The vertical bark wall of the Titan-Tree rose five hundred meters toward Arbo's hidden sky.
A ninety-degree angle, perfect and unforgiving.
For most, it would be a death sentence, but for Lucas, with his newly restored muscles and his blood boiling with the energy of foreign food and the dream of a world without a ceiling, it was merely a step.
He looked at the little girl beside him.
"Climb up," Lucas said, crouching down.
Yasmin smiled, her emerald eyes full of confidence, and wrapped her arms around his neck, locking her legs firmly around his waist.
Lucas took a deep breath, his lungs expanding and pulling in the dense air of the lower forest.
He dug the first hook-nail into the bark.
And the climb began.
With the full strength of his half-blood biology recovered, Lucas didn't just climb; he defied the planet.
His fingers didn't bleed.
When his Inner Ear popped, warning of the formation of an invisible gravity pocket, he used the sudden shift in weight to leap vertically, covering fifteen meters of trunk in a single floating bound.
Even when Arbo's Exhalation blew its deadly hurricane, Lucas found a deep fissure in the ancient wood.
He anchored himself firmly with his nails and arched his back, acting as an impenetrable shield of flesh and bone to protect Yasmin from the gale tearing through the air.
Hours later, the setting sun bathed the upper branches, casting golden rays that cut through the gloom of the high forest.
A tribe patrol, walking along the peripheral platforms, stopped abruptly.
One of the guards heard the sound of a nail scratching the wood just below the edge.
The village chief, with platinum hair and severe features, ran across the vine bridge and froze, his eyes widening in absolute shock.
Lucas propelled his body upward and rolled over the edge of the platform.
He was filthy with sap, covered in the dust of the abyss, and his tunic was torn, but he breathed steadily, carrying Yasmin safely on his back.
The girl opened her eyes, blinking at the golden light of the late afternoon.
The entire village stopped.
The silence that followed was thick and incredulous; no one had ever returned from the ground of Arbo.
The crowd parted when Lucas's mother broke through the barrier.
With a gut-wrenching scream that shattered all the rigid elven stoicism, she fell to her knees on the platform.
She wrapped her son in a desperate embrace, kissing the boy's dirty face while uncontrollable tears washed the dust from his cheeks.
The half-blood raised his gaze over his mother's shoulder and faced the tribe's chief.
He didn't need to say a single word.
He had survived the vacuum, the abyss, and the monsters, both from the forest and from the stories.
The trial was complete.
The next day dawned with the sunlight struggling to pierce through Arbo's emerald mist.
For the first time in fourteen years, Lucas didn't wake up under the crushing weight of repulsed stares.
The tribe didn't love him, the human blood in his veins was still a ghost that haunted them, but the air around him had changed.
Fear had given way to a tense, silent respect; the boy had walked through hell and returned.
Lucas was sitting with his legs dangling off the edge of his Web-House's platform, watching the movement of the colossal leaves far below.
A soft creak in the gut ropes announced Yasmin's arrival.
The girl sat beside him.
She didn't seem traumatized by the fall; in fact, she was twirling the small blue light baton that Elara, the human doctor, had given her between her fingers.
The artificial glow reflected in her wonder-filled eyes.
"Do you think they reached the ship yet?"
Yasmin asked in a low voice, swinging her feet in the void.
"Kaelen seemed to know what he was doing," Lucas replied, his eyes tracking a flock of Leapers jumping from branch to branch in the distance.
"They had strong weapons. If they didn't take the wrong path through the dead roots, they should be trying to start the engines right now."
Yasmin smiled and rested her head on the boy's shoulder.
"I remembered last night... when I was six years old. Remember the day you tried to teach me how to tie the glider, and we ended up tying the tribe chief in his own sleeping hammock?"
Lucas let out a genuine laugh.
The sound was rare, but his chest felt incredibly light.
"I took a vine beating that lasted three days, and you hid behind your mother crying from laughing so hard."
"It was worth it," she whispered, her laughter slowly fading, replaced by a dreamy sigh.
