Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
She let herself die. Had she kept the gem, she would’ve survived, I was sure of it. She didn’t want to continue. The invasion of the Rakalan began with a breach, and my mother had chosen to die in one, closing the whole tragic saga full circle. She passed, betrayed by her people and never knowing if I and the knowledge she gifted me would survive.
I felt strangely hollow.
The gress didn’t say “sadrin.” He said “their sadrin.” That meant other worlds had them as well. Was that something that occurred naturally or just in response to the invasion? Whatever the answer was, the Tsuun wanted sadrins. Perhaps they had a way to harvest our knowledge.
The Rakalan resisted for almost thirteen centuries. Thirteen hundred years of war. The enormity of it slammed into me. I sat down on the ground by the gress’s body. My legs refused to hold my weight.
How many gates was that? How many deaths? Generations and generations, born with the war already burning and dying while it still raged. Thirteen hundred years. We’ve been fighting for only ten, and it already completely changed our lives. Over a thousand years of this?
And in the end, the Rakalan still lost and gave up their sadrin. If the Tsuun found out I existed and carried all of that generational knowledge in my head, they could pressure the Earth to turn me over.
Would my planet give me up? Was there even a point to going on?
Something nudged me. Bear brought me a bloody feline femur with shreds of flesh on it. The claw marks on her back weren’t bleeding anymore.
I flexed on autopilot. Well, the meat wasn’t poisonous, and she had already eaten some of it, so it was probably too late to make a fuss about it.
Bear nudged me again.
“Hey, Bear.”
She dropped the femur at my feet. I crouched. I’d read somewhere that dogs didn’t like being hugged. I had hugged her before because I was too far gone, but I was calm now, so I leaned against her, stroking her side. She leaned back against me and licked my cheek.
The flat, empty feeling inside me faded.
I felt more like myself.
There were so many fucking questions I didn’t have the answers to. What happened to the worlds after the Tsuun won? They could be destroyed, occupied, vassalized… Did anyone ever win against the Tsuun?
The answers to all those questions were likely in my head and out of reach for now. The most pressing question was, what do I do now? How do I fix this mess?
Staggering out of the gate and announcing to the world that I was sadrin was out of the question. I had no intention of becoming a bargaining chip. Nor would I let the government collect me like a weird specimen or turn me into a weapon by keeping my kids hostage. If they understood what I was, I would face the choice of being eliminated, confined, or controlled for the rest of my life. Not going to happen.
My priorities were the same: get out of the breach alive and return to my children. But now there was one final part to that awesome plan. Once I managed to escape, I would end this invasion.
There would be no thirteen centuries of conflict. My children deserved a safe future. I deserved it.
The Tsuun wanted my mother because she was a threat. I would use her legacy. I had to get out and study the gem. I needed to learn what it contained, how to access it quickly, and where to find the information I required. I needed to know what we faced. I needed to learn the limits of my new body. All of this meant I would need to hide until I accomplished that.
Bear and I had been stuck in this breach for at least a week. Whoever had the rights to this breach – whether it was still Cold Chaos or some other guild – would be sending a new team in. For all I knew, they were already inside. That team would attempt to blast through the passageway London collapsed, because they would want to recover the corpses and the incredibly valuable adamantite.
London’s face flashed before me. Soon. We would meet very soon.
When the second assault team entered that cave, they would find the corpses of four alien humanoids and my mother. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to avoid anything that drew attention to the existence of sadrin.
If our government already knew about the Tsuun and other sophonts on the other side of the breach and were actively hiding it, they could disappear the entire assault team for just discovering the bodies. Not to mention that the devourer shroud required living hosts. By now it would have fallen into a semi-dormant state from starvation but the moment a human approached one of the gress corpses, the shroud would strike. People would die.