They flew in absolute silence for what felt like eons, when the Red Lion knew that it had really only been a few doboshes since he and the other Lions had departed from Altea for the final time.
It wasn't his Paladin at his controls, however. No, Alfor had remained on the planet to stall Zarkon long enough for them to get far away enough to be lost in the expanse of unexplored space.
Red wanted to turn around and fly at full-speed back toward Altea, to tear the pretender to pieces with his own claws, but he couldn't. Not with Melenor at his controls.
She was silent, as were several of the of the Castle of Lions' staff. They all knew what Zarkon's intent for Altea was. The presence of Zaiforge cannons made it all too clear.
They had destroyed Daibazaal after all, by necessity or not.
Alfor's final words to Red had been an order, to hide on the planet Xerios. Red had wanted to stay and fight—and that was when Melenor and the castle staff had become a factor.
The queen was strictly a diplomat. The castle staff composed of one of the cooks, three of the engineers, a magistrate, and an alchemist's apprentice. Not a single one of them knew how to pilot even a cargo craft; Melenor only had been told how to steer Red in a general direction.
As Voltron, their mission was to protect the innocent, like Red's passengers. So as much as the Red Lion wanted to go back for his idiot of a Paladin, he couldn't.
The Xeriosians had been long-standing allies of Altea. Their people had been involved in the war firsthand, and Altea's imminent (already-happened) destruction would be the final warning to scatter to the winds, much like the Lions themselves had been ordered to.
Then Red had felt it—the bond that had been forged even when the Lion himself had still only been half-aware of his own surroundings, tying him to his Paladin on a level reaching their very quintessence—shudder before snapping.
It struck suddenly enough for him to come to a near-complete halt, suddenly enough for even his inertial dampeners to stop his passengers from being flung forward.
Alfor was gone. His Paladin was gone. And Red was far, too far to have been able to even hope to do anything about it. He wanted to strike at the nearest asteroids, roar his rage to the distant nebulas—but that wouldn't do any good now. All the rage in the world couldn't bring the dead back, as much as one wished it could.
In hindsight, maybe it was the one still-sensical part of the Red Lion at that exact tick that realized the danger Xerios held, in the mere detail of being a volcanic planet, before he'd seized control and flown in a completely different direction, without regard to the startled cries of his substitute pilot.
Xerios would have been so, so predictable.
Melenor must have realized as well. Red felt her nervous grip on the control sticks slacken for a few ticks, before a wormhole flared into existence in front of him. The Lion would later realize that she'd remotely summoned one from the castle. He hadn't known that to be possible until then.
The planet before them on the other end was fairly unassuming, having two moons. It was inhabited, and it was mostly water, though it had sparse archipelagos here and there. The faraway piece of the Red Lion's consciousness recognized it.
If anything, Zarkon would expect to find the Blue Lion on planet Alwas. If even that.
Initially, she had been confused beyond comprehension when she was able to detect Red's presence again. Then it occurred to her that Melenor may have decided that Xerios wasn't the best place to put Red—and that had been for the best, if true.
The Blue Lion had still been within communication range when Xerios had been destroyed in the same manner as Altea. Survivors had been very few, if any, with how fast it had happened.
Had Red been there, he would have been in Zarkon's clutches now.
That thought aside, Blue was left with a dilemma of her own now. The planet that her Paladin (he was dead and she hadn't even been close enough to give him any comfort) had told her to go to was in the same direction as Red. Definitely the same quadrant, maybe even the same galaxy.
It was going to hurt. Oh, it was going to hurt disregarding that final command. But it was just too much of a risk. Ancients forbid that Zarkon even found one of them, but he would find the other all too quickly if they were too close to each other.
After some consideration, Blue angled away from her original destination, starting toward the Challaxian quadrant. Pokitaru would be unassuming enough, she decided.
It had taken a few rotations for Satis to notice something out of the ordinary, and that by itself was an impressive feat, considering how close it was to Ōban. On Alwas, specifically. Once he'd known it was there, however, that had been that.
It did nothing to prepare him for what it was, though. He recognized the Altean queen from the Great Race, but the six other Alteans were unfamiliar. And that was saying nothing about the energy signature under the ocean some ways off—or more specifically, in an undersea cavern.
The people of the planet Adalou were, by nature, sensitive to the auras living things gave off. People, a limited number of artificial constructs, even planets each had an aura. Satis had known at first glance that the ships that the visitors from worlds uncomprehendingly far away had come in were in the middle faction. Or, at least, he'd assumed that had been the case.
He hadn't known how much of an understatement that was until then.
The Red Lion's aura was something equitable to a hurricane of nothing but fire, but at the same time, it was withdrawn into itself to such a degree that if he hadn't known any better, Satis would have almost assumed that the Lion was…
No. It was.
That there were Alteans here to begin with—notably the queen without the king or princess—was a damning sign. Something terrible had to have happened.
For some time, the Avatar watched the refugee Alteans go about their business, setting up structures to provide shelter among the rocky shoreline.
Among the first things he'd been told after his predecessor had been…contained, was that he was to not under any circumstance involve himself with the affairs of the so-called usurper.
They hadn't said anything about a portion of whatever Voltron really was.
Time had very little meaning to the Red Lion for some time after that, as did many things in general. He hadn't even bothered with raising his particle barrier after his passengers had disembarked, though was vaguely aware that they all, Melenor included, occasionally returned to the cavern to continue working on…an engraving of some sort, with the alchemist's apprentice (or simply the alchemist now) overseeing it.
They finished one quintant, and Melenor remained for a dobosh longer than the others, with a quiet "Goodbye, Red," being dimly comprehended.
Red finally thought to raise his particle barrier once she'd departed.