Ten thousand years.

Ten thousand years since he had escaped the mortality of Silver to seize the glory of Gold and each day he spent locked here on Terra in the Sol Invictus solar system Vespasias cursed his own ascension.

The Golden Imperator sat on his throne in the palace the Regent had so graciously allowed him on Terra, capital of the Dominium, like the illusion of rule and self-determination would sooth Vespasias’s pride.

Instead, it insulted him to live in this gilded cage, to play Augustas’s games.

Casting out his innumerable senses he had gained and enhanced over his lifetime and advancement: sight, hearing, lifesense, bloodline connection, psychic detection, he prowled his so-called domain. There were thirty billion humans living on the planetary capital of the Regent’s empire and Vespasias Flavion had been allotted eight billion of them to be steward over, to administrate and dictate to the masses as one of Augustas’s Golden puppets, kings and queens of nothing at all.

Vespasias split his mind into hundreds of independent entities, clones of his thought process capable of perceiving the world and thinking separately from one another. Such mental abnormalities were what gave Gold Imperators their true psychic mastery, when one could devote countless copies of oneself working in unison to manipulate telekinesis or other arcane arts, they had the might and processing power of a legion rather than a single entity.

Through all of those offshoots, the Gold slithered through his territory, eavesdropping on the inane, unimportant conversations of lesser beings, penetrating his servants’ deepest thoughts, investigating every secret and hidden location.

Ten thousand years. Ten thousand years as Gold and these damn people never changed. In all those millennia, humanity never developed beyond the crude and pointless creatures they were, no matter what the Paths of the twelve Olympians might have offered them. Marital infidelities, jealousy of brothers and neighbors over riches, petty theft, vanity and pride and hubris, gluttony and sloth.

He collapsed his hundreds of mirrored copies of his cognition and personality back into one singular self, one entity and consciousness.

The same song and dance over and over since the gods had first created mankind. Vespasias was no Golden Demigod like the Regent and so he was not truly immortal, but as a Fourth Rank Imperator he had the dubious pleasure of looking forward to witnessing the same soap opera of human life for hundreds of thousands of years before he finally died of old age. He did not know if he wanted to cry or laugh at that thought, the idea that he would be surrounded by the indistinct, wretched masses of lesser beings for such a mind-numbing amount of time.

He wanted to kill them. He wanted to kill them all. He craved the silence that would fall upon the cradle of humanity when each and every filthy creature of the subspecies were in the grave. He wanted to crush their heads to a pulp, shatter every bone in their bodies to let the marrow seep out, spill their blood until their veins were dry, flay the skin from their muscle, rip out and devour their hearts raw.

And most of all, Vespasias wanted to set them ablaze.

Vespasias held out his right palm facing upright and generated an azure blue flame as if he had an invisible lighter in his hand. He watched it turn violet and then the deepest and darkest of blacks. This was the power he had chosen when he had selected the Order of the Afrit as his sacred vocation when he had reached Gold. Being an Afrit Imperator granted him incredible thermokinesis and the ability to reach the highest heights of psychic ignition. Even a spark of the dark flame would eat a one-inch-deep hole into a being as grand as Augustas Heraclides. Not that it would come to that, the Regent would engage Vespasias in a telepathic war before he could utilize his pyric powers.

As with all of the Dauntless Paths, Gold Imperators had three Orders: Afrits, Archangels, and Seraphs. Just as the Orders of the Campeador Champions were named after the mythologies and stories of the Northmen of Europa, the Imperators’ Orders were named after Ibrahamian myths, the legends of the Judaeans and the Moslemites. Archangels were taller and stronger than other Imperator Golds, reaching eight feet of height similarly to Campeadors, and Seraphs were faster in both movement speed and levitating flight.

Not counting the Regent, who stood above and apart from the others, there were only nine Golds in existence. Ever. Their rarity was simple, the Emperor’s Path of cultivation and progression demanded victory and domination over increasingly difficult foes, and the Dominium was largely at an uneasy peace under Augustas Heraclides’s iron fist. All of the Nine had arisen during times of civil war, all had been Silvers who had learned what it was really like to drown in the blood of other Silver Imperators, to command great fleets and legions, to conquer worlds and destroy planetoids, to bomb cities and rebel states into fused, irradiated glass and molten metal.

In the beginning, in his early days, Vespasias Flavion had despised the other Golds. They had felt like rivals, like enemies who had to be plotted against and undermined. Now he understood though, they weren’t his foes, they were his fellow prisoners on Terra. Inmates one and all in a tyrant’s grip. Were they friends? Of course not, but he understood them now, felt empathy for how they strained and writhed in the chains of the Regent’s edict that kept them in the solar system. Kept them from being truly free.

What was the point of godlike power if you could not do anything real or permanent with it?

Amongst his auric brethren, Vespasias was unique in that he was the only one Red Haloed, the only impure hybrid of them all despite being older than three of them. Vespasias knew the others looked down on him for his mixed heritage, called him a bastard mutt even, but he did not care. He had been an early iteration of gene splicing and had been implanted with the DNA of a Faber Artisan, the chosen Path of Hephaestus. When he had been young, in his days as Copper and Bronze, he had not noticed being any different from other Imperators besides seeing the red rings around his violet irises in the mirror. When he had hit Silver Rank, the stolen legacy of the Artisan’s Path started to emerge alongside his Imperial glory and with it he had gained new power.

