June 1906 E-10
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The longer a Starspawn hunting deployment lasted, the more statistically likely it was for Ev’s team to run into anti-Imperial uprisings. Or at least that’s what Ev had noticed. Apparently, colonies of imperial dictatorships didn’t take kindly to the one publicly declared the imperial dictator tromping through their dimension for days on end, hunting beasts said imperial dictator had set loose in the first place. Who would have thought.
Ev really, really wished their face hadn’t been broadcasted across the multiverse four months ago. Right about now, they’d like to just be the leader of a small hunting squad. Not an Emperor, puppet ruler or not.
They were in a foxhole. A shallow, water- and blood-filled foxhole, crammed in below the ridge that another team had sculpted, one of Ev’s squadmates firing a heavy plasma rifle over their shoulder and the other still bleeding out from a wound in her stomach that hadn’t cauterized. Considering this was probably the thousandth time Ev had been in a situation like this in their twenty-three years, they weren’t fazed. However, their teammate kept missing his shots. It was starting to get on their nerves.
“Switch me,” they ordered.
The teammate handed him their rifle and ducked down to try and take over healing while they popped the rifle over the dirty ridge and took out three of the enemy combatants across the thin strip of pathway Ev was calling “no man’s land.” Then they ducked back down and waited. Their aim wasn’t the best, but it was good enough. When their injured teammate was healed enough to take her rifle back, she did, taking with it a few more of the opposition.
All things considered, Ev didn’t want to be engaged in guerilla or trench warfare with an opposing party whose motives they didn’t understand. They’d always known what the State Traders wanted: more land, more uniformity, less cultural diversity—and, usually, to take back an outpost Ev’s team had stolen from them. They had even known some of the commanding officers in their region by name. Now, Ev didn’t know their enemies from their friends, and everyone was wearing the same colors—the entire Empire was united under light blue, blood red, and variations of yellow and gold. Even the rebels.
Ev was also rapidly coming to realize the shitty armor they’d been given on their first deployment was only slightly worse than the set they had now, which was a bastardized version of the high-tech, exceptionally-crafted armor suits the ASMC wore. The injured teammate next to them was the first ASMC soldier Ev had seen go down, and that was because her torso armor was compromised. In comparison, Ev themselves were only alive because they had good instincts and a shocking new healing factor.
Yeah, whatever race they had resurrected into because of Cosanna’s rune had a healing factor. They were more bitter about it than they had any right to be, considering even now their minor blaster burns were scarring over, inch by inch. But really, how nice would it have been to not have spent a week and a half drifting in and out of consciousness due to an infected slug wound four years ago? "Very nice" was the answer. Even the deep knife wound they had gotten stitched up a day ago was almost healed.
Endless oddities. Add it to the fucking list.
They got out of the foxhole after the ASMC corporal next to them had taken out enough of their trigger happy friends. The staff sergeant who had healed her wasn’t so lucky. Ev was smart enough not to look at him or his gaping head wound when they followed the corporal over the ridge of their small ditch and ran.
They reached the edge of a small enemy encampment and slowed. They watched as their companion downed two, five, nine people all dressed in scavenged armor and bullet-proof vests and wondered when exactly they’d switched sides—these anti-Imperials looked like Averonian rebels, or like Ev at the beginning of this same year.
They passed through the camp and into the outskirts of a rural town filled with stone brick buildings and contrasting metal defense mechanisms. This entire satellite dimension seemed to operate out of the rural modernism aesthetic—ancient buildings, brand new tech. The anti-imperialist holdout they had been tracking to this town seemed to have cleared out. They found the entire place empty after an hour of slinking through alleyways and across stair-stepped rooftops, then stopped to regroup. The other four members of Ev’s adopted squad met them at the town square.
The rest of the squad had a conversation in Aetherian while Ev checked a few of their own wounds and counted the deaths of the three squadmates that had been killed in action. Then, they tried to recite the OPORD.
Nothing.
Here was another new problem they’d encountered with this deployment: their memory had garnered more blank spots. Ev didn’t know if it was because there was lingering head trauma from whenever it was that the Second Councilman had knocked them out on the roof, a side effect of some other nasty bang to their head that they perhaps didn’t remember, or something else entirely. So not only did they not know anything about who they were fighting or why beyond a generic “they’re anti-Imperial,” but they also had recurring memory loss that never seemed to fix itself. Oh, and really, really bad armor. Ev rattled off their mental checklist of concerns instead of the missing OPORD, waiting until their squadmates remembered they didn’t speak much Aetherian.
Once they did, they filled Ev in on the next part of the plan and led the way out of town. It wasn’t until everyone stopped and Ev nearly ran into the corporal that they realized they hadn’t absorbed a single word of the explanation. But then they stopped in their tracks too and saw red, and the next thing they knew, they were waking up in a medical bay room on the 5th ASMC Regiment’s flagship. On a cot. In new clothes. With no recollection of how or when they got there.
