The Doom makes us do many things. – common saying during the Doom Era, as recorded by Arch-Historian Matrion Huv'lk, in his Feeble People of Post-Doom Society, from The Annotations

Everyone was shouting at once.

"—Dorja—” Turtle screamed.

“—not so reasonable after all—” the visitor cried.

“—out of here, Turtle!” Dorja shouted.

“—keep away from his hands, that suit’s got power armor!” Master Korvix warned.

“—eek!”

“Turtle!”

“—rrrrrrrraaaahhh!”

The cargo hold came alive with the sound of combat, and it carried throughout Veringulf’s tight passages as Dorja clashed with the visitor and the two of them went tumbling out into the corridor, shoving, slashing, grabbing and slipping loose of one another. A savage scramble ensued, the two of them merging and coming apart, like two riptides pulling in opposite directions, or two cosmic bodies warring for command of a star system. There was hardly even room inside this ship for two people to walk abreast, and Turtle had barely enough room to get out of the way before Dorja and the visitor gripped one another’s weapon hand and began redirecting attackings

Dorja delivered a knee to his abdomen. It did nothing, his vac-suit was armored. Her enemy head-butted her, his helmet cracking against her skull, stunning her. She heard a dull ringing in her ears. She checked his knife hand with her left reaching-hand and pulled chi from her root and into the palms of her weeping-hands, flashing the faery lights into his goggled eyes and hoping to blind him.

He growled, and raked his boot down her bare shins, pulling skin clean off and Dorja knew at once that he’d used the magnetic crampons he’d likely used for walking around the exterior hull. He kicked her with those crampons again and again. Using all four of her hands, she gripped her glaive’s shaft and rammed him with it, pushing back against his chest and looking to off-balance him.

In the close confines, there was no room to swing or thrust her glaive, but she could use the shaft to attack, hook, shove and grapple.

The visitor held his blade in icepick-grip, hooked the shaft of Dorja’s glaive, held it close before head-butting her again. She heard another distant ringing, heard Turtle somewhere screaming, heard Master Korvix calling out from somewhere “—forget pressing his centerline, it won’t work!” as she pushed against her enemy.

He swung with a wild haymaker. Dorja caught it with her right reaching-hand. He unhooked his knife from her glaive and slashed at her face. Dorja tucked her chin to hide her neck, hiding her throat and taking the cut across her forehead. She shin-pressed him, off-balancing him, shoving him backwards but he recovered quickly—

“—too powerful, Dorja!” Korvix cried. “You need to confine him! No good, Dorja, you need to control his options, limit his spacing!”

“Dorja!” shouted Kirek, who suddenly came tearing down the corridor. “What in—?” He saw the scuffle and to his credit he did not hesitate, he came up behind the intruder and wrapped both his arms around the armored neck.

Their enemy hardly noticed.

A giant gauntleted hand reached out, palming Dorja’s entire face, wrenching it sideways and flinging her bodily against the far wall. All was chaos. Newpik and Joshua rushed in at Turtle’s command of “Sick him!” and Kirek put his back against a wall and kicked straight out at the enemy, whose suit’s stabilizers made him as solid as boulder. The two bots barely did anything, Newpik was swatted away and Joshua fumbled over him and fell on his side. Dorja could hardly see through the blood leaking down from her forehead and into her eyes, but her right weeping-hand caught the forearm of the enemy just as he slashed out at her. She batted away the attack, spun around, and mule-kicked him in the stomach.

Again, he barely moved.

Dorja wanted to lure him away from the others, so she kicked him again to make sure she had his attention and retreated towards the airlock. Still trapped within the confines of the corridor, she drew her glaive straight back and thrust forward with the butt of the shaft. In this way, she parried his knife attacks from long range, push-stepping backwards, goading him with small, questing attacks. Thankfully he took the bait, and he came at her screaming until she had maneuvered him into a wider space—right outside the sealed door of the airlock.

Her enemy got into a low stance, glanced once behind him upon hearing Kirek’s footsteps approaching, then looked back at her. He held the knife low, still in icepick-grip, his free hand out in front, ready to parry the glaive if need be. In these confines, she couldn’t swing her weapon with any efficacy, so thrusts were all she had.

Her enemy push-stepped forward, swiping once, testing her. Dorja parried it with her shaft and then attacked his legs using Low Heaven, and she would have tripped him, too, if he wasn’t so well armored. It appeared the power armor did indeed have a working core, and Dorja could feel the heat roiling off of the suit. There was a low whine, the suit’s internal fans working overtime. Dorja imagined it must be hot as an oven inside there.

