Green was her favorite color. Linzi used to call it the color of life. She was such an unusual child; she’d even begged to have the house shutters painted in Island Palm.
Now when I see green, it just reminds me of her death.
I sit next to the rain-splattered window, catching
Aster leaned into the cold stone sill and gazed out the window. The night sky was brushed with the haze of winter clouds, shrouding the stars to a ghostly hue and cloaking the evening star. No moon swam behind them. In the pale light, Aster could see the orchard
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Jaq Orleans no longer had a home to go back to. The war was over, the graves dug and covered, the medals all hung. After six years of fighting against the evil trying to invade their nation, his people had won. They’d finally won.
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The hero of the Hoard War was a coward. The legions of ash-stained soldiers who watched her in awe, whispered of her great feats, and saluted her every step just didn’t know it. They looked at her and saw a hero come to save them and extinguish the dark. They didn’t see
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The monstrous leviathan rises from the depths, swimming across the bay toward Super Awesome City. I grin. At last, the battle where I prove myself has come. Every shortsighted inventor who dismissed my ideas, every teacher who gave me detention for starting food fights in class—they will all look upon me as their savior.
“Load the pineapults!” I bark.
“Another raid has been reported, Your Majesty. We lost the Orion.”
I nodded, narrowing my eyes and bracing my feet against the floor’s slight rocking motion. Hopefully I looked as calm as I needed to.
“Sunken or captured?”
“Captured, sire.”
“Thank you, general. Dismissed.”
Drums. Their song echoes through the valley. The ground beneath my feet quivers with each beat, and my heart pounds in rhythm with the melody of war, pumping adrenaline through my twitching muscles.
Fear. Its claws dig into my chest, scratching my lungs with every breath I take and squeezes my heart with an iron grip.
“Galastar General, we have limited time to—”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“General, you’re the only one who—”
“I know!”
“General—”
“Five damn minutes if you please!” General Jones swung into his cabin and slammed the door button. The white carbon fiber hatch hissed closed, shutting out the gray-clad soldiers and their white noise.
His mottled hands shook as Viktor Engel etched characters into the damp earthen brow. “The good book says it took a word to create the world, eh?” He shuffled back a few steps, flicking the scrapings from his cracked nailbeds. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” A smile crept across his face, deepening crevices under his grizzled beard.
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The booming of the tribunal’s drums rivals even that of the cannons firing outside the city walls. That the High Council would go to the trouble of putting on a public trial even while besieged testifies to their displeasure. I don’t think Azer, the judge, has cracked a smile since the war started, but today his face is grim as death.
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Aram sipped black coffee in a café on a street corner, quaint for a metropolitan area. He scanned his mark from a rough wooden chair on a little porch outside. An insurgent patrol, one of a few hundred targets to be obliterated in the same second, drove by.
The missiles were already launched.
The beat of war drums drives any notion of rest from my bones. I gird on my legendary sword, Jimmy Bob, and stride out of my tent to give my troops an inspiring speech before the battle. Across the torchlit river, the enemy army lurks, human troops intermixed with monstrous daemons summoned from the underworld.
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