For a mont, Jasmine felt as though she had been struck in the face.
"T-twin brother...?"
Pollux looked on with an unreadable expression, seemingly indifferent to both himself and the brother before him.
"Brother! Are you listening!? We must flee! We will not stand a cha—"
"No."
The Emperor of the Starbloods, Pollux, spoke in a voice so cold it seed to freeze the very air.
A chill ran through Jasmine, and she shuddered. For a fleeting mont, it felt as though she were standing in the path of a blade—one that would pass through her without hesitation or malice, as though her death would an nothing at all.
"...Brother..." Castor looked stricken. Hopeless.
"We... we will die here if we do not run."
The emperor turned and looked directly into his brother’s eyes with a gaze devoid of warmth.
Then, to Jasmine’s surprise, he raised one hand and gently placed it against the side of Castor’s face.
"Then," he said, his voice low and absolute, "at my word, will you die for , brother?"
Castor’s face froze.
For a mont, he said nothing.
Then the muscles in his jaw tightened. He t his brother’s gaze in silence, reached up, and placed his own hand over Pollux’s.
And he nodded.
"If that is your command, my king."
The Pollux standing beside Jasmine spoke then, his voice touched with wistfulness.
"Unlike other newborns, I was not a mindless creature that cried, vomited, and soiled itself. I was born with knowledge of the future. From the first second I opened my eyes, I already knew the deaths of my parents, the extinction of my people, and the coming of this day. The very mont I turned my head and looked upon my brother cradled in my mother’s arms... I knew."
Jasmine looked up at him, searching his face.
And suddenly, a sharp pain struck her chest.
Then she heard Castor speak again, this ti more hesitantly.
"My brother... you, the strongest among us, refused to fight in this battle. That refusal led to the fall of our Holy Guardian, the impending destruction of the veil that protects us from great evil... and now you command us to die. You command , your own brother, to die. To what path can such a choice possibly lead you?"
Castor let go of the emperor’s hand.
This ti, his face was just as cold.
No—Jasmine realized she was wrong.
His face was colder.
It resembled the frozen depths at the bottom of an endless well.
Emperor Pollux lowered his hand as well. Then, in a quiet voice filled with the kind of authority only a king could possess, he answered:
"A path where, one day, we will have our revenge. A path where the angels shall unleash divine judgnt upon the great evils of this universe." His gaze did not waver. "A path of victory, my dearest brother."
Castor stood there for a mont without speaking, without showing so much as a flicker of emotion.
Then, slowly, he crouched.
He knelt on one knee and bowed his head.
"May our stars shield you on your journey, brother."
Then he rose.
Without looking back, Castor turned away and walked off.
But Jasmine still heard it—
That soft, mournful voice, steeped in a pain so profound it was nearly soundless.
"...Goodbye, brother."
Hearing the sigh from the Pollux beside her pulled Jasmine back from the verge of tears. She rembered, then, the atrocities this man had already committed. She did not want to sympathize with him.
She truly did not.
And yet, when she looked at him, sympathy was all she could feel.
His life had indeed been cruel.
The Pollux standing beside her now was nothing like the emotionless figure in the mory, the one who had watched his brother with a face devoid of all feeling. Instead, he looked at her with a warm smile.
"’Everyone loves Jasmine.’" He chuckled softly. "I think I understand that sentence a little better now."
Jasmine looked at him in confusion as he laughed under his breath.
"You are remarkably kind. Adorably so."
"..."
"I believe you humans have an odd tale involving my na and my twin brother’s—sothing drawn from Greek and Roman mythology. There are... fragnts of truth in it, though it does not apply to and my brother, but to another pair of twins entirely..."
"What do you an?"
"...Nothing you need concern yourself with," he said, to Jasmine’s irritation.
Then why ntion it at all?
Biting her lip, Jasmine could not stop herself from asking,
"...Did everyone truly have to die? Why couldn’t you save your people? You knew the future, yet you did nothing. Was it really impossible to prevent?"
"It was not," he said.
The answer was so imdiate, so unhesitating, that it horrified her.
"The mont my heart began to beat, I stood at a crossroads before two divergent paths. On one, I could have saved them all... or at least preserved my people for far longer. Protected them. Beco the second Starblood ever to ascend to godhood." His gaze darkened. "But I chose this path instead. The path in which I sacrifice everything to kill your brother."
Jasmine stared at him.
There was only one thing she could ask.
"Why?"
"Because eventually, we would have lost regardless."
Pollux looked at her with narrowed eyes.
"You see, I did not want this to beco the sort of story where everyone grows at a asured pace—where the weak beco strong, where the ignorant beco wise. No. I chose to beco the catalyst that would hurl absolute chaos upon all of you." His voice remained calm, yet sothing profoundly sinister lay beneath it. "The sacrifice of the Starbloods, and my own, will trigger a chain of events that will one day end with everyone losing."
A faint smile touched his lips.
"And that... will be my ultimate revenge."
There was a darkness in him then unlike anything Jasmine had seen before.
Not madness.
