Chapter 4

But the Soldier was one of the lucky ones. The Soldier managed to forge a connection with a Zoidian who still lived. She, and she alone, could see him: his pale, young face; his dark, sad eyes. He did not know why he was visible to this strange and beautiful girl, but she was a welcome pinprick of light in a flat blackness that, for him, had existed across all space and time.

Perhaps it was because she was just as lonely as he himself was.

Perhaps it was because the yearning in her heart had called him forth to return from the in-between.

Or perhaps it was because only those touched by the desert's magic can learn all the secrets it guards; she was a creature of the barren dunes, shaped by their sands and kissed into life by their stars, a being apart from all others.

The Soldier would never live again, and yet, in some small way, he was indeed still alive, tethered willingly to his homeland by the love of a girl with hair the color of twilight.

It was because of her that he was able to connect once more with his Zoidian side after an eternity as a forgotten spectre. It was because of her that he eventually recalled the violent way he had transitioned out of her world and into his own nowhere of sorrowed emptiness.

When the emotions and memories returned, they returned in a great and terrible wave. But at last, at last, the Soldier understood again why he remained.

-.-.-.-

ZAC 2044

Pyxis had had scant few opportunities to ride in a Zoid before, and certainly never like this. The night desert, site of so many dreams and tears and breeze-lulled hours, flew by in a blur, all sand and shifting shadow, utterly familiar yet completely alien at this great height and velocity.

With the ceasing of her physical contact with him, the pilot was shimmering and rippling pale again, just like his mount. In fact, if Pyxis squinted her eyes and tilted her head just so, she fancied she could even see the dunes passing by through the Liger's belly beneath her feet, though surely this could not be so.

The thunder of cannon fire preceded their first sighting of Solas Base, but it soon came into view under towering columns of black smoke losing their upper reaches into the heavens. Pyxis cried out, craning forward to see what had become of the only home she'd ever known.

As they came closer, the full extent of the destruction about to engulf the base became clear. A contingent of Lidiers encircling something enormous could be seen trotting along alertly, firing forward every few seconds, their silver and red sheet metal glowing in the reflected light of their guns' bright beams.

Pyxis' eyes settled upon the vast creature being escorted by the Lidiers, and traveled upwards to take in its great stature. "No," she breathed, aghast. "Not here."

"Go, Liger!" the pilot commanded, urging the feline faster. "We're almost out of time!" It snarled in response, calling upon all of the energy it possessed.

"But what - how -" Pyxis could not believe what was happening. "Don't you see what we're up against?! How can you fight with only one Zoid?" Nothing at the base really mattered, in the end, as long as all of the residents had managed to escape in time. She squeezed her eyes shut against this unfolding nightmare, and clutched her sleeping cosmosite in her palm. If only she hadn't left the base tonight, she could have helped with the evacuations...

Yet still, the Liger sprinted towards Solas, towards certain doom for all three of them. What was the point? Anyone who remained at the base, with the enemy force nearly upon its borders, had no hope of rescue. "What are you doing?" she cried. "Just run away! Let it fall!"

"No. We fight," the pilot said simply, yet in a tone that brooked no argument.

"How? How do we fight, when it's just us against all of them? Against - against a Death Saurer?" Her voice trembled to even speak those two cursed words aloud.

"We turn their evil against them," the pilot replied cryptically. They would be facing the leading Lidiers in just a few more seconds.

"Can they...can they see us?" Pyxis whispered, nearly sick with terror.

She could hear the smile on the pilot's lips when he answered her: "No."

With a ground-shaking roar, the Shield Liger charged into position, defiantly planting its mighty forelegs into the sand just beyond Solas' northern entrance, near the barracks. Confused cries and shouts were heard over the communications channel.

"Look! Do you see those lights? What are they?"

"Did you hear that roar? That wasn't a friendly!"

"Leave now or be destroyed!" the pilot bellowed, his voice so imposing, so visceral, so seemingly having sprung from all directions at once, that even Pyxis shrank back at the sound.

The Lidiers up front paused, unsure what to do against this invisible threat, and the Death Saurer's pilot only scarcely halted the clumsy beast in time before its massive foot crushed one of the escort. For all anyone could see, a hovering assemblage of stars had suddenly appeared between them and their objective, and no one had any idea what to make of this strange and ominous portent.

"It's because of you that the forgetting and the darkness no longer control me," the pilot said now, softly and only for Pyxis' ears to hear. "Because of you, I'm free to choose my own path. And I choose to stay here with my Liger, to do what good I can, to use my former tormentors to try to undo what can never be undone." He turned around in his seat to look at her. His eyes and lips and the skin of his cheeks were shimmering like pearl. "I can never thank you enough for your friendship."

Pyxis blinked her tears away and swallowed, nodding.

The pilot turned to face forward once more, looked up at the night sky through his mount's glass canopy, and murmured what sounded like an incantation. "Stars fall from high to down below." Pyxis looked up through the canopy, too, and gasped. "To the darkest reaches go."

The moons had vanished, and the stars were falling downward, leaking down the sides of the great dome of the sky like drops of water slinking down the curves of an overturned bowl. Impenetrable blackness followed as if it were a curtain being drawn by the stars as they fell down to Zi, and as the countless celestial bodies disappeared into the horizon, the darkness became complete.

Cries of fear and confusion from the enemy Zoids followed, for there seemed to be no light left in the world, save for the few fires burning in Solas Base, the angry glowing red slits of the Death Saurer's eyes, and the Liger's dancing constellation.

