Kaius listened to the Castellan’s words numbly.

  A duke. Him.

  It was patently ridiculous, even before he considered the fact it was the duke of a long-dead Empire that had once ruled the continent. Every time he tried to wrap his head around it, he failed. Was he supposed to introduce himself as a lord now? Demand that simple commoners should not meet his eyes like the other pompous pricks he’d heard of?

  What did it even mean? Even if the title was meaningless in his current age, it was still credible.

  He giggled, unable to help himself, only to snap his mouth shut as the Castellan pushed down on the hilt of its enormous blade.

  Moulded stone crunched as a brass greatsword, larger than Kaius, sank a foot and a half into the floor. Had they done something wrong?

  Yet the Castellan only reached forwards toward his blade.

  “May I, my lord?”

  Kaius nodded; the automaton picked up his blade. It looked like a damned toothpick in the thing’s hands.

  The automaton’s eyes grew brighter, shining a light on A Father’s Gift as it turned Kaius’s sword back and forth, inspecting it from every angle. Most of its focus seemed to be devoted to the runes in its fuller and, oddly, its hilt. Could it sense the runes directly somehow? That was where his father had placed the binding array — under the wrappings.

  After a few moments, the Castellan gingerly passed back the weapon — its slow and careful movements utterly at odds with the brutal strength he knew its bronze body carried.

  “Most fascinating,” the Castellan finally said. “A moment, please.”

  Rising back to its full height, the Castellan wrapped its hands around the hilt of its gargantuan blade, and Kaius saw a flicker of mana pass into the weapon. Before he could even tense, there was a sudden vacuum.

  The latent arcane energy that still roiled through the chamber pulsed — rebuffed away from them. Kaius could have wept. He hadn’t even realised the discomfort he was under from the intensity of the affinity until it was gone.

  Hearing clattering from behind him, Kaius turned and saw four worker drones skittering into the hall. One gingerly held three chairs in its many arms, while the other automatons awkwardly supported a long table.

  Sharing confused looks with his team, Kaius watched the automata approach before politely setting down the furniture and retreating once more.

  “Please sit,” the Castellan said, waving them to the table. “The accommodations are unfit for a lord such as yourself, but this was a facility of military research and it is in a great state of disrepair. There is not much appropriate finery, and what there was has largely decayed as the stasis wards started to fail.”

  The Castellan’s demeanour had changed. Kaius was certain of it. If it had given him begrudging obeisance before, now it was treating him with true respect.

  “Help me up,” Kaius said to Kenva.

  “Of course,” she replied, slinging an arm around his chest to haul him to his feet, before she slowly backed off as he waved her away.

  He planted his blade point-first into the ground, leaning on it with his full weight. It was a terrible abuse of the weapon, but it would do no damage, and with an absent leg he needed something to support himself.

  No way was he going to give Porkchop the opportunity to lord something over him if he asked for help. Awkwardly hopping to the nearest bare metal chair, Kaius slid into the seat.

  As his friends joined him, the Castellan crouched down once more. Though this time, it kept its hand on its sword, presumably to maintain whatever skill was protecting them from the arcane mana.

  “First, an answer to your earlier question, my lord,” the Castallain said. “Your blood. There are biological markers present in all beings, but over significant spans of time they are…unsuitable for determining House lineage. Sympathetic resonance is far more important. Blood calls to blood; one of the sympathies that has resonated within mana since long before the system arrived on this plane. It is an unbreakable bond that can be felt, with the right capabilities. Unterstern was more than aware of this, and prepared…contingencies.”

  “Contingencies?” Kaius questioned.

  Rather than answer, the automaton gestured to Kaius’s sword.

  “Your blade is most fascinating. There were multiple different scripts involved in its construction, and as simplistic as they are, the work is masterful. There is even a derivative of the sovereign star built into the binding. That above all proves your claim.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Excuse me?” Kaius replied. What was that — and how did it relate to what the automaton was saying about his blood?

  When the Castellan responded, Kaius could have sworn he heard a hint of delight in its otherwise even voice.

  “The greatest achievement of the House of Creation, and the very same mechanism through which I recognised you. It is a lordship, and a divine right to rule, built into my very marrow — into all critical infrastructure that Unterstern had its personal, unminded, unmonitored hands in creating and designing. No one else had the knowledge, or the mastery, to find its far-flung presence in their works.”

  The Castellan paused, giving Kaius just enough time to reel at its words. Had it just bloody implied that his family had created it?

  “If you are the last, has this treason been discovered?” the Castellan asked, uncaring of his shock. “I will do my best to shield you, should the Emperor or his agents be in pursuit of you. But we must act swiftly.”

