March 1907
—
A week after the Starspawn horde was defeated on the northern Talkian coast, Ev opened their message board to a ping from the Arv’hein.
( FHeran_ARVHN: imagefile_0027631.atch
better or worse than the live ones? )
Attached with his message was a series of holopics. Ev frowned at the first thumbnail, then at the time of night. With nothing better to do, they tapped the first one and recoiled with a start, their rifle parts nearly falling out of their lap.
The first picture was of a severed Starspawn head: a lionere with a bright blue mane, six marble-like pink eyes, and fleck of black across its left cheek. Perhaps worse than the image of the beast itself: it was one of the lioneres they had killed in the attempt to stop the horde’s progression further inland. But, thankfully, it had been fully converted into a taxidermy trophy.
The next two pictures were also of severed, fully taxidermied Starspawn heads, but it was the fourth one that nearly made them spill their lunch across the training room floor. It was a freshly-cut chimera head, the beast’s eyes still glassy and fully capable of giving them vertigo, even through a picture. The next two pictures were the chimera’s other, also freshly severed heads. They wrote Heran back.
( AE-I_RA: worse. should’ve gouged the eyes out and replaced em with
glass )
( FHeran_ARVHN: oh shit you answered
Why, because they can still give you vertigo even when they’re dead? )
Ev glanced at the clock. It was four in the morning their time, they could only imagine what hour it was in Tartarus. Either extremely late or extremely early, if Heran was surprised by their answering. They squinted at the pictures again, only glancing quickly at the one that was only partially preserved.
( AE-I_RA: look into their eyes and ask me that again )
A few minutes later, after they had finished assembling their rifle, they got a reply. It was a video clearly not taken by Heran, as it showed him dry heaving into a trashcan, his back facing the camera while the recorder of the video cackled. Between heaving, Heran threw an accusatory finger back at the video recorder and called them a traitor. After they’d played through the video, another messages was waiting for them:
( FHeran_ARVHN: so you’re THAT kind of asshole, huh )
They sneered.
( AE-I_RA: told you. Make sure to remove all the eyes and replace them. At least those marbles are pretty. )
( FHeran_ARVHN: tu-kas’e )
( AE-I_RA: let me guess: “fuck you” )
( FHeran_ARVHN: fast learner. But seriously, tu-kas’e, that was awful. Are they always like that? )
( AE-I_RA: yes )
( FHeran_ARVHN: tia Madrea… )
Ev chuckled; that, at least, they didn’t need to translate. They tucked the last of their cleaning gear back into their rifle case, which was remarkably less used than the rifle itself, then sat back against the training room wall. They looked at the pictures of the taxidermied Starspawn heads again.
( AE-I_RA: where’d you get those things taxidermied anyway? )
No one in their right mind would be crazy enough to try and turn a toxic creature like a Starspawn into a wall trophy. (Except, maybe, someone from a hellworld, they noted wryly.)
Heran replied with another picture, this one of two tall, broad-shouldered men with the same olive-toned skin, dark hair, and small, crown-like horns. One man was a little shorter than the other and had four horns along the front of his head. The taller one had long, curly hair and a full circlet of horns around to top of his skull. The shorter one was scowling at Fin while the other dug into what looked like a completely stripped Starspawn skull, his eyes shining as he bore broad, toothy smile.
( FHeran_ARVHN: Seah’ka and Hirosea Chirrell )
Ev frowned and chewed on the inside of their cheek. They knew the name “Chirrell” from somewhere. Out of curiosity, they pulled up their message board and scrolled through their saved files until they found the reference sheet of names they had been given for the Tartarun-Aetherian Alliance. There—under the list of representatives for a province called Trivaal. They reread the titles attached to Seah’ka and Hirosea Chirrell’s names.
( AE-I_RA: as in the Director of the Interior, fourth prince of Trivaal, and the to-be Chief Commander of the entire province’s military?? Why are they dissecting and taxidermying Starspawn??? )
That seemed like a great way to get two heirs in the royal family killed, in Ev’s opinion.
Heran sent another picture of jarred organs and biomatter, with Seah’ka still smiling wildly in the background.
