Beloved (lore)

“

Boons I grant you, oh bearer mine, but debts must be paid in time.

”

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Beloved is one series of lore entries that comes in the Lightfall's Collector Edition, alongside Breakdown and Bitter. It is a compendium of Empress Caiatl's that discusses key moments of her life in the empire as Princess Imperial to Emperor Calus to her later years as Empress.

I am three. My father is pregnant again.

The woman standing guard over his brood bower is not my mother. My father invites me to visit him while he nurses her young, but I am afraid to pass her. Her tusks are huge-ah! huge. She greets me kindly and gives me a scraping stick to scratch my father's hide. I do not understand where my mother has gone. In the stories Ahztja tells me, mates stay together their whole lives. But Ahztja is a Psion. Maybe there are things about mates that Psions do not know.

I go into the bower. I ask my father if my mother is dead.

He draws me close. He asks me to sing to my new siblings. His belly is soft and strong, fat with the brood pouches where the babies grow. I watch one climb to find his teat. I know that mother and father mate, that mother gestates the young and delivers them to father's pouches, that father broods them until they are weaned. Ahztja taught me how the mother must stand guard while he is sessile and vulnerable. She must keep the other females away from him, lest he discard her offspring and take on the brood of another female.

I ask my father if that is really true. Can a father choose to forsake his children?

Of course, my father says. "That's how you know that I love you. I could have turned you out of me, and I did not.

He tickles me. I laugh.

I am centuries old.

I am beating an assassin to death. Their helmet splinters in my fists. Their taunt rings in my sinuses: You are a child in a general’s costume. None of the vision of your father. None of the drive or strength of the one they call Dominus... You will not be remembered.

My father put those words in the assassin's mouth. He put the blade in the assassin's hands.

I have been stabbed in the ribcage, but the ribs of the Cabal are a closed vault. We evolved to face our enemy. I have been shot in the arm, but I wear armor, even in private. I have been shot in the hand, but I have another to make a fist.

I break the assassin's skull as I broke my father's heart.

I send the enactine blade back to him, as he will one day send it back to me.

I am three. Something has gone wrong between the woman and my father.

I slide on my greased belly through palace halls, pretending I am a whale-kayak. Guards smile at me and I smile back, but I keep my ear pressed to the floor.

Nearby, the woman bellows in his chambers

She says he has not kept his political promises to the ex-Praetorate families that approved their match. He is so wounded, he says. Doesn't his luscious body delight her? Doesn't the right to fill his pouches with her young bring her joy? She says she is not a sexist. and this is not the Era of Lead. She worries about policy and external security, not his lusciousness. He complains that she does not make him happy. She says there is more to life than happiness. He disagrees. She calls him weak. He calls her a curse and a killer.

She roars and strikes him. I gasp into the floor. It is the first time I have ever heard my father in pain. The guards stand very still.

Then there is a terrible sound. I am too young to understand it as the sound of a father opening his brood pouches.

"I do not want them anymore," my father the emperor says, quite softly. "If you cannot love me, then how could they? You can find another male with open pouches, some barracks beau. But be sure I never know him. I will not have by-blows."

The large-tusked woman screams in rage. She stampedes out, past the guards, past me. Her hands are full of little things.

I am thirty-five years old.

I have just returned to the palace from my first deployment on the cruiser Aedile Tlolol, showing our banner in the Sindû marches. I saw no action. I feel like a fraud. The sheltered Princess-Imperial who never left the rails of her father's brood pouch. He has demanded that the Evocate-General promote me to a staff position back home. She has refused.

In a tantrum, Father throws a tremendous celebration to commemorate my return. The streets of Torobatl run pulpy with trampled fruit. The skies rain cloudfry stunned by fireworks. I escape my attendants and stand in a corner of the palace ballroom, drinking pollened water and pretending I am back in my fighter.

"Your name is a prayer for war," the Evocate-General says.

I snap to attention. She laughs at me and offers a small harpoon of canapes and a cocktail with a middling-sized shrub. I decline, and she tsks. "You should enjoy yourself. It's your party." Although we both know it is his party.

"My father named me for a star," I say. "Nothing to do with war."

"Yes. But the star Caiatl was named for a myth. Not an old homeworld myth, either. A myth from the Age of Sails, when we conquered the stars. Surely you know it, assuming that you've been briefed on the OXA?"

"The Odyle Xenotaph Anarchive. Sometimes OXTA, depending on how you construct the acronym. The alien oracle that led us to the graves of Aark." Must be wary, now. OXA is a Psion myth, and the Psions are a sensitive topic. My father wants to free them from bondage. "It claimed to record the story of the galaxy, and to prophesize what may yet come."

"A black box for galactic civilizations, if you prefer it in pilot's terms." The Evocate-General nods to the pin on my right pauldron. I am conscious of my shaved-down tusks, of the sores left by the fighter's interface. "The doomed and the damned left the record of their downfall in the OXA. Your star got its name from the oldest myths in that archive. And when your mother told your father that story... the star became your name. A prayer that all will go as it must... and the way it must go is struggle."

