Lionel Graveheart I

  Lionel stood attending the guests at his family’s annual ball, his impeccable manners and clean appearance a mirror of his father’s. A perfect heir, they called him. Yet when he caught his reflection in the gilded mirrors, he saw only a stranger in a uniform two sizes too tight.

  This was normal for any noble of the Empire. Nobles cared for only three things: wealth, power, and legacy. For the Gravehearts—a house young enough that its silver still smelled of gunpowder—legacy was the hardest currency. His late grandfather had clawed their power through the military; his father had laundered it into wealth through trade and marriages. Now it fell to Lionel to secure their name.

  Across the room, his sister held court at a table of women. Camilla Graveheart, sixteen and terrifying, had them enamored with every word she spoke, every gesture she made. She laughed at some unheard joke, and like trained hounds, the others followed—louder than necessary, leaning in as if her every sigh were a secret. Lionel watched as she traced a finger along her wineglass, and the table fell silent. Then, with a glance toward the Duke’s son, she murmured, “I heard the Aster fleet is already mobilized.” A dozen heads swiveled toward the Duke’s heir, eyes alight with fresh gossip.

  Mission accomplished.

  Camilla was the most terrifying person Lionel knew. Two years his junior, she played with everyone—their parents, their peers, even the Emperor’s shadowy envoys. Sometimes, he wondered if she’d forgotten her true self beneath the layers of manipulation. Not that it mattered. She’d always been like this: brilliant, relentless, and utterly devoid of tells.

  As Lionel turned to leave, his gaze snagged on a figure in the corner. A girl with black hair like spilled ink, her muted dress blending into the shadows. The Kane heir—one of the old retainer houses, small but sharp as a dagger. She smiled politely at a passing lord, her brown eyes glazed with disinterest. When the lord moved on, her face settled into stillness, as if the ball were a painting she’d been forced to admire.

  He knew of her: two brothers, a sister, all groomed for alliances. Had the war not loomed, she might’ve been paraded for marriage bids tonight. Their eyes never met—his bronze skin and her pallor, his rigid posture and her quiet slump, two contrasts refusing to acknowledge the pull between them.

  Perhaps he should’ve spoken. But words were Camilla’s weapon, not his. Later, when the war took her—just another name on the memorial lists—he’d wonder if a single sentence could’ve changed their fates.

  The night ended quietly—not for lack of revelry, but because everyone knew war was coming. Again. The Empire and its neighbor clashed like clockwork: build, provoke, burn. A dance where the notes were the lives of millions—some fresh-faced recruits, some grandfathers who’d survived the last round.

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  As Lionel stepped into the hall’s cold atrium, he caught his father’s voice from a shadowed alcove: “—of course the border ‘incident’ was staged. The Treasury needs another war to justify the new taxes.” A chuckle. “And the Fleet Admirals need corpses to promote over.”

  Lionel walked away. Some truths were like the stars—better admired from a distance.

  Lionel Graveheart II

  War broke out three days later, as inevitable as gravity.

  Draft notices arrived at dawn, stamped with the Imperial seal. No noble house could refuse without forfeiting its titles, and so by sundown Lionel stood on the muster grounds, his duffel slung over one shoulder, his new rank pins glinting under the floodlights. The 257th Regiment. Familiar faces—boys he’d trained with at thirteen, then sixteen, then eighteen—nodded at him with hollow grins. Camilla had already been whisked away to the 23rd, her parting smirk lingering in his mind like a knife left between ribs.

  The Empire called it “dispersion protocol.” A noble lie. They claimed it was to preserve bloodlines, but Lionel knew the truth: the High Command feared dynasties more than extinction.

  Mobilization was a well-oiled ritual. Factories exhaled ships into orbit; conscripts shuffled through armories to collect rifles still warm from the last war. Lionel had seen the simulations a hundred times—how to hold a trench on a dying moon, how to reload a plasma cannon with gloves slick from someone else’s blood. None of it mattered when the real fighting began. War wasn’t about skill. It was about whose luck ran out first.

  He boarded the frigate "Iron Resolve" with seventeen others from his cadet class. Their laughter echoed through the gangway, too sharp, too loud. They’d all be dead by year’s end. Maybe sooner.

  His station was the gun deck, a cavern of steel and flickering holoscreens. Officer of Ordnance, the manifest declared. A title that meant nothing when the alarms sounded. His job was simple: make the guns fire, no matter what. The men under his command—children, really, their cheeks still soft from nursery ships—would forget their training the moment the hull shook. They’d fumble with coolant valves, misalign targeting arrays, pray to gods the Empire had outlawed centuries ago. It didn’t matter. In the end, the void killed everyone the same way.

  First, the shields would fail. A single concentrated volley to crack them open. Then, in the heartbeat before backup generators whined to life, the enemy would strike again. Munitions would cook off in their racks. Fuel lines would vomit fire into the corridors. And the Iron Resolve, like every ship before her, would bloom soundlessly into light, her crew reduced to atoms before they could scream.

  The fleet assembled around them: three battleships, their hulls scarred from previous campaigns; two logistics carriers bristling with flak guns; a handful of civilian freighters pressed into service as decoys. The freighters clustered at the rear, their unarmed crews gripping rosaries and family holos. Lionel’s frigate hovered mid-formation—nimble enough to dart forward, fragile enough to die in a single well-placed shot.

  When the long-range scanners lit up with enemy signatures, the captain’s voice crackled through the shipwide comm. “All batteries, standby. Remember—the first volley is always a test.” A pause. Static. “The second is the lesson.”

  Lionel exhaled, his breath fogging the tactical display. Somewhere in the black, Camilla’s ship was waiting too.