Chapter 6: The War-Galleon’s Shadow
The first plasma bolt hit the market square and the world bent sideways.
Eshiren’s feet left the mud. The mud left too, rising in fat brown ropes that twisted toward the sky as if the planet had forgotten which direction to hold. A child’s sandal tumbled past his ear. The stall where he’d bought fire-noodles an hour ago folded upward, the iron frame groaning as it accordioned into a ruined mess. Loose cobblestones lifted from the ground and hung, spinning, in a haze of dust and debris and the shrieking of three hundred voices whose owners had just lost their relationship with gravity.
Lyalina screamed his name.
He grabbed her wrist before the thought formed. He pulled her against his chest and dropped, driving his heels into the sucking, inverted ground with a force that should have shattered both his ankles. The bones held. He pressed that awareness down deep where no one could see it and wrapped his arms around his sister as the crowd stampeded past. A roaring, shrieking tide of elbows and bare feet brought the copper stink of fresh blood. Bodies collided. Someone fell and didn’t get up. Eshiren stepped over them. He had no choice. Standing still in a stampede meant Lyalina being crushed by the panicking mass of people who weighed nothing to him and everything to her.
He kept his grip loose. That was the hardest part. The draconic instinct screamed at him to hold her tight, lock his arms around her body, and make her indestructible through proximity. But his arms could crack her ribs. His embrace could puncture her lungs. She was glass. Every person in this crowd was glass, and Eshiren was made of something that glass could never forgive.
Overhead, the sky had stopped being sky.
Something vast filled the space overhead. The war-galleon’s underbelly hung close enough to see individual bone-growths crusting its hull. Each growth dwarfed the nearby hab-blocks. A low, sub-audible thrumming bypassed his ears to settle into his molars, his sternum, and the fluid behind his eyes. Tearing the ground loose, the galleon’s anti-gravity wake pulled Azaria’s surface upward like a dog lifting a smaller animal by the scruff.
The wake rolled in waves. The gravity warped, stabilised, warped again. Eshiren’s stomach heaved with each cycle, not from the physical effect, which his draconic body compensated for automatically, but from the sickening sight of the people around him being tossed like insects in a current. An old woman cartwheeled through the air, her thin arms grasping at nothing. A child bounced off the wall of a hab-block and landed in the mud with a crack that Eshiren’s ears catalogued, filed, and refused to forget.
"Eshiren," Lyalina’s fingernails dug through his shirt. Her voice came out compressed, airless, squeezed thin by the warping pressure. "I can’t, my ears."
"I know." He was already moving. Three steps to the left, through the gap between the overturned dumpling cart and the toppled hab-block wall, brought them to safety. The gravity snapped back as he crossed an invisible threshold beneath the galleon’s wake-edge, and his stomach lurched so violently he tasted bile. The transition zone was brutally sudden, shifting from floating to crushing in one step. Lyalina gasped as the full weight of her body returned.
Senreno materialised from the panicking crowd the way he always did, without announcement, without wasted motion. His father’s maimed hand found Eshiren’s shoulder, the three remaining fingers squeezing once. The grip was assessment rather than comfort. Senreno’s eyes tracked the sky, the approaching troops, and the structural integrity of the buildings around them in a single sweep that lasted less than a second.
"Inside," he said.
They ducked into the skeletal frame of Hab-Block Nine. The building had already cracked down its centre seam from the gravity fluctuations, the upper floors sagging inward like a man folding over a gut wound. Dust rained from the ceiling in grey, choking sheets. The smell of burst sewage pipes, old cooking grease, and the acrid chemical tang of stressed Vren-crystal filled the darkness. Somewhere above them, a wet snap signaled structural iron giving way, the building’s spine breaking in slow motion.
"Further in," Senreno ordered. He pulled Lyalina by the arm, moving toward the interior wall where the load-bearing columns were thickest. "Against the wall."
The ceiling came down.
A massive slab of compressed iron and stone—the floor of the apartment above—dropped straight down as the weakened beams surrendered to the galleon’s gravitational assault. Senreno threw himself over Lyalina, his body curling around hers with the instinctive geometry of a man who had been shielding people from falling things for decades.
Eshiren threw himself over Senreno.
The iron crossbeam hit his shoulders. Easily six hundred pounds of riveted, rust-scaled metal fell from a height of eight feet with the full force of re-stabilised gravity behind it. It struck the meat of his trapezius muscles and drove him downward. His knees bent, his spine compressed, and his arms braced against the floor on either side of his father and sister.
