Prologue #4
Airik’s hand, holding the gel, twitched against his cheek. Pain exploded across his face. “But you had a choice not to create me…this way.” His heart pounded hard. He had to escape.
They’d never know the pain of injury or disease with the intensity it would hit him. Their only obligation in life was to age, though it seemed the last few years had taken a heavier toll on both than expected.
After sparing his mother’s outstretched hand one more glance, he left.
He heard his mother rise after him, then a few hushed words from his father.
Some sort of hope made him pause in the hall, blood rushing in his ears. Waiting for…something.
No one came for him. Airik rubbed his chest, a tightness building that he didn’t understand. He returned to his room, where he slept on the floor. The soft bed of his boyhood no longer suited him.
The next morning, before the sun rose, he arranged a return transit to Zarmur.
He’d missed his progenitors too much. A weakness that needed to be squashed, not fed by waiting to see them after they woke.
Whatever disease had infected their mind with love would not catch him.
He’d remain untouched, untaken, unconquered and earn the prestige of a morazir, despite being wild.
He quietly told Poosha how good she was.
The thought of treating his little friend with coldness hurt him more than he could ignore, and he hoped with time that he’d learn to let that attachment go as well.
But for now, he stroked the white star-shaped patch on her head and buried his nose in her fur one last time.
He left before his parents woke, letting the childish thought persist that it’d be good for them to miss him for once—and be sorry for what they’d done to him without his consent.
A day passed. Beaten during forging and too tired to acknowledge Torren anxiously humming some otherworldly song from his side of their dwelling, he lay on his cot, an arm draped across his eyes.
Just as he finally drifted into sleep, there was a sharp rap at the door.
Airik shot upright, spinning toward the sound.
Three more urgent knocks.
He jumped up, went to the door, but then hesitated. It was late—much too late to be a standard summons.
Steeling himself, he slid open the door.
He froze, faced with a commander’s uniform. Looking up, he met with Aelior Darin’s hard glare. Once a morazir assigned to monitor his father’s progress, and now a candidate for the position of general.
Airik hadn’t seen her since being called to walk the path of the morazir, except in passing when she checked on Torren, his forgemate and a living prime—children without progenitors, designed entirely in a laboratory and near biological perfection.
But the technology had not yet been perfected, and the few who survived to birth were almost always deemed undesirable and destroyed.
“Did I do something wrong again?” a small voice asked from behind Airik. Only Torren’s eyes were visible in the darkness, wide with blue tears already pooling.
“No,” Aelior said. “I’m here for him.”
Airik felt a strong hand on his shoulder, pulling him out of the door.
Before he could open his mouth, her tail wrapped around his ankle, dragging him halfway into the hall.
He fell onto his backside, a hot flush of embarrassment flooding him. Before he could speak, Aelior grabbed his collar and pulled him to a stand. “Come with me. We haven’t got time.” Her scales pressed tight against her brow, quivering with extreme, indecipherable emotion.
Airik’s heart dropped into his belly.
With a firm grasp on his collar, Aelior pulled him through the dormitory halls.
He tried to keep up with her brisk pace. But she was tall, and Airik—still not grown to his full height—nearly went down trying to keep even. “Aelior—”
“Your parents were attacked. Kudra poisoning.”
“Kudra?” Airik tore out of her grip, a violent heat bursting over his skin. He thrust an arm out, catching a door handle, jarring them both to a stop. “They couldn’t have been attacked by…whatever kudra is. The estate is protected, and none can trespass—you’re lying!”
Aelior’s tail shot out, wrapped around his wrist, and broke his grip with a painful twist. “They weren’t protected! They were here—in Zarmur. Less than an hour ago.”
It felt like Airik’s chest had been split in two, rendering his lungs useless and his breath too shallow to survive. “They wouldn’t! They know not to—”
“Are you refusing my command?” Her scales flared erratically, the very tips flashing from brown to yellow.
Airik went still, a realization piercing through him—the only reason they’d be in Zarmur, away from the ancient estate’s protections, was to follow him.
In the space it took to gather his thoughts, Aelior’s muscular tail wrapped around his leg and yanked him across the floor.
Airik had no choice but to let himself be dragged through the halls. How could he defy a commander?
“Kudra is a crystal. A source of unending energy,” she said as she practically threw him into the stairwell. “But sometimes it morphs into something deadly.”
Airik heard, but he couldn’t listen. The Morazir’s Oath surrounded them, painted on the walls so as never to allow a candidate to forget. “My father is a morazir,” he said. “Unkillable.”
Aelior’s tail tightened around his ankle.
After his father had refused work on the translating protocols when Airik had been called to walk the path, the Veynari had retasked Aelior.
Exalted as the pinnacle of moraziri control, redeeming herself after an indiscretion he didn’t know, the Veynari had allowed her the rare honor of trading the Sword of Ulliel for a battalion to command. So for her to behave like this…
She hauled his thrashing body down the stairs to the courtyard, where an aerocar waited. Aelior yanked open the door and flung him in. “A morazir can be killed,” she said with a flare of emotion he’d never witnessed from a commander before.
The transport was quick. In less than a few minutes, Airik was thrust from the car in front of the hospital.
“Don’t call them Mother and Father,” she said in a hushed voice. “Remember—they are only progenitors to you.”
Attendants escorted them to a dim room containing a glass box, within which lay a large bed with two forms lying side by side.