The sky was as violet as our irises, the ground glasslike and so clear that you could stare down into an infinite abyss below it.

“So this is the Cognitosphere.” I said.

I had… ascended or perhaps descended into the astral plane, a realm of thoughts and memories and minds.

We weren’t as we had been, all three of us had taken on strange and impossible forms. I had been expecting to just be like a holograph or a ghostly presence here, but that had been an uninformed assumption.

Vespasias, cruel and fiery, had been transformed into a man made of clockwork gears and burnished pipes with lava flows seeping out.

Nero, on the other hand, had taken on the form of hundreds of white serpents twisting around each other to form a vaguely humanoid frame, topped with a mask frozen in a laughing expression.

As for myself, I had become a creature made out of burning vines, crowned with a circle of miniature stars and armed with extended metal claws.

“Why is it so empty?” I wondered, stalling for time. “Should not more dreams and ideas be floating around?”

They thought they had won, that their victory was assured and if I could give Antonias a little more time while saving a bit more of myself from psychological trauma, I would take the opportunity wholeheartedly.

“The same reason only we can access it.” Vespasias’s astral form growled. “Other minds, though many, are small and weak.”

“It has to do with our consciousness duplication, 001.” Nero said, as if in apology for his comrade’s rougher explanation.

“Don’t call me that.” I told him. “Whatever connection between me and what I thought was Clodias Aezion was merely smoke and mirrors.”

Nero ignored my words.

“The ability to be multiple selves in the same body at once while accelerating mental processing speed gives a Gold a window into this desolate place.” He continued.

“Why bother with it at all?” I said, pleasantly surprised that they were letting me stall even more.

“Convenience.” Vespasias grunted.

“Elegance. Why fight with physical violence like lesser beings?” Nero said, his astral form’s mask attempting to smile, the material cracking around the mouth as it shifted to fit his emotions.

Paranoia ran through me.

Why are they just letting me talk? I thought. This makes no sense.

Getting them to hold off while I was the one pulling something sneaky and underhanded was perfectly fair, but if they were running something themselves that I didn’t already know about, that was a problem. What if they could somehow make illusions here and only one of the two was present while the other was working on killing Antonias and then offing me?

I didn’t know or understand the rules here.

“This is awfully peaceful for a psychic battle for supremacy.” I commented.

“You stuck your foot in a bear trap willingly, child.” Vespasias said. “We can stop you from leaving and reattaching to your body, and you lack the experience with this realm to defeat even one of us. No divine flame will manifest here to stop me from tearing you into a thousand pieces.”

Nero’s astral body twitched involuntarily, the snakes that made up his “throat” writhing and hissing.

“What?” Vespasias asked, his clockwork gears grinding against each other.

“It is nothing.” Nero said hesitantly. “Just thought I… felt something.”

Yes. Yes! Yes! Toni, you glorious bastard! I thought, glad that nothing about my astral aspect could show my pleasure at the first part of Antonias and my gambit succeeding.

“No last minute pitches on getting me to join you?” I asked, changing the subject to distract Nero.

“Well-“ He started before Vespasias cut him off.

“No.” The other Gold said firmly, overriding him. “Any surrender a creature like you could make would only be a false one. You die today as someday your tyrant grandfather will too.”

My metal claws stretched into sharp points and the glow of my crown of stars intensified.

“Let’s get a move on then, before the planet’s rotation makes you a liar.” I said, charging Nero.

His serpents struck, their teeth finding their mark and somehow biting into the fire itself that burned on my vines like it was muscle instead of blazing combustion.

They injected venom, but not of the physical kind, the vile secretions spread through my thoughts like a plague. My family’s voices shouted at me, begged me, hated me.

My own slashing attacks didn’t do much and my flickering anger washed out the roar of conjured voices. I was doing something wrong.

Think, Adrias, think. I demanded of myself as I stepped out of the way of Nero using one of his scaly pets as a whip.

Vespasias’s mechanical parts clanged and shook as he charged up his movements, striding forward to smash a hand morphed into a hammer’s head into the equivalent of my face in astral form.

