The first thing he felt was a tremor. The shaking, the vibrations. Things that felt like they should have been sounds.
But he couldn't hear anything, and he couldn't see anything.
This wasn't a body he had known before.
He was cold and getting colder. He tingled with something like pain.
Close to him was a certain kind of warmth.
And this body he didn't know, small and blind, knew that that was what would keep him safe.
He was slow, he was delicate. He was wet with some kind of gel.
He touched the source of the warmth.
With his body he felt the surface.
Through the cracks, that was where he needed to be.
He was feeling very cold.
There was a crease on the surface, a crease between metal and flesh.
He twisted through the seam and the pain began to slow.
This thing he was in had spots he could connect with.
He could hear now. He could see.
He was trapped beneath a large metal object.
And he wasn't so small anymore. When he moved, he could feel parts of him farther out than he had before.
Some of those parts were claws. He dug his way out of the ground.
It was only at the surface that he gave himself time to worry about it.
They'd been fighting Zarkon, the Lion had told him to use the black bayard, and now… he was here, he had claws and a strange body, and he didn't know anything in between.
He tried to call a name. His voice didn't manage it.
This thing he was, it wasn't human. And it wasn't animal, at least not completely.
The thing that had been on top of him was a ship. A Galra fighter, split open and burning.
There was a person inside. They were Galra, and they were dead.
Laser marks all through the ship.
He looked back outside of it.
Nothing that looked like it could have shot them. Mountains and grass and fields, visible like daytime even though the sky was dark with stars.
The light was from the arches. Great and blue, like they were holding up the sky.
There was glass on the crash site, too.
He turned back to the ship.
There was a small container inside, with a wet trail leading to the place he had come from.
With a hand that was almost too big to use, he moved the dead Galra off the console and laid them on the seat.
He touched its hand to the screen. It was small next to his, this giant gray paw.
Ship's logs. He played the last one
"Being pulled in by the gravity of a space station. Location unknown. Impact imminent."
He played the one before that.
"Pursuers have left. Still unable to fly the ship."
And before that.
"We've taken a hit, steering now impossible."
It wasn't a voice he knew.
"There are four ships following us now, just started firing."
Shiro moved the dead hand again.
"Agent Thanzar, Report 61: Article successfully stolen from Operation Kuron, contained in a stasis canister. Vulnerable if left outside."
There weren't any other reports.
He reached down to pick up the canister.
Article stolen from Operation Kuron.
Sure was small.
He didn't like the way this felt.
But there wasn't anything else at the crash site.
He touched Agent Thanzar on the forehead and moved on.
A few stretches on there were some cows.
Some cows with metal horns and lights in their eyes.
But unmistakably, they were cows from Earth.
He'd never been this much taller than one before.
He got a little closer.
The nearest cow raised her head from the grass. Her friends looked up when she lowed.
Looking at him, they lowered their horns. He thought they were going to charge.
But instead their horns shot lasers at him.
He turned and he ran.
There was a valley under the anchor point of the nearest sky arch. With caution, he entered.
It was a valley like you would see on Earth, except for the nighttime light. Rocks, trees, shining pools of water despite the limited atmosphere.
From afar, he could see a group of animals. Even from the distance, they looked enormous.
Like the animal he'd seen in Beta Traz.
He edged down the mountain to see them.
One of them came up and jumped on him.
He growled in surprise.
But the Yupper was wagging its tail. It licked him on the face.
Those paws looked just like his.
A couple of others bounded up to them. None of them were completely made of flesh.
"Yup."
"Yup-yup."
It was a pretty agreeable gathering.
But it didn't take him long to figure he wasn't getting anything out of their conversations, and he didn't know how much time he could spend there.
He looked back again at the mountain that held up the sky.
It had a sheer face on one side, with a crack running through.
From the other side, there was light. It was blue like the arches, faint but present.
At its widest, he could have fit his hand through. Instead he looked in.
It really wasn't a planet they were on, it was a ship, and inside there were guts and workings and light.
