Chapter Text
SANKTA ARPINA
The Rising of the Sun
TED NIVISION
In the house at the corner of Ted’s street lives an old woman. Her hair is thick and long and white, shot through with the dull rust red of a youth that clings to her still. The woman’s knuckles are swollen and her fingers are always cold, but she never fumbles a stitch when she sews. The Humans in Ted’s quarter of the city call her Grandmother, and they all belong to her though no one remembers which family is hers.
In Grandmother’s backyard, hidden from prying alien eyes by high walls and vaulting trellis roof woven thick and sturdy with leafy vines, is their quarter’s hearth. Ted is sure Grandmother had a different job when she was younger but now that she is more old than young and more blind than not she has become their hearth-mother. She tends to the gathering fire, and it never goes out.
When Grandmother tells The Story, she talks about the families left behind on Earth as the twelve ancient astronauts sailed to call for help. Tells them about the grief of those left behind, about the bone-deep resignation when the astronauts realized no help was coming and the tears they shed because they knew they couldn’t go back to their families in their broken ship.
She tells them their names — Sankta Arpina, Sankta Aine, Sankt Viggo, Sankt Stellan, Sankta Saga, Sankta Artemis, Sankta Bulan, Sankta Diana, Sankt Jericho, Sankt Arvad, Sankt Sirius, Sankt Dimas — because names are important, she says, and names leave legacies.
Grandmother piles wood on the fire, reaches strong hands into it’s beating heart for the coals, and passes them through the hands of her grandchildren. Her voice rises and falls, singing strong and loud like the engine of an Essempi war vessel when she tells them about the icy chill of Mars, the lethargy that clung to the astronauts as they carved their names into the rock and lay their heads down beneath and slipped from life into martyrdom and sainthood.
She tells her grandchildren to press the coals to their mouths and eat them like apples, sparks falling tart and sweet like juice down their chins, so that they will never feel the chill of their own gravestones.
When the kids in Grandmother’s care grow up and leave her quarter, they ask her blessing. Not all Humans ask for their hearth-keeper’s blessing but her’s does. So when it’s time for Ted to leave and apprentice under his aunt, he asks Grandmother’s blessing. She gives it to him in the form of a sigil stitched in brass thread on a white kerchief he ties around his neck. It identifies him as family to the others from Grandmother’s quarter, and when he is tired and alone and scared he presses the cold metal to his lips and whispers a prayer to Grandmother.
He knows that other Humans pray differently — some to all the ancestors, some to their own ancestors, some to the saints themselves — but Ted is from Grandmother’s quarter, and so it is to Grandmother that he prays. His prayers to Grandmother are most often a recitation of names, a chanted litany she teaches her grandchildren to center themselves: Sankta Arpina and Sankta Aine and Sankt Viggo and Sankt Stellan and Sankta Saga and Sankta Artemis and Sankta Bulan and Sankta Diana and Sankt Jericho and Sankt Arvad and Sankt Sirius and Sankt Dimas.
Ted’s aunt is a merchant. Aunt Marisha is childless by choice, so when it comes time to train an heir to the Nivision trading empire, she chooses her sister’s son. Aunt Marisha, and now by extension Ted, will sell anything that’s not conscious. Spices and perfumes from the Nether planets, jewelry and rugs from the Manbergian system, hunks of metal mined from asteroids ready to be melted down and turned beautiful.
Aunt Marisha takes Ted aboard her ship The Vox Machina. He spends his days learning from her, developing a network for himself for when he sets out on his own vessel, his own practice under her aegis. His plan is simple: to learn from the best, then nestle himself firmly in his Aunt’s empire until she retires or passes away. He learns very quickly that her plan is to hand her empire over to him much sooner than that.
She’s married, but Uncle Matt doesn’t work with Aunt Marisha. He’s their quarter’s youngest ever hearth-father; only thirty-six and charged with keeping the fires lit in their hearth and in the bellies of their children. He’s tied to the hearth and the planet while his wife sails the stars.
“I miss my husband, Ted. Money is all well and good, but I don’t know how many more times I can leave him behind.” She says, flicking flame-bright hair over her shoulder and fixing him with a near-predatory grin. “So I hope you can learn fast.”
Learn fast he does. Ted learns who can be trusted, who can’t, and how to tell the difference by the set of their shoulders. He learns how to push a deal in his favour, how to haggle with the best of any species, how to forge documents so everything he sells came into his possession legally. Ted weaves his story into the fabric of the legend of the Nivision Empire with deft hands and an easy smile.
He turns twenty-five and Aunt Marisha retires. They’re resting by Uncle Matt’s hearth on a planet light-years from Grandmother’s hearth when Ted finds out.
“Oh I’m not coming with you.” Aunt Marisha says from beside Uncle Matt, cutting off Ted’s final checks about what needs to be done in preparation for their departure the next day.
“And the Bailey-Willingham ship wi— come again?” Ted tears his eyes away from his datapad.
“I’m retired as of now. Have fun! Be safe! I know you can do it!” She grins. Ted looks to Uncle Matt for help, but he’s looking at Aunt Marisha with eyes full of wonder and adoration, like a man seeing his first sunset and learning it loves him back.
