by Megan J. Kerr
From Goblins & Galaxies #3 Spring 2026
The planet outside Brusa’s dingy, grease-coated window swirled with white clouds over gold and green and blue. Not brown or red or raging like the others she’d seen over her lifetime. It looked alive. This had to be what life looked like.
Not like her counter that stretched out before her, with its rows of portioned meat, dark and oozing, dull skins peeled off to be sent to the tanners, fat carved away and tossed into buckets for the candlemakers. Not like the old, putrid scents of death and flesh that bathed her for the past twenty years. The only difference between pig and person was the length of the limbs, how much came off the bones, how much fat.
She looked away from her window and swung her cleaver down, deft through tendon and tissue. The cut of meat was unusually good, well-marbled and so she trimmed it and tied it with red twine, marked it for Athlos, His Supreme.
With luck, it might be the last meal His Supreme ever ate.
Brusa washed up when she finished and left the rest of the evening’s work to the cooks and the cleaners. In haste, she weaved through the dark gray corridors of sparse, riveted walls. The commons, dimly lit by a mix of ensorcelled globes and candles, were filled with people. Those who waited expectant and those who pretended they did not wait. Most were like her, unbound, though others came shackled with heavy suppressors around their necks. As the clocks struck seven and reverberated through the ship, nothing happened.
The Guard did not come for a sorcerer this evening.
Brusa did not exhale the breath she was sure she’d been holding since the last evening, and the one before that. The same breath for the past twenty years. The same breath held since Calt had been chosen. Taken from her.
They came for no one this evening and the engines still drove them on toward the deepest center, to the Creator’s domain. That meant Calt persisted, as well.
She stood near the wall, straightened her back, and smirked. Of course he did. That’s why she married him.
The two of them nineteen and he a shackled sorcerer sworn to the engine like the rest of his lot. Yet they found an old priest willing to bind their hands and their hearts, anyway. The Guard took him the next night, but they’d never take all of him. Not while her heart belonged to him.
Not when her hands knew the feel of a cleaver within them like an extension of herself, with her arms wrapped in the muscle those cleavers granted her. Not when his heart belonged to her, in turn, and she’d been waiting two decades to get it back.
She did not eat, didn’t need the tough, stringy meat of someone who died far past their prime to weigh down her gut. She needed it to weigh down the guts of others, though. To sit heavy in the belly as it was digested, pull in blood from the brain to help get the job done and leave the body tired and head foggy. It only took an hour for the Guard to finish up and wander back to their posts by all the locked doors that stood between her and Calt.
Outside the windows in the commons, the planet full of life floated beside the ship, silent. If it wasn’t now, nothing else mattered.
Brusa strode down a service hallway and took the pair of sharpened cleavers out from the back of her waistband. The single Guard stationed there saw her coming, looked up to nod in greeting. By the time he spotted the shine of candlelight against one of the blades, Brusa arced her arm up and half his teeth were strewn across the hall.
His body landed after, with the delayed wet thud of his skull hitting the floor.
She stood over his body as blood leaked out of the gaping wound of his face, as his body tried to respond in desperate twitches, as it finally came to a stop. It wasn’t much different than cutting through any flesh, any other skull that sat on her counter.
Yet she smiled at the sight, at the man who had chosen to stand between her and Calt. That was one down. She wondered how many more there were to go.
She found a set of old, half-rusted keys on his person and used them to let herself into the service area. The hall behind the door led in two directions, so she picked one and started off. It was a simple matter, really. Go through every room until she found him.
Around the next corner, someone tried to yell to stop her. When that didn’t work, they raised a sword, not quite fast enough for her to smack it out of the way with a cleaver and send the second blade down into the neck, softer than the face, more giving, the death more ready and willing.
The blade squelched out of the esophagus as the body dropped, and Brusa kept moving.
The yell had attracted attention. More came, a pair. Exactly why she had two. The first she threw, sent it end over end just like she’d practiced in a back passage for years. While it hit the gut, thick and satisfying, she used the surprise to take down the other, neverminding the blood that sprayed across her face. Warmer than that of the already dead, wet and runny instead of congealing in the veins.
