NOVEL NEXT 136 - Other People Have Fathers Too
"You're going to be going to the Academy within the decade," said the Emperor Marcus Omnio the Tenth. "Which means you'd best be able to take care of yourself."
Marcus Omnio X (often abbreviated as Mar10O) was his regnal name. When he'd ascended to the throne, he'd cast aside his birth name for the singular title of the Emperor.
Angelina wondered what her regnal name would be. Then she chastised herself for overconfidence, and tuned it back to a healthy level of confidence.
"With utmost respect, my esteemed and heavenly father, am I not the greatest of my generation? Do I not dwarf the powers of any of my peers? Could I not face a man ten times my size in single combat, and win?"
"When you stand atop the highest mountain, the loser's inclination is to look below at those who have yet to reach him. But the victor keeps his eyes turned ever-skyward."
Ah yes. This was just about what Angelina had heard every single day of her life. She'd honestly begun to despair that there could ever be anyone who had any hope of relating to her outside of her extended family, and she'd be playing ridiculous and different roles for the rest of her life, until she'd met Archmund, who seemed every bit as jaded and cynical as she did.
Archmund, who had thought much the same way.
"In recognition of your many achievements, I have a gift for you," the Emperor said. He pulled out an iron box from his pocket.
Angelina frowned. "What is it?"
"Activate it."
Angelina fed her magic into the box, and it bloomed into… well, it was still a box, but it was more recognizable as a vehicle.
"A miniature battletank?"
"Keep trying. Do you have your Interface?"
She grimaced. "I never let it out of my sight. As you taught me."
She opened her notebook, to view elaborate words written with her cadence but not by her hand, the benefit nature of her Gemstone notebook.
The Gemstone Battletank.
Exterior is made of Gemstone Refabricated Plates, composited from across the Empire.
Interior connections are forged of iron, worked cold to form Numen-conduits based on a design harvested from Intuwal Dungeon. Additional Iron Numen-Grate prevents personal overexertion due to hungry Gem, based on a design harvested from Grundhill Dungeon 2.
A spatial working is present; however, due to the limited reach of these techniques, it can only be used to shrink the Battletank when not in use. As the tank is used and becomes Attuned to a personal magic, this working will cease to function. It also won't work when someone is in it.
Within the Empire, the Battletank can draw upon the Gem Pylons erected along each of the major roads for rapid self-propulsion. Additionally, while closed, the rider will experience no harm from the outside world.
The implications were obvious to her.
"A perfect escape vehicle. A perfect murder weapon. Are you truly so worried about me going to school?" she asked curiously.
Her father chuckled. "No. No. That's where I met your mother, after all."
It was sort of cute. The Emperor was worried about her.
"Your childhood will end soon," the Emperor said. Personally, she thought she'd never had much of a childhood, compared to her far-distant cousins and the low-nobility, like Archmund Granavale, but she knew what he meant. "All too soon, you'll be on the cusp of adulthood, and so adult's tactics will become fair play. Poison. Humiliation. Extortion. Murder. All that could not touch Mercy Stirpstredecim will come for Angelina Grace Marca Prima. You are strong… but I can only hope you will truly be ready."
In another chamber within the Imperial City, still belonging to the royal family yet of a lesser branch—
"Father, do you think I have a chance at the throne?"
"No."
Kelvin Ash Navalnus Primus Omnio's father had always been blunt, and so the statement didn't hurt nearly as much as it once had.
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"Why, father?" Kelvin said. His blond hair was slicked back and regal, his eyes ever so slightly greener than all his cousins. "I am the fifth in the line of succession, and the first son."
The air grew tense. Kelvin stomped his foot, and a wall of dirt rose to block his father's spike of ice.
"Still of the Second Awakening," the Grand Admiral Navalnus Halcyon Caius Quartus Omnio said. "Angelina Grace Marca Prima, I'm told, is fast approaching her Fourth."
"You can't possibly know that," Kelvin snorted. Even within the royal family, the exact capabilities of each child were kept secret within the subbranches.
"The navy has spies everywhere," Navalnus said.
"And was it merely a matter of circumstances of birth?"
"Circumstances of birth, perhaps," Navalnus said. "She is, as you know, Jupiterian. While you, my son, are Cerean. Uniquely unqualified to hold either the Throne or the Admiralship, at least based on our current standards."
"It's not fair," Kelvin said. It wasn't a whine or a screed, but a simple statement of fact. He knew he was every bit as capable as Angelina or her sisters. But through an accident of birth, being born to one mother instead of another, he was on a cadet branch of the family, technically within the line of succession but with little hope of holding the ultimate power, and little hope of holding his "birthright". His own power was fundamental to the upholding of the Empire, as every bit as powerful as his cousin's command over heaven's thunder, but Cerean arts were most famous for maintaining vanity gardens.
