The first sign that the ghosts around Jili and Aralas were something unusual came from the fact that they were neither translucent, nor surrounded by a cloud of ectoplasm.

“Umm, hello?” Aralas asked, looking at the crowd of apparently solid beings who were winking into existence throughout the building.

At his words, the nearest ghosts reacted like someone had popped a large paper bag unexpectedly near them. Jili saw their surprise and reached for the Void anima she’d discovered. The ghosts looked too solid to be consumed by it but Void anima was a potent weapon against a wide variety of threats.

“Who are you?” one of the ghosts asked.

“What are you?” another asked.

The ghosts were in the form of the spindly legged, bug-like inhabitants of the planet. Or former inhabitants to be precise. Sometime in the five thousands years since Jili and Aralas began their journey, the planet had been wiped clean of sapient life.

“We’re humans, we crash landed here,” Jili said. “What are you?”

“We are Dels, or we were,” one of the people said.

“Why have you come here?” another asked.

“We landed by accident,” Jili said. “There was an explosion on our ship and we managed to crash here.”

“Are there any with you who need medical attention?” another Del asked.

“No,” Jili said. The Dels were beginning to swarm around them, pressing in closer than Jili was comfortable with. She’d dealt with non-human’s before, but the Del’s physiology was sufficiently removed from basic bipedal template that she had no idea how to read their body language.

“Give them room people,” one of the Dels said. It was larger than most of the rest and its coloration was towards the more vibrant end of the spectrum. In response to its command, the rest of the Del’s moved back, expanding the radius of the ring around Jili and Aralas. They also adopted a sort of kneeling posture, which, Jili reasoned, might be how the naturally sat down.

“You speak Galactic Common?” Aralas asked, a note of surprise in his voice.

“It’s a translation spell,” one of the Dels said.

“We knew that we would need it once we were found,” another said.

“Once you were found?” Aralas asked.

“Our world is off the great trade routes,” the lead Del said. “And our people have passed. We are the Eternal Memory of the Dels, but what’s the point of remembering something if those memories can never be shared or passed along.”

“So you really are ghosts?” Jili asked.

“Of a sort,” the lead Del said.

“What does that mean?” Aralas asked.

“We didn’t die and leave behind ghosts,” one of the Dels said. “We imprinted the entirety of our consciousnesses onto an aetheric mold.”

“Uh, I have some training in Aether casting and that doesn’t make any sense to me,” Aralas said.

“To understand what we are you need to understand the tale of our people,” the lead Dels said.

“Maybe you could tell us about that then?” Jili asked. There were a lot more Dels around them than she was comfortable with, but as long, as they were talking, things didn’t look like they were going to get unpleasant, so Jili was all in favor of expanding their talking time for as long as possible. If she got lucky, some people from the ship might track them down before anything unpleasant happened. Or maybe the Dels would go away when the sun rose.

The literal buzz that erupted from the Dels at Jili’s words was frightening but, she suspected, also a good sign. They seemed excited and happy rather than angry at the prospect.

“From what contact we had with the other Galactic races, we know that we were not an old species. Nor a widely spread one,” the lead Del said. “From our own history, we gleaned that we were not a wise race either.”

“Was this your only planet?” Aralas asked.

“Yes,” the lead Del said. “We never developed the spellcraft to travel the stars ourselves, but we were visited by a few of the wide ranging galactic races.”

“What did you mean about not being a wise race?” Jili asked.

“We are gone now, all living members of our race extinct,” the lead Del said. “And the fault for that lies on no one but ourselves.”

“We believed a great ravager race was going to descend on us and take our world away,” another Del said.

“And so we built all manner of weapons and enchantments,” another added.

“But the things that we knew how to fight were each other,” the lead Del said. “And the people that we had the most reason to hate were the ones we saw every day.”

“What did you do to yourselves?” Jili asked, her fear diminishing as she was caught up in their tale.

“We found reasons to use our weapons,” the lead Del said. “There were radical ideologies to be stamped out, and ancient grievances that could never be forgiven. Imbalances of power that could only be adjusted by secret attacks and sanctions that could only be imposed by outright assaults.”

“But lots of planets go through that stage,” Aralas said.

“So we understood,” the Del leader said. “But also many planets do not survive their follies. As we did not.”

“What was the breaking point?” Jili asked. “You must have seen it coming to have time to do whatever you did to yourselves.”

“There were many breaking points,” the Del leader said. “Events that sealed our fate. Against any one of them, we could perhaps have thrown the weight of our might as a species and clawed out of a future for ourselves. By the time the Egg Eater Plague was released though we were too diminished to fight any further.”

“Someone released a plague to destroy your young?” Jili asked.

“It was only supposed to target a subsection of our population,” the lead Del said.

“It worked as designed too,” one of the other Del said. “But what it’s architects didn’t account for was that once the plague was released its victims had little reason not to modify it and release a version that targeted their enemies as well.”

“But it didn’t just target their enemies,” another Del said.

“Or more people modified it as well,” another said.

“We never discovered what the truth was,” the leader said. “And in the end it didn’t matter. There were too few of us and we’d lost too much of our knowledge and too much of our industry to repair the damage that was done. In the end all that mattered was that our eggs were destroyed and any new ones would be as well.”

“What did you do?” Jili asked.

“We became as we are now,” the leader said.

“You need to tell them more than that!” one of the Dels said.

“Let me,” another said.

“As you will Cicil,” the leader said.

“What you see before you, what we are, is not quite a ghost, and not quite a living being.” Cicil said. “A ghost is a fleeting imprint, the remnants of a life engraved on anima. We are closer to a living spell, bound by our wills and formed in the image of our progenitors.”

“So, why did you appear only after the sun went down?” Aralas asked.

“A restriction of the spell,” Cicil said. “By night the planet’s anima is quieter and it is easier for us to form these bodies.”

“How long ago did you become like this?” Jili asked.

“We don’t know,” the leader said.

“We are eternal but, as a result, limited in many aspects,” Cicil said. “We remember our lost lives because we ingrained those memories into the the anima that makes us up. We have only a small amount of anima beyond that to hold new memories and so anything beyond a week is difficult to remember and anything beyond a month is impossible for us to retain.”

“We remember who we were, who our people were, but we can never really change,” the leader said. “Anything new we discover, anything we learn, it’s all forgotten before long.”

“Why do this then?” Aralas asked.

“Because it was the only chance we had to endure, the only chance anyone would ever know about us,” Cicil said.

“We could carry your stories out to the galaxy,” Aralas offered.

“That is all we ask,” the leader said.

“But you won’t remember we did that,” Jili said. “Once we leave you’ll forget that you gave your stories to us and you’ll be back to waiting for someone to tell them too!”

“Yes,” the leader said.

“We can’t do that then,” Jili said. “There’s got to be some better option here.”

“We do not suffer in our existence,” Cicil said.

“Is that really true?” Jili asked. “You recorded yourselves at the end of your civilization as an act of desperation.”

“Yes, we know, every moment, that our world is lost and we are forgotten,” Cicil said. “But we’ve accepted that.”

“That’s not…not entirely true,” one of the Dels said.

“What do you mean?” Cicil asked.

“I thought I was ok with this, but to be honest, part of me wasn’t sure we would ever be found, or that the creatures that found us wouldn’t be monsters of some sort,” the Del said.

“You’ve existed all this time, worrying about that?” Cicil asked.

The other Del twitched in a gesture that seemed to be the equivalent of a nod.

“And the rest of you?” Cicil asked. “Are there others who are built with that same kind of fear?”

Many others twitched in the same nodding gesture.

“We were always a foolish species Cicil,” the leader said.

“It’s not right to leave you here like this then,” Jili said.

“Um, we can’t really stay though? Can we?” Aralas asked.

“We would not object,” the leader said. “Our hope was always to see our world repopulated and full of life.”

“There’s a problem with that though,” Jili said.

“The biosphere here is poisonous to us,” Aralas said.

“Why would that be a problem?” Cicil asked.

“Did that not translate properly?” Jili asked. “Do you have a word for poison in your language?”

“Of course,” Cicil said. “We developed a vast array of toxins to defend our world with and then an even vaster array to wipe ourselves out.”

“And you don’t see why it would be a problem for us to try to live on a toxic world?” Jili asked.

“Do your people not know how to convert biospheres to suit your needs?” Cicil asked.

“Convert biospheres?” Aralas asked. “As in change the entire planet?”

“Or selected parts of it,” Cicil said.

“Not like that,” Aralas said.

“Actually that’s true for us,”Jili said. “But I heard the Crystal Navy folks talking about terraforming a lifeless world for us. There’s a lot of those to chose from but it was still going to take years for one to be ready.”

“Years?” Cicil asked. “Well, ok, I suppose if you’re starting from a lifeless husk it would be more difficult. Very little anima to work with that and jump starting the process would take a lot of work, but our world isn’t like that.”

“Do you mean we could change this world to be suitable for human habitation?” Jili asked.

“We could change this city by tomorrow,” Cicil said. “The rest of the world would take a little more time.”

“And you would want people like us to move in here?” Jili asked. “To live where you lived? To use these buildings and the artifacts you left behind?”

“If there is anything we could trade to convince you to do that, you have only to name your price,” the leader said.

“You know, I think we might be able to work something out,” Jili said.

Jili looked at Aralas and imagined the million humans in orbit above them, the millions of humans with no where to go who’d been promised the chance of a new life on a new world. She imagined them living with the Dels rather than destroying them as the Nophilans had intended. The future rose before her in the picture of a new world, full again with life and carrying on the legacy of a people long past but whose knowledge and spirits lived on.

Despite the Void anima she carried, Jili didn’t feel empty at all anymore.

Ghosts are formed, in most cases, from trauma. For the Nophilans who crashed their warp space flyer into a star, the trauma has been mercifully brief. A moment of panic as the readings showed a deviation from their projected course and then a rending flash as the shadow of gravity the star projected into warp space ripped the subatomic particles of the ship apart. Even the best stasis fields on the Nophilan ship hadn’t been able to resist destruction on so fundamental a scale.

To their credit though, those stasis fields did partially survive the plunge through the star. They were little more than scattered shreds of anima when they exited the far side of the star, but they retained the signature of their original caster as they hurtled aimlessly through warp space for millennia. It was to these scraps of anima that the ghosts of the Nophilans clung and waited for some connection to regular space to emerge.

A connection like their sleeping warrior-victims being reawakened.

The  prime mercy granted to ghosts is that they fade over time. That’s true when they’re not bound up in the remnants of a magical spell designed to preserve and hold things together forever if need be. That the Nophilan ghosts were trapped and in torment did nothing to make the one before her seem less threatening to Jili though.

All Jili saw when she caught site of the manifested Nophilan ghost was death. It reached out to her with arms that were impossibly long and made of deadly Void anima. The ghosts was a by-product of a living being. It wasn’t alive  and so it didn’t “need” anything. But it still had cravings and, with the Void anima it hung onto, it had the capacity to satisfy those cravings.

It could draw in the anima of living beings to add to its own. It could become more complete at the cost of the life energy of the people it consumed. It could devour any sort of energy thrown at it and grow stronger and more terrible.

Except against Jili, it couldn’t.

The ghost reached out to drain her dry and she pushed its arms away, bending them without ever making contact with the deadly anima they contained.

Jili was barely conscious of what she was doing. In her mind all that mattered was survival. For herself, for the boy the ghost had been about to eat, and for the rest of the people on the habitation module.

It helped that she was already in motion. The ghost was an inhuman nightmare come to life. It was bigger than she was, it was, in a very real sense, death incarnate and yet she charged it anyways, slipping around it’s grasp because she willed its arms to miss her.

On instinct, she slid underneath a horde of tentacles the ghost exhaled from its mouth. The closer she came, the more it transformed, gaining limbs and mouths and all sorts of unreal appendages. She’d captured the monster’s complete attention and it was doing everything it could to capture her in return.

