They will tell you that the Emperor is immortal. They will murmur it between bent backs and withered mouths, wrinkled with jaundice and eyes milky with cataracts. The Emperor’s black palanquin will pass through the streets and the elderly, the sick, the desperate will crowd the edges and risk beatings from his black-robed guards just to catch a glimpse of him behind his dark, velvet and gossamer curtains. They hope that even a brief look at his shining timeless face will grace them, make them young and healthy again. They hope that he sheds a single blood red strand of hair for them to keep as a talisman.

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The Emperor has ruled them for two thousand years. They whisper it, shaking with fear or reverence or both. He will make appearances sometimes, always looking young, healthy; his burning red hair will have no streaks of gray, his black eye will be unclouded by cataracts, his ivory skin will be smooth and unwrinkled. He will wreath himself in shadow, crowned in obsidian. He will speak in a voice clear and free of age, promising bread and circuses for loyalty, and the people will hang onto every word.

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They say the Emperor is immortal. They do not know the truth.

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“An artificial body?”

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“Yes,” he leans back, crosses his legs, and tries not to pay attention to the way they creak. “Take a piece of me and grow a homunculus from it – you are my greatest and most skilled magus. I’m sure you can figure something out.”

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His head pulses. Tremors. He is not meant to remember memories he should never have.

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“Yes, but how to transfer your consciousness. A brain transplant?”

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“Precisely.”

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“It will be delicate.”

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Everything is black. Everything hurts. He claws and scrapes his fingernails against the soft, membranous gelatin that keeps him pinned, keeps his limbs from floating to the top like water should. He opens his mouth to gasp in air and swallows salt. He thrashes. When he finally bursts out of his liquid cocoon, everything is too bright, and his nerves are too raw, and the ceiling above him is a frightening spiral of things he can’t name rendered in soft white gossamer stone. He sees blue skeins of light streak across the long face of a beast with wide, blank eyes and he screams. It sounds uncomfortably like an infantile wail.

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He drags himself out of his stone tomb, coughing and crying, nude legs slick with phosphorescent, oily blue water, and hits the cold marble tile with an echoing wet slap, alone and in pain. He curls up by the spot where the sarcophagus meets the floor, back pressed into the granite, and flings his hands over his eyes; he shivers there in a puddle of dying blue fluid until his new nerves stop screaming.

In the secluded, secret Homuncularium, hidden away in the Emperor’s isolated personal palace, a boy is born alone.