There was no pain despite the fury behind the blow, but I kept spasming every few seconds and half my vision had warped like a kaleidoscope, colors and patterns warping over and over again.

Desperately, I stabbed my right claw into where Vespasias’s heart would be.

A rumbling sound came from him. With dread, I realized it was laughter.

I tried to wrench my hand back out of him, but he seized it and ripped it off me, flinging it aside.

Children’s rhymes screeched in my head, drowning out my reasoning skills. If I kept taking hits, each new problem would just build upon themselves.

Think! Think! Thi-

-I’m an idiot. I realized. Nero had even told me outright, “Elegance. Why fight with physical violence like lesser beings?”

We weren’t just having a fight like all three of us were sharing the same dream, doing what we could in the real world, my enemies were literally fighting me by injecting psychological damage and emotional stresses into my brain with every blow.

My attempts to hurt them were doing nothing at all because all I was doing was mashing a representation of me against a representation of the Golds.

These “bodies” don’t matter at all, they’re gateways to the real prize. I thought.

I rammed my metal stump of a hand into Vespasias’s side, but this time I thought of it as a pathway instead of a punch.

“He’s going to drag you back kicking and screaming eventually,” I sent through, distilling into those words the thought of Augustas coming for the Gold, breaking him in body and soul, before imprisoning him on Terra.

Vespasias hissed and reached for me, I knocked his red-hot hand aside with a memory of the deadness in Achilles’s eyes at the prospect of eternity.

“This waits for you.” I promised, lacing it into the poisonous gift.

“Aezion, get off your ass and help me hold him down.” Vespasias spat, his voice as rumbling and gravelly as aged industrial machinery.

“Aezion!” He said again, more forcefully.

We both looked to see Nero on the glassy floor, his snakes collapsed into a heap and his mask of comedy shattered into thirteen pieces.

“Guard him!” The ancestor of the Aezions cried out, the voice coming from a single violet snake that had been hidden behind the mask. “Guard him while I’m gone, Vespasias!”

“What’s going on?” Vespasias said, sounding as bewildered as a man made of scrapyard and lava could vocalize.

“Something is- Something is eating me!” Nero said.

I grabbed onto his serpentine body, holding the Imperator back just as he had planned to do to me.

Go Toni, Go! Drain this jerk. I thought.

Vespasias tore me away, but I knew it was far too late for Antonias’s prey.

I stabbed the Gold’s heart a second time, now with my left, and sent along only one thing. An image of my friend rising to Goldhood, and a corpse beside him.

I kept going and going, detailing every miserable detail of what Vespasias’s life was going to be like whether he killed me, or I took him to my grandfather in chains, or he was sent to the Underworld to spend eternity in a realm without Elysium.

“You did what?” Vespasias said in horror. “You did-“

“It’s all ash and dust.” I smiled, pressing into him every gruesome and glorious moment of that cursed place’s destruction.

The Golden Imperator’s astral form stilled and began to crumble. Something in him had broken so fundamentally that all I would find of him when we searched was a brain-dead body.

Now how did I get back?

“I want to wake up, I guess.” I said, closed my eyes and then opened them back in the physical realm on Iulius.

One eye was still seeing a bit funny, but the other saw well enough. My mouth gaped open.

Antonias looked like- well, I wasn’t sure what he looked like.

A red liquid darker and fouler than blood formed a nightmarish halo about his head and “wings” grew from his back, though they were more like scarlet spider legs fused together to mimic an eagle’s wingspan.

His eyes were closed.

“You alright there, Toni?” I asked.

“Never better.” He said softly.

Antonias opened them to reveal red and Golden eyes. I noticed a shriveled husk submerged in the molten sea.

“I picked Seraph.” Antonias said. “Not out of vanity, I’ll have you know. But trust me you wouldn’t have liked to see what I looked like before I picked the Golden Order of speed and beauty.”

I shrugged. “You said to me that if you can look past what I’ve become, then I’ll look past whatever you are. That holds true for me as well.”

“Brothers no matter what then?” Antonias said with a fanged smile.

“Brothers no matter what.” I agreed.