Dawn rises on a broken world. The radji were once a strong people, united and sure of our place amongst the stars. With three-thousand years at our backs, our civilisation was one of the oldest in charted space. Whilst alien oligarchies and consortiums vied for commercial dominance, we happily bought their wares. We patted the backs of mammoth aristocrats with one paw and offered a drink commercialists lapped up with a toothy, sideways grin. They were only concerned with outdoing one another, and that all worked in our favour. We spread, and flourished, and built our colonies in the light of a hundred different suns.

But now there is no sunlight. Now, ash climbs high into an atmosphere, charged with the soot of so many HETI strikes that it crackles pink and red with vibrant, violent rage. The ash descends in a lazy, dirty snowfall, casting every ruined building and toppled city, every living or broken body, every wretched thing left on the radji homeworld in a thin layer of grey grime. Millennia-old limestone walls crumble like sandcastles against the incoming tide, and great monoliths of metal and glass have shattered into toppled, twisted wreckage. The only sound is distant thunder, and a low wind.

A radji centurion lies sprawled on their back in what was once a lively plaza, looking up with lifeless eyes. Even in this sorry state they are beautiful—androgynous and strong, the pinnacle of our form. Their broad, deep jaw and wide-set eyes once betrayed no fear in the face of the enemy. Beneath an armoured breastplate, a prideful heart once thundered in a barrelled chest. The legs were stout and sure-footed, the shoulders broad and strong. Their bristled pelt is matted and bloodied between the armour from days of constant warring, and those eyes watch the swirling ash cloud without sight.

Nearby a pyq hunter is half-crushed by fallen debris, its long neck and narrow muzzle lolling in a final grim grin. The invaders were sinuous, scrappy things by comparison; all lean muscle and tendon, standing two heads above most radji. They shirk armour for their naked scaled hides, grey skinned and long of limb. For centuries they took chattel amid the colonies on the edge of dark space, revelled in the slaughter in their short sharp tongue. Their toothy maw laughs no longer. Despite days of ravenous feasting on radji flesh they are still stick thin, and the predator’s large dark eyes now reflect nothing. A Grey looks no different dead than alive, coated in the grief and death of so much and so many.

And lastly, that most unlikely of species, the human soldier. An ape; a puny hairless simian. Her armour failed her, she lies face down in the ash. She was promised the stars and given a rifle. How far she travelled to fight and die, forgotten on this rock.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Broken bodies like these can be found on most streets: men and women, warriors and invaders, the young and old. The grey ash takes them all. But slowly, the clouds begin to part. Kay-ut’s light cracks through the haze, prying the fingers of death from Her child’s Cradle.

In the final days of the Cradle—our homeworld—, nothing had seemed amiss. Certainly, the re-emergence of an old adversary was something of a novelty, a cause for concern, but people still went about their days as they had for centuries. They woke in the morning, made their beds, and set off for wherever they needed to be. They ate and laughed. Danced and played. They sang and prayed and hoped for a better tomorrow. There were tears and sorrows to be sure, but none more so than normal. What an abysmally dull word ‘normal’ is to describe the gorgeous cacophony of but a single day of my people. How much we took for granted, how blissful ‘normality’ was.

But something had changed. Something was amiss. A sickness had taken root, its intended purpose secreted away beneath the centuries of bureaucracy. We all felt it. You could pass someone in the street, or spy a child mid-play, and see the same wan expression. It was as if they could almost place a forgotten name, recall an old secret. There were whispers of dark things, lurking in dimly lit alleys and ancient places, hidden away from the light of the sun, where they sat and awaited their chance. Most dismissed them as rumours, the usual prattle meant to scare children into staying in their beds. Indeed, I did too. All the better to keep them off the scent.

Of course, I was there. I saw it coming. I tried to prepare. The nature of my work was such that others would have reacted with revulsion, and rightly so. It was a terrible thing I was tasked with doing, but I did what I must. I did my duty. I had no regrets, at least none I voiced to anyone. But I also became complacent. Obsessed. I failed to adapt, and by the time the enemy arrived, we were too late.

Some point to humanity. Their invasion created panic, their peace-making brought war. Many blame the pyq. Their assault was as brutal as ever, their violence maleficent and gleeful. More recently we have begun to blame ourselves. Our ignorant assumptions of these species—these people—is what started the conflict so long ago. Perhaps we paint with too fine a brush, who is to say that all are not equally to blame? We all played our parts I suppose, for better or for worse.

I used to think that this story was about the end of an empire, and the parts we all played in it. But I have come to realise that it is also about that most insipid and insurmountable facet of life, something I first realised as I stood in the ash of all I had wrought: hope persists in living things, for we are its avatar. It all began in the most unlikely of places, long before the first hints of the looming conflict. It began, as all stories do, with a mother.