Page 61 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

E ven ugly things have a beginning.

This is the dawn of the world according to Sena’s mother:

Once, when our Seren was a young planet, fresh and new, the Celestial Beast who fashioned the universe swam in the great river of stars.

Traveling by, it fell in love with the planet that had blossomed vibrant green and jewel-blue in its absence, a gem brighter than any star.

On the surface of the planet, great hunters toiled, men and women with unbroken spirits.

With the children of the land, the Beast was also pleased.

This is how Sena Vantaras begins: seventeen, accepting a salute and an armful of awards and an assignment as far away from the capital as they can send him.

He returns the salute with gloved hands.

He does not celebrate with alcohol and loud parties like the others.

The noise is sandpaper on his skin. He’s led to a room where they lay him on his belly and lock soft restraints around his hands.

He burns as they slice a perfect line along his spine.

They talk like they’re adding something to him.

A precaution, they assure him. They don’t say a word about what they’re taking away.

So the Great Beast descended from the heavens to admire the planet.

It watched the people and the land they worked and was exceedingly pleased.

At first it only visited, but after a time, it would not leave.

The Beast traveled through the skies of Seren even though it belonged in the river of the universe.

Solitude can make even the vastest domain into a cage, and starlight is no gentler a prison than any other.

To know warmth and let it go was not in the beast’s nature—or in ours.

As if in answer, the world reached up with fingers vibrant green and strung with flowers and pierced the flesh of the Beast to fill the void within it, slithered between crystalline scales and into its core, vines like veins within the arches of the beast’s ribs.

And so it was that the heart of our planet beat also within the Beast.

But perhaps Sena begins at nine years old: blood sharp on his tongue, a small hand wrapped around a strong ankle. Flesh drying up, dead on a still-living body. His father looks at him and sees not a boy but a weapon. To no one’s surprise except his own, he’s sent where all weapons go: to war.

Life eternal can make a soul old, but the sweet blue planet offered peace.

The Beast lingered long on Seren and watched its people toil to take sustenance from the land.

Its body, though, made from the stuff of stars, with galaxies aglow in every scale, was not meant to be contained in such a way.

An age passed thus, and the Beast began to die.

Maybe he begins like this: six years old, with his mother’s hands rubbing pungent herbs onto his chest and coaxing him to breathe.

Miokh , she whispers, hands on his fevered forehead, the endearment like a farewell.

She exhales scriptures and legends into his ear, stories that make the world sound ordered and on purpose—the kinds of stories Sena needs to hear.

Miokh. My heart. My soul. My core , his mother calls him.

Sena loves that word until his father orders his skin split open and a different sort of Core planted inside him.

Or this: a young man named Erwin Kirlov, born into poverty, enters officer school on his own merit and single-handedly lifts his family into the lower middle class.

Like Sena, he is sharp and quiet and studious, an outsider who graduates with all honors.

Like Sena, he should be assigned to the capital, but he has no family name to back him.

Like Sena, he is both too much and too little.

When Sena Vantaras graduates and the old men at the top are looking for a hole in which to bury Michal Vantaras’ little Seedling, Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Kirlov is the perfect victim.

They make a fuss about promoting him, about the honor of overseeing the son of the Grand General.

They send him away from the capital and his family, away from any hope of advancement.

His name becomes a joke, a cautionary tale, Sena the chain around his neck.

But the Beast longed not for life. After some time had passed—short for the Beast but long for the people of Seren, the Beast died. When it did, it shattered and scattered scales like stars upon the land and sea, and they grew bountiful and rich. The people no longer toiled.

Maybe Sena began years before he existed, in a small village where a charming general-to-be entered Arlune for a diplomatic exchange trip and met a young woman who yearned for travel.

The stories Sena knows go like this: the young officer laughed with the woman for hours, sharing slices of ham as they swung their legs over the edge of the Arou cliffs and stared into the swirling mist and crashing waves below.

His face wrinkled up when she fed him pickled vegetables and she kissed the sourness away.

