The Fall of Aphelyon

Cronos squeezed Feray’s hand as she labored, his mother Daphnis’ ear pressed against the outside of their locked bedroom door. The entire Aphelyon family held their breath. The time had come to meet the most important person in the world: the heir to their bloodline. 

Feray had carried for nine months. Labored for hours in pain, pushing. But it was all worth it the moment they welcomed a healthy baby girl into the world. Cronos held the newborn in his arms. They would name her Jupetra. He and Daphnis carefully selected it from astral names of old, a planet that may have once been, in a far away star system. It was lucky. Destined for prosperity. Perfect for the next generation in the line of Cosmic Order and a high noble of the Reian empire. 

As Cronos stroked Jupetra’s pearly tuft of hair, a smile crept across his face. Starlit silver spiraled in her blue eyes —just like his own. A blessed sign of the Cosmic Order within. For a moment, he allowed himself to wonder what feats of magic she would perform. Would she harness solar flames to claim land for Reia? Would her power rival his own? Might she blink through the space between stars, like her grandmother? Banish fiends, like his grandfather? Or might she even move the heavens, like Amares Aphelyon himself? 

His musings were cut short as Feray continued to bleed. She screamed and bared down once more. Daphnis blinked into the room. Jupetra began to cry. Between his mother, his heir, and his wife, Cronos stood in shock as they welcomed a second baby girl into the world. Mercurie. 

The possibility of twins had not crossed anyone’s minds in the Aphelyon family because, frankly, there had never been such a thing. Since Amares had been blessed with the power of Cosmic Order more than ten generations ago, no one had sired more than a single child. No one dared risk diluting their magic. For a moment, the family feared she may cleave their magic in two. But in Mercurie’s eyes, the flecks of silver bore no shape. They were scattered, messy. Only one child could carry on the soul of their bloodline. Thank the heavens, Cronos thought. She was simply an empty copy. 

✦

The first year of parenthood proved more perturbing than Cronos had imagined. True, they had staff to wait on Feray while she nursed. They had their pick of special healers when the twins came down with fever. And Cronos could still attend every royal council hearing, high court party, and meeting to discuss the influx of non-human species in Reia’s lands. But the twins were, unfortunately, quite attached to one another. He could not spend a moment alone with Jupetra without the pair of them screaming for one another. Not even Jupetra’s first words were sacred. Mere seconds after she looked to Cronos and said “Baba,” Mercurie interjected with her own first word. 

“Jupe!” 

… 

Jupe was no name for a noble, and certainly not for a wielder of Cosmic Order. Feray and Jupetra’s giggles be damned, the charm of this moment was lost on Cronos. His feelings began to shift from mere ambivalence to annoyance at Mercurie’s presence. 

✦

In her early years, Cronos attempted to show Jupetra order and power, the principles of the bloodline she belonged to. Jupetra’s innate magic held promise. With time, she’d refine it and become a proper sorceress, the rightful wielder of his family’s great power. Mercurie, while she proved to be fairly orderly, also proved fairly needy. And unremarkable.

“Let Feray take care of the other one,” Daphnis instructed. “Concentrate on Jupetra. Show her what it means to be an Aphelyon.” 

The family enjoyed traveling for Cronos’ work, most especially to their new summer home in the southern colony. Cronos commissioned it just before the twins were born to aid in the advocation of separate non-human and human villages. City elves weren’t quite human, but they were wise enough to see the risk halflings and orcs posed to their culture. To the lands of Reia. The new colonists, however, even the human colonists, proved more challenging to convince. Frequenting this residence allowed him more influence. And thanks to their noble standing, it allowed Jupetra to see the world she was promised. Everywhere the red flag touched was hers to enjoy. And one day, to help shape.

Cronos delighted in watching Jupetra explore her powers. She conjured miniature comets, turned candle light into solar flames. She could float objects about the room, as if they were in her orbit. He and Daphnis felt pride swell in their chests at her accomplishments. Feray did too, of course. But she could not quite understand. It was not her bloodline. Mercurie found fun inside the textbooks Feray kept from her collegiate years. She was a quick read, but desperate for attention. Every so often, she’d hurry into the office to show Jupetra some small feat of magic. But they were all common spells. Nothing like the innate power Cronos recognized in himself, in Jupetra. A waste of time. 

