The relay crystal delivered its message at dawn.
Straze listened to all of it — the aide's fractured voice, the gaps where the man on the other end ran out of words and had to find new ones, the part where "the Emperor is dead" was said plainly because there was no better way to say it, and the part where "eleven seconds" was mentioned, and the part where five hundred thousand soldiers in full battle formation were described as currently positioned three hundred kilometers from the only place that mattered.
He listened without interrupting.
When it was done, he set the crystal down on the tactical table.
His senior officers stood around him in the command tent — fourteen men and women who had survived things that killed lesser soldiers, who had followed him through four campaigns and never once seen him hesitate. They were looking at him now with that particular attention soldiers gave their commanders in the moments that decided everything.
Straze looked at the map.
Byzantium. Three hundred kilometers north. The capital of an empire whose Emperor had just been killed in eleven seconds by a single man with an unmeasured soul-rank, who had subsequently given operational management instructions to the palace staff before walking out.
He's running it, Straze thought. He didn't come to burn the empire. He came to take it.
That distinction — the distance between those two things — was the most important piece of information anyone had produced since Rūme.
"Recall the march order," he said. "We're not going to Byzantium."
---
Silence in the command tent.
His second-in-command, Kane, was the first to find his voice. "Sir, the Emperor—"
"Is dead." Straze picked up a marking rod and drew a line on the map — not toward Byzantium, but northeast, toward the mountain pass at the border of MACEDON. "The Emperor is dead. Marching five hundred thousand men to Byzantium to stand between that man and whatever he decides to do next is not a military strategy. It's a burial arrangement."
"Then what—"
"We build something he can't burn." Straze circled the mountain pass. "Macedon. We regroup there — outside his current operational theater, behind terrain that limits his movement options, in a province with its own garrison forces and supply infrastructure that hasn't been touched." He looked up at his officers. "We don't fight him in his chosen ground. We choose ours."
The officers exchanged glances. Straze watched it happen — the calculation running through every face, the question nobody wanted to ask first.
Kane asked it. Because Kane always asked the things nobody else would. "Can we choose ground that matters? If he can dissolve the South Gate of Rūme, and walk three hundred kilometers to Byzantium in thirty-six hours—"
"Then we need something that doesn't depend on gates or distance," Straze said. "Yes. I know."
He rolled the map and picked up the relay crystal again. There were eleven more calls to make before sunrise. He had six weeks, maybe eight, before the new management in Byzantium turned its attention outward.
Eight weeks to build something worth fighting with.
He began.
---
Three hours south of the Macedonian border, in a training ground that existed specifically because Straze had ordered it built two years ago for reasons he had not fully articulated even to himself, a young soldier named Ervalen was running.
Not jogging. Running. The kind of running that stopped being exercise and started being something between punishment and religion — lap after lap around the stone track at full sprint, Soul-Brand already active at this hour, the amber light of his Rank 4 mark visible through his training shirt's cut-outs even in the grey pre-dawn.
He had been at it for two hours when the runner found him.
"Sergeant Ervalen." The runner was breathing hard — a relay messenger, probably hadn't slept. "Commander Straze's orders. All Macedonian-garrison units to assemble at the northern camp by—"
"I heard." Ervalen stopped running. He stood with his hands on his knees for exactly three seconds — a practiced recovery — and straightened. His amber eyes were sharp in the pre-dawn light. "The Emperor's dead."
The runner blinked. "How did you—"
"The relay crystals in the command office have been active every twenty minutes since midnight." He turned toward the barracks. "Tell Commander Straze I'll have my unit assembled in forty minutes."
The runner stared at his back. "The assembly order is for two hours from now—"
"Forty minutes," Ervalen said, without stopping.
---
He was twenty-three years old. He had held a Rank 4 Soul-Brand since nineteen — the youngest recorded in Macedonian military history. His seniors called him several things, most of them grudging variations of prodigy delivered in tones that made the word sound like an accusation.
He thought about the reports he'd overheard through the command office wall.
· Single individual.
· Unmeasured rank.
· South gate: dissolved.
· General Blaze: gone.
· Emperor Krau: dead.
· Duration of final engagement: eleven seconds.
He thought about eleven seconds for the entire forty-minute march to the assembly ground.
By the time his unit was formed up and Straze walked out to address them — ahead of his own two-hour window, which Ervalen noted without surprise — he had arrived at an answer he didn't like and could not improve upon.
Eleven seconds means the Emperor never touched him. A Rank 4 Sovereign who had refined his power for forty years, and the engagement lasted eleven seconds. Which meant whatever rank that man carried, it wasn't comparable to anything in the existing classification structure.
Which meant everyone currently planning to fight him was planning to fight a number they didn't have.
---
Straze stopped in front of the assembled units and looked out at three thousand soldiers standing at attention in the grey dawn. His face was what it always was — carved, still, giving nothing away.
"You've heard the reports," he said. No preamble. Straze never used preamble. "Some of them are accurate. Some of them are fear wearing the shape of a report. Here is what I can confirm: Emperor Krau is dead. Byzantium has fallen. A single individual with no recorded rank classification is currently operating from the Imperial Palace."
Ervalen watched the line. It held — Macedonian soldiers, properly trained, but he could see the effort in the stillness. The particular tension of men holding themselves together by discipline alone.
