Chapter 53: The Last Shaper of the Daiamid

Adora sat in the copilot's chair on the Dzivia, staring at the hyperspace tunnel bursting outside the view screens. The door at the back hissed open and she turned, already halfway out the seat to help Corynth. How had she not heard him wandering the ship, or noticed the empty infirmary bed on the security footage? She'd had it up on one of the forward screens specifically to keep an eye on him.

"I made it to the cockpit on my own," Corynth said, waving her off before she got to him. "I can make it to the chair on my own, too."

Adora settled back in, but didn't take his eyes off him as he made his way to the front. The fact he was up and about on his own without her constant help was a big improvement, but he still wasn't fully healed if the grimace on his face and subtle lines of exertion around his eyes as he lowered himself into the pilot's chair were any indication.

Adora let him settle in. With him having spent most of the previous days recuperating in the same medical bay she'd first woken up in, it had fallen to her to learn how to make the sand-food concoctions in the kitchen for the both of them to eat. When she'd discovered boxes of ready-made snacks in one of the cupboards as well, she'd taken to carrying handfuls of them with her to eat whenever the mood struck.

A pile of such snack bars was sitting atop the dashboard, nearly depleted on account of her stress eating the previous hour. She grabbed one and held it out for him. Corynth took it with a muted 'thanks,' and Adora wordlessly tried to go back to what she'd been doing before he joined her: staring out at the hyperspace tunnel with a blank mind.

"What's up with you?" Corynth asked after an indeterminate amount of time had passed in silence.

Adora turned to him, her eyes trailing down at the unopened snack still sitting in his lap before flicking back to his face. He seemed to be looking straight through her, and she suddenly wished she could just disappear.

"Nothing's wrong," she said. "I'm fine."

"I didn't ask if anything was wrong," Corynth said. "I just asked what was up with you."

Adora frowned and tilted her head back until it lay flush against the headrest. Wasn't that the same thing? Playing semantics was the last thing she wanted to do, but then again, she'd always been a terrible liar anyways.

"I'm worried about them," she said. "Ly and Vasher. Eden looked like it blew apart seconds after we got free of it. I don't know if they got out in time."

"They're fine," Corynth said, adjusting himself in the pilot's chair the way someone did when their whole body still ached. "Trust me. They've escaped far worse situations, and have pulled me out of spots I didn't think I could get myself out of in the past as well. They'll have made it out."

Adora hmm'd but didn't say anything further. She hoped by not engaging and not even looking at him—by keeping her eyes trained on the tunnel in front of her—he'd stop probing her.

She wasn't being truthful with him. Sure, she'd been worried about Ly and Vasher—how could she not?—but she'd only told him that to hopefully keep him from finding out what was actually bothering her. As soon as it became apparent he'd recover from his injuries, or at least not die outright because of them after they'd escaped, something else had plagued her mind. And Corynth, with nothing but his silence, somehow was able to communicate to Adora that he knew all of this and was waiting for her to come clean.

"Do you think I'll get a response from Catra before we get to Phoenix Station?" she said instead, trying a second time to deflect.

Adora cringed the moment the words left her mouth. She'd already asked that question, and he had already answered it at least twice already. In the preceding days, Corynth had asked about her history with Catra, and she'd told him everything. And he'd helped get her anxiety over not hearing back—or worse, being actively rejected after so many years apart—to a manageable state, so the fact she was still deflecting again was even more obvious than the comment about Ly and Vasher.

"What is it really?" he asked. "You can ask me anything you'd like."

Adora closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. "Why didn't you tell me who you really were?"

She felt like she was about to throw up. If she saw distrust—or worse, apathy—on his face after finally mustering the courage to confront him about this, she might just die. She didn't want to open her eyes, didn't want to look at him. Part of her knew she was being perhaps a little overdramatic, but she'd just come to admit she was grateful for having traveled off Etheria with him despite how rough of a start they got. Finding out he didn't feel the same would be catastrophic.

"I don't distrust you, if that's what you're worried about," Corynth said, gentler than Adora would have expected. She still didn't look at him.

"I only attacked you the first time we met, chased after you, damaged your ship, then acted very distrusting of you when you patched me up afterward. But it's not because you distrust me." Adora gave a self-deprecating laugh. "Of course not."

Corynth chuckled wit her and that only put her more on guard. She whirled in the chair to face him, a sharp comment defending herself from his teasing already on the tip of her tongue. When she saw his smirk and the mirth sparkling in his eyes, though, she came up short.

