Free Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains by Jeremiah D. Schmidt

pang of sympathy
for these fellow Candaran men and woman. Most of them looked
younger than him, naïve and simple, and with the dull-eyed
expression of the lowborn class. They were never equipped to think
about the grand picture; it simply wasn’t their lot, and now they
were in over their heads. He pitied them, drawn into a hopeless
conflict such as this. If any of them had a brain they would take
the captain up on his offer to leave this isle.
    And then Arvis turned to Drish. “I’m glad
you’re here safe, son, and I wish we had a bit more time for
pleasantries, but… so is the way of the Pantheon. Now I know we
didn’t exactly part on good terms last night. We both said a lot of
things that we didn’t mean—”
    “Are you so sure about that?” interrupted
Drish rudely. He wasn’t interested in his father’s olive
branch.
    “How ‘bout I let you two talk this one out
alone,” said Bar. “Seems to me like…family business, to be sure, so
I’ll leave you two at it.”
    Drish was glad to see the pirate go. Damn
meddling fool, never should have come in the first place. He should
have stayed on that damn airship of his.
    “I—” his father started, but Drish cut him
off. “Why did you do this? Why did you send that oaf to kidnap
me?”
    “ Kidnap …? Son, you were on that list,
you were in danger. I just thought that—”
    “What, that I was helpless? That I needed to
be rescued, father? I haven’t needed your help in years.”
    “I don’t understand why you’re being like
this, Drish—why you hate me so much. I’ve always told you that
working for the Empire was a foolish idea. That it didn’t matter
how much you tried to impress them. In the end you’re just another
Candaran, beneath their contempt, and easily replaceable. In the
end, they would have seen fit to stick you in the stockades sooner
or later. Why you ever agreed to sign that Oath is beyond me.”
    “You seem to forget that my life as a collaborator was going fine until you destroyed it.
It wasn’t the imperials who put me on that list; it was you—you and
this pointless ‘resistance’. This misplaced loyalty to the idea of
bringing back a lost nation and a dead king. What difference does
it make if we serve a king on the throne here on King’s Isle, or an
Emperor on the throne in Junction? How does it change the simple
rules of survival?”
    “Gods, Drish, they invaded us, slaughtered
us—”
    “We started the war!”
    “That’s what you think? We were already at
war, son, since the Endasol Engagement—before that even—when the
Empire decided to start spreading through the Candaran states of
the Giedi Cluster, and harvesting atmium that didn’t belong to
them!”
    “It doesn’t matter,” snarled Drish. “None of
it. In the end life it is what we can make of it; what we can earn;
where we can live; and what we can accomplish under the
circumstances we’re placed in. It’s not in the idea that we’re
bound together by imaginary borders held together by the invisible
force of patriotism. I’m not willing to die for a fantasy like some
people, Arvis! I just want to go home!”
    The elder Larken stood shocked into silence,
and he didn’t speak for some time. Meanwhile, Drish fumed angrily
in the cold air that blew in between them, until finally his father
spoke. The man’s tremulous voice issued soft and low, as though
trying not to upset the dead that were buried in the snow and
rubble beneath them. “You don’t have a home, Drish; it was the
Empire who took that away from you the second they invaded. Now I
just don’t know how you can keep making excuses for them in
light of that truth.”
    “No, dammit, I have a home! It’s at 521
Cooper Street, Arvis. I was there this very morning and would’ve
been there tonight, and the night after that, and the night after
that had you not taken that away through your actions.”
    Arvis sighed and looked up past the rafters,
into a steely, overcast sky peeking down