The Charnel Child
I haven't posted something here before. But I like scifi and I like to write a lot, and draw a lot, and when I was playing Stellaris I had a rare bit of really powerful inspiration and I just rolled with it. What I ended up with ended up significantly darker than anything I had written before, and it features some very heavy and intense themes of war and a lot of graphic content that ranges from gore to genocide. But I mean, this is Stellaris. Purges exist, slavery exists, and it is easy to check some boxes and watch your economy improve.
But what about the people on the ground?
The Lumirians were a peaceful race of aquatic mammalians, living simple lives and just starting to reach for the stars, when the Rothaki showed up and changed everything.
You will be the last I care for.
Those were among the final words my father ever said. It was in the Season of Storms, back when I was a mere fourteen, towards the end of the Rothaki Occupation. I had never seen a Mekon free, but the memory of a time where the sky didn’t burn and when the holt village gathered in the monastery grounds for Harvest Festival without fear haunted my father and grandfather like the spectre of a lost lover. I had only heard stories; tales of a time where there were weekly fishing reports, not weekly lists of those who had gone missing. A simpler time, so sweet sounding it may as well have just been a story. It was something my grandfather dwelled on and squaked on about for hours on end. Honestly there were times where I wish he would have just stopped.
It made me mad.
Sometimes I could feel my blood boil as he told our holt village about the time he had gone out to fish just before this grand typhoon; he had gone out with his friend, Sula, for one last spearfishing sail before the Season of Storms. I could see the glimmer in his eyes when he spoke of the tale. Tears he held back with the experience of age. He recounted the cold air and the gently rolling waves, how Sula and he would fight the wind and the rigging as they made their way towards the safe shallows some two leagues out into the shoals. White sand and breaking waves marked dangerous waters, and he had said that what he lacked in sailing skill he made up for with his aim. He admitted that Sula did all the skilled work on the boat, and at times he was perhaps more of a hassle than a help. He’d tell us about how the sky was as clear and as deep a sapphire, and how you could see the ghostly shadow and glaring crescent of Mekon-Sul as our little watery world orbited around her. I dreamed of those skies with longing when I was younger. At this point, it saddened me to know that they were taken away from me before I had ever seen them.
My grandfather would tell us about how the cold ocean water sprayed up on his face as they crested waves, how he could not get the smell of the Tulan-ik he used for bait out of his paws, and how he fished with a bone spear made by his own father rather than using one of the carbon composite shafts you could buy in the city center. He’d tell us about the time where he spent a full ten minutes under water, searching through the clear depths and lurking between outcroppings of red coral and how he’d have to avoid the anemones that blended their poisoning stingers into the wafting seaweed near the bottom of the cove. He’d say how he hunted his famed sand-shark, a creature of legend to the children of our holt village, for it was some twelve tails in length with teeth the size of his paw. He’d tell us about how he fought with the beast and how it nearly took his leg, and how it grew more ferocious as it came to realize it smelled the inky blood of a Lumirian. It was an exciting tale that went on longer than it should have and overstayed its welcome like bad neighbour. It was a riveting tale, it always got the youngest to use their imaginations to their fullest… just like my grandfather.
Even now when I think about it, my mouth grows sour and my nerves grow tense. It makes me mad, as I would never have that. I feel greedy.
My father was young when the Rothaki of the Fell Throne made planetfall for the first time. Despite what it may have sounded like, the Lumirians are by no means a primitive species. The old nation states of Mekon had made it into space by the time of my grandfather. I can’t speak much of what happened at first contact. Likely what you’d expect. The Fell Throne had made a declaration to the nations of Mekon and her outlying colonies that effective immediately they were to be annexed and fell under the direct jurisdiction of the Fell Throne. This all happened very quickly from what I was told by my father. The Rothaki ships had only been spotted in the system a week or so prior to their official communication, and their sighting sparked a new wave of scientific and militaristic frenzy as first contact with an alien race loomed on the horizon. But it was not a peaceful meeting, as you are already aware.
Panic was the first thing, everyone was confused and frightened by this announcement. Some called it out as a hoax of some kind, our Monastery Keepers frantically sought out prophecies to explain and calm the populace, while others immediately broadcast messages that they have surrendered. When it became obvious that there wouldn’t be any negotiations prior to our subjugation, the fleeting nation states elected to resist the Rothaki. I was told that there was some hope for a time.