For a moment, they all stood there beside the airlock door—Dorja, Kirek, and the visitor—and all of them were panting heavily. For a third time, Dorja wiped the blood out of her eyes. Kirek had a short metal pipe he’d picked up from somewhere, probably one of the spare conduits from the parts closet. Dorja had no idea what he expected to do with it.

They corralled the visitor. Their enemy swiped back at them, and they parried or gave short attacks back that did nothing. Dorja performed a triangle step around to his left side, thrust forward hard to the spot where his neckpiece met his helmet, staggered him, but again the suit’s stabilizers kept him upright.

And they all went back to standing there. And panting. And glancing between one another.

But Dorja could hear the power armor whining louder. “Dorja knows what that sound means,” she said, controlling her breath. She wiped more blood from her eyes. It was really pouring now, it would need fast-clot sealant or stitches. “That suit is old. Pre-Doom, or just after?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Power core is wearing down. If it overheats, parts will begin to melt. Core’s shell will crack. An exposed core is dangerous, radiation will be lethal, you’ll be dead within days, if it doesn’t melt through your flesh first.”

The enemy was huffing. Those big red goggled eyes glanced between Kirek and Dorja.

“Revised deal,” said Dorja. “Because we’re both so reasonable. Half a jar of pycno.”

“Didn’t mean to scare the girl,” the enemy panted. He took a step towards the airlock. “She scared me, is all. I wasn’t going to kill her, I just lunged at her out of reflex. And that hologram—” he gestured with his knife over to Master Korvix, still hovering in the doorway leading to the cargo hold. “Just startled me, is all.”

“Even so,” she said. “You are running out of time in that thing.”

The enemy seemed to be seriously considering it. A faint hissing sound emitted from his armor. “Half a jar, then. And my apologies.”

“And tell Dorja how you got in.”

“When I have the pycno in hand,” he said tetchily. “And not before.”

“Kirek?”

Kirek looked over at her, eyes narrowed. “You’re not seriously considering giving this scum—”

“This is Dorja’s ship, Kirek.”

“He’s robbing us! He tried to kill us!”

“Didn’t mean to hurt the little one,” the visitor said. “On my word as a man, I didn’t mean it.”

“The ‘word as a man’ doesn’t mean much coming from a thief—”

“Dorja?” said the visitor, looking back at her. “Are we doing this trade or not?”

“You’re running out of time,” Kirek said. “Your battery’s eating itself, I can smell the burning ozone from here—”

“You’re running out of time, too, friend.”

Dorja shot the visitor a look. “What do you mean?”

“You honestly didn’t think I walked in here alone without a contingency plan for getting out, did you?” He turned his head fractionally to face Kirek. “Check your external cams, have them take a look at your exhaust manifold. Portside. Zoom in. Let me know once you see it.”

But Dorja didn’t need Kirek to check it out to know what the visitor was talking about. “You put something on our ship? What? A bomb?”

“Just a little insurance,” he panted. “I needed to make sure I had a way out.”

“You damned snake!” Kirek spat.

“The Doom makes us do many things. Once upon a time, we could be cordial, and if you saw a ship out in the void you could ask ‘pretty please.’ Hells, you could even exchange a song and a few jokes for a week’s supply. Folks used to that, you know. Called them bards and versifiers. But those days are over,” he added grimly. “The Brood saw to that.”

The blood once more ran into Dorja’s eye, and she wiped it away with a forearm. She considered this trespasser, wondered again what his story had been, where he had come from. Had he always been like this? He hadn’t fought all that well, Dorja felt confident the only reason he’d been able to do as well as he had was because of the power armor, so the visitor did not strike her as a trained soldier or mercenary. A desperate man who found the power armor somewhere, clever enough to have survived this long. For all she knew, this man had been a schoolteacher before the Doom came to his world and forced him to stay on the move.

“Kirek,” she said. “Do as I said. Give him the pycno. We will make it to Saito or to the asteroid colony—”

“No!” the visitor said suddenly. “No, you don’t want to go Agrinon.”

“What is Agrinon?”

“It’s what they call that place. The asteroid. Don’t go there.”

“Why not?”

“Trust me. The Doom makes us do many things, and those people…there are no words for what they’ve become. Consider that advice freely given, on the house.” He held out a huge gloved hand and waved his fingers, a gimme gesture. “Pycno. Now.”