She grew up on the border and spoke his language.

He never learned a word of hers. Her name was Yarana Hahka, but he called her darling, called her beautiful, called her Ana. He called her his .

Soon after, the first of the Children were born: the first Seeds. And the world rejoiced, for the Beast had given them magic. They revered the Seed of the Void and the Seed of the World, and from them came many more, each one a gift.

Sena should have known the children his mother bore would belong to the general, too. Men like Michal Vantaras can do whatever they wish with the things they own. They can love them (he still calls his Ana darling ) or use them.

When he swears he can feel his NOVA wrapped around his spine, pincer-like, Sena remembers Kirlov urging him to his feet before the wooziness from the anesthesia wore off and saying, “All Seeds are dangerous, but you’re uniquely so. You understand why we had to do this.”

The four families go to balls and Sena and his ilk go to battlefields.

So it was in the land of Arlune and the lands all around. And the world was blessed with bounty.

This is how the world began: a god died to water it and allow its Seeds to blossom. Some stories are like that. Someone has to die.

This is how Sena Vantaras dies.

*

Sena steps in front of the weapon Kirlov levels at the huddling group of survivors and aims his own handgun at the chest of the man who once controlled him.

A sickening sense of wrongness nearly makes him stagger, but he doesn’t move.

This—steadiness in the face of fear that might otherwise break him—is something he learned because of Kirlov.

“Tory. Take them and run,” he says. And, to Kirlov, “If you move, I’ll shoot.” He does not say Colonel , does not say sir. It will take Kirlov longer to switch from the tranquilizer gun to a weapon that can harm Sena than it will take for Sena to pull the trigger, and he knows it.

With his teeth, Sena tugs the blood-stiff glove from his right hand and lets it drop, soundless, to the floor. Kirlov follows it, lips twitching in something Sena has learned the hard way to identify as disgust.

He’s spent every moment since he was nine horror-struck and breathless at the idea of losing control and hurting someone.

That first time, the eyes of the world turned on him and found him lacking.

His mother meant well when she gave him that pair of gloves—his first—but he let them become a barrier between him and the world.

Around him, fires blaze, cratered remains of the Compound’s hallways strewn with rubble and blackened by the explosions.

Sena prefers it this way. The hallways, closed and clinical, white and gray with the guiding stripe of cold blue, are no more.

This place—his prison—is open to the air, burning. There’s peace in that.

It’s fitting that he should be here, now. It’s as good an end as any.

His legs tremble.

Niela warned him not to overdo it. He locks his knees and hopes they’ll hold him.

Tory stumbles into the crowd toward him, bloody face soot-streaked. “Sena,” he breathes.

“ Go. Get them to safety. I’ll meet you outside.”

Tory can probably tell he’s bluffing. This feels like a good lie, though.

“I can’t just—”

Kirlov moves, a quick twitch of aborted motion. This stalemate won’t last long.

“Leave!” Sena barks, all the cool, emotionless authority of his rank behind it. It’s the hyper-competent mask Tory hates, the one Sena left behind what seems like ages ago.

Of all the responses he expects from Tory—the foremost being actually going away —dry laughter is not among them.

“Fine! But I’ll be back as soon as they’re safe, and we’re going to talk about you and your warped sense of self-preservation.”

Sena’s heart squeezes in his chest. He can’t spare more than a glance to Tory—red-lit, grinning and irreverent and warm—and maybe that’s the worst part of all of this, that he’s not allowed to linger.

“Fine,” he says. Then, quiet enough that Tory won’t hear, “Hurry.”

Tory goes. The survivors shuffle away behind him, and Sena breathes.

His gun must waver, or his attention, or something . Kirlov recognizes an opening. His hand goes for the dial on his wrist.

Adrenaline spears Sena, and he responds without thinking, lunging to touch the device before Kirlov can activate it.

In a split second, the metal ages, rusting and flaking away. Before Sena has time to draw a breath, it crumbles, and he jolts backward. Triumph burns through him.

