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Published:

January 30, 2025

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In the heart of an ancient warship, fed exotic matter by two dozen tubes, Yuen looked upon the walls of her prison and saw stars. Saw nebulae. Saw empire vying against empire, heard warrior battling against warrior.

 

raptor on my six, evade, eva

 

third Khopesh squadron, move into hexahedron format

 

I love you, Tial, I

 

hull integrity down forty-five

 

On the bridge of a battlecruiser, in the cockpit of a fighter, in the heart of dying technician, she was there.

 

I am here, I will never leave.

 

She could almost believe the lie.

 

* * *

 

Within the Dawn Monastery, Yuen had sat before her fellow acolytes and was told how her life would be now.

 

"Again," the Lord Admiral said standing before her, the bulk of his starship above casting the monastery in shadow. "Let me see him again."

 

Through his mind’s eyes, Yuen showed him: his husband’s smile under moonlight, that sensation of lips against lips, the last time they’d ever meet before their world was destroyed in nuclear fire.

 

"Fried dumplings was his favourite meal," Yuen said, expression unchanged, pale hands in her lap. "As it was yours, admiral."

 

Past those cybernetic eyes and those battle scars, the admiral’s expression shifted. But Yuen saw more. How loss consumed him and filled him with vengeance.

 

Beyond the confines of the monastery, dawn-drenched mountains crowded afar. Mountains Yuen could see but was never allowed to climb.

 

"Good," the admiral said to Yuen’s master. The woman who had beaten her until there was no stick nor skin, only mind and power.


"This one will do." He bent low, "You will be our finest weapon and our greatest hope, child. The Empress herself thanks you."

 

Yuen, in that last, forbidden part of herself, had believed him.

 

* * *

 

In the court of She of Ten Thousand Banners, Yuen knelt. Clothed in fine silk, she was the highest servant of the Empress, lavished with everything except what she wanted.

 

"You have done well," the Empress said, beckoning. "We expand in every direction, our legions emboldened by your power. Come, sit by my side, and let us drink together."

 

Yuen chest fluttered; she thought it a heart attack. It was only something she had used to inspire, not something she had personally felt.

 

She wanted to feel it again.

 

She came forth, born in the gutter of a world long cremated by war, and sat beside her Empress amongst opulence. They drank long into the night, but the conversation was always the same: what the Empress could give her, and what Yuen could provide.

 

All Yuen wanted to be asked was what her favourite food was.

 

Even as her Empress drifted off to sleep, as Yuen sought to depart, beringed fingers clutched her wrist.


Another flutter.

 

"Show me this power." Her eyes fluttered open, rimmed with dark bags. "Comfort me."

 

On that night, the Empress saw paradise.

 

Yuen saw glass.

 

* * *

 

When Yuen had first been placed in the amplification sphere, fed experimental chemicals poorly tested and less understood, she was still naïve enough to think that it wouldn’t be for long.

 

She had first connected in a stealth ship above a rebellious world. The intensity had been a shock. The minds of the imperial legion were overwhelming, like cupping an ocean or holding a mountain. So many voices, the victors and the defeated. The screams of children, the roar of the triumphant. The ecstasy and pain and hope and screams and love and hate and rage and love and—

 

It took her a moment to realise she too was screaming. In that cacophony, she was a child pulled from rubble by her mother. A soldier consoling her comrade. A strategist toasting to victory, a dissident swearing revenge. That warmth in her chest, that flutter. That feeling.

 

When her service team disconnected her and reprimanded her, she had not complained.

 

"Do you forget your training?" they had said. "You must only see. You cannot touch."

 

* * *

 

In battle, Yuen was with the pilot and the captain and the technician and ten thousand more.

 

Still, a hundred light years away, she was with her Empress. Feeding her dreams, letting her play that memory of her and her husband in the twilight fields of a paradise world before his assassination. That violet sky eternal, those warm hands clasped.

 

Again, again, the Empress dreamed.

 

Again, Yuen saw. Pressed against the glass of her sphere; a prism with a million panes.

 

Fingers scraping, then clawing. Her concentration faltered; her visions dulled in the minds of squadrons fifty-five to ninety-two.

 

See, she had told herself. Use. Control.

 

Do not touch.

 

Still, she clawed against the walls of her sphere.

 

Those lovers in the twilight.

 

The squadron and their leader.

 

That single flutter of a lonely heart.

 

Yuen screamed, and through ten thousand minds, was heard.

 

She broke free of her sphere, glass puncturing her skin. The pain delicious and deep. She tasted pressured air, heard laughter bouncing off the walls, saw soldiers approaching the translucent door. Felt the bliss of freedom, and despaired at its passing — they would never let her go.

 

Already Yuen's power was diminished, all connections winnowed save one. The reason for it all.

 

Again. Show me again.

 

The person that, perhaps, in another life, might have meant something.

 

Yuen wrenched that memory away, and showed the Empress everything she had protected her from. The cries of her people on shattered worlds. The agony of a pilot incinerated by plasma barrage. The despair of a captain as his ship’s reactor went critical.

 

A life behind a pane of glass, a life that could only see, and never, ever touch.

 

When the soldiers arrived, barrel to her head, Yuen heard the screams, the cries, the pleas for it to stop. But Yuen had promised to show her power, and now she had done so. Showed her the most important thing there was.

 

What it meant to feel.

Copyright 2024 - SFS Publishing LLC

To Shatter Glass

She was there

Dom D. Borg

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