AS OF THE YEAR 2,575,108,072,

  WE HAD CONQUERED SOL, OUR HOME,

  TRAVERSED THE STARS OF ORION,

  AND BROUGHT LIFE AND LIGHT,

  TO DESOLATE REALMS.

  THEREAFTER WE DID THE SAME,

  IN SCUTUM-CENTAURUS,

  SAGITTARIUS, NORMA,

  AND THE SPIRAL’S CENTRE.

  THE YEAR 4,023,478,007 HAS ARRIVED.

  WE HAVE TAMED THE BLACK SUN,

  AND WITH IT AS FURNACE WE HAVE IGNITED THE DIMENSIONAL LIGHTHOUSE,

  WHOSE SHINE OUTRACES LIGHT AND BURNS AWAY THE SHADOW,

  OF THE COLD END OF ALL THINGS,

  THE SHADOW OF ENTROPY,

  OF DEATH ITSELF.

  BY OUR OWN HANDS,

  WE HAVE FORSTALLED,

  THE DEATH OF THE WORLD,

  IN PERPETUITY.

  LOOK UPON OUR WORKS, YE MEEK, AND REJOICE.

  LOOK UPON OUR WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR.

  FOR WE ARE NOT OZYMANDIAS,

  AND WE WERE BORN TO INHERIT THE STARS.

  ONCE WE WERE BRIGHT AMID A MYRIAD DARK ONES,

  ONCE WE WERE SMALL AMID A MYRIAD VAST ONES,

  WE HAVE CROSSED OCEANS OF TIME TO ARRIVE HERE.

  SOL AETERNA

  Maroon waves roiled all around, stretching out unto the horizon, and a scarlet haze obfuscated all vision beyond a few hundred meters. Upon this Sea of Blood, only living ships built around and inside enormous beasts could sail; the scarlet waters below mercilessly corroded all that had not been born within them, and the beasts who dwelt in the deep would surface only to drag down and devour manmade vessels. Thus, the crafty men of ancient times had turned the leviathan beasts themselves into their vessels, grafting steel and machine to living carapace. One such vessel drove forward, the lurching motion of the leviathan’s swimmerets evened out by a pair of pristine, shell-whittled rotors. The beast-ship released enormous gusts of steam from its sides beneath the waterline, boiling the waters to cool itself. Its venerable hull bore its name in three symbols, reading Etsutensoku, a religious phrase meaning something that surpasses the base natural law. Dynasties could be built on the literal back of a single such creature, and part of this one’s cargo hold happened to be the temporary workshop of a nascent puppetmaster.

  In the vessel’s bowels, the puppetmaster jolted awake in his chair. A young man of nineteen, of a thin build, long fingers, and longer, bright red hair. Earrings of black stone, finger-length and half as thick, dangled from his ears, and his only garment was a bodysuit of the same color. He awoke not to a nightmare or the noise from the upper decks, but because he was suffocating.

  Instinctively, his addled mind moved to reach for the canister that he knew would save him, but, finding that it was nowhere in reach, he glanced about like a confused animal. Spotting the fist-sized cylinder on a table across the room, he attempted to exert telekinetic force over it, drawing on whatever scrap of willpower he could. Worse than his physical state, his mind was just as choked; he couldn’t attempt anything more than the most primitive of brute-force telekinesis even if he thought to try. He reached out, invisibly, and lifted the canister from its place, only to have the vessel tumble down from thin air and roll across the floor, coming to a rest even further than it had been previously. Barely halfway-conscious now, he made another attempt. Scarlet light flowed, like a waterfall, across the long bundles of his hair that draped down to the ground, and a flickering arm of the same light took form above his shoulder. It barely held itself together, thrumming and pulsating, twitching in place. Finally, as the urgency of not being able to breathe set his lungs afire, Zanma snapped to full lucidity through sheer force of adrenaline. The arm’s energy unravelled in a spiral and shot out as a thread, a mere touch of the canister sufficient to connect to it and drag it into his waiting hand.

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  A single thread; a psionic limb, a so-called “Vector,” reduced to the utmost extent, whittled down to the minimum functional form. That was a Thread. Moving an object by tethering it with a thread was an order of magnitude easier than doing so through direct, brute psychokinesis. Normally, this didn’t matter a great deal; on a day-to-day basis, Zanma would grab things directly through “Brute Telekinesis” without even thinking about it, but in his current state, even that much proved to be a herculean effort.

  The reason he couldn’t breathe was the same reason he had to exert himself to this extent just to grab that small canister of life-saving Locke’s Salt, the sole antidote to the predicament which he found himself in.

  He tried to pop it open, but his thumb wouldn’t move right; he had to force it on the edge of his workbench. The moment he brought it to his nostrils, a burning sensation flooded his sinuses and his mind blazed with renewed vigour. Through brute telekinetic force, he expelled from his mouth a perfect, pearlescent casting of his own throat and lungs. Gossamer, a single molecule thick, yet airtight and strong enough he knew he couldn’t tear it even if he tried. It emitted a faint glow, charged by contact with the salt’s psi-amplifying vapours.

  Hands shaking, he closed the canister. A searing heat coursed through his nose and into his skull as the whiff of Locke’s Salt stimulated his mind beyond the boundary of a seizure in any unevolved human. For him, it only caused his psionic energy to spill out; his long hair shone red and floated, and so did the various tools and knick-knacks littering the workbench. Seconds later, the salt wore off and the bout of psionic overflow ended, replaced instead by crushing fatigue.

