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The place where an eternity and an instant are interchangeable.

Maybe I should have taken the risk regardless.

Truth be told? Disappearing into the void might have been the best thing that could have happened to me.

Instead, I’m cursed with life, and burdened with the guilt of survival.

Only I remain.

Out of the first four missions we’d embarked on, they’d all been against Toads. Ling had told me the fifth would be against Rogue Aurelians – the most powerful beasts in the universe.

Aurelian warriors are over seven-feet-tall – towering statues hewn from brutal muscle and violent strength. Those that turn Rogue are even more fearsome – forsaking the cold, but noble ways of the Empire to practice the Old Ways.

The Old Ways harken to the ancient past of the Aurelian Empire – a brutal time of slavery and conquest. In that era, Aurelians openly owned human women like property, and forced them into service in their harems.

Those times were meant to have been consigned to history – but the Old Ways suddenly aren’t so Old anymore. In recent history, a growing faction of Aurelians began practicing the much lauded Old Ways – first in secret, and then openly; despite those being caught doing so being branded Rogue and forever hunted by Aurelian Law Enforcement.

Their defiance demonstrates that the universe has become a powder keg – and just one little spark could ignite a civil war on Colossus. It would pit the Aurelians who still honor the Empire against those who’d return to the Old Ways – when they couldownwomen.

Owning women. Slavery.

Disgusting.

The old me had been eager to take on the scum who preyed on such women, and those who’d hold them against their will. I’d been eager to punish them.

But the old me is dead.

She’s served her purpose. She did her job, and there are fifty slaves who’ve regained their freedom because of her. Over the course of four rescue missions, the old me made a difference – her, and her mentor Ling.

But – Gods – at what cost?

The price I’d paid – well, was it worth it?

That last mission rescue mission… I’d barely made it out alive, and only by the luck of the Gods.

Ling hadn’t been so blessed.

That day, I lost my best friend, my mentor, and the woman I wanted to be. She’d been skewered by a Bullfrog slaver, hell-bent on revenge for the slaves we’d freed.

That day, all my training disappeared. In a single moment, the old me had been revealed to be an illusion.

I’d stared oblivion in the face – and blinked.

I’d lost my nerve – and, with it, all the years of practice and training I’d undertaken to make myself strong. As I stood there helplessly, I lost everything that had ever driven me to risk my life over and over again in such selfless pursuits.

It was as if the old me had died the same day Ling had.

She’s certainly a ghost to me now. I can never be that ‘old me’ again. I need to put that life to rest, so I can begin accepting what the ‘new me’ will become.

I’d shed the accoutrements of my old life like a Scorp sheds its bony shell when it comes of age. I’d sold the weapons that I’d use to free so many slaves. I traded the last of the credits I’d been rewarded for doing so. I even sold Ling’s modified mining ship – the one we’d used to steal away the women other species would call their ‘property.’

I’d given up everything – all my belonging, my savings, and what felt like my very identity.

I’d traded them all for a homestead on a quiet Human Alliance planet – a place where the venomous Scorp and greedy Toads can’t venture near, and far away from the imperious Aurelians. Even those of their kind who spurned the Old Ways kept vast harems of women, so I barely trusted their kind over the Aurelians with the shamelessness to declare themselves Rogue.

I’d traded it all like that Old-Earth story,Jack and the Beanstalk. The inventory of my life, in exchange for a sack of three different types of seed; bioengineered so that even a beginner homesteader like me could grow enough to sell and survive from.

It would be a new life.