Denor first laid eyes on this particular bunch of Trunians a few days after his father had trudged back into the village, burdened by more than just his wounds. By then, the small village that constituted the last settlement of the Andronians on the planet had become a place of whispered names and quiet sobs, a grim inventory of the souls who had left for war but found no path back. The wails of the women echoed through the night like a dirge on repeat, each fresh wave of grief more piercing than the last. This was all very frustrating for Denor, who appreciated nothing more than a good night’s sleep.

Only the previous evening, the sorrow had flared up again when a stubborn fever claimed another Andronian warrior, a man who had survived the battle only to be felled by an enemy too small to see. This sort of merciless injustice could really ignite someone into becoming a dangerous foe to the invaders, but as of yet that hadn’t happened. This was due to the potential stock of heroes all being the ones who had fled the previous battle in disgrace, proving to the bafflement of statisticians that sample quality is just as important as sample size.

As if summoned by the tears, the invaders marched into view, treading the very path the villagers had scurried along when they fled the battlefield. The bolt throwers led the way, energy already crackling in their hands, just asking the locals to step out of line so they could gift it to them. Behind them came the armored division, and to Denor their epaulet-enhanced shoulders seemed broad enough to block out the sun, hair the color of darkest night, their eyes continued keenly scanning the woods for any sign of treachery. None came, of course. It’s hard to ambush someone when all the potential ambushees had decided to remain lying at the previous outpost in various states of dismemberment.

There was a seemingly endless tide of them, many times the number that had been sent from the village to their doom. Denor, squinting at the approaching column, muttered, “Let me at ‘em, Grandpa Tycho! Let me at them!”

Tycho, having bristled at being called ‘grandpa’ and also disliking references, clouted Denor on the head to settle him down.

Beside him, Ledo leaned on a blade that had long since become more walking stick than weapon. The gunsmith’s voice was missing since his humbling in battle, so it was Tycho who spoke.

“Twenty years ago I could have taken on an army like that, no problem, even the Kilru.”

“So why don’t you?” Denor asked, more in confusion than accusation.

“I don’t know if you’re much of a mathematician boy, but it’s not twenty years ago. I’m retired, your father is incapacitated, and the rest of these boys would have been better lying down in the snow and dying than coming back to us in disgrace.”

“Yeah,” Denor scowled, understanding that if he agreed with his grandfather it substantially reduced his chances of getting hit again. “Fleeing a battlefield, what a disgrace!”

Ledo winced. “Son, I’m right here.”

Denor cocked an eyebrow, completely oblvious. “Yes Ledo, I know you’re here. Do you know anyone who can help us?”

“Perhaps, I know a few warriors I could get in touch with that might still be prowling the stars,” Tycho mused.

“Is it Ledo?” Denor asked.

Tycho sent a withering gaze in his son’s direction. “No, it’s a Highgold I knew long ago…”

“Ledo is a Highgold?!” Denor persisted, amazed.

“It’s not Ledo!” Tycho snapped.

Ledo shrugged, the gesture as weary as his voice. “They’d be too late anyway, we can’t stand up to that. Not now, not ever. They’d cut us down if they intercepted the communiques.”

Bitter as it was, Tycho knew that his son spoke the truth. Even before the latest invasion, the villagers had been outnumbered by the populace of New Titania alone. Now, with so many gone to the grave, the odds were even worse. Denor clenched his teeth in the silence, fury and confusion twisting in his gut. They had to do something!

But even if Denor couldn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation, Tycho could see that Ledo was right—resistance would be a fast road to slaughter. There was no magic army from the stars coming to their aid.

As the Trunians drew nearer, more villagers crept out to the main road, eyes narrowing as they took in the sight. Not one of them held anything more threatening than a kitchen knife, but the venom in their stares could have slain a dozen men if such things were possible. And the women, lined up beside them, were no less fierce; their gazes alone might have been enough to flay the flesh from the invaders’ bones. Unfortunately the Trunian army weren’t known across the galaxy for determining their battles with staring contests.

At a barked command, the armored warriors snapped into formation. They just obeyed, as if they had no minds of their own—probably because they didn’t use them much anyway. “Slaves,” Tycho muttered, his lip curling at this pompous display of precision. “You’d never see our people be so brainless.”

Denor nodded. “I agree completely and whole-heartedly with what you’re saying, Grandpa. That sure is exactly the case.” The was a brief pause as the boy frowned, his brain struggling to parse the old man’s statement. “Which people?”

“You stand corrected, old man,” Ledo muttered hoarsely.

From the mouth of babes (or in this case, Denor) can sometimes come the honest truth though. Now that the Trunians had appeared in their village, the Andronians were—in the strictest sense—slaves.

The man who had given the order strutted forward, the scarlet crest on his helmet marking him as someone important, or at least someone who thought he was. These sorts slithered out from the crevices in every major army of a certain size. The administrators and the organizers who wrinkled their nose at a blade but were quite happy behind a console distributing numbers. He stated something in his own tongue, the words harsh and foreign.

