Alicia didn’t sleep well that timeless slice of day she had chosen to designate as night. It wasn’t quite the towering shadow that was the dream representation of the Dragon Thane, it wasn’t quite the new arrival of the voidborne superlion with tissue-dissolving venom and a sucking proboscis, either, which was a mercy, of sorts. No, the dream shifted around too much to be one set thing, like the void around her, the void that perhaps was the true antagonist of this bad dream, it was simmering, roiling, frothing really with malign change. Alicia ran in place, she got lost in a large and hostile airport, she wasn’t sure if her teeth fell out at one point or if that was such an anxiety dream mainstay that she merely assumed that bullshit had to happen at some point.

Despite the even and inevitable pace of the nightmare, Alicia woke with a start, like she had been catapulted from the nightmare straight to awakening. A persistent queasiness let her know she wasn’t dreaming. Dreams could feel bad, but it couldn’t feel bad in quite this specific way, or so Alicia assumed. Eating some Camp flatbread and a slice of the soft cheese they made did something, if not everything, in calming her innards. A mouthful of water felt compulsory, but since it did serve to remind Alicia that their stocks were limited, she was pretty close to skipping it entirely. Still though, rationing was not a good time, and there was no glory in going there before it was strictly necessary. Alicia took a sip. The water tasted mineral-y in a way that the Thereafter water didn’t, probably on account of being found and extracted from rocks and dust, and Camp’s filtration technology not being perfect. There were advantages, Alicia realized, to having a magical sword that could provide functionally infinite fresh clean water.

With that brief foray into absurd understatement over, though, Alicia was getting ready to start her day, such as it was. According to her cellphone clock she had been sleeping around six hours, which wasn’t ideal, but it’d have to do. She was too wired by the nightmare to sleep much more, and part of her felt, with increasing urgency, a need to relieve Lia.
There was, of course, the risk that Lia didn’t want to be relieved. When getting on a couple of her earlier shifts, Lia had seemed terse, almost a bit reluctant to give up the helm, as it were. Alicia wasn’t sure if this dismay was motivated by a desire to do more, a need to do less, or worry over Alicia taking on a bigger part of the responsibilities. Maybe it was all of those things. Maybe it was none of them. Alicia wasn’t quite sure of Lia at times. She tended to read much of herself into the older woman, and while that probably wasn’t the worst of Alicia’s sins, it did reveal some less than flattering things about her, or at least Alicia thought so.
Alicia knew she was stubborn. To be an influencer you need to be stubborn, you need to be self-motivated, you need to be independent. By some measures, probably, you need to be somewhat of a narcissist, but compared to the other things which are strictly requirements, it’s more of a “nice if you can get it” type trait. That said, when she saw those traits in Lia, Alicia tended to find them profoundly annoying. She was stubborn, of course she was. To Alicia’s understanding, she was basically the leader of a (up until recently) pretty sizeable religion. Humility was important in such a position, granted, but it also called for a faith in oneself that could withstand the storm of scrutiny that being seen in that way could turn into at the drop of a hat. And yet… Alicia almost couldn’t think of the casual way Lia asserted what she believed to be truths without getting annoyed, no, more than annoyed. She got pissy. She felt that hackle-raising teenager rebellion rise like bile in her throat. It wasn’t a purely rational or even particularly healthy reaction, but Alicia couldn’t help herself. She wanted to scream at Lia for the sheer vindication of the act itself. She wanted to put her fists on her hips and let this formidable woman know that she wasn’t afraid of her, that if she wanted to kick her ass, the Deep Speaker better bring her A-game and bring it right away.
Whether Lia felt the same way, Alicia couldn’t even begin to speculate on. Maybe she thought Alicia was an impudent child, in some ways that was preferable to being viewed as clueless or misguided as an adult. It wasn’t just an age thing either, although Alicia would be lying if she didn’t say she longed for the time when it was assumed that the person she would be wasn’t “set.” Being human means changing, but only children are supposedly malleable at all. It’s frustrating as a child because impermanence often is given the same meaning as insignificance, and it’s frustrating as an adult because nothing you really do to better or worsen yourself feels like it’s allowed to “take” at all.

