The silence of the final century was the loudest thing in the history of Eternia. Under the crushing velocity of the 1,000x time dilation, the internal calendar of the empire ticked toward the one-thousand-year mark.
Outside, in the slow, sluggish reality of the Kyros Hegemony, only 1 year had passed.
To High Arbiter Vane, he was merely returning to a backwater province to collect a routine harvest. To Emperor Aegis, a literal millennium of evolution, struggle, and preparation was about to culminate in a single moment of planetary labor.
The atmosphere of Eternia was no longer composed of mere gases. It had become a pressurized lattice of Law-Mana, a planetary shield so dense that the stars visible through it appeared as warped, colorful streaks. The oceans of Aquabyss were now white-hot with data and power, the water serving as a coolant for the massive Causal-Engines buried in the world's mantle.
