Chapter 85 - The World of Konrad Curze (1)
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The ringing in his ears faded.
Kellen opened his eyes and pushed himself up off the ground.
No bridge control console. No low orbit over Davin. No Loken, no Kullen, no Horus.
Just a blank white void in every direction.
He turned. Someone was standing in front of him.
An androgynous youth with warm brown skin and a face that could stop traffic. He wore a white linen chiton in the classic ancient Greek style, a green laurel crown perched on his head, and he was grinning at Kellen like they were old friends.
So. The Emperor of Mankind.
"I figured you'd show up as something else," Kellen said, still processing. "The Roman she-wolf, maybe. Instead I get an ancient Greek pretty boy."
The youth let out an intrigued "Oh."
"The Roman she-wolf?"
He propped his chin on one hand and seemed to actually think about it.
"You mean the founding myth of Rome? That's quite distant. The earliest written records don't appear until the 3rd century BC, and even the corroborating evidence on bronze mirrors only dates to the 4th century. The story was revised by generations of people over that entire span."
"Besides," he added, "during that period I spent the vast majority of my time in Greece."
"The ancient Greek city-states? Then the Roman she-wolf story..."
"Yes, though I did make one trip to Rome. I pulled two boys out of a cave belonging to the Lupercal cultist shamans, the ones you know as Romulus and Remus."
The beautiful youth snorted.
"Truthfully, I'm far more ordinary than you imagine, Kellen. I had absolutely no desire to go to that backwater Apennine Peninsula. I only went because I detected Chaos agents infiltrating and trying to alter the course of human history. Special trip, one time. Most of the rest of the time I was in ancient Greece, exchanging ideas with philosophers and statesmen, watching which way civilization was leaning. The Axial Age, you know it?"
Kellen nodded.
The Axial Age. Roughly the 8th to the 2nd century BC. The breakthrough era of human civilization across three continents, clustered around the 30th parallel north of Terra. Ancient Greece, ancient Judea, India, China — four places whose ideas laid the foundation for every branch of civilization that followed. Standard history curriculum.
"So you stayed in ancient Greece to witness the intellectual exchange and observe where humanity was heading."
"Correct. When Greek civilization started showing signs of decline, I relocated to the Apennine Peninsula. I was present when Rome rose as well."
The youth raised his eyebrows, visibly pleased with himself.
"I went to many other places too. Every corner of Terra. At various points I even switched identities and lived as several famous historical figures."
Kellen looked at him. This eternal emperor wearing the face of a beautiful youth, his expression practically screaming praise me.
The image Kellen had carried in his head, the master strategist, the calculating Lord of Mankind, cracked apart and fell to pieces.
"I'm a little disappointed," Kellen said flatly.
The youth didn't care even slightly.
He extended a pale hand.
"Come on. No point wasting time. Let's go find Konrad."
Kellen stared at that hand.
Several deeply problematic pieces of historical knowledge surfaced in his mind, unbidden.
Among male citizens of ancient Greece, a custom known as pederasty had once been exceedingly common. A curious equilibrium suspended somewhere between friendship and something that absolutely could not be described in polite company. Those so-called philosophers had played things remarkably wild.
Heaven only knew whether Old Huang the Golden One had ever followed local customs and participated in such explosively scandalous activities.
Goosebumps crawled up Kellen's arms.
Maximum safe distance. Non-negotiable.
"Put your hand away. Just lead the way. I'll follow behind you."
Kellen kept his face neutral and took half a step back.
The youth pursed his lips, withdrew his hand, and turned to walk toward the blank space ahead.
They set off, one in front, one behind.
The white void around them began to warp and churn.
Light and shadow collapsed and rebuilt themselves.
They were standing on a city street.
The buildings were enormous and packed so tightly together that overhead, the sky had simply ceased to exist. Just layers of steel and concrete stacked into darkness.
The place was prosperous, in its way. Wide streets. Shops on every side. The kind of city that looked, at first glance, like it was thriving.
But something was wrong with it. Something that sat in the chest like a stone.
Every pedestrian walked with their neck pulled in, their face rigid, their movements mechanical. Nobody murmured to their neighbor. Nobody raised their voice. There were no expressions on these faces, none at all, except for the thing buried underneath everything else. The numbness. The terror. Both of them so old they'd become structural, load-bearing, part of how these people moved through the world.
And yet the order was immaculate.
