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He does not feel young. He feels hungry, the sort of hungry that gnaws at him day and night, until it is so much his companion he does not know how to live without it. He feels hard, because he knows how to take a beating, how to fall just so when a guard hits him with a baton. He feels angry, so angry, the sort of anger that does not need fuel.
The blood never dies, he remembers. The blood never forgets.
But the feather of a magical, extinct bird? Like all things from the old order, it called to me.
“Hope is a younger girl’s game, and you find more comfort in it than I do.”
The bones of our old ways of life were there, barely traceable, and I wanted them back.
I knew what it was like to trace a quickly fading memory in my mind, to watch it fade with every remembering until it was nothing but a feeling, a well-worn groove you could walk but not recall.
Our souls will return home, we will return.
The smoke had taken an oppressive turn, so that it was no longer the dream-like fog. Something thicker, like a funeral shroud.
No fear, no emotion, nothing that would focus their gaze on you.
There were no rebels here—just a farming village that would starve in the coming months with our livelihood now smoldering.
Everyone here knew the cost of sedition. No one here would risk it.
My heart raced—difference was never good.
My whole body hurt, and my vision was blurry with unshed tears.
Galactic law meant they couldn’t outlaw an indigenous language outright, and all of Andala’s various populations took pride in their mother tongues.
“Trial and tribulation is how poems are penned.”