"You stared me down when I was helping deliver Entrapta's equipment, but I got away before you could do anything," he said. "Technically we fought the second time we met, if you're counting by the number of times you saw me, too. More if not."

"We crossed paths before then?"

"Did you forget that I was wandering all around Etheria for three years before you realized I was there?"

Adora crossed her arms and pouted, and Corynth laughed again.

"I'd heard all about you and had seen you in person several times already before you ever noticed me," he said. "Even if we weren't on good terms, and even if you didn't trust me, I knew you wouldn't betray me if I'd told you my name wasn't really Kallanthe."

"Then why didn't you say anything?" she asked. "I probably wouldn't have found out at all if that Abomination showed up. You would have just continued to pretend to be Kal." The look on his face told her she was right, and her stomach plummeted. "Why keep me in the dark if not because you don't trust me?"

Her eyes burned with unshed tears and she was convinced anything he said or didn't say would end with her crying. Corynth took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair to stare at the hyperspace tunnel. Suddenly, he looked older and much more tired.

"I just didn't know what to do and ended up saying nothing at all," he said at last. "You were already on edge and I worried telling you would make it worse. Not because I didn't trust you, but because I know you didn't trust me. Any way I thought to put it, I was convinced it would just make things worse, so I didn't say anything." He frowned and glanced sidelong at her. "Truthfully, it's never gone well in the past, either."

Surprisingly, this answer got Adora more curious than upset. Him not saying anything because he'd worried she didn't trust him instead of the other way around made sense, but…

"I would have been quicker to trust you if you told me who you were from the start," she said.

"Really?"

"Yes! Why does it sound like you don't believe me?"

"I have a hard time believing things people tell me."

He'd said it like he was telling her what he'd eaten for breakfast, and Adora narrowed her eyes at him in disbelief. "You've seen some of the most outlandish things to ever happen in the galaxy, things that probably break the laws of physics, and you say you have a hard time believing what people say?"

Corynth shrugged and Adora tilted her head up to the cockpit ceiling and groaned. This man was a frustrating enigma, but he'd assuaged her fears about being distrusted or disliked, at least. And if someone with his life experience and power could get hung up on such trivial, pedestrian issues, then maybe her struggles with her powers weren't such a far-fetched thing, either.

"What did you mean when you said it's never gone well for you in the past?" Adora asked. "Are you talking about Taline? Salas had told me she was meant to join the Daiamid but fought against you after Evelyn was put on trial."

To her surprise and relief, Corynth seemed to already know Salas had fed her information. "That's an example of it working out poorly when I chose not to tell someone who I was. Before that, everything fell apart after I did tell someone who I was." Corynth pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the armrest of the chair. "Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Me not saying anything to you wasn't personal, Adora."

"I know it wasn't," she said, "but what happened before, when you did tell someone? I've never heard that story before."

Corynth laughed. "You wouldn't have. It's not something most anyone would know, actually. Even when I was one of the most wanted people in the empire for a time, they couldn't propagandize that story to demonize me to the public either. I doubt anyone other than those who know me personally, know that story."

Adora shifted in her seat, timid. "What happened?"

"You actually want to know?"

Of course she wanted to know, but Adora didn't trust herself to speak. She nodded once, and the look on Corynth's face betrayed his surprise. Or was it skepticism? She hoped it was surprise and not actually a reluctance to tell a story he apparently only shared with friends. What would it mean if he refused her, then? Adora didn't want to think about it, so she instead forced herself to utter, "Please," to hopefully nudge him to speak.

Finally—finally—Corynth spoke and told her everything. He told her how he'd been born into the secretive Daiamid sect, knew nothing about anything except what they groomed him for and, after initiating into their ranks as a full member, went on assassination mission after assassination mission as decreed by the emperor whom he served. Adora listened with rapt attention as he explained how, after a time, they'd sent him to exterminate a highly influential family—an aristocratic lineage called House La Valette with ties reaching back to the very founding of the empire.

"This was different from the other assignments," he said. "Those were quick kills. This time, though, Prime wanted the entire family line gone in one go and he wanted it to look like an accident. Politically speaking, they were very powerful, which was part of the reason why he wanted them gone to begin with. The job took planning. There was infiltration on my part over the course of months to earn their trust."

"You didn't want to kill them once you got to know them," Adora said. Strange that she could guess where the story was going before he'd explained, but something about the person she'd come to know—both over the course of their adventures and from how his friends spoke of him—told her that's what had happened.

Corynth gave a humorless laugh and when he spoke, Adora could hear the bitterness tingeing his voice. "Imagine growing up in a death cult only to finally grow a conscience as a teenager. It would have been easier if I'd just become a fully entrenched psychopath like I was supposed to."

