“This is an outrage! We need to bring them to heel!”

  A voice roared across the round table to the twenty-five others that sat there. They were a mix of young and old, men and women, some wrapped in expensive hard-light suits while others wore outfits that looked like they had been stolen from centuries in the past. Some even still had the faint aroma from those times, and I was all but certain I could still name them by smell alone. My focus though was drawn onto the gathered assembly, choosing not to focus on the empty seats but rather noting those who seemed to nod along in agreement with Christopher's words while a few just stared at the ceiling, no doubt counting the seconds and wishing for the meeting to end.

  “I agree the corporate empires pulling away from us is serious,” I eventually said, “but that damn Leviathan is the bigger threat that we need to address.”

  My words caused many to roll their eyes in annoyance. Someone had even laughed into their sleeve, making me scowl slightly.

  “Gabriel, can we not have a single meeting without your paranoid ramblings?” Christopher said, giving me a rather frustrated look. Once he was my brother in arms, but over far too many years he had instead become something closer to a rival with teeth polished for climbing corporate ladders. His current body looked barely twenty, which meant the flood of old memories had only recently finished digesting him. I would gladly admit the host he had was handsome with short spiked hair, sharp features, a soft voice that fit the pretty-boy effect. Only his eyes betrayed him and his act. They were bright and burnt with barely contained irritation; the eyes have always been his tell, always far older than the skin around them. “Every meeting you drag that name in here instead of waiting for when we decide it’s worth addressing.”

  “He’s killed twenty-four of our own already,” I fired back. “Fifty members once sat here and now only twenty-six of us remain. Those missing numbers were given true deaths by the one who founded that accursed cult! The same church that proceeded to claim multiple planets and broken from corporate systems to create their own empire upon its edge. I will also once more bring to everyone's attention how he was the source of the unrest on multiple core worlds and even behind the numerous dragon disappearances. I can't prove it yet but I also know he's behind the fracturing between empires. All this and you would still call this a small matter that can be addressed when convenient!”

  I had risen without noticing. My lungs burned either from my age getting to me or anger; it was hard to say which. Around the table I heard them whisper with unease, but even so none of them were willing to validate my points, willing to acknowledge my fears.

  “We don't see it as a small matter, only as multiple matters that I promise you will be addressed in due time, old friend.”

  Agatha spoke gently; the fact it was her telling me this is what made it hurt so much more than it should have. Her grey hair was tied in a bun; her robe patterned with symbols I remembered helping design when hope still felt fashionable. In recent years she had become head of the Absolvers, a splinter group of the order made up of those who desired an end to our eternal punishment of immortality. “But the matter at hand is far more pressing. We need to regain the full control of the corporations so the human race remains stable and guided on the correct path, just as we swore to do all those years ago. We cannot split our focus now for a matter such as this. And should the Leviathan truly kill all of us and end our curse? Well, I would see it as a blessing, a gift of final peace and a sign that the world no longer needs us. If he ends me, I will call it my reward for all I have done.”

  I wasn't sure if it was her words or the reaction of many others that shook me somewhat. I noticed more faces than before wearing that same fragile hope of having Leviathan bringing their life to an end. It seemed there were even fewer this time who sat opposite them and didn't agree. The Eternalists with eyes holding traces of fear, led by Christopher, had moved over to her side. They were the ones who clutched onto this cursed life, treating it as a gift to make each life smoother, filled with more power, and had developed not just a taste but a need for power and control.

  “We’re getting off topic,” Christopher continued with a harder tone. “Gabriel, if you have nothing to contribute to the real discussion, be it suggestions to bring the corporate empires back under our guidance or how to deal with their new foolish presidents, then I must ask you to leave. I also think you should consider a fresh perspective. A younger point of view would no doubt help you more than you can imagine. Maybe then you will see that a single dragon with a following isn’t worth our concern compared to the engines of human expansion and ensuring we don't end up wiping ourselves out.”

  He tried to make his tone calm and concerned but I could clearly hear the mockery in it.

