:04 PM | Upper Oreskios | June 5th | 1608 COVENANT

Once we approached the arcology, the tram line linked up with the ones originating in the other freeholds, then shot through a circular transposition gate straight to the far side of the docks where the civilian voidship port was located. Grey and dome-shaped with the landing pads lined up neatly against the water, it was pretty small compared to the military shipyards, only having space for a dozen craft to be docked at any one time. Hybrid trains were incredibly efficient nowadays, and since the war started, it was relatively uncommon to travel to the Empyrean except by aetherbridge - there were seven across the world now, so capitalizing the name was no longer appropriate - since traffic had dropped like a rock. Even most of the people I'd be seeing on the way to my flight would probably be indirectly associated with the military; secondary contractors, family members, that sort of affair.

Suffice it to say, the atmosphere of the place was not good, especially in light of the fact that it was one of the few public facilities shared by people living in the freeholds. The tram station, the terminus of the line, looked like the border of a demilitarized zone. Stony-faced armed guards in Dai League military uniform - black cloth tunic and skirt, red armbands, scarves and veils, grey leather pants, ornamental mail over over the waist and shoulders - patrolled in significant numbers, accompanied by a military golem resembling a headless metal elephant with a small tank on its back. Cameras, positioned high on the walls of the structure and the surrounding lamps and walls, darted about constantly, taking note of everyone who approached.

I don't mean to get, well, gendered about this, but when you are a relatively small person, it's difficult not to feel a spike of uneasy vulnerability when suddenly surrounded by extremely large, hard-looking men whose mannerisms indicate a clear willingness to shoot you and possibly everyone else in a 10-yard radius if anything even slightly abnormal should happen. I was a seasoned arcanist, so rationally, there was an extremely good chance I was the most dangerous person there. But that didn't make the atmosphere any more comfortable.

The platform led directly out into a shared plaza at the port exterior, but the actual entrances were segregated, with the queue for freehold citizens located at an altogether different part of the building. Though considerably shorter and less intrusive, even the process I had to go through was still pretty exhausting.

After standing in line under a stone alcove while a smaller, more humanoid, and friendlier golem (still armed with a rifle) watched us to make sure we didn't do anything funny, I came to the entryway checkpoint, whereupon I was directed by a sign to stand next to an artifice in the form of a seven-foot bronze sheet, which scanned me for active incantations, weapons, and other suspicious material. I then approached the booth and pressed my hand into a logic bridge, which should have been enough to verify my identity to the clerk at the desk, but they still insisted on seeing your physical documents on the off-chance you were using Biomancy to commit seed fraud. I rooted around in my bag until I found my passport, which had the scant embedded in it scanned by a machine inside the booth that I could only describe as resembling a glass toaster. And then the details were still checked manually.

"It says here you're a grafted arcanist," the clerk inevitably said, sounding like I'd inconvenienced her.

"Yes, that's correct," I replied quickly, trying to move things along.

"You're a citizen and a class eight..." she said, indicating the number dashes on my paperwork as if I needed to be informed, "so you won't need to be shadowed by a flier. But as a foreign resident, your resistances will still need to be shredded before you can enter the boarding area. Please report to the arcane office at the far left of the entry hall before proceeding."

After this, she didn't even wait for me to thank her before buzzing the door open. So I went, dragging my luggage behind me.

The 'entry hall' was comprised of the edge of one half of the dome, and was largely an unused liminal space save for a variety of security and logistical offices like the one I was visiting, and a single cafe near the entrance to the port proper. It had an uncomfortably cold and almost gothic feeling to it, with metallic archways criss-crossing the ceiling. I passed through it quickly, nervous about the possibility of being confronted by some official if my definition of 'proceeding' was too narrow relative to whatever regulations mandated.

The 'arcane office' was little more than a waiting area and a small chamber for the actual casting, and was so inconspicuous that I'd almost had a panic attack the first time I'd visited after moving to Deshur. There was only a single person manning the desk, and upon my arrival, they called for an arcanist - them presumably having multiple duties around the port rather than just this - and had me wait. Ten or so minutes later, they arrived: A young man in uniform with stubble and scruffy hair, wearing what looked like a silver headband.

