It is noon when the soldiers arrive at the town below the Ausez Cliffs. The part of the day when the day laborers and the farmers and the craftsmen have left their tools behind to rest beneath the overhangs and drink vraka tea with the very old. It is blisteringly hot, hot enough to sear the skin, and the desert seems to glisten like waves on an ocean that most looking upon it have never seen. They find it magnificent all the same—though only from a distance. Only the hatchlings, too young to understand the sun is to be hated so much as loved, remain outside at this hour. In fields left abandoned by their parents and siblings, they raise fortresses from the dust and play at war, with kell-husk shields and kaitan vines woven into the shape of Lij swords.

War, too, is something that they are too young to have learned to hate.

It is the second-oldest among these hatchlings who first spots the soldiers, their speeders kicking up an arc of dust that splits the horizon like a wound. She stops halfway through her stride (she had been playing Vekka jai Kandakis, leading the kolkpravis in taking the Rim[1] back from the Huk),[2] then shades her eyes and squints at the horizon. She does not know yet who these people are—they are too distant for her to make out the rifles strapped across their backs—yet their speeders are large and alike enough that she can be certain they cannot be Kaleesh. She feels a stab of annoyance, like a hard rock caught beneath her claws. Her parents had told her to bring the other hatchlings back to the overhangs if she saw any off-worlders, but she doesn't really know why. Also, this is the first time in ages that the others have let her play Vekka jai Kandakis, and she'd hate to let some stupid off-worlders ruin—

"Slskk— You're dead!"

The hatchling feels a sharp prod on her back and turns around to find her younger brother staring up at her. He's grinning (of course, he is), and his hands are wrapped in kell-husks to echo the sharp claws of the Huk that, like most of the other younger hatchlings, he has been told to play.

"I said, you're dead, Nesk!" He shouts. This is probably the only time he's ever gotten to 'kill' someone; the older hatchling reasons—of course, he has to be soooo happy about it.

"It doesn't count." She scoffs. "I wasn't in the game anymore. I was looking at something."

"That's stupid. You can't just say you're out of the game just because you…"

Nesk doesn't hear the rest of it. She's looking out at the horizon again, watching as the clouds of dust drift closer and closer to the Ausez Cliffs. To them.

She's never seen off-worlders do that before.

She turns back at her younger brother, in time to catch the last of his argument. "…I killed you, square as snap-stones[3]. You're just being a sore loser."

The part of Nesk that rankles at the accusation seems far away now, farther than the speeders that are eating up the desert between them and the Cliffs. "…You're right."

"No, you're—" Her brother says, then blinks. "Wait, you think I'm right?" Nesk nods, dropping the kaitan-vine lig swords that she had carried as Kandakis and bends down so that she's face to face with him. "Tanna, I need you to do something for me, okay? Can you go run to the overhangs, and tell va and ta that I saw some off-worlders that are headed our way?"

The younger Kaleesh stares at Nesk, as though she was actually Kandakis back from the dead . Then he sees the trail of torn-up earth behind her, and his eyes widen. When he speaks, she can hear the fear in his words. "Nesk, what's going on?"

She opens her mouth and realizes that she doesn't know what to tell him. Kandakis would, though. She imagines herself as the commander, and the words come—haltingly at first—but they come. "I guess…I mean I don't really know. But va and ta will[4]. You've gotta go tell them, okay? There's like twenty of them and they're all on speeders. You talk to them, and I can go find the others."

Her younger brother says nothing, his lower lip quivering as he stares at the approaching speeders, and Nesk suddenly remembers that he's almost five standards younger than her. Barely grown his adult tusks. She grabs him by the shoulders and draws him close until he has to look her in the eye.

"Tanna, I know you can do this. You're brave. And—" she sighs, "—you just 'killed' me, remember? You can definitely run back to va and ta on your own." She gets no response. Yet, like so many older siblings, Nesk knows her brother better than he does himself, and adds. "Unless that was just chance?"

Immediately, the fear in Tanna's eyes retreats—not completely—but enough that she can see the headstrong little kid reappear. "'Course not! I'll find va and ta! And—" he pauses, a half-smirk reappearing on his face, "When I do, I'm going to tell them that I got you, Nesk. Square as snapstones."

Of course, he would.

He turns to race towards the overhang, the kell-husks still wrapped around his wrists, though loosening with each stride. She watches for a second, then grabs her kaitan-vine lig swords, and clambers back up to her feet. Alive once more—that was, after all, how the game worked. Then, she turns towards the heat-parched plains.

The other commanders—Huk and kolkpravis—were still out there and she had a sinking feeling that the battle was about to begin.

…

Tanna is too small to be good at running.