( FHeran_ARVHN: they just kind of do this sort of thing. Hiro was dissecting scabbardae for fun when we were ten-year-olds )
Ev hesitated at the word “scabbardae.” Did they want to ask what kind of creature that was? They’d seen their fair share of wild things in Averon, considering it had been the epicenter of multiple cataclysmic disasters over the millennia, but what they’d seen in Aetheria was weirder. If they started learning what kind of hellish things lived in Tartarus, whose rugged environment alone was hellish, they weren’t sure they would recover.
They asked anyway.
Heran informed them that a scabbarda (“scabbardae” being its plural) was a omnivorous lizard about a foot long that had an outer body and an inner body, kind of like the shell of a torke (the Tartarun word for “turtle,” he explained). When frightened, the lizards would suck their long necks and head back into their exoshell and pull in their front legs, and it made them look like long knives in scabbards, hence the name. Apparently, they were as common as rodents in eastern Tartarus, and often became roadkill on the ATV trails. The point, Heran conveyed, was that taxidermying Starspawn was nothing for the Chirrells. Ev asked how the brothers were capable of even handling the severed heads, given the toxic nature of the creatures’ biomatter and their fiberglass-like fur.
( FHeran_ARVHN: honestly, I don’t know either. it’d be better if you just talked to them directly instead of me typing it out when I ask )
The next notification was a prompt for a video call.
Ev hesitated. The training room on this voidship—a small diplomatic ANIC frigate—was empty, but that didn’t mean they were alone. They had noticed months ago the plethora of security cameras in every room on Aetherian vessels, and in official government buildings. There was a very high chance they were being recorded at this very minute. They had been forced to look over the Rules de Empera multiple times since last summer, and they knew now that their neutrality rules were pretty extensive… but surely nothing prohibited them from taking a friendly HOLOcall. It was personal, unofficial business, and surely they were allowed to make friends.
Talis was in the room next door doing inventory of the frigate’s armory; technically, they could ask him. But doing so would mean admitting that they didn’t really read the Rules de Empera, and they’d surely be subjected yet another lecture about why they needed to know those rules by heart. It had been a sore subject recently; Talis seemed convinced that following Rules de Empera would keep both of them safer, and keep Ev alive. It was similar to his fixation on teaching them the ranking systems of the IAF when they were first acclimating to it. They glanced at the door, chewing on their inner lip. They were not, Ev decided, ready for another overprotective lecture today.
They accepted the HOLOcall invite and were immediately greeted with high-volume yelling being fed straight through their over-ear mic. They cranked the volume down and tried to figure out what was being said, only to realize that there were two entirely different languages being spoken. As the camera view came into focus and they messed with the permissions on their HOLOscreen, they were met with a confusing, alarmingly bloody scene as they tried to separate the two languages and the speakers.
One of the Chirrells—the long-haired one—was shouting at Fin Heran in a soft-edged, winding language that somehow managed to sound both eloquent and furious at the same time. Fin was shouting back in a harsher language with sharp pronunciations and angles to it. They seemed to understand each other perfectly fine, and Ev was sure they both swapped languages once or twice. Fin’s HOLOscreen view was showing Ev the two of them arguing over the same cleaned skull as before, the video call forgotten.
A third face stepped into view and commandeered Fin’s HOLOscreen, the viewer color switching to blue as the shorter Chirrell brother took over the call and crossed the room, fleeing the argument. He sat down at another table that was covered in tools, potted plants, and another half-deconstructed Starspawn skull, then glanced over his shoulder at Heran and his brother, and rolled his eyes.
He turned to Ev and smiled, two long tusks protruding from the corners of his mouth. “Tia eveah, Empera,” he said smoothly, his voice deeper than Heran’s and almost musical in quality. “Apologies for my insane brother and our even more insane Talkian friend.”
Ev grinned. “Oh, don’t bother. I’m familiar with Heran’s type of crazy; this doesn’t faze me.”
It was strange to consider themselves “familiar” with Fin Heran, but it wasn’t inaccurate. They’d known him for three months now, give or take—which wasn’t much, but it was longer than they’d known some of their comrades in arms in Cyresia, or some colleagues in Aetheria.
The Trivaalian smiled wider in return, his green eyes crinkling at the edges. “He does have an acquired, edgy taste, doesn’t he? I guess we’re the ones that can put up with it.”
