He catches a glimpse of him from the other side of Z.E.U.S—a hypersurface refractor that emitted an electrical field spread between Floating Gaea and the remnants of Ünder Forgotten, the last planet to exist. At first he doesn't know it's him. It's more of a speck, a dot amongst the interweaving lines of glowing blue and green before him. But it’s enough to make Minho pause his daily checks, to stare out, to guess.

Minho's duty is to shepherd the refractor, gather any and all energy sources from the ambient around them, cultivate them into blastseeds, and plant them into the generator's soil. From there, the blastseeds would blossom and grow, traning any viable light, heat, gravitational, electrical, sound or atomic energy into electricity that would keep Z.E.U.S., thus Floating Gaea alive.

Z.E.U.S. protected. Z.E.U.S. provided.

Minho liked his job—it was lonely, just shy of unbearably, but he liked growing things. He considered the things he grew like children or friends. Sometimes the blastseeds would unfurl like flowers in the generation field, sweeping along the currents like a feather in the wind. Sometimes the roots of the blastseeds would dig deep, curling around energy beams and conductor coils.

It was all so very beautiful to Minho. It was all Minho had, other than his loyalty, his honor, and his respect to The Energy Tranation Corp.

Two hundred Galactic years ago, Floating Gaea became his home. It became everyone's homes after the destruction of Ünder. No one knows how or why Ünder was undone the way it was, just that it was undone in the same way every other planet in their system had.

Days after the emergency sirens began wailing, hours after the public announcement calls stating that evacuation was mandatory, minutes after their escape pods left the atmosphere and entered The Beyond—space—did the Great Light swallow Ünder in her shimmering, resplendent halo of destruction.

A beacon from his pod some ten miles away light up, a silent herald that indicated his shift was almost done. He began ending his day as he always did—repacking his tools, uploading his data to the ETC mainframe and saying goodbye to his children and his friends.

“Good work today, my loves,” he murmured, his fingers dancing over the energy field.

Minho had no sense of belonging to his pod—it wasn't his home, his real home, or the one he’d claimed two hundred years ago. His pod was just a place in the many great places he'd been forced to move to as the Great Light's kiss annihilated planet after planet. He can't even recall what his planet had looked like. Green. He could remember all of the green.

Gaea was blue. Ünder was grey. The radiation from the Great Light had rendered it so. There hadn’t been much green on Ünder to begin with—the whole place was basically one large city, the roots and branches and leaves and trees and flowers all carved out to make room for the galaxies refugees.

Planetary Reconstruction Act of 2319. They were going to use Ünder as a base and bit by bit, rebuild their acute solar system. Then build and build and build, expanding until there was room for everyone.

But then....the Great Light, so they had to rebuild from Gaea. Much building hadn’t been done in the last two hundred years. Practically none. But Minho trusted Floating Gaea’s leadership. They would have a planet again. One day.

That’s what made him look at Ünder—the aching yearning of wanting soil and land under his feet again. But even if the radiation had dissipated, it was beyond repair. No one should be on Ünder. No one could survive on Ünder. But...

Just there, as if he were floating amongst the clouds, then the stars, is a figure.

Impossible.

Uncannily, the same moment Minho notices him through Z.E.U.S. is the same moment the man notices Minho. Minho blinks hard, tries to clear his vision, because it was simply impossible what he was seeing. But when he opens his eyes, a figure in all black and masked, appears before him. Lights flare on the mask, a welcoming, soothing light green.

Minho was back in his personal transportation unit, hurtling back to his solitary pod before the figure could so much as speak.

The next day—because despite how much as he would like to, he cannot abandon his duties—Minho is back, tending to his electric fields, his energy garden. He doesn't see the figure that day and he is relieved.

He doesn't see them the next day,or the day after that, and by the end of the week, Minho begins to think that he imagined the whole entire encounter.

