I awoke with my face pressed against cold stone, grit digging into my cheek. I knew there was something deeply wrong when I couldn’t see. Since my transformation, seeing even without the slightest fraction of light was possible due to the unnatural nature of Imperators. It was something I had taken for granted. And now it was gone. There was something in my mouth, under my tongue. I fished it out, sightless and blind, and dropped it. It clinked against the hard ground.

I coughed. Once at first and then a wracking fit that made my lungs burn.

Alsig? What’s your status? I thought to her. There was no response.

Where was I? How did I get here? Why wasn’t my Daimon replying? I had thought that it was over for me, but I had been brought to some kind of bunker or underground base. I brushed off the grit that had stuck to my face when my cheek was pressed sharply against the stone. My fingertips paused as I processed that ordinary stone and dust had caused an uncomfortable sensation against my skin. I couldn’t see, but that didn’t stop me from applying pressure to my skin, lightly and hesitant. My flesh was pressed down easily, shifted by pressure far from a superhuman’s full strength. It did not feel like the stiff, firm and marblelike exterior of an Imperator.

“No. No!” I said in horror. I was a Servus again. My transformation had been reversed. I had survived the blade of a god and the murderous revenge of Diokletian Claudion, but at what cost? My thoughts raced, my fists balled, my teeth grit. What had happened?

“I lived…” I said to myself. But had the payment for life been the sacrifice of the blood I had gained from Augustas? How was I supposed to fight? How was I supposed to lead? Forget reaching the Rank of Golden Imperator, I would be lucky to live long enough for a state execution if and when the others turned me over to the Claudions to be killed. Others had followed because I was strong and now I was… nothing. Nothing and no one.

Desperately, I tried to call on the power of Heracles, to set my heart and blood ablaze with celestial fire. Not even a spark. Perhaps someone more charitable would have said that my pride and fortitude was so resolute and stalwart that no tears leaked from my eyes at the crushing end of my dreams, but the truth was that I merely felt hollow. Empty. I did not cry because numbness was settling over me like a packman freezing on his icy mountain paths, giving into the chill. What was the point?

One thing brought me out of the spiral into surrender in the end, simple confusion. Where was I? What was this frigid and pitch-black place?

“Hello!” I shouted, more to hear for an echo than to actually attract help. This area was big, wherever it was. A massive cavern under Amatius’s surface or maybe some pocket realm of Persias’s that I had been stored in. More likely a pocket realm, I decided, Amatius didn’t have the right kind of earth and soil for any caves this massive. Thinking of lands hidden by spatial manipulation, I touched where the signet ring of the Apollonian Governorship should have lied.

“Gone.” I said, my hand feeling naked without it despite having it for such a time. I had won it with force and courage. And the help of Persias Fulvion. But now neither the ring nor the Silver were to be seen. The device that had held the entire Scholarium had been stripped off my genetically and spiritually weakened body, presumably by the man who had put it there.

I remembered what Dio had said, “I know you’re easily baited. And even more easily manipulated. You think Persias is following you because you’re strong? Or because you did him a favor by killing my father? The man is a snake.”

If he had betrayed me, I would break every bone in his treacherous body, I would crush his skull and rip the heart from his-

“I’m going to snap your neck.” I had said with rage to Dio before I had fallen from the sky, the memory coming back like a electric shock running through my mind.

“Oh, I’m sure. I just want you to know that you have a third weakness. You are always, always convinced being bolder and more violent means you’re destined to win.” Dio had replied.

“I will destroy everyone who stands against me and take the throne on Iulius.” I had vowed.

“Oh, I’m sure. But if you think you can keep that throne by burning everyone you dislike to ash, you’re delusional.” He had said.

I finished the memory aloud, repeating the words I had said to Dio to try to fill the unearthly silence of the cavern. “You don’t know anything about me. Or how I’ll rule.”

But was that true? Was what Dio had prophesied so far from what I suspected would be the future, what I desired to do. I was not a complete monster, some beast that lacked any morals, I had restrained the Silvers from wholesale extermination of the Houses that opposed me, but at the same time I was committed to more or less what they wanted. I had said that they could not kill an innocent noncombatant, but what counted as innocent? And how many really would be noncombatants? A thirteen-year-old Imperator child just passed their birthday’s Awakening was just as much a Copper Imperator as one many years older. All of the members of a Iulian Great House would have been trained in combat from the moment they could stand on two feet without toppling over. Almost everyone would be warriors who would have to be killed to contain them.

What member of my enemies’ households and families would be sitting quietly waiting for me to cast judgment on them? My forces, if I had command of them, would be coming to butcher their relatives and cast down their Houses, no one with a speck of pride would give up that easily. And if there was one thing Imperators had in spades, it was pride. Even if I had promised them that no harm would come to those who surrender beforehand or did not act in the battlefields, none of them would believe me. I wouldn’t have if I was in their places, I would have assumed it was a ploy designed to con those who were both stupid and cowardly.

Dio did know me. And he did know how I would rule. Not everyone would love me, not everyone would stay true and loyal, not everyone would obey. And when they defied me, I would destroy them viciously because that was what had worked since the beginning. That was what had worked with Gavias Cantion as I crushed his skull in vengeance for my family’s death.

