Hadrian's Colony: Chapter One, Part Two

 Notes: Back in the saddle again...woot!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter One, Part Two

***

Chapter One, Part Two

 

“Where do you want to go once we get there?”

Kieron looked over at Elanus, who was sipping from a glass as he idly rocked his chair back and forth in front of the control panel. His legs, average length for a Ganian but a good foot longer than Kieron’s, at least, were crossed at the ankles. His beard was freshly shaved, the elegant designs in it and up the sides of his head crisp and clean. The rest of his hair was still a little wet—Catie was excellent at recycling water, and made it so they could have regular showers instead of the low-water or sonic versions he’d gotten used to over the years.

Stars, he was so beautiful. Kieron didn’t think that about a lot of people, and he’d been surprised when he first woke up to realize that that was one of the first thoughts he figured out about the man. He thought he was beautiful. Looking back at his scanty logs from the first time around had been illuminating in that regard; it was clear that Elanus Desfontaines had spread through the corners of Kieron’s heart like an invasive species. He was still there, even though Kieron was kind of confused as to why.

Why did they work? Why was their relationship even possible? They’d been through terrible things and done terrible things together, but why was that enough to bind two people’s emotions? They were so different. Gania had proven that; Kieron had rarely felt so instantly uncomfortable in a place as he had in Elanus’s beautiful, expensive home. He belonged in simpler places. He belonged in…

“Kieron?”

“Sorry,” he said reflexively, coming back to himself to see Elanus’s bright eyes staring at him with concern. “I, um. The central compound is probably the place to start. That’s where the barracks were, so…”

“The barracks?” Elanus tilted his head. “Not houses?”

“No. Nobody had an individual house, not even the general. It was all communal living.”

“The general, your grandfather.”

General Hadrian Carr. “Sir” for short. Never Grandpa, or Pops, or even Grandfather Carr. They always had to be formal when addressing him, even Kieron’s mother. He remembered the first time meeting the man, once he was brought out of the creche. It had been a terrifying experience; he’d been pulled out of the line of children, turned around, and beaten across the backside until he screamed with pain.

“Let this be a lesson to you all,” General Carr had told them. “There’s no favoritism on this colony. No connection to this child can be used to make me think better of you, so don’t try it.” He’d been shoved back into line after that, still crying, and swatted once more to stand upright. “And as for you.” His grandfather had stared down at him, disappointment clear in every line of his body. “I’d hoped you’d turn out better than your damn mother. Looks like I was wrong.”

Kieron’s mind shied away from the memory. “No, let’s start with the creche.”

Elanus nodded slowly. “All right. What exactly is the creche?”

“A creche is a gaaathering place for babies and young children while their parrrents are otherwise occupied,” Catie put in helpfully…and unnecessarily, because Kieron was sure Elanus knew the general word. “Reports indicate that the crrreche on Hadrian’s Colony was where chiiildren under the age of five werrre raised.”

“Under the age of five…and then what?”

“And then we were put to work,” Kieron muttered. “Like good little soldiers.”

Elanus’s curious expression melted into something much harder to deal with—compassion. Kieron turned away from it and stared out the viewscreen instead. They would be to the planet in another twelve hours. It didn’t feel like enough time. He wasn’t ready, but then again, he didn’t quite feel ready for any facet of his life right now. He wasn’t ready to look back and think about Zak’s death, he wasn’t ready to consider just how wonderful his life with Elanus must have been before Kieron broke it, he wasn’t ready to relive his fraught and abusive childhood…but at least his childhood was far in the past. He remembered getting a lot of therapy for it on Trakta, and some of it must have stuck with him, because he wouldn’t have suggested coming here if he was going to be out of his mind from the trauma the entire time.

You wanted to do this. Now you have to live with it. Make it worth your while. Make it worth his while. And worth being away from Xilinn and Pol and Lizzie. Lizzie kept sending little messages through his implant, nothing more than images of what she was up to or snippets from the news on Gania, but he appreciated it. It meant she was thinking about him.