Dorja didn’t know why, but she believed him about Agrinon. Something in his tone, like you might expect of a man embittered and beleaguered by one too many disappointments in life, and who might hate to see the same disappointments befall a stranger. And Dorja felt a cold shiver travel up her spine, tiny pinpricks of harsh realization, knowing that had things been different, had she not had her mother’s Candle or the teachings of Master Jerrod, then this could be her. This broken shell of a man, existing inside someone else’s forgotten armor, desperate and doing anything to survive, undoubtedly having been put through what the Doom had put everyone else through. Perhaps more.

“Kirek, get him what he wants,” she said. “Dorja won’t say it again.”

Kirek stood there a moment, watching the visitor, and finally moved to obey Dorja’s command. He went into the engine bay, and returned a few minutes later with a half-kilo jar of pycno.

“Set it down,” the visitor said. “Roll it over here.”

Kirek did as bidden, begrudgingly, looking like he was still vying for an opportunity to wrest control back over this situation. The visitor knelt slowly, the actuators in each of his suit’s knees whining from the strain. He was close to the end of that power suit’s lifespan. He picked up the jar slowly, shook it. He nodded. “All right, then.”

“Tell Dorja how you got inside her ship,” she said.

The man’s large shoulder pauldrons gave a shrug. “The airlock.”

“Impossible. Veringulf would’ve warned Dorja.”

“Unless I told it not to.”

“How?”

“Might want to take a look at your outer panel. The airlock is roughly spliced, likely you or some previous owner did the job in haste. Pretty shoddy work. Most of the wires leading to the manual bypass switch weren’t even covered. I used a jackport,” he said, removing something from the back of his belt. Dorja had seen a jackport before. It was a little smaller than an omni-pad, palm-sized, and with the tap of a button emitted holographic strands of code. “Replaced part of the system code with malware, convinced it to do a factory reset, that gave me admin controls independent of your ship’s AI. It’s an old trick. I was actually surprised it worked. Probably wouldn’t have with a newer model.”

Dorja nodded slowly. “Dorja will update that when she can.”

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“Be sure that you do. It’s dangerous out here. All sorts.” He waved the jackport towards the airlock, and its inner door slowly shunted open. He stepped inside. “You’re not going to fire on me once I’m out? I’ve still got the bomb rigged to your portside manifold. I’ll leave that for you to disable.”

“Dorja is Dorja.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you can take her at her word,” Kirek said, glaring daggers at him.

“And Dorja does not kill,” she said.

“But my conscience doesn’t struggle with the task—” Kirek began.

“Kirek,” she hissed warningly. She looked over at him, frustrated beyond words. She had never seen this side of him, and she’d thought she knew him pretty well at this point. Just goes to show. Hotheadedness and vengeance did not suit him. “You may go,” she told the visitor. “In peace.”

The visitor gave one final nod, and said, “Good luck.” Then he sealed himself into the airlock, depressurized it, and opened the outer door and leapt out into space. As soon as he was gone, a tightness left her chest, and Dorja turned towards Turtle at the same time the small girl came running out of the corridor where she’d been hiding and threw her arms around Dorja’s waist, burying her face in Dorja’s belly. “Is Turtle okay?”

“Yes.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No. Is he gone, Dorja?”

They watched through Veringulf’s external cams, viewed on Kirek’s omni-pad, and there went the mysterious visitor floating through the void, over to a dark patch of space. It was a Black Egg, all right, and no mistake. The visitor vanished into it. In less than a minute, the Black Egg dissolved, revealing a boxy gray ship, twice the size of Veringulf. Its engines flared once, and it banked hard away from them and cruised away.

And they couldn’t fire on him now, even if they wanted to, lest the visitor detonate the bomb remotely. His tactic of mutually assured destruction (or stranding) had worked. Dorja watched the ship fade into the distance. The range on Veringulf’s quad turret was…What is it, exactly? At the moment she couldn’t remember. The turret’s plasmafire would begin dissolving after a few miles, she knew that much, and it would become completely decayed and not at all potent after hundreds of miles. And what is the range on his detonator? Could he detonate the bomb from that far away?

As Dorja watched the visitor’s ship vanish in the distance, she pulled away from Turtle, handing her off to Kirek. “Dorja will get her vac-suit. She will go out and deal with the bomb.”

“I should go with you.”

