The Archive wanted payment.

  The Keeper—a being that looked like a nebula contained within a glass suit—projected a hologram into the Garden. It spoke with the measured cadence of something that has been alive long enough to have stopped rushing.

  Its price for the Entropy-Engine blueprints—the only weapon capable of cutting the Maw—was the Diamond-Chrome frequency. My frequency. The specific signature of everything I had become.

  To give it would mean losing my divine status. Becoming, again, the twenty-seven-year-old gambler. Mortal. Without the silver-chrome power. Without the Sync—because without the Diamond-White to anchor it, the Arbiter and I would separate back into two distinct entities, and I would lead the thousand universes with nothing but my voice and my wisdom.

  The Board was quiet.

  Elias was holding my hand.

  I asked them all. I needed to hear them.

  The Arbiter, in the Sync, was precise: if I gave the power, the Sync broke. If the Weaver tried to take the energy from the people as a substitute, it set a precedent of a King drawing from his subjects to pay a personal debt. If I refused and the Architect took the blueprints by force, we became the Tithe-Lords with better intentions and a different logo.

  Sera and the Joker wanted force. Their Gems flickered amber with the assessment.

  The Weaver looked at the Council of 100. Then looked at me. “If we choose Option 2, I can weave the connection. It wouldn’t be taking. It would be a voluntary offering. We ask the twenty-six billion: Will you give a spark of your life to save your King’s light? If they say yes, the bond between you and the people becomes unbreakable.”

  Elias: “Don’t steal it. Not after we just got our souls back. And don’t make them pay for your mistakes.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  He paused.

  “Look at the 100. They’re watching you. They want to see if the Sufferer-King is a hero or just another landlord.”

  I had been a landlord once. I had been a demon, a tyrant, a machine for generating suffering. I had spent a century unmaking those things, and I was not going to put on one of them now to solve a resource problem.

  But I was not going to make the twenty-six billion pay alone either.

  I stood up. The Sync hummed. The Arbiter and I found, in the shared space of our linked consciousness, something that was neither theft nor martyrdom.

  A grain of sand.

  We are a Bracelet, I said, and the Witness-Gems of the Board and the tokens of the 100 carried it to every soul in the thousand universes simultaneously. A circle is only as strong as its smallest link. I will not be your sacrifice, and I will not be your thief. We will be each other’s strength.

  The Weaver began to spin. She opened a thousand golden channels—tiny capillaries, connecting the Council, the Board, and the billions of volunteers to the Archive’s dying sun.

  The deities stepped onto the Loom and led by example. I poured the remaining Diamond-White into the channel. The Arbiter poured the Silver-Law. Sera’s warriors each gave a breath of controlled violence redirected into warmth. The Joker gave probability. The Glutton gave potential. The Architect gave precision. The Weaver gave continuity.

  In the plazas of the Bracelet, in the factories of the thousand worlds, on the decks of the Hearth—billions of people touched their Gems and their tokens. A grain of sand each. The energy equivalent of a single deep breath, a moment of joy, a memory of home.

  The energy did not arrive as a bolt.

  It arrived as a River of Stardust.

  The Archive’s dying sun turned Rose-Gold. Not Diamond-White. Not Silver. A new color—the specific hue of a civilization that had decided, collectively, to sacrifice a small thing so that the larger thing could continue.

  The Keeper of the Archive staggered.

  “We have existed for aeons,” it said. Its voice carried the specific quality of surprise in something very old. “We have traded with empires and stolen from gods. But we have never seen a power that was Given with such mundane grace. You have not just fueled our sun. You have changed its spectrum.”

  The blueprints flooded into the Architect’s mind.

  He caught them. Filed them. Began building immediately, his hands moving through holographic projections of the Entropy-Engine’s architecture with the focused intensity of someone who has just received the problem he was made to solve.