Reiha de Boisselier

Reiha de Boisselier

Blood, Rust, and Salt.


Some girls grow up with bedtime stories, loving parents, and the comforting assurance that the world is a reasonably safe place.

Reiha de Boisellier grew up on a dying colony two hundred thousand years of travel from the heart of the Golden Empire of Kyejorna, among the descendants of two rather unfortunate evolutionary influences: the fiery Succubi and the vicious warrior-women known as the Dakhiek.

And when I say vicious, I mean the sort of vicious that makes you reconsider inviting someone to dinner. The Dakhiek had a tradition of devouring one another's flesh as a ritual expression of respect for their sisters. They also considered just about anything that moved to be perfectly acceptable food.

Charming people. Absolutely delightful dinner guests.

Reiha's people called themselves the Na'abakti. They had long since forgotten, or perhaps simply stopped caring about, the precise details of their ancestry. Nevertheless, the old blood remained. The cruelty of the Dakhiek and the blazing passions of the Succubi had survived countless generations, preserved in customs, rituals, and the rather unforgiving realities of everyday life.

Every Na'abakti child was raised to become a warrior, regardless of sex. There were no exemptions for the delicate, the timid, or the unfortunate little souls who might have preferred a quieter existence. On their world, everyone was expected to be useful, and preferably dangerous.

From the Succubi, the Na'abakti inherited their internal furnace of a metabolism, their irresistible pheromonal allure, their striking appearance, their intense passions, and their extraordinary fertility. They could eat and digest practically anything, with the notable exceptions of stone and metal.

From the Dakhiek came their dense musculature, their almost offensively pronounced beauty, their monstrous tolerance for pain, and the remnants of an animalistic social hierarchy that still surfaced in certain tribes. They also inherited the tradition of ritual feasting.

The hybridization of these two bloodlines, however, left the Na'abakti with one particularly inconvenient biological curse.

They were always hungry.

Not metaphorically. Not because they were greedy little bastards. Not because they had poor impulse control.

Their metabolism burned calories like a blast furnace.

A Na'abakti could finish a meal large enough to bankrupt a lesser household and start wondering what was for dessert before the dishes had even been cleared. Their appetites were a biological necessity, not a personality flaw. Anyone who mistook the two would learn the difference sooner or later.

Preferably sooner, if they valued their fingers.



///  A Family That Never Wasted Good Meat  ///

The Na'abakti had a particular understanding of death.

When one of their own died, whether from old age, a predator's jaws, or an enemy's blade, the family gathered to divide the body among themselves.

Nothing was wasted.

The bones were delivered to the Metat, the bone forge, where skilled craftsmen transformed them into ornaments for weapons, clothing, and other personal possessions. A warrior's remains might become a beautiful fitting on a blade, a clasp on a coat, or a piece of jewelry worn by a descendant who had never even met them.

To consume a dead relative was to ensure that they never truly left the blood of the family.

It was remembrance, inheritance, and affection expressed in a way that would have given most civilized societies a collective nervous breakdown.

Enemies were treated much the same way, albeit with considerably less sentimentality.

Captured foes who had proved themselves worthy might be consumed, their bones preserved as trophies. The Na'abakti had a saying for such occasions:

"If you're worthy, you'll become a bone in our house."

One could argue that it was a compliment.

One could also argue that the Na'abakti desperately needed a hobby.

Their children were raised under the same merciless philosophy. Parents were harsh, demanding, and often cruel, because the world of Derifia had little patience for weakness. Only the ruthless, the resilient, and the thoroughly tempered could survive its endless crucible of pain and fire.

Love existed among the Na'abakti, certainly.

It simply didn't always look particularly cuddly.

And Reiha was born into precisely that world.



///  The Granddaughter of a Butcher  ///

Reiha's family was considered aristocratic, though not quite part of the highest nobility. Their bloodline afforded them a handful of privileges, certain social courtesies, and enough influence to make their lives considerably more comfortable than those of the average colonist.

Her grandfather, Bozart, was the most prominent member of the family.

He had served as the right hand of the most notorious and feared enforcer of the Buhenian Tatls Corporation, the dominant power in their corner of the system.

By the standards of Kyejorna, the Tatls were little more than glorified space hobos with delusions of grandeur.

By the standards of their own system, however, they were practically a superpower.

They possessed two combat starships.

Two.

When you're stranded in the galactic equivalent of nowhere, two armed starships are enough to make everyone else reconsider their career choices.