“No, Dorja will have Joshua or Newpik come with—”

“What in blazes was all that about?!” Luke Kennison suddenly cried. They all turned, startled, as the man came stumbling down the companionway, a wrench in one hand, held defensively like a club. “Who was that?! Are they gone?! Did they—”

“They are gone, Luke,” Dorja assured him. “They left and they are far from here. Getting farther by the minute. He is long gone and will be far, far away—”

“Well,” Kirek said. “Not too far.” And a wolfish grin spread across his face.

Dorja lifted an eyebrow. “Kirek? What did you do?”

The scout gave a shrug, and scratched casually at his beard, still grinning. “Let’s just say he was in such a hurry, he didn’t bother looking at each of those pycno pellets I gave him.”

Dorja shook her head, not understanding. Then, it hit her. “You…”

“Yes. Some of them were spent. Not sure how many, but I grabbed a handful from the A-drive’s empty-can dispenser. I threw them in the jar, mixed them in with the good pellets. So he walked away with not as much fuel as he thought he had.” He chuckled savagely. “When that scum gets halfway to where he’s going, he’s going to find out the hard way that you shouldn’t rob the innocent.”

“Kirek!” Dorja said. “You’ve sent that man to his death! This is not the way of the Candle!”

“The Doom makes us do many things,” he said grimly. “He could’ve asked nicely. Could’ve radioed us, asked us for help over comms. But he didn’t. He chose his method, and I chose mine. Now,” he added, raising one finger and stabbing it in the direction just over Dorja’s shoulder. “Who in the hell is that?”

Dorja turned. They all turned, in fact, and faced the flickering, blue-gray holographic form standing in the doorway into the cargo hold. Master Korvix was as still as the stars, hands clasped humbly in front of him, a man waiting patiently for a train.

Dorja ground her teeth. It had been a long time since she’d been this angry with an AI.

* * *

Dorja had bade the others leave, and closed the door to the cargo hold, sealing herself in. It was just her and the artificial intelligence now. After the visitor had gone, she’d closed the cargo hold, ordered everyone back to their rooms, and gone to the med bay so that the auto-doc could dispense some fast-clot to seal the cut across her forehead and shins. After she and Kirek performed a spacewalk and had safely removed the small, N-9 shaped charge hanging on Veringulf’s portside exhaust manifold, Dorja told Kirek to prepare another micro-jump towards Saito Sector. He had demanded she explain about the holographic Master Korvix and she had insisted that it would have to wait. Now, standing before the holographic image of the long-dead bladesman, she had to remind herself that she wasn’t speaking to it, she was speaking to the intelligence trapped inside the small, black, cubed essence box lying innocently on the floor.

Master Korvix stood now at the center of the cargo hold, flickering in and out of existence, sometimes smiling, other times vanishing due to some resolution problem with his image, and rematerializing across the room. Dorja stood before him—it, whatever—and had to resist the urge to leap out at the image. Not only was it incorporeal, it didn’t even possess a soul. It did possess a mind, though. That it did possess. And she was angry with it.

Dorja was still, like she was uncertain peril, a woman who had suddenly locked herself inside a room with a wild animal, the depths of whose mind could not be fathomed or rationalized in any logical way. Who knew the mind of an AI, especially one so advanced as this?

“You have five minutes,” she said coldly. “In five minutes, Dorja is throwing you out into space and that will be the end of this.”

“Five minutes?” the hologram said, looking puzzled, as if the concept of time was only for ephemerals and not worth the effort to contemplate. “Five minutes. But we’ve already been here, we’ve already had this conversation. We will have it. We will always be having it—”

“Stop it!” she shouted, stalking around him, eyeing him. “Dorja had the situation under control, that man was well on his way to leaving before you goaded him—”

“Is that how you do things?” he queried. “Is that how my student fares in this galaxy now?”

“Your ‘student’? Dorja is not your student. You are not even real.”

Master Korvix shrugged as if to say it made no difference how she defined reality. “Is this how you do things, Dorja, in this ‘post-Doom’ or whatever it is that you call this era? Do you let the weak and desperate control you, manipulate you into—?”

“Dorja had it under control!” she boomed, walking up to the hologram’s face and feeling ridiculous, knowing she was no more facing a real person than she was talking to a spirit. “You jeopardized Turtle. You put her at risk.”

“Ah, the girl,” he chuckled.

“Yes, the girl! She is Dorja’s responsibility!”

“And you are mine,” Master Korvix said casually, and began walking about the hold. He cast about the room now, as though he were an appraiser, and ran his hands along the wall. He ran his simulated hands against it, as if he could actually touch it. How ridiculous. “Do you know what an essence box is?”

