“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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The firm, resounding thunder of combat boots fills the tunnel, a drumroll announcing my impending doom. A moment later, boot tips stop a breath away from me. I listen as the beats between sound waves stretch, the peaks falling into stillness.
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