Radio Detective

A Mother's Love

'You're a monster,' she breathed, hand half raising but unable to cross the space between them, a space that had turned into galaxies since...

'Is that what you'd call me?' Vandras asked wryly, his helmet discarded, eyes softening in amusement. For a moment he looked like the child she had known and loved, but a hardness touched his hands and his eyes were unrecognisable. 'Perhaps I am.'

'How could you do this?' she asked, but Hinla Moonacre had not come to her son for questions. She had expected no answers when she had followed his transport, confronted him beneath the still smoking sky of Ornlos. The beautiful, welcoming palace lay in ruins before them, pools of water once so still now marred with ruin that he had decreed. 'You're destroying the galaxy,' she said, the memory of her own home's destruction flashing before her eyes.

She had wished, ever since that moment, that she could create a galaxy where no goodbye had to be final. Where no one left their home in fear of never returning.

'I'm fixing your mistakes,' he corrected, so proud, so demeaning, the awful, cruel weapon in his hand crackling to life between them, just as it had when he had killed his father.

Lun, she knew, had been more forgiving of their son than she could be.

'You're gone, aren't you?' she whispered, eyes bright with anger, reflecting the light of his blazing weapon. 'You've been gone for a long time. I know that.' He made to laugh but it, like many things, died in the space of a gunshot, confusion the last emotion Vandras would ever express as he looked into his mother's eyes and watched her turn and leave him to die.