That was bad for Jili but it left the boy free from the ghost’s attacks which proved to be critical to both of their survivals. Jili sped towards the boy like an arrow in flight, drawing on her talents with Mental anima casting to predict the ghost’s moves and slip around them. Her spells worked up until she was five feet away from the boy and the ghost ripped part of the floor out from in front of her.

Jili tumbled and went down as her foot caught the edge of the ruined floor. Her reflexes were enhanced enough that she was able to turn the tumble in a roll but smashing into the corridor wall killed the momentum that she had. She managed to come up into a kneeling posture right beside the boy, but the impact rattled her enough that only the shield the boy cast diverted the scythe hooked claw the ghost tried to impale her with.

With a scream of frustrated hunger, the ghost rained down what felt like a million arms on her but none of the smoke-like limbs connected. All were held at bay by a circle of equally dark force that emanated from Jili’s hand.

Try though it might, the ghost couldn’t get through the Void shield Jili cast.

So it blew up the hallway around them.

Neither Jili, nor Aralas, the young boy, were familiar with the modern space shielding spells. In five thousand years people had tinkered with the comfort and functionality and energy cost of environmental shielding spells. Even with the advances though such spells were usually enchanted into a space traveler’s gear as the anima costs were quite high.

Without access to those spells, Jili and Aralas had only the older style options to work with and those hurt.

Both of them responded to the sudden expulsion into airless void the same way; shields on themselves and then shields on each other. Neither could maintain the shield long, but in disaster situations buying time was occasionally all that you could manage and (on very fortunate occasions) all you needed to do.

The cloud of debris that had once been walls and deck plating told Jili that they needed more than time though. The Nophilan ghost was an ancient remnant of a powerful spell caster. Despite that power, it fought like the simple creature of hunger and rage that it was, which meant it wasn’t going to let them drift until someone rescued them.

“It faded back into warp space, but it’s still targetting us!” Aralas said.

“How do you know?” Jili asked.

“I’m an Aether caster,” Aralas said.

“Can you tell when it’s going to attack next,” Jili asked. The strain of the shield spell was already becoming overwhelming.

“No,” Aralas said. “Wait, yes, now!”

The Nophilan ghost’s passage out of warp space was as unnatural as every other aspect of it. Space split and a weird, non-illuminating light gleamed around the edges of the ghost as it poured into regular space and tried to surround them.

The added pressure of the ghost’s attack popped both sets of shields like the fragile bubbles they were. Empty space didn’t transmit the monster’s scream of triumph but the surge of Mental anima it released did.

Desperate and flailing for life, Jili cast out for anything she could find.

The ghost dove onto the two of them, maddened and ravenous for the feast.

It was never able to regret that decision.

Jili ate it too quickly.

It was the most unnatural act she’d ever performed and yet it was so simple and ingrained as well.

She was in dire need of power. The ghost was nothing but power held together by the imprint of a long forgotten will.

Jili hadn’t been a Void caster before the thousands of years drifting in space, but she was undeniably one afterwards and some things just come naturally to people who work with that sort of magic.

With the anima stolen from the ghost, Jili rewove the shield spell and drew the air and heat they needed to survive back in close to Aralas and herself.

“It’s gone?” the boy asked.

“I think it is,” Jili said, blinking in surprise at her own deed.

“What did you do?” Aralas asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” Jili said. “But I don’t think it’s coming back.”

“I don’t think we are either,” Aralas said and pointed to the habitation ship that was rapidly drifting away from them.

“The explosion!” Jili said. “It knocked us away from the ship!”

“That’s not the worst of it,” Aralas said and pointed in the other direction.

The direction where the planet was.

“I’m terrible with Energetic anima and I can’t teleport at all,” Aralas said. “Can you do anything?”

“Maybe,” Jili said. “I can’t fly us anywhere, or teleport, but I think I have enough anima to reinforce the shield so we can survive the landing.”

“But the whole planet is poisonous to us!” Aralas said.

“That’s if we try to eat something,” Jili said. “Space is deadly a lot quicker than that.”

“So we’re just going to crash land?” Aralas said.

“Yeah, I think so,” Jili said. “We’ve been putting it off for five thousand years right? Might as well see what kind of fun we can have with it.”

Something inside her was oddly excited by the idea. Not the crash landing part of it. That she expected to be bumpy, hot, and unfun. After walking around for a week feeling as hollow as a ghost though, Jili felt something stirring inside her at last. Crashing on the planet was a problem, but it was a problem that it felt right for her to be solving.

“If we don’t make it, I just wanted to say thank you,” Aralas said. “I think I’d rather die like this than be eaten by a ghost.”

“You’re not going to die,” Jili said.

“You sound as sure of that as the guy who strapped me into the stasis pod was when he said that we’d get here without a hitch,” Aralas said.

“Yeah, except there’s one big difference between us,” Jili said.

“What?” Aralas asked.

“I don’t suck at math,” she said.

Aralas smiled and then clung to her as their shield bubble hit thick enough atmosphere that turbulence started to toss them around.

Jili’s claim was only partially meant as a joke. She wasn’t a warp space navigator, no one from her time could have passed one of the Crystal Empire’s navigator tests, but she was able to calculate a re-entry vector that offered them the best chance of landing safely.

Guiding the shield bubble onto that re-entry vector was noticeably more difficult than plotting its course and Jili spent all of the stolen anima from the ghost and a fair chunk of her own to make it happen. As a credit to her efforts, both she and Aralas survived the landing, though neither was technically able to “walk away from it” for several hours.

When they did eventually regain consciousness, they discovered that in fleeing from a ghost, they’d managed to land in a necropolis. Empty streets and empty buildings with no signs of destruction other than the ravages of time.

“Where is everyone?” Aralas asked.

“No one’s here, or someone would have bothered us before we woke up,” Jili said.

“How long were were out?” Aralas asked.

“An hour or so, I think,” Jili said.

“Do you think the Navy guys will come looking for us?” Aralas asked.

“I don’t know,” Jili said. “I hope so, cause we’re going to starve if they don’t, but I don’t even know if they think we’re still alive,”

“I guess we probably shouldn’t be, should we?” Aralas asked.

“Fought a Void powered ghost, survived an explosion into space and then an unpowered crashing landing?” Jili said. “Come on we didn’t win a trip to a brand new colony world just to get killed by something minor like that.”

“Well if you start feeling peckish, just know that I’m very tasteless,” Aralas said. “Skin and bones and gristle, not much nutritional value at all either.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll only go for the meaty bits. Heart, organs, that sort of thing,” Jili said.

The grim humor brought a disgruntled grin onto Aralas’s face.

“It’s going to be dark soon though and that’s more of a priority for us,” Jili said. “I’ve got less than embers left of anima after that drop and just because there’s no one out in the day doesn’t mean this place is safe at night.

“Think the predators here will find us tasty?” Aralas asked. “I mean we should be as poisonous to them as they are to us right?”

“I don’t think it necessarily works like that,” Jili said. “And there’s the problem that even if they don’t want to eat us, they may still not be happy that we’re in their territory.”

“Maybe we can find shelter in one of these buildings?” Aralas said.

“Shelter or one of their lairs,” Jili said. “But that is our best bet.

Picking one that looked like it had weathered the silent years better than the ones around it, Jili peered inside to confirm that it was empty.

It looked habitable enough to spend a night in right up until the moment when the sun finished setting.

That’s when all of the ghosts came out.

In the ship Jili had been faced with one ghost and had barely survived the encounter. Gazing around the building as night fell she saw that this time they were surrounded by hundreds of ghosts.

Fortunately for her and Aralas though, these ghosts were rather different.

Waking from cold sleep bore more resemblance to returning from the dead than it did to regaining consciousness from any kind of natural sleep. Jili’s eye didn’t open when the stasis spell fell away, but that was because they’d never been closed. For five millennia, she’d looked out at the same dark covering of her cold sleep tube and yet had never seen, never experienced a moment of it.

“I don’t think the spell worked,” she said, surprised at the quick flicker from light to darkness and back to light, as she’d experienced it.

“Luckily for you, it did,” said an unfamiliar human in unfamiliar space armor.

“I don’t get it, where are we? Who are you? How did you get here?” Jili asked.

“Ok, in order; we are onboard your transport ship in orbit over Mileene III, I am Lt. Tym Ovarch of the Imperial Crystal Navy Fast Response ship Horizon Breaker and I got here by boarding your ship before it could crash land into Mileene III,” the man in space armor said.

“Why?” Jili’s thoughts felt like they were leaves being scattered by a hurricane.

“There’s a lot we need to bring you up to speed on,” Tym said. “But probably the most important thing is that your trip took longer than expected. A lot longer.”

“We were supposed to be on an accelerated path,” Jili said. “Thirty years for the whole trip. How far off are we? Under fifty still?”

“Fifty centuries,” Tym said. “I’m sorry, I know that has to be a shock, but a lot of the other things I have to say will make a lot more sense if you know that.”

“Fifty centuries?” Jill said.

She wondered if she should scream, or at least be upset at the idea. She looked inside and couldn’t find any fuel for those emotions though. If she was being honest with herself, she wasn’t sure she could see much of anything when she looked inside herself.

“Yes,” Tym said. “If you have any skill at Chrono-casting, you can verify it on your own or I can give you a galactic history lesson, but the short form is; you went into an enchanted slumber somewhere around five thousand years ago and the galaxy you’re waking up into is a radically different one from the galaxy you knew.”

“We were going to settle a new world,” Jili said. “We competed for the chance to be part of the expedition.”

“Physical contests?” Tym asked. “Feats of stamina and strength? Maybe a little fighting thrown in there?”

“Yes,” Jili said. “The competition was widely advertised. It drew people from all over the planet.”

“You were scammed. Even that long ago, physical prowess isn’t what it took to settle a new world,” Tym said. “You need environmental engineers and agricultural specialists. You need healers and resources extraction specialists and administrators. You need people too, but just being athletic doesn’t cover it, unless you want the colonists to starve out within six months or so.”

“You’re saying the competition was a trick?” Jili asked.

“Unfortunately, yeah,” Tym said. “You all are a million winners who were, according to the ship’s automated piloting logs, set to crash into Mileene III with enough force to vaporize one of the planet’s minor land mass.”

“Why?” Jili asked.

“As best as we can recreate from the logs, it looks like the people who sponsored that contest, a race called the Nophila, intended to use you as a strike force against the natives,” Tym said. “Blow up part of the planet to initiate a global catastrophe and then release a violent species into the world’s eco-system to clean up any serious resistance.”

“A violent species?” Jili asked.

“Humans,” Tym said. “You.”

“I’m not violent,” Jili said.

“You’re human, we’re all violent compared to some of the other races in the galaxy,” Tym said. “More than that though, we’re clever, reasonably hard to kill and adept at both group and individual thinking. Oh, and the Mileene natives at the time were extreme xenophobes who looked like spindle legged spiders with pulsing organs for faces. So low odds on making friends with them plus you probably have an instinct to squash them like bugs.”

Protesting seemed like the right thing to do, but as Jili’s mind whirled dozens of little details filtered into her awareness.

On a primal level, she didn’t feel like any time had passed since the sleep spell was cast, but rationally she knew that the whole point of the stasis field was that it would protect her from the ravages of time.  The Lt’s story of it being five thousand years in the future wasn’t particularly hard to believe in that light. She’d known that warp travel was dangerous. That they’d survived the trip at all was a miracle and on a stellar scale, five thousand years was barely distinguishable from five minutes.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Tym said. “Are there any questions that you want to ask me?”

Jili lay in the cold sleep pod and considered that question.

“What went wrong?” She settled on that question out of the thousands that were fluttered around her mind. She had no idea if she could afford to trust the man speaking to her, but she also had no idea what she should do if it turned out that she couldn’t.

“Navigational error,” Tym said. “You got thrown into a highly irregular path through warp space, while the Nophilans managed to plunge right into the heart of a star.”

“What do you want with us?” she asked next.

“Primarily for you not to crash into Mileene III,” Tym said. “Beyond that, I think it will be up to you. You’ll need to tell us what you want to do from here.”