The corporation operated penal labor camps and employed vast numbers of contract workers, most of whom were miners. Their principal commodity was pelium, a skeletal organic mineral that was neither particularly rare nor especially glamorous, but was indispensable to the galactic economy.

Pelium was the quiet foundation of two essential pillars of the Golden Empire: medicine and everyday three-dimensional printing.

And its origins were considerably stranger than its humble appearance suggested.

Millions of years ago, enormous spacefaring whales had inhabited the galaxy. These ancient creatures eventually died, leaving behind vast cosmic graveyards on dead worlds. Their remains contained the shells and microscopic skeletons of ancient endoparasites that had once lived inside them.

Over geological ages, those microscopic remains accumulated into immense deposits.

The result was pelium.

A soft, fibrous limestone-like material, usually pale green or gray, it formed in enormous layers across long-dead planets. It was easy to extract and process, yet exposure to a particular form of radiation caused it to polymerize.

Its unusual biological signature made it exceptionally valuable.

The Empire used pelium to print ideal prosthetics, artificial organs, and structural scaffolds that accelerated the healing of humanoid bones. Because the mineral retained a biological trace of the ancient parasites from which it originated, living tissue generally accepted it without the rejection problems associated with many conventional implants.

So there you have it: the galaxy's medical miracles were built, quite literally, from the fossilized leftovers of microscopic parasites that had once infested space whales.

Science is beautiful.

The universe is disgusting.

And somewhere in the middle of that arrangement, the Tatls were getting rich.

Or at least rich by the standards of a forgotten colonial system.



///  Seven Years in the Eternal Night  ///

Reiha grew up on Derifia, although her parents had little enthusiasm for the prospect.

Unfortunately for them, Bozart's word carried considerable weight within the family. They could disagree with him privately, curse him over dinner, and pray to whatever gods still listened to the inhabitants of that forsaken rock.

They could not openly defy him.

Their daughter would be sent into the wilderness with the other children, and there was nothing they could do about it.

The only thing left to them was preparation.

They trained Reiha as thoroughly as they could, teaching her everything they believed might help her survive. Then they watched her depart and hoped that the gods had developed a particular fondness for stubborn little girls.

Derifia's dark hemisphere was a place where sunlight never reached the ground.

Its endless night was not empty, however. Poisonous vegetation painted the landscape in vivid colors. Acid-green grasses glowed beneath the darkness, while scarlet flowers spread across fields that looked almost beautiful enough to be harmless.

They were not.

The twisting rocks were dark green with toxic secretions. Predators moved through the undergrowth with astonishing speed, their brilliant hides serving as both camouflage and warning. The mountains concealed dens. The forests concealed hunting grounds. The swamps swallowed careless travelers without offering much in the way of an explanation.

It was a gorgeous place.

It was also an ecological war crime.

Every year, another group of Na'abakti children was deposited somewhere on the dark hemisphere.

The landing sites were deliberately selected to maximize the chances of immediate disaster. Mountain dens, heavily wooded valleys, broad clearings surrounded by deep marshes: anywhere large predators were likely to gather was considered an excellent location.

The children were expected to find their way back to the original landing site after seven years.

Seven years.

That was the test.

The transport ships released sonic grenades to frighten away nearby predators, but the effect lasted only moments. Sometimes it was barely enough to unload the children before the screaming started.

The purpose was simple enough.

The children had to leave the landing site immediately, survive the wilderness, and eventually fight their way back.

There was no rescue service. No convenient emergency beacon. No kindly instructor watching from orbit with a tablet and a reassuring smile.

If you wanted to survive, you learned.

If you wanted to eat, you hunted.

If something wanted to eat you, you had better be faster, cleverer, or considerably more unpleasant than it was.

Very few children survived.

Yet the population of the Na'abakti settlements remained stable and even grew slightly, thanks to the extraordinary fertility inherited from their Succubus ancestors.

It was a grimly efficient arrangement.

Civilized people might have called it barbarism.

The Na'abakti called it growing up.

Reiha was among the children sent into that darkness.

And for a long time, the world assumed it had swallowed her whole.



///  The Girl Who Never Came Home  ///

At fourteen, Reiha should have returned.

Her family waited.

Then they waited some more.

When she failed to appear, her parents paid the corporation to conduct additional searches. They spent an absurd amount of money on repeated flights, sending ships back to the landing region in the hope that someone might find their daughter.

There was nothing.

No Reiha.

No recognizable traces of her passage.

No sign of the other children who had been deposited alongside her.

Such disappearances were common enough. Entire groups sometimes vanished within the first six months. The wilderness was enormous, and the Na'abakti were not exactly known for leaving behind convenient paperwork.

