Prologue #2
Only hours earlier, he’d knelt in the Ourex’s chambers before the Six Generals, fully expecting them to brand his other cheek or worse.
He’d briefly glanced toward the far corner, behind their round table, where a large glowing crystal—the True Engine, the only evidence that the True Father, Ulliel, had been a real man—dimmed and brightened in a pattern interpreted as a code.
The Algorithm that determined lives and history.
And now, Rhavik had been sure, it would order another branding or finally end his life—disobedient and of no use to the Veynari’s purpose.
But the Ourex had announced that the Algorithm had determined it was time for him to retire the Sword of Ulliel and return to Seldi—if he accepted a new task.
His head had whipped up to the True Engine, innocuous with its white pulsing light. Had it really set him free?
I accept any task, he had said to the Ourex, laying the sword before them, his heart racing.
As he’d listened to the Ourex’s demands, he’d stared at his sword lying dignified, ready to defend or destroy. An unexpected sense of loss had welled in his chest, heavy with regret and memories of the things he’d done in the name of progress.
One of the generals had uttered a command. Vorn, Rhavik thought. A new general who didn’t usually speak, so it had been surprising to hear his thin, gentle voice. The sword had dulled, its power made inert.
They’d asked him to build a compendium of Urrth’s primary languages. His vault, an ancient repository of wealth and artifacts that unlocked only in response to his living tissue and voice, contained the only source of native Urrth texts and sound recordings.
He’d also been forced to accept a morazir to assist him.
So that the errors of first contact won’t be repeated, one of the other generals had said.
Hyoomans have been left last to bring into the Veynari’s fold for a reason.
Their superstitions are too strong, and they resort to violence when faced with what they don’t understand.
We must use their own words to bend them, and if they still refuse, the True Father blesses us with the power needed to make them comply.
Only then can we finally unify all true sapient species into a single organism—as the True Father wants.
It was a mistake to contact them without the Algorithm’s blessings, but we’re certain the time will come soon.
This is an opportunity to restore your purpose, Rhavik.
Don’t squander it. May Ulliel’s light find us.
With that, they’d let him go. No fanfare. No explanations as to what their final judgment about Urrth and the singular organism meant. Just a morazir assigned to him, who followed him in the return transport home.
And he didn’t care. For now, he could keep his family whole and worry about the implications later.
Rhavik eyed the morazir’s tail wrapped tightly around her ankle, the tip flicking against the crisp crease of her uniform trousers. “Is your true task to serve as eyes where the watcher system can’t see? To scrutinize my family? To ensure I behave?”
The woman—Aelior of the Darin clan, as her records stated—didn’t look at him, scowling out the window, at the ice mountains in the distance.
“You’ve already agreed to the monitoring of your progeny.
” Her dark purple eyes cast a disapproving glance his way, the slits of her pupils widening when he met her gaze with equal defiance. She frowned.
Rhavik raised a brow. Morazir rarely showed open disdain.
“A wild birth with the lineage of a morazir—a child of Jortag blood, no less. You’ve created another key to your ancestral vault, and you’re a fool if you thought the Veynari wouldn’t watch him.” She turned back to the window. “And to be clear, my task is only to witness your daily operations.”
“A morazir was pulled from Ed’un to see to my daily operations?” Rhavik scoffed. He turned back to his omnislate. “Does that include how many times I piss in a day? I know the Ourex like their reports to be thorough.”
“I was pulled from Ed’un to serve a punishment.” She flexed a cloth-wrapped hand across the belly of the blade—an attempt to cover a raw brand. “And if you feel your elimination habits are relevant, then I’d be obliged to watch and report them.”
“Why were you pulled from Ed’un?” Rhavik asked.
“You have my records.”
“It says that you ‘violated the oath.’ That could mean you showed mercy or killed Veynari forces. You’ll find you’re in good company if that’s all. But you’re about to be let into my home, and I’d like to know from your own mouth what you’ve done.”
“I report only to the Ourex. I won’t discuss anything beyond the task I’m assigned—a misguided effort to communicate with a psychotic species best suited to rot on their own planet.”
Rhavik put down his omnislate, narrowing his eyes at the mention of the failed Urrth mission. “What exactly went wrong on Urrth?”