A month passes and it is inspection time. Minho was practically humming with excitement It is the only time that he gets visitors and he may be a little eager to show them—show anyone—what he has managed to accomplish with his section of Z.E.U.S. The Inspector General, covered head to toe in a radiation resistant suit—excessive, and unnecessary—introduces himself, but doesn't give Minho the chance to speak before he is glancing over Minho's work, his expression torpid and bored. Not to be deterred, Minho tries anyways.

"It's a field, sir," he croaks, his voice long grown to going days, weeks, months, without speaking to someone else. Without speaking at all. "Not like generation field but a–I, uh started off with flowers, but since we’re trying to sustain life—”

The Inspector General glares at him balefully through the visor of his suit before going back to punching something into his datapad.

“Grains.”

Minho’s head snaps towards the voice, his eyes wide, his mouth falling open. It was the same figure–a man, he can tell—in his all black, masked, hovering on the other side of Z.E.U.S. like he’d been invited to the inspection as well. He isn’t wearing a radiation suit like the inspector is wearing, despite being on the supposedly radioactive side of the shield, nor is he wearing the astrosuit that Minho dons. It’s just him, the void of space, and nothing else.

Minho isn’t even sure how he can hear him. Hell, he may not even be real. The Inspector does not react to the voice. Doesn’t even look up.

“I’m not speaking. I’m…in your head. No, no. That sounds creepy. I am—” The man, the creature, stops and waves. “I’m Jinki. I live down there,” and he points towards Ünder, which is impossible. “I live there. I rule there. It is my kingdom.”

Minho nods slowly and reminds himself once he is back in his pod, that he should schedule a trip to Gaea proper and seek out a full mental health panel.

“Your section of Z.E.U.S. passes, but let’s eliminate most, if not all, of these...abnormal augments you’ve made,” he says, his nose scrunched in disgust as he glances over a patch of marigold energy flowers it had take Minho a six months to grow. “Regulation codes exist for a reason. You’re responsible for a lot of lives, Minji.”

Minho, once again, doesn’t get a chance to respond because the Inspector is gone, floating back to his own PTU and darting back towards the large floating space station hoving in the distance some fifty-miles away.

“Your name is Minji?” There is a brightness to his aura, shades of gold, and wheat, much like his fields.

Minho turns back towards the man—Jinki. His head is tilted, as if curious, and it would almost be adorable if not for the all black, the menacing mask, and the fact that he is hovering in space, moving through it, where Minho is tethered to his unit and would float away without it.

“No. My name is Minho.”

The man tilts his head in the other direction. “I know.” He says with a hunt of humor that makes Minho feel like he is listening to a joke he doesn’t understand. “I just wanted to know why you didn’t correct him. I don’t like him. Any of them. They don’t treat you well.”

Despite the fact that this man couldn’t very well know how others treated him, to Minho, it was not a matter of being treated well. It’s about being treated at all. Mattering. Minho’s job is important; thus, it makes him important. “I ignore it because I need to seem irreplaceable. Content. Useful. That way they won’t leave me behind.”

“Someone would leave you behind?” The sound of his voice is one of disbelief. He begins pacing, or floating, back and forth between the great void of space and Minho’s section of Z.E.U.S. “Considering Gaea’s mission to rebuild the universe, they should want nothing but the finest specimen for reproduction. Look at you.” He pauses and his head turns towards Minho, a sweeping look from head to toe. The mask flares bright pink. “Even if you lost your job here, you’d make an excellent breeder.”

Minho is so blown away by the matter-of-fact way that Jinki sprouts his nonsense that he isn’t even offended by Jinki’s suggestion that if he would never be useless just because of his DNA.

“I—I like being important here. With my field. If I have to suffer a little…” he motions towards Gaea, “to get secure that, then I will.”

Minho’s vision is filled with more color, this time a sickly green from Jinki’s mask. “Ghastly,” he spits. “That you have to suffer disrespect to survive, Minho.”

