Xaleyp rushed through the halls of the Starkiller alone, his breathing and footsteps growing faster with each corner he turned on his way to the jail ward. Seth drake was there, just waiting for him to show up, and he had all the answers to Xaleyp’s questions. He hardly paid attention as he passed the occasional person, none of them bothering to stop him though they had no reason to.

Suddenly, he found himself staring at the door of the jail ward, its metal face staring him down in a futile effort at intimidating him, attempting to convince him to give up his mission. He ignored it, taking a deep breath in before approaching and letting the two halves slide into the wall with a hiss.

Inside was the somewhat familiar command chair in the center of the room with the cells lining the walls on either side. Now that both Tober and Seth were imprisoned on the Starkiller, security seemed to have drastically increased. A group of guards stood around the chair, talking and laughing as they enjoyed glasses of some type of mysterious drink. Another patrolled on each layer, walking slowly but purposefully along the catwalks that surrounded the room. Each had a strap holding an assault rifle to their body.

As Xaleyp approached, the guards looked up at him, one of them moving forward and cradling his rifle loosely against his chest. His visor slid up into the top of his helmet as he neared the younger man, his lips curving into something of a snarl.

‟I’ll be honest,” the guard said, ‟Ardus warned us that you might be coming just a few minutes ago, and he told us to make sure that you talked to Seth Drake.”

Xaleyp’s mouth dropped open in surprise with the guard’s words, unsure what exactly to make of them. Why would Ardus want him to talk to Seth, and, further, how did he even know that was where he was going?

The guard walked back to the command chair and pressed a few buttons on the console, causing the lift at the opposite side of the room to whir as it returned to the bottom floor of the jail ward. With a sweeping arm, he gestured for Xaleyp to go to it, which he did without a second though.

With each step he took, he felt his head start to spin faster and faster, and he thought he might collapse. As he stepped onto the lift, it immediately went into motion, bringing him to the middle floor. The guard patrolled the level met him at the lift, escorting him to the cell to the left side of the room. When they reached it, he pressed a few buttons on the keypad, and the door slid open, disappearing into the wall and revealing Seth sitting in the corner of the room. He had his head between his knees and hands clutching the sides of it, gently rocking back and forth. Quiet mutters emanated from the man, and he did not look up as the door opened.

The guard gently prodded Xaleyp forward, forcing him into the room and shutting the door behind him. A sinking feeling came to his stomach as he realized he was alone with Seth Drake for the first time in months. Xaleyp cleared his throat in a rather feeble attempt at getting the man’s attention, but it did no good. He stepped closer, taking cautious steps towards the rambling man, and, finally, he looked up at Xaleyp. His head cocked to one side, a somewhat curious expression on his face.

‟Seth, I want to talk to you about something that happened a few years ago,” Xaleyp said, his voice full of uncertainty.

‟A few years ago, you say?” A shrill laugh pierced the air as Seth threw his head back, opening his mouth as wide as it would go. After several seconds of the noise, it stopped, and he stood, walking back and forth along the opposite wall and gesticulating wildly. ‟I’m afraid I cannot even tell you what happened five minutes ago, let alone a few years, so you’re going to have to ask someone else.”

‟There’s no one else I can ask this.” Xaleyp shook his head, and his heart raced faster than he thought it could go, hammering against his ribcage in an effort to break free. ‟I need to know the truth about my parents, about Siatia’s and Hyperia’s makeshift alliance, and how it all ties to Arcadia. Basically, I want to know everything about what’s on this.”

Xaleyp held up the chip for Seth to see, and the other man stopped and looked at it curiously, cocking his head to the other side from before.

‟You had a meeting with Ardus Kaine, Hunter Toten, and Hayden Irani in the Chancellor’s Office on Siatia, and I want to know what happened after that and where my parents are.”

‟A meeting in the Chancellor’s office on Siatia…” Seth rapped his knuckles against his head, the noise echoing in the small chamber as he paced around the room. His voice grew louder with every word. ‟Think, Seth, think, think, think, think, think.”

He yelled out, gripping the hairs of his head and pulling them as far as they would go. With deep breaths, he turned to Xaleyp, a look of worry filling his eyes.

‟Gareten has been with me for years, but lately he’s grown bolder, more incessant, more controlling, and he’s … he’s taken some of my memories from me, hiding them deep within the CAM so I can’t find them. I don’t even know what is real or fake anymore, and it’s been so long since I’ve been on my own, I can hardly hear myself think. I can’t even remember what my own thoughts sound like.” Seth turned and placed his head and hands against the wall, as if he were trying to phase through it. He sounded more and more panicked with each word he spoke. ‟So many voices, so much noise, so little time, and now another thrown into the mix, asking questions about a meeting I cannot remember, or I’m not allowed to remember.”

