The morning after the Great Disappearance, as historians would later call it, the kingdom of Astoria woke to find itself leaderless. Every major noble, royal family member, and high-ranking cleric had vanished without a trace, leaving behind only the faint scent of ozone and the echo of harmonic humming that seemed to emanate from the very stones of their residences.
General Morrison stood in the empty throne room, his weathered face grim as he addressed the emergency council of surviving mid-level officials. "Eighteen hours," he announced, his voice carrying the weight of absolute authority. "Eighteen hours since our sovereign and his entire bloodline disappeared. The kingdom is under attack, and we are at war."
The assembled officials—deputy ministers, regional governors, military commanders who'd been deemed insufficiently important for Valerian's initial harvest—listened with the desperate attention of people who suddenly found themselves responsible for a collapsing nation.
"By emergency protocols established during the Dimensional Crisis of '03," Morrison continued, "I am assuming temporary military command until the royal family can be recovered or legitimate succession established. My first act is to declare martial law throughout the kingdom."
Commander Sarah Chen, representing the Oversight Bureau, felt her stomach clench. "General, with respect, martial law is a significant escalation—"
"Escalation?" Morrison's laugh was bitter and sharp. "Commander, our king is gone. Our princess is gone. Every noble family that maintained the old protections against supernatural threats has been harvested like wheat. If this isn't the time for extreme measures, when is?"
The question hung in the air like smoke from a funeral pyre. In the silence that followed, Morrison continued with the methodical precision of a man who'd made terrible decisions long before this moment.
"Effective immediately, all citizens with suspected ties to Valerian Thorne's organization are to be detained for interrogation. All individuals who've shown signs of enhancement or transformation are to be considered enemy combatants. All gatherings of more than five people require military approval."
Dr. Elena Vasquez leaned forward. "General, you're describing mass arrest and detention of potentially innocent civilians—"
"Innocent?" Morrison slammed his fist on the ancient oak table, causing centuries-old wood to crack. "Tell me, Doctor, how do we distinguish between innocent civilians and sleeper agents who've been consciousness-linked to a cosmic horror? How do we identify collaborators when the enemy can literally rewrite human minds?"
The terrible logic of his argument was undeniable. The transformation process Valerian employed was subtle in its early stages. A person could be partially integrated into the collective consciousness while still appearing entirely normal. They could retain their memories, relationships, and basic personality while serving as unwitting intelligence assets for the Crimson Laboratory.
"We have protocols for screening—" Sarah began.
"Protocols that rely on technology Valerian helped design," Morrison interrupted. "Protocols that assume we're dealing with conventional threats, not entities that exist across multiple dimensions. No, Commander. When facing an enemy that can corrupt from within, the only safe assumption is that everyone is potentially compromised."
He activated a holographic display showing arrest quotas by district. The numbers were staggering—tens of thousands of citizens marked for immediate detention.
"But General," Elena protested, her voice barely above a whisper, "some of these people are just guilty of living in neighborhoods where transformations occurred. Others are marked simply for expressing sympathy for Valerian's stated goals before we understood their true nature."
"Expressed sympathy is collaboration," Morrison replied flatly. "Living in affected areas suggests possible exposure. These are not arbitrary distinctions, Doctor. They are survival necessities."
The purge began at dawn.
Alex Chen stood in the converted sports stadium that had been designated as Processing Center Alpha, watching as thousands of detained citizens were herded into holding pens by soldiers whose faces showed the strain of orders they didn't want to follow. The scene was surreal in its administrative efficiency—ID checks, categorization by suspected contamination level, assignment to interrogation schedules.
"This is insane," Marcus Velocity whispered, his enhanced speed allowing him to process the full scope of the operation faster than normal human perception could handle. "We're rounding up families, Alex. Children who've done nothing except live in the wrong neighborhoods."
