"I, Feoderick of Vimarr, do pledge fealty of province and office to the Walder Viothgarr."

The Gretwalder's once chuckling, distracted face grew suddenly, disturbingly pale as his sharp, feline ears pricked upwards and his searing eyes cast a burning, caustic glance towards his trembling assistant.

"How in the myriad, fiery layers of the Blackhell did this happen?" the lord's low, scathing voice rumbled over the wretched man seated beside him, his hoarse, glowering hue sheathed only by the tenuous dictates of politesse in this crowded, stiflingly sacrosanct Great Hall.

"I..., I..., I...," the servant hesitated, sweating profusely all the more for being unable to openly flail and quake in fear before such a revered collection of lords, priests and unmarketably-priced courtesans floating about him. "I don't know, my liege. Walder Vimarr spoke nothing but highly of you. I had assumed-."

"I need not assumptions now, thou fecal, foul, festering flotsam. I need the numbers!"

Edgar's hand could barely grip the stylus as he tabulated, breathlessly praying he would be able to hold back the truth just a second longer. Just one more string of doubt, one more shred of misplaced hope, one last touch of unearned prid-.

"Spit it out with thee!"

Edgar swallowed and looked up, straight into the vexatious, bloodshot eyes of his master, his whole, comically tiny body embroiled with nervous energy and jittery excitement like a schoolboy about to illicitly embrace a tender sweetheart behind the temple wall or the decapitated body of the condemned wriggling about with its last spurts of life in vain search of its dear, departed appendage.

The Gretwalder had never sat still a day in his life. There had been times when the servant had fancied it a trait almost admirable, a physical manifestation of the great man's impassioned energy, his undying aspiration to plunge his hands in the dirt and his teeth in the enemies of Vitharr. Now though, Edgar had become accustomed to the far more disconcerting, far more deleterious fantasy: that the lord's tremblings were mere substitutes to more secreted desire; that of seizing the throat of his prey.

The servant could feel his master's claws already settling themselves along his doomed larynx as he pronounced the fatal words, "Viothgarr: seven. Us: five."

The tremors ceased immediately as a grave, stone-like facade cemented itself over the Gretwalder, his lifeless visage staring emptily forward in nihilistic contemplation. "I had hoped it would be closer."

Edgar, genuinely moved by the abrupt emotional tumult of his former tormentor, for a moment considered gently brushing a reassuring hand against his lord's thorny backside, but thinking better of it, decided to keep professionally rigid and posit half-hearted prognostications instead. "We've yet to hear all evening from the northern Walders. If they part in our favour, perhaps there is yet hope!"

Without the slightest acknowledgement, the great man merely stood - a bit wobbly from the accumulation of decades of gout and public corruption - and made way to his rival beneath his soon-to-be-abandoned stage in the centre of the chamber.

The servant, though disheartened to see this giant now slain, could find some solace in the dignified nature of his slaying. Of the many conclusions to which this most dreaded and bitterly anticipated nights could have led, a clear defeat and concise concession where amongst the simplest and perhaps most advantageous for their dear country. Even Edgar, the Gretwalder's man, many years and over-exaggerated salaries into the lord's service, could see the numerous faults and false promises his patron had accumulated in four ponderous, purportless terms even without comparing to the dearth of such ignominious qualities in his principle opponent.

The Gretwalder had nearly ambled right up to his challenger's entourage when Kang, the tall, gaunt, yet deviously cheerful chief of security burst through the door, rising the greatest of clamours, though still unable to wipe away that hideous, almost giddy gleam from his face.

"My lords!" Kang thundered, his squeaky, high-pitched voice drawing as many eyes from bemusement as jocosity, ushering forth a wave of barely concealed chuckles. Kang took a series of nearly hyperventilative wheezes to fan the dying flames of his dignity before continuing, "there has been an attack. We are under attack!"

The wave of chortles quickly crested, and the chamber grew deathly silent. Kang, flanked on both sides with ceremonial guards clanking dull, antiquated rapiers against cheaply painted tin armour, jogged awkwardly to centre-stage of the auditorium, his pale, pinkish tongue stuck out through the left side of his tiny mouth to bite down on swelling, full-throated pants.

Standing before the crowd, his long tendril arms outstretched like the felled branches of withering birch trees, the security chief called all to attention and exclaimed. "The VLF, the terrorists, the extremists, they've set insurrection and disturbance all about our Northern regions."

The tinderbox of nervous anxiety burst forth into a wildfire of murmurs and speculations, nearly drowning out the smiling soprano of Kang as he continued, "in addition to the complete destruction of many temples, markets and a variety of other government and/or private edifices, it would appear that Walders Viherr, Vihorr and Vighurr have all been assassinated."

The crowd was immediately stunned into silence.

"Civilian casualty estimates at this time range between-."

"Never mind that!" Walder Viothgarr bellowed as he rose from his chair, the bright, admiring faces of his retinue following his ascent as if tracing an angel on his upward journey to the Heavenly Stars. "What does this mean for the election."

"We have no quorum!" Edgar shouted back, finding a strange confidence in himself that had never so much as slightly stirred in all his life. But this was it! This was what he had been waiting for, hoping for, praying for. The briefest of respites, the closest of reprieves, that marvelous second chance. They could delay, postpone, hold another election with a new set of Walders, and who knows, maybe, just maybe we would yet retain his coveted post and still-more coveted remittance.

"We need order!" the Gretwalder proclaimed, his voice now almost resonating with all the pride and majesty it had lost but mere moments ago when all hope seemed dashed. "We must solve the crisis at hand. We shall continue as the incumbent, and after a brief interregnum to appoint new Walders to the northern provinces and end this insurrection, we can revisit the question of this election."

"Supplanter!" His opponent cried, and now his entire entourage violently rose to their feet. "The desires of the northern lords were well known, far and wide, in my camp and yours. To let you usurp the throne against their clearly delineated instructions is not just an insult to our noble country of Vitharr, but to their eternal souls (may they shine amongst the Stars for a thousand years)." The behind-assembled gentry repeated the last phrase in solemn ceremony as they tapped their breasts in the shape of the eight-pointed star.

"My lord!" interjected Eric as he rushed to defend his leader. "As Keeper of the Scrolls, I must advise caution. Let us not debate here now but bring level heads and open hearts to a new conference tomorrow. Though we must abide by the Way of the Elders, we will happily consider all you propose as the Gretwalder guides us through this time of short troubles. Let us not conjure forth more commotion and disunity in the Great Hall on this most inauspicious of days."

"We demand your resignation," Walder Viothgarr spat back. "After that, we shall be at liberty to talk terms."

"Piss off, thou cooky, child-cocked cat fucker!" the Gretwalder scowled.

Walder Viothgarr's retinue drew their pistols as the Keeper of the Scrolls scurried to the nearest exit, his burst of courage now thoroughly extinguished. The onlookers, perhaps petrified in fear or delighted in fascination, did not have any chance to follow him, however, because just as the servant had reached the door - just briefly peering back - he noticed Walder Viothgarr's body kneeling before their humble leader, a voluminous jet of viscous, blackened blood spurting onto the grinning face of Kang as he gawked at his handiwork through round, dripping glasses.

The Gretwalder did not hesitate long enough for the corpse to even litter the chamber floor. "You all saw it!" he declared, pointing at the bewildered audience. "You know the sides now. Chaos," he gestured towards the now collapsed victim spluttering, breathless dying obscenities through his disconnected head, "or me."

Edgar waited just long enough to penetrate the exit before he vomited all across the corridor, the great leader's pompous, bellicose words following him even there.

"There's no going back now."

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Edward smiled at the return of his friend and felt every hair on his neck stand at attention, but the eyes of his assembled warriors burnt a prison of fiery chains over his immobile form. Still, their gazes lingered on one another, their noses shifting and corneas twinkling just enough that a genuine sense of fellowship and warmth could be exchanged between the two without even so much as the slightest outward interplay.

Alfred knelt, his bosom protruding outwards as he excessively prostrated himself before the prophet. "Oh, my Lord. How I have missed Thee."

Edward kept frigid, unwavering and unmoved as he beheld the supplicating figure. "You have been missed, dear child." Edward softly, solemnly pressed his index and middle fingers into his mouth, where he coated them just a little too much saliva, before stiffly painting eights points on Alfred's forehead, slowly, delicately stroking the flesh through the pool of lukewarm spittle like a hand waves through a puddle of massage oil on its way to tenderize a strained muscle.

"And what of your mission, Alfred?" Edward sighed, raising his glowing, quakingly excited hand from his friend's face. "Why have you returned from your Holy Quest?"

"I have found someone, Thy Eminence. Someone most intriguing, most uncanny and perhaps most favourful to our Cause."

Alfred's eyes scorched beneath the deeper depths of Edward's very soul, bright as the Single Star, alive with a belief so innocent and sincere, Edward knew not whether to pity this man or supplicate to him. It was a conviction so earnest as to either betray sheer righteousness or insanity; there could be no middle ground, and a knot formed in Edward's throat as he toed the line in his comrade's eyes.

"Who is it, Alfred?" Edward asked, astonished from some rare sense of foreboding in his friend's eye.

Alfred glanced upwards at his leader, his delighted teeth glittering with cunning and his right eye winking knowingly, alluringly as he stood, touched his prophet's stone-cut shoulder and asked, "thou will see her, will thou?" His voice was low, imperceptible to all but the beloved leader.