Eventually, Reiha's parents stopped looking.

They had other children to raise. Their resources were not infinite, and the repeated expeditions were becoming prohibitively expensive.

By the following year, they had accepted what seemed to be the obvious conclusion.

Reiha was dead.

They placed a memorial tablet bearing her name in the family ancestral chamber and mourned her as best they could.

No one came for her the next year.

No one came the year after that.

And the wilderness continued to keep its secrets.

Meanwhile, the galaxy was falling apart.



///  The Empire Begins to Burn  ///

The first rebellions erupted along the northern fringes of the Golden Empire, aided by an invasion of the accursed aliens known as the Chuzhas.

The fires spread with alarming speed.

World after world fell into chaos. Local powers that had once considered themselves untouchable discovered that their little empires were rather less impressive when confronted by an enemy with a real fleet.

The Tatls were forced to pay tribute to the Chuzhas, surrendering seventy percent of their extraction output every quarter.

Seventy percent.

It was an arrangement that made a mockery of their former prosperity.

But they were not alone. Across the frontier, every organization that lacked the protection of an Imperial fleet was being forced into similar humiliations.

Worse still, rumors spread that Imperial flotillas were retreating toward the central systems without even attempting to engage the invaders.

For the people living in the forgotten colonies, that was the most terrifying sign of all.

The Empire was no longer coming to save them.

The old rules were dead.

And whatever replaced them would be written by whoever possessed the largest guns.

Bozart could not accept that his granddaughter was gone.

Reiha had been born to his daughter and her first husband, a capable warrior and mercenary who had died protecting Bozart himself. The old man had never forgotten that debt, and he had transferred much of his affection for the dead warrior to his child.

He had failed to save the father.

He had failed to find the daughter.

At least, that was what he believed.

Ten years after Reiha's original deployment, Bozart finally decided to visit the landing site personally.

He wanted her remains, if any could still be found. A few bones would have been enough. Something to bring home, something to place beside her name, something that would let him pretend he had not abandoned her to the darkness.

He boarded a corporate starship and descended toward the planet with a dozen bodyguards and the grim determination of a man who had spent his life making other people regret their mistakes.

What he found was not a grave.

At the edge of a luminous field of toxic green grass and brilliant scarlet flowers, beneath the twisted dark-green cliffs, stood a fortified structure.

It was built from stones, timber, and God only knew what else. Sharp mandibles, claws, and fangs had been embedded into its walls, turning the entire construction into a grotesque monument to everything that had tried and failed to kill its owner.

The place looked less like a shelter and more like a predator had developed architectural ambitions.

Bozart stepped onto the cleared sandy ground with his guards and approached cautiously.

Then a long, thin projectile struck the ground directly in front of his foot.

It was a needle of bone, extraordinarily heavy despite its slender shape, with a delicate fringe of dark crimson feathers.

A warning shot.

A very good one.

From within the fortress came a woman's voice: metallic, proud, mocking, and unmistakably amused.

"Well, look what the cat dragged in. What the hell do you want, old man?"

Bozart had come searching for his dead granddaughter.

Instead, he had found a woman who looked perfectly capable of making him dead.

His granddaughter.

Alive.

And, judging by the projectile embedded in the sand, not especially pleased to see him.


/// Two Butchers and a Bloodline ///

Reiha eventually returned to civilization and went to live with her grandfather.

Bozart was afraid that if she encountered her parents, she might decide to settle the matter of her childhood abandonment in a manner consistent with Na'abakti family traditions.

He was not entirely unreasonable to worry.

Reiha had survived seven years in a wilderness designed to kill her. She had built a fortress, mastered the local predators, and learned to defend herself against creatures that would have made professional hunters reconsider their life choices.

A family reunion could easily have become a crime scene.

Her relationship with Bozart was not especially tender, either.

They did not spend their evenings exchanging tearful declarations of affection. They did not heal their wounds with gentle conversations or pretend that the past had never happened.

Their bond was something harder.

Mutual respect.

They were two butchers who understood one another.

Bozart recognized the strength in Reiha. Reiha recognized the debt she owed him, as well as the man he had always been. Neither needed to pretend the other was kinder than reality suggested.

For all his brutality, Bozart remained the only person she continued to consider family.

Not because he was innocent.

Not because he was gentle.

But because, in a world full of people who made promises they could not keep, he had come looking for her when everyone else had given up.

Sometimes that was enough.

By seventeen, Reiha had returned to the world of politics, commerce, and civilized violence.