She raised the light baton to the sky.
"Do you think it's true, Lucas? What they said about the world up there? Oceans that never end... ground you can walk on without sinking..."
"I want to believe so."
The half-blood looked up at the thick clouds covering the planet's ceiling.
The idea that he and the girl beside him could, one day, walk together on a ground that didn't try to swallow them, made his heart beat faster.
"One day, Yasmin, we're going to find out if their sky is real."
Afternoon gave way to night, and Arbo's temperature plummeted.
The wind calmed; darkness swallowed the Titan-Trees.
It was the night of the ritual.
The center of the village was bathed in the warm light of phosphorescent sap and dozens of resin torches.
The entire tribe was gathered.
Hundreds of elves surrounded the great platform of the Main Branch in reverent silence.
Even Lucas's mother stood in the front row, her hands clutched against her chest, crying softly with relief and pride as she watched her son.
Lucas was kneeling in the center of the circle, shirtless, his musculature tense, his brown skin glistening with the cold sweat of the night.
Before him stood the tribe's elder, a cadaverous figure covered in thick pelts, holding a dagger carved from the bone of a predator.
The blade was stained with the dark juice of a bitter fruit. On Arbo, surviving the fall wasn't the end; the rite of passage only finished with the mark of life carved into the flesh.
A ritualistic scar on the left cheek, signifying that Lucas had finally become a respected adult.
"The tree tries to bring us down, but we are the warriors who walk above them," the elder intoned, his drawn-out, solemn voice cutting through the night.
"The boy fell, saw the roots, and his skill brought him back. Today, the half-blood's blood dries. Today, a warrior of the wind rises."
Lucas took a deep breath and closed his eyes, ready to accept the pain of the sacred cut. The elder raised the bone dagger, its sharp point hovering inches from his face.
But the cut never came.
Lucas's Triple Inner Ear popped violently.
It wasn't the pressure of a gravity pocket.
It was a frequency.
A clean, artificial vibration tearing through the air currents in the darkness just above them.
*Fweeee-fwoo-fweee...*
Lucas's blood froze in his veins, the oxygen in his lungs turning to lead.
That rhythm... That exact sequence of eight musical notes, perfectly tuned.
It was the same melody Kaelen whistled in the abyss of roots.
The boy's stomach plummeted into a pit of absolute terror, the hairs on his arms standing up, his skin tingling with an irrational, primal sense of danger.
They hadn't left the planet like he thought.
They used him.
Lucas was the foolish guide who took them out of the root nest and led them directly to the largest concentration of half-bloods in the canopies.
Lucas opened his mouth wide to scream.
He snapped his neck around, his wide eyes desperately searching for Yasmin's face in the crowd to tell her to run.
But he didn't even have time to blink.
BZZZ-CRAAACK!
The sound of synthetic thunder ripped through the sacred silence, the air smelling of burnt ozone and roasted meat in the exact same millisecond.
An incandescent red flash streaked through the darkness above the village and struck the center of the circle.
The bone dagger hit the wooden floor with a dull thud.
The elder's body, suddenly devoid of weight, collapsed forward, dropping to its knees before crumbling.
There was no head.
From the old man's cauterized neck, a geyser of thick, metallic blood gushed out like a ruptured hose.
The scarlet torrent washed over Lucas's face, bare chest, and arms.
The viscous liquid ran down his eyes, blinding him momentarily with the taste of death.
For three absolute seconds, the tribe's silence was the most terrifying thing the universe had ever produced.
And then, all hell broke loose.
Hundreds of elves panicked, screaming and shoving each other at the edges of the platform.
Lucas blinked, wiping the blood from his eyelids just in time to see the sky fall.
From the shadows of the upper branches, black rappel cables dropped.
Eight figures slid through the air, heavy and armored.
Vance's polymer boots hit the wood, his cargo exoskeleton humming as he cocked his plasma cannon.
Jax and Tarus landed in a crouch, aiming their rifles at the fleeing elves.
