“Clodias Aezion, the real Clodias, has been mentally and spiritually crippled all his life, a damaged soul leading to a broken mind. On his own, he faced a life of never moving beyond Copper and of being nothing but an embarrassment for his spiteful family. Family. If you can even call it that. His parents might be his blood, but I am his only family. I offered young Clodias a deal, a trade where I would puppet his body for him so he could experience what it was like to be normal, and I could be free from Augustas.” Nero said.

“You expect me to believe that?” I laughed incredulously. The Aezion patriarch could say whatever he wanted and so long as he dominated his descendant, all I could was take his word. Not even telepathy would reach my friend while Nero had Clodias in an arcane stranglehold.

He shrugged Clodias’s shoulders. “You’re Golden, seek out the truth for yourself. Look within with your senses.”

I traced the structures of the young Imperator’s flesh and spirit. There was something critically wrong with him, but not physically.

“Draw back for a moment,” I ordered Nero. “I want to see him without your influence obscuring his functioning.”

A foggy, almost concussed look came over my friend’s face, his body drooping. Without his ancestor to direct his movements, Clodias’s body was falling out of control. The problem definitely did not lie with his physical form, but it was like when his neurons tried to fire and control the rest of him, his soul interceded to shut it down.

“A corruption of our healing mechanisms.” I realized.

“Is that what it is?” Nero mused, retaking command. “I’ve never put much thought into it beyond learning that no Medicus or psychic sorcery could fix the issue and then taking the opportunity.”

“It thinks he should be comatose, braindead even, and so his regeneration is diminishing his nervous system.” I explained.

The Paths’ healing factors were more than natural processes, made most clear by how matter was generated out of thin air without eating to replace lost flesh, but also in how things like the exact length of your hair was taken into account when regrowing damage to one’s head. The soul knew how things should be and it went ahead and intelligently fixed organs and bodily tissue. I had just never heard of nor considered the idea that your spiritual aspect could decide that the healthiest version of you was to be half a step from death.

It was a marvel in a wretched, twisted way like what Antonias had become. A violation of sanity and normality, though at least the Leechling Imperator had gained a dark power from his curse and had been able to have a normal childhood previously. Clodias, the real Clodias, was merely a cripple from birth that no amount of his Iulian Great House family’s riches, alliances, and business connections could fix.

But if Clodias had been disabled this way all his life and only had the ability to live a regular life for an Imperator, let alone reach an Imperial’s Bronze Rank and make 001 in the rankings for the Scholarium, that meant that every interaction and every conversation I had ever had with “Clodias” had really been with…

“Alright,” I said. “I believe you that you’ve been the person I thought was Clodias, but how? The Regent had told me that using the Bloodline Possession ability to speak to me took up a lot of his attention, you’ve been doing a lot more than just talking to your descendant, you have been orchestrating his every move. Every muscle contraction, all his expressions and actions, had to come from you. Were you just in a coma on Terra since you started this charade?”

“Why do you care?” Alsig said privately to me. “This is one of the Nine, specifically one of their members that is coming to Apollo system, you should focus on getting more important information out of him. Steer the conversation back on track.”

I am getting important details, not just satisfying my curiosity. I thought back to her. This is what he wanted to start off with and understanding this type of strange behavior will get me closer to unraveling his personality.

“No, Augustas would have noticed and reined me if I had been absent from my assigned duties and court functions, especially if he had found out I was interacting with you. I chose to bind myself to the Order of Seraphs not out of vanity, though the enhanced beauty has been a convenient asset, but because of the speed enhancement.” Nero Aezion said.

“I’m not following how moving faster lets you do what my grandfather cannot.” I replied.

“It’s not just moving faster, being a Seraphic Imperator means thinking faster.” Nero said.

I sighed. “You’ll have to elaborate for me, Clod- Nero.”

“Imperators who have reached the fourth Rank can split their minds into many distinct copies, as you know, and therefore truly multitask, but for most humans what we call multitasking isn’t simultaneous action at all. The brain instead switches rapidly from task to task, usually with a deficit in quality. A Gold cannot divide themselves when possessing their kin but with a Seraph’s mental velocity, I switch back and forth between my body and his with such quickness that I’m in two places at once.” Nero said with satisfied pride.

