Inmates of the Flesh by Alina Udrea - HTML preview

CHAPTER 2- The Tribunal of Stars

Long before her fall, before her name was stripped down to a

prison number, Eryn had stood in the blaze of the Tribunal. Every soul did. None remembered it afterwards, not fully- but echoes survived like scars, hiding in dreams and déjà vu.

The Tribunal was a ring of stars suspended in an endless void- an eye

of galaxies staring back into those who trembled at its center. The accused were brought there in essence, not in flesh. Raw consciousness, stripped of all masks and pretense, forced to stand naked before the gaze of eternity.

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Around her, shapes shimmered: the Overseers. They were not one

species, not one form, but an old coalition of luminous beings. They had been judges for eons, claiming the right to measure what they called

Page | 8 crimes against the Breath of Creation. And always at the center, the

Warden.

No one ever saw the Warden clearly. It flickered in and out, a

silhouette burning at a frequency just beyond comprehension. Only the voice remained steady, calm and sooth as polished stone: “You will be corrected “

Correction. That was their word for it. Not punishment- correction.

Eryn remembered fragments of her own trial, shards that sometimes

bled through in fever-dreams. A battlefield razed by her command. Thousands dying …..

“Your essence has fractured. You walk with shards of cruelty, of

ambition, of mercy withheld. Such weight cannot pass into the current of the stars. You must atone through immersion”.

And then the floor, the stars, the Tribunal, all reality – had

tilted, plunging her towards the Veil of Atonement. She had screamed that she had no memory of her crime, that she couldn’t repent for what she didn’t understand or at least remember…

But the Overseers had been clear. It was not their concern whether

she remembered her wounds. Their concern was that she live them again and again until the lesson was learnt.

Earth. The planet had not been chosen at random. A fragile cradle

of flesh and soil, designed to ensnare the infinite into the finite. To cage

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eternity in hunger, thirst, sleep, fear, shame, love and grief. The perfect forge.

Page | 9 Some souls learned swiftly. Some took lifetimes. Others became so

entangled in the illusion of power or despair that they forgot entirely…. And were recycled again and again, spat back through the Veil….

Eryn was one of these. A shard.

And though she did not remember standing in the Tribunal’s light,

the memory gnawed at her now. Somewhere beyond the cracked earth, beyond the monoliths, beyond the Nexus itself… The Tribunal still waited. Watching. Measuring. And she could not shake the feeling that when she returned, it would no longer be as the accused. It would be as the accuser.