story

The stars aligned when Camellia was born. It's cliche, it's truth, and it's the only explanation for what he is: perfect.

Camellia epitomises the High Terran species. They are a more evolved offshoot of humanity, engineered as custodians for the human race, hardcoded with directives to protect humans. United from birth in this common purpose — indeed, with each child’s role chosen years before their physical conception, their personalities calibrated for social conformity and mission efficacy — High Terrans regard themselves as a selfless, loving, and principled people.

The rest of the universe would not pick those descriptors. Robotic, condescending, psychotic, and dangerous all more readily jump to the tongue. That poor reputation owes itself to the two High Terran traits most salient to outsiders: their hyper-aggression towards perceived threats to humans, and their unique, universally feared powers of reality warping.

Combine those, and the records of innocent misunderstandings escalating into manslaughters are not too surprising.

But many things temper widespread terror into wary acceptance. Their reclusiveness. Their adherence to law. Their conciliatory politics. Their free sharing of technology. Their neutrality in foreign affairs. Their predictable prioritisation of humans before anything. Their predictable touchiness, that flares only for humans. Their population, a minuscule 2500, so low as to be a statistical error.

As common wisdom says — just leave them alone, and you may as well forget they exist.

Making a High Terran takes years. Countless strings of genetic code are developed, read, tweaked, and refined. If its directives seem compromised — cull it. If its projected personality misfits its caste — cull it. If its body or mind appear ailed — cull it. Only upon securing a blueprint for a stable, productive, and operational new member of society does the code proceed to the incubators. Even then, perfect timing must deliver the child into a birth under the perfect star of the perfect constellation, to infuse them with cosmic energies of the archetype for which they were perfectly tailored.

For Camellia, that star would be Azimech, and his caste would be that of the Hatchery. In defiance of the AI incubating him, a premature birth landed him instead under Caph, a star of the Human Relations caste.

Debates erupted on what to do with him. Should he be raised in the Hatchery as intended, or in Human Relations as his birth decreed? Or simply culled as a botch? Though his soul was read and the ruling was made — “Raise him in Human Relations” — doubts towards his fidelity lingered. Even his supporters struggled to silence the feeling that, by taking a chance on him, they were perhaps making an incredible mistake.

Early in his tutelage, Camellia revealed an obscene aptitude for reality manipulation. Mechanics that took centuries to learn bended to him like nothing. With a breath he'd confer immortality, he could blink and the stars realigned. The supposed ceiling on his abilities grew higher and higher with every experiment. Once there was no ground to explore but taboos, everybody just stopped measuring.

With innate creativity, he applied these talents magnificently. He crafted beautiful landscapes, elegantly resolved conflicts to joyful conclusions, and balanced his interventions effortlessly between too much and too little. Where other children fumbled to adopt their tutors’ techniques, Camellia executed and eclipsed them with his own style. Soon he bouted his tutor for authorities and won. So doing, while not even a teenager, he became the youngest individual to ever win a serious bout.

Prodigy and genius became common epithets. They were also the kindest. He'd manifested a strangeness beyond a simple fudging of birthdate – so began the questions of: what if, what if, what if? What if something about him was wrong? What if his directives weren't working? What if competence tempted him into vanity? What if he fancied himself so omnipotent, he eschewed all care for council, restraint, and discipline? And what on earth would they do if he proved their worrying right? Sensible anxieties, spoken, more often than not in ignorance, by the ones who had not met him yet.

Camellia revelled in his existence. He adored his own power. All the things he could do for people, the ease with which he could do them, the infinite gift that was him. All the people to share himself with, who brought structure to his infinite potential. He adored it. He would be the brilliant sun, a paragon by his nature, and everything his light touched would be good. Then, for his whole life, he would bask in the joy of doing what he had been put here to do.

Preside.

In the following years, he reaped countless authorities from his castemates. Nobody could touch him. Nobody could challenge him. Every bout he initiated, he won. Even, ultimately, against the caste's High Executor. Camellia's warpath had succeeded, and he had reached the pinnacle of his society. He still was not a legal adult.

Outrageous as that was, the real shock came in the months following his ascendancy. It wasn't that he was going maverick, or shirking responsibility, or treating people like playthings. Because he wasn't doing any of those things. Indeed, the thing that caught everyone off-guard was, Camellia was good at ruling.

