Solomon paused in the doorway; Needle close beside him. Shah Rii waited inside.

“I didn’t think corporeal life could exist in your bower,” Needle said.

“All things exist,” was her irrefutable reply.

Solomon meant to enter first, but he was somehow a half step behind Needle, who turned his head immediately to a pile of corpses.

“Well, I wasn’t entirely wrong.”

“Your worshipers?” Solomon asked, his upper lip curled in a sneer.

In her matter conversion chamber, Shah Rii appeared as a fungal tree. Her bark turned blue at Solomon’s remark, then red. “You can make do without my help if you’d prefer.”

Needle looked at him incredulously.

“I apologize for the insult,” Solomon said, “but this warrants an explanation.”

“They went on the same journey as you but were not strong enough to survive.”

“We’ll be fine," said Needle.

“I expected to be taken to some sort of craft,” Solomon explained.

“Don’t you know anything about the Phrastus Belt?” asked Needle.

“No. Hence my years spent studying it.”

Needle shook his head. “You studied probe scans instead of folklore. Hence your ignorance. Shah Rii, I beg you not to hold his pensiveness against us.”

Her bark turned to a chill, soothing cyan. “Well, are you going or not?”

They both stepped further into her bower, and Solomon instantly felt his innards ignite in an electrostatic panic. He found a return to inner motion when he fixed his eyes on the Dial.

“Stand inside the circle, “she said.

As she spoke, a series of holographic symbols formed a ring just below the high ceiling, illuminating conduits like a net of capillaries woven through the oily black metal ribbing of the chamber’s infrastructure.

The lighting in the room, dim like candles at first, shifted to a deep red.

“This will take a great deal of effort from you,” she said. “Especially you, Needle.”

“Because I’m a robot?”

“Because you’re an aging cynic. I need you both to relinquish consciousness to me. I have a routine I could teach you, but I imagine you both have your own means.”

Solomon heard a low, descending hum from Needle. Then the Sentinel’s eyes went dark, and his body condensed into a hunched and minimized posture.

“That won’t work,” said the Dial.

His eyes relit and he slowly spread his shoulders while stretching his spine. “The old-fashioned way, eh?”

“I need access to your soul, Ned.”

He sighed. “This’ll take a minute.”

Solomon rolled his eyes before closing them, then settled his breath into a quiet, steady rhythm. He soon felt his breath constricted and opened his eyes.

"As I said," Shah Rii sighed,” this will take a lot of effort from you.”

He started again, easing into the process a little more gradually. Again he felt his breath constricted, but this time he kept his eyes closed and focused on remaining relaxed. Then he felt a metallic taste in his mouth and his eyes jerked open.

Needle was sitting cross legged on the floor. He looked up and shook his head.

“It might help if we understood what you were doing,” Solomon said.

“No, it wouldn’t.”

Needle shook his head again, then leaned back.

Solomon closed his eyes again, but this time he let his breath do what it would, setting his mind instead to reciting poems he found comforting. Again his breath was restricted, pulling him out of his exercise.

He wanted to complain again, but instead he kept quiet and tried to think through the various meditation techniques he’d encountered. Every last one of them involved breathing. Then a thought struck him. He held his breath, leaving his eyes open.

The minutes wore on, his favorite poems along with them.

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert… I, when in good humor, give grass its green, blazon blue sky, and endow the sun with gold… In Eden, females sleep the winter in soft silken veils, woven by their own hands to hide them in the darksome grave…

A young Sensus threw his rifle into its case, slammed his spare magazines into their crate, then slammed both lids shut and tossed them into H1’s hold. Wave signaled for everyone to strap in, and they were off, reeling a little from the shockwave caused by the last volley of shaped charges Wave launched into the Rathi frigate’s engine.

Once clear of the battlefield, Solomon rose and went to his quarters. It wasn’t long before he heard the knock on his door.

“Come.”

Sensus opened the door and came in sheepishly. “Permission to speak freely, Captain?”

“Always.”

He sat down at the small table between the doorway and Solomon’s desk, then leaned over and closed the door.

Solomon set his book down on his end table. “What’s bothering you, my boy?”

The younger man shook his head; young as a Harbinger, though his body wore the wear of a weathered man. “Is this all there is?”

Solomon set up on his cot. “What do you mean?”

“All we do is fight, and never for any clear purpose. Is this my new life? If I’m truly deathless now, then I wish you wouldn’t have woken me.”

“Sensus, we have clear objectives every time we spin up.”

“But we’re not fighting a war, Captain. We fight these exos on this colony, or we travel to this moon and destroy that mining outfit. I can’t see the big picture.”

