"The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that once believed they were eternal."

― Percy Bysshe Shelley

Something is different about the stars.

Ancient records indicate a myriad of possibilities, primarily on the intricacies of the movement of the heavenly bodies above, but always, the stars have been the purview of the Heavens, unreachable by those on the earth below. Their patterns and changing, traveling nature has ever been a source of wonder and intrigue one which has fascinated mankind since the early days of the arts, when records were carved into stone blocks and primitive pyramids.

And yet, there is something different now. In the olden days, it was spoken of that one might cultivate Qi from the stars above in the same manner that one might cultivate fire or water, absorbing their concept and the colors they add to the lifeblood of the world. There are whole sects, uncovered through archeological finds and long-studied by my fellow Researchers, whose primary arts revolve around reflecting stellar bodies and integrating their higher meanings into one's cultivation.

This is no longer the case.

There are no recognized sects in the Empire which utilize stellar Qi. There are no registered cultivators that have ever verifiably claimed that they have gained insight or power from those celestial bodies above, save through their own internal meditations. None of the techniques we have uncovered and catalogued still work.

On this last point, I place the highest emphasis. Proven techniques, long established, verifiably practiced, no longer work.

Something is different about the stars.

-Redacted text of Researcher Wei Xiong, arrested on charges of treason, unsanctioned demonic cultivation, and endangering the welfare of the state.

Bishop Lu Karai bows politely as he approaches, his gold long since finished with the initial damage now. "Well played, young Bishop. Every day you prove the value of adding your strength to the Church."

Raika snorts, almost giggling at how the weight of his voice has changed without the power imbued in it. He almost sounds like a person when he speaks now, the sound almost alien compared to the way it echoed and emanated against the world earlier. "Oh? You added my strength? As I recall, I'm the one who came to you, my dear Bishop."

"And yet, it was my wisdom which brought about your arrival, was it not? I hardly imagine that you would have had quite so easy a time securing for yourselves lodgings and tutelage had I not escorted you in. One cannot take credit for all things, but to fail to acknowledge one's own strength and consequence is simply foolish."

She sighs, shaking her head and turning to walk away. She has more important things to deal with than self-congratulatory speeches. She puts her back to the still-grinning form of Seo En-Hyun and his "brother", walking towards the wall where her portal still glows softly.

She passes Li Shu first, sending some of what little corpse-flesh remains viable to one side and forming an arm out of it to pat her on the shoulder. The healer-turned-cultivator-turned-witch gives her a nod, though it's clear she's shaky- much of her Core has been damaged, drained for the energy she needed to use to power the sheer scope of her techniques. Controlling her Sacrifice is one thing, but manifesting the concepts imbued into it takes energy, and forming so much of it, in the density required to repair and defend against Seo En-Hyun, has visibly strained her.

Raika's senses are dulled, but it doesn't take superhuman insight to feel a damaged breakthrough. Going from one real to another isn't easy, can't be easy. Pulling at the very foundation of that breakthrough so soon after it occurred has consequences.

But she nodded. And as Raika hesitates for just an instant, tempted to pause and double-check on her friend, she gives a shaky smile instead, and jerks her head over towards Raika's original destination.

So she trusts in her, and keeps walking.

Another few steps take her right to the edge of the portal. It grates on her senses, pulling in a way that feels wrong, that shouldn't be, the Will of the Heavens having decided infinite years prior and every living being having grown to match.

She ignores it. It doesn't matter. The portal, her other body, Centi-Croc, the Beetle, none of it matters right now.

She kneels down in front of her kid, using her flesh-hand to cup his chin and tilt his head from one side to the other.

"Breathe. Just breathe. Are you ok? Are you hurt? Did you get hit anywhere?"

His eyes are wide, his breath panting, his pupils dilated. She can feel his cultivation thrumming, no longer capable of sensing each and every meridian but more than capable of feeling the way his energy is circulating through around him, agitated and tense and much louder than normal.

Even through her deadened senses, the sensation of smoke, fog, whispers, and a hint of other flavors leaks through. Like tangerines.

"I… that was… I'm ok," he says, breathlessly. "I'm ok. It didn't- I mean he- it didn't touch me, I'm ok, I'm… fuck."

She lets out a laugh at that, ruffling his hair gently. "Yeah. Big first fight. You did good, kid. You kept yourself safe, kept yourself hidden, and got the work done. You did good. No notes."