My father said that there was a war, though it was brief. Before they were defeated and dismantled, the old nation states launched a coordinated attack on the Rothaki, but not before each capital city had been obliterated by orbital weapons. It was a fast war. The militaries did manage to damage the invasion ships and destroy some with the asteroid defense system, apparently the Rothaki had underestimated our resolve at the time. LD bombs were detonated at their primary beachheads, incinerating their occupation troops within their landing craft in brilliant thermonuclear blasts. This trick only worked once, it was one coordinated attack. The last one.
The war lasted five days.
My father told me that our people had been broken by then. He didn’t understand what was going on at the time, he was so young. I can’t imagine him like that, a child, crying, tugging at his father’s coat as news came in over the radio with stories about how the towns his friends lived in vanished off the map never to be seen again. I can’t picture it now, not as I remember him. Not that man, he was so strong.
I don’t know if I can even say I had a childhood. Everything felt so wrong. I could count the number of times where people were genuinely happy on one paw. I heard stories about how our parents and grandparents fished and played out in the caves. We couldn’t. My parents said the water wasn’t always such a dull gray color, that it didn’t always feel slippery near the surface, they said it wasn’t safe in certain places. It was from the strip mining, they said. And the unsafe places, well, kids never listen. I went there, to the shallow beaches out on the westside of the archipelago. It was where the current carried the bodies. That is why my mother and father said not to go there. Maybe I should have listened.
Then again there shouldn’t have been bodies there.
My father became some kind of clerk in the city. My grandfather was a fisherman, but he couldn’t do that anymore as he had grown old and his good friend Sula had been killed. Worse yet, the fish had gone from the shallows and the water soured like bad ale. He moved on to farming. My grandfather made the paddies where he planted and grew his crops his life’s work. The other fishers from the holt village soon worked for him, and the farms gave the people something to focus on. I had so much more respect for my grandfather than for my father at that time. I remember how frustrated I was with him. I had grown up so bitter and hollow feeling, I remember thinking about what my father did and wondering how he could just go about his life like this, he was practically working for the Rothaki with how he had rolled over. He was even called a collaborator, everyone in the government was at some point.
Our world changed with the puppet government the Rothaki had installed. Some Lumirians were given power, just enough power to try to appease the public as the Rothaki looked over their shoulders and their troops patrolled the streets of our villages. Labor camps were established along the inner coastlines. People would frequently vanish, like my older brother and my uncle, and there were weekly raids as the Rothaki troops and Lumirian collaborators broke into homes and searched for signs of anything relating to the resistance, often executing those who made a stand or talked back to them. People frequently vanished at night. I remember how our neighbours often came home injured and bloody with marks that they dared not speak of. The Rothaki haunted our villages and our fields. I remember my father looked so tired all the time. He was always watching them with fear in his eyes. I called him a coward, right to his face, in front of my mother. They ended up taking her away from us a month later, a collaborator said that she was to be taken to the Rothaki to “comfort” them. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. I never saw her again.
There was a resistance. I only heard whispers of them, sometimes the Rothaki guards could be overheard talking about how a cargo ship was damaged, or how a labor camp had their mining drills sabotaged. How a Rothaki landing pad had exploded or how a general had been poisoned. Bits and pieces, but it was enough to know that there was some hope out there. It was a growing hope for me. Despite what our overlords put up for a face we all knew that they were failable and mortal.
I remember when I asked my father about the resistance. I remember his eyes, he was so scared. He was always scared. The thought of losing one of his daughters must have terrified him beyond anything I could have imagined. But at the same time I could tell he was expecting me to ask about them. I was the oldest of his children, the most bitter, the quickest to anger, the one that had the most righteous inclinations. Stories of how beautiful and peaceful our world had been soured me to the core. It was like a dream that my grandfather had given me, the idea of a world where there were clear skies and oceans that were full of life, a world with happy families and villages that didn’t have a looming ghost lingering over them that would cart away their mothers and fathers in the dead of night. A time where the sky didn’t turn gray with smoke and when the land lacked scars, when the ocean was a brilliant lifegiving blue and didn’t wash the corpses of our neighbours up onto the beach.
