• • The Royal Bastards of Galagan
• February 14, 2026

The Royal Bastards of Galagan (Chapter 10)

The Royal Correction

“You never outrun your scars, sometimes you have to look in the mirror and face them.”

Lady Camilla Lexus

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Potempa Lexus

I felt my body burn as my cakra flowed through my body. At first, it was like when I teleported, where it fused with every inch of my body. I utilized the first lesson I learned and took everything a step at a time.

But this step was taking too long.

Atolli said that I can’t just try to expand without first preparing my molecules for the shift in size to come. They need to be stretched, or more specifically, taught to make room for the cakra that will move between them, copy and connect with them. The energy that flowed through me was going to take the place of matter itself, but my matter needed to be sold on the idea first. 

Apparently, if I tried expanding without preparing my body first, I could rip myself apart. So I let my cakra funnel through me like I was about teleport to prep me. 

What Atolli hadn’t properly expressed to me was how much it would hurt. If you just let your cakra become one with you and don’t do anything with it, it would work your muscles like you were hitting the gym and setting every machine to its heaviest weight. 

My body felt pressure bearing down on me from every direction, trying to suck me in from the center of my chest. After a while, my muscles all began to burn as if I tore every muscle fiber in my body hitting the bench, and then had to walk home. 

My body had to be ready at this point! It had to be! Why suffer all this pain, for so long if it wasn’t ready? My muscles were in the perfect condition to expand, it’s time I tried!

“I know what you’re thinking, Poppy,” Atolli told me.

I couldn’t see her. With my cakra having become one with me and one with me for a while now, my cakra cloak had become an opaque shade of blue.

“Don’t do it,” she warned me, but I pretended that my hearing had been affected too.

How did she say to do it? To let it flow, and then release it, not as a violent force, but as evenly…

The moment I started, my cakra tried to fill spaces I tore in my muscles. To this day, I have felt no pain sharper than when my cakra went where it didn’t belong.

My cakra cloak dissipated, flowing in a hazardous shockwave, tearing about the lawn and the plants around me in the garden we were training in. Atolli blocked it with a flash of her cakra cloak and was there to catch my head as I fell forward.

“I told you not to try it yet, your body isn’t ready, it takes time, which you do have believe it or not.”

I listened to her tell me what I did wrong as my head laid in her lap. My whole body started to feel achy, but there were places around me, in my bicep, my shin, and thigh, and cheek, where I felt like I had been cut deep, but wasn’t bleeding. 

I felt Atolli run her gentle hand over the spot, as she told me, “You’re bleeding internally, it’s like you’ve suffered a sword cut to your muscle, but it somehow skipped the skin.” It was as painful as it sounded, but it felt even nastier.

“Can… can you…” I shuddered to speak from the pain.

“Of course,” she said, as she laid her hand on my bicep wound first, and let her healing cakra flow into me. It was like water ran through my body and under my skin. That may sound gross and painful, but it flowed right through me, carrying away pain like it was a toxin in my body. 

This is what Cutta was trying to learn? That moment was the first time I ever really doubted my sister… well there was one time I doubted she could win at this board game but that hardly felt like the same thing.

Atolli’s healing touch still left me absolutely exhausted though. The burn was still overwhelming, not in that that I couldn’t move, but in how it was everywhere. Even in my mouth, my tongue felt tired and speaking felt like a drag. I couldn’t go back to training after this, I didn’t even know if I wanted to go back to training the next day. 

As I regained the ability to move and only feel an appropriate burn in my muscles, It dawned on me how much of this garden I destroyed. Someone had worked really hard and now it was all dirt. Maybe it was planting season soon?

“I’m sorry,” I told Atolli as I struggled to push myself to my knees.

“Hmm,” she mumbled, and her non-answer made me tense up, which only made the already uncomfortable burn worse. “What are you sorry for?”

When she asked me that, I couldn’t help but hang my head low. In fact, I shoved my forehead straight into the dirt and dug my hands into it. The cold little specs made my skin fizzle.

“I failed,” I said, garnering a devastating sigh of disappointment. “I spent all that time prepping myself and I just… I buckled.”

“Poppy,” she hummed as her hand began to stroke the back of my neck, “never apologize for failing when you tried your hardest.”

