Prologue

"To be thus is nothing/ but to be safely thus"

"Just how many stars are there, anyway?" the child breathed, his awestruck query nearly drowned out by the low whistling of the nighttime wind. As he said this his eyes seemed to grow to comical size, looking as if they might simply pop from his sockets; it was as if he somehow hoped to take in the entire breadth of the universe and never let go. On a whim he reached out his hand and made to squeeze one of the tiny points of light between his fingers, rolling it back and forth as one might a tiny ball of clay.

The father laughed quietly at the spectacle, disarmed by his son's simply innocence. "N'resh," he began, his deep, warbling voice further building the sense of majesty, "there are more stars and more planets in our universe than you could ever begin to imagine – and each and every last one of them is special in its own way." The father thought about this fact for a while, trying to wrap his head around this sheer size and scale of the galaxy they lived in; it made playful diversions like these seem trivial by comparison. He slowly lay backwards beside his son and allowed his eyelids to gently droop to a close. His breaths came in a slow, placid cadence; to his right he could faintly make out the tiny, fleeting breathing of N'resh. He suddenly wished that moments like these could last forever; he allowed his mind to drift away as he tried to take in each and every detail – the cool sting of the night air as it meandered over the hill; the soft, uneven tickling of the wet grass against his neck; the mournful, ethereal cries of the insects as they carried across the lake.

The father groaned and grunted slightly as the familiar aches and pains of old age flared up across his back; with some difficulty he tried to shift himself to a more comfortable position. It was the little burdens like these that reminded him he would soon be too old to run carefree through the fields with his son; he knew he should make peace with this reality, but the imminent loss of such childish luxuries only seemed to make him want to hold onto them more. He knew bitterly that his son noticed this irresistible decline in his father's health; instinctively the father looked to his side, meeting his son's amused grin with one of his own. "When you become as old as I, N'resh, you'll realize just how hard we adults have it with all of our back problems." As if the illustrate he pounded a bony fist to his lower back, listening to the crack-crack-crack of his spine. N'resh merely rolled his eyes and turned away.

A long but welcome silence interceded between the two as they stared back up at the sky; enjoying the scene together, but each in their own way. The father began to consider again the stunning breadth of the universe. He found his mind drifting unavoidably back to the difficult questions which had plagued his every moment, both awake and asleep, for the past months. How many of those tiny stars did he hold jurisdiction over as governor – A dozen, maybe two? How many more lives would have to be lost before order could be restored to the Empire? Each new disaster – every new report of bombings, raids, and sabotage burdened him with the crushing weight of guilt and responsibility. At once the canvass of stars above seemed to bear down on him like a coffin, entombing him amidst his doubts and fears. The father closed his eyes and willed with all his might for it to go away.

Eventually N'resh uttered a tiny, pointed cough; a filial imitation of a habit his father had picked up over the years. A few moments later, the intended question finally came.

"Dad?"

"Yes, my son?"

N'resh seemed to mull his question over in his head before continuing. "Does the Emperor rule every star? I mean, every last one of them?"

The question took his father by surprise; despite his office as an Imperial governor there was an intentional lack of political talk at home. It was a strangely sophisticated question; more suited to the ramblings of an Imperial metaphysicist than for a young child. What sort of answer should he give to someone so little? The pause between the two of them continued to stretch on uncomfortably. "Dad, did you hear me? I said-"

"Well…what do you think, N'resh?" the father decided upon uneasily, his sentence dangling as if unfinished.

The response seemed to satisfy the child's expectations regardless. He leaned back again and placed a tiny hand beneath his chin "Well, I mean, in school the other day my teacher was talking to us about history, and he told me that the Emperor of all Protheans was the rightful king of every last thing in the whole wide universe!"

The father considered this carefully for a moment. "I see now. And what do you think?"

In the deepening darkness he could still see his son's tiny head whip back and forth in defiance. "I don't think that could possibly be true. Like…how would he keep track of them all and stuff? There are millions of them!"

N'resh nearly jumped out of his skin and the booming, throaty laugh which erupted from his father. It was rare lately for his father to even laugh at all. He grinned somewhat half heartedly; not convinced his joke was that funny, but happy to see that his father was laughing. Belatedly he added his own giggling into the mix.

"I love you, Dad."

"And I you, son." The father closed his eyes again, and for a very long time they side-by-side in silence, their mere presence together already saying everything that needed to be said. It was an irreplaceable moment in time.

Eventually night's opaque blanket continued its descent across the planet, and the father was suddenly stricken by the lateness of the hour. "All right, kiddo," he sighed as he willed his stiffened bones to life. "It's getting late and your mother will have my head if we don't get you back home."

"Oh boy will she!" N'resh laughed, apparently delighted at the thought of his father being chastised. He clambered to his feet and posed comically; hands on his hips, his legs spread squarely apart. "Tadosh, I've told you a million times already, he can't be staying up that late!"

Tadosh put on a façade of mock outrage. "What, are you kidding me?" He laughed, "Your mother is way more annoying than that!" He froze where he stood, adopting a stance reminiscent of a towering tyrant. "Is it too much to ask for everybody to clean up their dishes around here!" He laughed and jogged to catch back up.

The path back to the house from the lake was windy and poorly lit, and for a while the pair kept their energies focused on simply trying to get home in one piece. There was a shortcut through the woods they could have taken, but this way was much safer, and neither of them particularly wanted to hurry back.

"Dad? Mom said you were going away tomorrow. She said you were going to the Citadel."

Tadosh squirmed uncomfortably. He knew he had to say something sooner or later, yet somehow he had foolish clung onto the hope that if he ignored it, eventually it would just go away. In an instant his tone became solemn and paternal. "Yes son, your mother was right. I need to leave for the Citadel early in the morning. I'll be gone before you even wake up."