“I…okay.” Ted has learned well from his aunt, and his first lesson had been when not to fight her. “Thank you.” For training me, for entrusting me with your empire, for being my aunt. He doesn’t say all that, but she smiles as though she heard it anyway.
“Will you stay for a story?” Uncle Matt asks, more than fire gleaming in his eyes.
“Of course.” Ted says, because there is no other answer when a hearth-keeper asks you to listen to their story.
When Uncle Matt tells The Story, voice deep and ringing, he talks about how much those left on Earth had to have loved each other to work to stay alive instead of lying down to die. How it had hurt them to remember their lives before the genocide, before the imprisonment, and how they had to let those stories be forgotten because it was the only way for them to move forward.
When Ted leaves the next day, the clouds are rosy with the rising of twin suns and Ted takes a moment at the base of The Vox Machina’s on-ramp. He presses Grandmother’s brass sigil to his mouth like the coals she fed him in his youth, and whispers a fragment of prayer into the fabric.
“Sankta Arpina’s blessing is the rising of the sun,” he murmurs, content with leaving the rest of the prayer hanging. This is, after all, only the beginning of this story.
The guard-saint has always been Ted’s favoured saint from Grandmother’s telling of The Story. Sankta Arpina was the captain of the ship that sailed to Mars to beg for help, and her bones were found closest to the mouth of the cave, curled on her side and clutching a knife. Standing vigil over her crew, even in death.
Arpina means the rising of the sun, so Ted always greets the morning a saint. With one final kiss to Grandmother’s sigil, Ted leaves Uncle Matt’s planet and takes on the mantle of his aunt’s hand-me-down empire.
Here, he teeters in the strange gray space on the fringe of what is considered Humanity. He deals with both aliens and Humans, and is a little too much of both. He’s Human enough for his distrust and tricking of aliens, and almost a credit to his kind for his dealings with them. Ted has to be so very careful not to tip the scales too far against himself. He allows no aliens on his crew or in the crews of the other vessels in his empire and in his dealings with them he drives hard bargains, always comes out on top, and never gives an inch.
He builds a reputation for himself that goes beyond ‘Marisha’s nephew’. He makes it known that he will not be tricked or swindled or bargained down. Ted becomes known to aliens as a greedy businessman that carries the best goods. They have to come to him, and he doesn’t make it easy for them.
It takes a while, but slowly he notices the aliens who he trades with the most become almost…superstitious about him. They bring him pale gifts to sway him in their direction, press offerings of salt crystals and brass disks into his palms, refuse to turn their backs on him. Ted hears them mutter stories that remind him of the tales of the fair folk back on Earth. Humans have fairy-blood, they say. They eat poisons for fun and know when you lie just by looking at you. When you shake their hands they can see how you die.
Centuries ago Humans called especially adept liars silver-tongued and now, a billion light years from Earth, Ted hears a Shulker call him fey-mouthed. Fey-mouths can’t tell a lie, the Shulker says in hushed tones to her companions, but will twist you up in the truth until you can’t tell up from down and leave with a fulfilled bargain you would never agree to in a thousand years.
Ted laughs and tells other Humans who share their own stories of fairy-blood accusations. Captain Liam O’Brien cautions him about playing too much into their superstitions. Liam was one of Aunt Marisha’s closest friends and has become a trusted advisor to Ted. When Liam talks, Ted listens.
“It may be funny to us because we know it’s not true — we know we don’t have magic and whatnot — but they don’t. Essempi’s military already buys into this shit and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of them do too. We don’t need to help it along.” He says in an old-world German accent. Liam switches his accent almost daily, and even Aunt Marisha can’t remember which one is real. Ted wonders if Liam can.
“What are we talking about?” Liam’s co-captain, Sam Riegel asks as he swings himself around Ted’s shoulders to stand between them as they walk. He loops his other arm through Liam’s and steers them away from a booth he’s definitely just stolen from.
“How superstitious the Essempi military is about ship rats.” Ted explains, allowing himself to be pulled.
Sam snorts. “Come on, the military’s probably the least superstitious institution out there! Do you think they throw salt over their shoulders before they shoot someone too?” Ted remembers the salt crystals his his pocket, thinks about the hundreds of others in a tall jar in his bunk. Maybe Sam’s not as far off as he thinks.
“No, but every single war vessel in the Essempi military has a ship rat.” Liam replies. “They think we bring good luck or something. Sometimes when a Captain looses their ship rat their crew refuses to fly until they get a new one.”
“I have heard some stories about ship rats that are pretty out-there,” Ted says thoughtfully.
“That a ship with a rat will survive something they logically shouldn’t.” Sam waves the hand on Ted’s shoulder dismissively. “But that’s ridiculous, all they do is get deep in the wiring where the larger species can’t reach or something. I think you’re taking it a bit too far.” He scoffs.
“Is he?” Ted asks contemplatively. “We call ourselves ‘the kind’. That’s only a few steps removed from ‘the fair folk’.”
“Because they call some of us credits to the kind,” Sam replies. Shouting erupts from behind them and he hurries their steps along. “They started it.”
“We take contracts as seriously as the fair folk did.” Ted continues, fingering his salt. “We’re secretive. We don’t tell them anything, and we let their imaginations run wild.”