"I… if he hadn't…" His hand comes up to his throat, right along the edge of where the flower petal would have grazed him. "I-"

"No one expected you to go up against someone like that. I should have protected you better, ok? It's my fault for that. You did better than I could have imagined, kid. I never expected you to have a trick like that up your sleeve. How in the hell did you do that?"

He laughs, then winces at the sound, like he's scared of hurting himself, like the sound is just too loud in the quiet. "I… I didn't. No trick. I just… his gravestone. His memorial. I…"

"I Honored him. And… he helped. Or something did."

She is very quiet for a moment. It takes focus not to have her voice break when next she speaks.

"Ok. Tell him… tell him he did a good job. Ok? And so did you. I messed up. Should have kept a better eye out. You did perfect."

He nods, but it's still shaky. So she turns her hand and knocks a knuckle against his forehead.

"Ow! What-"

"It was your first big battle. You did everything right, and you lived through to the end. Anything that scares you enough to get you to curse is plenty scary, but focus on the fact that you got it right and you made it through. Ok?"

He snorts, some of his street upbringing leaking through in the sound before he coughs and covers it back up with a more polite hum.

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"Yes, master. I shall focus as you say."

She knocks on his forehead again. "There's my little fancy-talker. Still don't know why you convinced Qen Hou to teach you that shit."

She ruffles his hair again before he can reply, making it back to her feet and turning back to face the Bishops.

The third member of their main group has arrived now, with Glorianna standing alongside the others and a half-step behind Lu karai. Her aide stands a little further in front of her in turn, the rippling robes of skin she wears as her Sacrifice slowly undulating in half-active deployment. All three of her teachers stand arrayed against her, three corpses brought close to divinity.

She's not deluding herself. Arrogance has no place here, in spite of how she makes it look. Sure, she fought with a hell of a handicap, but they fought with far more. She had to pull tricks, push her allies to the limit, and push her knowledge to the absolute limit to even land a hit on one of them- if they all cooperated? If they went all out from the beginning? Her ability to fight all out wouldn't even exist long enough to matter.

She passed a test that she forced into existence, that she taunted them into making, that she rushed them with, and relied on their personalities to fill in the necessary advantages she'd need. It worked. It worked almost perfectly, actually.

And even still, it went down to luck. It almost slit her son's throat.

That's another thing to remember. They're not like her. They don't want the things she wants. They don't see life and death as separate, even, and they're perfectly willing to live in their castles of corpses, in their echoing and empty city, killing and dying and re-enacting being alive for the next few millenia. Only the approach of the End has brought about any change at all in that status quo.

They're not human- which is a silly thing to say. "Human" is a broad and yet far too specific term. Frankly, she's not sure how much they're still people, rather than something altogether other.

"So," Lu Karai says, his voice echoing once more with power from within an empty skull. "It would seem that you've passed your little test, Bishop Raika. What now?"

She doesn't look at Glorianna. Doesn't let her gaze linger there, doesn't let her corpse give a single hint as to what she's really feeling. She stares at the three of them as a cohesive whole, shifting the shards of her left arm ever so delicately.

"Firstly, teachers, seniors, siblings- I have a few questions. Ones I'd like answered as directly as you can, for the sake of our time and my specific goals."

Seo En-Hyun falls back into the massive half-dome of keratin that contained the blow that impaled him, dragging the spear out of his chest slowly but otherwise seeming very unbothered by the whole thing. "That's fine," he echoes, his voice a bit subdued without the joy he takes in fighting. "Though if you're hoping for secret treasures and artifacts, this Seo En-Hyun will have to deny you. Your enthusiasm is a credit to you, but overeating can be as bad for one's development as starvation."

Lu Karai simply nods politely, his hands once again clasped behind his back. "I suppose, if this is what you demand of us, then this one can only respond."

"Oh, I'm demanding a lot more than that," Raika assures them. "Just have to figure out a few finishing details. Glorianna?"

She doesn't look at the phylactery of a woman, as intense a sign of the thing seething through her veins as she allows. Still, the snub is clear enough. The gilded noble raises a hand as if hiding a chuckle, though no such sound echoes from out of the glass holding her skull.

"I am amenable."

"Good enough. First and most important question- is there anything that I can do which would be considered polite and would get the other cities to march on the Empire?"

