“Unidentified vessel, this is Niho of the Filigree provisional defense force. Lock position at magnetic north five hundred thousand miles from planet surface while we process your landing request.”

  First contact with Filigree was over as quickly as it began. A formal submission for safe harbor was sent via low-net communication to the world a few minutes prior. Hope remained high for the minutes following the response, hopes that authorization to land would be forthcoming. After all, the vacspace surrounding Filigree was anything but busy. The Auric Wind had maintained a posture of unashamed paranoia when it came to early warning detection. Scanning as far out as it could to watch for the Merriment’s arrival granted them a firm grasp on just how few ships they shared the sky with.

  Minutes became hours. Hours became days. Hope died at the hands of melancholic boredom and an increasing sense of impending doom. Every moment hanging in the stars was a moment they were theoretically at risk of the Merriment’s return. Voy made the most of the unplanned downtime, poring over the ship’s onboard records to verify what Hembrandt said in the war room. Most of the Auric’s records had been opened to him following the tense but productive conversation. What little had been hidden or locked away did not remain so for long.

  That which hid in low-net devices was easily extracted with Undahiil’s help. That which lay buried in mounds of paper and dusty cabinets was just as easily acquired with Elara’s assistance. Both of them sympathized with him heavily after his discovery that Avaron not only never sent him orders to join them, but likely also thought him dead and disgraced. Elara especially warmed to him, after Hembrandt ordered her to ‘subdue’ Voy she’d not spoken a kind word about her brother. As far as Voy knew she hadn’t so much as spoken to the admiral since then.

  Hembrandt was, as far any of the three could discern, entirely truthful in the war room. It was a bittersweet accomplishment. Voy had, in some futile and irrational manner, hoped the admiral had lied about something that might be revealed as the path to Thurgia’s salvation. If such a path existed, he would find it down below on Filigree.

  Despite the negative air about the ship as tension built without resolve, Voy found that he felt…happy. Elara and Undahiil hadn’t turned their back on him after his usefulness expired. They hadn’t looked down at him for his recklessness in how he confronted Hembrandt. In time Voy grew to appreciate each of them as friends. He found himself frequenting their company often as the task of seeking subterfuge drew to a close.

  Three weeks passed in this state. The crew became restless, their preparatory checklists for landing done, done, and re-done many times over as they sought ways to busy themselves. Voy helped where he could, but after a few days it became evident there wasn’t any productivity in the repetition. When eventually the charade of busy work lost its luster the ship settled into a stagnant state as the thousands of crew finally accepted the agonizingly slow pace that Filigree worked at.

  It was on one such day, sometime around morning, that Voy found himself in the observation deck atop the Auric Wind. Peace was easy to come by here, something about a room with transparent wall panels made most people uneasy. Far away, the water covered rock at the center of their efforts hung against a backdrop of black sky and stars that didn’t twinkle. Voy always found that fascinating. Twinkling, one of the traits most often associated with stars, was only observable from within the bounds of planetary atmosphere.

  In vacspace they were just lights. Beautiful in their own way, certainly, but they didn’t wiggle. It was only a certain vantage that gave them that behavior. Voy wondered what else in his life might work that way. What twinkling stars in his life would cease their dance if his position changed?

  [ALL HANDS TO LANDING STATIONS. ALL HANDS TO LANDING STATIONS.]

  Distant hollers and jovial cheers rang throughout the decks below. Moments later the hum of engines leaving their idle state rocked the ship. Inertial harmonizers worked quickly to offset the rapid acceleration. Voy crossed his arms and stayed where he was, as a kartorim he would no have any mandatory duty in regard to landing beyond ‘stay out of the way’. This, he was alright with. It had been years since his time with Avaron, but one thing he most enjoyed in his adolescence was watching a ship’s descent into atmosphere.

  The way the fire danced against it’s hull, the way shields flared as they blunted impact forces, the way the horizon came into being from the edge of the planet and the void. In a way it was how he met a new world for the first time, witnessing its furious embrace upon its new arrivals. As the marble beyond grew Voy felt the living data crawling around in his nerves preparing to plant images in mind. Graciously it did not draw him from consciousness, this time being almost gentle as it offered up glimpses of the past.

  It showed him Filigree, but not as it was now. The water world raced up to meet him. He saw the world as it was once, in the days of the ancestors. There were more islands then, the water did not climb so high as it did in the present. Towering skyscrapers of engineered coral sprouted cities from above the seas. Mag-rails circled the planet between these bastions of civilization, connecting the raised metropolises to galleries of steel and crystal glass on the islands and down to the illuminated domes planted in the seafloor.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Every where he looked humans, people just as they might look now, moved about with content purpose. There was laughter, there was smiling, there was the minor grumbling that came with city living. Above the masses in their monument cities dozens of bladeships, all bigger, sleeker, and altogether greater than anything now mustered by man sailed in the sky. Their engines ran quiet enough that life below was not disturbed, and the weapons they doubtlessly bore were hidden seamlessly in their shining, white hulls.

  It was one thing to know those who came before achieved more, lived better, held to themselves a higher standard. It was quite another to see it, to have the disparity laid bare and strip away the soothing thoughts one tells themselves about the exaggeration of the past. This world was supposedly a fringe world, a frontier, even in the days of the ancestors. Yet this glimpse cast it as a rival to Anitora itself, if not in population then in all else.

