I Can Assimilate Everything

How did the betrayers and backstabbers within the vast Star Seas feel?

This question has plagued many since the first being looked at their friend's nice cave and thought…"I could probably convince a saber-toothed tiger that he lives there."

Or the middle manager who sabotaged their colleague for a promotion, only to discover the new position came with responsibilities they couldn't handle and a target painted on their back visible from orbit.

They got the corner office, certainly, but now they spend their nights staring at the ceiling, wondering if every whispered conversation is about them.

Or the romantic partner who left their devoted spouse for someone more exciting, more dangerous, more financially advantageous…only to lie awake beside their new conquest, remembering how their former partner used to bring them tea without being asked.

The new partner brings jewels, certainly, but jewels are cold comfort at three in the morning when guilt comes calling like an old friend you owe money.

There was a cosmic joke in betrayal: it always pays exactly what it promises, never a credit more!

The general who betrays their commander for power discovers that power means everyone wants to betray them in turn. The friend who sells secrets for wealth finds that wealth can't purchase a single person they can trust with their own secrets.

Existence has a twisted sense of humor about these things! It's as if existence itself keeps meticulous books, and the account labeled "Backstabbing Dividends" always, always comes with compounding interest in the currency of misery!

More often than not, none of these backstabbers have a good time. Their years are spent in constant guilt and pain, marinating in the special flavor of suffering that comes from knowing you authored your own tragedy.

—

Toward the center of Star Sea Alpha-9, where the influences of the Infinite Radiance Sovereignty and Void Dominion Empire met and mingled like oil refusing to mix with water, there existed a Plane of Existence that defied conventional categorization.

It was a prison, technically.

The kind built with bars of guilt and walls of consequence. Yet the prisoner within could likely break out and leave at any time…if leaving meant anything when you carried your cell with you in the form of memory that wouldn't fade.

The plane was filled with purple-pink clouds that moved with languid purpose, as if sadness itself had been given gaseous form and set adrift.

The colors shifted constantly, purple deepening to the shade of regret, pink lightening to the hue of chances forever lost.

Toward the very center of this melancholic paradise, seated on nothing because furniture seemed too much like comfort she didn't deserve, was a woman whose beauty transcended physical description.

She was unfathomably beautiful…the kind of beauty that made stars feel self-conscious about their luminosity.

Her eyes glimmered with waves of captured constellations, each one a memory of better times that now served only to illuminate her present darkness.

Her multicolored robe flowed around her form like painted water, shifting through spectrums that had no names because joy hadn't been present at their naming.

Behind her back spread butterfly wings of shining purple, with barely visible lines of platinum running through them like veins of corrupted purity.

There existed a myth that beautiful people had to always be happy, as if Existence wouldn't be cruel enough to wrap suffering in an attractive package.

Her gaze carried enough guilt to drown civilizations and enough sadness to make entropy itself suggest maybe things should slow down a bit.

She thought, as she always thought, of him.

The First Adrastia Emperor King.

The man who had loved her with the kind of dedication that reshaped reality around their connection. The man with whom she had borne a child that should have been the bridge between worlds but became instead the first crack in a foundation built on deception.

This was the woman at the root of the Fable of betrayal, the first domino that the Nar'Thyss had pushed all those years ago!

She had a name once, before she became a cautionary tale…Syl'thessara, the Weeping Constellation, the Forever Torn, the one who discovered that you could indeed have everything and nothing simultaneously!

While she wallowed in her perfectly appointed misery, an illusory purple-gold butterfly materialized above her without warning.

It gazed down with eyes that held all the warmth of absolute zero.

Her posture shifted instantly from dejected to attentive, though her expression remained carved from resignation. She nodded with the calmness of someone who had long ago accepted that surprise was something that happened to other people.

"What is it?" she asked, her voice carrying waves of beauty that had forgotten why it should care about being beautiful.

The illusory butterfly…Zar'nathaniel, spoke with the kind of bureaucratic indifference that made execution orders sound normal.

"We have sensed a Nexus Deviation Point," Zar'nathaniel announced, "but we do not know from which Star Sea it originates. Everyone has been put on high alert to wade through their assigned territories and observe for any discrepancy. If you find something... speak up."

Syl'thessara absorbed this information with the same enthusiasm she brought to everything these days…none whatsoever!

After a pause that conveyed exactly how much she cared about their concerns, she replied with cold precision.

"This Star Sea is more barren than most. There is nothing of true power here-"

"Just do what you are told, whore."

Zar'nathaniel's words cut through her sentence like a blade through silk. "You are permitted to leave this prison of your own Fables as part of your atonement."

The cruelty of the insult hung in the air after the illusory Nar'Thyss vanished, leaving her alone with the word echoing through dimensions.

Whore.

As if her betrayal had been about something as simple as desire. As if the complex manipulation that had destroyed the greatest love story in history could be reduced to such a crude term.

She was alone again. A betrayer without the comfort of believing in her betrayal.

A backstabber whose back had been thoroughly stabbed in return.

The Nar'Thyss had promised her power, importance, a role in the greatest Fable ever written. They had delivered exactly that…she was powerful, she was important, she was central to their narrative.

They had simply neglected to mention that her role was to be the eternal example of why betrayal was its own punishment.

Syl'thessara sat in her prison that wasn't a prison, in her paradise that was perfectly appointed hell, and continued the only activity available to her: remembering the exact moment when she had traded everything that mattered for everything that didn't.

Existence's ledger remained balanced, as it always did.

And somewhere in the vast Star Seas, unbeknownst to her, a distant child of that betrayal was preparing to rewrite a great fucking deal!