“Khadam.” Her name rumbled through the stones.

And when she did not respond, the Emperor sighed. Disappointed.

Good, Khadam thought. Let him be disappointed.

“Khadam, look at me.”

She refused to open her eyes. So he opened them for her.

A wave of pressure, and her eyelids disobeyed her, peeling themselves open so she was forced to look.

The Emperor was sitting on the edge of a fountain, leaning forward so that his mask gleamed in the sunlight that poured in through the open air temple, turning the floors white and the waters into blue crystal.

His body was muscle upon muscle, and golden-tan skin, and monstrous bones stretching against the leathers of his ancient, ceremonial armor.

The body was unnecessary. Just a vat-grown appendage. The Emperor, the true Everlord of Cyre, was nothing more than an algorithm, living in that mask.

Why bother with the body at all? Khadam wondered.

Because the machine that called itself Emperor understood the way of things. He understood how to control everything*.*

Everything?

Her eyes stung. She gritted her teeth, trying to squeeze them shut. Dark spots formed at the edge of her vision, and a faint chiming alarm sounded in the back of her skull, but she could not control her own body.

Trapped.

For how long?

The reality, which she had refused these last few days, came whistling into her thoughts like an unseen arrow: for as long as he wants. Days. Months. Centuries.

Unlike him, she was stuck in her body. There could be no escape. The only way out… was through him.

“What do you want with me?”

“I had hoped,” his voice seemed to rumble through the stones that she laid upon, “That you might find solace in my Servant.”

Her eyelids flickered, not quite closing. She had almost forgotten her last escape attempt. She had climbed through a hole in the wall and found the servant already waiting for her. Crushed between the interior walls of the Everthrone, blood dripping from her lips, and a cloud of nanites rising from her orifices.

Does the Emperor truly see everything?

The Emperor was smiling, as if he could read her very thoughts, but the smile was stretched and thin and joyless. What emotion was his algorithm pretending to have, now? “The next Servant will be more alert.”

Khadam sat up, or tried to. Her own body fought against the movement, making it feel like a blanket made of iron was crushing her lungs. And then came the nausea.

“You killed her.”

“You did,” the Emperor said. “My word is law. And you broke it. You are too valuable to punish, but my servants are plentiful- don’t spit.”

With a twitch of his head, Khadam felt her jaw lock up, and suddenly she was choking on her own spit. She had to close her eyes, and concentrate on swallowing.

“When did we become so uncivil?” He said, laying on the disappointment again.

“When did you lose all regard for life?”

“Hollow words, from a would be assassin. You should know best the cost of life. Or do you take pleasure in the thought of killing your own kind?”

Khadam hated him. Wanted to hate the Emperor more than anything. But the last reasoning part of her took its stand, a voice reminding her of what—not who—she was dealing with.

What was the point in hating a machine? Might as well hate herself, at that point. The thought sparked another, more awful thought. How deep would she have to cut to remove her own implants?

Khadam doubted she would survive. Not without proper medical attention, and there was only one being on this world who could offer that…

No, I’m going to have to talk my way out of this. Khadam cringed at the thought. At least he’s only a machine.

“I am not an assassin,” she said.

“Are you not?”

“The longer he lives, the closer he gets to destroying us all. Death lives within him. The death of all existence.”

“Not all existence,” the Emperor said. He pressed his hands to his knees, the belted straps of leather and polished metal sliding down and swaying as he rose to his full height. The marble ground shuddered as he took long, easy steps towards the balcony. Khadam felt her head turn to follow him, forced to watch as he gestured at the blue skies and torn-cotton clouds drifting high above the temple.

He aimed a finger at the broken, white line in the sky*.* What Khadam had mistaken earlier for a crescent moon was, on second viewing, something far less innocuous.

A lightning-white streak in the sky. This scar was spider-webbed with glassy, white cracks where a faint haze boiled out of its depths.

Pure Light. No extractors needed.

A bad sign, for the longevity of this planet. Indeed, for the longevity of this entire solar system. How long until the scar broke? A hundred years? A handful of days?

The Emperor’s voice rumbled over her thoughts, “The truth is you would not be here, if not for these scars. None of us would have ever left the core worlds. Oh, certainly, we could have sent generation ships out into the void, but without the Light, they would be forever stranded. Without the scars, there would be no Light. No gates. No grid. Nor even the power to bind consciousness.”

His back was turned to her, and she could not help drag her eyes up the metal workings of his mask, bolted into the flesh of his spine. All those tubes and wires and metallic, interlocking parts that reminded Khadam too much of a spider’s legs, clasped together.

“Such powerful places, the scars are. We dare not even approach them, lest they lash out and take us apart, atom by atom. And yet, we could never resist such power.”

