Invicta

It had all gone to hell so quickly, Augustus mused.

Things had been going so well. For a while, it even seemed as if they might win. Cyrene had been hopeful... she'd wanted to raise their children on a free world, free from the overarching influence and crushing arrogance of the Hierarchy... It had been her dream. Their dream.

Perhaps they'd been too hopeful. Or, perhaps, simply unwilling to believe that there had never been any real hope of victory to start with. That there was never any real escape, nor hope for freedom.

Perhaps they'd simply been unwilling to believe that their fighting - for their children, their colony, their very world - was in vain.

And yet, that is all it had come down to in the end. Betrayed in the heat of battle, beaten down, badgered and bartered over, handed over like so much livestock for trade...

They'd seen their supporters summarily executed, their battered bodies stacked alongside the road...

...Young children taken, screaming, from the homes of unrepentant families as their parents and elder siblings were gunned down mercilessly...

...Entire swaths of their home city set ablaze, razed to the ground in fiery retribution...

He'd been made to watch as his beloved mate was beaten and tortured, powerless to help her... but feeling a strange sense of pride when she neither cried out nor begged for mercy.

He wondered if she had felt the same for him when their roles had been reversed.

Now, though, those thoughts were far from his mind. Now, as the searing hot Palaven sun burned down from a cloudless sky, the pair were made to take their final stand. Long stripped of their armor and identifying markings, they stood clothed only in the plain garments of common prisoners, arms bound painfully tight behind their backs and legs shackled to the hot concrete platform...

All around them, a crowd had gathered, far too many now for him to count.

Augustus chanced a glance in Cyrene's direction, feeling his resolve weaken when he saw that someone had gouged out her beautiful eyes. Her fringe, too, had been mutilated, pared away until no trace of an upward curl had remained.

And yet, she was calm, holding her head proudly despite her humiliation. He drew strength from that, turning his defiant gaze back towards the firing squad who were their executioners.

"Do the condemned have any last words?" the senior officer asked, sounding almost bored. For a long moment, there was only silence.

Then... "Yes."

Cyrene's voice was low, but clear, and rose in volume as she spoke to be heard over the jeering of the crowd. "You have taken us from our home, starved us, humiliated us, beaten us like beasts... But you have not won. Even after you have murdered us here, you will not have won. The spirit of our family is not so easily conquered!"

She had always been freer with her words than he. Even still, they spoke as one in their next breath.

"Ad victoriam!" To victory!

In the next moment, the thunder of a dozen rifles rang out over the roar of the crowd... and then all was silent.

Augustus' greatest regret lay only in his inability to tell his precious Cyrene how much he loved her, one last time...