The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

by Anne Spackman

Eiron’s fighter unit had landed on Tiasenne, where they had come face-to-face with a squadron of Tiasennian comet fighters. The streets were already awash with burning buildings and blackened rubble, pieces of fighters, and zigzagging enemy planes as well as friends. It was becoming harder to tell who to fire upon, and more dangerous for friend and foe alike when reflexes took over.

  Looking down at the landscape, Eiron saw a park in the city, the tips of the trees smoldering, many of them burned to charred twigs. For a second, he was paralyzed. He was sure he recognized the place, and felt a hollow in his heart as he watched it burn. Something he had loved had been attached to it—no, surely not. How could that be?

  A moment’s lapse was enough for the fighter approaching him. Eiron only saw it coming when the missiles were released. He dodged quickly but took a hit to his engines.

  With relief he noted that the armor had absorbed most of the damage, and he was able to maintain enough control to crash land in the park. Nothing was broken, but he felt an odd pang shooting across his abdomen. He hurried to clear the plane before the enemy fighter made another pass, and he slunk into the shadows of the trees until it was nariars away.

  Staggering away on his feet, he headed towards the center of the city which he hoped might already be under Orian control. He hadn’t gotten far before he was lost in the residential areas.

  Despite his feelings against the Tiasennians, he was appalled by the number of dead people lying around in the streets, many of them children who had fled burning buildings. Nothing was moving around him; this particular area had been hit hard by the bombing. Then he saw something moving in the left field of his vision. As the object came closer, he was able to identify it.

  It was a little girl, running hysterically through the rubbled streets, her face streaked with ash and dirt, her torn clothes filthy with dried blood and soot. She saw him on the street and ran wildly towards him with huge, terrified eyes, not understanding that he wasn’t one of her people.

  Her bedraggled blond hair covered up the dried blood on her head where she had been injured by some falling debris. Just as she reached him, he could hear her soft, mumbled cries. He turned her face up to hear her better. Long lines on her tear-streaked face had traced a clean path from her eyes to her chin.

  “Daddy, daddy’s dying, he’s dying...” her voice faded, and she ceased crying until her face contorted with a new memory. “Oh, Mommy, Mommy’s hurt! She can’t move!” she cried and grabbed him by the hand, tugging him hard and pulling him through the streets to a collapsed building not far off. She pulled him through a sunken entranceway not two micro-nariars high and into a dark rubble-filled room.

  On the floor a man lay sprawled where a great section of brick wall had crushed him. His lifeless eyes stared back, fixed in death. A great pool of blood lay slick on the ground on the other side of the room, but the roof had collapsed even further and covered half of it.

  The girl stared uncomprehending for a moment before she began to scream hysterically and beat the debris with her tiny fists. “Mommy!” She cried over and over again.

  He dragged her away, but she didn’t want to leave, so he picked her up and carried her away, back out into the chaos and destruction that was once a fair city called Inen.