The first barricade fell at dawn, and with it, any pretense of civilization in Astoria.
What had begun as organized military suppression dissolved into chaos when the Royalist Guard encountered unexpected resistance from Revolutionary cells who had armed themselves with weapons looted from abandoned noble estates. But the true horror emerged when Valerian's Cult—comprised of both transformed humans and desperate survivors seeking power—entered the fray as a third faction, turning the capital into a three-way slaughter.
The cobblestones ran red with more than blood. They were stained with the last remnants of Astoria's humanity.
The New Rules of War
General Morrison had issued clear directives: "Pacify all resistance by any means necessary." But when faced with guerrilla warfare in familiar streets, his soldiers interpreted "any means" with terrifying creativity.
In the Merchant Quarter, Royalist forces herded suspected revolutionaries into the old grain warehouse. What happened inside became known as the "Wheat Field Massacre"—though no wheat grew there, only screams that echoed for three days. Women were violated before their husbands' eyes, children were forced to watch their parents tortured for information they didn't possess, and elderly citizens were beaten to death for the crime of being unable to run fast enough.
The Revolutionaries, led by former palace servants who knew the city's hidden passages, responded with equal brutality. They dragged captured Royalists into the sewers beneath the Noble District, where they conducted their own interrogations. Former maids who had endured years of abuse now held the whips. Former stable boys forced aristocratic prisoners to eat filth and worse.
But it was Valerian's Cult that introduced innovations in cruelty that neither side had imagined.
The Children's War
By the second week of fighting, all three factions had run out of adult volunteers. The solution was as practical as it was horrifying: conscription of anyone who could hold a weapon, regardless of age.
Alex Chen encountered his first child soldier in the ruins of St. Aldric's Cathedral. The boy couldn't have been more than twelve, wearing an oversized Royalist uniform and clutching a rifle nearly as tall as himself. When Alex ordered him to stand down, the child opened fire—not out of courage, but because he'd been told that surrender meant his little sister would be fed to Valerian's experiments.
Alex killed the boy. He had no choice. But as he knelt beside the small body, he noticed the improvised armor made from kitchen pots and prayer books. Someone had tried to protect this child while simultaneously sending him to die.
The Revolutionaries weren't better. They recruited from the orphanages their own forces had created, promising revenge against the nobles who had "abandoned" these children. Eight-year-olds learned to make incendiary devices from household chemicals. Ten-year-olds were taught to identify Royalist officers by their remaining jewelry and execute them with kitchen knives.
Valerian's Cult, however, didn't recruit children. They transformed them.
Subject Zero
Lyra felt the disturbance through the dimensional network before she saw it—a wrongness that made reality itself recoil. Following the psychic trail through the burning streets, she found herself in the basement of what had once been Astoria General Hospital.
The medical equipment had been modified with crystalline growths that pulsed with unnatural light. Tubes and wires snaked across the ceiling like technological vines. And in the center of it all, suspended in a tank of luminescent fluid, floated something that had once been human.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
Valerian materialized from the shadows, his form more unstable than before—sometimes solid, sometimes translucent, always wrong. "My first success. My proof of concept. I called him Subject Zero, though he's forgotten his original name."
The thing in the tank opened eyes that were pure silver, containing depths that seemed to extend beyond the physical world. When it spoke, its voice resonated through dimensions.
"I remember... pain. I remember... choosing." Subject Zero's attention fixed on Lyra. "You chose too. But you still cling to what you were."
Lyra stared at what she might become. Subject Zero had been transformed so completely that humanity was just a distant echo. His body constantly shifted between states—sometimes appearing as a man, sometimes as geometric patterns of pure energy, sometimes as something that hurt to perceive directly.
"He was the first to volunteer," Valerian explained. "A terminally ill researcher who believed in transcendence. Now he exists beyond death, beyond limitation, beyond the moral constraints that plague lesser beings."
"Beyond everything that makes existence meaningful," Lyra whispered.
Subject Zero laughed, and the sound shattered several glass containers across the room. "Meaning is a prison. Morality is a cage. I am free."
As if to demonstrate this freedom, Subject Zero gestured toward a row of smaller tanks containing children—volunteers or victims, the distinction had become meaningless. They floated in various stages of transformation, their small faces serene but empty.
