The monastery sat like a shadow on the edge of the world.
High in the Tibetan plateau—where clouds seemed close enough to touch—wind carried the scent of old parchment and snow. Travelers rarely came this far, and those who did were often seeking something they couldn’t name: peace, enlightenment, or perhaps, power.
The old monk who opened the gate said nothing. He only gestured for me to follow. His robe brushed the stone floor as he led me through corridors lined with cracked murals of kings, warriors, and sages—each painted with a strange symbol on their foreheads: a circle divided into four parts.
In the innermost chamber, beneath a fading mural of a thousand eyes, he stopped beside a chest made of black cedar. Its hinges groaned as he lifted the lid, revealing a bundle of scrolls bound by a thread of gold.
“The Four Faces of Power,” he whispered, his voice trembling between reverence and warning.
“It has survived empires, wars, and the silence of centuries. Read it only if you are ready to see power as it truly is—not as men pretend it to be.”
The scrolls were written in an ancient blend of Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese—languages that never should have met, yet somehow did. Translators across history had left marginal notes in Latin, Persian, and even early English. Each reader seemed to have added their own layer of interpretation, as if power itself demanded to be rewritten by every era it passed through.
The first line read:
“Power is neither light nor dark. It is a flame. The hands that hold it decide what burns.”
It was not a book of commands but of reflections—a map of human influence that had survived long before modern governments, corporations, or digital empires. Each civilization had renamed the same forces:
The Greeks called them Ethos, Pathos, Logos, and Mysteria.

The Romans spoke of Persuasion, Reward, Punishment, and Secrecy.

The Chinese saw them as the four balances of Heaven, Earth, Man, and Shadow.

Different names. Same essence.