“I understand. Believe me, Sensus, I’ve been a Harbinger so long I’ve had to reaffirm my purpose a dozen times over.”

“I forget that sometimes. You’ve seen Imogen.”

Solomon nodded, his eyes looking back on another life, another time. “She kindled me herself, as I kindled you.”

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but why did you kindle me?”

“It’s not entirely a deliberate act.”

“I was an accident, then? Were you as well?”

“Some view it as an accident. It is an incredible set of circumstances. I never set out to enkindle anyone, let alone you specifically. But something in you, something in that strange pairing of a tragic life’s end and a fragment of active ohr, something in that impossible coincidence screamed to me and I couldn’t ignore it. And that it I couldn’t ignore turned out to be you.”

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Sensus aged in the body of his mind, and asked Solomon the uncomfortable question.

“That was you in Needle’s recording, wasn’t it?”

Solomon looked out the window, fighting the urge to think of it as his. Perhaps the comfort of the apartment had worked to the Quorum’s ends. He felt drawn to the place, lulled by it.

“Sol...”

He saw nine faces in the stars; one nearing death, the others dead in life.

He turned his head slightly, pausing Sensus’s pursuit of an answer. “Yes. But the recording was doctored.”

“But you met Haleon. Made obeisance to him.”

“I was brought before him, and I feigned fealty. You can’t understand, Sensus, unless you’ve been in Ulro. I wandered there for over a year. It was torture.”

“You wanna know what’s torture? Putting up with your boring attitude. That’s torture.”

Solomon turned sharply. The Sentinel was lounging on one of the couches, drink in hand. “Needle!”

Solomon was back in the Dial’s bower. Needle was sitting cross legged on the ground, looking up at him and shaking his head.

“What?”

“I...”

Needle shrugged. “You what?”

Solomon shook his head. “Is this really necessary, Shah Rii?”

The tree’s halo turned from white to pink. “Yes.”

“We don’t have time for this.”

“Sure we do,” said Needle.

“No,” said Shah Rii, “you don’t.” And she sighed, the sound like any other wind in a forest. “Do you know why I am called the Dial?”

Needle leaned forward with melodramatic interest. “I’ve always wondered.”

“Because I know the hour. I’m telling you now that the hour is late. Albion is opening the shell of Othomo and I fear what will happen next.”

“We saw it,” said Solomon. “What’s happening to the ship, Shah Rii?”

“Don’t you know? You saw it before its travelling state once.”

“That was a whole different time. A whole different Briah.”

“No. It was this one. But don’t ask me to explain that to you now, Sol. The vagaries of time take more time to explain than anyone ever has. It is a cosmic irony most severitating.”

Needle laughed. “I thought you made that word up just to describe me.”

“Are you jealous?” Her light glowed a deep, comforting gold. “My boys, my sweet, brave boys, please let me help you.”

Solomon and Needle exchanged a nod. “I know what to do.”

“Yeah,” Needle agreed. “I’ll behave if he does.”

Solomon didn’t sit down, close his eyes or hold his breath. He summoned all the radiant force within him, holding in the pain his organs felt in that searing light. On the eve of his body melting away, he found himself floating as if in water, and when he looked at his hands, he saw stars swirling in the space where expected his fingers to be.

He looked for his companion. Needle was there, but he wasn’t the machine man Solomon expected. Glowing nerves spread like fine hair from a cluster of suns, and beneath the lacteals and veins that wrapped around those fibrous sensors, a chain of worlds dangled free in the stillwater void that held them. In that stillness, Solomon’s light turned to a fine mist and wove its way like ink through water towards Needle, whose own radiance had begun to seep out of the cracks in his cold-iron heart.

Then they were not floating, but clinging to an invisible bank, and when the water began to overtake them, they saw each other up close. Needle’s eyes glowed bright, and Solomon’s welled up with tears.

And then they were on dry ground, an island of fertile soil floating in deep space.

“I saw a man in a lab coat,” said Solomon. “But I was you. Who was the man? You felt…”

Needle raised his finger to his mouth. “Shhh…”. He pointed to the ground at the edge of their island. A narrow, shallow stream cut through the grass and vanished down a cave. A faint blue light flickered from inside the cave.

“When you last you spoke,” Needle said, “was it in a cave? Glowing, perhaps?”

Solomon went to the stream, ignoring Needle, and put the fingers of one hand in the water. He sent power into the flow, and the light ceased flickering. More power, and the stream stopped flowing. The rocks on the riverbed then revealed themselves to be stairs and they made their way down.

“Was it this way the last time you saw him?” Needle asked.

“You see what you want to see, Needle.”