"Here is what I know that the reports do not say," Straze continued. "He is not destroying the empire. He is administering it. That means he has a plan that requires a functioning Latium. That means he is not simply a weapon but a mind." A pause. "Minds can be countered. We will find the counter."
Will we? The question formed in Ervalen's head before he could stop it. He suppressed it. Not useful.
What was useful: Straze was not grieving, was not panicking, was already building. Whatever he was building, Ervalen intended to be at the front of it.
---
In Byzantium, the sun was fully up.
Yogiri sat at the Emperor's desk.
Not the throne — the desk. The actual working desk in the administrative office adjacent to the throne room, covered in documents that represented the daily operation of the largest empire in DEVAS. Trade routes. Tax assessments. Military deployment reports. Correspondence from fourteen provincial governors, three foreign nations, and something labeled SERAPHIC SEAT COMMUNIQUE — DIVINE MANDATE RENEWAL that had been sitting unopened for two weeks.
He opened that one first.
It was exactly what it sounded like. The divine religious authority of LATIUM — the Seraphic Seat, the twelve god-chosen figures who provided the Empire's theological legitimacy — requesting renewal of the Emperor's divine mandate. A bureaucratic ceremony, performed annually, rubber-stamped without thought for four hundred years.
Yogiri read it carefully.
Then he picked up the Emperor's correspondence seal — heavy, gold, the mark of four centuries of unbroken imperial authority — and stamped the renewal document.
He returned it to its envelope and set it in the outgoing correspondence tray.
The door to the administrative office opened. A palace official — the senior administrator, a man named Mort who had served four emperors and had the permanent expression of someone managing a headache that would never fully resolve — stepped carefully through the door.
He had come, Yogiri assumed, because someone had to. The palace staff had spent two hours deciding who would come. Mort had clearly lost.
---
"The provincial governors are requesting clarification on their status," Mort said. He kept his voice even with visible effort. "Three have already sent military contingents toward the capital. Two have declared martial law in their provinces. One—" He checked his notes. "—has apparently fled the country."
"Which one?"
"Governor of Livonia."
"Reasonable." Yogiri set down the trade assessment he had been reviewing. "Send word to the three sending military contingents: if they arrive armed, I will interpret it as an answer and respond accordingly. If they arrive as representatives, I'll hear them." He turned a page. "The two who declared martial law — what were their reasons?"
Mort blinked. He had clearly prepared for several scenarios. Being asked for context was not one of them. "Ah — public unrest. Citizens aware of the Emperor's death. Crowds gathering, some disorder—"
"Tell them to lift the martial law. Public unrest is information. Suppressing it is just making the information louder later." Yogiri pulled the military deployment report from the stack. "This garrison reassignment from six days ago — was this the Emperor's decision or Straze's?"
The name landed with weight. Mort paused. "Commander Straze operates with significant independent authority in military matters."
"Where is he currently?"
Another pause. Longer. "The last confirmed report placed him at Rūme, sir. But that was before—"
"He's not at Rūme." Yogiri set the deployment report down. "He wasn't there when we arrived and he's not there now. He's building something." He looked at Mort directly for the first time. The administrator did not appear to enjoy being looked at directly. "I want everything available on Commander Straze. Service record. Campaign history. Personal assessments from his officers. Everything."
"I — yes. Of course." Mort moved toward the door, then stopped as if remembering something critical. "There is also the matter of the Seraphic Seat. The renewal communique—"
"Sent."
Mort turned around slowly. "Sent?"
"I stamped it." Yogiri returned to his documents. "The Seraphic Seat maintains religious stability across fourteen provinces. Disrupting their operation creates public unrest I'll have to manage later. Efficiency."
Mort stood very still. "You — stamped the divine mandate renewal. With the Emperor's seal."
"The Emperor's seal, yes. Since I now administer what the Emperor administered." Yogiri turned a page. "Was there something theologically incorrect about the document?"
"It — no, but—" Mort appeared to be having a profound internal experience. "The Seraphic Seat will want to confirm the renewal in person. They will want to meet the — the new—"
"Administrator."
"The new administrator," Mort said faintly. "Yes."
"Schedule it." Yogiri picked up the next document. "A week from today. I'll have finished reviewing the administrative structure by then."
Mort left.
---
Yogiri read the service record of Commander Straze of Macedon — thirty years of service, zero lost campaigns, a tactical assessment from his own superior officers that used the phrase operates as if defeat is a concept he finds personally offensive — and was quiet for a while.
Then he turned to the strategic map spread across the desk's side table.
Macedon was marked in the northeast. He found the mountain pass. He found the terrain chokepoints. He followed the logic of a general who would never fight an enemy on the enemy's terms — the supply lines, the garrison positions, the specific way a man like Straze would structure a defense in terrain like that.
He's not coming to me, Yogiri thought. He's building something.
He turned back to the service record.
Good, he thought. I need to know what he's capable of before I burn it.
He read for another hour while the capital of LATIUM slowly, grudgingly, terrifyingly began to function again around him — the markets reopening because people needed to eat, the guard rotations resuming because disorder was worse than the alternative, the machinery of empire grinding forward because it did not know how to do anything else.
The new administrator did not look up from his documents.
He was not done reading.