✦

Between noblework and training Jupetra, Cronos’ patience thinned. Despite his increasingly busy work and social schedule, he and Feray agreed he would make an effort to attend family outings and dinner. He found even this frustrating. 

Jupetra had grown quite unruly, and one night conjured dancing starlight as a distraction so she could dispose of her peas on the floor. This would have been charming, several years ago. 

“Jupetra—” Daphnis scolded, “you send that starlight back and behave yourself.”

But Jupetra had become prone to tantrums when corrected, straining Cronos’ aching head. 

“Don’t cry, Jupe. Listen!” 

Mercurie tried to cheer her sister by speaking gibberish in some heavens-forsaken language. Elven would have been tolerable. But Orcish? Sylvan? Cronos demanded to know which books Feray owned in non-human languages. He reprimanded her. What a terrible impression it would make on the Aphelyon family to be tied to other species, when he worked on the committee spearheading their separation. At the threat of burning her mother’s books, Mercurie confessed she’d used spells to read non-human flyers hung around town. Ridiculous. 

Mercurie was promptly banned from attending family outings. And when Jupetra began to throw a tantrum at her twin’s punishment, Cronos took a dinner tray to his room. 

✦

In her adolescence, Jupetra’s magic grew potent, cosmically-charged, and harder to control. One morning, when Jupetra pitched a particularly large fit about practicing, she accidentally unleashed a wave of destructive matter through the great hall, slamming Feray, Daphnis, and Cronos into the wall. The only one who managed to dodge was Mercurie. In a fraction of a second, Jupetra turned from frustrated to frightened. She bolted to her room as Mercurie trailed behind. 

From that moment on, Cronos and Daphnis began to take a more structured approach to Jupetra’s training. He stepped back from the court, passed his non-human initiatives to another nobleman with a Bailiff as messenger. His sole concentration would be on raising his heir. Feray pleaded that Jupetra was under a lot of pressure, that she needed to take breaks and spend time with other children. With her sister. Cronos refuted this. Despite her noble upbringing, his wife has never understood. It was imperative that she control the Cosmic Order. There was no room for chaos. 

The twins disliked daily separation, but Mercurie’s interruptions were no longer just a nuisance. They were a hazard. Jupetra would lose concentration, and while her twin was always lucky enough to dodge and Daphnis could blink out of the way, Cronos was less fortunate. After one too many scorching rays to the beard, Mercurie was sequestered in the library during training. 

Promises of power and destiny helped to focus Jupetra. So they pushed her abilities, and praised her often. 

✦

Daphnis had grown very old. Her once radiant silver braid had gone white. The starry spirals in her eyes were covered in milky clouds. At one point, Cronos could have hired the nation’s finest healer, but now, no one would touch Daphnis. 

He learned from his Bailiff that the court had shrunk significantly in size. In Cronos’ prolonged absence, he was unable to see what this initiative had become. Reia’s list of unacceptable species had expanded. First, orcs and halflings fled to the colonies. Then, elven folk left the city. And in recent months, half-elf, even quarter-elf nobility were nowhere to be seen. Soon enough, their silver hair and starry eyes, their connection to the cosmos, were the very things that made the Aphelyons no longer human-enough in the eyes of Reia.

Perhaps they’d have better luck in the colonies, where news traveled slower. Cronos planned to move the five of them to their summer home, where he could rebuild his influence and take back power in the court. At the very least, his mother could live out her final years peacefully. But the night before the family’s departure, the Pseudohuman Removal Initiative had begun. 

The Aphelyon estate went up in flames that night, Daphnis stood against the red guards alone. She blinked between them, smoke twisting into their lungs as she manipulated fire and ash. But in her old age, she was not as quick as she had once been. One mistimed blink, and the guards snatched her through space. She could not break free.

“Take Jupetra and run. Preserve the bloodline!” Her final instruction to her son. 

Cronos grabbed Jupetra and a trunk full of jewels and escaped. When she cried for her sister, for her mother, Cronos turned back to face the fire. The red flag flew over the high tower as he divorced his eyes from the burning estate, and the flickering guilt of whom he’d left behind. 

Moments later, in a haze of silver mist, Feray and Mercurie appeared. Soot-riddled. Bloodied. Shocked. They’d conjured a form of magic to save themselves, Cronos realized. A different way to leap through space. He noted the trunk Mercurie managed to grab, one she’d filled with books and clothes. He’d wished she’d grabbed the trunk of gold instead. 

