Thrax and I traced our path backwards, leaving behind the Regnator facility, each step a burden released from my back. Another one grew heavy in my hand though, one that I was unable to set aside. The damnable spear, hungry for more of my shining radiance. A Gold should never feel as I did when I had fed it for the first time. Weak. Vulnerable. Half a breath from old age and two from death’s grip. Even when I was nothing more than a Servus, at least I could feel like standing upright was effortless.

“What troubles you, Spearbearer?” Thrax said.

“Many things. How I can fight this thing glued to my palm and drinking from me, how much I can actually use it before it kills me.” I said.

“You’ll figure it out, Sp-“

“Why are you forbidden from saying my name?” I said. The title grated against me and the question I hadn’t asked before leapt to my tongue.

“Names have power. They define and bind. The essence conforms to its designation and the designation warps to fit what it labels.” Thrax said.

“So my grandfather wants my identity to be shaped to my role in this war.” I said. The idea felt like a collar around my neck. Or a noose from the gallows.

“Yes.” Thrax replied.

“I already have a name though, whether he lets you say it or not.” I said.

“The perceptions of others remold a concept.” Thrax said.

“I’m not a concept though, I’m a human being. A million people can say that a man is something but that doesn’t change what he already is just by them thinking it.” I argued.

“You’re not a man. You’re a myth.” Thrax said.

“What?” I laughed. “You can descend to the Underworld and ask the people I have slain if I felt real to them when I cut their souls free from their bodies.”

“Myths can be real.” Thrax.

“Not by definition.” I countered.

“The gods are real, and divinity is myth incarnate.” He replied.

“The gods are command incarnate.” I said, annoyed. I had personal experience with this matter, far more than he had in his short span of existence. I had given reality my commands with the voice of Heracles and I had found through observation of my own altered genetics that the DNA of the Heavenly was littered with encoded orders when viewed as a cipher written with nucleotide bases. Transcribed as a script, it predated Dominese, Thaekyrian, Latin, Greek and most likely every language dreamed up by human minds. A form of writing that had hurt my eyes the first time I had looked at it.

“Divinity defies logic and nature.” Thrax said.

“Yes, that’s kind of what ordering the universe around looks like to those who can’t. Some have the power to manipulate matter fundamentally and others don’t.” I said.

“It doesn’t look like defying logic and nature, it is defying logic and nature.” Thrax said as we made a quick pace through palace, led only by his memory of this labyrinth that masqueraded as a palace and capital.

“You haven’t felt what I’ve felt. The way matter and energy bends under the weight of my words, how the most advanced technologies and the grandest of cultivated physiques crumble against my burning touch. Feats look impossible when nothing else has the force to accomplish it, but the gods are to the Paths what the Paths are to the Unpathed humans who lived before us.” I said.

“This is not a matter of quantity of forcefulness, Spearbearer. Even if a mortal Imperator of Golden glory had their abilities multiplied ten times over, there are things that a deity can do that they can never replicate. Things that you can do that mortals will never accomplish.” Thrax said.

“Let’s say that your perspective on this is right. Why can they—why can I—do what they can’t if it isn’t based on the amount of power we can use?” I said.

“Gods give commands, but the authority that backs those orders is that their ethos is contradiction. They don’t belong in this realm. Not fully. Their bloodline stretches back through the titans to Gaia and Uranus and then to primordial Chaos from which this universe arose. They inherited an origin that doesn’t fit into the cosmos created after that primeval state of nothingness. Your origin as well.” Thrax said to me.

“I’m only godlike sometimes. Only when I need to be.” I said. I used a borrowed lineage to tap into the might of an Olympian neither of my real parents shared any blood with.

“A contradiction.” Thrax noted.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

“Alright. I can buy that explanation of how it all works, but even if the heavens are more made of contrarians than ichor, that doesn’t back the idea that people using a different name for me will twist who I am.” I said.

“I did say that you were a myth first. The immortals were not conjured up by human imagination nor do they require mankind’s worship to exist, but this realm’s beliefs do affect them. The cost of being untethered to physical laws is that they lack the stability of those shackled to the rules they break. The divine can do the impossible at the price of their histories being everything and nothing so long as mortal eyes look to Olympus and see what they wanted to see.” Thrax said.

This was disturbing. A tiny part of me whispered that I should cut off the hand that held the spear, a primal impulse as much self-destruction as it was self-preservation that wished to tear out my throat with something that would leave a wound too terrible to heal back enough to speak with Heracles’s voice, and to slit my veins open until I had bled all of Augustas’s gift out of me. It told me that I should forsake the fire and my Rank and all the names I had had stamped onto me, abandon them and run so that Adrias alone would mark my identity. Take off into the deepest regions of space and hide there until I had faded into the mist of forgotten history.