At every intersection, the crowds queued in perfectly straight lines. No pushing. No jostling. The ground was spotless — not a scrap of paper, not a smear of anything. The trash cans had clean space around them. Even the children moved in silence, pressed close against the adults beside them, making no sound at all.
"This city is genuinely bizarre," Kellen said, and drew in a slow breath.
"Do you like it?"
The Emperor youth glanced back at him as he walked.
"Do you like the order here?"
Kellen looked around. Then nodded.
"The order is good. This is what people want society to look like — everyone following the law, everyone respecting the rules."
He paused.
"But there's no life in it. I don't see a single shred of vitality in any of these people. Their freedom has been stripped down to nothing."
The youth stopped in front of a shop window.
"For a society to maintain absolute order, stripping people of their freedom is unavoidable. It's an equivalent exchange. Rules and laws are the ropes that bind humanity, the same underlying logic as how humans tame horses and cattle."
He said it the way someone might comment on the weather.
He pointed at the freezer inside.
A Turkish ice cream shop. The owner scooped out two servings with the same mechanical precision as everyone else on this street and handed them over. The youth took both, pressed one into Kellen's hand.
"My treat."
"Thanks."
Kellen bit into it. The cold shot from his tongue straight to the back of his skull. Sweet, thick, completely real. If he hadn't known he'd been pulled into a dream, he would have believed every bit of it.
The Emperor youth bit into his own cone and picked up where he'd left off.
"That said, rules and laws alone can't fully constrain humanity's bottomless greed."
"Then what does?" Kellen asked.
"Fear."
The youth's voice dropped.
The word had barely landed when a woman burst out of the alley across the street.
She was wearing a tattered linen dress. Her face was white as chalk, tears streaked down her cheeks, and she was clutching something to her chest with both arms — a loaf of bread with burnt edges.
Not bought.
Stolen.
She made it to the middle of the street.
Then a shadow fell from the sky with no warning at all.
The impact hit like a thunderclap. Wind tore down the street, scattering empty trash cans in every direction.
A humanoid figure. Enormous fleshy wings folded back. Dark metal armor covering every inch of its body. It landed directly in front of the woman and the shadow swallowed her whole.
It didn't give her half a second.
A gauntlet fitted with lightning claws shot forward.
Riiip.
The sound of tearing flesh and skin scraped across the street and into the silence.
The monster worked with the ease of long practice.
Kill. Flay. Bleed.
Ten seconds. Less.
Then it seized the dripping corpse, launched itself skyward, and drove the red-and-white wreckage of the woman onto a lightning rod jutting from a rooftop across the street. Precise. Practiced.
Plop.
The ice cream hit the ground and shattered.
Kellen's head snapped up.
His gaze cut through the layered eaves, climbing higher, to the upper tiers of the buildings around him.
Those weren't neon signs.
Row after row, packed dense as teeth, corpses impaled on metal spikes. Every one of them flayed. Every one of them left on display. Dark red blood ran down the outer walls in long streaks, staining the buildings a deep, nauseating brown.
"Fucking lunatic!"
The words tore out of him.
"She stole one loaf of bread. One. And this is the execution she gets?! What kind of insane logic is that? Stealing food means someone's survival is already on the line! If a person is about to starve to death, do they lose even the right to keep breathing?!"
The numbness on every face around him suddenly made complete sense.
Waking up every day to this. Watching this. Living underneath this. The fact that anyone down here was still functional was the miracle, not the order.
"What the hell is this place?!"
Kellen grabbed the Emperor youth by the collar and yanked. The white linen chiton pulled taut and dragged downward.
The youth didn't resist. He simply raised that pale hand and patted the back of Kellen's twice, calm as anything, until Kellen let go.
"This is Konrad Curze's world."
He looked at Kellen.
"Now do you understand why Konrad is so unpopular among many of my sons?"
---
(Author's note: Official novels do explicitly mention the Emperor's connection to the Roman she-wolf story, as revealed by Erda, the Mother of Primarchs. However, after looking at the history of Europa during that period, I personally believe the Emperor spent the vast majority of his time in the civilized and intellectually flourishing ancient Greece rather than the backwater Apennine Peninsula. The official character setting for the Emperor also frames his core goal as protecting humanity's survival, guiding humanity toward psychic ascension, and breaking free from the control of the Chaos Gods, so I've adopted this hypothesis as the basis for this scene.)
➤ Next: Konrad Curze's World (2)
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