The cargo shuttle hurtled toward the north pole, Len staying low so Angar could pierce the gloom, peering through the narrow viewport slit on the rear hatch.

The first stone dwellings flashing beneath were crude and rugged, much like those of Kondune.

But as they pressed northward, the architecture refined. Structures grew taller, more intricate, their rough-hewn edges giving way to more precise and skilled masonry.

Eventually, the jagged mountain ranges vanished from view, and Angar realized they soared over the truly colossal Mount Sinay itself, a solitary peak blanketing the entire northern pole.

Temperatures here averaged a mere 40 Celsius, occasionally plummeting to 30 during the year's cooler spells. Far kinder than the south pole's 45-degree norm, which rarely dipped to 40 during brief parts of the year.

Equatorward, the heat intensified mercilessly, soaring past 100 degrees where the greenhouse grip of the sulfur-choked atmosphere squeezed tightest over the raging ocean.

Several factors tempered the north pole, including Mount Sinay's vast size and elevation, the planet's axial tilt funneling cooler currents, global winds dispersing the haze, and a thinner veil of clouds overhead, permitting far more heat to bleed into the void.

The shuttle banked sharply around the mountain's massive flat crest, revealing the grand Iramvati City of the Iramvati Nation sprawled in every direction, a vast tapestry of monumental stone edifices and spires etched against the hazy horizon, surprisingly devoid of burning fog.

It touched down in a broad clearing near the center of the giant, somewhat flat summit, close to an immense stone door embedded in the mountainside, its surface flanked by vigilant guards.

To Angar's surprise, an off-world encampment hunkered nearby, larger and more entrenched than Kondune's, devoid of all the military hardware, secured instead by a handful of corporate security in expensive armor.

The rear hatch hissed open with a reluctant groan, venting a swirl of sulfur-tinged mist.

Angar clambered out, helm under one arm and hammer gripped in the other, his gaze sweeping the off-world encampment a couple hundred meters away, still marveling at the near absence of burning fog.

A pair of corporate security waved before snapping into sharp salutes. Angar returned the gesture.

His expectations here shifted. No delegation from the Iramvati Nation awaited him, not even a solitary emissary.

Undeterred, he strode toward the massive stone door, where native guards stood sentinel.

They looked very similar to southerners but without horribly burned skin. They were clad in off-world clothing of simple, threadbare peasant attire worn like uniforms, each shouldering a cheap auto-blaster.

He'd barely taken a few steps when Len's voice cut through the haze. "One second, Sir!"

The longshoreman ran over and Angar pivoted to face him. "Deli's asking you to don your helm, and I wanted to thank you myself."

Len had shed his cheap biosuit armor, exposing himself to the planet's bite. Angar wasn't entirely sure what prompted the gratitude, but he guessed either a return to Ierne or his family joining him here.

"No armor?" Angar inquired.

"Figure I ought to acclimate to my new home, Sir," Len replied with a grin, though his skin already glistened with the first beads of corrosive sweat.

"So, your family's en route? They won't balk at living here?"

"They are, Sir," replied Len, his grin growing wider. "They'll traverse the stars, enjoying a proper voyage and vacation, seeing different worlds and stations, something I could never afford on my own. I'm sure they'll manage here, Sir, especially if we snag quarters at the heritage site. And the pay's great. Bonus pay on top of a rank bump for the conditions."

Angar nodded, glad things had worked out for the man.

The heritage site encompassed the Steadfast's landing zone and the encircling mountains, etched with the oldest petroglyphs.

Academics and scholars, including those typically devoted to unraveling Primordial relics, had flocked to Sulfuron 9.

They'd scrutinized the carvings near the Steadfast, ventured inland to decode more, and interrogated some witches. They'd even paid to have the ship's drive restored.

More crucially, their reports and treatises chronicled the events pre and post landing with unsparing clarity.

The Historic Foundation of the Holy and Glorious Terra had decreed the landing site and its environs a protected preserve, safeguarding it for posterity.

Hidetada was content to let the foundation shoulder the burdens, erecting domes, purging radiation, repairing the ship, funding the site, before he'd swoop in to steal it from them.

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He had some ideas on how to increase the planet's revenue. The Steadfast would double as an opulent resort, reserved for the Holy Empire's elite.

"I'm glad it all worked out," Angar said sincerely. He gave a final nod, then secured his helm with a click and hiss. "Deli?"

The comms sparked to life with a faint crackle. "The Zephuros departs the system in under two hours, Sir. Just confirming you're squared away?"

"I am," replied Angar.

"Good to hear. Simo sends his farewell and asks that you keep an eye on his kin. We'll see you on our return, Sir."

"Farewell, and safe travels." Angar hit the release and tugged off his helm as he strode toward the colossal stone door.

The hunched guards paid him no mind, their gazes fixed on some distant point as if he weren't there.

"Hello?" he barked, irritation sharpening his voice. "I'm here to meet with your tyrants."

Though it was rare, some imperial worlds, or sections of worlds, weren't ruled by nobility, and the same held true for this nation.

Iramvati's governance was a strange fusion of noocracy tempered by gerontocracy and laced with representative democracy.

Leaders were elected, but drawn exclusively from a revered cadre deemed the wisest, the Sangha Majlis, and only the most venerable elders among them, the Sages, qualified as candidates. Once elected, they became Elder Shura, members of the ruling council.

