Loric Tiberian stood before the expanse of his office window, looking down upon the perfect, sterile geometry of Aethelburg. The reports scrolled on a column of light beside him, data streams from the fringe worlds that spoke of panic. The Conceptual Bleed, the psychic wound left by the collapse of ‘Perfection’, was spreading. Where its influence touched, stable realities began to fray, and the citizens of the Mandate were afraid. Loric felt nothing of their fear. He felt only the cold, clean logic of opportunity. This chaos was not a crisis; it was an instrument.
He turned from the window and the data column dissolved. He walked to his desk, a seamless slab of white alloy, and picked up a thin data-slate. The file on Corian Severus. He had reviewed it a hundred times. He scrolled past the academic history, the psychological profiles, to the technical schematics of the heretic’s tools. One image held his attention: a diagram of a crude navigational device. A compass with only two markings: a perfect circle for Order and a jagged, chaotic scribble for its opposite. Loric’s lip curled in a flicker of distaste. To reduce the magnificent, structured reality of the Canon to one half of a child’s drawing was not just heresy; it was an insult to the very nature of existence.
He set the slate down. The panic from the fringe was a resource. The fear was leverage. The chaos Severus so admired would be the very thing that built the walls of his own prison. It was time to address the Grand Council.
The chamber materialized around him as he stepped onto the central podium. Two hundred and fifty holographic booths shimmered into existence, lining the vast, circular walls. Each contained the form of an ambassador, a representative from a world held in the stable embrace of the Canon. The air was silent, filtered, and carried the faint, sharp scent of ozone from the high-energy projectors. It was the smell of controlled reality.
He let the silence build, a pressure of its own. He saw the tension in the ambassadors’ postures, the subtle flicker of their projections that betrayed the instability of their own homeworlds’ belief. They were ready to be led. They were desperate for an answer, for a return to the placid certainty they had always known.
— We are faced with a contagion, — Loric’s voice was calm, resonant, filling the immense space without effort. It was a voice engineered for authority. Behind him, a vast holographic map of the Mandate ignited, showing the stable worlds as points of cool blue light. Then, he allowed the data from the fringe to bleed into the display. Sickly green and violet stains began to appear, spreading like mold from the wound in space designated The Glass Abyss. — This is not a natural decay. This is a disease of the mind.
He let the image hang in the air, a visual representation of their fear. He saw ambassadors lean forward, their expressions grim. He had their complete attention.
— The heretic Corian Severus championed the cause of chaos. He claimed it was a creative force. You see before you the fruits of his creation. This is not a renaissance; it is a plague. A meme contagion, spreading from his unmapped, unsanctioned realities and infecting our own.
He gestured, and the map zoomed in on the sector containing The Glass Abyss. A single, erratic flight path was highlighted—the last known trajectory of the scout ship Vagrant. The path was a jagged, unpredictable scribble, an echo of the symbol on Severus’s crude compass.
— Every new map he charts is another carrier for the disease, — Loric continued, his tone hardening slightly. — Every new world born of doubt and moral ambiguity weakens the walls of our own. The Canon is not merely a political agreement; it is the operating system of our universe. And it is under attack.
He paused, letting the weight of the existential threat settle over them. He could feel their collective belief wavering, seeking a strong hand to steady it.
— The existing protocols are insufficient. We are treating a systemic infection with localized remedies. This requires a unified, absolute response. Therefore, I ask this council to grant the office of the First Consul emergency powers to act unilaterally in the containment of this conceptual plague.
A murmur went through the chamber. It was an unprecedented request. It would suspend the very consensus the Mandate was built upon. An ambassador from a fringe world, his hologram already wavering from the Bleed affecting his home system, flickered into focus.
— First Consul, this is a subversion of the Great Concord. To abandon consensus is to abandon the very principle of the Canon.
— The principle of the Canon is stability, — Loric countered, his voice like ice. — And consensus has become a luxury we can no longer afford. Your worlds are failing because you have allowed ambiguity to fester. I am offering you the cure. The price is your obedience.
He called for the vote. For a moment, there was hesitation. Then, one by one, the booths began to flash green. The fear of dissolution was greater than the love of process. The dissenting ambassador’s booth remained dark for a few seconds longer before it, too, flashed a reluctant green. His holographic form seemed to dim, as if the act of capitulation had cost him a measure of his own reality. The vote was unanimous. His authority was no longer derived from consensus; it was now absolute.
— The motion carries, — Loric stated, his expression unchanged. He had not won a debate; he had merely confirmed a foregone conclusion.
With a simple gesture, he dismissed the council and brought up a new display. It was the fleet telemetry map, a god’s-eye view of the entire sector. His new authority flowed through the system like a current.
— I am issuing a full interdiction of all sectors adjacent to The Glass Abyss. No vessel enters or leaves without my direct authorization. All known Unseen College nodes are to be classified as hostile targets. Concentrate all available assets on the last known vector of the vessel Vagrant.
On the vast map, lines of force began to appear, glowing red walls of projected military power. They formed a net, closing off the chaotic spaces where a heretic might run. He watched as the system cross-referenced flight paths, nebula densities, and the locations of rogue outposts. One by one, the predicted escape routes for Corian Severus turned from amber to red. Blocked. Contained.
A single icon, a chaotic scribble representing the Vagrant, pulsed alone in the center of the closing net. The system calculated its remaining options. The number dwindled. Ten. Five. Three. Then, zero.
A flicker of profound satisfaction, clean and cold as the space between stars, moved through Loric Tiberian. This was not cruelty. It was correction. It was the restoration of order, the pruning of a flawed branch to save the tree. The universe was settling back into its proper, predictable state.
He closed the session. The holographic chamber dissolved, leaving him alone once more in the sterile white of his office. The silence was perfect. It was the sound of absolute control.
Across the galaxy, on the bridges of a thousand warships, the order arrived. A wave of pure, unambiguous command propagated through the Mandate’s networks. Engines ignited. Formations shifted. The net, now a physical reality of ships and weapons and unwavering belief, began to draw tight.
Loric Tiberian stood again at his window, looking out at the city that was the pinnacle of his life’s work. The lights of Aethelburg were steady, unwavering, a testament to the power of a single, unified will.
The sky above was clear and utterly black, without a single stray star to mar its perfection.
The net had closed. The heretic had only ghosts to call.
