#okay umm

Pallaxas had fought guardians during his service to the House of Kings. Individuals were easy enough to kill: picking them off with a wire rifle from afar, grabbing and lifting them overhead before hurling them off of a cliff, even hacking them apart with his shock swords. Facing down two coordinated and experienced fireteams, however, was altogether quite different.

Ether hissed from his many gaping wounds left by gunshots and knives. Three Hunters danced circles around him and stabbed at seemingly opportune moments only to be parried and given the occasional riposte. Moving like a whirlwind to fend off the lot of them was an increasingly difficult task as his movements slowed and his limbs grew heavier.

Phaenna and Beltane-5 occasionally blind-fired from behind cover and missed the guardians but were kept at bay by the Warlocks’ and Titans’ suppressing fire.

“We need to fall back!” Phaenna shouted.

“I’ll move first and take pot-shots. My frame can handle the heat!” Beltane-5 shouted back. “I go, then you go, we’ll split their attention!”

The doctor leapt out from behind cover, quickly took aim and fired, landing a perfect headshot on a Warlock manning the rooftops. The guardian fell, but in a blaze of solar energy, she arose and fired back. Beltane-5′s knee exploded in a spray of shards and wires and he collapsed with a thud.

Phaenna was already on the move and on seeing her companion fall, she hesitated and turned to face him.

And turned her back toward the Titan racing toward her. He tackled her to the ground and gripped her tightly by her neck. Only a wet gurgle escaped her lips. She stared up at his blank mask and armored fist. He said not a single word and punched her, and she fell limp.

Pallaxas caught the skirmish, saw his Exo companion crawling away on his belly, saw the Titan cuff Phaenna with manacles. His moment of distraction was all the Hunters needed; they charged him and slammed their daggers into his back, over and over. The Eliksni’s swords clattered to the ground as he fell to his knees, weakened limbs shuddering from ether-loss and body wracked with agony. At that moment, he knew that his time was upon him.

Looking up, he watched as another Warlock ascended into the air before him. Void energy sizzled around him and gathered between his hands, an orb of violet rage growing larger and larger. With a grunt of effort, he pushed himself to his feet. he sputtered in his native tongue. <God of Light, save my people->

The Warlock hurled his Void Bomb and blasted Pallaxas into nothingness.

The Exo convicts screamed, cried, and pleaded. Their final minutes and last words fell on deaf ears as the New Monarchy officers fastened their straps and secured cranial devices to their heads.

Beltane-5 stared at the metallic floor of the expungement chamber and ignored the plaintive wailing around him. He remained still, quiet, and for the first time in his life - the fifth time? He felt exhausted. Numb. Relinquished to his fate.

“Commence the execution,” a senior officer announced. Her tone was clinical and indifferent. There was no asking of last words, no priest to deliver their final rites, no regard for their humanity. To her, they were little more than noisy machines, non-compliant robots that defied the City, aberrations that needed correcting.

Their headgear hummed to life and he felt his circuits pulse with intense energy. A sensation swept through his frame, a feeling not unlike being ripped apart and slowly falling asleep. His memories raced in a desperate bid to fight for his life: the patients that died in his arms. The victims of Fallen brutality and bandit savagery he failed to save. Phaenna looking soulfully at him as she confided in him her hopes and fears. Pallaxas attending to him quietly, an unyielding and loyal sentry.

Young Ana, brightly chattering about video games and waking in the night with tears, holding him until dawn as she cried.

Beltane-5 surrendered to apathy and his head slumped and everything fell to blackness.

The Exo’s visuals went online. He looked up, bewildered at his surroundings and his equally-confused fellow Exos beside him. Several officers garbed in red uniforms approached each of them and scanned them, and followed up with a series of questions.

“Hello,” the Exo said. “Uh, who are you? Why am I strapped down?”

His attending officer stared at him with complete disinterest and scanned him. “What is your name?” He asked.

“My name is Beltane... six. Beltane-6,” the Exo replied.

“Do you have an assigned job, education and skillset?”

“I've got primary and secondary education protocols and, uh, no job training,” Beltane-6 replied. “Where am I?”

“Who are your friends and legal next of kin?” The officer asked.

“I don’t have any friends. No next of kin.”

“What do you know about medicine?”

“Nothing,” he replied calmly.

The Exos were released and ushered single-file out of the expungement chamber. “You will enter orientation shortly and receive your new job and living assignments,” the senior officer announced dully.

I’m getting a job? Beltane-6 wondered. And a place to live? I wonder if I can make any friends...

As they departed, the next set of Exo convicts were secured in the expungement chamber with the efficiency of an assembly line. They screamed, cried, and pleaded, all complaints falling on deaf ears.

The crowd of thousands roared in triumph as Phaenna stepped out of the prisoner transport van. Officers secured restraining poles to her legcuffs, checked her manacles, and secured a restraining pole to the collar around her neck. Two Titans bearing the brilliant white-on-red logos of the New Monarchy attended to her entourage of guards and escorted her on her short walk - a walk that seemed as long as a league - to the stage that was erected in the City square.

“Thief!” The many voices shouted as she passed. “Dirty cunt! Murderer! Thieving whore! Traitor! Burn in hell!”

The Titans kept the angry crowd at bay but made little effort to shield the woman from the trash thrown her way. An empty bottle shattered at her feet and rotten, maggot-ridden vegetables were hurled and caught in her unwashed hair. The guards did not clean her off and when she stopped to shake the vermin-ridden garbage away, they shoved her forward.

