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Councilman Shas unlocked the ornate doors to his quarters in the Council residency wing and slipped inside, pulling off his cape and pinning it to the magnetic strip in his entryway. He took off his boots, the dagger under his akasures, his belt, and the greaves over his shins and knees that were attached with a new kind of elastic mesh the ASMC was testing. Then he went to make himself a drink.
It had been six months since the new Emperor was crowned. Six months since his plans were knocked off the rails. Six months since the Imperial Vanguard, which had been moving towards public invisibility at full throttle, had been stopped in its tracks when portals in the oversky had been shredded open and he’d been pulled from the war room to deal with it. The ASMC was still playing damage control when the nine coordinated missions across the Vo-das Sector failed spectacularly without his oversight. Six months ago, he saw Death in his future for the first time in millennia.
The best he could figure, Evansen Rekore Stark was an enigma pulled from the reaches of the multiverse just to piss him off. The godly pantheon was probably cackling it like a joke from wherever they watched him from these days. Or otherwise, they were watching as all their plans ran off the rails too.
The arrival of Evansen Stark in the New Aetherian Empire had successfully done two things, in his eyes. First, it disrupted his own machinations and stopped the movements of the Council-controlled Vanguard in its tracks, and stalled most of the other Imperial Armed Forces branches while their highest levels of command were obliterated in the wake of a new Emperor’s rise to power. Secondly, it had introduced a new species to the Imperial throne. Never before had a ziojic, a creature of the Void, taken on the New Empire’s crowns. In a world where such things mattered, it might have been noteworthy. To Shas, it was just another chip on the scale—and, perhaps, a warning that other things were going to change, and that he’d been found out.
In his kitchen, he poured himself a glass of some sharp, sour whiskey mixture he’d been gifted at one gala or another and took a long drink.
That evening where he stopped Stark from ripping a bigger hole in the Aetherian reality plane.. that was significant. Stark had resisted him. They’d held out against simple control magic techniques that he’d perfected eons ago. So far, the only person he’d run into that could manage such a thing with any degree of success was Serra Tyrannis, the bounty hunter that had had it out for him a few decades back. Tyrannis, who had been trained and warded by the best, versus Stark who, to his knowledge, had not. They were a rural seaside rebellion leader from [ x ], not a trained mercenary or a political pawn or a destabilization plant.
It had something to do with them being a ziojic. He knew that, and he kept coming back to it in his mind. Something about the zio’andar and its resurrection process made it so that Stark was able to resist control magic; how much they could resist had yet to be discovered. It was strange to him to think that he’d never really cared to test it on ziojic, and therefore never noticed—this felt like something he should have accounted for. The fact that he hadn’t made it seem like it was something he wasn’t supposed to notice.
Somewhere, the pantheon was laughing at him.
Shas knocked back the rest of his whiskey and poured another.
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