Breaking Points
Jan
07
There were moments when all anyone could think about was the blood on their hands, their fallen team members—something not quite family but beyond mere friends—and their own willingness to go bloody themselves again.
Thaw
Dec
26
Lirian was queen of ice and snow, her lands robed in white mists and frost. Winter was cold in Lirian’s heart, fitting for her rank. She condemned who must be condemned to save who must be saved and never let it pain her. Such was the lot of she who would rule over the icy lands.
But as she swept in from another long day in councils, divying up what supplies there were, knowing she was deciding who would live and who would die, she let out a sigh as the heat of the roaring fireplace at the far end of the great hall began to thaw the chill off her skin and warm her furs to a tolerable temperature. There was a small child sitting near the fire, a fierce scowl on her dark face, black crow feathers growing from her black hair.
“Seiran,” said Lirian.
The child looked up, scowl vanishing into an expression more neutral than blank. The child stood and curtsied.
“Never mind that.” Lirian waved off the gesture and moved closer to the fire. Her gaze stayed on Seiran and something in her heart felt warm. “You had a pleasant day?”
Seiran shrugged indelicately. The child had only a feral grace, but she was beautiful to Lirian anyway. “You didn’t,” she said, more brazenly than anyone else might.
“I did not,” Lirian agreed. She reached out a hand to stroke her fingers through soft feathers and hair.
Seiran sighed quietly.
They stood in the silence together as their iciness thawed.
Drafted
Jun
05
Ide’a had never been a disappointment to his parents. He had a knack for business, was capable with the technology, software, and processes that kept his extended family firmly in control of the Flux’s mining economy, and knew how to manage business ‘partners’ with the appropriate balance of conciliation and hostility.
He’d never disappointed them until he took mandatory affinity testing and scored too valuable a potential pilot to avoid being drafted.
But when he arrived at his tiny bunk with his two permissible duffel bags, on equal footing with every other candidate, he exhaled his cage and inhaled relief.
Chapter 4: Consummation of the First Land
Jun
03
The Queen’s bedchamber was opened and aired through the day as the servants cleansed it from top to bottom. The Queen herself was not allowed within during the process. Eleya tried to occupy herself by moving upward through the castle’s once familiar halls towards a destination she could not remember.
Chapter 5: The Second and Third Lands
Jun
03
Tanata rose early most mornings, except on the rare annual holidays he’d always been granted leave for. He’d been trained in the Guard since he was a young boy, newly arrived from the mountains. One didn’t laze around in bed or in the courtyard. Too young to fight, there were errands to run, messages to carry, armor and weapons to polish and care for. Too old to scramble about, there was training and light duty shifts until the day there was the strength to stand in the Guard.
Chapter 6: Consummation of the Fourth Land
Jun
03
Sahasarel had wondered at the knowing words and looks Nirune used when watching the previous consummations, and he finally asked directly. “Did you sleep with others too before the marriage?”
Chapter 1: Beloved of the Gods
Jun
03
The blood of priests and oracles ran thick in the royal family. Eleya had wakened from night sweats and visions when she was sixteen seasons old and been delivered to the convent furthest from the Royal City at the Heart of All Things. There she was devoted to the gods, and what has been devoted to the gods should not be taken back again.
Chapter 2: City at the Heart of All Things
Jun
03
There was always the element of balancing political relationships and the intricately woven web of loyalties, rebellions, even small defiances, and having the right lineage in the first place when it came time to evaluate the four royal spouses a new monarch must take.
Chapter 3: Patterns in the Winds
Jun
03
The Northern Prince was about what they’d expected, slight of build and almost delicate in appearance, with fair skin like morning clouds and blue eyes like chinks of sky, narrowed at them in wary distrust. That delicate look, those airy features had always been deceptive, and even the most coddled royalty of the first of the Four Lands had an uncanny ability to survive.
Odd Out
May
24
Too violent. Too harsh. Too unwilling to use violence until pressed. Willing to use too much violence after.
Reasons to throw her from one complement to another, one look at clawed hooks on her wingtips enough to teach anyone she’d been built at Canaf. Playing nice shouldn’t be her first reflex.