He couldn't see how far in it went. There were corners to turn and levels to scale.
Through the cracks, that was where he needed to be.
But the wall was solid rock, maybe metal to boot.
He was looking in again when he heard the scuffle.
The pack of Yuppers was on the move, chasing a tiny part-metal animal. It was golden and rabbit-like… he felt like he had seen something like that before.
The lead Yupper caught it. It shrieked as its neck was snapped.
Shiro felt something come over him.
Through the cracks.
On the rabbit.
He was a strange body that had put on a creature.
He felt the electricity snapping in his limbs as he ran.
He snatched the dead rabbit from the Yupper.
Through the cracks.
He let out a breath and took off the Yupper's body he had become.
And he was small again, small and unseeing but he knew where the rabbit was, it had been in his hands a moment ago, he crawled from beneath the chest plate of the Yupper and into the tunnel that was the rabbit.
The circuits prickled as he touched them. He touched the rabbit with his mind, and then he could see from its eyes.
He was in the limp hands of a creature, a creature that was slumping over, about to crush him.
He slipped once as he tried to run, but he got the hang of it quickly.
Away from the Yuppers, and into the crack in the wall.
Nearly everything glowed inside the shell of the station. There was moss growing up some of the walls, the light glowing softly through it.
And there were rabbits.
Or whatever these rabbit-like creatures were, with their extra eyes and extra limbs and robotic parts.
They loped through the room like they were at ease. Like they knew they were safe from the Yuppers.
It looked like they lived here. With the moss and the light and the hum of the ship.
There were dead rabbits in places, some relatively fresh, some so decomposed they were sunken remains fused to panels and wires. The bones morphed into metal, so seamlessly there were places that were neither metal nor bone.
The rabbits moved among them as though nothing was there. Beside the decomposing creatures, life happened.
There were babies, with robotic parts all the same.
He went further inside.
Some of the walls were webbed with roots, threading in through the ductwork.
It was a maze in the station, panels and doors and exposed wiring in places. The further in he went, the less life there was, plant and animal alike.
The electrical hum continued.
These were halls big enough for a person to walk through.
These were doors constructed for just that reason.
But they wouldn't open by themselves.
At first he thought the body was human.
When he got closer, he saw it was Galra.
Teeth. Ear holes.
No more soft tissue left.
Bones in imperial clothing.
Slumped against the wall, it looked tired.
The light was dimmer here.
He couldn't see any obvious injury on it, no holes in the armor, no bones out of place.
But next to the hand, there was a keycard.
His dexterity was poor in this body, but with two of his hands, he managed.
He couldn't read the Galran signage, but he could tell this door had led him to the engine room.
It was bright. It glowed yellow like the sun.
The energy arced between pieces, sequential, like the nodes of a heart.
The light was warm.
It was like being in a womb older than life itself. It was like being forged in a star.
It was gigantic, this power cell that upheld the whole station.
The engine was melted, parts of it. The power was too strong.
Being near it, you could feel the quickened cycle of life – it ignited the energy of your being, bright and splendid, for just a moment before you were burned out completely.
It was the most spectacular death you could have, an entire life condensed into a moment, next thing winking out like a star.
It was raw quintessence. It fed itself with the engine, and it fed the engine, too.
The Galra wouldn't run a ship on raw quintessence. They COULDN'T. But it was an imperial ship, there was a crest on every door.
It had been an imperial ship very long ago.
But now, it was alive.
It was the heart of a planet.
If he stayed, it would kill him.
He continued across the walkway, leaving his spectacular death behind.
The keycard granted him access, through the cracks, to the station's second heart.
The second heart was smaller. And unlike the first, it was still.
A laboratory room. Another dead Galra.
And in the center of it all was a creature.
It hung suspended in a fluid, in a tube stretched floor to ceiling.
Barely perceptible, there was a ripple from his footstep. But in the static fluid it seemed like an earthquake, the breaking of an ancient stillness.
There were crystals forming on the glass, on the creature, like sugar on a string.
