Arkaenan's smile lingered, and it was the expression of a being who had traversed the deepest void and mastered the most esoteric secrets of the vast empyrean. There was a sense of majesty in every inch of his features, and Lucius couldn’t help but be magnetized by his expression. It held the gravitas of one who understood the intricate weave of vengeance, the pull it had on the soul, the way it could define and consume.

  Arkaenan, Lucius realized, understood his rage all too well.

  The Sovereign stepped forward in the same instant as the thought entered Lucius’ mind, his movements a graceful waltz of shadows and time. The chamber, even in its state of semi-ruin and on-going destruction, seemed to respond to his presence—the very air tensing as if in anticipation of the words that would come next.

  “You desire revenge, Lucius Argent,” Arkaenan began, his voice threading through the falling dust and the echoes of distant impacts. “A wish to turn your pain, and your rage, into weapons against those who have wronged you. But raw anger is a crude tool. It lacks... refinement, precision.” The ancient Methuselah’s expression shifted to one of empathy, and still his eyes never left Lucius’ own—entrapping him in the revelation of the crimson orbs.

  “I can offer you more.” Arkaenan stated with imperious authority, and absolute promise. “I can offer you power—the means to achieve your revenge with a breadth and depth that would make those who betrayed you quake at the encroachment of the very shadows they thought concealed them.”

  Lucius, impaled and broken, could only watch and listen with rapt attention as the Sovereign approached—seemingly unbothered by the continuing bombardment. Despite his agony, a spark of something fierce and desperate ignited within him at Arkaenan's words and he felt himself growing more interested in the ancient’s offer.

  “The power I speak of is ancient, born of the first darkness that caressed the universe," Arkaenan continued, his gaze holding Lucius in a thrall of morbid fascination. “It is the legacy of the Methuselah, the very essence of our being, and it can be yours."

  The ceiling groaned, another reminder of their limited time, of the precarious thread upon which Lucius' life balanced. The Sanctum, Lucius noticed, had simply stopped coming apart at the same rate. The why of it was… well, it didn’t matter. Something held, and that resilience allowed him time to consider Arkaenan's offer.

  Lucius' mind reeled when he did just that, and the offer laid before him seemed more overwhelming than the physical torment of his injuries. It was the chance to become a legend, and to possess power that could shake the pillars of the galaxy—it was a seductive promise, too; a dark gift wrapped in the allure of recompense. It seemed so perfect, and so terribly tempting… yet he had to know more. He had never been a man of impulse, and even at the edge of death, he had to know.

  “How?” he questioned in a rasping croak. “What will it cost?”

  Arkaenan studied him with an expression Lucius might charitably have identified as paternal interest, though the more cynical part of his mind whispered it to be a superior’s condescension. He paid no heed to that irritant of a whisper, however, and instead focused on listening to the Methuselah when he finally answered.

  “To exact revenge, and to truly become the nightmare that haunts shadows of those that betrayed you will require a sacrifice far greater than you've yet understood," Arkaenan elucidated in a voice like a silken thread in the heavy air. “For you to rise, Lucius Argent; I must embrace the end I've long eluded, and succumb to entropy at last. In my death, you shall find your genesis… but even that is only half of what must be done."

  Lucius felt a shock of surprise at the Sovereign’s admittance, and then abruptly froze, seized, and vomited blood. The sharp sting of his wounds and the cold embrace of encroaching death rolled over him in a wave of suddenness that felt almost clarifying for a moment, and Lucius looked back up at Arkaenan with a mixture of desperation and—to his shame—fear. "I’m dying," he gasped, each word a struggle against the tide of darkness that threatened to pull him under. "What use is your offer if death claims me before I can accept?"

  Arkaenan reclaimed Lucius’ eyes with a look that bordered on amusement, and a knowing gaze that seemed to pierce through the veil of mortality. In the Sovereign’s eyes, Lucius once more found a sense of calm—and the pain and struggles of his broken body again seemed like distant and unimportant details. Part of him railed against that idea, but he ignored it.

  His focus was solely on Arkaenan, and the ancient’s spoken words. “Oh, my child," the Methuselah said in a voice tinged with a condescension that was almost affectionate, “you lost the privilege of dying on your own terms the moment you set foot in this prison."

  Lucius’ eyebrows rose in confusion at the same time as his lips downturned into a bloodied frown, and his pain was momentarily forgotten in its entirety. “What do you mean?" he managed to rasp, his voice hoarse in his own ears.

