Twice-Dead King: Reign

Book : Warhammer 40,000

by Nate Crowley

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

Peer into the into the bizarre culture and motivations of the Necrons in this great novel from Nate Crowley.

After centuries of exile, the necron lord Oltyx has at last been granted the thing he has always craved: the throne of the Ithakas Dynasty. Kingship, however, is not quite what he had hoped for. Oltyx’s reign begins aboard the dying battleship Akrops, as it lumbers away from the ruins of his crownworld. Behind it is a hostile armada of unfathomable size, launched by the barbaric alien war-cult known as the Imperium of Man. And within the Akrops’ sepulchral hold, an even greater threat festers: the creeping horror of the flayer curse. Faced with such overwhelming odds, Oltyx begins a desperate voyage into a darkness so profound that salvation and doom look much the same. If he and his dynasty are to make it through that long night, Oltyx will have to become a very different sort of king.

Release date: October 25, 2022

Publisher: Games Workshop

Print pages: 400

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

REFLECTIONS

How has it come to this?

Oltyx intended to speak the words aloud, but he could not find the will. He did not often speak, these days, as when the silence flowed back into place, it only reminded him how alone he was. And so he let the words settle in the hollow of his mind instead, so as to at least make a companion of their echo.

How has it come to this?

Ismaronsz was burning. Oltyx watched the dawn spread in an arc across the arid tomb world, consuming a night pocked with glowing impact craters, and leaving smoke-streaked desert behind. Ahead of the sun’s light moved a line of ugly warships, cruising at the very limits of the world’s exosphere, and shedding yet more bombs from their city-broad bellies. Gauss fire streaked up from the shrouded surface, consuming two, three, six of the barbarian vessels. But it was not enough. The wrecks of the stricken craft tumbled silently down into the ocean of smoke, along with the bombs of the survivors, to pulverise whatever still stood beneath.

Oltyx listened to the last carrier wave signals echoing across the interstitial bands, as the remnants of Ismaronsz’s orbital defence cohort faced their end.

The Unclean overwhelm us… our core is stricken…

Recall failure approaching totality… The Sixth Legion is gone…

But, my lord, there are no scythecraft left to launch…

A curse on Unnas for this abandonment…

Oltyx had seen and heard enough. Waving a dark, ragged hand through the carnage before him, he swept the vision of the world away, and paced on to the next scene of devastation.

Here was Tarramun, where the mausoleums of his people were suspended in the seething heart of a gas giant. Those diamond-braced tombs had withstood sixty million years of crushing, elemental force down there, thought Oltyx, only for it all to end like this. Amid the tangled bones of necron cruisers, the last of the world’s particle whip batteries were in the process of being overwhelmed, picked apart by fighter swarms so dense they seemed like mist. In a silent flash of green, one of the ancient weapons platforms detonated, taking hundreds of attackers with it. But it made little difference. Thousands more craft were streaming through the firestorm of its death already, towards the gravitic aperture that led to the tomb complexes.

Just visible through the faint translucence of the scene, Oltyx could see another planet falling to the enemy, and another beyond that. The images, woven in light down the central aisle of the royal sanctum, were being transmitted from monitoring constructs spread across the breadth of the once mighty Ithakas Dynasty. Oltyx had been pacing up and down along that line for one hundred and four hours now, and he no longer bothered moving around the projections – he just walked straight through them, causing the images to shimmer and distort with his passing.

But they never failed to re-form in his wake, and on each new passage through them, they showed a worse situation. Oltyx had come to accept, some time ago, that he was not observing the progress of a war – he was watching the fall of his empire, in real time. And for all the certain confidence he knew a king should feel, it was beginning to get to him.

With a brief crash of interstitial static, a Scythe-class cruiser foundered off his left shoulder, its drive sepulchre rupturing under bombardment from six opposing capital ships. Trudging through the spectral, gauss-green vapour of its death bloom, Oltyx tilted his faceplate upwards, and watched the crude, blade-prowed victors slink onwards towards the now defenceless world it had guarded. The sight of those ships, barely void-worthy, and yet free to ransack the legacy of Ithakas, made his core boil with loathing.

