PRESENTLY...

“Let’s speak only of roses and lilies!” Kirek announced when he entered the cargo hold.

It was somewhere around the fortieth day of their journey, and there had been a sort of calm, sometimes dreary air about the ship. The Kennisons had spoken nary a word to anyone else aboard Veringulf. Dorja had been training alone a lot, sometimes reading a book on holopane. Turtle wasn’t avoiding her as much as she had those first few days, but she also wasn’t showing any enthusiasm for meditation, nor the morning exercise routine Dorja put her through. Kirek sat alone much of the time, alternating between reading the few paper books he’d brought with him and playing games of chiirepth with Joshua and Newpik—most maintenance bots came with built-in recreational uses.

The inhabitants of Veringulf were a strange crew of almost-acquaintances, people that existed in close proximity but had some unspoken understanding to steer clear of one another. They may as well have been neighbors living on separate mountains. Sometimes they spoke for a few minutes, most times they just nodded in passing. A handful of times, when Dorja was gathered with Kirek and Turtle at the tiny square table in the galley, the three of them would chat. Kirek did most of the talking, describing the places he’d been, the worlds he’d seen in his younger days, the types of customs locals had shared with him.

So, when Kirek came into the cargo bay shouting "Let's speak only of roses and lilies", Dorja was jolted out of her mindless training and spun around and aimed her glaive at him by reflex, then relaxed. Panting and wiping her brow, she said, “What?”

Kirek smiled, hands up in surrender, looking at the business end of her glaive. “Just something my mother used to say,” he said, smiling and taking a seat on a steel crate of food. “Let’s speak only of roses and lilies. She would say it just after she and my father had had a fight, and neither one of them wanted to say they were sorry, but they also didn’t know how to talk without bringing the old argument back up. So, she would say, ‘Hej, my love, let’s speak only of roses and lilies,’ meaning let’s just talk about the good things in life. They were both scouts, retired and became gardeners, and passed the family trade on to me.”

Dorja leaned her glaive against a wall and took a long swig of water from a jug. “Interesting. What matter is it to Dorja?”

Kirek sighed and shrugged. “I feel like we’ve…that is, you and I…well, we didn’t start off on the wrong foot, but we haven’t actually started on the right foot, either. Or any foot, for that matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, Dorja. Surely you must sense it. We’re all cooped up and we just saw an entire set of moons destroyed, and right now Herenov is probably being done the same way. It makes sense we’re all in a foul mood.” He hesitated. “And I spoke with Luke. He told me that he and Hela were having an argument about you. I saw you eavesdropping. No, no, don’t deny it. I saw it.” He smiled. “So, the Kennisons don’t know what to make of you. Neither did I when you first showed up. And now Turtle…I saw her stalking about. She looked grumpy. And it’s a small ship, so I heard some shouting a couple days ago.”

“That is between Dorja and Turtle,” she said defensively. “And she’s making progress. She’s meditating now, arriving at her sessions without Dorja having to tell her.”

Kirek held his hands up, palms out. “And I’m not going to pry, but I think we’re all pretty much gloomy sobs right now, and that’s got to change. So, let’s speak only of roses and lilies, what do you say?”

Dorja hefted her glaive, gave it a twirl, then held it behind her in her weeping hands and sat on a crate across from him. “What about lilies? Tell Dorja.”

Kirek chuckled. “We don’t actually have to talk about lilies—”

“Dorja knows. It was a joke.”

“Ah! Levity. There’s a start. So, you aren’t just some stone-cold robot with no understanding of human interaction.” Kirek’s smile wavered. “Sorry, I-I meant…well, I’m human but you’re—”

“It is fine, Dorja understands what you meant. And her people were probably human, too, long ago. The di’goji were said to be slaves once, genetically engineered to be strong and agile and capable of withstanding harsh cold.” Dorja took another swig of water, wiped her mouth. “But we somehow fought for our freedom, and earned it. Then we were left alone for a few thousand years and continued to evolve somewhat on our own.”

“I see. Interesting.” Kirek squinted. “Di’goji, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Few did.”

“So, is it just you?”

“What do you mean?”

Kirek was trying to be delicate here. “You’ve made comments…made it sound like there are no others.”