I tried squeezing my fingers as hard as I could, but I could barely squeeze the dirt. ‘Don’t apologize,’ she said, but I needed to get stronger, I wouldn’t be the weak link. How many times did I survive because I relied on Cutta and Lemon? That could have been their lives, and what would this master say to that? That my best was good enough? 

“But my hardest should be good enough. What if it has to be? What then?”

“Then it isn’t,” she answered me as if I asked questions that were meant to be answered as if they truly had an answer. “Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it, better to move on.”

But there, right there, was the thing… “But what if you can do something about it?”

“Then do it,” she answered, taking her hand off me, as I pushed myself to sit up. My body was shaking, everything was shaking as I pushed myself up, even the world. I looked at Atolli, and she shook until her hand thrust out to my head, and we were the only things that stayed still. 

“Apologizing only wastes time,” she said, “apologizing for failure only ails the mind. Apologizing for the wrong thing… it only…”

“What?” I asked her. “What were you going to say? Apologizing only does what?!”

The little alien wouldn’t answer. She ignored my question. “Poppy, don’t skip ahead like this again. Putting yourself through more pain is not going to speed the process up, this… this hurt you’re forcing on yourself for whoever isn’t going to make you strong.”

She let go of me, and I stayed steady in body, but not in mind. What did she mean by that? 

“Whoever?” I asked her.

“This isn’t about your siblings,” she said, “not entirely anyway.” She acted as if she had read my mind, “That’s what you were thinking? That you can’t keep depending on them?” 

Well, I guess she wasn’t entirely off. 

“That reason you give yourself, to justify hurting yourself, that’s a lie, it’s something else — someone else. The expectations of someone long gone is dragging you down.”

I turned away from her, disgusted by this all-knowing tone she was taking with me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her straight-up, she was an empath, not a telepath.

“Oh, they all say that,” she said, but she wasn’t smirking and she wasn’t having fun. It made me out to be the same as everyone else in the worst way. 

I was not just anyone else. I never was. 

Potempa Lexus could never be just… anyone else. 

She told me, “We can’t train anymore today, even if your body could take it, we cannot fight through this block on your mind tonight.” 

That was fine, I was already walking away. She could think she sent me away all she wanted.

She could look away from me, refuse to look at me, they all do that. These old crones and their lessons, they all thought they were all so right all the time, and that only made them more wrong.

When I slammed into the door back inside, I struggled to push it open, throwing my whole body to do what I could have done with a finger a few hours before.

Dusk lasted a long time on this planet, but that didn’t change the fact that most of the species here slept on shorter day cycles, and were fast asleep. These halls were mostly quiet, and as I struggled my way to my room, I could hear it when people were coming.

Calcutta said to be on guard, and I was, but it was dawning on me how helpless I was there. I was empty, I couldn’t defend myself, and if I needed help, I couldn’t charge my cakra to send up a signal to Cutta or Lemon that I needed help.

This shot of paranoia as I traversed a palace that suddenly felt so dark and suffocating, made me make a mistake. 

I missed the sound of footsteps and rushed around the corner without thinking. I ran right into someone I never would have expected to see again.

“Poppy, is that you?” she asked, stopping me dead in my tracks.

“Aunt Flavia?” I said in shock.

There might have been a vague resemblance between us. Despite my skin being the lightest in color of my siblings, the melanin I did have from my father still made her look like some snow woman.

But Flavia was a dead ringer for my mother. At least, my mother without all the stress lines that come with being the Khan’s concubine and Lexus’s Diadect leader. 

Normally, Flavia wouldn’t have made my heart stop. Even at my most exhausted, I never worried about being able to absolutely yoke her in a fight, which was not entirely unlikely in my mother’s side of the family. But right now? I’ve never felt weaker, save for maybe when the Khatun nearly yoked me.

Right now, the way the tips of her short hair floated around her head, as her cakra rose with her excitement, I considered screaming for Calcutta. The way her black gloss-laden lips smiled at me… somehow, my shoulders felt heavier, almost like when my mother was in the room.

Then she dashed to me, with us alone in the hall she could have taken me out and that would be that, nothing I could do. I contemplated death.

Hmph.

