While I was certainly happy to see a familiar face, as much as it warmed my heart it turned my stomach. I had chosen her because she had been my friend, but I hadn't fully considered the fact that I was objectively not that person any more. I shook the thoughts out of my head, maybe with her at my side I could kill more selectively. I wouldn't have to indulge the rage that had allowed me to survive on Inus. I wasn't sure I wanted that either though, Percy had spent so much time worrying, trying his best to save everyone. I didn't have to do that, I could ignore the petty trivialities of nuance and motivation. The question was, what would Zoe think about all this? When I had met her she had been a relatively cold and calculating idealist; her worldview was black and white much as mine was now. Men were evil and that was that, no other proof necessary for her to swiftly enact vengeance upon them. She would be able to at least understand Chaos' methods right? Should she? I'd seen enough blood for more than one lifetime, the problem with that was it meant I had begun feeling numb to it long ego.

"Come on, we've got a fair amount of ground together and information to gather. I'll answer as many of your questions as I can while we walk." I said taking a step away from where we had landed on the surface of what I assumed to be a moon. As I attempted to do so I floated several feet off the ground. "This may be a problem." I said.

Zoe laughed. "It may take a while to get used to this place, maybe we should sit and talk first. Like you said, you've got a lot of explaining to do."

I could feel myself falling slightly towards the surface I had pushed off from, though even with that reassurance it took almost all of my mental effort not to flail wildly. I had never been comfortable in the air, as a son of Poseidon that was a given. When my feet finally touched the surface again, I turned to Zoe with what I'm sure was an expression of genuine fear. She was smiling at me, entertained simply by the extent of my antics. The coldness that had begun to settle in my chest warmed for a moment, I was looking at the face of a person who cared about me. Someone who could find joy simply by being around me, the kind of thing genuine bonds are built on. I felt a tear well up in the corner of my eye. I had been alone for so long. Even though I had left, I felt as though I had been cast out. Ostracized by the people whose lives I had saved, treated as more of a transaction than a human being with my own thoughts, wants and feelings. My breath hitched and I did my best to play it off as a cough. Zoe didn't seem to buy it.

She sat down and patted the ground next to her expectantly. I looked at her, for the first time as a human instead of as a theoretical answer to my problem. She was dressed similarly as I remembered her in a white parka and arctic camo pants, tucked into black combat boots. She was pretty which almost felt like a foreign site to me, I had spent the last thirty years only being able to see aliens after all. Every time I thought about the time I spent there my mind started to fog up. I had been there so long yet it felt like an instant, as if it wasn't reality and my real life was still back on earth. No matter how hard I tried to leave that place behind, it still felt as if my life there was my most recent memory. Zoe's presence didn't help, for the moment she wasn't making me feel any less alone. Just reminding me of past failures. I must have been staring at her for a pretty long time, because a red tinge started to appear at the edges of her angular features.

I sat down which took a little bit more effort than I was expecting. I tried to plop down onto the ground, but my legs floated out from under me and I found myself falling slowly from about a foot in the air. Zoe giggled.

"You're a bit less serious than I remember." I said trying to break some of the awkward tension that I felt constricting around my throat.

"You're a bit more serious than I remember." She intoned in a deadpan that I was more accustomed to.

"You dropped the old English." I said.

"I had a lot of free time in the stars." She said wistfully.

"What was it like?" I asked, genuinely curious. Honestly I'd be happy talking about anything other than myself.

"Like I was dreaming, or watching a dream from a beanbag chair. I could kind of do anything within a small confined space, but the only thing to keep me entertained was watching the world unfold. That usually meant watching you." She said once again blushing slightly.

"Oh." I said, feeling a heat rising in my neck. Zoe had felt like the crush you have on a girl who is way older than you that you know will never amount to anything, but that doesn't really hinder your imagination. To have her telling me she had spent her time in the stars watching me felt a little embarrassing.

"You're quite the ladies man." She smirked. "Oh and the Hero of Olympus and all that."

Thirty years ago I would have been beet red, I had barely figured out how messed up of a year I had with women when Annabeth and I shared our kiss that night. But with what had transpired afterward the comment no longer brought me the kind of aw shucks embarrassment Zoe was used to seeing on my face. Instead I just frowned a little bit, trying not to dwell on my memories of my last days on earth.

"I'm sorry it seems I have struck a nerve." Zoe said.

I wasn't sure if I was going to be ready for her bluntness if the first five minutes of our interactions were anything to go on. "You could say that. Well I oughta get talking, I promised to explain a lot."

