#shahan

Only one aboard the ships thought differently. Someone in the center of the formation, upon a capitol ship, standing in the center of the bridge. And not just anyone—but the ultimate ruler of the Star Kingdom, Shahan. The “Golden Child,” the “Exalted Regent,” the “Most Excellent King”—just to name a few of his monikers.

Shahan stared at the lush green and blue moon through the large window of the bridge. His gilded armor and the golden embroidering upon his velvet cape gleamed in the starlight. Some of the bridge crew stared at him instead of the spectacle playing out in orbit of Ysmir. It was uncommon for their supreme ruler to be present for an operation. Nobody on deck had ever experienced it before.

The golden king watched patiently while vessel after vessel exploded and burnt and crashed into the lands and seas of Ysmir. The bridge crew awaited his next orders while he awaited a turn of events in the battle of Ysmir. He stood perfectly still, appearing like a majestic statue. But the people in his vicinity could taste the grim air about him. The knowledge that his next commands would lead to the death of millions.

When the capitol ship Hazaal burst into flames upon the orbit of Ysmir, Shahan budged. He raised his gauntlet-clad hand. One of the ship control officers gasped, and he turned red in the face with shame.

“Deploy the next capitol ship,” Shahan demanded. Only his status carried the gravity of his speech, for the words he spoke rang soft and collected, dripping with an infinite and uncanny wisdom.

Still, the meaning of that sentence chilled every person on the bridge to the bone. Their king had not ordered the destruction of Ysmir yet. The commanding officer swallowed and relayed the order to another ship in the fleet—a death sentence to its crew.

One of the colossal ships broke formation from the fleet and soared through space, trailing through the field in front of Shahan’s ship. Its hyperdrive engines flared up with bright blue light as it took course towards Ysmir.

The crew on Shahan’s bridge watched in silence, unnerved by how the void of space swallowed all sounds of the bright explosions on Ysmir.

An invisible speck, traced only by sensor systems upon the spaceships and invisible to the naked eye, emerged from the orbit of the moon. Then the people on the bridge saw explosions beginning to send ripples along the front hull of the attacking ship. Megatons of steel moved like waves on the water, wracked by a tremendous and unnatural force.

The vessel Shahan had sent forth crumpled at its spearheaded tip until it split down the middle. Unseen energies ripped the ship apart. Dread spread through the onlooking people as it dawned on them: what looked like mere motes of dust trailing from destroyed ship’s debris were people, sucked into space. Dead.

The commanding officer, Dillon, swallowed again. He, like all the other officers present, knew the numbers: these capitol ships required crews of people in the thousands. Each time King Shahan sent another vessel to attack the Scourge, he doomed the population of an entire town’s worth of loyal subjects to die.

“Fear not death,” the King told him. The King’s voice betrayed a detached equilibrium of mood and mind.

Dillon felt a burning gaze upon him. He turned his head until his fear came true. The fabled “Golden Child” stared at Dillon instead of observing the devastation outside Ysmir.

Dillon had never been directly addressed by the supreme ruler of the Star Kingdom. He knew why this god-king now spoke to him—the blood had drained from his face. Shahan could see Dillon’s courage was fleeting in the face of the carnage wrought by that wretched Sorceress.

Hydraulic hissing accompanied thundering deep thumps of Golden Knights in their pitch-black powered armor suits marching up to the left and right of Dillon. Their heavy rifles remained shouldered, but their presence by the helm where Dillon sat spoke volumes of menace.

Shahan addressed him again, “Do you fear the Sorceress?”

Chills ran down Dillon’s spine. Of course he feared the Worldslayer. But he feared even more what would happen should he tell the truth in the king’s presence. The faces of the two Knights flanking him were concealed by their golden-lined helmets and reflecting visors, and it appeared like they were looking out the window. Dillon knew better though. Insubordination and weakness in the face of the enemy was punishable by death in the higher echelons of the Star Kingdom’s navy. The echelons that Commander Dillon belonged to.

“N-no, my liege,” Dillon said, puffing out his chest and catching himself from stammering too much. “I worry that we will lose too many forces this way. Why do we not have all ships attack at once?”

The golden king turned his gaze from the commander and looked back out the bridge’s window.

“You are a thinking man who knows what needs to be done. Good,” Shahan said. “Were the circumstances any other, we would follow such a strategy. Were they any other, I would not be here to command you, either.”

Feeling the king’s attention fading from him, Dillon exhaled deeply through his nose, causing his nostrils to flare.