"Her?" Edward demanded, dragging Alfred to the far corner of the tent, away from any rude, prying ears.

"Fret not! Thou will like her," Alfred said before cowering behind his quivering leader.

Two attendants parted the ger's tent-flaps and in stepped a short, compact woman of impish proportions, an evident product of the harsh gravity and heavy, tar-crusted atmosphere of her native Cassia Prime. The garish light of the freshly minted snow bathed the figure in an almost satirical representation of saintly halo, making all the more distasteful her un-heeled boots, un-skirted pants, unconcealed forearms and unbraided hair.

Edward turned his back on the enticing corruptor. The other warriors shielded their eyes and beat a hasty retreat. They knew only too well the exacting penalties for those twisted by the feminine wiles of the infidel.

"How dare thou drag onto Holy ground such profane filth as this?" Edward hissed, scowling so harshly his forgotten scars all threatened wounds reemergent.

"Please, my Lord. She is an ally from the Party. She only means to assist us."

"Deal with the Party! We might well do so, but not until they have the decency of delivering a man with whom it is worth dealing," Edward scoffed, signalling the attendants to dispose of the impromptu visitor as quickly as she had been revealed.

The attendants had just laid the first peremptory hands on her when she cried, "there are no men left!"

"What?" Edward stopped and turned his head ever so slightly, not quite admitting the benefit of the doubt, but not quite willing to surrender his curiosity either. He signalled the guards to hold back, but kept his finger upraised, prepared to rain forth His judgement at any moment.

"You cannot speak to the man in the charge, because they are no men in charge. Not in my group, not in the Party, not in all Cassia Prime. They are all, nearly each and every one of them, now dead."

"I..." Edward was speechless. "How?"

"The Empire has kept you insulated for too long: protecting you from the tumult outside, maybe, but obscuring the truth as well, certainly. Everywhere I go, I find you know nothing of what has befallen your Cassian brothers on the Inner Worlds."

"We've heard rumours-."

"Rumours cannot set whole villages to torch, the wretched flames devouring the progeny of whole generations. Rumours cannot steel points into brothers and flesh points into sisters, their screams ringing shrilly through the cursed night. Rumours rend not fields fallow, stores plundered, and bellies festered with earthen clay. I do not doubt what you have heard, my lord, but I can only profess to it being nothing more than the empty shadow of a barren, hellish truth."

"We are sorry," Edward hung his head in shame. "We were wrong to treat you so dismissively, but the Revelations are clear. We cannot plague our thoughts with the poisoned meanderings of a witch, compelling though her tale may be."

"You won't be saying that when the war comes for you and Vitharr!" the woman cried out.

"Are you now claiming clairvoyancy, enchantress?" Edward asked, seething. "For I can see to it thou are tossed on the burning pile if our doorstep does not suit thee well enough."

"Not at all, Lord." The woman hung her head in deferential shame. "The Party is young, and fragile, but our mission has found acceptance far and wide." She looked up again, grinning, "We have spies in the Empire. We know of their plans."

"This is a feminine ruse! We shan't be persuaded by beguiling double-speak."

"She speaks truth!" Alfred professed. "She told me an imperial convoy is inbound to our planet, and my informants in the Gretwalden have confirmed it."

"And what is on carried on this caravan?" Edward asked, turning to Alfred, sneering.

"Well, the new governor of the jiaren colonies...," Alfred began.

"And four imperial legions," the woman finished.

"What!" Edward exclaimed, positively aghast. "What is the meaning of this! What is the object of such cruel deception?"

"There is no deception, Edward, my prophet," Alfred said, clamping his hand down Edward's shoulder and opening his arm towards the woman. "The Empire is a threat to the Party just as much as they are to us."

"The Party has only just reunified Cassia Prime, my Lord. Should we forfeit but a toe-hold in this system to such devils, it can all be lost for us again," the messenger added.

"To that end," Alfred nudged his friend in a most conspiratorial manner, "the Party has offered us weapons and vehicles to bring the fight to the infidel legions!"

"Lies!" Edward shrieked. "We are more educated than thou would have us pegged, demon! We know of your Party's atheistic creed and its treatment of our brethren in the inner worlds. We may not commit to memory the meandering plights of all your many wars and catastrophes, but we have heard tales a'plenty of your death-camps and re-education centres."

"I do not claim a the Old Faith, such as you, Lord, but to belief I am no foreigner," the woman said, pacing away from the guards and circling Edward almost like a tiger would stalk its victim. "The Party believes all Cassians - Prime and Vidar, man and woman, you and me - to be equals, and the Empire believes all the universe a jiaren colony and all of humanity the Emperor's slaves. One offers you supply and amity to meet a common foe and the other tempts with death and blasphemy. We just ask that you take our munitions, Prophet. You need not borrow our ideals too."

"Forgive our simple Vidar sensibilities if we cannot accept that you are somehow rendered more trustworthy through the paucity of your morals."

The woman stopped her pacing, smirked and looked straight into Edward's eyes, the first time a female had ever had the audacity to do any such thing in the entirety of his pure, unpolluted life. "I know Thy story, Eminence. Thy ancestors for a hundred generations were guardians of the Faith. Then the Empire compelled the Vidar to heretical gods, and your movement sprang up to defend the Old Believers who would not kiss the boot of a demon emperor."

"I understand, my lord, and I want thee to know that I long to tend a beautiful house and fill it with happy, smiling children with all the same passion and fire that thou wish to don thy grandfather's vestments and preach sermons in his high temple. But we are both practical people, and we will not let our desires stand on our principles. These are different times in a different universe, and if we cannot do that which we wish, we shall do that which we must."

"Take the arms," the woman said, her luminous yellow eyes still trained directly on Edward as she lifted the tent flaps and prepared her exit. "Alfred knows how to contact me should you desire it." She turned her head, dismissing herself. "We need not ever meet again."

"... if that preserves thy fragile pride," she muttered, leaving the tent to wander back in the bitter cold of the piercing, snow-choked northern mountains.

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And so to the victor shall go the spoils, Aeplerad mused to himself as he daintily ambled back and forth across the winding river carved so adroitly into the opulent igneous rock and tropical green of the Viothgarr villa.

Where this resort - this precious little enclave of sun-swept, alabaster beaches, towering, exotic fauna and equally tall, exotic women in an otherwise dim and frigid world - had once been a constant, aching reminder of the immense wealth Walder Viothgarr had so long dangled over the Gretwalder, it was now but a broken clam unable to conceal its glimmering pearl. Even after such a great many years of sticky fingers, shifty dealings and clever accounting, the Gretwalder had never dreamed of amassing a fortune but one tenth in the value that his rival had so serendipitously surrendered through treason. True, the man's sons certainly did have some rights to his title and property, but with the other lords so thoroughly and perfectly cowed, Aeplerad had needed only to snap his fingers to disinherit the entire Viothgarr line.

And this was just, was is not? Who else but the conqueror could ever hope to divide the plunder? Swimming upwards and down in crystalline, chartreuse waters until his weathered skin shrank around him like a shrivelled prune; epicurean meals of every beast and bird known to man drowned down with an ocean of fine wines; breeding an ever-expanding assortment of wives, bringing forth another heir to do it all over again: this was the life of a Gretwalder! The life of a king (though perhaps that was a word best left thought and unspoken)!

If only that Keeper could be done away with, and then the stratagem would be in all fulfilled, thought Aeplerad as he peevishly dove beneath the waters to evade his rapidly approaching servant.

"My lord!" the Keeper of the Scrolls called beneath the waves. "My lord. You must rise at once! A new governor of the jiaren colony has arrived unannounced!"

"Thou do bend in the wrong direction, slave," a strong, sumptuous feminine voice called from the pool's edge, pre-empting a deafening onslaught of marching boots onto the tiled finery.

The imperial herald, garbed in perfectly clean, pleated grey khaki emblazoned with an array of gold chains and medallions tied together by a vermillion sash entered first, followed shortly by a woman, the source of the voice and her retinue behind her. The other soldiers were all mostly dressed as the herald, with the exception of substituting a dark azure for their own crisp uniforms.

The Gretwalder, soaking and humiliated, hauled himself out of the water as a flurry of servants fastened a luxurious but entirely belittling satin robe about him. He stood uncouthly, little sapphires dripping down him to bathe his trail in an impromptu sparkling aura as he traversed the corridor of assembled legionnaires to greet his visitor.

The governor and her household staff stood in stark contrast to what was otherwise an ocean of martial conformity. The lady has adorned herself with a dazzling dress of silk and gold brocade enmeshed so perfectly and so minutely together that it hung as graceful clouds about her body, an enormous, radiant expanse of amorphous, glittering fibre that had to be carried by a train of footmen. Unwilling to allow her subjects to distract from the spectacle, however, the governor had also clothed each in their own stunning colour, linen entirely unique in their design save a shared, silver chain that linked the waists of each servant and seemed to trail over and under the skirts of the governor herself.

The Gretwalder had hear of such courtesans before, in the Inner Worlds, where such things were not as frowned upon as here. There, where the fighting had been greatest, where the plagues and famine more extreme, where the Cassian Order had disintegrated further than here, there were now men so desperate, so dispirited in nature, that they relinquished their pride as men and sold themselves on the imperial market as sexual curiosities. They shunned any and all meats to become frail and emasculated, lathering their bodies in talcum or chalk to imitate the pale, soft skin of their jiaren masters who were more accustomed to sunless, smoggy skies and eternal ocean storms. There, in the Inner Worlds, they starved and saved all their lives for the slightest chance to meet the eyes of a deep-pocketed merchant or loot-laden legionnaire or perhaps, glory of glories, an official at the court of the emperor himself!

