My long life taught me a simple creed on how one should live.

  Yesterday is a thing bitter, today is a thing sweet, and tomorrow a dream.

  What it means?

  Let go of the past, cherish the present moment, leave tomorrow for tomorrow.

  Personal reflections of Emperor Maximus Cornelius, from his work Contemptions

  The footbridge I walk upon now is the spine of a behemoth. Sadly, not in a literal sense. That filth is only good for destruction. Nevertheless, the footbridge is a rge structure in its own right. The huge white-gray bridge piers that rise from the abyss are densely packed, giving the superstructure a certain robust look.

  The walking surface of polished marble is outlined by rich purple grass and fnked by scores of life-sized, painted, gilded statues that depict some of my children, many of whom now long gone.

  The footbridge leads toward the impressive perron, located in front of the main entrance to the library. The perron itself consists of three flights of stairs. The giant staircase was clearly built with no children in mind, demanding of long, confident strides. I designed it to be imposing, magnificent.

  Fnking the third flight of stairs are the two spurting fountains: big chunks of white marble lost in the center of a quadrant-shaped pool of gss-clear water, tinted the palest blue.

  About me is a world of granite rock, a world of stonecrete and gleaming marble.

  The hills of granite rise boldly, and yet it is our edifices that truly command the ndscape.

  In creating the five cities there was one less than noble drive which pushed me, a spiteful way of thinking of which I am somewhat ashamed of. To build higher, more massive, obscenely rge, more magnanimous structures than humans ever did or could build. They used my progeny for conquest, never really unleashing their true potential for creation.

  While looking at this splendor of rge structures around me, a flurry of cascading thoughts sms my mind and I ponder how in human history their schors would often write about some old monumental structure as if it were built by one human. The name of the architect would often become lost forever, and sves or workers who did the bulk of the work and who often gave their bones for the foundation of the structure—to quote an old book on architecture—would go unmentioned, or forgotten completely in history books. A ruler would not move a single block of stone but would get all the praise. I smile at my own musings. Perhaps this is why I pulled all those thousands of huge blocks on my own.

  Historians of old would often try to ingratiate themselves with the great ruling families of their day; they would write endless praises concerning the ancestors of those families—obviously, architectural achievements were just a small part of all those praises. Not to mention this would often reduce the chance of the mentioned historians ending up being burned alive with their scrolls and books. Generations of schors that would come thereafter would also embellish and add to the praises made by long-dead historians. A huge chunk of humanity's history is a fantasy of selective falsehoods.

  Moreover, before the printing press, book copying was done by hand, and over time mistakes would metastasize and grow—being copied and recopied. As you might assume, these inaccuracies were added to by the newer generations of scribes and historians. All embellishing or twisting events long past, or adding their own interpretations and events that did not happen. Consequently, historical texts would correspond with the way of thinking and beliefs of the age in which they were penned.

  The further back in history one goes, the more it becomes akin to fiction. Human history is rarely objective, it was often a malleable thing, a subject to interpretation and pgued by many aggrandizements and embellishments. Even the current civilization that my progeny and I have created is not entirely immune to this.

  It is a great shame of history to lose the name of the architect forever; to not have at least an echo of a single word from countless workers who died building the edifices of old times. Nonetheless, architects and workers created something that outlived them by many human lifetimes.

  The architect's name is in the grace and beauty of the structure, and the names of the workers are in the colossal scale of it.

  A small grin escapes me.

  I am rambling to myself.

  Fathomless ages from now, I do not care if historical writings remember my name, as long as the descendants of my offspring are the ones who write the st sentence.

  It is the fate of every empire to die, every realm to perish. And those that build a new world upon the ashes of old will be of my blood.

  If you ask an average human What is power? they would, many of them, essentially say It is the ability to destroy. Yet that is but one side of power. Paradoxically, they...were creators obsessed with destruction. True power, or at least one of its many sides, is the ability to create something greater than what was before.

  I did not erase humankind because they were fwed and self-serving. There was greatness in them, a potential endless. I ended them because they would never have shared this vast and beautiful world with my progeny.

  For I knew their heart and it was a thing forever restless.

  Far above and to my left, thousands of Void-bck ravens fly somewhere westward. When compared to the edifice that is the Pace they are smaller than flies.

  A bck sun in a field of green, my eye focuses on them as I continue to walk toward the library's grand entrance. I see each feather with great crity. Their pupils are enrged. I stop. A feeling of dread runs down my spine. It is nothing but nothing.

  I twirl my valorium ring for a few moments and then look at the distant, amarium-cd guard, walking past a fountain. My thoughts fly far faster than those ravens can; the order is received in an instant. The guard nods and then runs.

  I commanded for scouting parties to be sent, east of Vantium. A winged Wraith could have sent those ravens fleeing, scattering them far and wide.

  It is nothing.

  On my index finger is a serpent eating its own tail. I am fond of twirling it, from time to time, especially when alone.

  The ring is valorium—silvery-white in color and several times stronger than bloodsteel. It boggles the mind, but this ring is the only manifestation evidencing the existence of valorium. I wear the entire known world's quantity of the metal on my finger.

  A rather pin-looking thing, considering its strength. Harder to work with than hepatizon—if such a thing were even possible. Tiny ore of it was found in the deepest of mines, near a sunken and roughly circur valley located within the mountains of Caledonia, north of my eastern city, aptly named Caledon.

  At night valorium glows; the glow pale, weak, and greyish, that of a forgotten star: distant, cold, and beautiful.

  Perhaps I cherish the ring, just like a human would because it is beyond rare. Would I even look at it twice were its abundance to rival that of gold?

  I am ridiculous. I almost despise that...human side of me, the side I could never hope escape. Some chains are made of stuff stronger than even this ring.