The beam weighed nothing.
Nothing. The word was precise. It weighed nothing at all. Somewhere inside him, a voice assessed the load with the dispassionate clarity of a machine calibrated for planetary destruction. The voice concluded that this iron beam was a leaf, a toy, a piece of tissue paper dropped by a child. He could have straightened up and tossed it through the wall, or caught it one-handed and set it aside.
Instead he hunched. Grunted. Made his breath ragged. He forced his arms to shake, his legs to tremble, and his body to produce the specific, detailed performance of human strain that would convince the two people beneath him that he was barely holding on. The performance was exhaustive. It required him to calculate muscle groups, breathing patterns, and the exact amount of visible effort a boy of his size and apparent malnutrition should exhibit under six hundred pounds. He ran the calculations in the time it took to draw one breath.
"Hold it," Senreno’s whisper came from beneath him, strained, barely audible through the settling dust.
Lyalina made no sound at all. Her fingers clamped around Eshiren’s forearm, and through the point of contact he could feel the rapid-fire drumming of her pulse. Eighty beats a minute. Ninety. One hundred. Her heart raced with the blind, animal terror of a body that knew it was trapped, breakable, and dependent on something outside itself. She was so fragile. The bones in her wrist beneath his palm felt like dried twigs. A genuine squeeze would powder them.
Rubble settled. The dust thickened until breathing meant chewing the air, filtering grit between teeth, and spitting to clear the throat. A wedge of grey daylight filtered through a crack in the debris pile, just wide enough to show a narrow slice of the street outside. Eshiren fixed his eyes on it. The crack was his window and his intelligence feed.
For a long time, there was nothing but settling dust, the distant rumble of the galleon’s engines, and the muffled, fading screams of the stampede moving deeper into the sector.
Then the plasma fire started.
Unlike the orbital strike, this fire was precise. It held a rhythm. One discharge every three seconds was followed by a wet, truncated noise. A human body was being erased into ash and gas, leaving no trace behind.
"Enforcers," Senreno breathed. His jaw worked beneath his beard. His eyes had gone flat and calculating, the way they did when he counted patrol routes and weighed bad options against worse ones. "Standard cull pattern. Two-by-two formation. They’re clearing block by block."
Through the crack, Eshiren could see boots. Polished black and regulation-stamped with the Imperial crest, they moved in a tight two-by-two formation across the mud. The boots stepped over something in the street, a shape Eshiren’s brain registered and swiftly quarantined, refusing to process it as a body. One Enforcer murmured a remark to his partner. The other laughed. This brief, administrative sound lacked any emotion, resembling a clerk stamping a form and finding the next one mildly amusing.
The ozone from their mana-rifles drifted through the crack and into the rubble pocket. The smell was sharp, electric, chemical. It hit Eshiren’s sinuses and detonated something primal behind them.
Hunger.
A deep, pulling ache throbbed in the roof of his mouth. A visceral, involuntary craving flared, as if the concentrated energy in those plasma bolts was food. His body knew, on some level his consciousness refused to access, that the energy was meant to be consumed, swallowed, digested, absorbed into his blood, and converted into fuel for a metabolism built to process the raw output of stars.
His stomach clenched. He bit the inside of his cheek until copper flooded his tongue, using the pain to break the craving’s hold. The golden magic stirred in his chest, responding to the plasma’s proximity with an eager, dangerous warmth.
He crushed it. Buried it. Added another layer to the dam.
The boots came closer.
Lyalina’s pulse reached one hundred and twelve beats per minute. She hadn’t spoken or moved. She’d gone terrifyingly silent, the way she always did when the fear got too big for sarcasm, when the sharp tongue she used as armour melted, and what remained was a fourteen-year-old girl holding her brother’s arm in the dark.
The formation tightened. Eshiren could hear the leader’s voice now, closer, each word clipped and managerial. A man read a checklist and performed a function. There was no malice in the voice. Malice would have been easier to hate.
"Check the basements. Leave no breath."
A pair of polished obsidian boots stopped. They stood directly in front of the crack. The spotless soles bore no trace of mud or blood. The filth of the slum, and everything it contained, lay beneath the dignity of their contact.
Eshiren held the beam. The beam weighed nothing.
The people beneath him weighed everything.
And the boots did not move.
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