An orbit to a halfling like Tres who had lived more moons than even he could be bothered to count should feel like a blip, a burp into the void of a lengthy lifespan—but as orbits go, this had to be one of his worst. That coming from one on the losing side of the war that had cost his kind the planet. He had spent little time with humans since then, but those he had were proving themselves proper villains.

He awoke, painful and cold, head feeling like a bruised pumpkin that had long collapsed in on itself, exposed innards now caked in rot, cooking in the sun. A dull ache plagued his left side and his eyes were so heavy in his sockets that he kept them closed, the backs of his eyelids orange, as he thought dumbly—

Fire.

He opened them to a searing white light and sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. The ceiling was ablaze with it. Blinking back tears, his head rolled loose on his shoulders as he surveyed the room. There was little to see save a single slab of grey in the wall of an otherwise white box—he the centerpiece, strapped to another slab he took for some sort of metal. Beside it, a small table with a mean looking display of gleaming implements. He recognized the only bloody one as a sewing needle.

Ah. It was all rushing back to him now like putrid water slogging through a crumbling dam—

Snow, more than he had ever remembered seeing fall through the Holókaustos' canopy had instilled in him a pestering wariness for which he could not explain, and he insisted they check in on the girl. He and Hurgo stumbled from the tree line into a world of white. Nothing separated ground from sky. It was no easy feat looping around the snowdrifts the howling wind sculpted with rough hands. More than once, he lost the solthus under all that moving white. The house he had moved through with a human woman in his arms all those moons ago eventually appeared right in front of them like a fever dream, not a light on and the door swinging loose on its hinges.

The sanest part of him knew then that the house was empty, but the other reasoned the man had left the girl before.

Throwing caution to the dogs, he ran inside. Hurgo gave a warning yelp that went ignored. Darting from room to room, Tres gave only cursory glances around corners downstairs as he made toward the boy's study. His negligence earned him an ugly surprise. As he reached the threshold, Tres heard more than saw someone at his back, right before a blunt object connected with his temple. Hurgo snarled on the landing behind him as Tres went down, sunbursts in his eyes, before cracking his head on the floor and blacking out.

He woke to being dragged like a prized kill through a throng of mortals down a dimly lit corridor made of pristinely carved, black rock. His mind stuttered, their collective chatter a dull buzz between his ears as he blinked up at their uniforms, all black with a silver pin of a bird escaping a star fastened to their chests. His head swiveled, vision bouncing from gawker to gawker, until his eyes locked onto Hurgo writhing on the ground, trapped between wolf and man—muzzle shortening, foaming at the mouth, claws scraping on the floor as he unleashed a caterwaul that arrested the crowd's attention. A thin tube stuck out of his neck and above him stood a man in a long, white cloak who simply pushed up his spectacles at the sight.

As more of the onlookers noticed Tres was awake, they began to elbow each other like school children. Before the man dragging him on his back by the ankles could catch on, Tres yanked his knees up to his chest, sending him careening toward him. Tres caught him by the face and urged the fire bubbling up in his gut out through his fingertips. The onlookers ripped long, black sticks from their belts and shoved them into Tres' side, filling him with a spark that made his head snap back, his ossueta crawl, and his vision burn white, yet he held on, sinking his fingers deeper and deeper into the screaming man's melting flesh, until, one by one, the assailants stepped back, sticks falling limply to their sides, faces pinching at the stench of burning meat.

A woman with white-gold hair piled expertly atop her head, wearing a white dress, pushed to the front of the stunned crowd. By the anger warping her face, Tres gauged she was screeching orders, but her demands were drowned out by the wail of the burning man quickly losing his face. She wrestled a tiny tube with a pointy end, identical to the one stuck in Hurgo, from the man in the white coat and shoved it into Tres' neck. He peeked through the bystanders' legs, looking for the solthus but could no longer see or hear him. Instead, he saw a black pillar with a familiar face, keeping watch at the back of the hubbub. A snarl burned up the faery's throat just for the methuselah as the world began to tilt. Tres' eyes grew heavy in their sockets and his tongue felt like it was swelling as the fire inside him began to peter out.

The dasdard poisoned me.

No longer able to hold up his arms, they fell like stones to his side and with them went the man's face, stuck between his fingers—it was lights out for them both.

Now, Tres was strapped to a table, exhausted, the flame that had burned in his gut for as long as he could remember gone, snuffed out by whatever they had contaminated him with. And he was shirtless, he realized belatedly. Under the glaring light, his insignia was screaming red. He could not have felt more naked if they had removed his pants. But the worst part was none of this felt new. Everything about his current situation exuded a nagging sense of déjà vu. Fragments of memories bobbed to the surface of his mind's eye: the man in the white coat at his tableside; more tiny tubes thrust into him every time he began to surface, to run his mouth; sharp and recurring pains; the mingling scent of burning skin and melting metal; and grumblings from those in black when the one in white was away--

How long's it take to turn a bonespook inside out?