The practice was forbidden on Vitharr, and there seemed something perniciously insulting about so prominently displaying such hussies before him now.

The herald stood to attention, clasped his tight, brown leather boots together, pointed his snout as far upwards as could be done without raising his patronization to a completely ridiculous height, and cried, "her Excellency the Lady Ci Xiao, by grace of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of the Great Home Dynasty, hereby appointed Governor of Septimi on 13 Shahhis, first year of the Yongle reign."

The Keeper shuffled himself awkwardly so as to be remaining kowtowing for as long as seemed polite whilst ambling over to better present his master. "His highness, Lord Aeplerad deVoffrarr, Gretwalder of all Vitharr and Overlord of the Vidar."

Aeplerad's party all bowed, their heads nearly kissing the floor, while their lord remained upright, unable to bend without exposing the furry innards of his housecoat. Someone then realized what was amiss, as a loud, inexpertly muffled whisper "a tribute!" was heard, before a band of servants began chaotically scouring the villa.

Eventually, after much clammer from shattering urns, clinking armour and crumbling antiquities a dusty, fracturing, clay orb etched with ancient runes was brought forth lying sloppily on a lace-embroidered pillow. "A tribute, your Excellency," the Gretwalder introduced.

Aeplerad waited, stiff and unmoving, wondering when the governor would present a gift of her own, but none was offered. Instead, the woman snapped, and her prostitutes hastily tore the silky clouds from her body, leaving her, while still in formal attire, far too shapely and almost nude by Vidar custom. The Gretwalder's representatives could hardly contain their own exasperated gasps as the governor, prancing on white, pearl-crusted shoes levitating over tall, crystal, invisible soles ambled towards the Vidar offering.

"Garlic?" she asked, in a tone entirely personal and untoward, as if the estate were void of all but her and the Gretwalder.

"What?" Aeplerad asked, profoundly befuddled.

"It's an old charm," the Keeper explained, dipping his head even further down as he did. "Our people, in olden, barbaric days, believed some aromatics could ward off evil spirits. It is a most treasured and holy relic of our-."

"Thou have furnished us with a most puerile product of a puerile race. It is well received amongst the other savage novelties of this charmingly alien planet," the governor giggled, the glossy, over-stretched folds of her face pulled disturbingly taut across her sunken, protruding skull into a technically beautiful but unsettling smile. "Thou will serve us most well, we reckon. Raise thyself."

"My lady," Aeplerad jumped to his feet, unwilling to bear another moment of such unbridled emasculation, "we fear your worship has not been adequately informed of our unique relationship to the Empire-."

"Firstly," the governor continued, speaking over the Gretwalder as if his words had been but meritless musings, "there shall be a called a new session of the Gretwalden. The emperor wishes to address thee and thy fellow lords in the shortest possible recourse of time."

"That can certainly be arranged, your excellency," Aeplerad pleaded, nearly stammering as he held back his tongue, "but is not your place to issue edict-."

"Secondly, your ports will begin unloading our legions from orbit. This is the General Order of the Imperial Joint Chiefs," she said, as a trail of blue uniformed officers began stacking a pyramid more than a meter high of documents and letters. "Distribute to your military advisors, and we shall call a first command meeting at the first tomorrow morning."

"But what of these legions? What of these command meetings? Your worship, this is entirely without notice any kind." Aeplerad could barely breathe, and his toes were shaking so quickly and so intensely they seemed aiming to break the volcanic rock beneath his feet. He breathed a deep sigh, steadied himself and asked, "but who are we fighting, your excellency?"

"The terrorists, our dear Aeplerad," Lady Ci winked, the motion of a pleasant kiss forming itself on her lips. "Worry no longer thy delicate brain, Gretwalder. The Empire is here to help at last."

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"Shovelled swine-shit lingers less distasteful in my mouth," the Gretwalder said, staring at the words before him.

"We must show deference, my lord," the Keeper replied, now beginning to wobble and waver from the contagious apprehensive excitement of the cowardly caitiff beside him. "We will strategize later, but for now, let us breathe and consider all lest we move brashly."

"I know not if I have the strength to pacify such a venomous harlot, Edgar."

"Please, my liege, the governor is entering. Guard your tongue."

The Gretwalder and other assembled lords stood as the governor strode to the centre-stage, leaving her army of courtiers and bodyguards to watch from the gallery as well as guarding the exits should any confrontation arise. Alone and untethered, however, her earlier, more fearsome veneer seemed strangely absent. To Aeplerad, it seemed was as if the irritable, challenging eyes of the assembled Vidar lords and attendants were wearing down the jagged edges to reveal some feminine smoothness beneath.

Lady Ci cleared her throat before placing a tastefully decorated sheet of parchment on the lectern and noticeably leaning all her weight against it for support. "Thank you for having gathered here today on such urgent business, my lords. We - though according with custom - shall be brief, and allow us after only the most necessary of introductions to present the matter at hand."

"First, we shall present to you a poem, written in the hand of the Emperor Himself, giving good wishes from His court to yours. It reads:

"Friends and vassals, love most facile

Bleeds from my heart.

One home built from stones of each castle."

The governor withdrew from the lectern abruptly, her heavy shoes echoing clumsily on the empty stage, muffled not at all by the tremendous applause on which she had anticipated but did not arrive. Flustered, she coughed, stiffened herself, and overly formally, with the personality and feeling of only the most lazily programmed of automatons, she removed a long, ostentatiously drooping quill from an enormous inkwell, and performatively scratched the character for "unity" onto the page. Each slash and stroke seemed to absorb almost the entirety of a lifetime as the reverence the ceremony demanded was never quite delivered, and every wheeze, sneeze, clanging door and clanking teacup visibly disrupted and incensed the poised governor, twitching as she fought desperately to maintain the regal decorum so owed her.

Aeplerad had seen all he needed. He knew the Walders were rough and uncivilized, a fact that produced nothing but great shame in him, but here and now, it could have its uses.

It was now time for him to demonstrate who was truly lord of this domain.

He stood to give a poem in return, picking up the Keeper's carefully prepared lyrics in his hand, and shredding them in half before the governor's very eyes.

"Now, we Vidar don't often abide such foreign customs," the Gretwalder said, reclaiming his deep, roaring voice as he addressed his peers, all but ignoring the woman standing just beside him. "Yet I shall endeavour to make a reply worthy of our countrymen all the same," Aeplerad said, teasing playfully his eager audience.

Performatively puffing out his chest in a theatrically grandiose breath of air, he grinned, almost too elated at his own cleverness and good humour to actually deliver the lines before pronouncing:

"Sweaty, swelling, sweetly

My manly member melts

Cold claustrophobic cunt"

The great men of the hall exploded in raucous applause as the Gretwalder bowed to each hoot and holler, beaming with delight, flaying his arms about like an actor throwing smooches at the culmination of a momentous play. Aeplerad stole a glance over to her worship before seating himself again, hoping to spot some scarlet blushes come to the surface of her painted face, but she remained undaunted, perhaps even with a new, imperceptible guile about her.

"And with that sorted, we shall commence," the governor began, not even waiting for the laughter to die down before cutting through it with a steely, serious air.

"For many decades we have enjoyed a peaceful, fruitful co-existence, your people and ours, but sadly, that harmony, that cohesion, that unity is threatened now more than ever before. Where once the colony was the colony and Vitharr was Vitharr, our people work in the same affairs, serve in the same administrations, marry into the same bloodlines and face the same threats. It is thus, with the faintest of hearts and of no ill of your own, that the Emperor in His infinite wisdom has made it known that all of this planet, Septimi is to be annexed as a province of the Empire as soon as such provisions can be feasibly undertaken."

Tiny chortles and mocking laughter had still been reverberating about the room, but now it suddenly became entirely silent. The governor continued, not looking up once from her notes.

"The Emperor does not take this decision without warrant or due diligence. It is done in light of new, unanticipated threats and unprecedented challenges, threats and challenges that we cannot reasonably hope to overcome if the martial and administrative resources of this planet remain divided."

"When, after seven generations of travelling through the grueling desert of space, the first of our colonists arrived here in the frozen wastes of Septimi's north pole, the ancient Cassian Order was already falling, and the extremist Old Believers had poisoned your institutions and society. Through our infinite generosity and kindness, the Vidar were spared the anarchy and desolation that befell the Cassian Inner planets as well as the violent sectarianism preached by the Old Believers. Now, sadly, as we are afraid most of you may already know, both have pledged their return to this poor, forgotten corner of the universe."

The lady coughed dryly, turning the page, her unyielding monotone hardly keeping pace to the drama clearly intentioned by her writer.

"A wicked, corrupt ideology has infected the minds of your fellow Cassians in the Inner Worlds, and a vile, vehement and unshakeably dogmatic Party has arisen on Cassia Prime. Already, even the most disgusting and unnatural of its teachings - equality of the classes, abolition of private property, hatred of freedom – have reached far beyond that planet, even to the Home Worlds themselves."