Humans, he thought, stung by hatred at the thought of the word. This variety of Unclean had only staggered into consciousness at the very end of his own people’s Great Sleep. The creatures had blundered through chaotic cycles of expansion and collapse as the necrons had slept on, losing great swathes of what meagre advancements they had once achieved. But they had persisted, and were now in what would be the last throes of a period of empire, begun ten thousand years ago by a thuggish mystic on their homeworld.

They should have been a triviality: a degenerate martial cult, haunting the shell of former conquests. And yet here they were, thought Oltyx bitterly. And even armed with such pitiful technology as they were – they used solid munitions, by the Triarchs – they were sweeping away the entire empire of Ithakas, once the bastion of necrontyr power in the galactic west.

A crusade, the humans called this warfleet. A tidal wave of superstition and hatred, manifesting as an armada thousands of ships strong. It had been sighted months ago, approaching Sedh, the fringeworld where Oltyx had waited out the centuries in exile. He had known then that the Unclean fleet would be the doom of Ithakas.

Once, such a foe would have been laughable. But the dynasty had become weak, rotting from the inside as Unnas, its dynast, had languished in madness. Now, like some ancient, dull-witted beast, the kingdom had been all but devoured alive before it even knew it was under attack. For all his bitterness towards the king who had cast him out, Oltyx had not been able to stand aside and watch it all be swept away. After the armada had been sighted, he had travelled to the crownworld Antikef, risking death in breaching the terms of his exile, to plead for the defence of the realm.

First, he had gone to Kynazh Djoseras, his elder, and the heir to the throne. But crippled by his loyalty to Unnas, Djoseras had offered nothing. Then, with no other roads left to him, Oltyx had gone to Unnas himself. It had… not gone well.

The king’s court, it had transpired, had fallen to the flayer curse in the years of Oltyx’s absence. And so had the king. Unnas had collapsed entirely into degeneracy, becoming little more than a puppet to his honourless adviser, Hemiun. The treacherous courtier had stripped Oltyx of all his royal enhancements, imprisoning him in the desecrated vault of Ithakka the Founder, along with a menagerie of horrors. In the depths of that decaying ziggurat, Oltyx had come to the brink of losing his own mind.

But in the end, Djoseras had seen sense. While Oltyx had been imprisoned, his elder had rallied those few worlds still willing and able to fight, and had scraped together a fleet for the final, desperate defence of Antikef. With the battle raging, and hundreds of capital ships clashing across the breadth of the home system, Djoseras had stormed Unnas’ palace himself, delivering Oltyx from destruction so that they might fight together.

And how they had fought, Oltyx lamented. Within the walls of the ­crumbling necropolis, the two scions had commanded the defence of the capital against staggering odds. For a full solar cycle, starships had fallen like rain across the crownworld’s deserts, until Oltyx had almost begun to wonder if the dynasty would weather the storm. But then the landing craft had come.

Oltyx’s ocular array flagged motion to his right; as if summoned from his engrammatic strata, a cluster of crude, bulky shapes lumbered in from the edge of the nearest projection, on a slow approach to the world of Gehsekt. They were giant craft of appalling simplicity: little more than airtight steel boxes, crammed with their reeking organic cargo. But that was all they needed to be, against an empire that had spent the best of its strength so many millennia ago.

Because the humans were numberless, it seemed. On the second solar cycle of the Battle of Antikef, they had invaded in million-strong waves, overcoming the ancient bastion of the necropolis with sheer, wasteful mass of soldiery. Every monstrous, ancient contingency of defence had been brought to bear by Djoseras. Every last scrap of the dynasty’s faded might had been scoured from the storage sepulchres and dimensional appendices. But Ithakas had mouldered too long in decadence. What remained, for all its grandeur, had not been enough to hold back the tide.