  The last thing Voy saw as the living data pulled him along it’s impromptu tour was a mountain, one at the center of the Filigree’s grandest island. It was familiar. Alone it sat, part of no range or clear natural formation. Its stone was smooth and intentional, and as Voy took it in he realized it was no mountain at all, but an immense pyramid-like structure built to such scale that it resembled a mountain. Steps of reflective metal led to it’s entrance on the ground, and few people in official looking uniforms moved to and from the massive construction. The great metal doors at it’s entrance lay open, but beyond them Voy saw only darkness.

  “You would see this and deny me still,” Voy turned, suddenly more corporeal than he’d been. The black armored kartorim stood behind him, red eyes piercing through the vision as though he saw Voy in the observation deck. A shudder ran down Voy’s spine.

  “What does this have to do with you?” Voy spat as he asked, finding it difficult to constrain the immediate aggression he felt seeing the shadowy, blurry thing.

  “Come now, you’re smarter than that,” the crowds around them moved as though neither was truly there. One man, busy tapping away on a screenslab, walked right through them both. “Avaron built a paradise in the age of his rule. What do you think I shall do in mine?” He spread his arms out wide as if to claim all around them as his.

  “I have no patience for lying. You want power, and you’ll kill to get it. I won’t let that happen,” Voy dismissed his petty attempt at manipulation. The image of his friends dead at this monster’s hand was too fresh for anything else. The demagogue let out a sinister, knowing laugh.

  “You brought the command protocols to Filigree. I will be there to claim them. Do whatever you like, the world is already mine. Rest assured, on this world you will kneel before me,” the demagogue calmly gloated. Voy stepped closer to him and looked directly into his glowing red eyes, and turned his own words upon him.

  “We shall see.”

  The vision began to melt away as he finished speaking, fading into nothing as Voy slowly returned to himself on the observation deck.

  Voy was still standing when he came to. Flames had just begun to lap at the Auric Wind as it pressed into Filigree’s atmosphere. Elevator doors clicked open behind him. To Voy’s pleasant surprise, Elara walked out alone to meet him. Like him, she was covered in her carapace armor from the neck down as a mostly unnecessary precaution during re-entry. She surprised him again by walking up beside him and leaning against his right side, a somewhat awkward gesture given their size disparity.

  “I never said sorry for Hembrandt’s scheme,” she began meekly, “I didn’t know the orders were fake. Or that you were dead. Legally dead anyway,” her eyes wandered and she dug at the floor with the toe of her carapace boot. “I’d have told you. If I knew, I mean.” Voy felt her heartbeat rise as she spoke, but it was not the panic that came with deceit. The two had only just begun their friendship, neither wanted to risk damaging it. But old wounds left untended tend to fester.

  Voy relaxed and let his hands fall from his chest. “No need to apologize,” he gave her a side glance with a coy smile, “I got a cool arm out of it.” He punctuated his sentence by raising his left hand and wiggling his metal fingers, reflecting firelight from outside off the polished metal surface. “That, and you saved me from that moegon back on Treffel. That moegon would’ve attacked me whether Hembrandt ever landed the Auric there in the first place.” Elara smiled softly.

  “You still owe me for that by the way,” she teased, letting her head fall to rest against his. Voy laughed through his nose.

  “I suppose I do. How about you stay out of mortal danger and I can keep on owing you for the rest of our lives?” Voy answered back faster than he could think to hesitate.

  “No can do Shatter-Batter,” she turned and looked at him, “I’m way too accident prone for that.” Her green eyes locked with his own. “You’ll just have to stay on your toes.”

  “Workshop that,” Voy said, holding eye contact with her. Elara giggled as the flames outside at once dispersed and revealed the world outside. Elara sprang to the window, Voy close behind, as the two raced to take in the sight of a world unseen by thurgians for centuries. Vast ocean stretched in all direction, broken only by the presence of occasional islands. The nearest one was host to the Darkmount, and it certainly lived up to its moniker.

  The Darkmount itself was worn down, cracked and rugged the way a natural mountain was. Jungle had grown around it’s base, burying the steps that once led to it. Even so it remained an imposing presence, its unique black stone an ominous ward over the otherwise mundane island. The city beyond fared no better, its once towering constructs replaced by a choking urban sprawl of irregular, scrappy huts and shacks stacked over one another enough to approximate multistory buildings. Gone was the pristine, intentional city Voy had seen in his vision. No spires of woven crystal or shaped alloys glittered here, no mag-rails ferried joyful citizens to and from coral cities and magnificent towers. What few proper structures there were lay closer to the mountain. It was heartbreaking in a way Voy struggled to comprehend, he mourned a thing he’d never known.

  Elara turned and scampered over to the elevator. “Join me for the de-barking?” she asked, turning halfway back to him before stepping through the elevator doors. Voy tore himself from the window and began to walk over, laughing as he did.

  “De-barking? You mean ‘disembarking’?” Voy corrected unseriously. Elara stuck out her tongue at him.

  “Yea whatever, nerd. You comin’ or what?” Voy quickened his pace slightly, and as they stepped through the elevator Voy decided he would gamble, just this once. Once they turned to face the elevator exit, Voy gently reached out and placed his hand around hers. There was one agonizing second before she returned the gesture, squeezing his hand in turn. The two both reflexively extended their helms and nervously looked away from one another, but kept their hands together, squeezing tighter in tandem with their ever growing hybrid of joy and embarrassment.

  Voy still wasn't sure why or how it was possible he felt this way, or how she seemed to be the same. It defied what he understood about kartorim physiology and psychology. But as of this moment, he no longer cared. The Iyallat forbid this sort of relationship, but it also forbid someone like him from living in the first place. If Samuine couldn't find a way to get Voy back in Avaron's good graces, he was going to make damn sure he had no regrets when the executioners blade fell upon him.