"Make no mistake; the Party seeks to rebuild the tyranny of the ancient Order with no regard whatsoever for the suffering and commiseration it will cost them to do it, and we believe, they have already made their first strike, here, on this very planet, not so many months ago."

"Our haruspex has undertaken an investigation of the VLF attack that so devastated your Northern region and cut short the lives of three noble Walders. It has been determined, by experts both scientific and extremely prudential, that such an attack could not possibly have been conducted without the assistance of a far more sophisticated organization than these mountain-dwelling zealots. These terrorists are but a ruse, a distraction, a half-convincing façade for a plot far more insidious: The Party mandate to rob us all of our lives and hard-gotten property."

The governor, after rattling in a broken, uncertain voice, now tilted her head as if in mild contemplation, before letting her eyes droop and face grow stern, mimicking a disappointed mother redressing her ungrateful offspring.

"We had hoped, when we first arrived here, that our mission to normalize and integrate this fair country into the greater Home Empire would be a most pleasant and amiable task, but as the dear Gretwalder has just so thoroughly demonstrated, your level of civilization is currently far lacking the standards of an imperial province. As such, we are left with little choice but to utilize the vast prerogative having been bestowed upon us by His Majesty the Emperor to ameliorate your presently pitiable state and thus make it suitable for the habitation of less barbaric peoples."

The room was stirring now. An energy rife with melodramatic airs of antagonism and rancour spilled forth as the governor chose to gaze up from the lectern and stare defiantly at the grumbling men beneath her. The assembled legionnaires, far in the rafters looked down with smiles on their lips and their hands eagerly fingering their greedy triggers.

"First and foremost, there is the matter of the great number - some would say perhaps many millions - of imperial peoples, jiaren as you call them, now by movement or intermarriage living among the Vidar but enjoying none of the same rights and privileges so guaranteed to all such other inhabitants of our great Empire. This cannot stand, and the Gretwalder himself, in his own, unknowing grace, has happily delivered unto us the solution ready made."

The Gretwalder shrank in his seat, a sense of overwhelming dread taking hold of him, depriving him of breath and wit. "We do not follow, " Aeplerad stated meekly, reclining so far into his chair as to nearly slide under and escape the ambush.

"Worry yourself noy, my lord. We shall elucidate. You see," the governor continued, "it has been brought to our attention that instead of naming a successor to the Walder Viothgarr, as the Gretwalder did for the other three Walders killed by the VLF, he has instead elected to administer that Walden as a personal fief and disenfranchise the dead Walder's heirs altogether."

"Viothgarr was a traitor, my lady," Aeplerad pleaded. "It is well within customs, but ...," he quickly reconsidered, seeing a grotesque sneer meet his remark on the lady's fine countenance, "perhaps I was too extreme, perhaps over-zealous. We can always reconsid-."

"Not at all! Not at all! No apology is necessary, my dear servant. In fact," Lady Ci tittered again, though Aeplerad was learning to hear these chortles for the maniacal howls they were, cloaked as they may be in girlish nonchalance, "if anything you have erred on the side of being too cautious, too unambitious, of not being overzealous enough! For now that a Walder family has been completely disinherited, a measure not even the Emperor Himself would deploy on his subjects, the precedent is set, the power is acknowledged, and we are at complete and total liberty on how to replace them, perhaps replace all of you Walders one day!"

Not a single breath was taken in the whole of the capacious cavern of the colossal chamber. The Governor, well amused at the abject terror she had stricken into her audience began to burst again into cute, feminine laughter. "A joke, a joke, dear lords! You take us far too seriously. For we have little want or desire to replace you, the loyal vassals of His Majesty. We need only now, however, the smallest, most brief of introductions to civilization to this Gretwalden. A jiaren. As such, it is decided the Walden Viothgarr is now and forever disbanded, and in its seat, an elected representative of the jiaren - the people heretofore so unfairly trampled and neglected in this country - shall henceforth sit."

"To the purpose of properly civilizing and educating your barbarous race, there shall be swift and immediate reform as well. Primarily, the official language of all affairs of import, shall they be of a commercial, administrative, legal or religious nature, will now and forever be the language of the Home Empire: jiawen."

"The Revelations cannot be read in a foreign tongue!" an ecclesiastical Walder cried out, but the governor forged ahead, determined to flatten any such objections.

"Moreover," Lady Ci continued, having noticed she was pressing on a subject of particular sensitivity, and smiling all the more for it, "although your religion has proven extremist and prone to outbursts of violence and fundamentalism, our Empire is tolerant and respecting of local custom. As such, we will grant the privilege, upon formal annexation, to continue observing your ancient rites, but not without some careful reworking and reimagining of current doctrinal teachings, and the imposition, now that He is dead and King over Heaven, of the deceased Hongwu Emperor in relief at every temple and house of worship throughout all of Vitharr."

The offended clerics leaped to their feet, their leader stammering a disdainful, infuriated response. "That was not the deal! Our people were promised that the Empire, for all eternity, would never tamper with our Faith."

"The deal," the governor lashed out with her vicious tongue, "was to worship the Emperor along with your own gods, yet everywhere I go I see Old Believers and fanatical terrorists and pompous priests who know not when to bend their knees and shut their mouths. There is no compact of which to speak wherein one party refuses to hold up his own end."

The rest of the clerics were cowed back into their seat, but the first Walder to object still stood his ground as if the Stars Themselves had commanded his feet cemented to the floor. "The Faith has made all the concessions it can to the Emperor. Thou shall see no others!"

"Remove him," Lady Ci demanded, almost dismissively to Kang and the Vidar security officers stationed all around the centre platform.

The officers stood motionless, their faces awash with confusion and fear, as the Gretwalder leaned over to the governor and whispered, "we cannot arrest a cleric, my lady. It is not the Way of the Elders."

The governor leaned back also, so close to Aeplerad that the conversation took on an almost sensual tone as her words kissed the Gretwalder's forehead in much the same way a playful whip might caress the masochist's bare back. "Arrest him or my soldiers will open fire."

The governor grabbed Aeplerad by the scruff of his neck, pulling him ever closer, completely uncaring as to who might be overhearing, the smell of her poison apple perfume smothering every sensor of his nostrils. "He has insulted me, and I won't stand to be insulted; thou do hear? I will not stand to be insulted. I'd sooner kill every Cassian in this room than be insulted. I need thee to understand it and understand it now."

The Gretwalder gulped, though from intense fear or unacknowledged, submissive lust, he could not tell. Either way, he released himself from the lady's porcelain grasp and signalled to Kang who immediately strode out to the ecclesiastical benches.

A great tumult ensued as the priests were dragged away, some kicking, screaming and one even biting the ear clean off a guard who had imprudently begun hauling the cleric away on his back, throwing the man and his billowing vestments like a sac of salt over the shoulders. All the while, they hollered and protested: "we demand justice!" "respect our rights!" "we cannot be treated as commoners!" "protect the scriptures" "Stars have mercy on your eternal souls, blasphemers!" and other similar ominous nonsense.

The governor left her lectern and walked to the very far edge of the platform, where above her, an elaborate tapestry depicting the submission of Vitharr to the Home Empire was fixed high on the marble wall. "Perhaps, despite it being made plain and evident to all your illiterate eyes, you have still failed to see, but no matter, we are always and primarily an educator, and we will never hesitate to teach any lesson, no matter how challenging to the student."

Lady Ci pointed her arm straight above her, displaying proudly her willowy, thin, giraffe arms, entirely and inappropriately naked, shining in reflected, golden light, "who is this, your worship?" the governor asked the now almost entirely disintegrated Gretwalder.

"His Majesty, the Hongwu Emperor, your worship," Aeplerad called out, an unruly student now disciplined before the class.

"Correct. And who are these pathetic, mewling creatures, before Him?"

"The Council of the Gretwalden, your worship."

"So it was and so it shall be," the governor stated, so vigorously that it came out nearly as a prayer. "Speak not to us of any 'deals' you have thus far presumed, gentlemen. That," she said, pointing directly at the woven lords kneeling before the Emperor, "is the one and only deal on offer. Now let us not allow the Vidar to forget it!"

The legionnaires began to clap and applaud, cheering loudly and threateningly enough to instill the lords below them to also rise from their chairs and clap along like rusty marionettes at the leash of a palsied puppeteer. True to his craven nature, the Gretwalder leaped to applause without too great a prompting.

Still, he surveyed the crowd and kept a clear mental note of all the Walders seeming to clap a little bit too enthusiastically. He would have need of all the support he could muster.

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It was nearly three in the morning when the Gretwalder summoned them: a handful of the freshest, most pliable lords, made all the more so by the agony of being roused from their soft beds and assailed by Kang and his men at this unholy hour, dragged through the corridors in indecent bed-clothes and propped before Aeplerad shivering and frosted in the morning chill. The Gretwalder knew their suffering all too well - the governor having exacted the very same fate upon him - but suffering was its own form of education, and he hoped his Walders would leave the conference as edified as when he had left his first conference with the Lady Ci.

"We must protest!" Ethelrad, a bulbous, malformed, tumour of a man and incidentally the imp Aeplerad had donned Walder Viherr (a cursory jape), sputtered through his fleshy jowls, nearly enmeshing his absurdly tiny, glorified rectum of a mouth.

"My lords, please forgive the ardent nature of my guards," Aeplerad began, opening his palms in feigned mollification. "They are better suited to clearing palace rabble than your esteemed selves, I will not hesitate to admit, but circumstances are so dire, so urgent, so desperate for redress, that I felt myself no choice but to have you procured here by any means necessary."