More than an orbit, evidently.

An orbit?!

I think Highness has a new favorite pet.

Yeah, but she doesn't let this one walk around on two legs.

That's because the bloodsucker obeys.

The methuselah.

What about the man-dog, where's the mad doc keep him?

Nikko works on him whenever he tires of this halfling; Highness trusts no one else, not with the real deal--

The ache in Tres' head yawned at the thought of Hurgo. Tres grappled for any memory of the solthus—behind bars, surrounded by more rock, no, metal, lots and lots of metal—too much to be gotten on Helithica. Just when Hurgo as a full-fledged man careened into his thoughts, he was gone.

Tres yanked on his restraints to no avail, uttered an oath, and another pain made itself known on the right side of his mouth. Tasting blood, he worked that side of his face.

Movement.

His eyes roved over the rectangle that had to be the way in and out of here to the corner beside it and found he wasn't alone: two silhouettes, heads bent low in whispers, stood behind the glare in the shadow at the edge of the room.

"Excuse me," Tres said with the air of a friendly neighbor in the mortal tongue. "Haven't you heard? It's rude to keep guests waiting."

The whispering stopped.

Tres continued to prod the inside of his cheek with his tongue until the woman who had shoved that first tube into his neck walked into the light. The methuselah stayed put.

"You must forgive Nikko," she said with a sugar-coated smile. "He's convinced you're developing an immunity to the sedative and thought to stitch you up so that he might work in peace for awhile." She dragged two fingers across her lips with a look that said: You know how you can be. "Fortunately, I happened to be passing by as he was getting started." Her gaze slipped to the tiny table.

That explained the bloody needle and abandoned string with what could only be a chunk of his lip snagged on the knot at the end.

"Highness, what a pleasure," he drawled, taking a stab in the dark. Again, she flashed that sickly-sweet smile that Tres wanted to nibble into a bloody pulp. He remembered the mortals' childish fascination with princesses, queens and kingdoms from his boyhood. "Highness of what, exactly?" he asked, making a show of studying her feminine form, one it was evident she spent gobs of time dressing up. "Grandiose fantasies and short-sighted delusions?"

She grabbed his face, mashing his cheeks together so that his lips puckered, forced his chin up and leaned in close enough for him to smell her breath, slightly spoiled. "You don't sound like what I'd imagine a faery or even a half-breed to sound like."

"Sorry to disappoint," he garbled through her pinched fingers.

She squeezed harder. "I, like you, cannot help my nature, but I am determined to break beyond the barriers nature strapped me with."

But he didn't hear this, he was too busy eyeing her pin, the same one the others wore of the bird and star—why did it seem so familiar?

She caught him looking. "I suppose it seems particularly cute to you," she said, fingering the pin with her other hand. "But the starbirds have made quite a name for themselves. I admit, I wasn't keen on the name at first, but you've got to let the underlings call themselves something; it's good for moral, you know."

Starbirds. 

The realization burned through him like a hot iron. The very first sightings of mortals, beings that had fallen from the sky on alien contraptions bigger than any bird any faery had ever seen had filled them all with wonder and excitement. Once Faen children had started to grasp the mortal tongue, they took to calling their closest human counterparts starbirds as a show of affection; birds that journeyed from the stars.

He was imagining ripping the pin from her dress and shoving it into her eye when a new thought interrupted—

It oozed out of him in an unintelligible dribble. Highness let go impatiently.

"I'm aboard an Episteme."

"Indeed. The last of its kind," she said proudly.

More than a century after the war, he'd seen the airship time and again, skirting the Holókaustos, every once in awhile letting loose that banshee scream that burrowed into his brain and made him bleed. They hadn't always been capable of that noise; humans had had to get creative to gain the upper hand in a war against immortals.

Of course. How could he have thought himself anywhere else?

"A warship," he said incredulously. "You do know your people won the war?"

She waved her hand dismissively. "Yes, and a shot job they've done of staying out of trouble ever since. Already, they're separating into political factions and waging tiny wars on each other over children, land and newborn religions. Because despite our superior intellects, we can't seem to shed that primitive nature, that "mine" gene we've harbored ever since we smashed our brother's head in with a rock when he dared to claim the dirt patch closest to the fire—"

Her dictator-glow dimmed as Tres suffered an overlong yawn. "You can tell Nikko he doesn't need to poke me to put me out, he can just have you tell me a story."

She removed a dagger from her belt and shoved it between his ribs so quick that he barely registered the movement. An animalistic cry tore through his eardrums. It took him a blinding, whiteout second to realize it was him. He ended it in a snap and snarl as his organs spilled into others and that fire in the pit of his gut yawned before winking right back out.

