“Everything we were told to believe was sacred was nothing but lies, a faith of horrors as I see it now,” said Playa. “But it doesn’t mean there isn’t anything worth believing in. That’s something the eon has shown us. Both of us. Maybe the Nine Gods aren’t real. But there is something . . . more to this life. Something that gives life and love. A connection deeper than our skin and bones. Deeper than any lie. Maybe the Gods of the Nahgak-Ri don’t see us. But something must have seen you and brought you to join us. Just like Maia and Gabriel were brought through the Shattered Gates to free us.”
“What we’re trying to say, Sabira,” said Zonte, “is that you need to let go. But don’t lose faith. Not now. We’ve come so far.”
“We’re a brood now,” said Torque, “and we need you to be our protector. That’s what I say about it.”
Was it possible? Could she protect them? Sabira had tempered her body and will through trial after trial to become a conqueror, to become a holy warrior of Divine Will. Could that same strength be called on to protect?
She had protected brood before. When they were little mine rats, she defended her brood-sister from the more brutish in the warrens. Whether it was by chance, or eon, or intervention of some greater powers, she felt like Torque was right. They were all brood now.
Tomorrow they would leave the Unity and the Monarchy and all the madness of war and slavery behind. But who knew what waited for them, really, on the other side of the galaxy? Gabriel and Maia and Orion, as much as she wanted to believe she could trust them, had kept secrets from her about who they were and where they were from. Maybe there was more they were keeping from all of them? But whatever awaited them on the other side of the Shattered Gates, her brood would need protecting. They would need her. She was a servant after all; maybe it was time to serve her own.
She would need help, though. Would need to get through to Daggeira. They were both servants. The two of them had protected each other, even to what they thought would be their dying breaths. Sabira hoped she could find that instinct in Daggs and call on it to stand by her side, protecting their new brothers and sisters together. Even if some of their new brood didn’t trust them yet.
Sabira stepped out of the swirl of thoughts for a moment, realized the eon was already taking effect. A tight nausea seized her belly, but soon let go. The bucket waited nearby, though she suspected she may not need it. Her palms turned clammy. The silent darkness of the room seemed to breathe, reality itself expanding and contracting around them.
“Be calm, lay back,” said Maia softly. Her fingertips traced a light caress along Sabira’s sweat-beaded scalp. “You are safe. Close your eyes. Let the sacrament do its work.”
For the third night in a row, she felt the change come over her, the queer, new awareness of her own body, even of her own thoughts. She stood beneath a great, living dome with her fellow eon drinkers. Passed through worlds of light and meaning. It wasn’t the same as before. Each experience and vision was unique. Though there was a similarity, an uncanny familiarness.
And for the third night in a row, the zaicha came to her. Small, timid, fragile—everything she had spent her life stripping away from herself—it stood before her in the darkness, waiting to show her the way. For the third night in a row, she followed.
The zaicha led her to herself.
In the pit again. Gouts of red pouring from her chest, globs of black dripping from her hands. Runny smears of black across her face. Teeth bared, muscles rippling, pale eyes wide like a frenzied beast. The rage and the strength unlocked by the yarist gem consuming her.
And then she was someone else. She lay on the fighting pit’s rocky floor. Lights glared and spun overhead. A stranger with a familiar face stood over her, victorious, bloody, a gem in one hand and a gore-drenched axe in the other.
Is this how I die? At the hands of a nameless mine rat, deep in the fighting pit? Far from the stars?
Was that Sabira looming over her? Was that who she was then, or who she was now? Were the wide, feral eyes her own? The power and the fury and the righteous faith, was it unleashed, burning inside her, now? Or a memory, an echo? Victor and victim. Living and dead. Hero and traitor.
Like a single rock tumbling within a cave-in, a thought about Torque bounced through the chaos of her mind. Did Torque see her like this? Did she feel this same confusion?
Was she Torque? Or was she Sabira? Or was she the nameless, unseen dead?
All around, the drums boomed. The walls of the pit trembled. The pounding war rhythms of the Servants grew louder, fiercer. They reverberated in her chest. Her heart thumped in sync to the deafening beat, awakening her instincts, her training. The drums surrounded her, encased her in sound. The drums . . .
The Servants are here.
