It is dark. Night has come.

The man stands at the top of the lighthouse, staring out at the encampments all around the cliff-side. They’re nested in like rats in an old brickhouse. There’s no getting them out now and it’s only a matter of time until they nibble their way forward towards him, towards his home.

There’s nowhere left to go, not that he has anywhere else in the world where he would rather be.

The noble-houses coming here to hide was a mistake on their part that he had pointed out from the first day of their arrival, at the risk of his own head. They should have known better, but at the same time, there was something nostalgic about the idea of coming here for them.

The lighthouse is where his uncle, the once-king, had grown up. It’s where his father’s father had grown up. It’s where he grew up, together with his older brother who holds the throne through a line of succession so twisted that it comes around in the shape of a circle. For as long as the tower has existed, even before they had risen to nobility, his family line had held it as theirs, serving their key duty in keeping the lives of the sailors at sea safe, so that they might provide the city, the place where his heart truly resides, prosperity.

He had never wanted anything to do with the whole ‘nobility’ and ‘bloodlines’ thing. He just wanted to keep the lighthouse burning, safe and bright, so that the world might keep moving without him. That’s one reason, but the truth is that he’s just a romantic who loves the glow of the stars out here, so far away from the city.

It sounds dumb. It sounds stupid. But in a weird, half-desire that he could never explain, he hoped that the lighthouse would appear to be a star as bright as any in the sky above the ocean, for any travelers out at sea.

But now, despite all of that, the world has come to his doorstep.

The nobles, fleeing the city, had come here in some desperate bid of a last attempt at survival, indifferent to his wishes to be left out of it all. Kingly blood will only serve you so far, until a desperate bodyguard kicks in your door and holds a pike to you. Honestly, Meridian is sure that he would have been killed, if they didn’t need him to keep the lighthouse running, in hopes that reinforcements might arrive from over the ocean after all, even at the last minute.

But he knows that nobody is coming. The rest of the world has its own problems and the force of reputation that a few petty nobles have to offer are sparsely bright enough to mobilize a local militia, let alone international troops.

“They’re getting ready to move,” says a woman to his right. An elf, clad in light riding armor. She’s with the noble-guard. Probably the last of their troop, actually.

Meridian looks at her, stroking his old, sea-washed beard. “And?” he asks, almost sarcastically. “What are you going to do about it?”

“My job,” she says. “As for you, I suggest jumping,” states the elf dryly, turning away to go back downstairs. “Otherwise, I’ll be back in a minute.”

He can’t help but laugh. She could just kill him now, but it’s perhaps a hint of kindness in her eyes that she’s giving him a chance to do it himself.

What a nice young lady.

Now, on one hand, the existence of the station itself was a problem on the international scale. After its reveal through the first initial blast, alliances shifted, falling as quickly as the dust around the impact crater. Long standing treaties and under-table deals were thrown away in the blink of an eye, after the deciding power of the weapon was first witnessed.

As such, after the war mostly ended immediately, its use was regulated and controlled to an almost insane extent. Usually, every practice firing in the desert would have to be approved and rubber-stamped ten times over in order to allow him to undertake his favorite task in the world.

It is a construct with world-changing potential and was, responsibly enough, treated as such. Gottlieb isn’t exactly sure how fate had decided for him to be the man who gets to pull the trigger, he’s hardly a model citizen. But he got the job and that’s been that ever since.

Wielding this thing, just holding onto this single control stick is like grasping the ruling scepter of god. The fate of nations, the lives of leagues of men and women and children, the literal future of the world and its peoples are in his hands in a way that no mortal has ever controlled before.

For many, this would be a mind-numbing sense of pressure and obligation. Gottlieb however, wiggles the stick left and right, zooming in between the man on top of the lighthouse and the man riding on the big bird, which is clearly not a chicken.

Gene manipulation has come far, but not this far. It’s a magic world, so it’s obviously a magical bird. Fair enough, right?

“Kai,” asks Gottlieb. “Is it immoral for us to get involved in stuff like this?” he asks. “I mean, it’s not our business, right?” he ponders, perhaps too late, considering the ‘chicken lady’ incident.

