Public A Lesson in Power

[Mercy]

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OUTER RIM
ZYGERRIS MINOR
YAVVEN'S HOLLOW

Yavven's Hollow was once a thriving and successful Zygerrian mining colony. Bringing in valuable ores and passing them onto the Zygerrian Empire that had rosen up after the Levantine Sanctum fell in that region of space. With no major nation keeping them in check, the Zygerrians sadly went back to their old habits. Because a thriving Zygerrian colony was one that ran on slave labor.

Surprising few tensions within the Zygerrian Empire slowly began to weaken their influence on the outskirts of its state. Planets like Zygerris Minor and the colony of Yavven's Hollow became lesser priorities for the slavers.

The slaves of Hollow saw an opportunity and took it. Without support from the Empire, the slaves began a revolt and set the region aflame. The conflict has been raging on for about a month now with no end in sight. The Zygerrians have the technological advantage, but the former slaves have the numbers. The first thing to go were the shuttles the slavers had used to ferry themselves back and forth from the automated space station hovering over the world.

Cut off from it they couldn't reach the communication array that would request help from their Empire. If they'd respond and send help was a different story.

Besides those two sides, there were spacers who were trying to profit from the conflict, smuggling in supplies and weapons to feed both sides. There were would-be warlords that were trying to take advantage and carve out a base of power of their own.

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This is what Mercy dropped herself and one Sael in.

Their ship was already gone, flying off into the air, and programmed to return on a per-established schedule. For all intents and purposes they were stuck on this world.

"Be thankful, little goblin." Mercy said lightly as she crouched down on the ridge that overlooked the burning colony. It seemed that for the day the fight was gone. But that didn't mean there wouldn't be festivities later that night. "I never had a Master until I was already grown and in control of my strength. I never had opportunities like this. I fought and scrapped my way to who I am today. I would have killed for a chance like this."

She turned around to face Sael.

"I will not intervene, but I will observe and be with you. If you face something I consider unfair, I will step in. Otherwise you are on your own. You know what you are supposed to do. Take control of the colony by any and all means. By the end of our trip, I want them to kneel for you. Show me you understand what domination truly is. Any questions?"

 

[Sael]

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No answer came at first.

The air stank of smoke and old metal. Same as everywhere else war had called home. Everywhere else the destitute moved from plight to plight, never free. From their perch above the colony, the burned-out wreck of Yavven's Hollow stretched wide below, lit by fires, smoke crawled along the horizon in thin fingers.

Take control of the colony by any and all means.

As if domination were a lesson to be practiced, like handwork or posture. As if the weight of a thing could be measured by how many knees you forced to the ground. Something in her pulled inward, like a tide turning. She looked down, toward the scorched heart of the colony. It was full of those lost, squandering, helpless and hopeless: A world she could empathize deeply with.

RATTATAK, SLAVE PITS
PAST: WHEN MERCY FIRST FOUND HER

If her mother hadn't been born into bondage, maybe she wouldn't have woken each morning to the same burden. Maybe if her life had begun in anything other than chains, she might've learned something richer than survival. And maybe then, the fear wouldn't have grown so large. Fear of the next loss, the next silence, the next taking. Maybe, then, when it finally came, the vanishing wouldn't have felt so complete.

But all those maybes, stacked like kindling, did nothing to stop the fire when it lit. They didn't muffle the sound, wet and terrible, of her best friend's final breath clawing free from froth-choked lungs. Her only friend. Her truest friend. Nothing imagined could reach into that space and replace what was real, and dying, right in front of her.

Loss had never been so clear as an event until now.

She had always lived beside it—loss as a shadow, a presence, not a moment. It stood in the doorway with her. Slept curled behind her knees. Less food, less water, less kindness in a master's voice, less restraint in a master's fist. Less of the thread that tethered her to any notion of a future. And when that thread finally snapped, the sound it made was silence.

Who was she now that she had nothing?

She had feared the losing more than anything. But the loss itself? It left only a hollow, ringing thing inside her. A vast, waking emptiness that unspooled and stretched into the dark like a scream with no air behind it.

And then it looked up.

Whatever lived in that emptiness had teeth.
It crawled outward, silent, hungry, and found others. Found their fear. And she could feel it. Not just see it, not just sense it, but live inside it, the way she used to live inside hope.

The guard outside, he feared becoming prey. That the punishment he dealt would return to him. That fear twisted him fast and ugly. His voice became bile. He struck first.

Her cellmates carried horrors of their own. Their pain rose up in flashes: one saw her own skin peeled back under sterile lights; another heard the keening cries of children taken in the night, tiny voices fading into the void; another smelled the fire, felt it lick his ankles, and knew it would come again.

And she—she felt it all.

