The Stargazer's War - Book 1 Epilogues

Epilogues

Maria only made it to her feet as she felt the whirr of thrusters quake the floors beneath her. Her hands shook as she moved to the window, pressed her face up to the glass to watch the soulship shrink into nothingness in starry sky.

She kept her eyes fixed upon that spot, as if even too far away to make out, she could still watch Caliban Rex fade into the distance.

Maria didn’t resent her defeat. How could she? She’d set herself against a force far beyond her comprehension. Her defeat had been an inevitability. His mercy hadn’t.

The thought of it sent chills down her spine. She’d gazed into the abyss, experienced the revelation of infinity in a way few if any had the privilege, and at the end, even after all she’d done, He’d seen fit to let her live.

This changed everything. For all her life Maria live a world of little things. She’d become so embroiled in petty squabbles and sect politics and her own advancement, she’d failed to grasp the larger truth.

None of that mattered.

The cadets had seen that. It all made so much sense now. Honchel and Velereau weren’t thralls under His control, but disciples, the lucky few who’d understood His significance, who’d proven themselves worthy of His teachings.

Maria, in her selfishness, had failed to earn such an honor.

But she would. She understood it now. She’d seen His vastness.

Maria knew His power still lingered, still waited for her just outside that window. It’d always been there. It’d always been everywhere. She didn’t go looking for it. The human mind had never been meant to perceive such greatness. Even the tiny glimpse she’d been given had driven her to near madness.

She touched dearly upon the places within her His qi had traveled. Along her body, through her meridians, into her very core it’d come. To think she’d been so dismissive, so arrogant, so afraid. She saw it now as the blessing it was, the chance for redemption she’d so desperately needed.

She’d have to rebuild her foundation from the ground up. Her Way had begun with errant steps. That would need correcting. The light she’d spent so many years contemplating, cultivating, understanding, felt hollow now, a futile gasp against the reality of the infinite dark.

No, she’d walk a path more suited to one of His followers.

Plans began to circle in her mind. She’d have to leave Fyrion, of course. Its people were too small-minded to grasp her message. The Right Eye would do for now. After that, who knew?

It’d mean abandoning her position at the sect, but she didn’t need them, not when she knew what true power looked like.

A gentle hand upon her shoulder tore her from her revelations. She turned to find the morning vac-welding shift lined against the wall as far away from her they could manage. Apparently one of them had called her assistant.

“Elder Lopez, ma’am, are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No, not a ghost,” Maria replied, turning back to gaze out the window. “It’s worse. It’s so much worse.” Despite the words, a smile crept across her face.

“I’ve seen a god.”

——

Martha Vesper clenched the fingers of her good hand until the nails drew blood.

She sat perfectly still in her front row seat, resisting the urge to fidget with the funeral veil that shrouded her face. Threads, the thing itched.

“—a dedicated cadet, perhaps the most promising youth the Dragon’s Right Eye has ever seen. Nicolas reached tin younger than any in Fyrion’s history, a testament to his talent, his drive, and his will to defy the heavens.”

Martha chewed her lip as Elder Smith droned on. As his assigned mentor, Smith had been responsible for Nick’s wellbeing and advancement within the cadet program. If this speech was any indicator, her brother hadn’t even met the man.

It was bullshit. It was all bullshit. She wanted to jump up there, to shove that snide elder aside and inform the crowd that her brother had wanted none of this. He hadn’t wanted fame or glory or cultivation. He hadn’t been dedicated. He’d had no will to defy the heavens.

And his name was Nick.

But Martha knew she couldn’t disrespect Elder Smith like that. She couldn’t disrespect her parents like that, even as they all disrespected Nick with this farce of a lie they kept telling that he was just as ambitious as their parents had always wanted.

The coffin sat empty. They all knew it. The sect had hardly tried to hide the fact they’d taken Nick’s body for themselves. Her father had taken the handful of credits recompense with a smile on his face.

Even in death they wouldn’t let Nick be.

He lay in a lab somewhere, someplace dark and quiet where a team of scientists could take him apart piece by piece in their greedy attempts to figure out what exactly Caliban had done to him. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they wanted. The ability to inflict void-induced psychosis would make for a powerful—if indiscriminate—weapon.

Martha cared less about the what and more about the why.

Over and over she’d run it through in her head, how the Cal she knew could’ve done something so terrible. He’d seemed so… nice. He’d befriended the mortals. He’d saved that kid from the void beasts. He’d looked after Nick.

Obviously not.

At the time she’d never doubted the speed of his advancement. It was fast, sure, maybe even prodigious, but possible. The first recordings of his duel with Senior Cadet Long had dismissed that notion. She’d had Long for combat one, studied under him for her very first swings of a blade. That a fresh recruit could beat him after a single year of training was impossible.