As she prepared to get up and stretch a little, readying up for a long day of mostly standing and leaning, Alicia could feel the stone sphere shift a bit. It wasn’t a huge thing, just a small change in how the magical gravity tugged at her, if she hadn’t become extremely sensitive to that sort of thing after navigating in the low, or at least conditional and limited gravity of The Void, she might have missed it entirely. Knowing what she now knew, though, this shift felt wrong. They were, as far as they could detect with the rather limited instrumentation that was their very human eyes, heading straight for Thereafter. Any adjustment of their bearing they could currently make would be a very slight one, so slight that Alicia couldn’t rightfully say she had felt it at all when she had tried it on her own shift. There was, of course, moving to dodge potential hazards, but it didn’t feel like that either, any evasive manuever would surely be followed by a course correction in the aftermath. This meant that unless Thereafter had moved, and moved a lot, there was only one possible explanation for what Alicia had just sensed. The sphere had, for some reason, changed direction. Alicia found herself scrambling for the exit. She had a bad feeling about this.

Once she was on the outside of the sphere, it was trivial to confirm that, indeed, the sphere had changed course. The rope running from the hole of the sphere to the steering point used to point straight at the coldly gleaming star that wasn’t a star, Thereafter, but now the source of light and the goal of their seemingly impossibly long Journey was off to the left as Alicia climbed the rope. In the back of her mind, some sensible part of her told her to ask Lia about it right away, but some other part held her back. This, it seemed to reason, was something that needed to be seen to be fully comprehended.
Once Alicia had climbed far enough to see Lia, though, she had to concede that seeing wouldn’t be quite enough in this case.

“Hey Lia, why have we changed course?” Alicia asked.
“Hm?” Lia seemed to only be partially aware of Alicia’s presence as she swayed slightly, steering the stone sphere with some skill as it approached… something. Alicia could see a faint light somewhere within a shell of world debris, but it was not enough to make much sense of.
“I said Why Have We Changed Course?”
“Might have found… a Crystal or something.” Lia mumbled. There was a dreamy quality to her voice that made Alicia uncomfortable.
“A port crystal?” Alicia asked. She wasn’t sure what she was looking at, but it didn’t look a lot like the open, tidy platforms where she had seen port crystals set up before.
“Yeah… we have to check it out don’t you think?” It wasn’t a question, exactly. “Could have us home in the blink of an eye.”

The shell of debris was drawing closer, and it did little to assuage Alicia’s fears. The light was comparable to the one a port crystal produced, sure, but there was a… flicker to it, something organic that the digital-feeling pulses of the port crystals just would not produce under any circumstances. Worst of all, there was something about all of this that triggered some sort of memory in Alicia. Someone, back in camp had talked about a phenomenon like this. Not as a warning, but in passing. A cultural idea that was well-known enough that reminding people of anything but its existence was unnecessary, like saying “break a leg” to an actor or referring to The Scottish Play.

The debris cloud was, mercifully, not very dense, and with Lia’s navigation, misguided as it might be, it was relatively trivial to approach the light. Alicia found herself guiding approaching rocks over a certain size out of their way, wary to not trigger any more voidborne reaction chains. Alicia knew she should be speaking up, but then again, Lia was right, if there existed even a chance that this was a port crystal after all, they had to check it out to confirm. It would mean cutting the journey down to just about nothing, and considering how their voyage across the void relied on the good luck of not encountering high-speed debris past a certain size, it would be cutting out a lot of room for random chance to turn their Apollo 13 into Challenger.