[Request Accepted]

Failure

- Incapable of reviewing moral guidelines.

Suggestion: See §1 p.12 of field manual ‘Approved morality and war’ for further guidance.

If spiritual guidance is necessary for Orbital Gunner Gottlieb, please vacate your post and wait until a religious-spiritual counselor has been transported to the ORBITAL OPERATIONS VESSEL to personally hand you your termination papers.

“Wow. That’s fucking harsh, Kai,” says Gottlieb, raising an eyebrow. “Sheesh.”

[Suggestion]

: As ranking officer, it is advised for Orbital Gunner Gottlieb to undertake any actions necessary to safe-keeping the survival of the ORBITAL OPERATIONS VESSEL, including meeting mental stability guidelines of any members of crew, as listed in ‘space survival protocols’, §1 p.2.

Gottlieb stares at the monitor for a while, trying to decipher Kai’s latest dickery. He raises an eyebrow, his hand still zooming around with the stick. Not because he’s looking at anything in particular, he just thinks it looks funny when the camera bounces around like that.

“…So you’re saying that I can do whatever I want, if I say that it’s for the sake of my mental health?” he asks.

[Ambiguous]

- Incapable of reviewing moral guidelines.

Gottlieb stares at the monitor for a moment, before turning back to the screen. Kai sure has been acting weird ever since the shift.

He stares up towards the blue dot above his face for a moment, sure that, in a day in which he had less sleep, he would think that it winked at him.

The siege and inevitable capture of the lighthouse and its occupants is about to start. The elf is just leaving to go downstairs now, to do her job, as tasteless as it might be.

Meridian meanwhile continues his morbid chuckle, engaging in a humor that only many years on this world will allow one access to. Looking back towards the hundreds of moralizing soldiers, far more than is needed to capture a place like this, his chuckle falls into a tired grin. They want to be sure, after all, the head of the snake is here. No point in taking chances.

As she leaves, heading downstairs, a glint of metal coming from her waist, Meridian closes the door behind her so that he doesn’t have to listen.

- Politics is dirty work. That’s why he never wanted to get involved.

But, in order to secure the future stability of the nation, a victor must be clearly declared. Both surrender and defeat will be ineffective if some whispering nobles of the old guard are left alive, whispering discontent in the shadows and so, they have to be removed, before they can be captured and used by the enemy to console the people and hold them docile by the strength of familiar words. True revolution will only happen if an effective, real leader is born from the ashes.

It’s grim, but it has to be done. They’ve lost, but they can still prune the tree, so that it might regrow anew in some years to come.

A man blows a horn off in the distance. The soldiers gather into formation, a rider on an anqa, the giant bird, moving in at their head, fairly certain that they have no archers or anything of the sort, given his loose demeanor.

He’s right, too. There are a total of…

Well, actually, about ten seconds ago, there were probably sixteen people in the tower, himself and the children included. But given that the elf is ‘at work’, there are probably about eight left. Hardly a defense. In about a minute, it’s just going to be two.

He sighs, shaking his head. Damn young people. They could have chosen any tower, lighthouse, keep or cave in the land to hide in and they chose his.

There isn’t much of a war-cry or anything, the contingent of soldiers simply nonchalantly walks up towards the next to defenseless lighthouse.

Meridian cups his hand by his mouth to shout down at them. “Hey!” he calls. The man riding on the anqa looks up towards him. Meridian shakes his hand for emphasis. “You gotta jiggle the door when you open it,” he calls. “It gets stuck!”

The old man laughs to himself again. It’s a good joke. The door is in fact barricaded. With his furniture, of course, but there wasn’t much else to barricade it with. But he likes the mental image of the heavily armored man standing there, awkwardly trying to open it in vain while a contingent waits behind him and watches.

The light behind him begins to fade, as the lighthouse, not having been refueled, slowly begins to die low in what is perhaps the most eventful timing of any event in his entire life and as the troop moves towards the tower, it fully burns out, leaving him in the darkness of a moonless night. This is the first time this has happened since he took over the lighthouse, all of those years ago.

Only the cloud of stars covers the land. He loves the sight of them, they’re so bright.