"And what urgent business is that?" another Walder moaned, his reddened, tear-soaked eyes nearly bleeding from strain.

"We must discuss again our response to the governor!" the Gretwalder hollered at them, spittle bursting from his lips, knowing just a touch of volume could keep them unsettled and in discomfort.

"This has been debated already four times," Ethelrad whined, though as his temper waned, he broke quickly towards condescension. "We all side with you, my lord, but you cannot continue to assemble us in committees of various compositions until one is serendipitously led to some answer you refuse to provide!"

"But we have an answer," the new Walder Vighurr echoed, jubilantly. "It is the Emperor! We shall make an appeal to the Emperor. You were there; you agreed, Gretwalder. I heard of your mouth it said, 'let us gather a fine case and supplicate ourselves just so,'" the short, scrawny man contorted his brittle, bony body so grotesquely that all assembled were quite certain his hollow frame was certain to break.

"You spout lies in my face!" the Gretwalder denounced, insouciant at their unfortunately continuing close relationship to reality. "Worry not, for I shall provide forthwith what I sadly was too constrained to produce before the entirety of the Gretwalden."

He shifted up from his desk and began pacing all about the suffocating confinements of his now-insignificant office, circling each of his most loyal lords again and again, like a spider spooling silk over entangled flies, just waiting to devour them. "For the Emperor is a proud and reasonable man, sure, but why does a proud and reasonable man appoint a petulant woman to govern His province? This is the questions we have not asked gentlemen, and we ask it not for we fear the answer that must lead from it: He does so because He does not care, and the province does not matter."

"I hope you understand why I hesitated to adjoin this to the public record." Aeplerad stopped abruptly between two of the seated Walders and poked his head through their chairs. "There can be no appeals, no supplications. As the governor said, we are alone and there is only one deal on offer."

"But the Emperor, He offered us a poem of friendship in His own hand!" cried out another bewildered Walder.

"And the Imperial Joint Chiefs have issued a General Order," the Gretwalder retorted, scattering the secret documents about his desk like they were little more than discarded placemats. "These generals have already mapped when and where to build five defensive bases, the logistics of pressing over half our male population into the imperial legion, and there is even included a six hundred page appendix detailing how to completely dismantle and reconfigure the natural material from our moons into a giant space station and staging area for a potential invasion of Cassia Prime."

"This is not some whim, my lords. The whole of the Imperial bureaucracy is invested. The Emperor could not stop it even if He wanted to."

"But why share such a vivid portrayal, if this truly was their design?" asked the lord now right below the Gretwalder's enormous hand. He strained himself, careening his neck to address his leader, but soon had to lean in the opposite direction as a voice called out from the shadows.

"Because such matters are mere trivialities to them." Kang, leaning against the far corner of the office, crept forward, only the more scarred and fearsome side of his still-grinning face illuminated in the murky light. "I'm a jiaren myself, and I've served in their legions. The doldrum matter of subjugating whole worlds and ripping them apart for spare resources and new recruits never seems to raise even the slightest of controversies."

"So, we are doomed!" sobbed Ethelrad, a fountain of tears moistening the numerous folds of glistening fat drooping off his face.

"Not at all, gentlemen, not at all," Aeplerad demurred, walking directly over to the weeping lord and placing a loving, but still uncomfortably twitching hand directly against his shoulder. "Worry yourselves not, for there is a plan in motion. Due to the delicacy of my position, I, of course, must remain completely loyal to the governor in appearance, and in all public duties I may even be seen doubting or undermining our case, but know always I am with you and you alone! You must stay brave and fierce, even as I am called upon to be more clandestine and docile."

"But what shall you have us do!" cried the Walders, almost in harmonic unison.

"Ah," replied the Gretwalder, returning to his seat, "such enthusiasm does truly delight me. With such men as you I have little doubt our country will remain strong, firm and independent for many generations to come."

Aeplerad swallowed, trying not to gag on the taste of his ill-placed praise. "We shall win through obedience, gentlemen, a clever, most creative form of obedience. We shall remain loyal in all things to the Emperor, and endeavour to serve Him as best we can, sometimes, perhaps, in spite of His governor's over-eager remonstrations."

"With all due respect," asserted one of the lower nobles on the far side of the room, "your 'creative obedience' so far has landed a cleric in indefinite, illegal detention and made a mockery of our law and customs. I can scarce imagine what finer delicacies this spineless program will surely conjure forth."

"A criticism most measured and thoughtful, Sir Harold," the Gretwalder began, smiling curtly as he signalled Kang to begin stalking the interloper from the shadows. "It is the sort of criticism which, when received and restricted to an intimate circle of friends can be quite enlightening, perhaps beneficial even, but whereupon leaving said circle of close confidantes, becomes most terribly destructive."

"On the same note, I have a similar criticism to share with thee, Harold," Aeplerad continued, removing an ominously bloody coloured folder from a lower drawer and nonchalantly flipping it open about his desk. "You see, our dear Kang here, has made it known to me that thou do enjoy fucking little servant boys up the bum. Why it says here, some even bleed so heavily they've nearly died, the sorry chaps. Now, between us friends, I think we can all agree that thou are more than capable of reform and good deeds, and who amongst us anyways has not stuck our cocks into one hole or another where it did not belong."

Abruptly, terrifyingly, he then raised his face and nearly snarled, "The clerics, however -should such an issue be raised with them - would likely see it in much a different light, perhaps even setting thee alight, dear Harold."

The Gretwalder closed his heavy file with a deep and gloomy thud. "Now, perhaps we shall save up a repository of questions for a later date and just listen for the moment, hmm?"

The gathered lords sat muted and repressed, their heads bowed in shame, light sobbing echoing from indistinct corners of the room. Aeplerad winked, tactlessly trying to lighten the mood, immediately feeling a pang of unpleasantness at such a physical manifestation of terror. Regardless, he pressed on. "The key, gentlemen, is to read the words between the governor's lines, to find the hidden message and deliver, obediently and perfectly, the true agenda of His majesty's masterful plan."

"Each of us has been proud in the past of hiring into our retinues and administrations a great number of jiaren, like our very Mister Kang here, who can better read and write the imperial script that so pleases our Emperor, but perhaps we have been misguided in doing so. As the governor said herself, the Party's ideology is already infecting all manner of her people on the Home worlds. Many jiaren here, who almost certainly much richer soil to alien ideals, have no doubt already become hopelessly ensnared in the Party's deadly grip. The most part are still loyal, of course. I doubt the numbers could exceed more than one in a thousand, one in a hundred maybe-."

"One in ten!" Kang shouted, positively exuberant, already checking names off in his head.

"Perhaps. I do not doubt the possibility," Aeplerad continued, "but regardless of one in ten or one in a million, we cannot allow the nine innocents or even the nine hundred thousand innocents to obscure the one guilty, for all it takes is one to unravel the very foundations of our fragile, ancient society."

"As such, we must begin posthaste to root out any potential unreliables, no matter how unlikely or how innocuous. We cannot be faulted for overzealousness; if nine must go to seal the fate of the one, that is acceptable. For by contrast, we shall be greatly faulted if we show too great a leniency and the one so neglected does destroy our entire civilization. You all heard the governor, the Party is so great a threat, no conceivable response thereto can ever be in excess."

"This election also," the Gretwalder quivered, overtaken by a violent set of not-unrelated fits, "will undoubtedly provide another opportunity for these jiaren radicals and Party agents to establish themselves, and when one considers the sheer novelty of the public forum to our sheltered, little country, it is difficult to predict what chaotic and anarchic voices may arise. Why, given the fact that their temples are ransacked, scriptures censored, and priests imprisoned, it would not surprise me if any such political gatherings and other jiaren assemblies attracted a most ... prejudicial crowd."

"But, of course, we are civilized people, gentlemen, and we must do our absolute best to maintain order, my lords. We must maintain order. That is why, you have all heard from me, and you can repeat it anywhere, we must not allow any resulting violence to rise above acceptable levels. You heard it, gentlemen, and I will repeat it: we cannot allow violence to exceed acceptable levels. Any riots, pogroms, sectarian killings, holocausts, come what may, we cannot allow anything above acceptable levels. You understand, gentlemen. Of course, you understand. There is a reason I had you all placed in this room. It is not your just for your obedience but for your understanding, your competence. It cannot exceed acceptable levels!"

Aeplerad stood, careening just slightly over his desk, as he tried to distract from his left foot's incessant, neurotic tapping. "Now, gentlemen," he said, his voice faltering now that he had left the calming confines of his carefully crafted project, "if, um, you are at ease – and I would suggest rather fervently that you are – you may depart."

There lasted for a moment a brief, eerie stillness, as if the petite assembly had been stocked by well dressed corpses, their lips open but mouths unmoving, encompassed entirely in a debilitating uncertainty, until the first of them surrendered to their most animalistic desire to escape, and the others slowly followed, as hesitant and grave as a procession to the gallows.

"Not thee, Walder Vihorr," Aeplerad called back, positively delighting in the wave of angst and palpable dread that washed over the miserable, shriveled face of Karl. He was a flimsy card-house of a man more affable to crumble in the wind than change directions with it, and by leaps and bounds, the weakest, most terrified of the paltry prey whom the Gretwalder had so entrapped.

