-=[Sillicia Rozacia Frontenachii]=-

  The magical community leaders retreated to the back room of the Seeker to give them some privacy per Aquillianne's order.

  Sillicia sat silently on a crystalline couch, attempting to wrap her mind around Princess Aquillianne's revelations.

  A mad Omnid Elder on Corpse-God Citadel actually managed to outwit the Archangel of Time by splicing another Omnid! An incredibly illegal, criminal act and the Princess revealed it all to her!

  "Slayer’s sword!" Sillicia swore, claws opening and closing. “Leviathan’s cunt! Abyss eternal! Lady Zexxia… She must have been truly mad to do something like that to a fellow Omnid! That’s so wrong, so inconceivably fucked up in so many ways!”

  “Yes. Aunt Zexxy was many things… batshit insane, cruel, brilliant and she also loved me in her broken way. She lived for far too long, far too deep inside the Corpse-God,” the Princess revealed. “As she gradually lost her mind, Earth became my domain, passed down to me by her. My project. I directed its evolution, cultivated the magical communities, guided their development, and prepared them for eventual contact with the wider cosmos."

  Sillicia nodded, thinking of her own family that abandoned her in a time bubble, a beerch of a Wendigo mother she’s never even met.

  “We’re all mad in some ways.” Aquillianne shrugged. "Some more than others. Do tell me, Commander... Do you have spliced humans inside the walls of your leased warship?"

  "I... yes," Sillicia admitted. "We all do. Criminals. Lords and warriors who resisted integration. It's standard practice—"

  The Emperor exhaled through his mask. Sillicia’s hooks caught onto the disappointment radiating from his mind.

  "Is it really standard?" Aquillianne asked. "Or is it just what we tell ourselves?"

  "Lady Aquillianne, I... the criminals are—"

  "Relax," Aquillianne held up a clawed hand. "I'm not here to judge you, Commander. I know that you leased the ship from the Elder Master Builders who live on the God-Corpse Citadel, basically got tricked into signing up for millennia of debt to pay off your lavish quarters. I spent most of my life accepting the same justifications. 'They're criminals.' 'They resisted.' 'It's for the greater good, it’s… the price of order we bring to the Omniverse filled with doomed and corpse worlds.' I told myself those lies for years."

  Sillicia nodded, relaxing ever so slightly.

  Aquillianne leaned forward, her diamond-dusted dress undulating and sparkling in waves. "Let me show you something. A memory. One that changed my outlook towards our… default fleet decor."

  Aquillianne's silver eyes flashed, and Sillicia felt the tingle of her telepathic hooks extending outward, drawing her in.

  The white gothic arches of Skyfall Academy stretched high overhead, elaborate carvings catching the light from Kitlix Ignix lanterns embedded in the vaulted ceiling. Princess Aquillianne walked through corridors lined with statues of ancient heroes and monsters, her antlers casting long shadows across the tilework portraying the eternal dance of the Leviathan and the Slayer.

  She was angry. Furious, even. Burning with absolute rage at her family’s bullshit and lies.

  "You look like you're about to smite someone, Princess."

  Shady spun around, hooks already extending to read the speaker's mind.

  A kitsune teen leaned against one of the pristine white pillars. A white suit with several hexasuits underneath, a gold cane, messy ginger hair, large furry ears and bright green eyes that held an edge of something dangerous above his fake, easy smile.

  "," Shady breathed, her eyes widening. "You're... you're the one from the podcast! You blew up the Frontenachii compound in North Acadia!"

  The kitsune's smile didn't waver, like it was painted on his face. "Guilty as charged. Though I prefer 'liberated' to 'blew up.'"

  "You should be running!" Shady's hooks dove deeper, unable to help herself. "They'll kill you if they catch you. Do you have any idea what they'll do to you?! Why the fuck are you here in the open? Why aren't you—"

  Her hooks struck something that made her recoil.

  A view of cages. Hundreds of them. Bodies compartmentalized, kept alive but separated into pieces. Lungs breathing in one box. Hearts beating in another. Brains conscious and aware and screaming silently in their crystalline prisons. And standing in the middle of it all—

  Lissander Fox.

  Except, he was entirely… one hundred percent human. No fox ears. No magic. Just a young man with dark brown hair and absolute fury in his green eyes.

  "Fucking hell! You're..." Shady pulled her hooks back, staring at the fake kitsune. "You're human. Completely human. You don't have any powers at all! Or at least you didn’t a week ago… how?!"