Corin, Milo, Rhea, and Elara surrounded the edges, systematically blocking the vine bridges.
In the center of the chaos, walking slowly out of the darkness and keeping the phantom whistle on his lips, was Kaelen.
The tired, paternal face that had told stories about oceans was gone.
What remained was a mercenary, calculating, and ruthless smile. He lowered the smoking rifle that had just obliterated the elder and stepped unceremoniously into the pooling blood.
"Good evening, kid," Kaelen said, his metallic, muffled voice echoing through his newly activated tactical helmet.
"Nice little village you've got up here..."
He ignored the expression of absolute horror on Lucas's face and turned his head.
"Hey, Jax!" Kaelen's voice sounded relaxed, almost bored, as he kicked the elder's decapitated body out of his way.
"How much do you think this whole herd is worth in the Lyor mines?"
Jax emerged from the shadows of a torn canvas.
The scout twirled a combat knife between his fingers, his eyes sweeping over the crowd of terror-paralyzed elves under the crosshairs of their rifles.
He licked his cracked lips.
"Enough to retire even our grandkids, boss," Jax answered, dragging his words with greed.
"Every pointy-eared freak here is a winning ticket. Half-blood meat can take three times the radiation in those excavations."
Kaelen let out a dry laugh.
The mercenary's armored boot stomped down, crushing the sacred dagger on the floor.
The sound of the relic shattering was like a snap in the tribe's soul.
He lowered his face until he was level with Lucas, who remained kneeling, motionless, someone else's blood dripping from his chin.
"Is this it?" Kaelen mocked, poking Lucas's bare shoulder with the still-hot barrel of his rifle.
"A stupid little cut on the left cheek and you think you've become men? By the gods... what a ridiculous tradition."
"YOU LIED!"
The scream tore across the platform.
Yasmin broke through the elves' line of shock.
The girl's face was bathed in tears, her tiny fists clenched so hard her knuckles were white.
She ignored the rifles pointed at her head. The blue light baton she had received as a gift fell from her hand and rolled across the bloodstained wood, stopping at the invaders' feet.
"We trusted you!" she bellowed, her voice cracking in a wail of pure childish despair.
"You helped us! You healed Lucas and..."
A swift blur moved.
It was Elara.
The sweet-faced woman, the doctor who had healed Lucas's shoulder with such gentle touches, lunged with the speed of a viper.
Her fist, coated in tactical polymer, collided brutally against Yasmin's fragile face.
The crack of breaking cartilage was loud and sickening.
Yasmin was thrown backward like a discarded ragdoll, landing on her back against the wood with a dull thud.
The girl's nose was caved in; blood began to gush from her mouth and nostrils, rapidly staining her light tunic.
"Shut your mouth, you stupid pest," Elara snarled, spitting a thick wad of saliva directly into the girl's bloody hair.
Her maternal gaze was gone, revealing the coldness of a slaughterhouse.
"Did you really think we care about a bunch of monkeys living in trees?"
Lucas's blood boiled.
He tried to stand, a primal roar of pure fury rising in the base of his throat, but Kaelen's boot sank mercilessly into the back of his knee, forcing him back down into the puddle of blood.
Meanwhile, at the edges of the platform, the sickening smell of chemicals swallowed the air.
Jax, Corin, Tarus, and Milo weren't just standing guard.
They were carrying heavy gallons.
With the rehearsed movements of men who had already destroyed hundreds of homes, they poured aviation fuel over the dry canvases of the Web-Houses, over the support roots, and across the floor of the main square.
Jax pulled a military flare from his belt.
He smiled at Lucas's mother, who wept in despair while hugging another elf, and ignited the glowing tip.
He tossed the flame into the liquid.
FWOOSH!
The entire scene was engulfed in a millisecond.
A wall of furious, orange fire exploded around the village. The flames devoured the canvases and tree resin with a grotesque hunger.
The heat became instantly suffocating, melting the superficial skin, cooking the oxygen, and transforming the platform into a cage illuminated by the depths of hell.