A painful pause preceded the question that Tadosh knew was coming. "Why though?"

"The Emperor has summoned all his magistrates to the Citadel; and no man, especially not me, would dare fail the Emperor in his summons."

"How long will you be gone?"

"Two weeks – maybe three if His Majesty is feeling pedantic," Tadosh added with an especially fierce rolling of the eyes. He tossed his words around in his mouth for a minute as he tried to decide how best to explain those things which few children were old enough to understand. "You see, the Empire is facing a lot of problems right now, son. It's my job to help come up with ways to fix them."

"What kind of problems?"

Tadosh hesitated, wisely catching himself before he could continue. "Many."

"Can you fix them though?"

"I am bound to at least try, I suppose," he said with a heavy, burdened shrug. "They didn't go through all the trouble of making your father a governor just so he could sit back and relax all day, now did they? No, they made me a governor so I could help His Majesty fix things when they go wrong. Ah, but here we are! Home."

The house lay in the same spot and the same manner as it always did; a dependable point of consistency in an otherwise interminably identical canvass of nature. From their angle at the bottom of the hill its high walls and ornamented colonnades caused it to look like a sprawling, regal fortress, perched stoically above the land. Many miles away to the south the audacious, garish lights of the city seemed to blur and meld together as one, forming an ambiguous smudge of neon which could just as easily have been mistaken for a sun.

Whenever he gazed out in that direction some part of Tadosh always reminded himself that living in enormous, opulent mansions like while the common people languored in such cramped, over-dense cities these was one of the main reasons why the Imperial nobility had garnered enough widespread resentment and hatred to inspire revolt in the first place. Another, much more pragmatic part reminded him that he wasn't supposed to particularly care; the result of this mental battle was a somewhat unhealthy combination of aloof arrogance and unacknowledged self-loathing, coupled with perhaps a trace of condescension to his peers.

The duo continued to press on up the hill; Tadosh's tired, sluggish strides contrastingly sharply with his son's buoyant, energetic bouncing. The weather had begun to take a sour turn; the wind had a bit more of a bite to it now, and the first rumblings of a storm were clearly audible. Tadosh pulled his coat tighter around his frame and quickened his pace. He observed apprehensively that a light appeared to be on in the main foyer. "We'd better hurry up and get inside, N'resh. The sky looks bad and I think your mother might still be awake."

With clandestine tread the two stole into the house, their every movement slow, calculated, and exaggerated. The huge, uncontrollable grins on the pair's faces unmasked the childish comedy of their quest. Nearby in the adjoining living-room the mother sat unawares, calmly reading her book by the light of her lamp. N'resh and his father silently pressed themselves as flat as they could against the wall, their poses as rigid and inanimate as the engravings which decorated the Imperial tombs. Tadosh pressed his lips to his son's ear. "On three, okay?"

N'resh's head bobbled up and down. "Got it. Then we shoot her, right?"

"Right. Okay...one…two…three!"

One the cue they leaped out from behind the wall, battle cries ringing to the heavens, their fingers leveled like guns at their target's head. Before they could so much as speak their quarry had already rounded upon them, her simmering anger swiftly extinguishing any lingering expectations of clemency; even so, when she at last spoke her voiced was charged more with worry than with fury. "Where have you two been! It's practically morning!"

The smiles instantly dropped off of their faces, replaced instead by expressions of uneasy trepidation. N'resh chuckled weakly. "…bang?"

Tadosh knew enough not to fight back as he was half-led, half-dragged back out of the room by his wife. With a stiff wave of her hand she silenced Tadosh's excuses, pressing inexorably onward with her inquisition. "What took you so long?"

"We were running around down by the lake. I guess I lost track of time."

"That much I could figure for myself"

"Darria, I'm-"

Darria coldly waved down his apologies. "Zip it." She reached into her pocket and withdrew a small white envelope. "I found these shuttle tickets lying out on your desk…did you plan on telling me you were going to the Citadel?"

"I only just found out. The Emperor has summoned his officers to Council."

Darria's steely demeanor quickly melted into genuine concern. She reflexively drew closer. "Have things become so bad?"

Tadosh sighed, pensively running his fingers along the length of his finely kept tentacles which fell from his chin. "Worse, even. There was another string of attacks in Ultmire province. And now entire worlds are dropping out of communications with the Citadel. The whole Empire is burning," he spat bitterly.

"Are they in revolt?" Darria whispered.

"We don't know yet. But let's hope we will soon."

For a tense moment no words passed between them; only a foreboding and unwelcome silence in which the darkest possible explanations were left to play out uninhibited in their minds. Tadosh gingerly pried the envelope from his wife's fingers. "My shuttle is leaving in just a few hours. I'll need to get going now if I plan on getting there in time."

Darria took a deep breath and managed to compose herself. "Right. You head on out. We'll call you later tomorrow."

Tadosh smiled reassuringly. "Of course – I'll be waiting for it."

N'resh knew what was coming before his mother even opened her mouth. "I know, I know," he said dramatically. "Time for bed."

Tadosh looked on tenderly as his son trudged up the stairs. Two decades of cutthroat government and playing the political game inevitably left one with a certain sense of detachment to emotions and semantics, both good and bad; Tadosh doubted he could even remember all of those whose careers he had been forced to cut down in order to further his own. He had tried first to justify it, then to deny it. Now, he merely accepted it without thought. The childish antics of his son, however, still seemed to strike a chord with him somewhere. He grinned and raised a hand in farewell. "Goodbye guys. I'll see you in a couple of weeks."

N'resh returned the wave emphatically. "Bye Dad! Have fun on the Citadel!"

Tadosh rolled his eyes and laughed bitterly. "You can count on it."