✦

The Empire began to enforce a new law: anyone caught hiding a pseudohuman would be put to death for treason. Ridiculous, Cronos thought. The empire was turning on even its noblest. Still, the Aphelyon family journeyed the edges of the Reian Empire. They slept in abandoned homes, camped in forests. They traveled by foot, and only by night. They often avoided towns all together, taking a tedious route to their summer home. It was no way for this family to live. 

For weeks, Cronos grew bitter about what they’d lost. Concerned with Jupetra’s lack of structure. He resented Feray’s coldness. Above all, he detested Mercurie's incantations and enchantments. Her insistence on helping. Her incessant need to stay by her sister. At least at the summer home, he would tuck away in the east wing and sort matters out. Or so he thought. 

Where their house once stood, they found only cinders and a red flag staked in the ground. The dread that had been looming over Cronos fell upon him with full gravitational force —no corner of the Empire was safe.

✦

In an inn just south of Reia’s colony, —the twins in one bed, his wife in another —Cronos laid on the floor, planning their next move. Could they make it to Atria, the coastal kingdom to the east? It’d probably be a diverse enough crowd to blend in.

 Mercurie whispered something about raiders in her sleep. 

He hushed her. He needed silence to think. 

They wouldn’t have to socialize with the other species, but their presence would make his family look more human.

“They’re here,” she muttered. 

“Silence,” Cronos hissed. 

Seconds later, Reian guards came knocking. 

Feray cracked the door to reveal her human face, her plain black hair. This was their family’s greatest asset. She used her charm, suggested the guards check down the hall for another family that arrived just this afternoon. Behind her, trunks were packed, silver locks of hair were covered. Cronos had almost finished readying them to escape when the door came crashing down. Cronos conjured a sphere of flames and shooting comets to strike the guards down. But when one grabbed Feray by her hair, a knife to her neck, Cronos froze. All he could do was stare into his wife’s teary, ordinary eyes.  

“Do not split them up.” And then they slit her throat. 

Together, Jupetra and Cronos carved their way through the guards, the people who utterly betrayed them. Jupetra’s anguish fueled her. She blasted holes through guards; she let them feel her world-shattering rage. Mercurie was incredibly fortunate to survive the night, using her books and what Cronos suspected was lucky intuition. She anticipated the raiders, foresaw their many attacks upon her and Jupetra, and countered them with spells of her own. She adorned her sister with silvery shields of mist and quiet boons of starlight. While Cronos found her magic underwhelming, it certainly helped the two of them to turn every guard into human paste.

✦ 

The family eventually arrived in Atria, far from the Reians. Far from the Pseudohuman Removal Initiative. He enrolled the twins in The Cessa Academy of Arcane Arts & Science, paid in-full to ensure they were admitted mid-term. With some of their remaining, completely liquid assets, Cronos secured a two-bedroom townhome with a waterfront view. Modest, he thought. He could tell it bothered Jupetra to live without wealth and power. One day, he promised her, she’d become a legendary sorceress, and the cosmos would know her name. All she had to do was work for it. This didn’t seem to soothe her as it once had. 

A year came and went, and Jupetra’s performance at Cessa Academy became cause for concern. Her discipline: non-existent. She spent his money carelessly, she skipped her classes. Mercurie, near-top of class, offered over and over to tutor her twin. But she was unable to get through. 

A week before final exams, Jupetra was caught tampering with a cursed blade that had been forged by a dark entity. She may have even made a pact with it. This broke the rules of magical conduct at Cessa, and now, Jupetra was on the brink of expulsion. The embarrassment was unbearable, but for the first time in his life, Cronos was in no financial position to buy his way out. When the administration called for a group of students to travel to the Bethan Isles and recover stolen artifacts, Cronos knew what Jupetra must do. 

Jupetra protested, called it beneath their family to do mercenary work. But she needed structure. She needed discipline. And he had failed to give it to her. He ordered Mercurie to go along too, despite her exceptional standing. She would ensure her sister completed her mission, or he would revoke her funding —and privilege —to return to Cessa next term. 

With nothing but a fraction of his wealth, and a pending refugee visa, Cronos waited in the townhouse for his prodigal daughter to return. Days. Months. Perhaps Jupetra chose not to return. Perhaps her destiny lay elsewhere. 

This thought gave hope to Cronos, as red-flagged ships docked ashore.

✦