The sound of ancient wood cracking under absurd temperatures mixed with the desperate screams of mothers trying to protect their children from the flying embers.
In the center of that nightmare, Kaelen wasn't sweating.
He raised his left wrist, where a tactical watch with an atmospheric pressure compass glowed red.
The mercenary tapped the visor twice and smiled broadly.
"Attention, freaks!" Kaelen yelled, his voice amplified by the speakers, overpowering the deafening roar of the flames.
"We are hunters, not butchers. We have no intention of ruining a cargo as rare and valuable as you, but our patience has a limit."
He pointed at Lucas, who struggled uselessly under the polymer boot, his eyes glazed over Yasmin, passed out on the floor.
"Thanks to your little friend right there, I've thoroughly studied this garbage ecosystem," Kaelen announced, spreading his arms to the flames rising thirty meters into the air.
"I know a colossal gust of wind is going to sweep through this place in exactly... ten minutes. And you know that fire and high-speed oxygen are best friends, right?"
The hunter's smile tore from ear to ear.
"This damn forest is going to burn you alive using its own nature."
On the edge of the platform, watching fascinated as the fire climbed the main ropes holding the village, Rhea let out a high-pitched, sadistic cackle.
The orange light reflected in her dark goggles.
"So beautiful!" she screamed in ecstasy, kicking a useless elven spear into the fire.
Kaelen lowered his weapon and faced the terrified tribe, who trembled, hugging their families in the middle of the circle of flames.
"Your bodies charred to the bone aren't worth much to me," the leader declared, his cold tone cutting through the chaos.
"But that depends on your cooperation, ladies and gentlemen."
He unlatched magnetic handcuffs from his belt, tossing them onto the floor at the feet of the cowering elves.
"If you cooperate, I'll just cuff you and take you out of here. What do you think?! The clock is ticking, and the wind is coming!"
The mercenary's laughter echoed, but was interrupted by a wet smack of flesh and bone.
Lucas didn't think.
The pain of betrayal and the sight of Yasmin bleeding on the floor detonated the last pillar of his sanity.
Using the brute strength of his legs, he ejected himself from the floor like a predator.
His fist cut through the black smoke and sank straight into Kaelen's unprotected jaw.
The impact was so violent that the tactical helmet flew off. Kaelen stumbled backward, spitting out a thick puddle of dark blood and a broken tooth onto the boiling wooden floor.
Lucas didn't advance to finish him.
He spun on his heels, his chest heaving, his face still bathed in the elder's blood, and faced his tribe.
"Grab your weapons!" Lucas bellowed, his voice shredding his vocal cords as he pointed frantically at the fallen spears.
"There are only eight of them! We are the tribe of the canopies! Don't bow your heads to them, fight!"
But the silence that followed was more suffocating than the fire's smoke itself.
Not a single elf moved.
The hands that should have wielded knives and spears merely trembled. Their wide eyes, bathed in the orange reflection of the flames, didn't look at the mercenaries with hatred.
They looked at Lucas.
There was dread, yes.
But there was something far worse: accusation.
*You brought them. You and your cursed blood.*
The boy searched for his mother's face in the crowd.
The elf was hunched over, sobbing compulsively. When her eyes met his, she didn't run to help him.
She took a step back.
A single, faltering step, retreating into the middle of the terrified herd, distancing herself from her own son.
That broke the legs of Lucas's soul, the absolute rejection from his only safe harbor.
But the sadness lasted only a fraction of a second before being completely swallowed by an incandescent fury.
With a bestial roar of guilt, betrayal, and hatred, Lucas turned and charged alone against the humans, determined to kill the problem he himself had brought.
Milo was the first.
He dodged the boy's blind punch with a sidestep and delivered an elbow that cracked against Lucas's ribs.
The elf stumbled, and Tarus welcomed him with a brutal knee to the stomach.
Lucas spat blood, attempting a left hook, but Jax slipped under his guard.