“There are no others. Well,” she added, thinking. “Maybe one or two.”

They looked at one another at length. For a moment, the room was silent except for the vents and air scrubbers whirring.

Finally, Dorja said, “Is that all you wanted to know?”

Kirek scratched his cheek. “Neither one of us are very good at this, are we?”

“What do you mean?”

He sighed. “Let’s start with your people. Tell me about the di’goji. Are they all bladesmen like you?

“No. Dorja is unique among her people.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I’m assuming you lost your world to the Brood? That’s why you’re traveling?”

“Of course. Isn’t that everyone’s story?”

“So tell me about it.”

“Why?”

Kirek sighed. “Do you know what a griot is?”

“No.”

“It’s an old word. In ancient times, before any human ever left Earth, people lived in tribes. Some of those tribes had a person called a griot, who was a kind of story collector. Everyone in the village told the griot stories, and he collected them to pass down to other griots. He was the tribe’s memory.” Kirek shrugged. “We could use a griot or two these days. So, tell me a story, Dorja Blade-Merchant.”

* * *

The way Dorja described it was the way she saw it in her dreams, which was from the top of the bucolic cliffs, looking down into the frost-covered valley where her clan spent their last days. The wide gash in the land looked like it had been left by some titan dragging its axe behind it, and down in that lovely gash, all of Dorja’s people. The planet was abandoned and belonged to them, and yet here they stayed, never leaving the valley, never venturing out to the bucolic hills that glimmered with dew when the two tiny suns rose each morning. The di’goji people remained in the frigid valley.

See them now, as they were, the many homes built into the cliff side, like beehives bored into rock, and vine-riddled trellises stretching from one house to the next. At the valley’s nadir, there was a spaceport that had not been used in a hundred years—it was from that spaceport that a single starship would one day land, bearing her Dorja’s Master, who would take her off-world before the Doom fell. But for now, watch it sit and collect ice, and occasionally be used as a gathering place during the Twice-autumn Festival.

See the skies. They are never empty, always filled with the swoon birds, the adults’ wingspans so massive they shielded the rest of the flock beneath them, sheltering them from the plunderhawks that would climb high into the sky and then dive down to prey on the swoons.

Now see the lightning storms in summer, where lightning bolts the color of jade and ruby etched jaggedly across the sky, inviting celebrations from all the di’goji, particularly the very young ones, who could sometimes ride a kite on the high winds. Dorja had been a windrider, she had indulged to such an extent that her clanmother had feared she was wasting too much time that could be spent on books.

Now see the mother. Tall and with flesh of a dark blue like the deep sea, with hard eyes the no-color of dust and ice. See the weeping hands etched with lines, missing fingernails, forming a collection of calluses from days hunting and sewing. See how she held Dorja in her weeping arms even as she cooked and cleaned and hunted with her reaching arms. Dorja barely knew her father, he had been crippled in a hunting accident when she was very young, and succumbed to his wounds not long after.

Now see them alone, mother and daughter. Their clanmother and clanfather had offered help wherever they could, but resources were stretched thin as they were. The galaxy had ended, people were saying, the Kingdom had come to a close a century ago or more, the Brood had seen to it, and the great civilization’s decay was just now reaching their homeworld.

Caring yet stern, the mother always had a hard gaze nocked and ready to fire whenever her daughter was out in public, but she was also ready with a wry smile whenever Dorja did something to impress. And gods, how Dorja did try to be the recipient of that smile often. She needed it. Quested for it. Not through gifts or compliments, for her mother had never been overly sentimental. As a clan priestess and servant of the goddess Meriwendervvn, her mother respected strength, intelligence, and above all kindness. Anything else was for show.

Dorja had struggled with the first two, but kindness she had in spades. It was natural for her. Seeing things suffer caused her nightmares, and she often woke during the night crying into her weeping hands, because she had dreamt of the animals she and her mother had killed on the hunt earlier that day. Dorja imagined them in pain, and her mother had assured her the animals had not suffered.

But as she got older, Dorja had been forced to keep away from the slaughterhouses and the rituals of skinning fresh kills—she could not be trusted to not have an episode, either sobbing or vomiting.