The crownworld had been lost. And though its surface had been turned to a sea of boiling rock by the Akrops, the ship which carried him now, it had been small vengeance. Antikef was now a staging post for the humans’ crusade. Even now their ships were emerging from the warp by the hundred, and every few hours, a new attack fleet would split off to target one of the coreworlds. There could be no fighting back against such an onslaught, Oltyx knew. All he could do was watch.

He glared at the spindly shapes now, as they shoaled over the molten surface of the crownworld in the next projection. Although more than half the Unclean armada was barely armed – civilian vessels belonging to their strange cult, plus cargo vessels, hospital ships and troop carriers – at its core were hundreds of naval vessels, some of which rivalled necron voidcraft in scale. And leading this great host of warships, like the heads of some beast from the ancient texts, were three leviathans.

The human flagship was a vessel called the Polyphemus, which the Akrops had wounded on the way out of Antikef. The strike had torn the ship’s prow away, and should have foundered it. But Oltyx knew better than to presume a corpse when there was none to be seen.

The second head of the monster was the Lystraegonian, a blood-red hammer of a ship that was both fortress and temple to an order of the transhuman warriors called the Astartes – the Space Marines. It had been the ship which had finally breached the necropolis walls, in a reckless atmospheric bombing run, before disgorging waves of Astartes to lead the sacking. That ship was a devil.

The third great ship had arrived just after the Battle of Antikef, and it was the strangest of them. Oltyx looked at it now, as the huge sigil on its flank – a skull and a primitive toothed gear – glowed with the reflected devastation of the planet below. This craft was called the Tyresias, and belonged to the machine-cultists of the world known as Mars. They would be here to plunder noctilith from the tombs of Ithakas. But scavengers though they were, they had not come armed lightly – the ship bore relict weapons more formidable than anything he had seen on a human vessel before.

At the sight of the thing, Oltyx could not bear to look at the barbarian ships any longer. Emitting the low buzz which had passed for a sigh ever since his people had given up their bodies, Oltyx dismissed the sight of Antikef, and then cast for all the projections down the length of the sanctum to be dispelled. They faded, their chorus of interstitial distress calls dwindling along with them, until the sanctum was shrouded in darkness once more. The only light now was from the glow of the stars beyond the viewport. And between those stars and him, no longer possible to ignore, sat a blunt black shadow.

The throne.

As far as Oltyx knew, that great slab was the last piece of crownworld stone still under Ithakan sovereignty. It was a replica of the throne which had sat in Unnas’ palatial ziggurat, installed here so as to provide proper lodgings to the dynast, should he have found cause to travel the stars. But Unnas had not left the walls of his court for centuries, and so it had been empty a long time. Now, the emptiness of the seat beckoned to Oltyx. It had gone from being a throne to the throne.

Stepping resentfully forward, Oltyx considered taking his seat on the thing at last. But just as he had done every time the thought occurred after a few laps of the room, he opted to walk around the throne, and stand in front of the viewport instead, gazing into the void.

Oltyx let out another sigh-analogue, and as the sound resonated in the chill, a glow spread out across the viewport. It was a green glow: smoulder­ing slivers of light, like magma seeping from the floor of some oceanic trench. Ships? barked some deep-rooted array in his flux, combat engagement states enacting themselves even before his optic buffer could parse the true meaning of the lights. But Oltyx knew these were no enemy ships. These were his reflection: the discharge nodes of his battered carapace, flaring with minute exhalations of plasma as thoughts stirred his core-flux.

Lit by those smouldering points of light, Oltyx’s body was a wasteland of char-dark matter: raw necrodermis, riven with cracks and gouges. A necron of the Ithakan royal line should have worn gold and silver, of course. But on the day of his exile, Oltyx had undergone the rite of excoriation, and been stripped of his status. He had only acquired scars since then.