"Something tells me everyone would have died long time ago if that was the case."

"Like I said, it would have been easier. Dead people don't have hardships. They're dead."

The morbidity in his words shook Adora. It sounded like something he'd joke about, but she couldn't hear any hint of a joke in his voice and that scared her. He didn't really believe that, did he?

"I told them who I was," Corynth said, bringing her back. "The La Valettes. I told them what I was there to do, and I tried to help them escape their fate. The Daiamid just sent someone else to finish the contract. As for me…the penalty for revealing the Daiamid's existence to any unsanctioned outsider was death. They sent me to one of the empire's black-site research stations as 'security.'" He made air quotes, and the disdain in his voice was plain as he continued.

"At the time, serving on one of those stations was a guaranteed death sentence because Evelyn still hadn't invented a reliable way to contain the Beast with ignominite yet. The plan back then was to progress with research before an infection inevitably broke out and everyone was killed, then another team with another two-to-four-month window would carry that research forward until a breakthrough." He laughed, and it was derisive, sneering, and cold. "They didn't plan on me or anyone else surviving the outbreak. I met Evelyn on that station, actually. I protected her when the outbreak occurred. No one else had been able to do such a thing. Not even my brothers and sisters who had condemned me."

Corynth kept his eyes forward, staring out at the hyperspace tunnel as if it were the one reciting the story and his body were merely a vessel to convey the words. Unshed tears made his eyes look glossy, and they reflected the brilliant kaleidoscope of colors from the tunnel.

Adora didn't take her eyes off him. She didn't think she could if she'd tried. For all the information littering the empire about him, the sheer humanity on display before her was staggering. This wasn't the version of Corynth she'd come to know from the empire's propaganda.

"I told the La Valettes of my true identity hoping to spare them death, yet death came for them all the same. Evelyn found who I really was after the station succumbed, too," he said. "How could she not? Death came for her, too, in the end. Although, it took a little longer."

Adora's jaw hinged open, appalled. "You saved her!" she said. "You saved her, and she was able to research things that saved trillions more lives. We're on our way to shore up the Barrier right now and end the Beast threat forever, something she discovered only because you saved her in the first place!"

Corynth smile was forced. "She said the same thing, years ago. I didn't even bring the subject up, she just sensed I had a lot on my mind one day and said that to me."

Adora pressed her lips into a thin line and refrained from saying anything further. What more could she say if the truth didn't work? She'd been unable to reach Catra with it when she'd defected from the Horde, too. The only difference between her from then and now was now she was older and a little wiser. Now she understood that rational truth frequently did nothing productive in the face of emotion, and thus she could understand Corynth's pessimism.

"I promised myself to do it differently with Taline," he said. "Something had happened on Archanas, and the Daiamid reached out to recruit her. Evelyn wanted me to reveal my association with them before they did…she was worried Taline wouldn't take their visit well. I didn't want a repeat of what they had done to me the first time I broke their rules, especially with Evelyn and Taline's lives potentially on the line if it went bad. I promised I'd tell her after they made contact with her first.

"She killed our envoy." Corynth shook his head in disbelief with a smile and twinkling, reminiscing eyes. "I'd run every scenario in my head thinking up the best way to tell her who I was, thinking about how best to acclimate her to the idea of the Daiamid after they'd revealed themselves to her, but her outright killing the envoy had never once crossed my mind. I wasn't even mad, I was amazed. I remember still having a hard time believing she'd done it even as I stared at his body lying in two separate corners of the room. And even though I wanted to, I couldn't tell her who I was. Not after that."

"Why not?" Adora asked.

"Because they were going to come for her. She spurned the invitation. They'd told her about what they did the La Valettes without implicating me, and Taline had decided if they could do away with such a powerful family with impunity, then it was only a matter of time before she'd fall victim to them out of revenge. She'd almost died killing the first one they'd sent."

"But she's not dead," Adora said. "She's alive, and all of the Daiamid except for you are dead."

"Funny how that works, isn't it? She was in danger, but they couldn't come after her so soon after what had happened." A reader on the cockpit beeped, indicating they'd traveled another AU closer to their destination. "Taline's name had taken off like wildfire through the galaxy because of what she'd reportedly done on a recently infected world. You couldn't go twenty minutes on even a backwater imperial settlement without hearing one story or another of the newly minted Seraph of Archanas. Those who led the Daiamid, the Old Guard, they knew that killing her then would only bring unwanted scrutiny that not even they could avoid. So, they played the long game. They wanted the fervor around her exploits to die down first, then kill her and make it look like an accident out in the field."

