"Which means whatever chased them is real," Swan said, quietly, "and old, and it's still out here."
"It has a name," Taisen said. "I intend to have more than that before this is finished."
The distress call from Argos reached the Arctic three days later, garbled by the planet's metal-rich upper atmosphere into something barely intelligible, and it took Captain Dorian's ground team the better part of a day, sweeping the western edge of the Great Northern Forest on foot, to trace it to its source: not a crash site, not an injury, but Colonel Lyn's own voice, calm and utterly unbothered by the fact that she'd apparently walked into something none of them had a name for yet, requesting, no, ordering, that no one on the recovery team so much as scuff a single tree on the way in.
Taisen and Alita found her waiting in a chamber carved into the planet's bones, lit only by the cold blue chemical glow of a dozen scattered glowsticks, and beside her, visible only to the two of them, a tall, pale, third-eyed woman in flowing green stood watching their approach with the patient, ancient stillness of something that had been waiting considerably longer than four days for anyone to arrive.
"You may leave now, Captain," Lyn said. "You're not cleared for what happens next."
"I am Ashera," the woman said, once Dorian's footsteps had faded back up the tunnel, "last Queen of the Falmeri. I will be your inquisitor, Taisen of Kharsat, and my judgment, once rendered, will be final."
She put him on trial there, in the dark, for Boettia: asked him, plainly, without cruelty and without mercy either, whether a man who turns his weapons on civilians to save a supply base has any honest claim left to the word soldier, and listened, unmoved, while he gave her the same answer he'd been giving himself for two lifetimes, about sieges and timetables and the difference between a hard choice and a coward's excuse for one. She did not contradict him. She only watched, third eye unblinking, and Taisen understood, dimly, underneath the old practiced certainty of his own defense, that her silence wasn't agreement. It was simply patience, waiting to see whether he'd ever get tired enough of the answer to ask himself a better question.
"The Falmeri have need of you, if we're ever to be free of Malkor the Deceiver," she said instead. "Trickery and cunning must be your weapons. You must be prepared to make hard choices. I only hope, Taisen of Kharsat, that you learn in time which choices are hard because they cost something, and which are only hard to admit are cowardice with a better name attached."
The vision faded. The sarcophagus beneath her (long enough, Taisen realized only now, to have held a body far taller than any of them) split open under a touch of the current he barely had to reach for, and inside, resting on embalmed remains gone dry and papery with centuries, sat a small box, and within it, a soul stone: a fist-sized sphere of shimmering glass, warm to the touch, already showing him fragments of a life none of his had ever touched.
He lost four days to it, shut inside his own quarters with orders that only the ship's outright destruction was permitted to interrupt him, and somewhere in the second day, deep enough into Ashera's memories that the line between watching and living them had gone thin as paper, he found himself standing (not present, not seen, simply witnessing, the way a soul stone always let its keeper witness) in a receiving hall he'd never stood in, watching a man he'd never met walk toward a queen he now, distantly, understood to be dying.
Malkor was not what the reports and the reputation had built him into. No armor, no ceremony, no cruelty performed for an audience. He wore plain dark clothing, moved without hurry, and spoke, when he finally did, in the reasonable, almost gentle register of a man discussing terms with someone whose objection he had already, privately, dismissed as sentiment.
"You could simply give me what I've asked for," he said, "and your people would want for nothing again. I don't ask because I hate the Falmeri, Ashera. I ask because you have something I need, and I've found, across a very long study of every species I've ever conquered, that the ones who survive intact are the ones wise enough to be useful before they're forced to be."
"You would enslave my people to steer your ships through the dark," Ashera said, her voice, even in memory, carrying the same patient weight it had carried in the tomb.
"I would employ them," Malkor said, "which is a distinction your people seem unable to make, and which is, frankly, the only distinction that has ever mattered in the history of every empire that outlived the ones who founded it. You call it enslavement because it costs your pride something to admit it's simply the efficient use of a resource that happens to think and bleed. I call it conquest because I've never once pretended otherwise to myself the way every other tyrant in history has needed to. That honesty is the whole of what separates me from them, Ashera: not cruelty. I am not cruel. I am unsentimental, which every empire that has ever lasted has eventually had to become, and which yours, I think, secretly envies me for, even now."
"And when you no longer need us to see through the dark? When your empire has swallowed enough worlds that the Chaos Region is simply one more system among a thousand you no longer have to navigate carefully?"
"Then I will have already taken what I needed from you," Malkor said, without a flicker of shame in it, "the way I have taken it from every gift any species has ever been foolish enough to hand me in exchange for their own safety. Your third sight. A Falmeri child's closing eye, transplanted into a better vessel than the one it was born to. Whatever a people has that makes them worth conquering is, by definition, worth harvesting once the conquering is finished: that isn't malice, Ashera, it's simply what power looks like once you stop pretending it has a ceiling. I have no ceiling. That is the whole of my philosophy, and the whole of my advantage over every enemy who still believes, foolishly, that there ought to be a line he refuses to cross. I have never found that line useful. I have found, every single time, that the men who draw one simply hand the rest of the board to men like me."