Morrigan finally awoke with a headache that threatened to split her skull, her body sore and the dryness of dehydration. She shifted and groaned as she felt resistance. Blinking away the bleariness from her eyes she found that the room she was in was mostly dark save for bright light that shed through a small, barred window. The floor was hard and ice cold, metal and quickly found out that she could not move her arms which were bound to her chest in a dense fabric and heavy chains that weighed her down. Well good morning princess, I hope you had a nice nap.

She was startled by Apollyon’s seemingly loud voice in her head. “Where are we?”

On a prison ship.

“What!” she asked aloud, adrenaline making her alert. She looked around frantically to only find more darkness that her enhanced vision could not even penetrate.

Oh yeah you missed that, you’re being shipped off to a penal prison planet called Castile V. They’ve had you chained and sedated this entire time, seems you made an impression heh..

“Why did you let them take me? Why is that funny?”

Well power does bring notoriety. Anyways, you’ve had guns trained on you since they hauled you off, even knowing what you’re capable of dear: fighting off gunships, a battalion of soldiers and however many guards are on this ship is not within your skill set. It was better to just let you sleep and repair what the asshole did to you.

“Well, thanks for that at least…” she replied in her head as she heard a guard walking. Apollyon’s answer was not ideal, but it did calm her down to the point of thinking a little more logically. “How long was I out?”

Eh about a week or so? Honestly after spending millennia trapped in that planet of yours, my sense of time is kind of shit. My guess though is that we’re almost there seeing as they stopped sticking you with sedatives.

“How do you suppose we get out of here?” she asked, her inner voice pleadingly hopeful.

We don’t. Her hopes dropped right there. For now, at least. I have no idea what a penal colony is like, but I say we play along and go from there. Not like we have much choice with you bound like a sushi roll.

Morrigan tried to move her arms again and found dreadful accuracy behind that simile. She could not help but chuckle, “how do you know what a sushi roll is?” She decided there was no point in talking in her head which required slightly more focus to do than to just speak aloud and let Apollyon hear her.

Do you know how fanatical humans are about that shit? Centuries upon centuries of listening to them try to claim one way is the best way to make them compared to others. Then again, food seems to be a pretty acute obsession of humans. I don’t understand why.

“Have you ever had food before?” she asked with genuine curiosity. She had no idea what a god ate.

The answer to that is no, I have never needed material sustenance. That doesn’t go without saying that if I had a mouth, I wouldn’t try it.

Morrigan tilted her head sharply in amusement to make up for the inability to shrug. She went to ask something else before a klaxon alarm and flashing lights went off and a voice over an intercom spoke.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Attention all crew members, docking in process, proceed with prepping cargo for offloading.”

The speaker repeated the announcement then cut off. There was a sudden shudder throughout the entire ship that rocked Morrigan slightly.

Seems we’re home… Apollyon sounded odd to her, as if it was worried. Morrigan knew full well how Earth prisons worked, so she suspected space prisons to be no different which made it more odd that the normally fearless and power hungry being inhabiting her body seemed worried. She could hear a series of footsteps approaching as well as a set of heavy metallic foot falls that sounded way larger than a human. A shadow of a head cast in the opening that she could see before she heard a massive locking device unwind. She guessed the opening was part of a door she could not see.

Blinded by multiple flashlights as well as the deck lighting, she was proven right about two things; one was that the opening belonged to an unnecessarily thick reinforced door, and second that the heavy metallic stomping was definitely not human per se, but that of a human piloting a suit of mech-armor, equipped with enough weaponry that could end her life instantly. If that was not enough, there were three other guards spouting shotguns who seemed less stalwart than the mech-armor.

She began to see Apollyon’s amusement as she could feel the fear emanating off the guards while having a brief moment to acknowledge the weird sensation of sensing the emotion. It seemed quite ridiculous that they were this afraid of a 19-year-old girl, especially one bound as she was. She could not help but smirk as one of the guards entered the room and proceeded to pull her off the floor and get her on her feet.

She was led out of the cell into a hall of reinforced steel doors and entire squads lining the deck with their weapons trained on her. She was actually thankful that Apollyon’s instincts were right, there was no way out of this alive if she had been free and chose to fight.

The heavy stomping of the mech-armor followed behind as the three guards escorted her at gun point. The entire way she saw nervous guardsmen and began to wonder what horror stories they were told by the colonel to have them this worried. She even found the humor to make a guardsman jump by clicking her teeth at him to emphasize that she does in fact bite. However, that was met with a barrel of a gun pointed directly at her face and that had her decide humor was probably not the best thing to attempt for the time being.

In her core though, she felt pleased. There was something about the fear she caused in these people that made her feel good. Perhaps it was a layer added to what Apollyon mentioned when it came to power. Power was not just the amount of ability one had; money had power, influence did as well. The ability to strike fear into a foe or embolden one’s ally was also power itself. In her case, infamy was a power that emboldened her own resolve but shook her enemy to the core and weaken themselves in her wake. That is the path she would take.

To leave a wake in her trail, whether it was on the ground or through the stars, she would leave a wake so large it would rock the foundation of the Federation. She would be the cause of the Federations collapse, by her hand and her design it would end with the death of a tyrannical era and bring peace to those who strove for peace. That was a promise she made not only to herself, but to everyone she held dear: her parents, Echo squad, Mo’Emori, the Eskarii, the magic-less Terrans, Taylor…

As she looked out the windows of the docking tunnel that led to a massive blast door, the rotating flashing lights to signify that the door was about to open. The planet surface was barren, lifeless, and devoid of anything but the massive gun emplacements that formed a line out each side, some of which were aimed directly at the prison ship.

The blast doors opened into another small area with a second set of doors, assuming the planet had no atmosphere, was a transfer area between the colony and the void of space. Shoved from behind with the butt of a shotgun, Morrigan stepped towards the massive entry way.

Part of her was terrified, struck to the very essence of her being about being stuck in the helpless situation she was in, yet at the same time, part of her was happy. A small smile formed along her lips, she survived Earth’s abhorrence, survived being hunted by the Federation military, survived the brutal torture of the psychopath Lieutenant Colonel Amaranthe, now she just had to survive her new home, The penal colony of Castile V. Through all the chaos over the past week, all of the hardship and turmoil she had endured; her therapy sessions, her fall into the abyss, fighting wolves, fighting the military; there had been one singular consistency throughout it all. She survived, and she would continue to survive by any means necessary.