“The scars are nothing,” Khadam said. “Compared to him. You know what will happen if he is allowed to live. The whole universe-”

“Yes, yes,” he waved his hand dismissively as he turned to regard her again. “I have heard all your visions. A light to devour all others. I know what you believe.”

The asymmetry of his mask made it hard for her eyes to focus on a single spot. Too many lights blinked, and none of them in a pattern that made sense to her. She could feel him scanning her, a million times a minute. Reading her every emotion.

“It is not my belief. It is truth. It is a warning of what is coming, and if you don’t let me answer it-”

“A warning from where?”

She stayed silent.

Some questions don’t have answers, Khadam. Rodeiro’s voice filtered back to her, up from the depths of time. And some do, but we’re not always so fortunate to know them.

The Emperor turned back to the balcony, where the scar was as bright as a moon at night, “There is something out there, Khadam. It lies beyond this existence. And it wants to be discovered. The scars have been waiting for us, all this time. The first and only sign we ever needed. All we have to do is open our eyes and look-”

“We have tried. When they first started showing up, we sent countless machines into them. Never to be heard from again. We even sent teams of scientists on suicide missions*.* Nothing survives contact. Not even the slightest shred of data. Black holes are more permeable-”

“To you, maybe,” he said, raising his chin so that the fluted shafts of the ceiling seemed to sing with his voice. “To you, they are impossible. Wounds to be ignored, because there can be no healing. But everything is impossible until you’ve seen it done, right? There is something out there, cold smith. And I intend to answer it.”

Khadam ground her teeth, finding it harder and harder not to hate this machine. She had heard all this before. The demagogues and prophets, the fringe scientists and would-be saviors. They spoke of that which lived beyond, and that always changed based on what grand idea they were selling. Other dimensions, or paradise beyond compare, or limitless possibilities. They sang their lies to humanity, and they sang them so loudly, they even began to believe themselves. Some even tried to start new religions, claiming they and they alone could speak to “the other side.”

Frauds, all of them.

The scars were thin places in their universe, through which Light leaked through. Anything else was pure, unfounded speculation. That’s all.

Whatever might be on the other side of the scars—another universe, another dimension, or whatever—was so impossibly different from their own that nothing could pass through. And if it did, what physics there could possibly support their own?

“Nothing survives,” she said. “And in the time it would take to create something-”

“Nothing that you know of.” He cut her off. “But I will not fault you for your ignorance, Khadam, for ignorance was chosen for you.”

Khadam couldn’t hold back her outrage, “You have no idea how hard I studied. Every waking moment, I-”

The Emperor spoke over her, “Did you know Poire was born after Seedfall?”

His words were so wrong, they felt like a hammer, cracking against her skull. Now, she knew this machine had lost its mind. “Nobody was born after Seedfall.”

The Emperor cocked his head at her, as if to say, “Are you sure?”

“No humans, at least,” Khadam amended, thinking of all the cyrans and avians and other xenos she had met over the last few months. “The biologists tried everything. They reached too high and too far, and that’s how the Swarm found them.”

“Studied that, too, did you?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. We watched them. Our clan talked to them, as much as we could. Whatever Poire told you about his birth was a lie.”

“Poire told me nothing. Not even he knows.”

The hammer cracked again, knocking loose the ideas that had collected in her thoughts like dust. Not anything she had ever intentionally thought about, but ideas that had grown there all along anyway.

“We watched them,” Khadam said, “We read all their reports. Every time the biologists came close to creating something human, the disease followed. Always. Their genes fell to pieces.”

“That depends on your definition of human, then, doesn’t it?” He paused, waiting for her to pick up the thread. And when she didn’t, he offered his bait. “What do you make of the xenos? My cyrans… Poire’s avians…”

“What of them?”

“Are they human?”

“No,” she said immediately.

“And your android?”

Khadam felt a pang of guilt. Why? She was the one who offered to come here. And I, she thought to herself, was the one who went in, guns blazing when she told me not to do that.

“Where is she? What have you done to her?”

“Answer the question. Do you consider the android to be human?”

Khadam’s answer came slower, “No, her neither.”

“Yet she calls herself daughter. And the xenos believe they, too, are our children. Well, one more question, Khadam. What of me? Certainly I am not human, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Not you.”

He rolled his head as if casually stretching his neck, but Khadam had the sense that he was watching her reaction more closely than ever.

“And what makes you human, cold smith? My analysis suggests your tissues have been refreshed at least three times. And how much of you is machine? Your heart, your eyes, your joints, your lungs, to name a few parts. And, tell me, what distinguishes your mind from that of a cyran’s? Certainly you are more intelligent than your average xeno, but that is only a matter of degrees. Where should be place my intelligence on that scale, hm? No, I don’t think you know what makes you human. You only think you do. You have a feeling, don’t you?”