"Sorcery!"

"What evil magic is this?"

"I can't see! My instrument panels have all gone dark!"

"Mine too!"

"Awaiting orders, Captain! We can't fight like this!"

"Attack! Attack, I say! Destroy that - whatever that thing is! That is an order!"

"Let us now bring back the light," the pilot said quietly, his voice an oasis of calm amid the furor ahead. "Deploying energy shield."

The Liger stiffened its stance as the mane fins on its chin and the crown of its head opened up. Simultaneously, numberless beams of light came streaking in from every point of the horizon, shining forward in a searing blaze of light with the shield as it deployed.

Pyxis blinked against the sudden brightness, though judging from the agonized cries of the enemy pilots, the light perceived from their vantage point must have been blinding.

Any shots that had been fired a moment prior exploded harmlessly against the radiant shield, and none further came, for the Death Saurer and its escorts were retreating. The Zenebas combatants knew not what force they had come up against, but this little desert outpost was not worth the casualties promised by the strange power serving as its guardian.

Pyxis gazed in mute awe at the shield and the wondrous, swirling clouds of vivid colors its dome-shaped arrangement of panels contained: turquoise, aquamarine, blue, indigo. She had never beheld such a mesmerizing embrace of movement and hue in all her life. To bear witness to the iridescence of this radiant light was to touch the cosmos, approach infinity. Her stone pulsed with life in her palm.

The enemy Zoids were gone, and all was still.

"Stars born from beauty, fly back up high," the pilot whispered. "Return your light to all the sky."

The Liger's shield flickered and vanished, and the concentration of light that had been at its center broke into countless pieces, each soaring upwards to its own place in the heavens again. Familiar astral formations reappeared in the flat black overhead, twinkling pleasantly as if they had never left.

The wind roamed softly over the dunes and the desert was quiet beneath the light of the stars. Pyxis realized she had been holding her breath. "What...just happened?" she asked, dazed.

The pilot turned in his seat to smile at her. "As long as even the tiniest flicker of light exists, the darkness is never total, and so you must never give up hope." He gestured to the vast starfield above them both. Pyxis could imagine the swirling colors of the shield, of her cosmosite, pirouetting through the constellations. "And we have far more than just one."

-.-.-.-

With the Liger's help, the fires were all put out. Pyxis stood wordlessly in the middle of the main north-south-running street, a street that was normally full of people, trucks, carts full of supplies, and even some small Zoids. Now, though, the wind whistled lonely down empty alleys and through open doorways. Solas Base had endured some heavy damage, to be sure, but it was the sheer emptiness of a place formerly teeming with activity that most broke her.

It had been easy to take all of the busyness here for granted, she realized as she pushed a stray lock of violet hair out of her eyes, when all she had wanted was an escape. But now, but now...the very lifelessness of this place felt as if it had torn a hole open in her heart. She would have to leave here, too.

"Pyxis."

She turned; the pilot stood in the center of the street a short distance away. Night was passing and the three lunar sisters, now dipping towards the horizon, were visible through his wavering, ethereal body.

"I'm sorry we could not get here in time to save your home."

She shook her head, already rejecting this apology. "None of this was your fault. Or mine, although I'm probably going to need awhile before I actually believe that."

"Where will you go now?"

"I'm pretty sure I know where everyone was headed. There's a large base about half a day's drive from here. They would have room enough to take in all us refugees." Her eyes roamed over the shelled buildings, the collapsed roofs, the broken glass, the smoking remnants from where fires had burned before being stomped out. "I had no idea when I left my bedroom last night that that was the last time I would ever see Solas whole." She shook her head again, frustrated. "I was always so keen to get back out into the desert that I never stopped to think about what I was leaving behind."

The pilot stepped closer to her. "I couldn't have driven them all away without you, you know."

She laughed darkly. "I'm sure I was quite helpful, quivering there in the backseat."

He ignored this. "All the world is filled with light and darkness. They exist together, symbiotically. Until you came along, I was only ever able to see one side. The way I died..." His voice trembled slightly and he paused, gathering himself. "That eternal darkness marked me. It would have marked me forever, perhaps, if you hadn't found me out there in the desert all those years ago. You reintroduced the light. It was born from you." Pyxis looked at him. "Light and shadow are both a part of me now, and I can use them, as I did tonight, to try to prevent what happened to me from happening to anyone else ever again."

Pyxis studied his handsome, shimmering face, and wondered if he would ever be able to let go of what had been done to him. It was almost unbearably sad to think of what he had gone through and how much it seemed to haunt him still. He perhaps was not alive in the strictest sense of the term, but he experienced pain and grief just like any living Zoidian could.

Stirred by the compassion she felt, she moved towards him as he simultaneously held his arms out, and she allowed herself to be enfolded into his embrace.

"Thank you for helping me remember who I am," he said softly into her hair.

Pyxis blinked. The portion of skin on his arm that was visible to her at that moment was solid, flesh-colored, opaque. She stepped back and searched his suddenly sparkling hazel eyes. "Then...who are you?" she asked.

He gave her a melancholy smile. "I don't know." Already, his features were blurring, graying, fading again from her pulling away. "I am everyone who has ever suffered." He stood before her, the expression on his face wistful, nothing more than a beautiful and shimmering mirage. "And I am no one. A lonely asteroid."