NOVEL NEXT 141 - Angelina Grace Prima Marca Omnio
The most powerful weapons of the Omnio Empire were the Gemstone Pangraphs.
"Pangraphs" was a misnomer. But the first tools of their kind had been lead styluses, quill pens, and clay-forming rods, and the name had stuck .
They weren't universally writing implements. They were a way of translating the fundamental nature of the world, all its quirks and foibles and miracles and majesties, into words. Numbers, if one was so inclined, but Angelina Grace Prima Marca Omnio preferred words.
Numbers could lie, be made to hide things, turned into statistics and deceptions. Words were always lies, but they were prettier.
And with all stories and lies, they could be warped and twisted to take other forms.
Every child in the Imperial Capital, the vast majority of them a distant but largely insignificant relation of the Omnios, was technically entitled to use magic. The most skilled of them were taught of the Gemstone Imperial Interface, which was what they called the "tamed" form of the Gemstone Pangraphs. A magical communication and information network strictly under the control of the Omnio, managed by the Emperor's servants from the Imperial Palace.
This wasn't true. They only had theories on where the information in the pangraphs came from, but it was always accurate. And in the hands of someone who knew the truth, like Angelina, they could be far more detailed than what the general populace believed.
Which was why it was so dangerous to have one in the hands of someone who wasn't instructed on what they "could" do from the very moment they were born.
But that was a matter for later.
It was a horribly typical day. Her father was offering audience, and the usual band of noble petitioners came before them to beg for Imperial sanction for their own pet projects, extra funding for ventures too risky for their own coffers. She was to sit at the side with her two sisters, ostensibly to learn and prepare for the day she would one day ascend to the throne, practically just for appearances.
"Words and numbers can both spin lies. Words are prettier."
She wrote this in her Gemstone Notebook, one of the Gemstone Pangraphs. It looked good to seem to be paying attention to the petitioners. This one was a well-meaning idiot who wanted funding for a street sweeping operation. Then, with a flick, the ink faded, whisked away into the deep invisible memory of the Notebook, in the facets and nuances of its Gem, to be retrieved if she so wished.
Each Dungeon spawned exactly one Pangraph, in the First Tier, and they didn't regenerate as the Dungeons slowly rebuilt themselves.
The Gemstone Pangraphs bound themselves to a user until death. Their ancestors had tested this extensively in grisly fashion and developed a method to handle the things without binding to them. Far cleaner for the Stirpstredecim to collect them as they spawned and allocate them based on merit to those who advanced sufficiently through the Omnio bureaucracy, so they could better manage the vast empire, unknowing and unaware of the true nature of the tools they held.
Her father dismissed the petitioner with a smile and a nod, just warm enough to elicit hope and cold enough not to promise it. She'd seen him do this many times before, that expression of sympathy without promise. She wasn't any good at it herself, but she supposed that came with time. The Emperor, after all, was a living god — all-loving but not acting. His subjects had to work to reap the rewards of their own labors, but he loved them anyways.
The next petitioner stepped forward. This one had the pudginess of a desk worker, the teeming ambition of a lifetime bureaucrat. No doubt he would say something horrifically pedestrian that he imagined would be distinct and impactful enough to set him apart from his peers. He even had his own Gemstone Pangraph, which he referred to as he began his petition. Angelina groaned internally. He was citing statistics, no doubt pulled from his own daily labors.
The average bureaucrat was deathly incurious, after all. They would use their Gemstone Pangraphs to manage their purview and nothing more. Any who could unlock the potential of such a thing were noticed far earlier as magical prodigies, recruited by the Stirpstredecim, and adopted into the central family proper if they proved themselves.
She technically wasn't supposed to have a Gemstone Pangraph, but her father, the Emperor, had ordered her by Imperial Decree to clear a Dungeon at an age far to young for it. Her loyal men, who had put up with her bratty entitled childhood tantrums, had paid the ultimate price. And as a result, she'd obtained a tool that took most of her extended family until their mid-to-late thirties.
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So as a result, she was far ahead of her two sisters, and far, far ahead of all her first cousins, and so far ahead of her extended family that they weren't even in the same realm of possibility as her. All because she had access to a tool she wasn't supposed to, which let her see what others thought of her, her personal strength, whether she was growing or stagnating…
And then, when she'd made a pilgrimage to the Second Tier of the Omnio Dungeon, and touched the great Ancestral Gem of Worldsoul that sat at its lowest point… She saw even more. The aggregate status of her Sacred Guard, and the rough economic output of all the minor holdings she was technically the countess or duchess of, in far greater detail. In a way where she could influence, instead of just monitoring. She read how one of her holdings was due to flood, and so she turned away a rainstorm… somehow.