Caliban was no ordinary recruit. The way his skin had gone pale, his breath near stopped, his eyes gone black as the night sky… it gave her chills. It was clear he’d been lying from day one. The extent or breadth of his lies she couldn’t guess. He certainly hadn’t come to Fyrion for simple training.

But why else? Why Fyrion? Why Nick?

And why oh why were they sitting around an empty coffin spouting lies instead of tracking down her brother’s killer?

Martha glanced down to her half-formed right hand. It’d be another year at the minimum before she recovered full use of the limb. At least she’d finally rid herself of that cursed sling.

If her injuries, if her parents, if Nick had taught her anything, it was that if she wanted something, she had to seize it herself.

She had a long way to go, a mountain of recovery, of cultivating, of training between her and her vengeance. She’d have to advance at unprecedented speeds if she hoped to catch up to Caliban’s breakneck pace.

But Martha was no stranger to pushing herself. She better than anyone understood the sacrifices it took, the pain one had to endure to temper oneself and survive the crucible.

If no one else would, Martha herself would track down the man who’d killed her brother.

This, to the gods, to the threads, and to herself, she so swore.

——

Three days gone from Fyrion’s gray wastes, just enough time to begin to recover from our injuries, we gathered in the garden to say goodbye. Already we’d spoken, already we’d gone over our options and made our plans.

We hadn’t yet decided whether or not we’d look for sect positions on a different planet, but to get them we’d need to be impressive; we’d need to show potential.

We’d need to reach bronze. Either way, that was our goal. None of us wanted to let the week’s events stop us on our Ways. But getting to bronze meant crafting a focus, and crafting a focus meant natural treasures, and obtaining natural treasures, with our limited funds, meant one thing and one thing only.

Ilirian.

Already Lucy and Charlotte had begun to work out how we’d sneak onto the system’s sole habitable world.

But that was for tomorrow. Today was for goodbyes.

My right hand in a brace, my chest bandaged where Lucy had cut through to mend my ribs and patch my lung, I knelt in the unsowed loam.

Xavier and Charlotte stood at my back, the former with his arm in a sling to help his collarbone heal, the latter leaning on him to keep weight off her right shin. I’m sure we made a sorry sight, beat to shit and in the mismatched garments that made the best approximation of funeral blacks we could manage.

I could feel Lucy there with us, a warm and comforting presence I’d come to lean on heavily. She didn’t call attention to herself, didn’t intrude upon our grief, but she was there, ready to offer support to those who needed it.

I reminded myself to thank her for that later.

After a moment’s breath, I let my hand fall to the cool earth, and I began.

“Nick… suffered. I think it would be dishonest to say otherwise. He was lonely. He was depressed. He lived his life under the yoke of potential from which he never quite broke free. Those of us who’ve experienced the kind of cruelty Nick has like to say that it gets better. Just hang on. Just a few more years. Soon you’ll be old enough to leave them all behind, to escape their harsh words and crushing expectations and live the life you’ve always wanted.

“We say that as if it makes it all suck less, as if the promise of a brighter future somehow softens the gloomy present, but the cold truth of the matter is, however better it may get, some of us don’t make it there.

“Nick didn’t. He lived and died in the same shit situation in which he was born. Sometimes that’s just how it is. Shit all the way down.”

I swallowed down a knot in my throat. “Nick suffered, and I refuse to romanticize that fact. Maybe a more poetic mind, someone who’s never been where Nick has, would look for beauty in all he achieved, would ascribe his momentous rise to tin, his cutting edge research into dark qi, that he found the infinite sea through sheer force of will, to his suffering. He overcame adversity, reforged himself in the fires of his hardship, and came out stronger.

“That’s bullshit. Pain never helps. Nick accomplished everything he did in spite of his suffering. And I respect him all the more for it.”

With my uninjured hand, I dug out a half inch of soil. From my pocket I pulled two seeds, one brimming with light, the other in shadow. They were all we had of him. I closed my fist around them and held them to my lips before lowering them into the earth. Only as I tossed on the first layer of topsoil did I speak the final words of my eulogy.

“I’m so sorry.”

As Charlotte and Xavier each knelt in turn to add their own fistful of dirt to the planting and say their own goodbyes, I sat back, I shut my eyes, and for the first time since I’d first seen him standing over that mortal’s body, I cut off the flow of numbing qi to my brain.

And I wept.

——

Chairwoman Alabastra Verenzia Ren cycled the sweet qi from the air, through the tiny black speck of immeasurable mass at her center, and back out into the environment around her. At the peak of the black hole stage, she had little use for such trifles, at least not until she made the inevitable journey across the frayed veil to join the others at Ascension’s End.

But the super mass at the center of the galaxy would have to wait. The rest of the galaxy still needed tending.

So for now, she meditated, searched for peace among the ongoing maelstrom of ideas, complaints, and problems all begging for her attention.

She’d long learned to tune out her immediate surroundings. The hundred-thousand seat arena in which she sat offered plenty of those.