He didn’t remember how they first met, but he knew he wanted her to be thinking about him. He knew he loved her, just like he loved Catie, just like he loved Elanus. They were in his heart, and he didn’t know how they’d gotten there. Surely it was too rotten to support more life, much less love, and yet…

“We don’t have to do this.”

Kieron looked up to see Elanus leaning forward, his glass forgotten. He stared intently at Kieron’s face, those bright eyes seeing way too much. “We don’t,” he repeated. “I know I got us effectively kicked off Gania for the time being—”

“I did that.”

“Bullshit, it was my fault and I know it, but that doesn’t mean you have to hurt yourself by coming back to this…to this awful place.” He spread his hands helplessly. “It’s pretty apparent that there’s nothing good waiting for you here. No joy, just pain. Why are you seeking out pain? Why are you trying to hurt yourself?”

I’m not, he wanted to say, but that was a lie. He wanted to be honest with his…Elanus. “I might never get my memories back,” he said at last. Elanus opened his mouth, but Kieron stopped him. “It’s likely I won’t, thanks to the head trauma. If I don’t, then…I need to know that I’ve dealt with the past. My past, I mean. If you and the girls really choose to be with me, you deserve to have a whole person. I don’t think I’ll feel completely whole until I get past the…well, the past, I guess. I need to know that nothing inside of me is going to come back to bite you, and that means I need to confront it head-on.”

Elanus sighed. “I don’t think that’s how trauma recovery works.”

“I’d ask my shrink, but.” But she was under investigation pending removal from Gania after her wife was found to have shared confidential files from her therapy practice. “We don’t have to stay long,” he added. “Just a few days. Let me get my bearings and know that I’ve left it all behind for good. Then we can go somewhere you pick out.”

“I’m holding you to that,” Elanus said. He sat back and drained his glass, then stood. “I’m heading for bed.” Unspoken was the request: “Will you join me?” Some nights Kieron did, others he didn’t. Tonight, though…

“Yes.”

Tonight he wanted to be with Elanus, whatever that looked like.

Lord of Unkindness: Chapter One

 Notes: Ahahahaa, what? Why? I don't even know, it just needs to come out. Have some vaguely-familiar urban fantasy with witches, familiars, strange powers and stranger love stories.

Title: Lord of Unkindness: Chapter One

***

 Chapter One

 

Nobody comes to Vernon without a damn good reason.

It’s the least-populated city in all of California, LA-adjacent and with more buildings than people. Half the people who live here work for the government, and the other half work in the endless industrial warehouses that line every street and spill into every alley. Vernon is a town beaten down by greed and fueled by corruption; the perfect venue for witchfights.

People with all kinds of magic flock here for the chance to see and be seen; to compete among their own kind in a world where it’s dangerous to be acknowledged. No stage acts or mentalists to be found here; this crowd is made up of tattooed brujos with entourages twenty people thick, bone-thin blood witches who leak power from self-inflicted wounds, fae half-breeds who flinch from iron but wrap strangle-vines around their hands like boxing gloves. It’s a place for gambling, fighting, and fucking.

For Ciro, it’s a chance to learn things that people don’t want spread around.

His raven familiar is enough to get him through the door, and the difference in noise from outside the tin-and-brick warehouse to inside is staggering. Someone cast a hell of a silencing spell on this place. His raven flies from his shoulder to on top of his head, curling its wings down so the feathers touch the tops of his ears, and the sound becomes much more manageable.

“Good bird,” the man at the door, a foot taller and two feet wider than him, comments. He has a skull tattoo on his face that changes color from black to blood red depending on which direction he’s looking.

“He is,” Ciro says companionably before heading deeper into the crush.

It stinks of bodies and magic in here. There must be hundreds of people inside the warehouse, and the latent energy in the air is more magic than he’s been around for over a year. It prickles against his skin, tingling in every pore and making him itch. How funny, that it should affect him so strongly now. Ciro grew up surrounded by more power than most of these people have ever seen; more than some of them know exists. It didn’t take long for him to become vulnerable to it, though.

Eh, be fair. It’s not like you’re at full strength right now. Ciro would never have dared show his face at a formal event at anything less than full strength before, in case someone in his family got ideas.

