"What are you looking for, little girl?" The man's voice was cold, emotionless, and carried the roughness that comes with witnessing much more death than one should.
"Leave her alone, Dalen. If she wants to look, let her look," a man not far from them proclaimed. Lina knew his voice; it was Ruk. He was kinder than Dalen. His voice wasn't much warmer, but still, it was alive. It had a tone of hope in it, a lingering hope that could fade any minute. Ruk and Dalen were much alike; they both were tall, and they were the same in height. They both were bulky; hunger hadn't worked much on their sizable statures, despite the long years they had come to endure its presence. They shared the same facial features; if one didn't know that they were born worlds apart, one could mistake them for brothers. And in a way, they were brothers in chains who had lost their family, their home, and every other thing they held dear.
Lina couldn't look away. She was peeking through the pocketholes that ash-sand had poked in the iron walls of the slave shed from many years past. The pocketholes were only wide enough for her juvenile eyes to see through, and on the other side, there was nothing but darkness. The blistering wind pierced her eyes like needles, and she had to blink time and again as she clutched the little wooden pony in her tiny fingers. The stallion was bigger than her palm, and she couldn't clasp it unless she used both hands.
"He isn't coming, is he?" the girl asked the old man who was nibbling at the dry bread.
"Even if he is alive, he can't find the shed in the dark. He is gone," Dalen uttered. The girl clutched harder at the wooden horse as she heard his voice.
"You must eat, Lina. For Peter, you must eat," Ruk urged as he sat near the girl with a loaf of hard bread. Lina was never a picky eater, as she had never come to know any taste or texture but the hard, unseasoned bread that the slaves dined upon. She was but a babe when she was stolen along with her dead mother, whom she never had come to know. The only food that she had come to eat was the bread, and the only toy, the horse-Peter's horse that he so kindly had gifted to her. Peter was like a brother to her; he was eight years older than her, but he was the only other child in the shed and her only playmate. He often talked to her about trees and birds and rivers and all the other things that the girl had never come to know and believed to be his imagination.
"Don't you want to eat?" Ruk pressed. The girl didn't move away from her viewpoint. Peter would come back; he had promised to show her the trees, the birds, a blue sky, and many other spectacular things that were unknown to her.
"I will eat when Peter returns," Lina declared. Ruk gave a look to the old man, Jaro. He himself wasn't doing much better than the little girl, for he too had lost a friend, and unlike the girl, he had no hope of his return. But for the girl, he had to be strong. He hoisted upright and limped with his good leg to the corner in which the girl was peeping at the dark world behind the walls.
"Lina, sometimes we lose things, like the time you lost the horse, remember?" the old man said. His tone blended well with the gloomy sorrow.
Lina leapt at Jaro's words and looked at him with a spark in her tiny green eyes.
"Yes, I remember! I lost the horse, and then Uncle Ruk found it for me after six days!" The old man was in shock at her spring and naivete-a naivete that was expected of a seven-year-old child. How could he phrase this to her, he thought? The child had never come to know loss; she never had a mother to feel her absence. Life was this to her; she hadn't known better times. Jaro steadied his voice and swallowed the lump that filled his throat. He gasped for air and spoke with no anxiety, no emotion; he had directed all that to his lungs, which now burned like a red fire inside his chest.
"You see, Lina, sometimes when we lose something, we can't find it again." Lina dropped back to the holes, annoyed and angered. She shrugged. "Peter has promised to take me to a place with trees and birds! I want to see what they look like! Peter won't break his promise." The girl was relentless in her hope. She didn't even know what a tree was, but she always wanted to see one. The way Peter would picture them to her was as entrancing as how Ruk would describe the taste of chicken-succulent, mild, salty, soft, and yeasty. She wanted to taste this chicken that Ruk talked so much about, but she couldn't imagine it to taste any different from the usual stale bread. That, at least, she could envision; chicken, but the tree? She had never seen a tree or anything like it that could give her an image.
The leaves brushed against each other in the calm spring wind; when it hit the palace walls, it would turn into an eddy that had no mark to it but a few swirling leaves and carried the singing of the leaves ever higher to the palace top.
"I hate it when it does that."
"We could hack the trees down if you wish it, Kenta." The figure pushed himself up from his seat behind the table and slowly shuffled his way to the balcony, where he closed the glass door, leaving the wind and its clatter outside.