Artisans had a special connection to metalworking and technology due to their link to the smith god, though as a culture they had expanded to all forms of artwork from song to painting to sculptures, and at higher levels they possessed technopathic abilities that let them interlink with and enhance mechanical and electronic tools and equipment.

With an invisible telekinetic razor conjured by his mind, Vespasias cut a corner off of his metal throne’s armrest, producing a chunk of metallic material. He could not use his Artisan’s technopathy with just a piece of steel, of course, but it was a start. Using telekinesis to cleave sections of the chunk apart and carve it into shape and psychic transmutation to turn the iron-carbon alloy to silicon, crystal, gold, and copper, Vespasias pieced together the seed of this current diversion.

With his Artisan’s gift, the Gold Imperator evolved and mutated the piece of technology, advancing it hundreds and then thousands of years of scientific and engineering discovery. It hummed and vibrated as pieces shuffled around and the structure reformed into something new and dynamic. When it was finished, he let it descend down into his hand. Though it was a tiny little thing of complex circuitry and and glowing crystal, it had great potential energy. It was a bomb powerful enough to destroy everything within a hundred miles.

He tossed to it to one of the servants staffing his throneroom, waiting to fulfill any of his requests. All of the Slaves in the chamber were Golden Servi, though Vespasias did not see why that mattered. All of their Ranks were insignificant ants compared to his majesty and a Copper Servus could bring Vespasias an ice-cold drink or a bowl of fruit or sweep the floors just as well as a Golden Slave.

“What is it, Great Master?” The Servus man said to him.

“A paperweight.” Vespasias lied easily, and the Servus tucked it away in a pocket and bowed in thanks.

Something disturbed one of Vespasias’s senses like a ripple on a pond’s surface after chucking a stone. Something that did not come from the teeming hordes of humans all around him. He searched for the source and found it. A psychic battle in the Cognitosphere, the realm of minds and thoughts, a dreamscape land that the Nine and the Regent used for their infrequent squabbles. Kastia and Drusas, two of his fellow kind, were fighting with Augustas.

“Far be it from me to miss out on a spectacle.” Vespasias whispered to himself and closed his eyes, casting his mind out.

He opened his mind’s eye in a nightmare world of dark purple skies that stretched on infinitely over a grey desert. The Cognitosphere. He saw Augustas and the two Golds ahead of him, locked in violent attack.

Here Vespasias and the others did not look as they did in the physical world, instead they took on cognitive avatars, metaphysical representations of their minds, souls, and bodies.

Vespasias looked like a machine man, something like an android powered by a combustion engine and clockwork gears, one that seeped with molten lava at the joints and seams of his mechanical parts. Augustas looked like a man made of amber with a head of a lion made of marble with amethyst gem eyes and an interior skeleton formed from solidified lightning. Drusas looked like a bat winged creature of smoke and Kastia rapidly flickered through a series of forms, switching from a beautiful maiden to a humanoid dragon woman with slitted violet eyes to a luminous being of light and starfire.

The other Golds hit the Regent with telepathic blows laced with the passion of their hatred for him and the full strength of their psychic rhetoric, but Augustas retaliated with more than mental might. Each of his attacks was fueled by his blazing, incandescent divinity.

Vespasias watched with displeasure as his compatriots fought as losing battle and considered jumping in before discarding the thought. Involving himself would only lead to the Regent’s reprisal and punishment. He had learned that lesson long ago.

The fight intensified and it almost looked for a moment like the tides had turned and Drusas and Kastia had gained the upper hand when the Regent’s avatar raised its lion head to the sky and screamed, a wordless prayer to the Skyfather that expressed Augustas’s burning wrath. Two bolts of white lightning as thick as tree trunks and as bright as the sun lanced down from the dreamscape’s purple sky and struck the two Golden Imperators. The sacred energies of the bolts flashed outwards, catching Vespasias in the crossfire and he spit molten blood from the mental and spiritual pressure.

Vespasias opened his eyes, forced back to his body, and hissed in annoyance, a migraine coming on from the backlash of the Regent’s attack.

“Sir.” One of the Servi said to him.

“Yes?” He replied through grit teeth.

“You have a visitor seeking an audience.” The woman said.

Vespasias sent his senses out to see who it was, but the person was somehow cloaked even from the Gold Imperator’s perceptions. Whoever it was, they felt like a hole in reality.

“Enter.” He commanded, speaking loudly and projecting his voice.

An Imperator boy set foot in his throneroom, barely a teenager really. Vespasias attempted to control his frustration.

“I am busy for non-essential requests. Please leave a message with my secretary.” The Gold said.

“This is essential.” The boy replied.

“I said get out, boy.” Vespasias growled.

“It is essential.” The youth insisted. “And I am not a boy.”

His form shifted and he grew, changing in appearance, his skin gaining a tan and his hair turning straw blond. Soon he had reached nine feet and his irises were gold and his sclera were white.

Vespasias Flavion knew what this person was, even if he did not know who.

“A Golden demigod.” Vespasias said in awe.

“I am Orpheas Phoebides, son of Apollo.” The demigod said.

“How can I assist you?” Vespasias said carefully.

Orpheas smiled brilliantly. “Would you like to be free of Augustas?”

There was nothing more that Vespasias wanted than that.

“How?” He questioned.

“Why, we bring down the Dominium, of course.” Orpheas said.