"Is this part of the exercise protocol?"

  Thus Seralyth asked, and there was a note of honest disbelief in her voice, for she hadn't expected Rynna to come to this, nor to carry her eagerness so far.

  "Of course it is! I'm not about to lose another data window, not for anything!"

  So it was obsession, plain to see, though Rynna herself would never have named it so. The researcher had insisted, with remarkable firmness, upon joining Seralyth within the rib cage facility itself. Nor had she come lightly burdened. She'd brought with her a whole assortment of instruments and measuring frames meant to catalogue the resonance pipelines in full. Indeed, she'd even carried along her own personal magitech sensors, devices she trusted more than any issued by the institute.

  "Very well," said Seralyth at last, and she could do little more than sigh, her patience wearing thin. "But do not interfere with the internal systems."

  As she spoke, an odd and unwelcome feeling stirred within her breast. Somewhere along the way, without quite realising when it had begun, she'd come to think of this simple inner structure as something like a home. It was a place of safety and quiet order to her, a shelter shaped of purpose and familiarity. To have another enter it, even with reasonable cause and honest intent, felt unsettling, like a door opened without warning.

  "Yes, yes, of course," Rynna replied, brushing the concern aside with a casual wave of her hand. She was already at work, setting her equipment about the broad chamber. It was a curious room, serving at once as a place of reception, a sleeping space, and a kitchen besides, and Rynna treated it as though such mingling of functions were the most natural thing in the world.

  For a little while, no one spoke. The silence spread between them, growing thicker with each passing moment, until Seralyth felt a strong urge to shatter it before it became truly awkward.

  "Shouldn't you brief me about the exercise?" she asked at last.

  "Ah. Yes," said Rynna, tilting her head as she gathered her thoughts. "It's a stress test of Saeryn's stability under near vacuum conditions, most particularly those of outer space. Since we'll be leaving the institute sector, there will also be several observers present from the Imperial Fleet."

  "The military?" Seralyth asked, lifting a brow in mild but genuine surprise.

  "Mmm. An escort of sorts, I suppose," Rynna answered.

  In truth, the explanation made sense. It would have been stranger still had Seralyth been permitted to roam the void beyond the world without any oversight at all. Yet doubt gnawed at her heart. Were they fearful that she might grow beyond their capacity to guide or restrain her? Or was there some other motive at work in this display of power, this choice to set battle ready dragons as watchers over the experiment?

  "Don't dwell on it," Rynna said, and to Seralyth's surprise she'd noticed the unease without being told. "You are part of the reason, yes, but not the whole of it. The Imperium has had other concerns of late."

  Seralyth frowned at that, but she inclined her head nonetheless. "Thank you for the clarification."

  "Good. Then off you go," Rynna said briskly. "I'll keep in touch through「 Transmission. 」"

  How impertinent. The princess felt the sharp edge of a reply rise to her lips, but she let it fade away with a long, steady breath. Rynna had an astonishing talent for making herself comfortable, as though she had always belonged wherever she stood. Perhaps that was simply the way of those who devoted their lives to dracology.

  Without further words, Seralyth gestured for her to stay back and passed through a thick isolation gate. Beyond it awaited the familiar synchronization chamber, quiet and ready.

  'Saeryn?' she reached out in thought.

  The resonance answered her at once, steady and present, as it always was.

  'It's time to depart.'

  And so, together, they turned their purpose toward the void.

  ???

  Technically speaking, the place of the exercise lay not so far abroad that it stood wholly free of the dominion of the system’s star, for its influence still reached there, thin though it was. Elder dragons, it was known among the learned, could counter such drawing forces by means of their own bending of space and measure, thus attaining a manner of balance in the cosmos that no device of human magitech had ever truly managed to copy.

  'How is it?'

  For this reason there was in truth little aid that Seralyth herself might offer.

  Saeryn, guided by instinct alone, didn't pause to reckon its inner workings, nor did it place any restraint upon those organs by which it might rend and worry at the very weave of the world.

  It merely allowed the motion to come. Much as an infant first learns to crawl, or a small child takes its earliest steps, and later runs without thinking of how its limbs obey, so did Saeryn move. Its long, coiling form cleft the emptiness without effort or hindrance.

  The emptiness.

  'It feels… familiar?'

  Seralyth asked with care, for it seemed to her that she understood Saeryn’s feelings better than the dragon itself, which passed through it without conscious thought. Within the synchronization pod she laid, she let herself sink down into those shared sensations.

  The resonance between them was changed, quieter than before, and broader, as though it stretched far beyond its former bounds.

  There was an absence of the usual background noise. At other times the bond had felt to her like a slender thread dragged through thick and clinging earth. Now, however, it ran clear and smooth, unhindered, through a plain of unmistakable nothing.

  'Saeryn. I need your help. Join your senses with mine.'

  Born as it was to dwell in the void, the dragon had no need to learn its ways. For Seralyth it was otherwise. She couldn't apprehend the emptiness as Saeryn did, not by nature. Without some firm body or landmark to serve her as a guide, such as the moon had been before, she found herself blind when she looked through the dragon’s sight.

