Chapter 2: Homecoming into a Palace Built from Absence

The Immaculate Accord entered Verath Prime's orbital approach corridor at 0614 standard, and the planet rose in the viewport like a debt coming due.

Caelen had not slept. He had intended to — had lain in the Accord's guest quarters for four hours with his eyes closed and his mind conducting the precise, useless inventory of a man too tired to think and too awake to stop — and had given up sometime around the third hour, risen, dressed in the formal uniform that had been waiting, pressed and silent, on the cabin hook, and gone to stand at the forward viewport instead. The uniform was not his. Or rather: it bore his rank, his decorations, the twin-galaxy sigil of fleet command on the collar, but it had been tailored to measurements someone on Verath Prime had on file, measurements taken eleven years ago and updated, he assumed, by inference. It fit almost exactly. He found this more unsettling than if it had not fit at all.

Verath Prime in the early light was amber and grey, cloud systems trailing across its equatorial band like brushstrokes, the capital's orbital ring a thin silver thread stitched through the upper atmosphere. From this distance it was beautiful in the way that old institutional buildings are beautiful — monumental, impersonal, designed for impression at scale and indifferent to what happens inside. He had grown up inside it, more or less. He had left it at seventeen with a commission and two kit bags and the careful, private relief of a person who has been waiting a long time to be somewhere else. He was thirty-one now and descending back toward it in a Chancellery carrier with his decorations properly aligned and a death roster still waiting in his personal terminal queue, because the notifications had been transmitted but the authorizations were his, and the dead still deserved the administrative dignity of a commander's signature, regardless of the distance.