Sword of the Gods: The Chosen One

by Anna Erishkigal

Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.04

  51-Pegasi-4 – Genocide Memorial

  Prime Minister Lucifer

  Lucifer

  Lucifer stared at the wasteland which stretched before him, his heart as empty as the empty field where only a handful of people had shown up to commemorate the passing of an entire species. Most were descendants, such as himself, whose ancestors had been cast off of this world because they had not met the Seraphim’s high moral standards. A few reporters from obscure local networks had shown up, but no big players from the Alliance itself. Nobody cared about the Seraphim whose murders had taken all hope of evolution for the hybrids along with them.

  “Today is the 25th anniversary of the 51-Pegasi-4 genocide.”

  Lucifer's wings drooped as he stood in front of the wall listing the names of the dead, the stark black granite a sharp contrast against his snowy white wings. It would have made a magnificent publicity shot … if anyone had cared. A lone reporter snapped a photograph.

  'This speech serves no political purpose. You're wasting your precious time…'

  'Oh … shut up!' he told that small, nasty voice that lived inside of his head. Zepar had scheduled him to be someplace else today, but he'd given him the slip. His conversation with Hashem had made him realize that his adopted father was not going to step in and rescue his species any more than anyone had saved the people of this world.

  “Eleven million people called this world their home," Lucifer said. "This was a peaceful colony where many races lived in harmony. Including refugees from the Sata’an Empire. Races people thought of as enemies raised their families here … together."

  He glanced at the names on the black granite wall. Alongside the tell-tale Angelic names ending with ‘il or ‘el were names bearing the mark of almost every other species in the galaxy. Two out-of-uniform Sata'anic males kneeled before one of the black granite slabs that listed the names of the dead, one holding the other up as they solemnly ran their claws along a list of family names that were not Angelic in origin, but Sata'anic.

  "They were spiritual beings united in a single purpose," he said. "They'd evolved beyond their baser impulses, but they forgot that the rest of the galaxy had not.”

  He was too much of a pragmatist to idealize the failed Seraphim quest to create Utopia. It had failed, miserably, ending in their own extinction. But now, more than ever, he understood the impulse which had driven them to turn their backs on both empires.

  “Nobody protected this world." He looked out at the smattering of military uniforms. Hybrids, like him, who recognized a lot more than a few million civilians had died that day. “They insisted they were a peaceful planet and didn't need protecting. All they wanted was to stay out of the intrigues of the other empires. They were above it, and they viewed our little dramas with disgust.”

  It was a rhetorical question, really. If somebody were to ever hand him a planet, far from the influence of Shay'tan and his father, what would he do differently? Defend them? How? His biological father had tried to build a Third Empire and been crushed between the other two, uniting Hashem and Shay'tan in rare agreement to hit the rebel base with a planet-killer. It was an act of genocide which had come back to bite the Emperor in the backside when his mother had reacted to his biological father's death by willing herself to die.

  Hide? Until the Seraphim had been slaughtered, it had been impossible to even find the Seraphim homeworld. But now everyone in the galaxy knew where pirates had destroyed them. Gone. The Seraphim who were his ancestors were gone. Extinct. Just as, unable to reproduce, his bloodline was now going extinct. He was the last of his kind.

  “They wanted to be left alone," Lucifer's voice was almost a whisper. "So we left them alone. -I- left them alone. It was within my power while my father was away to station warships in this sector to protect them, but I didn't." He stared at the empty green fields that were being reclaimed as forest. "I would like to say it was because we respected their wishes. But truth be told, we thought they had nothing to offer us. No resources. No trade. They were a completely self-enclosed world who wanted nothing to do with us, and we wanted nothing to do with them in return.”

  Lucifer closed his eyes and caught his breath. He could almost feel the screams of the dying as he spoke. Zepar had told him horror stories about the genetic weakness the Seraphim had deliberately bred into their sub-species, ensuring their entire population would be tied to one another spiritually so that harm to one member would be harm to them all. Nobody had ever dreamed someone would intentionally use that defect to destroy them. He remembered his own mother's sadness even though she'd never stepped foot upon this world.

  “My mother's people came from this world." He looked down at his empty hands. Hands which lacked the cue cards he usually relied upon when making speeches. Today's speech was coming straight from his heart. He decided, just for once, to speak the truth his father didn't want told. “As a species, the Seraphim were so close to genetic perfection they were expected to ascend to take the place of the Wheles.”

  Guilt assailed his consciousness. Why had he left the Seraphim sub-species alone instead of enticing them back into the Alliance? Why had he allowed his anger at this species, whose foolish romantic notions had cost him the life of his mother, to cloud his judgment? He'd refused to seek diplomatic ties with this world after Hashem had disappeared and eleven million people had paid with their lives.