That question haunted Jili for the next week as Imperial Navy brought in habitation ships and got the rest of the cold sleepers awake. The process of reviving more than a million humans was a daunting one, but by getting the newly revived to help with the effort, the task went reasonably fast.

“I don’t understand why they woke us up at all?” said Burla, one of the women Jili helped wake up. They were taking their midday meal in one of the ramshackle cantinas setup on the habitation ship they’d been assigned to.

“What else were they going to do?” Jili asked.

“Let us float on by,” Burla said. “Who would have known or cared?”

“You mean aside from us?” Jili asked.

“No, including us,” Burla said. “I mean how do we know someone didn’t find us drifting along a hundred years ago, or a thousand, and just let us keep going.”

“We don’t,” Jili said. “But what does it matter. We’re here now right?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be,” Burla said. “A lot of people aren’t taking it so well.”

“I’ve seen that,” Jili said. There’d been fights, because with a million people gathered together there are always fights. The feeling Burla spoke of though was more pervasive. A generalized sense of surliness that ran just below the surface for a sizeable swath of the proto-colony’s population.

They’d been contestants first, and then winners. People who scraped a path for themselves out of their old lives and into the promise of a new one. The one trait that united them was the desire to see a different future for themselves and in waking up they’d lost more than just five thousand years. They’d lost the dream that had carried them out in the vast black of the galaxy and the hope that dream had inspired.

“You seem to be hanging together pretty well though?” Burla asked, sizing up her companion.

“Not much use falling apart right?” Jili said. “Just gotta make do with the hand we’ve been dealt.”

The words sounded true, but they barely made contact with what Jili was actually feeling. Over the “Waking” week, Jili had waited, expecting a sense of loss to catch up with her and it never had. Fifty years or five thousand, when she looked out at the sky that enveloped them, she didn’t see a difference.

She wasn’t alone. She had Burla and a million other people who knew exactly what she was going through. She knew some of the other competitors too from before the cold sleep and had made it a point to check on them as they were revived. Each of them had made it through the process unharmed. Apparently the cold sleep spell was one of surprising power and resiliency. Apart from a dive into the heart of a star, little was capable of disturbing those under its protection. Physically at least. The more she looked though, the more Jili had to wonder if she hadn’t lost something across the long millennia that she’d slept.

“Do you ever wonder if they really woke us up at all?” Jili asked. “I mean what if this is all a dream and we’re still stuck in those pods but the spell’s starting to fade?”

Burla reached over and pinched Jili’s arm hard enough for Jili to cry out.

“Yeah, I thought of that,” Burla said. “This isn’t a dream though.”

“Something’s missing though isn’t it?” Jili asked.

“Sure, we all just lost our families, our homeworlds, everything we ever knew,” Burla said. “All for a lie.”

Mileene III couldn’t have supported humans even if they’d survived the crash thanks to the stasis fields. The cold ship hadn’t been packed with any supplies and the native flora and fauna on the planet were from an evolutionary chain that was toxic to humans. The humans would have struggled for months to survive, trying to eat anything they could find, destroying all of the monstrous-looking creatures that inhabited the world before they turned to the only food source that would keep them alive for another day. Each other.

The flight the Nophilan’s took into a solar inferno was too merciful a judgment against them by far, Jili thought, but even there she couldn’t summon up much anger or rage against them. The Nophilans had been horrible people, but she couldn’t fault their plan for using the humans to get what they wanted. It probably would have worked, and history would have long since forgotten about the act of villainy as it forgot about so many others.

“You going to attend the holo-conference tonight?” Burla asked.

The Crystal Navy was making its first official broadcast to the “colonists” via a two way holo-conference setup. Participation was optional since it was just an informational meeting to recap where things were at and what the plans were for the colonists in the next week.

“Maybe,” Jili said and shrugged. She knew what the Navy was going to say. They were looking for a world for the colonists. Anyone who wished to remain in the habitation modules would be supported there for at least the next several months, and definitely until a more stable home could be found for them. There would be further updates on a daily basis, with holo meetings every week where the colonists could voice their concerns and get their questions answered.

She was thinking about that an hour later as she strolled along the habitation module’s outer ring. The great starry vista outside the windows called to her, but she couldn’t find an answer to it. Even with the artificial gravity of the module she still felt as though she was floating.

It was a scream that brought her back to the ground. Primal terror wailing out from someone reached into her brain and kicked off a cocktail of chemicals that brought her awareness into hyperfocus and eliminated all traces of introspection.

She was frozen in place by the scream until she heard another one. Some long forgotten memory surfaced at that. Herself, racing through a jungle, screaming for help as a pack of carnivorous quadrapeds bore down on her. No one had come for her. Anger flared at that. She wasn’t going to let no one come for the boy who was screaming around the curve of the corridor.

Rounding the arc of the hallway, Jili found the young boy she’d expected to find, and standing over him, the last thing in the galaxy she’d ever expected to see.

As she skidded to a halt, the ghost of a long dead Nophilan turned its baleful gaze on her and she felt it’s life stealing magics reach out to silence her beating heart.

The cold ship tumbled out of rent in the fabric of space, leaking dreams and toxic plasma. In an earlier era it would have spelled the doom of the civilization it was aimed at. Onboard the ship, an army of advanced killing machines were stored in pods set to protect them from the rigors of orbital re-entry and a hard landing on a planetary surface. In the wake of a cataclysmic impact, the drones would pour out and ‘sterilize’ the land to allow their masters to colonize the world without opposition.

“Who does something like this?” Lt. Tym Ovarch asked.

“People who are very inept,” Lt. Xys said.

The two members of the Horizon Breaker’s “Black Team” were the first into the cold ship after its discovery by long range spell scans.

“No seriously, it takes a lot of know-how to put together an army like this,” Tym said. “How do you not double check your hyper-space calculations? From the readings I’m getting, this thing has been drifting for close to five thousand years.”

“Five thousand years used to be how long interstellar trips took,” Xys said. “That’s why people made sleeper ships like this in the first place.”

“Yeah, I know what the primitives were like,” Tym said. “But these folks weren’t primitive. They had warp spells, they should have been able to make the trip hundreds of times faster.”

“I’m linking into the navigation web now,” Xys said. “Or what’s left of it.”

“Please tell me they didn’t try to plot a hyperspace route by the seat of their pants?” Tym said.

Xys made a few noises to indicate he was still processing the data before he looked up from the communication pool he was carrying.

“I don’t think they were that stupid,” he said. “Not a smart race by any stretch of the imagination, but they definitely had a full flight plan in place.”

“What threw them off then?” Tym asked. “Sabotage? Enemy action? Did the murder drones come alive and kill them all?”

“No,” Xys said. “I’m checking their predicted course versus their recorded flight path.”

“Rogue asteroid plow into them?” Tym asked.

“Don’t think so,” Xys said. “If I’m reading this right, they missed a rounding error.”

“A math mistake?” Tym asked. “Someone forgot to carry a one and they wound up drifting off course for fifty centuries?”

“Oh, it gets better than that,” Xys said. “This was the vanguard ship. The drones in the back were meant to be an expendable shock force to go in and prepare the planet for habitation. The actual colonists were going to follow along six months later, after the drones all died out.”

“So I’m guessing the colonists had a rude surprise when they arrived and, oh look, the original inhabitants were still there,” Tym said.

“If I’m reading the telemetry reports right, they got a much ruder surprise than that,” Xys said.

“Some of the murder drones stowed away on the colony ship and wiped them all out?” Tym said.

“You’re really kind of hung up on the drones aren’t you?” Xys asked.

“We’re in a ship filled with beings who’s only purpose is to depopulate a planet,” Tym said. “You don’t find that even a little bit creepy?”

“We’ve been on Black Team for how long now?” Xys asked. “And you find a million killer drones frightening?”

“Not frightening,” Tym said. “Just, you know, worrisome.”

“Well, put your worries to rest then,” Xys said. “They didn’t rise up and overthrow their masters. They’ve been in an enchanted stasis since the ship launched.”

“That is a strong stasis spell,” Tym said.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’ll be taking this ship in for study by Imperial R&D,” Xys said.

“Oh, those poor, poor murder bots,” Tym said.

“Now you feel bad for them?” Xys asked.

“Have you met the kind of people they have in R&D?” Tym asked.

“Point taken,” Xys said.

The Imperial policy of giving people second chances in positions where there was sufficient oversight to keep them from getting into further trouble meant that Imperial Research and Development was filled with some of the brightest minds in the galaxy. Not the most stable minds, just the brightest.

Imperial troops owed their lives to the countless inventions that came out of the R&D department, but the sensible trooper still made it a point to never, ever be the first to to test one of R&D’s “new toys”.

“So what happened to the colony ship then?” Tym asked.

“Well see this line here?” Xys asked, pulling up a holographic display. “That’s the course this ship took. Notice anything sketchy about it?”

“They dove in pretty close to a red giant star,” Tym said. “And it looks like that’s right where their course started deviating from the projected plan.”

“Yeah, I’m guessing they were trying to get a gravity assist from the star and didn’t account for the drag from the solar wind quite right,” Xys said. “The colonists path is this one.”

Another line appeared on the graph when Xys tapped the display.

“That appears to plunge right into the gas giant,” Tym said.

“That’s based on the observed telemetry from this ship,” Xys said. “It gets better though.”

“Do the murder bots make an appearance yet?” Tym asked.

“Sorry, still no murder bots,” Xys said. “Check out this communique though.”

He brought up document up onto the monitor.

“Enemy action detected in course alteration of terraforming vessel?” Tym read aloud. “I thought you said it was a math error?”

“It was, but from what I’m reading there were some very angry messages sent back and forth where no one would own up to that,” Xys said.

“What did they do?” Tym asked.

“The corrected for the enemy action,” Xys said.

“And that didn’t work out so well for them?” Tim asked.

“Not so much,” Xys said. “See they corrected for what they thought their enemies had done, but they didn’t correct the math.”

“So instead of correcting as much as they needed to, they over corrected themselves right down into the heart of the star didn’t they?” Tym asked.

“Like I said, very inept people.”

“And unfortunately ones we need clean up after,” Tym said.

“It could be worse,” Xys said.

“Yes, in a million different varieties of worse,” Tym said. “So what aren’t you telling me?”

“You know the killer drones?” Xys said.

“Yeah,” Tym said. “They’re waking up aren’t they?”

“They are indeed.”

“You why I used to like being on Black team?” Tym asked.

“My sparkling wit?” Xys asked.

“Sure, and…” Tym said.

“My powerful and stunning physique?” Xys asked.

“You do make good mancandy, but there’s another reason too,” Tym said.

“Because we usually have a Crystal Guardian running around with us who could take down a million angry murder bots in her sleep?” Xys asked.

“Yeah, that.” Tym said.

“I think her vacation’s up in about two weeks,” Xys said.

“Wonderful,” Tym said. “Then we only need to fight off the million murder bot army for two weeks then. That’s only thirteen days, twenty three hours and fifty nine minutes longer than we’re actually likely to last. This is going to be so fun.”

“We could call in the rest of Black Team you know?” Xys said.

“I was more thinking we’d call in the Horizon Breaker’s deck guns on this one,” Tym said.

“I’m not liking our odds there,” Xys said. “The deck guns don’t do ‘precision’ so much.”

“There’s a reason they’re called Annihilation Turrets,” Tym said.

“Can’t say I’m super fond of being annihilated,” Xys said.

“That’s why I’m thinking we shouldn’t be here, and we shouldn’t be here really soon.”

“I’m not super fond of unplanned space walks either,” Xys said. “This ship is armed you know, and our survival shields aren’t all that resilient.”

“How many of the drones are awake so far?” Tym asked.

“None yet,” Xys said. “The stasis thaw cycle seems kind of long on the spell they were under.”

“Maybe that’s why it lasted that long?” Tym said. “Can we reverse it?”

“We’d risk killing all of the drones,” Xys said.

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Tym said.

