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floating high on the horizon, the Fleet starships soaring so graceful, so carefree, so unchained … In his frequent Stare sessions, he came to know the ships by heart. There were the Venture and Midnight , the Great Expectations and the Fictner , to mention a few. Able to see through the ship's hulls, he came to recognize their crews and their captains as well. He watched them eating and drinking in the mess halls; all that food, all that drink and good fellowship—oh, how he craved it. He watched the ships launch from their berths, going to wherever it was they were going. He watched them return to port weeks later, sometimes with battle damage. Sometimes, they didn't come back at all, their berthing docks empty, and he, missing their presence, mourning the lost crews, wept. His father, not a hard-hearted man, stopped the punishment, thinking he was hurting his son too much.
    Those ships had been destroyed in space by the Xaphans. The enemy. The betrayers. The Xaphans weren't so bad his father, ever the diplomat, said. The Xaphans should be welcomed back into the League. Remembering the lost ships, the dead and wounded crews that he had befriended from afar, he stood and told his father to be quiet … to shut up in front of a shocked luncheon. The Xaphans were evil.
    More Stare … the hardest yet, the longest, the most angry.

    * * * * *

    Another indignity Sadric subjected him to was letter-writing— endless correspondence to this Great Lord and that Great Countess, all people he neither knew or cared to know. A fashionable trend in the League was to forgo the usual methods of communicating—no holos, no tele-vids, or insta-types. No, Great Lords were expected to write letters longhand using ink and fine paper, the way the ancients before the time of the Elders did it. Three hours a day of letter-writing was Davage's bane. He swore his hand was going to fall off, his fingers hurt so badly. Another hour a day was spent reading the letters coming back to him—letters from peers and ladies of standing from other Houses who might be agreeable to court one day. The letters he got back from Countess Hortensia of Monama were characteristically dark and depressing, full of the usual warnings regarding a terrifying evil presence that searched for him across the stars. In one letter, Countess Monama drew a picture of a strange pyramidal shape that she had seen in her frequent visions. Within the pyramid was a smaller one with a crudely drawn stick figure sitting at the top. At the base of the pyramid were many prone and weeping stick figures. "Here, the evil searches. Here the evil commands," she wrote. "Beware this place."
    Good Creation, why couldn't the evil force be done with him already and give him peace?

    * * * * *

    Much later, no longer a boy, as a handsome young man Davage again ran through the castle. By this point, his father was mad, locked in his tower, and his mother had passed away, resting in her tomb on Dead Hill.
    He ran, this time from his sister, Pardock, the new Countess of Vincent.
    How could his sister have done this to him?
    Davage had two sisters, Pardock, again, the newly married Countess of Vincent, and Lady Poe, several years her younger. Both sisters were decades older than Davage, their faces unchanged with time, ever young. Pardock, like their mother, was tall and statuesque. She was blue-haired and beautiful. Additionally, like her mother and her grandfather Maserfeld, she was rowdy, and she could be downright mean too. She often stood firm against Sadric, arguing with him in public, defying him at home, spurning his efforts to make a proper lady of standing out of her. Sadric couldn't punish her with the Stare like he did with Davage because Pardock had the Stare too. Two Starers couldn't Hard Stare each other, so that was that. So, there was yelling— lots and lots of yelling—and slammed doors.
    Pardock, rough and tumble with outsiders and an obstinate rock with her father, always loved