The ruins of Naebel had devastated its star system and made the route to Yorth’s Remorse treacherous. They’d ripped up the nearby branches of the Stream and frayed them, and a new ring of debris orbited the star, occasionally cutting through the Stream and sending plumes of spirit water far into the void.
But it was the only way to the singularity.
Captain Pels navigated through the system slower than usual, shifting windlanes to avoid debris and avoid the debris field. For any chunks of smaller dust and debris, Vayra Warded the ship, protecting it from harm.
There were no other ships on the Stream near Naebel, not even a distant speck. The system was dead, and soon its Stream connections would dry up altogether, but they still had time to use the singularity.
“How will I have enough Arcara to advance to Admiral?” Vayra asked Phasoné when they neared the edge of the system, furthest from the worst of the debris. “We needed enormously powerful elixirs to advance through the lieutenant stages, and eventually to Captain. But now?”
‘It’s not about sheer Arcara accumulation anymore,’ Phasoné said. ‘You have your reserves, and it's now about improving the energy’s quality. You need more powerful Arcara, and you need to permanently bend what you have to the purpose of starlight. Bask in it. Seek connection to it, and draw it in. Once your Arcara has reached a certain quality, your core will feel full, and you’ll be ready to push for Admiral.’
After another half-hour of sailing, Yorth’s Remorse appeared in the distance as a bright bluish-white speck. A pinprick of darkness appeared in its center, like eyelids peeling apart, and the speck broadened into an oval-shaped eye of blank darkness with a ring of light crossing through it.
Without a giant spaceborne beast on their stern, it was kind pretty, but soon, it’d start pulling them in.
Vayra pushed away from the forward railing and ran across the forecastle, then down to the main deck. She turned side to side, dodging sailors and officers. Halfway across the deck, Bremi intercepted her. He grabbed her wrist and tugged, and for a moment, she spun to face him.
“We’re almost in range of the singularity’s tug!” Bremi called excitedly. “And I’ll actually get to see it this time!”
“If we actually can stay out of its pull this time,” Vayra replied. She raised her voice to an almost-yell. The winds of the Stream whipped louder and faster, and the windlanes became choppied. The gossamyr sails luffed, and the edges rippled.
Someone yelled an order at Bremi, and he shouted something jargony at the sailors, then glanced back at Vayra. “I’ve gotta be going soon, but…look, if I don’t see you again before this is all over, good luck. And don’t do anything stupid.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said. “We’re almost there.”
Then Bremi scampered away and ran to the mainmast’s ratlines. He climbed up to the first yard and, clinging onto the ropes as tight as he could, pointed and called out to the sailors, repeating a lieutenant’s orders.
Vayra sprinted back to the quarterdeck and leapt up the stairs, then skittered to a halt beside the wheel hub to face Captain Pels. The Harmony had accelerated after its departure from the Naebel system, but with the strain on the Stream, it had slowed down again.
“If we maintain this speed, will we pass the singularity?” Vayra asked. “Or will it still pull us in?”
“We haven’t gone too far beyond it, yet,” Pels said. “At our pace, we’ll pass it, though barely. I can increase our speed, though we’ll pass too quickly for it to be useful, eh?”
“We would,” Vayra said.
“You can’t leap overboard and do some fancy god-stuff inside the light disk, can you?”
“I’m not sure if even a god can survive that.”
‘I doubt it,’ Phasoné said. ‘Perhaps some fiend-abomination from the realms above, or the Streamfather, but not us.’
“If Karmion could survive that, I’m done for,” Vayra whispered.
‘One step at a time.’
“How are other branches of the Stream?” Vayra asked Pels. “Can we circle around it?”
“I can do my best to keep us close. We’ll have to pass through Naebel a few times if we want to keep close by.” He stepped up to the ship’s wheel and placed a hand on it, then dismissed the coxswain. “But it won’t be perfect, and most times, it’ll seem like just a distant star..”
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“If I Ward the ship and protect the Streamrunning fins and masts, can we linger close to the singularity for longer? And then…protect them when we need a kick out, to launch away?”
“I can’t say for sure,” said Pels. “But if it goes anywhere like last time, it should work.”
“Then that’s what we’ll try,” said Vayra. “I’ll need more Stream water, though.”
“I’ll assign your brother to the task. He’ll keep you topped up.”
Vayra nodded professionally, then jumped back down the quarterdeck stairs to the main deck. She’d need the best, closest view of the singularity as she could.