"No one would think twice about her dying on another world fighting off a Beast infection," Adora said. "It'd still draw attention, but it wouldn't seem strange and the narrative would stick."

Corynth nodded.

"What changed, then?" Adora asked. "You showed your hand at Evelyn's trial. When Horde Prime ordered her executed for choosing to pursue research on the Barrier instead of follow his orders, you were in charge of the Daiamid. You revealed the entire sect to everyone watching. Every one of your brothers and sisters in that room followed your lead to protect her, not anyone else's."

"What changed is I became their new leader." Corynth finally looked at her, and the glint in his eyes sent a shiver down her spine. The expressiveness of his face had gone, replaced with a mask as hard and cold as steel. "The Old Guard led through merciless brutality and were insulated from outside contact. It took planning and subterfuge on my end in order to get close enough to assassinate them and take over. It took time."

Adora swallowed. "H-how did you pull it off?"

"I went along with their plans to kill Taline. In fact, I made myself a key component of those plans. I was an outcast after having survived my death sentence, so I portrayed someone desperate to regain favor in the Old Guard's eyes. Because Taline and I were…involved, I put myself forward as a direct line to her. Any and all information about her whereabouts, her standing in the public—everything—I gave it to them. And shortly before Evelyn's trial, I'd succeeded. I had curried enough favor to gain a direct audience.

"I murdered the entire Old Guard. All of them and their sympathizers, all at once. The most powerful and accomplished members of the Daiamid together could not stand up to me. Brutality and mercilessness was their legacy, so I killed them in a manner befitting that legacy. Some of my brothers and sisters were kind. Some were driven to do horrible things out of fear and ignorance of a different way despite how they wished they didn't have to.

"I'd tried to emulate that for myself once, but"—he broke eye contact and drew in a shaky breath—"I ended up getting crushed all the same. It wasn't until I came back with a bigger stick, for lack of a better phrase, that things could change. I executed the Old Guard in a way that freed those with empathy from murdering, and demanded complete obedience, if not begrudging respect, from everyone else who valued their lives."

"And with everyone in line, either through fear or true respect, Taline was no longer in danger," Adora said.

"It came at great cost, but…yes. Telling her of my involvement and identity before taking over wasn't an option, since it would have only put her at further risk. My support for Evelyn, my decision to rebuke the emperor and reveal our existence to the public, it was a declaration of a new course I intended to take the Daiamid as an organization. It worked, since everyone either followed or fell in line and Evelyn's science team were able to complete their research on the Barrier, but…"

"You lost Taline."

Corynth nodded. "Among other things, but yes. The moment she found out who I was, I lost her." He paused, then, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you."

Adora's eyes stung with welling tears. She no longer blamed him for keeping secrets. Hell, she wasn't even upset at it having happened now that she had context. Instead, there was pain in his voice despite the look lingering in his eyes, and that had done enough to move her despite him turning his gaze back to the hyperspace tunnel.

"You know, Vasher and Ly would leave me in the cockpit for hours like this when we ran smuggling jobs," he said. "Ly was the pilot, but she often gave me the space during transit. I'd stare out the viewscreen the whole time."

"It is oddly therapeutic once you get used to it," Adora said, for lack of anything better.

"Sometimes, if I stare long enough, I can almost hear her voice again. Taline has a beautiful singing voice, believe it or not, but I'd rarely ever hear it since she'd get embarrassed letting anyone listen. Usually, she'd be distracted with some chore and start humming to herself, forgetting anyone was there for a moment.

"Sometimes, it'd be the only thing that would help me get to sleep, and then she'd get mad-but-not-actually-mad at me for falling asleep in the middle of the day. She'd never actually wake me up once she realized I'd dozed off." He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the headrest. "It's been so many years since I'd last heard her sing. And I'm so very, very tired."

The steel in his eyes had faded, leaving nothing left. Even the beautiful colors of the hyperspace tunnel barely reflected there anymore, leaving him lifeless and empty, and Adora finally turned fully away to wipe quickly at the tears that had fallen down her cheeks. It had been a long time since she'd cried in earnest, and despite how she hated the feeling, something deep inside her began to unravel. Something she hadn't realized was knotted there to begin with.

"I should thank you," Corynth said after a moment.

Adora started to speak, then cleared her throat when her words came out thick and raspy. "Thank me for what?"

