'Aikka. Aikka, I'm scared.'

There's a sound then. A crack, a creak in the static. Maybe muffled sobbing, though it doesn't seem to be from the girl that's speaking. Her breathing is harsh, grating against the static as though she's in the middle of a ceasefire, waiting for the bombs to start falling. She waits, her breath usually steady (especially for a girl, your mind retorts), waits until the sobbing dies down and fades into sniffling.

'I'm scared,' she starts again. 'God, Aikka, you have no idea...and I wish I wasn't here, hiding like a coward, but I'm not a warrior, I'm not Jordan and I'm certainly not you. I'm a pilot.'

You snort. Typical. Her hands are made for steering, for pressing buttons to unleash blue bursts of energy behind her, to cheat nature and engage a hyper-drive. You've met pilots. You've broken their hands.

You never stop to wonder why your imagination tells you that the energy she leaves behind her is blue and not red or yellow, like the other models you've seen.

Her voice lowers. 'Sometimes I think I'm the worse of you, of all of us.' She pauses. 'Jordan died for me when I was fifteen. You weren't awake to see it and I'm glad. And you have no idea how terrible a person I am to say it. Because Jordan...he was so brave. He thought being the Avatar gave him worth, like he was worthless before. I wish I had understood that his own self-esteem was even crappier than my own. Maybe all three of us could have found a different way to end things. If we had just talked to each other more...'

She swallows. The noise is distorted, like the device she's speaking into is trying to tear her voice apart.

'Say...do you think Jordan's punishing us, right now? Because we didn't find another way to take down Canaletto? For leaving him there? Is that why he's abandoned us? God-' And then her voice rises in volume, so much so that you have to jerk your head back. '-WHY DOESN'T HE HELP US!' it's a roar and it's a dying sound, her voice fading back into a calm, choked-off whisper afterwards.

'I've got a job now. Bet you never realised I was a mechanic as well as a pilot, did you Aikka?' She sounds smug now and it's enough to make you want to reach into this recording, back into time and shake her until her bones rattle. 'I can't fly in this war but I can certainly build for it. I make war machines now. I have to. Those bastards killed my father.' Her voice oozes poison now and it's full of such steel that you almost leap back at the hard bite behind it. It's like she's morphed into a different person.

'I can't do much. But I can do enough. And if you knew about me, if I'd told you about me and my mother, the way I told Jordan, you'd understand. I know you would.' There's something painful behind the word 'mother' you can tell. It's all there in how it cracks her voice wide open.

She's raw, you realise, and she's never needed you to break her apart. She's done it to herself.

'Oh Aikka...I saw it on the news, what the Crogs did to your planet. Everything that it was, all gone. Just like Rush's. So, maybe like Rush, you survived too!' The hope in her voice makes it sunny, makes her a kid on Christmas Eve. 'I think if I can just hold onto that, onto the fact that maybe one person in my life, just one has survived...huh. You don't want to know what happened to all the others.' Her voice turns wistful. 'I guess I never got to visit your planet, huh? Oh well. I forgive you for breaking your promise. Just keep me waiting, Prince. Even if I'm delusional, I choose to believe you're alive.'

You wait. For a moment you think that's it, she's not going to say anything more. Then she's breathes, 'I hope whoever's listening to this, had a good time. This is something I wish I could have said to Aikka. But I don't think he knows how to press the button to technology like this even if he did find it, so you'll have to do. I don't know where this will end up. Hell, I hope Jordan finds it. Preserves it. He doesn't owe me anything but he loved me, at least once. So maybe he'll keep this last part of me safe.' She pauses. 'It's a lonely thing you know, when there's nobody around to love you.'

The message goes silent.

'Huh,' says Anxia. He stretches, unloosening himself from the huddled up position he'd taken up beside you. 'Well, that was weird.'

'Indeed,' you say.

He makes a face. 'I wonder why the Avatar kept such a thing? It looks...I would say outdated but I've never even seen such a thing before. It must be from one of those worlds that make stuff out of metal.' He shudders. 'Imagine it! Metal! Ha!'

You pause. 'Most of them have died out over time though. And this Aikka...sounds like his world took a heavy beating. Probably nothing left. I've never heard of the Crogs though. This girl's world might have fallen too, with whatever happened.'

Anxia rolls his eyes, all sixteen of them and you think you love him for it. For his brutal, uncaring selfishness. You've done a lot of dark things for Anxia. A lot of dark, horrible things. You've broken pilots' hands for him. Mostly where nobody can see.

He grins at you, a sloppy tucked-up motion where his tongue curls back up into his jaws. If you had been on Earth ten thousand years ago, you would have likened him to a moth. Or on Nourasia, perhaps a beetle.

'Shall we go?' He asks. 'The great race of Oban waits for no one!'

Jordan meanwhile, shudders. And turns away. He glows, the complex twists and turns of his body burning like a star, like the breakdown of a dying body, chemical explosions and magic force straining together under the wake of mental grief.

The Avatar, after all, cannot interfere. He can only set down rules and enforce them. He sighs.

More daydreams of Eva (or are they memories?) curl out from his head and infuse the subconscious of the galaxy. They make up the very heartbeat of the universe, drifting down to feed into the unsuspecting minds of the participants in the new, great race of Oban.

The heartbreak of an Avatar is both a lonely and an invasive thing. But when he's dead, which will be soon, his magic will fade from the few mementos he's managed to snag out of the ether over the years. Every trace of Eva will fade, will crumble, like the blackened forms of the flying temples, once so long ago, before Jordan began his reign. It will be as though she never stepped foot here.

Jordan sometimes wishes that this was so.

But wishes, as he also learnt so long ago, are never granted. Not even for Eva.