I was afraid of so much and I wanted so many things to change. I wanted to claw and rip these changes out of the corpse of a Rothaki. But sometimes I think I just wanted to hurt them. I didn’t think that was so bad. And I am still not sure that is a bad thing to want.
When I was fourteen, during the Season of Storms, there was a night that would take great effort to forget. I was rebellious in my youth, and I would often slink away at night with some of my friends and cousins. I had known some people who would have been called thieves and vandals, and we would frequently sneak away from the town at night to the ocean caves to eat our stolen food and gawk at alien trinkets we acquired.
I could remember it like it was days ago.
I was sitting out on some wet stones, throwing rocks into the ocean as my friends joked around and yelled at each other as they ate stolen rations. I remember the cold breeze steadily growing warm. Something struck me as dreadfully wrong as the silver shimmers on the water slowly turned orange. There was smoke in the air.
Suddenly my heart was racing, and I was compelled to climb up over the sea stones and look behind us where our holt village was. Scorching swafts of fire blanketed the hills as I saw our farm fields and homes vanish in a blaze. I could see shadows backed by the fire, huge Rothaki clad in armor were moving from building to building as scampering Lumirians either fled or pleaded with them. I saw in the distance a Rothaki soldier kill a man with his disruptor, the hollow electric pop of it with its little green flash, blowing chunks of his body out as he collapsed into an unmoving heap. I saw him move over to one of his comrades, who pointed at the next building and leveled his flamethrower on it.
And I hid in the cave and I cried.
I heard more gunshots not long after but I dare not look. Seeing the orange reflecting off the waves was dreadful enough. I didn’t look. I let myself imagine it, imagine it like when I was a kid and I dreamed of clear blue skies and a cold sea breeze with boundless fish down below. I had a good imagination.
Not long after I was surprised by the sound of voices up above, my friends had already gone and run, but I did recognize them as Lumirian voices. I remember hiding in the wet sand, unsure if they were collaborators working with the Rothaki up there, looking for survivors. I had a particularly hefty stone in hand, fearing that this was the case I was ready to kill, kill anyone, it didn’t matter if I died.
And that was when two disheveled looking women came in, mag rifles slung across their backs as they awkwardly carried an improvised stretcher with a wounded man on it. My father. They saw me the instant I dropped my stone, it hit the mud with a smack which made them wheel around and train their guns on this unarmed crying teenager. Neither of them shot, and I remember pushing my way past them to see my broken father on that stretcher. I remember another man who I later learned was named Moss entered from outside but I barely noticed him. My father was here. His stomach was sopping wet and drenched with blood that had stained through all his clothes. I could feel a hole in his side big enough to put my paw in. There was a look of terror in his eyes when he saw me, he knew that I was going to see him die there.
He told me that he tried, he tried to stop them. The Rothaki had come looking to kill and had begun burning the town. My father said he begged, he pleaded, but they kept going, and they shot him. Through the sobbing I could hear him say how they burnt down our farm, his grandmother’s garden, our home with my brothers and sisters inside. My poor old grandfather too... It was all gone. Everything he worked for all his life, except for me. I was all he had left.
I couldn’t remember the face he was making through the tears I had in my eyes.
He told me that I was the last he would care for.
I found out later that my father had been in the resistance. For most of my youth, I hated him, I won’t lie, it was a quiet hate that kind of festered. I saw him as a man who was complacent with the world, who wouldn’t do anything about the evil in it. And I was wrong. He was stronger than anyone I have ever met. The resistance fighters who were with my father that night told me that the Rothaki had come looking for revenge, as someone had been funneling information to the resistance.
My father?
It was him. The clerk. The quiet sad man who had been forced to give up fishing with his own father. He wasn’t a fighter or anything nearly as glorious. Just a man who tried to keep his head down, a man who got sick of it and tried to help. I don’t know what he did in the town. Logistic work I think, he was deep enough in the government to see the ledgers and manifests for the labor camps and he smuggled out what little information he could. That is how the resistance knew which camps were doing what, and where organized mass murder was about to take place, what towns were in their sights, sometimes even when a high value prisoner was being moved. I don’t know how many people my father saved with his work. Some of the people who I met later called him the bravest man they knew, because he stayed so close to the Rothaki, he stayed close and stole every bit of information he could when he could have been found out any day and killed right there. He was as sick of what had become of Mekon as I was.