She plucked her blade out of the stomach with a quick yank and stepped over them. Once, years ago, she asked herself if it would be hard to kill the Guard. Faces she saw every day in the halls and relaxing in the commons, complaining about the daily stew. But time happened, and every day of it, her husband fueled their passage through the stars. Part of Athlos’s Great Sacrifice. A sacrifice that he, His Supreme the Eternal, never had to make himself.
It wasn’t easy, no. It was simple. Natural. As though with each swing of her cleaver, each skull or arm or gut she sundered was her breathing at last. The first tip of a sword that escaped her defense didn’t even hurt as it sliced across her cheek. She smiled, tasted her blood as it traced a line down to the corner of her mouth, and hacked through a collarbone until the offending sword went clattering to the ground, shrill and sweet.
Her swings were wild, but steady. In those confined, narrow hallways where the Guard couldn’t fit more than two side-by-side, they could do nothing more than surge forward or flee and get a blade in the back.
Long hallways turned into storage rooms, then maintenance. Pipes along the walls steamed, hot and stale. She used the occasional window as guidance, relished the cast of blood across a pane of glass as she passed by with a curving swing, the way it stood out against the planet’s pale white clouds. Toward the rear of the ship and down narrow staircases, rough black stone replaced metal. Remnants of Athlos, His Supreme’s fortress before he built the ship upon its top and launched his subjects into the stars eons ago. Down and down, into the bowels of those hot, sputtering ruins.
The ensorcelled lights that floated near the ceiling in wide intervals began to flicker and flash, so blades and cries came to her in brief bursts from the dark. When she could not swing on the stairs, she kicked out instead and caught a blade in the thigh. Another glanced through the hair and skin of her scalp from behind, the coming of footsteps muted under the hiss of the pipes. Yet she found purchase in shins and through ears alike, crushed noses beneath the blunt side of her cleavers and screamed her own cries on every strike.
She didn’t know how deep the ship went, simply that the only option was forward, to keep swinging, to become the fire that burned in her limbs and let the rage boil and release from her throat. Until all at once, it stopped. No more blades came from the dark, no more screams. Only she alone in the intermittent lights. Her blood and the blood of others soaked through her clothes. She heard only the sound of steam and the steady pulsing of her heartbeat in her eardrums. The carnage at her feet caught the light in glistening pools and slipped beneath her boots.
The antechamber at the base of the stairs was small, the door before her ordinary. Unlocked when she turned the handle, for who would dare to come this far?
She felt him as the door swung open. An overwhelming sense of him, aching and reaching. So much heat and light that Brusa threw a hand over her face to shield herself. Blinking against the onslaught of vibrant white light, she could see the magic flowing, rising from the center of the room and laced with strands of greens and blues and reds, to fill the whole of the domed ceiling before swirling away—to the engine.
The sound of it, so loud and yet almost silent, like crystal on the verge of shattering. Brusa pressed against the force of it, stepped through the streams of glowing magic. It buffeted her like the storms of legend, all of nature aroused in defiance. Still, it let her through. Calt let her through.
Within that surge of brilliant magic, she found the large metal box in the center, odd, glowing glyphs in the surface. Here now, she could see the way those glyphs traced lines and paths along the floor, and everything in the room syphoned toward the engine, a burning white heat at the farthest end of the room.
Ancient locks outlined one side of the box. Brusa took the blunt side of the cleaver to the old, rusted things.
Metal crumbled beneath metal. The old locks fell away.
With the swing of a door on squeaking hinges, Calt lay before her.
Emaciated, skin sallow, what hair remained thin and gray. Limbs strapped into the machine that sucked away all that he was.
Brusa broke the locks that bound him tight and stored the cleavers in the back of her waistband. As she attempted to drag him out, he snagged, and she found a large plug attached to his neck. With a gentle lift of his head, and a hard tug that needed no hesitation, for death was nothing compared to this, she severed the connection to the depths of his spine.