“And ourselves,” Xys said. “Any everyone in a two light second radius.”

“It’s just never easy is it?” Tym asked.

“Would they pay us piles of money if it was?” Xys asked.

“They pay you?” Tym asked. “I thought we worked for the food in the cafeteria?”

“Hush, I’m trying to reverse the wake-up order,” Xys said.

“If you blow me up, I will haunt your ghost,” Tym said.

Several tense and silent moment followed.

Requests for status updates came in from the Horizon Breaker, which Tym dutifully answered. Without Officer Fari on board, the communication links between the away team and the ship weren’t as robust and wide as usual, but thanks to her tutelage they still had the information sharing capabilities of a top of the line espionage vessel, despite their designation as a “Fast Response” vessel.

“Black Team’s coming for us,” Tym said.

“Captain Okoro let them?” Xys asked.

“He’s leading them,” Tym said. “Also we’re not supposed to kill the murder bots.”

“I’m glad you mentioned that,” Xys said.

“Just about to have the stasis spell smoke them all weren’t you?” Tym said.

“Of course not,” Xys said. “And once I get done pulling out these modifications there’ll be no evidence to support that notion at all.”

“So how many of them do you think we can take?” Tym asked.

“I’m good for a hundred I’d say,” Xys said.

“So nine hundred ninety nine thousand or so for me?” Tym said. “I’d better get some stretching in.”

“Probably less than that,” Xys said. “I think a couple thousand of the stasis pods failed over the years.”

“A couple thousand?” Tym said. “Well that makes all the difference then, bring them on!”

“You’re an idiot, you know that?” Xys said.

“Yeah, but I’m a lovable one,” Tym said. “Aren’t I?”

“Sure,” Xys said. “I mean there’s people who love sentient slime mold, there’s gotta be someone out there for you.”

“You two going to invite us in or do I get to carve a new docking port in this ancient can?” Captain Okoro asked.

“Docking port cycle starting now sir,” Tym said.

“Have you inspected the drones yet?” Hanq asked.

“Not yet,” Xys said. “The pirating spells are still establishing control of the ship.”

“What do the scanning spells have to say about them?” Hanq asked.

“Nothing,” Xys said. “We can’t get a read on what they are until we get them out of the stasis fields.”

“The ship’s logs list them as an ‘acquired’ weapon race,” Tym said. “Apparently whoever built this ship went out and bought a batch of the most vicious animals they could find to stock it with.”

“Prioritize getting us into the sleep chamber,” Hanq said. “I want to see what we’re dealing with.”

Ten minutes later the sleep chamber door cycled open, it’s security overridden and burned out an Imperial R&D tool which the Horizon Breaker’s crew had been unfortunate enough to field test a few months earlier.

Inside the sleep chamber there were rows of narrow shelves, hundreds of feet high, which held over a million stasis cylinders in total. Most of the cylinders were perfectly opaque, the stasis effect preventing even light from exiting or entering the chambers interior.

“We’ve got the sleep cycle overridden,” Xys said.

“Except on these four,” Tym said.

It had taken the kind of desperate, last minute work that is as likely to result in catastrophic failure as anything else, but between the two of them, Xys and Tym had gotten things under control. It was what they did when the chips were down and why Hanq had sent them in together and alone in the first place. Some people just need the right audience to perform well.

“Let’s see what have here then,” Hanq said and touched the final override button to dispel the stasis effect.

With a rainbow shimmer, the spell fell away from the container revealing the horrible, deadly creature that awaited within. The was a silent pause, broken only when the creature finally spoke.

“Where…where am I?” asked the human who’d been asleep for five thousand years.

Opal sat and watched Arvana’s reactions with an unnerving sort of calm. It was a calculated display, meant to suggest that the Crystal Guardian was in complete control of the situation. Each moment they spoke though was like a game of chess played onboard a ship during tsunami seas. The moves were important, but there was the matter of the entire board being wiped clean if the players let their attention wander for a moment.

Looking at Arvana, Opal saw a well of potential that ran deeper than the girl could possibly fathom. It was potential balanced on the edge of a blade though. Arvana didn’t trust Opal, and had good reason to be wary.

They were sitting in Arvana’s home, her sanctum, the one place in the universe she should have felt the most safe. It wasn’t the best place for a confrontation, or a calm reasoned discussion, but Opal hadn’t been left with much choice. Arvana was a good enough caster that Opal honestly wasn’t sure she could track the girl if Arvana escaped from her sight. There was still a good chance Arvana could get away in fact. Opal could think of half a dozen combinations of spells that would let Arvana exit the loft undetectably, leaving the girl free to wreck whatever foolish havoc came to her mind. That was why it was important Opal convince her not to try in the first place.

Around Arvana the magics of a Mind Shatter spell grew to a point where they illuminated her with a halo that was visible even in the daylight that was streaming through the large open windows of the loft. The girl was sufficiently impressed with Opal’s prowess. The key was to transform that impression to something that trust could be built on.

“You have very good defenses,” Opal said. “And a talent with invisibility spells.”

“That wasn’t my invisibility spell,” Arvana said, forcing the words out through the concentration required to hold the Mind Shatter spell.

“Most of it was,” Opal said. “I only provided the final twists and held it for a moment while you recovered.”

“Why?” Arvana asked.

“Because you lost your masks in the blast and if the Beacon family knew who you were people would suffer,” Opal said.

“No, why did you care,” Arvana asked. “Why are you here now?”

“I thought I was here on vacation,” Opal said. “But that possibility is looking ever more remote.”

“You’re a galactic,” Arvana said. The word held the fear and wonder that only someone who had never been to space could muster.

“Yes,” Opal said.

“And you work for the Beacons?” Arvana asked. The hurt in her voice was a cry against the abject unfairness of life. She’d lived the knowledge that odds were slanted against them, but to discover that they had never had any hope of succeeding at all was cruel enough to drive her to the self-annihilation that she was gathering power for.

“No, I answer to a very different authority,” Opal said and silently wove magics of her own. Arvana looked determined to go out in a final blaze of glory and was closer to doing so than she appeared to realize. Opal couldn’t allow that to happen, but dreaded what the cost to the young caster would be if she had to stop her the hard way.

“A galactic syndicate is moving in now?” Arvana asked, caught between horror and disbelief at the idea.

Opal smiled. The girl believed in Opal’s show of power, perhaps too much. Easing it back a notch seemed to be called for Opal decided.

“Do you know what the principal weakness of an invisibility spell is?” Opal asked.

“Anyone covered by it can still see each other,” Arvana said. “That’s how you tracked us, isn’t it?”

“Not quite,” Opal said. “I tracked you through the haste spell of your friends that I augmented. You cast the invisibility spell to obscure sight but not to block magic so I was able to follow you thanks to the link the active spell gave me.”

“What are you going to do to us now?” Arvana asked.

“That depends a great deal on you,” Opal said. “You want me to leave you alone don’t you?”

“But you’re not going to do that,” Arvana said.

“I don’t think it would be wise,” Opal said. “I’m not a fate reader, but I can see you are tied up in all sorts of trouble at the moment and if I leave you alone you’re only going to make it worse.”

“If you’re not with Beacon, what do you care what we do to them?” Arvana asked. “Why not just go back to space and leave us alone. There’s got to be more interesting people out there for you to play with.”

Arvana pleaded with reason, but it was the sort of reason that would appeal to a monster. ‘We’re too tasteless to eat, go eat someone else’. That put Opal in a delicate position. Arvana hadn’t reasoned herself into the belief that Opal was a monster. She’d reasoned out how powerful Opal was, but it was a deeper, more fundamental rift of pain that said anyone with power was a monster. Opal couldn’t offer reasonable arguments against her own power. They would be nothing more than transparent lies giving what Arvana had seen her do. She could try to offer reasonable arguments that she wasn’t a monster, could proclaim that she was a Crystal Guardian and held to an exacting ethical and moral standard, but no simple reasoning like that would convince Arvana. Fear can find a counter-argument to anything.

“Do you think you’re too unimportant for my attentions?” Opal asked, trying to shift the conversation into an area where she could attack Arvana’s fears indirectly.

“Yes! Come on, this isn’t a galactic thing! It’s local and small and pointless,” Arvana said.

“Do you know how many people there are in the galaxy?” Opal asked.

“Billions,” Arvana said.

“That doesn’t even cover your local sector,” Opal said. “The galaxy seethes with life. We sapients have expanded through it and filled corners and ecosystems across the stars. For every point of light you see when you gaze at the sky, billions of people are gazing back. With that as a reference point do you think I can claim to be any more important than you?”

“Yes,” Arvana said. “That’s where you live. Out there. You’re strong enough to deal with all that. We’re just regular people here.”

“You underestimate what regular people are capable of then,” Opal said. “Tell me though, why did you go along with the plan to attack the Beacons? You could see where it was going to lead. The vengeance they would take on the community until a scapegoat was found.”

“The attack was going to happen with or without me,” Arvana said. “I had to go along with it because I had the best chance of keeping my friends safe.”

“You succeeded in that,” Opal said. “The stasis I have them in is quite pleasant from all accounts.”

“But you’re not going to let them go either are you?” Arvana asked.

“Not yet,” Opal said. “But once our conversation is complete, I’ll release them unharmed and unhindered.”

“We both know that’s not going to happen,” Arvana said.

“Do we?” Opal asked. Inside, she stifled a groan. Arvana was wearing her fear like a shield. It was a terrible tactic. A master manipulator could use fear as easily as carelessness. Opal could do that too but she was working with the disadvantage that she wanted Arvana in one healthy and whole piece when their conversation was over, so she switched gears and didn’t try to dodge the question further. “What do you think is going to occur?”

Arvana was quiet, but the tremble in her jaw spoke of how terrible she thought their fates would be.

“Is that why you’re building up that Mind Shatter spell?” Opal asked with no reproach in her voice. “Do you know the radius you’re going to affect if you let it go as you have it configured now?”

Opal saw Arvana’s control starting to slip on the spell and added a few support threads to the Mind Shatter. If Arvana chose to cast the spell, Opal’s magics would be added to the devastation is caused, but for the time being the extra anima was helping Arvana keep the unruly spell under control.

“Your two friends here have been with you your whole life haven’t they?” Opal asked. “And above all else, you’re going to make sure they don’t suffer?”

“That’s right,” Arvana said, her jaw tense as her spell built to a critical intensity. Opal saw her tie it off. It was ready to cast whenever Arvana wished to let it go. The girl held it as though she could choose that moment at a whim, apparently unaware of the uncontrollable meltdown that was starting to occur in the heart of the malformed magic.

“And whatever I say, you really won’t trust, will you?” Opal asked. “You know how skilled I am, so even if I leave, I could come back to finish the game at any time. Right now, you think you’re going to have to live with that fear for the rest of your life.”

“That’s why you’re doing this isn’t it?” Arvana asked. “I don’t have any choice here and that amuses you!”

“I must say, you are quite intelligent,” Opal said. “The important question though is are you smart enough to know how stupid you are?”

The Mind Shatter spell wobbled as Arvana flinched in surprise.

“What do you mean?” the young caster asked.

“Intelligent people often know many things and can see how various situations will play out,” Opal said. “Very smart people however know that there are even more things which they don’t know and that there are resolutions they can’t foresee.”

“What other choice do I have here then?” Arvana asked, clutching her hands into fists.

“You want to protect your friends and you don’t want to have to live wondering if someone is coming to get you?” Opal asked. “Then come with me. If you’re by my side, you’ll always know what I’m doing.”

“Come with you?” Arvana asked. “Where?”

“Out there.” Opal said, gesture towards the heavens.

“I can’t,” Arvana said. “The Beacons are hurting people here. They’ll kill Marsh and Keel when they find them.”

“The Beacons aren’t going to be a problem anymore,” Opal said.

The Mind Shatter spell trembled and tried to burst but Opal’s reinforcements caught it and held the spell steady.

“You’re lying,” Arvana said.

