The Space Empress He Craved
Description
When Lyra Ash, the youngest Station Commander in Kaelari history-and a five-time rejected bride-is forced to attend the Annual Galactic Summit, she expects nothing but another public humiliation. But Emperor Orion, the most powerful Lyrokan in the galaxy, shocks everyone by refusing to reject his Kaelari match, breaking centuries of tradition. As political conspiracies destabilize the Empire and Lyra's rainbow-shifting skin betrays her every emotion, she must navigate deadly Rogue attacks, assassination attempts, and her growing feelings for an Emperor who sees her as far more than "mining-colony trash."
Chapter 1
Dec 11, 2025
POV: Lyra
"Are you rejecting me?"
The Lyrokan Emperor's voice dropped to subzero temperatures, his bioluminescent pathways pulsing from purple to midnight black. Seven feet of raw power loomed over me, and every being in the station's main hall held their breath.
The crystalline walls seemed to vibrate with his barely contained rage.
This is it. Match number six. At least he's asking what I want first.
I stood there—the youngest Station Commander in Kaelari history, the mining colony girl made good—and faced the most powerful being in the galaxy. My skin was already shifting through its embarrassing spectrum: blue for sadness, purple for anxiety, that sickly green tinge of anticipated rejection. Every Lyrokan in the room could read my emotions. Every Kaelari could smell my fear.
"Your preference, Your Eminence—should I initiate the rejection or will you?" I kept my voice steady, professional. The way I'd learned to speak when delivering casualty reports.
The entire hall erupted.
Shocked gasps from the Kaelari. Stunned silence from the Lyrokans. Someone dropped a data pad, the crash echoing like thunder. The Emperor—the one they called the Void Killer, who'd supposedly executed three ministers for incompetence just last cycle—had found his psychic match.
And that match was asking about rejection?
His pathways went completely black. The temperature dropped so fast that frost formed on nearby surfaces. The very air seemed to crystallize. "Why the void would we reject each other?"
Every consciousness in the room recoiled from his rage. Ministers stepped backward. Guards shifted nervously. But I had to make him understand. This always ended the same way.
Three Hours Earlier
I'd been pacing the waiting area outside the main hall for twenty minutes, wearing a groove in the imported Crystalline flooring. My skin cycled through colors like a broken holo-display—silver to blue to purple to that nauseating yellow of pure anxiety.
Get it together, Lyra. You're a Station Commander, not some rookie pilot.
But this wasn't about command. This was about the psychic pull that had been driving me insane for the past week—the consciousness calling to mine across space, demanding I come to the Annual Summit. A psychic bond manifestation. My sixth one.
Because apparently the universe thinks it's hilarious to keep matching me with people who'll take one look at my mining colony records and run.
The waiting area was a study in Imperial excess. Walls of pure transparisteel showed the cosmos beyond—a nebula painted purple and gold across the void, three moons of different compositions orbiting below us.
The station itself was a marvel of Lyrokan engineering, all sweeping curves and impossible angles that shouldn't be able to exist in three-dimensional space. Everything here screamed power, superiority, untouchable perfection.
And here I stood, the walking contradiction.
Twenty-five cycles old, commanding a battle station with the best combat record in the outer rim, and I couldn't keep a match for more than two weeks.
My love life was a standing joke whispered in officer's lounges across the galaxy. The Rainbow Commander who couldn't hold a bond. The mining colony success story whose personal life was an absolute disaster.
The irony burned.
I'd survived seventeen assassination attempts, led thirty-seven successful campaigns against the Rogue Collective, and earned the respect of warriors twice my age. But romantic rejection?
That was the one battle I couldn't win.
Five years as Commander, never once summoned to the Core Worlds. Mining trash doesn't get palace invitations, no matter how many battles they win.
Match one: A Lyrokan lieutenant, rejected me when he discovered my father still worked the dilithium mines. Lasted four days.
Match two: A Kaelari from a merchant family. Kept me for three days before his family threatened disinheritance if he bonded with "mining trash."
Match three: Sebastian Cummings, that sorry excuse for a Defense Minister's son. He didn't just reject me—he stole my prototype warship during his "rejection speech" and sold it to pirates. I had to hunt him across three systems to get it back.
Match four: Marcus, a weapons specialist. Nearly killed me in a jealous rage when he thought I looked at another male. The med-techs said I was lucky to survive the plasma burns. The rejection came while I was still in recovery.
Match five: Chen, an ambassador's aide. Publicly humiliated me at a diplomatic gathering, announcing to three hundred dignitaries that I was "genetically inferior" and "an embarrassment to the bond institution."
…Each rejection left scars deeper than any Rogue plasma weapon. My skin betrayed me every time—cycling through hurt, humiliation, rage—making my pain visible to everyone. And now, the universe decided to really twist the knife.
The psychic pull I'd been feeling wasn't from another minor officer or mid-level bureaucrat. It was from him. The Lyrokan Emperor himself.
The same Emperor who supposedly decapitated an ambassador for suggesting peace talks with the Rogues. The one who destroyed an entire moon to make a point about insubordination.
And I'm supposed to walk in there and... what? Pretend we're equals?
My sub-commanders stood beside me, both trying not to look as worried as they felt. Juan—my steady rock since academy days, the older brother I never had—kept shooting me concerned glances.
Hale, his partner and my strategic mastermind, maintained her usual calm despite her concern bleeding through our friendship bond. Her silver hair caught the station lights, her amber eyes calculating escape routes.
"Lyra," Hale whispered, using the nickname only they were allowed. "Your skin's doing the thing again."
The thing where it cycled through every possible color when I was panicking. The thing that made other species call us "mood rings" behind our backs. The thing that marked me as irreversibly Kaelari, no matter how many battles I won.
"Can't help it," I muttered. "The pull's getting stronger. It's like gravity itself is dragging me toward him."
The psychic bond—that evolutionary quirk that happened to one in thousands. When two consciousness patterns achieved resonance, creating an unbreakable link. Scientists called it nature's way of ensuring optimal genetic combinations.
Bonded pairs shared everything: thoughts, emotions, even physical sensations. In battle, they moved as one unit, reaction times halved, effectiveness doubled. In life, they supposedly found perfect unity, understanding, and completion.
The Lyrokans, with their superior psychic abilities, treated it as sacred law.
Even their Emperor couldn't ignore a true bond. To reject a bond was considered blasphemy against evolution itself. Which is why I had to come, despite the terror clawing at my chest.
The Space Empress He Craved
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