“Then explain we aren’t on a beach on Pallus. I wanna see android women in neon bikinis with drink trays, not some creepy little cave. We must still be sharing consciousnesses a little."

"Are we going to talk about that, then? I saw some strange things from your eyes."

"Yeah. Dear old dad, right before sending me off on my journey."

"Doctor Yamin was your father? Figuratively or literally?"

"I don't remember much of my life before he put me in this tin can, but he was my daddy allright."

"So, that story you told Sensus..."

"That all happened, more or less, but after the fact. My guess, as best as I can make, is that dad used me as a guinea pig before he put all those crazies in their shells."

"No wonder you avoid Samhadi. Why not simply tell people?"

Needle, walking ahead, stopped and turned to face Solomon. "Spitball a few possible reasons and I'll tell you how close to the mark you get."

"No one would believe you. You'd rather not think about it. It's been so long you don't even care."

"You nailed the first too. Unfortunately, I've got nearly limitless data storage and a recall script that would impress Yahweh, making it difficult for me to let things go. That's the secret to forgiveness by the way; faulty memory. Hence the phrase 'forgive and forget.'"

Solomon kept his argument to himself, and let the next few moments pass quietly. The cave had begun to descend more steeply, and instead of stairs they had a broken path through jagged boulders and slick moss; likely due to Needle's emotional state. Eventually the path leveled out, and they passed through a curtain of red vines into a grotto. They were serenaded by multiple streams and singing insects, and the roof of the grotto was dotted with stars.

"So, what exactly was I looking at when I was you?" Needle asked. "I saw your Seventh Seal and some girl I didn't quite recognize."

"That was Imogen's sister, Ona.'

"Sister? Since when do Harbingers have family?"

"You were honest with me, so I'll be honest with you. Imogen and Ona were not Harbingers."

Needle stopped again. "Really. That's the most interesting thing I've heard all week. What were they then? And what are you?"

"I'm what I appear to be, Needle. We're all Imogen's creations. Her and Ona died in an anomaly I can't even begin to explain; the catalyst for my life's work. This life's work, anyway. Ona was freed from the anomaly by the Surge and found by some fanatics who believed killing Imogen would put an end to Ulro and this whole cycle of destruction. They left her with me and my followers to train in my gambit."

"Huh. When did all this happen? You think I'd have heard of this Ona girl."

Solomon squinted at Needle again. "Something tells me you have. You did recognize her, didn't you? I can feel your residue on that memory."

"Ever recognize a face, but can't remember for the life of you where you've seen it?'

Solomon nodded. "Allright. I'll accept that for now. Let's keep going. The Bones of Hod are only the first objective Sensus gave us."

"I thought they were the only objective Sensus gave us."

"He ordered me to continue my work, starting with Hod. Now let's go."

They resumed walking, weaving their way through a bog filled with bones from every sapient kindred, careful not to lose their footing on the rocks popping out of the murky water.

"Oh no," said Needle, halting yet again.

"What? I can't see as far as you."

The grotto, not in fact a grotto at all, showed them an infinite plain of mossy bogs inside a cave whose ceiling mirrored a night sky. But the will empowering that projection was omnipresent, manifesting on a hilltop crested by standing stones of dolomite, osmium and pearl. Solomon could see the hill, and knew Hod to be enshrined within the stones, but the projection held the hill too far for him to spy whatever halted Needle's steps.

"How real is the place?" he asked.

"As real as we make it," Solomon answered.

Needle's clothing disappeared in a white flash. His hyperfiber skin opened along his forearms and shoulders, revealing batteries of micro missile tubes and laser turrets. Jets sprang from his heels and wings from his ankles.

Solomon reached out with his hands and summoned a glowing orb of raw energy. "What is it?"

"It's him."

"Who?"

Needle's heels glowed and he rocketed forward. Solomon channeled power into his legs and ran after him, ready all the while to fire blasts from his summoned orb. He skidded to a halt when he got to the hill.

The standing stones bled. Hod's shrine, a simple basin, held a pile of components that, according to folklore, he had accrued as a corporeal body over his many fabled sojourns. When Solomon saw him before, there was an ember of living light inside those components, glowing faintly. A corpse grey tree had broken through the hilltop and surrounded Hod's basin with its gnarled branches. A lone root had clawed its way through the ground and wrapped around the shrine, spreading long fingers at its end that had pried away Hod's shell. The last of his light was gone, flowing in dim traces through the fingers into the root that sprouted them.

"Well, well, if it isn't Briah's most wanted, travelling together for a change," said Goethe of Goetaria, also known as the Gnomon. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Solomon snarled, Needle growled, and the etheric hilltop beamed with radiant fire and missile plumes.