  Arkaenan chuckled at his question, a sound that resonated with the power of ages, and hummed throughout the expanse of the ruined mausoleum. “This prison, this tomb of my making, is suffused with my essence. As long as you are within its walls, your life is mine to command. Death, for you, is now but a whim of my will, not an inevitability of your mortal coil."

  The revelation stunned Lucius into shocked silence.

  The concept that his life was now tethered to the whims of this ancient being was both terrifying and awe-inspiring, and some primal part of him was horrified by the implications of such power. It painted Arkaenan in a light far beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, and instead as a being for whom death was an idle fancy—not the all-consuming end it was for the rest of creation.

  Arkaenan continued while Lucius tried to resolve the information he’d gleaned within his own mind, and the Sovereign’s voice was a gentle but firm reminder of the vast gulf between them. “Even at the threshold of my long-awaited demise, Lucius Argent; my power is more than sufficient to stave off something as trivial as death. It is a mere trinket in the hands of one such as I, a plaything that can be ignored or embraced at my leisure."

  The casual way Arkaenan spoke of such power, as if holding sway over life and death were no more significant than choosing what to wear, hammered home the reality of the Methuselah's might. The ancient was a force beyond reckoning, a power that scoffed at the natural laws that governed all other beings, and defined the limitations of even the greatest of humanity’s Cultivators. He was a living, breathing counterpoint to every fundamental belief of inevitability that each sapient race clung to.

  “Perhaps this will ease your mind,” the Sovereign said curtly, and snapped two pallid fingers together. The moment he did, Lucius noticed a… shift. Everything seemed to slow. The collapsing ceiling, the rattling pillars, even the movement of dust and flakes within the air seemed to grind down to such a miniscule level of motion that it was almost still.

  “I have frozen us in a bubble of potentiality,” Arkaenan explained with the inflective disconnection of someone speaking about the weather, or another equally mundane affair. “Now, you need to concern yourself with the animals hammering away at us so rudely.”

  Lucius' understanding of life, of power, of the very fabric of existence was being rewritten in Arkaenan’s pseudo-divine presence. Neither Time nor Death, it seemed, were the masters of all—and instead were but tools to the whims of the Methuselah before him. Lucius realized then that the offer he had been made was more than a mere exchange of power; it was an invitation to step into a realm where even death and time bowed before him.

  It was the chance to never need to fear anything, or anyone, ever again.

  “What… what is the other half, then?” Lucius asked with a determined wheeze.

  “You must swear a Blood Oath to me,” Arkaenan answered simply, “bound by its namesake.” the Sovereign leaned forward while he spoke, and when he continued there was a palpably greater intensity to his gaze and words, “and you must surrender your Aether Core.”

  Lucius listened, each word settling upon him like a blanket of consequence, and a chain forged of his own apprehensions. An Oath and the surrender of his Aether Core? He had to know more. He had to.

  “T-this oath, what does it entail?" he asked in barely more than a rasp.

  “It is a covenant of blood and spirit, older than the stars that watch our plight," Arkaenan responded patiently. “Through it you will inherit not just power, but purpose as well. You will become the instrument of our will, and the executor of our vengeance—as well as your own. You will travel to the Crimson Star by the Oath’s guidance and mandate, where you will Inherit my dominion.” Arkaenan’s voice gained a measure of zeal, and Lucius felt himself sinking into the ancient’s indomitable presence.

  “You will be granted all that which I have left for your smooth ascension as my anointed Heir, Lucius Argent, and you will adhere to the precepts that govern the Methuselan race—and perhaps, if you grow powerful enough, reforge them to suit a vision wholly your own.”

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  The gravity of the oath and its implications weighed heavily on Lucius while Arkaenan explained its details. It was a pledge that demanded not just his allegiance, which was a small price for his life, but also his very essence. There was something existentially terrifying about the mere existence of such a compulsion, especially when it could last through death.

  The sanctum rumbled around them, and Lucius swallowed anxiously..

  “And my Aether Core?" he inquired in a rasp, and with a sense of urgency knotting in his stomach.

  “Your Aether Core, as well as all of your Cultivation, must be relinquished," Arkaenan said in a tone as unyielding and forceful as a neutron star. “It is a remnant of your human limitations, and a tainted tether to a weaker existence. For you to ascend, to embrace the full magnitude of a nascent Methuselah’s power, it must be torn from you like cancer from its host.”

  The Sovereign gestured with his right hand while he spoke, and mimed plucking something from the air as casually as one might pick a grape before continuing.

  “In its place, I will bestow upon you a fragment of my essence—an Essence Seed. This new Core will grow within you, granting you powers beyond your current comprehension as you cultivate it, including the so-called ‘Vampiric Gifts’ that have defined the Methuselah since the dawn of time."

