Dedicated to Beachzz and NefariousDrO **** 120 PCE was an agonizing year for the great celestial lion. The Widow’s Year--as reckoned in the spoken histories of New Ruthenia. It was a year of warfare and blood. A year of smoke. A year of screams. Now, two centuries later, everyone remembers it, as if they were there. On each of the planets in the Nemaean Territories, there are those who can speak of the misery felt generations before their individual births. They curse the most ancient names of Earth and Barnard, Centaura, Malloran, and Polluxi. At two bells past midnight, Ilya has returned from his agitated wander through the sand-flats. His walk, he recalls, carried him nearly to the Lion’s Guard tower monuments. It was a long walk, taken shirtless and with naked feet. The powdery grit of sand remains between his toes as an echo to those restless, pacing hours on foot. He sits awake in his cell now, thinking of an Earth woman. A heavy mug of tea warms the tense clasp of his palms. He is not yet drowsy, though the brew--spiced with tranquilizing hif--is sure to take effect soon enough. The tea, he reasons in wordless logic, is defense against the disquieting dreams he is sure will come. The dwelling-cell he shares with Aleo is strong with the redolence of hif, and other cognitive-spectrum stimulants. A single candle burns in the meditation niche. “You’re not alone in this,” Aleo says quietly. His voice, Ilya thinks, is like the comforting burn of expensive brandy. “Yes,” Ilya says. “I have the entire Cloister behind me…” “And you have me at your side.” “I know.” His words are almost a whisper. They are seated, face to face, at the small wooden table where they take their private dinners: where Aleo reads the calligraphy of worms on pH-reactant parchment. He centers each sheet with a lump of coral-bark sap--bait for voracious hag’s-hair worms, and on nights when the mood takes him, he reads arcane narratives in the blackened tracings of oxidized worm-slime. He does not read tonight. Instead, he drinks hif-tea with Ilya, and listens as Ilya speaks. He smokes as well. A neat wad of gummed, scented tabak smolders in the bowl of his ornate, blackwood pipe. “I’ll do treacherous things,” Ilya says. “You’re a Guardian Brother of the Cloister, Ilyachka…and you’ll be dealing with an Earther; there’s no treachery where outsiders are concerned.” Aleo is always so implacably calm. Ilya--in unquiet moments--always feels too tall and too blond, too pale, even in darkness. He steals another sip of tea, contemplating the milky pallor of his fingers in contrast to the warm, brown clay of the mug. He envies Aleo for his unruffled, hunter’s detachment, his instinctive, feline mien. “It isn’t just any Earther.” Aleo nods. “Of course not.” The Earther. Ilya feels the syllables of her name rolling through the muddled convolutions of his thoughts. He’s said her name before, even called it in friendly greeting. Now, if spoken, her name will burn his tongue, and even the merest thought of it drives him to consume numbing hif behind desperate prayers that the herb is kind in is manner of inducing numb, dreamless sleep. Why? He asks, in every voiceless manner…Why does she have to come back? What purpose could her return possibly serve? The Central Duma has granted her a visa; but they’ve given orders to the Senior Fathers of the Cloister. They’ve sifted through records and found Ilya’s name in connection with hers. And now, with her name and his orders jostling for domination behind all of his other conscious thoughts, he simply wishes to sleep. But sleep doesn’t come until three bells past midnight. **** Her shuttle makes planet fall on schedule, and she is checked through Frontier Control within minutes of touchdown. She is the most familiar of off-worlders, and her eyes are as he remembers them: devastating in their eloquent, austere hunger. There is a chilling hauteur in the verbs spoken through her flesh…through the set of her uneven smile, and the sharp, upward cock of a single eyebrow. Now, she stands before him, flanked by two Yeoman-Sisters in the black garb of the Nemaean Frontier Guard. They are a comfort, though as an initiate brother of the Cloister, he is in possession of a greater-than-ample arsenal of defenses against even the subtlest of knowable incursions. Time stops, and for the eternity of a heartbeat, Ilya is an awkward teenager at float in the waterborne town of Nôv’åmur. The lone son of municipal aquaculturists, he is trapped in violent spasms of dizzying uncertainty. There are things to say, things he wishes to articulate, but the intended words are inflexible and rebellious. They freeze into silence, shattering as he inhales. Their shards of wreckage plunge silently and oh-so-quickly into the abyss of his lungs. Only the rolling, staccato thunder of a departing MHD shuttle announces the shift in time. “Hello Ilya-Viktorovich,“ she says. “You’ve barely changed.” Her voice is all milky silk tousled in cloying wafts of auditory smoke. “Barely?“ He is surprised by the mocking lilt in his own tone. “I’m not the stupid fisher-boy you left when your family’s term expired.” “Hmmm.” “Welcome back to New Ruthenia,” he says in crisp, mannered tones. He can taste the chill in his voice. “New, Ruthenia,” she echoes. “New,” she says again, as if tasting the word for the very first time. “Not Free Ruthenia.”--And those words hang in suspension somewhere between question and comment. “We were new when you were here last.” And she laughs, cocking a glance of appraisal along the contours of his body. “Yes,” she drawls, and in that smoke-silk voice, her accent overpowers the mocking, honeyed coo buried deep within her tone. “But the rhetoric of your stellar lands demands at least a nodding reference to the classic name, no?” “Nemaea has many voices, and many classic names Dorianna.” “So, it’s formal now…when I left, you called me Danka.” “When you left, we were children.” Though larger than the junction-port at Novochesk, Junction-Port Gogol boasts half the crowds today. Half the traffic, but double the stress. Jump shuttles are carried on lancing beams of microwave energy, fired down from heavy cruisers in orbit, but Ilya hears only the absence of heavier traffic, and the echo of his bland declaration. There are undulant waves of random talk around him, but the voices--like the shuttles, and semi-light carriers--address the disrupting shift in the port’s routine; and though no one speaks overtly of it, he can hear references to the Central System ship in orbit. The Persephone: in from Sol-space--from Earth itself. There are five ships under Central System registry that ever cross the Nemaean Frontier. Five. And the Persephone is one of them. The smallest. The fastest. And always the one to bring troubling visitors. --The ones like Dorianna. “So,” she says. “Are we going to remain here, engaged in only half-playful badinage, or are you going to release my two lovely keepers and escort me, yourself, to whatever holding cell has been reserved under my name?” He smiles for the first time today. “Which do you prefer?” “My cell…if it has a shower, and something resembling decent food.” ***** ***Okay, this ending is a bit abrupt, but that's only because I'm uploading this story according to chapter (or rather, by section) and what you have read here is simply the opening and introduction. There is more to come. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for those already familiar with the Nemaean universe depicted visually, the story appearing here will put some of those images into a more coherent, temporal context.