She nodded lightly from her sitting position and brought her arms from being neatly folded in her lap to be behind her body propping her up as she leaned back. Then I started telling her, she gasped at the right times, nodded in furious indignation at the right times, and tended to have a dubious look on her face whenever Chaos showed up. By the time I got to the end of my time on earth she seemed to be itching to say something. I didn't really want to talk anymore so I paused in hopes that she would say whatever was on the tip of her tongue.

"I am so sorry Percy…" She said, pausing slightly.

I groaned out loud. I knew this wasn't the right time for this, but I had to say it sooner rather than later. "About that, I don't really go by Percy anymore. To me he died that day in Cabin Three. Since then I've been Pawn, and I don't have to think about what it meant to be Percy, or what he would think about what I'm doing right now."

"Ok, I understand. If you don't want to be called Percy that's fine, but don't you think abandoning your past entirely is unhealthy. If you just ignore it you can never heal, you taught me that." Zoe said with a sheen in her eyes.

"It isn't just that I am abandoning it. I am a different person as well. I spent thirty years alone on an alien planet. The first two years of which I spent locked in the same room under constant observation. I was so pent up when I got my first opportunity to show them I was intelligent I started babbling and bouncing off the walls like a baboon. I've seen things, and I've done things that don't make sense. Earth was just a tiny spec in the grand scheme of the cosmos, what happened there doesn't even matter to me anymore." I said. It was partially true. When it came to my outlook I no longer cared about the inner workings of an individual planet, but the emotional scars were still deeply ingrained. I looked at her and she was staring at me forlornly, as if I had lost something. If I'm being honest I have to admit it made me angry.

"You gasped when you saw my arm. Would you like to know what happened?" I asked.

She nodded slowly.

"I tried to make peace with one of the leaders of the last planet I was on. I reached out, told him where to meet me. When he saw that I had showed up to the meeting, he dropped a nuke on me. Most of my body was protected by my sword, but my right arm wasn't. It got fried by the radiation. Worse things have happened to me since I left earth, it's not that I am abandoning my past. I just have new, more important things to dwell on." I said, with a conviction that almost convinced me.

"I see." Zoe said slowly. "Pe-Pawn… I apologize in advance if this offends you but how well do you know Chaos?"

I had figured a question like this was coming based on her reactions to my story. "I barely know it. What I can tell you is that it doesn't mess around, and it doesn't take no for an answer. It seems to be infinitely powerful but incapable of or at least unwilling to interact with normal beings. According to it the gods aren't anything special, they are just lifeforms of a different element than so-called mortals, I'm not sure what that makes it though." I said.

"That's not really what I meant, I meant why do you trust it?" She asked.

I honestly laughed at that. "Well at first I'll admit that I acted pretty impulsively in the heat of the moment. I didn't have any reason to trust it more than any other deity that had interfered with my life, but when I confronted Annabeth I knew it was telling the truth just by the look on her face. She looked absolutely distraught, like all the lies she had been telling had crumbled apart. I didn't really have anything to live for after that, so I took Chaos' offer. Since then I have no reason not to trust it. It's more like an evil robot than anything else, well evil in the sense that it will do anything for the sake of its goals and it is ruthlessly efficient."

"Ok, but why did it choose you? What even are its goals?" she asked pointedly.

I didn't have answers to those questions, I knew that. It bothered me more than Zoe possibly could have known. You don't spend thirty years alone and not think about all of the possible factors that got you there and all of the solutions that may be able to get you out. "I don't know. That night Chaos told me I was pure of heart, near as I can tell that's why it wanted me. My fatal flaw is loyalty, and believe it or not I'm loyal to Chaos. As to what it wants, it seems to want to maintain some kind of balance. On the last planet I ended a civil war and on this one we are supposed to free a race from subjugation."

Zoe seemed to be satisfied somewhat with my answers, or more accurately my approximations. That made me happy, I desperately wanted to just be friends with this girl. We had the universe at our fingertips, we could be literal intergalactic superheroes. I wasn't sure if there was literally anything cooler than that. Though so far I had certainly botched my origin story, with my luck they'd be calling me Nuke boy until the heat death of the universe. After that I would have to ask Chaos what we would do next.

"Would you like to start walking now? We don't know when the sun will set and we need to find information and a place to sleep. I figure we can probably find one of these so-called gods' houses and just shack up there until we figure out what to do next." I said trying to act as casually as I possibly could.

"Shack up." She raised an eyebrow at me.

"You know what I mean." I said. Standing up slowly so that I didn't float off the ground .\

"I accept your offer, but there's one last thing. If you are going to go by Pawn I think I'd like to have a name too." she said.

"What were you thinking?" I asked. This was the kind of small talk that I was way more invested in.