“He says his name is Tirides, and he wants to know if anyone here can understand him,” Tycho translated to the few villagers who didn’t know any Trunian, the predominant language of the galaxy. Stepping forward, he spoke in the same language, the words rolling off his tongue with practiced ease. The officer responded with a long speech, one that Tycho interrupted more than once. “I’ll tell him to slow down,” he whispered to Denor, a sly grin briefly crossing his face.

It was then that Denor remembered that he could understand any language, he just hadn’t been paying any attention to what the man was saying.

Tirides frowned but obliged, his words coming slower, “You are now subjects of the Trunian Empire. Andron VII belongs to the Trunians by conquest, just like the rest of the Andron system.”

That Andron VII was the only habitable planet in the system didn’t factor into the speech, it sounded more impressive to claim you had conquered all the uninhabited rocks as well as the populated one.

It should be noted that Tycho, being a man of some experience and a keen sense of self-preservation, took great care to make it abundantly clear to those within earshot that all these pronouncements came directly from Tirides and not from himself. It wouldn’t do to have some exceptionally thick villager hold a grudge because he thought the old man was a Trunian sympthiser.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Denor had briefly gazed up in betrayal at his grandfather speaking these words and joining the bad guys, but a swift smack around the ear from Ledo disabused him of those notions.

In the heart of Andron VII, where the landscape itself seemed to sulk under a perpetual cloud of ancient grudges, Tycho found himself speaking the words of Tirides as if they were a curse upon the very soil. “Instead of killing us all, there will be an outpost here in the village,” he translated, each word landing like a leaden weight on the ears of the villagers, “or nearby, as this officer sees fit.” The chill air seemed to grow colder as Tycho continued, “We must help feed and care for the outpost, or freeze in the cold. If any soldier is ambushed, the Trunians will take hostages—chosen from the lawbreaker’s family—and kill them.” The silence that followed was as thick as the tension in the air, only broken when Tycho added the final, ominous words: “The lawbreaker will be sent into the wilderness, without supplies.”

A murmur spread through the gathered villagers, low and threatening, like the rumble of distant thunder. In Andron VII, even the most hardened raiders hesitated at the thought of such brutal reprisals. Freezing to death may not have been the worst option, but there were Gurruks out there and worse when night fell.

Ledo’s voice, still rough with disuse, cut through the growing unrest. “We must do as the Trunians command, for they have proven stronger than us. I and a scant few others have seen it with our own eyes. Keep your wits about you,” he pointedly gazed at Denor then “and for Tamet’s sake, don’t do anything stupid to provoke them.”

As his son spoke, Tycho watched the soldiers with the intense focus of a predator stalking its prey, his eyes narrowing as one of the warriors approached Tirides and spoke in their guttural tongue. The officer’s gaze flicked to Ledo, his hand rising as if to signal something that would end in violence. Every muscle in Denor’s body tensed, ready to spring, but Tirides paused, reconsidered, and instead, his next words shot at Tycho like an arrow loosed from a bow.

“He asks: Do we understand?” Tycho’s voice, strained with the effort of keeping his own defiance in check, carried the question to the villagers.

Heads bowed, the gathered populace nodded, their pride buried beneath the weight of defeat. They had fought, and they had lost to these warriors from a distant planet. They had been left without a choice.

But not Denor. He did not nod. His heart was a smoldering forge of rebellion, stoked by a combination of sheer stupidity, stubbornness, and every lesson his father had ever taught him. His eyes locked onto the Trunian officer with a gaze as sharp as any dagger, and Tirides, noticing the blaze in Denor’s eyes, spoke again to Tycho, a question wrapped in a threat. The old man placed a heavy hand on Denor’s shoulder, both to restrain and to identify him.

“He asked if you were my son,” Ledo murmured, his voice low.

“Do you want him to pretend he’s not so you can save face?” Tycho rumbled.

Denor looked up at him, anger temporarily forgotten thanks to a relentless onslaught of boredom. “Can we go now?”

“No,” Ledo’s grip tightened, the pain a silent command for silence. “Remember what I said about holding your tongue. And remember what he said—if you get in trouble, then both me and your grandfather get in trouble too.”

Denor grinned, a response that was more troubling than any words he could have uttered. Unfortunately for both men, he decided that more words would be a good idea too.

“So this means…” he began, and the entire village took a collective deep breath. “…if I can get you both in trouble with the Trunians…” he trailed off, and neither man liked where this was going. “… you have to be nice to me all the time!”

Several villagers chose this moment to collapse, knowing that they were all doomed if their fate rested on Denor’s shoulders.

Tirides barked an interjection, clearly tiring of the Andronian muttering that he didn’t understand. “What is this child talking about?”

“Denor,” Denor insisted, stepping forward and causing a tightening of certain anatomical features of the various villagers in attendance. “Denor Kara.”