And civilization, naturally, had plans for her.


/// The Wedding That Never Happened ///

A year later, arrangements were made for Reiha to marry Kiton Chopukoton, the eldest son of the third son of the corporation's chairman.

It was a suitably aristocratic arrangement: politically convenient, socially advantageous, and probably accompanied by enough expensive food to keep Reiha happy for at least an afternoon.

The wedding was never going to be a love story.

Then again, nobody had asked me to write a love story.

They had asked for an empire.

And empires have a nasty habit of turning weddings into funerals.

The rebellion began before the ceremony could take place.

When the fighting erupted, Reiha personally killed her intended husband in battle.

There would be no wedding.

No marriage contract.

No awkward family photographs.

Just a dead fianc; and one less political inconvenience.

Bozart died in the same battle.

But his death was not the end of his story. In the aftermath, he was remembered as the Third Pillar of the Revolution, one of the great figures who had supposedly helped lead the people toward freedom.

A monument was erected in his honor.

And that, my dear reader, is where history began to lie.

Bozart had never been a particularly principled revolutionary. He had been an executioner for the corporation, a man who fought for himself and his family rather than for abstract notions of freedom or justice.

He had not suddenly discovered a burning passion for civil rights.

He had wanted to drag his own bloodline out of the swamp into which the Chuzhas had dragged them all.

He wanted his family to survive.

That was it.

Freedom was a useful word, but survival was the real objective.

The monument was therefore less a tribute to the man himself than to the idea he had come to represent. The revolutionaries needed symbols, heroes, and figures whose names could inspire people to fight.

Bozart was dead.

He could hardly object to the marketing.

Unfortunately, the revolution's victory was short-lived.

The uprising, intended to bring freedom, instead opened the door to catastrophe.

The Chuzhas arrived in overwhelming force and began slaughtering the population.

The revolution had taken one step toward liberation and fallen headfirst into an abyss.

Reiha was captured.

And her life became a very different kind of nightmare.



///  Four Years in Chains  ///

Reiha spent the next four years enslaved by high-ranking Chuzha masters.

She was used as a sex slave, reduced to an object for the entertainment and gratification of powerful men who considered the conquered population their property.

There was no glory in it. No hidden nobility.
No romantic transformation waiting at the end.

It was exploitation, plain and simple, and it stripped away any illusions she might still have possessed about the people who ruled the galaxy.

The woman who had survived the darkness of Derifia, who had built her own fortress and killed her way through the wilderness, was now trapped in a system where her strength and skill meant little against the machinery of occupation.

Eventually, she lost hope.

She became accustomed to the reality of her captivity, not because it was acceptable, but because endurance was the only thing left to her.

Then, during an escort mission involving a high-ranking Chuzha officer, everything changed.

Their convoy was attacked by insurgents. The engagement erupted into chaos. And Reiha saw an opportunity.

She did not fight because she suddenly believed in the insurgents' cause. She did not decide that the rebellion had been right all along. She was not overcome by patriotic fervor or a touching rediscovery of her inner idealist.

She fought because she wanted to escape.

That was her objective.

The insurgents were a means to an end, and she was quite prepared to use the opportunity they had created.

Reiha applied every scrap of combat experience she possessed, turned the chaos to her advantage, and escaped the Chuzhas.

She had no intention of becoming anyone's martyr.

She simply wanted her life back.

And after four years of captivity, that was more than enough reason to make the galaxy bleed.


/// A New Name, A New Life ///

Reiha eventually found her way into the Imperial Resistance.

There, she met Dern Bichting, an influential figure who recognized that the ferocious survivor standing before him might be useful in ways that extended well beyond the battlefield.

Dern arranged a new identity for her. New documents. A new official history.
A chance to disappear into the immense bureaucratic machinery of the Empire.

He also secured her admission to one of the military universities affiliated with the Imperial Military Academy.

There was, naturally, a catch.

Reiha could study, but she would have to serve.

So she completed a year-long introductory course as a combat mech driver and mechanic, then entered active military service in the Third Technical Combat Division.

The division frequently conducted training exercises and combat operations alongside the space fleet's assault and landing forces.

It was not the glamorous side of military life. Technical combat units were expected to keep their machines running, recover damaged equipment, maintain battlefield readiness, and ensure that the more prestigious troops had functioning hardware when it mattered.

In other words, they were responsible for making sure that the expensive war machines did not become very expensive scrap metal.

Reiha was good at it.

By the age of thirty-two, she had become a lawyer and attained the rank of major in the technical corps of Kyejorna's Imperial Space Fleet.

