“So, what are these made of, anyway?” Ayna asked as Saketa placed one of their grey-brown bricks in a stone firepit.

“The right plant fibres, mixed with the right animal dung, dried and prepared the right way. It is an ancient recipe.”

“I’m finding that most things on this planet are.”

Saketa lit a firestick and put it against the top of the brick.

“There is no reason to change what has proven to work,” she told the Dwyyk as the flame started to catch.

“I’m also finding that you’re rather proud of your home.”

Saketa looked at her.

“I am. I am proud of our strengths, and the lessons we have taken to heart.”

Ayna grinned.

“A Warden must walk in truth, I’ve been told.”

“Indeed. I am proud of Kalero and its people, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.”

The brick flared to full life. For its size, it gave off a surprising amount of heat and light. In a fairly enclosed space it could turn even a rainy highlands evening, such as this one, comfortable. Granted, the smell was a bit unpleasant, but it kept animals away.

They each took out some of the meat bits that had been prepared for them at the lodge, and started warming them over the flames. Saketa looked around, at their surroundings; both foreign and all-too familiar.

“Speaking of honesty…” Ayna said with hesitancy well into their meal. “You don’t like being here much, do you?”

“No,” Saketa said. The past hung close this evening, and while she didn’t count Ayna among her very closest friends, she felt glad for the company.

She reached out with her free hand, off the blanket she sat on, and touched the metal grating the firepit had been built on top of.

On a planet that embraced ancient traditions, here was a new addition to the landscape, and a new resting place for travellers. Emergency thrusters had kicked in as the battleship neared the ground, preventing it from shattering apart as it crashed. So here it was, like many others like it. A physical reminder of the full-scale assault from three years earlier. When Saketa’s spirit had broken, and her sword along with it.

“No,” she said again, and let her eyes travel over metal walls, bathed in the glow of the burning brick. “But strength doesn’t come from avoiding hardships.”

“No…” Ayna said. “But, uh, I would have been willing to sleep under a cliff, or in the tent.”

“No need.”

“Your call.”

Saketa sat in silence for a few seconds. Much of the suffering she’d endured in recent years had been due to a stubborn refusal to bear it all for herself. To expect too much of herself.

“Did I ever tell you the full story?” she asked Ayna.

“It has trickled through in bits and pieces, I would say. But… why don’t you give me the full version, all in one go?”

“Do you actually want it, or are you just humouring me?”

“No no, go ahead and tell me,” Ayna said.

Saketa cleared her throat, and spent a few seconds deciding how to turn very old history into a brief summary.

“In the ancient days, after our ancestors first learned to access power, they were careless with it. They did not fully understand the forces they were playing with, and so the standards set for trainees were much laxer than they are today. This was also before they learned to create balancing focuses, in the form of our Warden blades. So people broke in large numbers. Rather than balance between the positive and negative, and reaping the energies from those crossroads, they simply fell down, into the abyss. And those who broke were exiled to the Valley of Vartana. There they stayed, there they festered, and there their numbers grew over time. Supposedly, the Wardens of that time held out hope that these people could be recovered, brought back to sanity. That their glow could be kindled again, as our understanding of these energies improved.”

“Of course, that didn’t happen. Because there is no coming back from that abyss. No one ever has. And in time there were enough Exiles for them to launch a war of conquest and hate.”

Saketa let her eyes unfocus.

“Every child of Kalero learns of those days. They taught us many lessons, and left many scars. On the psyche of our culture, and in all the tribe and settlement names that now exist only in memory. The Exiles learned lessons of their own, in ways of wielding deadly powers. Still, they were stopped in their tracks. But the conflict had been bloody and exhausting enough that our ancestors allowed them to flee the planet into further exile. It was another grand mistake, in the long run, on top of allowing the Valley to fester in the first place. Space travel then wasn’t what it is today, and certainly not on Kalero. But they were allowed to board three great vessels, and blast off into the unknown. It was deemed better than letting the conflict drag on until nothing remained to be saved.”

She closed her eyes.

“This decision simply made them a problem for the rest of the galaxy. The Exiles scattered, some individually, some under the command of powerful leaders. This disease that had started on my planet mutated into different strains. One you are already familiar with, through Avanon, who followed an ideology that has passed from teacher to student ever since the ancient days.”