See, I told Alsig. Now I’ve gotten the important knowledge that I’m going to fighting someone whose reaction time and reflexes make mine look like molasses. Fun.

To keep my mind off the sense of impending doom, I switch gears back to Clodias’s ailment.

“Loosen your grip again.” I said, wanting to try to talk with the boy with something with more closeness and mystic bandwidth than vocalization.

“Is this really necessary?” Nero asked.

“Yes, if you want this conversation to continue. Let go.” I said.

When I felt the Gold grudgingly recede to just barely linking to Clodias, I bridged the real boy’s dampened thoughts to my own, hopeful to make headway even if Clodias’s dialogue was limited.

It was all a confusing blur. There was activity in his head that my senses perceived but trying to grasp it was slippery and the bond glitched randomly.

I was surprised to realize that it wasn’t just Nero’s distant touch preventing me from meeting the younger Aezion by way of mind-to-mind communication. His curse prevented his brain from effectively “speaking” to the rest of his nervous system and muscles, and that same metaphysical disease was making my attempt flop as if we spoke different languages and there was a distance almost as vast as a fifteen-minute lag time between each word.

The Dominium’s science and technological advances had failed him so utterly that it made me more sick than angry, my default response to resort to fury when faced with injustice and the suffering of someone sympathetic to me was quenched in the icy logic that there was no enemy for me to rip and tear apart for cathartic retribution. There was nothing for me to do, nothing I could do.

“Since when has the Scorched Divinity, the claimed grandson of Augustas and the earned great-grandson of Heracles the Champion of Heaven, ever given up without trying the impossible.” Alsig admonished me.

She pushed images and past scenes of my triumphs, swathed in holy fire, into my visual cortex for my viewing, but they weren’t my memories. They weren’t even anyone’s memories at all, though those moments had assuredly spawned countless ones of my followers. Instead, those images of my blazing glory came from recordings taken from the battles on Amatius against the draconic Subgovernor.

From my perspective, those events had been a fever dream of wrath and euphoria. From those downloaded photographs Alsig gifted me with now, I saw myself from a stranger’s view. A view that did not simply show me as a seventeen-year-old Imperator that sometimes seized the inhumanity and superhumanity of an Olympian as I often thought about myself, but rather as heavenly annihilation that hid itself behind a human face and a human name.

Maybe a teenage Imperator couldn’t do the impossible, but whatever that thing was that revealed itself from inside me was the impossible.

Sparks ignited in my veins, the air around me wavering in a heat shimmer’s haze.

“As I said, I wanted to talk.” Nero said. “There’s no need for-“

“Be made whole in spirit and mind.” I stated with another man’s booming voice, the bedroom shaking.

Alsig cheered within me, the first time I had felt her be happy with me since I had returned.

Nothing changed.

“I can’t feel anything new from that.” Nero said apologetically.

I conferred with several copies of my personality over this disappointment, speeding our reaction time as we did so. The bitter answer that we came back with was that just as I had been unable to command a shield against spying earlier without making one of something with mass like vines, Clodias’s spirit was too intangible for me to reshape with words while he was living. His flesh was an intermediary that would not carry on the message to the source of the problem.

“I’m sorry, Clodias.” I said as I stared into his violet and Bronze eyes. I hoped that some part of him actually heard and comprehended my pity. Maybe I had never known the true person I had believed I had been around, but I wish I had been able to.

“Don’t be, I’ve offered him back what was stolen from him.” Nero said dismissively as if Clodias living as a passenger in his own body was a solution.

“Did you come here today just to taunt me, or is there a better reason?” I asked, any goodwill I had held out in good faith now thrown out the window.

“Vespasias and I will be arriving in a month’s time by our Navitae’s projections of the interstellar currents, and we are coming to eliminate you if we must. I would like for that not to be necessary and I’m willing to corral Vespasias’s bloodlust if you and I manage to make an arrangement.” He said.

I shook my head.

“Your compatriots among the Nine and the Golden Demigods behind all of you are either rebellious servants or greedy rivals of my grandfather who has commanded me to bring you to heel. The only arrangements we could reach right now are you two returning to Terra with me alive or your corpses returning to Terra with me. Your choice.” I said firmly.

“Neither of those options are likely to work out for you.” Nero said with sympathy, like I was an ignorant child.