  No one met my gaze or spoke up to argue; not a single person tried to defend me, not even Agatha. They only muttered to one another in a clear attempt to try and ignore what had just been said, to ignore me and my opinions. That was all the indication I needed that I was no longer their leader; rather Agatha and Christopher had taken that role and fractured my group into two. All I was now was an old man who still remembered when he had been their leader, when my words held weight and opinions had value. I denied Christopher the reaction he wanted and stood calmly rather than arguing, grabbed my cane and walked out calmly rather than storming off. The door had barely closed before their voices could once again be heard yelling at one another.

  At the window my reflection greeted me for a few brief moments; hollow, wrinkle-layered and weary eyes stared back. A beard running down to my chest over a simple suit with the only flashy part being my white cane made of dragon bone layered with names long since faded and forgotten, each one a stone of guilt on my mind. I wondered at times just how much of that stranger staring back was still Gabriel and how much was Christopher’s favorite caricature who he liked to poke fun at and mock.

  As I left the building my mind wandered back, all the way to six hundred years ago when humanity was still chained to its dying Earth. I could still remember the smell of rain on hot tar, the news broadcasting about corporations fighting to gather resources for the biggest ark ships possible while people starved in the streets below. Their adverts flashing across screens showing smiling families boarding ships promising better futures all as a means to use people's hope and exploit them for labor and to continue buying their products to line their pockets. Their promise of a better tomorrow was just a way to hide their crimes, to draw attention away from the skeletons they desperately tried to hide in their closet.

  Our near extinction was triggered by a simple mining company, Vulkan Industrial Solutions, that just so happened to be one of the galaxy's top 5 empires now. Back then they were hired to dig toward the outer layer of the planet’s core in hopes of harvesting more materials for the ark projects. Warnings were ignored with the devotion only greed could afford. Instead of minerals they struck a clutch of dragons, many mothers and their eggs using the warmth from the core to hibernate in peace. These same creatures would eventually become the foundation humanity learned to depend upon so completely that we forgot the shape of the cage or why we were forced to do so all together.

  As I blended into the bustling crowd outside the building the city felt like a living museum erected over a grave I still carried in my hands. Displays hovered everywhere, selling insurance, holiday trips and even “pet dragons,” cute and harmless, bred to be batteries for everyday items or a companion for your child instead of wolves with wings they had once been. The sight made the whispers in my skull stir again, something I quickly put a stop to by stirring my anger with more memories of the past.

  The corporation that first uncovered them called the dragons obstacles with potential, but when they realized control was impossible, they tried to wipe them out with nuclear fire and brush their existence under the rug. I have no idea how they got their hands on the nukes but all they did was kill the eggs and enrage the mothers. That anger spread like an unseen wave and soon dragons were breaking through the ground across the globe, all seeking vengeance for the murdered young. My fiancée was among the first victims of their rise, torn apart outside a hospital whose parking lot I can still draw perfectly from memory.

  The war lasted forty years. The first twenty-five had us so outclassed extinction was almost a certainty. Conventional weapons could only harm hatchling's and juveniles. Biological attacks risked killing us faster than them and no one seemed to be able to create anything that would harm and kill only the dragons. Then luck finally favored us with a miracle. A small group of scientists in a desperate attempt to understand the dragon’s physiology found that dragon materials could harm the adults. Soon we began producing crude arms from dragon bone and flesh. Swords with teeth. Spears wrapped in rib. We went primitive to fight adults who proved intelligent while we persisted in making the remaining civilians believe they weren’t.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  A few years after those weapons appeared I was given the mission that split my life into before and after. A “leader of dragons” was discovered. It was smaller than its kin, so pale it almost glowed, yet its eyes held a frightening intellect that still makes me shiver when I remember it. My squad of two hundred marched through streets to where it was last sighted, pretending to protect important officers. We had learnt this dragon was smart enough to understand our command structure and how we would act and react, so we set a trap to lure it out, a few of our highest-ranking officers as bait set up in such a way its larger brethren couldn't reach them, giving it a far too valuable opportunity we knew it couldn't pass up. At the end of it only fifty of us survived fighting it, its speed taking us by surprise and strength that had no place on such a small form. In its final moments it spat grey mist over me and the others who managed to survive before growling in an unknown tongue. I never let it finish whatever it was that it was trying to do; I stabbed it through the head and took the body with me. Later its spine became my cane and each small marking upon it the name of someone I lost that day, a physical reminder to always ensure I never forget that horror.