Consider that for a moment. A girl abandoned on a predator-infested world. A survivor presumed dead by her own family. A warrior who had lost her grandfather, killed her intended husband, and endured four years of enslavement.

Now a military officer and a qualified legal professional, operating under a carefully constructed identity while the Empire itself was occupied.

Some people collect university degrees. Reiha collected professions. And apparently, she wasn't finished.


/// The Empire in Ruins ///

By the time Reiha reached thirty-two, the Golden Empire was still struggling to recover from the catastrophe.

The Imperial family remained in hiding.

The young Crown Princess was somewhere out there, continuing her guerrilla campaign and refusing to accept the occupation as the new permanent order of things.

The economy was in free fall.

Inflation ravaged household budgets. Financial institutions buckled under mounting pressure. Crime spread through cities where law enforcement had become corrupt, ineffective, or entirely subordinate to the occupiers.

Ordinary citizens struggled to survive under the Chuzhas, whose rule had transformed vast regions of the Empire into places where power mattered more than law.

The irony of Reiha becoming a lawyer during this period was almost too good to waste.

She understood violence.

She understood coercion.

She understood what happened when someone with enough power decided that the rules no longer applied to them.

And she understood the value of a properly worded contract.

But military service and legal work did not always provide enough money to sustain the life she wanted.

So Reiha diversified.

Because when an occupied empire is experiencing an economic collapse, a sensible woman finds additional sources of income.

A particularly sensible woman finds several.

And Reiha de Boisellier was many things, but sensible was a flexible term.


/// Blood, Rust, and Salt ///

Reiha became a popular webcam model and streamer.

Yes, that kind of webcam model.

She also streamed cooking, hunting, and the preparation of various creatures she encountered in the wild.

And before you ask, yes, her appetite was every bit as ridiculous as her ancestry suggested.

At first, the adult entertainment side of her work provided an additional income stream. It also attracted an audience that appreciated her striking appearance, confident demeanor, and unapologetically provocative public persona.

Her cooking and hunting streams, however, gradually became the real moneymakers.

Turns out people enjoy watching an intimidating woman hunt strange monsters, prepare them for dinner, and eat with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for people who have just discovered that their favorite restaurant offers an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Who could have predicted it?

Her military rank gave her prestige in the eyes of her followers. Her work as an attorney earned her recognition among local elites. Her social connections opened doors to exclusive clubs, private lounges, and gatherings attended by wealthy and influential people.

She frequently organized collaborative streams with other adult entertainers in those exclusive settings, building a public presence that extended well beyond her original audience.

Her schedule became an absolute monstrosity.

Military duties. Legal appointments. Streaming sessions.
Hunting trips. Cooking broadcasts. Social engagements.

Private events.

Every minute accounted for, every obligation competing for her attention.

Somewhere in there, she presumably slept.

Probably.

Maybe.

I refuse to be held responsible for the long-term health of a fictional woman who treats a twenty-four-hour day like a personal challenge.

Her channel was called Blood, Rust, and Salt.

And it was a perfect name.

The public believed they were watching an entertaining parody of a sultry wilderness savage who hunted and devoured monsters for the amusement of her audience.

They assumed the character was exaggerated.

The appetite, the aggression, the strange rituals, the gleeful violence of the hunt: all of it seemed like carefully cultivated performance.

The joke was that the audience had it backward.

This was the one place where Reiha was most authentically herself.

She was not pretending to be a ferocious survivor.
She was not manufacturing her appetite.
She was not acting out some carefully rehearsed approximation of the culture that had raised her.
She was simply doing what came naturally.

She hunted.
She cooked.
She ate.
She laughed at the absurdity of the world.

And she did so in front of an audience that had no idea how much of what they watched was real.

There was a delicious irony in the fact that her most niche occupation paid better than her two respectable professions combined.

Reiha understood that perfectly well.

She could spend an afternoon arguing legal precedent with a wealthy client, an evening maintaining a combat mech, and the night hunting some hideous creature for her subscribers.

The supposedly respectable jobs gave her status. The supposedly ridiculous one paid the bills. And if anyone found the arrangement embarrassing, they were welcome to stop watching.

They rarely did.


/// A Penthouse Full of Ghosts ///

Reiha loved extravagance.

She liked expensive possessions, beautiful furnishings, and the sort of luxury that announced itself without requiring an introduction.

She enjoyed the finer things in life, and after everything she had endured, she saw no reason to apologize for wanting them.

