The last time the Imperium had called for a full court attendance was over two hundred years ago.

The end of the Silver Era and the beginning of the Ceramic had marked some grand finale of the Imperium's old age, with nearly every noble across the Ensolian Belt in attendance in Capital for an entire month's worth of ceremony, restructuring, and debate. A national bedrock laid to last for the next hundred years (and, in typical bureaucratic fashion, still going strong two hundred later) through vast bureaucratic votes, debates in the Silver Chamber, and even one singular popular vote amongst the entire nation for a restructuring of the Silver Charter.

And never again was it called: not for any Emperor's coronation, not for the millennial anniversary of the Imperium, and not even when they went to war against the Axial continent.

Because how awfully inconvenient it was to have your nation come to a standstill for the silliness of tradition.

But this wasn't the Imperium, it wasn't Sophia's home where tradition could be somewhat dispensed for the sake of bureaucratic efficiency. This was a Dominion older than the Belt's written history, whose bedrock were laid in literal stone before even the first village in the Capital Valley decided to trade out their spare stores of corn for wool.

And so the Court was here.

Every court.

From the Magistrates, whose hundreds of numbers were chosen by the minor nobles of their respective states for seats in the Lower Court; to these Sages of the High Court, whose authority extended across both province and principle, ruling not just over the land but the law that bound it.

Courtiers in-between them all, staff and players from across Tianci's tracts of land; minor nobility to even the most lauded Generals of their military.

Packed into the Palatial Temple's throne room.

Hundreds, or perhaps a thousand of them, faceless like some vast crowd come to watch the return of a simple crown prince and his wife taken from that far off land beyond the Wailing Fang.

Forced here under the suffocating hands of tradition around their necks.

Forced here, in this vast temple to watch them return.

Forced into a throne room built for reverence.

Columns the size of towers rise like petrified trees, carved from dark stone that consumes the light. Each inscribed from base to canopy in some ancient Tiancin dialect—prayers, battle hymns, and divine judgments etched in deep grooves that could swallow an outstretched hand. Each line winding like vines, vanishing into the shadows of a ceiling too distant to see.

These walls are a cathedral of war. Murals climb the stone like ivy on a mausoleum, layered in gold leaf and abyssal metal: legions of soldiers in armor march against ancient golems with splayed, inhuman limbs; dragons bleed gravity fire into the sky; gunmen fire cannon upward into the clouds, aiming at the trails of descending gods.

Actions swelling and spiraling in chaos, gods and mortals bleeding into each other, bodies torn apart in acts of holy sacrifice and unholy retaliation. There are no banners. No flowers. No color beyond black, gold, and blood.

And through the center a single carpet runs like a gushing wound—crimson aged to a dry rust. Cutting a line through the congregation, straight from the gilded doors to the throne itself: a monolith of steel-veined obsidian, perched atop a hundred ascending steps, so steep and sheer that no mortal should ever reach it.

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They do not whisper.

They do not shift.

Their gazes are fixed forward, unreadable masks of judgment drawn across flesh. From the lowest petty adjunct to the highest Sage, they have gathered not for ceremony, but for witness.

Tradition demands it.

Fear ensures it.

An outsider walks through this tomb.

She holds the blood of the belt, beyond these cursed lands and that kingdom of upstarts. She has the eyes of a cloudless sky, her hair the color of a vast field of gold; her body supple along the ribs, spare fat stored on her thin hips—a body untouched by the scars of starvation and warfare.

She wears their clothing.

The silken dress, the cotton fitting, the gold inlays are from this place; the hair piece taken from the vaults of the Temple, the ring of arcanite mined from the very land they stand upon.

And she wears it all like it's hers.

But they know what she is, what this monster represents.

These were the people of the aerostatic and ceramic, those who had broken the Divine Covenant like some child's promise.

These were the people who had mined the corpse of their god for the holy metal, who had used their science to perfect their warfare. The people who took to the skies aboard those aerostatics, and brought fire to the world as the ancient ones once did.

These people, these tenuous allies had won the war against the Axial Powers, their aerostatics razing Kotimaä, the City of Glass, into ashes.

And now, in this new world, nobody shall dare stand against them.

Not even the Dominion.

A Dominion that has been there when their empire was but a rabble of shepherds. A Dominion that will persist long after that stone castle on immortal hill will be ground to dust.

A Dominion that now stares up at the skies, the place where once the gods came with their fire; and now see the shape of those aerostatics treading across the horizon.

And fears them.

How dare this child of that 'Imperium' come here.

How dare these heretics, breakers of the Divine Covenant come here to take our Dominion.

How dare they.

There's rage, anger—jealousy mixing in an incendiary bomb about to explode.

Choked into submission by her.

The way she moves is with perfect, inhuman control—not a single motion wasted in perfect efficiency. Like a ghost gliding through this holy chamber, not a single footfall betrays that demon—only a shadow, and that Crown Prince two paces behind her.

She keeps that gaze forward, her body held by a clinical, precise posture. A doll made far too human-like, that form falling into a valley of uncanniness, of inhumanity.

They feel the sweat drip from their necks, the ragged breathes in their lungs as her presence carries with her a chill like glacial ice passing through this chamber.

No one dares to even glance at this thing.

Because she carries with her the blood of something worse than death, something primordial in some human form barely able to contain it.

She brings the fire. The slums, the streets; the nascent neural network of Landfall quietly whispers. The fire.

And each row, from the lowest of ministers ranked at the back of the Throne Room to the sages at the very foot of their Lord, feels her pass by like an angel of death across their doorstep.

Until she stops. Exactly seven meters from the first step towards the Throne.

And they wait.

Wait for her to prostrate before the Lord of the Dominion, wait for her to bow before the monster that all Tianci have feared for his rule.

They all wait for this Demon to submit to the power of this most holy place, to come before them all as another pawn in this vast, deadly political game.

But there is no game.

There is no power left in this hollow mausoleum.

There is only her, and that Lord who sits on the Holy Throne.

Sophia Elise the Eighth does not bow.

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