The scout's combat knife gleamed in the firelight, slicing a quick, painful gash into the boy's thigh.
They weren't trying to kill him.
They were humiliating him.
A kick to the back sent him stumbling forward; a polymer punch to the face knocked him backward.
Lucas was a bloody punching bag, batted around in the middle of a circle of cruel laughter.
Blinded by his own blood, he attempted one last charge, but a hand as heavy as an anvil grabbed the back of his neck.
Kaelen had gotten back up.
With the strength of a tractor, the mercenary leader slammed Lucas face-first into the hot wooden floor.
The impact flattened the boy's nose, bursting his lips.
Kaelen wiped the trail of blood leaking from his mouth, spat on the ground, and smiled grimly.
"You've got a hell of a punch, kid," he muttered, stepping on Lucas's back to keep him pinned to the floor.
"Maybe I'll be able to sell you for a higher price because of it."
The mercenary raised two fingers and signaled to the women in the group.
"Wake up the girl."
Elara and Rhea approached Yasmin's unconscious body.
They didn't take the slightest care; they grabbed the girl by her pale hair and dragged her across the splintered wood like a trash bag.
Rhea unscrewed the cap of a canteen and splashed aviation fuel directly onto the girl's injured face.
Yasmin woke up with a strangled scream.
The flammable stench and the chemical burn in her eyes made her choke violently.
She rolled on the ground, coughing and vomiting bile mixed with blood, while the mercenaries laughed at the child's despair.
"You know," Kaelen continued, ignoring the girl's choking and pressing his boot even harder into Lucas's spine.
"Maybe I'll sell you to an underground coliseum, huh? Or, even better... maybe to those damn pureblood elves in Lavinsk."
Jax leaned over the leader's shoulder, twirling his bloody knife.
"Lavinsk is a tough nut to crack, boss. Damn near impossible to cross those borders without being killed by the Royal Guard."
Kaelen smiled with pure greed, admiring the dense musculature and absurd resilience of the boy under his foot.
"For this half-blood right here? It might be worth the risk."
"They won't accept them," Elara interjected, delivering a light kick to Yasmin's ribs just to keep her quiet.
"The nobility of the Lavinsk black market is picky about the laws of the forest. They only buy slaves and gladiators who are documented adults."
"Minors aren't allowed in."
Kaelen paused.
He looked at Lucas.
The mercenary's silence lasted two seconds before a monstrous, guttural laugh exploded from his chest.
He laughed so hard his shoulders shook.
"What was it that the headless old man said before he died?" Kaelen asked, pulling a serrated tactical knife from his belt.
"A scar on the left cheek, right?"
Kaelen crouched down.
He violently grabbed Lucas's dark hair and yanked the boy's head back, forcing him to look at the smoke-filled ceiling.
"No... no," Lucas growled, struggling in vain against the arms crushed under Vance's knees, who had come over to hold him down.
"Hold still," Kaelen whispered.
The mercenary pressed the cold tip of the serrated knife against the boy's left cheek.
He made a point of sinking the steel in and tearing the skin and muscle in a torturously slow manner.
The pain was indescribable.
Lucas screamed, a demonic sound that was quickly muffled by his own blood flooding his mouth.
In a wild instinct of pure survival, the boy twisted his jaw and sank his teeth with all the force of his hatred into the exposed fingers of Kaelen's glove.
The human cursed, feeling the sharp canines pierce the leather and hit the bone, but he didn't stop.
He simply twisted the blade and yanked the knife downward violently, opening a jagged, shredded, and deep gash that ran from the cheekbone to the jaw.
Kaelen ripped his hand out of the boy's mouth, shaking off his own blood, and smiled as he looked at the grotesque piece of artwork.
"There," he mocked, his voice dripping with sarcastic venom.
"Welcome to adulthood, you little shit elf."
Lucas panted.
The left side of his face burned as if hot coals had been shoved into the flesh, blood pouring out in streams and flooding the floor.