  “Perhaps that's why they were all killed?" Lucifer bowed his head. He had no more words to describe his sense of loss, both for the Seraphim, and for his own species. “I would like to observe a moment of silence.”

  The ceremony broke up as soon as he was finished. A few reporters asked questions, but the media circus which usually dogged his every step was as conspicuously absent today as the people who should have been living here and were not. Nobody cared. Just as his father didn't care that the hybrids were dying out.

  An elderly couple, well into their 900th year, sobbed in the background, their black-brown wings and dark hair betraying them as two of the few surviving full-blooded Seraphim who had been off-world when it had happened. They shakily made their way over to where he stood giving a quote to a junior reporter awe-struck the Prime Minister had made an unexpected appearance. The couple didn't approach him the way a citizen normally did the Alliance's highest elected official, but with that strange ease of equality he could remember his mother practiced even though she'd never stepped foot upon the Seraphim homeworld.

  “We knew your grandmother." The elderly woman shook his hand. Her dark hair was peppered with grey, as were her dark wings. The old woman's skin was wrinkled and paper-thin with age.

  “It was tragic,” the elderly man's hands trembled with age. “What Zuriel did to her … ouch!”

  The elderly woman elbowed her mate in the ribs.

  “I never knew them,” Lucifer said. “They both died before I was born."

  His mother had never told him why his ancestors had been cast off of this planet. Perhaps she'd not known herself? He only knew the Seraphim considered it shameful to not follow your mate into the dreamtime when they died. Should he ask the elderly couple what had really happened? No. It only rubbed salt in the old wound of his mother abandoning him for a mate who had abandoned her as soon as he'd impregnated her. He remembered her sadness…

  “The genocide was not your fault,” the man's voice was wispy and thin. “We never dreamed pirates would come all the way out here. This planet was chosen because its only resource was its fertile soil. Without people to till it, it's worthless.”

  Lucifer noted the hollow circles beneath the old man's eyes. He was dying. The anger he felt towards his mother dissolved.

  “Soon we'll reunite with our children and grandchildren,” the woman took her husband's hand. “We don't wish to be a part of the material realm anymore.”

  “I can feel them waiting for us,” the man's eyes looked right through Lucifer as though he were staring someplace
far beyond. “Just but on the other side."

  Lucifer's wings trembled. Those were the exact same words his mother had whispered with her dying breath. He looked away so the couple wouldn't see his eyes were too bright and shiny for someone as above-the-fray as the Alliance Prime Minister. The elderly Seraphim man had one foot in the dreamtime. It wouldn't be long before whatever ailment was eating away at him killed him.

  “Come, dear,” the woman said. “We have an appointment to keep.”

  Lucifer watched them shuffle into the fading sunlight. The frail wife helped the even frailer husband along, the last remnants of a species that was now extinct. Just as the rest of the hybrids were about to go extinct.

  His comms pin had been blinking all afternoon. Zepar. Trying to get him off to some diplomatic mission with an emissary of the Tokoloshe Kingdom. Screw Zepar! Keying in a different comms frequency, he called the commander of his diplomatic carrier.

  “Colonel Marbas,” Lucifer said. “Tell Zepar I'm spending the night down here on the planet.”

  “Zepar has been frantic to get hold of you, Sir,” Colonel Marbas said. “He was furious when we told him you ordered us not to provide transport down to the planet.”

  “I don't answer to Zepar,” Lucifer said. “I'll be back in the morning. You're not to transport him anywhere. Got that?" He cut Marbas off before he could give him an argument.

  A few reporters lit candles and lay flowers along the long, black wall before getting into their shuttle craft and departing. There were no accommodations on this planet. No hotels. No restaurants. No stores to get food. No people. Just the overgrown skeletons of burned out houses, clustered into little communities where people had once lived and worked together in close-knit family units and empty fields.

  For once in his overly-busy, overly-scheduled life, Lucifer was alone with his thoughts. Sitting on the ground with his back against the cold, black granite memorial, he encircled himself in his wings and contemplated the impending demise of his own species.

  “Is this spot taken?” a voice rumbled.

  Looking up, he saw a middle-aged Leonid male. Lieutenant-General Valepor, out of uniform and dressed as a civilian. His golden leonine eyes reflected the scant glow of the moonlight.

  “It's an empty planet." Lucifer didn't feel like company, but it was inappropriate to object. This was a public memorial. He adjusted his wings so that the general could sit.

  Valepor sat down and didn't speak, his tail twitching thoughtfully. They both stared out at the darkness, alone in their thoughts.