"I was thinking you should come up with it. You got me into this mess after all." she said. She was smiling, but there was something ever so slightly off about it that I just couldn't figure out.

I thought about it for a good minute or so before I had a thought. I dredged it up from a real deep memory, but it seemed to fit the theme that I had inadvertently set in motion.

"How do you feel about Draught?" I asked.

"Uh what's it mean?" She looked at me quizzically.

"It's an older name for checkers. I heard it when I was a kid one time while my mom and I were driving out to Montauk. She had the radio tuned to NPR and they had this British computer scientist on talking about how they had finally 'solved' checkers. Like the computers new exactly what to do on every move, and they would always force a draw with each other. Anyway he kept calling it draughts so I asked my mom what that was and she told me it was a fancy name for checkers. I always liked checkers better than chess anyway." I said. I had lost myself in the memory as I was talking. The twinge of unease I had had while looking at Zoe's smile was gone now, she seemed to be beaming brightly now.

"Sounds perfect to me. She said before reaching out her hand for me to help her up.

I obliged and tried to ignore what was left of my stunted teenage emotions when our fingers initially graced one anothers.

"I'm going to jump up and see if I can see anything." I said.

"Are you sure that's a good idea? What if you float away?" she asked, looking slightly worried.

"I should be fine, if planes fall back to earth from as high as they fly I shouldn't be able to jump out of orbit." I reassured her. I was omitting the fact that I was speaking from the perspective of a person who could only jump a normal height. I was actually quite scared that if I attempted to jump too high I would start hurtling towards the planet below.

I bent my legs and jumped with about twenty five percent of what I had, I went soaring into the sky, but only a bit past where I had intended. As I started to look over the horizon I felt my acceleration slow to a halt as I hit the apex of my parabolic motion. I began to slowly descend towards the surface, and I was picking up speed. Highschool physics certainly hadn't been my strong suit but I remembered one thing. Gravitational potential energy meant I was going to fall with almost as much force as I pushed off with. There wasn't a crater where I had jumped, so I didn't expect to crash into the ground with any problems. I could clearly see a structure to what I was pretty sure was north, or at least my best estimation of north based on alien planetary movements.

I touched down and bent my knees slightly to absorb the impact. I didn't want to ruin the happy note we had left off by talking so I simply pointed in a direction and began trying to mimic the skipping that the astronauts had done on the moon. It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it and I had to do my best to ignore the snickering of the huntress behind me who had slipped into the awkward stunted gate as if she had been doing it her entire life. By the time that we got to the house it was dark outside, which left us with only one problem. The light was on inside. It was an interesting building, I had to assume that it was a domicile since there was nothing else around it to indicate that it served any other purpose. There was no writing and no signs, just the single individual stark white structure. I couldn't tell what it was made of, it almost reminded me of adobo, but the color was strikingly different. The structure itself seemed to be a dodecagonal pyramid, meaning that the base was a dodecagon and it had triangles rising from each of its sides meeting at a point in the center. On every third face was a sort of vent that looked almost like a mail slot, these seemed to be the windows. The structure itself was far bigger than the average home on earth, if I could give it a comparison I'd say it had to be at least six bedrooms. It certainly had a furnished basement with a bar and a pool table.

The entrance was one of the strangest things about the abode. It seemed that instead of building the structure above ground and then placing the roof on top of that, the structure was dug out first and then a roof was created at ground level. There was a set of stairs that led into the vertices of the base and to a round door about twelve feet into the earth. I was hesitant to advance any further, there was no telling what we would find inside, or if we would even be able to enter the building without resorting to drastic measures.

"What's the plan Pawn?" Zoe egged me on from behind.

"I say we go inside." I responded rather unsure of myself.

"If we have to fight a god, how do you think that will go?" She asked in a voice that made it clear to me she had little faith in me as a leader so far.

"If they are on the level of your average minor god I can take them easily. If it's Olympian level or more we will have a serious problem." I said.

"You still want to go inside?" She asked seemingly rhetorically, but I had an answer.

"Yeah, Chaos wouldn't have sent me here if it thought I would get wiped out by the first person I ran into."

"So you do trust it then?" She asked in an almost accusatory voice. This line of questioning was becoming grating.

"Like I said earlier, I don't have any reason not to. I'll tell you this much, if I have learned anything in life, it's that you can always trust people to act in their own self interest." I said bitterly.