“This way, we draw the Sorceress out without destroying Ysmir,” Shahan concluded.

A small vessel swerving through the floating wreckage of the destroyed capitol ship became visible. A tiny blue stream of light, a streak of emitted hyperdrive energy trailing behind it as it neared the front of the fleet’s formation.

Dillon swallowed and spoke up, hoping to feign more bravado this way, “I believe I understand, my king—this way, her power is spread out between multiple waves of attacks, weakening her.”

Shahan remained silent first, watching as a capitol ship broke formation against orders, opening fire upon the small vessel. The thousands of shots being fired looked like beautiful fireworks from this distance.

“Correct,” Shahan then said, making no comment about the error just committed by the other ship. “Her power is vast, but not infinite. It will wane, eventually.”

Dillon cast a sidelong glance at the two Knights to his left and right.

“Send the next capitol ship once the Dominator has been destroyed,” King Shahan said under a sigh, beginning to pace upon the platform where he stood. The weight of his armor, too, thudded upon the metal grates like that of the Knights in their powered suits. No regular human could wear such a massive suit of armor like that without it being powered.

Shahan was different. Almighty.

Yet Dillon was not. Nor was anybody else upon the ship. And many of Shahan’s subjects had lives, friends, families, things to lose. Dillon had no such excuses. He had spent his life making a career in the royal navy. He had no real friends or family who would miss him. He had no reason to fear. Every combat scenario he had faced in the past just happened to be a downhill battle. Only now did he realize it. Only now did his insignificance start weighing down on him.

Now he stared into the jaws of death. The bright lights of explosions reflected on his widened eyes when the next capitol ship split apart amid bright explosions. Closer than any others before. One more ship, and Dillon’s would be next.

Dillon felt that the king expected him and everybody else in the fleet to march into those jaws without question. But Dillon burned with questions. He burned with the fear that made him want to hightail out of here and save his own hide and that of the crew who had served him for the better part of five years. He prayed the cold sweat he felt erupting from the pores upon his own brow had not become visible. Then he felt that burning gaze upon him again, and feared that the golden king might be capable of reading his mind.

Indeed, Shahan stared at him again, and commanded, “Deploy the next ship.”

Dillon swallowed and set his jaw. His fear now mingled with defiance. How could so many sacrifices be warranted? If Shahan was so almighty, why did he not face the Sorceress himself?

Yet Dillon’s innards cramped up. The part of him that feared Shahan outweighed his sudden sense of defiance. The crew on the bridge remained silent—a testimony to their unwavering loyalty or a paralysis through sheer fear. Dillon wondered where his spine had gone when he pushed the button on his chair’s armrest and relayed the command.

The next ship exited the formation and headed towards the wreckage of destroyed ships. More people dying in futility. Shahan had explained the strategy and Dillon understood the rationale. He just did not like it one bit. He was not ready to die. Not like this.

How could he have spent a lifetime of training, indoctrination, service, and relative comfort without questioning it? How many enemies of the Star Kingdom had he sent to their deaths, screaming, with no thought for the consequences whatsoever? For the first time in his life, it sank in how hollow all those victories had been. He was no champion. His perceived hardships until now—all meaningless.

“Did you not hear your king, Commander?”

The question posed by the Golden Knight to his right came out distorted by the speaker of his helmet. It cut deep into Dillon’s mind like a sharp knife. It ripped him from the tunnel vision he had just lost himself in, filling him with the dread of wondering what Shahan had just said and Dillon missed.

“My king,” Dillon said. The words drifted and hung in the air, meandering as both statement and question. Lost in between desperation and questioning where his loyalties now lied.

“Divert all shield strength to the bridge,” Shahan said, overruling Dillon’s authority on the ship.

Dillon blinked and blinked, realizing what spectacle played out before his eyes. A tiny spacecraft soared through the ranks of the fleet, unharmed by the fire from thousands of weapon batteries blasting away at it. The shots were not just absorbed by shields, they reflected away from the vessel, sending those energized missiles back to the cannons that launched them. Capitol ships and starfighters alike exploded, obliterated together with the people within them.

And the small vessel of the Sorceress flew towards the bridge of his ship, the Overseer. On a collision course.

The merciless grip of steel gauntlets clamped down around his shoulders. The two Knights threw Dillon to the ground, sending him onto his knees. He heard their rifles power up and could feel the cold muzzles of their barrels scrape against the stubble of hair on the back of his shaved head. Ready to execute him for insubordination.

