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Stellar Year 4510, 51st Entry
There are loneliness no battle prepares you for. I learned that on the journey to Vorth, two weeks shut inside a ship that smelled of new metal, with not a single explosion to remind me I was still alive. On a battlefield, at least, loneliness serves a purpose — it keeps you alive, keeps you sharp, keeps you watching. On that ship, it was only emptiness. An emptiness I didn’t yet know I’d learn to fear more than any cannon.
The technology surprised me first. I had already seen Vorth’s design in weapons, in healing machines, in the glove that changed my life for good — but never in an entire ship, wrapping me in on every side. The corridors were smooth, without a single living edge, as if someone had sanded the whole world down until nothing capable of drawing blood was left. Blue lines ran along the walls, thin as veins, pulsing slowly each time the ship accelerated — a mechanical heart beating in time with the journey. I stared at them that first night far longer than I should have, hypnotized, hunting for a pattern I never found.
We shared a cabin, Ren, Clay, and I. There were only two beds. I slept on the floor, and nobody said so out loud — it wasn’t anyone’s decision, just the natural order of things, and I’d slept in far worse places than the smooth, warm floor of a warship. I didn’t mind. A body learns to make do with enough, and I had already learned in Vorne to ask very little of the world.
It wasn’t the floor that wore on me. It was everything else.
They spoke to me, yes — Ren asked if I was hungry, Clay made some comment about the rhythm of the ship, and I answered, and life kept up its pretense of being normal. But it wasn’t what it had been the year before. Before, they had looked at me as a person. Now they looked at me almost as a thing. A weapon to be used, stored, watched with the same nervous care you’d give anything that has already shown what it can do without warning.
Only years later did I understand it hadn’t really been that. It wasn’t contempt. Neither of them knew how to mend what the loss of trust had broken between us — and a man who doesn’t know how to mend something usually chooses not to touch it at all.
Lira was the worst of the three.
She’d been given a cabin on the far side of the ship. Whenever she passed me in the corridors, her eyes dropped to the floor before I could say a word, and she walked past me the way you’d walk past a wall — present, solid, and with nothing to say to it.
I was with Clay once when she passed. He looked at me, sighed, and said, “You need to have patience. She’ll forgive you.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“You need to move on. After everything you’ve been through this year, this isn’t what’s going to break you.”
I nodded. It made sense, the same cold, distant way true things often make sense without ever managing to lighten the weight of feeling them. We walked a few more steps in silence before the question left my mouth, unplanned.
“You weren’t an ordinary slave, like me. Were you?”
He didn’t deny it right away. He stopped walking. He looked at me with that same dry attention I already knew well, the one he used to size up a target before he fired.
“What makes you say that?”
“When I was unconscious, recovering from my leg, you held off enemy units alone. And on the day of the final battle, you took down six trained gladiators by yourself, and nobody heard anything but muffled voices through the wall. You always seem to know more than you say. There’s something in your eyes.”
He laughed. The same smile he’d given me months earlier, when I said he was “one of us” — full, rare, the kind of smile he didn’t hand out for just any reason. But he didn’t answer. And to me, at the time, the silence was already answer enough.
General Ysane let us travel aboard his own ship, but he never once authorized us onto the bridge, nor into any area where the high-ranking officers moved. He never treated us badly, either. Quite the opposite — outside those months in the Arena, I hadn’t eaten or slept so well in a long time. There was something unsettling in that, a peace my body still didn’t know how to trust.
Ren traveled with us because he was, in truth, under a kind of preventive arrest for what he’d done — summoned now and then to the General’s private quarters, alone, without us. When he came back, his face was always closed, and he never said a word about what had happened in there. Neither Clay nor I asked. Some silences you respect without needing them explained, and this was one of them.
The days passed slowly, heavy with boredom. It took me weeks to understand that a body used to living on the edge to survive doesn’t quite know what to do with itself once survival stops being at stake. Comfort became, almost absurdly, one of the hardest things to endure on that ship. So whenever I could, I strapped on the wrist device Ren had given me and drilled the shield’s movements alone in the empty corridors — expand, retract, spin, again and again, until my fingers learned by themselves what my head already knew. When Ren or Clay caught me at it, they’d just nod, as if that were the most ordinary thing in the world to be doing in a cramped cabin, on the way to a planet I still couldn’t picture.
The night before we reached Vorth, Ren called Lira to our cabin.
“We arrive tomorrow,” he said, without preamble. “You should stay at my family’s estate, as thanks for saving my life. I don’t know if I’ll be able to be with you. I don’t even know yet what I’ll be charged with.”
“What can they do to you?” I asked.
“Best case, they lock me up. Worst case, they kill me.”
Nobody spoke for a moment that stretched a beat too long to be comfortable. Lira looked at me — the first direct look she’d given me since the great hall at headquarters — but she pulled it away again before I could hold it with mine.