"I'd run out of motivation after Pip failed to decode the Eye," he said. "When you first confronted me in your castle, that was supposed to be the end of my mission. Pip was to bring the Barrier up to full strength with what she'd pull from the Eye. When that failed and the castle attacked us, that was the last straw for me. I was discouraged, and I saw no way to come back from it."

He turned back to her and Adora nearly hid her face from him again, until she saw that the light in his eyes had come back, and he was smiling at her.

"Seeing you leap four stories in the air just to catch me got me going again, so, thank you for the inspiration."

"I put a hole in your ship, dude. Then I yelled at you while you made me food." Adora grinned when that pulled a laugh out of him. All the heaviness from earlier had evaporated. She felt light.

"Both of these are true," Corynth said, playing with the still unopened snack bar in his lap. "If seeing you reawaken your powers just to chase me helped kick me into high gear, then putting up with you for the first leg of our journey kept me occupied enough not to slip back."

Adora pursed her lips. "Partially reawaken my powers," she said, correcting him as their shift in top jogged her memory. "Wait, you can help me with that! Salas told me."

Corynth paused. "Salas…told you what, exactly?"

"I was struggling so much I went to talk to him. He said my powers, the way I draw them from my runestone, it's not dissimilar to how you and the Daiamid shape your own magic. He said that Taline would have made a good teacher since she was supposed to join, but you're here now. You can help me."

She bounced in the chair from excitement, and wondered why Corynth didn't seem as enthused.

He grimaced and said, "Salas was making a lot of assumptions."

Adora's bouncing slowed, then stopped. "Is that not how your powers work, pulling it from a source?"

"It's an oversimplification. And even if it weren't, there isn't much I could do to help with your specific problem."

Salas was wrong? He couldn't be wrong; he was the only one who'd had anything helpful to say in the first place. Even Angella had vouched for him. "I don't understand," she said.

Corynth gave her what she thought was a sympathetic look. "How do you imagine the magic works in the first place, yours and mine?"

Adora chewed her lip and gave him the best rundown she could: that on Etheria, princesses like her and Glimmer drew it from their runestones to manipulate freely as they saw fit, while sorcerers like Micah would draw runes. Micah had explained it once, how Etherian and Enclave sorcerers used magic in similar. Admittedly, she didn't know nearly as much as she thought she might have, given how little she could explain beyond that.

"The magic taught at Mystacor is a branch of Enclave magic, this is true," Corynth said. "It was interesting researching the similarities while I was there. There are variations and dialectical differences in the actual runes they use and the effects those spells engender, but they are indeed cousins of a sort. Even the pedagogy that drive the education of Enclave and Mystacor initiates are similar."

Adora had somehow forgotten Corynth was not only a mythically powerful magic user, but had also traveled for years to every kingdom on Etheria before having officially met. There was a reason he'd been able to successfully masquerade as a Battlemage to Taline in the decades prior, too. Seeing this expertise come out in explicit terms, however, was jarring compared to how he'd normally acted with her so far. It might have given her hope for maybe learning to unlock her powers from him, too, if he hadn't already cast doubt on it.

"Transmutation of energy is difficult," he said. "In all forms of teaching, it's something that takes normal mages years of dedicated study and practice with runes to pull off. You Etherian princesses can do the same without the need to draw complicated circuitry first, provided you have an adequate source of energy such as your runestones. Doing even that much is an incredible feat of magical skill."

"And the Daiamid?" Adora asked. "You said the similarities Salas told me about were an oversimplification."

"We were known for casting powerful spells without the need for runes or a store of magic energy. We 'shaped' reality as we saw fit, purely from the strength of our will."

"Okay…" Adora chewed her lip. "So, I get the link between Mystacor and the Enclave, but it still sounds like there is some sort of connection between the Daiamid and the princesses."

"I never said there isn't, I just said what Salas told you was an oversimplification. Once you access the magic in your runestones, the way you wield that magic is similar to how I shape mine."

It should have been good news, since it seemed to Adora like a good reason for Corynth to be able to help her. The expression on his face, however, still didn't give her hope.

"My people were once a dominant power in the galaxy thousands of years ago," he said. "Before Horde Prime, we warred with the Eternians—your ancestors. Etheria was one of their colonies before it disappeared, and it was rife with magic energy back then, even more than it is today.

"I'm not sure how exactly those runestones were first created. Looking back in time with Evelyn never did yield answers, but whether they were a byproduct of Eternian technology or a natural occurrence that they merely harnessed, I'm not sure. What I am sure of, however, is that the Eternians took inspiration from my people, from our Shaper Kings of Old, when forging connections to those runestones. Connections that are hereditary to each kingdom's princess and now underly the foundation of their power, generations later."

