The day began like all others—mud on the ground, the stink of sweat and iron, the lash cracking against hollow backs. Yet something was wrong. Even the overseers, men carved from cruelty, carried themselves strangely. Their words were sharper, their tempers shorter, as if some unseen weight pressed against their shoulders.
Alpha noticed it immediately. Shackled in the dust, his back bent beneath a yoke of timber, he watched the change with quiet eyes. He did not ask questions. He never did. Silence was safer, and silence had kept him alive this long.
The whispers began with the kitchen slaves, leaking from the walls of the manor like smoke.
"The Emperor… he is dead."
No one believed it at first. The Emperor of Talvia was eternal, a shadow that stretched across the continent, a god draped in flesh. His word was law, his will iron. To imagine him gone was to imagine the sun failing to rise. And yet, as the rumor spread, it carried the weight of truth.
The overseers barked less. Their eyes lingered too long on the horizon, as though they expected the sky itself to split.
By dusk, the rumor was no longer rumor.
An iron-bell was struck across the city, its toll rolling like thunder into the slave yards. One toll. Two. Three. Each was a hammer to the chest. The overseers gathered the slaves, driving them together beneath the fading light.
"Listen, worms!" one barked, though his voice was hoarse. "By decree of the Regent Council, with the passing of His Imperial Majesty, the chain-law is invoked."
Chain-law. The words struck the yard into silence.
It was an old tradition, born from the belief that death should scatter chains like ashes. Whenever an emperor died, the empire freed a fraction of its slaves. Not out of kindness, but ritual. A sign that even in the face of loss, Talvia renewed itself.
The freed did not often survive. Out beyond the city walls lay hunger, brigands, and worse. To be cast out was to be untethered, stripped of meager bread and beaten roofs. Some preferred the whip to such a freedom.
The yard trembled with anticipation. Some wept with joy, daring to dream. Others fell to their knees in despair.
Alpha remained still.
Freedom. The word meant nothing to him. What was freedom, when the same emptiness gnawed within? When hunger did not end and the void of memory still yawned behind his eyes? He did not know his parents. He did not know his name. All he had was the scarred brand on his back—two words burned into flesh:
Alpha Omega.
He had taken them for himself, for there was nothing else.
As the slaves stirred, he sat in silence, watching. The fires of hope did not reach him. The overseer's words passed through him like wind through stone. He felt only the cold, and the strange sense that something vast was moving in the dark beyond the horizon.
That night, as he lay beneath the stars with the other branded, Alpha heard something. Not a voice, not truly, but a whisper brushing the edge of thought. A syllable without sound. A shape without form.
It vanished as quickly as it came, leaving only the faint ache of unease.
The Emperor was dead. Chains would fall. Tomorrow, he would be cast into a world he had never known.
And still, Alpha's eyes closed without a prayer, without a smile.
He had nothing to lose.