Page 132 of Cage of Starlight
By the time Tory calls back, “What?” it’s too late.
Kirlov rounds the corner, lit vital red by the lights, the shadows of his face carved deep. He’s as put together as he’s ever been. With one stone-steady hand, he aims a tranquilizer gun at the crowd. From the other, Sena’s compass dangles, its core lit foggy, flickering gray. Kirlov’s eyes find Sena, brutal and unerring.
“Lieutenant,” he says. “I thought I’d find you here.”
Part Four:
Free
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Even ugly thingshave a beginning.
This is the dawn of the world according to Sena’s mother:
Once, when our Seren was a young planet, fresh and new, the Celestial Beast who fashioned the universe swam in the great river of stars. Traveling by, it fell in love with the planet that had blossomed vibrant green and jewel-blue in its absence, a gem brighter than any star. On the surface of the planet, great hunters toiled, men and women with unbroken spirits. With the children of the land, the Beast was also pleased.
This is how Sena Vantaras begins: seventeen, accepting a salute and an armful of awards and an assignment as far away from the capital as they can send him. He returns the salute with gloved hands. He does not celebrate with alcohol and loud parties like the others. The noise is sandpaper on his skin. He’s led to a room where they lay him on his belly and lock soft restraints around his hands. He burns as they slice a perfect line along his spine. They talk like they’re adding something to him. A precaution, they assure him. They don’t say a word about what they’re taking away.
So the Great Beast descended from the heavens to admire the planet. It watched the people and the land they worked and was exceedingly pleased. At first it only visited, but after a time, it would not leave. The Beast traveled through the skies of Seren even though it belonged in the river of the universe. Solitude can makeeven the vastest domain into a cage, and starlight is no gentler a prison than any other. To know warmth and let it go was not in the beast’s nature—or in ours. As if in answer, the world reached up with fingers vibrant green and strung with flowers and pierced the flesh of the Beast to fill the void within it, slithered between crystalline scales and into its core, vines like veins within the arches of the beast’s ribs. And so it was that the heart of our planet beat also within the Beast.
But perhaps Sena begins at nine years old: blood sharp on his tongue, a small hand wrapped around a strong ankle. Flesh drying up, dead on a still-living body. His father looks at him and sees not a boy but a weapon. To no one’s surprise except his own, he’s sent where all weapons go: to war.
Life eternal can make a soul old, but the sweet blue planet offered peace. The Beast lingered long on Seren and watched its people toil to take sustenance from the land. Its body, though, made from the stuff of stars, with galaxies aglow in every scale, was not meant to be contained in such a way. An age passed thus, and the Beast began to die.
Maybe he begins like this: six years old, with his mother’s hands rubbing pungent herbs onto his chest and coaxing him to breathe.Miokh, she whispers, hands on his fevered forehead, the endearment like a farewell. She exhales scriptures and legends into his ear, stories that make the world sound ordered and on purpose—the kinds of stories Sena needs to hear. Miokh. My heart. My soul. Mycore, his mother calls him. Sena loves that word until his father orders his skin split open and a different sort of Core planted inside him.
Or this: a young man named Erwin Kirlov, born into poverty, enters officer school on his own merit and single-handedly lifts his family into the lower middle class. Like Sena, he is sharp and quiet and studious, an outsider who graduates with all honors. Like Sena,he should be assigned to the capital, but he has no family name to back him. Like Sena, he is both too much and too little. When Sena Vantaras graduates and the old men at the top are looking for a hole in which to bury Michal Vantaras’ little Seedling, Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Kirlov is the perfect victim. They make a fuss about promoting him, about the honor of overseeing the son of the Grand General. They send him away from the capital and his family, away from any hope of advancement. His name becomes a joke, a cautionary tale, Sena the chain around his neck.
But the Beast longed not for life. After some time had passed—short for the Beast but long for the people of Seren, the Beast died. When it did, it shattered and scattered scales like stars upon the land and sea, and they grew bountiful and rich. The people no longer toiled.
Maybe Sena began years before he existed, in a small village where a charming general-to-be entered Arlune for a diplomatic exchange trip and met a young woman who yearned for travel. The stories Sena knows go like this: the young officer laughed with the woman for hours, sharing slices of ham as they swung their legs over the edge of the Arou cliffs and stared into the swirling mist and crashing waves below. His face wrinkled up when she fed him pickled vegetables and she kissed the sourness away. She grew up on the border and spoke his language. He never learned a word of hers. Her name was Yarana Hahka, but he called her darling, called her beautiful, called her Ana. He called herhis.
Soon after, the first of the Children were born: the first Seeds. And the world rejoiced, for the Beast had given them magic. They revered the Seed of the Void and the Seed of the World, and from them came many more, each one a gift.
Sena should have known the children his mother bore would belong to the general, too. Men like Michal Vantaras can do whateverthey wish with the things they own. They can love them (he still calls his Anadarling) or use them.
When he swears he can feel his NOVA wrapped around his spine, pincer-like, Sena remembers Kirlov urging him to his feet before the wooziness from the anesthesia wore off and saying, “All Seeds are dangerous, but you’re uniquely so. You understand why we had to do this.”
The four families go to balls and Sena and his ilk go to battlefields.
So it was in the land of Arlune and the lands all around. And the world was blessed with bounty.
This is how the world began: a god died to water it and allow its Seeds to blossom. Some stories are like that. Someone has to die.
This is how Sena Vantaras dies.
*
Sena steps in front of the weapon Kirlov levels at the huddling group of survivors and aims his own handgun at the chest of the man who once controlled him. A sickening sense of wrongness nearly makes him stagger, but he doesn’t move. This—steadiness in the face of fear that might otherwise break him—is something he learned because of Kirlov.
“Tory. Take them and run,” he says. And, to Kirlov, “If you move, I’ll shoot.” He does not sayColonel, does not saysir.It will take Kirlov longer to switch from the tranquilizer gun to a weapon that can harm Sena than it will take for Sena to pull the trigger, and he knows it.
With his teeth, Sena tugs the blood-stiff glove from his right hand and lets it drop, soundless, to the floor. Kirlov follows it, lips twitching in something Sena has learned the hard way to identify as disgust.
He’s spent every moment since he was nine horror-struck and breathless at the idea of losing control and hurting someone. That first time, the eyes of the world turned on him and found him lacking. His mother meant well when she gave him that pair of gloves—his first—but he let them become a barrier between him and the world.
Around him, fires blaze, cratered remains of the Compound’s hallways strewn with rubble and blackened by the explosions. Sena prefers it this way. The hallways, closed and clinical, white and gray with the guiding stripe of cold blue, are no more. This place—his prison—is open to the air, burning. There’s peace in that.
