"Then I refuse you," Ashera said, "and I will spend whatever remains of my people's freedom making that refusal cost you more than the alternative would have."
"You will," Malkor agreed, entirely unbothered, already turning to go. "And I will win regardless, because you have a line you won't cross, and I don't, and that has never once in the long history of anything been a fair fight. I take no pleasure in saying so. It's simply true, and I've never seen the use in being anything other than honest about the things that are simply true."
The vision released him, and Taisen came back to himself in his own dark quarters with his heart going hard against his ribs and a taste in his mouth like old copper, because he had heard, in Malkor's voice, in the register of it, in the reasonable, patient certainty of a man explaining why cruelty was simply efficiency wearing a more honest name: something he recognized far too well to be comfortable admitting where he'd heard it before. He sat with that a long while, in the dark, and did not, that night, let himself finish the thought all the way to the end.
The rest of her history (he still caught himself reaching for an older name every time he tried to think of her, some habit of the stone itself rather than his own memory) unspooled over the remaining two days: a species of grey-skinned Falmeri, born with a literal third eye that let them glimpse the branching paths of the future well enough to navigate the Chaos Region's ever-shifting lanes, worshippers of something they called only the Great Presence, split at the moment Malkor's Reza first came for them into two irreconcilable camps: the Kestrali, who bent the knee and served, and the ones who ran, whom history and Malkor's own propaganda alike had taken to calling, cruelly, the Unbound, as if freedom itself were the joke.
Some of the Unbound who fled with Ashera had fallen, later, into the hands of pirates under a man named Jorun Na'ak, and been sold into the possession of something Ashera's memory referred to, with an old dread that survived even translation, only as the Demon: a being who conducted experiments, some on children, trying to learn why a Falmeri's third eye sealed shut forever at the moment of death, and who had, by the time Ashera finally caught up to what remained of her people, already learned how to transplant a living third eye into another body entirely.
They had come to Argos, in the end, because the planet itself lay hidden from Third Sight and resisted, violently, any attempt to settle it: the great taloned hunter-beasts, the Myrkr trees that could crush a hull like tin when threatened despite lying dormant for centuries at a time. It was the only place left, in all the galaxy Ashera had access to, where Malkor's reach could not follow.
Taisen went to the second tomb with a party of seven (himself, Alita, Dorian, four of Dorian's troopers) and stood at the treeline a long moment before anything else happened, feeling the current settle low and patient under his sternum, still not fully repaid from the derelict, the debt of it a dull, familiar weight he'd learned to carry the way he carried everything else that never quite finished costing him.
The beast came for them out of the undergrowth exactly as its ancestors' bones had promised it would, three meters at the shoulder, armored, bellowing, and Taisen reached for the current rather than his blade, felt the numbness bloom faster than he liked at the very tips of his fingers (still raw from the derelict, still owed) and pressed forward anyway, because a soul-bond wasn't a thing that waited politely for a man's convenience.
It came to heel. It always did, eventually, once he found the old, half-shattered bond some long-dead Falmeri had left buried in its skull like a splinter that had never fully worked its way out, and beneath the bond, buried deeper, the memory of a stone pyramid it could not be made, by any pressure he applied, to explain the ending of.
They rode it through country that made itself scarce around them (birds and small game fleeing long before the beast's shadow reached them) until the second tomb rose out of the jungle exactly as Ashera's memory had promised: older, more worn, twenty meters of carved stone in a world with no stone formations of its own to have carved it from, its grounds kept in a state of manicured, inexplicable care by hands neither of them could account for.
At the tomb's lowest level, past chambers that had clearly once held defenses now silently, deliberately disarmed, they found a floating cube of dark, arcane-etched metal that woke at Taisen's touch with the current spent freely, one more debt added to a ledger already running dangerously long. A cloaked figure coalesced out of scattered light above it.
"I am Vessyr," the voice said, crisp, unhurried, with an accent that made the name land, unmistakably, closer to demon than its owner had likely ever intended. "The greatest mind ever to catalogue the mysteries of this galaxy. This repository holds the whole of my life's work. One of many I left scattered, in case any single one of them was ever found and destroyed before it had done its work."
The knowledge inside surpassed anything in the UN's archives: star charts of worlds lost to time, the anatomies of species no living record had ever catalogued, and Taisen understood, reading it, exactly how those anatomies had been obtained, and did not ask Vessyr to confirm it, because some answers cost more to hear spoken aloud than to simply already know.
He had the whole of the archive removed and carried back to the Arctic, and sat with it a long while afterward, alone, turning over everything he now knew about a man who had never once, in his long study of Vessyr's files or Ashera's memory or the ruin left scattered across two systems in his wake, drawn a single line he wasn't willing to cross, and understood, with the specific, unwelcome clarity of a man recognizing his own reflection in water he hadn't meant to look into, exactly how far that made Malkor from him, and exactly how much closer than he wanted to admit.