What did it matter? They were all about to die, anyway. The tiny spacecraft hurtled towards the huge glass window of the bridge at breakneck speed. Dillon remained kneeling. His shoulders slumped. But the part of him that wanted to survive, to forsake everything he had built, to abandon everything he thought he had been fighting for—it clicked.

Commander Dillon cast a sidelong glance, peering back at the Knights behind him. They awaited the order to execute him, but the incoming spaceship clearly drew their full attention.

Dillon’s heart beat fast, and his hands trembled. Then he acted.

He ducked down and pushed the rifles away, rolling back and past the two Knights. He dove for his commanding chair and produced his helmet from there, slipping it on and activating its connection to his spacesuit. The soft hum and beeps of his flight suit powering up gave him a shred of comfort. The Knights were slow to react and turned to shoot him, but pure mayhem engulfed the bridge. The bridge’s window shattered, and the entire room exploded into a deafening bedlam of screeching steel and human screams. The blast doors to the bridge shot down and locked down all exits while the vacuum of space sucked all breathable air outside.

The ship’s shield had not held.

Immediately following the impact, a piece of collapsing ceiling crushed one of the Knights. The other Knight shot but missed because a huge metal girder impaled him. In the last seconds of the Knight’s life, he looked down at the chunk of steel sticking through him before his arms drooped lifelessly by his sides.

The small space vessel of the Sorceress had lodged itself into one of the walls, burying bodies of slain crewmen under it.

Dillon held on to a beam until all the air had been drained from the exposed bridge and his legs began to drift in zero gravity.

Almost everybody else on the bridge was dead. To Dillon’s amazement and horror, King Shahan stood there, still like a statue. Without helmet, he breathed as if the void of space had no effect on him.

Shahan had murder in his eyes, glaring at Dillon with the vengeful fire of a hundred dying suns in them. The king defied the laws of physics, walking across the floor towards Dillon as if gravity still worked for him. His golden gauntlets clenched into fists.

With the force of an explosion, a panel flung itself from the side of the Sorceress’ ship. It spun and flew till it hit the ceiling and spiraled away.

A small, feminine figure emerged from the distorted frame of the ship’s emergency hatch. Shrouded in red and black robes, she was a strange sight—she too exited the vessel and landed upon the bridge’s deck as if gravity still decided to work for her. King Shahan stopped dead in his tracks and directed his furious gaze at the Sorceress. Her mouth opened to emit a shout, but the encroaching void muffled the sounds. She had no eyes for Dillon or the myriad of dead bodies floating around the bridge. Dillon saw a burning hatred in her mien as she stared daggers at the king.

Dillon’s heart raced, and he saw the opportunity to flee. For the first time since training, his own helmet made him feel claustrophobic. Death loomed over him everywhere now. Only seconds and he already swam in his own sweat, blinking so his vision of the display on the inside of his visor did not blur. Dillon grunted and carefully pulled to propel himself forward. He drifted towards the sealed blast door, hoping to find a way to escape.

These monsters could defy the laws of nature. He knew deep down: hell was about to break loose. He pawed at the door controls, but they fizzled with sparks, and he did not even need to consult his heads-up display to know that they were broken beyond repair.

Holding on to a groove upon the blast door, he looked back and saw King Shahan and the Sorceress approach each other. They walked, rather than running. They glared, rather than talking. A burst of energy flared up around her, a brilliant light that exploded outwards in a ray, engulfing the king.

When the light died down, it had dulled the luster of his armor and frayed the fabric of his raiments. With his dark hair frazzled and his face contorted in rage, Dillon believed to hear his angry shouts, though the void rendered the exact words incomprehensible to the commander.

The ground underneath the king’s boots suddenly bent and deformed as if it had been depressed by several tons of weight crashing into it. Then all the metal from the grates around him warped and twisted until an invisible force shredded the steel into a million pieces. The scrap parts swirled around and turned into a tornado of cutting knives that hurled themselves at the Sorceress.

She had raised her hands in what looked like a feeble attempt at shielding her face. Dillon witnessed another field of invisible energy deflect most of the shrapnel that flew at her, but the whirlwind of flying metal particles overwhelmed it and engulfed her and sliced away at her exposed skin. Streaks of crimson droplets flew from her body once cut free from wounds. When the tornado of metal ceased to move, her blood drifted, floating in space like the wreckage and bodies around her. Her robe had been torn to pieces, giving her the air of someone who had just survived being sent through a meat grinder.

