“The current slows, the stone drops, and here it sits gathering silt,” Miran said to Soren’s unconscious body.

  Diega, the nurse that had been attending him on The Dream had long since gone, moved on with her life along with the rest of the flock. It was her and Soren alone that seemed stuck in this state, in this quiet room, in a sterile hospital wing on Ganon’s surface.

  The Cattleheart was no more – absorbed into the Idle and Veiled flocks and into the Ganon system fleet, which was a substantial force unto itself. After signing over her ship and the task force to Matriarch Kerrigen and leaving behind most of her possessions along with the entirety of her matriarchal wardrobe, Miran had moved herself and Soren to Eidao, a city of little notoriety on the south-eastern edge of Hisshou, Ganon’s capital megalopolis.

  A world with little surface water and dominating peaks, Ganon was pockmarked by sprawling cityscapes and little rural land to speak of. It was a far cry from the rolling hills and blistering wildfires of Bordeaux. Desert lands had long since been dissected and consumed, transformed into endless towers and monuments. Structures extended far into the clouds, Ganon was a planet settled a century before the Federation was founded.

  Hisshou was Ganon’s largest city, a megalopolis flanked with dozens of other cities. Each would dwarf many of the largest cities elsewhere in the Federation, acting to shield the old inner city from ferocious dust storms. The deserts were still present, stretching unbroken for hundreds of kilometres between clusters of cities. The water that was present was locked in caves or aquifers deep beneath the surface. Hisshou’s core hugged the summit of a mountain, on top of which was a wide plateau with an open-air lake, a rare sight.

  Eidao sat at the base of the mountain. Looking out from Soren’s hospital window, the slope of steep city streets stretched skyward and out of view. Delivery drones vaulted between open windows delivering their loads with constant precision. Miran had spent the last week getting to know the city. It was relaxing at first, fun even. It helped her to be able to escape the terrors that plagued her sleep, if only for a few hours each day. After a few days, she spent less time in the shops, less time walking the sidewalks. She had spent the entirety of yesterday next to Soren or in the hospital mess hall picking up something to eat back in Soren’s room.

  "You look pale," a voice said from where Soren had lain. A sound so unfamiliar to Miran that at first, she hadn't realised he was speaking.

  Turning to him, she lept toward him. Throwing her weight on his chest, she wrapped her arms and squeezed. He let out a wince.

  "You bastard," she said, not lifting her head.

  "I earned that," he admitted. "I'm sorry, you know. I took advantage of you. Whatever you decide as matriarch– I'm sorry."

  "But I'm not Matriarch. Not anymore." She stood and retook her place by the window.

  Soren sat up in his bed, wincing from the effort.

  "That's a gaff," he said. "You're not serious, are you?"

  "Made official last week," said Miran, "Soren. So much has happened. We've lost everything."

  His eyes grew concerned, and he urged her to explain. Miran ran him through the month's events. From the moments after his crash to the battle to the sacrifice that led to their escape and his subsequent rescue — Miran spared no painful detail.

  “What about Connor? What about Tolly?” he said, pressing his urgency through a metal sieve.

  “Connor went after Tolly. We don’t know where he is. Tolly is safe. I saw to that personally.”

  “Thank you,” he said after a long sullen moment. Awareness retook him, and Miran could see the inner turmoil rippling over his bruised face.

  “I’ll send word to Tolly that you're up,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I’ll say to her,” he said, lost in thought, “I let her down. I let Blane down.”

  “You didn’t let anyone down,” Miran lied, not wanting to dump anymore on his weary soul. Miran had expected to finally be able to share with someone – anyone – once Soren awoke. It was looking more and more that he was in no place to take on her pain as well as his.

  “I did.”

  “You just need rest,” she said.

  “And after that? I expect a court martial is still on the way for me.” There it is. He knew he had derelicted his duty back on Bordeaux’s Folly; he knew of the consequences that meant. “You didn’t tell me. What happened to my ship, what of my crew?”

  Miran sighed. She knew he wasn’t ready. She thought she should lie to him, waiting for him to recover. He made the decision, however. He should live the consequences as she did.

  “All lost,” she said unapologetically, “The Winterspell was destroyed in our first charge against the enemy.”

  Soren’s posture soured, and he slumped back into his pillow.

  “The Seragam did survive, though. Amazingly, out of all the ships in the attack fleet, this one remained untouched.”

  He took little comfort in this. Instead, turning his head to the window, he said: “Unforgivable.” Miran assumed he was speaking of his own actions.

  “There’s nothing for it,” she said.

  “What am I to do– how can I carry on with this over me?”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Miran didn’t have an answer, stepping to grab his hand. She gripped it with pain in her heart. She had assumed herself numb by this point, but here the well dropped deeper.

  “We will carry on together,” she urged.

  “A disgraced captain and– what are you now?” he said with a bite. She knew he was hurting, lashing out.

  Miran hadn’t considered it. She had given up her flock, her ship. Until now, she had assumed that that had been the end of it. Was she a civilian now? Maybe not.

  But the people had elected her Matriarch. It was a title not so easily washed away.

  Without a flock, what was she?

  She didn’t have a chance to voice her resolve to Soren, however. Shortly after speaking, his vitals readings on the monitor spiked, sounding an alarm. By the time hospital staff entered, Soren was wailing, rambling about some unclear pain, and urging them to put him back to sleep. The hospital staff forced Miran out, and as the door closed in her face, she was left in the uneasy silence of the hallway.

  Miran checked Soren’s hospital record on her terminal, which was now showing several recent updates. She scrolled through the feed and saw several invasive tests had been ordered for him and a battery of new treatment lines proposed and being discussed by off-site doctors and medical engineers.