The hug she gave me nearly gave me a heart attack, and when she whispered in my ear, I got this fuzzy feeling. “You’ve just made me the luckiest woman in the world. We need to speak in my room.”

I felt myself being dragged in and then shoved, I fell to my knees as soon as she did that. She stopped halfway through closing the door, after seeing me fall.

“Potempa?” she questioned, utterly baffled. She walked around me and placed her hands on her hips, “What the hell happened to you?”

“My training here,” I told her as I tried to sit up, looking up at her, half expecting her to offer me her hand. I realized my mistake and struggled to stand, feeling her eyes analyzing me. “It nearly tore me apart, I had to stop to recover.”

“Stopping your training early?” she mocked me in a huff. “My, my, if your mother heard you say that…”

“I did a technique wrong and nearly died.”

Flavia waved off my concern as she assured me, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell her.”

She walked right on past me to the lamp, letting me see more of her room. It wasn’t much different from mine, save for the many suitcases of clothes and the makeup at the dresser and mirror. Lots of powder more than anything. I’m not quite sure how pale Diadect Lexus and Galagans from the Collix region are. I’ve never even seen my mother without several layers of powder, and all the senators from the region were the same way. Even the men.

Flavia got the chance to look at me better now in the light and made a squeak at the sight of me. “By the gods, this training the Pyrie are doing must truly be something. You look absolutely devastated.”

“Thank you.”

“Hmm,” Flavia muttered as she looked me up and down before seemingly giving up and moving to the room’s dresser, which turned out to be a fridge when she opened it. I definitely should check my room later if fridges looked like dressers on this planet.

“You should know that all of Galagan is looking for you,” she told me, as she grabbed two bottles of water and actually… handed one to me. “Who would have thought Kybi’s beam sent you here.”

Kybi, that pervert. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t stopped Cutta from killing him, but she would have been in so much trouble.

“Well, I’m here,” I said, waving my elbows around as I struggled to take the cap off the bottle.

My aunt just watched me, utterly enamored by my struggle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so weak before.”

“You should have seen me after the fight with Killua,” I muttered as I took the cap off and started to just down that water. I usually hated water, like, why would you want a drink with no flavor? But after the mother of all workouts, water was the elixir of the gods.

“So you did fight her,” Flavia muttered, looking away for a moment to think, before turning back and sternly telling me, “well, keep that to yourself. That won’t help our case back home.”

I stopped drinking and nearly spilled some of my water listening to her. “Our case?”

“Right,” Flavia laughed to herself, “you don’t even know why I’m here!”

“No, no I don’t, I would like to if you don’t mind. Never took you for the training type.”

Flavia laughed with her belly. “And I’ll never need to, that’s your lot,” she said as she took her drink down smooth, one I notice she never opened. “No, I’m the negotiator Lexus sends when your mother decides she’s unavailable, or so she says.”

Negotiator?

“What are you negotiating for?”

Her smile really unnerved me, with was like two half smirks that met in the middle rather than a real smile. “You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

“No way to keep informed, I didn’t even know about this planet until I got here.”

“That’s fair, I didn’t know about it until the Zaolights said they wanted to meet here.”

The Zaolights?! That’s a terrorist cell from the colonies. They want to escape the Galagan Empire, the amount of times father sent us after some rogues who would suicide bomb our ships… it’s… 

It’s a little intense to say the least… when someone runs at you with the intent of dying for the cause.

“Why would the Zaolights ever meet with Diadect Lexus?!” I nearly shouted before Flavia snapped her fingers and her purple cakra at me.

“The walls have ears, Potempa, I know your mother told you that much.”

I found my head dipping to look at the ground, just like old times. “I’m… I’m sorry…”

“You’ll learn eventually,” she said, “hopefully.” I tried to ignore the hint of disdain in her voice. “But in regards to the Zaolights, use your head, I know it sounds hard, but it’s not incredibly difficult to put together.”

“You want an alliance, their help or something,” I figured, “but why do we need help, and why them? I don’t get that.”

“You really-”

“I really don’t know what’s going,” I interrupted her, so she would stop taunting me again and again.

Flavia waited, and raised her chin at me. That smile/smirk of hers crept at the corners of her mouth, but it was restrained by something I couldn’t quite recognize.

“Sit,” she seemed to order me, “you can barely stand, sit with your aunty and it can be story time like when you were younger.”

