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

The Royal Bastards of Galagan (Chapter 7)

The Royal Apathy

“To be refused by the village is to be refused by the home. Most children break and crumble, but then there are children who grow up to tear the whole world down.”

Lady Zohra Sha

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Calcutta Sha

Family, I’m not sure I’ve ever understood what that word meant, truly, at least not when other people use it.

‘Family’ meant obligation when it came from the mouths of my mother and her clan. ‘Work’ when it came from my father’s. ‘Debt’ when it came from my elder brother’s.

But for Poppy… Lemon… I’d have done anything for them, they felt like family because it didn’t mean any of those things. 

For my brother, Kincade, I… I had done just about everything for him until I killed him. Watching him die felt freeing, yet, by definition he was family.

Father was too, the old man, Kita Khan. He used his bastard children for war, and treated us like things, yet, mother said he was family.

Was there ever a time when I could have called them family? Or was there just a time when I realized they weren’t?

I think it was slow, something I slowly came to realize. I only had two real people who fit what should have been a treasured position in my heart, but I didn’t know that until just before the old man found out he was sick.

We had just been sent to squash a rebellion on one of the outer planets. It was common for worlds on the outskirts, who thought we would forget about them if they were so far away. They never realized that they were the ones who were being watched the most.

It was an easy mission, something troopers could have done. Father sent me and Poppy there as punishment for sticking up for Lemon when he came out. I wasn’t able to find him anywhere when we got back, I wasn’t sure what they would have done to him.

Lemon told us to leave, to go, and I had spent so much time worrying about him that I had forgotten about the other sister right at my heels. 

I stalked the halls to the throne room, shoving aside a few troopers who took too long to get out of the way. None actually tried to stop me, and few spoke up. I was the Fist of the Khan, the eldest bastard, his second born. None of them were going to stop me, not until I had seen him.

I remember shoving open those doors to his parliament of sycophants and stomping in. Poppy tried talking to me, trying to get me to calm down, to not go in, but I ignored her. 

I didn’t even care for the old coons lining the walls, or the one sitting by his throne. When I walked with the rage of a royal, I did so with my eyes white and my hands glowing with power.

I had disrupted their assembly or whatever, and the first thing I noticed was the Khatun opening her mouth to have me silenced before I could speak. But my father, oh, the old man silenced her with a finger. 

In my rage, I actually thought it was because he knew better than to try and quiet me. I was halfway through my demands, “Where’s Lemon?! Tell me where my brother is or I’ll—”

“Aaah!”

Poppy’s cry silenced me, but it was the cackling of the spineless worm that did me in.

I turned around to see the lecher pawing his gross little hands at my sister. He snickered as he groped her chest, chuckling with this twisted and disgusting delight, “Are they getting bigger?”

Poppy screamed as she tried to fling him away, but he let her go so she could fall after he slapped her butt for good measure. 

Kybi actively assaulted a royal, the daughter of the Khan in his own presence and the Khan didn’t say a word, didn’t twitch to do anything but smirk. His old jester was more important than protecting his own child.

The way he looked down as she had fallen, stunned by his advances, I imagine she was so filled with fear and embarrassment that she forgot she could crush him. I hope that’s what he felt when he noticed me behind him.

He barely dodged my fist, yet he still laughed at me like a hyena even as the spot he stood turned to dust and vapor. 

He told me, with that high and wire-y voice, “I was just touching the goods, it’s not like anyone else is!”

Kybi thought he was funny. They all did, not because he had any kind of clever sense of humor, the assembly just liked seeing a royal bastard humiliated. Well, I was going to humiliate the court with the jester’s blood as I smashed the floor again and again as he barely evaded. 

The old witch of a Khatun laughed into her hand, mocking us both. “Maybe your monster spawn will finally do the old coot in. That would be something.”

Kybi’s eyes trailed to her, the only time his lecherous mask ever came down. It went back up just as fast.

No, it was when he let his mocking go too far that he made his mistake. He brought his hands behind his ears and stuck his tongue out to mock me. That’s when my hand wrapped around his neck, and I slammed his short stubby body into the ground.

“I’ll kill you, lecher!” I snarled as my spit covered his face and his less than fearful expression was lit by the cakra in his eyes.