“A diplomatic envoy?” Maru asked, skeptical of her pilot.
“In a war complement,” Taseta said, tossing her braid and grinning. “A permanent post. We’ll serve as point.”
A war complement. They could use both her violence and her restraint.
“You really think it’ll last?”
Taseta shrugged. “At least try.”
Castles
May
14
The first time Cor saw sand, he ran across the beach with giggles and bare feet, not even noticing the stinging heat and grit. Zana watched with a smile and settled down to build castles.
He came back over, curiously, after her towers began to rise from the sand, looked with wide eyes, never touching. She was raising him at essentially a spaceport. He knew to keep his fingers away from delicate things.
But he was her little brother. She took his small hands and showed him how to shape and pat and firm the walls.
“Our castle,” she said.
Succession
May
07
“Princess.”
A pause, a silent gap stretching out into the distant horizon and over the edge—
“Your parents are dead.”
—war.
She closed her eyes, no longer listening to details that only confirmed what she’d already known. Pain, crashing, screaming of metal and flesh rending open to space—
Pain.
“My princess—”
“Queen,” she corrected quietly. She opened her eyes, collected herself, and rose to go find her brothers, dismissing the servant with a gesture. She let her bodyguards flank her down the too empty corridors to her oldest brother’s study.
“King,” she greeted him.
“Queen,” he greeted back.
Simple Pleasures
May
01
Ide’a stared long enough that Mihzät finally turned around with an exasperated sigh and demanded, “What?”
“You got your ears pierced,” Ide’a said, gaze flitting between Mihzät’s ears and his face, a flat, almost unreadable expression on his own.
But Ide’a wasn’t truly unreadable, not to Mihzät. There was a little wonder there, surprised faint pleasure.
Mihzät blushed, suddenly conscious that he was finally wearing the earrings Ide’a had given him a year ago and of what such a gift actually meant. “Yeah.”
Ide’a leaned over and kissed him softly just behind his ear, making Mihzät shiver. “I like them.”
Blade
Apr
15
You will be my blade.
The words echo in his mind sometimes, a soft-voiced memory, the imprint of a small hand against his hull.
Mihzat doesn’t remember it, but Veset does. Veset, blade, and he looks through log files that predate his integration, digs through memories that are his for all they aren’t.
That quiet voice, You will be my blade.
Is that what you want to call it, my queen? More familiar. Kasuru, the designer of the spaceship, who’d been at Mihzat’s integration when he became Veset.
Queen. Yes.
The Future
Apr
10
Rhezere didn’t like to think of memories, instead he made endless plans. But sometimes he dreamed them, waking with screams strangled between his teeth.
Sometimes he woke and muffled the memories until they faded. Sometimes he called Kasuru, who had seen his scars and never heard the stories behind them.
“You did a terrible job of healing them,” Rhezere complained. “When the weather’s bad, they hurt.”
“Ah.” Kasuru could hear everything Rhezere wasn’t saying.
They didn’t talk about the past or about the aches and pains Rhezere claimed to have. They talked about their plans, their work, and the future.
Long Distance Family
Apr
10
Zana ran Ijeve’s training facility, almost never leaving it, and had since she was a teenage girl, well trained but saddled with a little brother she wouldn’t leave. Her little brother wasn’t little anymore, but a warship who only came home on leave.
But how the messages flew between them!
She knew his triumphs and struggles before the battle reports rolled in, and every infuriating thing she didn’t need to know about his pilot. He knew about her frustrations with each new batch of trainees and which ones she had high hopes for. But they never said, I miss you.
A Little Chat
Mar
25
Captain Mikral was rather pleased at how easily they’d slipped past their enemy’s border defense and how many parsecs into enemy space they’d gone. The target was fast approaching.
He should have saved his pleasure.
He barely saw the flash of blue in the ship’s viewer before he saw the hooked blades unsheathing from the tips of its wings, before the entire crew felt them puncture the hull as their velocity ground to zero.
Mikral swore.
The communications panel lit, then a woman appeared on-screen and her warm voice came through the intercom. “Let’s have a little chat.” She grinned.