"I guess that can do the trick too, huh, Corri." The seated figure on the far end of the room uttered.
"Rex, tell me, how did your talk go with Provost Baird on Hellebron?" the figure asked the seated man.
"Very well, Lord Kenta. She actually was very interested in my late ancestor's work on Roxy," the seated figure answered. The other man had reached his desk, and as he was preparing to sit, he glanced at the seated man, Iliam Rex. He was shorter than him, much shorter. He was nothing like his ancestor Charlos, who had forged the planet they now stood on from his sheer cruelty; he was a figure to take pity on, for a thousand years had passed since the last Rex ruled on MelasOon or Roxy or anywhere else.
"What exactly did you talk about, Rex? Word for word," Kenta asked while sitting comfortably behind his wooden, oak-carved desk.
"Yes, word for word. We are very interested," the figure who leaned on the left-side wall pressed.
"Ah, not much. How she admires Roxy's art of synthetic planetary formation, her study of men and how strange they are," Iliam answered, his voice calm and steady.
"Just that? You wouldn't go back on me, Iliam, would you? After all these years, all our friendship? You can be honest with me, you know. Didn't she mention MelasOon or her brother's plans for it?" Kenta queried with his usual cold tone.
"Never! I would never..." Iliam sprung from his chair.
"I never said you would, old friend. I just wanted to know. You can trust me with these things, you know I'm a calm and reasonable person."
Kenta grabbed the paper knife and started to clean his nails, one by one.
"By the way, why didn't you bring the girl? You know Mira is going to nag all night to me, right?" Kenta asked, his eyes fixated on his elongated nails.
"My lord, I would never betray your trust. I am where I stand because of you, I swear on Mara's life. The subject of our talk was synthetic planetary formation; she wants to purchase all the files I have on Roxy's creation," Iliam uttered as he trotted his way to Kenta's desk.
"I know, I know, my friend. I trust you. How can I not trust you? I mean, you of all people." Kenta tossed the letter knife aside and stood, as his tall figure eclipsed Iliam. Kenta wasn't too tall, but when he stood next to Iliam, he felt as though he was the tallest man in the world, and that gave him a sense of power; it was the main reason he would keep Iliam around.
"How much?" the figure that leaned on the wall questioned.
"What, are you going to tax him or steal from him, Corri? Our friend is becoming rich; we should congratulate him," Kenta said with a hint of a smirk on his lips.
"We should congratulate Iliam. A toast, yes! A toast to Iliam for getting rich, and a toast to Rex for building Roxy so that Iliam could get rich a thousand years after his death," Kenta added as he poured three glasses of wine: one for himself, one for Iliam, and another for Corri.
Kenta drank the red wine, and so did Iliam, reluctantly. But Corri, when he reached out to the cup, didn't drink from it. He had a habit of drinking everything from his own goblet, a simple wooden cup that would be considered cheap if not for the carvings on it that depicted the Battle of Gordsi when Herclion defeated the Third Circleum. The carvings almost looked divine. Corri had come to own that cup at the same time that he had attained his long scar that stretched from the top of his skull down to his chin and cut through the middle of his left eye, which rotted in its socket, and its scent spread in every room he entered-the scent of dead flesh. Corri poured the red wine into his goblet before gulping it in one swift sup.
"You should poke out your bad eye; it smells like a dead rat." Kenta covered his nostrils with his fingers as the pungent scent was too much even for him.
"What smell? I can't smell anything." Corri shrugged.
"You must have cut off your nose too, then. Maybe the rot of your eye has found its way to your brain." Kenta spilled out what remained of the wine in his cup and smashed it on the table. Rex, too, set his cup aside.
"It's my battle scar; makes me remember the prize," Corri said.
"And what prize is that? A slave? A woman?" Kenta asked.
"I hear it was a child, a little girl," Rex answered as Corri frowned at his notion and drank Iliam's leftover wine in one gulp.
"Speaking of girls, how is your girl? Have I told you what I think of her?" Corri gripped Iliam's shoulders as Iliam clutched his fingers into a fist so hard that his knuckles popped.
"When I see Mara in her perfect green eyes, I see your eyes. Have I ever told you how much you look alike? Little Mara, she has outgrown you, Iliam; she is almost a woma..." Iliam stared up at Corri's sickening gaze as water dripped from Corri's gob to Rex's white shirt that he had worn solely to decorate his fine leather jacket, which he had acquired from some distant planet on his way back from Hellebron. Kenta was quick to intervene as he separated Iliam from Corri's grasp.
