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1
The stars belong to everyone.
That’s what Spacers believe.
All of the sentient races–everything that exists–came from the stars. No one owns them.
Whatever any other sentients and the Gigacorps claim.
The stars are always free.
In the end, everything and everyone returns to them.
Naero’s parents, her friends, and her space-faring people taught her to cherish and respect the harsh beauty of space for what it was and for what it offered: Freedom. Challenge. Everything.
Her mother was her sun, and gave her light, life, and love.
Her father was her ship, her courage and adventure.
In her Spacer Clan she found herself, others–knowledge, strength and joy.
Naero woke up in her quarters and scribbled down the poetry and thoughts that had danced in her head while she snoozed. She scrawled on an old-style lighted pad with a pen she kept in reach of her bunk, the same way her illustrious father did.
This was the way he taught her, to be a poet warrior, a philosopher king…or queen. This was the blood she came from.
She let the pad fade, lay back down, and drifted off again, one night before her nineteenth birthday. One year to go before she’d come of age and could captain a ship–her own ship–just as her famous mother had done at that age.
For a young Spacer warrior in her Clan’s merchant fleet, Naero often experienced strange, wildly vivid dreams when she slept.
Tonight’s nightmare was exceptionally bizarre and frightening. As usual, she was fighting something.
She struggled against some kind of devouring darkness. It penetrated her very flesh, violating her mind with horror and abject agony. No matter how she resisted, it absorbed her like a giant amoeba.
Yet the attacking darkness came from within her as well, and that was the most frightening part of it all somehow. The fact that such negative energy and twisted desires were part of her, and she part of them.
Parts of her secretly enjoyed some of those demented feelings–even yearned for them.
They lusted for the destroying power to subjugate everything and everyone to her will, and inflict suffering and misery upon them all, crushing and decimating them under the grinding heel of her enraged might.
Just as her strength to resist failed, right on the verge of her being swallowed up by the insane annihilation, the darkness parted.
A shining, beautiful, green young man with flowing golden hair appeared, his blinding sword cutting through the deep shadows.
She thrust both arms toward him for rescue.
He plunged his blade through her forehead, transfixing her gasping face upon its blazing length. She heard, felt his voice in her mind.
I’m sorry. This will not hold the Chaos back for long.