Chapter 40:

  The silence in the room stretched longer than Eli had intended.

  The crystal privacy device he had created in a rush was a crude model of the more intricate devices Verans had painstakingly invented specifically to counter the more advanced surveillance methods of the invaders.

  Eli stared at the crystal that still shimmered faintly where it rested at the center of the table. Its soft iridescent cloaking blended seamlessly with the deeper glow of the Rodrigo ward lattice hidden in the walls. The layered protections hummed quietly around them, sealing the room away from the rest of the keep, and the rest of the world. Sound, space, and time itself would not pierce the veil.

  Nothing could be allowed to escape.

  Nobody would be allowed to know.

  Yet despite taking every precaution, Eli still hesitated.

  His palms were pressed flat on the cool surface of the table, small hands dwarfed by the large expanse of dark polished wood. He was aware – embarrassingly aware – of the subtle ache in his knees as he propped his small body up on the chair. The table had been built for adults, for commanders and strategists and household leaders, not for children who still needed to scramble up the side to reach it. And what was Eli? Where did he fit in that list of people.

  The absurdity of his situation might have been enough to make him laugh, under other circumstances. Instead, his throat felt tight.

  He had faced armies. He had stood before beings whose power could burn the sky. He had commanded, and followed orders, strategized and innovated. He had fought, and bled, and lost, and lost, and lost. He had even – presumably – died. Yet somehow the idea of spilling his secrets to the two people sitting across from him felt like one of the most difficult things he had ever tried to do.

  Eli was both terrified they wouldn’t believe him, and perhaps more terrified that they would.

  If they didn’t believe him, fine. He would take the punishment; his parents would stay safe in their ignorance. It meant he would be doing a lot more sneaking, and lying, and ‘strategically-reappropriating-operational-resources’ behind his parent’s backs, but he would learn to live with that guilt. If they didn’t believe him, nothing would really change. At least not in ways that couldn’t be dealt with, avoided, worked around or mitigated.

  If they did believe him though? Eli closed his eyes and bowed his head, taking in deep breaths, feeling his mana pool refilling with each inhale, and expanding, subtly with each exhale, steeling himself to begin. If they believed him then everything changed.

  Slowly, he lifted his eyes.

  His mother and father had not moved.

  Gabriel Rodrigo sat with his hands folded in front of him, posture straight and immovable as carved stone. His expression was calm, controlled, but Eli knew that look. It was all in his eyes. Beneath the stillness was a raw intensity his father could never fully hide. Not from his family.

  Sela, by contrast, had leaned forward slightly. Her hands were steepled against the bridge of her nose, her thumbs under her chin, a familiar gesture she used when forcing her thoughts into order. Her eyes, like Gabriels, were intensely focused on Eli.

  Neither of them spoke, and yet their demeanour communicated one thing clearly.

  ‘Speak.’

  Eli swallowed. His mouth opened and close, once, twice, then he cleared his throat.

  “I would like to tell you a story,” Eli repeated.

  Eli closed his eyes briefly, and kept them closed as he began.

  “In a time out of time, in a place out of place, there was once a boy named Eli.”

  The familiar words sounded strange in the quiet room. It was the opening to almost any children’s folktale.

  Eli opened his eyes but kept his gaze on the table in front of him as he forced himself to continue.

  “One day the boy began to dream.

  “The boy had dreamed for all his life, so at first, he thought nothing of it. The dreams seemed normal. Strange, perhaps, but dreams all the same.

  “He dreamt of familiar people, and familiar places. He dreamt of his home in the keep, of the capital city of Adler, of family he had yet to meet, and places he had never gone.

  “Every morning he would wake up, and it was as though he had lived another life. In those dreams he was himself. He breathed, tasted, he felt and he saw. It was all so real.”

  His fingers curled slightly against the table.

  “Night after night, the dreams returned. And each time they did, they were a little clearer. A little longer. A little harder to forget. Sometimes one dream, sometimes many. At first the dreams were interesting, or fun. Sometimes they were boring, or exhausting, or even a little scary. But the dreams, the visions, did not stay so gentle.”

  His parents did not interrupt.

  “At first the boy thought they were nightmares,” Eli continued. “Because in those dreams, those visions, he felt everything.” He lifted one hand slowly. Turned it in front of his face and clenched it into a fist.

  “In these new dreams. There was joy, but there was also pain.

  “When he ran in those dreams, his lungs burned. When he fought, his arms trembled from the effort. When he cast spells, his channels ached as if he had strained his own.