Zoe pretty much clammed up after I said that. I removed my sword from the sheathe on my back; it wasn't the kind of thing that could be done quickly. I had to undo the strap that held it to my body and physically pull the thing out of the massive hardened fabric container. It was a lot more like a carrying case than a holster, needless to say surprise attacks meant I would have to fend off opponents with things other than the hulking blade. Though as I began removing it I remembered that we were operating under different circumstances now that I had left Inus. These life forms were Khorson based, meaning that celestial bronze would do the trick. I could finally hold Anaklusmos again, though that brought with it the prospect of once again dredging up memories that I;d rather not touch on. I buckled the strap holding my sword and readjusted it so that it was once again fastened tightly to my body.

"Why did you stop taking out your sword? Change of plans?" Zoe whispered.

"Steel blade." I said trying to sound cryptic, she would understand the implication, but I didn't want to outright say that the prior blade was made for killing mortals. Anyone with immortal blood running through their veins and a stable conscience would retch a bit internally at the idea. It was bullying plain and simple, killing people who had no chance against someone with naturally heightened abilities like themselves. Though I didn't feel all that bad about it, one versus millions was a relatively significant handicap. The vacant looks of the dead began to flash against the backs of my eyes. It was the only way I reminded myself. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, nothing can be done when one stands in opposition to the will of the universe.

I uncapped riptide letting the faint glow cascade around me, as I suspected my body had multiple reactions. My hands began to feel clammy as my mind and heart raced, adrenaline pumped and I felt my muscles tense as I readied myself for confrontation. I pressed my hand against the flat face of the door. There was no knob and no lock but the door didn't budge; I knew it couldn't be pulled since I had nothing to grab so I slid it to the side and it quickly gave in to the pressure with a light squeak. Even on alien planets the average door still needs a squirt of WD-40. I winced at the sound but pressed on, there was nothing that could be done about it now.

The light from the interior squeezed out of the crack and illuminated the steps, I passed through the crack in the door as soon as it was big enough to fit me. Zoe quickly followed suit, her trained feet making even softer footfalls than mine. She moved with the utmost grace like a panther stalking its prey under cover of darkness. It was clear she was more accustomed to stealth than me, I was more of a swing first ask questions later kind of guy. The interior of the room reminded me of the kind of utopian depictions of society from the middle of the previous century. Everything looked very fifties, just shinier, and more geometric. The room we entered seemed to be an entryway that connected directly to the main living space. It too shared the geometric shape of the roof and had four doors in about the same spots as the vents on the outside.

Sitting in the center of the room was a large chair outfitted with several devices and tubes that looked medical in nature. There were two bags, one holding a clear liquid that had to be some kind of water or saline solution, and the other holding some kind of brown mass that I was quite sure was biomatter. In the center of the seat was what looked like a headset. It reminded me of cerebro, but it had goggles and two thick cords coming out of the back of it, one near where the base of the skull would be situated in the helmet and the other coming directly out of the goggles.

There was what looked like a fireplace in one of the corners of the abode not occupied by a door, that made very little sense to me as I hadn't seen a chimney coming out of the roof, but the smoke could be output elsewhere. Or more logically I just thought it was a fireplace because that was what it looked like to me and it wasn't actually a fireplace. Above the mantle mounted to the wall was a very futuristic looking recurve bow, with an entirely black color palette in both its limbs and string, behind it was an x made of several bronze tipped arrows. The helmet seemed to be calling to me, much like the way that an enchantress's voice is intoxicating and makes you desperately want to drop your guard and give in. I wanted to put on those goggles. So I sat down in the chair and did just that. I was greeted with an interface written in a text that I clearly had no idea how to comprehend, however thankfully the UI was mostly visual and very intuitive. I was able to start scrolling through options very quickly, it immediately became obvious that this device allowed the wearer to peek into alternate worlds and realities, but I wasn't sure how it worked at all. All of the viewpoints seemed to be coming from the same kind of being, red leather skinned individuals with four fingered hands and faces much like that of a pug or other smushed dog.

I was trying to make sense of it all when I felt something grab my shoulder and then I heard words spoken clearly in my mind. They weren't like words though, it was more like I was hearing the feelings of another being directly rather than talking to them through the medium of some imprecise oral communication. I knew that it was scared and angry. It wanted to know what we were, and even more than any of those other emotions I could feel it practically screaming, it wanted us gone.

I tried to think back at it. "What is this device, who are these beings?"

"Why is it asking about the Wroplings. Get out." It psychically shouted.

I took off the helmet and looked at it, it was much the same as the so-called Wroplings had looked, though far taller and leaner. It also had a multicolored skin tone that looked almost like tie-dye. I couldn't figure out if it was natural or some kind of body modification. Some of the things I had seen on Inus made gauges the size of dinner plates look like perfectly natural human attire.

"As you can tell I am not from here, I have questions." I thought.

"The wroplings are insignificant, mere playthings." It exuded in indignance.

