“ANORA?” Magnus said aloud with his blood and dirt covered brow scrunched in confusion as he slowly turned his head to look over his right shoulder.

  Standing behind the World-Breaker adorned in her skin tight black Galactic Decider’s Uniform with its golden Voltairan ‘V’ crest emblazoned over her chest and golden battle helmet was…

  “Anora,” Magnus gasped as he laid eyes upon his former fellow kinsman.

  Eyes widened and jaw literally almost dropped to the ground, the Breaker of Worlds stared at Anora in sheer shock after not seeing her for a whole cycle since fleeing from Voltaira.

  Pressing a button on the right side of her armored neck, Anora deactivated her battle helmet, causing it to fizzle away into digitized ‘dust’ whilst revealing her true angelic-like face to her gaunt faced former Commanding-Leader.

  “Magnus???” Anora said once more in an unsure tone as she looked upon the World-Breaker’s skeletal-like face. “Tis… Tis you?”

  “Ugh… What the thrack was that?” the Jorrakan asked himself after rising back to his feet.

  Looking onward past the tree that he was standing behind once more, the Jorrakan squinted his eyes to see that the World-Breaker had been joined by…

  “A Galactic Decider???” the Jorrakan gasped as Anora stood frozen on the other side of the impact crater directly across from Magnus.

  Eyes widened, and jaw dropped now, the Jorrakan quickly put two and two together, causing him to say, “Holy…”

  “THRACK,” Anora thoughtlessly blurted in response to the World-Breaker’s ghastly physical appearance. “Magnus… What happened to you?”

  “HOW?” Magnus asked whilst locking eyes with Anora, now having since returned to his bare feet. “How are you… HERE? How did you find me? After all this time, how did you--”

  “I didn’t find you, Magnus,” Anora revealed. “You found us.”

  “Us,” the Breaker of Worlds repeated with his brow furled before realizing ‘who’ his former kinsman was referring to. “Where are they?”

  “Residing in Rannuk’s Orbit,” Anora informed. “Waiting there, they are…”

  “Waiting for what?”

  Anora did not answer.

  Instead, she just gave the World-Breaker’s radically transformed physical frame another ‘look over’ whilst she asked, “Magnus… What have you done to yourself? What have you… allowed yourself to become?”

  “No one,” Magnus gritted. “I… AM NO ONE. Just a worthless skogger who has been allowed to live for far too long…”

  “You need to come with me… RIGHT NOW. You need to come with me before…”

  “Before what? Why must I come with you, Anora? What is happening???”

  “MAGNUS, LOOK. There’s no time to explain. Come with me and I shall tell you everything that you need to know… EVERYTHING. I swear to you that I shall.”

  “They are going to break Rannuk… AREN’T THEY?”

  “WUH-WHAT???”

  “Tis why you are here… Why you are ALL here, is it not?” Magnus asked with his face sullen and hard. “To take my life-cycle and to BREAK Rannuk…”

  Again, Anora did not respond.

  Scrunching his brow, Magnus looked up to the clear skyways that were painted over the Rannukan surface.

  “You have come to make me pay for my ‘crimes’,” Magnus treaded. “If so, then why must I come with you???”

  Now locking eyes with Magnus again, Anora still could not speak.

  “Where shall you take me? Back to Voltaira?” Magnus continued to press forth. “Back to the Voltair… Where he shall ‘justly’ and ‘RIGHTFULLY’ punish me for my ‘supposed’ crimes against HIS people, world, and Empire???”

  “Magnus, you NEED to come with me. NOW,” Anora stressed more intensely as she walked on over to the Breaker of Worlds. “We, along with ALL of Rannuk, are running out of ti--”

  “Kill me,” Magnus said in a broken tone, shocking Anora.

  “What??? What did you just say?”

  “KILL ME. Your ears do not deceive you, Anora. I want you to do it. Kill me. Please… KILL ME.”

  Remembering Emperor Voltair’s order for her to kill Magnus if need be, but quickly shaking it away and out of her head, Anora scrunched her brow and said, “Nuh-No… NO, MAGNUS. I shall not ‘kill’ you. No one shall kill you as long as…”

  “I come with you?”

  “Yes… YES, MAGNUS! As long as you come with me…. WILLINGLY and without conflict then your life-cycle shall be spared.”

  “For how long though?”

  “What?”

  “How long shall my life-cycle be spared, Anora? If it be an extended amount of time then please, do me the courtesy… And decency in ending life-cycle now. Extinguish my Life-Force… END ME. Go on. Do it…. DO IT. Please. I beg of you…”

  Seeing Magnus’s eyes beginning to water, Anora scrunched her brow as she asked, “Are… Are those… TEARS???”

  Watching a lonely teardrop roll down Magnus’s right cheekbone, Anora gasped in shock at the very foreign sight.

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  “Before you do so, Anora,” Magnus started. “Before you… TAKE my life-cycle you must know something. Something you ALL must know.”

  Knowing that time was running out for her to apprehend Magnus before Braako and the others came down to the surface, Anora wanted to drag him along, but something told her to ask the World-Breaker what he was talking about.

  “What?” Anora asked rather curiously. “What is it, Magnus?”

  “The truth,” Magnus replied grimly. “The TERRIBLE truth.”

  “Truth? What are talking about, Mag--”

  “The truth about everything, Anora…. EVERYTHING.”