“Of course, Dorja knows.”

“Then tell me.”

“It is a piece of old tech that keeps a mind’s simulated essence trapped within,” she said. “It is an AI that thinks because it has the stored memories of someone who once lived, that it is somehow more alive than other machines.”

“It is a chronicle,” he said, as though not hearing her. “An archive of an individual’s accumulated knowledge. All of it. Not just their knowledge of martial arts or warfare or philosophy. It is an archive of all their experiences.” Master Korvix paced about the room, taking it all in as if for the first time, nodding appreciatively, a man coming home to a place he’d long been searching for, and finally found. “Such impermanence. Metal walls, plastics, fiberoptic weaves—all of it meshed together into a vessel that sends you across the stars, into the slipstream, yet it will decay and die, just as civilizations do. You’re finding that out. All of you. Knowledge decays, too, you know.” He tapped his head. “Unless you are clever in how you pass it on.”

Dorja sneered. “You talk with pride, like it was you who came up with the idea of essence boxes. But it wasn’t. It was old Blademasters using Stranger tech, reworked by the person that actually had your memories, that actually lived. You’re just a box with ideas in it, the product of the Strangers, who lived so long ago no one knows what they even looked like. Their leftover tech was somehow harnessed by old Blademasters, and that’s all you are—”

“These walls must become impregnable,” he said. Again, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Not just by reinforcing its hull or adding better energy shields—you and your whole crew, all those you keep close, they must be made impenetrable if you are to survive. If my teachings are to have time to take root.” He nodded again, sagely, a man confirming the wisdom in his own words. Dorja hated him. “You have enemies. You heard the visitor, he said so himself. Someone is looking for you. Someone called Syyd?”

She glared at him. “Three minutes,” said. “Then Dorja is throwing you out.”

“I see I’m running out of time. Very well. Let’s speed this up, then. This essence box,” he said, pointing to it, “is all that is or was ever me. My experiences included, as I said. And those experiences told me everything I needed to know about the visitor. He was going to get what he needed out of you, and then more. You had already kowtowed to his needs—”

“Dorja negotiated.”

“Fool!” he spat with shocking venom. “You yielded. There is a difference.”

“For this you risked this ship and everyone on it? You risked Turtle’s life to make a point about Dorja’s methods!”

“I prompted him to make the desperate move I saw already brewing in him. It was in his voice, Dorja. He was going to try for more. He was. He just needed a little more time to think about how he would do it, and he was gauging you by your reaction to his demands—” Master Korvix stopped pacing, rippling and fading from existence, then rematerialized across the room from her, repeating what he’d just said, “—by your reaction to his demands.” He’d glitched, and seemingly hadn’t noticed.

“Two minutes left,” she said, still fuming.

“You desire self-actualization, attainment of that which few ever achieve. Total control over your body and your chi. I sense an incomplete warrior before me. By your fighting style, it appears you were given just enough training to make yourself a target to others. And did I hear you correctly when you said you do not kill?” He tsked and waggled a finger at her. “We’ll work on that.”

“No, we won’t. That part of Dorja is non-negotiable.”

“Really? But I heard you ‘negotiating’ so readily with our visitor. Seems to me you are open to all sorts of negotiations—”

“Dorja is Dorja!” she thundered, and stamped her foot resolutely. “Dorja. Is. Dorja. And she will not compromise her morals.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because they are superior to all else! They are the Candle!”

“The Candle,” he whispered. “The Candle. Yes…yes, I’ve heard you speak on it before, either while I was inside the essence box or because we’ve had this conversation before. That Candle of yours…feels so…limiting.” Master Korvix stared at her for a protracted moment, curling his lower lip in a moue of distaste. “Pity. For I saw great potential in you.” The hologram sighed, and looked down at the floor a moment. The silence was filled by the hum of air-scrubbers. At last, he said, “Before you chuck me out into the void, Dorja, let me ask you something. Are there any other Masters willing to take you in? Do you know of any Blademasters left in this Doomed galaxy that will guide you? Anyone in this ethos that will take you to the next level in your training?”

She walked over to him, and said coldly, “Dorja. Is. Dorja.”

“I see,” he said, obviously disappointed. “I see. Then, for your sake, I hope that whatever this personal quest of yours is, wherever it comes from, I hope it is doused, and soon. For Turtle’s sake, if none other’s.”

“What do you mean?” she said, sensing a trap in the form of rhetoric.

