The Harmony made it onto the Stream without a hitch. As soon as they ascended up through the upper atmosphere of Harvest Sanctuary, they were moving fast enough that no ship could catch them easily.
Vayra stood at the corner of a table, looking on while the navigators, coxswains, and Captain Pels charted their next route. They’d take small, inconsequential routes back to Velaydian space to avoid any trouble or blockades, then rendezvous with High Command to plan their next moves.
Vayra only faintly paid attention. Glade had returned to work, Nathariel was still keeping watch, and Phasoné had fallen silent. She let her attention drift off the side of the ship, inching further and further away until she was peering through the clouds of iridescent mist rising on either side of the ship.
She blinked a few times, then rubbed her eyes. A pair of glowing yellow specks raced along through the Stream beside the Harmony.
She pulled away from the table and ran to the railing. A silver messenger fish swam alongside the Harmony, perfectly matching the ship’s speed.
Normally, messenger fish could swim faster than a ship. If it was matching their pace, it meant it had a message for them.
“Messenger fish!” she called. “For us!”
After a few seconds of scrambling, a group of sailors sprinted over to the railing. They strung out a net and scooped the fish up, then dropped it on the deck. Vayra pounced on it to stop it from squirming, then peeled its mouth open. A tiny scroll of waxy paper had been inserted inside.
She pulled out the scroll and unwound it. It was barely larger than the palm of her hand.
Before she could even start to read, Pels plucked it from her grasp and read it aloud: “ ‘Dear Captain Pels, You are hereby requested to return to Decathe…’ ”
Vayra’s heart pounded faster and her eyes widened. Were they mad at Pels? Had he done something wrong?
“ ‘...to meet with the grand admirals of the Navy and commanders of the armies. Please ensure that the Mediator and the Disciple Arvitir attend alongside you, presuming they remain in good health. This is a preemptive measure to secure Velaydian coordination and effectiveness at the upcoming tournament.’ ”
“Is that the king’s seal?” Vayra breathed, leaning over Pels’s shoulder.
“King Tallerion approved the letter,” Pels said. “Must be important.”
“Why Decathe?”
Pels shrugged. “They figured it was close enough to the Line of Battle, and that we wouldn’t have trouble finding it—or getting there without attracting much attention. I doubt it was out of respect for our heritage.”
That was a passable reason. Pels turned back to the navigator’s table, ordering a change to their destination, and the conversation remained the same from there on out. Instead of lingering, Vayra ran down to the main deck. Glade still occupied the forecastle, working on his core, and she didn’t want to bother him.
She climbed up to the top of the mainmast, basking in the winds of the Stream. When she used her spiritual sight, wisps of glowing spiritual energy even blew in the winds, tracing complex swirling patterns along the gossamyr sails. It almost lulled her to sleep with its repetitive pattern—and she desperately needed some good sleep—but she had other matters to attend to first.
She tugged herself into her corespace and walked around to the little cabin at the top of the central hill. Adair had scrambled up to the roof, and he was napping on one of the thatched corners. Phasoné sat in the cabin’s entrance, leaning back against the empty doorframe. She wore her normal void-like dress again, and she gazed up at the sky as if deep in thought.
The Goddess hadn’t needed a repair to her mechanical hand. Ever since Vayra’s flesh-and-blood arm and leg had been chopped off, what happened to their mechanical limbs stayed separate. Phasoné’s arm had never been damaged in the first place.
Vayra had been expecting something a little more somber. She knelt down in front of the Goddess, then quickly shifted her legs around into a sitting position.
“Phas? You good?” She waved her mechanical hand in front of Phasoné’s face just in case.
Phasoné nodded. “I’m good.”
“You’re alright, after seeing everything your brother left behind?” Vayra guessed the answer, and as soon as she said it, a surge of loneliness swept off of Phasoné in a numbing aura.
“No.”
“I’ll be here if you ever need to talk. I promise, I’ll listen. You don’t have to hide it from me.” She pulled herself closer, trying to be a comforting presence if nothing else. But Phasoné looked away.
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She didn’t want to talk about that. Or maybe she didn’t trust Vayra’s commitment.
“Back before we left the planet,” Vayra said, “when I gave Glade the elixirs, I sensed your emotions.”
Phasoné chuckled softly. “I know. I didn’t think it’d feel this awkward, but…”
“But now you know how I feel all the time?”
“I guess so.”
Smiling, Vayra leaned forwards. “You’ll get used to it. Promise.”
“Yeah, I figure I will. But…what are you going to do with that information?”
Vayra stroked her chin exaggeratedly. “Hm…maybe blackmail. Phasoné had a crush on a mortal, and it was me! Wouldn’t that be a story to tell…”
“Considering half the galaxy thinks I’m a traitor and the other half thinks I abandoned them? I think that would be the least of my scandals.”