Tirides rose his hand to strike the child, then smiled at the sheer audacity. “Is that your name, boy?”

“Denor. Kara.” Denor Kara repeated, kicking the man in the shin.

The general hopped back and forth, his eyes watering. This somewhat reduced his fear factor with the audience. “You little whelp! I could have you killed for that!”

“Denor!” Ledo bellowed, quickly running to the boy’s aid. “How could you do something so stupid?”

Denor looked up at him with earnest eyes. “If you're going to get mad at me every time I do something stupid, then I guess I'll just have to stop doing stupid things starting from now.”

His father’s face contorted with anger and he reached out to him. Denor took a step back, only to collide with the unfortunately-placed hopping Tirides, whose nose made an unfortunate impact with Denor’s sturdy cranium.

“How long was that?” Denor asked, looking back at the hopping man with blood pouring from his nose.

The soldiers, largely confused by this display, didn’t seem to advance on the villagers for this unfortunate besmirching of their commanding officer. Possibly because they were quite happy that this was happening to him, on account of him being a colossal idiot.

“Just wait until General Stantych Drenda hears about this!” Tirides wailed, no longer hopping but still clearly mad at the whole situation, though on account of his broken nose the words came out more along the lines of “butch bait buntil beneral banbick benba bears bout bis!” which even Denor’s universal translator struggled with.

Tycho’s frown deepened as he translated for the villagers. “He says their commander is called General Stantych Drenda. He says this Drenda is a hard and cruel man, and warns us not to anger him.” Another string of harsh words followed, and Tycho’s expression darkened even further as he relayed the message. “He says we had better not let Stantych see such nonsense when he arrives or he’ll steal all our women.”

Denor’s gaze shifted to Gella, Charan’s wife to be. She was still technically a girl and had been awfully helpful with the whole undead thing prior to the invasion, and Denor, not yet a man, felt a fierce surge of protectiveness. Their eyes met for a fleeting moment, a silent vow passing between them before she looked away.

“He says his people are here to stay, and we had better get used to it,” Tycho announced, his voice thick with barely contained fury. “He will give us one more chance to redeem ourselves, but no more defiance!”

Unfortunately for his grandfather, Denor had lapsed into his default state of not listening.

***

Some time after this ordeal, outside the makeshift outpost to the south that had been helpfully decorpsed, Grenal and Linon stood watch, flanked by two bolt throwers in hastily-erected lookout towers. The sun barely hung in the sky, but Odont had ordered vigilance around the clock. Grenal, ever the pragmatist, saw no fault in the commander’s caution. They might have won today, but this was Andron VII—a place where defiance was seemingly as common as the crags and shadows that shaped the land. The same crags that he expected hordes of Andronians to seep out of. He shuddered at the thought.

One of the bolt throwers, a wiry fellow named Hebet, squinted at the darkening forest. “The captain mentioned seeing the legendary Aurox around these parts,” he said. “By Martos’ ever-flowing generosity, I’d love a Aurox-skin cloak, one I hunted myself.”

Linon gestured toward the trees where the village lay. “If it’s Aurox you’re after, you might find more in that direction. Every house there’s got a few wild beasts in it ready for skinning.”

“Ain’t that the truth!” Grenal chuckled. “Did you see that lad, the gunsmith’s son? Took on the Captain and all he got was a slap on the wrist. Left him bloodied and everything. A strange turn of events if you ask me.”

“Oh, him,” the bolt thrower nodded, recalling the boy with a smile. “Not a brain cell to rub together, but there’s something about him.”

Linon, somber as ever, nodded. “I saw him too. But that lad’s no threat. He’s an idiot who will get himself killed and his family along with him.”

"If he lets loose a bolt at one of us, we'll cast him into the wilds and do the killing ourselves, I think he had two next of kin," Grenal remarked, with the air of a man who has worked out all the tricky bits of a sum that consisted of more than one part. "Even these animals can grasp consequences when shown them up close. Kill one of us, lose yourself and several of your friends. Simple math."

“I hope so," Linon replied, though with less conviction. "But then again, Andronians have a nasty habit of not doing the math. That’s what makes them animals, after all."

Captain Odont strode up to what looked like a conversation brewing instead of constant vigilance. He shrugged as if the whole thing was a mildly interesting but ultimately trivial problem. "It’ll happen once or twice. Then we’ll kill ten or twenty Andronians, or however many it takes. Sooner or later, the survivors will figure out that attacking the Empire only ends up hurting themselves more."

"Yes Captain!” All four soldiers replied, even the one who hadn’t involved himself in the chatter.

“And they’d be right—unless you happen to be the poor soul who catches that bolt," Linon added, a touch of grim humor in his voice.

Except it wasn’t funny, not really. There was something about these Andronians that none of the men could shake. Something deep down and primal that left them exchanging uneasy glances, each one silently hoping that when their foes did the math, they wouldn't be the ones left paying the price.

After all, it only took one, and one is the most dangerous number. Especially when it’s named Denor.