Downfall Page

A lie, he realized. Because if everything was stable, why had no one told him about Caelus?

For three hours, Valerius read. He wasn’t an engineer, but he had conquered worlds—he knew how to read between lines. The aqueduct, the great artery that supplied fresh water to the capital’s agricultural domes, had been developing microfractures for eleven years. Each report had been “optimistically amended” by a succession of prefects who did not wish to alarm the throne. The fractures had been patched, not repaired. The patching had been paid for by reallocating funds from the northern defense grid.

The defense grid, he then discovered, had been quietly decommissioning its outer sentry stations for twenty years. The reasoning was sound on paper: no external enemy had threatened Solaria for centuries. The real reason, buried in a private message cache he had to crack with his own emergency override, was that the sentries’ maintenance costs were being funneled into the construction of a new pleasure barge for the Admiralty. Downfall

Valerius turned slowly, the weight of his purple cloak shifting like a storm cloud. The courtiers in the antechamber fell silent. Their practiced smiles faltered. They saw the slight twitch in his jaw, the way his fingers drummed once, twice on the cup’s golden handle.

“Bring Caelus to me,” he commanded.

And no one had told him.

The first crack wasn't a loud bang or a shattering of glass. It was the faint tink of a porcelain cup against its saucer, a sound so small it was almost polite. In the grand throne room of the Solarian Empire, that tiny noise marked the beginning of the end. A lie, he realized

The final crack came not from without, but from within his own body. As he stood to confront his reflection in the dark glass of the throne room window, a hot lance of pain shot through his chest. The same pain that had killed Caelus. A worn-out heart.