And what happens when they think we can do something we can’t?” Liam asks seriously. “What happens when they think Humans are good luck charms that can be easily stolen?”
“No way they think we’re actually magic.” Sam says, rolling his eyes.
“What they think is the reason for it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they believe it. Do you want to be trapped in a ship rat’s contract?” Liam forces them to stop and looks them in the eyes, his own hard as star-forged steel.
“No, of course not.” Ted says after a moment.
“Of course not. Keep your head down, and keep to the kind.” Liam was a ship rat who escaped, Ted knows. This is hard-won wisdom, and Ted learns fast.
Ted walks the tightrope between Humans who think him too alien and aliens who think him something more like he was born on it and his aunt’s hand-me-down empire that had chafed finally starts fitting him as though it were always his own.
——
KRISTIN ROSALES
Kristin was never an angry girl. She wouldn’t have been picked to be her city’s next hearth-mother if she was. Hearth-mothers have to be calm, have to be understanding, have to listen to those in their care and have to be patient. Anger does not serve a hearth-mother well.
She is an angry woman now. She’s so furious she feels sick with it but there’s nothing she can do to help herself. The Ambassador has spoken: Kristin Rosales will be the next Human Ambassador sitting on the Essempi Council of Ambassadors.
She was kind to a man declared to be a credit to the kind, and he must have been lonely because that was enough to condemn her to the same hell. The Human Ambassador must represent and speak for a species that has deemed them no longer a part of them. In one fell swoop, the Ambassador stole her entire future from her, and she is livid.
But anger does not get things done, and so she pushes it deep down into her belly and gets to work. There is much to be done.
The first thing she must do is send her son away. Tommy is ten years old; too young for the life of a credit to the kind, too young to be taken from his mother. Kristin sends him to live with a man named Sam, tells him Sam is his godfather.
She’s only met the man once — back when he was a bounty hunter called the Warden and in dire need of medical attention — before he’d settled into civilian life. He’s good with kids, and Kristin’s sister’s parting gift to her was the knowledge that Sam takes in children who can’t stay with their parents anymore.
Kristin hugs Tommy close, wishing fiercely she could keep him beneath her cloak forever. All too soon, she must let him go, must to let him run under the cloak of a stranger.
In return, Sam gives Kristin a package wrapped in coarsely-woven cloth with sad eyes. “In memory of The Ambassador,” He says.
The current Human Ambassador is alive, but that is not who he means. Sam is talking about the first known Human Ambassador, the last one before their imprisonment on Earth. The one that every Ambassador since has had to live in the cold shadow of. Kristin closes her eyes. She has painted the thick line across her nose and cheekbones that denotes her as a Human Ambassador and she will not cry it off.
“Thank you.” She says thickly once she can open her eyes. “Take care of my boy.”
“Of course,” Sam murmurs. He rests a big hand on Tommy’s shoulder and, with one last smile, leads her son away from her.
They will call each other, and they will talk, but it will be a long time before Kristin can tug her son into the safety of her cloak again. She doesn’t know this now, but the next time Kristen sees her son he will be taller and less innocent, a soldier yet still a child, and she will be terrified that he has condemned them to another genocide and exile.
All she knows now is that it will be a long time, and the first thing she will do is wrap him warm in her cloak.
Kristin returns to her apartment late that night. It’s a temporary placement, just until her predecessor officially retires and hands the Ambassador’s chambers off to her. It’s small — only a sitting room, a kitchen, a bedroom and attached bathroom she’d shared with Tommy until that morning — but it feels cavernous without her baby’s laughter bouncing off the walls.
Sam’s package sits on her coffee table until she moves into the Ambassador’s chambers the night before she takes her oath. She makes herself a calming tea and sits down to open it. By the time she gains the confidence to peel away the cloth, she has had to refill her cup twice. With shaking hands she pretends are solid and immovable as red rock, she lifts the folds of the cloth off her gift.
Guns. Sam has given her guns.
Not the Essempi kind that shoot plasma bolts, but the Human kind that shoots metal bullets. They’re revolvers, the most gorgeous she’s ever seen. Their steel bodies are inlaid with twining brass thorns, their handles bracketed with carved mother-of-pearl grips, and each one has a data chip slotted into the base of the handles, blank and encoded and ready to be used.
Alongside the guns are beautiful dark leather holsters. She threads them around her waist and tucks under her corset so the weapons will sit hidden in the small of her back before she turns to the last part of her gift.
Twenty-four bullets. Kristin loads both guns with five bullets each — because she is Human, and she knows how to shoot Human guns, and so she knows to leave the first chamber empty for safety. She hides the remaining fourteen bullets in the hollow in the heels of her boots that she has been leaving empty just in case.
Kristin knows this is a gift, know this is not part of a trade, knows that Sam hasn’t bought her son with two guns and twenty-four bullets. Knows she hasn’t sold her son for two guns and twenty-four bullets. The exchange has still happened, and she still feels dirty with it.
Kristin was born under the moon of Sankt Sirius, the hearth-saint, but if she can no longer be a hearth-mother, she will be a guardian of the kind like Sankta Arpina before her. She names her guns Dawnbreaker and Duskmaker and decides she will honour the legacy of the first Human Ambassador. The one who loved Humanity to the point of murdering the enemy at the negotiation table.
