Finally came the call. The last time the Saurian Emperor would hear his own name.

“Avarice of Fire!”

His end was a forgone conclusion. Outside the echoing marble and granite of his throne room, the city of Oppul lay in ruins.Its spires were torn down by descendants of the people that had laid their foundations, with a frenzied haste they had never before demonstrated. The monuments were methodically smashed, each piece lovingly thrown through any pane of glass that could be found. The emerald green sky of day filled with choking smoke and the din of a million voices screaming a mix of elation and agony.

The temple of the harvest had been toppled, the charred remains of half a heavy cruiser crushing it. The royal garden had been set alight, and anything else that could be carried was fed to the flames as the sun began to set, bathing the ruins in the dancing flickers of orange. The trees that lined the royal road bubbled and popped sap as they burned, halos of brilliant fire lighting the way. The bathhouse that had served a thousand dignitaries and figureheads was in full working order, filled with the riotous laughter of the previously excluded masses.

The throne of the Saurian Emperors was built with all the arrogance and self importance DuCaine had come to expect. It was a simple seat, wrought of stone, and while the room itself held no great ornate decoration beyond its polish, it sat at the very center of the ziggurat. A strategically placed beam of light came from above, brighter than any sun, directly into the center of the chamber, to light one person alone. All else in the spacious room fell to darkness; the court and every visitor was to bask in the eternal glow of the seat, and know their place.

The room echoed at the call of Avarice’s name, but the only answer was the cacophony outside it: deep rumbles of spacecraft, the river of noise from the burning city below, and the immediate sound on the other end of the grand hall of weapons fire traded with the last of the imperial guard.

From the monitored communications traffic, it appeared that somewhere in the bowels of the ziggurat, someone was still desperately trying to call for help, from anyone and everyone. The Saurians understood the direness of their own situation, but had not yet grasped the scale of their predicament. They could call all they wanted, without interference, but the hails would at best be answered with similar distress. There would be no one to render aid that would not also be fighting for control. The planet was lost.

The royal family had splintered amusingly fast. The ziggurat itself was a labyrinthine fortress, but as the screaming masses of rebellion had crashed upon it as a torrent of waves, it eventually broke to their rage. The younger brother had attempted to take his consort and staff, though DuCaine knew not where they had intended to go. It did not matter, the prince made it no further than his sabotaged engine core had allowed. This did not deter a few others from trying with their own craft, and they all met similar fates in their attempts to flee.

Malice had smiled to DuCaine wordlessly, as his own people confirmed the cowards were effectively vaporized. Or, he assumed it was supposed to be a smile–she had far too many teeth, as her name implied. She stood out against to the rest of his company, quite literally two heads above them, a lithe mass of green scales and wavering camouflage armor. Up to this moment, even he had been unsure of the veracity of their saurian traitor, but she was true to her word, and had arranged a level of destruction and finality that they would not have been able to achieve on their own. He acknowledged her with a nod, the highest form of praise he could manage in the middle of a firefight.

Malice was visibly pleased with her work, but DuCaine had felt nothing beyond a cold ball of ice in his gut. He could pinpoint the day, months earlier, when guilt and anger and fear had become too overwhelming a combined entity for a single person to sustain, and something in him burned away. The connection between him and those emotions that had ruled him simply hit a peak of brilliance, then vanished. He knew he should have been concerned, but stopping was a mercy he no longer was capable of.

The sight of that illuminated throne brought back a little of that part of him that had fizzled. He had ignored the noise and screaming and gunfire and smoke and adrenaline, in favor of focusing on his goal. As he stood before it, at the literal center of all the pain and suffering visited on him and everyone he had ever known, the frayed connections between him and the scared child he had once been glowed red hot again.

So, after spending the day giving hand signals and delegating tasks, he found his voice again, and began shouting into the chamber, at its empty seat.

“Destroyer! Ruler of all and friend of none! Light of an empire of ashes!” he called with increasing mockery. “Your line ends today!”

Malice stood nearby, her position at the head of the procession fully earned. She watched the seat with her own cold fury, but did not interfere. The rest of the inner circle stayed behind her, in the grand arch that served as a doorway, their attention taken by the firefight behind them.

“I am your justice! Show yourself!”

He was keenly aware that he had an audience, and what happened today would be exaggerated and turned around and lionized. He may as well act the part. The words echoed around the dark chamber, drifting until they were swallowed by the rumbling thuds and chorus of fighting elsewhere. Behind him, a voice murmured that he could not fully hear, but knew it was a whispered worry that he was addressing an empty throne room. Concern that despite their diligence, they had lost their final quarry.

They could not see what he saw.