"My, how he gabs," she said sweetly while rotating the dagger, eliciting a groan. "Shut it, or you'll spoil the ending. Where was I.... Ah, yes: humankind's infallible predictability. You see, without the right someone to grant them a sense of higher purpose, they'll forever stay little piggies, rutting around in the mud for the biggest lump of lard, putting other piggies in charge against their best interests. And we know how that turned out last time." She put her fingers together, then brought her hands apart, fingers splayed and made an explosive sound.

"But the faeries—their homes were taken, their neighbors slaughtered, and they all but stood by until threatened with extinction. Of course, by then it was too late," she added with a dismissive air.

A litany of oaths shot through his mind as he imagined cooking her to a blackened crisp.

"Humans have brains, but they lack discipline. Faeries had all the forbearance and magic to make anything possible but lacked direction, purpose. Combine the two and we've a sustainable Helithica."

Tres would have laughed if he wasn't in so much pain.

"Sure, there was interbreeding on a small scale, but it's not simply enough to roll the dice. We must be deliberate, engineer a cohort of peerless specimens."

She paused expectantly with a crazed look in her eye as if waiting for him to enlist.

"Hate to break it to ya, but you're about two hundred orbits too late. In case you haven't heard, your people killed all my people."

"You and I both know that's not true," she said, giving his insignia three succinct taps with a manicured fingernail.

He imagined relieving her of that finger with each one.

"Here's the living proof, right before me," she said, a gleam in her eye like Tres was a pig she had raised only to slaughter and the axe was on the grindstone. "I've seen your second face. Why do you hide it?"

"I save it for special occasions."

"Ah. Well, you may be only a halfling, but I've seen the damage you can do. In fact, I'd argue you lack that forbearance I have praised the faeries for having, but like I said, that's what you get when you roll the dice. In time, science will iron out the discrepancies. And we've got to start somewhere," she said lustily, voice sweet as honey.

Once they started to run out of fuel, they used our own magic to power the ships that disintegrated us into bone dust. Now she wants to use me to create a super race of freaks.

"Look, you've been hospitable and all," he said, giving his cuffs another hearty yank, "but I'm used to keeping pets, not being one, and for that, you'd have to gut me and make one of your soldiers wear me as a puppet."

Tres winked at the methuselah, a living statue. Sour and not a whiff of magic in that meatsuit, Tres couldn't fathom why Highness bothered to keep him close.

Bit handsome in a dour way, I guess.

Highness was right about one thing: The faeries hadn't wanted to fight. It wasn't in them, so they created their own army, their own super race of killers: methuselah—faeries who volunteered to become less than, bloodthirsty and weaponized. But it didn't work. Not all were able to give up this forbearance she spoke of, and in the end, the Council wiped them out for refusing to thwart the mortals. And to think, this one, the commander himself of King Alastor's army, hid to save his own hide while his own were buried in the Holóspiritus. Caught cowering after the mass expulsion, he was dragged before the Council but Alastor spared him, decided letting him live was a better punishment.

Despite all that, Tres never would have guessed the methuselah would go to all the trouble of escaping the Holókaustos only to latch onto a human and such a crazy one at that. Underneath all that sinewy muscle and that iron glare was a slimy, wiggly wretch, and the leech had finally found a host.

Tres' bored glare flicked back to Highness, gabbing away: "You must understand, my soldiers are quick to fright and their egos require stroking. You've severely bruised, burned and melted them. An exchange had to be made," she added, tracing his insignia.

He wanted to spit on her.

"I haven't even mentioned the best part. Shall we tell him?" she asked the methuselah without sparing him another unrequited glance. "This isn't our first rendezvous. You see the reason I know I can do this," she said, tapping the hilt, "is because you and I have been here before."

He denied her the shock she so obviously wanted, because he wasn't surprised, not really. He'd suspected as much.

Instead, Tres looked to the methuselah. If the leech was deriving any pleasure from this, he didn't show it.

"Smell that?" she asked, and as a matter of fact, he did.

It smelled like burning flesh and melting metal.

The hilt protruding from his side was beginning to lean. The wound oozed a bloody and thick, silvery liquid. Using those slender fingers, she pressed on the bulging skin and watched the discharge trickle out even as the hole began to close, his body making a slow go of healing itself under the influence of poison.

"Now, that's magical," she glowed. "Nikko would blanch to see me being so reckless, but he's had moons to do it his way. Now, we'll try mine."

Tres didn't like the sound of that.

"Get a few willing participants," Highness told the methuselah. "You know the ones."

He exited, and to Tres' surprise, the door opened to make way of its own accord.

Highness bent to open a compartment to a woosh of cold air below the miniature table and stood up with another tube in hand that she gave a tiny thwack. "No more forgetting, but I'm not so crass as to not give you an itsy-bitsy handicap."