath the reflection of oil lamps drifting across the river's dark skin, each light a small prayer floating toward tomorrow.

I dragged myself to the stone steps, arms shaking. Stone bit into my palms. Pain radiated through my side, my shoulder, my everything. The Nexus node sparked uselessly-the lattice gone, my soldiers beyond reach, three hundred minds I could no longer touch. I felt their absence like missing limbs.

I despise being unmoored.

Footsteps approached-soft, unhurried. A woman's voice, scolding softly in that unknown-familiar language. A younger voice answering with quiet calm. Civilians. Unarmed.

I tried to call to them. My throat failed. My body, pushed beyond all reasonable limits, chose this moment to remind me that flesh has boundaries even when will does not.

The artifact warmed against my palm-steady, certain, alive with purpose I could not yet name.

"Atherion," Aster whispered, her voice distant now, fading into static. "Rest. I will keep the ship hidden. I will keep us safe. Rest."

Darkness drew me down like a closing door, heavy and inexorable.

Before it shut completely, I held fast to two truths:

my father's name, whispered like a prayer to gods I had stopped believing in,

and the unshakable certainty that this world-whoever ruled it, whatever laws governed it-would be mine.

I had lost everything once before.

I would not lose again.