The Omnio were nepotist, in that all truly crucial roles in the Emipre were reserved for the royal family. But within those crucial roles, they were meritocratic. The best family member was to hold the roles available.
"No, it is not fair," Navalnus agreed.
He returned to his paperwork. The imperial "Navy" was more than boats. It also governed airships and landships. All ships, really. When he was eight, Kelvin had snuck into his father's office and read a flyer on "Numenships", which he'd never heard heads or tails of since.
All of them were opposed to his Cerean nature.
Kelvin waited for his father to dismiss him.
The dismissal never came.
"What am I to do, father?"
"Have you come to me for a plan?"
This was a trap. This was always a trap. The Omnio didn't give their plans out. They imposed them from above, maliciously and subtly if necessary. No pawn was to be told that a plan even existed. Even asking for it was begging to be lied to.
"Just for advice, my esteemed lord father. What would I do, in your situation?"
Navalnus put down his pen.
"There are many territories in the Empire that, I hesitate to note, are under direct Omnio rule only nominally. We rule them as a matter of diplomacy. The nobles within swear fealty to us, and we have little cause to doubt that fealty. They are more than powerful enough to stop any peasant rebellion. They are far too weak to challenge the capital."
"I am more than aware, father," Kelvin said politely.
"With that in mind, a long-standing project of the family has been to bring the whole of the Empire firmly under our control, primarily through marriage-ties. The Imperial Capital was once almost a hundred counties and villages and parishes, each ruled by its own family, yet now have all been subsumed to a cadet branch of the Omnio. Yet those cadet branches have so little prestige that to them, marrying into a border county would be an upgrade."
"This too I am aware of."
He was starting to get annoyed with how his father always meandered before getting to the point. Men who did were invariably the most annoying men on earth.
"There are exceptions. Some counties lack clear lines of succession or even inheritance. The Crylaxan Plague has increased their number. If the current holders of this land were to die, the claims would be drawn before the genealogy courts, and the lands would fall under Omnio governance for a time, but eventually deliberation would determine a meaningful relation and allocate the land to the closest living relative. While a cadet line might be able to govern such lands for a period, that rule would, by nature, be temporary."
Kelvin loved his father, but he also hated him. Yet he knew he couldn't just tell the old man to get to the point.
"The Crylaxan Plague has cost noble families heirs and wives. If I were an enterprising young member of a branch family, I would find such a House with no meaningful living relations, whose holdings are suited to my talents. I would ingratiate myself with the current head of that House and make explicit my desire to be named his heir while he still breathed. And I would defend that title as the rock of my future. You are dismissed."
Kelvin Ash Navalnus Primus Omnio left his father's office, adrenaline pounding through his veins. And yet, rising beneath it, a foolish, impossible hope.
He'd always known he had no shot at being emperor, and had resigned himself to irrelevance. But there was another way.
He was a small fish in the vast ocean of the Omnio family, thousands of members strong, most too minor to mention. In two generations' time, if he didn't fight to keep the station he'd been born with, his children and childrens' children would be hundreds of places from succession, reduced to minor bureaucrats in the city, of Omnio blood but granted titles only as noble as "Duke of the 13th Avenue and 888th Street block, northwest quadrant."
But out there, in the wider empire, was opportunity. He could become landed while keeping the Omnio name. That was an opportunity afforded to few others, because marrying into the Omnio family was just vanity, qualifying your children for the lowest rungs of a vast bureaucracy. Those with true potential of their own didn't bother with marriage for a powerful name alone. Only fools would see the lowest Omnio hand as a true improvement in their stations.
But to be an Omnio, born with a high station (which dropped every moment he failed to achieve), yet with his own lands and holdings? His own industries and economics, capable of sustaining himself outside of the curated Omnio bureaucracy? That was away ahead of the game. That was a way out. He could have a family of his own, separated out from all the politicking of the Imperial Capital. Cultivate a secondary faction of Omnio, separate from the main branch.
Not in pursuit of rebellion, of course — that would be suicide. But building up a power base apart from the main bureaucracy, with its rules and biases? Setting up a place where he could grow into power, so he might genuinely be the best candidate for the next Omnio Emprex?
That suddenly seemed all the more possible.
Now, all he had to do was find a suitable demesne. A county would be suitable.
But a duchy? Even better.
Ideally, it'd have a Dungeon. Preferably a young one. One where the bindings were weak enough for a low-ranking Omnio Stirpstredecim to break and release its true power, and so grow a rival to the great Dungeons of the world.