“I do that sometimes, but at the moment I don’t need to,” Opal said. “Check the spell web. Look for reports on the explosion at the restaurant.”

“I can’t,” Arvana said. “I’m barely holding the Mind Shatter as it is.”

“Then let it go,” Opal said.

“We’ll die,” Arvana said.

“I won’t let that happen,” Opal said.

Arvana hesitated.

“Lying is a part of my job,” Opal said. “If you trust me though I can make this pledge; I will never lie to you. You may not always be happy with me, and I may not always be able to tell you everything that I know, but I will never lie to you.”

“Why me?” Arvana asked.

“Because I need a student and you need a teacher and somehow in the great vastness of the Million Worlds, we found each other,” Opal said. “Come with me, and leave this place behind.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Arvana said, tears welling up in her eyes.

“I don’t either,” Opal said. “And there’s only one way we’re going to find out. Take my hand, let the spell go and we’ll find out together.”

Arvana hesitated for a single instant longer before her hand began to move on its own. As tentative as a kitten, Arvana clasped Opal’s outstretched hand and let the Mind Shatter spell run free.

There was no explosion, no scream of deadly psychic force. Just quiet and the warmth of two hands clasped together.

***

The Hooded Lantern was shuddered following the blast which damaged its entryway. In the ensuing investigation a shocking amount of information was discovered on various illegal activities the proprietors were involved in. Several of the patrons were also arrested on outstanding warrants stretching back across decades, including galactic extraditions for over a dozen of them.

The local news reports didn’t waste much time on those stories though. The one which captured their attention instead was the massive Internal Affairs investigation into the local police forces who were supposed to be protecting the area dominated by the Beacon family. For months thereafter the courts were the scene to grand corruption cases and sensational indictments brought against a wide array of corrupt law enforcement officials as information against them surfaced at a record pace.

Unseen and unnoticed in all the commotion of the first few days of those scandals breaking was the departure of one of the planet’s residents.

“Do you really have to go?” Marsh asked as they stood at the space port’s docking area.

“Yeah, those robes look terrible on you,” Keel said.

“They’re apprentice robes,” Arvana said. “I think they’re supposed to look terrible so that you’ve got reason to graduate.”

“We’re going to miss you,” Keel said.

“Yeah, it won’t be the same without you here,” Marsh said.

“I’m sorry, were you under the impression that you got to stay here?” Opal asked, appearing at their sides.

“What?” Marsh asked looking dumbfounded.

Arvana smiled. Opal had already filled her in on the fate of her two friends.

“You’re guilty of assault on a Crystal Guardian,” Opal said to Keel. “And conspiracy to commit that assault.” She looked at Marsh with the latter statement.

“What does that mean?” Marsh asked.

“We’re going to put you someplace where you’ll be safe,” Arvana said.

“Technically, it will be an Imperial judge who will do that,” Opal said. “But yes, I will be recommending that you be reprimanded to the custody of a watchful overseer. Also, I happen to need some crew for cleaning out the bilges and other such tasks.”

Arvana grinned with malevolent delight.

“You made me run through the sewers,” she told her friends. “Hope you like mopping cause I see a whole lot of that in your future.”

And together they left for the wide open galaxy that awaited them.

By the time the bolt caster exploded, Arvana knew her day was going to be miserable, but the signs were there as soon as she woke up. Marsh’s frantic call that they had a line on the black market weapons they needed and the confirmation that Zazog’s crew would be at the Hooded Beacon for lunch was not how she wanted to be greet a new day. Or any day really.

Marsh and Keel had been planning a counterstrike on the Beacon family for weeks. She knew from the first time they told her about it that there wasn’t any chance she could convince them to take a saner approach to the problem (like leaving for a different planet), so she’d settled for pointing out the obvious holes in their plans. The idiots thought they could overcharge some enchanted knives and take Zazog’s crew in a straight up melee fight. When neither of them could score a clean hit on her in a sparring match, they dropped that idea and moved to the plan of getting some real weapons.

The bolt casters seemed like the perfect foil for Marsh’s hot headed zeal. He didn’t have any contacts in the black market and Arvana reasoned that few people would be willing to sell a nut like him the kind of military grade hardware they needed to pull off the assault.

As it turned out though, while Marsh was a little too passionate to close a deal on the weapons, Keel (or rather Keel’s money) was able to convince the right people that a transaction could be made that wouldn’t get traced back to the seller.

They tested the weapons out in an old basement and nearly killed themselves in the process, but with the confirmation that the bolt casters worked as advertised, they had everything they needed to move forward.

Arvana’s part of the job was simple, in theory. She was there to maintain a secure communication web for them and cover their getaway with an illusion. As a primarily Mental anima caster, Arvana’s illusions were purely mind-affecting, but the Beacon family didn’t have any kind of non-intelligent surveillance on their restaurant since that kind of thing always came back as evidence that could be used against you in court sooner or later.

Marsh and Keel thought they were protecting her by keeping her “out of the actual fighting”, but that was mostly because they’d never tried to cast an obscuring spell that covered three people at once and have it hold up during an armed conflict. She’d practiced a few times before they went through the door to the Hooded Beacon and the results had been sufficiently dismal that she’d insisted they wear masks as well. Magic was incredible in what it could do, but simple physical props made it a lot easier and were much more dependable.

Marsh had enchanted the three would-be vigilantes with a haste spell that made the world seem to slow to a crawl before they burst into the restaurant. That had given Arvana the sense that things were happening in a simple, controlled manner. They’d stroll in, blast Zazog and his crew, she’d cloak them and they’d stroll right back out. For them it would take about a minute, and for everyone else inside the restaurant they’d be in and out in under two seconds. In the aftermath the Beacon family would get an anonymous message that anything they extorted from the neighborhood was going to come back to them in medical and repair bills. The Beacons would leave off the extortion racket and people’s lives would get better.

Or at least that’s what Marsh and Keel thought. Arvana knew the plan was doomed, and people were going to get hurt. People got hurt all the time though. She figured the best she could do was to make sure it wasn’t the people she cared about who were on the receiving end of that pain. At least not this time.

The assault went smooth and according to plan right up until the moment when Keel’s nerve broke.

At their accelerated speed, Arvana had time to hear the bolt caster that he was carrying go off and turn to look in his direction before the inevitable disaster occurred.

Later, as they were running away, Arvana had the presence of mind to ask herself if that moment, the one ‘misfire’ on Keel’s part doomed them or saved them.

They were supposed to pick out Zazog’s group and take them down. That was predicated on finding Zazog’s group before the restaurant descended into chaos. The moment Keel pulled the trigger that option vanished.

Marsh tried to argue for killing everyone in the restaurant, but fortunately their black market weapons chose that moment breakdown. It was the kind of amazing coincidence that was too ridiculous for Arvana to even assign a conspiracy too. If the weapon’s dealer had wanted them dead there were plenty of easier, safer methods of accomplishing that than to let them walk into a den of criminals with partially functioning murder devices.

With the loss of their weapon, Keel and Marsh were willing to flee, at last, and Arvana felt a surge of energy as the world slowed down even further. She started to spin the invisibility spell as they ran for the door and was two twists of the anima weaving away from completing it when one of her companions dropped their bolt caster and it exploded.

The force should have killed them. It reduced the door, the window and even the brick steps leading up to the restaurant to microscopic particles. None of the three of them were proficient enough with shielding magic to withstand that sort of destructive force but, before Arvana was even aware of the blast, she found herself tumbling into the road outside the Hooded Beacon. Something, or someone had protected them with a very short lived shield. Arvana thought she saw the remnants of it fade away but couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just an after image of the blast.

As the three of them got to their feet, the haste spell diminished but still held as did Arvana’s invisibility spell, though only be the barest of threads.

Neither Marsh nor Keel thought to question their good fortune. Between the excitement of the attempted assault on the restaurant, the terror of their weapons failing and the mind rattling force of the explosion, the two boys were running on little more than pure animal instinct. The same was true for Arvana, with the major difference being that as a Mentalist, one of her animal instincts was to cast a spell to dampen her emotions and enhance her senses. She wasn’t a calm, cool killer by nature, but she could fake that mindset for a while with the right spells.

As they fled, invisible to the people who were rushing towards the excitement at the restaurant, Arvana fitted the bits and pieces of the failed raid into place. The picture they revealed wasn’t a pleasant one.

Someone wanted them out of the restaurant and didn’t want any of the patrons injured. Their weapons shouldn’t have failed. Not all three of them at once. The speed they were fleeing at was wrong too. Marsh wasn’t a good enough caster to pull off that strong of a haste spell. In his panic it didn’t look like he was maintaining it all in fact.

And then there was the invisibility spell. Arvana thought back. She’d been in the midst of casting it when the explosion went off. There was a brief blip of time, a few hundred microseconds of real time, when she was totally stunned by the explosion. There were spellcasters who were good enough to cast through that kind of distraction. She was not one of them.

Marsh and Keel peeled around the corner of an Puffed Pastry shop and dashed for the entrance to the crypts that ran beneath the city. The crypts were the perfect sort of labyrinth to lose pursuers in. Arvana wanted to smack her two companions for heading to them however since using the crypts was a dead giveaway that they were locals. She was prevented from following through on that course of action by a sickening thought.

Someone else had finished the invisibility spell for her.

A cold, nauseous feeling lodged in her stomach and stuck with Arvana all through their flight to the far end of the crypts. If she hadn’t cast the invisibility spell, if someone else had sewn it shut and maintained it for the few moments before Arvana reached out for it again, that meant someone else was in control of it. Whoever finished the spell was on the inside of it, and able to see them as clearly as Arvana could see Marsh and Keel.

Zazog was a beast. Huge, tough and even stronger than he looked. They’d selected him as their target because putting him in the recovery ward seemed like an attainable goal. He was a very big fish, and Marsh believed his fall would send just the right sort of message to the Beacon family.

They were on the stairs leading up to the rooms they shared on the top floor of a run down theater when Arvana managed to put things properly into context. Zazog was huge and tough and strong compared to the local competition, but that didn’t mean he was the worst thing they had to worry about. If he was really powerful, he wouldn’t be on a minor world like Haldron’s Edge.

“What happened there?” Marsh asked. “What kind of junk did they sell you?”

“The casters were good!” Keel said. “We checked them out!”

“He’s right,” Arvana said. “They were fine.”

“They blew up! How is that fine?” Marsh asked.

Keel looked crushed by the question. He’d sunk a lot into obtaining the weapons, but their loss was inconsequential compared to the pain losing them had inflicted on Marsh.

“The caster didn’t blow up,” Arvana said. “It was destroyed.”

“By who?” Marsh asked.

“Someone in the restaurant,” Arvana said. “We shouldn’t have been able to make it out there.”

“You invisibility spell…” Keel began to say.

“It wasn’t mine,” Arvana said. “Just like the speed spell wasn’t yours right Marsh?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Did you remember to maintain the spell after the caster blew up?” Arvana asked.

“Yeah, of course,” Marsh said.

“When did you let it drop then?” Arvana asked.

“I…”

A small, mean part of Arvana was happy to see that her sick feeling was communicable. The gears in Marsh’s head turned slower than in hers but he wasn’t stupid. Nor was Keel.

“I didn’t,” Marsh said. “I didn’t maintain it. That was somebody else’s spell.”

“On us the whole way back here?” Keel said. “That’s impossible. No one’s that good.”

“No one local,” Arvana said.

“What, you think we stumbled on a Warlord or something?” Keel said.

“I have no idea what we stumbled on,” Arvana said, her words meant for more than Marsh and Keel’s ears.

“What’s going to happen next?” Marsh asked.

“I think they let us get away because they didn’t want a fight there,” Arvana said. “And I think they covered for us because they didn’t want any of the rest of the Beacon goons involved.”

“That’s good right?” Keel asked.

“No,” Arvana said. “That’s very bad.”

“It means they want to hunt us themselves,” Marsh said.

“How long do we have?” Keel asked.

“Before someone that good catches us?” Arvana said. “They’re probably already here.”