  I took a seat in a restaurant as I remembered all this. The waitress brought my meal and smiled at me the way people smile at old men who seem harmless, more so since I frequently came here and tipped well. They really had no idea how lucky they were. When they die, they will meet their loved ones on the other side. As for me and the others who survived that day? We were cursed to never die of age or sickness, forced into new young bodies each time we were killed by a fatal injury where we then slowly took over, our original memories and those we gained over time consuming the host, leaving only fragments behind that ranged from a nervous habit or tick. Sometimes their beliefs would bleed into our own like cheap dye on expensive cloth. Because I struck the final blow, I was cursed worse than the others, forced to carry a larger part of each host I assimilated into. Even now their voices claw on my mind, mocking me as some cry while others accuse me of being as much a monster as the one I killed that day.

  It took ten more years to end the war in earnest after we killed the “leader”. It didn’t make the rest die like the corporations claimed; instead, it only disrupted them, a neural shock as the scientists called it that caused the dragons to begin fighting each other. That small opening was enough for the remaining corporations, under my direction at the time, to begin capturing and enslaving them until they became livestock and an endless warehouse of parts and natural materials. I noticed that without their leader they reverted to a more animalistic state. I feared a new leader rising up so I personally led my team in eliminating any others who showed signs of taking up such a role while all but ensuring they wouldn't ever be a threat again. I called it necessary. Many of the voices in my head still call it something closer to genocide wearing a polite tie.

  Around that time, we learned of the curse in earnest. A few of my squad, unable to handle the trauma, took their own lives to escape, only to approach me years later in new bodies, telling me things only they could have known. I convinced the rest of them at the time and rather foolishly that this was an opportunity to make things right. We could use our fame as heroes to seize leadership within corporations, to rewrite history to portray dragons as a means of survival instead of profit, and created “The Order” to continue guiding humanity from the shadows while ensuring the monopolies would remain under our control. I thought we had unified mankind and that we knew what was best for everyone. Instead, we only taught greed how to pray better.

  By my third cycle I learnt of and begun hunting the Leviathan, a stray whelp everyone seemed to dismiss. My worry that I tried to bring forward proved true when he founded that cult. He planted the seeds of worship into their heads, twisted the narrative I had written to benefit its own goals and over centuries fanned friction between the corporate stellar kingdoms we helped create, the various supply routes that fell to “pirates” who were secretly paid by the church; cities burned on planets whose names the Order never bothered to learn because they were outside profit margins. A month ago, an entire planet was lost after a raid I traced to Agatha’s own Absolver sector, and she still won’t meet my eyes when I speak to her about it, making excuses even after I showed her the proof I had gathered.

  Paying for my meal and walking out I spotted one of them, one of those cult worshipers walking proudly down the street in a scale-styled robe with golden attachments, but I instead turned my rage inward. They would have just made me out to be a crazy old man, and yet the sight of the worshiper stirred another, far more recent memory from ten years ago, of when I met the accursed dragon face to face. The Leviathan spoke in common tongue to mock me after disarming me and pinning me to a wall while laughing. It told me I would be the last to meet my end, that he wanted me to witness my race wiped out and enslaved just as he had watched us do to his own when he was nothing but a hatchling. He mocked me, telling me how he would ensure I was powerless to do anything while he burned everything we built to ashes but not with his claws but rather using our own hands to do it for him.

  And there lies my problem. I grow weaker with every year in this old body of mine but I can't die yet. If I end this life and claim a new one, I could return to my prime and be ready to face him but I fear the time it would take to bring that host up to an acceptable level will give Leviathan the opening he needs to act. I would be powerless to stop whatever it is he has planned. At least with my old body I can react to whatever he does, my memories intact and able to plan counters to whatever he decides to do.

  “No,” I growled softly, realizing I had wandered to my own office building, the one I personally owned and designed to be private and different from the Order's. Where they keep things modern with glass walls and doors, I keep mine old fashioned with stone walls, wooden-framed windows and sturdy iron doors. As I stepped through the rich wood-paneled lobby the voices thankfully muted again.

  “Welcome back, sir!”