I held his hand through the night, even after he died.
I joined the resistance that night.
But what about the people on the ground?
The Lumirians were a peaceful race of aquatic mammalians, living simple lives and just starting to reach for the stars, when the Rothaki showed up and changed everything.
You will be the last I care for.
Those were among the final words my father ever said. It was in the Season of Storms, back when I was a mere fourteen, towards the end of the Rothaki Occupation. I had never seen a Mekon free, but the memory of a time where the sky didn’t burn and when the holt village gathered in the monastery grounds for Harvest Festival without fear haunted my father and grandfather like the spectre of a lost lover. I had only heard stories; tales of a time where there were weekly fishing reports, not weekly lists of those who had gone missing. A simpler time, so sweet sounding it may as well have just been a story. It was something my grandfather dwelled on and squaked on about for hours on end. Honestly there were times where I wish he would have just stopped.
It made me mad.
Sometimes I could feel my blood boil as he told our holt village about the time he had gone out to fish just before this grand typhoon; he had gone out with his friend, Sula, for one last spearfishing sail before the Season of Storms. I could see the glimmer in his eyes when he spoke of the tale. Tears he held back with the experience of age. He recounted the cold air and the gently rolling waves, how Sula and he would fight the wind and the rigging as they made their way towards the safe shallows some two leagues out into the shoals. White sand and breaking waves marked dangerous waters, and he had said that what he lacked in sailing skill he made up for with his aim. He admitted that Sula did all the skilled work on the boat, and at times he was perhaps more of a hassle than a help. He’d tell us about how the sky was as clear and as deep a sapphire, and how you could see the ghostly shadow and glaring crescent of Mekon-Sul as our little watery world orbited around her. I dreamed of those skies with longing when I was younger. At this point, it saddened me to know that they were taken away from me before I had ever seen them.
My grandfather would tell us about how the cold ocean water sprayed up on his face as they crested waves, how he could not get the smell of the Tulan-ik he used for bait out of his paws, and how he fished with a bone spear made by his own father rather than using one of the carbon composite shafts you could buy in the city center. He’d tell us about the time where he spent a full ten minutes under water, searching through the clear depths and lurking between outcroppings of red coral and how he’d have to avoid the anemones that blended their poisoning stingers into the wafting seaweed near the bottom of the cove. He’d say how he hunted his famed sand-shark, a creature of legend to the children of our holt village, for it was some twelve tails in length with teeth the size of his paw. He’d tell us about how he fought with the beast and how it nearly took his leg, and how it grew more ferocious as it came to realize it smelled the inky blood of a Lumirian. It was an exciting tale that went on longer than it should have and overstayed its welcome like bad neighbour. It was a riveting tale, it always got the youngest to use their imaginations to their fullest… just like my grandfather.
Even now when I think about it, my mouth grows sour and my nerves grow tense. It makes me mad, as I would never have that. I feel greedy.
My father was young when the Rothaki of the Fell Throne made planetfall for the first time. Despite what it may have sounded like, the Lumirians are by no means a primitive species. The old nation states of Mekon had made it into space by the time of my grandfather. I can’t speak much of what happened at first contact. Likely what you’d expect. The Fell Throne had made a declaration to the nations of Mekon and her outlying colonies that effective immediately they were to be annexed and fell under the direct jurisdiction of the Fell Throne. This all happened very quickly from what I was told by my father. The Rothaki ships had only been spotted in the system a week or so prior to their official communication, and their sighting sparked a new wave of scientific and militaristic frenzy as first contact with an alien race loomed on the horizon. But it was not a peaceful meeting, as you are already aware.
Panic was the first thing, everyone was confused and frightened by this announcement. Some called it out as a hoax of some kind, our Monastery Keepers frantically sought out prophecies to explain and calm the populace, while others immediately broadcast messages that they have surrendered. When it became obvious that there wouldn’t be any negotiations prior to our subjugation, the fleeting nation states elected to resist the Rothaki. I was told that there was some hope for a time.