As they approached the light, it became clearer and clearer to Alicia that this wasn’t a port crystal, yet what it actually was still eluded her. Bit by bit, they uncovered glowing spots on the debris rocks. At first only a couple of glowing motes, like errant glow-in-the-dark spray paint, but the density only increased the closer to the center. Eventually, they uncovered what Alicia instantly came to think of as the heart of the whole phenomenon.
The glowing motes were everywhere, covering a cluster of smaller rock fragments in patterns that, though they were dazzling, reminded Alicia of mold, in how its colors shifted based on assumed density and age. The Thousand Lights, the name Alicia had heard mention among the campfolk came to her mind all but unbidden. It wasn’t an accurate name, at least not if one read one mote of light as one light, but it could be a case of “Thousand” also being a word that meant “a whole dang lot” similar to how other words for numbers were used in various languages on Earth. Now you had to beware the Thousand Lights, Alicia remembered faintly as she saw the pattern of the Lights shift, responding as if governed by some level of primitive proximity detection, the spots of deep indigo and royal blue lights concentrating in the parts closer to the intruder, like pseudopods or eyes forming out of the lights inherent formlessness.
“We need to go” Alicia found herself saying, knowing full well the very sensible suggestion would fall on deaf ears.
“I… this isn’t right… what IS this” Lia’s mumbling confirmed what Alicia already knew.
The lights shifted yet again, the colder colors moving frantically across the central rocks, what Alicia was already thinking of as the phenomenon’s brain. Whether it was thinking and aware that it was making a rather obvious threat display, Alicia did not feel either professionally or philosophically able to determine, but the threat display remained prominent, and hard to mistake for anything else.
The rocks around them, Alicia realized, was starting to glow brighter, rising in intensity in waves synchronous, or sympathetic rather, to the frantic motion of the central glow.
Alicia found herself speaking, more words that would only fall on deaf, uncomprehending ears. “We have to get the fuck out of here,” she shouted at Lia, who only mumbled in response. “I said…” Instincts guided Alicia now, no, they weren’t instincts alone, there was a synthesis there, experience mixing with instinct, tutelage mixed with Alicia’s inherent nature. The Deep Song found her as easily as if she had been a gravity well. “W E‎⠀A R E‎⠀L E A V I N G” The compelling voice emerged from Alicia, not so much as pure sound alone she understood now, but as a projection of her will and intention. It was this, more than the deafening volume that made the “voice” impossible to ignore.

Way too many things happened at once. Lia snapped out of whatever confusion had held her, the stone sphere sprung into action, spurred by Lia, and the Thousand Lights unleashed its fury. Like in slow motion Alicia could see the central brain of the possibly brainless lights contract and expand, a wave of distortion, were it not physical force, that traversed the emptiness of the void, for the lack of a better word activated several of the glowing chunks of debris. The stone sphere turned, a sudden, inelegant motion spurred by Lia’s sudden awareness and enthusiasm to follow Alicia’s Deep Song-powered suggestion.
They shot away from the Thousand Lights and for a blessed second it looked like they were going to make a clean getaway. Then, the first debris chunk hit.
It was not a particularly impressive impact, and had it not been for the fact that it came from the direction they were fleeing from, and left minuscule particles of the lights after bouncing off the shell of the stone sphere, Alicia wouldn’t have noticed it at all. This, it turned out, was a mercy, as it gave Alicia a second to spot the oncoming barrage.
“We’ve got incoming,” Alicia shouted.
“I don’t know what that means!” Lia barked back.
“The fucking thing back there is throwing fucking rocks at us.”
“Now that I do understand, that wasn’t so…”
“Oh shut the FUCK up and fly!”

Alicia wanted to go on the counteroffensive. Launch herself off the sphere and take out the projectiles, but what sense she still retained saved her from that idea. She had only one functioning arm, and as fast as those things had to move she’d have little, if no chance to course correct after the initial thrust. It was, put plainly, a really shit idea, and it bothered Alicia that knowing that, she wanted to do it anyway.
“Debris coming up.” Lia shouted. “See if you can deflect some of ‘em with anything that happens to fly by.”
“Sure NOW she’s bossy,” Alicia grumbled to herself as she shifted around on the sphere to scout for a fitting shield against the rapidly approaching missiles.