Whatever. Ciro wasn’t here to gawk; he was looking for someone specific. He slid through the crowd like a shadow, long and lean and hard to distinguish in his black leather jacket and dark jeans. Just another pretty face, that was all he needed to be here. One more thrillseeker in a long line of them, come to drink magic and taste power.

The second floor seemed to thrum with energy—they’d probably moved the sex stuff up there. Good. Sex magic tended to be volatile, and Ciro had issues with how some people defined “consent,” even though good sex magic required consent to really take off. Some people didn’t care about that, and others used drugs to augment their results. Case in point…

Ciro shook his head slightly, putting the past out of his mind. The fight rings were ahead, and that was where he needed to be. He skirted the gamblers, only turning to watch when a cheer went up as a pair of bone dice gave double-sixes to its thrower, who looked surprised by his own good fortune. As Ciro watched, a small, slender brown hand sporting half a dozen silver rings clapped the man on the shoulder before vanishing back into the crowd. A second later, he got another pair of sixes.

“Lucky bastard,” one of the watchers grunted. The dice had been spelled to be unspellable—it should have been contradictory, given the nature of the event, but sometimes all a witch wanted was to experience life like there was nothing extraordinary about them. Luck was a real thing.

So was cheating.

Not my problem.

Ciro kept going until he got to the far side of the warehouse. It had been divided in two, a ring in the center of each of the crowds. In one ring were a pair of humanoid fighters, without gloves or mouthguards, beating the ever-loving hell out of each other. The smaller competitor, a wiry man who moved in a way that reminded Ciro of a spider, jumped up and over his six-foot-plus opponent, kicking her in the head as he came down behind her. The woman, built along the lines of the guy at the door but with a long blonde braid that would put a Valkyrie to shame, laughed out loud as she spun around, her tree trunk of a leg leading the way. It caught the little man in the chest just as his feet touched the ground, and he flew out of the ring and into the first row of watchers with a shriek. Most people in the crowd laughed, but some groaned as money left their hands.

“Eh, he lasted longer than the last one.”

“The twins should try her on.”

“Ha! They’re not that stupid.”

Ciro turned his attention to the other ring, one where the hoots and hollers of the watchers were augmented by the hisses and growls of dozens of different familiars. Witchfights traditionally happened between familiars, the beasts a physical representation of their masters’ magical nature, not their personal strength. Bigger didn’t always mean stronger, which made for some wild witchfights.

Someone nudged Ciro’s side. He looked down at a short, gray-haired woman holding a clipboard. “You here to watch, bet, or fight?”

“Bet,” he said, because he knew if he said “watch” he’d get chivvied out as quickly as he’d gotten here. “Who’s on the roster?”

She turned the clipboard toward him so he could read it. Regular English—good. He could handle Spanish and basic Chinese as well—very basic—but the last fight he’d gone to had listed all the competitors in Runic. The one before that had decided to go with emojis to name their fighters; that was what he got for trying to get anything useful out of a witchfight associated with Comic-Con.

Ciro scanned the upcoming matches. There, just two down, that was what he was looking for. Got here just in time. “Fifty on the eagle in four,” he said, betting on a totally different match.

“Poor odds on that one.”

Ciro smiled. “I like a longshot.”

The woman huffed and held out her hand. He laid down the fifty-dollar bill, and with a brief flare it vanished. She’d logged it with her magic somehow; useful in an environment where most modern technology wouldn’t work.

That was the thing about magic; it had a tendency to fuck things up, especially delicate technological things. It took a lot of money and research to create a device that could withstand the energy bursts associated with high levels of magic, like the kind found in this place.

Lucky for Ciro, he knew a guy who knew a guy. He meandered closer to the ring past a bruja’s silent black panther, which stared at him with bright golden eyes, much to her escorts’ amusement.

“A witch with a bird? One bird? You think that’s a threat? Mama, your baby’s danger radar is broken,” one of the men said in Spanish to the woman in her colorful dress, shawl pulled close around her shoulders. Ciro nodded at her before moving on, and the last thing he heard was the man whining as she smacked him on the arm. Game recognized game.