He tilted his HOLOscreen so Ev could see both him and what he was working on, then reached for a scalpel. “I am Hirosea Chirrell—I go by Hiro. My family and I are aware of your Rules, so I will not ask your name, but do you prefer one over your title?”
Ev tried to imagine all of these people—Heran, the Chirrels—calling them “Emperor” or “Razienne” or “Emperor Razienne” for the rest of time and cringed. “My nickname, Ev, is fine. No titles unless we have to use them, if that’s alright.”
Hiro glanced between them and the Starspawn skull, this one belonging to a long-nosed chimera, a flicker of surprise in his expression before he smiled again. “Ev, then. No titles with me either; I don’t know about you, but I’m avoiding my responsibilities as long as I can.”
Ev recalled one of the news articles they had automatically been forwarded through the Tartarun-Aetherian Alliance boards. “Ah, you’re taking over as head of your province’s military soon, yes?”
He nodded. “Earlier than expected, too. Something Fin and I seem to have in common these days.”
They had managed to find a few articles on Fin Heran after meeting him for the first time. He had been crowned Arv’hein of Talki a little over six months ago now, following the abdication and disappearance of his mother, Syne Heran. Everything they had managed to read with their translator app had explained that he wasn’t set to take on the Crown until he was twenty-five. But because of the abdication, he had been pulled from his obligatory service in the Talkian military years before he was technically ready to lead the province.
What they had read about Hirosea Chirrell was much the same. One of his uncles had fallen ill and resigned from the position of Chief Commander, ceding his position to the appointed next in line: Hirosea, who was finishing up his final year at the Trivaalian Provincial Military Academy as a strategist and demolitions expert. Ev agree they could easily see the similarities.
“That’s good, in a way,” they said. “You seem like you’re good friends. You have each other to gripe to and seek help from while you adjust.”
Hiro smiled sadly and reached for a different tool, and it was then that Ev saw he was wearing gloves. “That is true.”
He cut a section of flesh free from the Starspawn’s skull and placed it on a tray that was glowing with some kind of stabilization field. “We watched your Tournament run, and my brothers have been keeping up with your reign and the incidents that followed your portal catastrophe,” he said. “They’ve noticed a change; my oldest brothers, the Overseers of Trivaal, have reason to think you’re a bit out of your depth too. Something about possibly waking up from a battle trance…?”
A spike of fear shot Ev through the chest and they swallowed hard. No one had called them on that yet except Talis and others on the inside of the IAF. That they possessed the zio’andar and had woken up from a post-resurrection “battle trance” was something of a rumor in the IAF these days, though they suspected on a few, like Talis, knew it was the truth. Very few others had enough contact with them to verify those rumors. That these Trivaalian rulers had noticed and were willing to call them on their inexperience too…
Then they realized Hiro was smiling again, looking at their screen out of the corner of his eye with a mischievous lilt. They narrowed their eyes at him, something of a hunch tickling the back of their mind. Either he was playing them, or he had ways of finding out these kinds of things. Either way…
“How do you know that?”
He turned and beamed, his dark sclera glittering like green-dark voidspace. “I didn’t, until you just confirmed it.”
They deadpanned and Hirosea Chirrell laughed, putting his tool down.
Too late, Ev realized the background noise had quieted. While Hiro was still laughing, Fin Heran returned and wrenched the HOLOscren around and looked between them and Hiro.
“What, are you stealing my Aetherian, Hiro’sa?” Fin snapped, though he was also smiling. He said Hiro’s name differently, a little sharper than normal, and Ev wondered if it was a nickname.
"I didn’t steal anything!” Hiro squawked, laughing and jabbing is elbow at his friend’s face.
“Filthy lies,” his brother, who must be Seah’ka, protested from his other side. He smacked his hand down on top of his little brother’s head and mushed his curly hair around. “You steal my stuff all the time—like this poor uroadii you keep forgetting to water!”
He swiped a plant off of Hiro’s work table: a curly, dark blue thing with orange flowers and green buds sat in a dark gray ceramic pot. Hiro grabbed for him, then the plant, but Seah’ka jumped out of the way and fled the room, cackling as Hiro sent curses hurtling after him. Fin covered a snort of laughter with his hand and received a glare of equal darkness a second later. Then all attention was swiveled back to Ev.