  In that moment she also perceived that she had never truly grasped how Saeryn beheld the world and all that was real. What she had done until then was to turn his perception into a human likeness, reshaping it into something her own mind could bear.

  If she meant to travel among the stars, she would have to unmake this habit, and undo her own accustomed awareness.

  Slowly, and one after another, she thrust her human senses aside from the resonance.

  She paid no heed to the discomfort that followed, but allowed herself to fall inward, until her self seemed to collapse into a single point of knowing, drifting alone in an endless field of absence.

  As though it had awaited this very hour, Saeryn then began to pour its own manner of awareness into the bond. Gradually it came, until there formed within her mind an image that was scarcely an image at all, and a notion that was not quite a notion, yet an abstract perception that nonetheless took shape.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She could make sense of it.

  If she were forced to clothe it in human words, she would've said that the whole universe was drawn tight and held within a construct of five dimensions.

  By means of this she perceived the two adult dragons that followed them across the wide deeps.

  She perceived Caeloryn, the moon upon which the institute stood.

  She perceived Aeltheryl, the world of her birth, inspired by the name of her own dynasty.

  She perceived Orthelios, the great gas giant about which Aeltheryl circled.

  And beyond these, she perceived uncounted astral bodies, worlds without number, and even the system’s star itself. A vast flood of knowledge pressed in upon her, though only so much of it as she could grasp at any one time came clear.

  'Saeryn, this is…' the thought faltered.

  Was it beautiful?

  Never had she dreamed that the cosmos concealed such richness and wonder.

  Or was it eerie?

  What hidden things, what dread secrets, might lie concealed within such breadth?

  Or was it overwhelming?

  For all at once everything seemed small, and of no account, set against a space that verged upon the infinite.

  “Bonded pilot, respond. Your vital signs are becoming unstable and your resonance profile is rising beyond acceptable limits.”

  There was no answer. Rynna called again and yet again, her voice sharpening with urgency, but Seralyth had wandered too far from ordinary reality to hear it. She was submerged in a feeling of smallness, not measured against any foe or force, but against the universe itself.

  What weight did their lives truly carry?

  Were they no more than a grain of dust, or less even than that, when set beside this immeasurable expanse?

  “Saeryn…?” the call went out.

  It wasn't comfort that Seralyth sought, and Saeryn knew this well. Instead, the dragon pressed its own feeling into hers, and wouldn't let them remain apart.

  If the cosmos made her feel estranged, Saeryn was of the cosmos.

  If the wide reaches left her adrift and alone, Saeryn felt at home and unbound within them.

  Their impressions flowed together, and became one, like two faces of a single coin.

  In the end, what was the self?

  Beneath the weight of this thought, under the crushing sense of the universe’s immensity, Seralyth found herself asking the question.

  What was it that she truly desired?

  What did Saeryn desire?

  In that state there was no difference between the two, for they had become a single whole, two spirits so closely mingled that they couldn't readily be parted. Their longings, joined together, rose and took shape as one.

  A faint glow kindled along Saeryn’s veins, as charged bioplasm gathered and thickened within them.

  Its wings began to gleam with the shimmer of spatial distortion, and the very cloth of the universe folded and rippled about them.

  The dragon’s heat output surged beyond all recorded measure, far exceeding even the levels reached when it loosed its biochemical armaments.

  Rynna’s instruments shook and stuttered. Among the military watchers, confusion turned swiftly into alarm. Commands were spoken in quick succession. Abort the exercise. Break the bond. Hold position. Stabilise the energy flow.

  None of these words found their way to the bonded pair.

  Within Seralyth’s heart a new ambition had taken root, a hunger to know and to seek, a longing for discovery and the road ahead.

  It was answered in Saeryn’s own being. The dragon felt a keen desire to roam the cosmos, and a wish to seize and savour its freedom.

  Space itself was pressed and bent, drawn into the shape of a passage. Saeryn’s body began to slip out of phase with the world.

  '…!' came the startled cry.

  Then it came close to tearing itself apart.

  'Saeryn, stop. Stop at once!'

  It couldn't. The chain of events had already been set in motion. Though it should have been beyond possibility, a mere hatchling stood upon the brink of warping.

  'Fuck?!'

  The sudden peril wrenched Seralyth back to herself. She knew at once, without thinking, that to force a halt now would only bring them harm.

  “In that case… we'll ride it out.”

  Saeryn wasn't choosing a path with intent. It had followed a natural slope within the void, a current whose end it didn't know. Seralyth curbed the impulse just enough to lessen the distance, guiding them toward a nearer fold that she dimly perceived within her shattered sense of space.

  She drove the warp to completion.

  Light bent and twisted, and their forms blurred and mingled with the substance of the heavens.

  Then they were gone.

  ???

  The universe resisted them, or so it seemed to any mind that might still trouble itself with such judgments.