Nevertheless, glowing now in his reflection was a new, stronger light. At the centre of his hulking, half-ruined form, the thoracic cartouche bearing the sigil of his dynasty glowed as fiercely as ever. It was not like the cartouche on the breast of any other necron in the kingdom. And in the solar cycles since Antikef’s death, it had only grown more complex and elaborate. This was the royal sigil, in its most perfect form, and it was a signal of its bearer’s divinity.

Because of course, it had not just been land and tombs which had been lost on the crownworld. The dynast himself, King Unnas, had died. That had been a blessing. But Djoseras had also fallen, in a duel with an Astartes champion, after commanding Oltyx to seek escape aboard the Akrops. That had been no blessing at all.

Oltyx and his elder had never had an easy understanding of each other. Indeed, Oltyx had spent the last few centuries thinking of little but his hatred for the kynazh, who he had always seen as vain and weak of mind. He had only begun to realise just how worthy an inheritor of Ithakas Djoseras would have been, on the very eve of devastation. And he had only understood in full as he had chanted his funerary rites atop the siege-quaked ruin of the palace.

Djoseras. His mentor, his rival, his brother, for sixty million years. The only being Oltyx could imagine knowing how to fight on against such dire odds, obliterated forever. And in the wake of his passing, Oltyx had ­inherited his birthright at last. He was king.

Rejoice, thought Oltyx, as he gazed into the darkness outside. The stars were faint out here, in the dense cloud of gas and ice where the Akrops had taken shelter, at the edge of Antikef’s solar system. But even without the aid of his optic buffer, he could make out the slightly brighter light of the crownworld’s sun among them. It was a sad thing: a dim spectre, outshone entirely by the reflected fire of his own cartouche.

That was a bleak omen. According to the most ancient principles of the necrontyr, an inscription was not just the symbol of a thing. It was the thing, by right of the inscriber’s heka – their sheer will. It was why the necrontyr had always been ready to sacrifice anything in defence of their tombs, as without their monuments the dead could have no honour, nor even identity. In a very real sense, that sigil on his breast was the dynasty now. Already, it outshone the divine light of the crownworld’s star. And soon, once he led what remained of his people from this doomed place, that fragile fire in his core would be flickering alone in the great blackness. In the face of exodus, the reflection of the cartouche suddenly seemed very, very small.

In time, Oltyx resolved that he’d had enough of staring at that sad, gloomy scrap of a star, just as he’d had enough of watching his kingdom being dismantled by apes. It was time to face the future. He sent an interstitial order through the bones of the Akrops, the strength of his seal riding over all other operations, and with the slowness of sinking dusk, the great ship began to turn towards the great emptiness beyond the system’s edge, so that he could look outwards. As the Akrops rotated, a transmission made its way back through the interstices, bearing both shipmaster’s and admiral’s seals. Yenekh.

‘A new bearing, my liege?’ enquired the warrior once known as the Razor of Sedh, his words appended by involuntary stacks of doubt-signifier glyphs as they appeared in Oltyx’s mind. Yenekh was unsure, Oltyx noted, of how to address his king. In the long years of Oltyx’s exile, the high admiral had been the nearest thing to a friend in his existence. But that situation could no longer persist, as a king could have no equals.

And a king owes nobody an explanation, thought Oltyx, before dismissing the message without a response. He tried to convince himself his silence was rooted in the formalities of rank, but the ideation collapsed near instantly in his memetic buffer. There was, after all, another far more ­troubling reason to avoid speaking with Yenekh.

There was a reckoning due between them. Unfinished business. And while he knew neither of them were keen to settle it, it was a problem that would come to find them soon enough if they did not hunt it down first.

That grim matter with Yenekh was just one of the many dreads the future held for Oltyx. There would be no avoiding any of them. And as the engines rumbled deep below, hauling that great keel around to face away from his home star, he began to regret the order to turn altogether, as it had shown him just how little cause there was for hope.