  Alone in the hall for far too long, Miran was starting to lose it. Her rage boiled, and she knew she needed to grab onto something to hold it at bay. She chose the last person in her life, however against her own will, and left to find Tolly.

  Tolly was just as miserable as Miran. When she had told Tolly about Connor’s foolish rescue mission, Tolly didn’t take it very well. She had been on the fence about what path to take in Herd service before that, and now she seemed even more lost.

  Miran could see the same pain that Soren and herself had felt echoed across the young woman’s face. She didn’t want another to go down this hateful, resentful path as she was doing and instead had come up with a solution.

  As one of her last acts as Matriarch, Miran had reached out to an old contact of hers from the start of her political career. Hamsen Smythe, who had been a researcher on the bleeding edge of life-extension therapies, was now serving as director of an unaffiliated research station and trade hub at the intersection of Federation, Terran Sovereignty, and Vasser Dominion space. The so-named Belltower Station was beholden to no governmental body, at least not overtly, and instead served the directive of common research and development, sometimes on the edge of what was considered acceptable. If it was anyone’s wish to get as far away from the Federation as they could, this was it.

  If that wasn’t enough to convince her, Soren’s worsening condition was. He had lapsed in and out of comas for the past several days. The finest doctors on hand didn’t know what to make of it. He was healthy, aside from the muscle stiffness and outward bruising. The moments he was awake, he was lucid and speaking normally, only to quickly revert into bouts of incoherent babbling and unexplained pain before again losing consciousness. The leading opinion now was onset schizophrenia due to the effects of P.T.S.D. from the events following his shuttle crash.

  Miran didn’t want to believe that hope was lost. She knew that someone somewhere could get to the truth of it.

  “You’re sure you want to go?” Miran asked Tolly one evening in Miran’s new quarters, in a district due south of Soren’s hospital.

  “I think so,” Tolly said. “I don’t know what else I would do. And besides, Soren needs this.”

  “You might be his last hope,” Miran admitted.

  Tolly, who still seemed estranged from the whole idea, asked, “what will you do?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “For the first time in as far as I can remember, I am without a path.”

  “Why not leave? Come with me?” Tolly asked. She did have a point. Miran knew she could just up and leave, and little of anyone would notice. For now, though, she decided to hold to the one shred of hope she still had.

  “No,” said Miran, “Soren will need someone here when he wakes up.”

  "Thank you. For everything, thank you," Tolly said nervously.

  "Goodbye, Captain Ignacio," Miran said, ushering the girl to the door. The pain was too much, and the young woman didn't need to see Miran break down again.

  Closing the door behind Tolly, Miran's last grip on reality faded. She didn't know how long she spent in that apartment over the next intervening weeks. Reports from the hospital put Soren worse off each and every time she checked. He had been long since quarantined, and she was forced to keep tabs on him via video feed. However, on the clips that she did watch – and when Soren was lucid enough to speak – he would complain about the same voices the crept ever nearer.

  It was so unlike him, to be brought so low, and in Miran’s opinion, the worst part was that he was behaving so erratically. The calm, careful Soren was gone, replaced with this husk of torment on the other end of a live feed. His actions became so erratic that, as Miran watched, he lashed out and grabbed an attending nurse by the throat. His eyes were wide with a fear to match the nurse’s. It was in that moment that the video feeds stopped rolling. Her access had been cut. And, without her position as Matriarch, she knew she would be refused entry should she go down to see him.

  Miran reached out to Patriarch Umar Hari to get clearance, but his office had been stonewalling her. It seemed her bottom was now at her feet.

  Pity of herself and what her life had become drove her into an itchy rage that came to a tee one day and forced her out of her hole. Walking outside of her apartment block, people were bustling about, but she cared little for them. For all she knew, some of them could be of the many that she helped save on Bordeaux; what little did that matter now?

  “Trust yourself, Miran.” Her father’s words pounded inside her, “Step out into the black.”

  Above her, as she moved through the parklands around the bend from her apartment, the sky was bright blue and clear. The birds were out in yearlong romance. If she had reached the bottom, she thought, then above her lay only sky.

  “Matriarch Nagoya,” A voice fluttered from behind her. She turned to see several large, cloaked figures in head-to-toe covering gliding towards her.

  “Halah Alteralta, your eminence,” she said, bowing. “You don’t need to call me that anymore. Miran will do fine.”

  “Miran-Yi, of course,” Halah said, “I was greatly saddened to hear of your abdication.”

  “What can I do for you, your eminence?” she asked, still lost in a sullen daze.

  “I fear very little in your present role,” Halah admitted, “You see, through the fault of neither side, we did not expect to be ferried to such a desolate world. As such, I and my kin that follow me have found our collective under-planned to deal with the harsh realities of this planet’s climate. We are not suited to an existence so devoid of water. I was hoping you still might be able to get a message to one in your government that might help us?”

  Miran felt responsible. After all, she had been the one to invite Halah and his ilk aboard her flock in what seemed like years ago. Though, given her present lack of authority, she couldn’t even help herself, let alone a host of orphaned vass.

  “I will try,” she lied. “I will do what I can. In fact, I have a bone to pick with the Patriarch myself.”

  “This is all I ask,” Halah said, relieved. “We apologise for disrupting you. We shall leave you now.”

  Halah and his cohort moved away, deeper into the park seeking the shade. Leaving the park, Miran knew she had to do something – speak to someone – about the vass, about her friend.

  Pushing her way into the hospital level Soren’s room had been on, Miran sought answers. The nurses refused to help, nor did the patients and loved ones of patients that she had seen in the halls just weeks prior. Everyone was going out of their way to avoid stepping into her fury-filled bubble.

  That’s when Patriarch Hari’s men came to get her. They ushered her into a stairwell, down, and out into the street to a waiting car.