Sabira’s eyes popped open. She needed to warn them all. But her jaw reacted like a machine she didn’t know how to operate. She reached for Maia. Heard Torque’s scream a moment before the explosion. The whole building lurched. A high-pitched ringing eliminated all other sounds. She didn’t hear the window exploding or the harsh tittering of a thousand glass shards. But she did see the stunner roll across the floor, streaming black, icky lines behind it in the air. She tried to dive for it, but her insides were thick, sloshy mud.
The stunner exploded in her face.
Then she was on her back, convulsing, unable to control her movements. Sharp bile stung the back of her throat. The walls rippled into glowing geometries. Armored bodies flew through the shattered window. Blood-coated afterimages trailed their every movement. Nine of them. A whole crew.
Her guts spasmed, and she vomited foul, brown liquid and stinging bile. Lems stepped out of the walls, a team of faceless men dripping sparkling shards in their wake. Long arms projected from their bodies, whipped out at the servants, coiled around armored limbs and snared their weapons.
Searing, bright plasma ripped through lems. The whole room glowed hellish scarlet. The lems recongealed, kept moving forward, whipping tentacular arms at the invaders. Burning bits of forma dropped to the floor around her.
Sabira gagged, convulsed. She couldn’t get all the vomit purged from her mouth. It pooled in her throat. A weak hand grasped her shoulder, pushed her on her side. Still gagging, desperate for air, she felt like a giant was wringing her insides like a wet rag. The vomit mostly cleared her throat, splattered onto the floor. Sabira still couldn’t breathe.
She felt a presence near, radiating terror. Maia’s arm encircled Sabira. Her gasps echoed hollow and pained in Sabira’s ears. Maia couldn’t breathe either. The regulated atmosphere within the Embassy blew out of the broken windows, leaving nothing for their desperate, burning lungs.
The eon makes everything abstract and deeply horrifying. Every moment plops into being with a shrill screaming dread.
Loud, cracking pops, sparks tear white-hot arcs through the air. The servants blast the lems until they burn through to the nodes animating their forma bodies. Plasma fire slags nodes into steam.
Motion erupts from the pole shaft. Spirals of purple and gold carve through the room, bisecting the invaders. Armored limbs drop to the floor. Red blood spatters on Sabira’s face. Blood drips down the walls, leaving graffiti glyphs in its wake.
A stream of sizzling plasma bolts slams into the torrent of color and butchery, gives it a form. Blur solidifies into body, crashes back against the wall. The body is covered in scorched armor. Bits of it burn and flake off. Matter pours from the wall and floor, replaces what was shed. A glint of gold and silver eyes. Gabriel.
Another explosion. A hollow thud from above slams the building.
Sabira gasps, and Gabriel transmutes into color and motion, leaves fading echoes of his passage. One last lem tangles a servant. A flash of gold, a volcano of blood from the decapitated neck. Plasma fire. The room strobes red.
Sabira sees the breathing masks where they lay across a terrain of broken glass, severed limbs, and writhing forma tentacles. She tri
es to crawl, but her muscles still spasm and clench uncontrollably from the stunner. All she can do is shake and gasp and watch the blur of killing.
Two servants, one lem, and Gabriel’s lethal blur are fractals of time, velocities of color. Plasma blasts sear through the room. A slagged node spurts from the smoking lem body. Round after round of plasma fire tumbles Gabriel out onto the balcony. A fleeting hint of his image through the empty window frame before the transformation back into pure motion. Something flies across the room and lands near where Sabira and the others huddle, quivering and breathless.
With violently shaking hands, Torque finds the object Gabriel had thrown to them. A bag. She manages to pull out a breathing mask and affix it over her mouth.
An armored servant blasts plasma fire again and again, misses, while the other quickly reconfigures their palukai into a short spear.
The torso of the servant who was just firing falls to the floor, his pelvis and legs falling back the opposite direction. A thick slosh of intestines slithers out of each half.
The remaining servant nails Gabriel with plasma fire to the chest, spins the palukai with expert precision, and drives the spearpoint through the Emissary’s thigh. Gabriel swings, but the servant is already dodging back. Gold-tinged rupture blades carve through empty air, leave shaky tracers in its wake. Gabriel lunges, still fast, but no longer a blur.