Crystals the color of life.
He went over to one of the consoles.
He had to stand on a table of instruments to reach it.
It didn't respond to his paws, but it did respond to the dead Galra's finger bone.
The records of the project.
Possibly projects, plural.
But they were written records and he couldn't read the language.
There were some images, though. A blueprint of the creature inside. And what must have been a map of the ship.
Models of various robotic animals he'd seen roaming about the station. Pictures that looked like they were focused on their reproduction.
Biological reproduction.
And there was text upon text near the images of the creature.
He looked at it again.
It wasn't much bigger than he was, in this rabbit-like body. Curled up and black, it almost seemed to have its own light.
He had never seen anything like it. Whatever it was, it was the most important thing on the ship.
It was the thing he would take back with him. It was the thing that would get him out.
He crawled out of the rabbit's body to meet it.
There was a seam in the floor where the tube was. He followed it until he was beneath, until he breached a gap.
In the fluid of the tube, he wasn't cold. Not hearing or seeing or breathing, it was like floating through a dream.
Whatever his body was, it could swim. He moved to where he remembered the creature being.
And there was that warmth, warmer than ever before, telling him this was where he needed to be, that this was more right than anything.
He touched it.
It was like it had been waiting for him.
He found the channel behind the head and slid in.
It was like being the Lion.
It was a seamless fusion of technology and life, bones infused with knowing. He interfaced with the metal parts and accessed the soft ones.
Life was an electric thing, with synapses and pacemakers and the muscle fibers they spoke to. Life had an electricity to it, and so did the wires and the circuits, the artificial life harnessed by a creator, not divine, not omniscient, but an electric creature of flesh and blood who applied the principles of its existence to something that started as mud.
In this body, in these robeasts, he could be them both.
But this one was different. Its resonance was familiar.
Slowly, he opened its eyes.
The creature could phase through glass. It could turn into light, into energy.
He was wet with the fluid of the tube when he came out. He could taste it in his mouth, he could feel it in his lungs.
It took a couple more light-phasings to leave it behind.
This was a body that knew how to handle itself, even if its feet had never touched the ground before now.
It was like speaking with Voltron.
He turned into light again and moved on.
He left it all there, the Galra, the rabbit, the keycard.
The crash site, the entire living colony.
He had never touched the void before. But this body, this beam of light, it did just that.
He didn't know where Voltron was.
He didn't know where he was going.
He just thought about what he wanted to find as he flew past the stars.
He landed far away from everything he had ever known.
Except Keith.
On a creature that floated through space, a creature the size of a moon.
And Keith was there, with a member of the Blade and no one else in sight.
It scared him.
Keith put his hand out.
"It's okay, little guy."
Keith gave him a different name.
He understood.
But he still tried to get through.
"Krolia, look. He already knows 'paw.'"
He understood why it didn't work.
He felt sick, being worried about everyone else and not being able to ask.
But if nothing else, there was Keith, sitting quietly next to him, petting him between his ears.
He loved Keith, and he loved that Keith was happy.
Every now and again, the sky turned to fire and he saw things. It seemed, so did Keith. So did the Blade agent.
They didn't seem as afraid of it.
There were times when he saw the witch.
"This ore is from the comet that built Voltron."
It was small, a chip hardly bigger than a Galra's finger bone.
"You understand that this project is under high security. The blueprints have been sent to the station. Reports on the ore and its creature are expected."
"Vrepit sa."
He saw Agent Thanzar, too.
Agent Thanzar, far from the station, hooking something to a strange-looking computer chip.
A wormlike thing, flat with joints and feelers. It curled, like a living thing, as Thanzar transferred the information.
With the process through, it went into a fluid-filled canister.
"AI copy secured."
He followed Keith and the Blade agent off the star whale.
He followed them to a planet in the quantum abyss.
He followed them through the reaches of space to the Castle, to Voltron and all of the others.
The Lions and the people he loved.
And there on the ship, he found himself looking into his own human face.