[…]
Kristin’s relationship with Admiral Philza Mi’Craft is carefully engineered. She needs allies on Hypixel, and if that role can’t be filled with Humans, she will fill it with aliens. First, she does research. Uses her new resources to look into prominent diplomatic and military figures, and decides that Admiral Mi’Craft is the best place to start.
He is the only commander of a military ship who, as of yet, has not procured a ship rat for his vessel. He’s most likely to view her species in, if not a positive light, then at least a neutral one. Kristin’s been all too aware of the fact that most of her new colleagues have only ever seen Humans as enslaved or second-class citizens since she took her oath. This Admiral, however, might treat her with the dignity that should be afforded to all.
She follows Admiral Mi’Craft’s route and waits until he is leaving a meeting with his species’ Ambassador to make her move. Kristin hurls herself around the blind corner with reckless abandon, smacking into the Elytrian’s chest and spilling lukewarm tea over them both.
“Saints! Oh no, I’m so sorry!” She exclaims, appropriately horrified.
“Its not a trouble at all, Miss…” Admiral Mi’Craft assures, righting her balance with a polite hand on her elbow.
Kristin had known, intellectually, that Admiral Mi’Craft was good looking. She’d studied pictures of him, memorized his face. But being at eye-level with his scruffy jaw, having just felt his muscles with her whole body as she hit him, staring up into his clear blue eyes…Kristin is rendered momentarily speechless.
“Miss?” Admiral Mi’Craft prompts again.
“Oh! Kristin. Uh, Kristin Rosales.” She answers with a sheepish smile, desperately fighting the flush rising to her cheeks. “I am so sorry about that! Here, let me buy you lunch to make up for it.”
“You don’t need to do that,” He says graciously, stepping back. Kristin momentarily mourns the loss of his hand on her elbow before snapping back to herself. She’s here for allies, not a crush.
“Please, I insist! Oh saints, I am just so sorry!” Kristin pushes, letting her voice get ever-so-slightly more shrill.
Admiral Mi’Craft raises his hands placatingly with a small bemused smile. “Alright, alright.”
“Wonderful,” She sighs in relief. First step done, do not think about how sharp his jaw is or how pretty his feathers are. Nope, do not do that. He twitches a wing to shake some of the tea off, and she’s thinking about his feathers again.
Kristin leads him to a nearby bistro she’s developed an affinity for, chattering away about nothing the entire time. Partially to keep him close and partially to give her the time to haul her mind out of the gutter. When he holds the door open for her she catches sight of his hands and she’s lost again.
Admiral Mi’Craft — Phil, please — seems amused by her antics almost the way a person is amused by a puppy chasing their tail. A little demeaning, perhaps, but he doesn’t act patronizing the way some of her colleagues do and he at least appears to be interested and engaged with what she has to say.
By the end of their little lunch she has his personal comm link and a plan to meet for dinner before The Angel of Death leaves Hypixel. Kristin pats herself on the back for a job well done and begins to research other potential allies.
[…]
Over the next few years as Kristin develops a more extensive network of friends and allies in the capital, her acquaintanceship with Phil becomes a friendship and then something more. On the third consecutive night Kristin researches Elytrian courting rituals instead of sleeping, she finally admits to herself that she might love him.
The first step in the ritual is a gift. One Elytrian — Kristin replaces the word with ‘person’ in her mind — gives the other a metal disk pressed with a personal pattern they made themselves, threaded through with a thin leather string. If the other person puts on the necklace, then they accept the courtship.
It’s not hard for her to find the metal but it takes her a long time to figure out the right pattern to press into the pendant. Eventually, she decides on the three concentric rings that every Human paints on their forehead. It means friend and ally of the kind, which feels appropriate.
Kristin fairly throws the box at Phil when he enters her Ambassador apartments and buries her head in her hands in embarrassment. She hears the soft shush of the lid being pulled off and the softer gasp when Phil realizes what she’s giving him.
“It’s okay if you say no,” She says into her hands when the silence becomes too oppressive. “Maybe I read the situation wrong, no hard feelings! I’d probably damage your reputation anyway, being a Human and all, so we could just forget about it? Yeah, just forget about it, I was being stup—“
“Kristin,” Phil interrupts. His long fingers wrap around her wrists and gently pry her hands away from her face. He has very nice hands, even if they never touch her again. “Kristin, look at me.” It takes her a minute, but she does. He’s wearing the necklace.
“Oh,” She breathes, mouth slightly agape. Then again, “Oh,”
“I would love to court you and be courted by you,” He tells her earnestly. “And I don’t think you’ll hurt my reputation. Even if you did, I find other people care more about it than I do.”
She stares at him, love and something akin to awe bursting in her chest. “I would like to kiss you,” She blurts out. “Is that too soon? I researched the living daylights out of the right courting rituals but they never mentioned kissing or- or- or anything else like that so, I don’t know, would that be okay?”
Phil’s smile is a bit dazed. “You researched?”
“Of course I did! I want to do this right!” Kristin exclaims, probably too loud for how close they’re sitting on her couch.