The man stares over his shoulder towards the endless ocean which is covered in the reflections of starlight. It looks as beautiful as it had on any other night of his life. It was a quiet life, but a good one. He managed to stay clean of any such affairs as this one for just about all of his years. He managed to grow old and to carve thick laugh-lines into the spaces beneath his eyes and next to the corners of his mouth.

Next to him, the door opens, the elf coming back upstairs, her hands covered in red, holding onto her short-sword.

“I hope you didn’t stain the carpet,” jokes Meridian, raising an eyebrow. “It’s from the east, you know?” he asks. “Paid a fortune for it. But it really brought the room together.”

She doesn’t say anything, not even cracking a small smile as she silently walks towards him, holding the blade tightly in her grasp. Meridian sighs, turning back to look towards the ocean one last time as she approaches. “You young people are so serious these days,” he says. “No fun at all,” remarks the old, salty lighthouse keeper, shaking his head.

The man, feeling the wind of the ocean coming to caress his face one last time, rubs his beard. “Thank you for your services,” he says to the elf, knowing that she wants to be here as little as he does. But just like he had to keep the lighthouse burning until tonight, she has to do this.

It would be unfortunate, if someone with noble-blood was to be captured and used by the enemy, after all. Especially someone with king’s blood.

“Beneath my mattress, there’s a potion full of witch-water,” says the old man. “You have time to get to it before they break in. It’ll hurt less.”

The glint of starlight is caught in the red metal in the corner of his eyes as she lifts her arm, its twinkling only indistinguishable from the rest of the shimmering ocean for a moment. But the ocean, covered before in the midnight dotting of night-light, is now aglow from here to where the horizon sits.

Meridian covers his old eyes, thinking that this is some final signaling of his body as the blade shoots through his neck.

Through the cracks of his fingers, he stares at the sky, wondering why there is only one star there in the sky now.

It’s the brightest that he has ever seen.

“Right there, Kai,” says Gottlieb, confident in his plan. He pulls the trigger. The room around him hums, singing with a buzz that he himself feels is the voice of angels themselves. The rectangular, massive interior casing of the gun hums. A static fills the room, pulling the hairs on his arms and necks up on end as a magnetic wave pulses through the station.

[Activated: High-Precision Strike]

He always imagines the contrast to be interesting. The difference that the presence of the gun has inside of the station and outside of it. Inside, it’s like being suspended in a swarm of raging insects. The computers all light up, the fans going into overdrive to process every single detail on the sensors, the station itself shakes, as the vibrations from the tree-trunk sized conduits seem to bring the platform itself to life. It all moves, it all flows together, surging as one like the many cells of a body, working to release but a single breath.

By the time he lets go of the trigger, the exhalation of the station stops, leaving only Gottlieb to let out the air he had been holding inside of his chest this entire time.

Outside however, it must be entirely quiet. Just a glow, just a brief flash of life and that’s it, before the station returns to darkness that it is suspended inside of.

- He wonders what it looks like from down there?

Smugly, Gottlieb watches as his expert de-escalation tactic, his high-precision shot, impacts down on the world in the space right between the advancing army and the lighthouse on the cliff. ‘Precision’ is of course a relative term, given the blast radius of the gun under normal conditions.

Rows of men fly back, the man on the bird hurtling together with his mount into a row of soldiers.

The live feed shakes for a moment, which is unusual. There’s no reason for it to be shaking.

Gottlieb blinks, tapping the monitor, wondering what’s going on until he realizes his simple mistake.

The monitor isn’t shaking.

- The world is.

Wincing, Gottlieb inhales a sharp breath as he watches the cliff-side come loose from the rock of the world. The lighthouse crumbles, the entire cliff-side falling into the ocean at once.

It’s quiet, apart from the buzzing of the monitors and some odd beeps and pulses here and then from the machinery.

Gottlieb stares at the monitor for an awkward moment, before lifting his gaze towards the blue light above himself. It is staring down his way, almost knowingly.

“Shut up, Kai,” says Gottlieb, sitting back down on his chair, sure that in the back of his mind, he can hear the hum of the station come together like a laugh.

The man clears his throat, tugs on his collar to get some air and then quickly moves the control stick to zoom the camera somewhere else.