Adora still didn't understand what the problem was. "If we cast the same way, then why can't you help me?"

"Because we don't cast the same, Adora," he said, agitated. "It is similar but not the same, and if you think that is too pedantic a difference to matter then you haven't been paying attention to the lessons you received back home. The Eternians didn't copy us, especially after they found out how the old Shapers' magic worked, they only reverse engineered what they could to better arm themselves against us in a conflict. Their choice to tie the execution of their magic to runestones was deliberate."

Adora narrowed her eyes at him. "You killed an Abomination before it had the chance to infect an entire settlement. Why do I get the sense that's not even scratching the surface of what you're capable of? I only held out against it for a handful of seconds." When he didn't respond, at first, she doubled down. "What exactly is the extent of your power?"

He laughed and said, "At this point, it'd probably be easier to categorize things I can't do, rather than the extent of things I can." Adora didn't laugh with him and he sobered. "Not everyone in the old Daiamid kingdoms were sorcerers. Much like the dichotomy between Enclave mages and their standing army, there were rank and file Daiamid soldiers who couldn't perform magic, led by those who could.

"And just as there is a distinction between an Enclave mage and an Enclave Battlemage—between those who assist Salas and Salas himself—among the old Daiamid Sorcerors, there were only a handful of Shaper Kings. Exceptionally powerful individuals that gained the power to shape reality itself after surviving an initiation ritual.

"In their hubris, they eventually fell. And once Horde Prime had conquered the known galaxy, he'd kept a small number of rank-and-file Daiamid sorcerers who swore fealty to him, exploiting their more-than-capable rune-less spellcasting for his own benefit, enshrouding them in mystery and employing them for clandestine assassinations and espionage assignments. He called them 'Shapers,' perhaps as a way to subtly mock the old rulers he'd toppled, but the true Shaper Kings would never have bowed to him and so all were exterminated. Those that remained in the emperor's faction were fake."

"And what about you?"

"I am genuine," he said, fixing her with a grave look. "I am the first in countless generations to wield the old magic in its purest form. I can bend the fabric of reality itself to my will. I can create fire from nothing and have it burn so hot it turns a person to ash within an instant. I can accelerate the flow of time and turn that same person to atoms instead of ash. If I so desire, I can reach back through time and enmesh it with our current reality."

He leaned toward Adora and she shied away from him, unsure of what else to do in the face of his sudden intensity. "The great hall of some decrepit ancient castle can manifest newly built once again if I so desire, as can the people inside who once walked its halls but now lay buried in the ground. I could make them appear as they were thousands of years ago, drinking and singing and reveling with their loved ones. Here and now, should I but desire it strongly enough."

Adora scowled at him. "Why don't you just 'wish' the Beast away, then? If your so powerful you could resurrect the dead, why are we doing this whole song and dance running around the galaxy trying to seal it away with some giant crystal?"

"Where do you think the knowledge of all the old magic comes from? The power to do all of that?"

"Your powers come from the Beast?"

He gave her a blank look and Adora slammed two fists down on her chair's armrests.

"Are you fucking kidding me? Is it here because of you? Did you bring it?"

Corynth shook his head. "No. I became this way because of it. I didn't bring it here."

Adora watched him again, looking for any sign of a lie. She found none, although she didn't trust her skill in reading faces enough to say for sure whether or not he was telling the truth. She sat back, crossing her arms and thought, trying to ignore how her heart raced.

"Your runestone is a receptacle for your powers," Corynth said. He reached into the folds of his shirt to extract the blood-red ignominite crystal Ly had given him on Eden, containing the pieces of the Beast she'd extracted from the Eye of Shukra. "If we were to use the same analogy, then this would be like a runestone for me."

"But you don't need a runestone or apeiron or any other receptacle to use your powers," Adora said. "You just told me. You were even able to cast back on Etheria before you had that."

"Yes, well it was just an analogy to help explain," he said, stowing the crystal away again. "Maybe a bad analogy. Anyway, when the Beast infected the Evie's first research station—the same station I had been assigned to die on—I saved her from succumbing to the infection. And when I did that, I inadvertently completed the ancient ritual none of my people had been able to perform since Prime's ascension. Because I somehow retained my sense of self, I became one of my people's fabled Shaper Kings of old. The first in thousands of years."

Adora considered that, the tension in her shoulders and adrenaline in her veins lessening the more she realized Corynth's explanation of things made sense and was consistent. She was grateful they hadn't devolved into another shouting match based on distrust for one another. "Now I understand how Salas' explanation might have oversimplified things," she said. "But I still think you can help me."

