Royal Reboot: Level up, Your Majesty!-Epilogue-Book 4: Children of the First Dawn

Epilogue

Book 4: Love and War

Ngū’s breath caught in the frozen dawn, quarter to seven a.m., beneath Aoraki’s hard dome of blue ice. She waited alone by the armoured lift, unease twisting like a knot under her ribs. Taika and Huka should’ve been here already, ready to meet Orion.

Her hand curled into a fist, then uncurled.

She glanced up at the sky, which remained dark and cloudy. What troubled her was that the snow had stopped, allowing a sliver of sunlight to peek through. The temperature still hovered around minus thirty degrees, but she sensed it deep in her temples…

It was getting warmer.

Huka and his perfect, obsessive little equations. He’d sooner die than let the balance slip. Wouldn’t he? She checked the message again, finding no news from Taika other than the ominous note about Lionel Robin.

Father kept Lionel close, even though he was scarcely worthy to be one of His Children of the First Dawn. Could Lionel have betrayed them? It explained why the Children’s activities were constantly being tracked and exposed as of late.

What if they’d both…

The rumble below screamed through her bones. She choked down the panic. Admit it or not, she needed Orion.

“Ngū, brooding. Must be Tuesday.”

She smelled pine before she heard the newcomer.

Orion stood in an immaculate dark suit, a head shorter than Ngū, yet beside her it often felt otherwise.

“Orion. You are early.” Ngū dipped her chin, a fractional bow. “I think we have a problem. Huka and Taika are ghosts.”

Orion’s expression went blank, then the corners of her mouth curved into a predator’s smile, warm as fire and twice as false.

“You argued so sweetly for this little expedition, and yet you didn’t wait for me to play. Have you forgotten the chain of command?”

Ngū flicked the files to Orion via encrypted phone pairing. “I dispatched Taika for recon.”

“Which was your first mistake.” Orion’s eyes narrowed, though the smile did not move. She lifted her phone. A familiar face filled the screen. Orion’s thumb stroked the glass. “Astra’s a wild card, isn’t she?”

“You know her?”

“Enough to be interested.” Orion pressed her left eye to the lock panel beside the lift. Light flared green, fanned over her lashes, and the doors hissed apart. She stepped in without looking to see if Ngū followed. “Lionel is thorough. And Astra’s a vision. We agree on that, yes.”

“Oh. That kind of interest. But we should be looking for…”

Orion raised a flat palm. “Come now, do not sound jealous. Do you think Father would really mind” – her green eyes twinkled – “if I played with her a little? Just a nibble?”

Ngū’s glance went icy. Her lips pressed together.

“Kidding,” Orion sang. She tapped Ngū’s shoulder with two fingers, then dragged them slowly down her bicep and lingered. “You are always so serious.”

Ngū swallowed a curse and jerked her arm away. “Enough of your games, Orion.”

“Games? Please.” Orion cocked her head and lowered her voice. “You do know I prefer my toys unbroken.”

“Fuck off.” Ngū’s knuckles popped as her fists balled. She itched to smear that smug grin across the ice.

But Orion moved like a snake you could not touch. “Oh, there it is,” Orion said. “Thought you’d gone pious on me.”

The lift dropped sharply. The floor vibrated under their boots. Orion stood loose and perfectly balanced as the car plunged through strata of snow and stone, leaving the world of light behind.

Father had built this place beneath Aoraki, hollowed out the glacier and anchored it to the bedrock. A lion’s den for lion cubs, layered in paranoia.

Ngū had grown up inside those walls. She could have walked the path with her eyes closed, yet she felt the old unease rise all the same. Orion watched her, of course, her smile sharpening. In that look, Ngū recognised the echo of Him.

Orion was His finest creation. She took after Him. And unlike Taika, she revelled in it.

Doors parted into a corridor where its walls were a collage of materials: composite, black ceramic, a shimmer of mesh beneath, all grounded and strapped. A Faraday mesh ran along the walls, inlaid with gold runes of containment that flickered when they passed.

Despite all of that, the air was unnaturally warm for the heart of a glacier mountain.

