“So it might be said, the sacred is what influences the stars.”
“Indeed, that is true.”
The Emperor’s lips curved into an odd smile. “Most Ascendant One, I just influenced the stars.”
Fustian opened his mouth but had no reply. He gawked up at the Emperor, no doubt trying to divine from that mysterious smile what he was supposed to say.
“I created malignant space. I caused a supernova. I.” Tyrus stared down at him expectantly.
“In-indeed, you did.”
“So what is the meaning of that, Most Ascendant One?”
Fustian began to tremble. “I… I know not.”
The Emperor’s unblinking stare was as empty and flat as a reptile’s. A building hum came from the security bots overhead, causing many in the room to gasp and shrink into themselves. The lethal killing machines began to crowd together over the Emperor’s head, their mechanized eyes fixed on the cowering Fustian.
“Hazard a guess,” the Emperor suggested.
He spoke very blandly, but the words themselves were the warning. The wrong answer would mean death. None here doubted it. After all, in the ball dome of this very starship, they had watched him drive a sword through his wife—the woman he’d valued above all others, for whom he’d gambled everything.
They had hated her. Detested and feared her. Yet they had not celebrated her death for very long before a new understanding had set in.
If the Emperor could murder his own wife, then their lives would be nothing to him.
Though Tyrus von Domitrian had beamed upon them all but a moment ago, a swift undercurrent of fear stole through their ranks at the realization of what he could do to them if they gave him cause to frown.
Fustian bowed his head, deathly pale, and took a deep, audible breath. Then his gaze shot up, milky and desperate—eager. Yes, he knew just what to stay.
“You influenced the stars, Your Supremacy, so you must be a… a god!”
Only the greatest fools in the room let their incredulity show.
But their Emperor gave a maddening smile, his eyes warm with approval. “Think you so, truly?”
“I am certain. I am absolutely certain,” burbled Fustian. “You are a god!” He rose and turned to the others. “Do you not see it? Do you not understand?” Desperation frayed his voice. “How… how he glows with a holy light? How he shines with it?”
Stunned silence answered him.
“You must see it!” Fustian shielded his eyes, as though blinded by Tyrus’s essence. “Oh, it is inspiring! How lucky we are! There is a living god in our midst!” He fell to his knees again, then fell flat on his belly, his diaphanous ceremonial robes spilling around him. “Hail! Hail, Divine Emperor Tyrus! Hail to the Divine Emperor!”
The Emperor despised Fustian nan Domitrian. In the past, he’d been seen kicking away the puppet Interdict’s hands as they pawed at his feet, sneering at his captive vicar’s simpering reverence.
Today, though, the Emperor smiled at him broadly, fondly—like a parent to a child who’d offered some small gift.
“You see it truly, then,” Tyrus said tenderly. He reached down to raise up Fustian’s trembling form, and cupped the man’s shoulders gently. “I will see you rewarded beyond your dreams for this… understanding.”
“Your Supreme… Divine Reverence, I thank you,” Fustian whispered, awestruck.
The Emperor turned his expectant gaze toward the rest of the Grandiloquy.
“Hail!” Fustian bellowed at them, chest puffed out now—emboldened. “Hail! As Interdict, I command you all to hail our Divine Emperor Tyrus!”
Behind the Emperor, the window still bloomed with the vast glow of the supernova, while the star-shaped metal security bots re-formed themselves into a circle above Tyrus’s head, a crown made of deadly weaponry, awaiting a single thought from their master.
But it was Tyrus von Domitrian’s next utterance that at last stirred them: “If I am indeed a divine being, I must need my most favored subjects. My most valued of disciples. What say you?” His gaze traveled over the Grandiloquy, glittering with a promise the courtiers of his Empire could not dare to resist.
Many of them had, in the past, clashed with Tyrus—back in those idealistic days when he’d been swept up in youthful dreams, in love with a Diabolic, ready to sacrifice them on the altar of some egalitarian vision for the galaxy. Yet the creature—the Emperor—before them now was shaped by cynicism, by Venalox, and yes, by avarice into a form they could clearly discern, for at last, this Tyrus von Domitrian was an Emperor they could understand.
In his demand for worship, there was a promise in return:
Profane yourselves for me and I will reward you beyond your wildest dreams.
And so came the first: “Hail!”
“Hail!” came another voice.
“Why, the light is blinding!” cried a third. “He is a god!”
“Our Divine Emperor!”
“The Divine Emperor Tyrus!”
As a wave, the Grandiloquy threw themselves to the floor, crying, “Hail to the Divine Emperor! Hail!”
Soon there was no question of remaining silent, no restraint to temper the Grandiloquy in gleefully prostrating themselves before Tyrus, because he seemed to have at last been born to their ranks. This was no god, but it was certainly a cynical, power-grasping megalomaniac, and the Empire had long shaped itself around just such tyrants.
What was a god, after all, but the arbiter of destiny? One who could ignite a supernova, who could kill a man with a single thought, who held the entirety of the galaxy and the Helionic faith in his hands: Was that not a god? His power over their lives was complete and unbreakable. Was that not a kind of divinity?
Tyrus gave a laugh as they knelt, and he began to call out promises: “A monopoly on the Novashine trade to you, Senator von Sornyx! And you—Credenza von Fordyce—I mean to give you Gorgon’s Arm for this show of faith!”
The shouts and cheers grew louder. As the presence chamber at the heart of the galactic Empire filled with voices crying, “Our Divine Emperor! Hail to our God-Emperor!” the Emperor passed through their midst, giving favors even as he graciously allowed them to clutch at his feet, receiving their reverence as his right, and after all, was it not all his? He had triggered a supernova, and even the most restive of the Excess would quail before an Emperor—united with his Grandiloquy—with such destructive power at his fingertips.
Overhead, below, all around, the Chrysanthemum’s surveillance machines recorded this moment, capturing it for posterity. And for eons to come, historians of the tragic and violent reign of Tyrus von Domitrian would debate the significance of this day. Was it here that the Emperor’s madness had truly begun? Was this the defining moment of his reign?
Some would argue vociferously against it. They would point instead to an earlier time, to the years Tyrus spent under the control of Alectar von Pasus. The Senator had forced upon his captive Emperor the neurotoxic drug Venalox, one notorious for its deleterious effects upon character—one that eroded one’s empathy, one’s conscience. This, they would argue, was the formative period that turned a young idealist into a brutal tyrant.
But gradually, over the centuries, a consensus would form. Neither von Pasus nor delusions of divinity could account for what the Emperor became. The key to that transformation was found elsewhere, in the single person who influenced his rise, his degeneration, and then his fall.