The Fall of Solaris
From the personal account of Al-Zuharim al-Saif — Lumarch of the Sword, Member of the Starborne
The light over the horizon bled crimson as dawn broke. Even the sun seemed to cry for them. From my post on the hill the goddess of Sol looked small and trapped, a burning dot pinned to the sky—her light reflected in our armor and on the faces of men who would not live to see dusk.
"My lord Al-Saif… the men request words before we march on Suntal. They would hear encouragement," came Lord Deneb's careful voice; the sort of voice that polishes courage into orders.
I snapped the quill and let the ink blot the parchment. "Yes. Yes, Lord Deneb. I'll be right there." I smoothed the page with a hand that did not feel steady.
At the war table I shoved aside the carved tokens of lords and troop movements; wood skittered across the map like fleeing ants. "Why do we do this?" I spat, more to myself than the empty tent. My fist struck the oak until my hand trembled. "The Sols have done nothing—nothing—deserving of this. A rumor, a whisper—and we burn a nation for it?"
Outside, the camp breathed low and restless. Tents ran in ranks to the sea; fires winked and guttered like a thousand tired stars. This was the largest muster since the Sons' War. The Najmun's five greatest houses joined with Imperium Luxaris and the Astraeon Concord. The coalition's banners snapped in a wind that tasted of salt and iron.
As I walked the lines, I saw doubt stitched into faces. Old soldiers checked straps they had worn since boyhood. New ones clutched rods as if they could keep the world from tilting. Most here knew what it meant to lose. Many feared that this time, the losing would be final.
The battle of Kane had already carved a ruin into Solaris. Farms blackened like scorched bones, towns emptied, the once-mighty Sol host undone by hunger and disease after encirclement. Lancers turned on lords; unpaid mercenaries toppled standards. We swept into that chaos and called it victory. One hundred loyal lords counted dead. One hundred thousand soldiers vanished into the mud and cold. The slaughter had been neat as a harvest.
Which is why this feels too easy.
Too swift. Too clean. It smells of something else—of a blade guided by hands unseen.
At the hill's center I stood before my men. They stretched farther than the eye could take in; banners were a forest of color. Most could not hear my voice, but I did not speak for their ears. I spoke because the habit of command must mask the quake inside. I breathed, then let it out slow.
"Men," I called, "today you die for what you are told is justice. You die for banners and for oaths and for a name. You die because others decide the price of peace. If you must fall, fall with steel in hand. If we are to burn a world, let us be the ones who decide the end."
The cheers rose, thin and brittle at first, then thicker—an attempt at defiance. The sound should have steadied me. It did not.
A streak of light tore the sky—white, too bright for the sun—so sudden and hot the world seemed to tilt. For a breath the light swallowed everything: men, tents, banners. The air tore with the heat.
When the flash subsided, my mouth went dry. Where the plain had been, a crater yawned; the earth had been ground away as if a god had taken his palm and swept the land clean. Tens of thousands of men—gone. Their cries ended in the light.
The battle began not with trumpets but with absence.
Deneb cursed beside me, a sound like splintering wood. I felt the old maps under my boots as if they were ashes. Command decisions are weighty; the moment they land, they become stories. This one would be a ruin.
We had come to break the Sols. Now the war broke us first.
As we recovered from the blast, the men began to waver—uncertain if this war was still winnable. We gathered what remained and surrounded the radiant city with nearly four hundred thousand soldiers and lords. Siege engines groaned across the plains, and the luminari rained against the golden walls of Suntal, but the city did not bend.
Across the vast lines stretching for hundreds of miles, more blinding strikes fell from the heavens. A dozen more flashes like the first, each erasing thousands in an instant. By the time the sky stilled, nearly a quarter of our army had vanished. No blade could counter it. No shield could deflect it.
The Sols were no ordinary family—they were gods in all but name. That was the excuse the Najmun clung to, calling their strength treachery against the divine constellations themselves. But the Sols never sought godhood. Their power was born only of their devotion—to her. The goddess of all creation, Sol, imprisoned by her own kin.
In her absence, the Sols did not rage. They did not conquer. They withdrew. The city of Suntal closed its gates, and the world beyond was left in silence.
Over the next few weeks the western wall finally gave. Our remaining host—some 250,000 men—poured through the breach in a single, hungry wave. Inside, Suntal's population had been hollowed by the war; the latest counts put the living at two hundred thousand, though many had fled before we reached the city. Guardians of Sol, a force barely a thousand strong, met us at the breach and held longer than anyone expected.
They fought like statues given life. For nearly a day a single Guardian cut down one hundred and twenty-seven of our soldiers, on average. They were terrible, perfect blades of loyalty. Even so, numbers told their usual story: exhaustion bent the Guardians' shoulders, fatigue frayed their hands, and one by one they fell beneath our weight. When the last of them crumpled, what followed was not victory but unthinking hunger. Our men spilled into the streets and began to butcher anyone still standing—men, women, children—because the order had been given and no one asked questions. The Najmûn had one command: cleanse Solaris. No mercy. No exceptions.
We pushed on to the castle. From a distance its towers pierced the clouds; it was a citadel the size of myth. I gathered the Starborne with me—the Lunix Renalt, the Areon Confidants—each contingent led by their finest. Even with the fifteen most powerful commanders on the field, I did not feel certain of victory. The Sols' power had already proven itself beyond our reckoning.
The castle gates shuddered beneath the touch of our engines. The hinges screamed like wounded beasts as they opened. Once inside, only a few remaining Guardians opposed us; they fought to the end, not with the hope of triumph but for the heaven they imagined waiting beyond death. We cut them down quickly, stripping their last defiant breaths so we might conserve our strength for the lordly faces behind the final doors.
The throne chamber glowed as if lit from within. Gold reflected gold; tapestries and light braided into brilliance. Fifteen figures stood lined across the dais. History spoke of nineteen Sols; four had apparently escaped the slaughter. The ones before us were the most dangerous of the household—their presence a concentrated weight of power. Even one of them standing alone would have been enough to undo us.
I stepped forward with the rest, voice sliding from my throat the formal insult I had rehearsed for our duty. "Family of Sol," I said, "I apologize for this intrusion upon your throne."
My companions watched me with something like disbelief. To me, the Sols were not conspirators but victims—prisoners of a vengeance I could not justify. Still, I obeyed. I had sworn oaths that did not bend to private opinions. For the sake of order—and for the sanctimonious god I had learned to flatter—I lined up with the others.
They brought the condemned across the chamber. I found myself facing one of the youngest princes: the fifth son of Sol. The boy's eyes were dry and wide; tears threatened at the rims. His hands trembled. My arm shook with him.
I had never executed a child.
Around me the others worked with grim efficiency. Heads severed. Blood took the marble. The men showed no hesitation; to them this was a cleansing, a duty performed for history. They did not know—could not know—the truth of the Sols' retreat, the goddess buried in the firmament, the orders that had led us here.
For a moment a thing in me rebelled. I could not bring my blade down on him, not with the sound of his small voice inside my head. But the world had already chosen. The blade fell from my hand and the motion I had trained for took over. I chopped.
When it was done the chamber smelled of iron and candlewax and the echo of a single, terrible obedience. We had toppled Solaris. We had fallen into the role the Najmûn demanded. And even as the victory was declared, a part of me—an exile within my own skin—knew we had only loosened the leash that bound the world to something far worse.
The fall of Solaris.
-The Lumarch of the Sword