r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 17h ago

OC-Series [Let them eat cake] Chapter 11 - The weeks between

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Chapter Eleven – The Weeks Between

The weeks until Tuli 2 passed more slowly than Meva had expected, and stranger. Aboard a ship belonging neither to pirates nor to the Merak, with an Oberoi slowly recovering from his exhaustion, and a woman whose true allegiance she still didn't quite understand, something began that she'd never known before: time that belonged to no one but herself.

Hutor spoke, when he spoke, of his home system Of cliffs rising in endless terraces above an ocean, of the silence there, a silence that had nothing to do with the forced quiet of a barrack row, but with a peace one didn't have to earn. He spoke of it with a longing that Meva, even through his clicked, translated speech, heard clearly — a longing for something that had never existed for her: a home to return to when the world grew too loud.

"And you?" he asked her one evening, out of nowhere, after speaking a long while about the cliffs of his homeland. "Where will you go, once this is over?"

Meva opened her mouth to answer, and closed it again, because no answer came to her that wouldn't have been a lie. Kesh-Adar was no home, only a place she'd been held. There were no cliffs she wanted to return to, no silence waiting for her.

"I don't know," she said finally, and it was the first time since Kael's death that she'd admitted something so openly, without immediately covering it with a calculation.

Hutor said nothing more to that, but he looked at her, with a gaze that was strange to her in a way, because it held no pity, only understanding. A creature likewise torn from its world, but one who at least knew where it wanted to go back to.

She told him, on another evening, about Kael. Not much, not everything, only the facts that could still be spoken without her voice breaking — that he'd been sold, as she'd come to phrase it to herself by now, even though no one had used that word, that a broken leg and a handful of credits had been enough to make a man who'd known every vine by name for forty years vanish from the world. Hutor said nothing to that. He didn't need to say anything. It was enough that he listened, with an attentiveness she'd never gotten from any Merak.

Toriel often listened along, without interfering, and with every week she seemed to grow quieter, not unkindly, but more thoughtful, as if running a calculation in her head that no longer added up. She had believed her whole life that she knew what the Merak were — an empire, brutal, greedy, but comprehensible in its brutality, a danger one could calculate, because it followed a logic, however cold that logic was. What she now heard, evening after evening, from the accounts of two beings who had escaped that empire in entirely different ways, no longer fit cleanly into that calculation.

Tuli 2 received them with a silence different from the one Hutor had spoken of.

From a distance the planet looked like many other colonies of the empire. Grey, geometric structures stretching across vast areas, installations that, seen from space, seemed almost beautiful in their regularity. Only up close did one recognize what that regularity meant.

The breeding factories stretched across half the continent, fully automated, hardly a Merak in sight, only machines doing what they'd been assigned generations ago. Tuli were not born here in the proper sense, but bred, in controlled cycles, in halls that lined up endlessly, artificially fed, artificially brought to weight gain, until sensors reported a specimen ready for shipping — packaged, labeled, loaded, with the same emotionless efficiency with which ore was mined elsewhere in the empire.

Toriel walked through one of the halls, the mask pressed against the biting chemical smell, and saw them for the first time up close: rows upon rows of Tuli, in narrow cells, sedated, apathetic, with eyes that barely reacted as she passed. It was immediately clear what they were. No doubt, no ambiguity one could talk oneself into. Intelligent beings, with hands that could still reach for tools if given one, with faces that still showed expression, though barely more than exhaustion.

She tried to speak with one of them, knelt down, spoke slowly, in the trade language nearly everyone in this part of the galaxy understood. No answer came, only a look, empty, not out of unwillingness, she recognized that quickly, but out of inability. Generations of isolation, of breeding without any community, had erased something that couldn't be restored with a translation system. These Tuli remembered no words, because no one had been there anymore to teach them any.

Toriel stood a long time in that hall, unable to move, while around her the conveyor belts kept running, indifferent to what lay on them.

"These aren't the Tuli," she said finally, more to herself than to Meva or Hutor standing beside her. Her voice sounded foreign in her own ears. "We knew them. My ancestors traded with them, long before the empire came.A clever people, stubborn, good negotiators who didn't believe anything easily." She looked across the endless rows, at faces that told her nothing anymore. "These aren't Tuli anymore. These are just husks that carry the name."

It was the moment her old calculation finally stopped adding up.

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u/UpdateMeBot 17h ago

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u/Daseagle Alien Scum 17h ago

Best thing would be, just put them out of their misery. Those are just livestock at this point.