Tanna is too small to be good at most things. That's why he always had to be Huk when he and the other hatchlings played Kalee-Independence, and why he'd only been able to get a kill when someone's back was turned, and probably why his older sister (who was good at everything) had asked whether or not he thought he could make it back to the overhang.

No doubt, she would have rather anyone else had stabbed her, instead of the younger brother that had already once sprained his ankle running this same route, back when he was six standards and she asked him to grab the hand-wraps for kell harvesting. Yet today he would be able to do this, and not just because he was eight standards now.

He had the feeling he would have to.

As these thoughts raced through his head, Tanna's lungs heaved in the dusty steppe air. The settlement he lived in was not large—not large enough, even, to have a name—yet, to an eight-standard hatchling it seemed to hold universes. The rows of kell brush that tore at his cloths as he ran through them, then gave way to a small huddle of homes, stitched together from canvas, kell husks, and prefab plastisteel. They looked abandoned now, an apparition that glistened in Kalee's sun as it rose beyond the towering Ausez scarps. Yet Tanna knew that most of their inhabitants had only gone as far as the overhangs, where they spoke or played pakkar-cards[5] or whatever else adults did when hatchlings weren't looking.

It was there that he ran, dust trailing behind him, until he came to the rock face and could go no farther on foot.

What the unnamed town called kakannai—the overhangs—were deep scores in the rock of the Ausez Cliffs, worn over time by a brutal wind, then hollowed out by generations of Kaleesh seeking refuge from an equally brutal heat. They were spaced unevenly along the cliffs, the larger part a story or two off the ground and only accessible by woven-kaitan ladders. The hatchlings of the unnamed town would learn how to use these ladders as soon as their legs had grown strong enough to make the climb, so it was with almost no effort that even small Tanna raced to their top, to the kakanna his parents habited.

"Vaaaa! Taaaaaaa!" he called into the shade of the overhang, even before he hauled himself onto its rock floor. There was no reply. Three older cousins gave him a seconds-long glance before returning to their low-stakes game of kaitta-knocks[6]. His grandmother looked up at Tanna from where she knelt, stirring the fire beneath a small pot of vraka tea, and pointed to the other side of the overhang. Her silence, unlike that of her younger relatives, was not disregard—when she was a child, her tongue had been cut out by a Yam'rii soldier for attempting to betray their location to a nearby force of kolkpravis soldiers.

Tanna had not yet been told this, yet in the typical thoughtless way of children he was accustomed to his grandmother's silence. He called "Thank you, Vatta[7]!" and hopped over the stovepot to head in the direction she had pointed. As he got closer, the darkened overhang resolved itself into the shadow-softened shapes of his parents, uncle, and other grandmother (his Tavva[8], on his father's side)—all stooped atop on battered stools, with cooling mugs of vraka held loosely between their hands. They, too, all turned to look at the sound of his claws skidding across the floor (one could not be sneaky in a kakanna).

"What is it, Tanna?" his father asked. He was a large man—so much so that his personal name was Ausel, after the cliffs he was born under—and Tanna wanted nothing more than to be like him. Yet so often now he sounded weary.

His voice trembled (because of course it did, because he was too small, even for this), yet he spoke.

"Ta…there are off-worlders out there. They're on bikes, and they're coming this way."

It was as though he had fired a rifle, the way they all stiffened. His uncle swore softly, got up, and walked past him to his cousins, as his va and ta exchanged a look. His ta-side grandmother said nothing, as though she had seen all this before.

"How many of them are there?" his mother asked. Va had a slight build and angry past (hers was the mother that could not speak), yet she refused to act harshly toward her son. As she spoke, Tanna's mind staggered for answers— he had heard Nesk tell him just seconds ago, hadn't he? Yet that was back in the kell-brush, and everyone hadn't been staring at him as though they needed him and—

"Twenty." He replied. "Nesk said there were—"

"That may have been what Nesk saw," his uncle said, "But there are more. At least twice that." He had returned to their group, his old slugthrower strapped over his shoulder, and its scope held tight in his hand. "I put a comm in through the prav[9] channel, and sent my sons down to—"

"Hold on— Where is Nesk?" Ausel spoke over him, the desperation in his voice evident, "Why is she not with you?"

"She, um—she had to get the other hatchlings. We were in the kell fields playing Kalee-Independence, and…" He trailed off. He had wanted to tell them about what he had done, getting his first kill at last, and on Vekka jai Kandakis (well, Nesk as Kandakis) too—yet he was starting to get the sense that something important was happening. Something bad.

"Are the off-worlders," he said, "coming to hurt us?"

The adults exchanged a look.

