I Can Assimilate Everything

He couldn't be.

Syl'thessara, the Betrayer, his own Ancestor, stared toward him in disbelief that made her perfect features crack like a masterpiece discovering it could feel pain.

Her constellation eyes cycled through emotions too complex for simple naming…shock, recognition, hope, despair, all bleeding into each other like watercolors in rain.

"You truly are..." she began, her voice barely a whisper across the void.

"The current Adrastia Emperor King?" Achilles finished for her, his stellar form maintaining perfect stillness that somehow conveyed more motion than any gesture could. "Yes. The Last. The Ninth. Though…that title grows increasingly inaccurate."

She drifted closer, not quite approaching but no longer maintaining safe distance.

"How? How did you know of me? How are you emanating waves of a…Nar'Thyss? You shouldn't be... this."

"Shouldn't be?" Achilles's voice carried edges that could have carved meaning into meaninglessness. "I've recently discovered that 'should' is just another narrative construct your masters impose on reality."

HUUM!

Silence stretched between them, weighted with millennia of unspoken history.

"I came here for many things," Achilles continued, his tone shifting to something colder, more clinical.

"But as I stand before you... I don't think you can give me anything. Syl'thessara. Great Grandmother. Great Ancestor?"

He paused, letting each title land like a stone in still water.

"If I were to ask you to explain yourself…why you did what you did, would that lead to anything? Allow us to gain anything? Or is your story already over and done, and you're simply leaving the rest of us the burden to pick up the pieces?"

…!

The words struck her with force that had nothing to do with physical impact. Her form…beautiful beyond description, tragic beyond comprehension, seemed to dim slightly, as if his questions had reminded her that she was more ghost than woman, more echo than voice.

Complex emotions played across her features in patterns that would have inspired poets if any had been present to witness them!

When she finally spoke, her voice carried the exhaustion of someone who had been waiting centuries for someone to ask these questions.

"You… want to understand," she said, not quite a question. "You want the story that no one has ever asked for, because asking would have required caring, and no one has cared about my side for so, so very long."

"I want the truth," Achilles corrected. "Whether I care about it remains to be determined."

She laughed…a sound like stars giving up.

"The truth. Such a simple word for such a complex thing." She gathered herself, her form solidifying as if preparing for confession required physical substance.

"I was… sent here to scout, originally. Young by Nar'Thyss standards, eager to prove myself useful to beings who saw everything as narrative potential."

Her gaze grew distant, looking past Achilles toward memories that existed in dimensions only she could access.

"I met him…the First Adrastia Emperor King. He was... magnificent. Not just in power, though that was considerable, but in purpose. He looked at Existence and saw not what it was but what it could become. And when he looked at me..."

She paused, her voice catching on emotions that should have eroded away centuries ago.

"He saw me. Not the scout, not the Nar'Thyss operative, not the tool. Me. And I fell in love with him with the kind of totality that rewrites your entire existence around a single point."

"And then?" Achilles prompted, his tone carefully neutral.

"And then I bore his child. Your ancestor, my son, the Second Emperor King." Pain flickered across her features like lightning through clouds. "When the Nar'Thyss found out, when they discovered their tool had become compromised..."

She shuddered, her perfect form rippling with remembered trauma.

"They didn't punish me directly. That would have been mercy. Instead, they wrote me into their narrative. Every choice I wanted to make became impossible. Every action I tried to take to help him, to warn him, to save him…my body wouldn't obey. I became a character in their story, and characters can only do what the plot demands."

Her voice grew quieter, more hollow.

"I led him to his doom. My own hands, my own words, my own betrayal…all of it scripted, all of it inevitable once they decided how the story would end. And afterward? They let me remember. Let me understand exactly what I had done. Let me live with it for millennia as entertainment, as a source of narrative anguish they could harvest whenever they grew bored."

She looked directly at Achilles then, her constellation eyes blazing with desperate need for understanding.

"I've been living this whole time as a monument to my own failure. Watching our lineage suffer, generation after generation, unable to help, unable to die, unable to do anything but exist as the Nar'Thyss's pet tragedy. If I could change things..."

"Oh," Achilles interrupted, his eyes flashing with sudden, terrible cold.

"So you were a victim. A poor girl in love, manipulated by forces beyond your control."

The sarcasm in his voice could have curdled starlight.

"Let me see about your touching story, Ancestor. When you first met him, knowing what you were, what you represented…you could have left. You could have reported failure, claimed the Star Seas were barren, protected him by staying away. You chose to stay."

She flinched, but he continued relentlessly.

"When you fell in love, you could have told him the truth. About the Nar'Thyss, about your nature, about the danger you represented. He was the First Adrastia Emperor King. He was grand. He had power! Yet…You chose silence."

His stellar form blazed brighter with each point.

"When you bore his child, you could have refused their commands. Yes, it would have meant your death, but death is just another choice. You chose survival over his life."

"You don't understand…" she began.

"When they scripted your betrayal," he cut through her protest, "you could have found ways to resist. Leave clues, partial warnings, anything that might have given him a chance. You chose complete compliance."

His voice dropped to barely above a whisper, somehow more devastating for its quietness.

"And in all the millennia since? You could have found ways to help our lineage secretly. Small interventions, anonymous assistance, anything. You chose to wallow in self-pity while watching us die, generation after generation."

Syl'thessara looked as if each word was a physical blow, her perfect form seeming to crack under the weight of truth delivered without mercy.

"Every point in your story where you claim helplessness was actually a choice," Achilles concluded. "You chose the narrative that kept you alive, kept you comfortable in your misery, kept you from having to risk anything. You chose to be their victim rather than our family."

The silence that followed was absolute, the kind that existed before creation or after ending.

Achilles sighed, the sound carrying exhaustion that had nothing to do with physical tiredness.

"No matter, Great Ancestor. Attack me."

She looked at him with shock that transcended her already shattered expression.

"What?"

"Attack me," he repeated, his stance shifting into something that suggested readiness despite his relaxed appearance.

"I wish to see how weak I am compared to someone like you. Someone who has had millennia to perfect their power while our lineage struggled to survive. Show me the strength you chose over family."

A sense of pain welled up in Syl'thessara's eyes…those beautiful, terrible eyes that had watched so much suffering and done nothing. The pain of hearing such words from her very own blood, delivered with the casual cruelty of someone who had moved past anger into something colder.

"You want me to..." she couldn't finish the sentence.

"Fight me, yes," Achilles confirmed. "Consider it educational. For both of us. You can learn what your abandoned lineage has become despite your absence. And I can learn whether the power you preserved by choosing survival was worth the price you made us all pay."

She floated there, the Mother of the Adrastia line, faced with a request that was really a judgment.

To fight him would be to acknowledge the truth of his words…that she had chosen power over family. To refuse would be to admit she couldn't even do that much for them.

"I... I can't," she whispered.

"Can't?" Achilles asked, his tone sharpening. "Or won't? Another choice, Ancestor. How refreshing to see you're consistent."

The words hung between them like a blade waiting to drop, while back in the Sea of Thalassara, two other Emperor Kings watched their descendant methodically dissect the mythology of their line's first betrayal, revealing it as something far more mundane and far more damning- not grand manipulation but simple, repeated cowardice!