I crushed that voice down into my subconscious. No, I wasn’t that much of a coward to flee at the thought of a little predicament like my free will being as malleable as clay. I took heart at the pleasant thought that I was more likely to die before such things really mattered.

Voices were picked up by my hearing, Livia and Toni and Persias amidst the clamor of metal and machinery, the smell of blood wafting through the air to reach my nostrils. No doubt blood that Toni was downing as a refreshment, and that the background noise meant they were in the armory. A new hope flourished in me.

“You might call me by another name, but I have people here who say the true one and many more back in the Apollonian solar system who know of the deeds I did myself.” I said as we reached the door of the armory.

Livia smiled at me, and I smiled back as Toni raised a crystal goblet filled with dark scarlet in acknowledgement. Both wore mechanized bronze armor that glowed at the seams.

“All of the tens of thousands of Regnators know you by the one we were given by the Regent. And Terra and the rest of the Dominium outside of your Apollonian sector have been seeded with propaganda associating you with spear-based imagery.” Thrax said.

My smile died.

I distorted the air around us, veiling sight and sound within from everything and everyone outside its radius.

“Do you enjoy upsetting me?” I said.

“No. Of course not.” Thrax said. His all-golden eyes and still face made it hard to judge his expression, but I thought he was being genuine.

“Then why are you so dead set on rubbing it in when you could just let me live in a happier delusion?” I said.

A hand pressed against the outside of my obscurity shield, a muffled voice accompanying it.

“I could never lie to you.” He said.

“Because your brain was wired to not lie to me?” I said.

“Because I would never dishonor my hero by deceiving him.” Thrax. He sounded just on the verge of being emotional without actually crossing over into open intensity.

His hero? It was almost funny. What meaningfulness was in being the idol of something that was created to admire you as one of its core traits?

“I’m sure my grandfather can manufacture a better one for you.” I muttered.

The hand banged against my bubble of warped air again, the voice louder but no more distinct.

“If someone was built to bear that weapon, they wouldn’t be my hero.” Thrax said, nodding to the spear I carried.

“Why, is suffering a requirement for you being impressed?” I said.

“There is no courage or nobility without sacrifice involved. A Regnator could be chained to that role if they had divinity like you, but we could never have the choice to not take it up and yet still accept that responsibility. Your flaws make your triumphs significant because they weren’t assured, your lack of born purpose makes your actions entirely yours.” Thrax said.

“I’m glad you think so, I guess, because if what you’re saying is true, my actions won’t be entirely mine for long.” I said. “I’ll be just another myth to you all.”

“You’ll be a myth to the others, but you’ll always be my hero. Until the moment of my death, I will remember that the Spearbearer’s first name… was… was… A-Adr-A...” Thrax promised, stumbling to use his voice to say syllables he had been designed never to utter together. He coughed and wiped away amber fluid from his lips, attempting to break the restriction somehow doing physical damage to his tongue.

“I appreciate it. Don’t hurt yourself trying, I understand what you wanted to say.” I said.

The knocking against the shield continued, up until the person banging against it was shoved aside by someone who tore my bubble of obscurity open with their hands to reveal the outside world once more. I wasn’t surprised to see that the first person was Livia but I was to see that the second person was not Toni.

“I hope I wasn’t missing out on some interesting scheming in there.” Persias said. His excited violet eyes flicked from my face to the spear to Thrax and then back to me.

“We weren’t scheming, Fulvion.” I said.

Persias reached out to grab my shoulder and my Regnator seized him by the neck, as swift and merciless as a Golden Imperator.

“You will not defile the Prince of Blazing Suns with your mongrel hands.” Thrax said softly.

I wondered if that name was approved or if it just wasn’t forbidden to make new ones for me because Augustas hadn’t thought that they would think of doing so.

“Drop him.” I said. “We need to get momentum for the war going, not start fighting amongst ourselves.”

The Regnator released him and I stepped inside the armory to survey what I had to work with. In addition to my friends, there was a group of three hundred other Regnators clad in silver plate, armorers running last minute equipment checks and frenzied preparations.

I was directed an alcove where a bizarre construct that looked like a suit of white armor that had been unfolded like flower. Hesitantly, I laid down into it and the armor folded back into place around me seamlessly, a perfect fit without even having to put it on piece by piece.

As one group united in violent intent, my war party departed for the ships that would take us to Terra’s South Pole and Akhillos’s base of operations.