Phaenna and her escort climbed the short staircase to the stage. A line of FOTC soldiers stared dispassionately at her, each one standing with rifles resting calmly at their sides. The Titans secured her to a post upstage center before moving to either side of the stage.

A New Monarchy Executor glared down at her from his podium nested on a balcony above and sneered. She could see his thoughts in his eyes: Lowlife. Traitorous scum. Living garbage.

“Phaenna Serov, aka ‘Kosma’,” he began. “You have been accused of the following crimes against humankind: grand theft, assault on guardians, conspiring with the Eliksni, abduction, smuggling, theft of classified Vanguard materials, interference with Vanguard operations. You were previously sentenced to exile in twenty-seven-oh-seven, but your actions have deemed you a traitor to humanity and an enemy of the state. You are sentenced to die by firing squad and your assets will be absorbed by the City, as you have no next-of-kin. Do you have any last words?”

Hot tears welled up in her eyes and her chest tightened. She opened her quivering mouth to speak but her words were drowned out by the roaring crowd. The gravity of her situation fully sank in and she lowered her head, her shoulders shaking along with her quiet sobbing.

“Let the execution commence,” the Executor said.

One of the Titans barked a command, loud and clear to the soldiers and they readied their rifles.

Phaenna looked up at the Traveler hanging above. The sky was clear blue and the sun was shining. Birds flew carefree and she felt a cool breeze waft over her body. The snow glistened on the mountains flanking the City. The sun shone brightly and warmed her face. The day seemed filled with life.

The Titan barked another command, and the soldiers took aim.

Phaenna thought of her lovers, dead or gone. Rotting in prison, cold in the ground, lost forever. She missed their warm, loving embraces, their soft kisses and whispered nothings. She missed fighting by their sides, watching the stars and telling tales over the campfire. She missed her respite from loneliness.

She missed her parents. The last she saw them, she had left New Boston on reaching adulthood and traveled to the Last City to become a Cryptarch. Her mother, Kosma, an adventurer who traveled the world and seized problems by the throat. Her soft-spoken father, who discouraged Phaenna from fighting, swearing, and running wild through the settlement. When she returned in exile from the City, New Boston had long since been razed to the ground by the Fallen. She never saw them again.

She thought of Beltane-5. He had always been dedicated to her, tending to her wounds and acting as her confidante and friend, her shoulder to lean on. She missed his peculiar friendliness coupled with his morbid violent streak, and his compassion for treating the many victims in the world. His cheerful voice. His steady reassurance that everything would turn out okay.

Pallaxas was dependable, loyal to a fault, and in many ways one of her closest friends yet something of a mystery. Even over the course of a decade she still found herself amazed at his tenacity in battle and his expert swordsmanship. She missed the soft music he played on his instrument, missed his temerity around loudness and his unusually soft nature.

And Ana... skin and bones and trembling with fear when they met - now a healthy young girl on the verge of womanhood. Her indecipherable chatter of esoteric technology, her screaming curse words at video games, her soft body shaking in her arms when she was wracked with an episode. Her unique way of looking at the world, of playing with problems and devising ingenious solutions, her disbelief in “impossible” and dedication to unlocking even the most arcane enigmas.

In their brief years together, Ana became more than her charge, more than her crew member. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

“I’m sorry Ana,” she whispered to the Traveler. “I’m sorry... my wonderful daughter...”

The soldiers fired.

They were her heroes.

They were her heroes and she had spent her life looking up to them, the saviors of the Earth.

Two years ago, she watched her crew get cut down by two fireteams from the safety of the Kingswind. She saw Pallaxas disintegrate in a blast of Void energy, watched Phaenna get knocked out, watched Beltane-5 get dragged away in chains. She watched her heroes destroy her crew. Her family.

In her panic, she fled the skiff and lost herself in the wilderness. Days later, she was found by settlers and taken in.

Two years passed. Each day she looked at the sky and waited. Waited for Phaenna to arrive on the Kingswind with Beltane-5 at the helm. Every night she woke in a cold sweat and sought Beltane’s or Phaenna’s arms, and instead, found nothing but her stinking hayloft that was her new home. Each day she toiled on the farm and performed menial tasks throughout the settlement.

She never mentioned her vast knowledge of science and engineering to the villagers. To them, she was a transient with no family, an outsider, a young woman that worked as a laborer from dawn to dusk. And what was the point of her mentioning anything? They had no machines, no technology that was relevant to her field. She would not have been able to help them.

Each day she waited, and each day Phaenna did not come, and a growing sense of dread crept up on her: maybe she would never come back. Still, she watched the skies with diminishing hope and grieved for Pallaxas.

A Hunter passed through the settlement one day and for the first time in her life, Ana turned away in anger. She felt betrayed. She hated him. Leaving his presence was all she could do to keep herself from strangling the guardian. The image of their capturing her crew two years ago still felt fresh. Disgust heated her cheeks as she listened to the settlers croon over the Hunter, who bragged about his adventures. She wanted nothing more than to watch him die. She wanted her crew’s captors to die. She wanted them all to die.

Perhaps she had been a fool to have believed in them. When they killed Pallaxas and hauled away the remainder of her crew, the last of her meager hope fizzled. She remembered the sensation of hope dying. Every last dream she had of meeting them, of listening to their stories, making friends and watching them show off their powers shattered in an instant.

Perhaps Phaenna had been right all along. Perhaps they were never the heroes she thought they were.