Orynth Asked Me to Stay for Dinner

“The chosen vessel must depart immediately.”

I hated being called that.

My name was Evadne Syrana.

I escaped from the Strategy Chamber through a ventilation duct.

It smelled like hot metal and the collective despair of every trainee who was forced to listen to Commander Grynn explain orbital prophecy with a laser pointer.

Below me, the supreme council continued arguing over the duty that was imposed on me.

“The celestial entity known as Orynth has consumed three outer moons, destabilized two pilgrimage routes, and corrupted the prayer-net surrounding Ulthar Nine,” Commander Grynn said.

I crawled forward on my elbows, dragging the ceremonial blade of ending behind me. It was too long for the duct and kept scraping against the walls with tiny metallic shrieks that made me whisper apologies to the ventilation system.

“So, where is she?” someone asked below.

I froze.

Then my combat instructor, Hager, said, “Probably contemplating the sacred burden.”

That was generous of him.

I was actually contemplating whether falling twelve feet through a chute would injure me less than another hour of war diagrams and battle techniques.

The duct curved ahead. I followed it, sweating beneath my armor, until I reached the maintenance bay and dropped into a cart of folded temple linens.

A junior mechanic stared at me.

He had a wrench in one hand and a pastry in the other.

I stared back.

“The vessel,” he said.

He saw the blade sticking out from beneath the sheets.

“Please do not report me,” I pleaded.

“You were never here.”

I stole his pastry, and ran like the wind.

The starship assigned to my glorious destiny was called The Lament of Gaia.

It had a clogged hydration dispenser and a pilot who had decorated the cockpit with tiny plush comets.

Her name was Captain Nyra Sol, and she did not bow to me when I boarded.

This instantly made me like her.

The ship detached from the temple station.

Outside the viewport, the sanctuary world of Laelia Prime dwindled into a pearl-colored sphere wrapped in luminous rings, each one carrying a different order of monks, soldiers, astronomers, and government officials who had spent the last nineteen years preparing me to murder an immortal.

We crossed the Calypso Expanse, a region of space where old stars shed their outer skins in translucent ribbons.

Somewhere in that radiant waste, Orynth waited.

The god I had been trained to end, also known as the devourer of moons.

I sat in the co-pilot chair and recited the Litany of Severance under my breath.

Nyra endured this for roughly six minutes.

She then angled the ship through a field of drifting shrine-buoys.

I had imagined his wicked lair for years. A citadel made of bone-white meteors, perhaps.

An endless vortex of screaming souls, or maybe a throne suspended above a black hole.

Instead, when we arrived at the forbidden coordinates, we found a garden.

It floated inside a glass sphere larger than a city, orbiting a blue-white star with no catalog number.

There were trees beneath the dome.

Their branches glimmered with tiny fruits, and rivers wound through the landscape in luminous coils. Bright grass bowed beneath artificial weather. Stone paths curled toward a house built from obsidian, cedar, and something that looked suspiciously like coral.

Nyra stared through the viewport.

“Maybe he hides the screaming souls in a shed.”

I should have felt vindicated by fear.

Instead, I felt offended.

No one had told me the moon-eating god had a sense for landscaping.

We landed on a circular platform bordered by flowers that turned their faces toward me as I stepped out. They had petals like frosted glass and stems full of moving starlight.

The blade hummed against my spine.

Nyra stopped at the end of the platform.

“I’ll cover you from here,” she said.

At the threshold, the door opened before I touched it.

A cosmic man stood on the other side.

He was tall, barefoot, and wearing a loose black shirt with flour on one sleeve.

The ancient celestial entity who had allegedly cracked the moons of Bellaros was dusted with flour.

His hair was white, not elderly-white, but comet-white, falling to his shoulders in ungoverned waves. His eyes were dark at first glance, then galactic at second, filled with tiny moving points of light.

He looked at the blade.

“Oh,” he said. “You made it early.”

I had prepared seventeen opening declarations.

“I am Evadne Syrana,” I began, drawing myself to my full height. “Chosen instrument of the Astral Orders, bearer of the Severance Blade, sworn daughter of—”

“Yes, yes, I'm aware,” he said gently.

“Would you like soup?”

I blinked.

“What?”

“Soup,” he repeated. “It is not poisoned, though I realize that is exactly what someone would say if the soup were poisoned.”

“Are you Orynth?”

“I am.”

“You consumed three moons.”

He winced.

“People keep saying consumed.”

“Did you not consume them?”

“I relocated them.”

Orynth stepped aside, opening the door wider.