"Aiat." Not a word in Ulurant or any other Cabal tongue. "But Caiatl means something else."

"Yes. 'It may not always go as it needs to go.’ A good name for a soldier."

"A strange name for a daughter." I say. "Your father chose it for your mother's sake. Out of love." I remain at attention. I do not look at her. "So she's dead."

The Evocate-General looks sharply at me; I can tell by the motion of her cocktail shrub in the edge of my vision. "He never told you?"

"No."

"Well." She sounds genuinely shocked. "Then. It's not my place."

"Evocate-General." A junior pilot should not address her senior officer so directly, but we are in the palace, and I am the Princess-Imperial. "What does your name mean?"

She grins. Her tusks are huge. "My parents were soldiers. Soldiers know mythology too."

I am seven years old.

We are at the Brunth Bloodbath, watching the games. Gladiators strive atop live whales drowning in a sea of wine. The defending champion, Ulurunth, pilots the whale named Denouncer from a cage of iron. Afterwards, we will see the whales rendered down, their blubber turned to candles, their hearts and sweetbreads auctioned off.

My father explains to me how the Rite of Proving predates all written Cabal history, how it was illustrated in the deep caves, where ancient females scraped the rocks with their tusks to make the first art.

The challenging gladiator's name is Ghau'ul. He is an outcast, as low as a slave, but he is mighty, My father admires him. "I was a slave, once." he tells me. He only speaks so openly when we are alone together. As if he's talking to himself. "I was utterly under the control of the Praetorate. I was Prince-Designate, and it was my job to promise a brighter future while they made their miserable progress. The empress before me was so old that her whole body was turning to bone. That's what happens to us, you know, if we live too long. In ancient days, those who ossified would be honored as statues, and carried about the herdlands to share their final wisdom.

"Her ruling days were coming to a close. But the Praetorate, those canny slavemongers, they wanted her to remain on the throne so they could avoid the chaos of a succession. They put her on a ship modeled after a landwhale. Its mouth was a scoop, so it would never have to stop to refuel. They accelerated it to the edge of light and flew it in an endless procession around our worlds. So that the empress, fossilized in slow time, would never die. So that I would never assume the throne."

"What happened to the old empress?" I ask.

"Oh, she took her own life, I think. Who could go on living that way?"

"Is that what happened to my mother?"

Patient Ghau'ul makes his move: leaps between whales, hurls Ulurunth off the top of her whale's control cage. She plunges sixteen meters and vanishes into the Denouncer's navel. The crowd roars. "By Acrius," the announcer screams, "she is in to the haft! She is stuck in the whale's belly button! He has killed her, he has won the bell!"

My jubilant father leaves me in his box and goes down to meet this Ghau'ul. I envy the gladiator who consumes my father's attention. I resolve to meet him myself.

Much later in my life, I will learn that the females who carved the first art in those caves were scraping lithium from the rock. It was a folk remedy for dark moods.

I am thirty-eight years old. I drown in the cockpit of my ship.

Pressure gel surrounds and fills me. Tiny, implanted pumps circulate the gel through my lungs and sinuses, through all the empty spaces of my body, so that I am one contiguous, equally dense mass without difference inside me, so that there are no weak places which can break and crush. For the first time, I truly understand the Evocate-General, and the reason she fears my father's reforms. They create differences. Differences can be points of failure.

My fighter accelerates at thirty felt gravities, down through the shrieking ionosphere of a gas giant, across the face of the storms below.

The Sindû escadrille flees from Aedile Tlolol, and I pursue. It is the cruiser's job to run the marathon, and the fighter's job to make the final sprint to interception. Our Harrowers are not the nimble Sindû fighters: ours are heavy missile sleds, built for our tough anatomies and roaring engines, booming ahead of the cruisers to release their payloads. It is risky: chase your prey too far before weapons release and you will be stranded on an unavoidable intercept vector. Damned by kinematics to plunge through the Sindu formation, clawing out with guns and CIWS, trying to survive your suicidal plummet through foes bloodied by your missile strike.

Under the strain, my wingman's aorta shears off his heart. I am stronger. I wait, crushed by the acceleration of my own ship's haste, until my missiles signal they are in the 90% bracket. I fire. The Sindû answer with jamming, with decoys, with interceptors, with the final close-in fire of their guns. They answer well.

Six little pinpricks of white light. Six kills. Another three survive. Three against one, and no delta-V left to maneuver. I am doomed.

I go in grim and laughing

The Aedile Tlolol recovers me two days later. I spill exhausted from the drained-out cockpit into the arms of waiting medics. They try to hustle me to the emergency baths. I bat them away; I rise to my feet; I roar to the gathered deck crew: "All nine! ALL MINE!"

And they roar with me—not adulation for the Princess-Imperial, but love for their new ace.