Her apartment, however, was a peculiar reflection of the woman she had become.

Amid the polished surfaces, expensive fittings, and carefully chosen furnishings, traces of her past remained stubbornly visible.

A platinum weapon stand held her bow and quiver, the arrows fitted with poisoned tips.

Beside them rested a long, heavy bone blade with an elegant silver-blue hilt. Its appearance was almost delicate, until one noticed the lethal edge and the poison coating it.

The poison had no known antidote.

Subtlety was not exactly the Na'abakti family's strongest tradition.

Nearby stood a mannequin dressed in Reiha's jacket, complete with a trophy from one of her most dangerous hunts: the jaw of a Zeserat nest-mother.

The Zeserat were enormous, extraordinarily fast predators that had once dominated the dark hemisphere of Derifia.

They were among the most formidable hunters in that ecosystem, and they frequently targeted entire groups of Na'abakti children.

The nest-mothers were particularly dangerous.

Female Zeserat were the active hunters, agile and aggressive predators capable of tracking and attacking prey with terrifying efficiency. Their males, though larger, were comparatively passive amphibious hunters that primarily fed on fish.

The females also had a habit of devouring their mates.

Because apparently, even the local wildlife had decided that family relationships were best conducted through a combination of violence and creative meal planning.

The Zeserat jaw had become the defining trophy of Reiha's jacket, positioned over her shoulder as a permanent reminder of what she had survived.

It was more than an ornament.

It was a declaration.

The world had tried to eat her.

She had learned to bite back.

Her apartment therefore contained two distinct versions of Reiha.

One was the sophisticated officer, the attorney, the woman who attended elite gatherings and navigated the tangled politics of an occupied empire.

The other was the girl who had spent seven years in eternal darkness, learning which creatures could be eaten, which creatures could kill her, and which creatures were unfortunate enough to discover that she was the more dangerous predator.

They were not really separate people.

They were simply two sides of the same woman.

And she had no intention of throwing either one away.



/// An Offer from Dern Bichting ///

Eventually, Dern Bichting arrived on the planet Pituriya-17.

He came with a proposition.

And, as usual, the proposition involved politics, power, and a price that would have made an ordinary person develop a sudden and overwhelming interest in moving somewhere else.

Dern wanted a favor from Reiha.

In exchange, he offered her something extraordinary: an official duchy.

A title. A recognized place among the aristocracy.

The kind of political standing that could transform her from a useful but unofficial asset into a legitimate power in her own right.

There was, of course, a condition.

Kyejorna needed a politically necessary marriage between Reiha and Count Mern von Bjornstahl.

The arrangement would serve the Empire's interests, securing an important connection between two individuals whose union carried consequences far beyond their personal lives.

Reiha was being offered a duchy in exchange for becoming part of a political calculation.

A lesser woman might have been offended. A more romantic woman might have asked whether the count was handsome. A truly sensible woman would probably have asked to see the contract.

Reiha, having spent much of her life learning how power actually worked, understood that titles were never simply gifts.

They were instruments.

A duchy could provide influence, resources, legal privileges, and a degree of protection unavailable to someone without recognized standing.

It could also turn its recipient into a very expensive political hostage.

The question was whether Reiha could make the arrangement work for herself.

And whether the Empire could afford the consequences if she decided to play by her own rules.


//// A Galaxy Full of Other People's Problems ////

Of course, Reiha was hardly the only person keeping the galaxy's political machinery from grinding to a halt.

While she considered Dern's offer, other events were unfolding across the fractured territories of the known powers.


/// Butonia IV and the Synod of the Haths ///

Reiha's pen pal, Butonia IV, a princess of the Sovtan Empire, found herself facing an internal crisis involving the Haths' Synod.

The Haths had long maintained a policy of neutrality, but the growing conflict between Kyejorna and the Chuzhas was making that position increasingly difficult to sustain.

Butonia would have to decide whether the Haths should preserve their neutrality or finally support one of the opposing sides.

Remain neutral, and risk being crushed between two expanding powers.

Choose a side, and risk turning former diplomatic partners into enemies.

A lovely little diplomatic predicament.

The sort of situation that makes one grateful for a quiet evening, a good meal, and a complete absence of interstellar politics.

Unfortunately, princesses are rarely permitted all three.


/// Amelia, the Missing Heir ///

Meanwhile, Amelia, the elder sister of Kyejorna's Crown Princess, had disappeared long ago and been presumed dead.

She had lost her memory.

Now she had risen through the ranks of a mercenary legion and received a promotion to deputy commander.

