Book I - The Precursors
The Tohotsi were the first civilization to exist within the universe. It is said they were born at the same moment as Time and Space themselves, or perhaps that they were the ones who created those concepts.
The question has never had an answer. No one was there before them to witness it.
But Existence is just. When it creates the white, the black is born at the same moment. This is the law of Balance, more fundamental than any other. Light exists only because shadow exists.
Matter and the Void. Life and death. Joy and sorrow.
So it goes, without exception, without end.
This is how the Frahusi came to be, an existence in every way opposed to the Tohotsi, their necessary counterpart in the Balance of Existence. Neither enemies nor allies. Simply the other side of the same reality.
Together, they shaped the world, true architects of Existence, creating Life and Death, for every concept must be balanced, each claiming their share of the universes according to a logic as ancient as Time itself.
But a fracture came.
The Tohotsi betrayed the Frahusi. They betrayed Existence itself. They created a concept without balance, the Qualia. They allowed the sub-civilizations they had engendered to rise, to transcend their original condition, to impose their will upon reality.
To what end?
The Tohotsi and the Frahusi being both absolute, war, life and death were not concepts applicable to them. It was therefore their creations that were charged with resolving this conflict in their place.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The arid wind blew hard across the Aiotla plains, shaking the Cagurts, carrying with it a red, dry dust that clung to the lips and burned the eyes. Hundreds of nomads ran in every direction, avoiding each other with the instinctive precision of people who had shared the same space for generations. Most wore horse tails of varying lengths, and all had that hurried air, that shared direction, that same gaze stretched toward a single point on the horizon.
Apollos was not running. He was walking.
The plain stretched before him, arid to the horizon, and yet a few hundred meters away, something refused to obey the ordinary laws of geography.
Space itself seemed distended around a precise point, as though reality had been stretched over the edges of a wound it could not close. The air vibrated there with a glow impossible to name, not quite light, not quite heat, something prior to those concepts, something that predated language.
And at the center of that distortion, a palace.
From a distance, it was magnificent. The walls appeared to be made of stone whose color shifted with the angle of the gaze, oscillating between an almost living white and a black so deep it absorbed the light around it.
The towers rose according to proportions that obeyed no known architectural calculation, too narrow at their base to support their own height, too perfect in their curves to have been built by ordinary hands. Arches connected the buildings without pillars, in pure defiance of gravity, and beneath some of them the air itself seemed to carry a different density, slightly too heavy, slightly too silent.
Apollos narrowed his eyes.
The image held, as long as you did not look at it too long. The moment he fixed on any specific point, the layering came apart, like a dream that tears the instant you try to hold it. Beneath the palace's perfect silhouette lay the real ruins, walls collapsed in on themselves, some reduced to simple lines of blackened stone barely breaking the surface, others still standing but hollowed out, their facades cracked from the ground to the cornices.
A dense, strange vegetation had reclaimed what the builders had left behind, its stalks of dark, nearly translucent blue climbing in trajectories that obeyed no natural tropism, coiling around the columns with an almost deliberate precision.
The distortion was not preserving the palace. It was projecting its memory.
The Emptum, Apollos thought, stopping at the edge of the distorted zone. But not like the others.
"Relic Apollos."
Officer Heral stepped up beside him, his copper armor creaking under the movement. He always chose his words with an economy few soldiers mastered, because he had learned, over years in Apollos's service, that every unnecessary detail risked triggering an hour of questions.
"Half the men have been positioned around the perimeter. The entire surface is secured. According to the elders, the distortion should open within moments."
Apollos did not turn around. He kept his arms crossed, his gaze fixed on that palace that was no longer quite there, on that memory of architecture the Emptum was projecting into their reality like a polite lie.
"This Emptum is an anomaly in itself," he said. "The age of the Emptum has been over for nearly twenty years. Not one had reappeared."
He paused.
"I find myself extremely curious about this one."
Heral said nothing. He did not need to. He knew that particular silence, that way Apollos had of speaking aloud what his mind was already methodically dismantling.
He had served this man for years, first under the Tribut chief, then directly beside him when circumstances had made that title irrelevant. Apollos was a Relic, which was enough, on their continent, to place him outside any ordinary hierarchy.
Heral pushed the thought away before it could take hold. Apollos hated it when people dwelled on that part of his history.
"Stop thinking about it, Heral." Apollos's voice was almost gentle, as though he had sensed it without turning. "It won't take as long as you fear. And then I'll give us Odyssey."
The conviction in those words had nothing of a boast about it. It was a settled certainty, as natural and irrefutable as the horizon before them.
Then the ground shook.
A single, massive impulse rose from the depths of the distortion and spread outward like a seismic wave, throwing up a wall of red dust that swept across the plain within seconds. The Cagurts in the distance twisted, some nearly tearing free of their stakes. The soldiers in copper armor held their ground but raised their forearms to shield their faces. Even Apollos took a step back under the force, blinking against the particles that stung his skin.
Then the palace materialized.
The illusion gave way all at once, as though reality had simply refused to sustain it any longer. What had presented itself to them as something perfect and intact was gone, and what the real world had done to this place over centuries appeared at last in all its brutality, without the distortion's filter to soften it.
Around Apollos, the men stiffened.
Emptums rarely released survivors intact. The vast majority of those trapped within them could not resist their own drives over time, their Qualia twisting progressively toward everything they had never dared to indulge, until nothing recognizable remained. Mutants. Beings whose Distortion had been corrupted not by the violence of the outside world, but by the interior violence of a mind left to itself for too long.
Spears rose. Copper shields pressed together. Heral placed his hand on his weapon's pommel without drawing it, eyes fixed on the ruins, waiting.
Everyone was waiting.
Silence fell over the zone. Not the ordinary silence of wind and dust. A silence with texture, with presence, the kind that always precedes something rather than follows it.
No mutant appeared. A long moment passed with nothing.
Then the door of the ruined palace swung open all at once, and what escaped it was neither light nor darkness, but both simultaneously.
Black and white flames burst from the opening with a low roar, scorching the ground for several meters in every direction, driving the men back an involuntary step. They did not burn the way ordinary fire burns. They consumed something else, something invisible, and the air around them rippled under a heat that had nothing to do with combustion.
A man walked out. The flames did not touch him.
Apollos did not need to make out his face to understand the essentials. His gait was enough, measured, disoriented, that of someone whose legs still remembered how to walk but whose eyes recognized nothing of what they saw.
The black and white flames were not coming from the palace. They were coming from him. They quieted as he advanced, folding back in on themselves like a breath growing calm, until all that remained behind him was a dense, nearly visible heat that made the air around his silhouette shimmer the way it does above a burning stone in midsummer.
He stopped a few meters from the ruins. He looked at the sky. He looked at the plain. He looked at the armed men who were looking back at him without lowering their spears.
His voice carried by the wind, when it came, was hoarse from a silence too long.
"So this is what the future looks like?"
Behind Apollos, the men had stopped breathing. Heral kept his hand on his weapon, eyes fixed on the stranger, waiting for an order that did not come.
Apollos did not move. He watched the man standing there a few tens of meters away, watched him look at the sky, look at the plain, look at the soldiers who did not know what to do with him. He took the time to see everything, with that same quiet attention he gave to anything that deserved to be understood before it was judged.
Then he uncrossed his arms.
"Interesting."