Her knees wobbled, but she released another blast of light and energy. King Shahan staggered backwards but braced himself before yet another blast followed. This time, the beam of energy split in two before it hit him, shooting past him in two directions. One of them got so close to Dillon that he could feel the heat of it searing the wall a few steps away from him—slicing through metal and fusing its edges like a heavy-duty fusion cutter. Dillon’s helmet swallowed the sound of his own gasp and with hectic head movements, he looked for other means of fleeing from the bridge.

The only way left now was through the broken window where the spaceship had crashed into and corpses drifted out of in an eerily blissful peace. Dillon held on to every surface and crack he could latch onto while he slowly made his way along the wall, nearing his only hope of escaping this incredible battle.

Before he even made it halfway, Shahan grabbed the Sorceress by her neck and lifted her off the ground. He bared his teeth at her, gritting them with such force that his gums bled. She struggled against his grip, but her strength waned as each kick, each grab, each swing at Shahan grew weaker than the last.

Dillon tried to move quicker, but his gloved hand slipped from a surface and he panicked. Pawing at an exposed wall panel peeling off the main struts, he regained his hold and breathed more heavily than ever before in his life. Still, he feared that the attention of these two horrible human-sized titans might turn to him. He looked over to the two locked in their death struggle.

Either Dillon’s mind imagined it, or it was because he could read her lips in that very moment, but he believed to hear the Sorceress say, “As long as I live, so shall you. And when I die, so will you.” Then those pale lips of hers formed a malevolent smile, directed at the king.

Moments passed before Dillon remembered to continue his escape, but a morbid curiosity paralyzed him as he stared upon King Shahan and his Scourge.

Dillon’s heart stopped when the king reared his head and stared directly at him instead. Rather than the burning fury that Dillon had seen in Shahan’s eyes these past moments, a calculating cold had re-entered them. A cold that rivaled space itself. Just like when he had sent all those capitol ships to their deaths or reminded the crew that the destruction of Ysmir was a worthwhile sacrifice for the greater good of the Star Kingdom.

A merciless stare that paralyzed Dillon with a palpable and unseen power. Shahan outstretched his free hand towards Dillon and invisible forces suddenly pried Dillon off of the wall, pulling him towards Shahan like a puppet being drawn to the puppeteer pulling his strings.

Shahan did not even pay Dillon the final respects of looking at him once his insubordinate commander floated within arm’s reach. The king focused his attention entirely on the Sorceress once more, who still hung from his hand, clawing at his gauntlet in futile attempts to break his grasp around her neck and turning red in the face.

Muffled through his helmet and the void between them, the last thing Dillon heard was Shahan speaking, “How fortunate—that your betrayal would help serve your king in the end.”

Shahan’s gauntleted hand latched on to Dillon’s head and clamped down around it. Dillon screamed when that hand crushed his helmet with superhuman strength. The visor and plating shattered along with the commander’s skull. In a flash of bright red energy, Dillon’s life force was drained from his body in mere instants, like the air had been sucked into the vacuum of space just before.

The energy of the commander’s sacrificed essence pooled in Shahan’s hand in the shape of a glowing orb. With icy conviction, the king ignored the Sorceress’ sneering smile and released the orb of energy, letting the bright light engulf all three of them.

When the blinding flash of light had dissipated, the Sorceress floated in a sphere of energy, curled up into a fetal position and unconscious. Knights cut through the blast door to the bridge using fusion cutters and approached the king with their armor’s magnetized boots clomping across the ravaged bridge’s surface.

“I sentence the Worldslayer to two thousand years in prison,” the king declared. A number he believed would offer him enough time to explore his options. Even though space should have swallowed his words, the Knights could hear him clearly. “Take her away.”

“Affirmative,” the four arriving Knights replied in unison over intercom. They activated propulsion guns, enveloping the red-glowing sphere of energy with a much softer blue shimmer. Then they began to move the immobilized Sorceress in her stasis field between the four of them.

Shahan did not even waste a single glance at Dillon’s lifeless body drifting off the bridge into the cold and unforgiving infinity of space. One speck among millions of dead people, floating out there between the pieces of a destroyed fleet.

Shahan marched towards the blast door, following his loyal subjects as the captured Sorceress hovered between the Knights transporting her away.

In his infinite wisdom, the Golden King saw only the greater picture.

Like he had told Dillon, he feared not death. He had feared nothing. Until now.

Now, he feared the immortality the Sorceress had cursed him with. Using mere words.

Words to last an eternity.