I am on my knees, though I do not remember falling. One portal—I could have managed one. Two in succession leaves the world spinning, my stomach threatening rebellion.
My boots catch on thick fabric as I push upward, a rug bunching beneath my feet before my hand finds a chair and stops my collapse. Azure banners hang from every wall, the Qilin's mark repeated in silver thread, while black stone floor polished to mirror-brightness reflects the glowglobes' steady light. The room is too warm after New Larin's cold surface, the air heavy with wood polish and something else. Authority, perhaps.
Titus emerges from the closing portal behind me, unaffected by the transit that leaves me on my knees. He strides past me as though I am not here. His boots make no sound on the stone. He moves to a wide table, placing his hands flat on its surface as he leans over scattered star maps. His back to me. The silence stretches.
A palm presses against my back. Binah's palm, its touch radiating an eerie calmness that somehow knots my stomach tighter.
"My Qilin..." The words spill out unbidden, a plea or apology I cannot finish.
"The monument keeper filed another complaint this morning." Titus does not turn, his fingers tapping against the star map with measured precision. "Vandalism, he claims. Disturbances at the memorial anchors." The tapping stops. "I wonder who could be disturbing the dead."
My throat closes. I open my mouth to respond, but no words form.
"No?" His tone carries a faint, disdainful edge. "Nothing to say?"
The warmth of Binah's palm vanishes.
From the corner of my vision, I catch her movement. She drifts toward the table, her attention shifting to the star maps. My breath falters as I track her, her silence heavy with intent.
Titus straightens. His hand moves to a decanter on the table, crystal catching the glowglobes' light. "Your father drank from this decanter the night he returned from Nenuphar." He slides one glass toward me. "Silver torq. First in a century."
I cross the distance between us, my legs steadier than they were moments ago. The glass trembles as I reach for it, but I do not drink. Not yet, not until I understand what this ritual means.
He picks up his own glass, examining the liquid as though it holds answers. "The water was colder then. Or so he claimed." His gaze lifts to my neck. "Strange, how temperature varies."
The torq feels heavier under his scrutiny.
"Your father made a toast." Titus raises his glass, studying the liquid. "I have forgotten the words."
He drinks without waiting for me.
I follow his lead, taking a hesitant sip. The liquid burns down my throat, leaving heat in my chest.
The moment passes.
Titus circles, hands clasped behind his back, steps measured and deliberate as a ritual. His boots whisper against stone, the sound circling with him like a hunter pacing the boundaries of his territory. I track his movement, recognizing the pattern: he circles when he has already decided something, when the words that follow are merely confirmation of a judgment already rendered.
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Binah halts before the desk, her fingers hovering above the star map, tracing invisible lines across its surface as though reading coordinates written in the air itself.
"The Mere opens its gates tomorrow." He stops beside a window, beyond which dusk bleeds across Malkiel's tessellated expanse, purple light catching on distant towers. The glowglobes behind me seem dimmer against the dying sun.
Silence settles between us. He does not continue immediately, letting the weight of unspoken expectation build like pressure before a storm.
"Three generations of our line have held Primarch status at the Mere." His reflection in the window waits with him, a ghost of authority doubled in glass. "Your father. Your grandfather." Each name a stone dropped into still water, ripples spreading outward through decades. "The pattern continues, or it breaks. There is no middle ground, no honorable decline."
The implication settles between us like a blade, sharp and unsheathed.
My pulse quickens. "And if the pattern continues?"
"Patterns that hold across generations become tradition." He lets the word tradition hang in the air between us, weighted with all it implies: honor, expectation, the accumulated pressure of every Ragnos who came before. "They become the foundation upon which houses rise or fall, the measure by which worth is judged."
The word Polemarch never passes his lips. It does not need to.
He moves from the window, returning to the table where the star maps wait. His reflection follows him across the glass.
My children hate me. Do you know why?
The question from the gardens returns, carried on the scent of night-blooming flowers and the memory of his hand on my shoulder. A gesture he has never made to his own sons, not in any memory I carry. I had lied then, said no, but we both knew the truth even as I shaped the denial.
He treats me as more than nephew, and in doing so creates a gap his children can never bridge, a comparison they can never win. The weight of it presses against my chest like the torq around my neck. Both honor and burden, both gift and chain.
The tightness in my throat forces a swallow. Binah's finger moves across the star map, deliberate, slow.
"Tradition."
Titus turns the word over slowly, testing its edges like a blade in his hand, feeling for weakness or flaw in its construction.
"It has weight. Momentum. Things with momentum cannot simply stop. They continue forward, or they shatter against whatever stands in their path." His fingers drum once against the table's edge, a slow, deliberate rhythm. "I have watched families who thought they could slow their descent, who believed they could negotiate with gravity. They discovered that tradition does not bend. It either carries you upward, or it crushes you beneath its accumulated weight."
The drumming stops.
The room's warmth presses against my skin. The wood polish smell is suddenly cloying, thick.
My shoulders straighten though my hand still shakes, and I force myself to meet his gaze with something approaching steadiness.
Silence stretches. I stare at the glass in my hand. The amber liquid catches the light. "And those who shattered." My voice is careful. "What became of them?"
"They fell." A pause. "And Malkiel does not weep for the broken."
"Rest tonight." He turns back to the maps, his attention already shifting away as though I have ceased to exist in his awareness. "The Mere does not offer second chances."
The dismissal is clear, final as a door closing.
Stiffness overtakes my movements as I turn toward the door, each step requiring conscious decision. But as I reach the threshold, something compels me to glance back.
Binah's finger trails over the star map, deliberate and slow. My eyes catch the faint glow of New Larin, the third planet from the sun, our home. But her finger does not rest there. It moves lower, pausing over the fourth planet with unmistakable intention.
Cythraen.
The name ignites a memory, sharp and vivid as lightning against a darkling sky. A splinter group. My mother's people. The ones who refused the compromise, who chose isolation over integration. My pulse quickens as questions flood my mind, too many to voice, each one branching into a dozen more. Why would Binah point there? What does Titus know? Binah's gaze flicks toward me, unblinking and knowing, before she turns back to the map as though her message has been delivered.
I step into the corridor, the cooler air hitting my face like a slap.
The door closes behind me with a soft click that sounds final as a tomb sealing, as permanent as judgment rendered.
Cythraen burns in my thoughts, a name that refuses to fade.
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