In reaching for the dial, Kirlov exposed the holster at his side. With a quick swipe, Sena frees the weapon and flings it into the rubble and flames behind him. He draws back (too close, he needs more space between them) and levels his own gun, finger twitching on the trigger.

“ Lieutenant Vantaras !”

It’s the voice that promises Kirlov will twist the dial until Sena can’t stand, can scarcely breathe. His body conjures an echo of pain and horror, draws back to obey as he’s done for years.

It takes maybe three seconds for Sena’s will to override his body’s reflexive response.

It’s three seconds too long.

Kirlov vaults forward, wrests the gun from Sena’s left hand, then twists it behind Sena’s back, spinning him until he crashes into what remains of the blackened wall.

He gasps smoke and coughs helplessly, cheek pressed against the too-warm concrete.

Flames blister the paint on the wall to his left.

When the shock wears off, he registers the ugly irony of this moment: this is the first time Kirlov has gotten close enough to touch him.

It’s a dubious victory, forcing the man’s hand like this.

The barrel of his own gun presses against his spine.

“Sena,” Kirlov says. “I’ll kill every one of those creatures in your name.”

“I won’t let you.”

A huff of breath raises the hair on his neck. “You think you have a choice?”

Sena wrenches his body and elbows the arm that holds the gun. Pain bursts in his lower back, hot then cold; the sound of the gun firing registers belatedly.

It’s the moment he needs, if only he could force his body to move .

With his last shred of strength, he whips around, grabbing for any part of Kirlov he can reach. He finds Kirlov’s bare wrist and squeezes.

Kirlov screams. The skin wrinkles and thins and grows spots that spread, then darken, then blacken , decay rushing like flames to his upper arm.

Not enough.

He wrenches his ruined arm away before the decay can get to his heart, and Sena falls. The last thing he sees is his superior officer clutching his arm and stumbling off, gun in hand.

I’ll kill them in your name.

Kirlov is nothing if not a man of his word.

Rasping and coughing in the smoke from the burning Compound, Sena stares through the ruined ceiling at the sky. Black shapes writhe over the low-hanging gray ceiling of the world, sick and insidious like blots of ink, spreading.

The pain from the bullet wound—through and through, more insult than death sentence—blends into an electric throb that blends into something quiet and slow-spreading and faraway.

He could close his eyes here.

A laugh wrenches its way from his throat. Except he can’t. Not yet. He’s not done.

He told Tory—

Sena grits his teeth and tries to rise. Fails, legs liquid. Again.

He doesn’t want this to be the end, a bare sliver of gunmetal sky between billows of choking smoke. He doesn’t want it to end at all.

Again. He bites his lip against the noise that wants to escape him.

His own blood smooths the way as he pushes himself up along the soot-smeared wall, vision fading.

He doesn’t know how he’ll get his leaden feet to move, but that’s nothing new.

Sena has been practicing his whole life to move when his body says no .

He lifts the pendant his mother gave him, and even in the smoky grayness, it glitters like the night sky. The little chunk of stellite takes the world’s light and beams it back brighter, turning the cage of his bare fingers to a wash of brilliant starlight.

Sena is neither trinket nor tool, but there’s nothing of the Celestial Beast in him, either—star-strewn and crystalline, sacred and so at peace with sacrifice. Sena can’t stride into war unarmored and unafraid of death like Arlune’s soldiers.

He’s so afraid of losing this precious thing he’s gained that he can barely breathe.

With a sick lurch, Sena understands why Tory hated that story about kuhlu and the stars so much. Being torn apart, reaching but never having—it’s awful. There’s no beauty in it. It can’t be over so quickly, before he’s even had a chance to treasure it.

I’ll meet you outside , he said.

Tory must be waiting, ready with hands on his hips and a rant about self-preservation , as if there’s a single thing Sena wouldn’t give up to stay with him.

He takes one step, swallowing a noise of pain, and then another. His vision shutters, and he grips the guide-rail along the wall and lets it carry most of his weight.

He walks because there’s someone to walk toward.