Ezra woke with ink on his cheek.
The world came back as a blur of white vellum and gold letters, the smell hitting him in the same breath—dust, glue, old leather, and whatever herbs the Imperium used to keep mold off expensive books. Somewhere in the night, someone had carried him; he'd fallen asleep on the desk again, and now he was in his crib, blanket crooked over one leg like someone had tried to tuck him in and given up halfway. Mana hummed under his skin—restless, bright, like a generator left running.
He swung a leg over the rail and dropped. His little body soaked the impact without a sound; reinforcement wasn't conscious anymore, it was reflex, mana tugging into bone and tendon the moment gravity tried to remind him he was eight months old. He padded across the cold stone floor and climbed back to the desk in a practiced sequence that would've looked ridiculous to anyone who didn't already live in the same castle as him.
A bottle of milk waited there, still faintly warm. "Evan," Ezra muttered, taking it with both hands. He drank it in one long pull—fuel, not comfort.
He set it aside and dragged The Histories of Rex Imperium toward him.
He began reading where he left off.
The First Edicts of Ascent.
The Histories—inconveniently vague about what exact crisis finally pushed the nobles into agreement—only said:
>"After much blood and fire, there arose a consensus among the surviving high lords."
Ezra translated in his head.
After the rich got tired of killing and being killed.
The illustration under the heading showed four Primarchs and a crowned king seated at a long stone table. Parchment unrolled before them. Seals and signets. The kind of picture that screamed civilization while quietly admitting it only existed because everyone else had died.
The text laid out the core reforms.
Degrees.
Titles became a ladder. Formal, fixed.
Knight, Baron, Viscount, Earl/Count, Marquis/Margrave, Duke, Archduke, Primarch, Rex Imperia.
No more arguing about whether "Lord of Three Rivers" outranked "Guardian of the Red Pass."
Bonds.
Every titled House was recorded as holding land of someone.
A liege–vassal bond written into a central Roll.
Bounded Duels.
Only a vassal could duel his liege for place, and only for the specific degree tied to their bond, at least for the Bounded Duels.
No more random Baron challenging some distant Duke he'd never sworn to.
On parchment, it looked like a massive step forward.
No more free-for-all.
No more "I challenge the Rex because I don't like his taxes."
You had to be in a direct, defined relationship to someone to put his title at stake.
Ezra could see it clearly. They took a chaotic graph of rivalries and forced it into a tree: each node with exactly one parent, each edge able to host at most one upward challenge at a time—no cycles, no ambiguity. But one problem jumped out at him so hard it was almost funny.
If challenges can be brought any time, then ambitious vassals can keep a liege in perpetual crisis
The book called this period "the Early Peace of Ascent."
The art stated differently. For a while, things did improve. Feuds that might have turned into open war got shoved into duels along neat feudal lines. You didn't raise an army; you sent a formal writ. Then ambitious people noticed something obvious. If the door is always open, you can stand in it forever.
The next chapters—written with a strained, polite pain—described a generation later dubbed:
The Age of Petition.
>"There arose in those days men who, seeing that the Law permitted them to call their lords to hazard, did so not in gravity but in hunger, year upon year, for every imagined slight and every denied gift."
>"And there were lords who, for fear of seeming weak, answered the ring as often, until their courts became little more than galleries of spectators."
Primarchs—and even the Rex—could, in theory, be challenged by their direct vassals at any time. Some Houses learned to weaponize that constant threat; others, trapped in perpetually contested bonds, did nothing but train. You couldn't execute a vassal for invoking a right the law itself had granted, so you could spend your entire life fending off people you'd personally promoted. Governance stalled again—this time with a legal backbone. Ezra turned the page, and the art changed: not warriors, but scribes.
Rows of them hunched over desks, copying names into fat ledgers. Behind them, on a wall, hung a great board covered in wooden tiles—House names, arrows, notes.
The caption read:
The Officium Ascensus in its first founding.
The Officium Ascensus
The Histories framed it like a practical necessity.
There were now so many bonds, so many writs, so many outcomes that someone had to keep track. Who held what degree. Which duel had been fought. Which Houses now held land in quittance after a loss.
>"To the end that the Ascent of Houses be ordered and recorded with firmness and without forgetfulness, there is established under the authority of the Rex Imperia an Office of Ascent… to keep and guard the Rolls of Ascent in all their kinds."
Ezra could almost hear the exhausted clerks behind that sentence.
We're getting buried in duels. Please, for the love of Omniscience, let us at least index them.
He traced the ink depiction of the great ledger. Soft power, he thought. The office didn't formally decide who rose, but they saw who was trying—who was restless, who was loyal—and they could always "lose" a petition for a week if someone important asked nicely. Even so, records didn't fix the underlying problem: people kept challenging, the law kept saying they could, and lords spent their days in rings instead of ruling.
>" And in those years the restlessness of the ladder waxed bold, and men ceased to cloak hunger in courtesy."
>" Three times in one span did the Crown's own house bear mourning; three times were the royal colors laid upon coffins while heralds spoke of "unlooked-for mischance" with faces too still to be believed. In the same season a Primarch's hall was put to flame—whether by traitors within or enemies without the scribes would not set down—yet the rafters fell all the same, and the stone of that seat was blackened for a generation."
>" Then did there arise a League of Lesser Lords, Barons and Viscounts bound by common grievance and common arithmetic, who reasoned thus: that a single writ may be answered, but ten writs in one month make mockery of rule. They did not cry rebellion, for rebellion is a naked word and draws steel; instead they cried right, and came in order and in number, year upon year, setting their betters at hazard as the Law permitted, until the Primarchate stood near to sundering—lords above calling it treason, lords below calling it justice, and all the land between paying the cost."