  “And when he woke,” Eli said quietly, “the pain remained.”

  He unclenched his fist, and stared at his palm, pale and mottled from squeezing so hard, before he lowered his hand laid it flat against the table again.

  A slight crease formed between Sela’s brows.

  Gabriel’s expression did not change, but his eyes sharpened.

  Eli went on.

  “In those dreams the boy was older. Much older. He stood on battlefields he had never seen before. Walked through cities that did not yet exist. Spoke with people he had never met.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  His gaze lifted, his eyes staring unseeingly into empty space.

  “He thought at first that his imagination had simply grown too vivid. That perhaps it was a side effect of awakening early. Only, the dreams were too real. They built on one another. The same places appeared again. The same people. It was too consistent, and the feelings, the experiences were too real.

  “In those visions the boy learned things.”

  The room grew very still.

  “He learned how to move his mana differently. How to fight differently. How to endure longer than he should have been able to.”

  Sela’s eyes flicked briefly toward the bag resting beside Eli’s chair, then to the enchanted crystal. Eli pretended he hadn’t noticed.

  “The dreams taught him things that could not be learned,” he paused. “Not on Vereth.”

  Gabriel’s fingers tightened slightly against each other.

  Eli continued before either of them could interject.

  “At first the boy tried to ignore them.” He let out a small breath that could have been a sob or a laugh. “It did not work. The dreams grew darker, harsher. The boy dreamed of war.”

  His voice remained steady, but the words carried a heaviness now.

  “It was not the kind of war he had read about in stories, or studied in history books. These battles spanned the world. These were battles for Vereth itself.”

  The room seemed to grow colder as Eli spoke. It was as if his words were sucking the warmth out of the air.

  “In the dreams, strangers came,” Eli said, then corrected himself. “No. That is not quite right. While they were strangers to us, we were not strangers to them. Their influence had been present among us for generations. Quietly. Through the Families. Through deals and shipments and exchanges hidden under layers of secrecy and pride. They did not need a single person to set foot on our planet in order to seize the initiative.”

  He swallowed and forced himself onward.

  “They did not come to negotiate. They did not come to ask. They did not come politely. At first, there were only rumours. Strange goods circulating the market. Unorthodox teachings being spread in secret. Of discoveries that were suppressed. There were disappearances. There were ideas that surfaced and vanished. There were scholars who asked the wrong questions yet never seemed to live long enough to find answers.

  “Over a long stretch of time, decades and centuries, it is easy to believe things like this were unconnected. Until one day, suddenly, they were.”

  His fingers curled lightly against the table. His parent’s watched in silence as he gathered his thoughts.

  “There was an announcement, a declaration.” Eli’s mouth twisted faintly. “It did not come from our leaders, or from any imperial messenger. It was like after centuries of secrecy, one day they just stopped hiding.” He searched for the right words and hated every one of them as he spoke them. “They commanded we welcome our new overlords. If you declined, you died. No middle ground, no opting out. No peaceful coexistence.

  “Submit or die.”

  He lifted his eyes then, looking somewhere past his parents, beyond the walls, beyond the keep itself. His mother’s brows knit together faintly. Gabriel had not moved at all.

  “The sky was full of them. Thousands upon thousands of what they called space-ships, though they looked nothing like ships at all,” Eli said. “These were not flying carriages or aerial-mounts. Not the floating citadels the old stories speak of. These were metal vehicles that traveled beyond the sky. The day they came, those space-ships hung above the world, surrounding Vereth. Whether it was through the placement of their ships, or the actions they took, the message was clear. They looked down on us.

  “That was the day most people understood: Vereth was already under attack.”

  He let out a slow breath through his nose.

  “It was not a war like the wars in our histories. Not a border dispute. Not some feud between nobles, or merchant houses, or even empires. This was not a rebellion or a campaign for territory. It was Vereth against people who had looked at our world and decided it was finally ripe.”

  Eli’s voice went flat.

  “They wanted the planet. Its mana. Its resources. Its people. Everything. They wanted to harvest it the way a farmer harvests a field or strips an orchard bare when the fruit is finally ready. But most of all, they wanted us.

  For the first time since he had begun, one of his parent’s interrupted.

  “Us?” Sela asked.

  Eli nodded once. “The people. Humans,” he said. “Though they did not think of us that way. To them we were not equals, not even people. We posed such little threat, they didn’t even see us as real enemies at all.” His lips thinned. “We were just resources. Livestock. Labor. Mana. Bodies to be sorted, culled, cultivated, spent, and then discarded.