“Calcutta,” I heard my father call. He spoke to save the lecher, not his daughter, not her dignity or her respect. He spoke for the lecher… 

His voice boomed, and it would come again. Others wouldn’t dare make him raise it again… until me.

I raised my other fist to crush him to bits, it would be easy.

The old piece of scum looked up grinning, spitting towards my face, and taunting me. “Go on then, princess, better than you have tried.” 

My cakra pulsed as I was about to put this stain out of our lives once and for all when a hand gripped my wrist.

“Have they now?” taunted the prince who made the old man roll his eyes. I tried to pull my arm down, but this new grip was more than strong enough to hold me back. That’s why I had to poison him later.

I turned to the face of my older brother, Kincade, with his long lion-like mane of hair. He was the Khatun’s son, the heir apparent, and the only person I knew who could fight me with an arm tied behind his back.

“Cal,” he said my name, as he held my shaking fist, “get a grip and calm down.” 

I despised him most when he said that. 

“Yes, Cal,” the lecher taunted me from below, “you might cut yourself.” 

I thought about how I could just blast him, get around Kincade’s grip. I could have used the hand that held Kybi to finish him off. Sure, I wouldn’t get to enjoy what it felt like for him to become a mere smear on my fist, but he would be dead.

No such luck.

“Cutta, stop…” I heard Poppy whisper, just as she took my other hand. “It’s not worth it,” she told me as tears welled up in her eyes.

This would get me in trouble for sure, with Kincade and father locking me up with cakra dampeners like they were surely doing to Lemon. It was hard not to look away, to squeeze a bit harder on Kybi’s neck as I was held at the hand by two of my siblings. 

I looked away for a moment when I let Kybi go. I opened my eyes as he gave that disgusting grin of pleasure.

Then he went to grab Poppy again, having put herself in his reach.

I was going to fucking flatten him, but Kincade was faster. 

He had moved between Kybi and our sister and kicked the old man like a soccer ball. The old ball of shits and trash hit the stairs to my father’s throne where he groaned and rubbed his head. 

Before Kybi could even get his bearings, Kincade was casting his large shadow over him. The muscles and longer wiry hair cast darkness large enough to consume the lecher.

“My father’s tolerance of you is disgusting,” Kincade told him, in open view of our father and our father’s court. The court may have been filled with holograms, but you could see the way they gasped.

I could see the way some of them snickered, the few looking in my direction, as I held Poppy close in my arms. Moralless, all of them, and I would have seen them all die if I could.

“You should hope yourself dead before the position of Royal Khan is mine,” Kincade threatened Kybi, “because I will have you drawn and quartered by asteroids before the next day is done.” 

Kybi hee’d and hoo’d from his place on the ground. “Lucky me,” he taunted the prince, “I plan to be dead before you sit a single throne.” 

“Enough,” Kita Khan said again, this time to people who listened and promptly ended the assembly with a push of the button.

In the blink of an eye, all the holograms were silenced, and all who remained were royals and the Khan’s jester. 

“Control yourselves, the lot of you,” he told us all from on high, letting the wife he’s betrayed several times play the role of pawing at him for affections. It was enough to keep her place in the palace until Kincade could properly protect her.

“Surely, you will punish them,” the Khatun witch said.

“Of course, with more death,” he agreed. 

If you had had even half the childhood you were supposed to, you would have assumed this meant he would punish us all, but most of all his jester. Maybe not his heir who ended the spat, but definitely the jester, not just his children.

If you did, you expected too much from the Khan who made foreign women from across Galagan rear his bastards in the name of peace and the treaties that recorded it.

“You have returned to leave again,” he told us. “Both of you will take Tamiyo to the Faraday Sector, and kill any and all of the Hakai you find. You will not return until you have a hundred scalps each.”

My hands tightened the distinct lack of a punishment for the lecherous jester, but Poppy covered them with hers. She shook her head, somehow able to stay calm and collected despite being the victim. 

She brought us to our feet and bowed with her torso, I could barely bring myself to bow my head. “We’ll leave immediately.”

“You’ll leave in the morning,” he corrected her, and then he sat back in his chair with his chin in his hand. “Your mothers would see your faces, I would not have them so… stilted for so long.” 

It hadn’t taken long for me to figure that when he said that, it meant they weren’t as good lays, as uncaring to his pleasure as he was to everyone who wasn’t his heir.

“Yes, father,” she said before trying to drag me out. 

