Ohre (Heaven's Edge #2)
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Ohre suppressed his wild nature while living on board Datura 3. Plucked from the bottom of the ocean as a boy, he struggled to learn the ways of the land dwellers. He never asked to live with the heaven-sailing miners. But when his adopted clan's ship is attacked, he must give into the instincts he long fought against.
After fighting to keep Qeya and the Royal children, alive, he finds himself abandoned once more. All Ohre wants is the kind of freedom a life in the sea can give. But he doesn't want to live it alone anymore. He wants the princess and if Qeya won't come willingly, he'll make her.
Jennifer Silverwood
Jennifer Silverwood has been involved in the publishing world since 2012 and is passionate about supporting the writing community however she can. After studying traditional art at university, she began helping Qamber Designs bring authors’ books to life. In real life, she’s a mom of two, a passionate reader, and an occasional artist. Jennifer is the author of three series—Wylder Tales, Heaven’s Edge Novellas, and the Borderlands Saga—and the stand-alone romance titles Stay and She Walks in Moonlight.Discover more with Jennifer’s blog on writing life and other bookish delights at www.jennifersilverwood.com
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Ohre (Heaven's Edge #2) - Jennifer Silverwood
OHRE
A HEAVEN’S EDGE NOVELLA
Jennifer Silverwood
Copyright
©2013 Jennifer Silverwood
Edited By
Jessica Augustsson
Published by JayHenge Publishing KB
Cover Art By
Najla Qamber
Formatting by
Champagne Formats
License Notes
All rights reserved including the right to produce this novella and or portions of it without specific permission from the author. This novella is a work of fiction, all names, characters, incidents and places are purely fictitious. Deep within the uncharted reaches of a science fiction universe that should be fairly obvious.
Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
I: REBUILD
II: DESCEND
III: ATONE
IV: RETURN
V: DIVIDE
VI: ACCORD
VII: RELINQUISH
VIII: DIVE
OTHER BOOKS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I: Rebuild
The first time I saw Qeya was the moment my life began. I wasn’t supposed to be on third deck that day, when she came to watch the miners cook and avoid the Royals. I learned after this that she often did that, came to sit with her mealtime bowl and watched us work. It seemed strange to see so much wisdom and sorrow on a face so young.
Living in the eternal darkness of the lower decks I had heard rumors about the Royal family. We all knew it was because of them we were stuck on Datura 3, forever sailing the stars without a port of call. Yes, there was plenty to mine and every pirate ship we came across paid us thousands for our goods. For some below it was the dream life, far better than scrapping it in the deep cave wastes on home world. But I hadn’t spent all my days on a miner ship. I still remembered the smell of salty sea air and the glow of the undersea palaces at night.
As a boy I slipped out of the slums, past the guard and into that sea to catch a glimpse of it. Something the Royals didn’t know—or had chosen to forget—was that we all came from the sea. The underwater caverns opened up inside the abandoned palaces. I spent at least a hundred nights exploring these forbidden places. I saw the inner chambers of their temples and lost caverns filled with Royal treasures, things my land-dwelling cousins cared little for. Countless times I nearly lost my life, but the sea meant true freedom for me.
Somewhere down the ages we forgot that; we simply dismissed the memory of our first homes. Few lived below the waves now, save the wild ones we didn’t speak of—old clans that it was said had never surfaced. When I was a boy I dreamt of joining them, but Old Brien said that was just crazy water-logging talk. Ever since the Land Wars that lasted the better part of an age and in which my kind lost their chance to rule the world above, we stuck to what we did best: mining the core. And that’s all you’ll ever be good for, boy,
Brien would say. Just remember that next time you go risking your neck below.
When I had more fool than sense, I used to argue with him. But we were great once, weren’t we, Brien? We could be great again!
I meant it too. When the palaces grew wearisome, I slipped back to the water. The Royals could never go as deep as us, had forgotten how to breathe when the water pressed you so hard your mind saw new colors. That was when I learned the hidden truth not even Old Brien wanted to remember. My people had come first.
Are you just going to stare at the blowing sea all day or will you pick up a blasting shovel and help me?
Adi’s harsh voice cut me from my reverie and brought me back to the present.
Like all miners, Adi was hairless save a thick fringe of eyelashes only the females had. Though she was smaller than me, she was swarthier than a Royal and by our standards beautiful. Her tattoos were similar to mine, of the same jagged lines beginning over her scalp and covering her face and neck, but they were lined with blue chole dust. Chole was very rare and in our journey we had only gathered a single vial of the precious mineral. Adi had chosen to tattoo herself with it because she was the miner who discovered it.
Adi wasn’t like me. She had been born and raised in the heavens above, on this very ship we were salvaging, in fact. Even though she’d been chosen to join the Pioneer crew as their chief tactician in dealing with hostile worlds, her heart had remained on Datura 3. A part of her had died the day it was blown to bits. As terrifying an experience as it had been for those of us on board, Adi had watched from the surface of Nukvar. Half of her blood family had been on that ship.
So while I had agreed it better to return to the caves where we could at least be close to the sea, Adi was the one pushing me to rebuild. We are just as smart as Old Brien or any of them ever was, Ohre!
she had exclaimed. While I doubted we could manage to haul the abandoned shuttle from its watery grave, she was annoyingly confident.
Gritting my teeth, I fought the urge to hurl up the fish we had caught and cooked for breakfast. The stench from the pile of mangled bodies waiting behind me was overwhelming to our overdeveloped sense of smell.
For the better part of the day, Adi and I split our work in half. She dug the trench needed to bury our dead from the Datura 3, and I brought the bodies out of the deck onto the white sand. This is how we learned no living creatures lived in the sand bar lining the mountains and sea. Nothing had entered the wreckage through the hole I blasted free after the crash, leaving the bodies stinking but intact.
Some miners would have gladly taken my job, spat on the grave and said good riddance to the Royal scabs. Others would have set the whole ruined deck on fire and never flinched from what they considered duty. My opinion lay somewhere between that thin line of hate and honor toward those who had shaped my life.
Most of the bodies were nearly a third of my size. On this world they didn’t decay as quickly as we had expected. It wasn’t the expressions of terror frozen on their faces that troubled me, but the gills on the sides of their necks, blackened with death, open in desperation to breathe the water in. Even in the end, our bodies tried to return to our first home, the sea. For a moment I wondered if we should throw them into the alien ocean. An old legend said when we were returned to the sea we became the water and began a new and better life. If I knew the bodies would keep in these waters I would have done it.
But if we had any hope of salvaging the technology from second deck, we had no other choice. Ever since the Royals won the wars, they claimed it as their new birthright. That meant abandoning older traditions like burning instead of anchoring them to the ocean floor. At least we could handle the work without the burden of burying our families. Qeya would have pretended to stomach it, while secretly dying on the inside. That was her way, burying her woes until I had to come and pick her spirits back up again.
With blood-streaked hands I picked up another child and dumped him into Adi’s deep trench. All of my kind had hated the Royals, save those pampered few who worked for them in the palaces. Now that we were so far removed from home world, things had changed. Even Adi’s sharply featured, lovely face contorted in sorrow as she continued to dig. I watched as she wiped the sweat off her gray skin.
Soon as we finished here and scrapped the parts we needed from deck two, we would search for the Pioneer. According to Adi it was still lodged