Dammit.
Ev tried to sit up and immediately stopped, pain flaring across their chest—their ribs were broken, or healing from being broken.
How much time had they just lost?
“Ow,” they muttered to themselves. Without jostling their ribs, they turned their head and used levitation magic to bring the cup of water on their bedside tray to them. They took a drink, grateful at least that they weren’t flat on their back, and tried to assess how long they’d been out via the scratchiness of their throat.
The swishing of trench coat fabric against itself made their head turn, only to reveal Talis Errison blinking awake in the visitor’s chair next to their cot. He stared owlishly at them for a minute, then gold-yellow eyes focused and he frowned irritably.
“You,” he growled.
“Me,” Ev hummed at him, unsurprised. That was his accusatory frown. “What’d I do this time?”
“The rune.”
They let their silence speak for them.
“On your chest.” He nodded in that direction. “I figured out what is—what you are—and I’m pissed.”
Well that was unusual. Most of the time he was pissed at them for doing something stupid that would’ve been praised back home, but was considered a violation of standard operating procedure here. They took another drink and waited for him to elaborate.
“What?” he drawled, “You don’t know what I’m talking about? Come on, Raz.”
He only called them Raz, the shortened version of Razienne, when he was really upset with them. That made Ev frown. They looked down at their chest to find themselves in a sleeveless ASMC undershirt, the edge lines of their rune peeking out from under it.
All Ev knew about the rune was that Cosanna had tattooed it on them without their approval when they turned seventeen and became an adult. They knew what it looked like—all complicated lines and circles with a large equilateral triangle taking up most of the center, inverted when viewed from the front. Beyond that, and the knowledge that they were supposed to cut across one of its lines right before they died, they knew nothing.
Talis scoffed and in the dim, blue-gold lighting of the medbay night cycle he almost looked hurt. “Don’t give me that bullshit.”
He must have read their mind. Ev projected general annoyance his way and glared at him. “I was never told anything more than that,” they hissed.
“If that’s true, you probably never asked.”
Of course they asked! Cosanna had sat them down without a word at age seventeen and painfully tattooed a complicated rule on their person; they’d had dozens of questions that all went unanswered until the day they died! They projected all of that at Talis and hoped he got the message.
He only narrowed his eyes at them. Ev waited. They wanted to know what he knew.
“It’s called the zio’andar,” he said brittly. “The Void Death Rune. I had to hack myself out of the Aetherian HOLOsystem and search on the expanded ‘net to figure it out. It’s an invocation rune, one that demands the gods fulfill a resurrection promise to whoever wears the rune carved in blood."
The word “zio’andar” rang in their head like the resonation of a bell. It was from another language—not Aetherian, not quite Old Tongue or Common Tongue, but something they knew. Something woven into the very essence of their being. They mouthed the word to themselves and felt the briefest chill wash over them.
“Why do you have it?” Talis demanded.
“My aunt tattooed it on me when I was seventeen,” they repeated numbly. Had Cosanna known? Was the cult she grew up in dedicated to this rune? To a godly promise of resurrection? Had she known it would work? “I didn’t have a say in it. She gave me instructions to cut along one of the lines if I was ever on my deathbed—to reactivate it, she said.”
And on that beach the day Kalei shot them in the throat, they had done just that. Now they were in Aetheria, wholly alive, their tribal tattoos a vibrant orange that contrasted their bright blue rune, an orange ring over their neck where a scar might have punctured both sides of it. Now they looked the same but different—white hair that faded to the same orange at the tips, blue eyes instead of burnt orange, dark sclera where it had once been white, no facial hair in sight. More muscle, less bulk. A haunting glare that seemed to make everyone the met shy away.
All they could think was why?
“She didn’t tell you anything?” Talis asked incredulously.
Ev shook their head. “Did… did your research tell you what I am now?”
They certainly weren’t human anymore.
Talis studied them for a while. Then he settled back into his chair, evidently deciding they were being genuine. “I found two terms: ziojic and ziorisa demonica. The former is, I think, an adopted term that used to mean ‘void magic’ and now means ‘void magic user.’ The latter translates to ‘Void Demon’ or ‘creature of the Void,’ meaning you were re-created by the Void itself.”
Void magic. A creature created by the void. Old stories the elders told when they were a child lingered just out of reach of Ev’s recall capabilities. They doubted those stories would ring true even if they could remember them, but… They sighed and took another long drink of water, finishing their cup. Talis wordlessly magicked it out of their hands over to the sink in the corner of the room. He filled it and returned it to them without comment. They nodded their thanks and sipped at it more slowly, their throat aching less. He continued to glare at him.