"Iliam, tell the girl to come by more often. Mira misses her, you know; she is her best friend." Kenta led him to the door and opened it to the circular stairs that went down the tall palace tower.
"Would you be so kind as to leave us, my friend? Me and Corri have business to attend to," Kenta said as he patted Iliam's shoulders.
"Of course, Lord Kenta, as you command," Iliam replied with his calm tone as he exited through the door.
"And Iliam, thanks for the souvenirs, by the way; they look nice," Kenta said as he closed the iron door, leaving Rex no chance to reply.
"What was that?" Kenta exclaimed in a tone pitched with anger as he turned to face Corri.
"What, you are the only one who can mock him now!" Corri shrugged in dismissal as he poured himself a cup of red wine into his wooden cup.
"I am the owner of this planet and the black one and more than ten million slaves! Who are you to talk to him like that, and about his daughter? Who do you think you are?" Kenta yelled as he approached the old, balding, one-eyed man.
"I am the guy who has sold you more than ten million slaves. Have you grown soft on Iliam? Are you inclined to him?" Corri mocked with an open smile as he drank his third sup of wine.
"He is a Rex. They built this planet you stand on and drink in so comfortably," Kenta said as he reached for the glass door of the balcony.
"I can tell that from his green eyes," Corri replied with a sigh.
"So, is he backstabbing us or not?" Corri questioned.
"No, at least not yet, as far as I know. That smell of yours is familiar somehow, but I don't recall to what," Kenta answered as he opened the glass door that led to the balcony and let the cold wind flow inside to ease the stench.
"Maybe we should hire more mercenaries," Corri noted as Kenta stepped onto the balcony.
"More mercenaries means more spies; are you that dense?" Kenta replied as he gasped for fresh air at the edge of the balcony.
"We should still hire more mercenaries," Corri insisted.
"More mercenaries for what? To run when Karina's sluts are cutting us down?" Kenta responded, clearly annoyed.
"So what should we do?" Corri demanded.
"I must go to Astain. You will travel to Selmon," Kenta said as he looked to the balcony below where his daughter was gazing at the lemon gardens and the not-so-distant black planet in the background.
"What should I do on Selmon?" Corri queried as he approached the balcony.
"Don't come any closer; that stench moves faster than you," Kenta replied without turning back.
"On Selmon, there is a Covarion fleet. You will hire some muscle there, Covarion muscle," Kenta added as he moved for the iron door and opened it wide.
"What should I do now?" Corri asked, annoyed.
"There is an open door; we are now inside the room. It should be obvious, don't you think?" Kenta said with a smirk and waited at the door.
Corri shambled to the door in lazy, drunk steps and stretched his hand to Kenta, who refused to shake it. Kenta much preferred to use his hand to block the stench from his nose. He could barely smell anything at his age, but this stench was too potent for him to ignore. He closed the door and waited for the drunk to step down the stairs; he wouldn't dare to pass them himself with that scent nested near his nose. I wish I had gone first, he thought to himself. Then he did a quick cognition and opened the iron door, letting the wind flow free in the stairs, hoping that it could cleanse the deep stench.
As he walked to sit in his seat to wait out the rotting scent, his eyes took a glimpse of the figure that stood in the silver mirror Iliam had brought him from worlds afar.
Time had hollowed Kenta like a blighted tree. The sleek, sharp-featured merchant's son from Sallemon was gone-eroded by decades of smelter-smoke and betrayal. His body, once corded with the lean strength of a void-raider, had settled into the stiff rigidity of a man who ruled more by will than muscle. Some mornings, when he rose from his wood-frame bed, his joints crackled like cooling slag.
He rarely remembered Selmon now. He couldn't even remember his given name, the name of his father and grandfather Denn, the name of proud merchants now mocked in shame, the shame he had brought to the name he carried. The spires, the perfumed politics, even the sting of his father's disapproval-all had dissolved into the ever-present haze of MelasOon's ever-changing glow. Sometimes, passing a polished bulkhead or the black glass of a command screen, he would pause, struck by the face that stared back. A stranger's face, webbed with scars, the skin leathered by acidic winds. Only the beard-trimmed precise as a knife's edge-remained as testament. A relic. A vanity. The last echo of the man he had imagined himself becoming.