Dorja’s greatest emotion was empathy, possibly to an extreme. It sometimes held her back whenever she had to stand up against a bully, or whenever she had to fire the killing arrow herself on a hunchbeast. Her mother had tried not to show disappointment, and Dorja had tried to pretend she didn’t notice how hard her mother was trying.

The sole function of their community in the valley, and all throughout the year, was to survive. Winters were harsh, but every few years the summers were so intense they could cause plants to wilt and springs to dry and cattle to die. If it wasn’t the summers, it was the blizzards. If not the blizzards, then any one of the numerous volcanoes that dotted the planet’s surface and erupted at random. If not the volcanoes, then a season of visitations from the terror birds, flocks of which came twice a year from all over the world in search of large meals.

Preparing for inevitable disasters was a full-time occupation for the clans. Dorja had been formed in this environment. For her, there had never been a galaxy filled with conveniences, starships, militaries, nor any trade between worlds. That had all died a long, long time before she was ever born. It was habit for her to set deadfall traps for small forest vermin, to help track the animals her mother killed with her bow, to forage for edible plants as she went about her day, and to help add to the stockpile of pickled foods stored in the cliffside warehouses.

It was how they all survived. A constant focus on food and shelter.

Advanced technology was scarce. Dorja’s clanmother had an old projector that could emit holopanes and play vids, but with each passing year it grew more unreliable.

Dorja had met exactly one human family in her entire life in the valley, and they were all that was left of the passengers that had come on the last ship a hundred years before; they were stranded. The last of the humans had gone venturing out someplace, looking for new horizons to spread to, and never returned.

Even as Dorja described this to Kirek, the memories kept flooding in.

Now see this harsh winter, Isho’gi’ya, the Tearmaker, as it was called. How many died? How many froze in their beds, or dropped dead on their way back from gathering firewood? More than Dorja could count on her reaching and weeping hands put together. Isho’gi’ya was the winter when Dorja’s mother saw the hopelessness in the faces of all their clanspeople. All good cheer evaporated from their little valley. That was when Dorja saw people so starved they cannibalized the dead, and sometimes murdered their own clanmates just to eat.

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That was also when Dorja’s mother told her about the candle, as they walked home from the market, which was half buried in snow and ice. They had seen people fighting at several market stalls, neighbor turning against neighbor as they descended into desperation and madness.

“You have fire in you. Do you believe that, Dorja?”

Shivering in her mother’s arms, her breath coming out in thick white clouds, Dorja could only nod. She believed anything her mother said, for she hadn’t been wrong yet.

“Don’t just nod your head. I need you to believe it,” her mother went on. See her now, the mother di’goji with her weeping-arms wrapped around her daughter, and her reaching hands clutching the fur blanket to them. “When all hope seems lost, and there is naught but despair, you will witness other people behave wickedly, as you have seen. But that is not you. You are my daughter, and neither I nor your father have that weakness in us, and so neither do you. You have a candle, and you will carry it long after I’m gone. I don’t know how long, but it will be yours. Your job is to spread that candle, touch its flame to the unlit candles in the hearts of others. Help them. Make them see. If you are not an example, then who will be? Meriwendervvn wills it. Do you understand?”

Again, Dorja nodded. She was cold and hungry and afraid, but she nodded.

That night, her mother fell ill. She was overcome by sudden coughing, and became dizzy once and fell to her knees. Dorja raced over to her, and heard her mother say, “Oh…oh, no.”

“Mother? What is it?”

She turned to her daughter and smiled. But it was a sad smile, a something-is-wrong smile. “Nothing, my star. I’m just…not feeling well, that’s all.” Dorja didn’t remember much else that happened that night, only that her mother snuggled with her close by the fire. Her coughing became worse, her voice raspy, but still she managed to hum and sing to Dorja throughout the night. As Dorja dozed in and out of sleep, she heard her mother say, “A man will be coming. You don’t know him, but he’s an old friend of mine. You will be scared, but I need you to be brave. Like the first time you saw the ghosts in the zero field. Do you remember?”

“Mmmm-hmmmm,” Dorja said dreamily, fading.

