Daegel Baelthorn
Before the power, before the protocols, before the spire—there is silence.
I stand alone at the edge of the Old World’s ruin, watching a city burn. I’m thirteen the day the Great Collapse severs the tether between order and madness. I remember the air—thick with the smell of melting steel and ozone. I remember the screams beneath the silence, the people clawing at crumbling data towers, begging the government to restore control.
But it’s already too late.
My father, a systems theorist turned rebel, dies shouting about dreams and freedom. My mother disappears into the folds of a broken simulation, her consciousness never recovered.
I don’t cry. I watch the world fracture, and I decide that day: emotion is a liability. Dreams are dangerous. And stability—true, lasting stability—will never be born from chaos or compassion.
It must be engineered.
I build my empire not with belief, but with code.
That boy becomes a man of structure. A man who never again begs the world to stay together. I shape it. Fix it. Rule it. Read more