Imperium Descent: Volume II by Christopher Hopper

Author:Christopher Hopper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Somnium Publishing
Published: 2022-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

“Are you okay?” Hale asked. Mink had left the table in a hurry and taken refuge near one of the Haven’s two waterfalls. “Cora? You good?” he asked again.

She kept her face from him and shook her head.

“You… wanna talk about it?”

“No.” And that was the truth. Her attraction to Hale was distracting enough. But now something else tried to muddy the waters… something that concerned devotion. And it had everything to do with Sillix.

The woman was more faithful to the Imperium’s tenets than Mink… or at least had been, once upon a time. If faced with the same legal requirements, Mink honestly didn’t know if she could sacrifice not one but two of her offspring in pallador fires. Obviously, her training taught her that she was capable of such violence—No, such mercy, she corrected herself, especially if her children’s measures of deformity were sufficient to overshadow the weakness of pity.

Another aspect of Sillix’s story that deeply troubled Mink was that even with such purity of devotion—passion that empowered her to commit infanticide not once but twice in the name of faith—Sillix still found herself betrayed by the very system she’d sworn to uphold.

No, not the system, Mink corrected herself. Kull. He had done the betraying. His lack of faith had blinded him to the truth that Sillix’s third child was not cursed but blessed. This was no fault of the Imperium’s or Ki Tuck’s. Instead, the blame rested on him. On the Legatus alone. And as long as Mink focused her ire on Kull, perhaps she would prove to Ki Tuck that she was worthy of promotion even despite faltering over Hale.

“I want to kill him,” Mink said at last. She turned to Hale and gave herself fully to the confession. The words came out with such conviction that she shook as she spoke them. “I want to kill Sedarious Kull with everything that’s in me. He must pay for what he’s done. Sillix will have her vengeance, I vow it.”

Hale nodded a few times and folded his arms while staring into the waterfall’s rippling pool.

When he didn’t say anything more, Mink realized she needed to continue to play her part as Cora. Though, somehow, that was getting harder to do with him. “Do you fault me for this?”

“No. Sillix would probably welcome a friend too.”

“But…?”

“But… vengeance is a dangerous game.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Vengeance inevitably kills both the perpetrator and the victim. No one wins.”

Mink wanted to argue the point, but she was too stirred up to think clearly.

“There’s another aspect to Sillix’s story too, though,” Hale said.

“And that is?”

“That if you kill Kull, you have to kill everyone else too.”

“What?”

“Kull is just a pawn.”

“But he was the one who—”

“Drew blood? Come on. You know as well as I do that it could have been any commander. They’re just following orders from someone higher up the ladder.”

“Not him.”

“Especially him. Listen, Cora, you don’t know him like I do.”

Mink ground her teeth, wishing nothing more than to prove him wrong… to put him in his place and speak the truth of it.

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