The Lost Knight

“I’m not in this war for your ideals or your money. I’m here for revenge, plain and simple.”

Cieran Kean

Awakening

I hadn’t really enjoyed my life on Earth. I lost my parents to a drunk driver, had distant family who didn’t offer much, and I was stuck in a job that I couldn’t stand. So when the opportunity came up to be flung out into space, to start over on a new world, I grabbed it with both hands.

Going into cryo-freeze with a thousand others I expected to wake up early to prepare the ship for arrival. Instead I woke up next to an alien on a world I’d never heard of.

Between a foul mouthed roommate with a mysterious past, alien gangs wanting to make an example of me, and a local crime lord wanting to conscript us… this really wasn’t the fresh start I’d hoped for. But it was what I had, and come hell or high water I was going to make the most of it.

Fealty

You would think that nearly two years on an alien world would be enough to acclimate someone… and you’d be mostly right. I could speak the languages, I could enjoy the sports, and I could find a new family. Sure, my accent was a bit rough, and some of my friends hated each other, but it was a good and stable life.

At least until politics got involved.

Now I’m just one more pawn in the interstellar games of the Far Reaches. The Queen of the Crescent wants to end her mercenary war. The Ascendancy wants to silence traitors and make inroads to Alum’s economy. The Empire of the Homeworld wants both to lose.

And my noble lover wants to use all of them to advance the position of her house.

If I’m going to make it through this, it’s going to take all of the skill, luck, and coordination in the world.

Ronin

One moment you’re finally gaining the respect of the people around you. You’re a trusted friend and subordinate, you’re in a committed and loving relationship… The next you’re faking your own death to escape from bounty hunting assassins and fleeing to the single most corrupt world in the known galaxy. All the while the two groups who want to protect you are more interested in screwing each other over than actually helping.

Being exiled is more fun in the movies.

All I want to do is find out who set me up to fail on Alum and then go home, but for every step I take forwards I’m shoved three steps back. Try to find good help? Turns out they’re a paranoid, sadistic trauma victim. Try to deal with a slaver? Draw the attention of a local warlord. Try to keep our heads down? Dragged into a gang war.

I never used to understand how the phrase ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’ was considered a curse.

Now I do.

Huntsman

Everything changed after Terminus… after their deaths.. after that bastard killed my friends just to get me involved in his sick game.

I know I’m playing into his hands. Doing exactly what he wants. That I’m about to chase a master assassin through an interstellar warzone that filled with deadly beings who would love nothing more than to see my head on a spike.

But to be honest? I can’t bring myself to care about how insane this all is.

I’ve left behind my pack. My adopted home. My old allies. All I have are a few mercenaries eager for fortune and glory, an adopted teenager with more loyalty than sense, and a bone-collecting sociopath scarcely more stable than me. But each and every one of them is committed to helping me chase down Krom and his partner, to collecting the bounty on their heads.

We will hunt them down, or we’ll die trying.

Vengeance

The first year of the war has brought us a long of things. Lost friends and battered bodies first and foremost, but also fortune, glory, and some measure of revenge.

Zero, the partner of the man who killed my closest friends, is dead. Some part of me knows I shouldn’t be happy about that. Shouldn’t find some sick pleasure in repaying Krom with the same pain he delivered to me. Most days I don’t, some days… some days I wonder just what kind of man I’m turning into.

I guess that’s just the price of vengeance. Becoming, if only for a while, something like the bastards you’re hunting down. None of us are the same as we were a year ago, and I worry what that will mean now that my packmates have caught up with me. Now that they’ve bullied their way onto our team, joining our mercenary lives as we head to the hottest battlefield in the Far Reaches.

I have to get Krom. I have to make it clear to the entire galaxy that my family is not to be touched.

I have to keep my remaining packmates alive. This is all for nothing if I lose more of them.

Aspects preserve me, may this be the final campaign. May this dry desert be where we pay back the man who dragged us into this disaster. May this be the end of it.

Einherjar

There is nothing worse than chasing revenge… and being forced to give up the man you’ve sworn to kill. Even when you had to do it just to survive.

His time would come. But in the aftermath of Zadith, even I could admit we weren’t in any shape to go after him. More than a year of constant battle had worn me down to the point where I needed a break. Needed some time to recover, prepare, to figure out just what my partner meant to me. Time to figure out where I fit in the alien pack that has come to mean family.

A trip to her homeworld, to Xentha itself, might help with all of those things.

Or it’ll leave us fighting for our lives against a whole new group of less than friendly people. You know. One or the other.

Either way I felt certain that our time was running out. That as the war pushed into its third year, as it kept grinding worlds, fleets, and lives to dust, that sooner or later Krom would get the better of us once again. That he might find a way to kill someone I couldn’t lose. That he might win the game he began when he killed people I’d come to love.

I didn’t know how things would turn out… but I knew that I would die before I let that happen.

The next time would be the last time. I’d grab every ally I could. I’d go to any world in the galaxy to find him.

I was going to end this once and for all.