every working dismantled simultaneously, every weapon deactivated, every vessel that depended on stolen Khet suddenly floating dark and unpowered in the silence between the planets. Those who survived did so only because biological life does not require magic to continue in its most basic functions. Their hearts kept beating. Their lungs kept working. But everything they had built with the power they had stolen was gone in the space between one breath and the next.
In the chamber at the heart of the world, forty-seven lights went out. But the invaders had prepared for this possibility. Among the three civilizations of the coalition, one had dedicated its greatest minds not to winning the war but to surviving the loss of it, understanding that the Aur'Khet's most likely final action was precisely what it turned out to be. These scholars, these architects of catastrophe, had spent two centuries constructing what they called the Curse of Unmaking**, a working of dark Khet, stolen and corrupted, that they had embedded in the war itself, woven through the conflict so thoroughly that the very act of ending the war would activate it. It was elegant in the way that terrible things are sometimes elegant.
The curse could not undo the pulse. The pulse was done. The invaders were destroyed. But the curse could ensure that the victory meant nothing, that the sacrifice of the forty-seven produced no lasting legacy, that the Aur'Sana's descendants would never be able to reclaim what their ancestors had spent themselves to protect. The curse had three components.
First, it targeted the Khet itself. The background level of ambient magic in the solar system, which had been maintained at a high level by the continuous practice of an entire civilization for tens of thousands of years, began to drop. Slowly at first, then faster, then slowly again, finding its new equilibrium at a level so far below what the Aur'Sana had maintained that the descendants of that civilization would live their entire lives in what was, from the perspective of what had existed before, a condition of profound magical deprivation, like creatures evolved for deep ocean living out their lives in a shallow puddle.
Second, it targeted the physical marks of the royal bloodline. The white luminescent hair of the Aur'Khet, which had been the most visible marker of their identity and authority for the entire history of the civilization, began to change in the bloodline's survivors. Not immediately. Over generations. The Khet-infused pigmentation that had maintained the royal hair's white luminescence faded as the ambient Khet fell, and in its absence, the ordinary biological pigmentation of the body, dark brown in the Aur'Sana as in all things shaped by the same African sun, reasserted itself. Within three generations, the royal bloodline's children were born with dark hair. Within five, the memory of white hair as a marker of royalty was already blurring at the edges. Within ten, it was beginning to seem like a story rather than a history.
Third, and most devastatingly, it targeted memory itself. Not individual memory, the curse was not surgical enough for that. Collective memory. Cultural memory. The shared story that a civilization tells itself about who it is and where it came from. The records of the Aur'Sana, which had survived the physical destruction of the war in magical repositories the invaders had never been able to locate, began to fail. Not all at once. Gradually, in the way of organic processes, the magical preservation structures decayed as the ambient Khet fell, and as they decayed the records they held became inaccessible, then corrupted, then simply lost. The great library on Aur'Nhet had already been physically destroyed. Now the secondary repositories, the magical archives embedded in the walls of the Khet'Aur and in certain ancient trees and in the deep geological formations of the continent, went dark one by one.
The survivors, and there were many of them, hundreds of thousands of Aur'Sana still living on Earth when the war ended, found themselves in possession of a civilization with the heart removed. The technology remained, for a time. The cities remained, for a time. But technology and cities require maintenance, and maintenance requires knowledge, and knowledge requires records, and the records were going dark. Within a century, the survivors were living in the ruins of their own civilization, understanding that they had once been something magnificent but unable to access the details of what that had been with any reliability. Within two centuries, the ruins themselves were beginning to be dismantled, the shaped stone repurposed, the crystal structures harvested for materials. Within five centuries, the continent that had been the throne of the solar system's greatest empire was, to the eyes of anyone who had not known what it once was, simply a continent.
Rich. Warm. Extraordinarily alive with Khet that was too faint now to be used but that still ran through the soil and the rivers and the trees and the people like a deep current too slow to be detected by those swimming in it.
And among the Aur'Sana survivors, moving quietly, working patiently, were those who had survived from the invaders' civilization. Not many. Not obviously. But enough, and purposeful, and possessed of exactly the knowledge the Aur'Sana had lost, which meant they knew exactly what the people around them had once been and exactly how to ensure they never remembered it. The survivors of the invader civilizations had lost their magical infrastructure but not their knowledge, and their knowledge was enough.
They understood the curse. They had built it. And they understood that the curse, though powerful, was not absolute. The bloodline of the Aur'Khet still existed. Diminished, unmarked, their white hair gone to black, their Khet compressed to a small still point deep in the cellular structure of their bodies, but alive. Alive and carrying, in that compressed form, the original frequency, the root note, the thing that the forty-seven had used to end the war and that could, given sufficient time and the right catalyst, be read again.
This could not be permitted. And so, subtly, over generations, with the patient malice of those who have nothing left but purpose, they worked to ensure that the descendants of the Aur'Khet bloodline would never be in a position to recover. They inserted themselves into trade networks and then into positions of influence. They cultivated relationships with emerging groups and cultures and redirected those relationships in ways that disadvantaged the Aur'Sana's descendants specifically. And eventually, when the conditions they had spent centuries engineering were finally in place, they orchestrated what history would record in its most sanitized and decontextualized form as the Atlantic slave trade.
The descendants of the solar system's royal family, dark-skinned and dark-haired and stripped of all memory of what they had been, were taken from the continent that had once been their throne and distributed across the world, separated from each other and from the land that still carried the faintest resonance of their ancestors' power, placed in conditions designed to ensure that survival consumed all available cognitive and emotional resources, leaving nothing for the kind of deep inquiry that might eventually circle back toward the truth.
The curse had done its work well. But curses, like all workings, are not permanent. They are not physics. They are intention, and intention can be outlasted, and the thing about the Aur'Khet bloodline was that it had been built, over tens of thousands of years, for exactly the kind of endurance that would be required to outlast even this.
The compressed Khet in the royal bloodline's cells had not died. It had waited. Patient in the way of deep roots. Patient in the way of seeds in drought conditions. Patient in the specific and purposeful way of something that knows, at a level below cognition and below language, that the conditions required for its expression will eventually return.
And in the deep places of the surviving Khet'Aur, the mountain-palace that the curse had not destroyed because it was not made of magic but of magic-shaped stone, and stone does not forget as easily as people do, certain things had been placed before the forty-seven sat down in their circle.
Not records. Records could be corrupted.