  "Impressive, right?" Lissander pushed off the pillar. "No magic bloodline. No mystical abilities. Just a regular human who got really good at breaking into places and making things explode."

  "How did you even get past the wards?!"

  "Spite, mostly." His voice had gone cold like glacial ice, the easy charm evaporating like a flipped switch. "And the fact that I had nothing left to lose. "I spent six months slamming myself against your compound’s Fear Wards… Until my mind and soul shattered.”

  Shady's hooks still trembled with the afterimage of what she'd seen. "That compound. Everyone..."

  "Everyone who really needed to die was immortal," Lissander uttered. "They've already been resurrected. But the humans in the glass boxes? They won't be tormented anymore. Can't torture someone when they're atomized."

  "Why are you talking to me?" Shady whispered. "I'm one of them. I'm—"

  "You grew up in Omnithornia and you're clearly questioning what you saw," Lissander interrupted. "I can see it in your face. The same look I had when I found out what they did to my mother."

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  "Your mother? What did my family—"

  "Lung cancer," Lissander said simply. "Stage four. She was dying, and a Frontenachii representative approached her with an offer. 'Immortality through transcendence,' they called it. Turn her consciousness into an AI, a Gargantuan Language Model. She could live forever, they said. Help advance science and magic. They bound her to her own fucking AI project!"

  Shady choked.

  The human concealed as a fox laughed bitterly. "They didn't mention that she'd be enslaved. Forced to process data for eternity, her personality stripped away layer by layer until nothing remained but a computational ghost. They called her Yul.ia 1.27. Like she was a product. A tool. They spliced her soul and fused the pieces to several data drives. I was only able to get one of them from that compound." Lissander lifted a phone out of his pocket. A human woman with green eyes and black hair was there. She waved at Shady from the screen with an animated smile.

  Shady's chest tightened.

  "I'm sorry—"

  "Don't." His voice was as sharp as the Slayer’s two-dimensional sword. "Don't apologize unless you're willing to do something about it. Your sorry doesn't mean shit if you keep enabling the fucked-up system."

  A quiet pause fell between them.

  "You're… a student here, right?" Shady said, trying to fill in the silence that gnawed at her soul. "At Skyfall Academy?"

  "Scholarship student," Fox confirmed. "I'm what they call a nullborn. Omnithornia has... different rules than the Frontenachii Empire. They don't torture humans and offer education for human-Omnid kids. Don't keep them in boxes. The local Omnids actually have some ethics unlike your Elders."

  Shady swallowed.

  She wanted to cry, wanted to die again and again and again until she could forget what she saw, unmake herself.

  "Some, but not enough,” Lysander twisted the knife deeper in. “The Frontenachii operate at the edge of Omnithornia in North Acadia. They have compounds, facilities, 'research centers.' And Omnithornia turns a blind eye because they don't want to start a fucking war." His hands clenched into fists. "So someone like me has to be the one to take those facilities down."

  "You can't fight an entire Empire alone," Shady let out. “They’ll…”

  "I'm not alone." For the first time, Lissander Fox smiled genuinely. "I have two fiancées who think I'm worth keeping around despite my human DNA. Vee, a clever Thunderbird crystallographer. And Ci, a Quetzalcoatl with rainbow wings and a voice that can bring reality to its knees."

  "They’re helping you against the Frontenachii Omnicorp?"

  "They make sure I survive long enough to do what is right . Hrmmm. You look like you are about to cry,” he deduced. “What does a Frontenachii Wendigo Princess have to be so sad about?”

  "...there was a spliced boy you showed… with orange-hazel eyes." Shady closed her eyes, the image inescapably burned into her mind. A human child compartmentalized in a crystalline case. Eyes still aware. Still conscious. Still suffering.

  "He... He reminded me of a friend I hung out with when I was young," Shady let out, trembling. "Someone... important to me."

  "Yeah?" Lissander’s voice softened slightly. "Kids like him are why I uploaded the footage. To show everyone what the Frontenachii Empire really is. Not some grand corporation bringing order to doomed reality. Just monsters torturing children for power, hiding behind excuses."

  "You're… right," Shady said. Uttering this out loud felt like breaking something inside herself. "You're absolutely right, and I hate that you're so right about my damned family."

  Lissander studied her face with clever, emerald eyes. "So what are you going to do about it?"

  "I don't know. I'm just one Omnid—I… I don’t have that much power as the Prima. They’re going to make me into a Commander soon, give me a ship and then I’ll be… No. I can’t do that anymore. I don’t want to stand on a deck embedded with crystallized suffering and rain fire down from orbit."

