• • The Royal Bastards of Galagan
• July 26, 2025

The Royal Bastards of Galagan (Chapter 3)

The Royal Awakening

“What surprises each new morning can bring.”

Master Koki of the Jade Hand

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Calcutta Sha

“You are your brother’s ultimate weapon, Cal, through you, he will accomplish great things.”

It was hardly the first time I had woken up haunted by other people telling me the point of my life. But I had to admit, that was the first time I had ever woken that way after someone else knocked me out.

Nobody knocks me out.

I sat up in the bed before I knew it was a bed, finding myself in a room fit for a palace guest. Well, I guess that might have accurately fit my description. Hell, the bed even came with an overhead canopy, my would-be jailers had a sense of decor.

“You are safe, Calcutta,” I heard some crotchety old voice say to me, and I aimed to be on top of it immediately.

My cakra was flowing through me at a moment’s notice. I flipped up and out of the bed, kicking the sheets off, charging a blast in my hand. The second my feet touch the ground, I feel the same overwhelming pressure that put me to sleep. If anything, this time it was even stronger but more controlled. It sought to bring me to the level of calm it wanted.

“I see safety is not what you seek,” the voice said again, and as my vision blurred, I saw the shape of one of those small creatures that surrounded us before. He shouldn’t have trapped himself with me alone.

At least, that’s what I would have been saying if he alone wasn’t threatening to bring me to my knees.

“I’d tell you that I’m not here to hurt you,” the thing kept talking, “but we’re not going to have a conversation until you calm down.”  

That’s what this was, he was trying to calm me as he hid in the shadows. I had begun to realize then that this species must have been a people of telepaths or empaths of some kind. It didn’t seem to respond to my thoughts but controlled my emotion, so a planet of empaths was more likely.

And this one empath alone was threatening to bring me down, trying to wash away and expel my mind of the anger and excitement inside. One by one, as I used the typical fuels for my cakra, rage, excitement, lust for violence, this thing seemed to be drowning them all away, flushing them down a toilet of sorts.

“Calm down, Calcutta,” he warned me. Yes, it took a moment to realize that it was man’s condescension talking to me. “It may have taken several dozen to quell your mind before, but I promise you, I am alone am all that someone like you will need. 

“So calm down.”

Calm down, he said. They all say that, but maybe this guy had a point. I couldn’t do a thing as tried to fight him tooth and nail in my mind. 

I let my cakra quell in the fist I had aimed in his direction. I pulled it back into my stance and took deep breaths. As I calmed myself, I felt his influence on my mind stop working against me, and start working with me. He was controlling the flow of my emotions, and I had moved with the current.

“Isn’t this better?” he told me. “There is peace in a calm mind, such basic knowledge has built belief systems across worlds since the dawn of time.”

“I know,” I told him.

“Do you?”

I showed him how much I knew then and there.

Ki-YO!

My other hand struck out, sending a cakra blast straight for him. It hit the wall, leaving a smoking mark from how hard and how fast the beam hit it. 

With the way his small gray neck bent to the side, it’s clear to me he has some decent reaction speed. If he didn’t, I would have killed him.

And my hand still glowed with a still and solid form of cakra, a taunt to him. I held my fighting position, feet apart, legs bent, one fist in the chamber and the other waiting to be reloaded. Overall, I was ready to fight. 

Yet, I was calm, just as he wanted.

“Did you think I was incapable of attacking while calm?” I asked him, as he still sat on a shelf, neck bent, head next to a smoking mark. “During the mind’s calm is when one first learns and masters cakra. Calm is the only foundation for true power.”

“You have surprised me, well done,” he said as he passed his staff to the crook in his arm to clap. “I apologize for underestimating you, it will not happen again.”

I let my cakra flow back into my other hand, the energy of the self flowing around me as I prepared for the fight to come. It was strange, I didn’t feel him trying to calm me anymore, and if he wasn’t trying to influence, I couldn’t imagine him standing any chance.

“Now that your lesson is out of the way,” is how I started my threat, “you can tell me where I am and where my siblings are, or else-”

“You’ll wipe me off the face of the planet?” he interrupted me and proceeded to wave me off as he leaned into the light. “Forgive me if I’ve heard it before, hardened warriors such as yourself start to say the same thing once you get all muscle-y. You don’t train the strongest muscle you have enough, at least not with a dictionary.”

His words rolled off me, I was more concerned with his physique. He was an old man because of course he was. He wrinkled as any other animal would, and his eyes were uneven, one bit swollen, permanently so. He could have had a recent injury, but it looked like an old wound that left him with an eye that appeared smaller than the other. I would never have called his kind pretty, but he was one of the uglier ones.

In response to his own retort, I asked him, “Would you prefer that I just blast you again?”

“I’d rather you not for the sake of the palace’s contractor, repainting the walls isn’t easy you know. It’s a very special type of white.”

