Summary:

Nine hundred years have elapsed since the Dominion War ended and Odo and Kira said their goodbyes. Now, a strange vision sent by his former commanding officer wakes Odo from his sleep in the Great Link. The captain's message is unclear, but one thing is certain: Someone back on Bajor is in trouble. And somehow, Odo is meant to help her.

Meanwhile, on Bajor, Kira Eeris at last resists the fate that she has silently loathed for fifteen years. As the sole direct descendant of Kira Nerys, the first Figurehead of Bajor, her destiny is to succeed her mother and take the throne. But following her heart comes with a price. And being a revolutionary is never easy.

A/N: Thanks to Queenix for knocking this story into shape. Thanks also to my mom, for catching a few final draft mistakes that my eyes ran right over. Thanks finally to my inner muse for finally knocking the idea of composing a forty-or-so chapter novel. I decided to break it up into a series of smaller stories instead. Of course, that only means one thing—this is only the beginning. There are years of Eeris's story left to tell.


~2378~


The Link was as alluring a concept now as it had been when he'd first discovered it, on that fateful mission to the Gamma Quadrant with Nerys. He'd lost track of how much time he'd spent simply being, now existing as a liquid, then as a gas, then as anything his now unlimited vocabulary could think of. It was fascinating how many forms he now knew how to mimic, how many years of history he could now recall, even before the lab. Time was meaningless, his existence based solely on the limits of his imagination. And never, even with Laas, had he felt so free.

But free or not, sometimes he found it comforting to take humanoid form at the edge of the Great Link and simply watch as his people lapped at the shore. He could see the expanse of the red-orange sky, the slight undulations of the living ocean he could become a part of without so much as a thought, and the powdery red of that single island where he'd said goodbye to Nerys. Despite the fine, dust-like quality of the minerals that composed it, that island was still here, still standing, the spikes of rock still piled high, the ground still solid, having had no wind or water to tear at it. In these ways, the island was almost as peaceful as the Link. And it was comforting to return to the form that had once identified him in the Solid world. He still thought of that form as uniquely his. He never remained Solid for long, though. As a Solid, he once again gained a sense of time, and the weight of what he had lost pressed down on him. Never one to dwell, he always returned almost immediately to the peace of the Great Link. He would submerge himself in that living ocean and let his mind run free. It let him forget about the past, let him let go of the painful memories he carried.

Suddenly, his surroundings shifted.

Odo's head spun as the endless red-orange of his homeworld melted instantly into dull earth tones. One minute, he was standing on the very solid, real red dirt of his island, and the next, he found his boots sinking into wet soil. Brush that was somehow dry covered the ground. Odo whipped his head around in surprise, trying to identify where he was and how he had been transported. He was in a vast field that undulated with hills. The sky was overcast and he could hear the sound of rain, but oddly, there was none to be seen. A cold wind blew past and he pulled his outermost cells more tightly together to resist the chill. He knew almost immediately that he hadn't been here before. But how could he have been brought here? There was no one around to be seen. He tilted his head up, searching for some sign of the entity responsible, but all that greeted him were gloomy, gray clouds that hovered low over the land, shutting out the sun and the sky.

A possibility came to him as a tiny flash of a memory he had forgotten. The wormhole aliens. They were known for making Jem'Hadar disappear and for experimenting with corporeal beings. But that was impossible. He had watched the wormhole aliens die himself. There were no more Prophets. There was no more wormhole. Whoever was responsible for bringing him here wasn't working from a godlike chair.

And besides…where was he? This certainly wasn't his homeworld. It looked like no place he'd ever been to before. The gently rolling hills, the grasses and shrubs that quivered in the breeze, the slight chill of the air—none of it bore any resemblance to any place he remembered. But he had the strangest, most visceral sense that he knew this place—or, at least, had once known it. He turned slowly, scanning the land in all directions. The wind whipped around his body, freezing him to the core despite his attempts to rearrange his cells to better defend himself. The skirt of his Founder robes flapped against his legs and he slid into a more snuggly fitting form, his old security uniform.

A strange calm swept over him, as if some outside force was asking him to take a deep breath. Odo closed his eyes. A chilly wind began to churn around him, roaring like a hurricane as it whipped around his head. His lungs filled with the icy air and he suddenly realized why this place felt so familiar. It wasn't anything to do with the actual place. The rolling hills, overcast sky, and wet, sinking ground existed nowhere in his memory. It was the feeling, more than anything else, that he recognized. It was his isolation and his battle against the cold that he remembered. The last time he'd felt so alone, so lost, had been years ago. It had been the time when he'd finally escaped the lab. That day he had bid his resentful farewell to Dr. Mora and had stepped out into the dark chill of the night, alone.

He hadn't had a game plan then, nor any idea of where to go or how to move on. His only thought had been to leave. To escape that place of his nightmares. Just as he wanted to escape the forbidding chill now.

Bajor, he realized. This place was Bajor!