“I would also very much like to kiss you right now,” He says breathlessly.
“Is that okay?” She asks again.
“It’s more than okay.” He assures, and then they’re kissing.
And he’s right. Its far, far more than okay.
[…]
It’s been three years since Kristin has seen her son in person, and she can finally honestly say that she’s happy again. She has Phil, she has a burgeoning friendship with a couple other Ambassadors, and she has woven a firm base for her web of acquaintances on Hypixel. She talks with Tommy as much as she can, and Sam sends her updates on him when she can’t. She is a little concerned about how close Tommy has gotten with some of the dogs that use Sam’s services, but Sam has assured her that the crew of The Dream Team are good people.
All in all, things are looking up. Kristin wakes each day with a tiny spark of hope in her chest behind the medallion Phil made to court her properly.
Of course that’s when it all falls apart.
It’s happened again, Kristin thinks despairingly as she stares unseeing at the report on the holoscreen embedded in her desk in the Council Chambers.
She tears her eyes away from the mounting tally of the dead and looks out at the hollow circle of the council table with hooded eyes. There’s a wide cut in the curve of the table nearest the door where witnesses and petitioners enter to stand on the weathered stone platform in the center of the room, supposedly the rock the first peace treaty between member species was signed and the first brick in the foundations of Essempi.
The chair of the Human Ambassador sits beside the cut in the least favoured place with a view of the presenter’s back and their own to the doors. It’s symbolic of her species’ position within the Federation, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. She sits vulnerable with her back to the doors and slouches with half-lidded eyes and their attention slides over her like a plasma bolt over Human flesh.
The vaulted room echoes with an overlapping cacophony of the other Ambassadors’ shouts, but Kristin is not shouting. Kristin is not standing, flailing her arms about and calling for retaliation. Kristin is sitting in her chair, unspeaking, unmoving. Slouched, so that her guns do not press into her spine. Slouched, so that she is overlooked and ignored. The members of the Council of Ambassadors are suitably horrified and panicked due to this never-before-seen act of war, but Kristin is not.
Kristin has seen this before.
Not with her own eyes, granted, but with the eyes of her ancestors. She has seen this before, and she knows what will follow. She knows what will follow, and so she says nothing. She says nothing, and she slouches, and so her colleagues think her lesser. A simple Human.
She is smaller than them, slighter than them, dwarfed by the wingspan of the Elytrian Ambassador and the horns of the Aresi Ambassador and the bulk of the Shulker Ambassador. She represents a race of nothings and nobodies and criminals with no history of battles. She should have nothing to add to deliberations of war.
They do not know that her predecessor instructed her in the ways of the old generals, or that she mediates disputes between Human factions that could spiral out into full-blown intra-species war if left unaddressed. They do not know about the coals her hearth-father fed her, the violence she has painstakingly threaded through her bones to be worthy of the First Ambassador’s title, the anger of a mother separated from her child she swallows and gags on every morning.
There is much the Essempi Council of Ambassadors does not know. There is much that Kristin makes sure they never know.
The Shulker Ambassador rumbles the words genocide, and revenge, and righteous war, and Kristin hears them as the bang of a gavel, as the shattering of a stone hurled into glass, hears a billion voices scream out and fall silent at once. She sends a prayer to the unnamed Human Ambassador that led Humanity into the last war that started like this. With a bang and a shattering and a cry that fades. The eyes through which she has seen the fall of Humanity and the hands that assured it. Her murmured prayer goes unnoticed in the din.
“Ambassador. Grant me sharpness in my eyes and strength in my hand and love in my heart,” She whispers in English. Because this is the kind of war Humanity will build out of love for the fallen.
Kristin runs her fingers along the base of her corset, the movement hidden in the folds of her cloak and the laid-back lean of an Ambassador who represents nothing but criminals and knows it. Her thumb catches on the hilt of one of the thin blades she has hidden in the boning as the Aresi Ambassador moves to vote.
Kristin thinks about the twin guns hidden in the small of her back, loaded with live rounds. She grinds the heel of her boot into the glistening marble floor where she has hidden the extra bullets, thinks about the the rings she wears over her opera gloves for the tearing damage they would cause to flesh should she lose her guns and her knives. Thinks about the First Ambassador and the legacy she swore to uphold.
When it comes her turn to vote, she doesn’t have to think about anything. Kristin — mother, sister, credit to her kind, and now unwilling general — votes to go to war.
She stays behind in the Council Chamber after the others have bustled out, talking battle strategies and recruitment and how to rend the most bloody vengeance of the enemy. Kristin stays in her seat and watches how the setting sun strikes the bronze wood of the table. She allows herself three deep breaths to marshal her expression.
“Just get to your office, Kristin.” She murmurs, voice no louder than the soft taps of her gloved fingers on wood. “Just get to your office.”
It takes her another minute but when she strides out of the room, no one would be able to guess at the surging emotions within her. Just like always, they would see exactly what she wants them to see, and today she wants them to see the face of a scared little girl whose species has never known war on any scale.
