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.