She reached behind herself, under her shirt, and touched the numb scar on her back that Avanon had inflicted during their battle.

“His hate… the hate that was taught to him, and which he in turn taught to others… was just mythmaking. An excuse to feel cheated out of some glorious past, and to have enemies to seethe at. But what came to Kalero that day… at the head of a hired battle fleet… those were Ancients.”

The scepticism on Ayna’s face wasn’t too overt, but Saketa had seen it before.

“And you guys are SURE that these are the real thing? That they’re not heirs or something, using passed-down names and titles.”

“We are quite sure, Ayna,” Saketa told her.

“Human beings… can live… past two thousand years, or however long it’s been?”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“They can. By unlocking the right secrets. And at great cost to themselves, and others. Trust me, it is not a venue you would want to pursue.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“Some endure by being a parasitic wound in the universe. Others spend ages hidden away in tombs, either on forgotten worlds, or in ships drifting far away in the deep. You told me the story of that derelict you boarded, during your first run with the Addax. I think you may have come across a tomb ship.”

Ayna absorbed this, and seemed to mull over some unpleasant memories.

“Is that why that salvager guy was… completely insane?”

“It could very well be,” Saketa told her. “Encounters with the actual Ancients have been sporadic through the history of the Wardens. They have sometimes surprised us with new tricks.”

Ayna writhed a little, visibly trying to shake off an unpleasant feeling.

“I’m glad it was a short stop.”

This resting place had been set up with location in mind: Far enough from the entrance to give some protection from cold air, but close enough to not make it too much of a commute. Deep enough within the ship to keep rain from seeping in through the damaged hull, and in a space large enough for a whole group, but small enough for a single brick to warm it up. The room was some sort of thoroughfare, and Saketa knew it well. Her eyes finally travelled to a particular doorway, leading to the front of the ship.

“I arrived into the system well after the attack had started, right on the heels of my experiences during Volkan Vol’s war. What traditional air defences we had had been taken out, troops and Exiles had made planetfall, and population centres were being bombed. My brothers and sisters were doing what they could to defend against the bombardments, but they were also tied up in fighting the Exiles themselves. And, as always, many were simply offworld, like I had been.”

She took a strengthening breath.

“I Shifted from ship to ship, crippling machinery and leadership as fast as I could. I was desperate, frantic, to stop the calamity. I did a lot of damage, but I also wore myself out, and I lost track of my spirit. And then… then I reached the flagship.”

Saketa fell silent. Her eyes were back on that doorway, and her mind was on what lay beyond it. She took a stick from their travelling bags and touched it against the top of the brick. It caught, and she used it as a light as she got up and walked to the doorway.

The door itself had popped out as the frame was deformed in the crash, but someone had hung a pelt in its place. She parted it and walked through. Beyond was a hard point, a feature of many large warships: A killzone set up around the bridge as a last-ditch defence against boarders. Some scavenging had taken place, and the mounted turrets were gone, but Saketa saw this place had had the exact same setup as the flagship.

“My aim was off, when I Shifted,” she said to Ayna, an unheard presence behind her. “I ended up further back, in the ship. And once I was on board, the Exile’s power disrupted my ability to Shift again. I fought my way through, killing everything in my path, through this hard point… and finally to the bridge.”

The final door had stayed shut in the crash, and the scavengers had cut through it with torches. Beyond was a command bridge in a circular style. There was no front or back, just a lowered floor for the bridge crew, around an elevated area where a commander would have a 360 degree view.

Saketa’s meagre torch showed little more than outlines, but she could tell that the bridge was largely intact. The scavengers had worked efficiently, taking valuable electronics and the like without making too much of a mess. Like the hard point, it was exactly as she remembered from the flagship.

“And this is where I met her,” Saketa said, and pointed to the command area. “Ancient Zuthira. The leader of the expedition. A villain from the ancient days of Kalero. An empty husk of power and hate, back across vast distances of space and time to reclaim the world that had exiled her. The hellish will and patience it took to assemble an entire war fleet in secret and smuggle it all the way here… and it came down to a duel.”

