The war was over. The bloodwine had been served now that the bloodletting had ceased.

Zayba had done it. At the forefront of the team who crossed the barrier of time itself to beat the Iconians, she had become the one who saved them from extinction in the first place. She was the Other. And yet she felt somehow responsible for every life lost over the past few months. It was because she had disappeared that the Iconians had engineered themselves and their Heralds into energy beings of Mass destruction. It was because she had saved them 200,000 years ago that billions of lives had been lost in the present. While the war was over, she couldn't say that the war was won.

"Lori?"

She looked up suddenly, snapping out of her trance to the voice of Tiaru Jarok, the commanding officer of the Romulan Republic flagship.

"Yeah… sorry, I just… we lost so much and yet… I went and caused it?" The Trill responded once she'd regained awareness of her surroundings, notably the smell of the freshly cut grass in the Starfleet Academy courtyard.

"No, you'd never cause all this." Tiaru stepped towards her partner and embraced her in arms. "You followed your heart and you helped a species on the brink of extinction. You were kind… and that's what ended the battle. While everyone else, me included, were figuring out how to destroy the Herald ships and kill them all, you were kind and reasonable."

"You always… saw the best in me." Lori spoke quietly with her head beside Jarok's. To anyone looking the two would have seemed like the closest of couples at that moment, between themselves they were still unsure of where they stood between close friends and lifelong partners, different things seemed to point to either option.

It was through the Romulan officer's support that Vice Admiral Lori Zayba came to her words a week later, at the memorial of those lost in the war, a gathering held on New Romulus.

"I have been asked by some to explain my actions many millennia ago. I've been asked what made me decide to save the Iconians, to let the bloodshed happen, to return their World Heart to them. I have to say that the answer to that is not exclusive to this one event, for it applies to my every walking moment, as it has ever since I first took the chair.'

'My decisions follow but are not dictated by the Prime Directive. What I do, I don't do because a big admiral in a polished suit with a spotless office on Starbase One tells me to do it. I don't to it to spite one person or to please another, and God knows it's never because it's easy. I do what I do because it's right… and it's sane. And because it's kind. Just… kind. Tactics didn't win this war. It wasn't a victory by who had the biggest ships, they did. It wasn't who had the strongest weapons or who had the biggest army, the Iconians outmatched us by any means calculable. The Federation is not a military. This war ended when we stood up, put down the gun and someone said 'I care. I am kind.' That is the Federation."

It was as the applause came that Zayba was distracted. Not by memories, but by something that was really there this time. She watched the pinkish-blue form move back into the trees and fortunately she was to leave the stand anyway for the next speaker, so she was able to subtly go after the quickly moving form. She followed it from the staging area across Vastam Peaks, finally to the ancient stone bridge. She stopped on one end as she saw her on the other, facing in her direction. The glowing energy form of an Iconian was a sight Zayba had come to recognise instantly, and as she slowly and cautiously stepped closer along the bridge, she recognised her. She'd seen this Iconian before, when she and Nog witnessed the Whole gathering, and she remembered her name being spoken too.

"What brought you here?" Zayba called across the bridge, the wind whistling between them and sending shivers down her body from her exposed shoulders. Her gathering outfit wasn't the best to go running through the New Romulus wilderness at night, especially since it left a large V shape exposing both the front and back of her shoulders.

"Curiosity." V'Lar answered simply, her figure towering above Zayba as she approached.

"You've watched things from the shadows so well for so long, what makes an Iconian come personally?" Zayba questioned. The figure of myth and legend lowered from her hover and set her feet upon the ancient stonework.

"This planet was our sanctuary after the loss of the homeworld. I became… connected. I have missed it as much as I have missed Iconia itself." V'Lar answered. Then she looked closer at Lori, her energy reaching to examine her. She could see things about Zayba that she probably didn't know about herself, but then found something she probably did know. "You are… with a child?"

"It's… complicated." Zayba answered.

It was a while later that Zayba sat upon the bridge of the USS Trenzalore, the Paladin class temporal battlecruiser now repaired from its venture through time and ready to return to Earth Spacedock. They were preparing to do so with their temporal drive, a warp system integrated with the experimental spore drive once used on the USS Discovery. It better controlled the jumps, allowing streamlined and smooth access to the timeline.

But that control dropped at this moment.

Being spore powered, it required a living being to guide the temporal drive. Nate was connected to the system directly, his eyes closed as he readied himself to guide the ship home. The deflector opened and emitted its pulse, the singularity opened and the ship entered the raw timestream. Earth was only a moment away… then Nate began to yell and scream.

The ship began to spin in a loop of displacements, much like Discovery did with its original spore drive but constantly, gradually getting faster and faster as it pelted through the timestream. The overloading energy was filling every part of the system, Nate's brain included.

"Stop the warp! Cut it!" Zayba called over the noise of the shaking ship and blasting warp bubble outside.

"We can't stop the drive!" Set'Setia called back, the Kobali gripping the edges of her console to stay in her seat.

"No…" Zayba responded, managing to get up from the chair and grip the same console as she shot forwards to the engineering station. "The warp drive wants to go forward, conventionally through time. The spores want to jump, so disconnect one and let the other do what it wants."

"Yes… yes, good thinking Admiral!" Set'Setia responded before tapping quickly on the panel, ejecting the plasma-integrated warp core. That was when everyone shot forward in the ship, as it suddenly came to a halt, then the spinning shot it into a spore jump. Back into the timestream, back to Earth.

"You… hurt them…" Nate muttered as he pulled the connector from his arm, then collapsed to the floor.

Lori pulled herself up from the floor of the bridge, having been shot forward in front of the viewscreen. Her first instinct of anything was to lightly rest her hand on her stomach, her thoughts with her child, before she made her way back to the chair. "Wh… where are we?"

"Earth, but…" T'Vrell answered, examining the star charts. "The wrong century. We're 400 years early."

"In the past… spores out of control… warp core ejected." Zayba spoke as she stepped slowly towards the viewscreen, looking at an Earth that compared to theirs could only be described as primitive. She turned to face the rest of the bridge crew. "We're stuck."

They all looked at each other… and they knew she was right.