Intro Interlude (Otto)

Twelve years.

You nigh-double the size of the Empire, slay hundreds in pitched battle, shatter the greatest democracy yet known to Mankind… and your father gives you twelve years.

Twelve years. You think back to your youth, the beginning of the prime of your life. Countless hours spent hard at work under House Arthen, your skills honed to a razor’s edge in sweat and toil, every aspect, mental and physical, refined into a singular instrument of conquest, waiting to bleed the foe and be bled for the Empire, and what did your father do?

He held you in court. Listening to him prattle on to bureaucrats and attend petty functions. An entire childhood, reared on tales of glory and glorious battle, squandered!

Some of the best years of your life, wasted!

Now, on the eve of your greatest victory, a campaign he only let you take part in because victory was a certainty, he tells you that you can have anything you desire. You ask of him little, a mere two decades of your own, so that you can strike out into the stars and begin to make up for lost time, and what does he do?

He gives you twelve years! The one thing you’ve ever asked of him in your entire life, and he has the gall to haggle you down! To demand you waste precious time coming back to Mars to visit!

Concerned for the safety of the imperial heir…

The same prince who spent his youth wrestling the Death-Spiders of the Unope moon!

Twelve years…

Twelve more years a hypocrite sits on the throne!

>...

The Lost Reaches are full of mystery, millions upon millions of stars, just waiting to be found once more. Full of anti-imperialists, waiting to be slain, and full of treasures, waiting to be taken from the dead. There are false leads and dead stretches, hundreds of light years of no more than dust and rumours. Many expeditions find themselves mired in nothing, but you’re smarter than that. Your subtle tutelage under the storytellers of Arthen taught you to seek the truth beneath the myth and there, see how the tale was made that much greater for the grounding.

As you lack the time to go wide, you knew you must go deep: Find a single, plausible rumour and pursue it to the furthest ends possible. If you must uproot mountains of dirt and have a head of gray hairs by the onset of your thirties, so be it. You heard whispers on the solar winds, wild tales of a fallen quadrant overflowing with wonders. These were vague stories and you would've dismissed them as so, if the coordinates weren't so consistent. You burned thrusters to reach the site in record time, forgoing all but the most critical safety protocols to go where no Emperor's son had gone before.

You found what you were seeking. An ancient ruin in the depths of an oceanic moon, screaming its presence on all sensor wavelengths. Doubtless radioactive, no doubt worth the diving. You and four-hundred men, a small entry party, garbed yourselves in skin-tight atmo-suits and then in the heaviest armour that could keep buoyancy on top of that. Breaching charges hammered open an already tilted gate and you were given free reign to search. Right about the time you'd surfaced in that artificial cavern, you realized you weren't alone.

Now, you were fighting for your life in an emerald mausoleum, trading blows with dozens of ravening savages. They bore the signs of tech-use- sophisticated tactics, med-evac, and a clear squad hierarchy, but they showed no civility. Covered in vicious extremes of scarified flesh and dented cybernetics, these unkempt and unwashed men, unmistakably human and howling in a foreign tongue, hit your retinue like a storm. They gave up war cries and once cohesion broke down, fought like animals. There were three coming at you, one with an industrial arc-cutter, two more with crude laser rifles.

Your hands moved on their own. A sword stroke saw the neck of the first sliced in two, the staccato of the pistol in your hands reduced the foreheads of the others to wet gore. You were in the thick of it, running on instinct. The enemy stepped to you and you cut them down, time and again. The violence was an orchestra, and your weapons were one more instrument in lockstep to the rhythm. Once it was done, you found yourself filled with a quiet excitement. This would be a true struggle after all!

You betrayed none of this to the sons of House Heinrich and the imperial army's finest at your side. They'd lost three to every one of yours. Your men had fought well, enough to make the Empire proud, but as you examine the dead, puzzling over the culture that must've led to them, you feel a strange sense of kinship. The reckless ferocity, the savage tradition in synthesis with tempered steel, running wild, their strength theirs and theirs alone...

Oh, would that you hadn't been born an Emperor's son!

>...