Khadam refused to open her mouth, though all the words warred to tumble out. He was right in all the wrong ways, and it didn’t matter, because she couldn’t say anything to him with his voice pounding inside her skull, shaking ideas together in ways she didn’t need them to be shaken together.

“If only you people had listened to me. What I could have done for us. What I could have discovered. But no! NO!” He erupted, and smashed his fist against the balcony so suddenly, Khadam thought the stone had cracked itself, until he smashed it again, and again, cracking through the stone and bursting his own tendons apart, not just in his hand, but in his elbow and shoulder as he moved the muscles far too fast.

Each battering smack of his hand jolted fear through her body. Until now, she had believed he had only meant to capture her. That she was a prisoner, but a safe one…

The Emperor made no sound, except the odd grunt as he exerted himself and smashed his own temple. And when the balcony tumbled away, he looked down at his arm, as if it were a tool that had failed him.

It was over as quickly as it had begun. Whatever switch flicked inside him, now flicked back and he was calm, as if he hadn’t just crushed his own fist into a bloody pulp. Khadam could see ironized bones sticking out, almost bronze, and covered in tattered shreds of muscle and skin.

“I’m sorry,” his voice rumbled with affected politeness. He tore a shred from his tunic, and wrapped it around the pulp of his hand. “Here I am, calling you uncivil, when I find it difficult to even control myself.”

Whatever emotions he had removed, new ones had clearly grown in their place, and these were dramatically out of balance. There would be no reasoning with this machine. No matter what truth she brought to bear.

His mind was already made up. This thing that called itself Emperor. It was stuck on a disproven idea that made no sense. It was programmed to believe a lie.

And you? Khadam heard a voice echo in her thoughts. What makes you so different?

The Emperor sagged against a column, now split with a new crack down its perfect marble length. As he sighed, a cloud of nanites streamed out from his breath, glittering and wandering down to his arm. Slipping into his torn flesh, and sewing it back together from the inside.

“Where were we?”

Khadam’s voice was weak and breathless with fear. “Poire. We were talking about Poire.” She said it more to keep his focus off of her, than anything else.

“There were whole groups of them, born after Seedfall. I thought it impossible, too. The humane genome was a magnet for the disease. You know this all too well, I assume. But the Historians have confirmed it. Somehow, they created new human life. Again. I have seen the Historian’s records, Khadam. They are confused, to say the least, but you would be amazed at their accuracy. They see things that no one should see.”

“The Historians?”

Something in her voice must have made him think she was lost.

“Oh, I forget. You wouldn’t know about Auster’s little cephalopods. They’ve been around since… well, since before I awoke. Auster spread them across the dams. All of them.”

Khadam blinked. Tried to ignore the memory of the dam over that nameless world, crumbling to pieces.

When it fell, the scar would have broken open. How much of that distant system was now so much glittering ash?

“I believe,” the Emperor continued, “It’s something about the dams lets them see into the past. Not all of it. Just the pieces shrouded in mist and light. Yet, in seeing the past, those clever little beings have discovered that if they watch us through the past*,* sometimes they can see the visions too.”

“Then they should know the truth.”

“They know more of it than you do.” He looked like he was about to say more, when he became distracted by a wet dripping sound. Blood rolled down his cloth-wrapped fist and pattered on the floor, staining his sandals.

“Damn things are slower than they used to be,” he muttered.

“If he was born after Seedfall,” Khadam said, “Then where is humanity? Where are his siblings?”

The Emperor squeezed his hand around his bloody fist, holding it to his chest, and returned his focus to Khadam. “Dead. He is the last, as far as any of us know. The Historians notes were crude on the matter, but it seems the Swarm found his home.”

“Gaiam? If that was true, then it would be crawling with machines.”

“I have told you once already. The Swarm is nothing.”

Khadam clenched her jaws. Trying so hard to keep her emotions hidden. And knowing she was failing. How could he say the Swarm was nothing?

It hunts us. It has never given up.

Khadam shook her head. Not because she disagreed, but because she knew none of what he was saying was founded in anything close to truth. “You have invented this madness. Over the ages, there was no one to second guess you, and so you invented all this. You’ve pretend to prove yourself right. You pretend everyone else was wrong, and because we were all gone, no one could say otherwise.”

Instead of the rage she was expecting, the Emperor eased up. She felt his presence soften, could have sworn she felt her own body grow lighter as he blew out his breath.

“You know nothing,” he said. “Worse. You think you understand, which puts you further behind than even him. A mere child.”

“The Herald of Ruin is no mere child.”

“Tell me. Why do you think your visions show only him?”