She wasn't about to let it go that easily. She'd run herself ragged for years trying for even the smallest of breakthroughs. She'd had several since leaving Etheria with him and was within grasping distance of another; she'd be damned if she let the opportunity just slip by.

"I know, I know," she said when Corynth looked unconvinced. "Our powers work similarly but are fundamentally different. I get mine from a rock, and you get yours from some inter-dimensional eldritch horror that's consuming our galaxy, fine. I might not know exactly howthat works, but the point is, we both cast magic and the method through which you get it to work is the same as mine. You think of something, wish for something, 'will' it to happen, so to speak, and it happens. I used to be able to do the same with my runestone. I used to be able to call on She Ra and transform at will, and now I can't."

Adora felt as if the fate of the galaxy rested on how Corynth responded. The thought seemed dire, and for once she hoped she was just catastrophizing her feelings as per usual.

"How exactly do you imagine me helping?" he asked at last.

Adora scrunched up her nose like she'd smelled something repulsive. "I can't believe I'm actually going to say this and give her credit, but Shadow Weaver helped get me through a particularly nasty block when I was trying to heal her. She explained exactly what was going on with me up in here"—she pointed to her head—"and guided me through the emotions and how to respond to them in the moment until I figured it out. Maybe you could do the same for me?"

She'd expected him to think it over, or worse, expected to see a refusal plain on his face. Instead, he looked away again and started playing with the wrapper of the still-unopened snack she'd given him. Was he…uncomfortable?

"There's something else, isn't there?" she asked. "What haven't you told me?"

"The Eternian's decision to tie their most powerful rulers to Etheria's runestones was a deliberate choice, like I said, but they only came to that decision after too many failed attempts to recreate our method of casting magic in full, first."

Adora didn't like what that implied. "Explain."

"We are Masters of the Universe." Corynth effected an official tone that told Adora he was reciting something from memory. "We shape that which is. Reality persists at our sole discretion, and it is by our sole discretion that reality may change. To affect this power without the belief one is worthy of it—to put on the airs of a Shaper but hold not the substance of one within your heart of hearts—it is the height of hubris. It is anathema. It is Abomination."

A beat passed between them. "Sound familiar?" he asked.

Adora shook her head.

"That is the first stanza of the Daiamid initiation ritual," he said. "It's more of a warning, really, to those who would take it on. It involved calling forth a strain of the World Eater, as we'd called it. If you survived touching it, if you kept your sense of self after it attempted to subsume you, then you were proclaimed 'Shaper,' able to wield power beyond recognition through the old magic. If you failed and the Beast took you instead, you were an Abomination, and subsequently executed before you could spread your corruption to others."

He pointed to himself and said, "The only difference between myself and any of the countless Abominations that sprung up during the last war is that I was strong enough, both magically and in my self-identity, to survive being touched by the Beast. They were not."

"Alright..." Adora said. She wasn't sure what significance she was supposed to have gleaned from that. Why would that make Corynth hesitate to help her?

"The forbidden archives on Mystacor have written instructions on how to perform what's known as the Spell of Obtainment. That stanza prefaces those instructions too. It's the same text, warning practitioners of the risks involved in invoking the spell."

"No." Adora pressed herself further into the chair and squeezed her eyes shut. Micah had told her the story of 'Light Spinner' and what the Spell of Obtainment had turned his mentor—her foster mother—into. "No, no, no."

"I understand it might be a lot to take in," he said in a gentle voice. "But it's true. The ties between Mystacor, the Enclave, and the Daiamid are concrete. If there—"

"Shadow Weaver is a Shaper?" Adora fixated on him, searching even harder this time for any sign of a lie, this time hoping to find one.

"Technically she is," Corynth said. "While it did leave her malformed, from what I've heard, she retained her individuality. She is considered one of us." He reached up and tapped his forehead with his index finger. "She even made a mask for herself in our same style. Probably to hide her disfigurement, sure, but the design had all the ritual and symbolic markers."

Adora deflated, unsure of what to say, unsure of what to think. Maybe she'd never get up from that chair again. Shadow Weaver had been a sore subject even when she was still around, and the one silver lining to the pressures of the previous few years was that Adora had used it as excuse to pack everything 'Shadow Weaver' into a box in her head and shove it far, far down in her head. These revelations about her lust for power and its abstract ties to the man sitting next to her made her impossible to ignore anymore.

She'd used that magic to torture Catra. Torture Glimmer. Nearly wipe her own memory! The power to inflict that came from the same source Corynth had used to save everyone on Eden? Save her at the Crystal Castle? The very same source that had been eating away at the galaxy for years, planet by planet and system by system?

