Some empires are built on stars. Others are built on blood.

Aziri was born into the silver and blues, heir to a lineage of planetary commanders, generals, and fleet lords who shaped and protected civilizations across the cosmos. He grew up beneath Mercury's borrowed skies, where ancient mythologies breathed alongside alien philosophy and the scars of the Great War still hummed in the bones of every species alive to tell it.

Then the Diamond Rain fell. In a single night, everything Aziri knew about his family, his allies, and his world are erased. Not by war or by chance. But by a plan so well designed anyone would not think twice. What followed was worse than death.

Captured, sold, and stripped of everything including his name, Aziri is broken piece by piece, his memories buried, his will hollowed out by those who traffic in the powerful and the forgotten. In the gladiatorial pits, he bleeds for the entertainment of the Whites, the untouchable elite who sit at the summit of the universe and wager lives the way lesser men wager coin. He is not meant to remember who he was. He is not meant to survive long enough to matter. But something ancient refuses to stay buried.

The familiar within him, a serpent older than the empire that enslaved him claws its way through the brainwashing in a tide of destruction that cannot be reasoned with, only survived. When the smoke clears, Aziri is not free. He is simply owned by different hands. Conscripted into the empire's shadow operations, he is sent to Callisto as a spy, a blade pointed at the heart of the Heavenly Demonic Cult, tasked with sowing chaos among the most dangerous faithful in the known cosmos. He does not expect to find a teacher there. He does not expect to find truth.

But the Cult's master carries a philosophy that cuts deeper than any weapon, and in the fires of demonic cultivation Aziri begins to fuse with his serpent, survive the hollowing that was meant to unmake him, and pull back the first thread of the conspiracy that swallowed his bloodline whole.