  “When crystals ran low, they used people instead. When stores were exhausted, they built formations, these giant arrays around towns, villages, even cities. Entire populations penned in and drained. Mana first, then vitality, then life itself if there was nothing left worth taking.” Eli’s gaze drifted as behind his eyes distant memories played out in vivid detail. “Some people were turned into power sources. A cruel perversion of the reservoir bond. Whole settlements were drained into mana batteries, their lives and essence harvested to fuel instruments of war.”

  He stopped and drew a breath through teeth that had clenched without his noticing.

  “If food could not be taken, they took people. If people could not be taken, they took power. If nothing useful remained they simply erased what was left.”

  The room fell into a grim silence.

  “The people of Vereth did not just submit.” Eli said after a moment, forcing himself to say what needed to be said. “There was resistance almost immediately, though not all at once and not all together until near the end. In the beginning some bent the knee, some believed they could bargain, some convinced themselves that faithful service would spare their lands, their families, their bloodlines.” His mouth curved in something brittle and joyless. “Some even thought they were clever enough to profit.”

  His eyes lifted again, and there was something sharper in them.

  “That was how we learned what the Families had done.”

  He did not need to explain which Families. He didn’t bother to say the word traitors.

  “They knew,” Eli said. “Perhaps, not everything. Maybe not even the full consequences. However, they knew enough. Enough to aid the enemy. For centuries they hid knowledge. They raised some Houses and stunted others. They traded away the future of our world before most of us even knew there was a price being negotiated.”

  His fingers dug harder into the table’s edge, his mana churning chaotically in his body.

  “We had been betrayed so thoroughly that most of us did not understand it until there was a fleet above our heads and demands already being enforced. It put so many things into place all at once that the true scope of it made people sick. The missing techniques, the gaps in power. The way some discoveries simply vanished, and the way innovation on Vereth always seemed to reach a point and then stop.”

  He looked at his mother now, because if anyone would understand what that meant, it would be Sela.

  “When the invaders came, even the greatest mages on Vereth could not keep pace,” he said quietly. “Not because we were fools or because we lacked discipline but because Vereth had been fenced in. Its people cultivated. Limited. Like livestock trained to believe their pasture was the whole world. The few who made it outside the pen were either recruited, or removed.”

  Eli’s parent’s had gone very still. Even if this were just a fanciful story conjured from a child’s mind. What had happened to their son that he would come up with something like this?

  Eli continued.

  “The invaders looked enough like us to be mistaken for our own people, if you ignored their power. That was almost the worst part of it. They were not monsters from the wilds, or hideous abominations that came down with claws and horns and fangs. They looked human, Veren. Spoke our language clearly, and blended in.” His voice roughened. “Only, they were stronger than anything we could have prepared for.”

  He shook his head once, the motion small.

  “Our greatest mages were humiliated, our strongest fighters more futile than children wielding toys. Men and women who on Vereth had been called monsters of talent, prodigies, future Primus’, were made to look pathetic. Crude. Primitive. The invaders’ bodies were stronger, their mana was denser, their control-” He exhaled sharply. “There was no comparison.

  “I was there in the visions. They were never just dreams.” His gaze dropped to his own hands. Flat against the table. “When I ran in them, my feet blistered. My calves burned. My thighs ached. When I was captured, and tortured and starved, I awoke with the memories of pain. Like my body carried an echo of it over. When I fought, I felt every impact. Every parried blow and every spell dragged through sore channels and nearly dry reserves.” Eli’s voice got quieter. “When I was cut, I bled. When I was burned, I could feel the crackle of my own flesh. When my comrades died, I-” He stopped.

  For a brief moment, Eli said nothing. He could feel his parents’ questions pressing against their restraint. He still forced the next words out.

  “I did not just dream those visions. I lived them.” he said quietly. “I survived them.” Eli lifted his eyes.

  “In those visions, by the time we discovered what was happening, we were already too late. We had not yet been defeated,” he added, with the ghost of an old, bitter pride. “But we had been sold out before we even knew we were a product.”

  Eli stopped, reached into the spatial pouch he’d crafted with his mother, and pulled out an enchanted water cup. Channeling mana into it, he took a careful sip and prepared to continue his story.

  Verethian:

  Adjective | Relating to or characteristic of Vereth or its inhabitants.

  Noun | A native or inhabitant of Vereth.

  Veren:

  Adjective/Noun

  Etc...