Kaelen stood up and pointed the soaked knife at Yasmin, who watched everything paralyzed with horror, still vomiting from the taste of gasoline.
"Cut her face too," he ordered coldly.
"NO!" Lucas roared.
He tried to launch his mutilated body forward.
The aura of a wounded beast exploded in his veins, clouding his mind.
"DON'T TOUCH HER! DON'T TOUCH HER!"
Two of the mercenaries collapsed on top of him with the full weight of their armor.
Steel boots sank into his spine and neck, crushing the boy's disfigured face against the boiling floorboards.
Lucas's last conscious sight that night, through one swollen eye and the blinding black smoke, was Rhea cruelly pulling Yasmin by her hair.
The woman's sharp blade came down, slicing the girl's fragile face.
The sharp, broken scream that escaped Yasmin's lips shattered the boy's eardrums and his soul.
And then, the metallic fist of Jax's exoskeleton came down like a steel sledgehammer directly against Lucas's temple.
The world finally went black.
What followed weren't clear memories, but fragmented echoes in a mind drowning in darkness.
*The harsh grinding of thick iron links dragging across a steel grate, each metallic clank vibrating painfully against the root of his broken teeth.*
*The wet, ragged gasping of a small body choking on its own sobs beside him, a raw throat fighting for air through the suffocating stench of ash and blood.*
*An incandescent, searing, and brutal white heat piercing his dilated pupils like physical needles, burning his retinas and prying his swollen eyelids apart.*
A massive cargo ship had broken through the canopy of the Titan-Trees.
Its thrusters scorched Arbo's ancient wood, bathing the destroyed village in a blinding white light.
Rough hands dragged Lucas across the iron floor.
He smelled ozone and burnt flesh.
All around him, the hunters ruthlessly shoved the "valuable products" up the ship's ramp.
Elves with dense muscles and young elven women with delicate faces; all handcuffed, bruised, and branded.
Kaelen's watch had hit zero.
The Inhalation ended, and the planet began to exhale. The two-hundred-kilometer-per-hour wind exploded from Arbo's bowels, slamming right into the village's flames.
The fire, previously restricted to the platform, morphed into an uncontrollable, infernal hurricane.
Tossed onto the ship's ramp, the cargo doors began to close with a deafening hydraulic hiss.
Kaelen was inside, tallying up the profits in his head.
The "rejects"—the elders, the sick, and the gravely injured—had been left behind to die.
In the midst of the storm of fire and wind, Lucas's blurred vision found his mother.
The fire licked her thin skin; she screamed, reaching her hand out desperately toward the ship.
The ramp closed; the firelight vanished.
But his mother's screams did not.
Even in space, even plunged into the pitch black of the cargo hold, the sound of his people's agony burning alive embedded itself into Lucas's brain.
An invisible and indestructible brand.
It was there, on the cold surgical metal and listening to the sobs of Yasmin chained beside him, that the kindness of the fourteen-year-old boy died.
The low hum of the spatial engines was what brought him back, slowly.
There was no more smell of smoke, nor the heat of the flames, just the absolute cold of synthetic steel and the stench of dried blood and sweat that permeated the overcrowded cargo hold.
The impact of a landing rattled the ship's hull, making Lucas's stomach churn with nausea.
He opened his eyes.
The excruciating pain in his left cheek throbbed as if acid had been poured into the open wound, but that wasn't what truly woke him up.
It was the screams.
"LUCAS!"
The shrill voice, shredded by terror, echoed through the hold. The ship's rear ramp had been lowered, revealing an alien sky of a sickly purple hue and a desert of dead, gray dust.
Kaelen and his mercenaries were aggressively sorting the cargo; chains clattered against the grates.
Elven women and girls screamed as they were brutally dragged out of the ship by magnetic hooks, destined for the auctions of that place, for the worst brothels in the mining colonies.
Among them, thrashing like a terrified little animal in Vance's gigantic hands, was Yasmin.
"LUCAS!" she bellowed again, her bare feet slipping desperately on the metal ramp.