Aeplerad gracefully plopped himself on the chair beside Karl's, his arm reaching around to indelicately caress the prickly top of the Walder's back, feeling the delicious little electrical discharges as every hair on the mark's lower neck straightened and tugged at his fraying sanity. Kang prowled in the distance, his white smile still glittering from time to menacing time.

"Karl, my dear Karl," the Gretwalder began, his words saccharine and voluminous as the thickest gob of molasses, "when I bestowed that eternal jewel that is Vihorr upon thee, I had such great, no, magnificent plans for thy little fiefdom, but now I fear they may come all to ruin!"

"Stars forbid!" the lord replied, astonished.

"Yes, yes, but there is something more than prayer which we can offer yet, my lord," Aeplerad continued. "Your army, yes, it guards an outpost near farthest fringes of VLF activity, is that right?"

"Yes. We there established it to, uh, prevent another incursion from the mountains. I think at least. I can always ask my-."

"I want you to abandon it."

"My, my, my ... lord," Karl tried to respond, but he was entirely subsumed by asphyxiating terror.

"Now, now, Karl. I can see thy hesitation, but know I speak not without warrant," Aeplerad said, attempting a half-convincing look of reassurance. "Vihorr borders also the jiaren colony, and it has been determined -by this marvelous imperial haruspex, not me of course, but by this stunning feat of technical ingenuity- that is a far more likely where the terrorists will strike."

"But they have their own legio-."

"Deploy your soldiers there, on the frontier with them, and all may not be lost yet."

"My lord..." the vassal was begging, clambering through a fit of tears.

"Worry not, my little Walder," the Gretwalder cooed, rising once again and with tender hand wiping his serf's wettened cheek. "Should any ill come to pass, thou know I will endeavour to defend thee. Thou know thou are defended!"

"Yes," Karl gulped. "Yes..., of course."

"Excellent," the Gretwalder concluded, beaming. "It is precisely what I must hear from such an old and loyal friend."

Winking, he patted the lord on his back and sent him off, but not before one final, singsong, "do not disappoint me, Karl!"

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"So, it is true," Edward gasped in amazement, his incredulous fingers tracing the shimmering outlines of the steal beast before him.

"It was always wrong to doubt her, my Prophet," Alfred implored, rather humbly but with firm conviction. "The Revelations may claim a woman never keeps her promises, but no same such thing is spoken of the Party."

"And with this woman they are one in the same," Edward grimaced as he stood taller and began crossing the line of vehicles back to his quarters.

"Yes. Precisely, thy Eminence," Alfred replied softly, unable to ascertain why his jubilation was not shared with the venerated commander.

Edward folded his arms behind his back, halted suddenly, hands clenching into raging fists before finally kicking up the snowy gravel into a filth-ridden flurry at the passively levitating fleet.

"I hate it!" He shouted. "I hate it. I hate it. I hate it!"

"Let us inside," Alfred suggested, calmly grabbing hold of his leader's shoulders, but he was torn off immediately in the way a belligerent toddler would pry a suddenly disfavoured set of night-clothes.

"No! This must come to an end, Alfred!" Edward cried, his words hysterically piercing through to the night. "Thou have been seduced! First by her beauty, and now by her gifts, but this is no courtship, Alfred! No court-."

"Edward!" Alfred interrupted, cracking the prophet's arm in a vise almost entirely heretical for its maltreatment of the exalted one. "Guard thy tongue or the men will surely hear thee and despair!"

Edward was indignant enough that he nearly demanded the guards come at once, but the thought of his old friend propped up on the witch's pyre was enough to hold him fast. The Revelations were omnipotent, all powerful, the inspiration for his every move and word, but not even those could hold a measly candle to the immense pull of Alfred.

He breathed, nodded and allowed himself to be the led back into his chambers. Something inside him, however, seemed to know that every step brought them further to fiery damnation, every footfall warmer, every print made in ash. Edward could hardly wait for the unclasping of the door, the Horizon of the Blackhell itself, before he collapsed into the blinding, eviscerating light of his private quarters, his skin already melting, hair ablaze and blood boiling red steam out his nostrils and ears.

"We're dying, Alfred! We're dying! The Party has us! We're sinners! We're condemned!"

"About what are thou talking, Edward?" Alfred asked, quickly sealing the chamber and darting around to ensure the absence of any eavesdropping slaves or footmen.

"The Party, my son! The Party! They're devils. No..., worse! She-devils! They don't care for us. They don't need us! They just want us to die instead of them. And what shall happen to those who die in their service! How can we lie to those men? How can we lie to them? They won't meet paradise. They won't find 80 virgin planets among the Heavenly Stars! They'll perish thinking they died a good death, a brilliant death, a noble death in the care of their prophet when truly, in reality, in cursed, godless reality, they've but shed their blood in the service of the Sataness. For we will die, Alfred! We will all die, even with these weapons, even with this fleet!"

"We will all die and Paradise will never be delivered onto this Earth, and all our sacrifice will be for naught. But those women, those she-devils, they will persist, and we will see from Blackhell, from the tortures of fire and brimstones, the wretched dreams they have rendered real onto this country. We will see their incest, their pedophilia, their exposed breasts, their fucking our women with fake cocks and all other diversities of perversions and calamities, and we will prefer the hellfire! Believe it, Alfred! I have seen; if these women get their way, those languishing in Blackhell will pity the pious left above. We are the prophet. It is proclaimed! It is a vision!"

"This is not a vision, my dear," Alfred smiled, condescendingly. "It is hysteria."

"How dare you question your Prophet!" Edward screamed, tears bursting from his face. "Thou were our most devoted disciple, our most devout follower, our most trusted of friends."

"Oh, Edward!" Alfred sighed, his cheeks reddening with embarrassment. "We both know my love for thee, know not just that it exists, but that it has always existed and will always exist, that it is eternal and can never, no matter the words or deeds, ever be perished from the universe."

"I love the Word, Edward, the Revelations, and they flow through you, flow through you like I have never seen or heard, with such passion it is both electrifying and horrific. But thou are a weak man, Eddy, weaker than that almighty force that flows through thee, for who can be strong in the face of omnipotence, what dam can hold the infinite river or roof withstand the eternal deluge?"

"I will never doubt thy visions, my love, but thou must pause, breathe, and weigh diligently their meaning. Sometimes, inauspicious omens when heeded still pay dividends most unexpected. Take heed of thy senses, Prophet, for I have some information that may enlighten you as to your imaginings most unsettling."

"You've dared hidden something from us?" Edward demanded, completely aghast, shivering violently and wanting nothing more than to crawl inward into the foetal position and be left alone for all of eternity. There were only so many betrayals a man can bare before his heart extinguishes itself forever.

"No! Of course not, my Edward," Alfred reassured, gripping his friend's chin and planting a tender kiss on his soft, infantile cheek. "I had only wanted to wait until I had seen it myself, but now, in thy time of commiseration and doubt, I shall furnish thee with tales of hope and victory not just of you, yourself, but of your glorious Vidar Liberation Front, for victory, my prophet, ultimate victory, is now finally within our grasp."

"What do thou say?" Edward asked, leaning up against the wall, his cheeks salty but drying.

"Our scouts found a Walder's outpost, Edward, right in the Vihorr mountain pass. Unguarded and uncleaned, a wall of cannons and mound of ordnance just waiting for the picking."

"Impossible! The Walders would never leave such arteries undefended."

"Aye, yes! This is what I thought, and why I waited to bring it forward, but it appears so, my Prophet. It appears so. The Legions and the Walders are at odds, my Prophet. A great ruckus is afoot in the cities; Vidar clash with jiaren as their leaders watch on, inching ever closer to their broadswords. I believe this was no oversight on the part of the Walders. Quite the contrary; we were meant to uncover it. Meant to find those weapons and train them on the jiaren colony!"

"But surely that is ludicrous! We could just as easily deploy such weapons against the Walders themselves?"

"Yes, with those new vehicles we surely can, my Prophet. With those new vehicles such heavy, sluggish artillery can suddenly, and surprisingly become rather mobile, but the Walders (this is my estimation) are unaware of our advancing capabilities, and have thus been subject to a grave miscalculation."

"By the Stars, thou are right, my Alfred!" Edward started, leaping from the ground and onto his excited, trembling feet. "Could this possibly be true? Could we possibly be so close?"

"Yes, Edward, yes! But remember well your vision. Keep the enemy in shambles and we shall be victorious. Allow them to unite, and we'll have," Alfred began playfully tickling the ribbon between Edward's shirt button-holes, "women ploughing one another with fake cocks, as you say."

"What horrors!" Edward sighed, "the things they would do."

"Oh, what things?" Alfred asked, pushing the prophet forcefully against the wall and clutching at his chest.

"They...," Edward's breath caught in exhilaration before continuing, "they'd have us dress in uncomfortable leather and stuff socks into our mouths to keep us from speaking."

"Mmmm." Alfred slid his fingers across his leader's bosom, unhinging every button they met. "What else?"

"They'd tell us whom to marry and what to do, and they'd give all the prettiest, handsomest boys to the ugly, old hags."

"Oh my! How dreadful!" Alfred sputtered in between fervent licks and amorous kisses of the Prophet's neck and prickling nipples.

"And then they'd tie us up and put us in chains and use us like common objects to pleasure their perverted fantasies or else strike us for disobedience."

