Rohan sat back from the data surface, breath caught somewhere between disbelief and a joy so sharp it ached, and stared at the crude, hand-drawn line stretching from a dying ash-world he might never see again toward a stretch of unmapped space he'd never heard of until tonight.
'I have a direction. Not a certainty. Not a destination. But a direction. Something real. Something I can actually chase instead of just surviving toward.'
He thought, unbidden, of Hestia's temple, of her calm, terrible honesty telling him the anchor point might be impossibly far away, might require him to search blind through an entire hostile universe with no more guidance than his own stubbornness.
She never mentioned this. Maybe she didn't know I could do it. Maybe even a goddess doesn't know everything about what happens to a person who's had two systems tangled together inside them for seven months.