Good that she didn’t get too good a look, then.

Ciro wandered until he found a good vantage point for the fights, on an empty oil barrel next to a load-bearing column that was rusted all over. A spotlight illuminated the ring, where a chimpanzee was currently fighting with a tiger. Ooh, tough matchup. At first glance it seemed like the tiger should have had every advantage, but the chimp’s grip was brutally strong. It managed to get its hands around the tiger’s neck and squeezed, and that might have been the end of the fight right there if the chimp had positioned itself better.

The tiger, hacking and coughing, made just enough space to bring its hind paws into play and clawed viciously at the chimpanzee. It fell back with a screech, bleeding, then hit the ground as the tiger got its jaws around the monkey’s neck.

“Hold!” The spotlight turned red, and the crowd went wild. The tiger released the chimp, which turned and ran over to the sideline as quickly as possible, slipping back into a slender woman’s embrace. The tiger prowled the ring once, victorious and pleased with itself, before returning to its own witch, an Asian businessman in a three-piece suit who bowed to his familiar as it returned to his side.

“Mr. Zhāng takes the match!” the same voice shouted, and now Ciro could make out the man sitting near the back wall on a tall chair, controlling the spotlight with one hand and holding a megaphone with the other. “Congratulations to all the winners! Up next, it’s Vira Bogdanova’s Russian bear versus Jackie Fraser’s terrorizing terrier!”

This was the match Ciro had come here to watch. Surreptitiously, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, turned it on, and began to film. Magic pulsed all around him, but the image on the screen didn’t even waver. He smiled a little bitterly and watched the fight begin.

 

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter One: Part One

 Notes: OMG IT'S TIME! Let's dive into Hadrian's Colony, also known as "Kieron is mindfucked, Elanus is sore about it, and the girls are just in it to keep their nuclear family from falling apart!"

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter One, Part One

***

Chapter One, Part One

 

“I spyyy…with my little eye…a luminescent interstellarrr medium consisting of iiionized cosmic dust approximately two hundred and forty-four light yearsss in diameter.”

“That’s cheating,” Lizzie said over the com.

“No it’sss not.”

“Yes it is! You can’t see that with your on-board optics, you’re extrapolating from your long-distance instrumentation.”

“That’s not against the rulesss! Daddeee,” Catie whined to Elanus, who was sitting in the pilot’s chair covering his mouth. Kieron knew he was hiding a smile.

Kieron wasn’t smiling, but he wished he was.

“Daddeee,” Catie went on, sounding for all the world like a petulant toddler instead of an AI ship so advanced that Elanus had hunted her across half the galaxy, “tell Lizzie it’s okay to uuuse all our sensesss for I Spyyyy! You said it was!”

“I did say that,” he confirmed, and Lizzie groaned in three different octaves. “But I admit I was only considering human limitations when I said it. After all, the game is called ‘I Spy,’ not ‘I utilized my gravity-wave extrapolation algorithms to probabilistically ascertain,’ you know.”

“See? You are cheating!”

“Am not! Daddee, guess. Guesssss what I spy!”

Elanus steepled his fingers and looked up at Catie’s ceiling for a moment. “Um…is it a nebula?”

“Yesss!” She sounded astonished. “How did you know?”

“What else could it be, with a description like that?” Lizzie demanded. “It’s my turn. I spy, with—”

“No,” Catie protested. “No, my turn’s not overrr yet. He has to guess the color. What’s the colorrrr, Daddeee?”

Elanus blinked. “Um.”

Kieron took pity on him. “Pink,” he said.

“Kee got it!” Lizzie crowed. “My turn now.”

“But that’s cheatingggg,” Catie insisted. “Kieron, you’re not allowed to help Daddeeee come up with the answer.”

“If you’re allowed to use long-distance instruments to spy things instead of close optics, why can’t Kee help Elanus figure out the color of your nebula?”

“Because it’s not the same!”