"No," his father said at last, "They probably aren't. But it's better to prepared, isn't it?"

The question rang out into the shadowy room and was met with silence, until, at last, his grandmother stood up. "I'm going to get my rifle," she said.

"Get mine too," va added, placing a hand on her son's shoulder. "I can provide cover fire. If you need it." Eyes passing over Tanna, his uncle turned to his father, "Ausel, you'll come with the rest of us to speak with them?" Ta nodded. His shoulders bent as though the cliffs themselves were collapsing in on themselves, and Tanna felt as though the world had begun to end without anyone bothering to tell him.

He tore out of va's grasp and, through the paper-thin layer of kell husk, grabbed the loose cloth of ta's pant leg. "Wait! I can come with you! I— I— know how to hold lig swords, I can fight! I have fought!"

The two older Kaleesh looked back at him, and Tanna's uncle let out a low laugh—not mean-spirited, but the sort that adults make, when hatchlings say something amusing. "Kid, I appreciate your spirit, but you're eight standards—"

Too small.

"—You haven't fought. Not really. Not unless the weapons these offworlders'll be packing 're made out of dried plants."

Ausel flashes him a warning glance that he probably thinks his son doesn't notice. "Right now, Tanna, we need you watch for Nesk and stay here. Your mother can protect you both if it comes to that. But—" he hesitates, just a second, "it won't."

He stoops his broad shoulders once more to touch his tusks to his son's forehead, then follows his brother through the opening in the overhang. Tanna watches him go. And for the first time in his young life, he knows that his father is not telling him the truth.

…

Tanna does not live through the next quarter hour. It simply happens, too large and too fast for him to understand.

He is scrambling across the cool stone floor of the kakanna as his ta-side grandmother pokes her head through the opening to hand off va's slugthrower. He is reaching to strap it over her offhand shoulder—she has one arm instead of two, so Ausel crafted a set of karabbac-leather fastenings to help to steady the weapon in her arms. He is handing her bullets, from the pouch that his va-side grandmother had brought, and realizing how much they are like snap-stones in his fingers, except colder and heavier and meant to kill.

And he is looking for Nesk.

Any hatchling that has grown up playing chase-games knows how their siblings move, and Tanna is no exception. He knows he could recognize Nesk's run from as far as from a klick away. Even now, he thinks he can see movement in the fields, knocking aside the kell-brush and stirring up dust. Yet no hatchling comes as far as the town.

The off-worlders, though—the off-worlders do.

He realizes they have arrived, first by the sharp intake of breath on his mother's tongue and the snap of the safety from her gun. He feels his stomach drop, though he can't say why, and cranes his head until he can see through the opening in the overhang. To his surprise, no one draws him back. It could be that he is not too young for this. Or, more likely, they are also preoccupied with watching the scene play out below.

His uncle was right—there are certainly more than twenty off-worlders, at least thirty and possibly up to forty. About half the people in the town, and roughly equal to the number with any training in combat. And they're armed. Tanna has, of course, seen guns before: the cyclers and 6-2Aug2s and Czerka-make slugthrowers that allow unnamed towns like this a chance against the shal-lizards and odd bands of raiders that roam the Taril-interior desert. But these, these are different: they're larger, heavier, with long rows of bullets hanging from their backs like vattal-horns[10]. Guns for soldiers, not farmers[11].

Tanna watches with rapt interest as the off-worlder closest to Ta and his uncle slides off his speeder and saunters across the parched earth. Their helmet is removed and tossed to the ground, revealing what appears to be a thousand small spikes emerging from a scarred head the same color as sandstone. For a moment, Tanna speculates what would happen if he touched their head-spikes: would they scratch him, or would they feel pleasantly prickly, like the spines on the stem of a vraka flower? Had Tanna lived alongside off-worlders before, he would know this question to be rude—however, he had not. Before today, he could count the number of off-worlders he had seen on one hand.

So, staring at over thirty of them below, the parched cliffside that he had imagined the whole world starts to feel a good deal smaller.

His uncle starts to talk to the off-worlder. Tanna cannot hear what he's saying—and, even if he could, his Basic is poor enough that he doubts he'd understand it. Yet same as he knows Nesk by her gait, he can make a good guess at what's going on, just by watching. His uncle raises his hand—oh, that's a greeting—then asks why the off-worlder would come to a small town at the base of the Ausez Cliffs, with nothing but kaitan and kell. The off-worlder doesn't give a clear answer. (The unnamed town will never know for certain why they stopped that day.) Yet they raise a hand towards the closest set of houses and spread their fingers (five, Tanna counts, not four[12]) in a clear look-here gesture. Whatever they say next is enough to make his uncle stiffen, as though he'd been slapped. That is enough to cause the other off-worlders to react too, fingers tightening on the handles of their rifles or pistols or batons. Tanna remembers his father's words earlier and gets the slow, sinking feeling that things are about to come to that.