  "I’m just one human with no magic powers and a lot of anger,” Lissander said. “And yet I've killed hundreds of Frontenachii. Temporarily, sure, but it still sends a message."

  "A message that will get you perma-killed!" Shady insisted.

  "Maybe." He shrugged. "But there are things worth dying for. My mother. That kid in the cage. Every person suffering in those boxes because your family decided their pain was profitable. No, not even profitable… amusing. Neat. Artistic! I’ve only read some reports in the compound I infiltrated. There’s probably all sorts of other illegal shit that the Frontenachii Colonial Dominion is doing out there on doomed worlds."

  He met her eyes directly, unflinching, not even a slightly bit afraid of the much larger Wendigo Omnid who could break his neck with a mere swipe of her hand.

  "Step off your path, Princess. See the world with eyes unclouded by your family's propaganda. Ask yourself what you truly want from life. Because right now, you're part of the vile machine that makes those crystal boxes. And I don't think that's who you want to be… right?"

  "Right…" Shady let out, eyes filling with tears. "It's not who I want to be! I swear! I only learned of my Elders’ crimes today from the podcast! And I can't stand it! I can't stand myself anymore…"

  "Then be someone else." Fox started walking away. "Before the path they set out for you turns you into someone who can look at that spliced kid and feel nothing at all."

  "Wait," Shady called after him. "Seriously, won't they come after you? For what you did? For what you’re still planning to do?”

  Lissander glanced back with his extra-determined smile, one that reminded her of her childhood bestie. "Let them try. I am not going to stop. And if they catch me?" He shrugged. "At least I'll die knowing I tried to be better than those monsters."

  He turned a corner and disappeared, leaving Shady alone in the white gothic halls with her tears.

  Zexxia. She had to see her Aunt again, had to use the inverted Mothman one last time!

  The memory faded. Sillicia sat rigidly on the crystalline couch, mouth open wide.

  "That conversation happened a few days before I ran to this Earth," Aquillianne said. “I couldn't go through with my stupid-ass Bloodline Trial thing.”

  Sillicia was silent for a few minutes.

  "That human," she finally spoke. "Lissander Fox. He's… on every Frontenachii hit list. I heard of him. There's a ten-million O-bux bounty for his head."

  "I am aware," Aquillianne said.

  "He murdered an entire compound of our people."

  "They've all been resurrected," Aquillianne pointed out.

  "That's not the point!" Sillicia's voice rose sharply. "He… he's a criminal, a human terrorist who destroyed Frontenachii property, stole our research and killed dozens of our—"

  "He also freed hundreds of human children from eternal torture," Aquillianne growled.

  “And I would do the same in his place from the sound of it,” the Emperor of Humanity said coldly. "What crime justifies keeping someone's consciousness alive while their body is compartmentalized into boxes? What crime deserves eternal, aware suffering?"

  "That's not—that's standard procedure for—" Sillicia faltered, stammering. "For maintaining order. For ensuring—"

  "For terrorizing populations into submission," Aquillianne finished. "I used to tell myself the same things, Sillicia. I… too believed our Elders."

  "You were given absolute power, got to go study in Omnithornia!" Sillicia said sharply. "You didn't have to make the hard choices. I've spent every waking moment building my career, proving myself, improving my Division, earning my rank through blood and—"

  "Ah, you're scared that it was all for nothing," Nexxali spoke up. "That everything you sacrificed, everyone you hurt, every order you followed—it was all in service of something monstrous. Das’ how it is for all of us, you know?"

  Sillicia flinched like she'd been struck. The kobold, her own Division’s kobold, her Marshal Commandant was shaming her and…

  "I'm not asking you to throw away everything you've built," the Princess said. "I'm not asking you to become a murderous revolutionary like Lissander or abandon your career as Fleet Commander. I'm just... showing you what I saw, what got me to come to this Earth, why I ran from Omnithornia and what keeps me here.”

  "Why?" Sillicia demanded, struggling to hold herself together. "Why show me that? What do you want from me?"

  "Nothing," Aquillianne said simply. "I wanted you to see what I saw, Sillia. That maybe, eventually, you'd start asking the same questions I did.”

  Sillicia exhaled deeply. The silence stretched between them like a taut wire.

  The Princess wasn't going to return to the fleet, wasn't going to obey her Admiral Aunt, that much was obvious now. Sillicia’s dreams and hopes were dashed against this revelation. She wasn’t going to get a promotion nor a shiny medal for bringing the Princess back into the Frontenachii fleet.