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The course filled her eyes, her feathers consumed her senses. She was swimming among the futures of what could come from what had been.

Her potencies in her feathers had lightened while her bones grew heavy with the strain of being shifted and turned. She could feel the world around her being warped and compressed and the steps of time shuddering and slowing yet she knew also being greatly distorted by her passing.

The volume of what could be done immediately had grown, making the act of moments stretch wider and further head of her. She was living with the potentials hundreds of thousands of body lengths ahead of her practically brushing her consciousness as instantaneous. Her skin and flesh was ahead of her. An envelope of the possible which she could respond too.

At speed Tunie was a vast and delicate cloud of herself and full of furious power and danger.

It made the tiny space within her actual hold seem insignificant and abstract, the movements of her crew, passengers and cargo impossibly close.

Practically speaking she was no longer even capable of conceiving them and their scales.

Her sense of self was stretched too wide, too far into the future, too vast and gossamer. She could feel the sting of impacts that would never happen. She could taste the light and the momenta of things far ahead. Anticipating as if it was true and real deep in her bones.

Her branching profusion of possible courses and too brushed her future self envelope against the equally wide bloomings of every spark and speck and flicker of light and motion ahead of her.

Her course was a thing of gentle dance, shaping herself into a spiraling whorling wave of potentiality around the equally fluttering whorls and sharp sheets and bulbs of dust and matter and erratic long light hinted sources.

Each ship too was its own unfolded arcing whirling maelstrom of possibility, highlighted with sharper more certain courses where they sang to her their planned possibilities.

They were all of them dancing with the force of unleashed potency to such great degrees they could each slay each other or a dozen worlds with a moment of carelessness. They all of them to a ship sang their planned and present path to ensure against such horror.

They all of them held back a margin, a paranoid terror ready to leap and glide away if one deviated from their planned paths.

Tunie swam the future of the reef as her manifold self, choosing and wefting and curling herself so that she was always fresh and free and safe. Long millions and billions of body lengths were preferable between herself and any sizable mass or identified possible existence there of.

There were future phantoms that her course predictions would sometimes create. Imaginings at the fiercest most terrible limits of possibility. Monsters lurking behind secret wakes. She did not see them, she did not really think they were there.

But she felt tremors of their possibility anyway and kept herself clear of the phantoms.

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Tunie was simultaneously more alive and more focused now then in any other state of her life. Yet at the same time she was also much diminished, she could not be Tunie the friend of her crew, she was barely even Tunie the ship.

She was Tunie as would be and never was and had been.

Tunie the Course.

There was a purity to herself at speed that she could not put into gesture or whorling movement even to other ships. None of them could and yet they all shared the knowledge of the experience. Tunie never had the relation to time that her crew did, but in moments like this the shadow and pretense of it disappeared as well.

Flight at cruise speed for a Ship was a purifying of one’s essence. Every eye and feather and scrap of self devoted to becoming and being the course.

She felt a fluttering erraticness, a few motes of shifted long light where before she had seen clarity. This happened all along her envelope during transit. Light from fresh futures arrived all the time and she had to bend and twist herself to accommodate.

This one was abrupt but not outside her experience.

She spun and shifted her shape.

And down deep in the well of herself the minute almost forgotten physical root twisted and then momentarily itched distractingly.

A sharp not-instant that sent momentary troubling whorls up and down the weft of herself. A recoiling shift in what would already be seen as past if such a thing existed unwove and rewound her up and down her course. She danced her self evident plans to the other looping ribbons of Ship twined and twisted, fluttered and bloomed in their own specific accommodations of her.

Then all was again herself looping and twisting, she was a bit more frayed with uncertainties and many forms of danger had a sharper, more dangerous wideness of potential to them. She wove and wound and unspooled herself to accommodate.

She sought to slip herself in a fierce cleanse via the star along her path. Not close by reckoning of her infinitesimal body lengths. But intimately, claustrophobically, envelope scratching close by reckoning of herself as was and would be and had been.

Her blooming was sharp and twisted and narrow and vulnerable there but also sweetly safe and secure and it would give her great sweeping solidity and certainty when that had long since been past and was long severed from anything but the fossilized once was of herself.

It would bake and sooth and sear and cleanse.

Tunie spared precious scarce attention to ping her crew with adjustment updates and reports of the erratic input. It would not have been warranted but given that one of her eyes had been subverted in transit already, it was not unthinkable that perhaps she was suffering new and more subtle sensory compromises.

The uncertainty made the reef that much more dark and dangerous. But she would prevail.

She was Tunie the Course who had been and would once more be Tunie the Ship.

And she trusted her Crew.