Deep, rattling sobs came from the man, and his shoulders racked violently with each gasping breath he took. Xaleyp simply stood there, his back pressed against the wall and unsure of what exactly to do.

Suddenly, Seth stopped and stood upright, his spine realigning itself as he turned to look at Xaleyp, a faint smile touching his lips.

‟Xaleyp, it is so nice to finally be able to meet you in person,” Seth said, and he gestured to the bed as he walked over to it. His voice was calm, almost soothing, as he spoke now, and he sounded somewhat lucid. ‟Please, have a seat so we can discuss whatever is on your mind. I promise to answer whatever you ask as truthfully as I am able, so do not feel the need to attempt to hide anything from me. Trust me, I will know if you attempt to deceive me.”

Xaleyp froze as a bout of panic surged through him at the sudden three-sixty Seth did, and he wished he could melt away and out of the door. His heart didn’t seem like it was pounding as first as it was; in fact, it hardly felt like it was beating at all. Seth saw the look of apprehension on Xaleyp’s face, and his smile grew wider as he shook his head in mild annoyance.

‟Oh, I am so sorry, Xaleyp, as I seem to have forgotten my manners. When you spend millennia with no one then suddenly find yourself inexplicably tied to one of your descendants, you tend to lose track of modern etiquette.” Seth stood once more and bowed with an overly enthusiastic flourish of his arms, bending his body in half before popping back upright and pausing as if for applause. ‟My name is Gareten Drake, ancestor of Seth and one of the founders of the Hyperion Empire with Alan Rezal.”

Xaleyp couldn’t hide the look of surprise on his face as he stared at Seth, who appeared no different than how he had left him after his capture.

‟How are you talking through Seth’s body?” he managed to squeak out, his voice hardly audible even in the small chamber.

‟Seth, you see, allowed me in when his CAM was first implanted.” Seth crossed one leg over the other and held the knee gingerly with folded hands. ‟As such, he granted me access to control his body in ways that scientists never foresaw with the CAM, such as being able to control his memories and even his body. It’s not a type of control that I use often, nor do I enjoy it, but it can have its uses, like for a moment such as this one.”

Xaleyp didn’t know how to reply to this, instead choosing to stare at Seth—or, perhaps more accurately, Gareten—with a somewhat dumbfounded look.

‟Can you tell me anything about that meeting then?” Xaleyp ‘s mouth went dry as he asked the question.

‟Of course I can, seeing how I was the one that altered it in the first place, not to mention I’m the one that ensured it ended up in your hands.”

‟What do you mean altered?”

‟Didn’t you hear the garbled speech, the warping of the images? I changed key points of that meeting because I didn’t want too much to be spoiled if it fell into the wrong hands at an inopportune time.” Seth stroked his chin thoughtfully, as if trying to recall a distant memory. ‟The first alteration, if I’m not mistaken—and very rarely am I mistaken—was when Seth was talking about … disposing of Tober Delargivic, then mentioning that he must be dispatched afterwards. I removed a few words here, nothing too intense, mostly because Seth had threatened the at the time High Strategos Hayden Irani. I was forced to alter the others’ memories as well to ensure that they were none the wiser afterwards, which was no easy feat.

‟The second was when he mentioned you to the others. Here, I made High Strategos Irani appear to not know who you were.” Seth shrugged and returned his hands to his knee, where he bounced it idly. ‟This was simply because he had mentioned kidnapping your father, which you already know they did, of course, but I wouldn’t want just anyone finding that out. Better for Seth to say it, make it sound like a conspiracy theory than any sort of confirmation. They also briefly discussed using the combination of the Hyperions taking your mother and Siatians taking your father as leverage to keep you under their thumbs. I’m sure you can see how this would be detrimental to any attempt at galactic unity if the two governments leading it would so blatantly use such abhorrent methods as blackmail. Not to mention it would’ve been entirely unnecessary to achieve my goals.”

‟Your goals?” Xaleyp asked, unable to form any other words.

‟Yes, my goals. You know, those things that I wish to accomplish with my transcendental life?” Seth scoffed and leaned against the wall, shaking his head and look away from Xaleyp. ‟Here I thought you were supposed to be smart, but now you have me second guessing whether my test actually worked the way it was supposed to.”

Xaleyp felt his face flush and opened his mouth to speak, but Seth waved his hand to dismiss anything he might have said.

‟Now, let’s move on to some more pressing matters before my control fades again.” Seth stood and paced around the room with careful, measured steps, a sharp contrast to the frantic pacing he had done before. ‟During the beginning of Seth’s reign, a man by the name of Lym Fradovette came to him as an agent of the Obsidian Order. Despite my protests, Seth allowed this man to rise the ranks of the Order, eventually becoming Director. With each successive promotion, mysterious deaths and other occurrences followed Lym, and I repeatedly expressed my concerns of what he may be planning, but Seth ignored me, even with the punishments I doled out.