Seo En-Hyun cackles with the laughter of the long-dead, echoing back out of him from where he's absorbed them. "That's more like it."

"You already know the answer."

She nods. Fair enough. "Fine. What does the Fallen Kingdom have against the Corpse Martyr of the Pack? Back when we spoke with the other cities, I was told that it stands alone. Why?"

Lu Karai laughs softly, the power he's putting into his voice to form it into Truespeak still making it echo loudly against the rest of the space around him. "It stands alone because it does not stand with us. It believes in martyring itself for a cause, any cause, and finds this one particularly appealing. So it marches on, ready to perish a final time against your Wall. It is a thing enamored with a perfect End, and so it can never truly be one of us."

"The blood drinkers, the corpse-forgers, ghost-kin, other liches, all of us wield Death against the final End, as a way to shape reality to something of our choosing." Seo En-Hyun cracks his boneless neck, sighing as he at last pulls the final point of her spear out of his chest and tosses it back to her. "Our enemy is the thing behind the Cold Sun, and the End of all that is. The Empire, as you call it, might advance the arrival of such a thing, but the End is neither its desire nor intrinsic to its methods, and thus, it isn't nearly so important a foe as oblivion itself, though we would never stoop to call it an ally."

"It kills, yes," whispers the corpse-voice of Bishop Glorianna, "but it shall die in time, as it has before. There are more important things to worry about."

Raika stops. That… hmm.

The Truespeak of the Fallen Kingdom is weird. She noticed it way back during their council meeting, and it remains true here- they express opinions. They act as if their logic is the only logic, but they don't impose it onto reality or reflect it, like her version fo Truespeak. It's almost like by speaking a watered-down version, one that doesn't ring as loud, they can speak things that are mostly true, or true specifically to them, without incurring the weird sense of push-back she's always experienced with larger claims.

However, they still can't lie. That remains absolutely fucking crucial.

She idly taps the point of her spear against the ground, the vantablack pillar rumbling quietly in her hand. She reviews what they just said.

No, it's still there. She turns to face Glorianna, finally.

"You just said it's died before. The Empire? I know there have been other large nations in the past, more than a few built from conquest, but I've never been a scholar, and the history before the Empire isn't exactly widely talked about."

The lich makes a sound that, on a living person, might be considered a snort. "It is the way of conquering powers to erase what comes before, whether in absolutes or in misquotation. Yes, there have been other empires before. No, that is not what I was referring to. I was referring to that thing ruled by the beast that now calls itself Emperor."

"That… what?"

"Glorianna's old, sister," rumbles Seo En-Hyun, ignoring the death-glare that the other Bishop points his way (knowing her magics, that might even be literal). "Older than most liches, even. Not the eldest, but she's in line for that throne if we lose enough members. I'm well over four thousand years of age, and she was here long before me. I remember a time before the thing atop that plateau at the center of the world was crowned. She remembers the time when it was crowned before that."

"...Indeed. This is not the first time that golden Empire has oozed over the world. It is different in each iteration, but it has always died before, and so it will again."

"Different iterations. So it hasn't always looked like this?"

The phylactery anchoring the lich to existence turns its face towards her, shadows glistening behind its glass. "No. It has taken many forms. This one is perhaps a bit more successful than the rest, but not so much as to demand redress. The End takes priority, always."

"I don't… fuck, this isn't even what I wanted to ask about. Hell of a distraction, Bishop."

The woman cannot smile, for her teeth are always on display, but there is a teasing lilt to those bones now. "I only seek to answer your inquiries, Bishop."

She sighs, which requires an intentional inhale, seeing as her lungs don't really work right anymore. Then she taps the spear against the ground one last time before tossing it over her shoulder, hard enough that she trusts her other body through the portal to catch it.

"Fine. Fine. We're going to get into that, but later. Priorities. My intention is to overthrow the Empire and stop the End of the world. Both are intrinsically tied. So. Whose ass do I have to kick, and what kind of polite do I need to be about it, to get the other cities to fucking listen to me?"

They don't have lungs, but she can almost feel the way that Lu Karai and Glorianna want to sigh. Seo En-Hyun, on the other hand, lets out a chuckle.

"Ah, what a pity it is that your Echo-craft is so lacking. It's so rare to find a woman after my own heart nowadays."

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