“It’s going to be scary, but I need you to be brave like you were that day. What do you say, my little Dorja? Be brave one more time?”

The next morning, Dorja woke in her mother’s arms. Something was wrong. Her mother’s arms were usually so warm, but now they were cold. And Dorja noticed something else—she always slept in her mother’s arms to keep warm, and her head had always rested on her mother’s chest…and something was missing.

A heartbeat.

Dorja spent all the morning trying to wake her mother. She paced the room, crying, shouting out the windows for help but nobody would come, all frozen inside their homes, buried under snow, or else afraid it was a trap, that someone was trying to trick them into coming out so they could be eaten. Dorja’s reaching hands shook her mother’s body while her weeping hands collected the tears even as they froze on her cheeks. “Dorja cried all day and night for help. And nobody would help,” she told Kirek. “Nobody came for Dorja.” She would never remember the next few days, they were a blur. She did remember the burial, but that was about it. She remembered kissing her mother’s forehead one last time, and being shocked by how cold the flesh was.

She remembered closing Mother’s eyes.

She remembered being afraid to put the dirt in the grave, afraid it would suffocate her, even though that didn’t make sense now.

After that day, a few villagers pulled together to help raise Dorja. She hunted on her own, but she would never have made it without donations from the others.

Isho’gi’ya came and went, and, after a year, people tried to pretend it never occurred. Crimes committed and hateful words spoken during that time were never mentioned again. The following year was a boon, a gift from the gods, her clanmother said. The winters weren’t as harsh and crops grew fully. For a time, it appeared things had settled.

Then, one day, a starship came down from the sky. It bore a dozen wandering blade merchants, all of them low on fuel and food. They caused quite a stir, and the people in the valley rushed out with weapons to meet the trespassers.

Dorja would never forget the day she saw them. She had been cleaning fish in the house she now lived in alone, when the engines detonated in the sky. She looked out the window at a long, gunmetal-gray ship, dragging a column of black smoke down from the sky with it. She ran to the center of town, to the old spaceport, and watched the strangers emerge. They were all human, and they bore a message.

“The Brood are coming this way!” one of them shouted as he stood with his sword out and pointed at the natives with their spears. “We came to warn you! We can take all of you in several trips!”

“Take us where?” someone shouted. It was Niri, their clan’s Speaker, entrusted with village lore and potions and spiritual healing. He spoke NewGal better than anyone.

The blade merchant looked at Niri. “Anywhere but here,” he said.

“We will not leave our homes!”

“Then you will all die!”

Dorja and the other children had watched in confusion. She could no longer recall just how the negotiations went, but over the next several days, some decided to stay and some decided to leave. Dorja decided to stay. She did not believe the strangers. She did not trust them at their word.

The strangers began taking people off-world in trips that took them weeks to return from. Dorja and a few others suspected the strangers were actually taking the di’goji somewhere to be slaves, and so she hid every time the strangers returned in their loud starship. But there were always a few people that heeded their warning, one or two that climbed aboard their ship and left and were never seen again.

The valley was becoming sparsely populated. See it now, that once flourishing valley, carved partially in the cliffs, with rope bridges extending for miles, and down in the small lake, where crannog houses stood above the water on stilts, and lonely boats, never to be rowed again, tied off to each dock and lightly bobbing in the water. No more fishing would ever be done here. Nature started reclaiming the valley, houses were overgrown with moss, packs of wild animals came roaming through the streets.

Five months after the strangers’ first visit, while both suns were high in the sky and Dorja was peeling potatoes in the back yard where her mother used to chase after her, a shadow fell over the entire valley. Night had come abruptly, and soon a coldness descended on Dorja. She looked up at the sky, and at first did not understand what she was seeing. It was her first time seeing the Brood. She had heard stories, but nothing could prepare her. Those stories were all about planets far from her sector of space, in places too distant to ponder. Horrific stories. Worlds being eaten by unfathomable monsters from the void.

Now the Brood were here, and they were devouring the moons. There were earthquakes. They started one day and didn’t stop, just these constant tremors. The strangers all claimed that the earthquakes were caused by a broodling stabbing its tentacles into a continent on the other side of the planet.