Ev sighed discontentedly and leveled a glare of their own right back. What did he want them to say? They hadn’t known anything that he just told them. Up until today, they’d both been clueless.
“That rune is banned in most civilized dimensions because it damns the bearer to an immortal life and eternal debt to the gods that resurrected them,” Talis said flatly. “You were probably dropped in Aetheria because the gods wanted you to do something here. That makes you unpredictable.”
Ev shook their head. Most of the gods were gone. Everyone knew that. Cerisi, Morsanna, Lio-veta, one of the water gods, and Maikoa, god of trickery, were all that was left. Or at least those were the ones vodé-cyresia had had living proof of. Whoever resurrected Ev was the last of a dying pantheon. They weren't sure what a god like that would want that someone like them could do.
Quietly, to themselves, they wondered if the gods who resurrected them and dropped them into the role of Emperor had known the Emperor of Aetheria wasn’t really in control. Maybe, maybe not.
Talis was still glaring at them. He looked no less hurt than when he’d woken up, despite Ev’s lack of knowledge about the zio’andar.
“What do you want me to say?” they asked finally, shaking their head. “Talis, I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this to happen, you know that.” They had several nights of drunken lamentation surrounding that very fact. “If you’re going to join the ranks of the people who think I’m irresponsible and unqualified for this job, just say it and go.”
It was true, at any rate. Ev wasn’t qualified to lead a full company, much less an Empire. Everyone knew it too; they’d had dozens of people in the past four months tell them as much, from Councilmen to offcers who, according to the hierarchy, should have been their subordinates several times over. Talis had politely not taken a side, and instead had tried to help them where he could, but even he must have his limits. This revelation might be it.
Ev waited, but instead of agreeing they were an incompetent fool, Talis deflated and rubbed a gloved hand over his face. He was still in his armor, under the trenchcoat. “That’s not what I was trying to say.”
Ev watched him, waiting for more elaboration, until he got too uncomfortable and stood and left. He came back a few moments later, arms filled with their gauntlets, nanotech helmet pieces, and a new undersuit, face devoid of emotion. Then he left again, the door shutting behind him with a pneumatic hiss. A minute later, a medic came in and checked them over, removed their IV, spun a healing circle around their ribs that finished knitting them together instantly, and handed them the brief for the next drop zone.
“Is there a report for the last satellite dimension we were in?” they asked her. They wanted to at least know the name of the place they’d been sent to protect from Starspawn, even if the inhabitants had revolted and turned it into a warzone.
She gave them a look that, for an ASMC navy medic, equated to being startled. She said nothing, gave no answer, and left.
When the healing circle puttered out, Ev put on their undersuit, gauntlets, and earpieces and left to go find out what had happened to the rest of their gear, mulling over the information they’d been given.
They made a new mental list.
Their name was Evansen Stark. They were born in Averon to Rayda and Vandas Stark in the year 1883 E-10. They had an adopted sister and an adoptive aunt, both of whom were now dead. They were twenty-two years old when they were killed by the former love of their life.
They were resurrected a month after dying, still twenty two. The method by which they were resurrected was a possibly-cursed rune that invoked a promise from the gods, demanding resurrection in return for the completely a godly quest of some kind. They did not know what this quest was or why it had taken them to Aetheria. They were now twenty-three.
They had been born mostly human. They had been resurrected as a ziojic, a creature of the Void. Allegedly, they could access Void Magic: a mythical magic type that was woven into the fabric of most dimension realities.
They used to have brown hair. Now it was a little brown at the roots, but was mostly white and the tips of their hair seemed to stay proportionately orange as it grew. Their hair was down to their shoulders now. They could wear it in a ponytail again.
Thick bands and two dots had been tattooed on each of their wrists when they took vows for the rebellion at age fourteen. The bands signified service and honor, the dots, one larger and one smaller on each arm, represented Cosanna and Viera. They had been black before they died, now they matched the bright orange of the line around their neck and the wide stripes down their cheeks. Likewise, their zio’andar had been black and was now bright blue.
They used to look human. Now they didn’t. They didn’t even look Aetherian, which might have been cause for some discomfort among the plasma-haired, vitiligo-skinned, horned members of their new war family. (Did Aetherian culture frame military comrades as family like Cyresia?)
It was a list of self-perceptions. If they changed, Ev would make note of it. But for now, reminding themselves of who and what they were would have to serve in place of the operating orders they never seemed to get. A new recitation.
As Ev walked down blank, utilitarian hallways, past viewports that led out into black voidspace, they began to recite the things they did know.
My name is Evansen Stark. I was born in Averon to Rayda and Vandas Stark in the year 1883 E-10. I had an adopted sister and an adoptive aunt, both of whom were now dead. I was twenty-two years old when I was killed by the former love of my life…
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