Minho bristles at this because he has explained—he has explained—why he does what he does and if this…wraith doesn’t get it, then too bad!

“Have a good day,” he says instead of the curses he wants to spit out because respect has been drilled into him and he can’t abandon his Gaean teachings, not even for a...whatever Jinki was.

“Please don’t go.” It was said softly, so delicately that Minho has no choice but to turn around. “I—need your help.”

A raised brow. “With what?”

Jinki looks around, at him, at the vast emptiness under and around him, and then at Z.E.U.S. “You know how to operate this thing, right?”

“Of course, I do.”

“Do you…know how to dismantle it?”

Jinki’s question surprises him, confounds him, but mostly enrages him. “Why would I dismantle it? It saves people’s lives.”

Jinki head tilts again. “Is that what they told you?”

“It keeps the radiation from Floating Gaea,” Minho barks out even though he knows that isn’t quite...true. “It generates the energy for it! You heard him! I—I am responsible for a lot of lives.”

The way that he tilts his head is annoying, as if he is studying Minho. But more than that, it feels as if he is studying what Minho is, what Minho means—to him, to the universe at large. Suddenly, though, Jinki’s aura, which was once bright and full of light, the very thing that had allowed Minho to continue this asinine conversation, darkens. Wisps of it fans out behind him, like a miasmic void, curling and ripping through his light. “They are lying,” he hisses. “They aren’t saving lives. They are ending them.” He appears closer now, almost touching Z.E.U.S, and the light radiating from his mask is a vivid, angry red. “They are murderers.”

Minho stews over it for hours, pacing up and down his pod, doing an unhealthy amount of cleaning after his dismisses the cleaning droids, reprogramming his audio/visual droid for a crisper resolution. He slams his food into the rehydrator, he beats his fist against the Atmospheric Water Producer when the stream isn’t fast enough to fill his cup without him waiting for minutes, he kicks the astrobutler’s charging dock when it asks Minho what’s wrong.

“Everything, you pile of junk!”

Loyalty. Respect. Honor.

Those were the words he swore on when he aligned himself with Gaea’s Energy Tranation Corp. That his work would be for the betterment of Floating Gaea, that he respected their cause of building and sustaining life, that he would honor those lost—planets, plants, and life—to the Great Light.

How dare he. How dare he.

Minho doesn’t even bother eating his food or drinking his water. He is out of his pod, into his suit, and powering his PTU back towards his sector of Z.E.U.S.

Jinki is waiting for him, his aura once again emitting light and warmth. As soon as Jinki sees him, the lights on his mask flare in luminous arcs of pale gold.

Z.E.U.S. buzzes between them. Minho slams his hand against it and it flares as well, blue and green and white. “I don’t believe you.”

Jinki nods, as if he understands Minho accusation sans a lack of explanation. “Of course, you don’t believe me. Of course. I’m sorry. I should have…explained better. I was just...angry. I shouldn’t have—.”

“There is nothing to explain. Floating Gaea is not a lie. The Corp is not a lie.”

“You, the people, no. You are not a lie, Minho. The generator that keeps us separated is not a lie. It does power Floating Gaea. But do you know how?”

This is ground Minho can stand on in confidence. “Ambient energy from the universe. I–we—the Corp, we collect it, convert it into a useful form—blastseeds—and plant them into the generator,” Minho recites like he is speaking to a review board and not a floating apparition.

“Yes. That is correct.” When Jinki sighs, the mask doesn’t change from it’s steady, peaceful yellow, but flutters and vibrates like ripples in the very ambient he spoke of. “…by stealing energy from Ünder. From stealing the life energy from what’s left of my world. This…energy you think you are collecting from space? It is there because it is life energy…from “The Dead”, who I rule over. We try to keep as much as we can, but it floats away, beckoned by the generator’s gravitational pull.”

Minho laughs, unable to help himself. “You think ghost are powering Z.E.U.S?”