Only Orion’s clearances could open the way. At the first intersection she keyed a passcode; at the second she laid her palm on a plate; at the third she leaned into a retina scan.

This next chamber was a secret not even the Council’s supercomputer could crack. Black ribs of some composite rose from floor to ceiling, creating a cage within the cage. Everything they had done so far disrupted energy trackers and satellites alike.

Aoraki was almost always snowing in winter. They had fed more storms into its crown, thickened its clouds. No satellite would call a blizzard over Aoraki unusual. Even so, they had been careful, placing spotters at the airport, private airstrips, and popular tourist hotspots, searching for one thing.

Trouble.

“We need to track Taika and Huka,” Ngū said quietly.

“Pass.” Orion answered casually.

“Why the hell not?”

Orion’s eyes gleamed emerald. “Because they are probably already dead.”

Ngū’s heart clenched. “Huka can handle himself. Taika’s phasing is unmatched. He isn’t someone who just dies.”

“Relax, Ngū. In our profession, dying hardly counts. Especially when something is hunting us.”

“But they are–”

“Kin in arms—Whanu? Whāna? Or whatever.” Orion’s tone dripped boredom. “That tired mantra you chant as if it’s scripture. Oops. Wrong religion?”

Ngū kept her anger in check. She knew Orion knew the term, for this woman had an eidetic memory. But this was, once again, one of her games.

Orion flicked through her photos with her thumb, unconcerned. The photos blurred past Astra, past Melissa, past Natalia. Orion’s thumb slowed.

She paused at Eydis.

Orion’s tongue brushed her teeth. Her eyes went still, dilated, bright. “Wow,” she breathed. “Mesmerising.”

Ngū tuned her out, fixated on the chamber’s heart: a pod radiating toxic green, arcane currents throbbing beneath glass like a captive storm. Energy bled out, haloing the air.

That glow threw bright light across Orion’s high cheekbones. She reached toward it and slipped a finger through the field, then snapped her hand back with a sharp intake of breath that might have been pain or—

Might have been ecstacy.

“Be a dear, Stillness,” she purred. “Turn it off.”

Ecstacy it is.

“Do not call me that,” Ngū deadpanned.

“Semantics.” Orion shrugged, batting lashes. “Lend a hand, big sis?”

“Or that.”

“You started it. Remember when we were still pretending to play house?”

Ngū huffed. “Whatever.”

She stared into the green. The light pooled in her pupils, poured through, then whitened. The pod’s power fluttered then died.

Orion grinned and leaned in to study the figure sleeping behind the layered shell. The face within was blurred by distortion, but Ngū knew the outline.

Suddenly, the ground trembled again. Not from this chamber. It was abrupt, like something massive punching into stone above them. Dust sifted from cracks. Red light strobed.

Breach.

Orion’s smile stretched feral. “Game on.”

“Evac,” Ngū barked. “Now.”

Orion was about to protest when a pale shaft of sunlight from above somehow found its way down the narrow crack. Was it really light?

Ngū’s system flared, alerting her to massive structural displacement and energy fluctuations. Someone had breached the lift. But the camera showed only static.

The pod’s green glow pulsed violently, reacting to the new disturbance, and Ngū grunted, forcing her control back into place. Tears of blood traced fine lines from the corners of her eyes.

Pride be damned. “Help me,” she rasped.

Orion stepped back, turned, and with a gloved thumb gently wiped a red line from Ngū’s cheek. She examined the blood, then brought it to her mouth.

“Hmm.”

“Dammit, please!”

“Alright.” Abruptly, Orion jammed the thumb into Ngū’s mouth and pressed against a molar, cracking it apart. Her eyes flared green and her mouth widened.

Pain shook her entire body, but Ngū held her breath and her pain like a taonga. “Are you finished?” she tried to say.

“Oh, you would tell me if you wanted more,” Orion said sweetly, withdrawing. She did the same as Ngū earlier, sucking the green light into her eyes and turning it white, stabilising the energy.

Ngū’s eyes blazed whiter this time. She stepped closer, ripped the thick cable tethering the pod to the chamber floor, and hefted the pod onto her shoulder. “Activate deconstruction.”