Her wide eyes searched for his silhouette in the shadows.
Adrenaline exploded in the half-blood's veins.
Lucas tried to stand up, but the metallic clank of the handcuffs and the crushing weight pulled him back down.
His arms and legs were completely immobilized by electromagnetic blocks, pinning his wrists behind his back and his ankles together.
He couldn't use his hands, and he couldn't use his legs.
But Lucas began to drag himself.
Like a cornered beast, he used the strength of his neck and shoulders to pull his own body across the freezing metal floor, ignoring the skin of his freshly torn face scraping painfully against the grates.
Vance was dragging Yasmin right down the middle of the main aisle, passing mere inches from where Lucas lay.
With a guttural roar, muffled by the gag of pain and hatred, Lucas thrust his torso forward.
He had no hands, so he used the only weapon his biology hadn't stripped from him yet.
He threw his mouth wide open and sank his teeth with all his jaw's strength into the hem of Yasmin's tunic.
Lucas clenched his teeth, locking his jaw with the brute force of an Anchor-Shell clamping onto wood.
Vance gave an impatient tug, but the girl didn't move.
Lucas's dead weight, with his neck muscles strained to the point of tearing, acted as a living anchor.
The boy was being dragged across the ramp's metal, his teeth grinding violently against the leather fabric, but he refused to let go.
He growled through his nose, his bloodshot eyes locked onto the mercenary's face.
Yasmin fell to her knees on the ramp.
The dark blood from the identical slash on her own cheek trickled down and dripped onto Lucas's face.
She looked down.
Her gaze was no longer that of the wonder-filled child who played with her best friend on Arbo, pulling pranks and trading jokes.
Hell had crushed her childhood the night before. Trembling, with tears washing the dirt and blood from her disfigured face, she brought her two handcuffed hands to Lucas's locked face.
She touched his hair.
Her cold fingers calmed the beast for a mere fraction of a second.
The world around them disappeared; the screams of the other women became a distant, hollow hum.
"Be the strongest, Lucas," Yasmin whispered.
Her voice was broken by exhaustion and pain, but it carried a definitive order, something that would engrave the fate of the universe for eras to come.
Her tears wet the boy's cut skin.
"Be the strongest... and get me out of here."
Lucas's pupils dilated.
He tried to growl a response of confirmation, but if he opened his mouth, he would let her go.
"Let go of her, you disgusting freak!" Vance bellowed.
The mercenary raised his heavy polymer boot tipped with solid steel and delivered a brutal kick, with full force, directly into Lucas's face.
The crack of a broken jawbone echoed in the hold; a blinding, white-hot pain exploded inside the boy's skull.
The kinetic force of the impact ripped the fabric trapped between his teeth and hurled him backward, lethargically, against the cold wall of the ship.
Lucas's vision spun in a dark whirlpool.
The heavy taste of rust flooded his throat.
Fallen on the floor, completely paralyzed, he blinked through the red mist.
The last thing he saw was Yasmin's fragile silhouette being dragged outside, swallowed by the purple dust of the unknown planet.
The ship's hydraulic ramp rose, locking the hatch with a dull, irreversible thud.
Total darkness once again swallowed the cargo hold.
The elf's body trembled in uncontrollable spasms of pain and cold.
He rested his forehead against the steel floor.
A single warm tear slid from his uninjured eye, mixing with the blood from the cut on his cheek, and dripped onto the dark metal.
Then, another.
The boy's chest rose and fell in a tearing sob.
He cried for the mother who burned.
He cried for the tribe that hated him.
He cried for the emerald little girl he didn't have the strength to hold onto.
He cried until the last drop of moisture in his eyes dried up, until the remaining stubble of human warmth inside his chest cooled completely, transforming into a furnace of ice and absolute hatred.
When the final emptiness settled into his soul, the tears simply stopped.
"I was weak," Lucas murmured to the silence.
And that night, in the absolute dark of that slave ship, was the last time Lucas cried.