“Then tell me where my brother and sister are and I’ll make it quick.”

“They’re resting, eating even, Calcutta, there’s no need for hostility. You’ll see them after we talk.”

This man sounded like Kybi with the way he spoke, like I was an irrational child who would learn if I only listened. I had wasted too much time talking to old men.

I sent another blast his way without warning, aiming for his chest. All I hit was the wall again, but this time I followed his movement to the ground. I got to see that he was taller than the others by a few inches, half my height. 

My eyes never lost track of him, he was a skilled and knowledgeable warrior, that much was clear to me the moment he tried to hide from my sight. Most of my locs remained tied back down my head, but a few hung over my eye, and that’s where he hid. I concentrated used calmed cakra to make my locs float out of the way, removing my blindspot.

When we locked eyes he was smiling at me.

“I think we could have a lot of fun playing this game,” he told me, tapping his little stick against the ground like it was some replacement for clapping his hands. “But, my people are waiting, and your people are waiting. Surely, we can speak and come to an agreement so that we may see them sooner than later?”

“It’s far too early to be sure about anything,” I warned him.

“You are a careful girl, there’s something to respect about that,” he said as he raised his finger, and wagged it back and forth, “but carefulness doesn’t often pair well with open hostility.”

I had a smirk at that, pointing my cakra fueled fist at him, moving to another position refusing to leave an opening. “Where I’m from, this hardly counts as ‘open hostility.’”

“What a sad world you must come from, it explains the undue pressure and stress we found on your siblings…” His words made me grind my teeth, I won’t lie. There was some kind of implication in his tone that his words should be surprising to me, as if I didn’t know Poppy and Lemon better than anyone. 

“It’s on you too,” he added as if to trip me up anymore.

“If you’re trying to build trust with me, it’s not going to work.”

“Oh?”

“How can I be anything but hostile to a man who watches me while I sleep and talks in taunts for minutes on end before telling me his name?”

The old man tilted his head up, scratching the point of his chin as he thought about my words. “Huh, I can see why that must set you off, I’m sorry, that was very rude of me, wasn’t it?”

There was a shift in his expression. There was less of a smirk and more like a guilty smile. “I’m Koki, one of the masters of this temple palace. Let us start over.”

“Start…?” I stammered, trying to keep my composure as this… Koki extended his hand to me as I still threatened to kill him with mine. 

Koki eyes changed, appearing less welcoming, and more like a bird of prey. “No, I supposed you’re not quite capable of such things. You’re siblings were, but not you, you are the leader, you cannot make such mistakes.”

“You’re not going to butter me up.”

Koki waves his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, I wouldn’t even try. How about this? How about I make the offer to you that we do to everyone who finds their way to this planet? The same thing we offered your siblings, who would decide on nothing without you.”

He started to walk around me, and my fist stayed on him. He arched what passed for a brow on his face as if thoroughly annoyed with me. Good, I felt the same way about him.

“On Drota, we Pyrie are peaceful empaths, it is our natural inclination to understand and heal others, among teaching them to master their cakra. When you came here, your first response was aggression, and your sister’s was to hide behind you. When we see such classic traumatic responses, we can’t help ourselves but want to help.”

“Oh really?” I questioned. I couldn’t help but reek of sarcasm. “What does that help look like?”

“Well, you clearly come from a warrior species, or at least a warrior clan. How else would we teach you?”

I arched my brow at that. What could that mean? The sounds of my flowing cakra were starting to distract me. “Are you… saying what I…?”

“Yes, Calcutta, you are a being of violence, violence is your way of life, we Pyrie would not change that, nor should we judge… much. But to help you with your issues of the mind and soul, we would teach you ways of combat, to reveal to you your heart, and your path of healing.”

I have to admit, my cakra faltered there. The solid light around my hand dimmed and flashed a bit, which I’m sure Koki did not miss at all. I just… I just couldn’t help it… I had to chuckle and grin a bit. This little pipsqueak was really saying that… 

“You could learn here, Calcutta, new ways to hurt people,” he said plain and clear.

I nearly laughed, that broke my calm, my violent concentration. “You’d… teach us that, heh heh…” I was laughing now, the royal bastard in me couldn’t quite stop it. “Aren’t you afraid we’d use whatever you teach us against you?”

“Well,” he said with a bit of a shrug, “it usually starts with us teaching you how to fight, but it never actually ends the way you’re thinking.”

I smirked, and I hid nothing. More power? My siblings and I were just run off our homeworld because we didn’t have enough of it… because I didn’t. I would have taken whatever I could get, and used it gladly. If these… Pyrie thought that training was a healing process that meant the fools had their uses. I wouldn’t pass it up.

Poppy, Lemon, and I were going to have to take back Galagan by force. This was could be a big step in the right direction.

So I lowered my fist, my weapons.

“There can always be a first.”

He smirked too at that. 

“Oh, you all always say that, some way or another.”