Through the crystal of the viewport was a new set of lights. Shivering green constellations, they huddled together in a loose cluster as if seeking warmth in the void, with smaller sparks drifting between them. This time, the lights really were ships: those which had escaped from the carnage of Antikef, and those loyalist vessels which had responded to Djoseras’ summons in the days since. For the first time since Ithakka the Founder had sailed his torchship to Antikef from the homeworld at the other end of time, the dynasty’s ruler could see the entirety of his holdings at once.

The ships had gathered here under an apotropaic shroud cast by the Akrops itself. The protocol would be sufficient to conceal them indefinitely from the eyes of the Unclean. But as tempting as it was to remain hidden, it would have been a dishonour to Djoseras.

Because this fleet was his elder’s real legacy. The kynazh had known Antikef was doomed from the moment he had seen the crusade armada, just as Oltyx had. And so, before he had begun gathering ships from the coreworlds for the battle at Antikef, he had called upon Yenekh on Sedh, and tasked him with his own mission of mercy.

Acting on those orders, the Akrops had made lightning visits to the grandest tomb worlds in the dynasty, offering a stark ultimatum: board with whatever troops, war machines, relics and treasures they could translate inside the ship within an hour, or be left to the ravages of the Unclean. Many had scoffed, of course, too lost in their own decadence to take the threat of a lesser species seriously, or too outraged by the apparent blasphemy of abandoning the kemmeht, the divine territory of the necrontyr. Yenekh had not wasted his time on them.

Still, for every domain that had ignored the offer, another had accepted. The Akrops had eventually been forced to abandon the mission, racing to Antikef in order to retrieve Oltyx before the capital was entirely overrun. But the siege had held long enough for the gigantic vessel to have made its way round a broad swathe of Ithakas, and so it had arrived heaving with refugees. There were entire tomb complexes aboard, teleported in their entirety into the cavernous holds, and hundreds of nobles, all with attendant legions.

The other vessels that had limped here were similarly burdened, and between them all, the ragged hulls of the exodus fleet held the whole of the dynasty. It was nowhere near enough to take back and hold even a corner of their former domain. But it was enough, at least in theory, to claim a new home, somewhere in the sordid bloom of lesser cultures which had afflicted the galaxy during the necrons’ long slumber.

Djoseras had arranged all of this. He had let himself be destroyed for it, even. Power had been everything to the necrontyr, and meant even more to the necrons who had inherited their minds. And yet Djoseras had waived the greatest power of all, the divine gold of kingship, purely for his faith in Oltyx. He had been convinced his younger was capable of something that he, like most of their kind, would never be able to grasp – the ability to adapt. Djoseras had thought Oltyx both cunning, and willing to bend the old ways, in the name of preserving his people. He had believed, unshakably, that Oltyx would lead Ithakas to survival.

That was all extremely flattering, of course. But as Oltyx stared out over the lights of the exodus fleet, his phantasory buffer filling with thoughts of all the lords waiting for his orders to sail, a terrible realisation sank over him.

He had absolutely no idea what to do next.

Oltyx felt the weight of the throne behind him then, almost as if the whole of it sat on his shoulders. He turned, glowering at the stone lump with the violence usually reserved for an enemy, and when he finally conceded he could not intimidate it into crumbling, he resigned himself to sitting on the damned thing.

‘Perhaps I will think like a king,’ he said out loud, appending the words with flashes of sarcasm-patterns, ‘if I sit in the proper chair.’

Oltyx sat, and thought. He floated the question of where to lead the fleet in his memetic buffer time and time again, but no wisdom leaked from the rock of the crownworld, and his flux only grew more turbulent with indecision. Hours passed, until thought crumbled entirely, and all he could do was stare out at those meagre ships, and his own reflection before them: a king defeated at the start of his reign, looking too small on his relic throne.

Oltyx was brought back to himself by a muted warning glyph from his seismoreceptory array, informing him of a vibration in the deck below the throne. The shudder came again, building into a rumble that lasted for seconds, and the sanctum’s gauss lamps began to flicker. This was not unexpected. Such disturbances had been commonplace on the Akrops, even before the damage it had sustained at Antikef, for it was an old ship, and had long ago been damaged on a level that could never truly be repaired.