The weather changed drastically. Storms became violent. The atmosphere had been disrupted, wounded. Gale-force winds reached down into the valley and tore homes away. Most of the survivors agreed to evacuate.

Dorja’s home remained upright, so she stayed.

She watched the moons become cracked eggshells, become rocky fragments, become ash. She watched them be torn asunder by creatures too large to fathom. The earthquakes were ceaseless. Sometimes rocks fell from the cliffs, and smashed into people’s homes.

Then came the day when Mount Orgal, and all the volcanoes in their region, erupted at once, and lava poured into the valley, lighting homes on fire and chasing people up the cliffs, including Dorja. The earthquakes became more violent. The skies darkened with smoke and Dorja watched as two Brood went swimming across the sky at speeds too great to be believed. At night there were no stars, in daytime there was barely any sun. She took blankets and went back into the valley and slept on her mother’s grave and covered her eyes and wept. Her whole world was coming to an end, her whole way of life. She just wanted to be with her mother. She just wanted to die.

Someone lifted her in the night and carried her into the spaceport. At first, Dorja thought she was dreaming. Then she saw she was in the arms of a human and fought and bit and struggled to get free, but the man was too strong. He dragged her kicking and screaming into the starship and took her away from her home. Dorja never stood a chance, she was so hungry, so thirsty, practically skin and bones. Without realizing it, she had withered.

Dorja had never been inside a starship before, never seen her homeworld from the sky. As she looked out the windows at the valley of her ancestors, she saw the totality of the devastation. But even that wasn’t the worst of it. As the ship climbed higher and higher, she saw the world ruined by black smoke and red lava and orange fires. Grasslands destroyed, forests burned, mountains crumbling, a world annihilated.

For the first time ever, she saw the stars as more than just the flat canvas of the night sky. She flew into those stars, and listened to the cries of what few of her people remained as they walked up and down the corridors, horrified. Some committed suicide in the night. Hanged themselves. Gutted themselves. Some stared unblinkingly at walls, at their hands, at their feet.

Dorja slept. She had a dream where her mother was walking through a field of flaming grass, and reached out to her. “Keep the candle,” she said. When Dorja awoke her weeping hands were already wiping her face and her reaching hands were straight out in front of her, reaching for her mother’s hands. When reality sunk in, she had never felt such despair.

Days went by. Perhaps weeks.

One day, a man sat beside her. A human. He was a dark-skinned man with a finely-trimmed black beard and a sword sheathed at his side. Dorja would later learn it was called a messer sword. He offered her a bowl of soup. His lips moved. He had a strange accent. Dorja did not remember all that he said, just the last part. “My name is Jerrod. And you will be my Apprentice. Your mother was a dear friend of mine, and she arranged this before her passing. You're lucky I found you in time.” He looked at her a long moment before adding, “I have not found your sister yet, but I plan to keep searching for her.”

That was how she met Jerrod the Unsworn, her mentor and Master. And where her mother had bequeathed to her the candle, it was Jerrod who taught her to fight for it.

* * *

When she finished, Kirek had a dark look on his face. “Wait, you have a sister?” He shook his head. “You didn’t mention that anywhere in your story. Who is she? Where did she go? Why wasn’t she with you when your mother died?” Dorja sat thinking, her tongue moving slowly across her upper teeth as she pondered just how much she ought to share. When she didn’t answer, Kirek leaned back, absorbing it all. He did not speak for a long time. Dorja felt strange under his gaze, like she was being analyzed under a microscope. Kirek remained quiet so long that Dorja thought he must be unmoved by her story, even bored. When he finally spoke, though, it was the last thing she expected to hear. “All right, well, I suppose I understand. Some things are very personal. But, I’d need to ask, would you let me help you carry it?”

She winced. “Carry what?”

“The candle.”

Dorja was on guard. The candle was the most precious thing to her, and anyone offering to carry it might also use it as a tool to control her. She had seen it done before, even fell for it a few times. People playing on her heartstrings, taking advantage. Humans could not be trusted far, men least of all. Even as she endeavored to help their kind and others, she had to be wary of their ways. “What do you mean, ‘carry’ it?”

“It is your cause, isn’t it?”

“It is. But why would you want to be part of it?”