The mirror never lied. The warlord saw what he was.
But the boy he had been?
That face was ash.
But his girl was fresh; she was nothing like the father, as she was an exact image of her mother. When he looked at her, he would remember the past, when he was a simple sellsword, young and strong, and loved that woman with pitch-black eyes and short black hair, that he danced with all night-images that always ended with him hugging her as blood poured from her chest and she drew her final breath in his shivering hands, and then pitch, like her eyes. After that, everything was black for Kenta.
He pulled his weight up from the chair before he went down the spiraling path to his child. He took a second glimpse at the mirror and cursed, for he couldn't break it since it was made of silver, and silver is easier to bend than to break.
He entered the stairway, and despite all his trick, it still smelled like death. "Ahh, I remember now, that dead dog that died in the rain. That's the smell. Oh God, I hate the rain," Kenta said to himself as he added more speed to his steps. When he got to the lower level, he could barely breathe.
"You are still awake, Mira?" Kenta said to his girl.
"I couldn't sleep. The night is colorful," she paused, "real. I like the night; it's not fake like the day," she said as she opened her arms to embrace her father.
"Maybe we should sleep by day and wake by night, like vampires," Kenta said as he hugged the girl and put a passionate kiss on her forehead.
"Oow, you smell horrible! What is that scent?" Mira said as she backed away from her father.
"Do I? Ha ha ha, the stench must be viral," Kenta responded with laughter.
"Speaking of scents, you don't smell so nice yourself, you know. You should drink less, find some other hobbies," he added.
"There isn't much to do here but to drink," she shrugged as she glanced back at the lemon trees and the planet beyond.
"You can spend time with your friends," Kenta said as he leaned on the balcony.
"What do you think I do when I am with my friends?" Mira responded, her gaze fixated on the nearby planet.
"I want to see something new. I want to see MelasOon," Mira looked at her father with her pitch-black eyes.
"Can't you see it from here? It's pretty visible," Kenta replied with a shaking fear nestled deep in his voice.
"Not like this. I want to see it, to walk on it, to feel its wind, to breathe its air," Mira insisted.
Kenta took a step towards her and touched her cheek as if she was still a child.
"Let me tell you a story," Kenta said to the girl.
"When I was your age, I knew a boy. His father had wanted a merchant-prince-a sharp-eyed heir to navigate the velvet wars of Salmon's trading floors. But the boy only ever heard the void's whisper, the promise of solar winds singing through hull plating. He left at fifteen, on a rainswept dawn, the kind of downpour that smothers good sense. Let his father keep his gilded ledgers and simmering grudges. The boy wanted thunder. Wanted the electric stink of a ship's engine pushed past redline.
For a time, the stars gave him what he craved.
The Dusk Corsairs taught him the pirate's truth: luck was just another word for 'not dead yet.' He raided void-haulers fat with terraforming equipment, hijacked luxury yachts carrying bored oligarchs. His name grew teeth-not yet feared, but recognized. Most pirates died within five years-spaced for betrayal, or gutted in some nameless skirmish. He lasted eight. Not because he was the best, but because he understood the second truth: the game always changes.
The pirate became a smuggler.
The smuggler would become something worse.
He had been the best smuggler Grazz ever employed. For ten years, he sharpened himself in Grazz's service. He became the warlord's right hand, the shadow behind the throne. And the more power he tasted, the more he hungered. Grazz ruled from Roxy, but it was he who truly commanded-he who approved the officer promotions, he who signed the pay ledgers, he who decided which battalions ate fresh rations and which choked down protein-scum. The soldiers didn't know Grazz-they knew the hand that fed them.
So when the day came, the choice was laughably simple.
No grand battle. No heroic last stand. Just a single shot in the night-Grazz's skull opened like an overripe fruit-and by dawn, the Black Cradle answered to a new master." The girl listened to the tale she had heard a thousand times; this story had never grown old on her. As Kenta finished his tale, he added.
"Do you know what happened to the boy?" Kenta questioned.
"He never allowed his daughter to leave a cage in the shape of a palace?" Mira answered with a smirk.
"No. He came to regret all of it. All of it, except one thing. A girl. A drunk girl," Kenta said with a fatherly smile shining on his old, cracked lips.
"I have to travel somewhere, but when I come back, we will go there together," Kenta added as they both gazed upon the lemon trees, their leaves rattling in the wind as if they danced or sang.