“Then…” Vayra tucked her hands behind her back, and her heart started to pound. Her cheeks heated up. Something swelled in her chest and gut, like her core was exerting a completely foreign pressure—but she doubted it was an arcane force at all.
All the pieces had finally fallen in place. A cloud of silt dissipated out of Vayra’s mind. She breathed twice as fast. “You know how I feel anyway, so—”
Phasoné lunged and caught Vayra across the shoulders. It was probably supposed to be a hug, but Vayra wasn’t balanced. She slipped back, then tumbled down the slope of the corespace, rolling with Phasoné through the faint bedding until they came to a stop beside the pond.
Vayra splayed her arms out to the side and tried to laugh, but Phasoné leaned over and planted a kiss on her lips, and all Vayra could do was return the favour. They stayed together for a few seconds after. The Goddess’ breath washed across Vayra’s already-burning cheeks, and she figured she should say something.
“For two people who can read each other’s minds, that was…harder than it should have been,” Vayra whispered.
“I don’t make it easy.”
“You don’t make anything easy, Phas.”
Phasoné rolled off to the side, but she still grabbed Vayra’s hand. Their fingers interlocked, and they stayed completely still, staring up at the starry dome above. The sky stabilized, all agitation removed from the core, and the stars twinkled peacefully.
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Glade sat at the center of his core, forming the final touches of the corespace with all of the Arcara he’d purified from the elixirs.
He fashioned a rickety fence around the training pit, specifically crafting the wooden planks so they looked old and splintered. They were nearing the end of their use. He added a mound of stones that would have faced the shores of Pala (as best as he recalled his old master’s training pit). Now, it faced off into the pink-orange void of his corespace.
Over a course of days, he walked back and forth through the corespace, tracing channels for Arcara to surge straight through the core.
He wasn’t sure what his Path was called—or if he even had one to begin with. Order Disciples never got a Path, not like God-heirs. No one expected the weak spirits of the Order of Balance to get to a point where such a concept would be useful. They learned basic sword techniques, because that was all they could muster.
But he knew what a sword was. It was a tool, and he’d held one his entire life. It had layers of hard and soft steel to keep it just flexible enough to not shatter, but strong enough to cause damage with.
The pathways through his core had to be direct and robust. He took small steps as he traced channels around and through the core. He nudged leaves aside, and after a few days of walking back and forth, the boundary between the red and white leaves had blurred into a wavy swirl of pink-orange down the core’s center.
As soon as he set the pathways in place, he painted details into the sky. The void was the colour of sunset, so he kept it mostly the same. He added in a few wispy clouds, and a few patches where the empty sky peered through.
Then that was it. It was complete.
He pulled himself out of the corespace and launched a wave of mana through the entire core, sealing the progress and solidifying the adjustments he had made.
He had finished the core, and he expected to feel something, but he should have expected this.
Vayra had described to him exactly how it felt to approach the peak of First Lieutenant and not have a revelation ready.
But he still needed to accumulate more Arcara, anyway—otherwise, the advancement might not ever have enough energy to proceed.
He took a sip from the last decanter of elixir. It was a green liquid with a slight healing aspect. He wouldn’t need the healing, but it did fill his channels with a temporary coolness and relieved his spiritual sting. It wouldn’t fix anything long-term, though.
With the clarity of mind it gave him, he walked back and forth across the forecastle, ruminating on what a possible insight might be while integrating the energy of the last elixir.
Nathariel must have sensed the progress, because he ran over to the quarterdeck. He told her the same simple insight-based questions that Vayra had told him to ponder: who he was, what he was, what his Path would mean, what his duty meant, and so on, but none of that seemed particularly useful or revealing.
“It’s not about what you are,” Nathariel said. “It’s about who you are, and how that ties everything about you together.”
It was called the Dawnspear body, but everything about dawn could be interchanged with evening and sunset—it was just a reverse.
He ran a finger through his single stained lock of hair and sighed. He’d been born into the autumn of the world, and for years, he’d known a simple truth: the galaxy might crumble before he grew old and died.
He might very well be of the last generation to sail the cosmos without the heel of an empire crushing him.
He was the product of a dying Order and a desperate bid to save a star-nation, but no matter what happened, there was no going back to the way things were. The galaxy would change forever.
“I am the end of an era,” he whispered, hopeful. His core trembled for a second before quieting, and something tugged at the back of his neck—almost like a creative inspiration. But it faded within the second.
Not yet. That wasn’t the revelation.
“Almost there,” Nathariel said. “We still have time. Keep working on it.”