It was painful to be so close to salvation, Augustas mused. The sensation was like that of being a desert traveler chained to a chair with a glass of water just out of reach. So close and yet so far.

More than everything that one could want, it was everything he needed to live on.

It was true that he despised higher authorities beyond his own control, but time was running out for something far more important than who got to make the laws of the universe.

Sanity.

He could delay perhaps. Play more of Zeus’s games, wait on the passage of time to create new allies and enemies only to wither them away almost as soon as he had known them. Hold on until things began to collapse, for the wing systems of the Dominium to fragment further, sit on his laurels until the whole empire fell apart into a million little kingdoms.

He wouldn’t die, he supposed. But at some point, his body would just become an automaton of superlative flesh carrying around a mind that just wasn’t truly there anymore. Augustas was tired, yes, but not of being barred from being seated in the highest throne in existence. He was tired of the infuriating knowledge that everything the divines created would wane and everything that humans made would fall apart. Just like a fine leather manuscript succumbing to dry rot and the binding coming undone as the brittle pages yellowed. Entropy had its way sooner or later.

Screams and voices flitted around him. Memories, unfortunately. The Regent wished that they were some trick of the senses sent as a curse or psychological tactic. It would be easier that way to cope with, but they were merely the buildup of thousands of years of memories and emotions. The brain, even an enhanced one, could only fit so much information into it without the flawed aid of external recording.

There was a choice then. One could forget, over and over, peeling away layers of memory to discard as rubbish. Or they could try and hold onto that which formed the foundation of their personality with a death grip. Those who forgot were doomed to become a stranger to all previous and future versions of themselves as their sense of self was eroded and replaced endlessly. It was more than the idea of the Ship of Theseus. Far more. At least in that tale, the replacement was still a ship. Live long enough as one who abandoned memories, and nothing would remain. Each mortal lifespan lived before would be no clearer than a dying man’s rosy dream of his childhood. Details blurred and fidelity abandoned.

Those that didn’t continually change like that though… They would remain themselves up until the point of insanity.

Augustas had never been truly given a choice for which he’d be given. Cut out a section of his brain and it would grow back into perfect position, slice parts of his soul away and they’d be restored. Experiences cramming themselves into his head, compacting further and further until he wished he could just split open his skull and let them all out.

In the corners of his vision, shadow figures danced and peered at him. Beneath his skin the sensation of ancient wounds felt as real and biting as they had been when he had first received them and when the physical evidence had remained. In his ears, voices chanted and begged and laughed, echoes of things that had been and might have been and had never been. Maddening, the only solace left to him being the promise of a life where he could be sure the degeneration of his mind progressed no further.

A life where the Regent merely had to content himself with a cracked psyche rather than a shattered one.

He hadn’t been dishonest with his grandson. Not totally. Augustas had no plans upon grasping Platinum to slaughter even those who disappointed him when there were better alternatives. Genocide was such a terribly flawed idea.

A terribly human one, and since he had been born and opened his eyes to see the faces of others, Augustas had known he was not and could never be one of them. Not even if he had wanted to as a child. Augustas would not kill any of the Paths off once he ascended beyond the gods, not even the vilest of hybridized mutants that littered his empire. No, there was no need to eliminate them.

But that didn’t mean they would be running anything important in the Dominium either. Not when he could put perfected humans in places of power. The humans of the Paths would become like infants in an eternal cradle, safeguarded and watched over by better versions of the species. His beautiful Regnators, built as precise as clockwork.

All that remained was to finish the fight. Two demigods, a handful of Golden Imperators, factions of rebellious Imperators on Terra, hordes of alchemically mutated Servi, and the gods themselves were the last obstacles in his way. All Augustas had to do was crush them and he would be free, liberated from the tyranny of time’s cruel curse.

That didn’t mean there would not be a cost though.

Augustas watched with some sadness as Adrias Lucion left the room of tattered treasures with the wretched spear. It would all be over soon, the bad but also some good things that the Regent would mourn.

It was truly unfortunate that he wouldn’t be able to save Adrias even after Platinum. That had been one of the few outright lies Augustas had told the boy. It was almost true, so much that it hurt, he really would have been able to save an Imperator with partial godhood from the effects of even the spear.

But Adrias had not been born a natural son of the Imperator’s Path, and by the time the final moment came in Olympas’s throne room, he’d be beyond Augustas’s ability to save. There remained traces of a Servus in his grandson’s rewritten soul. A residue of a former foundation that could never be fully expunged and while the ring’s transformation was stable enough in normal times, the spear of Damocles would accelerate his ruin. Seeing vines curl around his grandson’s fingers had been an agonizing reminder of the doom that awaited.

This had been what Augustas had seen with his precognition and decided to allow. After all, the choice was between his own sanity and one young man’s life. How could he ever choose otherwise? It was bitterly ironic though that the same Rank Augustas would seize to save his mind would have saved Adrias’s life if his grandson was the one to take it.