“They didn’t tell you?” Aelior, a true sapient known as suralian, flared her scales—an involuntary reaction to stress. “It was you who was supposed to be there instead of her—”
She stopped herself, tail thrashing. She shot out a hand, grabbed the tip, and shoved it under her thigh. Her nose flared, fighting her breath into submission.
Emotion lodged in his throat. How had he forgotten—that it would be someone else sent on a mission to Urrth instead of him?
Stripped of their blades as an earnest gesture of goodwill.
Presenting themselves unarmed to humans so that they’d be more willing to donate several live males and females to study.
Rhavik had refused because he’d known what the Veynari had intended—the execution of an unruly morazir disguised as a mission serving progress.
First contact with the humans had ended in a bloodbath. With both morazir sent for the mission killed and several dozen humans destroyed in the process. He hadn’t known there were more morazir due for punishment.
Aelior’s shoulders lifted and fell as she struggled to manage her breath.
He recognized that look in her eye. The same heartbreak that had been on his grown boy’s face—a pain that haunted him now that he’d seen it.
“Was the one sent to Urrth…important to you?”
Aelior’s glare wavered, her steel resolve betrayed as her eyes misted over.
So, that was what this was, then. She’d loved the morazir who was now dead because Rhavik hadn’t wanted to die himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said into the quiet, overly thick atmosphere of the speeding vehicle. “That you’ve lost someone you…loved.”
“That word.” Aelior shot him a sharp, bewildered look. Her scales shimmered in a brilliant warning pattern. “How dare you speak a forbidden word in a morazir’s path?”
Rhavik held still, knowing the pain itching under her skin. He’d known it once, too. A mind and body that had been forged to feel nothing. But the heart was too deep to be reached and ruined, and so it wanted everything—starved for all of it.
How beautiful it was for a morazir to lose themselves. An odd hope sparked as he watched her regain her composure. Maybe she could be trusted.
Aelior tamed her expression back into something firm and unknowable, her scales dulling to their typical green brown. “I remain untouched, untaken, unconquered in heart. Not all of us have the luxury to be anything else.”
The next morning, a miracle greater than the Veynari allowing him to return the Sword of Ulliel occurred.
Rhavik had become a father, and Seldi had become a mother. To everyone else, however, they were only progenitors with the unheard-of task of raising their own progeny.
As Seldi rested, he held the tiny infant in a plush blanket she had sewn for the occasion, and for the first time in his life, Rhavik didn’t know what to do with himself—or at all.
Airik, they’d named him. An ancient name from a time before the Veynari or the forced engineering of life. Fitting for a child born wild, not enhanced in a laboratory and then implanted into an assigned womb.
All night, Rhavik stared at both Seldi and Airik, a beautiful yet terrifying weight pressing against his throat with its enormity.
He searched his son’s sleeping face for signs of the heartbroken man he’d seen in his vision the day before.
A man who mumbled words in Ingelesh and who looked like he’d lost everything.
Who clutched a strange, dark rope in his hand and pressed it to his lips.
Rhavik understood none of it.
Because this is the Morazir’s Madness, not prophecy, he told himself. You foolishly thought that letting go of the sword meant letting go of the damage to your mind.
Unable to stop himself, Rhavik slipped a finger into his son’s palm that rested against Seldi’s breast.
He bit back a sound of surprise when Airik tightened his still delicate grasp, tiny black nails digging into his skin. Rhavik couldn’t imagine a more perfect hand, whether designed to Veynari standards—cleansed of undesirable traits—or born wild as Airik had been.
With his finger held captive to Airik, for the first time in his life, Rhavik fell to his knees beside their bed and prayed to the True Father, Ulliel, thanking him for his wife’s safe delivery and his son’s good health.
“What are you doing?” Seldi lifted open an eye. Airik stirred, letting go of Rhavik’s finger, stopping him mid-verse.
“Nothing, cheranna,” he hurriedly said. “Forget you saw anything.” He fetched a bowl of sliced iilas fruit, a particularly floral-smelling bunch, then returned to their side.
She sighed, gently stroking his cheek—the only part of him left unbranded with the metallic black ink. “It’s finally happened, hasn’t it? You’ve gone completely mad.”
He laughed softly, then fed her a berry, catching a red drop that slid down her lip and taking it for his own.
When she was done eating, and all the healers and assistants had left the room, Rhavik slipped into bed behind Seldi. With their little bundle of a boy nestled against his wife’s chest, who herself rested in his arms, Rhavik’s family was whole.