That was when I realized my weapons had already disintegrated.

“Fiend,” I muttered.

The only weapon left was the ceremonial blade.

“I prefer my dinners to be peaceful, don't you?” he asked.

The house behind him glowed with iridescent light. Something savory simmered somewhere within.

“I know exactly why you came,” he added, and some of the humor left his face, revealing an ancient exhaustion. “You can do as you please. For reasons I can't understand, I cannot touch that blade."

He looked away.

“But dinner is nearly finished, and I have not had a guest in nine hundred years.”

I tightened my grip on the blade.

“You expect me to dine with the enemy?”

“No,” he said. “I was hoping.”

The god served me dinner at a table carved from black meteorite and polished smooth by centuries of use.

His starlight soup tasted incredible. I tried to remain stern while eating it.

This was difficult because it contained dumplings shaped like tiny crescent moons.

I placed the spoon down with ceremonial severity.

“You will explain the moons.”

He folded his hands.

“There was a disease in their cores. An artificial one left by the same people who trained you.”

I felt my heartbeat move somewhere unpleasant.

“That is a fabricated lie.”

“A god does not lie,” Orynth said.

He continued. “The moons were weapons, but they were dormant for centuries. When they began waking, they would have ignited the atmospheres of the worlds beneath them. I removed them before that happened.”

“Removed them where?”

“To the lower orbit of this star, where they can burn without killing anyone.”

“You expect me to believe the Astral Orders created moon-weapons?”

“No,” Orynth said. “But I do expect you to be angry enough to at least want to find out.”

I stood so quickly my chair scraped backward.

The blade sang as I drew it.

Orynth remained seated. That infuriated me most.

“Fight me,” I said.

“No.”

“I was trained to end you.”

“I know.”

“Then stand up.”

“No.”

My hands trembled.

All those years of bruises, mantras, hunger, obedience, sleepless tests, sacred scars, and lonely birthdays in the training cloister rose inside me like a storm sealed in glass.

“Stand up,” I said again, and my voice cracked.

Orynth looked at me with unbearable gentleness.

“Eva,” he said, “instead of ramming that foul blade into my chest, you ate soup with me because some part of you already knew this was not the story they promised you.”

“I don’t know what I am without this duty,” I whispered.

He moved as if approaching a wild animal, though between us, only one of us held a weapon.

“Then stay a while,” he said. “Find out.”

Orynth showed me the relocated moons through a viewing chamber beneath the house, where the glass floor opened onto a celestial furnace.

Three damaged moons circled the nameless star, their surfaces splitting as hidden machinery burned away in golden sheets.

It was an effort to quarantine the moons.

He led me back through the garden afterward. Night had fallen inside the dome, though the surrounding space remained infinite and indifferent. The fruits brightened overhead. Small silver creatures snaked through the grass.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Starhares.”

One hopped onto the path, regarded my sacred blade, and sneezed.

Orynth walked beside me without touching me, yet I felt the strangeness of his presence the way one feels a storm beyond mountains.

Immortal did not mean invulnerable in the way I had imagined.

By dawn, Commander Grynn contacted my wrist communicator.

Her hologram appeared above my hand, stern and purple-tinted.

“Evadne,” she said. “Report status.”

I looked at Orynth. He stood across the kitchen, calmly washing dishes.

That image was the least threatening cosmic disaster in recorded history.

“Target located,” I said.

“And?”

Orynth glanced over and I held his gaze.

“Complications have arisen.”

Commander Grynn's eyes narrowed.

“Elaborate.”

“The moons are intact,” I said, my voice steadying. “They were weaponized. Orynth removed them before detonation. Captain Sol is transmitting evidence as we speak.”

Then Grynn said, “You have been compromised by the enemy.”

“No, Commander,” I replied. “By facts.”

Her face hardened. “Complete your damn mission and kill the demon.”

I looked at the blade on the table.

For the first time, it seemed smaller than my hand.

“No.”

Commander Grynn's image flickered as encrypted alarms began flashing behind her.

I ended the transmission.

Orynth turned, water dripping from his hands.

“They will come for you,” he said.

“You do not have to stay,” he added.

I looked around the kitchen at the meteorite table, the simmering pot, the elegant garden beyond the window, and the immortal god who had asked for dinner before death.

“But I can promise to protect you if you do,” he added.

Then I looked at him.

His smile returned slowly.

Like dawn arriving somewhere it had not been promised.

“Would you like breakfast?” he asked.

Orynth’s eyes glimmered with ridiculous light.

I had come to end a god, but I stayed for dinner instead.

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