Death is Eternal #456 by GIC
The Treaty of Fire and Silk and The Memory Accord of Zei-Vara
Contents
The Treaty of Fire and Silk (genre: fantasy romance)
The Memory Accord of Zei-Vara (genre: feminist science fiction)
The Treaty of Fire and Silk
Genre: fantasy romance
Word count: 502
When the bells of Kaerzhav struck midnight, the Treaty of Miraven was signed, ending the Thirty-Year Tide that had shattered borders and crowned tyrants across the Emerald Peninsula. Inside the Spire of Crowns, beneath vaults woven with silverleaf and soot, envoys sealed the accord with wax, ink and heavy silence.
Lady Alira of Velnyr stood at the edge of the marble dais, hands clenched beneath her violet sash. The document before her still smelled of fresh parchment, her name newly dried beneath the seal of her broken house. Velnyr would survive under Drennali rule. Her people would eat, her cities would reopen, but their sovereignty, once the pride of the southern coast, now existed only in memory.
Across the chamber stood Lord Kaelen of Drennal, cloaked in slate-grey silk, his silver circlet tarnished by long campaigns. They had met once before the war. Years ago, in the autumn glade of Olvar’s wood. She had worn green, he had worn kindness, and the world had still made sense.
Now, peace had come. And it felt like ash.
“I had hoped we would never meet like this,” Kaelen said as the last of the courtiers drifted out. The echo of polished boots and brittle laughter faded into the dark corridors.
Alira did not move. “And yet we have.”
“I fought for my crown.”
“I fought for my home,” she said, her voice sharper than she intended.
He hesitated, then took a step forward. “I asked for leniency. For Velnyr’s ports to remain free. For your council to remain intact.”
“You asked for just enough,” she said. “Enough to claim mercy while ensuring we bowed.”
“I asked for you.”
Alira blinked. “What?”
“I’ve carried your memory through every siege,” he said. “Through snowfields and ruined halls. I thought if I could end this war, I might find you again. Not as a prisoner of terms, but as yourself.”
Her heart beat unevenly. “And if I refuse?”
“Then I remain a footnote in your history,” he said. “And you return to Velnyr, sovereign in all but name.”
She looked at him — the man who had burned her banners and buried her brothers — and felt the terrible weight of what remained. Not hatred. Not forgiveness. Something older.
Alira stepped forward. Her fingers brushed his. “I need time. Not for politics. For me.”
Kaelen bowed. Not as a commander, nor as a victor, but as a man willing to wait. “Then I will wait. Not as your keeper, but as your equal.”
The flames in the sconces flickered low. Outside, Kaerzhav’s rooftops lit with fireworks, bursts of colour to mark a fragile peace. Inside, two names lay inked on the same parchment, far apart but on the same page.
The war had ended with treaties, maps and bloodless toasts. But something else began in that chamber — not with conquests, nor surrender, but a question neither had dared to ask until now.
Could love survive the cost of peace?
Alira did not yet know. But she would find out.
The end
The Memory Accord of Zei-Vara
Genre: feminist science fiction
Word count: 1,000
They called it peace. But peace forged in the silence of women’s bones was not peace at all.
Zei-Vara stood on the observation deck of the Kura Talon, a sleek vessel hovering just above the red plains of Iyen-Va, her white robe stained with the mineral dust of the upper mining cities. Below, the sun scorched the scarlet valleys, and beyond the horizon floated the fortress domes of Lishan, where the Memory Accord was being signed.
The Accord — they called it peace.
In truth, it was a partition. A carve-up of what had once been the free territories of Iyen-Va, a planet stewarded for centuries by the matrilineal Voshan tribes. Now, under pressure from the colonial emissaries of Rekatta and the war fleets of Rhentari, Iyen-Va was being halved. Gifted to powers that had never breathed its air, never bled on its rocks.
Zei-Vara’s fingers traced the silver clasp at her neck — her mother’s crest, handed down before the Council of Voshan was dissolved. In Rekatta’s official documents, that dissolution was referred to as diplomatic restructuring. In the valleys and mountains, it looked like fire.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said a voice behind her.
Zei-vara did not turn. “You came anyway.”
Captain Eshel Arem stepped forward, boots ringing sharply on the titanium floor. Her hair, once bound in the warrior’s braid of the Voshan, now hung loose — an act of defiance in her uniformed position with the Rekattan Peace Force. She, too, was Voshan — though she no longer called herself so.