You look up at your father. The two of you could not be more different. He's dressed in regalia befitting his imperial office, a sleek uniform reflecting the martial origins of the dynasty, ceremonial, and no less practical for it. Apart from his scepter of rule and the crown that weighs heavy on his head, he is unarmed, but these articles alone could render millions dead. His physique, once refined by the household tutors into the image of athleticism, has gone fallow in his reign and withered with age. You recoil in spirit at the sight of this weakness because you know it accompanies a weak will, driven by results with little care to the methods and much toward preserving its own life, and unasked for, your own life.

Nonetheless, this man is the Emperor who sits atop the throne on Mars, and your father.

You bow your head rather than kneel, as you are the appointed heir of the ruling dynasty and by custom, nearly equal to the Emperor in symbolic significance. "Father. It has been a long time-"

He interrupts, angry. "Too long! Four years, boy! The whole of the Eternal Empire has sat, waiting for the return of its beloved heir, and what has it gotten?" The Emperor, whose word is law, gets into your face, raising his voice with royal thunder. "FOUR YEARS! You gave me your word, Otto, that you would return safely, and instead, I get a courier who tells me you've gotten yourself into a pitched underwater war!"

You frown and assert yourself. "A war for the relics of old Earth. An entire hull full of them. I fought for Mankind-"

The Emperor, for the first time you've heard in your life outside of propaganda reels, shouts. "YOU SHOULD LIVE FOR MANKIND! Damn you, boy! Your hunger for war will be the death of us all!"

This frustrates you. After so many sacrifices for old Earth, the Federation, conquered, he still speaks to you as though you're only a child. Hundreds slain at your hand, an entire parliament razed, and a hull filled to the brim with glimmering artifacts, and none of it matters? None of it matters! The anger reaches a fever pitch, and something snaps. The words come out before you can stop them.

"Better I be a warmonger than fondling squids and plucking flowers."

You can't breathe. To condemn the very Emperor, it's a betrayal of everything you've sworn to uphold. You close your eyes, wracked by grief of the low you've sunk too, and potential yet unfulfilled.

>*SMACK*

You're blindsided by a sudden, thunderous force which sends you crashing to the dust. There's a sudden pain, a fleabite compared to the shame, but you instinctively hold it. For the first time in years, you are stunned. You cast your eyes up, to gaze on the Emperor. "...Father?"

His gaze pierces you with a contempt beyond words, and beneath the pressure, your resolve breaks. He speaks with the weight of ages.

"Son. Never speak to me that way again."

There's a moment of tension, as though the very galaxy pressed down on your shoulders. Then it is broken, as though it were never there. The Emperor, old but not yet stooped, bends and gives you his hand. You take it, gently, and he pulls you to your feet.

The guilt strikes you, mercilessly. It burrows in and doesn’t let go, but it is the path of Arthen to push forward. “Father, I…” No defense could’ve prepared you for this embrace, a wound to the heart. You hold the Emperor and are held, for a brief time, not head of the dynasty and heir, but father and son.

You hear dismay in his voice, with none of the practiced and drilled passion of rhetoric, but real, raw and vulnerable. “Otto, you are the greatest treasure this Empire has- Its living and breathing future! We can’t risk losing you… Not like my father, not like Alphonse!”

His motives for holding you back are clear, as they always have been. He doesn’t understand. “All I’ve ever wanted… was to serve the Empire.” Your father’s stance adjusts.

You’re expecting another lecture, but his words are brief. “Serve, you have. Serve, you shall. The Tripartite-”

If one breaks their oaths to old Earth, they have nothing, are nothing. “Traitors to all Mankind.” This, Arthen taught you well.

The next words bring you pause. “-They must die.” You wait a moment for more, but there is none. There is no subtext. The message is clear. You detach from his shoulders, stepping back with an imperial salute.

“Your will will be done, Emperor!”

Your father tilts his head, from the Emperor to one lesser, an incredible sign of respect. “Prince.”

Before he can change his mind, you turn and go. There’s a lightness to your steps, an exhilaration that only impending existential struggle can give. Against the traitor? There is no nobler cause. Yet as you walk away, you find your gauntlet returning to your cheek, and your thoughts to what transpired here.

In that moment, you truly began to respect your father.