But the minute fluctuations in the light had triggered overrides in his optic buffer, calibrated to detect the smallest slip in an assassin’s camouflage. And so, for the briefest instant after the flicker, while his vision was being recalibrated, darkness overtook him.

When sight came back to Oltyx, he found the reflection in the viewport was no longer his own.

The figure on the throne was roughly his shape, but it was clad in the gold reserved for the dynast alone. The gold did not gleam. The channels of its carapace were clotted with filth and gore, and around it bobbed a vile haze of tomb-flies. Its faceplate, too, was not his own – it was malformed, but he could not see how, for it was shrouded by a mask in the image of a skull. Only one ocular gleamed from the shadow of its socket; the other was empty and dark.

Was this an image of Unnas, who had once been his father and once his king? Unnas, who had been lost to the madness of Llandu’gor’s gift, and had called himself the Eater-of-Gods, making a squalid charnel-city of Antikef’s necropolis? Or was it some new horror, conjured entirely by the stress inflicted on his own mind? Whatever it was, it was still there, ­glowering at Oltyx with its lone ocular, and wearing the grin of a corpse.

An error, thought Oltyx, as the coldness of the stone beneath him became suddenly pronounced, matching the dread seeping through his core. Engrammatic leakage, he insisted to himself. It had to be. Refrenations from the stresses of the battle, or from the mending of the damage Hemiun had inflicted on him. The random merging of memories with perception, not to be imparted with any significance. Just an error.

Or madness, hissed the apparition, with acid cruelty. Do you realise, Oltyx, the significance of the throne you now sit in? Do you know, I wonder, when it last bore the weight of the divine?

Oltyx froze in place, the only sound the clink of chipping stone as his fingers tightened on the arms of the throne. Would answering this thing dispel the refrenation in his perceptory arrays which had caused it, or simply drive him further into madness? Was a hallucination conjured by the heka of a king a real thing? Whatever the case, he could not help considering its question, for Oltyx knew precisely when the old king had last sat here.

‘Sokar,’ said Oltyx, and the spectre laughed.

Yes… back in the good old days. The dying days of Szarekh’s war – the great War In Heaven. That bittersweet moment, where we saw we had conquered the Old Ones, but spent ourselves to do so. And where, overcome with the fate he had been tricked into inflicting on us all, Szarekh made plans for one last fight.

‘Against the C’tan,’ Oltyx ventured, increasingly distressed that the flux-glitch behind the apparition had not resolved itself, and the reflected king nodded gravely.

The C’tan had been gods, of the worst sort. They had offered the necrontyr victory not just over the ancient foes of the Old Ones, but over death itself. Szarekh had accepted their boon, but only discovered too late the price his people would pay. Freedom from death, it had transpired, was to be achieved by the abandonment of life. And so, on the day of biotransference, the necrontyr had been replaced by the necrons, shorn of their souls, and bound in frames of iron that would last until time itself wore them to atoms.

‘Szarekh summoned you… him… to take part in that final strike, didn’t he?’

He summoned Unnas, yes. Him and four others, with their finest weapons.

‘I remember.’

Oltyx did remember. Unnas had left Antikef on this very ship, with the admiral-king Korrocep and a crew of one hundred thousand, and would only say he was bound for a place called the Sokar Gate. After an absence of a year he had returned, aboard a ship beaten to the edge of annihilation. Of Korrocep, or the crew, there had been no sign. And while Unnas had stated that a victory had been won, he had never said another word about it.

Whatever had transpired at Sokar had changed him profoundly, to the point where Oltyx had long wondered if, in any real sense, what had come back had been Unnas at all. Back at the palace on Antikef, when he had confronted the Eater-of-Gods in his hall, Oltyx had come up against the very edges of the truth, but the whole of it had been concealed from him. He had learned that every dynasty whose king had flown to Sokar had long since fallen into ruin. Ithakas had been the last of them. And now with Unnas gone, there was no being left in existence, save perhaps Szarekh himself, who knew what had happened there.

