In the chill of the barracks, there was warmth that could only be found in the embrace of another. Thale had learned that in the early days, when he had been brutalized by a training regime focused on determining his talents. He could still remember the day that everything changed.
He had been a child - maybe twelve, thirteen cycles. The training master, a Knight by the name of Rentaro, had been putting the newest penitents through a device called the Grinder. The Grinder was less of a singular vision brought to life by some technical desire - rather, it was the end result of thousands of years of growth and destruction. Machinery from dozens of eras, compacted into a wild network of corridors, paths, and barely functioning tech. There were grinding gears, smashing plates, conveyor belts, electric arcs, plasma cutters. Some machines were locked in a perpetual, autophagic horror - perpetually destroying and rebuilding themselves out of the scrap components that filtered through the endless sprawl of Eudaimonia's world spanning capital.
The Grinder had brutally injured another student that day - a girl that the Hegemony had dragged in from two steps up the chain. She had been left without an arm and was still in the regen tanks. She'd be back with a brand new arm - but the sight of the blood, and the sound of her screaming had frozen Thale to the ground. He had trembled, standing there, looking at the doorway leading into the Grinder, while Rentaro began to bellow at him.
"You pathetic mutant! You
will
go in there! You have the talent, don't you?" He thrust a finger at the door. "Go! Or I'll give you something worse than Yalenet got!"
Thale had, by that point, been trained to respond to that tone of voice with a sprint, fifty push ups, or a smart 'yes m'lord!', but nothing could shake him out of the scent of blood, the sound of screaming - accentuated by the distant grinding and grumbling of the Grinder.
Rentaro had drawn his threshold blade. The weapon formatted into a shock-maul, with a blunt, skull faced head, shrouded in crackling lightning. "Oh, you're going to be a coward, huh?" Rentaro lifted his threshold blade and brought it whistling down towards Thale.
Fear shattered and Thale flung himself forward. His feet remained planted, his knees flexing as he used the very grace and strength that Rentaro had been training him for to dodge the blow. Rentaro, though, had caught him with the kick. Thale rolled and tumbled through the door into the entrance of the Grinder. The walls were covered with clicking gears and whirring pistons - gauges with languages no one spoke flickered in orange and red along the floor, while the ceiling was lit with those fierce iridescent bulbs that could last for centuries and centuries without wavering.
Thale scrambled back and away from Rentaro, who had shifted his maul - spikes grew from the eye sockets.
"I'll teach you to-" Rentaro growled.
Thale had thrust out his palm at that moment.
And every single gearing in the room had slipped its bearings in a single cataclysmic failing. They had gone whining into the air, their edges blurring, and Rentaro hadn't had the time to scream before they started to slam into his body. While each was light, the machine had imparted them with enough kinetic energy to smash muscle and shatter bone. One caught Rentaro in the throat, another revealed white along his skull. One lodged into the eye. Others rebounded off his chest and shoulders.
His knees had hit the ground, and then the ruined mess that was all that was left of Rentaro's upper torso had sprawled to the side.
The other penitents - terrified children each - had gaped at the corpse.
One, a skinny girl named Eriquah, had said: "...cool."
Thale had been certain that he'd be killed. Instead, he had been dragged up through the endless spires of the capital, to the temple where his cadre slept when they weren't being trained, up to the palace itself. There, he had been brought to the red room - the vast, tesseract shaped chamber carved out of a single piece of stellar heart. It was said it had been carved, with garvitic furnaces and miracles harnessed by the first generation of Hegemonic Knights, out of the heart of a red dwarf star for Emperor Daniel Haram Nebuchadnezzar I. It was said that without the might of twelve fusion reactors, the gravitic generators that kept the room in it shape would fail and the neutronium throne of the Hegemony would be lost - and the Emperor with it.
Many things were said about the red room. None could communicate the sense of awe and terror that came from being brought inside. The tesseract shape - the cube within a cube that could only be created by alterations to the euclidean plane of space-time via focused gravitational fields - made the chamber feel larger than it could ever be. The stark red-red color of the walls. The matte black of the floor. The throne that loomed in the middle distance, looking all the world like a monolith to some ancient god. It had no decoration, for the Emperor of the Gentek Hegemony needed no decoration.
And seated upon it had been many generations of the Imperial line - to now, Emperor Daniel Golgotha Rehoboam VI. He was the end product of a thousand years of eugenic tinkering and a lifetime of war. Immense, slab-thick muscles, gone to seed and sallowness by the hideous injuries he had suffered in the Fourth Siege of Castle. His face, once so handsome, split nearly in half by the scar that left his cheeks sunken and one nearly see through. His eyes. His brooding, intelligent, furious eyes.
He was surrounded, as he always was, by the Immortals. No one knew if they were Liminal Knights or drawn from the Shocktroops. The terrified rumors Thale had heard, even as a boy of thirteen, was that their name was quite accurate. Their scowling kabuki masks and their ornate, lacquered armor, gave them the look of primordial demons.
"So..." Emperor Rehobam had said, his voice like reeds. "You are the
potential
."
Thale, trembling from his eartips to his toes, hadn't even dared to breathe.
The Emperor had lifted a single hand - and Thale had felt as if a titanic force had gripped him. A cocoon of force wrapped around him, muffling his breathing, compressing his nose. His hair stood on end and his eyes widened as he lifted up and off the ground, then flew towards the Emperor. He hovered there, trembling in the embrace of a power beyond his imagination. Slowly, the Emperor spun his finger, and Thale found himself rotating on a spot.
"Pathetic..." The Emperor muttered. "Your geneline..." He sneered and glowing hologlyphics scrolled around Thale. He was upside down and illiterate - the glyphs were utterly meaningless, but the Emperor read them with an increasing sneer. "Your geneline is worse than an
insult
. You, my little...creature..." His hand tightened. Thale felt pressure beginning to build and build. "You are the offspring of whores and toys. I will not have you-"
His bones strained. His lungs burned. His eyes closed.
"-polluting my
Knights
one second-"
HIs tail felt like it was being torn in half.
"-
longer
than-"
Thale's eyes opened. He clenched his hands and his claws stabbed into his own palms - and he felt the forces pressing against him. Gravitic engines, concealed in the walls. He found the breath to scream, and it wasn't a scream of pain or fear. It was a scream of pure rage. The cocoon of crushing power that tried to smash him into paste exploded outwards. Immortals went flying and even the Emperor lifted an arm to shield his face as Thale dropped to the ground - landing lightly on his feet. He snarled and leaped at the Emperor-
A hand interposed itself between him and the Emperor and smashed him to the ground.
Thale saw stars.
And heard laughter. Deep, pleased laughter - with the steady beat of clapping.
When he could see through the haze of pain, he saw Lord Vorsoth -
the
Lord Vorsoth - standing above him. He hadn't even