  Was the Castellan defective? It was possible with its age. How could it not know that the Empire was destroyed and fallen, and its Emperor was dead?

  Hells, this very facility was full of the signs of destruction — men slaughtered in their beds and cut down as they tried to flee. He shared an awkward look with his team.

  “It might be damaged?” Kenva suggested.

  “Does it matter?” Ianmus replied, eyes shining. “Think of this opportunity! So much of the Empire has been lost. We know barely their scraps, despite the marvels they produced. There had been so little writing discovered. So little history. We can’t let this opportunity escape. From the sounds of it, Kaius has access to everything.”

  Kaius paused. Of course this went beyond his family and his history. Of course that was his priority, but there was so much they could learn.

  Still, if the Castellan was truly in the dark, he might as well enlighten the automaton.

  “The Empire is gone. It collapsed thousands of years ago. Unfortunately, the history of my family is entirely unknown to me. We suffered an attack when I was a child. My father and I were the only survivors, until he too was slain by follow-up pursuit only a year or so ago. You can assume that we know nothing — not of Unterstern, the Empire, or anything else. We’re hoping that you will be able to tell us more.”

  “Ah,” the Castellan said, pausing. “Aside from the basics, that will be rather difficult.”

  It turned, looking over its shoulder. Right at the glowing pool of the mana engine that lay at the centre of the contained dome.

  “Apologies, Lord Unterstern. But you have already destroyed almost all of our accessible records.”

  What? That was impossible. They hadn’t seen so much as chalk on slate since entering the ruin. He would have remembered if they had somehow managed to destroy a library on their way through.

  Ignoring the choking sounds coming from Ianmus, Kaius followed the automaton’s stare.

  Focused on the pool, with its iridescent waters and the stacks of shattered crystal spires that were only just visible within it. Arcane mana gouted from it in great plumes—visible to the naked eye even without his mana sight. A virulent purple that eddied in great arcs. An expulsion from the damage to the mana core that he and Kenva had wrought.

  He could still see the crystal dust swirling within the water, catching the light as it moved in currents, shifting the flows of arcane with it. It almost looked like an aurora.

  “You mean the pool?” he didn’t understand — what did stacked crystals have to do with stored knowledge? “I thought that was the mana core.”

  The Castellan turned back and gave him a single, almost imperceptible shake of its head.

  “No, my lord. The reactor is nearly a league below us. This facility was a testing site for an experimental engine. It could be isolated to an extreme, at the cost of siphoning mana from the surrounding atmospheric region, and the death of simplistic life in the immediate vicinity.”

  It pointed a single bronze finger at the pool, burning eyes fixing him in place.

  “Those were stacks of carefully grown and aligned thracia crystals. They were used to house data. This was a mainframe that was stabilised and powered by the reactor’s exhaust. It was a genius piece of engineering — making use of a waste product that would otherwise need to be carefully vented.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Kaius watched Ianmus pale to the point that he looked a half-step from death.

  “What the fuck does that even mean?” Porkchop asked.

  “It was a library the size of a city, and you just razed it to the ground.”

  Kaius could almost physically feel the disappointment radiating from the automaton.

  He could only gape at the creature as a yawning horror crawled up the back of his neck. He didn’t know what magic it had wrought to store the information as such, but if the loss was on the scale it mentioned, it was an unfathomable and unatonable crime.

  “No,” Ianmus whispered, despair evident in his voice, “We didn’t—”

  Kaius couldn’t blame the man.

  “We were fools,” he said.

  “Just a group of barbarians smashing what we didn’t understand,” Kenva agreed.

  Porkchop grunted. He, of all of them, seemed least affected by the destruction, but even he was plainly uncomfortable with the outcomes of their actions.

  “How does that even work?” Porkchop questioned, “It was simple crystal.”

  The automaton fixed Kaius with a stare, metallic notes of its voice equally curious as they were disappointed.

  “My lord, if the Empire has truly fallen, and it has been as long as you say, is the degradation so severe that even common knowledge of data storage has been lost?”

  Kaius groaned. Did it really have to rub it in?

  “Yes. Everything is gone. The destruction of the Empire was total — and followed by a dark age that lasted for multiple millennia, and stretched across the entire continent. The dwarves might have saved some fragment — they are the only other place I know with some semblance of automata and the mechanical marvels I have seen within this facility — but even they are reduced.”

  The Castellan said nothing, merely digesting his words.

  Kaius sighed. If they had not been so foolish as to break those crystalline towers, all of that might have been reversed. God’s bloody dammit.

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