Jinki’s returning laugh is loud, rueful, dark sounding. “Do you have to be dead to be considered dead by those in power?” He turns and looks back at Ünder. “We are alive. They stole our resources, left us behind when The Great Light came, and now are stealing the energy produced by us. The energy of our bodies and souls.”

“That’s—that’s absurd.”

Jinki, once again, nods, like he can understand Minho’s disbelief. “I can show you. I can take you to my home.”

Those words may sound ordinary to anyone else, but Minho has lived on Floating Gaea for 200 years. For fifty of those years, he has lived in his pod, separated, but still apart of the great glory of the space station. He has not once, in his 200 years here, left. He knows what a home is. He does not remember what home feels like. To Minho, those words sound like a siren’s call.

Still...

“Will I have to dismantle Z.E.U.S to do so?”

Jinki shakes his head. “I am Z.E.U.S. It is made of everything that I am. All of us from Ünder are Z.E.U.S. I—” and Jinki reaches towards Minho, through the refractor, to place a warm, gloved hand against Minho’s cheek. Minho gasp is sharp and loud.

Fifty years since Minho has touched another person. Minho is touch starved, and desperate and he only realizes this when Jinki’s gloved hands is against his face. The caress—which feels like thirst sated, like longing eradicated, even in this ephemeral form—is more than enough reason for him to clutch to the feeling. “I’ll…” Like it was a reflex, like it was inherent and natural to touch Jinki, Minho curls his hand around the hand against his cheek. “I’ll go. But I have to be back tomorrow to tend to my fields.”

“I’ll make sure that you are. I promise.”

The surface of Ünder is grey. The surface is—collapsed buildings, the hollow corpses of homes and the skeletal remains of life, withered away on its surface, remnants of the past, etched in stone, and ashes, and death.

Underground, underneath the soot and the ghost of forgotten civilization, however, is not grey. It is all colors. More colors than Minho has ever seen, more than his eye can actually conceptualize. He almost has to squint because it is so much.

“They call the surface Ünder Forgotten. They call us The Dead, the Leftbehinds,” Jinki says as he guides Minho through the underground citadel, “because they would not extend the resources to come back for us.”

“Why,” Minho says, awed, because there is so much life here, but also troubled by Jinki’s claims. “Why would we leave you behind?”

“Someone had to make sure you all escaped. Someone had to man the announcements and the alarms. Some of us were tasked with gathering history books and artefacts and monuments to Ünder to carry into the sky.” Jinki pauses and looks up to the cavern’s roof. “And some of us were just too much to fit on the last of the shuttles.”

“Jinki,” Minho says, looking around. “There are—”

“Millions of us? Yes. Some of us do procreate, Minho.”

Minho turns to look at him and Jinki’s mask is flaring with something like amusement, purples and soft reds.

“We started off as 569 people. We discovered this place and we flourished. Come. Let me show you.”

Jinki’s hand is warm around his as he drags Minho towards the center of town and Minho closes his eyes to savor the feeling. “The Ceremony,” is all he says once they reach a rocky sheared off bluff that looked over a caldera. “Since our energy is being stolen, I have found a way to share it between all of us. So, we can all, at the very least, stay alive. It’s not perfect—it weakens some, strengthens others, makes us equal in a way. But it was not a measure meant to sustain for all eternity. Energy comes in all shapes and forms and consistencies. It’s like mixing blood, transfusing one type into another. Our bodies have begun to refuse the energy of our neighbors, our families, our friends.”

The Ceremony is a—well Minho doesn’t know what to call it. A young boy, maybe Minho’s age, is lying on a bed of banana leaves and roses and moss, his skin, a sickly grey in contrast to the vividness of the flowers tucked around him.. From their vantage point on the overlook, Minho could see hundreds of thousands of people have surrounded him, chanting something, using words that Minho has never heard before.

“Old Ündean,” Jinki offers. “The language of energy.”