The woman everyone believed lost had become a military figure of considerable importance, entirely detached from the identity and history that had once defined her.

Her survival had the potential to change the balance of power in ways that no one could yet predict.

Especially since the people who might have recognized her were still searching for her.


 /// Aurelia's Private War ///

Aurelia, the elder political force behind another dangerous strand of the Imperial family drama, continued searching for her missing sister.

She feared Amelia might still be alive.

At the same time, Aurelia remained determined to find her stepfather, Kyejorna's young Emperor, whom she intended to kill.

Her ambitions extended beyond revenge.

In secret, she was assembling an opposition composed of both dissidents and loyalists, preparing to hand them over to the Chuzhas in an effort to secure her own future ascent to the throne.

It was an extraordinarily dangerous game.

Aurelia wanted power, but she was willing to betray nearly everyone who might help her obtain it.

She was building her future on the assumption that she could control the consequences.

History suggests that this is generally how people end up becoming cautionary examples.

But one must admire the sheer audacity.


/// Mern von Bjornstahl and the Regency of Roshani ///

In the Ferrum-Cor territories, Mern von Bjornstahl was one of seven counts who held power over the region.

He eventually secured a majority vote in the Council of Seven and was appointed regent of the free systems of the Roshani Empire for a term of five years.

A considerable achievement.

It also made him a much more consequential figure in the political landscape surrounding Reiha's proposed marriage.

Mern was no longer simply a count with a distinguished family name.

He was a regent with a defined term of authority over a collection of systems struggling to preserve their independence.

Which meant that the proposed union between him and Reiha was not merely a marriage arrangement.

It was potentially an alliance between two very different kinds of power.

One carried the authority of a recognized aristocratic office.

The other carried the experience of a survivor, a military officer, a lawyer, and a woman who had never been especially good at remaining inside the boundaries other people drew for her.

One could only hope their negotiations included enough food.


/// The Schism of the Chuzhas ///

Even the Chuzhas were experiencing trouble within their own ranks.

The rivalry between their two imperial houses, the Cherikh and the Segdal, was intensifying.

Their empire might appear overwhelming from the outside, but internal divisions were beginning to threaten its cohesion.

When two great houses compete for dominance, every subordinate becomes a potential ally, a disposable pawn, or a future corpse.

The occupied territories were already unstable.

A schism within the occupying power threatened to make the entire situation even more unpredictable.

And somewhere in the middle of this mess, Reiha was trying to organize her own life.

Best of luck, darling.

You're going to need it.


/// Shesoguruthth Beningron and the Three Baronies ///

Elsewhere, the young Baron Shesoguruthth Beningron succeeded in forging a powerful alliance among three baronies in Relium Sehtanot.

The agreement united trading houses from the neutral territories of the Birtii, bringing together several minor vassal powers that might otherwise have remained fragmented and vulnerable.

It was a shrewd political move.

In a galaxy where empires were breaking apart and old loyalties were becoming liabilities, smaller powers could no longer assume that remaining insignificant would keep them safe.

Trade, mutual defense, and carefully negotiated alliances could offer protection that no single barony could hope to provide alone.

The alliance also introduced another potential player into an already crowded political landscape.

Because apparently, the galaxy had decided that it could not possibly have enough ambitious aristocrats.


///  Mihata, the Tanka  ///

And then there was Mihata.

Reiha's new acquaintance was an Imperial operative, a combat assault specialist, and a fellow webcam model.

Her nickname was Tank.

A name that, one suspects, had not been chosen because she was particularly fond of delicate diplomacy.

Mihata had already conducted several successful and even profitable raids against bases belonging to bear beastfolk, a group involved in terrorism and organized crime across several major cities on Pituriya-17.

She was a woman with combat experience, operational initiative, and a demonstrated ability to turn dangerous missions into financially rewarding ventures.

In other words, she and Reiha had rather a lot in common.

The two women occupied overlapping worlds of military service, covert operations, and online celebrity.

They were both capable of violence.

They were both comfortable operating outside the expectations of respectable society.

And they both understood that a public persona could be a useful weapon in its own right.

Their acquaintance offered the possibility of cooperation, rivalry, friendship, or the sort of spectacular professional disaster that occurs when two competent, heavily armed women decide that an ordinary solution is simply too boring.

Personally, I would keep an eye on them.

Preferably from a safe distance.


//// The Woman at the Center of the Storm ////

By this point in her life, Reiha de Boisellier had become an extraordinary contradiction.

She was a Na'abakti survivor from a world where children were abandoned in the dark and expected to return as adults.