Technically, these free meditations of hers were open to the public, but as cultivators flocked for the opportunity to be near someone at the true edge of possibility in this plane of reality, the queue had outgrown the average lifespan. Positions mere years from the front bought and sold for millions of credits. Any closer, and the numbers grew staggering.

In truth, it made for quite a stable investment. Its value could only go up, after all, at least until Alabastra finally resigned from her position as chairwoman of the board and left Illustrious Sky Holdings behind. Much as the inequity of the system may have irked her, Alabastra had to admit, she did appreciate a good investment opportunity. She herself owned six spots in the queue.

Of course, nobody who owned a position actually waited in the line. They had mortals for that.

Since a high level cultivator could meditate for days or even weeks before the need to drink or relieve themselves forced them from their seat, turnover within the amphitheater itself stayed relatively low.

Sometimes, when she was feeling generous, Alabastra even offered advice to those who’d made the pilgrimage. She could hardly help but hear every uneven breath, see every misaligned bone, feel every imperfection in the cycling of the hundred thousand souls around her. A simple exertion of her will sent a list of corrections to offenders’ holopads.

On this particular meditation, she pondered how best to resolve the ongoing border dispute with The Glenn Conglomerate, if Emperor Jen would accept her offer to expand trading operations on Vareek-4, and, as with every meditation lately, what to do about her errant son.

She’d come no closer to finding a solution to any the day’s three dilemmas when she heard, somewhere else on Yabilon, her assistant, Telbraun, say her name. Within moments, her attention was three thousand miles away, on the words the portly old man uttered next.

“The Kai’Deiron are speaking.”

Alabastra blinked. He’d said “are.” That implied… “More than one?” she whispered on the winds to him and him alone.

“All of them, madam chairwoman.”

Without hesitation she ripped a hole into the Threads and vanished from the arena’s center. Her visitors knew to wait for her return.

She stepped from Faith to The Depths to The Bulwark to Winter, a familiar journey along the Threads that bound the universe together to an unassuming black marble building.

The pale blue light of the neutron star they called their home shined down from the mirrors above onto the streets of Yabilon. While Alabastra might’ve preferred to build their corporate headquarters around a black hole like the other great powers, she couldn’t deny the advantages of natural light and free heat.

Telbraun was waiting for her at the door. “Madam chairwoman.” He nodded respectfully.

“Any word on my son?” Alabastra didn’t stop walking.

Telbraun fell into line behind her. “No, madam chairwoman. The Kai’Deiron have had little to say on the matter since his disappearance.”

Alabastra didn’t react. She’d expected as much. Oracles were famously erratic, and the Kai’Deiron in particular had always been fickle in their attentions. One of them had once told her her son had a weight to him, a significance to the tangle of fate that would see his actions influencing the galaxy for generations to come.

They hadn’t spoken on him since.

She continued her interrogation as they seamlessly passed through two dozen security checkpoints. “Then what do they want? When was the last time they’ve all spoken at once?”

“Never, madam chairwoman. The most we’ve ever seen is three at once, each sharing a part of a larger message. This is… different.”

“How so?”

Telbraun stopped at the final set of doors, massive round obsidian things carved with the great mess of a tangle they called fate. “See for yourself.” He pulled the door open for her.

Alabastra stepped inside.

Each of the nineteen Kai’Deiron lay naked, afloat in their own pool of body temperature saline. Their eyes were bound, their noses plugged, their ears blocked, their senses diminished as far as science could take them to better hone their gift.

True sight came perhaps once every billion years, and the recipients of such power never lasted long. Assassination was easier than war, after all.

Most of the great powers instead relied upon their own version of the Kai’Deiron, those with but a tiny echo of the gift enhanced as best they could manage. It wasn’t an exact science, but Illustrious Sky Holdings had found the most success through non-maiming sensory deprivation combined with a particular cocktail of hallucinogens they’d come upon through decades of trial and error.

They were finicky. They were fickle. But they were the best Alabastra had.

Today, as she strode into their chamber, each and every one of the nineteen oracles spoke in hauntingly perfect unison, a message of three words they repeated through cracked lips and dried out throats.

“The stargazer comes.”

“The stargazer comes.”

“The stargazer comes.”

Alabastra froze as a chill ran down back. “Telbraun, run a scan of the archives.”

“I already have, madam chairwoman. There are no relevant mentions of a stargazer in any of the languages we have on file.”

“Something new, then…” Alabastra let her voice trail off. She looked back to the Kai’Deiron. “I’ll meditate on this. Let me know if they say anything else.”

“Of course, madam chairwoman.”

She opened another hole to the Threads, but paused before stepping through it. “In the meantime, keep looking for that ship. Wherever Cedric went, that soulship of his has gotta be close by.” Alabastra turned to deliver one final meaningful look into Telbraun’s eyes to reinforce the severity of her message.

“Find out what happened to my son.”