Downfall ⟶ | SIMPLE |

“Bring Caelus to me,” he commanded.

No, that wasn't right. They had told him. He just hadn’t listened. He had been surrounded by a wall of perfection, built by sycophants and maintained by his own impatience for bad news. He had executed the last messenger who brought him news of a crop failure—not for the failure itself, but for the “defeatism” in the man’s voice. After that, the messengers learned to smile. The reports became green. The cracks grew deeper.

A lie, he realized. Because if everything was stable, why had no one told him about Caelus?

The Grand Chamberlain, a man whose spine was made of silk and ambition, bowed. “Your Radiance, the cupbearer was… replaced this morning. He failed to appear. We have a substitute.” Downfall

“Replaced?” Valerius set the cup down. The tink echoed again, louder this time. “I gave no such order.”

The Chamberlain’s smile thinned. “It was deemed prudent, Sire. Caelus was old. His hands shook. He spilled a drop yesterday on the ceremonial map.”

But Caelus could not be brought. He had been found in his quarters an hour before the tea ceremony, slumped over a half-written letter. His heart, worn out from a lifetime of perfect service, had simply stopped. “Bring Caelus to me,” he commanded

The defense grid, he then discovered, had been quietly decommissioning its outer sentry stations for twenty years. The reasoning was sound on paper: no external enemy had threatened Solaria for centuries. The real reason, buried in a private message cache he had to crack with his own emergency override, was that the sentries’ maintenance costs were being funneled into the construction of a new pleasure barge for the Admiralty.

Lukewarm.

Valerius felt something he hadn’t felt in forty years: a flicker of uncertainty. He had not noticed the spilled drop. He had not noticed Caelus’s shaking hands. What else had he not noticed? He just hadn’t listened

Today, it was lukewarm.

The final crack came not from without, but from within his own body. As he stood to confront his reflection in the dark glass of the throne room window, a hot lance of pain shot through his chest. The same pain that had killed Caelus. A worn-out heart.

And no one had told him.