“I was there when you spoke to the castellan, remember? And I overheard you speaking to Turtle about it. Sorry, but I am a kind of sneak. It’s part of the repertoire for us scouts. And I…well, you saw what was left of my men. I didn’t even get to form a party to go up and take them from Vash’tik’s cave before the Brood arrived. I have no cause now. No cause and no brothers.”

Dorja inclined her head inquisitively. “Dorja still doesn’t understand.”

“No, I don’t think you do. I’ll be frank, Dorja. No one speaks like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never heard of someone so selfless. The Kingdom…it is falling apart. No one bothers to help anyone anymore. But what your mother told you, and those bladesmen that came to rescue you and your people…don’t you see, that was the candle, too? They imbued you with charity. Sympathy. Compassion. I was hired to climb the Amon’tha. I did it for money. The castellan only wanted it done because he had to stop the fear from spreading through his land like wildfire. But you…you did it without care for Coin.” He nodded. “And now you take the Kennisons, people who fear you, all because of your compassion. Just as your Master saved you from that world, you saved these ungrateful skags.”

Dorja shrugged. “Dorja is Dorja.”

“I think I see that, now,” he said, standing up from his crate and stepping over to her. Dorja watched him closely, still suspecting a trap. “Gods, woman, don’t you know how incredible you are? How beautiful? You’ve not yet been to Wyrmdov, you will see what cruelty truly is, what men will do when there are no law-keeper or Free Rangers left. Mark me, you are a real blue beauty, the only real sort of treasure left in the universe. And I would be honored to stay with you, even after we’ve reached Wyrmdov. I…I have nothing left.” He touched his eyes. Turned his back to her.

Dorja thought to say something. Probably should have.

“Apologies,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’m speaking rashly. These last few weeks have been…emotionally taxing.”

Dorja stood and set her glaive to one side. “What is it exactly you are asking Dorja?”

Kirek turned back to her. “I don’t know, really. I spoke before I knew what I was saying. I suppose…I suppose I was asking for a partnership. For…anything, really. The Kingdom is empty of cause, devoid of purpose. The collapse breaks us all. And your story, I must admit it, was inspiring. It so closely mirrors my own, and a billion others’, I’m sure. My brother, he was much like your mother. Perhaps a sort of ‘candlebearer’ himself. He had hope for people. I didn’t. He was charitable. I wasn’t so much.” He shrugged.

Dorja wanted to speak, but sensed he had more to say. As with Turtle, she had to know when to be patient, and let the other person find their own medicine.

“Herenov is the third world I’ve known to be eaten by the Brood. Where are any of us to go? What are any of us to do? Orphans,” he sneered. “The lot of us.” He turned and stormed out of the room.

“Kirek!” she called after him.

But the man had already left.

Dorja returned to her training. She’d been in the middle of positioning work, getting into a low horse stance and transitioning to bow stance, repeatedly and slowly, getting lower and lower with each rep, all while holding her glaive high above her head with her reaching arms. Her weeping arms were extended, feeling the chi drawn up from the ship’s deck, through her ankles, up through her knees and into her fingertips. The faery lights set her weeping hands aglow.

For a while, she thought about Kirek’s offer, but the training soon chased it from her mind and she was lost, shadow-sparring with ghosts.

* * *

That nightcycle, Dorja lay awake on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. She couldn’t sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she heard Turtle’s hurtful words. You lied to me! You lied! And she saw the cold acceptance in Turtle’s eyes whenever she reluctantly went through stretches and exercises, or practiced meditation. She heard Kirek’s words, asking to help bear her candle. She saw the queer gazes she’d received from the castellan and his court. She turned on her side, going into a fetal position, her weeping hands cupped over her mouth. She didn’t realize she had put her weeping hands there until it was already done. A habit since…well, since.

She closed her eyes. She imagined she heard a sniffling child. In her dreams, Dorja saw Senjelica, a girl she had never met, cowering in a cold dungeon somewhere, with no hope of rescue She was alone and afraid and no one was coming. No one. Dorja became so afraid for the girl that she started crying. Weeping hands quivering, she fought for sleep.

image [https://i.imgur.com/f6fHUfp.jpeg]