A major development in use of the Power in the last 100 years had been the invention of artificial Indexes. Well, that wasn't strictly accurate - technically, what they were was an artificial link to an Index that replaced the process of grafting it to a pneuma, and allowed multiple people to make use of the same one simultaneously in lieu of them being 'consumed' in the latter half of Induction. If a traditional arcanist used their pneuma to give commands to the Power directly through their affixed Index, then an arcanist using this technology instead had it read their pneuma, then pass on the command, thereby acting as a sort of middleman. For this reason, the devices were called 'pneumaic command interpreters', or more casually just arcane interpreters. They most often took the form of headgear, usually circlets, like what this kid was wearing.

Arcane interpreters were, frankly, not anywhere near as good as having your own Index. There was a delay in relaying the commands by about a second, and because the connection they formed with the pneumaic index was more crude, instructions were often slightly misinterpreted. Plus, they didn't even solve the problem of having to go through the first stage of Induction, although circumstances surrounding that had also changed for, uh, other reasons.

There were two problems they did solve, however. The first was that they resolved the technical scarcity of Indexes, which despite their numbering at over a billion had caused a degree of restraint and politics in their distribution. The second - and the more important of the two - was that they made usage of the Power easier to control, and arcanists who took this approach less a unique class of person and more just wielders of a powerful weapon. If something could be confiscated or even disabled remotely, then granting it was considered far less dangerous.

So now, rank-and-file arcanists who didn't demonstrate enough talent to become masters or grandmasters were given them instead, and there were proportionally quite a lot more arcanists than there used to be as a result. Not exponentially so, but still a significant increase.

"Uh, may I see your passport and arcane writ, please?" The man said, after leaving me into the casting room. He seemed obviously quite young and inexperienced, coming across as awkward and inexperienced in his tone and mannerisms.

"Sure," I said. I still had my passport in-hand from earlier, and I fished out my arcanist paperwork from my bag.

He spent several moments squinted worriedly as both sets of parchment, muttering to himself as he processed the details. "...grandmaster... compromised mental..." After 30 seconds had passed, he gestured to a square rug in the middle of the room surrounded by a line of metallic runework. "Stand there, please."

I did so. He withdrew his scepter - a plain bronze rod - and moved to stand at a control panel on the other side of the room. He awkwardly spoke the initiating word, a rune activation command, and the terminating word.

This kid doesn't know how to do anything but active runework, I realized. He's probably barely been trained.

I guess that shouldn't be surprising if he's living outside the freeholds and hadn't been poached for the military at this point.

"Okay, we're done." A printer in the corner of the chamber spat out a sheet of parchment, which he signed and gave to me. "You can proceed into the boarding area."

"Thank you," I told him.

"Of course," he said. "Sorry to have kept you waiting."

He nodded at me, then lingered strangely for a moment, glancing towards the floor with a tight-lipped expression. Then, without raising his hands, he held up his forefinger and middle finger tightly together with his right, then grasped them with his left, before sharply pulling them apart and letting them rest at his sides. After this his face grew flushed, and without making eye contact, he walked away swiftly, heading back out the door.

It was over by the time I could even really intellectually process what had happened. I craned my head towards the exit, my mouth agape with confusion.

What the hell was that? Did he want to say something?

Was that some weird nervous tic? Sexual innuendo? What the hell...?

I felt completely baffled, but there wasn't time to hang around, and when I left the office, he was already long gone. I tried to put it out of my mind.

Need to get the fuck out of here. Literally everything possible is weird.

I headed back out into the entry hall, then to the gate into the center of the port. I queued, displayed my documents again to another clerk, and headed inside. This area was more impressive and somewhat less dreary, with much wider loop around the center of the dome and probably 40 or more shops, with 'shops' being the opportune word since luxury debt actually had a use here unlike in the freehold. Funnily, with the nightmare of how the economy was now structured, it would actually be kind of complicated for me to buy anything from these; there was a special food court for people from the freeholds to use instead, though I'd gone out of my way to eat a lot at breakfast so I wouldn't have to deal with any of this shit.

