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It was just an illusion conjured by fools who never left their libraries, or by agents of necessity.

This is the Noble Lie.

Every frayed nerve, every quaking cell, screams in horror, urging me to crawl out of the tube, to escape this insanity. Is a man a coward if he realizes that bravery is just a myth the old tell the young so they line up for the meatgrinder?

My first toy was a wooden sword.

Adults think it adorable.

“Better dead than a coward,” Aja would say when a member of the Palatine would fall in combat on some far-off sphere. Better rotting meat for worms than the butt of a passing joke or an embarrassment to the beloved dead. What hilarious things we do for people who will never know we did them.

I have not used the Mind’s Eye since the Rim. It makes me feel like my grandmother’s puppet. But in my fear, I have nothing else on which to rely.

“Fear is the torrent,” I whisper. “Fear is the torrent. Fear is the torrent.”

I am not here. I am no physical being.

Electricity tethered to carbon. I am a pattern.

And so is the world.

With that acceptance, I release a measured breath, and sink molecule by molecule into the Mind’s Eye.

I see Octavia as if she were before me.

She sits in her Ocular Sphere. The glass walls of the room are open and the city laid out beneath her. Her eyes look down at the Oracle on my wrist, its stinger waving.

“Do not let fear touch you,” she whispers. The intricate creases in her face are like the spiderweb in the high corner of the room. “Fear is the torrent. The raging river. To fight it is to break and drown. But to stand astride it is to see it, feel it, and use its course for your own whims. Now, Lysander, I want you to lie to me, if you can….”

The memory sputters, invaded by another.

Curtains waver like guttering candle flames. I’m walking down a hall toward a black door etched with a single phrase. Music tinkles behind the door. There is laughter. But as I reach forward with my little hand to push it open, I am swallowed by shadows.

The spiderweb emerges from the shadows. A fly struggles to escape, but with each strain entangles himself further.

“Fear is the torrent,” I rasp with Octavia. “Fear is the torrent.”

Her face is bathed green.

I surge forward.

Urine streams into the catheter. My stomach drops to my heels. My vision flickers; a ball of vomit catches halfway up my esophagus as blackness crawls at the corner of my sight. By the time I remember to breathe, the Annihilo is already twenty kilometers behind me. My gut swirls again and I cough up bile. It sprays, murky brown, into a plastic catch over my mouth.

Around me, my suit whirs and flashes with the nonverbal communication between Blue pilots and Gold flight leaders. Clipped commands crisscross over the com. I narrow my mind’s pupil to constrict the influx of information and collate in the background as I slip into the flight flow etched into me by Midnight School aviators.

My mind runs through a collection of instruction sequences, eyes siphoning and collecting data till I’ve assured myself and Overwatch, the maintenance support brigade on the Annihilo, that my systems are nominal.

Only then do I look up and gape at the grandeur.

The invasion sweeps along in its silent song.

Ahead, the silhouette of Ajax’s starShell is dark against the nightside of the onrushing planet. It flickers like white phosphorus as the particle cannons of the Annihilo and her gunships lance diagonally across the horizon and toward the breach.

The energy beams illuminate streams of starShells all around me. Hundreds of men in metal. And yet they form little more than a tributary of the great flooding river gushing from the fleets of the Two Hundred lesser houses, and giants Grimmus, Falthe, Carthii, and Votum.

The vanguard of our force falls, uncontested.

The ships become fainter than needles in the darkness behind. The planet grows. Its night face is black, the continents laid out like tatters of a death shroud trimmed in gold by city lights along the coasts. Its North Pole wears a mutating crown of electric green aurora.