My father said that there was a war, though it was brief. Before they were defeated and dismantled, the old nation states launched a coordinated attack on the Rothaki, but not before each capital city had been obliterated by orbital weapons. It was a fast war. The militaries did manage to damage the invasion ships and destroy some with the asteroid defense system, apparently the Rothaki had underestimated our resolve at the time. LD bombs were detonated at their primary beachheads, incinerating their occupation troops within their landing craft in brilliant thermonuclear blasts. This trick only worked once, it was one coordinated attack. The last one.
The war lasted five days.
My father told me that our people had been broken by then. He didn’t understand what was going on at the time, he was so young. I can’t imagine him like that, a child, crying, tugging at his father’s coat as news came in over the radio with stories about how the towns his friends lived in vanished off the map never to be seen again. I can’t picture it now, not as I remember him. Not that man, he was so strong.
I don’t know if I can even say I had a childhood. Everything felt so wrong. I could count the number of times where people were genuinely happy on one paw. I heard stories about how our parents and grandparents fished and played out in the caves. We couldn’t. My parents said the water wasn’t always such a dull gray color, that it didn’t always feel slippery near the surface, they said it wasn’t safe in certain places. It was from the strip mining, they said. And the unsafe places, well, kids never listen. I went there, to the shallow beaches out on the westside of the archipelago. It was where the current carried the bodies. That is why my mother and father said not to go there. Maybe I should have listened.
Then again there shouldn’t have been bodies there.
My father became some kind of clerk in the city. My grandfather was a fisherman, but he couldn’t do that anymore as he had grown old and his good friend Sula had been killed. Worse yet, the fish had gone from the shallows and the water soured like bad ale. He moved on to farming. My grandfather made the paddies where he planted and grew his crops his life’s work. The other fishers from the holt village soon worked for him, and the farms gave the people something to focus on. I had so much more respect for my grandfather than for my father at that time. I remember how frustrated I was with him. I had grown up so bitter and hollow feeling, I remember thinking about what my father did and wondering how he could just go about his life like this, he was practically working for the Rothaki with how he had rolled over. He was even called a collaborator, everyone in the government was at some point.
Our world changed with the puppet government the Rothaki had installed. Some Lumirians were given power, just enough power to try to appease the public as the Rothaki looked over their shoulders and their troops patrolled the streets of our villages. Labor camps were established along the inner coastlines. People would frequently vanish, like my older brother and my uncle, and there were weekly raids as the Rothaki troops and Lumirian collaborators broke into homes and searched for signs of anything relating to the resistance, often executing those who made a stand or talked back to them. People frequently vanished at night. I remember how our neighbours often came home injured and bloody with marks that they dared not speak of. The Rothaki haunted our villages and our fields. I remember my father looked so tired all the time. He was always watching them with fear in his eyes. I called him a coward, right to his face, in front of my mother. They ended up taking her away from us a month later, a collaborator said that she was to be taken to the Rothaki to “comfort” them. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. I never saw her again.
There was a resistance. I only heard whispers of them, sometimes the Rothaki guards could be overheard talking about how a cargo ship was damaged, or how a labor camp had their mining drills sabotaged. How a Rothaki landing pad had exploded or how a general had been poisoned. Bits and pieces, but it was enough to know that there was some hope out there. It was a growing hope for me. Despite what our overlords put up for a face we all knew that they were failable and mortal.
I remember when I asked my father about the resistance. I remember his eyes, he was so scared. He was always scared. The thought of losing one of his daughters must have terrified him beyond anything I could have imagined. But at the same time I could tell he was expecting me to ask about them. I was the oldest of his children, the most bitter, the quickest to anger, the one that had the most righteous inclinations. Stories of how beautiful and peaceful our world had been soured me to the core. It was like a dream that my grandfather had given me, the idea of a world where there were clear skies and oceans that were full of life, a world with happy families and villages that didn’t have a looming ghost lingering over them that would cart away their mothers and fathers in the dead of night. A time where the sky didn’t turn gray with smoke and when the land lacked scars, when the ocean was a brilliant lifegiving blue and didn’t wash the corpses of our neighbours up onto the beach.
I was afraid of so much and I wanted so many things to change. I wanted to claw and rip these changes out of the corpse of a Rothaki. But sometimes I think I just wanted to hurt them. I didn’t think that was so bad. And I am still not sure that is a bad thing to want.