The hallways of the Council Hall are made to be grand for species that are much larger than Humans, so to Kristin they are cavernous. Painstakingly polished marble floors spill from wrought gold pillars that stretch to the ceiling and hold it up with vaulted boughs of twisting stone and metal and inlaid with gems in the shape of leaves and flowers. It’s a sickening display of opulence as Kristin’s people steal to live.
Her office is much better. She designed it to be cozy, with plush sofas and wingback chairs in front of a fireplace large enough to fit three grown Humans shoulder-to-shoulder with room to spare. The walls and carpets are dark red and her desk is sturdy Earthen mahogany. She turns off all the watching and listening security systems and now, she is safe.
The first thing she does is cry. That word, tossed out by the Shulker Ambassador, burrows into her ears and rings clear through her ribs to fuel the fire in her breast. Genocide. The word that has dogged Humanity’s footsteps for millennium. The one that got them imprisoned, the one that sentenced them, the crime they committed against themselves before the bones were discovered on Mars.
Humans are nothing extraordinary. No divinity sparks within their meat, no power resides in their words. But if they were magical, and there was one word that could send them scuttling back into the shadows like a cross to a vampire, it would be that one.
The Council of Ambassadors had been in the process of putting together a diplomatic vessel to speak with the Dreamons about the possibility of joining the Federation, yet they had given no warning before they struck. They dropped hundreds of bombs on a planet from orbit, killed everyone. Billions of lives snuffed out in a first callous act of war and the word, it echoes.
Kristin has known sorrow in her life. She has known loss — parents and sisters and son and — and she has known fear. Fear for her future, fear of the unknown, fear of being alone. She has grieved for all these things. She has never grieved a loss that hasn’t happened yet and somehow it’s worse. Like looking up into a rain-heavy sky full of gunmetal gray clouds and knowing that the flood is coming and you will not survive it.
She sobs on the floor of her office, mourns the billions of lives lost today, the billions more that will be lost in the forthcoming war. She grieves the loss of innocence of so many children throughout the galaxy, the loss of Humanity’s secrets that will be spilled like blood by the time the war is over. The secrets that kept them safe for generations.
Then she tucks it all away. The fear, the grief, the rage, the word. Folds it all down into a little box deep in her belly to be opened later when there is less to do. Kristin sucks in a stuttering breath as she mentally orders her tasks into those that require immediate action and those that can wait. There are perilously few in she can say are the latter. When she can breathe without a hitch in her throat, she calls Ted Nivision.
“Evening, Ambassador!” Ted greets with his easy-looking smile. There’s a bruise on his temple and anger in his eyes. She’ll have to ask about that later, when she can speak without fear of collapse. Then again, maybe she doesn’t. Ted is no stranger to the violence of displeased aliens and she is no stranger to his tales. His smile falls as she remains silent, collecting herself. Kristin knows she must look a mess, but she has things she must do before she submits to her vanity. “What’s wrong?”
She hadn’t thought about how to tell him, how to put the enormity of the situation into words, what words will be the right ones or if the right words even exist in any language she knows. She opens her mouth and they fall out anyway.
“It’s happened again.” Kristin chokes on a thousand things she cannot say, not over an unsecured channel. “How fast can you get to Hypixel?”
Her unspoken words echo between them. Words of terror, of near-genocide, of hopelessness and helplessness and imprisonment. Kristin has told Ted her version of The Story — it doesn’t bear repeating now, so the words only echo.
Ted regards her with masked fear, professionalism in every pore. The bruise and the anger seem to fade away, become secondary to his purposes and needs. This is why she needs him. “I’m two days out. I’ll be there in thirty-six hours.”
He will make it in twenty.
Kristin is not idle while she waits. She thinks about who she needs to bring into her private war council separate from that of her colleagues, because one woman cannot lead an army by herself, let alone without the knowledge of the Council.
Ted is powerful, his aunt’s empire built in a few short decades and expanded to rival the network of an Elytrian grandparent with eight centuries under their feathers, but he is still only one man with an empire built for trade, not war. Kristin will need more. She will need someone more free-flying, someone elbow deep in circles more illegal than those of a merchant with stolen goods.
She thinks, and she is not idle.
Kristin gathers information and sends out massive data-dumps onto every public frequency she can find. She gives special preference to Human-only frequencies, but the information is in Human tongues (English and Arabic and Mandarin because those are the only ones she knows) so aliens won’t be able to understand anyway.
In these data-dumps she instructs the reader to translate and retransmit in any Human language they know, and to spread the information to every Human they can find. She tells them what happened; the unprovoked aggression of the Dreamons, the genocide of the Endermites, the declaration of war. She explains that though the Council’s forthcoming call for volunteers is intended to be filled by the militaries of member species, anyone can enter their name and the name of their ship.
She tells them that even criminals with warrants out for their arrest can join, that she has the ultimate power to exclude a member of her kind and that she will accept anyone. She cautions that she is not asking for volunteers, just that those who choose to fight do so where she can best protect and serve them.
And when she has done all she can, when she feels sleep pulling at her eyelids and a headache beating at her temples and she is one spilt cup from a breakdown, Kristin calls Unus Annus. She calls Unus Annus because they have the network she needs, and the captain loves Humanity too much to decline an invitation to the war room.
