Empire War – Chapter 12
Ekuron’s Secrets
⚠️ 18+ CONTENT WARNING ⚠️
This story contains graphic violence, war themes, and emotionally intense content intended for mature readers. Proceed only if you are over the age of 18 and ready to engage with heavy, complex, and often disturbing material. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
The wind was silent now. Even the crows were gone.
Queen Nzinga moved like smoke across the battlefield, boots pressing into scorched ash and blood-hardened sand. Behind her, what was left of her army limped west — a trail of shadows. She did not join them yet.
She knelt beside Captain M’Baku’s body, still warm, and whispered his name.
It was not a prayer.
It was a promise.
The cliffs gave way to a series of highland caves, old and untouched by the war. Smoke carried little here. Only wind. And stories.
By nightfall, Nzinga had collapsed beside a fire built by her few surviving officers. She spoke little. But her eyes never stopped moving — watching her people, watching the stars, and finally… watching the stranger who entered their camp.
He wasn’t alone.
One by one, shapes emerged from the cliffs: cloaked figures, some human, some not. Some had metal embedded in their skin. Others wore translucent armor that flickered in and out of view. One woman carried what looked like a staff, but it pulsed and hummed with an energy Nzinga couldn’t place.
She rose slowly, hand on her blade. “You’ve come to finish us off?”
“No,” said the woman with the staff. “We came to see if you are the one.”
Nzinga stared at her. “The one to do what?”
“To help save this world,” said another — an older man with half his face replaced by delicate circuitry.
The fire popped. Nzinga didn’t lower her blade.
“Talk,” she said.
And they did.
The planet’s name was Ekuron — a word that, in the native tongue, meant gathering of power. It was not merely a place. It was an intelligence. A kind of slow-moving, semi-sentient force that shaped the land, protected its people… and now, for the first time in its long life, had begun reaching out.
Something had broken the balance.
Time rifts. Distortions. Violent empires being ripped from their timelines and deposited here — Earth’s darkest and most brutal powers brought to a world they didn’t belong in. Most natives had no way to understand why it was happening. But some remembered the warnings.
Long ago, one civilization had experimented with time-folding tech — an ancient AI-melded society known only as the Silent Architects. They disappeared after a great collapse, leaving behind fractured tech, remnants of consciousness, and one prophecy:
“When the sky splits and Earth’s wars arrive, the fire-born daughter shall lead the reckoning.”
Queen Nzinga listened, arms folded, face unreadable. When the older man finished, she finally spoke.
“Why me?”
The woman with the staff stepped forward. “Because you are both war and peace. You carry a sword in one hand and a treaty in the other. You speak every tongue of suffering. And unlike the empires that came here to conquer… you listen.”
Nzinga let the silence stretch. Then she looked at the map carved into the cave wall — a massive rendering of the continent, marked with glowing points.
“These are settlements?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the old man. “Ours. What’s left of them. Some united. Some fractured. Some… corrupted.”
Nzinga pointed toward one in the far west, where a strange new symbol glowed.
“And that?”
“That,” said the woman, “is who burned your warriors today. The third force.”
Nzinga turned slowly. “You know them?”
“Only their name. They call themselves the Spindle Court. They emerged from one of the oldest Architect rifts. We don’t know what they want. Only that they burn everything they touch.”
By morning, Nzinga had agreed to a temporary alliance. Not because she trusted them — she didn’t — but because she knew war alone could not win this world. Not now.
She needed allies. She needed knowledge. And above all, she needed a way to turn the empires’ own weapons against them.
Ekuron was not Earth.
But Earth’s ghosts were marching.
And she would not let them win.
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