Cushio

When he was ten, he was savaged by a forest creature they had thought extinct thousands of years before. They killed the beast and put it on display in the largest museum of their world. The boy was taken to Regeneration and they rebuilt him with machine parts and soft things that had been flesh in other bodies. He grew up half-human, and thus never understood what humans wanted.

He killed his first when he was fifteen. By his twenty-first year he ruled the continent with a. guard of mercenaries as ruthless as himself. He went into space with an armada at the age of thirty and left behind him a route of road markers that had been lives and cities and thriving markets. The route made of embers and mass graves.

They stopped him near Aldebaran and space was littered with wreckage beyond the range of even the most sensitive sensors. They took him alive, and they encased him in amber and they imbedded him in the earth of the home world, with cameras that never shut down and never let him out of their sight. And there he stayed, forever. The Regenerators of his world had done their work well. He would live forever.

The mothers of the homeworld, who desired their children to go to sleep, invoked the name of Cushio. They said, “Cushio will take you if you don’t do good.” And the children were too young to know that could never be.