Below, the bodies are covered in markings Minho has never seen either, various shades of green across their eyes and down their chest, swirled around their fingers and up their backs, gentle arcs across shoulder blades. The young man has been smeared with these colors, but they do nothing to hide how near death he looks.

A few of them don masks like Jinki’s. They circle the young man in a rhythmic swaying dance, periodically reaching out to smear more colorful ink across his body.

“What are they doing?”

Jinki extends a hand towards the crowd. “Waiting,” he murmured.

“For what?” Minho thinks this is a healing ceremony, maybe, a prayer, sent up to the old Gods of Ünder—the ones he can remember—asking them to heal and restore.

Jinki turns his head towards him and the lights of his mask are now a deep blue. “For him to die.”

Minho’s breath hitched. “…What?”

Jinki sighs. “So that we may harvest the energy he has been given, and in turn, share it amongst us all. The energy has…killed him. Weakened his body. Rotted the container of his soul. He…” Jinki looks back over the procession. “He will be at peace. Soon.”

The ones in the mask like Jinki’s raise long gilded staffs in the air, and the moment the young boy’s eyes flutter closed, they bring them down against the earth with a solid, reverberating thud.

Wails. Loud, agonizing, sorrow heavy wails filled the cavern, the sound dancing along with a blueish-green mist—one so very familiar in hue and consistency to Minho. Like the energy coils of Z.E.U.S. It settles over everyone and the wails stop.

Jinki turns around and begins to leave. “Peace is all we have.”

They continue like this for weeks, months. Minho spends half of his time tending to his fields. At the end of his shift, instead of returning to his pod, he returns to Ünder, Jinki waiting patiently by Z.E.U.S. to charter him underground.

It’s odd that no one has noticed his absence. A gift, he tells himself, to be so unnoticed. A pang of regret that he is so unforgettable.

But no in Ünder. Minho is affection starved, so the laughter, and the hugs, and the kisses across his forehead from elderly Ünder citizens fills, his heart in a way that maintaining Z.E.U.S. never did.

He meets Jinki’s Acolytes, who appear at his side at random, whispering things in their ruler’s ear before flitting away. “Jonghyun,” he would announce when one with a deep red mask would appear. “Taemin,” when one with the blue mask popped up. Kibum, gold. Ara, purple, and Jungah yellow.

One day Jinki grabs his hand—Jinki never tells Minho to follow him, he always grabs his hands and leads—and the travel further and further underground until they reach a reflection pool. “I wanted to give you time…I,” Jinki pauses, and frowns, “I wanted you to believe me, just me. To trust me. But when you’re gone and I’m thinking of you, I realize that you’re a scientist and I’m the ruler of a forgotten city that shouldn’t exist—and proof. You need proof.”

Jinki suddenly pulls his hand to his face and bits down hard into his thumb. Minho gasps because what in the hell was he doing. A sharp canine digs into Jinki’s flesh, drawing forth a large droplet of blood. “Here. Proof. This will give you proof,.and he holds his hand over the pool.

Minho reaches out grabs him before the blood can hit the water, instead splatter on the stone lip of the pool. Quickly, he pulls Jinki’s arm into his lap before the fool can try again. “You’re right. I need proof.”

“Right,” Jinki says, determined, his mask flaring orange as he tries to untangle his hand from Minho’s. “So, I’m going to show you.”

Minho doesn’t need magical, mystical reflection pools. “Show me your face instead.”

“With this pooI I can—what?”

“You want me to trust you, and I do. But you haven’t trusted me enough to show your face. I believe you. I’ve been coming here for months and I…” He gestures to everything them. “I believe you.”

The mask flares a deep blue, one so deep it almost looks black. “If…if I show you my face, will you help me?” Jinki takes a step closer. “Help us?”