"The young adapt faster," Valerian noted clinically. "Less attachment to outdated concepts of identity."
The Secret Alliance
Three districts away, Alex Chen kicked down the door of a abandoned mansion and found himself face-to-face with Princess Astoria—alive, unharmed, and very much not disappeared.
She sat at an ornate desk, signing documents with a black quill that seemed to absorb light. Across from her sat a figure in elaborate ceremonial armor, its helmet wreathed in shadows that moved independently of any light source.
"Alex," the Princess said without looking up. "You're early. We weren't expecting the Sixth Battalion to reach this sector until tomorrow."
The armored figure turned toward Alex, and he glimpsed something that might have been a face beneath the helmet—angular features that were almost human but wrong in proportions that his mind refused to fully process.
"Princess," Alex's voice came out as a croak. "You're... alive. Where have you been? The kingdom thinks—"
"The kingdom thinks what it needs to think." She finally looked at him, and Alex saw that her eyes had changed. They were still human, still recognizably hers, but they held depths that reminded him uncomfortably of Subject Zero. "Did you really believe we would simply vanish without purpose?"
The armored figure spoke, its voice like the grinding of millstones. "The compact is nearly complete, mortal princess. Your subjects provide the chaos, and my realm provides the power to reshape order from that chaos."
Alex's blood turned to ice as understanding crashed over him. "You're working with the Demon Lord. You've made a deal."
Princess Astoria smiled, and for a moment she looked exactly like the young woman who had once given him a flower from the royal gardens as thanks for his service. "Not a deal, Alex. A partnership. Valerian forced our hand with his transformations, but he showed us something valuable: sometimes you must destroy the old world to build a better one."
She gestured to the chaos visible through the mansion's windows—the burning buildings, the screaming crowds, the children with weapons hunting each other through streets that should have been playgrounds.
"Look at them, Alex. Look at what humanity becomes when the facade of civilization falls away. Valerian believes he's elevating them, but he's only revealing what they always were: animals pretending to be angels."
The Demon Lord's laughter was like breaking glass. "Your species' capacity for self-destruction exceeds even our expectations. We merely provide... guidance."
Alex's hand moved to his weapon, but he found himself unable to draw it. The Princess was still his liege, the oath he'd sworn still bound him, even as she revealed the depth of her betrayal.
"The disappeared nobility?" he managed.
"Safe. Hidden. Waiting for the purge to complete itself." Her expression softened slightly. "I'm not a monster, Alex. But I am a ruler, and rulers must make impossible choices. Better a controlled catastrophe that births a stronger kingdom than a slow decay that kills everything we've built."
The Demon Lord stood, its armor clanking with sounds that echoed from impossible angles. "The harvest of souls proceeds ahead of schedule. Soon, the transformation will be complete, and order will emerge from this beautiful chaos."
Alex looked between the Princess and the demon, understanding finally settling like poison in his gut. The three-way war wasn't chaos—it was orchestrated. The atrocities, the child soldiers, the systematic destruction of everything decent about Astoria—it was all planned.
And he had been helping it happen.
The Point of No Return
As Alex stumbled from the mansion, his mind reeling from the revelation, the sounds of war surrounded him. But now he heard them differently. The screams weren't random—they followed patterns. The violence wasn't chaotic—it was being directed.
Somewhere in the city, Lyra was learning the true scope of Valerian's transformations from Subject Zero. Somewhere else, General Morrison was receiving orders that he believed came from legitimate authority but actually originated from deals made in shadow. And throughout it all, the three factions continued their dance of mutual destruction, unaware that they were all puppets in a larger game.
The Princess's words echoed in Alex's mind: "Better a controlled catastrophe that births a stronger kingdom than a slow decay that kills everything we've built."
But as he watched a group of child soldiers execute a captured civilian who had begged for mercy in three languages, Alex wondered if there was any meaningful difference between the two.
The blood in the streets wasn't just from the dying—it was from the last vestiges of innocence that any of them might have claimed.
And in the distance, something that might have been laughter drifted on smoke-laden winds, though whether it came from Valerian, the Demon Lord, or the ghost of Astoria's conscience, Alex couldn't tell.
The war was far from over. In many ways, it had barely begun.