Page 80 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
They said I was a ghost once — a relic — a traitor. That the world would wash over my name like wind over blown sand.
They were right about one thing: it feels like I’ve been erased.
But I won’t go quietly.
Not even into forgetting.
I burn the access codes next — every last one tied to my name, my record, my history with the Alliance. The flame sputters yellow-orange in the recycling chamber of the old access core, and the heat tastes like lies and beginnings both. I watch the numbers curl and warp until they’re nothing but ash, and for a moment I think I hear a voice in the hiss of the fire.
Then I destroy the comm devices — the encrypted hails, the beacon tags, the old loggers that geek-tech thought would protect me. I shred them down to circuit fragments and melt the pieces into the waste flux. No back door. No trail. No way for anyone to find me.
I don’t tell a soul where I’m going.
N o t a n y o n e.
Glimnern isn’t exactly a speck on most maps. A marginal world far beyond League oversight, far enough from Coalition reach that people there don’t bother askingwhoyou are. They askwhatyou want — and if you can pay for it.
That’s the kind of place I need.
I arrive at Glimner on a late-rust dusk, when the twin suns hang low enough to drag long shadows across the desert plains, and the wind presses warm against my cheek like a memory I forgot I had.
This world tastes of dust and salt and promise — a strange, sharp mix that claws at the back of my throat. The air here doesn’t feel like imprisonment. It feels likechoice.
The transport drops me near a small settlement: nothing but worn metal structures and cracked concrete, jutting out of the sand like exhumed bones. I step off the ramp with nothing but the pack on my back and a pouch of credits. No comms. No codes. No past.
Only a name on my lips.
“Kalev,” I whisper into the rising wind.
The sound disappears almost instantly, swallowed by distance and emptiness.
But it feels good to say it.
Glimner doesn’t care about grief.
It doesn’t care about war.
It justis.
The bar at the edge of town is dim and buzzy with chatter — rusted stools, whiskey vapor tanging the air, the smell of roasted root and sweat thick enough to hold water. I take a seat at the far end, orders a diluted drink, and study the room with eyes that have learned what to look for and what to avoid.
“Not from around here,” the barkeep says, wiping the bar with a stained rag.
“No,” I say. “Just passing through.”
He smiles — the polite kind that meansI don’t want trouble. Good. I don’t want trouble either.
I don’t stay long.
I rent a small room — one dusty cot, one flickering lamp. The mattress sighs when I sit. I watch my reflection flicker on the cracked mirror above the sink. My eyes are too tired. My heart too full.
Too empty.
And yet I feel something shifting — something tender and fragile.
The nausea comes back a week later.
Not the war-echo nausea. Not the pain-memory nausea.