Saketa swallowed, but her throat was dry.

“Picture this space, but with dead bodies, screaming voices, rent metal, showers of electricity, and flashes of sheer power. Our auras clashed as we did, tearing our environment apart. She was a talker, ranting about long-awaited vengeance, and all her efforts and all her patience… well, you can fill it in for yourself. The Exiles are neither deep nor interesting. Evil never is.”

The bridge wasn’t the same without Zuthira’s presence, and the vile, corrupted power it had held. The problem, this time, was within herself. With her memories. Zuthira had reached deep into the depths of the universe for strength, and the veil had parted. The awful colours on the other side had bled into physical reality, and things with no names had fought with her.

But here Saketa was, three years later. Here she stood, and she faced it. She accepted the pain, and so it lost much of its power over her.

“I couldn’t overcome her,” Saketa said. “Not in the state I was in, but perhaps my chances would never have been good. Our efforts tore the ship apart, up in the mesosphere. She simply Tunnelled away to another ship. And me… I plummeted down, injured, spent, and broken. The assault continued. I saw flashes and beams, and felt the pain of a planet under attack. I fell and fell and fell, fading in and out of consciousness. I regained it in time to save myself with a Shift down to the ground, but that was the last of my strength during that conflict. My sword and spirit both broke, and I could only lie there, in a field, as the rest of it played out.”

Feeling restless, she walked, and passed around the outside of the lowered circle. She touched, in passing, the spot where the flagship had cracked.

“You do know the rest,” she went on as she finished the circle. “The Wardens have allies here on the Outer Fringe, through old kinships and our battles to clean up the mistakes of the past. They arrived with battle fleets, and the siege was broken. Many of the Exile ships were destroyed, and the rest were driven off. Kalero was left wounded, but it endured.”

She made herself concentrate on the more relevant part of that last sentence.

“We endured,” she reiterated, more firmly.

Ayna watched her, and after a few seconds she started nodding very slightly.

“You did,” the Dwyyk said softly. “I’ve been seeing that for myself.”

Saketa nodded back.

“Despite having actually lived the old days, the thinking of the Exiles was decidedly in the coreward-mould. They mostly focused on what few major population centres our society had built up. What people from the Federation would call ‘modern’. It led to a higher death toll than otherwise, but it failed to break Kalero’s true strength. It was never in industry, or in trade with other worlds. It is in the old ways. In our culture. That they could not destroy. Wardens will be fewer in number for a couple of generations. It will have an effect on the Fringe. But we will bounce back. It is…”

She hesitated.

“It is just vanity to expect to not live through one of history’s darker eras.”

“Yyyeah,” Ayna said. “I’ve never really thought about it, but I suppose you’re right.”

“You might have it in you to grow wise, Ayna,” Saketa said. “From all your travels, and from the mistakes of people like myself.”

“Oh, Fates, no,” Ayna said, and her usual humour returned. “I’m just out for a good time.”

“Hmm. If you say so.”

Saketa crossed her arms.

“But it might sneak up on you, against your will.”

“I do the sneaking, Saketa,” Ayna said. “I’m just here because… well… you literally are the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so! And, in fact…”

Ayna picked up a cover that a scavenger had popped off one of the crew consoles. She put it up on the highest console within quick reach, and got it to balance upright.

“Give this one a blast, would you?”

Ayna stepped away and held out her hands, as if she were presenting a product up on a stage.

“Go on.”

“Hm.”

Saketa held her empty hand out, and focused. Waves were not precision tools. Any trainee’s first wave was a large, violent burst that tore through everything in its path, and only dared on large stretches of dead, empty ground. Ironically enough, knocking a warship out of the sky, or stopping an orbital blast, was a lot easier than knocking down a single person with no collateral damage. It took the kind of concentration that normally wasn’t to be found in the middle of battle. But she wasn’t in battle, and even without a sword to balance herself, she managed it.

The loose covering blew off the console like a bullet, and hit the wall behind it with a loud bang.

“That’s still cool!” Ayna shouted. “And it’s still crazy that magic exists!”

Her almost childlike joy was very sincere, and very amusing.

“I am glad I can entertain you.”