Orion’s eyes flared a venomous green. “Or we stay and greet our guests. Fun, no?”

“Not a damn game.”

“It is only a game.” Orion raised her hand to the intruding daylight. It weaved through fingers, laying bars across her face. “Everything is. Just for a little while. Then it ends.”

Ngū wiped her face and scoffed. “Of everyone, you resemble Him the most.”

“Why, thank you. Of course I do.”

Ngū took an automatic step back. That tone had always meant danger. But Orion would not break her yet. Not while Ngū could still be useful.

“And it is merely logical.” Orion used the lecture-tone Father used when He was about to hurt someone. “Meaning is a trick of time. But once you hear the gears grind, realise the trick, you can never stop listening. Oh… oh! But you can stop. Stop listening to the tick, stop listening to the tock, stop hunting for meaning.”

Orion leaned close and the smell of pine intensified. “Then you see through the illusion. Then you stop being so dull and have fun, Stillness.”

Ngū blinked. “Fun? With the Council, the Le Bleus? That’s madness. It spells—”

“War.”

“You fucking–”

“Do not pretend you have forgotten. He raised us to break things. Beautiful, fragile things. Peace? The frailest flower of all.”

Ngū swallowed the taste of iron on her tongue.

Orion’s heels clicked as she turned toward the secret escape tunnel, gateway to the hidden hangar where her high-speed jet waited.

“The Council. These little anomalies. The hunters above us,” she said. “None of them will matter. We will play them or we will erase them. Perspective, that is all.”

She glanced at her phone again, her thumb rested on Eydis’s lips.

“And nothing will stand in our way.”

Eydis flexed her black wings wide and dove into the yawning maw of the lift shaft. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Far below, Astra unleashed golden pulses that shredded reinforced titanium as if it were wet paper. The red glare sharpened with every level they passed until they reached a chamber wrapped in every security measure imaginable.

The heart of the whole mountain.

Cables had been ripped out in a hurry, their cores bleeding faint, fading strands of arcane energy.

Astra’s eyes lit a fierce red, then dimmed. “Any wild guesses on what they kept in here?”

Eydis gave a soft laugh. “Not a one. How about you?”

“I’ve got a theory,” Astra said.

“I love theories. Care to give a private physics lecture, Professor? I spent those lessons plotting escapes.”

Astra’s lips curved into an almost-smile. Above, an automatic, mechanical voice shrilled, “Automated shutdown sequence engaged. Five…”

Eydis drew near, wings vanishing into violet smoke. “Are you concerned that they’ll come for you?”

Astra’s hands settled firm on Eydis’s sides, lips a tantalising inch away. “That depends. Are you on my side, Eydis?”

“Four…”

Caught off guard by the intensity of the question, Eydis still managed a smooth reply near Astra’s ear. “Depends on the quality of truffles you’re offering. And how wild your theory is.”

Astra rewarded her with an endearing blush. “You… I think it’s related to the electromagnetic spectrum.”

“You know I find competence explosively hot?” Eydis tilted Astra’s chin with a finger.

“Three…”

“Interesting choice of words, babe.” Astra smiled. “Given the impending catastrophe.”

“Sounds cozy!”

Astra answered with a glare.

“Two…”

“But doom doesn’t concern me.” Eydis’s playfulness softened into a sincere confession. “Because I am with you.”

Astra’s eyes shimmered, and for half a disorienting second, Eydis thought she might have made a mistake, until Astra surged forward and captured Eydis’s lips in a fierce kiss.

Eydis responded with equal fire, melting into Astra, one hand tangling in her hair, the other clutching her close.

“One.”

An orb of golden energy enveloped them, hardening instants before the blasts unleashed hell. Red haze rolled outward as the chamber was torn apart. Their shield floated upward, riding the shockwaves as flames devoured the depths.

Eydis pulled back just enough to whisper against Astra’s lips. “Speaking of catastrophe…”

Her hand gentled in those silky silver locks, before sliding to trace Astra’s cheek.

“What happens when someone masters the spectrum’s every note?”

[End of Book 4 – Love and War]