I distinctly remember her being drunk, and not looking at me during many of those storytimes. That’s what I thought about as I sat at the desk with her makeup.

Flavia leaned up against the window beside the desk, the light of the setting sun falling down her face. It was really dramatic and definitely on purpose. Diadect Lexus taught us just how important image was at all times, or that’s what I gathered. I was only under my mother’s tutelage until I developed my cakra at… I think 10?

After that, I was my father’s weapon. At that point, the only image I needed was one I could back up with my fist.

“I’m assuming you knew Kybi took control,” she said. I didn’t stop the rise in my shoulder in time to keep her from noticing, nor did I stop myself from looking away. “So you didn’t know, but you’re not surprised. I guess that’s something.

“He has control of your father’s court, most of the generals and the home planet save for a few countries,” the five families Khans regularly took concubines and concubinators from, I would assume, “but those countries have most of the colonies so his control isn’t assured.

“Diadect Sha may be free of him in their backwater desert homeworld and its moon cluster, but after footage was released of Calcutta killing Killua…” There was this snide smirk again as if my sister’s fame should be a boon for us. “People don’t know if you or Tamiyo—”

“Lemon,” I corrected her.

“Are we really going to call her a fruit?”

“We’ll call him the fruit that blinds you when it gets in your eyes.” I knew, strategically speaking, that showing respect to Lemon wasn’t the thing to do when I was trying to hold things close to the vest.

But some things are worth it.

“Well, because you two weren’t on the footage, Diadect Sha has been swept aside into hiding, and everyone’s backing us… or Diadact Takeda.”

That’s when I understood the desire to partner with the Zaolist. The colony planet of Zao wasn’t under the country of my mother’s clan or that of my siblings, but it was close to Akai Sekai, which was under Diadect Takeka’s control. Attack them on two fronts, take a colony from Diadect Takeda, free one from another rival, or at least use them as a distraction to attack Diadect Takeda elsewhere. 

What happened to Lady Takeda then? And everyone at the capital? My mother and Cutta’s would be there too, and none were fans of Kybi.

“I see the wheels turning in your head,” Flavia said. “By now you see why it’s so good that I found you. We weren’t sure if Kybi had managed to off you or not, there were doubts but I believed you would pull through, what could that worm do to you?” 

Well, I was glad she had such faith in me.

“We can start preparing for your return, but be warned, there are just as many back home waiting to praise you as there are those who want to kill you. Public opinion goes hand-in-hand with vitriol and hypocrisy, not to mention a fine dose of falsehood,” then she gave me this devastating sweet smile and a chime in her voice, “that was a bit from us too!

“Oh, just thinking about it now, I really was so lucky to find you…” she started muttering to herself as if it wasn’t blind luck that she ran into me at all, or that we ended up on the same planet. 

“Lucky that I didn’t run into Calcutta, that ugly boar,” Flavia muttered as if the thought of my sister was ruining her plans.

“Yeah,” I agreed haphazardly, trying to seem like I wasn’t in on anything, “you really could have run to her instead.”

“She’s here too?!” Flavia snapped, her demeanor breaking as she looked at me in shock.

I had fucked up. She was being casual, she hadn’t assumed we were together. By the look on my face, she knew the truth.

“I bet little Tam… your other sibling is here too. That means I need to be more careful than I was, I’ll have to find them before they find us.”

I had no idea what it meant to find them first, but the sound of him suddenly made me think I wasn’t all that tired. I had to hold myself still, and think.

“Don’t do that,” I told her, and her look alone was an accusation that left me stuttering, “th-they-they’re training too, just like me, w-with the Pyrie.” 

Yes, the Pyrie, the masters here, masters who power we did not know. 

You know, they had to have been pretty powerful if so many listened to them. It couldn’t just be that everyone respected their kindness, right?

Regardless, I ran with it, and the more confident I sounded, the less accusatory Flavia looked. “Right now, we’re at peace because the Pyrie are teaching us all techniques to get stronger, if you try a coup, or instigate, either of them is strong enough to kill you—”

“Us,” she tried to correct but I corrected her in turn.

“No, just you, I’ve stayed out of trouble so far, I’m too important to get killed following you into the fire.” I was not sure where that came from, and I was quite sure that neither did my aunt Flavia, but that’s what sold it.