The magic stopped flowing. The glowing engine sputtered.
The crystalline silence stilled, leaving only the engine’s metallic clanking.
She pulled him to her chest, held his cheek in her palm. Without a gasp or a groan, he woke to her. Those dark eyes the same as their wedding night. Tired, more lined. But still just the same.
One frail hand came up, wrapped thin fingers around her wrist.
His mouth opened, but he had no words, no voice to offer.
She scooped him—his body so dangerously light—into her arms. “Come. We’ve more to do.”
Against her chest where he rested his head, she knew the touch of breath on her neck, the faintest whisper of his laughter. That, alone, would have been enough for her if it was all she could have.
His thin hand raised, pointed at the struggling engine.
Brusa carried him to the slowly dimming engine in the far wall, a churning pit of magic and metal three times her height in diameter. He urged them closer until he stuck both of his arms into the glowing cacaphony.
At once, the metal ground to a halt. The light boiled, balked, and surged through his fingertips, up through his arms and back into his body.
In her grasp, he grew heavier, limbs more solid, hair more brown. The room diminished into blackness, into silence as the engine that carried them across space and time, to the home of the Creator, stopped. Calt sighed, dropped his arms, and leaned back against her. “Lead the way, my dear.”
With each step up the old staircases over the bodies she’d left in her wake on the descent, an ensorcelled light blinked out of existence. Unshackled within the halls of the ship, Calt absorbed their magic.
When another wave of the Guard arrived, more orderly and with as many as could fit in the narrow corridors as possible, Brusa knew that Athlos, His Supreme realized the engine had stopped. She gently set her husband down onto his shaking limbs and set to work.
The first lost an eye and a hand. The second carved a line in her shoulder before she punctured his jugular. The third fell in an explosion, screaming as skin charred into ash on white bone, from a stream of searing fire that came from behind her.
The fire gave the rest of them pause.
Calt, body braced against the wall, used their hesitation to send more flames shooting from his shaking hands. Brusa basked in the heat of Calt’s fire as she stepped aside. A smile grew across her bloodied face. None had known an unshackled sorcerer within the ship beyond the isolation of Athlos. Brusa ached to learn the depths of the power her husband possessed.
The newfound terror in the Guard made the cutting easier, through soft meat and bones almost eager to break beneath her cleavers. She and Calt followed in the direction the fallen Guard had come from, and when the Guard’s line broke, they followed in the direction of retreat. For where else would they go in times of fear and trouble but to the feet of the one who dictated their every whim?
In those narrow halls of metal and stone, Calt stopped before a passing window. He used his fingers to wipe off streaks of aged grime. Outside, the planet made itself known to him, serene and unmistakable. For a moment, he simply stared at it, soaked it into himself with widened eyes. When at last he turned to his wife, his astonishment had faded into something steady and sure. He knew it as clear as she did. It needed to be now, or never again. They picked up their pace, and Brusa was happy to brace him against her, feel his weight and his warmth and his life.
Athlos did not live behind a grand entrance. There were no opulent/chandeliered hallways to lead them to His Supreme. The Eternal did not become eternal by valuing his privacy and safety so little. Even the ensorcelled lights became replaced by candles as they drew closer, so Calt instead absorbed strength from the final gasps of the remaining stragglers who dropped in their wake. Twisted faces turned pallid and eyes empty in his grasp.
The nondescript door that the last of the Guard fell before held wards that melted at Calt’s hand and locks that broke to Brusa’s blades. Athlos would be waiting for them on the other side, poised and ready. They did not hesitate, would not give Him any additional time to steel himself. Brusa kicked the door open wide.
Calt’s anticipatory flame met with an icy chill. Their magic dissipated and left the room steamy, difficult to navigate. The air shimmered before Brusa’s eyes as her husband, unsteady on his feet and brow dripping sweat, saw fit to provide what barrier he could.
