Tianci was falling behind.

  A single stumbling mistake by a family member decades prior and a genocide by the cruel universe was drawing its deadly dividends now; the nation’s inevitable step towards industrialization taken too late. Like a late-season chick fledgling beneath circling hawks, the Dominion’s own fate was now suddenly in the hands of its four bordering fellows.

  Even Zai could see the change; how their survival was no longer found in the hearts of their Rifle Guards or the silent applications of subterfuge, but in the power of ceramic-steel, consumer goods, and information.

  How platoons of armored tractors could cross the fields of trenches, impervious to all but the largest of cannonfire; how aerostatics would fill the skies, and rain upon the world a hellfire like the ancient ones once did. How in this new age wealth was no longer defined by silver bullion locked away in deep vaults, but by equity ownership of corporate concerns; and how it seemed that the average peasant with a printing press could shift a nation’s opinions faster than the entire lower court unified.

  In the Second Stygian War the Amorian Republic devastated their eastern states with a scale and speed of warfare beyond comprehension to even their greatest generals. In the Third, they watched as the Ensolian Imperium’s aerostatic legions leveled entire cities across the Stygian Sea thousands of miles away from their home bases.

  How today, the Kiralian Hegemony’s cheap goods poured through their ports and continuously outsold those from domestic factories; and how many of the surviving corporations would turn to the Imperium’s ‘rights of manufacture’ licenses instead of development at home.

  And how even now, almost a decade after the Great Starving, nations would still send paltry sums of food aid as a reminder to a pathetic nation; like a debt collector visiting their collections.

  The Dominion, in its current state, would die.

  And Lord Tianci of this crumbling state was gambling everything on a pile of typewriter typed paper to save it.

  Prince Zai, even through the tears streaming from his flush face and a mask of adrenaline fueled emotions, could see this incredible play of politics.

  Like mounting a wild horse or a parasite latching onto the belly of a reaper shark, the Dominion would need just one ally to save it from its downward spiral towards the graveyard of dead nations.

  The Ensolian Imperium, the great empire that straddled their northern borders, needed them. Specifically, they needed something they had.

  Archaeologists descending from the Adriatic Isles all the way to the most eastern nations of the Axial Powers all pointed towards their land. Artifacts that predated their earliest written languages were dug from meters of soil and analyzed in compositions; from arrowheads to long rusted away vehicle wrecks, all sharing shocking similarities to materials and soils sampled in central Tianci.

  Like in the oldest stories of the most ancient religions; tales that spoke of wars between ancient gods and their great ships that crossed the gaps between the stars, there had to be a legendary origin of humanity on their world, the place where gods had marooned them to suffer beneath heaven. And their corpses, the death throes of the ancient ones, were now buried beneath meters of topsoil, burrowed deep within mountain ranges, and sometimes even exposed like decaying carcasses across the world; and no place had them more than the Tianci Dominion.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  In the Dominion the miasma of divinity had poisoned the earth to never grow the correct crops, and giving those who lived around them waking dreams of both unspeakable atrocities and divine insights beyond all comprehension. But for the Ensolian Empire, they saw something more in these sacred bodies than simple vision quests and strange phenomena.

  With just a paltry thousand tons of arcanite in their lands from just one half-corpse draped over Mount Julius, the Imperium had transformed warfare, brought into existence new sciences, and altered the very foundation of their society.

  So what could they do with Tianci’s hundreds… perhaps thousands of corpses?

  Lord Tianci watched as his son realized the most awful truth by himself.

  A revitalization of Tianci from its most fundamental base: from the limitless wealth of foreign investments, tides of national migration from desperate workers, to even the stabilizing factors of Imperial military and political involvement. If played just right, this would be a new age for the Dominion; to stand alongside its fellow nations as equals, to never have its people starve again, and to preserve its culture for centuries to come.

  And all it would cost is a resource they couldn’t use, a respect they had long lost, and the dreams of just one crown prince.

  But Zai didn’t see it that way, and he should’ve never told his father that he did.

  How with just a single stroke of the brush this Lord invited the rape of their nation, signed eternal servitude to the most uncaring of slave masters, and had killed his own son.

  And when he spoke those words, everything changed between them.

  So Prince Zai Tianci lay in the guest bed, trying to ignore the hard mattress that was digging into his back; staring at the pale blue glow of Unudo that crept into this cold, lifeless chamber.

  He felt the ring upon his left hand, how its black shape absorbed whatever thin shafts of light that filtered through down to here; remembering how just hours prior his father had obsessively wore it. And how he kept the other on a necklace that he never took off — in some vain hope perhaps that its rightful owner could come back from the dead, or even his own joining of her through the last step of life.

  And now, it was worn upon the finger of his son’s own killer.

  Sophia Elise the Eighth now had a path to the throne of Tianci, and the only thing that stood between her and the domination of the Greater Ensolian Continent (or even perhaps the world at large) was just one, single Prince.

  He knew what she was capable of; he could see it in the way she carried herself.

  Lord Tianci once told him, in that cold, unmoving tone of his, that Zai trusted people too much. That he was not only insightfully dull to the true actions of the enemies within the court, he often foolishly took them at their word. To see the honor in those who would murder in their sleep, to see grace in those who would slaughter all in their path; Zai was too blind, too open for Tianci.

  But even he could see something in Sophia; how in that sunroom, she sat in complete silence and stared into his very soul. There were gears turning in the godless, unending depth of her’s; something scheming within like a rat preparing to loot a storeroom.

  And when she smiled, it was as if she knew what was happening all along, a conspiracy finally coming to its apex of execution.

  Could it be true? Could this monster have planned the assassination of her own father?

  Sophia Elise was never to be trusted, to never be left with an open back. Prince Zai would fight this in any way he could, to live the rest of his (probably) short life with insane vigilance.

  And even then, she would find a way in. With even just one single slip he was dead; whether it be a cup of coffee subtly dosed with cyanide or a razor thin blade sunk into his neck in the midst of deep sleep. Every day would be a battle, every second of this life spent with a killer right next to him just waiting for the opportune time to make her move.

  “Why me?” He asked his gods, hearing nothing but the distant bustle of a sleepless city. “Why me?”

  And for the first time in many years, Zai wept for himself.