“I came because if you try anything, I’ll have to arrest you,” Eshel said quietly.
Zei-Vara smiled, but it was hollow. “I’m not here to start a war, Captain.”
“Then why?”
Zei-Vara nodded toward the sky, where shuttles painted in Rekattan blue and Rhentari crimson streaked toward Lishan. “Because they’re about to write us out of history. And someone has to witness it.”
Eshel looked away, unable to meet her eyes.
Zei-Vara’s voice softened. “Do you remember the Tharan Singers? On the cliffs above the River Nasi?”
“I remember,” Eshel whispered.
“They sang in all thirteen dialects of the Voshan range. Each name, every mother, every war, every harvest — layered in harmony.”
“I remember,” Eshel repeated, quieter still.
“They were burned,” Zei-Vara said, voice breaking. “By Rekattan fir six years ago. The Peace Force said it was a Rhentari shell. And then you joined them.”
Eshel’s jaw clenched. “I joined to survive, like many of us. And to change them from inside.”
“They are inside you,” Zei-Vara said. “There is nothing left to change.”
A chime echoed from Zei-Vara’s writs. The Accord ceremony had begun.
She tapped her interface and projected the live feed onto the dome-like glass of the observation deck. A Rakattan diplomat, dressed in ceremonial grey, stood before the assembled councils, his voice smooth with false humility.
“For the sake of enduring peace between our great civilizations, and in honour of the fallen, we agree to the full transfer of the Iye-Va Eastern Corridor and Outer Colonies to the Rhentari Federation, effective immediately. The remaining territories, including the Equatorial Spires and Western Caverns, shall remain under Rekattan stewardship.”
There was polite applause. Some delegates gave forced nods. The Rhentari envou smiled like a predator.
Not one Voshan matriarch was invited to speak.
Eshel stepped back from the projection. “It’s over.”
“No,” Zei-Vara said. “It’s just beginning.”
From the folds of her robe, she drew a thin glass shard — a chrono-fragment, etched with unalterable memory-threads. The old Voshan technology, outlawed for decades because it was too inconvenient for empires that rewrote truth with treaties.
“This contains the truth,” Zei-Vara said. “Voices of the Singers, testimonies of mothers whose daughters vanished in ‘peace raids,’ maps of our gardens before they were strip-mined. I’m sending it to every child born in the disputed zones.”
Eshel’s eyes widened. “That’s sedition.”
“It’s survival,” Zei-Vara said. “If memory dies, we all become ghosts.”
“You’ll be hunted.”
“I already am.”
A heavy silence fell.
“I could destroy it,” Eshel said.
“You won’t,” Zei-Vara said firmly. “Because you remember the Singers.”
The Rakattan diplomat’s voice sounded again through the speaker. “Let this day be remembered as the start of an age where conflict is resolved through reason and mutual respect.”
Zei-Vara cut the feed. “They say that every time they gut a people.”
Suddenly, a tremor shook the Kura Talon. Not an explosion, but a storm. Dust rose across the far ridge, the wind carrying a haunting sound.
Soft. Defiant.
Eshel turned toward the noise. “Is that…?”
Zei-Vara nodded. “The surviving Singers. In exile. They returned.”
“But the Accord…”
“Mean nothing to the wind,” Zei-Vara said.
For a long moment, Captain Eshel Arem stood caught between uniform and bloodline.
Then, she did the impossible.
She removed her Peace Force insignia and laid it gently on the railing. Without hesitation, she stepped into the storm.
The wind carried voices of a thousand women, weaving through the valleys of Iyen-Va like a living tapestry. The Singers, once hunted and scattered, now gathered on the cliffs to reclaim what no treaty could erase.
Zei-vara followed, heart beating in time with the ancient songs.
“Why do they sing when there is no hope?” Eshel asked quietly.
“Because hope is in the song itself,” Zei-Vara replied. “Because memory is rebellion.”
At the cliffs, ragged figures stood, faces marked with ash and determination. The Singers wore their scars like crowns.
One stepped forward, eyes bright as burning coals. “We sing for those lost. For the children who will grow up under foreign stars. For mothers who wait for answers. We sing to say We are still here.”
Eshel’s eyes shimmered with tears. “I forgot what it means to belong.”
Zei-Vara took her hand. “Then come home.”
The Memory Accord divided lands — but it could not divide the women who carried the soil beneath their feet in their veins.
Together, they raised their voices, weaving thirteen dialects into a song that would echo through time — a song no empire could silence.