Prologue: A Place Where Warriors Never Rest
Months have bled into months since Lelouch vi Britannia and Nunnally vi Britannia were seized—stolen—taken as tokens, as tools, as bargaining chips cast onto the table of nations. Japan. Always Japan. But this betrayal, this abandonment, this sacrifice—it was not the only wound carved into the royal flesh that day.
Another prince was there. Another son of the empire.
Fourteen years old. Black hair, unremarkable. Ordinary in every way, the empire measured worth. When the terrorists came—when the politicians decided who was expendable and who was not—he learned the truth all soldiers learn eventually: you are alone on the battlefield, and no one is coming to save you.
Gunfire. A lamp exploding like a dying star. Flames devouring everything they touched.
He remembers the heat. The smoke. The screaming.
Now he lies in white sheets in a white room, wrapped in white bandages like a corpse awaiting burial. His body burns beneath the gauze. His face is a stranger's face, rebuilt by surgeons who speak in whispers outside his door. Some siblings visit—duty-bound, guilt-driven, uncomfortable in his presence. His mother would have come. His mother would have held his hand and told him everything would heal.
His mother is dead.
The visits mean nothing. Words mean nothing. Sympathy is the luxury of those who haven't burned.
What grows in the charred places of his heart is not hope. It is something patient. Something cold. Something that waits in the dark, calculating, preparing.
Revenge.
Time passes. Time always passes, indifferent as history, cruel as nations.
He walks now, though every step reminds him of what was taken. The bandages remain. The breathing mask covers his nose and mouth—his lungs were scorched, the doctors say, the tissue scarred beyond full recovery. He will carry this wound forever, this reminder that he was deemed acceptable collateral damage in someone else's war.
The medical wing is palatial. Gold fixtures. Imported marble. The empire spares no expense for its princes, even the broken ones, even the expendable ones. Appearances matter. Sympathy is good politics.
He leaves his room and walks—slowly, deliberately, each breath filtered and mechanical—to the bathroom at the corridor's end.
The window reflects a figure he barely recognizes: a mummy, a monster, a ghost wrapped in white. He stares at this stranger, this survivor, this weapon forged in fire and neglect. For a moment, there is only silence. Only the steady hiss of his breathing apparatus. Only the distant sounds of a hospital where people heal and forget.
Then the rage comes.
Not hot. Not wild. Cold. Focused. Pure.
His father, the Emperor, who sent Lelouch and Nunnally away like chess pieces, who let him burn while saving the valuable ones. His siblings—watching from their safe towers, their positions of power, their comfortable distance from consequence. His kingdom—Britannia the mighty, Britannia the golden, Britannia the empire built on the backs of soldiers and the graves of the expendable.
They made him this. They made him nothing.
His fist crashes through the window. Glass explodes outward in a cascade of crystalline shards, glittering like falling stars, like promises broken, like empires that will one day shatter just as easily. Blood seeps through his bandages. He watches it spread, dark against white, and feels nothing but certainty.
He returns to his bed. His breathing is steady behind the mask. On the nightstand: a book, probably left by some well-meaning doctor who thought distraction might substitute for justice.
He picks it up. Turns a page. Another. Seeking nothing. Expecting nothing.
Then he finds it.
Not a chapter on snakes. Not nature documentary prose about predators and prey.
A passage—hidden among medical texts and prescribed reading—about Outer Heaven. The philosopher's concept. The soldier's dream. A nation outside nations. A place where warriors answer only to war itself, where loyalty is chosen rather than inherited, where the abandoned and betrayed and used forge something new from the ruins of old empires.
He reads about soldiers who refuse to be pawns. About men who reject the nation-states that treat them as ammunition. About a vision: warfare without ideology, combat without political masters, a military force that exists for itself, by itself, beyond the reach of emperors and presidents and all the politicians who send boys to burn while they sleep in palaces.
A place where warriors—the wounded, the scarred, the expendable—never rest, because rest is surrender. Because peace is a lie nations tell to justify their next war.
The concept speaks to something primal in him, something that crystallized in the flames: they will use you until you are spent, then discard you.
Unless you refuse. Unless you become something they cannot control.
He thinks of nuclear deterrence. Mutually assured destruction. The paradox of peace through overwhelming force. If warriors controlled the weapons, if soldiers refused to be tools, if the burned and broken built their own nation…
The empire would have to reckon with him. With all of them.
Beneath the bandages, his lips curve upward. Not a smile of joy. A smile of understanding. Of purpose. Of patience.
He will wait. He will heal. He will learn everything—politics, strategy, warfare, manipulation, the very arts his father's empire used to justify abandoning him. He will become what they fear most: a soldier with no loyalty to crowns, a warrior who fights only for warriors, a prince who rejects his throne to build something truer.
Something dangerous.
Something outer.
The book falls closed in his lap. Outside, the world continues as if nothing has changed. But something has changed. In this white room, in this broken body, in this mind sharpened by betrayal—
A nation is being born.
And it will not forgive.