The silence after divinity was worse than its arrival.
It did not comfort—it accused.
Eryndor Kaine knelt among the fragments of shattered glass and fallen banners, head bowed, lungs straining as if the air itself weighed tons. The scent of burned incense, salt, and fear mixed thickly in the ruined corridor. He could still feel the pulse of the Solar Irises against the back of his skull, phantom heartbeats that refused to fade. Even for one who bore the sixth illumination of the Sun-Blessed, whose veins carried the faint ichor of Thaumiel, the memory scalded.
He had faced Sun-Beasts in the outer wastes, seen cathedrals crumble under storms of radiant fire, watched men turn to light and vanish—but never this. The moment Leviathan's eyes had opened, his awakening had become a curse. Every instinct to draw on the red energy within him had turned against him, flaring like molten metal in his chest. His two hearts had beaten out of rhythm, one divine, one mortal, and the pain had dropped him to his knees long before terror had taken the others.
Now, kneeling in the aftermath, he tried to summon control.
Inhale. Exhale.
Each breath dragged shards of heat through his throat.
Around him, ministers and guards still lay prostrate, some weeping softly, others whispering broken fragments of the Liturgy of Stillness. Above, the erased roof had re-formed imperfectly; light filtered through its warped sigils, casting distorted halos across the marble floor. Every halo trembled, like reflections on water.
I survived, Eryndor thought. So did they. But we are not the same.
He forced his eyes open. His vision bled between realities: the physical corridor before him and faint echoes of the abyss beyond it. The gift of Sol VI—the Eye of Remembrance—allowed him to see residual impressions of divine acts. It was a gift he now despised. The walls still held the shape of the Irises burned into them: countless black circles, pulsing slowly like dying suns.
He pressed a trembling hand to his chest and felt the uneven rhythm of his twin hearts.
If I had been a tier lower… He did not finish the thought.
A distant sound rippled through the palace—the muffled cadence of the Thrones' procession as they entered the inner sanctum. The noise made his bones vibrate. Even separated by walls of adamantine and wards of silence, their presence distorted time itself. Dust hung in mid-air longer than it should. Candle flames elongated toward unseen gravity.
Eryndor rose unsteadily. His robes of administrative black, marked with the insignia of the Conclave's logistics bureau, were torn and streaked with silver dust from shattered relic glass. He should have looked pitiful; instead he looked precisely as a mid-rank functionary ought—anonymous, unremarkable, invisible. That invisibility had kept him alive for almost three centuries inside this empire of stone minds.
He turned toward the archway that led deeper into the servant corridors. There, behind the panels of obsidian inlay, a hidden aperture waited: the line of communication maintained by the Onyx Imperium's silent intelligence, the Umbrae Solis.
He had not used it in years. Messages sent through it travelled not by courier or cipher, but by resonance—etched directly into the ambient flow of ichor that connected every cathedral of Sol Aeternum. Dangerous. Traceable. But necessary.
Before he could move, a voice murmured beside him.
"You saw it too."
Eryndor froze. A young steward stood half-hidden behind a toppled pillar, his pale face streaked with blood from a shallow cut. His eyes darted wildly. "You saw it," he whispered again, "the eyes in the sky… they were looking into us, weren't they?"
Eryndor measured him—one of the palace logisticians, Tier II at best. Harmless.
"They looked upon everyone," he said quietly, adopting the measured cadence of bureaucratic reassurance. "The manifestation was divine. You must not dwell on it."
The steward shook his head. "Divine? No. That was judgment. I saw myself drown in the dark. Over and over. My lungs—" He clutched his chest, gasping. "It's still happening."
Eryndor's gaze softened despite himself. The young man's mind was already unraveling. The after-images of a Throne's manifestation could hollow lesser souls from within. Pity was dangerous but reflexive. He reached out, placing two fingers on the steward's temple, murmuring a fragment of a calming cant. The ichor in his own veins pulsed, extending a trickle of warmth into the man's frayed psyche. The trembling ceased. The steward blinked once and slumped into shallow sleep.