Still, this was one of the few commercial zones shared between both classes of the citizenry, which meant it had an atmosphere quite unlike most places, or at least quite unlike most that I was used to. Notably, it was one of the only places where I was exposed to contemporary Grand Alliance propaganda. As the state-controlled parts of society had become more and more weird,the media ecosystem between it and the freeholds had slowly diverged entirely. Within the latter, you could be forgiven for thinking the Perpetual Peace had never ended - the war was barely discussed in the mainstream except as a distant problem relating to an alien arm of society, and news tended to focus on gossip, technological advancement, and vapid human interest. Criticism of the status quo and of the government wasn't suppressed, and in fact was embraced within some circles. It just never seemed to go anywhere.

While within the state ecosystem... Well, you probably don't need me to paint you a picture.

Ostensibly, Idealism is an ideology predicated on rewarding traditional cultural behaviors and community activity - the preservation of the 'national ideal', hence the name - for its own sake, as a way to instill a sense of unified purpose in a largely post-work economy. The reductive way that's sometimes framed is that whoever salutes the hardest gets to live in the biggest house, but at its theoretical best in at least foster support structures that wouldn't exist under, say, Meritism.

But that's the theory. In practice (so long as it doesn't veer into Iconism, where the lunatics are running the asylum) it's a system predicated on making people really focused and upset about everything that isn't the 'national ideal', and therefore the government.

Until recently, this energy had been focused towards domestic groups. Sometimes this meant the easy targets like one would expect: Religious and sexual minorities, people who did not act in ways considered appropriate for their sex, fringe cultures like those from the Lower Planes-- Tolerance for all of these had waned over the course of the past century to the point that it often made me feel like screaming and jumping off a bridge, though unfortunately the proliferation of aerial medical response golems would make this surprisingly difficult. More complicatedly, often fervor was directed at other nations within the Grand Alliance, especially from and towards the Ysaran-Inotian core. One thing I'd never expected in my youth was the degree to which the Alliance could be so seemingly hated by its own political class, and yet somehow continue to exist with basically nothing changing.

But since the start of the war 20 years ago, things had pivoted to largely focus in a single direction.

I didn't touch a single logic bridge that I didn't have to, and so avoided the communal broadcasts that had to be running throughout the port. Yet I was still exposed to a torrent of posters and notices trying to recruit me, or else talking about the whole thing like it was some ongoing ballgame. Currently, there was a great deal of celebrating going on because the Inotian Armada - of which Oreskios had nominally become aligned with - had recaptured some place called Hetepi Base, a supply station built into a false star about 500 km from the Empyrean's border. Various figures were being exalted as heroes, including a bearded man named Syrikos of Baranta who seemed to be on the cover of every newspaper I saw as I passed by, described as having 'executed the breach', whatever the hell that meant.

At the busiest area near the ticketing desk, there was even a broadcast being delivered by hologram which I had no choice but to see. It featured a stern looking admiral talking to a reporter about what a spectacular victory this has been, and how it surely represented the first step in a grand offensive that would see the colonies 'liberated' and eventually lead to bringing the fight to the enemy's homeland. This then transitioned, over the course of getting my boarding pass, into essentially a hype-piece for a new type of distortion cannon that had apparently been instrumental in the destruction of the enemy base. The word 'penetration' was used frequently enough that it was difficult not to feel like I was listening to an ad for a sexual stimulant.Royal Road's content has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It was all such bullshit. It was an open secret that we'd been at best in a stalemate with the Triumvirate for the past decade, and that was only by virtue of the fact that the front had been pushed right to the space around the Mimikos itself where we could hit their fleets from the surface if they overextended. A situation where your own homeland had to set up arcane barriers around every major settlement in the world to prevent them from being leveled by stray fire was not one where you should be talking about 'bringing the fight' anywhere.

The rulers of the Grand Alliance just couldn't accept it. That they'd been beaten, quite unceremoniously, by a bunch of rebels and, as they'd once been eager to term them, the 'fringe parties' with populations a fraction of their own. That the government which claimed rulership over all humanity barely had rulership over itself.

If I lived in the Triumvirate - gods, if only - I'd probably find the whole situation hilarious. As it was, it was just a mix of surreal and bleak.