He respected the systems and structures that had given him his power. He understood deference and often sought council. His level of assertiveness was excellent, his treatment to his peers and subordinates was excellent, his rulings were excellent, his governance was excellent. A genuine passion for his home, his people, and his rank underscored all that he did. There was almost nothing to fault him on, short of some eccentric habits and a bombastic, sometimes childish demeanour.

Before long, it became ridiculous to think there had ever been trepidation about Camellia. Things on Earth were peaceful, and very, very good.

It lasted about twenty years, before the disruption came. A foreign vessel loitering in the Milky Way was found harbouring alien xenophiles. Camellia promptly tortured them, slaughtered them, and turned his attention toward the greater universe for the first time. Finding no benefit there for his people, a long history of perceived disrespect, and nothing but antipathy for outsiders, Camellia proposed to personally nuke the rest of the universe and destroy all non-human life outside the Milky Way.

His talents included charisma. With passionate speech, ruthless logic, and unwavering conviction in the rightness of his genocide, public aversion to his plan shifted to dubiousness, to consideration, to nonchalance and to support. Those who debated him, his millennia of anecdotes conquered. The only possible dissent belonged to philosophy; morality. That treasured quality of his people perverted by offworlder leeches, with their self-serving perfidy and amorphic sophistry, a slaver's baton dressed in the word ‘ethics’. Hideous insult to a holy principle. As disingenuous as a baboon’s hoots issuing from a stuffed canary, that upon seeing the bird the gallery weeps, ah, how perfect its aria! The praise of liars, idiots, the blind, and deceived.

And if that primordial treachery were not justification enough to hate them, then never forget the abuses to the children.

And so on, went Camellia’s zeal.

The sole protester was the High Executor of External Affairs, Zubenelgenubi Vertel. Though not particularly invested in the outsiders, the proposal did defy his personal ethics, and the unknown consequences of such large-scale slaughter greatly concerned him. He feared, also, that it would push Camellia off his precarious mental perch into legitimate god delusions and megalomania. Being the highest authority on foreign relations between Earth and the greater universe, Camellia honoured Vertel's objection. But Vertel’s rhetoric remained unconvincing. Camellia determined to reassure Vertel, or otherwise draw him into support or neutrality, before going ahead with anything.

Their debates were interrupted. As part of an unrelated conflict, alien guerrillas weaponised Vertel by provoking a psychotic episode in which he exploded a populated planet. Enraged at this misuse of Vertel, and by the methods used to induce this, Camellia finally invoked his authority as High Executor of Human Relations to overrule Vertel and enact the proposal.

Vertel intercepted. By stalling Camellia in a protracted bout, he bought the time he needed to organize and enact an intergalactic treaty to install Camellia as the Head Engineer of the planet Kinesis. Vertel presided over Kinesis, and with Camellia instated as his direct subordinate, stationed on Vertel's home ground, attempts to overrule Vertel would now grossly undermine his authority. Camellia respected both Vertel and the power structure of High Terran society too much to ignore the treaty, and so found himself imprisoned on Kinesis.

Kinesis is a perpetual energy generator that supplies the civilizations of the universe with the vast majority of their power. Though it needs only minimal supervision, issues of distrust and politics gradually transformed it into a colony planet with a large acting workforce, who mostly sit around and watch computer readouts of AI behaviour. Quickly realizing the stupidity of Kinesis, Camellia freely abused his power to make his new engineering wing subordinates engage in random tomfoolery, mostly to stave his boredom and satisfy his instinctual urges to boss people around.

But Camellia would not obediently rot on Kinesis. He devised ways to persuade Vertel to overturn the treaty, or otherwise force Vertel into a diplomatic corner where he would be made to resign or relinquish Kinesis. Vertel countered Camellia's most egregious attempts at bureaucratic manoeuvring by installing an offworlder, Jennis, as Camellia's personal supervisor. Jennis outranked Camellia in the hierarchy of Vertel's vassals, and did not have to comply to High Terran power structures, crippling Camellia's designs. Camellia's behaviour became more and more erratic as boredom and frustration began to mount, while forced to delegate the duties he loved back home.

His mental state degraded under tedious decades of human deprivation. His antics devolved into unstable outbursts, into recurrent dissociation, into a passionless fugue. Still he refused to retire his proposal, so Vertel refused to release him. Neither would relent. The mental war of attrition would end only when one of them died — or rather, when Vertel died. He was several centuries older than Camellia, and as the decades turned, quickly approaching the end of his lifespan.