By now, the blazing black eye nearly filled her view to the right hand side. She sprinted up onto the railing, then gripped the ratlines and leaned out over the Stream as far as she could before falling off. Her mechanical hand tightened around the ropes, stronger than her regular arm, even as the great tug of the singularity tried to pull her away.
The ship groaned and strained, and its wake disappeared. The pull of the singularity fought the winds of the Stream, trying to draw the Harmony in, but Pels steered the ship so the arcane gusts blew directly from behind, holding the ship in place. A board splintered from the strain, and a rope snapped. Her hair whipped around her face, threatening to pull off her head at any time.
“Alright, Phas,” Vayra whispered. “Let's see how far we’ve come.”
She fed starlight Arcara out through her hand, letting it bleed into the ropes, then swirl down and Ward the railing below.
Before, when they’d sailed past Yorth’s Remorse, she’d only been able to protect a slice of the quarterdeck and the Streamrunning fins below, and it had taken nearly all her effort.
But she’d also only been a quartermaster.
She pressed her teeth together and clenched every muscle, then cycled Arcara as fast as she could, maintaining the Burnished Flame Loop and the pattern for the external Wards. The white energy fed into the ship’s hull, then snaked around and covered the quarterdeck in a net of rippling lines. It raced across the boards, filling their gaps with white cracks, and blazed up the masts and rigging until the entire ship shone white.
At first, the sailors leapt up or scattered. Some let out hectic cries, and others reached for the rigging—only to find that it too was Warded.
But then they realized that it was doing no harm, that she was holding the ship in one piece, and they scrambled back to their duties: keeping the sails trim, so the singularity didn’t pull them in, and repairing any minor damage.
Vayra chewed through her mana as quickly as she did while using the Astral Shroud and the internal Ward at the same time, but it also meant she was converting energy. And, in the act of drawing in Starlight, she imbued the Arcara with it.
It was the highest quality starlight available. Wisps of it visibly trailed into the fingers of her left hand, her real flesh, as if guided by a reverse of the Shattered Palm. It fuelled her, and she let it. Her channels were meant to take the burn.
As soon as her mana reached its bottom corner, Bremi ran up to her side, carrying a bucket of Stream Water, then dumped it over her head. She drew in the mana and maintained the cycle, staying level around a third full.
‘One more week of this,’ Phasoné said, ‘and we’ll be ready to advance.’
“Then, while we’re standing here, we better work on that revelation.”
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Myrrir approached the Kamoro system after a few days of sailing. The Hyovao was fast, but it’d still been a few days before he’d managed to signal his ship, and it couldn’t travel instantly.
But he was most of the way to Admiral already. He just needed the revelation, and a powerful source of gunpowder.
All that in account, he could wait. There were plenty of powder magazines across the galaxy, and he had suspicions about his revelation already. He had other, more important matters to attend to first.
When they reached the surface, they sailed into the same dreary port that they had docked in during Myrrir’s excursion on the planet. Myrrir instructed the crew to remain aboard—he didn’t plan to be gone long—and set off through the streets.
It had only been a few months since he’d been here last, but he didn’t expect them to keep the corpses of the dead hanging in the streets. He kept his head down as he prowled through the muddy streets, his boots crunching on the gravel.
Chances were, the Lieutenants had already moved off, and even if they hadn’t, he was a Commodore again, with a full supply of mana. They wouldn’t be able to stop him even if they wanted to. He passed through valleys of dark wood buildings, keeping away from the edges, where rain drizzled off the shingled eaves. Whenever he passed a patrol of bluecoats, he tucked his head down. They might recognize him, and they might not. It didn’t matter.
By nightfall, he found a small state cemetery at the outskirts of the port village, cordoned off by a simple, waist-high fence of driftwood. Stone obelisks marked the graves of fallen officers, wooden stakes for bluecoats, and unprotected wooden plaques for executed criminals—expected to rot away in years, leaving nothing behind.
But for a man who had recently died, a plaque would still be legible.
In the fading twilight, Myrrir marched up and down the rows, relying on his eyes and their reforged strength to read the plaques.
Halfway down the last row, he found the plaque he was looking for. Tye Bukhe Rou. Sentenced to death by hanging for murder.
Myrrir conjured a bracing technique around his hands, drawing gunpowder out of his flask, and began to dig with just his bare hands. No way was he leaving Tye’s bones in the grave of a criminal.