As the steam cleared, all of space opened up before them. High ceilings, and windows so vast, they revealed more stars than Brusa had ever seen at one time. In spite of herself, she gaped.
Athlos, His Supreme the Eternal laughed, rasping out of a throat ages past its prime. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? All of it cast by the Creator’s hand.”
He wore his own cloak of radiant light, and rich silken robes spoiled by time and wear. Brusa thought him to be like a figment. A strange dream manifested by her and everyone on the ship that came before, were it not for those they lost to the engine, tangible and so real that still Calt at her side seemed its own dream, in turn. Brusa lifted a cleaver and ran for him, cried out as he cowered though her cleaver deflected off the air before him as though it were glass.
Athlos lowered his hands that were thin twisted bones draped with paper-like skin. His smile turned sour. “I am destined to take the crown that sits upon the Creator’s head, I have brought all of us farther than any before or any ever will, and yet in your ignorance you shut down my engine.”
Calt wove a thread of himself toward His Supreme, Brusa knew it by the way it prickled her skin, knew it like she knew all of him when she’d stepped through the streams of his magic that fed the engine. She could see the cracks forming through the Eternal’s radiance.
The barrier shattered into pieces that shone like the stars behind him.
Athlos struck out, face contorted by ancient rage, crackling sparks from his hands and chest at the two of them. “I will put him back where you found him!”
The shimmering before her grew as Calt redirected his focus. The crackling fizzled across the shield, ancient and yet drawn too thin across centuries.
Brusa seized forward past the barrier and threw her cleaver.
The blade plunged into Athlos, His Supreme’s chest, pressed the air from his lungs as he fell.
Yet already Brusa could see Athlos reach for the blade, and she surged at him, held the blade in place before he could remove it and heal himself. Calt came next, thrust his hands on either side of Athlos’ skull. The brittle skin tore easily, squirting blood as Calt’s fingers punctured Athlos like the plug Brusa pulled from his spine.
Calt siphoned Athlos’ magic, drank His Supreme’s eternity into himself as the engine had done to him—as Athlos had commanded be done to him, and countless subjects before.
He siphoned until Athlos lay limp, damaged lungs struggling for each breath.
Brusa’s husband stood, back straight and skin colored with the flow of blood in his cheeks, hair vibrant and as dark as his eyes. She stood with him, looked out at the stars, at the living planet in the distance. “Can you get us to the planet?”
Calt’s eyes roved around the room, found a console below the windows laden in dials and pipes protruding from the walls. He gripped a series of handles, threaded them with ribbons of green and gold. “I can point us in the right direction, but without the engine’s power, I won’t be able to control the descent. We’ll crash into the surface.”
Both of their eyes moved to Athlos. Brusa looked to Calt, and he nodded to the door. “Hurry. He won’t last long.” Athlos was light in her arms when she picked him up, almost as light as Calt had been.
Brusa made for the engine room, flying down corridors and leaping over the sunken, defeated bodies of those who would have allowed Athlos to continue on and on. In the darkness of the chamber before the engine, she slid the fading Eternal into the machine, took up the plug in her hand, and plunged it deep into his spinal column.
With a wet gasp, the machine sucked out the last of him. Spirals of red and yellow light leapt into the air and fed into the engine. Its turbines began spinning, and glowing. Beneath her feet, she could feel the whole of the ship shift.
She returned to the engine room, found Calt at the controls, and took him into her arms.
He breathed her in, ignored the blood on her skin. “I knew you’d come eventually.”
“I knew you’d wait for me.” She kissed him as she had not done for twenty years. His smile had aged like her own, but it was still just as wide, just as wicked.
It would not be so hard to make up for lost time.
The planet grew in the window that stretched vast before them, grew until all Brusa could see was green and blue and drifting white clouds.
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Megan J. Kerr is a science fiction and fantasy writer based in western Pennsylvania. She had the privilege of being the guest editor for Saros Speculative Fiction, Issue #1. Her work has been published in Clarkesworld. Find her on Bluesky @MeganJKerr.
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