“What can we do?” Marsh asked.

“Make them an offer,” Arvana said.

“I’ve got some money left still,” Keel said.

“Not that kind of offer,” Arvana said. “They’re not going to need money. Not with that kind of skill.”

“What do you think they want?” Marsh asked.

“We’re not going to know until they tell us,” Arvana said. “And then we’re going to have a decision to make, probably on how we want to die.”

With what Arvana knew, she was pretty sure the gesture was a hopeless one, but she started gathering the magic needed for the worst spell she knew, and she prepared herself to cast it wrong.

A Mind Shatter spell, when properly cast, is a pure attack of magic and will, designed to fry another person’s brain and wipe away their ability to ever think again. It’s an ugly attack and one that Arvana had no business knowing how to cast, but she’d learned most of her magic from people who dealt in ugly spells so it came with the territory.

If Arvana followed the correct forms of the spell, the magic would be shaped into a lance and sent out to spear through her target’s defenses. She knew the attack wouldn’t be enough to stop whoever was pursuing them, their defenses had to be stronger than hers by a lot to manage what the casting she’d seen. That’s why she twisted the anima into the wrong shapes. Not a lance but a wave, not restricted to her target but rather ravaging everything around her. She wouldn’t survive the attack and neither would Marsh or Keel, but if she cast it that meant death was the preferable option compared to whatever their pursuer had in store for them.

“And what if what they want is you?” the woman sitting in the chair in the center of the room asked.

Arvana froze.

The woman had been there the whole time, had been with them the whole time, but a subtle block in Arvana’s memory had prevented her from noticing it. Arvana knew her mental wards were solid, but against this woman they might as well not have been there at all.

She looked around at Marsh and Keel. Nether were moving. Both of them stood like they were suspended in time, but there was no haste spell in effect. They were stuck in a web of a much more complicated casting than that.

“What do you want?” Arvana asked.

“I’m trying to decide,” the woman said.

Opal Kinsguard, Crystal Guardian and Protector of the Empire, had less than a quarter of a second to live. She reflected on the tolerable expanse of time that afford her as she sized up the room she was in.

The most immediate problem was the hyper-charged blast bolt that was hurtling through the air towards her. She sighed inwardly at its presence, more annoyed than anything else. She wasn’t traveling on official business and problems such as assassination attempts were simply rude when they intruded on her vacation time.

She had a variety of options for dealing with the potentially fatal attack but many of them were inappropriate for a casual dining establishment such as she found herself in. This was a problem she’d encountered on earlier vacations and had been determined to avoid repeating if at all possible.

In theory her choice of vacation destinations should have all but guaranteed a peaceful few weeks away from her duty. The tavern she was dining in, the Hooded Beacon, was an unremarkable establishment, on the unremarkable world of Haldron’s Edge. Opal had selected Haldron’s Edge as part of her agenda because it was almost too plain to notice. It held a standard amount of the typical resources a planet offers. It’s population was developed enough so that there were no large open areas to attract new settlers but not so overbuilt that it became a hub of trade merely by virtue of the local population density.

There were sights to see, and beaches and mountains and tropical forests to visit. With a wide and diverse population there were many different forms of entertainment and cultural events. In short, plenty to appeal to the locals but little to attract a galactic traveler.

Even the crime on Haldron’s Edge was ordinary. The three people who had entered the Hooded Beacon wearing face masks appeared to be nothing more than ordinary hold up artists. In the long quarter second as the blast bolt inched closer to the back of Opal’s head she examined the room for any clues that she had missed which could explain why a trio of armed people would decide to rob a restaurant of all places.

Mental anima, Opal’s forte, had her perception and thought processes accelerated beyond anything even vaguely possible for a human. The world didn’t appear to be standing stock still but it was doing a close impersonation of that state. With that added time to process her environment and dozens of passive spells feeding her information, Opal put together the situation that was occurring around her. She noticed the placement of patrons. How several were more armed than she was and how the walls had the telltale signs of repairs from heavy spell casting damage. She noticed the relative lack of clear firing lines in the restaurant and how a particular set of the patrons had arranged themselves with their backs to the most solid of the walls while those around them formed a protective circle.

A crime den. As she surveyed the room she saw that she’d quite innocently stumbled on the headquarters of one of the local underground families.

She sighed. She would be having words with her subconscious soon about the sorts of actions it was allowed to take without informing her. It was one of the problems with having a highly developed mind and the ability to multi-task at a transhuman level. Everything her conscious mind learned to do, her subconscious was capable of as well. Or in other words, she was very good at outthinking herself unless she was careful to avoid doing so.

In this case, she’d consciously known that a few weeks of enforced quiet and relaxation was something she needed to recharge her batteries and work out the snarls that had developed in her thoughts. Her subconscious however apparently viewed the last week as ‘too quite’ and had taken steps to rectify that problem.

Reviewing her memory, Opal was able to pick out the tiny scraps of information that had lead her to the Hooded Beacon at just the right time to be involved in the day’s dramatic events. Some part of her had known this lunch would be an exciting one even before she sat down and ordered the meat sampler platter and its variety of convenient carving utensils.

Despite her subconscious wish for excitement, Opal was determined to preserve as much of her vacation as possible. To that goal she reviewed several possible plans.

The simplest was to let the blast bolt hit her but diminish its force to a non-lethal level. She could feign an injury and play no further role in the proceedings. Technically a crime like this was outside her jurisdiction since it was a purely local matter with no galactic impact. In practice though her mandate to “protect the Empire and its citizens” also covered the defense of lives that were immediately imperiled.

The next simplest approach would be to apprehend the culprits but that presented the first of many complications. If she disarmed the trio, it was unlikely the other patrons would graciously allow the attackers to be turned over to the local police force. They had reputations to maintain. Opal could already seen the more responsive of the patrons beginning to draw their weapons to return fire.

She would need to shut them down as well or there’d be blood spilled and her vacation time was not worth that.

The problem with taking that approach was that she’d need to deal with far more than the people in the restaurant. There would be the extended family who would be looking to reclaim the their reputation. And then the other families who would see weakness or a vacuum that needed to be filled.

In the end the “keep hitting people until the problem goes away” approach would lead to her spending a long time hitting people, including, inevitably, offworlders who were drawn to the conflict like moths to the flame as they tried to figure out what on Haldron’s Edge was so important that a Crystal Guardian was spending time shutting down the minor criminals who lived there.

That left her with only more subtle methods of resolving the conflict, if she wanted to have any chance of maintaining her free time.

With a flick of her fingers, she pulled a strand of Physical anima into a gently curving shield. The lethal blast bolt would miss her by less than an inch and put a new pockmark in the wall beside her.

With her breath, she sang another cluster of anima threads out.

About three quarters of the micro-spells targeted the goons who were going for their weapons. While she could have put them to sleep to render them harmless, she didn’t want to tip her hand that far. Instead she merely stunned them for a second and a half. Not long enough that they’d even notice after the fact, but long enough for her to resolve the situation with a minimum of bloodshed.

The other spells she cast sought out the three attackers. Marsh, Keel and Arvana. They were natives, members of a counter-extortion group that was trying to kick the Beacon family out of the local area. They had the backing of many in the community but there were very few who would risk openly supporting them for fear of reprisal. Marsh was the leader of the group by virtue of having lost a brother to the Beacons and being the most passionate about the cause. Keel was the next most devoted due to a life long love of Marsh and Arvana was involved mostly because she was fond of the other two in a sisterly fashion. She was also their best caster of the mind magics they needed to escape and she didn’t want to see either of them get hurt if she could prevent it.

Opal’s spells gave her that information while the blast bolt was still a good five feet behind her head and just beginning to swerve off course to miss her.

She cast a speed enhancing enchantment and targeted its effects on the three vigilantes. She needed them able to react significantly faster than they were normally capable of if they were going to have time to understand the situation she was putting them in.

For her last spell Opal reached out with spikes of Energetic anima and flatlined the bolt casters they were carrying. The weapons didn’t explode. Opal was determined to see the encounter end without bloodshed on either side.

In the vigilantes’ hands the bolt casters sparked and lost their distinctive hum as the magics that powered them shutdown, leaving the weapons as little more than menacing looking paperweights.

Opal sensed a telepathic web binding the three together and tossed a thread of anima at them to infiltrate their conversation. A surprising amount of resistance met her attempt to eavesdrop but with a few of her more esoteric casting tricks, Opal was able to circumvent the privacy screen on their channel and insert herself into it silently.

“Keel, what the hell are you doing!” Arvana’s telepathic scream was loud enough that Opal had to double check it wasn’t actually audible.

“I saw one of them move! They were going to start shooting back!” Keel said. The guilt he projected suggested that he wasn’t terribly certain he’d actually seen someone move, but he was nowhere near ready to admit that.

“We were supposed to identify Zazog’s party,” Arvana said. “If we take them out none of the rest will give us trouble. If we don’t, they’re going to murder us before we get out of here!”

Opal found Zazog’s group. They were at the table next to her. Fast reacting and highly resistant to hostile spells, they were shaking off the effect of the stun ten times as fast as the rest of the goons.

So Opal hit them a hundred times harder.

“I can only hold this Quickness spell for so long,” Marsh said. He was gritting his teeth and pouring all of his physical anima into the enhancement. With another decade of practice he could have approached Opal’s efficiency with the spell, but it would take him twice that or more to develop the reserve of magic that she possessed to power it.

Fortunately for him, the effect of her spell stacked with his and so what he thought was the result of his best effort was in truth far beyond his actual capacity.

“Do we drop them all then?” Keel asked.

“No!” Arvana said.

“Yes!” Marsh said.

“We’re not going to kill everyone in here,” Arvana said. “Zazog’s our target because taking him down will have the most impact and with his protections they’ll be able to piece him back together.”

“If we don’t take them all out now, he’s going to take us down and leave us in so many pieces that no one will ever put two of our molecules back together,” Marsh said.

Keel raised his weapon to spray the room and finally noticed the dead state it was in.

“We’re in trouble guys,” he said. “This piece of junk disenchanted itself.”

Arvana and Marsh checked their weapons and discovered the same problem.

“We’re dead,” Arvana said.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Marsh said.

Marsh and Keel looked for exits aside from the main doors they’d come through, but Arvana cast around the room looking for something else. Her gaze settled on the back of Opal’s head and Opal felt a ping of recognition from the young caster. Arvana knew that the woman across the restaurant was actively casting some kind of spell but she didn’t have the training to piece out what it was quickly enough.

Marsh grabbed Arvana and dragged the girl out the front door, as he and Keel ran. It was a terrible exit from their point of view. Not only had the assault failed but the goons would be after them like lightning and the long open road outside wasn’t going to afford them much in terms of cover or places to hide.

From Opal’s point of view though their panicked flight was perfect. One small spell induced a spasm in Keel’s hand and he dropped his bolt caster right at the restaurant’s entrance. A few of the goons managed to notice the bolt caster drop, more of them saw the trio fleeing and pretty much everyone in a hundred yard radius saw or heard the explosion that blasted the doors and everything nearby to a fine mist of particles.

Opal sighed and relaxed her awareness to let time resume its normal rate of progression. The immediate crisis was past but she was going to have so much work to do still.

Awards ceremonies come in many forms, from small private occasions to lavish public spectacles. For Zyla though, they always came with an undercurrent of anxiety.

“Zy, are you ok?” Yael asked.

“Yes,” Zyla said, staring at the door beyond which her future awaited her.

“Good, cause there’s nothing to worry about,” Yael said. “After today you’ll be a free woman.”

“Yes,” Zyla said, still staring at the door.

“You know I remember your trial,” Yael said. “You were much more relaxed then. I think I even got you to crack a smile.”

“Yes,” Zyla said and glanced over at Yael. A small and obviously forced smile gracing her face briefly before Zyla returned her gaze to the door.

“When I was a kid, we had awards ceremonies all the time,” Yael said. “It got a little boring after a while to be honest.”