The girls devolved into an argument that Elanus had to mute after a few seconds. Kieron got up from where he’d been reviewing an Alliancec file on Hadrian’s Colony and sat next to Elanus. The smile he got for it told him it was the right move. He hated having to wonder whether the things he did genuinely made Elanus happy, or whether the man was putting on a good front for him.

Then again, the mere fact that Elanus was here with him, after watching Kieron messily behead the man who’d been holding Elanus hostage, had to mean that the guy’s feelings for him were sincere. Kieron wasn’t sure why, but he knew that they were. He just needed to learn what that meant for them, now that he couldn’t remember anything before a month ago. Not meeting Elanus, not meeting the girls, not even leaving Trakta. He was a mess of unhappy memories and negative emotions, the only bright spots being the sense of warmth and well-being he felt every time he looked at Elanus or spoke with Lizzie and Catie.

He loved him. He loved the girls, AI-powered ships with glorious, pure hearts who somehow loved him back. He couldn’t remember why, though. Massive head trauma will do that to a person.

“How did you know it was pink?” Elanus asked, pulling Kieron out of his unpleasant ruminations.

“Odds are good that anything Catalina picks as a standout favorite will be pink,” he replied, and Elanus chuckled. “But I also remember this section of space. There’s only one nebula close to the colony, the Spiderweb Nebula, and it’s shockingly pink to our eyes.”

“Really?” Elanus’s eyes went distant as he activated his implant, pulling the information into his brain so he could see it for himself. “Wow, that is neon pink. Holy shit.”

“Yeah it is.” They smiled at each other, and for a moment everything was okay. Just for a moment, though.

Kieron had learned fast that Elanus was incredibly good at powering through difficult times, and he kept the conversation going without mentioning the blip between them. “Was that part of your education when you were at the colony?”

Kieron nodded. “I started learning the basics of astronavigation when I was seven.” He watched the understanding of what that meant flicker across Elanus’s face. “It was considered especially important for us to know all major astral features within ten light years of the planet. The Spiderweb Nebula was my favorite.”

“Mm.”

“What is a spider?” Lizzie suddenly asked.

“You know what a spiderrrr is,” Catie said with a long-suffering sigh. “They have them on Trakta.”

“Not where I was.”

“They’re everywherrre on Traktaaaa!”

“No they’re not!”

“Lizzie,” Elanus said before the conversation could devolve into another argument. “There are a lot of good documentaries on spiders in the Alliance virtual libraries. Some of them cover the parallel evolution of spiders on different planets, which I think you girls will find especially fascinating.”

Catie made a “hmm” noise with her engines. “I thought humans transported spiders with them when they colonized new planets.”

“They did,” Kieron put in, “but they also found native animals on some of these planets that resembled what they knew as spiders. There were even spiders waiting for us at Hadrian’s Colony.”

“What color were they?” Catie immediately demanded.

Kieron smiled. “Pink.”

He still wasn’t completely sure that going back to Hadrian’s Colony was the right decision. Staying on Gania, especially anywhere near Chelen City, was impossible, though. He’d assassinated the president of the damn planet. President Moreno was in the process of being tried for assassinating his own VP at the time, but that wasn’t material to the fact that he had murdered a very important man, and needed to be gone because of it.

They’d concealed the killing, he and Elanus had left the planet with Catie, and media outlets on Gania were reporting that Moreno had kidnapped Elanus and escaped with him as a hostage. They needed to stay gone long enough to sell that story and let the furor die down, and given that his childhood was one of the clearest things in his memory, returning here had seemed like a good idea at the time. It was likely no more than ruins, but ruins could speak if you listened well enough.

Smart or not, it was too late for second guessing. They were almost to the colony. Time to face his past, and see if that helped him reconcile his present and offer any hope for his future.

Picking back up

 Hi darlins,

Okay, so! I no longer have Covid, but I'm still getting over the residuals. It's not nice! Not nice at all, booooo. I thought I'd have a lot more time to plot and plan in June, and then I spent most of that time sleeping and recovering. So no story this week, BUT! I should be back to posting next week, at least one of the blog stories. I'll have two going here asap--Hadrian's Colony and Lord of Unkindness, referencing the group of ravens on that particular cover ;)

I appreciate your patience <3