She calls Unus Annus for all those reasons and one more: she calls Unus Annus because she needs her sister.
——
TED NIVISION
If Ted is anything, he is careful. He has to be, to fend off accusations of being fey-touched, accolades of being a credit to the kind. But he is not heartless when it comes to those who cannot avoid such accusations because as much as it would be safer for him to avoid these people, he has things they need. No one else will sell them face paint or Human-woven clothes or any of the other dozens of Human cultural staples. He’s just…careful with them.
He keeps his dealings with those unlucky enough to be deemed credits to the kind secret. Brings their orders to dirty alleys and the shadows of their own apartments and houses where cameras can’t see him. He comes alone and leaves no trace and goes as soon as the deal is done.
The poor souls who have signed their names away to ship rat contracts don’t have any money. Their payment is their continued lives and room and board on their contract-holder’s ship, and so he accepts payment in kind. They might be poor in money, but they are rich in information gleaned from their spots in the shadows of their contract-holders. He trades cloth for stolen information and thinks about the old stories of selkies forced to stay on land because their husbands stole their coats.
The life of a ship rat isn’t easy, and sometimes he seeks them out to find a different too-skinny body caught in the same commander’s wake. Sometimes it’s a child. Ted offers each of them a way out — smuggled or stolen or a faked death — but none of them accept. All they have left to them is their honour, and no Human walks away from a contract once they have signed their name to it.
As careful as he is, he cannot avoid caring for his customers. He becomes friends with some of the others that waver in the fringes of Humanity. Some that are too close to aliens for comfort like him, and even some no-longer-Humans who wear the scarlet letter of ‘a credit to the kind’. They’re alone, and he shares a similar loneliness.
A woman who dresses herself in a rich wine red is the first one. Her name is Minx and she is a witch, as much as a Human can lay claim to magic. She has warded Manbergian space against other Humans and only lets Ted through to trade with her. As she leads him into her private rooms, the purple-red of her cape pours from her shoulders as though from a spilled carafe and chases her ankles like playful puppies.
He sells her makeup and bruise cream and sleeping pills. She makes him tea with shaking hands, veins too-blue beneath her pale skin, and he doesn’t leave when the deal is done. He gives her his personal comm link and promises that if she needs to leave her husband, he will take her. She never asks, and he never offers again, but with each visit he stays longer and longer as she relaxes into the steady rhythm of Human conversation.
By far the most surprising friend Ted makes is Kristin Rosales, the Human Ambassador. She drapes herself in a deep, rippling blue and more weapons than Ted can spot even with his trained eye. She carries a deep sadness and a burning rage that he recognizes from looking in the mirror.
He sells her empty data chips encrypted to high heaven and weapons and information. She tells him about her son, who hasn’t been safe under her cloak since he was ten, and he doesn’t leave when the deal is done. He gives her his personal comm link and promises to visit often.
He doesn’t.
Well…often is subjective, so maybe he does. But its a big universe out there, and Ted has knit the yarn of his empire through every arm of every Essempi galaxy. He’s a busy man. He relies on his network moving product and information like a well-oiled machine, and so he needs to keep in touch with most everyone. It leaves him very little time in the day, but he tries.
Especially for Kristin, because she’s not like the others at the outskirts. She doesn’t have many or possibly any other Humans to talk to, so they talk often, especially when its been a while since his last visit. So its no surprise to him when he receives a call from her one morning.
Ted is basking in Sankta Arpina’s blessing on a desert planet, content in the afterglow of a deal well-made and a Blazeborn’s rage at the unfairness of it, when he accepts the call. He is pleased. Satisfied. And he does not know it now, but this will be the last time he feels so good for too many years. Kristin’s face worries him, and her words, few though they are, wash ice through him.
It’s happened again.
If the aliens are right, if he truly is a pixie or a demon that can be summoned with the right words, those are the ones. Ted fairly bends space and time to his will to get to Hypixel in twenty hours, more than halving the usual time. His crew is confused, but they know when not to question his orders just as he knew when not to question his aunt’s.
They pull The Vox Machina into her usual berth near Hypixel’s Uptown Market. From here, its a five minute walk to the apartment Ted keeps for longer stays planet-side, and twenty minutes to Kristin’s Ambassador apartments where they usually meet. Tonight they’re meeting at her office in the Council Hall so Ted takes his motorcycle and gets there just shy of half an hour later.
As he speeds through the nearly empty streets, not even the saints’ names on his tongue can bring him any comfort. Grandmother’s quarter is only a few dozen light years away from Hypixel. Maybe he’ll visit her next. Something in his gut tells him he won’t have the time.
The Council Hall is empty and still. Ted is used to the opulence, but he is also well acquainted with how ship rats he’s never met before will beg him for any scrap of food, a pinch of face paint. He takes a short knife and pries a few of the larger precious stones from the walls to sell. They won’t be missed.
Kristin looks worse than Ted has ever seen her. Not in a way that any other species could identify if they cared to check but Ted is Human and, more importantly, Ted is a friend. So he sees the odd angle of her cloak, her hair slipping out of its loosened bun, her red-tinged eyes.
“You’re early,” She says, sounding relieved as she pulls him into a tight hug. She’s trembling minutely, and Ted clutches her tight, as if he could hold her pieces together long enough for her to be whole again.
