Blades of Arris: Erion

I am a forgotten lesser from a former servant world.

The first who dared to voyage across deadly space, knock on the brutal palace door, and demand entry.

But something went wrong.

My mission failed.

Now my family and friends are long gone. Others accomplished what I sacrificed everything for. All that’s left are nightmares and suspicious scars. 

Then one day the terrifying alien emperor bursts into my lounge.

He stalks toward me, his beautiful silver eyes flashing with rage.

It turns out my snarky, boredom-inspired annotations on his personal records weren't so private.

And now that I've captured his interest, he's the one holding me in his thrall...

This spicy, emotional novella filled with delicious longing is the final capstone in the Blades of Arris alien romance series. It’s not necessary to read the other books in the series to appreciate this one but it does feature characters introduced in Ranse. Two lost souls defy everything to fall in love, and in so doing, change the empire…You will love this story!

Six kortans after the events of Ranse...

ERION

There are many ways, large and small, that I am reminded I will never again be emperor.
Conversation topics that my physical trainers carefully skirt around while encouraging me to run faster. A subtle bracing when my neurospecialists review my reaction times. Stress lines around my visitors’ smiles when I miss a cue or don’t answer as quickly as they think I should.
“In the old era, your body would’ve been turned into nutrient cubes!” is a frequent joke, followed by how great my middle brother is doing as emperor and how no one else could do what he’s done. They hint that my personal devastation was “for the best” because of how well the empire is doing without me.
While I’m trying to formulate the proper response to their ongoing and yet mostly unintentional insults, their eyes skate up to the back of my head and away again, and they talk over me in a way they would never have dared a few kortans ago.
I do not want to close myself off to visitors. My neurospecialists believe daily conversations will improve my lingering delays. Still, it is a frustrating time for me, and maintaining a proper social facade is stressful.
But the reminder that most surprises me is the person who takes it upon themselves to correct my unpublished historical scholarship.
Some time after it was made excruciatingly clear that I would never again be useful to the empire in my original role, I began to exhume and re-examine the old hobbies and pastimes I once kept in reserve. One thing I enjoyed more than I perhaps should have was learning about the empire building of the Middle Past. Our ancient history is cloaked in useless myths, and the Harsi battles are examined in instant-by-instant detail in the officers’ training school, but there is a period after the rebuilding and first expansions that is almost universally ignored. It’s an era that I find fascinating.
And so it’s not hard to dive back into my old research and begin expanding it. One shift after I bid my last visitor farewell, wipe the stress off my face, and settle into my wall bench to finally have some peace, I open up my most recent document and see a change in a section that I didn’t make.
In my line, “Now, you would think such a defeat would crush the defiant aliens, but that was not the case,” someone has crossed out the “you” and replaced it with “one.”
My initial reaction is shock.
Next, rejection. My wording is perfectly fine. The change, while not incorrect, is needlessly formal.
After that comes shock again. Someone has read my personal scholarship? Who could possibly be interested enough in the Middle Past to do so? I scroll through my recent documents and find more incidents of unnecessary “corrections,” as well as comments to show not only did another person read my scholarship, but they engaged with it dismissively. A concluding paragraph about the aliens’ defeat is circled with a line that says, “Source?” and another personal observation is underlined and marked, “Unlikely.” Scrolling back to the beginning, I find this summary: “A typical Arrisan viewpoint of conquest. Nothing new here. Echan.”
Echan?
I open up more documents and find other notes, summaries, and questions, each document marked with the same name. Echan, whoever he is, has kept up with me, reviewing my work only clegs or even clicks after I last made a change.
I mention it to my physical trainer as he times me on the heavy-grav platform. Sweating and shaking, I force myself to stagger through tests where I once sprinted. Now I struggle to exceed a walk. But between the gasping breaths, I get out my question.
“Echan?” He frowns at my time, resets the test, and massages my calf muscles while I shakily drink electrolytes. “Sounds like a foreign name.”
“Only people inside the palace can access these documents.”
“Well, the empress has stashed ambassadors all over. They’ve been here since the incident.”
“Which incident?”
“Oh, the one where…” He glances at me and catches himself. He’s a science officer with a rare specialization in Arrisan rehabilitation. It’s an unneeded profession. We don’t bother to allocate resources to anyone who might be unable to fight off the Harsi when that day comes. “Uh…what was the last incident you heard about? It’s that one, probably.”
And I am reminded again of my place. “I checked the ambassadors’ list already, and the staff lists, but there is no Echan among them.”
“I guess it could be a human.” He assists me off the platform into the healing gel. “The empress got nervous and brought them into the palace. Some of them are still here.”
“Why did she get nervous?”
He blinks, then smiles vacantly. “Eh, you know how she is. Always worried about something or other. Lessers, right? Few aliens have Arrisan grit.”
Again, this is no answer. He glances at my head and then dismisses himself from my presence, practically fleeing.
So, the next day, when the thought of gracefully extracting information from yet another visitor makes me rebel, I grab my assistive walking device and amble out of my room in search of the humans.