Minho thinks of the old lady who made him a bracelet out of twisted moss just because she liked the way he smiled. Minho thinks of the young boy who died and his mother and father who’d cried, even as they received his energy back into them. He thinks of how Taemin’s mask is brightest right before he retires to eat, or how Jonghyun sings behind his when attending his duties, the colors fluctuating shades of crimson as he runs through note after note. Kibum likes to tinker with his settings so that sometimes his gold adopts hints of rose. Ara’s laugh, Jungah’s compassion.

He thinks of Jinki who is doing all of this for his people. How he would do and give Jinki anything. But Minho has lived a life where give and take is mandatory. He doesn’t want to demand Jinki take off his mask, he has made the decision to help regardless. But he wants to see. Because this want is selfish, adorn-born, and full of longing.

“I will.”

Jinki’s face and body is a disaster. A long line extends from the tip of his nose, over his lips, and down his neck, the skin pink and shiny and long healed. His right arm is a prosthesis, pieces welded together from scrap metal, glowing circuitry he’s scavenged from discarded Corp PTUs, covered with synthetic skin. The lower half of his jaw is a patchwork of scar tissue—rendered this way when the human body is exposed to a power that could rip flesh from bones.

It is the most beautiful disaster Minho has ever seen.

Floating Gaea—no one had scars. No one had anything to remember the nicks and cuts and bruises that life gave you. There were elixirs that annulled pain within seconds, medicines that healed within moments, technology that extended life for centuries.

Jinki is a testament to survival. Jinki is older and wiser than anyone, anything, he has ever met. He is everything that Minho has ever wanted.

And Minho reacts to this, reacts with every atom and molecule, every infinitesimal thing that has been boiling and hissing and foaming and yearning under his skin ever since Jinki reached out to touch him.

Minho is touched starved. Affection starved. He gets piecemeal from the citizens of Ünder. Touches here, laughter, and empathy, and concern, there.But it leaves him hungry, ravenous, craving for more.

So, Minho kisses him. A chaste thing, his lips pressed against the other’s. And it is enough for Minho. Jinki taste like serendipity. A shudder runs through him so powerful that the only thing Minho can do in the wake of it all...is cry.

“I—will help you. But I’m scared. I’m terrified. What—” he pauses when Jinki attempts to wipe away his tears, only for more to fall. “What happens if I help you? Am I surrendering the people of Gaea to destruction? Will I ever see you again once you have what you need?”

Jinki holds Minho away from him. “You think…I approached you because you have something I need?” His laugh is tender, but it was still laughter and Minho stiffens. “I could have picked any one of your peers. But I wouldn’t have been kind, Minho. I am not kind. I would have invaded their minds, like I did with yours, drove them to madness, manipulated them into doing what I want. I only need a few of the fields dismantled. Stasis. Homeostasis. That could have been done without even revealing my presence to them.”

“Why didn’t you?” Minho whispers. “Why me?”

“I came to you, asked you, because I wanted you. You. To understand me. To know me.”

“Not because I’m important?”

“You are not important.”

Minho stiffens further, tries to pull from Jinki’s grasp, but some fereal, primordial flashes in Jinki’s eyes, something possessive and his grip is like stone. “You are not important in the way they’ve trained you to value yourself. They think you are important because of what you can do for them. I know you are important because of who you are. Because I’ve learned you. I’ve peeked into your soul and found nothing wanting. You aren't important. You are invaluable.”

Minho looks down, tears still falling from his eyes—his face is probably all red and splotchy. “What happens after I give you the access codes?”

Jinki squeezes his hand. “I will dismantle certain portions of the generator. Only for a short time. I don’t want anyone from the sky to suffer. I could if I wanted. I could destroy the whole thing, indefinitely, but I am not, and I do not want to be, that person.”

“What was this all for, if you were only going to do something temporary?”

“Because this is about peace. I will offer your leadership what they refused us. Kindness. I will demand a solution that helps, not only Gaea, but all of us.”

Minho doesn’t understand how Jinki can be so brave, so fearless. Gaea is Gaea because it is powerful. The weapons they have, the resources…

“Aren’t you scared? What if they don’t want to help? What if they try to hurt you?”