“I’m gonna do a void walk. If we survive this, pick me up,” Alicia acted without thinking much about it. Probably, she told herself, because this was so obviously a terrible, terrible idea. Still, her instincts had saved her ass once today, so what was one more. Alicia leaped off the stone sphere, her eyes shining brighter than they had for years, replete as they were with The Deep Song. It had not been a carefully planned move, granted, but Alicia had made it with intention. The large slab, platform, really, of debris had been too big for Alicia to get moving without both of her hands, even in the all-but-zero-G of the Void but this, Alicia noted, presumed a motionless Alicia. Probably a spherical one too, just for the Physics Problem of it all.
Alicia, though, had no time to do the math. Instead, she dug into the platform, her grip sending a worrying cracking feeling through the material that she had no time to contemplate as her momentum carried herself and the now-tethered large debris chunk onward into the void. She did, however, have a different path in mind for her large lithic friend. Alicia took a deep breath, and with every single shred of Deep Song strength she could muster, she threw the massive rock at the approaching motes of light.
Although no part of this plan had included anything that could explode, a part of Alicia had no doubt expected something at least a little bit pyrotechnics-like for the payoff of her hastily assembled not-a-plan. As it were, though, she’d have to settle with the fairly undramatic sight of the majority of the mote missiles disappearing, as well as some being deflected, careening in untidy trajectories into the deep of the void as whatever targeting and thrust the improvised missile had, fought in vain against the forces of physics.

“Alicia, holy shit,” Lia’s voice crackled from the Void Pearl. “Are you ok?”
“Yeah…” Alicia felt her voice hoarse from the exertion and what was probably a nonzero amount of screaming she had phased out. “Can you come pick me up? I’m running on fumes out here.”
“Of course…”
In the corner of her eye, Alicia saw the faint light of Lia’s Deep Song glow as it drew nearer. In the other corner, Alicia saw something infinitely more dismaying. She had, apparently, forgotten about the possibility of a second volley. A more sparse, less fast-moving wave of mote-covered rocks, but a threat none the less.
“Lia watch out, there’s more.” Alicia shouted, but while it wasn’t entirely too late, it certainly could get to Too Late without calling a rideshare. Before Alicia could even begin to formulate another not-a-plan, the glowing rocks slammed into the sphere, diverting it more than a little bit from its heading.

Alicia wanted to imagine herself DBZ-flying straight to the stone sphere, but the truth was more that she performed a series of clumsy jumps from various space detritus to get there.
“Lia? Lia! Do you hear me? Where are you?” Alicia started desperately asking as soon as it became clear Lia was not standing on the exterior of the stone sphere. She’d have to be there when the rocks hit. “Girl? Where the FUCK…” Alicia swallowed a whole series of expletives as she tried, tried so very hard to muster sensible, productive thoughts and not the exhausted, panicked nonsense that was currently noising up the inside of her brain.
“…licia…” Alicia’s void pearl crackled. There was something wrong with the sound of it, but it definitely was Lia’s. Alicia drew in more of the Deep Song as she landed on the stone sphere. It had now stopped feeling like drawing strength out of a deep, powerful well, and felt an awful lot like drinking an energy drink around midnight, a sharp spike of energy which only did a so-so job of papering over the deep weariness whose sating it all but made impossible. Alicia did not, however, draw on the deep song for strength. She just needed the light and the heightened senses.

For a terrifying second, Alicia was convinced the didn’t see Lia anywhere, but after taking a few deep breaths to calm herself, she could spot a small form drifting away from the sphere. The form was not, as far as Alicia could see, moving other than moving relative to the sphere, but that didn’t change anything.
“Goddamnit, Lady,” Alicia whispered to herself through gritted teeth as she steered the stone sphere towards the motionless form, hoping against hope that she hadn’t failed to save her.

Author’s Note: Now this was a hoot to write. I’m usually not huge on the action climax part of a story, but with as much Space/Void action as this story has had, it didn’t feel right to not have a big bad set piece before it was all over. Next up comes the first thing that I came up with for Voidhearts and, not to hype it up too much, the one scene I basically wrote this whole thing to lead up to. Being an endings first writer can be kinda wild at times, not going to lie.

Catch you next time for that!

VSD