Alex stared at a young girl, maybe eight years old, who clutched a stuffed animal while her parents tried to explain to increasingly impatient soldiers that they'd never even heard of Valerian Thorne before the disappearances. The girl's eyes were wide with confusion and fear—entirely human emotions that spoke against any kind of consciousness tampering.
"Orders are orders," Alex replied, but his voice sounded flat even to himself. "After what we saw at Millbrook, after the Harmony Center... we can't take chances."
"Can't we?" Atlas asked, his gravity-based powers unconsciously creating small distortions in the air around him as his emotions destabilized. "Because from where I'm standing, this looks exactly like what we're supposed to be fighting against—mass processing of civilians for the crime of existing in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Alex wanted to argue, but the parallel was uncomfortably clear. The main difference between this operation and Valerian's mass transformations was that they were killing people instead of changing them. Whether that was actually an improvement was a question he didn't want to examine too closely.
"First batch for processing," announced Lieutenant Williams, gesturing toward a group of fifty detainees who'd been flagged as "high probability collaborators" based on criteria that seemed to change hourly. "Command wants a demonstration of efficiency."
The "processing" took place in a converted gymnasium where enhanced interrogation techniques could determine whether subjects had been consciousness-linked to Valerian's network. The methods were not gentle. The accuracy was questionable. The mortality rate was climbing.
Alex found himself appointed to lead the Enhanced Threat Response Squad—essentially a death squad with a bureaucratic name. His demonstrated willingness to make "hard choices" at the Harmony Center had marked him as someone who could be trusted with the kingdom's darkest necessities.
"Target acquired," came the report through his earpiece. "Family of four, Sector 7. Intelligence suggests the father attended three separate community meetings where Valerian's ideology was discussed favorably."
Alex's team moved through the residential district with military precision, enhanced abilities making them unstoppable against baseline human resistance. The target residence was a modest two-story home with a garden where children's toys suggested a normal family trying to live normal lives in increasingly abnormal times.
When they broke down the door, they found exactly that—a normal family. The father, a middle-aged accountant named David Park, had indeed attended community meetings. But the discussions he'd participated in were less about embracing Valerian's vision and more about trying to understand what was happening to their world.
"Please," David's wife begged as enhanced soldiers secured the premises. "We haven't done anything wrong. David just wanted to understand—we all did. When people started changing, when our neighbors began acting strangely, we needed answers."
Their children, twins aged twelve, pressed against their mother with the instinctive terror of young animals sensing predators. Neither showed any signs of enhancement or consciousness-linking. Neither posed any conceivable threat to kingdom security.
But the intelligence reports classified them as "potential vectors for ideological contamination." The new protocols required elimination of entire family units to prevent emotional leverage being used against surviving members.
Alex stared at the family and saw his own reflection in the father's desperate eyes. Here was a man who'd simply tried to make sense of an incomprehensible situation. Here were children whose only crime was being born into a world where cosmic horrors wore human faces.
Greater good, he told himself, the phrase that had become his personal mantra. Necessary sacrifices. Survival of the species.
But as he raised his weapon, Alex caught sight of himself in a hallway mirror. For just a moment, he saw that other version of himself—the one from those strange memories of Earth, the one who'd lived in a world where such choices were never necessary.
That other Alex was screaming.
The weapon discharged. The Park family joined the growing list of casualties in humanity's war against itself.
Miles away, in the depths of the Crimson Laboratory, Lyra watched the kingdom's descent into madness through surveillance networks that extended far beyond what the surface dwellers suspected. Every execution, every interrogation, every family destroyed in the name of preventing contamination—all of it streamed through her enhanced consciousness in real-time.
And for the first time since her transformation, she felt something that might have been regret.
"They're destroying themselves," she observed to Valerian, who monitored the purge with the detached interest of a scientist observing a particularly fascinating experiment. "The fear is making them commit atrocities that dwarf anything we've done."
