The Dominion of Leviathan: A Tor.com Original

By Manish Melwani

A thrilling space opera short story from Singaporean writer Manish Melwani, "The Dominion of Leviathan," a Tor.com Original.

Lord Ajax! First and greatest Ascendant; conqueror of the Martian machine-minds; mighty Steward of Leviathan’s Dominion! For a thousand years, Ajax has ruled the solar system’s worlds and moons with an iron fist. But history catches up with everyone—even an immortal tyrant. On the frozen dwarf planet Ceres, a scribe composes a record of his millennium-long rule. Unbeknownst to Ajax, her account contains a coded message that will spark a revolution.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250849472

Manish Melwani

Manish Melwani is a Singaporean writer of strange and monstrous fictions that skulk the borderlands of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His work explores history, migration, empire, and what it means to be shaped by vast and often hostile structures. Melwani attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop in 2014, and then completed a master's thesis at NYU entitled Starports, Portals, and Port Cities: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Empire's Wake. You can find him on the web at manishmelwani.com, and read his work in Nightmare Magazine, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, and in the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Shadows and Tall Trees 7.

Book preview

An account of the worlds

that comprise the realm of our Great God, Leviathan;

composed upon void-vellum, under patronage of Leviathan’s Steward, Ajax—

Ajax! Greatest among Ascendants! Ajax! Formidable Lord of Europa!

Ajax! Magnanimous Regent of Callisto and Ganymede!

—to commemorate the one thousandth anniversary

of his Ascent beyond humanity.

The Festival City on Mercury was built a century ago, to mark the nine hundredth anniversary of Lord Ajax’s Ascendance. Our august Lord opened the festivities by piloting a gravity-dhow from Leviathan’s holy orbit into the solar system’s core. His trajectory was perfect: noble Ajax struck Mercury’s nightside like a meteor. Leviathan’s banner gripped in one mighty hand, he climbed the Festival City’s hundred-stepped ziggurat to await the dawn.

Sunrise moves slow on that small, rocky world, but when it finally comes, it is blistering: white-hot and holy. For centuries, Ascendants have made pilgrimage to witness it. And until Lord Ajax’s celebration one hundred years ago, it was customary for the most ancient and honored of our Lesser Cousins to accompany them.

These humans—Earth’s anointed rulers!—considered sunrise on Mercury to be a sacred way to die. A way, perhaps, to Ascend in their final moments. For although an Ascendant can easily survive Mercurial daylight, an unaltered human cannot. This close to the sun, eyes cook in sockets; flesh bakes and blood boils beneath void-armor; screams rise and cease—a prayer-chime by which we Ascendants, humanity’s Greater Cousins, may contemplate the sacred mysteries of Leviathan’s Domain.

But to celebrate Lord Ajax’s nine hundredth year as semi-deus, humans of a different sort were brought to Mercury as well.

Not nobles, no. These were mere rabble, plucked by Indra from Earth’s crowded streets. None of these humans had been offworld before. None had even seen a space elevator, except perhaps as distant threads sewing the horizon.

Clad only in void-armor, they were cast upon Mercury’s surface minutes ahead of the implacable dawn. Ten miles between them and the Festival City; sunrise hot on their heels. The humans scrambled across rocks and craters, clumsily leaping and falling in unfamiliar gravity. Those who stumbled—who fell to frost, fatigue, or simple fear—were incinerated by the sun.

A fine sport, indeed, to commemorate our Lord.

It is well-known, of course, that one human was able to reach the Festival City, moments before daybreak. She crossed its threshold as the searing sun crested the horizon and the City’s pennants burst into brilliant flame. She struggled up the ziggurat’s one hundred steps, each taller and more arduous than the last; she struggled until finally, as the assembled crowd watched in disbelief, she pulled herself onto the dais, snatched the banner of Leviathan Itself from its place beside the throne, and attempted to murder Lord Ajax with