It ripped through her in waves, these borrowed torments, these visions too large for any one heart to carry. She screamed out a single sound—a raw, shattering thing shaped like NO—but it wasn't just hers. It came from them, from the deepest cracks in each soul. That word—no—wasn't a refusal. It was a rupture.

And with it, something loosed.

They turned on each other. Turned into the versions of themselves their fear had always warned them they might become. Brutal. Unforgiving. Lost.

And at the root of it all, curled in the corner like something barely living, she held what was left of her friend. Her knees drawn in, her face buried in the blood-wet shoulder of the one person who'd ever seen her without wanting more from what little she was.
Something dark slipped behind her ribs.

It breathed.
She trembled.

It had learned to breathe through her.​

ZYGERRIS MINOR, PRESENT


The memory passed, deep and cold. She blinked the wind from her lashes and raised her hood.

"I don't have questions," Sael said. Her voice was low and small. "Just time."

She turned away from the ridge. The wind caught her cloak and tangled it around her knees. Still, she moved quiet and without ceremony. A silhouette dissolving into stone and dusk.

The slope was loose with shale, the kind that scraped skin and patience. She didn't care. She dropped into it, let gravity carry her. Down. Toward the colony. Toward the smoke and the noise and the restless ache of people trying to win freedom with calloused hands. She would not arrive as a conqueror. No banners. No commands. She would blend. Into the ash. Into the crowd. Into the places where people's secrets lived just under the skin.

Sael would listen. And their fears would come home to her.

The idea of it terrified her.

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Mercy
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[Mercy]

Sael

Mercy followed along without skipping a beat.

"Tick, tock." Mercy sang along as she fell into step with her intrepid Apprentice. "You ought to relax, live a little, little worm." The creature was so different from Mercy but their entire existence had begun differently so that wasn't a surprise.

One a noble, another a slave. One broke her own chains, the other replaced one set for the other.

"The only way to become strong, is to live and experience. To draw it all in and learn from what you experience."

This wasn't her modus operandi. Trying to teach someone.

Her first apprentice.

It was ridiculous really, but Mercy tried. Because she kept impressing her. So much power in such a feral little creature. A different kind of strength than what Mercy possessed but that was okay.

They all had their way of things.

"What will you do first? You have so many options... It must be overwhelming..."

Take control of one side, or play them all against each other, ignore them entirely and go for a third party?

 

[Sael]

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Relaxing, living, strength — these were adjectives Mercy passed casually, but Sael understood none of them. Not really. She didn't understand how her mountain of a Master could lift her voice jovially in song, and in the same breath, give Sael instruction. She was unlike any other owner she'd ever had in every way. More than the way she spoke, the way she looked, it was the way she invested in Sael and encouraged her to evolve her pure survival instincts something more strategic, more self-aware.

While a dominator might have been the objective, Sael was unsure how to get there. She was a mirror. A siphon. She couldn't think beyond the need to better understand the situation she knew nothing about. This wasn't a household she served, it was a wartorn world where slaves like herself had the chance at acquiring the upperhand.

"I—" she started, and frowned, feeling a tremble of expectancy course through her shoulders. "Yes. Overwhelming. I think I need to get a feel for who is below first.

If you don't mind."

She'd told Mercy that she didn't have any questions, but she did now: "W-where would you start?"

Not that the answer would matter. Whatever it was Mercy would do, surely Sael wouldn't be able to accomplish the same approach.

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Mercy
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[Mercy]

Sael

"That's the wrong question, little worm." She said affectionately and patting her head lightly while looking past her to the colony coming into view.

They still had a walk and a half to go through but she could smell it already.

Not just the background scent of the world, but the particulars of this conflict. Blood, pain, shite, agony. But also hope, triumph, dreams made real.

"You are not me. You will never be me. Except in the ways that matter. By the time I am done with you, if I am successful? You will be proud, hard, you will find joy in life and live it to its fullest." Then she withdrew her hand, having ruffled her hair to amuse herself.

"I would go down there... I'd walk through haphazard fortifications. I'd grab and shake people until their leader appeared. Then I'd slam that leader through a wall. And I'd keep doing it until they broke. I'd take control... I'd set them against the other side, help them, encourage their worst instincts until they would no longer recognize themselves."

A shrug.

"And by the time I would be done, slave would become slaver. But they would all serve me."

Gods, she wished she had been her Master in her youth. She would have loved to do something like that for her own training.

Maybe she wouldn't have been just a simple brawler for so long.

But that is what Mercy was trying to correct here. Her own past through Sael. To teach her domination and control early, so she would never be stuck a lackey to someone unworthy.

"What does your instincts say? Do you want to overwhelm them? Do you want to infiltrate them and corrupt them from the inside? What sparks joy? This is your adventure, goblin."

Sael