“The road to Sorenna,

  is paved with broken ships,

  Their hulls glittering

  in the pale starlight.

  From the arches of Arvida, to the walls of Malengard,

  Spills the blood of the Outer Fleet,

  The many leaves of Hestgard’s Menengroth grow empty,

  The grave-stars of the Memorial fill the sky.

  The road to Sorenna,

  is filled with the fallen,

  Corpses floating gently

  in the deep cold void.

  The unnumbered tears mark the sacrifice of worlds,

  The wailing of our widows echoes in their lovers’ armor;

  The memory of persecution are our scars of pain,

  The wounds made fresh from the dead in battle.

  The road to Sorenna,

  is marked with shattered worlds,

  Their smoke-choked skies

  Obscuring pale red suns.

  Still the road to Sorenna calls,

  So we choke down our broken hearts and march on,

  Still the road to our long-sundered families calls,

  So we grasp our discarded spears in our hands once more.”

  – Avalon II, Queen of Hestgard

  Sorenna of the north. The crown jewel of the nation that bore its name, with its territory diffusing into the maze that was the Gasfire Nebula, Sorenna was a world with an unusually thick crust. Its upper surfaces are nigh inhospitable, due to the low pressure in the atmosphere, but its deep mountains trapped huge clusters and pools of gases that made life possible, generated by the teeming oceans of bacteria below.

  Through networks, tunnels, and skyways, the ecosystems of Sorenna developed, until the entire world glowed like a luminescent pearl. When humans first landed there, they named it after an ancient queen, renowned for her beauty. And with the settlers’ guidance, Sorenna became a dazzling mix of underground cities, cliffside towns, oases, and grand towers, roots nestled in deep ravines and lava wells before rising into an planet-covering ecumenopolis. The upper atmosphere, once poisonous, was transformed into crisp mountain air, breathable without the need for an apparatus. In time, Sorenna became the center of a interstellar nation, having weathered through the Wars of Light and Flames’ first bouts.

  But Sorenna’s politics were not nearly as beautiful as its capital.

  The region of Sorenna, a triangular stretch of territory nearly 1500 light-years wide, mostly sat between the gate-linked worlds of the Cyvonian Empire, the Gasfire Nebula, and the galaxy's northern frontier. Its heartstars included Arvida, Malengard, and Agrippa Dolat, worlds bedecked with ancient glories. For the first two, at least, their histories continued into the present. Arvida was an industrial world, with its World-Forged arches inhabited by technocrats and engineers churning out technological wonders and terrors alike. Malengard, likewise, housed great forges that processed the magma pouring out of it, supporting Arvida’s metropolitan needs with its industrial capacity. Only Agrippa Dolat, the planet where the Guiding Lights declared themselves (counting amongst them one known as the Dreamer of Sorenna), was left in its original state, quarantined as a mausoleum to Sorenna’s glorious but awkward past. After all, the Guiding Lights espoused everything Sorenna was currently not.

  The Dreamer of Sorenna left behind a grand Remnant, a fragment of her world. It was a dreamworld, linking together in thought all the worlds that it permeated, subtly shifting and strengthening society. Within it, there was unity and order, the perfection that came with calculation and subtlety, the work of a vast computational engine that ran like a second skin through the entire country, enacting its will through the nanoswarms that permeated the air and the comm-capsules that bounced from star to star.

  The Dreamer of Sorenna once spoke of a vast network to connect its people, to revitalize its worlds, to bring peace to the war-torn stars. But the dream turned to ash when the Dreamer died. The Dream became a nightmare, and those who tried to watch, to fix the problem, found themselves underneath a self-perpetuating tyranny, one that grew out of unrepaired biases within a system that choked out all dissent. The Dreamer’s followers hid the Seed and disappeared, and thus extinguished any hope of a successor, one who might have had the power to make things right. It had joined the Cyvonian-Dolan war, and though contributing little to its course, had expended soldiers’ lives profligately. It oppressed its people and ruined the planets it considered disposable. It made no attempt to court either the Guiding Lights and Conquering Flames, either of which could have brought much-needed reforms; instead, the government swayed back and forth between them, all the while tightening its grip on its people until they choked under its rule.

  —

  Avalon looked out at the cargo containers, and hoped that everyone in them were still alive. The hexagonal prisms were marked as terraforming supplies, from atmospheric gases and lichen tanks, to mirror segments and asteroid tugs. But hidden between cargo containers were small, cramped rooms, as well as millions of cryo-pods, siphoning off a combination of internal batteries and generators.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  A fleet was gathered around her ship. Ostensibly a cargo resupply to outposts in the northern wastes, the fleet in reality carried hundreds of millions of refugees, fleeing the Sorennan Union’s newfound tyranny. Avalon was part of the Guideposts, a secretive organization in charge of escorting those fleeing Sorennan crackdowns into the Northern Wastes after the Sorennan Union’s victory during the civil war.

  Avalon remembered the latest civil war. The clouds were smeared green and black, toxic fumes rising from Sorenna’s cities, as the government forces and the revolutionaries fought each other in the street. She remembered her aunt and uncle, shielding her from the shots that richocheted through the little apartment she’d lived in. She remembered how much she hated going out to the field for her job, taking pictures of dead people and sending them to publications that would never even publish them. Her company had been caught between the two sides, both vying to influence the public with the company’s media even as they sent assassins and killers. But at last, when the civil war ended, things became no better.