“So it was a battle trance?” Hiro asked, eyes sparkling with intrigue. “We had our suspicions, being dream demons and all, and Karian has this prophetic gift from the Goddess—he saw a ziojic with orange hair resurrecting on a red beach a week before the Tournée de Coronae! Was that you?”
Ev cringed at his enthusiasm at knowing all the things they were supposed to keep deep, dark secrets. Maybe they shouldn’t have given him their nickname. But he looked so excited to have figured it out, and even Heran was looking at them with curiosity. Perhaps a little late, Ev realized he wasn’t in his armor—they’d always seen him in his armor, from the day they met him in the outback until now. Instead, he was wearing an oversized shirt that looked like it should belong to Hiro, even sporting the same geometric neckline and green and blue accents. Hiro himself was wearing an open sweater over what looked like a band tee for a group they didn’t recognize. They were both wearing gloves, except Hiro’s were made of thick leather and ringed with enchantment runes, and Fin’s were his usual fingerless armored gloves, sans armor pieces.
“Yeah,” they reluctantly admitted, glancing around the training room at the cameras. “That was me.”
Hiro leaned over and whacked Heran’s shoulder with his elbow, keeping his contaminated gloves away from his friend. “I told you!”
Fin groaned and waved him off, stepping out of elbow range. “Oh hush. I was the one who told you they were ziojic in the first place.”
Ev frowned in consternation. “How did you know that?” they asked.
Fin looked at them as if to ask who didn’t? “Seriously?” he asked. “Everyone knows void demons have those stripes on their faces and eyes like yours.”
They shifted uneasily against the wall. “Well, I didn’t know until last June.”
At that, Hiro and Fin both stilled and subtly exchanged glances.
“How didn’t you know?” Fin asked cautiously. “Surely you recognized that you had resurrected from the dead. What else could you be?”
“Yeah, it’s what likely caused the battle trance,” Hiro said. “Most ziojic wake up in a daze; if someone grabbed you and entered you into a tournament like in my brother’s vision, then it’s entirely possible that whatever programming the gods gave you when you accepted their quest kicked in.” He stopped, eyes going wide. “Why were you sent to Aetheria and given combat programming?”
That was officially too much information for Ev to process. They knew so little about the zio’andar and what it had done to them, and they knew even less about the circumstances of their resurrection or what they had agreed to when they came back. Talis had said the zio’andar was an invocation rune; if it worked and the person branded with it was resurrected, they were honor-bound to uphold a promise they made with the gods—one they could not and would not remember making. Now Hiro was calling that promise a quest?
Talis had also called them unpredictable; if they were sent to Aetheria for a reason, and if that reason involved internal combat programming and unpredictability, that made them dangerous.
“I think you broke them,” Fin whispered to Hiro, evidently forgetting this was still his call and his mic was on, meaning Ev could still hear him.
“You didn’t ‘break me,’” Ev protested, breaking out of their stupor. “I just… didn’t know. Where I come from, we don’t have records of the ziojic race.”
Or any record of any race, really. Cyresia only had limited HOLOnet access, and if the zio’andar and anything related to it was banned multiverse-wide, then Cyresia wouldn’t have had access to that sort of information at all under the greater Averonian network.
Hiro frowned. “Aetheria definitely has access to ziojic species records,” he said. “Most of Tartarus does, anyway. Unless…”
Fin’s eyes flashed blue and he broke into a terrible grin.
Ev cursed themselves.
“You’re not Aetherian,” he said, confirming their fears. “You’re not Aetherian—I knew it! No one I’ve ever met from the Empire speaks Common Tongue like you do, or has that kind of navigational skills!”
Their expression pinched. “If you’re referring to the teleportation and the innate sense for the direction of the nearest voidbank, Heran, I’m pretty sure that’s a ziojic thing—”
“Sure, but finding your way back to the exact point you landed in Talki that first time we met? Without looking at a compass?” He scoffed. “I watched that on the biosignature trace. That’s the skill of someone who has practice with getting lost in the woods in the middle of nowhere and finding their way back home.”
Hiro turned his frown on Fin. “You only have that ability because you regularly get lost in the woods in the middle of nowhere. For fun.”