A hand touches Sabira’s face, shakily places the mask over her mouth. The sides of the mask cling to her sweaty cheeks. A quick, electric buzz and she breathes again.
Another blast, another stab into Gabriel’s leg. He slices again at the servant, but the elongated palukai keeps him out of Gabriel’s reach. The servant fires, and Gabriel slams to the floor hard on his back. The servant spins his weapon, reconfiguring during the motion. The palukai blade slices off Gabriel’s left arm at the elbow. Screaming. He grabs the stump of his arm to shield the wound, stop the gush of blood.
The servant’s heavy boot stomps down, traps Gabriel’s right arm, and the blade cleaves the right forearm in two. Sabira tries to gasp and scream at the same time. The servant drops down hard, grank-plate armor over his knee driving into Gabriel’s sternum, the butt of his palukai crushes his face. Gabriel’s forma helmet cracks, falls away. The servant pulls a small device from a utility compartment on his hip, sticks it on Gabriel’s forehead. The Emissary’s spine curves back on itself, as if he is being folded in half the wrong way. His eyes roll up, showing only white.
The servant stood, kicked Gabriel’s motionless body aside, and turned to face Sabira where she lay huddled in a terrified, shaking pile with the others. Sabira felt more arms wrap protectively around her. She wanted to embrace them back, but she had taken the majority of the stunner’s blast. Every muscle still spasmed and screamed in pain.
The servant stepped through pools of blood, vomit, and sizzling debris so that he towered over them. Using his palukai as a staff, he lowered himself to one knee directly before Sabira’s quivering eyes. The silver glyphs on his faceplate seemed familiar, but their lines wouldn’t hold still, each mark slithered into the next.
The amplified voice coming from his helm sounded hollow and dry. “Calm child. It’s all over. You’re safe now.” The helmet’s visor shifted transparent to reveal a face covered in scars and glyphs.
“Thank Star Father we found you,” he said. “It’s all over now. Grandfather is here to take you home.”
Sabira’s adventures continue in
Part 4: Sacrificial Altars
AFTERWORD
THANK YOU SO much. You took a chance on a new author and I truly hope you enjoyed this third installment of my four part novella series. Please let the world know what you think about it by leaving an honest review here on the Amazon book page. Even a short review means a ton to new and experienced authors alike.
Up next, the action-packed conclusion of Shattered Gates Volume 1. You can pre-order Part 4: Sacrificial Altars right now, right here, in order to find out what comes next as soon as possible.
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Thank you and hang in there.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SPECIAL THANKS TO September C. Fawkes for her insightful edits and Dan Van Oss at Covermint Designs for making such eye catching covers. You were both wonderful to work with and I’m looking forward to future projects together. Special thanks also goes to Orion Harbour for the amazing Void Forms Media logo.
I would like to thank Julia Glosemeyer, my loving wife and first reader, Mary Glosemeyer (love you, Mom!), and Dale Wilson,for getting me writing again. Particular thanks to Katie Harp, Elizabeth “Izanami” Vaughn, and Stephen Crone—your beta-read feedback was invaluable. Thanks to Andre Polk (you are missed, sorry you didn’t get to read this, my friend), Jarad Coates, Astra Price, Tatiana and Buzzy Brennan, Samuel Peterson, 8tracks.com, Johnathan Clayborn, and the Space Opera: Writers Facebook group.
Additional thanks to following podcasts, for many hours of inspiration, instruction, and distraction, that helped make this book what it is: The Sword and Laser, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, Writing Excuses, The Story Grid, The Creative Penn, and The Psychedelic Salon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRYAN S. GLOSEMEYER lives in San Francisco, CA, where he works in tech support, drinks too much coffee, and wanders the bustling streets with his wife. He has previously published a flash fiction piece in the Question of the Day anthology from Clayborn Press.
Copyright Pt 3 3
Dedication 4
Part 3: Eon 6
22. 7
23. 20
24. 33
25. 38
26. 44
27. 52
28. 58
29. 68
30. 76
31. 83
32. 91
33. 99
34. 104
35. 114
36. 125
37. 132
Afterword 142
Acknowledgements 143
About the Author 144
Table of Contents 145
Contents
Unnamed
Dedication
Part 3: Eon
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
Afterword
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Table of Contents
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven Part 3: Eon (Shattered Gates Volume 1 Part 3) Page 12