Impossible! He shook off the feeling. This couldn't be Bajor. The terrain was all wrong. And even if he was somehow back on his old adopted home, this had to be the saddest-looking Bajor he'd ever seen. How could his memory have come up with a landscape so different from what he'd known before? Did his mind really hold Bajor in so negative, so dismal, a light? This couldn't be real—that, he knew for sure. With the Prophets gone, there was no entity in the universe that could have actually transported him here. This was all in his head. But that left him with one nagging question. Why was he thinking of Bajor now? Why now, after the Prophets were dead, the wormhole was gone, and there was no way he could ever go back to his friends and resume his old life? Why did his memories insist on haunting him?

Off to his left, he spotted a cluster of huts that blended into the surrounding hills so well it would take a trained investigator to notice. Huts normally meant people. Even if he wasn't sure what he was doing here or how this was even possible, finding people was probably the best place to start. He set off through the hills, tempted to shape shift into an Arbazan vulture, but guessing it was probably best to trudge along in his humanoid form for the time being.

Movement caught the corner of Odo's eye. He swiveled his head towards it and saw the oddest sight he could have possibly imagined. A young Bajoran girl, perhaps fifteen, was running—no, racing—toward him, her breathing rapid, her expression one of alarm, her single arm flailing in all directions. Her hair was sopping wet, for a thundercloud had burst right over her head, and her own personal torrent of rain was crashing down around her as a spotlight follows a performer.

"Odo!" she cried as she sprang toward him. "Odo!"

He stood stock-still, not sure what to make of this new development. As far as he was aware, thunderclouds didn't go around chasing young Bajoran girls.

"Odo!" she cried again.

The girl collapsed at Odo's feet. Odo knelt down to help her, but she flinched away from him and scrambled to her feet.

"Prophets, I finally found you!" she gasped. "Is it really you?"

He certainly had reason to doubt that. "I suppose so."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "You are Odo, aren't you? The metamorph?"

It had been a long time since he'd heard that term. In fact, the last he'd heard it had been from Laas, and even his Changeling brother had stopped using it once he'd learned the traditional word of their kind. Why would this girl be using it?

Odo tilted his head at her. "I do have the ability to change my shape."

She breathed out in relief. "So do I, apparently."

"Are you a Changeling?"

Even as he asked the question, he wondered how she could possibly be one. She was a Bajoran, being chased around by rain, possessing only one arm, and using the term "metamorph." But this was all so surreal that he wouldn't really be surprised if she was a Changeling.

"Heh. Who knows?" She frowned and glanced over at the cluster of huts. "We should find some shelter. It's pouring out here."

Odo glanced up at the sky. There was still no water hitting him. "Only on you, apparently."

She scowled at him. "That doesn't surprise me. Now let's go."

She grabbed his arm with her only hand, and he was surprised to feel only four fingers close around his. He glanced down. Her ring finger was missing.

She noticed his glance.

"That must have hurt," he said.

She glared at him. "It didn't, actually. Now let's go."

Odo let himself be tugged along, no longer surprised by the absurdity of what was happening, but with a growing sense of urgency that he find out the answers. This surely couldn't be some elaborate trick of his people, could it?

They reached the huts far faster than they should have, given the distance. In a matter of seconds, Odo found himself standing under the straw eaves of their slanted, conical roofs, watching as the rain over the girl's head dripped down between the inefficient sticks, and then suddenly changed direction as if blown by wind. It now gusted at her in full force from the side, as if someone were pranking her with a hose set on the spray setting. Odo glanced around suspiciously for the suspected perpetrators, but still, there was no one to be seen. This was all so absurd. Not even the wormhole aliens had ever played this overtly with nature! And he was almost sure that making this experience play out in his mind wasn't the Founders' style. So where was he? In some induced dream, back in the Great Link? Or perhaps he'd never returned to his people. Perhaps Section 31 had planned to do more than just infect him with a deadly disease and he was back in their lab, being poked and prodded and—

There was no sense in useless speculation. He'd find out where he was when his captors chose to reveal that. In the meantime, he'd just have to watch for clues and play out his perceived role. And Odo was a practiced actor. It couldn't be that hard.

The girl yanked open the door to the hut. Standing immediately inside was Captain Benjamin Sisko.

Odo staggered back, stunned, unsure how to react. Captain Sisko couldn't possibly be standing there, in the flesh. Odo had no doubt now that he was making a fool of himself. But nevertheless, the habitual answer popped out of his mouth, unbidden.

"Captain!"

Sisko was smiling at him. "You always were such a skeptic, Constable. But I need your help, and this is the only way I can think of to communicate with you."

Odo gaped at the man who had supposedly been whisked away to the wormhole ages ago. The man who had been trapped there when his people's weapon had supposedly killed the wormhole aliens and the wormhole had permanently closed, cutting the Bajorans off from their Celestial Temple. Was it possible? Was it possible that Odo was standing here in the wormhole with Captain Sisko?

No. Impossible. He'd watched the destruction of the wormhole himself.

Sisko gave him a speculative look and seemed to think Odo had had enough excitement for one day. "Another time, perhaps."

Odo was still staring when Sisko blurred before his eyes. His surroundings undulated, giving Odo the distinctly unwelcome impression of nausea. And suddenly, he was back on his homeworld, standing on that island that now seemed so small and constraining.

Odo stood there for a long moment, regaining his composure, before effortlessly slipping back into the Great Link.