  Lucius grappled with the gravity of Arkaenan's words.

  The destruction of his Aether Core—the source of his power, and his identity as a Cultivator—was an act beyond reckoning. Yet, what was it worth in his current state, trapped at the bottom of a forgotten tomb, branded as a traitor by those he had served with fidelity and devotion, and left to die? The Methuselah’s offer remained the only recourse he had other than the acceptance of an ignoble death, which he had no doubt Arkaenan would grant instantly if he refused.

  He struggled to process the enormity of what was being asked of him despite that realization. He was being instructed that he would have to forsake his humanity, and become something else; something more, and yet also something subject to the unknown precepts of a race whose culture struck him as the incarnation of natural selection. Methuselah were the apex predators of the Galaxy—perhaps the Universe. That much was terrifyingly apparent.

  So what would it mean for him, as a newly born member of their ruthless species? Would he not be trading one grave for another, albeit in a different kind of forgotten star system?

  He felt a sigh of exhaustion leave him, and in Arkaenan’s eyes, he saw the truth.

  It simply didn’t matter. Perhaps it would mean death if he arrived at the Crimson Star and found Methuselah still living, but at least it’d be on his terms—not hunted as if he were little better than the societal detritus he’d once purged, forced down onto a frozen hellscape, and then trapped underground to die like a rat.

  Lucius felt his hesitation eroding steadily as he realized the inevitability of his choice, but still the soldier within him—the good man he’d once tried to be with every fiber of his being—found a final question clawing its way to the surface. “Why me?" he asked with the last dregs of hesitation and doubt. “Why didn't you break free from this prison? Why wait for millennia in isolation? What makes me so special?"

  Arkaenan regarded Lucius with an expression that spanned the divide between detachment and a strange, almost paternal approval for his residual resistance. “Eons ago, in the throes of a betrayal most profound, I foresaw your coming," he began, his voice a distant echo of ancient wisdom. "My entombment here was a ruse, you see. A most clever and impressively cruel ruse. This prison, crafted in the guise of a temple of worship, was believed by me to be a monument to my magnificence, and a tribute to the Methuselah by our supplicants.”

  Arkaenan laughed with what Lucius was surprised to identify as genuine mirth. “I am sure you saw the egregiously and painstakingly crafted tributes to my species filling every corridor and impressive hallway during your descent.”

  Lucius nodded his affirmation shallowly.

  “Alas,” Arkaenan continued with a sigh that held the weight of a dying star, “it was a trap, one laid not just by those who once worshiped us but also by Methuselah that feared my dominion. It is the nature of our people, after all: we destroy that which is a threat to us, even if it is our own sworn monarchs.” the ancient’s eyes narrowed when he said it, and he regarded Lucius with a look of searing intensity. “Remember that lesson well, my child. There is a not-insignificant chance you will meet those who originally betrayed me. It is very likely that they may yet tread upon the stars."

  Lucius could only nod again. The revelation was not wholly unexpected, even by his death-suspended mind, but it also made sense. An almost laughable echo of empathy extended from his heart toward the ancient Cultivator, and though the idea of him having common cause with such a godlike being was ludicrous at best, he couldn’t help but feel just such a kinship.

  For all that Arkaenan seemed resigned to the fate that had brought them to that moment, it was clear the Sovereign understood the cry for vengeance that had ignited within Lucius’ breast.

  When Arkaenan continued, Lucius found himself so absorbed in the elucidation that he forgot the pain suffusing his broken body.

  “I entertained the notion of breaking free, shattering these chains that bound me to this forsaken place. A vision granted to me by the Aether of a future that was to unfold, however, stayed my hand.” Arkaenan’s eyes flared with remembered power when he spoke, and Lucius felt a shiver of awe roll down his spine at the intensity of might in the ancient’s scarlet gaze. “The empyrean ocean spoke of your arrival, Lucius Argent. It promised me—in reward for my patience across the breadth and length of sixty long millennia—a being of potential and purpose crucial to the unfathomable designs of the Aether itself: You."

  The concept was almost too grand to grasp—a destiny written in the stars, a path foreseen by a being whose existence transcended time and space. “But why?" Lucius pressed, the question burning in his throat. “Why let the Methuselan Empire fall? Why allow the genocide of your own species?"

  Arkaenan's response was a whisper, a breeze that stirred the dust of ages. “For you to rise, the Methuselah had to fall. More than that, for the Methuselah to reach their truest potential, the lazy mockery of a species we had become had to be burnt away—much like how one might sear a forest to allow for new growth. That understanding was a seed of truth which I learned, and accepted, and gladly chose to let bloom.”

