Arusian Crusade: Starfall
Chapter 4: Moment of Impact


Heart of serenity?

Can you not hear me?

The body no longer contains the waters within.

The mind is silent when I call.

Why does this come to pass?


Sven's world became nothing but the call of the darkness. And another call, a call he could not grasp, let alone answer, as he fought the talons of blackness gripping his body and his soul.

Struggling to draw breath he could feel liquid in his chest, cutting off the air. Intellectually he knew it was blood gushing into his lungs, but he was not concerned. Not for that. If he was to die here, let it be by drowning. Let the water take him. He did not fear the darkness, the realm the stars pierced.

So convenient... not to fear the darkness...

Yet terror gripped him as his breath faded, terror much worse than the fear of mere death.

No. Not now. My mission... is not done.

He wasn't ready to die. Not yet. No amount of selfish courage could change that fact.

I failed...

Fading.

There was no fighting it any longer.


Heart of serenity, answer!

I feel it.

Darkness closes in.

The soul breaks, the ice shatters, the waves still.

This shall not come to pass!


The lion knight had never been sentient.

Never before.

Voltron remembered much. Remembered rampaging through worlds that had once belonged to the First Empire, remembered breaking much of what would become the Ninth Kingdom of the Drule Supremacy. Remembered it because it was in his databanks. It had happened.

But those memories were intellectual. Knowledge of what had occurred, nothing more. No images, no sensations. Only darkness.

And then... the warriors had come. They had bound themselves to the lions, and so bound the lions to themselves. Millennia of darkness had ceased, and a soul had been awakened. And Voltron was not prepared to give this fragment of that soul up.

Blue Lion roared and the lake shook. The water churned violently, its power flowing from the lake into the groundwater around it. Moving unhindered through the earth, beneath the forest, into the shattered body of the fallen pilot. Carrying with it the promise of healing. Water brought life, and life would endure.

By all rights, the human's heart should have stopped beating. But it did not.