To restrain Camellia after his passing, Vertel devised a scheme. Recently, he had been contacted by a Low Terran named Lisbet. Having travelled the universe, and witnessed hardship across galaxies, Lisbet reasoned that all wickedness was rooted in pain. Without pain, everyone would massively benefit. An example of her point was Earth, the idyllic outlier, protected from pain by powers of High Terrans. So before anyone, perhaps they could help with her proposal: the abolishment of all pain, for everyone.

Imagine Camellia’s talent, put to that cause instead!, thought Vertel, who authorised Lisbet and Camellia to meet on Kinesis.

Rekindled contact with a Low Terran shot Camellia right into euphoric mania. Anything he could do for her, he would do devotedly. So when she asked him to absolve the world of all pain and suffering, he fell over himself to promise her: yes, yes, yes!

He would fulfil this promise by the creation of his masterpiece, Miquir.

Miquir is a higher-plane spiritual entity with universe-breaking temporal powers. Through Miquir's existence, the universe would infinitely move towards peace and prosperity in a manner that suited Camellia. But the concepts that composed Miquir did not all exist in Pleroma, so Camellia intuitively designed Miquir as a disparate entity. In a universe where everything was conceptually one, and the material world always reflected that one, by manifesting a physical avatar of Miquir in reality, Camellia imposed upon the universe the impossible logic that 1 was = 2. In other words, he broke Pleroma's homoeostasis.

Instantly, the universe rearranged itself to restore that homoeostasis. It registered Miquir as a thing that simultaneously did and did not exist, which conveniently describes Kenoma, the primordial force of nothingness, separation, and individuation. This alteration of Miquir's nature corrupted him into Arsene – and instated him as a living avatar of Kenoma, which all began to converge onto him.

Otherwise said, with all the space and nothingness in existence converging on one point, everything else in the universe began to amalgamate into one. It was, very suddenly, and messily, and quickly, the apocalypse.

Nobody reacted but one. In the microseconds before Arsene could be sequestered from all of existence, he severed Camellia from Pleroma and dragged him into the void.

Overall things are a little screwed up.

Traumatic separation from the wellspring of all light and creation left Camellia mentally fractured and stricken with a convenient case of amnesia. Seeing nothing but himself and Arsene in existence, Camellia created a simple world for them to live in, using splinters of his own soul as the universe's base material. They agreed to call it Our Home, which was corrupted over time into Aurholm.

If something about the whole situation seemed wrong, that worry was quickly forgotten. Whether it was in coddling Arsene, building a world, filling it with life, or in finding new things to make, to develop and to do, as the architect of all creation, every day was another opportunity to invent something joyous and share it with Arsene.

Eventually, Camellia invented humans again. He liked them. His emotional investment in them outstripped that of his other creations, until his coddling of them began to make Arsene feel jealous. Various circumstances exacerbated this simmering envy until he saw no choice but to kill Camellia. Camellia allowed it, and hence is now very dead.

Arsene buried his corpse in their garden, where it sprouted into a magnificent camellia tree. Its flowers can perfectly grant any wish, without any karmic twists or mean misinterpretations. As their house was cast deep into the void of Nix, the tree is nigh inaccessible. Rather than people claiming the flowers, it's the flowers that naturally fall and find their way to their designated recipients.

Though fractured, Camellia’s mind is not gone either. As a side effect of his soul residing in everything, his psyche is retained somewhere in the collective subconscious. He drifts in and out of self-awareness, amnesic, dissociated, and confused, as he struggles to differentiate himself from everybody and everything in Aurholm. But occasionally potent circumstances, or deliberate calls for his help, are powerful enough to temporarily stabilize his psyche, though usually not to an exceptional degree. Still, it has allowed him to posthumously converse in snippets and intervene at critical moments – the northern nation of Kitiven often invokes him like this, for council or to end natural disasters.

But Camellia’s pet project, in this state, are the Archons.

Some people suffer lives so dismal, their existence offends Camellia. He refuses to let them wallow, from start to end, in such unremitting misery. Being dead, and unable to stabilise his mind for even seconds, Camellia isn’t in a state to nanny them directly. But he can buy them time.

When they die, he appears to them offering a pact. If they accept, they receive immortality and godlike powers that manifest according to their personal history and self-concept. Though the terms of the pact encourage them to find happiness, none have quite worked out how. No matter. A push and some guidance will sort them out, come Camellia’s inevitable return to the living.

With the birth of Camille, inevitable — and sure as the days pass, approaching.