“I won’t let that happen,” I said. “If they decide to kill you, I’ll tell the whole truth.”
Ren turned to me with the same closed face he always wore coming back from the General’s quarters.
“After everything I’ve done to protect you, you’re not going to do that. You matter far more than I do.”
“Why?”
“One day you’ll be able to answer that yourself. Until then, do as I tell you.”
The conversation didn’t last much longer after that. When Lira rose to leave, the door sliding open without a sound — another of Vorth’s small wonders that no longer impressed me — I went after her and caught her arm in the corridor.
“When are you going to forgive me?”
She didn’t turn right away. When she did, the eyes that had always seemed too big for the rest of her face looked, in that moment, small and tired.
“When it stops hurting to look at you.”
And she left.
I spent the whole night awake, repeating the sentence to myself, the way you repeat a word until it stops meaning anything — except this one never did. It made sense that whole night, and it went on making sense, decades later, every single time I remembered it.
We arrived the next day.
I saw the planet for the first time through one of the corridor’s panoramic windows — the third planet I’d known in my short life, and none of the three looked anything alike. Vorth was enormous, bigger than Caleth had ever been to my child’s eyes, and the colors had nothing in common. Where Caleth was brown and weary, Vorth was a riot of color, blue and white dominating the view from above, as if someone had poured ice over an entire world. Four moons circled it, each a different size, one so vast it looked, from a distance, almost like the planet’s own smaller sister.
As the ship drew closer, I began to make out shapes I took, for a moment, to be several different cities. Only after did I understand my mistake: it was all one city. Miles upon miles of white and blue stretching across that whole stretch of the planet, without a single visible seam — an endless megacity my eyes still didn’t know how to measure.
Like at Caleth, the General’s ship docked at a colossal port in orbit. The difference was that Caleth’s port had been built by human hands, with every rough edge and patch job that implies; this one was a seamless white smear suspended in space, beautiful and seductive in a way that felt almost indecent, big enough to swallow three ports the size of my homeworld’s whole. I had never seen anything so large. It would take me years to grow used to that thought, and I’d go on repeating it, less and less often, for the rest of the life that followed.
We descended with the General and a unit of soldiers by the space elevator — a few silent minutes, every body staring straight ahead. When the doors opened, the cold air hit my face like a punch I hadn’t braced for. After the constant heat of Caleth and the dry, bearable cold of Vorne, this was something else entirely — a cold that worked its way through your clothes and settled into your bones without asking permission.
Ren noticed my surprise.
“Vorth is colder than Vorne,” he said. “But there are warm zones. Sector Nineteen of the city is milder. That’s where I live.”
I nodded, still reeling from the scale of everything around me.
“How many sectors does the city have?”
“Two hundred and fifty,” he answered, with a proud smile I still couldn’t fully read. “Each one the size of a city in Vorne.”
It would take me many years to grow used to the sheer magnitude of everything now folding itself into my life. And yet part of me never lost its taste for the small things I’d always been taught to love — a familiar smell, a phrase repeated, the weight of a hand on a shoulder. Maybe that’s why, even now, at ninety-five, with an entire empire at my back, I remember a single sentence spoken in a ship’s corridor more clearly than I remember the sheer scale of Vorth itself.
In the courtyard where we stopped, a smaller ship, angular and smooth like all the rest, waited for us. Beside it, a man in a gray, insignia-less uniform — a maintenance worker, I guessed — was shoved aside by two soldiers, and neither of them offered him a word, not a warning, not an apology. He didn’t react. He lowered his head and went back to his work as if that were, for him, as ordinary as breathing. Nobody else seemed to notice. I noticed, and my stomach tightened without my quite knowing why — it would be a long time before I understood that I had just watched, in one small, unremarkable gesture, the same disease eating the whole Empire alive from the inside.
We boarded the smaller ship. The blue lights woke along the walls, and it began to climb. When it truly took off, I felt something I’d never felt before — a force that pinned me to my seat with an absurd weight, as if my own body had simply decided, on its own, that it wasn’t worth the fight.
That’s when Ren turned to us.
“When we reach my house, do exactly as I say. Trust no one there except my sister. Never my brother.”
“You don’t trust your own brother?” Lira asked.
He laughed, a tired sound with no joy left in it.
“Of course not. He’s already tried to kill me twice.”
It was in that instant, with the weight still pinning me to my seat and Ren’s words still hanging in the air, that I truly understood what I was walking into. A system that grinds everything down just to stay standing. Bonds, ideals, blood — none of it matters to a machine that only knows how to keep grinding.
That was when I saw, through the window, two ships of the same design closing in on us, one on each side, firing two warning shots that cut across Vorth’s white-and-blue sky like a question with no answer.
I had arrived at Vorth.