“Said with great conviction and heroism,” came a response from the dark. The voice was everywhere, bouncing from wall to wall, distorted as through a tinny loudspeaker. The people behind him cringed and shuffled ever so slightly backwards.

DuCaine had never actually heard the Emperor speak before. Prior to this moment, he had only the dimmest impression of what the lizard that ruled the nineteen worlds even looked like. Avarice of Fire did not lower himself to the tasks of the outer worlds, and had never even set foot on Creta. As far as anyone could recall, none of his lineage had gone far from the homeworld in generations. But the absentee landlord was not above living off his bounty all the same, and it mattered little to DuCaine that his master ruled through governors and lesser lords. He had spent his life toiling to someone else’s benefit, the structure of that system made little difference so long as it finally met its end.

There was a peel of maniacal laughter, the sort that was only ever the domain of the corrupt. “Your compassion glows brightly today.”

“No brighter than yours,” DuCaine answered, easily.

Malice stood a little straighter in his peripheral vision, though the only visible sign of her thoughts was the steady flick of a green, slithering tail. She had insisted that she was not interested in being the perpetrator of a final blow. She would help, but was more than willing to rest the blame of the actual eradication of the empire on his shoulders. Even so, it seemed that as a member of a disgraced house, she could simply not help but be aware of her proximity to the power she had been denied.

Behind her, the rest of the cohort in the doorway began to falter. Most of them had likely never heard the voice either, but it carried that unmistakable tone of importance. They shrank away, children being scolded by a patriarch. Some time later, when DuCaine had time to reflect rather than react, he would wonder how someone got a voice like that. How someone became so confident, so absolutely sure that they had the divine right to all their inherited power, that they could talk down to every person around them.

“I see you’ve brought your merry band of murderers and thieves,” the voice observed.

DuCaine glanced behind again. The very last of the close firefight had ended, and Elanus’s mercenaries were now methodically picking over the corpses. The accusation was not without merit. He did not know the entire list of any of their crimes, including his own. He had not made friends with the most flawless people he could find. Flawless people seldom existed. What did it all matter, weighed against an empire that extracted blood, blood, blood from every stone it could overturn?

“Have you prepared a speech?” the echo asked. “Demanding repentance and regret?”

The rest of the galaxy understood the inevitable. There would be no more Saurian Empire after. There was no honor guard left to defend the emperor. A few of their number had even chosen to lay down arms instead of fighting. They would die anyway, DuCaine did not much care about honor in this situation, but it was thoughtful of them to make things a little easier. Avarice insisted on prolonging the final confrontation as long as he could, even though he had no where to retreat to. The other doors into the throne room had been strategically collapsed. Once Malice had gained access to the ziggurat’s data core, teleportation on the planet stopped, or at least stopped among those who realized the positioning system was materializing users a mile above their intended location.

“I wonder, how many did you sacrifice in your little crusade?” the voice asked.

Avarice needn’t have bothered his taunting. DuCaine had been walking in the vivid memory of another fire during their grim procession, relived with each figure that fell before them in the gloom. He had learned quickly to walk without seeing who he shot beyond what was needed to determine hostility.When he slipped up and looked at their bodies in the dust and smoke, the faces of Oppul’s dead were replaced, through tricks of memory and fire, with the last snarling glare of a face he’d spend the rest of his life wishing to forget.

Avarice could not twist any knife of words that compared.

DuCaine had not spent time fantasizing about Avarice’s end. He had not planned meticulously what he would say, or what the final execution was supposed to look like, or if there were to be one at all. He understood that the longer that it drew out, the harder it was going to be to spin the narrative that it was justified. That there was no other way to begin what would be the rest of their lives. The rest of every life.

Avarice could not be allowed to be pathetic or cowardly or pitiable or sympathetic.

Up to now he had pretended not to see the emperor, trying to appear as confused at the echos as the those behind him, pointedly gazing around the room indecisively between scans. The company behind him could not see what DuCaine did, what the Mask did. Avarice had spat every word with self-sustained satisfaction, slinking around in the dark, voice distorted by personal cloaking device.

After the echoes of derisive laughter had died away, the silence between them going overlong, DuCaine answered Avarice’s question as honestly as he could manage: “I’ve given up more than you know.”

What his followers would see would be DuCaine lifting his rifle at a far corner of the room and taking a single shot. They would murmur and gasp collectively, as a body appeared from no where and fell to the floor, gurgling in its own blood, a hole piercing through the chest. They would be astonished. The majority of them had no idea of the Mask’s power, and assumed that he simply chose to hide his face for personal safety.

What he saw, before pulling the trigger, was the exact satisfying moment when Avarice realized that his rule, his very life, was no longer his concern.