>" So was the primacy of law tested; and many feared that, if the ladder were not given measure in time as well as in bond, the realm would be left with ink and blood and no governance at all."
He got the picture, Three Rexes and everything else was burned into submission.
So that's the origin story.
Not "unity." Not "progress."
A system collapsing under its own hunger, then being patched by men who didn't want to die in their sleep.
He turned the page.
A new heading stared up at him, like a judge clearing his throat.
Then a new heading, like a judge clearing his throat.
The Giving of the Aufsteigfrieden.
The king in the picture wore iron, not jewels. He stood over a long table with seal in hand, a simple crown on his brow; the Primarchs watched at his flanks, and behind them lords of many degrees stood in wary silence. On the table lay a single massive parchment.
The caption:
The Peace of Ascent, set forth in the sixtieth year of the First Rex Imperia's reign.
Ezra frowned.
Sixtieth year?
That didn't match the earlier timeline where the Earth Patriarch had killed the Water Rex and taken the crown mid-chaos.
Retcon?
They folded the coup and the lawgiver into one mythic figure. Easier to worship one First Rex than admit the second guy rewrote the whole system. I guess, just diefy him.
The book gave a snippet in ornate script:
>" Here beginneth the Aufsteigfrieden, the Peace of Ascent, set forth… that murder in the dark and rebellion without warrant be curbed, and that every lord who holds land of the Crown be answerable not only to his betters, but also to his peers of lesser degree."
The crucial step was the one they barely highlighted: time. The new law didn't just say who could challenge—it finally said when. The text only spoke of "appointed spans" between lord and vassal—but Ezra already knew what that meant in practice. Fifteen years, by the Imperial count.
In the year before, the vassal had to declare his intent:
Exercise.
Waive.
Abstain.
Recorded in the Rolls by the Officium Ascensus.
If he Exercised, he became a Claimant; if multiple Claimants existed, they fought each other first. If he Waived, he was barred from challenging in that Cycle. If he Abstained, he could step forward on the Day itself—either to challenge, or to block someone else by triggering a double challenge and forcing a Null Ascent.
On the page, the language was lofty:
>" Thus is private war bridled, and pride made to stand before the sword it hath provoked."
Ezra translated.
You get one legal shot at your boss every fifteen years. You have to file your intent early. If you try something cute, loyalists can throw themselves into the ring to ruin it.
The Histories admitted—obliquely—the political selling point.
"So was it ordered that even the high must stand at hazard when their appointed Day of Ascent is come, that none may say, 'I am above all answer.'"
Progressive on the surface: your lord wasn't a god. He had a scheduled hour when you could legally try to knock his head off. But the scheduling was the real genius—you couldn't dogpile a Primarch every harvest or paralyze a Duke with weekly petitions. You had to aim at spaced targets on a calendar.
Then came the fifty-year High Ascent.
Not just spectacle.
A pressure valve.
>" Over and above the Common Ascent, there is given a higher peril… yet not at all times, but once in the span of fifty years, that the realm be not forever in uproar."
You could still reach past your liege once in a generation and go for someone stronger—if you survived the High-Claimants' Trial, got written on the Roll, and waited. Win and you vaulted; lose and you paid dearly for reaching beyond your bond; if both died, the Primarch—or the Rex—named who filled the vacant degree.
Ezra saw the machine: first, raw duels—everyone stabbing everyone; then bonds—only stab your boss; then time-gated, clerk-run violence—stab your boss, but only on a scheduled Day with forms stamped in triplicate. Call it the Peace of Ascent, paint it as mercy, quote Omniscience and justice—it was still the same predator ladder, just encoded, deployable, and stable.
Vassals had clamored, indignant, that their forefathers could duel anyone they wanted up the chain—bond be damned—and that the Aufsteigfrieden, for all its "peace," felt like a muzzle.
So the law offered a compromise in the only language the Imperium truly respected: the calendar.
In the rare years when the fiftieth-year High Ascent and the common Cycle of Ascent overlapped, the ladder loosened for a single season. Bonds blurred. Degrees stopped being polite distance and became mere height.
They called it the Year of Unbound Ascent.
The common tongue called it Free Ascent.
On parchment it read like a return of ancient liberty. In practice it was a controlled relapse—legalized chaos, carefully recorded—one more valve so the realm wouldn't crack from holding the knife too tightly, too long.
Aufstiegsrecht—the Right of Ascent—meant you only got to challenge one man: your liege, by bond. The clerks called the regular season Gemeinaufstieg—Common Ascent—but locally it was just the Ascent, like there was no other kind of year worth naming. Aufsteigfrieden—the "Peace of Ascent"—was the real trick: it didn't change who you could stab, it just decided when you were allowed to. And when even that wasn't enough, they added pressure valves with prettier labels—High Ascent (Hochaufstieg) once in fifty years, and—when the calendars overlapped—the Year of Unbound Ascent, the Aufstegfreih, Free Ascent: a legalized relapse where bonds blurred and the ladder loosened for a single season.
So that was the Imperium's great invention: not the sword—the schedule.
They hadn't civilized violence. They'd bureaucratized it—ink, seals, and sanctioned murder, all indexed by the Officium.
And now Ezra could feel the real punchline settling into place.
Reitz wasn't just an earl. He was a rung—dated, recorded, and due.
And now so was Ezra.
Hm. I think I need to find out how the empire feels about secession.