Prologue #3
Six cycles passed. In exchange for human words and demonstrable progress on a human translating module, Rhavik was granted peace for himself and his family.
Airik lay on his belly beside Rhavik in the large, stone-walled book repository of the vault, scribbling large letters on paper. Poosha, his son’s black-furred ooshi, lay over Airik’s legs, keeping him warm.
With swelling pride, Rhavik peered over his son’s shoulder. “Are you sure you have everything in place?”
Airik pondered the letters, tapping the charcoal stylus against his chin, leaving a black smudge. Poosha, understanding Rhavik’s suggestion, flicked her flaring black tail over where Airik had been practicing his otherworldly words.
“Ehhyy…eye…arr…eye…kay.” Airik tapped each of the Ingelesh letters, his head turning from left to right as he searched for the error.
“You’re missing the dots.”
Airik quickly pressed two dots over the correct letters. “Mother said these words are bad. A…a…” He looked up, white hair falling into his eyes, searching for the word.
Rhavik leaned closer to his boy. “A see—”
“A secret!” Airik smiled, little fangs peeking over his lips, his eye shine a glimmering blue green that filled Rhavik with inexplicable dread. His son had only just gained their glow after weeks of sleepless nights.
“That’s right—a secret,” he confirmed, pushing the hair out of Airik’s face. “Your mother is correct, as she always is. Only the Ourex knows these words for now, so don’t repeat them to others.”
Several hours later, as Rhavik, still in the vault, worked on protocols that translated the Veynari common tongue into Ingelesh words, his omnislate lit with a notice, the winged insignia of the Veynari projecting above it. Rhavik froze, a painful pressure building in his chest.
Seldi had just come to him after putting their son to bed. “No,” she said, her softened voice almost lost in the low hum of the vault—its neural engine analyzing its occupants to ensure only Jortag heirs were within it.
Her eyes fixed on the scrolling message in his hand, her breaths becoming pained rasps.
The Veynari wanted Airik.
Rhavik let the omnislate fall to the floor. He stared at his wife, who stayed at the bottom of the stairs—she could not cross into the vault.
“But he’s wild!” She took a step back up the stairs. “Why would they want him? I thought—”
“There’s no law barring the wild from walking the path. The officials see the same things we see in him.” That, like his father, Airik could be forged into something greater.
“Not my boy. He’s not…unkillable.” Seldi turned and ran up the stairs leading out of the vault, stumbling at the top, her stuttering footsteps echoing in the repository.
“Not when he can’t use the regeneration chambers.
Did you forget he lacks the tagion code and compatibility?
Because we decided not to let the Veynari tamper with him. ”
Rhavik cursed, chasing her. “He won’t need to use it. I won’t let him take the oath.”
Seldi spun to him just as she reached Airik’s door, a frenzied look in her eyes.
“What?” she said in a loud whisper. “How can you say that? Even I know there are only two outcomes when walking the path: The oath. Or death.” She let out a short, distraught laugh.
“I’m not sure which one of them is worse! ”
“Not for Airik.” Rhavik took her hand, pulling her away from their son’s door.
“I’ll find us a way out—I swear it. I just need time.
” He didn’t know how he’d do it. Fleeing the planet was impossible—only approved transports could pass the plasma net controlling traffic on and off the planet.
But he’d broken free from the Veynari before. He could do it again.
Defeat shrouded them both and she sagged against his chest. “I knew this was what they really wanted when they said we could keep him. They weren’t just curious—they wanted him for themselves. An experiment…that’s all he is.”
Rhavik tightened his arms around her, burying his face against her neck and breathing in her sweet scent. It was impossible to tell which of them trembled more. “No, Seldi. He’s exceptional. That’s why they want him.”
“Even if he survives the forging, children in war…” Her voice shook. “They’ll never give him back if he survives. Especially if he survives.”
“He will. I’ve seen him grown.” Rhavik went stiff, disbelieving that he’d admitted to the vision aloud. He didn’t know why he told her—maybe to speak it into reality.
Seldi tilted her head to the side, her eye shine quivering with emotion.
“When he was born, do you remember? I saw his face—strong and…it was a man’s face.” He didn’t tell her about the scars on Airik’s face or the absolute torment in his eyes. It didn’t matter—in whatever he’d seen, their son lived.