  That, at least, was how Seralyth understood it in that instant, for there was no other language ready to her thoughts, and no calmer measure by which she could weigh what pressed against them.

  The warp they had entered was irregular and left unfinished, like a passage half-cut through stubborn stone, and it lacked the wholeness and knitting strength needed to hold a true distortion. Strain gathered along it as water gathers behind a dam poorly set, and the stress of the dimensions threatened to fold back upon itself, drawing inward and squeezing their bodies along the unseen fault as a millstone grinds grain caught too close to its heart.

  Saeryn’s body shuddered, not from fear alone but from effort, as it strove to declare itself whole and present within the torn place in space, pushing and bracing as a swimmer might against a riptide that would gladly pull them under.

  Yet the pressure wouldn't be denied. Nearly every second of it, if seconds could still be said to pass in such a place where time had little authority, carried the clear and present chance of death, and that knowledge pressed as hard as the forces that bent their forms.

  'Now!'

  The cry burst from Seralyth without her knowing its birth, flung outward through the resonance that bound them. She didn't understand why the moment had come, nor how she'd named it, but she felt it as surely as one feels the instant before a fall or the turn of the tide.

  Saeryn answered with motion rather than thought, snapping forward through the narrowing gap in the dimension, slipping through the shrinking wound in space just as it threatened to close and leave nothing behind but silence.

  ???

  In the wide and wandering canvas of cosmos, where the lamps of countless stars are set upon a dark cloth older than memory, there came a sudden blemish. Light itself leaned toward it as though curious or afraid, and the very weave of space drew tight, folding and pressing inward until all seemed gathered upon a single pinprick of being.

  Then, with a sigh that no ear could hear, they were made whole again.

  Seralyth knew only confusion at first. The world, or what passed for a world in that vast expanse, swam before her senses, and a spinning weakness clutched at her thoughts. Several long moments passed before she could even recall how one sets the mind in order and draws thought from the haze where instinct reigns alone.

  Her first clear act was to reach, swift and unthinking, for the bond.

  'Saeryn..?'

  The answering presence was there at once. It lay against her awareness as it ever had, vast and warm and unmistakably alive. There was strain in it, a soreness like a muscle overworked, yet there was no true hurt. The dragon lived, and lived whole. Much of that mercy came from Seralyth’s own choice, for she'd guided the warp into a nearer place rather than tearing free of it entirely and risking a harsher unmaking.

  'Where are we?'

  She opened herself wider then, letting her senses mingle with the dragon’s, seeing with its sight and feeling with its knowing. When understanding came, a deep breath escaped her, one she hadn't known she was holding.

  'That’s Orthelios. We aren’t so far from home after all.'

  The great gas giant lay within their shared awareness, a vast banded presence rolling in endless storms, distant yet unmistakable. Seralyth judged that Aeltheryl and its faithful moon must lie hidden beyond it, on the far side, out of sight but not out of reach.

  'What now?'

  There was doubt in the question. She wasn't certain about their own power to fold the world again and find the way back. Indeed, Saeryn wasn't confident it could summon such a feat by will alone, having stumbled into it more by circumstance than by craft.

  'I suppose we wait for them to find us.' Seralyth wondered. Then a sharper thought struck her. 'Oh. Rynna.'

  She frowned, worry stirring. She should be unharmed, shouldn't she? The structure had been wrought to endure the twisting strains of the warp, though it leaned upon the dragon’s strength to do so.

  Saeryn felt the doubt ripple through the bond. It turned its awareness inward, careful and methodical, and sought signs within the pilot facility. A steady warmth answered it, a living thermal mark within the habitat section. By the measures of breath and pulse that the dragon perceived, it guessed she'd swooned when space itself had lurched aside, nothing more.

  And there was another sign as well, one harder to miss.

  She hadn't yet begun to scold them through「 Transmission. 」

  'Alright. All’s well when it ends well.'

  She let herself believe it, though she knew, in some quiet corner of her mind, that they had strayed far beyond what the institute had expected of them this time. Such wandering seldom passed without consequence. There'd likely be tighter rules laid upon them in days to come, more careful watching, more limits set.

  Yet Seralyth didn't know, and couldn't know, that such worry was needless.

  For life, as the old tales say, is often steered not by grand design but by a string of small chances, each tugging the next into place.

  They'd never have been sent to perform the void exercise on that particular day if the arrays hadn't faltered during the examination of incantations.

  Had there been no void exercise, they wouldn't have slipped, by accident and not intent, through the folds between space, even if only for a short span.

  And had there been no warp at all, then the presence that haunted the deep cosmos, the one whose call had echoed through many solar systems, the same that had troubled the systems and bent their workings awry,

  Would never have marked them.

  Near Saeryn’s long and gleaming form, set against the star-strewn dark, space itself broke again. It cracked like thin ice under sudden strain.

  From that wound surged an ashen mass, swift and terrible, carrying with it a purpose long honed.

  It had found its quarry.

  And it moved, without pause or mercy, to exterminate it.