“I came as fast as I could.” He replies lowly. “Have you slept?”
“No,” She sighs into his shoulder. “Too much to do.”
When they break apart, Ted looks to her lips out of habit and necessity. Locals, Humans who don’t travel like Ted does, paint a thick line down the centre of their lower lip to indicate to travelers that it’s not safe to speak freely — that there are prying ears that don’t belong to the kind. Kristin has the remnant of smudged paint on her lip as though she’s hastily wiped away her speak freely line. The room is secure.
“Ted, I want you to meet the crew of the Unus Annus.” Kristin says, gesturing to the three other Humans in the room in turn. “Their captain Amy,” a guarded-looking woman dressed in gray, “Mark,” a solidly-built man wearing purest white, “and Ethan.” Another man, slender and wrapped in black.
“Pleasure to meet you.” Ted says politely. His own chosen colour is a soft milky white, like Grandmother’s nearly-unseeing eyes. “I’m Ted Nivision, captain of The Vox Machina.”
“The merchant emperor. I’ve heard of you.” Amy greets with a nod and wary eyes.
Most people have. Ted has heard of Unus Annus too. Independent purveyors of information, they take Human news from planet to planet and throughout the galaxies. He’s wanted to get them in his network for quite some time but they work for free, and don’t care to engage with a mercantile empire.
“Come, we have much to discuss.” Kristin guides the assembled group to the far side of her office where she has a casual seating area.
Two plush sofas face each other over a dark oak coffee table, and two wingback armchairs face the fireplace. There is no fire in it now, but there are logs that sit ready. Ted knows that Kristin had been in training to be a hearth-mother before she became Ambassador, and a hearth-mother is never far from fire.
Ted and Kristin take one couch and the crew of the Unus Annus claim the other. Amy sits farthest from Kristin, looking like she would rather be anywhere else in the known and unknown universe than this room. Ted wonders why she stays.
“Have any of you seen my data dumps?” Kristin asks. Ted wordlessly shakes his head, and the others do the same.
Kristin nods to herself and begins to mechanically pour them all cups of coffee. Ted looks at her sideways and tries to take the carafe from her. She’s — god — Kristin is his little sister, isn’t she? He has to help. But she shakes her head without meeting his eyes, so he settles for watching her closely. Only once they all have a mug does she start talking.
“Twenty-two hours ago, the Essempi Council of Ambassadors declared war.” She says after a fortifying breath. “The Dreamons glassed a planet.”
“They did what?” The man in white, Mark, asks dangerously. The hand not holding his mug drifts subconsciously to the neatly-hidden holster under his arm, though the threat is far from Hypixel. The other man, Ethan, pulls a thin blade from his tall boot and starts spinning it anxiously.
“The Dreamons nuked the Endermites’ home planet from space. No survivors.” Kristin reports tonelessly. It’s likely she’s been practicing, trying to find words that don’t exist. Ted very suddenly understands, really understands, what she meant when she said It’s happened again.
“Again,” Ethan murmurs, an unknowing echo.
“We won’t stand for it.” Amy says to her coffee, and she’s not talking about the five of them in the room though saints know they won’t. She’s talking about everyone. Every Human in the universe. It’s happening again; no one is a civilian, everyone is a soldier.
“We won’t.” Kristin agrees. “The Council has put out a call for volunteers outside the Essempi military. As of now, sixty-five percent of all volunteer fighters are Human despite being the only species that doesn’t have a standing army. The Council is going to put them in their own fleet and forget about them.”
“They won’t like that.” Ethan says with a raw chuckle, covering his eyes with his hand. How he manages to not even nick his face with his blade is a mystery to Ted. “They’ll go after the Dreamons and they won’t make it subtle. We’ll be imprisoned again. And worse.”
Kristin nods. “I have a plan. Most of a plan. If we can get them information safely, we can guide them and remain the unseen kind. For now at least. I don’t think we can survive the war secrecy intact.”
Ted appreciates her honesty, as much as it scares him. He smiles grimly, more a grimace than anything resembling joy, and his coffee tastes bitterer than it had a second ago. “I’m in.”
Amy glances at Mark, at Ethan. She looks to Kristin, brown eyes deep and full of a meaning that Ted can’t understand and probably isn’t meant to. “We’re in.”
The air in the room tightens and crackles with unspoken yet understood and binding oaths. Ted will do anything for these people now, even if he has just met them. They are united under one cause: the protection of the unseen kind.
When the others have left, after contacts have been exchanged and loose plans have been sketched, Ted turns to Kristin. “Who are they?”
“The crew of Unus Annus.” She answers, standing with her back to him as she stares out the wall of windows behind her desk.
“I know that,” Ted leans back against her desk, arms crossed, watching her. “Who are they to you?”
Kristin doesn’t turn. “Light the fire if you want a story.”
Ted drops his chin to his chest in exasperation. Still, he pushes off her desk after a moment and lights the kindling with a long match. He returns to his post, notes her hands clenching and unclenching behind her back as she collects her thoughts. It must be a difficult story. Painful.
“Amy was my sister,” Kristin starts. Was. Ted’s heart breaks.