Mali latched onto the word, his mind reeling from the whiplash of his new reality. He'd just learned to fire a single, draining-but-deadly magic spear, and she was already talking about throneworlds.
"What do you mean, 'a generation'?" he asked, his voice small in the cavernous apartment. "Kaelen... Jararu... they act like my parents died yesterday."
Anya turned from the viewport, her expression uncharacteristically somber. She walked over and, in a move that was becoming a familiar comfort, sat next to him on the edge of the cold bed.
"Mali," she said gently, "a 'generation,' to the Aethel Imperium, isn't a fixed number of years. It's the span of a regency. It's the time between one ruler and the next."
She saw the confusion still on his face and sighed, laying it bare. "The 'generation' that has passed... is your lifetime. It's been twenty years."
The number hit him. Twenty years. He had been alone, an orphan on a backwater planet, for twenty years, while... while what?
"They've been leaderless for twenty years?" he whispered. "How? How is... all of this..."—he gestured to the fleet outside—"still working?"
"Because of the memory of your father, the 'Unmaker,'" Anya said, her voice low. "And because of men like Kaelen and Vorlag. The Imperium has been a headless beast, held together by loyalty, bureaucracy, and sheer, terrified will. They've been in a state of 'Imperial Stasis,' hiding, rebuilding, pretending the throne wasn't empty, all while the Void gnawed at the borders."
She leaned in, her gaze intense. "Don't you see? You aren't just an heir, Mali. You are the lynchpin. You are the signal they've been waiting for. Your return doesn't just mean the prince is back. It means the Imperium is back."
Mali felt his stomach turn to ice. The pressure was unimaginable. It wasn't just a title. It was the survival of trillions of lives, all resting on... on him. On a boy who, just two weeks ago, was hiding from town guards.
His System, ever-present, flashed a bright, cruel notification in his mind.
[WARNING: DEBUFF INTENSIFIED: Imposter Syndrome]
[PENALTY INCREASED: (Social-based action (CTL) at -40 penalty)]
[SYSTEM QUERY: Leadership burden... catastrophic. Probability of successful rule... 0.21%]
He recoiled, a low groan escaping him. His small victory in the Kratos Drift felt like a joke now. That was a skirmish. This was the war.
"I... I can't," he breathed, the old panic returning, cold and choking. "Anya, I'm not my father. I'm not the 'Unmaker.' I'm... I'm a fluke. That 'Lance' almost tore my arm off. They're going to see. They're all going to see me for what I am."
"Good," she said simply.
He looked at her, stunned. "Good?"
"Good," she repeated, her voice firm. She grabbed his hand, her fingers lacing with his, an iron-clad anchor. "They don't need 'The Unmaker' right now. They don't need the dragon. They just need the Heir. They need to see that the bloodline is not broken. They need to see you."
Her eyes held his. "You're right. You're not your father. You're Mali Alkahest. And you are not alone. You have Jararu to train you, Kaelen to defend you, Vorlag to command your fleet... and you have me."
Before he could answer, the ship's deep, subsonic thrum changed. The impossible, shimmering indigo light of the spacetime-fold outside the viewport dissolved, replaced by the pinpricks of normal, stellar-black space.
A soft chime echoed through the room. The Sovereign had arrived.
"Come on," Anya said, pulling him to his feet. "You wanted to know what you're fighting for. It's time you saw it."
She led him to the massive viewport. Kaelen and Vorlag were already on the command deck below, but the room was silent. Everyone—every officer, every guard—was standing at attention, facing the window.
Mali stepped up to the glass, and his mind, his System, his very soul, stuttered.
It was not a planet. It was not a star system.
It was... a machine. A machine the size of a solar system.
At its heart, a blazing, white-gold artificial star, perfectly contained, pulsed with the power of a thousand suns. And orbiting it, in a complex, interlocking, impossible dance, was a web of spinning, silver rings, like the gears of a divine watch. Each "ring" was a band of territory the size of a continent, a ribbon of green and blue, dotted with cities that glowed like jewels. Bridges of pure, golden light arched between the rings, allowing for passage.
This was Sanctum. A throneworld built by gods. An artificial, habitable construct that drank the power of a star it had built itself.
[LOCATION: ALKAHEST SANCTUM (THRONECYCLE)]
[LEGACY INTEGRATION: 10%]
[||||||||||----------]
[WARNING: SENSORY OVERLOAD. SOUL SIGNATURE... FAMILIAR.]
"This... this is... home?" Mali whispered. His legs felt weak. He'd lived in a hut. A one-room hut made of mud and straw.
"This is the heart of the Imperium," Anya said, her voice filled with a reverence he'd never heard from her. "The Thronecycle. The greatest feat of engineering in the universe. Your ancestors built this, Mali."
This was too much. This was too much. He wasn't the heir to this. He was a stray. He was a fraud. The uniform was a lie. He was a speck of dust who had just been told he was a sun.
He was spiraling, the Imposter Syndrome debuff a screaming vortex in his head, when Anya's hand found his again, her grip painfully tight.
"Breathe," she commanded, her voice a low anchor. "Just breathe. Look."
He forced his eyes to focus, to look past the impossible architecture, into the "dark" space around it.
It wasn't dark.
It was full.
The space surrounding the Thronecycle was filled with ships. Not hundreds. Not thousands. Tens of thousands. The entire Aethel Imperium Home Fleet, gleaming in their white and gold livery, hung in the void in perfect, silent, concentric spheres of formation.
They were waiting.
As the Sovereign—a ship Mali had thought was a mountain-sized behemoth, but which now looked like a simple escort—glided toward the central ring, the fleet moved.
It was not an attack. It was a salute.
In a rolling, silent, impossibly fast wave, starting from the innermost ring and rippling outward, every ship in the fleet ignited a single, golden "honor" light.
A path of stars, lit just for him. A river of gold, welcoming him home.
Mali's System chimed.
[NEW BUFF GAINED: THE HEIR'S WELCOME]
> (BUFF): All 'Aethel Imperium' loyalty-based actions are at +100.
> (DEBUFF): The weight of expectation is crushing. [Imposter Syndrome]penalty temporarily doubled.[-80 CTL]`
He felt it. The awe, and the crushing, suffocating terror.
General Kaelen's voice, thick with an emotion Mali had never heard, boomed over the ship's internal comm.
"Your Highness."
Kaelen was on the command deck, his gauntleted fist slammed over his heart, his scarred face turned up toward the viewport—toward him.
"Welcome to Sanctum. Your people are waiting."