Her voice, booming low across the arena, doesn’t sound like her own. It rumbles like a shockwave, silencing all in its wake. The Grand Amphitheater is transfixed by this bold stranger speaking out of turn, blazing with the fire of a blue sun. She sees the white of the Emperor’s eyes; he’s turned to stone in his seat.

Misery lifts her lips from her teeth. She will turn them all to stone. “I come from the very edges of the Empire, from the duchy of Apis. You may have heard of me. Perhaps on the waves, perhaps as a whispered rumor. I have come to tell you that what you’ve heard is true. Yes! Rejoice! I am the Black Hole Messiah, as foretold by the prophet of Calister, sent by the Larex Forge to destroy the threat of the Heretics and seal the nullvoid forever.”

How easy these lies come to her, silver-coated and airy. She lets the untruths spill from her like a torrent, gaining velocity as her courage builds.

The Emperor jumps to his feet, fury purpling his complexion. “Are you insane? You wormy fuck. Sit down. Sit the fuck down.”

The speaker drone captures every syllable of his rant. How unhinged he sounds. Misery looks imperiously at him, this berry-faced babbling child, and projects upon him a disdain larger than she is. “Silence,” she says. “You call me a worm? You, from whom the Larex Forge chose to withhold Hir blessing? The gall of it.”

Titters and gasps from the audience. They said it, the crazy nixen. Uttering the truths that only fools would dare to voice. Their delight is what she has been seeking. Their delight turns her stomach.

The Emperor gapes at her audacity. The Empress Dowager has no such weaknesses. She’s on her feet, formidable for her age. “How dare you. Guards, arrest this terrorist.”

Misery twists the holy obsidian around the dais, and the aegis protecting the Emperor follows. Seals them in a little bubble, separate from the rings of palace guards. Around the Emperor and his grandmother, speaker drones crumple in a flare of sparks and flying shrapnel. Stone chunks rain to the ground, and Misery sees genuine fear in the boy Emperor’s eyes. “I think not,” she says. Now she’s the only one who can broadcast to the rest of the Grand Amphitheater. “You will listen to what I have to say. I have come a very long way, and I will not be thwarted.”