"Exactly as planned," Valerian replied, his hybrid voice carrying harmonics of satisfaction. "Fear is the most powerful transformer of all. More efficient than any machine, more thorough than any virus. In their desperation to remain human, they're becoming the very monsters they claim to fight."
"But these are innocent people," Lyra pressed, her consciousness processing casualty reports that climbed by the hour. "Children, families, individuals whose only crime was living in the wrong place or asking the wrong questions."
Valerian turned to study his greatest creation, noting the unusual emotional resonance in her voice. "And what were the subjects in our laboratories? What were the villagers of Millbrook? Innocents all, transformed for the greater good. Tell me, my dear—what makes their method worse than ours?"
The question struck Lyra like a physical blow. In her enhanced state, she could perceive the full scope of both campaigns—Valerian's systematic transformation of populations and the kingdom's systematic elimination of suspected collaborators. The mathematics were eerily similar. The justifications were nearly identical. The only significant difference was the final destination of the subjects.
"We preserved them," she said finally. "Enhanced them. Gave them purpose and power beyond their original limitations."
"And they simply destroy them," Valerian agreed. "Which of us is more humane, I wonder?"
The moral calculus was dizzying in its complexity. But as Lyra watched another family being processed through the kingdom's increasingly efficient killing machine, she found herself questioning assumptions she'd held since her transformation.
As evening fell over a kingdom convulsing with violence, Valerian made an unprecedented decision. For the first time since establishing the Crimson Laboratory, he would make a public appearance.
The execution grounds had been set up in the capital's main square, where public demonstrations of justice could serve both as deterrent and morale booster for the remaining population. A crowd of several thousand had gathered—some genuinely supportive of the harsh measures, others present because attendance had become effectively mandatory.
Alex Chen stood on the executioner's platform, weapon in hand, as the day's final batch of "confirmed collaborators" was brought forward. The evidence against them was thin to nonexistent, but the new standards of proof reflected the kingdom's descent into paranoid authoritarianism.
As the condemned were arranged for processing, a murmur ran through the crowd. At the edge of the square, walking with unhurried confidence through cordons of armed soldiers who seemed unable to perceive him, came Valerian Thorne himself.
He'd made no attempt to disguise his transformed nature. His eyes swirled with dimensions of light that hurt to look at directly. His movements carried the fluid grace of something that existed across multiple layers of reality. His very presence caused minor distortions in the physical world—shadows that moved independently, sounds that carried impossible harmonics.
And he was smiling.
Not the cruel smile of a conqueror or the satisfied smirk of a victor, but the gentle, almost sad smile of someone watching children play at being adults. He found a position with clear sightlines to the execution platform and simply... waited.
Alex felt his blood freeze as those impossible eyes met his across the crowded square. In that gaze, he saw recognition, understanding, and something that might have been approval. Valerian had come not to stop the executions, but to bear witness to them.
To watch his enemies complete their transformation into everything they claimed to oppose.
As the crowd began to notice the supernatural presence in their midst, panic started to spread. But Valerian raised one hand in a gesture of peaceful intent, and somehow, impossibly, the crowd calmed. His influence extended beyond the transformed subjects in his network—it touched something fundamental in human psychology itself.
"Proceed," he called out, his voice carrying clearly across the square without shouting. "Do not let my presence interrupt this demonstration of justice. I am merely here to observe the natural evolution of moral necessity."
Alex's hands trembled as he realized the full scope of the trap they'd walked into. Every execution, every family destroyed, every line crossed in the name of protecting humanity—all of it had been orchestrated by the very enemy they thought they were fighting.
Valerian had turned them into the monsters. And now he was here to watch them embrace that transformation completely.
The purge would continue. The innocent would die. And with each atrocity committed in the name of survival, the kingdom of Astoria would prove that the only real difference between heroes and villains was which side of the blade they happened to be holding.
In the crowd, former citizens who'd undergone partial transformation watched their unenhanced neighbors participate in systematic murder and wondered which group was truly more human.
The answer was becoming clearer by the hour.