Rhetoric had always frustrated her, and even Master Jerrod had said she’d better master an understanding of it or it could be her undoing. Dorja’s personal philosophy was simple, as pristine as when her mother had bequeathed it upon her death, but hyperbole and sophistry, guile and intrigue, these things often got the better of her, or else left her out in the cold whenever she refused to partake. She couldn’t win. Whatever she did, she just couldn’t win against rhetoric. Because rhetoric swayed others so easily, it was like a second language that would forever be beyond her, and in the deepest part of her Candle, which she kept so closely guarded, she hated herself for her ignorance of its power. Because it was clear others were smarter, and that someone more cunning could be able to persuade her that they had some secret knowledge she could never possess.

Rhetoric, Dorja knew, could easily poison the Candle.

All Dorja knew was the Oath of the Candle, its importance, and the blade. But those things often failed to stand up against a carefully worded argument, a sophist’s logic, or a single but fancy-sounding word, conveyed with all the confidence of a god who had a grasp over magicks no one else had.

“What do you mean?” she said again, feeling herself slipping into the trap, even as she desired to stay out of it. “What do you mean ‘for Turtle’s sake’?”

“Those with authority and power grant nothing to the common man unless it is demanded, unless it is taken,” Korvix said, starting to pace again. “You can be certain of this. It is a universal constant, like the exact level of collapse needed before a star goes supernova. Find what things a person or group will quietly submit to without thought, and you have uncovered the precise measure of injustice that will be imposed upon them.”

“Make sense. You’ve got one minute left.”

“All of society is a matchstick explosive, you see, and the limits of tyrants can be judged by the length of the fuse on those they oppress.” The long-dead Master smiled. “At present, I’d imagine the fuse is pretty long. A Doom such as this…it will make people desperate. They will search for leaders. Those leaders will impose what they want. As sure as a supernova follows a collapse in pressure. A people’s fuse will become long, they will tolerate so much injustice for the sake of promised security.”

“Dorja’s fuse isn’t long,” she said. “And you’re out of time.”

“No. No, your fuse is quite short. And a short fuse is a dangerous thing to possess in a universe filled with matchsticks. Which is, from all I can tell, precisely the kind of state this galaxy is in now. A far cry from the Kingdom that I and my brothers knew.”

“You don’t have any brothers. You are a copy. A cheap imitation of someone much greater.” Dorja marched over to the other side of the cargo hold and picked up the essence box. Master Korvix’s hologram remained exactly where it was.

“All right, fine,” he said suddenly. “Fine, Dorja. I submit. You win. I can see there will be no swaying you, but at present I have only one function and that is to pass on all that I am, all my teachings. And I admit to a certain need for companionship.”

Dorja tilted her head. “So,” she snorted. “It is loneliness that compels you.”

“You weren’t entirely wrong when you said I am trapped inside the box. You can put me back inside and toss me out. You could do that. Or,” he offered, walking over to her, his footsteps soundless, but his robes making a shuffling noise, “I can make you a promise. That I will train you, and that I will also wait for you.”

“Wait for Dorja to do what?”

“To come around. To acknowledge that you will not be able to be so kind forever, not if you want to protect Turtle and Kirek and all the other ungrateful sorts who will never appreciate your Candle. And, when that day comes, you will learn the Tenth and final Exalted Fist. But first, you have to learn J’ing.”

“J’ing? What is that?”

“The first step on your journey. The First Exalted Fist.”

Dorja snorted. She nearly walked right out of the cargo hold, entered the airlock, and flung the essence box out into the void. She very nearly did.

But then she looked over at the long-dead Master’s visage, and hated herself because she felt herself falling for the argument, the rhetoric. Worse, she felt herself falling into the other trap Master Jerrod had once warned her about: Your insatiable desire for knowledge, Dorja, particularly in the martial arts, is to be commended, he’d said. But it can be a trap, one that draws you in by your obsession, which, to your downfall, may cause you to focus on it to the exclusion of all else.

In the years after her mother’s death, and especially after she’d run away from Master Jerrod and been found again wandering the streets alone, Dorja had committed herself to training, first because it had been a distraction, and then because it had grown into something more.

A calling.

Dorja nearly stormed out and commended the essence box to the depths of space. She very nearly did.

But Dorja couldn’t. Dorja wanted to know.

She started towards the door. Stopped. Turned back to the holographic visage. “What is J’ing?”

Master Korvix looked at her. Then, he offered a slow, warm smile.

image [https://i.imgur.com/f6fHUfp.jpg]