  The millions that fled into the Northern Wastes included political refugees, intellectuals, as well as a whole host of “dissidents.” Some were targets of purges. Others had fallen on hard times, as civil war and dictatorship killed and imprisoned their families and friends. Ethnic groups, long pitted against each other and oppressed from above, co-existed in the fleet uneasily. All of these were grouped under the “dissident” label. And Avalon herself could be counted among them, having spoken out against the crackdowns and planetary starvation blockades enacted by the new government.

  In truth, many of them followed a young, charismatic leader nicknamed the “New Dreamer,” who died before her time. She had been a rising politician before the war, Upon her death, the policies she championed were thrown aside, and her followers were ousted from positions of power by conservative factions. Enraged, the people took to the streets and skyways, first in scattered hundreds, then swelling to the thousands, then millions, and finally, entire sectors rebelled until even the capital faced unrest.

  Avalon remembered those protests. All across the capital world of Sorenna, as the police built cordons around them and the military rolled in armored vehicles, the Sorennan people, armed nothing more than cheap plasti-shields, protest signs, and umbrellas, banded together in the streets. From the highest skyways to the lowest under-streets, the people roared, and the guns roared back. Those who were not killed were either exiled or forced to flee in fear. She saw way too many of them, shivering in crowded cells, or worse, jammed into cargo containers, to be strapped onto ships.

  She now walked among those same shivering people, the cargo container’s ad-hoc life-support unable to keep the temperature stable. She handed out blankets, warming pads, gloves and socks. She looked into the cryopods, and saw people in all stages in their lives, sleeping, frozen, waiting to be thawed. With the failing power, however, she feared that they would be at those stages forever.

  —

  The Sorennan escort fleet made long lines all around the cargo ships, guns poised to fire, pushing them all northward, far beyond all inhabited space. It was the cruelest form of execution, as not only were men and women consigned to exile, but exile with failing life support systems and the inevitability of slow, lonely deaths. Sorenna could claim humanity, benevolence even, while sending these people to their demise.

  It was not efficient, and not for the first time did Avalon suspect that something was horribly wrong with Sorenna’s Dream. The Dream’s failure to prevent civil war all but confirmed the experiments’ failure, but the system still trapped most of the population in it. The nanobots were in the air, in the food, in the water. These gathered information, subtly modified every form of media under consumption, and even wormed its way into people’s minds. The results were aggregated, The calculations were run through every planetary network, where the modified comm-capsules would predict and update information to each planet in the nation to suit the Dream’s parameters.

  —

  The story of Hestgard would become a monument for the ages to come. A people exiled far away, carving out a life in the frontiers before rising to greatness. Hestgard’s original settlers were explorers by necessity, moving far to the galactic north, either under forced exile, or fleeing from Sorennan authorities. Bit by bitter bit, the Hestgard people built homes out in the wastelands.

  Then the Terraforming Guild joined them. The Guild was a corporate consortium, and its elites had dared to question the Sorennan Dictatoriat’s industrialization program, which threatened the Guild’s already difficult task of terraforming heavily damaged planets. The loudest complaints came from engineers, who saw years, even decades of their work obliterated by the Dictatoriat’s greed. The corporate offices stood behind their engineers, not least because they were not paid on time, and only on the results, which meant that the Dictatoriat’s heavy-handed industrialization threatened their bottom line.

  Avalon was not an engineer. She had an understanding of the terraformer’s craft, but that was due to her job as a journalist. As Sorenna’s High Command tamped down on free speech by cutting off the news capsules between planets, She’d found herself jobless, fleeing the secret police that came knocking at her news station’s door. She continued in secret, however, occasionally writing articles decrying the latest atrocity, the most recent legislation, or the upcoming disaster. None made an impact, even as they circulated underground, seemingly beyond the reach of Sorenna's police forces. Only one, perhaps, rang in memory, a poem she had written on one of the worst nights of the civil war, and republished years later when the Sorennans began their policy of exile.

  “A leaf drifts softly in the wind in my dreams,

  Tracing the air currents as it falls;

  Its green translucent veins catch the sun,

  Before falling to the deep brown earth.

  Cold are the stars in the ashen wastes,

  And leaves wither in the poor man’s dust;

  Silent are the sundered refugees who are with me,

  Parents, siblings, widows, and orphans.

  I dream of Sorenna as it was,

  With towns and cities filled with smiles;

  I remember the streamers and lanterns

  In the solstice festivals.

  My heart aches when it sees

  The crying child, swaddled in rags,

  Shivering in the metal boxes

  As they drift silent toward exile.

  I dream of the tree in my home,

  Leaves blossoming in the warm sun

  Before the red-clad burned it into smoke

  That arose high into the blackened sky;

  My heart breaks and bleeds as it wanders

  Keeping the shattered remains of my world;

  I turn away from the burning buildings,

  And close my ears to screams of my countrymen.

  Oh blinking starfield filled with suns,

  Where might we find our home?

  I let out a sigh and dream of the leaf again,

  Feeling adrift in the darkness.”

  The next morning, at her door, she found a small tree in a pot. Its branches were black and silver, while its leaves were green and gold. Despite its small size, its leaves looked like miniature city blocks, while tiny towers sprung up like flowers in swirling patterns up its trunk. As she stared at the Tree, a name materialized in her thoughts, along with a vision of what that name could be: Menengroth of Hestgard.

  Avalon ran down, not towards her now defunct office, but to the spaceport, clutching the little pot in her hands.