She had doubt in her mind and it had begun to eat at her. She was stroking her chin, looking at the ground, and thinking herself to death. “Yes, yes dear niece, beloved niece, you are right, it’s not worth the risk.”

“And who knows what the Pyrie can do,” I added which made her purse her brow. I had to be careful not to fuck it up while I was ahead. “The people here are loyal, we’d be overpowered and outgunned.”

Flavia’s head nodded back with this look of recognition before she settled into this smile that came so naturally for her. “How smart you are when you get going, Potempa, your mother has rubbed off on you, you just need a little time to get started.” 

As she fumed with excitement, as if to cover up her mistake, she almost acted like I imagined real aunts should. 

She pinched my cheeks told me what a good girl I was.

“You should get back to your room then,” she told me, and with the chance to leave, I found myself pushing through my body’s ailment, through the pain, and didn’t even realize it.

“Yes, you’re right, I can leave without being seen,” I told her.

“Ooh, one of the techniques you were taught?” she asked as if she could play the part of the interested aunt now. 

I just tried to nod as I focused on a power that hasn’t went down since we got to Drota, but before I could let my cakra flow, Flavia made sure to tell me, “Remember, Potempa, you are Diadect Lexus’s future, it depends on you as it always has. Your mother would be proud to see how proactive you’ve been.”

Mother? Proud? I didn’t know what that would look like.

I let my cakra flow through me, and become one with me, barely noticing the burn Atolli wanted me to overcome. It took only a move and a flash to leave Flavia mocking a look of astonishment before I went to the one person she wouldn’t have wanted me to.

With a flash, I crashed into her room and slid across the floor. Suddenly, I remembered how much pain my body was in.

There was the sound of rushing cakra, but the sound of Cutta saying, “Poppy,” as she put on a shirt was comforting. She was there in a second to lift me to my feet and to her bed. I didn’t even register it, just the weird shirt she was wearing to bed. 

The symbol on her chest looked like something for a Pyrie rock band.

“Poppy, what’s wrong?” Cutta asked as her hand went to my cheek. 

I took her hand snuggled into it. I was safe with her, away from Flavia. It was selfish of me to want my comfort as she stood there needing me to watch her back, but I still stole those moments. 

I got to answering her eventually.

“There’s trouble,” I told her.

“Did Atolli try to hurt you?” Cutta asked, and I shook my head. Cutta’s first guess struck me as strange, I had never once considered that Atolli would try to hurt me.

I told Calcutta the truth. 

“My aunt Flavia’s here.”

Cutta was taken aback, likely only knowing her vaguely, but enough to know it was a problem. I didn’t hold anything back, I told her everything that happened, everything I remembered, even when how I pretended to be loyal.

I worried for a moment that Cutta would be mad, but instead, she told me, “That was smart, learn what you can, I can watch my own back, and I’ll watch Lemon’s. I’ll let him know.”

I hugged her then, and she seemed a bit confused. It wasn’t that we didn’t hug, we were the only ones who would hug us. Our families weren’t the hugging people and… Lemon’s mother couldn’t even though she wanted to.

Still, the suddenness confused Cutta. She wrapped me in her big arms, and asked me, “What’s wrong?”

“I… I worried for… for a moment… that you thought I had betrayed you,” I admitted.

She held me tighter. “I trust no one else but you and Lemon. I know you would never betray me, and you know…”

“… you would never betray me,” I finished.

“Forever and always,” she said, and I repeated it.

She loosened her grip on me, and I looked up at her to ask, “I know you said we should train apart but… can I stay with you tonight?”

People looked at my sister and only saw the hard and harsh battle-ready weapon. They only saw her as the Fist of the Khan, who crushed planets in her hands and reduced rebellions to ash. That’s not all she was, not to me.

“Sure, Poppy,” she told me, “it’ll be a sleepover, like when we were little.”

People didn’t know of the warmth she had, and honestly, I don’t think she did either. The way she undid the covers to tuck my grown-ass in and get in with me, even with how disgusting and unshowered I was. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight, not caring.

The Fist of the Khan was Cutta first, and the saddest thing I think was that no one but me and Lemon seemed to know that.