“You grew up on Safsalla didn’t you?” Zyla asked. “I thought that was one of the barren worlds.”

“It was,” Yael said. “Still is in fact.”

“The Empire hasn’t provided aid for you?” Zyla asked.

“Safsalla is barren of macroscopic life, except for the colony warrens where we lived,” Yael said. “On a microbiological level though its a wonderland. There are reagents and anima filtrants there that are found nowhere else in the galaxy.”

“That sounds like a treasure trove of wealth but you said your family was a poor one I thought?” Zyla asked.

“They were,” Zyla said. “The colony warrens, basically the cities, had a long history of isolation from each other and the galaxy at large. We lived like spacers for the most part, reclaiming and recycling everything because we couldn’t draw much sustenance from the planet around us.”

“And then the Empire conquered you and everything was better?” Zyla asked.

“Come on, we’ve worked together for how long now?” Yael asked. “You know the Empire doesn’t work like that.”

“I guess they don’t,” Zyla said.

“They showed up, judged we weren’t a threat to anyone and offered us membership in the Empire,” Yael said. “Some of the warrens took it, most passed. I was born in the one of the ones that passed on membership for a while, so we didn’t have much.”

“So what were the awards ceremonies for?” Zyla asked.

“At the time I thought they were for great achievements but looking back I think they were just little rituals to help divide up the time and keep people from going crazy,” Yael said.

“Did it work?” Zyla asked.

“I don’t know. I think in place of a generalized lunacy, we developed a more focused variety,” Yael said. “Most people were mostly reasonable about the awards, but some got far too obsessed with them.”

“What were the survival ratios like?” Zyla asked.

“I don’t know of anyone killing over a contest,” Yael said.

“You weren’t that crazy then,” Zyla said.

“What about you?” Yael asked. She voiced the question lightly, the subject of Zyla’s youth being a painful one in general.

“We had awards ceremonies too,” Zyla said. “Frequent ones.”

“How did you do in them?” Yael asked.

“I’m still here,” Zyla said. “So therefor I won an award at all of them.”

“How harsh was the Khan on his children?” Yael asked.

“He didn’t lay a hand on us,” Zyla said. “Most of the time. He let us compete for our place in his Circles, and encouraged us to use whatever tactics and methods were available to secure our positions.”

“So those who didn’t measure up?” Yael asked.

“They stayed in the lower circles,” Zyla said. “Or we destroyed them.”

“I should have guessed that,” Yael said.

“Yes,” Zyla said and closed her eyes for a moment.

“This isn’t like that,” Yael said and laid a hand on Zyla’s shoulder. “There’s no competition here. This is a celebration and recognition of the work you’ve done since your case was first adjudicated.”

“The work we’ve done,” Zyla said.

“I’ve gotten my accolades,” Yael said. “Today is about recognizing you. But I can understand how that could feel uncomfortable with your history.”

“Yes,” Zyla said.

“It’s already a small ceremony,” Yael said. “We can make it a brief one too if you like?”

“That’s not…” Zyla started to say. “That’s not  necessary.”

“We could skip it altogether and hop the next freighter to the rim?” Yael said, trying to put a real smile on Zyla’s face.

“I wish we could,” Zyla said.

There was a silence that stretched on a hair longer than was comfortable. Yael broke the awkward moment by first standing up and then turning to kneel in front of where Zyla was sitting.

“What’s stopping us?” Yael asked.

“What?” Zyla twitched back away from Yael.

“Why can’t we just grab a ship and head out?” Yael asked. “The paperwork’s already been put through. You’ve been a free woman since yesterday. This ceremony is just a formality. Why don’t we blow it off?”

“We can’t do that,” Zyla said.

“Zy, I haven’t seen you this upset since we first met,” Yael said. “We can totally do this.”

“I don’t mind the ceremony,” Zyla said. “Or I do, but I know it’s not like the ones my father hosted.”

“What’s wrong then?” Yael asked. “Please, tell me. I want to help.”

“It’s…” Zyla struggled to find the right words before settling on, “It’s premature.”

“Premature?” Yael said. “Are you nuts? This is long overdue!”

“No it’s not,” Zyla said.

“Zy, you’ve proven yourself so many times so far. You’ve satisfied every condition of your parole a hundred times over. The Empire has every reason to trust you now!”

“I didn’t do any of those things for the Empire,” Zyla said. “And I don’t think you’re right. I haven’t balanced the scales.”

Yael sighed and settled back to sit on the floor. She drew her knees up to her chest and regarded Zyla over them.

“Tell me about it,” Yael said. “Tell me what is weighing down the other side of the scale.”

“It’s not one thing,” Zyla said.

“I’ve never pried into your past,” Yael said. “Do you know why that is?”

“Afraid of what you’d find there?” Zyla said.

“Yeah,” Yael said. “I was. I was afraid I’d find something that would really hurt you.”

“My past can’t hurt me,” Zyla said.

“Really? Cause it looks like it’s killing you at the moment,” Yael said.

“I’m fine,” Zyla said.

“No, you’re not fine,” Yael said. “I’m not fine either. My magic is all screwed up and I can barely see anything two seconds ahead.”

“I’m messing things up,” Zyla said.

“It’s not your fault,” Yael said. “I can’t see anything because…”

Yael stopped herself and took a breath.

“Can you see anything?” she asked. “What does the future look like to you?”

“I don’t know,” Zyla said.

“What do you want it to look like?” Yael asked.

“I don’t know,” Zyla said.

Yael dropped her head onto her raised knees.

“We’re a great pair of fate wizards aren’t we?” she said after a long moment.

“I didn’t think it would be this hard,” Zyla said.

“Really?” Yael asked.

“I’ve been blind to this for a while. I couldn’t see how today was going to go at all,” Zyla said. “I still can’t.”

“My Master taught me a technique for dealing with blocks like this,” Yael said, relaxing as she spoke.

“Why do Guardians refer to their Elders as Masters,” Zyla asked. “That’s always seemed wrong to me.”

“The word has meant a lot of different things over the years,” Yael asked. “We take it from its early use in describing a ‘Master and their Apprentice’. It’s not required, and some Guardian mentors dislike the formality of it, but with Opal it always felt right.”

“You respect her a lot don’t you?” Zyla asked.

“I do,” Yael said. “She’s a very wise lady. She was the one who suggested I work with you for example.”

“So what was her technique for seeing through blocks like this?” Zyla asked.

“We start with meditation,” Yael said and scooted backwards on her butt to make room for Zyla on the floor.

The two women folded their legs into a half lotus position and sat upright facing each other.

“Simple breathing exercises to start with,” Yael said, and together they inhaled for a long ten count and exhaled for a slightly quicker five count. They repeated the measured breaths again and again, silently seeking the stillness in the center of their being.

“There are a lot of things that can block our foresight,” Yael said.

“Like a certain Void anima caster who hasn’t left the planet yet,” Zyla said.

“Yes,” Yael said. “Mel is a pain in the butt.”

“But a useful one sometimes,” Zyla said, a rare smile breaking across her lips like a wave.

“External influences are only one of the things that can cloud our vision though,” Yael said. “More often we’re blinded by what’s inside us.”

“I know,” Zyla said. “We were taught from as early as I can remember to kill our emotions.”

Yael winced.

“The Khan wasn’t alone in sponsoring that approach,” she said. “A lot of people see how chaotic the mind can be and they seek to lock it up, to carve away the pieces they can’t control. They try to remove emotions from their equations or they go the other direction and embrace utter madness.”

“Only a rare few can manage that sort of purity,” Zyla said. “I came close for a while but I’m much weaker now.”

“You are far from weak,” Yael said. “Denying who you are? Or giving up all control of yourself? Those are illusions of strength. You can walk those paths and gain power but you lose part of yourself in the process and are limited by that loss.”

“The children of the First Circle were far more powerful than I was,” Zyla said.

“Yes, because they’d trained more and been more fortunate,” Yael said. “But they weren’t more powerful than you can be. They were at the peak of what they could ever hope to be. You have so much more potential than that.”

“Right now, I can’t see anything,” Zyla said. “I don’t know what tomorrow holds, I don’t even know what’s going to happen ten seconds from now.”

“I know,” Yael said. “That’s what this technique will help with.”

“So what do we do?” Zyla asked.

“We be honest,” Yael said. “With ourselves above all else. I can’t see my future because this moment is too important for me. It feels like I’m blind, but when I look, when I really try to see what’s to come, I see too many futures, all overlaying each other and its too much. Too many that I want too strongly and too many that I can’t live with and too many where I can’t tell the difference.”

“I was taught to look only for the future that fulfilled the objective you were given,” Zyla said.

“What objective have you given yourself then?” Yael asked.

“I don’t know,” Zyla said.

“Is that the problem?” Yael asked. “Do you not know what future you want or is there some other conflict holding you back? You don’t have to tell me, but you’ve got to tell yourself.”

Zyla was still and silent for a long time. After a minute of holding her breath she finally spoke.

“I know what I want, and I know that I don’t deserve it,” she said.

“I’m prepared to argue with you pretty thoroughly on how much you deserve to get what you want,” Yael said. “But my thoughts aren’t what’s important here. All I can ask is that you consider how you’re measuring what you do and don’t deserve.”

“I’ve done some good,” Zyla said. “But almost all of it has been with you. And before then, on my own, I was very different.”

“We met as enemies,” Yael said. “So I think I know a little about what you were like then. I know how you clung to your honor like a lifeline. How you hated being what the Khan had forced you to be.”

“He didn’t have to force us,” Zyla said. “It was how we were born.”

“You weren’t born cruel, that was taught to you, from before you could even cast a spell or speak the word for it,” Yael said.

“That doesn’t change what I did,” Zyla said. “That doesn’t make me right, or even ok, or worthy of special consideration. I’m not a good person. I’m just good when I’m around you.”

“I destroyed my home warren.” Yael said.

“What?” Zyla asked.

“I destroyed my home.” Yael said. “When I was little. I figured out how to cast Aetherial spells and I hid my abilities from everyone. Made sure the tests didn’t show any aptitude for casting because I was afraid the Empire would come and take me away. And then one day I got mad, really mad, and I cursed the warren.”

“What happened?” Zyla asked.

“The Empire came and took me away,” Yael said. “They figured out what I did pretty easily. You’ve seen what an Imperial Auditor can do. I was too dangerous to leave on Safsalla, so they paired me up with Master Opal.”

“So you were on parole too?” Zyla asked.

“For a few years,” Yael said. “Longer than you in fact. Master Opal helped me work a lot of thing out though.”

“What about the people from your home city?” Zyla asked.

“I made amends where I could,” Yael said. “The Empire evacuated everyone to an orbital station though so I’m not exactly the most popular person there anymore. Someday I’m hoping to go back and undo the curse, but I’m not quite strong enough yet, and there’s not much left of the warren to make it a worthwhile endeavor.”

“You saved an entire planet,” Zyla said. “How can you not be strong enough?”

“I’m only that good with you,” Yael said. “See I can’t break the curse because a part of me is still mad at the warren. Until I really forgive them I won’t have the strength to undo what I did.”

“So are you saying I should forgive my father?” Zyla asked.

“No, I’m saying you should forgive yourself, who you are now matters as much as who you were then and who you chose to be matters more than either of those,” Yael said. “And I should take my own advice.”

“To be forgiving?” Zyla asked.

“No, to be honest,” Yael said. She breathed in, held the breath and then raised her head and opened her eyes to look directly at Zyla. “I know why I can’t see the future at the moment, I know what’s got my heart so flustered, and I hope I’m guessing correctly at what you want the future to be. I know all that, but I don’t want to cause you any pain or put any pressure on you. All I can ask is whether you want me to share that with you.”

“Yes,” Zyla said, her voice clipping on even so small a word.

“I can’t see the future because of my feelings for you,” Yael said. “You’re too important to me, and this conversation, this moment, could go too many different ways. I could lose you forever here, and I would give almost anything to avoid that.”

Zyla looked down, hiding her eyes from Yael and forcing her breathing to a pace that was close to even.

