He tapped the data slate, and a projection bloomed above its surface — a rough star chart, Cael Athis marked at one edge with a small, isolated glyph, a curving transit line stretching away from it toward a cluster of denser markings some distance across the projected field.
"The Halcyon Span," Odris said. "A crossroads system, as I told you. Four inhabited worlds, two major orbital stations, and traffic thick enough that customs authorities have long since given up attempting to track every independent transfer that passes through it. If you wished to disappear into a crowd, young man, you could not have named a better one, whether by luck or by genuine knowledge of merchant shipping lanes."
"Luck," Rohan admitted. "Mostly luck."
"Mm." Odris did not look entirely convinced, but let it pass. "We will arrive in six days, barring complications, which I trust you will not personally contribute any further of. You will remain confined to guest quarters for the duration — better quarters than the one you currently occupy, I should add, given the alternative was rather more punitive before I intervened. You will not approach engineering, the bridge, or any restricted section of this vessel. You will take meals delivered to your quarters. And you will, I hope, use the time to consider that not every merchant captain in this universe operates the way I do, and that whatever awaits you at the Halcyon Span will require rather more caution than the desperation that got you this far."
Rohan met his gaze steadily. "I’ve had plenty of practice with caution lately."
"Have you." Odris’s eyes flicked, briefly, unreadably, to the spear across Rohan’s knees. "I rather suspect you’ve had considerably more practice with desperation, and have simply learned to disguise the difference. It is not the same thing, whatever it may feel like from the inside."
The words landed harder than Rohan expected, close enough to something Maerin might have said that his throat tightened involuntarily. He said nothing, unwilling to give Odris the satisfaction of a response.
Odris seemed to take the silence as answer enough. He rose, straightening his coat with the same practised motion Rohan remembered from the landing ramp at Veyrhold, warmth sliding back over his features like a mask settling into place.
"My chief engineer would like a word with you before you return to your quarters," he said. "Purely professional curiosity, she assures me, regarding precisely what it was you did to her drive core housing. I would recommend humouring her. She is considerably less forgiving than I am, and considerably more capable of making the remainder of this transit unpleasant if she feels slighted."
The engineer’s name, Rohan learned within the first thirty seconds of the conversation, was Kessa, and she did not so much greet him as interrogate him, standing with arms crossed in the corridor outside his new quarters while Corrin hovered a discreet distance away.
"Molecular restructuring," she said without preamble, soot still smudged along one cheekbone despite what must have been hours since the incident. "That’s the closest classification I’ve got, and I’ve spent six years certifying drive systems across half a dozen shipping consortiums. You want to explain to me how an unregistered stowaway with no augmentation signature I can detect softened a Class-Four security lock and then put a thermal pulse through reinforced housing with his bare hand?"
"Would you believe me if I told you?"
"Try me."
Rohan hesitated, weighing the wisdom of the truth against the safety of a lie, and found — perhaps out of sheer exhaustion, perhaps out of some stubborn refusal to keep hiding every part of himself from everyone he met — that he simply didn’t have it in him to construct something false.
"I’m like the humans you are used to," he said. "I have an ability that lets me influence the structure of certain kinds of matter. It’s never worked on anything like a ship before. I wasn’t entirely sure it would."
Kessa stared at him for a long moment, and Rohan braced for disbelief, or mockery, or the particular flavour of suspicion he’d grown used to receiving whenever he skirted too close to the truth of his origins.
Instead, she let out a short, surprised laugh.
"Not like other humans..." she repeated. "Well. That’s certainly a new one. I’ve had smugglers, defectors, three separate bounty runners, and one very memorable escaped bond-worker come through this ship’s lower decks over the years, and not a single one of them ever tried that explanation." She shook her head, something almost like grudging respect flickering across her tired features. "For what it’s worth, whatever you are, you nearly cost me eleven years of certification exams and a very expensive core housing. I’d appreciate it if you kept whatever that ability is far, far away from my engine for the rest of this transit."
"That’s the plan."