  Gaining Anora’s undivided attention now, Magnus grabbed onto her arms and revealed, “Our life-cycles… Our WHOLE LIFE-CYCLES we have been lied to, Anora. ALL OF US. Ever since our first upbringings we have been fed cold, calculated, and well-orchestrated LIES about our pasts. Lies about ourselves. We are not of the Voltairan race.”

  “What?”

  “We are not even FROM Voltaira. We do not, nor have we EVER, hailed from Voltaira. You, Braako, Medo, Apollox, Rayven, Tristen, Draex, Kai, Xan, and I all hail from the planet of… CRIX.”

  Anora’s eyes widened whilst the Breaker of Worlds nodded in grand guilt.

  “We hail from the planet of Crix,” Magnus reconfirmed. “The ten of us are all Crixans by birth… AND BLOOD.”

  Shaking his head now, Magnus stated, “And we are not ‘siblings’, either. We are individual life-forms…. CRIXAN LIFE-FORMS. All of us are. When we were mere childlings, not too long after our births, we were taken from Crix…. STOLEN, WE WERE. Stolen by our Keepers, who were instructed and EMPLOYED by Voltair himself to do so.”

  Anora’s jaw then dropped in total awe as Magnus angrily pressed, “VOLTAIR. ‘Twas Voltair who stole us from our true home world. He stole us because he knew of the IMMENSE gravitational-based powers that each of us hold within our vessels. Then, in a means to hide his HORRIBLE, IMMORAL actions he ‘crafted’ us into his own personal, UNSTOPPABLE fighting force: the Galactic Deciders of the Voltairan Empire.

  “Then, to justify his creation of the Deciders, he created an enemy that was not equal in power, but FAR SUPERIOR than us in quantity and might: THE KREN. Emperor Voltair, along with a slew of us own Personal Scientists on Voltaira, genetically-engineered the creation of the Kren by fusing some kind of ‘biomechanical suits’ with the vessels of the people who were once native to Voltaira before the Emperor invaded it, conquered it, and took it as his own world, which secretly acted as a base for his sinister… DEPRAVED actions.

  “Tis the reason why I fled, Anora. Just before he perished, Lero gave me his Holo-Fier, which I then accessed to see all of which I have just told you now play out before my very thracking eyes as if I were originally there.

  “Then, somehow, the emperor must have found out, or discovered, that Lero had come to tell me the truth so he sent a squad of his personal Knights to take me out of my Private Chamber at the Temple under the false guise of my ‘hesitation’ to break Crix.

  “What they were originally sent to do though was ERASE ME from the equation altogether. They called it ‘punishment for allowing my emotional level to break away from its baseline’, but what they were ACTUALLY trying to do was zero me due to the fact that I knew the deep… DARK secret Voltair and our Keepers held and protected so vigilantly all these cycles. Once I realized what Voltair’s Knights were ‘attempting’ to do to me I…”

  “BROKE THEM,” Anora answered.

  “Yes… I BROKE THEM,” Magnus nodded. “I broke them all because they were trying to kill me… BECAUSE I KNEW THE TRUTH. Voltair’s truth. His truth about us, the Kren, what the cursed empire is and has always been built upon as well as its true means: CONQUEST… TOTAL. GALACTIC. CONQUEST.”

  “Tis why we salvage the ‘Kren-Aligned’ worlds that choose not to be broken,” Anora said after having an epiphany of her own. “The emperor and his forces drain them of their most vital resources and place Military Bases upon them in a means to…”

  “EXPAND HIS EMPIRE AND CONTROL.”

  “Thrack. Tis… Tis not possible.”

  “I know, Anora. Tis hard to understand. Tis much to take in, the truth… BUT IT IS WHAT TRULY HAPPENED.”

  Scrunching her brow in frustration, Anora asked, “So, you mean to tell me that all of our life-cycles, ever since we were childlings, have been…”

  “Complete and utter… FALSITIES,” Magnus confirmed. “All of it. Thracking all of it. We have been pawns, Anora… VOLTAIR’S PAWNS. He used us… ALL OF US to further and ensure the expansion of his empire throughout the Galactic Sector and strengthen his powerful reign. Over the past ten cycles that we have been the ‘Galactic Deciders’ he has done this and he shall CONTINUE onward with his wretched treachery… UNLESS ‘SOMEONE’ HALTS HIM.”

  Looking downwards now, Magnus said in a distressed tone, “I cannot do it though. I have sworn off violence… Or, at least, I have tried to. My battles are done. My wars are over. Now, all that I seek is rest… ETERNAL REST.

  “Which is WHY you must kill me, Anora,” Magnus pressed whilst tightening the grip that he had on Anora’s Arms. “PLEASE… I BEG OF YOU TO PLEASE KILL ME! Not Braako, or Rayven, or even thracking Apollox… YOU, ANORA! YOU MUST BE THE ONE WHO EXTINGUISHES MY LIFE-FORCE! Think of it as my last request, if it makes it easier on your own life-force. Tis does not matter to me… Just as long as you do me the kindness… And HONOR of ending my life-cycle… ONCE AND FOR ALL.”

  Anora, again, did not reply.

  Magnus and Anora just stood there, in front of the destroyed hut whilst the Jorrakan secretly watched them both converse with another from off in the distance.

  Seeing that Anora was currently ‘blank-minded’, Magnus was about to egg her onwards to ‘kill him’ again until… TIME RAN OUT.