3.
 On Tellerine in the Corduwaine system, years are phased much like those on mythical Old Earth. Each summer, on an easy warm dusk like this, I bring my family to the dry, glass-blasted Bay of Lue on the Sea of Blue for our annual remembrance celebrations. If only we could roll back time without destroying the universe, what would I give—or would I—to change anything? Life has been good after all, despite war and loss. We slowly grow older, and many of the thousands who stand solemnly around us were not born yet during the terror and the Swarm attacks, which changed everything—so long ago. We are the older ones, honored ones, who stand on the highest ramps to watch the ceremonies in the crater below. Our children had not yet come into this world, but they stand with us now.
Picture us on such an evening, among many thousands, as the military priestess arrives to summon us. I have one of my daughters on my shoulders—the littlest, who is still light enough to be carried so. Beside me stands my oldest, the daughter who looks so much like her mother and her mother's sister Zara that my heart aches every time I see this child. She keeps one smooth, caramel hand with happily, seductively painted pink nails on the unruly hair of my twin boys who make up the middle children. On the steel railing before me sits my oldest son, who is now twelve. My wife stands behind him, holding her arms around his waist to steady him (and rest herself). He is a strapping young boy with forest-dark hair. It is Upholder hair. Trask is long dead and gone, his ashes peacefully enurned at the foot of the obelisk. My son has intelligent eyes and a straight back, and will most likely serve in the Defense Fleets a generation from now. Rulership, military service, and sometimes the ultimate sacrifice are in Upholder family genes. I married into their clan, welcomed by the late, powerful Lord Upholder who governed cities, plantations, mountains, and vast bodies of water, all under the roiling golden-red clouds of Tellerine.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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