‟The Obsidian Order was a rather secret network of spies the Hyperion Empire setup throughout the millennia. When Arcadia took control, the network fell apart, the agents all fading away to await their next orders while blending into society. Now, Fradovette is putting the Order back together, and he is attempting to wrest control of whatever planets he can.”

Xaleyp’s head began to reel with the information being thrown out at him, but he tried to keep his face passive, avoiding showing Gareten his confusion. Seth smiled grimly, stopping his pacing and turning to Xaleyp.

‟I have been carefully plotting out the events leading up to where we are today, and I can clearly see the most likely outcome of our return to Siatia: Tober and Seth are going to be executed, as discussed in the meeting you just watched. I haven’t been able to find a way out, so I guess that’s that. I just want to ask you for one favor: Dispose of Lym Fradovette. He is a danger to the galaxy and must be stopped before he is able to get too far along in his plans.”

‟Why should I do anything you ask?” Xaleyp’s breathing increased, and he found his hands forming tight balls, his fingernails digging into his palms. His voice rose until he was shouting, the noise filling the small cell. ‟Every time I do anything you, or Seth, or anyone else asks, someone I care about ends up hurt. Just look at Lina, dead because you people decided you wanted to just play a stupid fucking game of war for no reason other than you can. So many others dead because of you, because no one’s stood up and tried to put a stop to it. Well, fuck that. It’s time someone looked evil in the eye and said no more.”

Xaleyp’s shoulders wracked with each breath he took, and his teeth clenched tighter than he had ever felt them. Seth simply stood there, leaning against the wall and staring at Xaleyp with a smug grin on his face and arms crossed. Finally, after several seconds of silence, Seth pushed himself off the wall with his shoulders and slowly crossed the distance to Xaleyp, speaking with each step he took.

‟You blame me and others for the deaths of so many. While I don’t deny that I have been responsible for some myself, shall we take a look at your track record?” Seth counted off on his fingertips with each person he listed. ‟Lina Guezal, dead because you thought you could play god. That poor technician of ArcDefense, Tyler Hudson, Finnegan Crowley, Adric Zechiel, Miyat Diaspora, all senselessly murdered because you didn’t care who got hurt as long as you got what you wanted, like a petulant child. No matter what kind of psychopath you think I am, you’re just as bad.”

‟None of those were my fault,” Xaleyp whispered, his shoulders deflating.

‟Weren’t they?” Seth put his hand to his chin, staring off to the distance as he pondered the statement. ‟You’ve found Oliver Sudden on this ship, and he was at Vertyn just the same as you and Lina. Yet, he is still here and she is not. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that she would still be alive if you had listened to orders and didn’t try to play the hero and save your precious little friends?”

‟I don’t know what the Arcadians have done at Vertyn.” Xaleyp shook his head in a futile effort to keep the tears from flowing down his cheeks. ‟They could’ve killed half the people there, and if one of those was Lina, she would’ve been dead anyway.”

‟Well, allow me to enlighten you on what exactly the Arcadians did once they took control of Vertyn.” Seth’s eyes went blank for a moment as he locked them on the wall opposite him. ‟Once the space station was captured, they converted it to an Arcadian training facility. Very few casualties aboard the station, less than a tenth of a percent, in fact. There was a reason, after all, that they were attempting to avoid firing directly on Vertyn, instead aiming for the Hyperion fleet. So, if you had not tried to play god, she would’ve been alive and well, just waiting for you to come back to rescue her. So, she is dead because of no one else but you. Shall I go on, explaining how whenever you try to save someone, they end up in harm’s way?”

‟Shut up.” The two words were barely audible, but Xaleyp felt as if lava mixed with ice was running through his veins. Seth still had that stupid smug grin on his face, and Xaleyp quickly gripped the man by his clothes, pushing him against the wall. ‟You’re nothing but a sorry excuse for a human, and you deserve everything that you’ve gotten in life. I swear I will see you burn in Hell, even if it’s the last thing I do.”

Seth shrugged off Xaleyp’s hands, tilting his head sideways as the grin widened. A dull rumble of laughter filled the room as he leaned in close, putting his mouth right next to Xaleyp’s ear.

‟I’ll see you there.”

At once, he leaned back, his eyes went blank, and he looked around in surprise, somewhat frightened at seeing Xaleyp so close to him. He ducked out and away from him, shrinking into the corner and collapsing to the ground. Muttered gibberish filled the air as Seth looked around the room, his eyes darting every which way.

His heart pounding in his ears and hands shaking, Xaleyp walked out of the cell.