Beloved is one series of lore entries that comes in the Lightfall's Collector Edition, alongside Breakdown and Bitter. It is a compendium of Empress Caiatl's that discusses key moments of her life in the empire as Princess Imperial to Emperor Calus to her later years as Empress.
I am three. My father is pregnant again.
The woman standing guard over his brood bower is not my mother. My father invites me to visit him while he nurses her young, but I am afraid to pass her. Her tusks are huge-ah! huge. She greets me kindly and gives me a scraping stick to scratch my father's hide. I do not understand where my mother has gone. In the stories Ahztja tells me, mates stay together their whole lives. But Ahztja is a Psion. Maybe there are things about mates that Psions do not know.
I go into the bower. I ask my father if my mother is dead.
He draws me close. He asks me to sing to my new siblings. His belly is soft and strong, fat with the brood pouches where the babies grow. I watch one climb to find his teat. I know that mother and father mate, that mother gestates the young and delivers them to father's pouches, that father broods them until they are weaned. Ahztja taught me how the mother must stand guard while he is sessile and vulnerable. She must keep the other females away from him, lest he discard her offspring and take on the brood of another female.
I ask my father if that is really true. Can a father choose to forsake his children?
Of course, my father says. "That's how you know that I love you. I could have turned you out of me, and I did not.
He tickles me. I laugh.
I am centuries old.
I am beating an assassin to death. Their helmet splinters in my fists. Their taunt rings in my sinuses: You are a child in a general’s costume. None of the vision of your father. None of the drive or strength of the one they call Dominus... You will not be remembered.
My father put those words in the assassin's mouth. He put the blade in the assassin's hands.
I have been stabbed in the ribcage, but the ribs of the Cabal are a closed vault. We evolved to face our enemy. I have been shot in the arm, but I wear armor, even in private. I have been shot in the hand, but I have another to make a fist.
I break the assassin's skull as I broke my father's heart.
I send the enactine blade back to him, as he will one day send it back to me.
I am three. Something has gone wrong between the woman and my father.
I slide on my greased belly through palace halls, pretending I am a whale-kayak. Guards smile at me and I smile back, but I keep my ear pressed to the floor.
Nearby, the woman bellows in his chambers
She says he has not kept his political promises to the ex-Praetorate families that approved their match. He is so wounded, he says. Doesn't his luscious body delight her? Doesn't the right to fill his pouches with her young bring her joy? She says she is not a sexist. and this is not the Era of Lead. She worries about policy and external security, not his lusciousness. He complains that she does not make him happy. She says there is more to life than happiness. He disagrees. She calls him weak. He calls her a curse and a killer.
She roars and strikes him. I gasp into the floor. It is the first time I have ever heard my father in pain. The guards stand very still.
Then there is a terrible sound. I am too young to understand it as the sound of a father opening his brood pouches.
"I do not want them anymore," my father the emperor says, quite softly. "If you cannot love me, then how could they? You can find another male with open pouches, some barracks beau. But be sure I never know him. I will not have by-blows."
The large-tusked woman screams in rage. She stampedes out, past the guards, past me. Her hands are full of little things.
I am thirty-five years old.
I have just returned to the palace from my first deployment on the cruiser Aedile Tlolol, showing our banner in the Sindû marches. I saw no action. I feel like a fraud. The sheltered Princess-Imperial who never left the rails of her father's brood pouch. He has demanded that the Evocate-General promote me to a staff position back home. She has refused.
In a tantrum, Father throws a tremendous celebration to commemorate my return. The streets of Torobatl run pulpy with trampled fruit. The skies rain cloudfry stunned by fireworks. I escape my attendants and stand in a corner of the palace ballroom, drinking pollened water and pretending I am back in my fighter.
"Your name is a prayer for war," the Evocate-General says.
I snap to attention. She laughs at me and offers a small harpoon of canapes and a cocktail with a middling-sized shrub. I decline, and she tsks. "You should enjoy yourself. It's your party." Although we both know it is his party.
"My father named me for a star," I say. "Nothing to do with war."
"Yes. But the star Caiatl was named for a myth. Not an old homeworld myth, either. A myth from the Age of Sails, when we conquered the stars. Surely you know it, assuming that you've been briefed on the OXA?"
"The Odyle Xenotaph Anarchive. Sometimes OXTA, depending on how you construct the acronym. The alien oracle that led us to the graves of Aark." Must be wary, now. OXA is a Psion myth, and the Psions are a sensitive topic. My father wants to free them from bondage. "It claimed to record the story of the galaxy, and to prophesize what may yet come."
"A black box for galactic civilizations, if you prefer it in pilot's terms." The Evocate-General nods to the pin on my right pauldron. I am conscious of my shaved-down tusks, of the sores left by the fighter's interface. "The doomed and the damned left the record of their downfall in the OXA. Your star got its name from the oldest myths in that archive. And when your mother told your father that story... the star became your name. A prayer that all will go as it must... and the way it must go is struggle."
"Aiat." Not a word in Ulurant or any other Cabal tongue. "But Caiatl means something else."
"Yes. 'It may not always go as it needs to go.’ A good name for a soldier."
"A strange name for a daughter." I say. "Your father chose it for your mother's sake. Out of love." I remain at attention. I do not look at her. "So she's dead."
The Evocate-General looks sharply at me; I can tell by the motion of her cocktail shrub in the edge of my vision. "He never told you?"
"No."
"Well." She sounds genuinely shocked. "Then. It's not my place."
"Evocate-General." A junior pilot should not address her senior officer so directly, but we are in the palace, and I am the Princess-Imperial. "What does your name mean?"
She grins. Her tusks are huge. "My parents were soldiers. Soldiers know mythology too."