Even though I'd been kept waiting, I ended up having about 30 minutes to spare. I immersed myself in a drama on my logic bridge, and tried to forget where I was until it was time for my flight. Even aside from all the stuff I'd just talked about, the whole dome was seeing strangely little traffic - it seemed like it dropped with every visit - and the overall atmosphere felt uneasy. There weren't as many, but there were still guards in here, too, and a lot of cameras. Plus subtle little things like half the people I saw being in some kind of uniform...

Again, I couldn't wait to get out of this place.

Soon enough, I was called up, scanned one last time, and finally permitted to board the voidship, stepping outdoors and climbing the stone steps up the dock and the open doors with a group of maybe 80 other people. Other than stylistic changes over the course of the past two centuries, the interior of a passenger voidship was basically indiscernible from how airships had been, with the same layout of a decorated central hall and individual compartments for seating, though they were usually significantly larger and sometimes had four or even six rows of rooms instead of just two. Military ships were apparently an altogether different story, though I couldn't speak from experience.

The exterior, in contrast, couldn't have looked more different. As Viraak had become an increasingly central member of the Grand Alliance - almost edging out Inotia as one of the two key members in the present day - and society had grown more comfortable with reverse-engineering technology used by the Wyrm in the Greater Interplanar War, Biomancy, and especially Biomancy-informed engineering,had risen to a state of greater and greater prominence. Modern ships tended to have partially grown exteriors that were often strikingly beautiful, sometimes almost resembling strange trees set on their sides, the engines and wings curving out from the trunk like roots and branches. Organic to the point of feeling deeply futuristic to someone like me.

But all of that was just aesthetics. In terms of actual functionality, the Grand Alliance was conservatively 50 years behind the Triumvirate when it came to this sort of technology, probably closer to 100. Their civilization had grown up in the Empyrean, which was even reflected in their name; 'Triumvirate' and previously 'Duumvirate' were just labels Inotian scholars had given them long ago, with the direct translation from the original Uan being something like 'Federation of the Free Peoples of the Outer Void'.

Compared to them, we were children playing in the shallow end of the pool. Our ships relied on currents of artificial stellar wind - 'voidways' - generated from massive facilities above the Mimikos to even approach the speed of their fastest vessels, and could easily be rendered immobile through the destruction of their sails. That made flights like this a little nerve-wracking for me, since even if they'd never done it so far, if they decided it was enough of a logistical advantage for them to set aside the humanitarian concerns and want to hit civilian travel (or more likely, if some idiot on our side wanted to do it first), chokepoints had practically been served to them on a silver platter.

Being at war - properly­ at war - really was awful, even if I knew I was better off than most. No matter what you did, you ran into the sense of fear and precarity it embodied over and over again. The sputters of violence during the revolution didn't even compare. I felt tremendously nostalgic for the days when the whole concept had felt confined to the realm of fiction and places impossibly distant across space and time.

But then, I felt tremendously nostalgic for quite a lot of things.

Though I sincerely did believe it would be better to get away from this place at all costs in the short term, in truth, Sukunoro had been right. There was ultimately no running from the state of the world, and increasingly I felt in a state of abject despair about the future. I honestly did expect to die in some bombing or equivalent event sooner or later, if not as a result of one of the many other social or technological crises facing the Remaining World.

But if I'm being honest, I'd lost the ability to rationally evaluate the state of things a long time ago. At some point - I couldn't say when - my mind had begun to conflate the decay I saw in the world around me with the decay I felt within myself. Things becoming colder and more twisted just felt like the natural order. Everything collapsed into nonsense.

Did that mean many things weren't obviously, quantifiably bad? Of course not.

But at the same, even if they weren't, I wondered if it would matter, or I'd just have found some other path to feeling the same way. Maybe this was just what it was like to grow old.

Or maybe it was something much more specific to myself.

I found my compartment, which fortunately it seemed I would have to myself. I opened the wooden door, then locked it behind me. I positioned myself as comfortably as possible on the black plush seating, before leaning my head against the glass, trying not to think about anything.

Then, despite the fact I wasn't particularly tired, I somehow drifted off to sleep.