Jinki’s smile is a bit sad. “It is not a question of not wanting to help. They will. It is not a question of them trying to hurt me. They can’t. Gaea will either allow me to rule Ünder as I find necessary, or I shall be forced to rule both land and sky.” Two hands skim up Minho’s arms, across his shoulders, to clutch his neck in a possessive grip and bring Minho closer. To where they are sharing the same breath. Jinki returns Minho’s kiss and it is nothing like Minho’s chaste thing. It leaves him breathless and consumed and utterly ruined. “And my hands are not gentle, Minho,” he whispered.

When Jinki returns to Minho, he and his Acolytes are covered in blood.

Minho wants to feel horror, he does, but when you’ve been isolated from something for so long, you begin to grow numb to its existence. He only feels a faint melancholy that Floating Gaea was not wise enough to listen.

“It’s only the blood from one person,” Jinki rumbles as he and his Acolytes float around Minho, now back in his suit. The suit itself now feels claustrophobic, like he wasn’t meant to spend most of his waking hours trapped in it, harvesting energy from a place he rarely got to enjoy.

“Come, Minho. We have an announcement to make.”

Jinki stands before his millions. They look up at him like he is the sun, a sun they can no longer remember. Minho absorbs his heat, thinking of the many fields he could plant if Jinki were his sun.

“Floating Gaea is no more,” he says, his voice soft with the authority of command.

The crowd rips into a frenzy, and Minho is confused. They’d left Floating Gaea as it was.

“And,” he says, as he surveys those below him “Ünder Forgotten shall no longer exist after today.”

This time the crowd greets him with silent confusion.

“I have spoken with the Gaeans. When they refused to help, I showed them my unmatched power and the limits of my benevolence. I exacted this cruelty for a purpose. As so, I have assumed leadership of their floating palace.”

Shouts rise up from the crowd, a cacophony of anger and sadness, variations of “You’re leaving us?” “You said you would fight for us! For Ünder!”

Jinki lets their anger swell. His Acolytes move forward as one unit, towards the edge of the bluff, but Jinki holds his hand up, calling them back to his side.

Minho is surprised at their viterol, having only seen the brightness in all of them, but maybe, just maybe the darkness was in them all, all along. For if you are forced to live in the shadows, you very well may become one. “I have,” Jinki says, eventually. He doesn’t yell, but his voice carries over his people with the power of a ferocious roar.

They quiet down. They tip their heads back. They listen.

“Ünder Forgotten will no longer be called Ünder just as Floating Gaea will no longer be called Gaea, for I will rule both. And they shall be one. Domain. Our land shall be called Domain. And we shall never want for energy, food, or life again.”

The crowd is a monolith of shock, mouths hanging open, tears welling in eyes. Then there is shouting, happy hoots and ecstatic cries, this time with shouts of old Ündean. “Jinki, kyvernítis! Ruler! King! God! Theós! Kyvernítis, Kyvernítis, Kyvernítis!”

“And,” Jinki steps back, holding his hand out to Minho.

Minho frowns but steps forward, nonetheless, use to Jinki’s silent commands that feel less like demands but an ushering onto the right path. “I can find no one else as worthy to rule over our Domain with me, then our savior.”

The crowd is frenzied now “Sotíras! Minho, sotíras!”

Minho takes a step back, his eyes wild, his heart racing. “What—what are you doing?”

Jinki grins, then sobers. “I am asking you to rule beside me. Both land and sky.” He pauses, then removes his mask in the darkness of the overlook. Minho can see the tears in his eyes, and the affection he has for this man feels more radiant and more powerful and more potent than The Great Light. “I’m asking you to be with me.”

“You want me? I am...nothing. Nothing,” he hisses.

On Gaea, Minho was important because of what he did.

Here…

“You are everything, Minho. And now,” Jinki paused to look at the new Domain citizens below him. “You are a King.”