"Good." She turned to go, then paused, glancing back at him with an expression that had softened, just slightly, into something more contemplative. "For what it’s worth — and I’ll deny saying this if you repeat it to the captain — most people who try what you tried tonight don’t walk away from it. You should probably spend some of these six days figuring out why you did."
She left before Rohan could think of anything to say in response.
The guest quarters, when Corrin finally left him alone inside them, proved to be everything Odris had promised and more than Rohan had expected — a proper bed, a working washroom, a porthole considerably larger than the one in his previous cell, currently framing a slow wash of distant stars against black.
Rohan set the spear down against the wall with the same careful reverence he always did, eased himself onto the edge of the bed, and finally allowed the full weight of everything — the ash squall, the drainage cut, the stabiliser casing, the charge scan, the chase, the engine room, the standoff,
Kessa’s parting words — to settle over him at once.
[Status]
[Name: Rohan Roy]
[Titles: Rabid Wolf Slayer I, Hestia’s Acknowledgement, Veyrhold Trusted Helper, Skarn Hunter I, Ship-Held Hostage-Taker]
[Rank: 35]
[Class: Evolution Gene]
[Origin Energy: 58% / 100%]
[Condition: Recovering]
[Active Quest Chain: Ashbound World → Stowaway Beneath the Gilded Heron → Passage to the Halcyon Span]
[Status: In Progress — Estimated Time to Arrival: 5 days, 22 hours]
[Great System Note: Primary Objective updated. Return to Origin Realm — Progress: Departed Cael Athis system. Anchor point search may now expand beyond planetary boundaries.]
That final line held his attention longest.
Beyond planetary boundaries. Beyond Cael Athis. Beyond everything I thought this search was limited to.
For seven months, his entire understanding of finding a way home had been bound to a single ash-choked planet, a single dungeon entrance, a single desperate hope that whatever anchor point Hestia had described might somehow still be findable from the wrong side of an impossible boundary. He had never let himself seriously consider what might lie beyond it — an entire universe of systems, stations, worlds, all of it now, however faintly, within reach.
The Halcyon Span was not an answer. It was, at best, the first real question he’d been given the chance to ask since arriving in this world — a place with enough traffic, enough information, enough possibility that he might finally begin gathering the kind of knowledge Cael Athis had never been able to offer him.
Rohan pulled Liora’s charm free from beneath his ash-cloth and turned it over once in his fingers, watching starlight catch along its worn edge.
’I told her I’d tell her if I found a way. I meant it. Whatever’s waiting at the Halcyon Span, I’ll find out, and I’ll find a way to let them know — Maerin, Bryan, Iri, Jorren, Pell, Liora. All of them. Somehow.’
He didn’t know yet how he’d manage that particular promise. He didn’t know, honestly, how he’d manage most of what lay ahead of him — an unfamiliar system, an unfamiliar galaxy, a search for an anchor point that might not even exist anymore, might have drifted, might have sealed shut the very moment he stepped through it.
But six days ago, he had been a legally cornered nobody on a backwater ash-world with two years of servitude bearing down on him and no path forward that didn’t end in someone else’s mercy.
Now he was a man aboard a ship bound for a crossroads of a thousand possibilities, carrying a spear a goddess had given him, a charm a girl who mattered had pressed into his hand, and a stubborn, hard-won certainty that impossible things could, in fact, be done twice.
Rohan closed his status panel, tucked the charm back against his chest, and watched the stars slide slowly past the porthole until, somewhere in that quiet drift of distant light, exhaustion finally pulled him under.
He did not dream of Cael Athis. For the first time in seven months, he dreamed of nothing at all — only quiet, only motion, only the steady, patient hum of an engine carrying him somewhere he had never been, toward a future that was, at last, entirely his own to shape.
Somewhere beyond the porthole, past the slow wheel of unfamiliar stars, the Halcyon Span waited — five days and twenty-two hours away, and closing.
[Active Quest Chain: Ashbound World -> Stowaway Beneath the Gilded Heron -> Passage to the Halcyon Span]
[Status: In Progress]