Eryndor exhaled and withdrew his hand. Mercy is wasteful, he told himself. But leaving him screaming would draw attention.
He stepped over the fallen pillar and entered the narrow maintenance corridor. It smelled of oil and metal, far removed from the perfumed grandeur of the upper halls. The faint hum of containment runes buzzed in the air. He walked until the noise of prayer and recovery faded, then stopped before a wall panel engraved with the sigil of the Civic Wheel. His fingers traced a pattern invisible to normal sight. The panel responded with a soft sigh, sliding inward to reveal a recess no wider than a coffin.
Inside waited the interface: a shard of black crystal suspended in a lattice of silver threads. At its core flickered a dim ember—the echo of the Onyx Imperium's relay network. For centuries he had guarded it, reporting only the trivial: supply ratios, troop rotations, the Conclave's endless debates about procedural perfection. Never anything worthy of alarm.
Until now.
He hesitated, staring into the crystal's glow. His reflection looked foreign: a tall man with iron-grey hair, eyes rimmed with faint red light, expression hollowed by centuries of patience. He had been trained to observe, not to feel. Yet the memory of those eyes—the infinite drowning—still burned behind his lids.
If he transmitted this truth, the Imperium would listen. The Arch-Throne Ophanim herself might hear of it. The thought both thrilled and terrified him.
To carry a message touched by divinity was an honour; to survive it was almost heresy.
He drew a blade across his palm. Blood welled, bright and viscous. He pressed it to the crystal. The ember flared, drinking in the ichor. Within its depths, sigils ignited—language beyond words, geometry folding into resonance.
To the Onyx Imperium, capital spire. From embedded agent Kaine, division of civic logistics, Praesidium Palace. The impossible has occurred. Two Thrones have descended—the Arch-Throne Draconis and the Sun-Throne Leviathan. The manifestation of Leviathan's Solar-Irises enveloped the empire. All systems within range experienced psychic inundation. Mortality illusions, physical paralysis, mass supplication. The Triumvirate endures but bends. The Thrones walk among them.
He paused, considering. What could such information mean to Valerius Scaevitus? To the Imperator who styled himself the living reflection of the sun? War? Worship? He did not know.
He added one final line:
Even the Awakened trembled.
When he withdrew his hand, the wound closed slowly, leaving a faint scar shaped like an eye. The crystal dimmed, absorbing the message into its core. In distant halls beneath the Onyx Spire, another shard would brighten in answer.
Eryndor stood in the darkness for a long moment, listening to the quiet tick of cooling metal. He felt the echo of the transmission ripple through his blood—a resonance that would linger for days. He imagined it crossing the void between empires like a ghostly pulse, carrying with it the scent of fear and salt.
The walls of the corridor seemed to breathe. He realized, belatedly, that the silence around him was not absolute. Faintly, somewhere deep in the palace, another voice was whispering—a hymn, maybe, or something older. The language was foreign, filled with slow vowels and rhythmic pauses. It sounded like water moving through stone.
He turned toward the sound but saw nothing. Only shadows shifting under torchlight.
Perhaps the palace itself was remembering.
He left the maintenance shaft and re-entered the grand corridors, walking as if nothing had happened. Servants had begun cleaning the marble floors; priests moved among the wounded, offering fragments of solace. No one noticed the quiet man with the black-banded cuffs slip through the crowd and vanish into the lesser chambers.
Only when he reached the outer terrace did he allow himself to look at the sky again.
It was empty now, serene, its surface flawless—yet behind that calm he could still feel the abyss staring back.
He bowed his head, murmuring the Onyx Benediction, a prayer meant to guard the mind from divine contagion. The words tasted like ash.
When he straightened, a tremor of light flickered across the distant horizon—one brief pulse from the direction of the Amaranthine border. He wondered, suddenly, whether their spies had survived the same ordeal, whether they too were even now composing their impossible reports.
The thought almost comforted him. Misery, after all, was more bearable when shared among enemies.
He turned and descended the marble steps into the palace depths, disappearing among the echoes of a world that no longer felt solid.