I could hear the grunt he made when she called him that as if he disproved of being denoted by what he was.

That was supposed to be my family in there, but they were pitiful. They were apathetic stains who couldn’t be helped to protect their youngest. It was their honor and their annoyance that mattered most to them.

How easy they made it to watch them all die.

*****

“To learn the power of healing, you must have empathy, Calcutta Sha,” the old Pyrie told me as I placed my hand upon their doll.

It was supposed to be featureless, a Terran without even a face. This matte white thing was supposed to be something that could be dealt wounds I could heal. It’s exterior and interior stitched itself together like flesh under Koki’s touch. 

Under my touch, it remained inflamed. It didn’t look different from anybody I had reduced to an ashen corpse, at least in any way that mattered. It was more smooth than fluttery, but who cared about that?

“Do you have empathy?” he asked me, after I had tried and failed to do as he instructed. I had placed my hand upon the doll, I had let my cakra flow through me as I had when I teleported, and let it flow into the doll. 

Rather than heal even the most minor of scratches, as it was supposed to, I filled it with apathy. When I did that, the wounds grew worse, with minor scratches tearing into open wounds. 

Well, at least I learned another way to kill a man.

Koki paced around me, staring. I’m sure he was less than enthused by how unresponsive I was to his questions. I’m sure previous students of his would answer his questions immediately, trying to spew some nonsense about how they’re more empathetic than anyone else.

Me? I admired my handiwork more than he could stand, I’m sure. I looked at my hand, covered in a mix of ash and flittery rubber from the doll. If I failed to learn healing, I could pride myself on learning how to kill someone with a touch. 

I wondered what the limits were of this new technique… Did I have to be calm? Was apathy the key or any negative emotion good? I had to admit, being apathetic in a real fight was difficult, even if the fight isn’t all that difficult.

Koki interrupted my flagitious thoughts. “Has anyone ever had it for you so you could know? Someone other than your brother and sister I mean.” 

I only tilted my head at him in response. He knew the answer to that.  

He looked away to grumble to himself about my answer. Not sure where he was looking in this dark square box of a room. There weren’t even trinkets on the wall, nor dirt. It was a firebox, meant to snuff flames and pull out the oxygen at a moment’s notice.

It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one who apparently had this… ‘problem.’

“No, I guess not,” he said to himself, stopping midway through his pacing, his eyes staring at some empty corner of the room. “You were just a bastard.” 

A part of my face twitched. I don’t know how he noticed, but I knew he did. He continued to pace around me again, and when he opened his mouth I steeled myself. I wasn’t going to let him get under my skin again.

“A royal one, but a bastard nonetheless,” he repeated, “and that meant you were a weapon. What is a weapon when it is not being used?” 

“It’s useless,” I answered, the first time in a while that I had. 

“Or maybe it’s actually a person,” he said, with a point of his finger towards me, “and was never a weapon in the first place. Maybe you deserved better, and you never should have been told you were a weapon. Never called a thing.” 

Oh, this was the route he was going to take? Show some empathy for me so I knew what it looked like? I knew what empathy looked like first by seeing how nobody had it and then seeing how Lemon and Poppy had it for me. This healing won’t work on people or things I can’t empathize with, but that’s alright, I only planned to use it for two people in my life anyway.

“It won’t work that way,” he said as if reading my thoughts. I narrowed my eyes on him as he gave me this uncanny answer. “If you can’t learn empathy for everyone, or even anyone, you won’t be able to heal your brother and sister when they’re hurt. You need to understand empathy as much as you need to give it, or else you’ll always let a bit of your apathy in.

“Then their pain will be because of you.”

I looked away, my own expression and emotions fighting against me. I was ready to snarl, but he couldn’t see that. It was too much for him to know how to get to me. I had to be steel.

I acted as if he hadn’t said anything after he stopped talking in metaphors. “Being a person is not much better than being a weapon,” I said, as I place my hand on the half-burnt doll. 

I let my cakra flow through me, everything I am and everything that I could stand to become melded with my cells. Then I let it flow into the doll, as I told Koki about that which he didn’t know. “A weapon is a thing, sure, but people are fodder.” 

Under my hand, the doll burst into flames entirely, and Koki had to turned away to protect his eyes. But he still watched me. There was this little corner in the crease of his eye that read my lips.“They’re fodder who be ash… or kneeling at my feet.”