Or had it? Had it really made me feel better about my family’s death? There was the rush I got from the sound and feeling of that crunch of bone and squelching of brains, the anger that had flashed through me, but that hadn’t made me feel complete again. Had not made me whole.

“He needed to be punished!” I said to myself, rage shooting through me almost as hot and potent as Heracles’s pyre.

The memory of Tullia, Gavias’s daughter, came to the forefront of my mind. She had asked me why and I had said…

“Mercy is no virtue.” I repeated it. There was no sound of thunder. It was the first time in a long time that I had said it and I wondered if the phrase would have done anything if I still had Imperial blood. Was the statement true? Did I even believe it anymore? Justice without mercy to shackle it was tyranny and spite. A berserker, a spiller of blood and a burner of flesh, may not have needed to be just, but a king did. And I wanted to be the king of an entire solar system. I needed to be more than power infused into superior flesh guided by passion and ambition. A ruler must first rule himself before he can command others. Not long ago, if someone else had told me that, I would have assumed that they meant I needed to be stronger, to be harsher on myself until I was unbreakable. But it was not about how powerful or dangerous I was, it was about my control of those capabilities. When nailing a board, one did not swing the hammer with an Imperator’s full force, nor did they get a bigger hammer. They moderated themselves.

Was I capable of that?

“You don’t know who I am or how I’ll rule, Dio. Because I don’t either. Not yet. But thank you for teaching me that I’m not invincible to my own flaws.” I said.

My hand found the coin I had pulled out of my mouth, I wiped it dry on the strange fabric I was wearing and rubbed it with my thumb. Why had it been put in my mouth? I was unable to see the face on it and pressing my fingers against it wasn’t yielding answers, but I assumed it must have been either the Regent’s, Theseas’s or Marias Maxion’s. Was it some kind of hidden message? A taunt?

If I escaped- No, when I escaped this place and when I somehow regained the Imperator’s Path, I wouldn’t kill Persias for betraying me. It was in his nature, as Dio had so clearly pointed out for me. But even a snake can be useful if handled properly. I would just remember that we weren’t friends, that he was a dangerous and cunning man, and that emotion couldn’t enter into my decisions with him. My anger couldn’t be the reason for his death and my friendliness with him couldn’t guarantee him forgiveness.

I resolved myself. While breath still filled my lungs, opportunity was not over. I would find a way, somehow and someway, to reclaim what was mine. Clutching my coin, I walked around, my bare feet slapping on the stone, dust and grit sometimes scraping and squealing as I shifted them. The darkness was unnerving and the extreme quiet even more so, the two multiplying the unease they caused me rather than merely being added together. It was not the same fear I had had as a child of monsters in my closet or under my bed, even in my weaker form I was not fearful, but the emptiness was giving me a horrifying thought that this pocket realm might be as large as the Scholarium. That I might wander until I starved to death.

When my eyes weakly detected light after hours of wandering, I could have laughed or cried. I chose laughing and I sprinted up a hill of sharp obsidian rock, not even caring that it sliced into my bare feet. There was light! There was-

“No.” I whispered.

Ahead of me was a deep body of water that thrummed with power and that stretched so wide that I could barely see the other side and tell that it was a river.

“It’s not that.” I said.

A river that held a line of people, most of them nearly transparent, all waiting to get onto a long boat.

Please. I thought, begging.

Waiting at the boat was a man in a black cloak who was holding out a bag that the passengers were dropping items into. No, not just items, I realized. Coins. I stared at the coin in my hand. I knew what it was now.

No.

The coin was called an obol and it was an offering to the Ferryman of the Styx. Payment for passage across the River Styx to the lands of the dead. I was used to the coins being placed over the eyes, but I supposed some people put the coin under the tongue as well.

I’m not-

“-dead.” I realized, unable to ignore what my subconscious had known since I had opened my eyes in the darkness, and what I had been repressing for as long as I could sit in the comfort of denial. I was dead and this was the Underworld. Realm of the Corpsefather, Hades, brother of the Skyfather and the Earthshaker, and husband of Persephone.

I got in line and trudged to the ship. I noticed strangely that while I was shorter than I was as an Imperator, I was taller than I was when I was a Servus. When I got to the Ferryman, I stared into his aged face and his burning eyes. I blinked first.

Then I dropped my coin in and took my place, the last one aboard. The Ferryman of the Styx pushed off with his pole and we set towards the rest of the Underworld.

Feeling sickened by looking at our destination, I stared into the waters.

“What?” I said in surprise when I saw a face staring back at me that was not an Imperator’s or a Servus’s, a face that was both familiar and unfamiliar. The image in the water had naturally tan skin like those who originated in Grecia long ago, green eyes with no metal in them, and wavy black hair. The skin tone was not wrong for a Servus, but I should have had brown eyes with no pupils and my hair had been brown back then.

“Why do I look different?” I wondered, feeling my face with my hands.

“The Paths are of the world of life, here you look as you would have if you had no Path at all, like ancient humanity.” The Ferryman said.

“Thank you.” I said, but he did not reply.

I caught another glimpse of the shoreline on the other side of the Styx and I swore.

“I have to get out of here. I’m going to get out of here.” I said, gripping the side of the boat.

Charon laughed. “That’s what they all say.”