"Like this!" Alfred shouted as he threw his leader around and slapped his buttocks with an open-palmed, echoing smack.

"Precisely," Edward moaned, turning just enough for to meet the adventurous tongue of his eager friend with his own.

After Alfred was made to come up for breath, he nearly wanted to interrogate further the prophet's harrowing visions, but his leader was already pushing his head lower to the holy groin, and Alfred did not want to disappoint the little prophet with such a frivolous use of his talented mouth.

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The fire piled higher and higher, its towering flames illuminating the thick, murky windowpanes of the Gretwalder's office with an eerie, golden iridescent glow.

The Gretwalden overlooked the Heavenly Square, an infrastructural wonder of nearly fantastical proportions, several kilometres long and wide and encompassing the Great Hall, Great Temple and so many other such ordinary buildings that had been ballooned to tremendous size and bestowed the now bewilderingly common distinction of "great". Though a shallow and almost ludicrous counterfeit of the truly awe-inspiring Imperial Palaces on the Home Worlds, devoid of all the original's architectural daring and splendour, it did fully commit to its absurd largesse and overextension, making it all the more remarkable that such a blaze could so thoroughly encompass the entirety of the square.

Perhaps there was some special moral wrapped in all this, thought Aeplerad, pacing absent-mindedly back and forth as he occasionally scanned the fettered mobs below. Perhaps this was always the Vidar spirit, making itself plain: a people perfectly immune to culture, to knowledge, to the very notion of avant-garde; a people who admired a painting for the size of its canvas but not the content of the art. Aeplerad smiled, feeling the warm glow wash across his cunning face. This is why the governor would be doomed to be fail, why she was failing already. The Vidar could be impressed, they could be awed, they could even be pacified, but try as she might, they would never be educated.

If asked about the curious circumstances now fully gripping the heart of his capital, the Gretwalder would have been made to admit a certain level of surprise even to himself. Whether the clergy had instructed the vulgar masses to begin stacking the newly printed jiawen scriptures in public and setting them alight or the plebeians, in the throws of their ignorant spiritual passion, had done so on their accord was entirely mystery, but the effect was the same. The Governor had, of course, insisted upon releasing the imprisoned priests that they humbly proclaim their fealty to the Emperor and keep the peace, but with just a wink and a nod from the Gretwalder, it seemed such expedient oaths could be made quite ephemeral.

Now, the pressure was mounting and all that was required was the crafty genius of an elder statesmanship like himself to offer the perfect release at the exactly the moment the governor, the Walders and everyone else but he were most wary of explosion. Admittedly, he was unsettled to see suspected jiaren spies having their homes vandalized, painted with profanities and accusations. That uncomfortable knot, too, began re-forming in his stomach as they were marched from their pillaged houses and made to stand by the fires and subjected to various humiliation. So far, however, the atrocities were few: just reports of some jiaren being stripped naked, their clothes and belongings tossed into the flames as their nude bodies were doused in ink obscenities. So far, all within acceptable limits. So far.

There were some beatings, yes, some lobbing of rotting vegetables, of course, but right now, no one set alight, no one tossed into the flames, so there was hardly any need to quell the ire just yet; especially not when any day the governor's legions would face a sudden, devastating assault from the VLF. Then, she would have no choice but to concede. Then, everything could revert to how it was: Aeplerad under the tropical sun and the Lady Ci aboard her departing spaceship, the people subdued but comfortable as always. It was so close, so tantalizingly close, that Aeplerad couldn't help but imagine the warmth of the fire as that yellow, oceanic sunshine tanning his flabby, feasting cheeks.

Kang was the first to disrupt the peace. He threw open the heavy brass door of Aeplerad's bureau and immediately fell to his knees, kowtowing in a distinctly jiaren fashion, his habitual grin worn off his face as roughly as sandpaper wipes away the jagged edges of unruly wood.

"My lord!" he cried, stammering into the carpet, not daring to glance up to his master. "It's Walder Vihorr, sir. A messenger has arrived from him, bearing terrible news!"

"Worry not, our most esteemed officer," the Gretwalder placated, "I have had my doubts about Karl for some time. If he is not up to the task, we can find another candidate more suitabl-."

"You misunderstand, my lord!" Kang pleaded, rearing up his strained, red-eyed face. "He did surrender the fort. He did exactly as you asked."

"So what of your discontentedness?" Aeplerad asked, bracing his arms against his desk as his feet began tottering up and down in nervous excitement.

"It's the VLF, sir. They took the ordinance, but they didn't attack the Legion, my lord. They attacked us! I do not know how, but my counsel was false. Their martial capabilities are far beyond anything we could have anticipated."

The vaunted, genius elder statesman was suddenly stilled. Every muscle in his core perfectly loosened, as if awaiting the impact of a seismic shock, wishing only to flow passively with the brutal waves and be not snapped betwixt them. He stumbled and nearly fell against the near wall.

"No, no, no, no...," the Gretwalder began repeating, clasping his hands over his head and bumping again and again into his office window, staring wild-eyed at the growing inferno below.

"It's not just Vihorr, sir. They've taken most of all the northern regions: Vihorr, Vighurr, some of Viherr. My agents left behind say they've proclaimed a new state: The Principality of-."

"I don't give a gouted goat's greasy girl-part what the name of their new state is!" Aeplerad bellowed, smashing an irate fist against frosty glass. "We need to destroy it!" He spun around, gripping his table for support, and addressed Kang directly, "Gather the lords still loyal, quickly and quietly, and let us put an end to it before the governor intervenes and discovers our devices."

"We cannot abide such foolhardiness, my lord!" retorted the Security Chief, now finding his footing once more. "We under-estimated the enemy once. If we do so a second time, we shall put the whole country at risk."

"If the governor realizes we left Vihorr undefended, our heads will be at risk, Kang!" the Gretwalder shouted back, incensed that such insubordination would find a moment inopportune as this to unveil itself.

Fate, being the conscientious guardian of idle words, naturally deemed it now the ideal time for yet another grand interruption, this from the Keeper of the Scrolls. The Keeper flew through the entrance way and nearly collapsed on the door, as he, panting, pressed it shut while enduring a barrage of unfettered abuse.

"Shall we barricade ourselves into his wretched chamber for to make obligatory the common courtesy of a simple knock!" the Gretwalder grumbled, his countenance now swollen with seething, red indignation.

The Keeper flattened himself onto the floor in much the same manner Kang had done, though entirely without form or practice, and so simply appeared abject and sullen, like a measly snail imprisoned to an invisible shell. "My most sincere .... apologies, my ... lord. I bare urgent ... summons from the ... Governor." The Keeper's words were spitting out of his mouth faster than he could breathe in the oxygen to say them. "Lady Ci," he continued, gasping, "demands your presence post-haste."

"Did she say what for?" Aeplerad asked, every drop of colour quickly draining from his petrified form.

"A war council, sir," the Keeper coughed. "A war council has been summoned."

Kang and Aeplerad glanced at one another for but a mere instant, but that was more than enough to convey that most dreaded and unspeakable of understandings: She knows!

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Mila surveyed herself in the mirror, her eyes borrowed out, on loan, no longer just hers alone. And what would they see, those mysterious, half-manly, half-womanly eyes? Would the man eyes linger on lifted breasts and tight buttons, so delicately altered and styled to attract them? Would the woman eyes scowl and snivel at such fashionable debasement, worrying their husbands and suitors would soon demand such degeneration of themselves? Or perhaps, the man eyes would twinge in disgust at the short, emaciated frame, preferring a plumper, rounder, fuller figure while the woman eyes mocked and cackled at the harlot unbeknownst of her place.

These endless, meandering hours before her looking-glass, clasping and unclasping undergarments, applying and removing maquillage, practicing and reforming her most feminine, submissive smile were not the daring escapades Lyudmila Ivanovna had envisioned would most completely exhaust her when she first joined the Party so many years ago. Back then, in the horrific chaos of the Collapse, such idle luxuries would have been entirely inconceivable, even to the once-great Walders still clasping for power with their feeble, dying claws.

There were desperate women, of course (they were all desperate women), and in the waves of famine and desolation, there were always those willing to do absolutely anything to survive. Mila often fancied, in these moments of solemn, tiresome contemplation, that women had been exactly that for many thousands of generations, long before her, before her mother and grandmother, before the Collapse itself even: just desperate to survive.

For a long time, Mila had despised those women, those too weak or too cowed to fight back. When the marauders had plundered her village, killed her brothers, ravished her mother and meant to steal her away into slavery, she had hidden in the burning ruins of their hovel, a cleaver hidden by her side and gutted the first man to lay hands on her. In the frenzy and confusion, she'd made her way to a Party encampment, finding shelter and companionship in a group of fellow women pushed to the edge and unwilling to go further.

How glorious those days had been! What passion enlivened in her breast! What poetic superiority and just condescension she had felt, marching about burning the burners, looting the looters, killing the killers. At first, it was just the chains of iron that had needed to be broken, and oh, what amusement it was to break them, but even after such physical liberation, a far greater, more destructive, more insidious slavery of the mind had persisted.

For a thousand generations, women had been bred to be slaves, to obey when commanded, to reform when chastised, to freeze when attacked. No matter that they had been unshackled from the chains of the flesh, they were still kept servile by the chains of the mind: pale, passive creatures unable and unwilling to stand by their own feet and think with their own thoughts. So, to be free, to be really, truly free, they had be retaught, reinstructed and reeducated, and that was a battle far more draining and torturous than any war Mila had fought through sword and shield.