When I was fourteen, during the Season of Storms, there was a night that would take great effort to forget. I was rebellious in my youth, and I would often slink away at night with some of my friends and cousins. I had known some people who would have been called thieves and vandals, and we would frequently sneak away from the town at night to the ocean caves to eat our stolen food and gawk at alien trinkets we acquired.
I could remember it like it was days ago.
I was sitting out on some wet stones, throwing rocks into the ocean as my friends joked around and yelled at each other as they ate stolen rations. I remember the cold breeze steadily growing warm. Something struck me as dreadfully wrong as the silver shimmers on the water slowly turned orange. There was smoke in the air.
Suddenly my heart was racing, and I was compelled to climb up over the sea stones and look behind us where our holt village was. Scorching swafts of fire blanketed the hills as I saw our farm fields and homes vanish in a blaze. I could see shadows backed by the fire, huge Rothaki clad in armor were moving from building to building as scampering Lumirians either fled or pleaded with them. I saw in the distance a Rothaki soldier kill a man with his disruptor, the hollow electric pop of it with its little green flash, blowing chunks of his body out as he collapsed into an unmoving heap. I saw him move over to one of his comrades, who pointed at the next building and leveled his flamethrower on it.
And I hid in the cave and I cried.
I heard more gunshots not long after but I dare not look. Seeing the orange reflecting off the waves was dreadful enough. I didn’t look. I let myself imagine it, imagine it like when I was a kid and I dreamed of clear blue skies and a cold sea breeze with boundless fish down below. I had a good imagination.
Not long after I was surprised by the sound of voices up above, my friends had already gone and run, but I did recognize them as Lumirian voices. I remember hiding in the wet sand, unsure if they were collaborators working with the Rothaki up there, looking for survivors. I had a particularly hefty stone in hand, fearing that this was the case I was ready to kill, kill anyone, it didn’t matter if I died.
And that was when two disheveled looking women came in, mag rifles slung across their backs as they awkwardly carried an improvised stretcher with a wounded man on it. My father. They saw me the instant I dropped my stone, it hit the mud with a smack which made them wheel around and train their guns on this unarmed crying teenager. Neither of them shot, and I remember pushing my way past them to see my broken father on that stretcher. I remember another man who I later learned was named Moss entered from outside but I barely noticed him. My father was here. His stomach was sopping wet and drenched with blood that had stained through all his clothes. I could feel a hole in his side big enough to put my paw in. There was a look of terror in his eyes when he saw me, he knew that I was going to see him die there.
He told me that he tried, he tried to stop them. The Rothaki had come looking to kill and had begun burning the town. My father said he begged, he pleaded, but they kept going, and they shot him. Through the sobbing I could hear him say how they burnt down our farm, his grandmother’s garden, our home with my brothers and sisters inside. My poor old grandfather too... It was all gone. Everything he worked for all his life, except for me. I was all he had left.
I couldn’t remember the face he was making through the tears I had in my eyes.
He told me that I was the last he would care for.
I found out later that my father had been in the resistance. For most of my youth, I hated him, I won’t lie, it was a quiet hate that kind of festered. I saw him as a man who was complacent with the world, who wouldn’t do anything about the evil in it. And I was wrong. He was stronger than anyone I have ever met. The resistance fighters who were with my father that night told me that the Rothaki had come looking for revenge, as someone had been funneling information to the resistance.
My father?
It was him. The clerk. The quiet sad man who had been forced to give up fishing with his own father. He wasn’t a fighter or anything nearly as glorious. Just a man who tried to keep his head down, a man who got sick of it and tried to help. I don’t know what he did in the town. Logistic work I think, he was deep enough in the government to see the ledgers and manifests for the labor camps and he smuggled out what little information he could. That is how the resistance knew which camps were doing what, and where organized mass murder was about to take place, what towns were in their sights, sometimes even when a high value prisoner was being moved. I don’t know how many people my father saved with his work. Some of the people who I met later called him the bravest man they knew, because he stayed so close to the Rothaki, he stayed close and stole every bit of information he could when he could have been found out any day and killed right there. He was as sick of what had become of Mekon as I was.
I held his hand through the night, even after he died.
I joined the resistance that night.
