God Grave

Confessions pt 1

Joren couldn't sleep. The corruption always got worse at night, pulsing, spreading, reminding him that each waking moment he spent brought him inches away from death.

‎He sat watch beside the cold fire pit, checking the perimeter more from habit than necessity. Nothing moved in the salt flats except bone-crawlers hunting in the dark. Their carapaces caught starlight, gleaming like mother-of-pearl as they skittered across a vertebrae half-buried in sediment.

‎Military training died hard. Even now, three years after desertion, and two years into corruption, he still checked sight lines and approach vectors, positioning himself where he could see threats before they saw him —old habits from a life he'd left behind, or tried to.

‎"Joren?" A hesitant voice came from the darkness. Petran emerged from between the wagons, moving with the careful quiet of someone trying not to wake others. "I didn't mean to startle you."

‎Joren's hand had already moved to his knife before he registered who it was. He forced himself to relax. "Can't sleep?"

‎"Not really." Petran glanced back toward the wagons, then moved closer. "Mind if I sit? I know you're on watch, but..."

‎"Sit." Joren gesture to the large boulder beside him. "Keep a dying man company."

‎Petran sat, but his eyes kept drifting to Joren's neck where the corruption was visible even in starlight—black veins spreading like cracks in porcelain. He tried to be subtle about it, but Joren noticed. Everyone always noticed.

‎For a while neither spoke, and just watched the stars wheel overhead through gaps in the god-bones. The Ribs curved against the night sky like the framework of some vast cathedral, bone-white in the moonlight.

‎Joren pulled out his knife—the good one, imperial issue, god-bone handle—and began the maintenance routine he'd performed ten thousand times. Check the edge. oil the pivot and ensure the mechanism for its retractable blade moved smoothly. It was meditation more than necessity. The blade was already sharp enough to shave with.

‎"Can I ask you something?" Petran said finally, his voice barely above a whisper.

‎"You're going to anyway."

‎"The... the thing on your neck. The black lines. Is that what they call the corruption?"

‎"Yes."

‎"And you got it from... god-dust? Like what they mine in the deep shafts?"

‎Joren tested the blade's edge against his thumb, careful not to press hard enough to break skin. "Most people who get exposed die immediately. Their brains can't acclimate to the divine frequency. But some people—people with certain genetic markers—survive. Sometimes they develop abilities, become god-touched. Other times, their bodies try to adapt and fail. That' then brings about the corruption."

‎"So . . .?"

“Yes I fell into the latter." Joren's voice was flat. My body tried to acclimate to the dust and couldn't. So now it's killing me slowly instead of quickly."

‎Petran was quiet for a moment, absorbing this. "You got it in the mines? Before you joined the imperial service?"

‎"After the mines. I already joined the army when it happened." It was from a Deep Spine operation, three years ago."

‎He should stop there, deflect, change the subject. But something about the kid's earnest curiosity, his obvious concern despite barely knowing Joren, made the words come easier than they should have.

‎We were hunting resistance operatives,” Joren continued, surprising himself. “At least, that’s what we were told at briefing. Intelligence had reported an abandoned god-bone structure showing signs of occupation. Supply movements in the region. Command suspected resistance activity.”

Petran leaned forward slightly, caught by the story despite himself.

“By the time it reached our unit, the intelligence had been… clarified.” Joren’s voice carried bitter irony. “Briefing said we’d find armed resistance operatives using the location for weapons storage, planning operations against imperial facilities. Each level of command had added their own assumptions, turning suspected activity into confirmation of an insurgent cell.’”

‎The memory was sharp despite the three year distance. He could remember the weight of his armor, the taste of adrenaline, the tight focus that came before action, when the world narrowed to threat assessment and tactical planning.

‎"We tracked them to a sealed chamber in what used to be Saros's lower ribcage— old structure, abandoned since the early mining days when they realized the resonance levels were too dangerous for sustained operations. Intelligence said it was perfect for resistance activity—isolated, defensible, off imperial patrol routes."

‎He stared at the stars, but he was seeing that chamber with its bone walls thick enough to muffle sound, and the darkness inside broken only by their lights. He remembered the sealed door that had taken them fifteen minutes to breach with cutting equipment.

‎"When we got inside..." Joren's voice caught. He forced himself to continue. "We found twenty-three people. A couple of families with their children, and some elderly. They'd been living there for months, judging from supplies. Some of those supplies had resistance markings—food , medicine, and clothes, so technically, there was a resistance connection. But they weren’t fighters. They weren’t operatives planning attacks.”

‎"They weren't resistance?" Petran's voice was small, beginning to understand where this was going.

‎"No. They were refugees from imperial resource extraction. Their settlements had been demolished to make room for expanded mining operations and they'd fled rather than relocate to approved housing districts." The bitterness in his voice surprised him.

“The resistance had been helping them survive—supply drops, information about safe routes. That’s what intelligence had detected. But somewhere between ‘civilians receiving aid from resistance networks’ and our briefing, they became ‘hardened insurgents with weapons caches. They were just people who'd lost everything and were trying to survive in the only place the empire wouldn't look for them."

‎"But... if they weren't dangerous, you just left them there, right? reported back that the intelligence was wrong?"

‎Joren wished he could say yes. He wished the story ended there.

‎"