Friends At The Table

An entry from the journal of the former excerpt “To the prince, we offered twelve thousand flowers, Blooming in an untouched field,” leader of the Beloved Nights. How did I get here? How did I find this home? Pain. Pain was my guide. For the first half of the year each second was a dozen or more. I have buried my kin, my peers, and myself. I put my love to rest and lived in a marionette corpse for months. Yet I never knew a pain like this until I looked up from Volition’s surface and saw a beautiful new world with no place for me in it. I knelt before the so-called Cadent Under Mirage and waited for an answer. Where could I best serve her? Lacking her own answer, and without her advisor, the priestess, in sight, she deferred to a bureaucrat. I remember the ship they put me on. It smelled of bleach and rust. it was crowded with those who would I would manage. A cleanup operation. The remains of Privign Station, which Volition’s monstrous retainers had crushed into crumbs, and which the pull of the Mirage and b