AS OF THE YEAR IS 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.

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  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 underfoot, 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. One such vessel drove forward, the lurching motion of the leviathan’s swimmerets supplemented by a pair of pristine, shell-whittled rotors. Its venerable hull bore its name in three symbols, reading Etsutensoku, a religious phrase meaning something that surpasses the base natural law. The waters boiled just beneath the waterline, cooling the enormous crustacean. 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 young 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.

  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 directly exerting psychokinetic force was an order of magnitude more difficult compared to tethering it with a thread first. 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.

  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.