‘What happened to Unnas out there?’ asked Oltyx, in a voice so quiet it was like shifting stone. But the lamps flickered again, and the golden thing was gone, replaced with his own coal-dark reflection once more. Oltyx felt a deep coldness, and a sense of absence, as if his core-flux had been vented to hard void. As if something had left him which he badly needed.

He was aware now of the utter silence of the dynast’s chamber, and the sheer emptiness of it. It was large enough to hold ten-score warriors, but contained only the throne, and him on it. On Unnas’ final flight from the ruin of Sokar, that emptiness would have filled the whole of the Akrops. He would have sat alone on this seat, on that burning ship, with only his thoughts – only the memories of whatever he had done – for company.

What happened to you out there?

The floor shook again, then, and a deep groan rose from the depths of the ship.

‘My king.’ It was Yenekh again, with the unmistakable tone of a noble preparing to deliver bad news to their dynast. ‘In your radiance, you will have noticed a brief difficulty with energistic transfer just now. It seems the Akrops’ engines have sustained greater damage than we first thought, and your rotation of the ship has triggered a refrenation event.’

Oltyx would have maintained his previous silence, but shaken by the apparition that had worn the guise of the slain dynast, he found his temper breaking the seal of his vocal buffer.

‘You criticise a royal mandate, admiral?’

‘On the contrary,’ continued Yenekh smoothly, with only the most muted stress-signifiers appended to the transmission. ‘I mean to praise you, as is right, on your wisdom. In commanding the ship to turn, you provided this loyal subject with an early warning of weakness in the drive – as you surely intended. Even as we speak, a plasmancer subconclave is translating from the Handtaker, fresh arrived from Phyloskh, to assess the flaws. A full self-refit sequence will be commanded of the ship’s autonomous spirit, so we shall not be caught off guard when the need to move arises.’

As you surely intended, thought Oltyx. Szarekh’s teeth, he has a nerve. Although he willed his anger to stay alight, Oltyx could not help himself. The Razor of Sedh, somehow, had found the precise tone with which to poke at his own king, while remaining entirely within protocol. It was… atrocious. And in the shadow of what he had just encountered, it made Oltyx profoundly thankful Yenekh existed, despite the gravity of the confrontation which doubtless lay ahead of them. It made him feel less alone.

‘Speaking of which,’ ventured Yenekh, ‘I have been wondering as to where we might move, when the time comes to do so. It is your decision alone, of course, but I have been around the stars in my time. Perhaps I could offer you a series of suggestions so foolish that certainty will be revealed by your own contrasting wisdom?’

Oltyx let the interstices remain silent a moment longer – Yenekh would wait on his king’s word for hours, if necessary – and tried to talk himself out of accepting the hand he was being offered. A king could not afford to have equals. A king was made distant by divinity; he could not be close to anyone.

But Oltyx’s memetic buffer was nothing if not thorough, and after a full second of deliberation, his mind was clear. All these things are true, he concluded. But this king is not having a good day at all. Perhaps it might not diminish him too much to accept a little counsel in this matter. Or a little company.

‘Very well, Razor,’ he said at last, letting glyphs of cold ambiguity coat the message. ‘You will present yourself to the dynast’s chamber at once, where your king will question you, and reveal what other weaknesses in the fleet you have surely failed to spot. Then, perhaps, I will hear your suggestions, and the new dynast of Ithakas will finally address his subjects on the matter of their crownworld to be.’

Yenekh sent nothing in return but glyphs of profound obedience, arranged with an immaculate balance of humility and flare. The fact the sequence could also be read in an obscure homeworld dialect from before biotransference, in which it would translate as ‘took your fly-blown time’, was surely an artefact of chance.