Not cruelty in its usual form.
Sothing far worse.
Sothing abyssal.
"How ironic," Pollux murmured.
"So might say your brother spared us by not sealing us away with the rest of the divine races. And yet, had he done so, we might never have gone extinct at all. And now, here I stand—the last of my kind—brought into existence for the sole purpose of killing the one who spared my race."
Yes.
There was sothing deeply wicked in the way Pollux laughed.
"What amuses even more is that the gods believe your brother is pretending. They think he is rely acting the part of so clueless, suffering human." He stepped closer to Jasmine, leaned near her ear, and lowered his voice to a whisper.
"But unlike them... I have seen what they have not."
Jasmine went still.
"Your brother," Pollux whispered, "genuinely sealed away his own mories. The gods, for all their thousands of years of preparation, for all the thought they have poured into their plans to kill him, have overlooked the greatest joke of all—that your brother is truly unaware of everything."
A strange ripple passed through Jasmine’s soul as she listened.
"He has no idea," Pollux went on softly, almost reverently, "and I do not believe he particularly cares about their efforts either. Your brother has gone from planet to planet, and the gods believe he has been fleeing from them..." A colder smile touched his lips. "But I think he has been running from sothing else. Or soone else."
His voice grew quieter.
"Soone who terrifies him so deeply that he keeps running... and running... and running..."
Jasmine felt her breath catch.
Then Pollux whispered even more softly, his words like a shadow brushing the edge of her mind.
"...Running, and taking those he loves with him each ti... while the gods remain blissfully ignorant of his greatest weakness."
He pulled back slightly and looked at her.
"Isn’t that right?"
"..."
"I may not be an Apostle of the True Stars," Pollux said, "but it was the True Stars who granted the ability to see the future. Your brother will die. And with his death, a new age will begin."
He lifted his eyes toward the heavens.
"The legendary Ancient Holy War will resu where it was left unfinished. One by one, all races will be unsealed as ti advances. And as they return, all will fight—to survive, to dominate, to kill, to hope, to live. I wonder what kind of heroes will be born from the chaos I have chosen to unleash upon all of you."
Another headache pounded through Jasmine’s skull. She squeezed her eyes shut, just as she had the other three tis, and then opened them again.
...Nothing had changed.
Pollux was still beside her. The other Pollux was there as well, once more standing among the flowers.
And then every hair on her body stood on end.
A terror so imnse seized her whole being that her mind scread at her to do sothing. Fear prickled beneath her skin. She began to breathe heavily, her eyes darting frantically in every direction—until she looked at the Pollux beside her and followed his gaze.
Upward.
Then a voice spoke behind her.
It was gentle. Soft. Like thousands of whispers speaking at once. The mont it reached her ears, Jasmine felt as though her brain were trying to split into a thousand pieces. She could not distinguish a single word of what was being said.
Pollux moved at once. He covered her eyes with his hand, shielding her from whatever stood behind her.
"Looking upon a god will kill you," Pollux whispered. "Even if it is within my own mind. But with my protection, I can at least help you understand... what the True Stars are saying."
And then she heard it.
Faint beyond asure, and yet unspeakably powerful.
The voice of a god.
"My angel, collect all the fragnts that the unknown has scattered across the realms... acquire the key from the unknown... befriend the odious creatures of the void... and wish, at the cost of your immortal life, for a fire that will burn them all."
Jasmine felt tears spill freely from her eyes once more, but this ti Pollux did not wipe them away. She trembled in awe and terror as the voice behind her spoke to Emperor Pollux.
And then she felt it.
A gaze.
It was looking at her.
Looking straight at her.
"Do not make a sound," Pollux whispered.
Why?
Why?
Was this not a mory, just as he had said? They were inside his mind. The True Stars were not truly here. They should not have been.
And yet...
They were powerful enough.
Terrible enough.
Divine enough.
Even as a mory.
Then, without the slightest warning, everything was unmade.
Fire spread through the garden in an instant.
The garden that had seed so immaculate only monts before was surrendered to a violence so sudden, so absolute, that its beauty beca almost obscene. Fire moved through it without rcy. The luminous flowerbeds blackened and collapsed into themselves, their cyan glow guttering out beneath waves of heat. Marble terraces split apart with sharp, percussive cracks. Colonnades buckled. The elegant dos and towers at the garden’s edge ca apart in showers of stone and molten light. What had once felt composed with imperial precision was now being ravaged with deliberate cruelty, as though destruction were not rely incidental to conquest, but its purest expression.
Above, the sky had turned catastrophic.
At first it resembled a storm of cots—long streaks of gold and white tearing through the violet heavens, setting the firmant ablaze as they fell.
But they were not cots.
They were beings.
Shapes wreathed in fire descended through the atmosphere like instrunts of judgnt, their forms burning with such ferocity that the very air scread around them.
The galaxy-lit sky, once vast and serene, had beco the backdrop to annihilation.
It seed the heavens themselves had opened for no purpose other than to send down hell.
User Comments
0 comments from readers