Prince Mito’s empire of fifty-one stars folds like an old map,
creases bright with the rumor of corrupt gravity and slow-burn taxes.
He travels incognito in the thin jacket of a commoner,
dust of border-moons soft on his boots,
listening to the market’s syntax—
the way a bribe pauses in the throat,
the way a plea breaks line before it reaches the airlock.
Some empires write their laws in marble,
his are written in orbit.
Three separate machines wait above the clouds,
each a stanza of armor and voltage,
each humming its own lonely meter.
When injustice rises—
a landlord tightening the atmosphere,
a baron of freight turning wages into vacuum—
he calls the parts down,
a sudden enjambment of metal on sky.
Daioja is not a single body
but a chord struck between three steels,
a free verse of engines breaking the old rhyme of fear.
Shoulder, chest, and crown latch together
like clauses in a sentence that finally says no.
The visor glows with courtroom light,
its fists are commas that stop the abuse mid-swing.
This is how justice moves now—
not as a throne, static and remote,
but as a roaming line break in the galaxy,
a royal inspection disguised as everyday talk.
He shows his crest only at the last possible moment,
like a signature at the end of a dangerous poem,
then signs again in ionized trails across the enemy hull.
Some nights, after the last governor has confessed,
after the last merchant has returned the stolen air,
he lies back beneath the hangar lights
and listens to Daioja cooling in the dark—
three hearts ticking down into silence,
three pilots breathing in a shared, unwritten meter.
The stars above rearrange themselves
into a rough draft of a kinder empire,
and he thinks:
if power must exist, let it arrive like this—
masked until mercy is impossible,
then blazing, combining,
refusing to leave the weak alone