This elite pool resided behind these very doors, in the ancient subterranean city of Amaravati, hewn from the mountain's heart by those who had fled northward millennia ago, and only its residents had voting rights.

Once, the entire populace dwelled within its vast confines, but as numbers swelled, expansion spilled outward, creeping southward, defiant tendrils spreading in all directions.

The Elder Shura had spurned Aude Heddle of Auronix Solutions, decrying non-representative rule as outright tyranny, and aristocracy as despotism.

But those beyond Amaravati's walls spoke of their overlords as heartless despots, cruel tyrants ruling with an iron fist, their magic feared by all of Iramvati's populace.

Of course, their 'magic' was only knowledge and primitive technology, much like the witches of the south.

Laka, Angar's mother, dubbed the Weirding Witch for her uncanny knack of foretelling futures that always came to pass, possessed no magical divination, just common sense, observation, and enough reasoning to trace actions and consequences to their obvious ends.

Angar's barb about 'tyrants' was deliberate, a venomous jab as he wrestled to leash his seething hatred for these northern scum.

With a deep rumble, the door cleaved apart, slowly grinding open. Inside, offset to one side, Angar spied a pair of massive boulders suspended by ropes woven from tendon and hide, his first glimpse of advanced native engineering on Sulfuron 9.

From above, he caught the rhythm of breathing and the dual thrum of heartbeats, concealed beyond the line of sight. The two who had parted the massive door, perched in some hidden alcove, watching those who approached, most likely with orders on whom to admit.

As the grinding subsided, he stepped into the gallery, impressed despite his disdain. The walls shone unnaturally smooth, sculpted not by crude tools but sheared somehow, adorned with vivid murals depicting Terra's verdant glory, inscribed with arcane scripts of wisdom.

He ventured deeper, rounding a bend to find a woman in brightly colored but cheap off-world clothing seated at a slab of stone, artfully shaped into a crude desk, looking at him, distaste at what she saw clear on her face.

She appeared clean, didn't stink all that terribly, late teens or early twenties. Either in the nascent stages of pregnancy or not with child at all, bearing hair akin to the southerners', but tamed and less tangled, as though combed with regular care.

She was just as hunched and thick-limbed minus the massive jaw, and her skin shared their sickly pallor, but nearly unblemished, spared the usual ravages of pockmarks and scars.

Soldiers, like those outside, were arrayed throughout the room.

An unnaturally sheared archway led to a chamber beyond her, while to Angar's left yawned a grand rift leading down, cropped from the rock as well, rigged with a pulley system and more of those rugged tendon-and-hide ropes.

The woman spat out gibberish Angar struggled to decipher, but he shouldn't have had to. It was rude of her, knowing the southern hemisphere dialects would be very different, and her own language possibly unintelligible to Angar.

Slaughtering all these beasts wouldn't be prudent, but the urge ate at him like acid on bare skin. He craved any pretext to unleash righteous vengeance, and these monkeys seemed determined to provide plenty. He clamped down on his fury, quelling the impulse to charge and hurl the stone desk through the gallery wall.

"I don't understand your animal yips and bleats," he stated in Standard Imperial instead.

The woman's eyes blazed with fury and contempt. "The Sangha Majlis has been called to session," she retorted in stilted Imperial. "The enlightened and benevolent Elder Shura await the barbarian."

She rose stiffly. "Follow. Don't wander and keep your barbarian hands off everything."

Angar drew a steadying breath, then trailed her into the depths. The path wound through a labyrinth of galleries and passages, their walls unnaturally sheared and polished, etched with an endless cascade of words, symbols, equations, and diagrams.

Almost the same language and script as the ancient southern petroglyphs was used, not all that different from Imperial Script. He recognized a few familiar works, such as Plato's 'The Republic' and Aristotle's 'Nicomachean Ethics,' etched in full.

Vast chambers branched off, some housing hulking relics of ancient machinery, their iron frames twisted into brittle, crystalline slags of pyrrhotite after millennia of slow corrosion in the fog-scarce air.

Rifts plunged downward, traversed by creaking pulley systems of tendon-and-hide ropes that lowered them level by level.

The subterranean city of Amaravati unfolded in breathtaking scale, a marvel hewn from the mountain's core.

Expansive galleries spanned wider than the largest cavern, supported by precisely cut pillars, chambers glowing with dim, perpetual light from embedded crystals, passages twisted with geometric precision, lined with vaults where strange mushrooms, moss, and lichen-like flora grew in abundance. That explained his guide's jaw size, and why he heard pregnancy wasn't so deadly in this city.

Angar marveled at the engineering of vast ventilation shafts drawing in cooler polar air, and sealed reservoirs of purified water.

There was deterioration, but this had endured long, though time and inevitability had claimed much, reducing once-mighty devices to rusted husks and mineral veins.

What there wasn't, besides an endless line of soldiers as if to impress him, were visible people, though he could hear them in side chambers and beyond, including the cries of infants. It was like everyone was ordered to clear the public spaces of his route.

They descended through more rifts and galleries until emerging before a grand, intricately carved domed structure of interlocking stone blocks, its facade etched with flowing scripts and geometric motifs, flanked by massive, open stone doors leading into a packed, auditorium-like chamber.

Above the doors, he saw inscribed, 'For a unity is that which is made up of many parts where they are present not as an aggregate but as part of one whole.'

Without a word, the woman pivoted and walked away. Angar stifled his rising ire once more and stormed inside, repressing his rage, and his great desire to slaughter all these monkeys.

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