  The Sovereign seemed to speak with utter detachment of consigning his species, untold billions perhaps, to death and ruin on the heels of a simple vision. The level of power, of confidence, of sheer force of will to do so was something Lucius felt himself humbled by. He had struggled with the idea of passing judgment, sometimes, when he was still a Captain. The scale of what Arkaenan spoke of beggared his ability to imagine.

  “For you it may seem a paradox, I grant you.” the Sovereign said with a small, amused smile. “Especially given my demands, and my wish for you to restore what was lost—but that is the ephemeral nature of the Aetherial Sea. One need not always understand in order to accept," he finished a tone that bore an enigmatic finality.

  Lucius did not understand, still. The idea of surrendering to perceived fate that way, especially for a creature of such age and power as what Arkaenan possessed, bewildered him in a way that no words could describe. The Sovereign was as close to a god-made-flesh as Lucius was ever likely to meet, and yet he had simply given in? To a vision?

  Even if he had possessed a comprehension others didn’t, the idea of resolving the creature of will and power before him with the notion of surrender, world-weary and exhausted or not, was almost an impossibility.

  “I see you are confused.” Arkaenan said with an indulgent smile, and a flare of his eyes amidst the ominous rattling of the Sanctum. “I understand. There are currents in the cosmos, Lucius Argent, that flow beyond our comprehension, and patterns that weave through the fabric of existence itself. Some things are simply meant to be, guided by an unseen calculus that defies all attempts at more logical quantification. The Aetherial Sea is not a God, any more than I am. It is simply… more.”

  The kinetic bombardment had not stopped, and yet their location remained fixed in time.

  Arkaenan gestured around them, at the crumbling and collapsing cathedral, in idle indication. “The fall of the Methuselah, the rise of humanity, and now, the emergence of the Inheritor—it is all part of one pattern upon an infinite tapestry, and was merely the one that most appealed to me in my whimsy. There were countless other variations I may have chosen for the future, but this is the one that most appealed to me. It is that simple."

  Lucius, his mind grappling with the revelations and the weight of his imminent transformation, found another question surfacing from the depths of his newfound understanding. “Will I live forever?" he asked, his voice steady despite the chaos that surrounded them.

  Arkaenan's response was laced with a cryptic certainty. “In time, and with proper Cultivation, that is one of the many abilities you will gain access to," he said in a tone which suggested an infinite horizon of possibilities. “Methuselah grow their power through predation—through the consumption of the aetheric force of living things. You must consume this essence, either through slaughter or—and less efficiently—regular syphonings, and then nurture it within, allowing it to grow and expand your own capabilities."

  Lucius listened intently, and absorbed the gravity of what was required of him. “Your potential is boundless," Arkaenan continued, "but reaching the apex of your power requires a sacrifice of immense scale. Death will be your companion, and your instrument. It will make you a beacon of fear, hatred, and even envy across the Orion Arm—perhaps even the galaxy at large. But it is a path you must walk, if you are to fulfill your destiny as the Inheritor."

  The final doubts and worries that had clung to Lucius began to erode as Arkaenan spoke, and were largely washed away by the tide of acceptance. His concerns about the morality of his actions, and the implications of the power he was about to embrace, slowly faded into insignificance. He realized he had been ensnared by Arkaenan's machinations, in how he had come to be where he was; absent option or escape… and yet the energy to be upset, or to resist, had dissipated like smoke.

  Instead he dismissed the idea that he had been played, and clung to the idea he had been chosen. The idea of that, in and of itself a form of manifest destiny, was far more palatable than being the idle plaything of an ancient and vampiric Cultivator.

  Lucius smiled bloodily up at Arkaenan finally, with his eyes clear and resolute. No more hesitation. No more procrastination. No more subtle ways to extend what should have been accepted minutes prior. It was time. It was either take the devil’s deal, or surrender to the injustice of his enemies—and not a single part of him even entertained the notion of the former.

  Revenge would be his, no matter the price he had to pay.

  “I accept your offer," Lucius said with the utter resolve of a soldier accepting his final mission. “Not for any selfless or noble reason. I accept because I want to live. I accept because I refuse to die here, underground and forgotten, like a rat in a trap—and I accept, most of all, because I want to show them the true meaning of vengeance; and teach mankind the cost of betraying a loyal son."

  Arkaenan smiled, and his crimson eyes maintained their unblinking hold on Lucius’ own. When he spoke, his voice shook the world, and seemed to resonate down to Lucius' soul. “Then let us begin the Inheritance.”