  As quickly as he had awoken, the young man fell back to sleep, surrounded by piles of pearlescent-glazed armor plating and canisters of the poisonous ambrosia from whence it spawned.

  “Turrets to bear, fire at will! Connect power couplings to smasher cannons!” the Captain bellowed. Crewmen swarmed to-and-fro, while the Captain feverishly smeared a bluish gel onto the ends of interface cables before shoving them into slots on the side of his head. His eyes glazed over as he became one with his vessel and the enormous beast that was its heart. The vessel’s hull creaked and rigging pulled taut as ill-maintained machinery was pushed to its limits. The beast at the ship’s core lurched forward, causing the hull to tilt sharply to the right, gouts of reeking steam erupting from vents at the sides of the upper hull. Even if the ship couldn’t intercept or outrun the pirates, it could keep up with them in a straight line. The Captain braced himself against the g-force, the muscle of his bare chest rippling as he strained to control two bodies at once. He was an enormous man, eight feet of leather and iron, bald and bearded, his face etched deeply with the unnatural wrinkles of his profession, straight lines radiating out from his eyes as if the intensity of his gaze had carved itself into his skin. He wore no garments save for a pair of baggy trousers made from reflective, metallic enviro-suit fabric, bound down tightly at the calves and held up by a wide, armored belt that covered half of his stomach. Such a man, destined to be a figure of awe and respect among the mundane men of the land, was the Captain of a “mere” merchant-mariner ship, the fourth of his line.

  This vessel was ancient — on the order of at least half a millennium, considering its size — and yet, it didn’t bear many scars. It had been traveling a relatively peaceful route for most of its lifespan, and that showed in its lackluster arsenal. Eight Type-5 Particle Smasher cannons to a side, their barrels hexagonal rods of black, stone-like fabricator-stock, as wide as two men’s heads side to side and with an aperture wide enough to fit one man’s head inside it.

  “Unleash full broadside!” the Captain bellowed into a speaking-tube’s flared opening. Streaks of pearlescent light flared across the waves, tightly-packed clumps of light dispersing as they flew. They tore even through an errant wave as if it were not there; their passage simultaneously boiled the sea surface and scattered it into mist, tearing the wave asunder as if it wasn't even there.

  The cannons’ firepower was truly, remarkably impressive. Enough to scare off any wildlife and most pirates. The problem was that it had never been designed to fight a near-peer adversary. In short, the Captain — or more likely, the Captain’s grandfather — had not actually expected to face a real combat vessel.

  The cannons could smash the privateers’ sloop in a single salvo, but they had no chance of hitting them to begin with. Their enormous power output came at the cost of a subpar range, as was the flaw of all particle smashers, but these cannons’ dispersion rate was even worse than usual, meaning they had been tuned for as much output as possible at the cost of everything else. The conventional particle accelerators in the ship’s two turrets fared better, but even the occasional shot that would've struck home found itself ricocheting off the thin air, or entirely scattered into flickering motes of light altogether by the pirate vessel's dispersion field. In short, the merchant-mariner had no hope of killing the pirates, while the pirates could gradually wear away at him until he gave up to save his vessel’s life or until it became too damaged to continue evading them.

  The Captain wildly turned his vessel to-and-fro. He cared for his own life, that was true, for the lives of his men and his ship, but he cared just as much for the life within his hold and for the debt it represented.

  A child of no renown, born to no-one parents, in a no-where coastal town, chosen from among the many, handed over to the stewardship of the equally famous and enigmatic “Old Taisei” on the promise of a better life for the boy and a generous stipend for his family. The coast-dwellers knew well that children who went with Taisei’s representatives oft returned to their hometowns as fully-fledged puppetmasters, even if they rarely stayed. The Captain had hauled dozens like Zanma, packed into the hold tightly, not for lack of space but for their own safety, to that island shrouded in fog, to which few men alive save him knew the route. All this, to pay his debt, all this in payment for the reclusive master’s gesture of goodwill that had given birth to his family line, and for the dozen more gestures than had ensured its thriving over the centuries. In part, it was also to prove that he, like his father before him, had the strength to bear the weight, the wit and cunning and sheer bravado to evade pirates such as these.

  The decade since he had ferried the red-haired child to the old master’s island had passed like perhaps two years to him. Time passed quickly on the open sea, weeks and months melting into nutrient gel and stimulants diluted with the vital fluids of his vessel, those all-devouring waters rendered into ambrosia for the crew and the crew alone. Back then, a brat of nine-or-so, average by way of extremes, dripping with the desperate zeal suitable for orphans and half-mad noble scions. Today, the Captain wagered, the young man that boy had become was likely sleeping in his hold unperturbed by the battle raging above.

  This journey was his final payment. With this, he would undo the final yoke about his neck. The Captain knew, in his heart, that it would change little about his relationship with the boy’s former teacher, for the man was not one to gouge his debtors, nor was he one to change his treatment of people without serious reason, but that mattered not. With this, he and his line would be free to roam the seas, perhaps even to divest themselves of the Sea of Blood altogether, even if the Captain had grown to love this wretched place and its peoples.

  For that reason — for his own sake, for the sake of his sons and his crew, for the sake of the boy-become-man in his hold, and for the sake of that old puppetmaster who had entrusted the boy to the Captain, the Captain had to meet these scum with the kind of bite they had not prepared themselves for.

  However, it was quickly becoming obvious that the most he could hope to achieve was to keep them away from his vessel for a time. He had experienced just such a hunt many times, only, back then, he had been among the hunters, hefting a jet-javelin over his shoulder. There was no helping it. This time, he was the prey.