Even the strongest of them, the freest of such women would find themselves clinging to old vestiges of the past, ancient ties to former servitude. There was the provincial General Secretary who had kept skirts hidden in her closet. Then the agricultural commissar allowing male farmers to interrupt her in public meetings. Even the vice-premier herself had once donned a collar and pranced about, barking like a servile pup to the private amusement of her perverted husband.

How terrifying it had been, spies secreted behind every corner, friends revealed as enemies and evil thoughts prying to enter even the most steadfast of minds. Then, the Fifth Convention, the New Doctrine, Cassia Prime reunited and Order re-established: a perfect system of equality and harmony where all found their station and no station was greater or lesser than any other. It had been the dream, the vision of utopia that kept the common hope aflame at sea in a cold, dark ocean of fear and desolation.

That was until the Party discovered that Mila's station was here, on Cassia Quartus, at the vanguard of a new revolution amongst the Vidar Cassians. Here, alone, with nothing and no one but herself as company, it was impossible but to hear those strident, devilish thoughts clamouring against the impasses of her weary mind.

After the VLF had nearly set her ablaze for the sin of bearing trousers, she'd cloaked herself in long dresses and heels to avoid any needless scrutiny. She'd then taken to receiving silently the verbal abuse of religious fanatics while she was helpless but to attend to their churlish demands and irascible moods. And now, falling further, she was before the mirror, wondering how best to objectify herself to the eye of a Walder.

Was it in service of the greater good? Undoubtedly. This poor lord would drain away every state secret along with his rancid seed. Was it acceptable, however? Was it pure? That was the question Mila could not answer.

Perhaps she was no different than those other women. She had escaped slavery on one Cassia only to enter into it willingly on another. She was desperate, willing to do anything to survive, and in the end no more or less pathetic than all the others before her.

But then there was that dream, that vision of perfect equality, true liberation and freedom for all, and in that, Mila found what that separated them. That was the object on which she made her final grasp.

The other women, the ones who submitted to slavery and submission, they had never seen a better way, a different choice. Mila had. She had laid the foundations to a perfect society, and after sacrificing so much in blood, sweat and tears, a few seconds of laying on one's back and fixing one's wig meant very little. Yes, she did debase herself. Yes, she did commit to slavery. But she did so willingly, and the "willingly" made all the difference.

Mila, finally satisfied, practiced her smile once more and departed for the lord's private chambers.

After a long, ponderous stroll through the Vihorr provincial gardens, now nothing but barren rock-bed in the throes of winter, she reached the Walder's personal residence within the palace, nodding silently to the two guards who bestowed upon her knowing, weasel grins before allowing her entrance. Now light of foot, almost floating on the wind like a stupid peasant girl swept up in the wonders of the impressive fortress, she fluttered to the lord's study door and knocked.

"Not now," the Walder replied, sounding raspy and agitated.

"Not even for thy darling Ethel?" Mila sang back, sweet and lulling as a chickadee chirping a love song.

There then transpired a most disconcerting of silences as Mila, a pleasant smile still plastered to her face, grew more and more anxious, awkwardly fidgeting about and readjusting her facial expressions like a sculptor might flute and finesse a mound of clay. She could feel the mask slipping, the oppressive glare of the guards shattering her porcelain features, the cracks and fissures aiming to explode at any moment and reveal that most secreted underwire beneath.

Could they already see it poking through? Had they seen it long ago? Had they been long harbouring private suspicions that now, finally caught up in the chilling winter gusts, would be swept out into the open?

"Please, my lord," Mila begged, almost sincere. "The cold chills me to my very soul. It shan't be long before my teeth are set to chattering and my skin affixed to door's brass."

Still, the Walder paused, but Mila could hear, just behind the door, his breathing, heavy and strained, contemplating, and now she was buoyed with radiant hope. A long, rusty clack of iron locks and finally the door was opened, though Karl refused to stand aside and escort Mila inside as he had done on all their previous encounters. Instead, he nodded for Mila to follow and then nonchalantly let the door shut on her arm, walking back to his parlour as if she had never arrived at all.

Karl could not bear even the most quotidian of efforts to drag himself to his vaulted, pretentiously throne-shaped armchair, opting instead to merely collapse on the left side of a padded leather sofa.

"Please, Ethel, do enlighten us as to your day. We would do well for some distracting tales now."

Karl seemed to be forcing his eyes open only under great duress, his whole upper torso engulfed in a war against himself merely to stretch a pitiful, palsied smile about his quivering lips. Large tracts of his thin, greying hair were glowing red in irritation, Mila fancied from incessant scratching, and great, black exhausted welts under his eyelids appeared to be dribbling down his face like heavy glaciers parting a rocky hillscape.

"My womanly senses do detect a great unease in thee, my lord," Mila said, sitting down on the floor beside him, propping one hand on his bony, skin-draped chest and another under his right ear to bring him forward to a gentle kiss. "Perhaps I shall sing for thee? I made acquaintance with the most magnificent jiaren poet at the tavern yesterday, and all the crowd did say my voice and his ballads can stir even the most unshakeable of hearts."

"Yes, that sounds..." Karl deigned to seem cheery, but his voice began waver, a tear forming in the corner of his sad, tired eyes. He croaked, every point of his countenance wracked in agony and despair, but the war was lost before it had even begun. The Walder broke from Mila's embrace, and huddled his head in his hand, crouching by the other end of the couch, his legs shaking, words sputtering. "I can't, I'm sorry. I just can't-."

Mila crept up on all fours to the devastated man, not quite certain as to which course of action to pursue. She'd never seen a Cassian man act like this before, at least, not one missing a blade to his neck. She knew that Vidar women were taught all their lives to nurture and care, however, so she reached out again, cradling the crying man's head in her arms, nestling her nose next to his as a mother might to her child.

"It's all right," she soothed, cooing and soft. "Whatever it might be, it's all right, my darling. It's all right."

"No," Karl whispered, his voice hoarse and barely audible. "It won't be. It will not be."

"Karl, please, my dear," Mila pressed, rubbing the lord's cheek with her thumb, brushing off away the splattered tears.

"It's lost, Ethel. It's all lost." Karl continued to retreat from her touch, withdrawing further and further into himself as his arms pressed his legs and head together, rocking back and forth.

Mila refused to surrender, stroking his back, asking, "what's lost, dear?"

Karl shot out from his body's cocoon, filled with irate, helpless madness so profoundly disquieting Mila fell back from mere instinct. "The fief!" he screamed. "Vihorr. Viherr. Vighurr. The North. It's all lost!"

"That cannot be!" Mila returned, still rather stunned from the sudden outburst.

"And yet, it is so," Karl shot back, but even that brief moment of rage so depleted him that he shrank back even further, his head now entirely wrapped within his legs.

"But how?" Ethel demanded, choosing to rise and pour a restorative elixir of tea and copious amounts of expensive liqueur lying on a gilded platter at the far end of the room. "The entire Northern mountains are impassable but by a single valley, which you, our lord, so carefully defend."

"I didn't do it." Karl mumbled, still pressing his now ruby-coloured face between his knees.

"Didn't do what, dear?" Mila asked, placing the tea on a clattering, painted clay plate before him.

"We'll have to leave soon. We'll need to be evacuated."

"What didn't thou do, Karl?" Mila knew she should err with far greater caution, but there was something so delicious, so intoxicating, so tantalizing in that miserable, broken form before her, she needed to dredge him until it was pushed to the surface.

Karl shunned the interrogation, still shuddering quietly and murmuring incoherent nonsense into his chest. Mila lifted the teacup, and with tender grace, but still rather firmly, propped up his chin to press the cup to his twitching mouth.

"It's all right, my darling," Mila assuaged, discharging the deceptively sugary liquid down his open, acquiescent throat. "Whatever it is, thou can tell me."

"I didn't do it," Karl repeated, taking a single breath before finishing off the cup himself.

"I know thou didn't, dear." Mila patted his back in soft, concentric circles, spiralling about his pointy, protruding spine. "I know thou did not."

"It was Aeplerad!" Karl spat, though not without looking up immediately afterwards to scan his surroundings, fearful doe eyes darting in all directions, searching out trailing hunters.

"Who is that, my lord?" Mila asked, but she knew exactly who he was. It was so enticingly close, Mila could all but smell the sweet scent of the Gretwalder's blood filling her simmering, predatory nostrils.

"The Gretwalder! He made me do it!" Karl screeched, baffled, distraught, dejected and enraged all at once in a repulsive, incomprehensible menagerie of emotions; his voice was both scathing and nearly imperceptible.

Now was the time to strike. Mila could hold back no longer. "He ordered you to leave the passage undefended?"

Karl peered at her, his drenched, red eyes barely able to hold the gaze without shifting away in terrible shame. He tried desperately, his throat bracing and bulging, his cheeks puffing in anger and determination, but eventually all he could do was nod, slowly, solemnly, tears streaming down his mournful face.

It was enough.

The Gretwalder had rendered the North defenceless. A conspiracy? A failed tactic? A saboteur hidden in the deepest, darkest crevasses of the Vitharr government?

Or perhaps the VLF was playing both sides.

No matter the fact, the rumour alone would be most useful.

Perhaps Mila had found her place after all.