  “Mine was the first Alliance ship to arrive at the scene,” Valepor finally said. “We didn't even know this planet was here until we received a distress call." A low growl rumbled in the Leonid commander's throat. "I've seen a lot of terrible things in my lifetime, but this was the worst. They slaughtered every living sentient creature and burned the buildings to the ground. Most of the bodies were so badly burned we were never able to identify them.”

  “Was there any indication of a reason?” Lucifer asked. He knew there wasn’t, but sometimes things didn't make it into the official report.

  “This was not about resources,” Valepor said. “Somebody wanted to make an example of these people. Shay’tan only butchers those who piss him off and subjugates the rest. This was not his style.”

  “The sole eyewitness said it was Sata’an soldiers,” Lucifer said.

  “That’s what the three dead lizard-soldiers were wearing that he killed,” Valepor said. “But the uniforms were the old style. Out of date. It took us forever to get the kid to even speak. He almost took out half a squadron with that sword he was carrying when we tried to remove him from his mother’s body. The sword was bigger than he was, but he was determined to protect her.”

  “Mikhail." Resentment clenched at his gut at the mere mention of the boy's name. Another one of his father's pet projects! After the 51-Pegasi-4 genocide, Hashem had returned from the ascended realms and started managing his empire again. Only Hashem was no longer interested in Lucifer because his mother had rejected him! Now he wanted Jophiel! And to run a million genetic tests on the first full-blooded Seraphim to come off of 51-Pegasi-4 not because he was defective, but because the kid had nowhere else to go and was too young to tell the Emperor ‘no.’

  “I'm still stationed in the sector,” Valepor said. “It seemed right to come today. It's disappointing that so few did. ”

  “My Chief of Staff was spitting fire,” Lucifer admitted. “No PR value in coming to a dead planet. He's still under the illusion my father’s breeding program will save the day.”

  “Bullshit,” Valepor said softly. “It hasn’t worked for us. I've managed to sire one pair of cubs during all my years of trying. Most of the poor guys now can’t even do that. We are going the way of the Wheles.”

  “We'll be right behind you,” Lucifer said. “I've pleaded with Hashem to pay attention, but he says he doesn't know how to fix us. He's already put in an order for all new equipment manufactured for your carriers to fit Spiderid physiology.”

  “I don't mind the bugs,” Valepor said with a shrug. “They pull their weight. I just don't like the fact that this is a problem we can't fight! It's not our nature to go down without a battle.”

  “The Seraphim didn't fight their killers?” Lucifer asked. “Why? Why would they just lie down and allow themselves to be exterminated?”

  “They even slaughtered the Sata’anic civilians." Valepor pointed to a segment of the black granite wall which contained Sata'anic names. “Shay’tan keeps the females confined to the Hades cluster, so once they defect, they have no hope of ever starting a family. Many were adopted into Seraphim families as farm labor. I found a lizard person curled around a Seraphim child, trying to use his body as a shield to save her. They killed him. And then they killed the little girl. But not one of them fought back. Not even the non-Seraphim. Only the boy fought back and survived.”

  “Utopia is great in theory,” Lucifer said. “But in real life, there are too many people waiting to reach out and take it from you so they can make a fast buck." He thoughtfully twirled a snowy white feather, a nervous habit he had picked up from his mother. "Like me. I'm as greedy as any of them.”

  “And yet you're the only one who came here today,” Valepor said.

  Silence stretched out between them. Yes. Why had he come?

  “Our races are dying,” Lucifer said. “When we go, we’re going to drag the Alliance with us. It seemed the most appropriate place to spend the afternoon.”

  They sat in silence until the general's comms pin chirped. His transport had arrived. They shook hands and parted ways, leaving Lucifer alone with the ghosts which haunted this world. He dreamt of them. Fitful dreams of Seraphim whose mates refused to follow them into the dreamtime and a dark, evil thing which devoured everything in its path.

  The next morning, he found the elderly Seraphim couple beneath the spreading branches of a great tree. A headstone commemorated the graves of a family of related individuals. The couple had lain down together on a blanket, curled up in each other’s arms, and died. Lucifer called his ship and ordered them to send a crew to bury them exactly where they'd willed themselves to die. He didn't report it to the official authorities. That would necessitate an autopsy, an inquiry, and the couple being buried in separate coffins someplace other than with the family they'd obviously come here to rejoin. Separating them seemed … wrong. It gave him conflicting emotions that he really didn't want to deal with right now.

  He gave Zepar crap about every single cockamamie political scheme he proposed that day. He'd suffered from migraines for almost as long as he could remember. Mumbling an apology about not feeling well, Lucifer headed down to his personal quarters to sleep it off.

  Chapter 42