She was the granddaughter of a corporate executioner whose reputation had been transformed into a revolutionary legend.

She was a former captive who had escaped not through faith in a grand political cause, but through the simple, stubborn desire to reclaim her own life.

She was a major in the Imperial Space Fleet, a practicing attorney, and a popular streamer whose audience mistook her reality for performance.

She loved expensive possessions, exclusive clubs, and the comforts of a life she had fought hard to obtain.

Yet she still kept her bone weapons, her poisoned arrows, and the trophies of the wilderness that had raised her.

She had lost her grandfather.
She had killed the man she was supposed to marry.
She had watched a rebellion become a catastrophe.
She had survived the occupation of her homeland and built herself a new identity in the wreckage.

And now the Empire was offering her a duchy in exchange for a politically necessary marriage, just as the wider galaxy entered another period of uncertainty.

The Imperial family remained in hiding.
The Crown Princess was still fighting.

Amelia had returned to the world without remembering who she was.

Aurelia was plotting her own path to the throne.

Mern von Bjornstahl had become regent of the free systems of Roshani.

The Haths faced a decision that could end their neutrality.

The Chuzha imperial houses were turning against one another.

And a young baron was quietly assembling a coalition of trading powers.

Everywhere Reiha looked, someone was trying to change the balance of power.

Everywhere she went, someone wanted something from her.

A title. An alliance. A favor. A weapon. A symbol.

Perhaps even a wife.

But Reiha had spent too much of her life being told what she was supposed to become.

She had survived a world that wanted to eat her.
She had endured people who believed they owned her.
She had escaped a war that had consumed almost everything she knew.

She had learned the law, mastered a profession, entered the military, and built a public identity that could sustain her financially.

And she had done all of it without surrendering the most important thing she possessed.

The right to decide what happened next.

That is what makes Reiha interesting.

Not that she is beautiful.

Not that she is dangerous.

Not that she can hunt monsters, eat things that would horrify a biologist, argue a legal case, maintain a combat mech, and then spend the evening attending an exclusive party in clothes that probably cost more than a small settlement's annual budget.

Although, admittedly, those are all excellent qualities in a protagonist.

What matters is that Reiha understands the world is neither fair nor particularly interested in her happiness.

She does not expect justice to arrive on a shining starship.

She does not assume that good intentions will save anyone.

She knows that history is written by survivors, that heroes can be manufactured, that revolutions can betray their promises, and that the people who call themselves civilized are perfectly capable of committing atrocities.

She knows that family can be a source of love, obligation, cruelty, and inheritance all at once.

She knows that survival is not the same thing as freedom.

And she knows that being free does not necessarily mean becoming a better person.

Sometimes it simply means finally having the power to choose your own mistakes.

So here she is.

Reiha de Boisellier.

Major. Attorney. Hunter. Streamer. Survivor.

Potential duchess.

A woman with a monstrous appetite, an impressive collection of weapons, an expensive apartment, and absolutely no shortage of people who would prefer her to behave herself.

Will she accept Dern Bichting's offer?

Will she marry Mern von Bjornstahl?

Will the marriage become a political alliance, a personal disaster, or something neither of them anticipated?

Will the Golden Empire reclaim its freedom?

Will the Chuzhas destroy themselves from within?

Will the missing heirs return to claim their places in the imperial drama?

And what, exactly, will happen when Reiha de Boisellier decides that she has had quite enough of being a convenient piece on somebody else's political board?

Well.

That is the wonderful thing about creating worlds.

You can build an empire, fill it with ancient civilizations, strange biology, beautiful monsters, murderous aristocrats, and enough political intrigue to give an entire generation of historians nervous breakdowns.

You can give your characters terrible childhoods, complicated loyalties, questionable morals, and lives so chaotic that a quiet week becomes an event worth celebrating.

You can make them suffer.

You can let them win.

You can give them everything they ever wanted and then reveal that what they wanted was a spectacularly bad idea.

And sometimes, if you're feeling particularly cruel, you can give them a choice.

Reiha has spent her entire life fighting for the right to make her own.

Now the galaxy is offering her power, prestige, and a marriage contract wrapped in political necessity.

For a woman who has survived almost everything the universe could throw at her, that might be the most dangerous offer of all.

After all, monsters are easy enough to recognize.

The truly troublesome ones wear crowns.

And some of them are sitting at the dinner table.


Welcome to Kyejorn, darling.

Mind your fingers.

And if Reiha invites you to dinner, for the love of every god still listening, ask what's on the menu before you accept.