This was knowledge over everything. More, it was power over everything — but in a way that was unclear to her. She had no idea how the mechanism worked, had no idea how she was able to change the course of the wind and sky, but it was immense and indubitable power.
So why had she let Archmund Granavale take a Gemstone Pangraph instead of just killing him where he stood, as he'd asked her to just hours before?
The petitioner left, his points made, forever to stay ungranted. The afternoon stretched on with much the same tedium.
That evening, as she reclined in her room, meditating on her Gems, her thoughts kept drifting back to the matter of Archmund Granavale.
She'd underestimated him. Then overestimated him, which caused him to spend an unreasonable amount of time blaming himself for losing the lives of some peasants. (She didn't get what the big idea was. Life was cheap. It was a miracle he'd only lost two or three.) Now she wondered if she had been underestimating him all along.
The kind of person who could achieve a First Awakening in a night was rare, but not unheard of. Such a feat alone wouldn't justify making someone a prodigy and it certainly wouldn't suggest they could extract the deeper potential of a Gemstone Pangraph.
And yet her Gemstone Notebook, which was carefully attuned to let her understand people's attitudes towards her and any information about themselves they let leak out into the world — well, she'd never known it to be wrong. And it was telling her that her "frenemy" (she had no idea where that word had come from, and could only guess it was Archmund's current thoughts towards her) had achieved a Second Awakening.
In six months.
That was rare.
It wasn't unheard of, but it was the suggestion of a prodigy. The true test was whether they could achieve the Third Awakening in a reasonable amount of time, or whether they would meander spiritually for years until coming to truths about themselves.
"Frenemy." She didn't like that word at all. She would rather make have him as an ally.
But, she knew, the Gemstone Pangraphs also had the power to track down dissidents, if one knew how to look. There were countless ways to dodge their power, to make things murky, but the Empire was powerful enough to trial and execute anyone with the slightest hints of rank disloyalty. No, the way dissidents and the potentially disloyal survived was by amassing power of their own. The Arcane University, the Church of the Goddess, the Venato Merchants, and the Frontier Kings. All of them escaped the righteous justice of the Empire.
Archmund Granavale wasn't stupid. That was his finest point, and, Angelina feared, would one day pit them against each other.
He had started building a private force, doing so on the basis of merit and cultivating loyalty afterwards, instead of doing so purely on the basis of loyalty, of contemporaries. He had a strange wisdom beyond his years, a disdain towards the competition she'd been placed through, but not an aversion to it.
He would see the rot at the core of the Empire if he hadn't already, the rot that her father had fought so hard to cauterize. He was so sensitive to peasant lives. He had already started writing dissident literature in the guise of fictional stories, even if he claimed he was an idiot who didn't realize how seditious it looked, even if he'd immediately turned around and started writing fables about how super her father, Marcus Omnio the Tenth (MAR.IO if you abbreviated it carefully) was.
He wanted to liberate his maid.
There was a very real chance he would one day have to be put down like a mad dog. She could pass the duty on to someone else, but it was considered a mark of an imperial mentality to be able to put down one's old allies in the name of the Empire. If worst came to worse, and he became a serious threat, then it would have to be her, if she wished to stay on the path to being Empress.
But she had some leeway. No one was stupid enough to go around putting literal children to death (except when absolutely necessary), and she'd seen him turn down the power of the Dungeon, the urge of the restless dead to overthrow the world. People were rarely tempted twice.
But no matter what duty demanded of her… she didn't want to put him to death. For the first time in her life, she'd felt seen. Other nobles were at her throat, or sucking up to each other, but his attitude had barely changed after he'd learned who she was. He'd stayed as sarcastic and snappy as before, yet also sympathetic. It was as if he'd somehow experienced the same tedious achievement that she had, even in his bucolic pastoral county.
Maybe there was another way. Some way she could turn him off any ruinous paths, and keep him in service to herself and the Empire.
But that was for far later. There wasn't any real proof he would turn into a threat as bad as the Frontier Lords.
But that was a false reassurance. Angelina knew, sure as anything, that one day he would rise above his current status. He would turn against her, the Emperor, the Empire. She knew it in her bones, that there was a spark in his eyes and his soul that would drive him to overturn any unjust order of things.
So even as the Princess Prima Marca Omnio assessed him as a potential threat to the future Empire, a foe that she would one day have to unmake, Angelina Grace prayed to any gods that would hear her that her friend would grow stronger faster than he grew angry, so that if one day she had to face him in the field of battle, he would be strong enough to stand against her.