“They said I would be free after the ceremony and that I could go wherever I wanted,” Zyla said. “But since the day we met, I haven’t wanted to be anywhere except by your side.”

“So the future you want has me in it then?” Yael asked and reached her hands forward.

“Forever,” Zyla said, taking Yael’s hands into her own. “If you’ll have me.”

“For as long as you’ll have me,” Yael said.

Little motes of light, anima that had been bound and trapped inside them began to float around the room as the future opened up before them at last.

“I thought we couldn’t be together,” Zyla said. “That your oath as a Crystal Guardian forbid it.

“Not at all,” Yael said. “We’re supposed to lead the most balanced lives that we can, and you help keep me sane better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“I thought I was going to go crazy being with you, but then the thought of losing you felt even more insane,” Zyla said.

“How do you feel now?” Yael asked.

“Like I’ve woken up into a dream,” Zyla said. “I didn’t even want to hope that we’d get to stay together. I thought you’d be sent off on another mission and I’d be left to find my way in the galaxy all alone.”

“I never want you to feel alone,” Yael said. “Even if we’re apart, I want you to know that the best part of me will always be with you.”

“Can I kiss you now?” Zyla asked.

“I’ve been waiting three years for you to ask that question!” Yael said and slid her arms around her partner, her companion, her best friend and her truest love.

As cantinas went, the nameless little dive on the third ring of Belarion Orbital Habitat held a singular charm. It was blissfully quiet. So many other cantinas felt the need to blare whatever passed for jaunty music in the local system. The nameless dive didn’t have that problem, largely because its enchanted music synthesizer had been blasted into ten thousand tiny pieces.

Even that wasn’t a guarantee of tranquility though. When music was missing, cantinas tended to have noisy patrons who filled the silence in with whatever idiocy came to their minds. The nameless cantina didn’t have that problem either however since its patrons were all mercifully unconscious.

Darius pulled up a chair to the table where Captain Okoro was sitting and plopped the last unbroken bottle of green spirits down beside a pair of small, mostly intact, glasses.

“They packed more of a punch than I expected,” Darius said, surveying the dozens of prone forms that were draped over the furniture or sprawled across the floor.

“It’s always the ones you don’t expect who put up the biggest fights,” Hanq said.

“Think Mel will be mad she missed this brawl?” Darius asked.

“Only if we tell her about it,” Hanq said with a smile.

“So how many guys would you say were here?” Darius asked. “Two hundred? Three hundred?”

“Oh clearly this was an entire militia hide out. Fully armed. Probably a thousand in enchanted power armor,” Hanq said.

“She’s going to murder us,” Darius said, unable to keep from giggling at the prospect of teasing his beloved brawler.

“I don’t know how you keep up with her,” Hanq said.

“What do you mean?” Darius said. “You’re the one who trained her. You’ve been keeping up with her since she was little right?”

“That girl? Nine hells no, she’s always set her own pace,” Hanq said. “Best I’ve done is managed to nudge her away from the really stupid mistakes I made when I was her age.”

“How did you two ever meet?” Darius asked. “I could never believe that she just stumbled onto a former Warlord who was also a master martial artist just when she needed training.”

“I know. You’d think there was some kind of spell at work there, but believe me, I checked and there wasn’t,” Hanq said. “How I remember it is that our meeting was all Mel’s idea.”

“What do you mean?” Darius asked.

“Well, you have to understand where I was at the time,” Hanq said. “I’d just gotten my crew together and conquered my first system when the Crystal Empress broke onto the scene. Like a lot of the Warlords in those days, I was young, strong as hell and smart enough to see the value of allies, especially ones you could sacrifice if the need arose.”

“That doesn’t seem like a solid long term strategy,” Darius said.

“Oh it wasn’t,” Hanq said. “The average reign for a Warlord was a decade at the outside. The smartest ones would pass their power onto a younger caster and retire somewhere with a shipload of money and enchanted objects.”

“Is that how you got the job?”

“No, I grabbed my system in a bloodless coup. The previous ruler was a cagey beast but he hadn’t kept up on the latest in security techniques. So I took the station that he had warded with spells a dozen levels deep and removed their ‘friend or foe’ recognition routines. Cut off his whole command infrastructure in one move.”

“I’m surprised it was bloodless.” Darius said.

“The old guy was smart enough to have the non-lethal defenses trigger first. Saved his life and left me with a clean conscience,” Hanq said. “Actually keeping the system wasn’t quite so bloodless though. Once word got out about the change in power a bunch of my neighbors decided to see if they could annex the system out from under me.”

“I’ve seen you work,” Darius said. “How many of their systems did you take?”

“Three,” Hanq said. “I didn’t even really want them but I had to collect a price for the trouble they caused.”

“Any of them live through it?” Darius asked.

“All of them actually, I needed allies after all and who better than a trio of Warlord I knew I could run rings around.”

“So what happened when the Empress showed up?” Darius asked.

“We had a huge battle. I almost had her at my mercy until all of my allies turned traitor,” Hanq said, hiding his expression with the glass of green liquer.

“Really?” Darius asked.

“No,” Hanq said. “Not even in my wildest day dreams. What really happened is one of her Crystal Guardians showed up. Not even one of the Prime ones.”

“They talked you into standing down peacefully?” Darius asked.

“Yes. She talked to us with her fists. I recall that her right cross made a very clear and concise case for why I should get out of the Warlord line of work and find something less dangerous like ‘stellar demolition’.”

“She beat you?”

“She beat all of us,” Hanq said. “All at the same time.”

“That’s when you took up martial arts seriously?” Darius asked.

“Oh no,” Hanq said. “I’d been serious about martial combat of all kinds for years. Since I could walk if fact. It’s why I was able to beat people into following me.”

“And the others didn’t betray you?”

“Not intentionally,” Hanq said. “We could have been better coordinated, but none of us were turncoats. We gave it our all, and hers was just better than that.”

“So what did you do afterwards?”

“After I got out of the Imperial medical facility?” Hanq said. “Well the first thing I did was refuse the commission they offered. My body was healed but my pride still in little pieces.”

“They let you go like that?” Darius asked.

“It was less a matter of ‘let me go’ and more a ‘failed to prevent my escape’,” Hanq said. “Since I was on the run I knew I had to disappear. Or at least that’s what I told myself at the time. Looking back, I wonder if I wasn’t running away from the guy I thought I was more than anything else.”

“Being a Warlord meant a lot to you?” Darius asked.

“At the time it was everything I was,” Hanq said. “You don’t get to a position like that without a certain mindset. I believed I was the strongest guy out there. And the smartest. And most fit to rule. Being a Warlord was about more than power. It was security. With me in charge I knew I could make sure nothing bad happened to the people that mattered.”

Hanq took a breath and looked down into the glass and the questionable green goo that sloshed inside it

“Then I wasn’t in charge,” he said. “And nothing bad happened. Things were even better in fact. And I wasn’t the strongest or the smartest or the most fit to rule.”

“That sounds brutal,” Darius said.

“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Hanq said. “Well, one of the best.”

“That brings us back to Mel I’m guessing?” Darius said.

“Eventually,” Hanq said. “There were days I was convinced she was the worst disaster ever to land in my life though.”

“Why?” Darius asked.

“Because she never gave up,” Hanq said. “She was relentless. I didn’t want to train her, not at first anyways. I gave her all kind of crazy things to do and she just kept doing them.”

“Yeah, I can’t say I find that hard to believe,” Darius said.

“So there I am, broken down, as low as I’d ever been, convinced that I had nothing left to fight for and there’s this little fuzzy haired stick of a girl who just won’t leave me alone!”

Darius chuckled.

“Gods, I’m picturing a little Mel now being on your case 24 hours a day,” he said. “It’s horrifying.”

“You have no idea,” Hanq said. “The worst part was that she was terrible at martial arts. At least to start. But every day, she was there.”

“How long did it take her to get good?” Darius asked.

“I don’t even know!” Hanq said. “Like I said, she was always there and it was so gradual that I don’t think I noticed for a while how good she’d become. I think it was about seven or eight years ago that I noticed I was using anima while I was sparring with her though. That was probably my first wake up call.”

“Wait, you were spell casting at her back when she couldn’t cast spells?” Darius asked.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds, but yes, I’d started casting cantrip buffs to edge up my speed or recover from some of the hits she was tagging me with. Nothing obvious or overwhelming, but it was still a pretty terrible thing to do.”

“It sounds like it really pushed her training into overdrive though,” Darius said.

“I suppose it did, but she never noticed it either,” Hanq said. “To her I was just staying tantalizing far ahead of her, but always beyond a level she could reach. What she didn’t see was that I was cheating more and more every day to maintain that lead.”

“Why did you keep training her if it was that hard?” Darius asked.

“You know, after a while I asked myself that too,” Hanq said. “The real answer took me a long time to work out though. At first I thought I had a responsibility to her. The streets on Belstarius weren’t friendly to kids and Mel’s disposition made them particularly hostile to her.”

“I’m having a hard time picturing how she survived as long as she did without magic to fall back on,” Darius said.

“Some of that was me, some of it was the Sisters of Water’s Mercy,” Hanq said. “For an order of holy women, they could sure raise unholy hell when they needed too. Mostly though I think it was just that damn determination of hers. She dragged herself to my place more times than I can count all busted up and broken from some fight or another.”

“A trend that continues to today,” Darius said and took another gulp from his glass.

“At least she’s learned to hang out with medics and a support staff,” Hanq said.

“Sounds like she always had a support staff, even if she didn’t know it,” Darius said.

“I guess she did,” Hanq said. “Even from that first day, even when I was trying as hard as I could to drive her away, I still couldn’t let anything really bad happen to that girl. Busted more than few heads for her that I’m hoping she never found out about.”

“Why?” Darius asked.

“She had a bit of a temper when she was younger,” Hanq said. “I was trying to teach her to control that by showing her a good example.”

“And?” Darius asked.

“Well, let’s just say sometimes I set a better example than others,” Hanq said. “I mean I was an ex-Warlord. There are certain threats I can laugh off and others? Well, sometimes its best that nobody is able to find those particular bodies.”

“You sound as protective as my Dads were,” Darius said.

“I guess I was,’ Hanq said. “For a long time I’ve thought of Mel as the daughter I’d never have.”

“For what it’s worth, I think she still regards you as the closest thing she has to a father,” Darius said.

“I’m happier for that than you can possibly understand,” Hanq said. “But thinking about it, even that’s not why I never pushed her away, not even during her incredibly bratty years.”

“It’s hard to imagine Mel as a brat,” Darius said.

“Oh do I have stories for you then,” Hanq said.

“I’m kind of terrified our daughter will turn out the same,” Darius said.

“Oh, you’re planning to have a family now?” Hanq asked.

“Well, not right now, but someday, maybe,” Darius said. “If she wants to.”

“The probably the kind of thing you should talk about with actual words,” Hanq said. “And for the record, I am in favor of grandchildren.”

“Her mother said the same thing,” Darius said. “But you were saying you didn’t stick with her because she was like a daughter to you?”

“Yeah, when I look back now what I see is that I was just being selfish. It’s as simple as that,” Hanq said.

“How so?” Darius asked.

“I was lower than low when I met Mel,” Hanq said. “And she wouldn’t let me stay there. She wouldn’t let me be the ‘washed up ex-Warlord’ that I thought I was. She made be her teacher. She made be this incredible martial master. And you know what? It worked. I didn’t want to but every day I got up and trained with her. She got better, I got better and I found something.”

“A new person you could be?” Darius asked.

“Yeah, or maybe it was the person I always was,” Hanq said. “Without that Crystal Guardians I would have continued on being a Warlord and odds are I’d be dead by now. Without Mel though, I’d have wasted away to nothing. My body might still be walking around but fifteen years of the guy I was back then would have left that body without a heart or a soul.”

Hanq looked at the glass and could only see his own, honest smile reflected back at him.

“Mel’s saved a lot of people, but the first person she saved was me.”