  Emy, my receptionist, personal assistant and confidant in all matters, greeted me with that impossible brightness. She was in her mid-twenties, short blue hair, soft white skin, and a smile that reached all the way to her deep brown eyes. She always smelt faintly of citrus candy which brought a smile to my face; it would make me remember the times I would buy them for my real granddaughter on my fifth cycle, when I had hoped to try and have a normal life only for it to be ripped away from me.

  “I didn’t expect you so soon. I take it they refused to listen again?” her soft voice asked, pulling me from yet another bad memory.

  “Indeed,” I sighed. “They wouldn’t even look at the evidence I presented. Too busy arguing about regaining control they lost a long time ago and refuse to acknowledge. They don’t care how the friction between empires is pushing humanity toward another war but between themselves this time. They didn't all say it this time but their eyes made it clear; they feel I'm being paranoid.”

  “It's only paranoid if they aren’t out to get you,” she laughed, “and being prepared never hurts.”

  It was that exact personality that endeared her to me, and perhaps why I had admitted everything to her soon after taking her in years ago and raised her into my perfect assistant and newest confidant. Admittedly it was a fact the Absolvers would probably call manipulation and Christopher would call insurance.

  As we approached the elevator, I saw her hesitate for a brief moment.

  “Is everyone gathered?” I asked.

  She nodded while reading her hard-light tablet. “Captains of your star fleet, various generals and the leaders of smaller invested corporations are present and waiting by holo-call sir.” Then she fidgeted again. “Sir… are we doing the right thing? Is raising our own batch of dragons and creating an artificial war truly the only path we can take?”

  Ah now she brings up something I often ask myself a lot, a question I ask myself more than what should be healthy before hardening my resolve and reaffirming to myself that it needs to be done as no one else will.

  Eighty years ago, when that damn cult stepped into the open and claimed a small sector of space. The Order lost a few of our members to Leviathan and when I not only pointed it out but demanded we take action they chose to brush off my words, too busy with arguing about succession instead of vengeance for our fallen. That was the first time I truly saw how far they had fallen and fueled my resolve to take matters into my own hands. I invested in new companies as fronts, letting them manufacture conventional items or things that most would find to be novelties while secretly leading the uplifting of old technologies with hopes of breaking humanity’s dependency on dragons as a whole or at the very least easing our dependency. I also collected various dragon eggs and raised them in underground labs scattered across planets I had absolute control over. There I screened scientists and hired those who had similar thoughts to my own to run tests on them along with pushing the hatchling's past their natural limits before ordering augmentation of those with the most potential and using the rest for forceful evolutionary experiments. I had originally planned to use them against the Leviathan or as a spark to force anger onto the dragon’s church, making it seem like they had been breeding dragons to wage war, but plans change, and old men learn to adapt or become fossils that only manage to vote at meetings rather than take action.

  Rubbing my temples I felt the voices surge again violently, drowned out ever so slightly as Agatha’s words returned to speak of human stability before being followed by Christopher’s comments about control. It was easy for them to say all that while ignoring the threats, turning a blind eye to the various threats I tried to force them to see. No, I will not allow humanity to burn or die through ignorance. If it means I have to sacrifice the few to ensure the survival of the many I will stain my hands red. If planets must fall to reunite mankind and drag Leviathan into the light, then so be it. I will walk through rivers of blood to ensure humanity continues as it should without threats waiting to rip their throat out. I will cause history to repeat and pull the dragon war from past to present to once more unite humanity, even if it means I become the villain and monster the voices curse me as.

  “Unfortunately it is, Emy,” I said aloud as the elevator carried us upward, my voice tired and tinged with sadness as I rested a hand on her shoulder. “The people need a true target rather than each other or the random raiders. They need a reason to stand together, a face to channel their misplaced hate. The Leviathan refuses to be seen though and the corporate dragons have become little more than puppies and cattle. This ugly course is the only one left to us that will all but ensure that humanity unites once more.”

  I gripped my cane tightly as the doors opened to the top floor where I was greeted to the various captains and generals projected through holograms to my left and the corporate executives and some scientists to my right. I made my way steadily to my place at the head of the table, my military saluting me while the business side gave me polite nods.

  I have no doubt early history, should they find out what we were about to do, they would label us monsters, call us traitors to humanity but we will be victorious and rewrite history to see us as the heroes we were forced to be.