Whether or not the lead off-worlder comes to the same realization, they do not care. They shrug their shoulders, mouth parting in a predator's grin, then say something else that causes Tanna's uncle to spit at their feet. The others scoff. And the off-worlder pulls out their gun.

Tanna's uncle's eyes go wide yet he does not back away. His hand, too, edges back to the handle of his slugthrower.

A shot rings out. Then another, another, another, as though it were not blaster bolts being discharged, but a barrage of stone tearing down the Ausez cliffs. Tanna did not know that guns, even those of soldiers, could do that.

He does not watch his uncle fall to the ground—his eyes snapped shut as soon as he heard the sound—yet when he opens his eyes, he can see the man lying there. Motionless. Tanna has seen people die before—in games. They stagger backwards as the kell-husk pincers of the Yam'rii slash at their chest, and drop to the ground, choking out a dramatic monologue before they breathe their last. And then they get up. And they protest because they weren't ready that time and isn't it unfair that someone got them when they weren't looking. But no one really listens because they'll always get a second chance in the next game.

Tanna's uncle does not get up.

There is a hole in his chest, the same place Tanna and all his cousins had rested their heads when they were small enough to be held, and a scorch-mark that blackens the ground behind him. These weapons the off-worlders are packing aren't made out of dried plants. His sons and his brother and his neighbors and his mother, they do not hear his last words—because they can't, because the predator-grin off-worlder is reloading his guns, and guns can be rockslides now, and the world is so, so much larger, and worse than Tanna ever imagined.

His father orders the others—ten in all—to fall back behind the crop transports and the prefab houses. It is not an orderly retreat, because they are not soldiers. Two more are taken down by the off-worlder's barrage of blaster bolts—including one of Tanna's kaitta-knocks playing cousins—and, back in the overhangs, Tanna can hear his mother snarl a word that she told him never to say. She stares down the scope of her slugthrower, and with a smooth, practiced motion, takes six shots. Four off-worlders go down—one dead—but her gun is not that of a soldier, and the others have the time to slide behind their speeders, protected by two feet of steel.

"Hand me another round, Tanna." She tells him, and he tries, only to find that he cannot move. His eyes are trapped in his uncle's body, watching as it darkens the ground with blood. He attempts to recall what Nesk had told him before he ran to the overhangs: he can do this, he is brave, he killed—

You haven't fought. Not really.

His arms go limp. The pouch of slugs drops from his hand and scatters across the ground. It is followed by a pair of kell husks, that after half a game of Kalee-Independence, a desperate run across the kell brush and, a two-story ladder, have at last seen it fit to fall off.

[1] Term for the equator of Kalee. Originally began as an off-worlder term, used typically as a pejorative for the planet and people (e.g., to be on the equator was to on the rim of the 'dry, endless pit' that was the planet itself). However, in later years, it was claimed by the Kaleesh people, and began to allude the emergence of equatorial cities as spaceflight hubs (e.g., to be at the rim of the larger galaxy, the stars themselves).

[2] This tale takes place in an AU, where…well, more happens than can be fit into a single footnote, but most relevantly , Grievous' grandmother fights not the Bitthævrians, but a Yam'rii invasion of her planet, and against all odds, succeeds. Her name— Vekka jai Kandakis.

[3] A game for young Kaleesh, not unlike knucklebones.

[4] Tarili (Ausez dialect) for 'mother' and 'father' respectively.

[5] A loanword, adopted into Tarili from off-worlder mercenaries. Means 'planetary poker.'

[6] Another Kaleesh game, for hatchlings and adults. On a player's turn, they release dried kaitan pods from the top off a board, so that they roll into a space (called the deja, or field) scattered with additional pods. If they hit any pods, the player gets to keep them. If not, they join the 'field.' Most games are played until there is a clear winner, but in particularly competitive families, they can last until one player has all of the pods in their possession.

[7] Tarili (Ausez dialect) word for grandmother, specifically on one's mother's side.

[8] Tarili (Ausez dialect) word for grandmother, specifically on one's father's side.

[9] Tarili and Rim slang for kolkpravis.

[10] A herbivore, typically dwelling in the steppes or mountains, not dissimilar to a bull.

[11] Tanna is not wrong— most likely, these men are mercenaries in the employee of Czerka, or one of the other megacorporations that have carved out a presence on Kalee in the decades after Kandakis' victory.

[12] Four, of course, being the number a Kaleesh would typically have.