I supposed I was compared to his millennia of lifetime. That thought irritated me.

“We’ll see.” I said softly. “Only one of us is a disappointment to the greatest man alive though, and it is not me.”

“The rationale for his favor has nothing to do with strength or power, he values you only for your slavish obedience. Augustas will use you until you’re expended and then throw you away. What do you get from him in return for such devotion?” Nero said.

I certainly was not going to tell this enemy about the ring that had made me an Imperator and how it had saved my life as I lay dying.

“Loyalty is its own reward.” I said instead.

He snorted. “I forget sometimes how young you are. I can assure you that the feeling does not last forever. When I first claimed Gold, do you think I was not a patriot and a proud servant of an emperor who I had been raised to see as more important than the Skyfather himself? Did you think that the Nine willingly took a Rank and a place at his side, a position that you presume we hated, just so we could suffer restriction?”

“No, I think you were weak, and your resolve shattered.” I said drily.

“Everyone’s loyalty to him breaks after long enough time knowing him.” Nero said.

“What’s that supposed to mean? I know my grandfather better than any of you!” I snapped.

“No, you don’t. Not even remotely.” Nero said. “Do you know what his plans are after the endgame of this conflict?”

“Nice try, you’re not getting me to dish out my grandfather’s secrets that easily.” I said.

“I presume you know about his desires for Platinum by assassinating a certain individual.” He replied.

I said nothing.

Nero grinned.

“Yes, I see it as clear as day.” He said. “You do know.”

“Okay. So we both know, so what? The Regent wanting to reach Platinum isn’t a goal I have anything against.”

“You’re certainly lack piety for the gods.” Nero chuckled. “But Platinum is not what I’m referring to, I’m speaking of what he wants after he gains near omnipotence.”

“How should I know? My grandfather doesn’t tell me everything, but I’m sure he’ll fill in the blanks once I bring him your head.” I said.

“He wants to replace the Dominium.” Nero said.

“What?”

“Rather, he wants to replace the Dominium’s population. The Nine aren’t his only disappointments, the older the Regent gets, the more he despises the Paths.”

“Replace humanity with what? Robots?” I said.

“Close. The Regent does plan to swap in an automaton worker class that is less prone to rebellion and inefficiency as the Servi once he kills them all, but the real replacements will be for our Path. Something better, something bolder than our kind. A superior breed to take our place.” Nero said.

“Bullshit.” I said. “I don’t believe a word out of your mouth.”

“Whether you believe it or not, it’s true.” Nero said. “Let me ask you though, do you think your grandfather values anything with imperfection?”

“No, but I don’t think he finds everyone on our Path to be garbage.” I said.

“Our subspecies of humanity is imperfect and the greatest warning sign for him has always been how few Golds we’ve produced while the majority never moves past Copper. He wants to wipe the slate clean and start anew as the gods did with floods. The Imperial Path is filled with self-indulgent weaklings without discipline and it reflects on all of us.”

“So I’m just going to be destroyed at the end of this according to you?” I said.

“No, I don’t think so. Not so long as you’re still his loyal hound, Augustas will let you rule over his flawless little humans when they crawl out of their test tubes.” Nero said.

“Why tell me that I would be safe?” I said. “Undercuts your argument if I’m not at physical risk.”

“Because I wouldn’t lie to you during this, Adrias Lucion.” Nero said. “I want you to understand that the Regent has only one desire, to make the perfect empire and for that he needs humans without error.”

Thoughts of my feelings during and after the purging of weakness from my body when I made Gold Rank filled my head. To be human was to be flawed.

“How is he going to outdo the gods’ design?” I asked.

“As I understand it from what the other demigods told me, it involves titan blood.”

A chill fell over me.

“Get out.” I said. “This conversation is over.”

“So have you come around-“

“I said, get out.” I said. “Do not approach me again with Clodias’s body. I need time to think.”

After he left, I found my way to the adjoining bathroom and looked in the mirror. A familiar face stared back, one that looked exhausted and spread thin, but it did not look like my normal face.

I looked exactly like the melancholic future self I had seen in the first vision of the Skyfather’s death that Kronos had shown me.

“It’s all lies.” I told the boy in the mirror, but he didn’t look convinced.