She furrowed her brow, searching for the linguistic trap. But she could not find it. “Because he is the one who will bring destruction to us all.”

“And if the opposite is true? No, listen to me.”

Khadam shook her head, “I can’t believe this. If you think he is some kind of savior incarnate, then you are just as blind as them-”

“We created him, Khadam. Why would we try to destroy ourselves?”

“I never said that. But accidents do occur. The Swarm-”

“Poire is not the Swarm. Nor this so-called destroyer. Nor is he anyone’s savior.”

“Then what is he?”

The Emperor gave a sharktooth grin, as if he had been waiting for her to ask. “He is a mistake. And what lives beyond has been trying to rectify him, ever since.”

“What are you talking about?”

The moment the question left her lips, Khadam’s eyelids were as heavy as steel. She could not hold them open, and the whole world became black.

“Remember Seedfall,” the Emperor uttered.

Behind closed eyelids, her own implants, without her input, conjured up an image of a scar, and a station the size of a city, shaped like the dried remains of some black flower, drifting before it.

The station was drawing from the scar’s Light, pulling the bright mists into a solid thread. Extracting its boundless energy.

As the dam transited the scar’s width, the light brightened. The scar cracked open. And a single teardrop of pure Light, whiter than white, descended from the scar, down to the dam.

The Emperor’s voice rumbled through the stones of the temple, though Khadam could see nothing but the scar and the dam. “It sent the seeds to us. The seeds gave you sight beyond sight. But through them, humanity was undone. What lives beyond gave us a trojan gift, a curse in waiting. A weapon of desperation-”

“You cannot prove this. The origin of the seeds was never proven. Virus. An accident of nature. A virus.”

“Humanity is dead. The disease kills only you. What more proof do you need?”

To that, Khadam had no argument. The odds were stacked against “an accident,” but there was no proof.

And the vision? The Herald of Ruin? What proof of that?

Her eyes opened, and the light from the sun pouring into the temple was too bright to be comforting. Even the water of the fountains was too sharp and glistening.

“Fine. Say you’re right. What have we ever done to deserve this curse?” Khadam asked. “Why would something try to kill us?”

The smile returned to his face, “We started a war, without ever knowing it.”

“What?”

“The Light. How long have we been extracting it? From where does it come?”

From the scars, the answer came automatically. From the thin places at the edges of our universe.

Everyone knew this. But that wasn’t what he was asking.

The Emperor approached. She could feel the thuds of his footsteps vibrating through the floor. He knelt down before her, so that his great, masked head was level with hers, and she was forced to stare at all those blinking lights and the reflections of herself in the asymmetric curves of his mask. To see the wild flow of her hair, the dust and dirt on her face.

“I want you to see what I have seen,” he said. He put his hands out, and though she tried to pull back, her neck fought against her, allowing him to cup her skull in his palms.

Her eyes fell closed, once more. The scar filled her vision, as if she were standing on its surface, and in every direction the light shimmered. And she could see the mist, swirling. Effervescing. Being pulled out of the scar by a nearby dam.

And she could see how the individual particles, like drops of solid dew, struggled against the current. Fighting to go back.

“I want you to hear what I have heard.”

A scream, a desperate raking along her ears. Quiet at first, though it grew and gathered more voices.

It became ten thousand.

Ten trillion.

“We killed them,” the Emperor said. “And we had no idea they were there, at all.”

“What is it?” She mouthed the words, though she could not hear her voice over the sounds of death. “Who?”

The Emperor’s hands left her skull, leaving a sudden coldness where the warmth of his body had been. Suddenly, the world was too heavy, and she was falling. The mattress caught her. She lay there, she knew not for how long. She felt the Emperor’s presence, sitting patiently. Waiting for her to return to this existence.

“Poire is a child,” his voice rumbled through the stones, through the soft fabric under her back. “And nothing more.”

“He is the Herald-”

“What Herald comes after the message has been given? You speak of destruction, Khadam. I tell you now, destruction has already come. This universe is damned, and all who stay, will be damned with it.”

“And Poire?”

“Poire is proof that death is a choice. He is living proof that what lives beyond is not all powerful, and the void cannot grip us utterly. On the contrary. He is proof that we can grip back.”

“What do you want from me?” she asked, too tired to lift her head.

“I want you to come with me. I want you to ascend.”

What does that even mean? She thought, but had no energy to voice the question. At least, she thought she did.

“Khadam, do you want to know where Poire is?”

Suddenly, she was sitting up. The world was spinning, and she covered her face with her hand, for the light from the sun—*or is that the scar?—*was far too bright.

“Where?”

“On the world made by Sen. I sent him there, to reclaim the Mirror. A tunnel through the void. Our gateway to ascension.”