Rhavik rested his forehead against hers, pressing his lips against hers to still them from questioning his sanity—he didn’t have any answers.
Quietly, he reached behind her and opened their son’s bedroom door. “Let’s hold him tonight. Let’s be with him while he dreams. While he’s still only ours.”
Cycles passed. In Zarmur, the center of operations for the Veynari, where buildings soared from the iced soil to the cold expanse of space, Airik vanished into the ranks of other uniformed children.
He had no name anymore and was simply a forgeling, lost in the sea of other forgelings armed with training blades and plasma guns, who’d been plucked from child wards by the Algorithm for forging.
Usually, they were trained at the moraziri institute under commanders and morazir who weren’t currently on active missions.
Mental and physical training were equally rigorous.
Other times, they were thrust into a war that the Veynari refused to admit existed, against worlds resisting the progress the Veynari sought to spread.
They fought alongside grown shield forces in live battlefields, sometimes ordered to precede the standard ranks.
A calculated culling that ensured only the strongest would survive training—or forging, as it was formally termed.
Each day, the number of his rank thinned. Airik’s pack of forgemates succumbed to injuries too severe for even the chambers to heal until it was only he and another child, Torren, left. New ranks were called, pulled from the wards to replace them.
Airik watched, fear crushing his chest and strangling his breath, as forgelings—children—were flipped into incineration boxes after failed resuscitation attempts in the chambers.
Trapped on space transports returning from the field, he had no escape.
Only the blank faces of other forgelings who repeated the oath like a chant: Untouched.
Untaken. Unconquered. I will be unkillable.
He, too, repeated the words fervently, even as commanders shouted at him, delivering menacing truths aimed at him in particular.
That he was wild. That using the regeneration chambers would kill him faster than any wound sustained in forging.
Learn this now, make no mistakes, and survive, his commanders said.
Or return to the stars as ash. Both would be an honorable end—the best a child born wild could hope for.
Fear hardened into a cold detachment—something that moved his muscles faster, let him strike harder, and banished hesitation. The transformation into a morazir came so quickly that a boy his age couldn’t possibly identify when it happened.
He only knew that one day he woke and he no longer felt any warmth. But just as importantly, he didn’t feel the cold paralysis of fright. And maybe this evolution would mean he’d survive.
Only once was he allowed to return to the estate: During the celebration of a new general rising to the Ourex, a daylong break from forging, as commanders were to be present for the voting.
“You’ve cursed me,” Airik said that night in a calm voice, sitting across the wide table from his progenitors.
He pressed healing gel into a still-oozing wound on his cheek, irritation already simmering within him about the scar that would form.
He’d been distracted in the field, and another forgeling had wanted to see if the wild bled the same color as everyone else.
“Now everyone will know what I am the moment they look at me.”
“And what exactly are you?” his father asked, glancing at Seldi beside him.
Airik glared, narrowing his eyes. “An abomination.”
His mother remained still, her plate untouched.
“It will be over very soon for you,” Rhavik said. His voice once boomed, but now Airik struggled to hear it. “I’ve done enough for the Veynari, given them enough words, and none of it was enough to keep you—” He clamped his mouth shut, the shadows on his branded jaws flexing with tension.
Airik watched, his cheeks now burning with rage for a reason he couldn’t yet place, as his mother reached for his father.
Averting his eyes to the library door, he focused on the dust gathered on the lever and lock panel—the vault hadn’t been opened in ages.
Perhaps his father had lost interest in the words.
“Walking the path is not a choice.” Airik fought to keep his voice steady. Why was he so angry?
Seldi reached for his hand from across the table, wiggling her fingers to entice him as she had when he was small. “It’s not a choice. But for you, my beautiful boy, it won’t be your future.”
Though Airik didn’t return her touch, she continued. “We’re arranging things. With Ael—”
“It’s safer for him not to know,” Rhavik said, before turning to Airik. “Soon, my son. Just keep surviving.”
Airik glanced between his parents. Their voices shook, and drops of luminescent tears gathered on their lashes—ti’rosi tears glowed when overcome with emotion.
What a fatal flaw, Airik thought. He pushed away from the table, his chair screeching across the floor. “Untouched. Untaken. Unconquered,” he said. “That is what I am now, as the Algorithm has selected me. There is no choice.”