Fin waved him off. “Not the point.” He turned his sharp, sun-white eyes on Ev. “I fucking knew it.”
Ev sighed, sagging against the wall. Were they really this transparent or did these Tartaruns have some sort of enhanced people-reading skills?
“Anyway,” Hiro cut in, glaring at his friend, “Fin said before all this that you had questions for us?”
Startled out of their rumination about their own transparency, Ev reoriented their thought process and nodded. “Yeah.” They inhaled slowly. “How in Solorana’s clear sky are you and your brother handling those things without dying?”
They pointed at the Starspawn and Hiro’s gaze followed, Fin’s intrigue shifting from them to the chimera head.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Fin poked him in the arm—Ev noted that Hiro’s shoulder and bicep were as big around as Fin’s head. “You know exactly what they mean, don’t play the same joke on them that you tried on me!”
Hiro deflated, flashing him a sly grin. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“Hiro’sa.”
The man snorted and reached for the edge of his left glove. Ev watched in horror as he reached out and touched the dead chimera’s fur, expecting for his skin to start blistering and puckering, only for it to do nothing at all. He even poked its empty eye socket—nothing.
“My people—my race, not my province’s people—are called Ialuans,” Hiro said. “We are people of Ialu, the goddess of prophecy, by nature, but our family also has connections to Meyaa, her counterpart, goddess of dreams, memory, and voidspace. As such, we have enhanced durability when it comes to things of the void—especially zio’cerual, Meyaa and Ialu’s sanctuary plane.”
Ev could have gone their entire life without ever learning that zio’cerual, home of the horrific beasts they had been chasing and killing for over a year, was also the home turf of their new race’s patron goddess and the goddess of prophecy. They had respected those gods more without that knowledge.
“So you have more tolerance for their toxicity?” they asked to clarify.
“Yes.” Hiro flicked his wrist and blue flames swirled up the length of his forearm, presumably cleansing it the same way they had seen Talkian healers do a week ago. He pulled his glove back on. “But it’s not unlimited. The gloves are safer overall. They’re thoroughly enchanted for this exact kind of work.”
Ev nodded, glad to have their assumption about the gloves proved. “But… Why turn them into trophies? It’s risky enough just cleaning and taxidermying them, not to mention keeping one’s head on your wall.”
Hiro brightened again. “For fun.”
Fin groaned again. “Turning toxic void beasts into wall decoration isn’t my idea of fun.”
“Correct. Your idea of fun is getting lost in the Talkian outback and going on a post-coronation bender to hide from your responsibilities.”
Ev snorted as Fin went red in the face, his hair sparking with fire. His head snapped towards them and he jabbed a finger at the viewscreen.
“You have no room to talk,” he snapped. “You jump out of voidships and into wormholes for fun!”
They gasped in mock offense and started to mime their protest when the door to the training room slid open and Councilman Deis sauntered in wearing sparring pants, a tight shirt that covered him from neck to wrist, and his usual gloves along and mask. His sharp eyes fell on Ev and they scrambled to their feet, muting their HOLOcall and grabbing their rifle case and gear before leaving the room with haste. They got back to the bunkroom they were once again sharing with Talis and, upon finding it empty, dropped onto their bunk and unmuted the call. Hiro and Fin were watching them with mild concern.
“Are you alright?” Hiro asked. “You looked scared.”
Had they been? Deis certainly unsettled them, but did he really scare them? Ev shook their head in denial and sat up, making themselves more comfortable.
“It’s nothing, just an odd coworker I don’t want to hear my personal conversations,” they said. It was the truth; it was also the excuse Viera once used because she picked it up from her older coworkers at the shop in town.
The Tartaruns exchanged looks again, then Hiro turned back to Ev with those shining green eyes.
“You jumped through a wormhole and lived?”
Ev sighed and met Fin’s eyes through the screen. He was smirking in prideful satisfaction, like this was exactly what he wanted. Considering the interest they and Hiro had in each other, maybe he had noticed and this had been what he wanted. They rolled their eyes at him and started into the explanation of how and why they had learned about jumping through the Starspawns’ wormholes, and why Fin knew about it.
This was, they decided, going to lead to a lively alliance dynamic, if nothing else.
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