She was so in her head she startled when Corynth moved out the corner of her vision. He was holding out the snack bar she'd first offered him for her to take. It was such a random gesture she didn't know how to respond, at first. She stared at it and at the ignominite manacle still clasped over his wrist.

"That's for you," she said, once she'd found her voice.

"Yes, but I'm not hungry. And knowing you, you're probably moments away from starvation anyways, despite that mountain of opened wrappers on the dash."

Indignation flared in her chest. Adora looked up from the shackle to scowl at him, only for that indignation to sputter out when she saw the smile on his face. His eyes now sparkled with more color and warmth than it possibly could have, were it merely reflecting the hyperspace tunnel. His eyes flicked past her, over her shoulder and ostensibly to the mountain of opened snack bar wrappers he'd mentioned before—remnants of her stress eating in the moments before he'd joined her in the cockpit.

Sheepish and embarrassed to the extent she could feel her flush on her cheeks, she reached for the snack bar only for him to hold fast to it when she tried to pull it from his grip.

"You know, in my culture, those masks were a symbol of your true self," he said, ignoring the confused look Adora gave him. "An enemy removing it in battle was symbolic of defeat. Removing it yourself for them to see your face was a sign you saw them as an equal. Leaving it behind was tantamount to death.

"Symbolically, of course, although we didn't see much difference between the symbolic and the literal. To us, a major setback could be just that, or it could be an analogy for something deep inside that needed tending to first. It all depended on how you looked at it."

"Are you going to give me the snack or not?" Adora tugged again and he still didn't let go.

"There's nothing wrong with your powers," he said, catching her eye and making her still before she gave up in a huff. "And there's nothing wrong with you for not being able to use them reliably. Remember the ritual? 'To affect the power without believing you are worthy' is wrong. You aren't in danger of becoming an Abomination, but it will still cause problems if your head and your heart aren't in the right place. It's not as easy as drawing a rune correctly or throwing a punch with the correct technique or passing some test, and that's the point. Your belief in yourself and your self-identity are much more complicated to resolve issues between."

"I've been trying for three years and have nothing to show for it!" She pulled at the snack bar again and growled at him, finally throwing her hands up in exasperation and abandoning any pretense of taking it back when still he didn't let it go. He chuckled at her frustration which just made her bristle.

"You've spent those years exercising to the point of overtraining, getting next to no sleep, ruminating endlessly every day about the end of the world and how you don't have results, and you're surprised you haven't made as much progress as you'd hoped? Do you think Catra has all her issues resolved after all this time, either?"

Adora scoffed and folded her arms. "Catra has a mentor, a job, and friends. She's fine. Better off than she'd ever been with me in her life."

"I doubt that."

Again, his voice sounded so calm and patient and understanding, Adora had relaxed before she'd realized it. He offered her the snack bar again, and this time, he let her have it she tried to take it.

"You've made progress getting your powers back," he said. "That progress will continue, you just have to breathe. Give yourself the space to work through it on your own time, instead of rushing for some arbitrary end goal like being able to transform at will."

Adora was about to say she didn't have the luxury of taking her time when he held up a hand to head her off.

"And before you argue about needing your powers back quickly to fight the Beast, no, you don't. We'll arrive at Phoenix soon enough. Once the Barrier is shored up with the algorithm contained within the Eye, the Beast will never come through again. And if that of all things fails to work for whatever reason, then I am still here to help. I just can't help you with your powers—there's no secret technique or incantation."

He put his hand on her knee and squeezed. It was reassuring. Firm. Something stable she could anchor to amidst the turmoil still roiling in her head.

"Thank you," she said, lowering her eyes and speaking quietly.

He nodded. "It's a journey you need to traverse for yourself and no one else, but that doesn't mean you're alone, Adora. We'll figure it out together, and I won't just abandon you. I'm not trying to lose any more friends."

Friends? Were they friends now?

Adora busied herself with opening the wrapper to the snack bar and tried not to show how much the words affected her. The rational part of her knew she had plenty of friends back home. Bow had even managed to break through her walls at intermittent periods and allow her to feel like she had friends, not just know she did.

She would have been happy moments earlier to walk away with someone she could refer to as a mentor. 'Friends' was not something that had crossed her mind to even hope for with Corynth given their short history, and yet, he'd been the one to label them as such.

Adora hummed to herself as she took her first bite, unable to wipe the small smile on her face away. She was friends with Corynth, the Last Shaper of the Daiamid.

Outstanding.