I could feel my temper beginning to flare. "How so?"

"Inferior beings trapped within their own minds, free real estate for us to tamper with." It seemed hesitant, feeling the anger building in my mind.

"Us?" I could feel my mental energy flowing out almost like tendrils. It was like this interaction with the alien had opened me to an entirely new domain.

"We Gracians, the superior form of life, farm them and inhabit their dreams for entertainment." It seemed to have lost its hold of common sense when given an opportunity to gloat.

"How do you entertain yourself?" I asked. I no longer felt like I was thinking and it was listening to my mind, now I felt as if I was imposing the question on him. Making it echo across the surface of his consciousness. He succumbed to the pressure.

"I hunt them." It thought, squeezing the memories it cherished into the visual center of my brain. I watched as the monster stalked countless Wroplings through horrid nightmare landscapes, sometimes for days or months at a time. It did not shoot them when given the opportunity, no. Instead it made its presence known, forcing its prey to flee in fear. Over and over again it taunted the poor beings, until finally, inevitably they gave up. Collapsed in a pile of despair and despondency. Only then would the monster slay them, with the shot of an arrow far off in the distance, as one final taunt. Letting them know that it was all a game, their resistance and participation meant nothing. If the being had wanted them dead it could have killed them at any time.

The images made me sick, I felt my rage flare. I pulled riptide from my pocket, where I had stashed it when I decided to put on the helmet.

"What is that?" The being shrieked.

"Kill! Kill! Kill!" I could feel my mind screaming.

I launched myself from the position I had been standing in, the weakened gravity allowing me to close the several paces of distance between us in the blink of an eye. I caught the Gracian with my left hand wrapping around its throat as we slammed against the wall. It sputtered and resisted, wailing in my mind as it knew what its fate would be already. I felt myself wanting to torture it, like I had with Solosk. But I buried the thoughts, torture wasn't efficient, it was just inserting emotions into a situation that didn't benefit from their involvement. I killed because it was necessary not because I enjoyed it, I wasn't a monster like this filthy individual. No matter how hard it struggled it couldn't break free from my grip. I held on to it with as much force as I could muster. It beat its arms against my chest until they were broken and flailing wildly. If this thing was anything to go by then not all Khorson based life was created equal, I could trounce the people of this planet, and I had a feeling that I would be doing just that.

"Percy…" I heard Zoe almost whisper from behind me.

It woke me up from my trance. In a bad way. I had let the poor wretch torture itself, even if that hadn't been my intention. I swiftly released my grip and separated its head from its body.

"Its Pawn remember." I said. It even sounded corny to me. Like a fourteen year old boy living out his edgy power fantasies.

"Pawn, when did you start killing people like it meant nothing." she asked me.

"On Inus." I said.

"Pawn, that's not okay. If we do that we're no better than the people we're fighting." she said.

"Morality is a cage." It came out so naturally. Words that I had never said before, ones that felt foreign on my tongue but made sense inside my head. "The gods put you inside it to control you. They've killed millions out of pettiness, and they torture us forever if we do it once? Zoe there are billions of planets with billions of intelligent life forms on each. Do you know what that means?"

"Percy…" She said tears welling in her eyes.

"Its Pawn!" I yelled at her. "It means that the lives that you were taught to cherish are worth less than a grain of sand."

"That can't be true." She said.

"It is true. Hell on earth you had that half figured out. How many men have you killed just for fitting that qualification?" I asked venomously.

"But you showed me I was wrong." she practically gasped.

"You were wrong about me, not wrong in general." I said. "The first thing Chaos taught me was to abandon the perspective that I learned on earth. In the greater universe thinking that way isn't helpful. It just wastes time and gets innocent people killed. If I hadn't killed that thing it just would have ratted us out. We don't have the resources to keep it prisoner, killing it was the only option."

Zoe was silent.

I felt myself calming down. "I know it can be a lot to take in, it seems like everything I'm saying is wrong to you. I disagreed at first too, but results speak for themselves. If you aren't willing to get your hands dirty, other people will get theirs way dirtier way faster. Some people deserve to die."

"And how can you judge that if you're just like them?" She asked.

"I'm not." I said indignantly.

"Are you sure, don't you kill people for getting in your way? Just so that you can get what you want? If people are like sand to you then what's to stop you from wiping out a hundred people just because you don't want to wait in line?" She screamed at me.

I was shocked, I hadn't thought about it like that. It wasn't about keeping your hands clean for the sake of your own conscience. If you killed indiscriminately how were you able to maintain a hold of what it even meant to be good or bad. If nothing even mattered what was the point of intervening.

"I understand, but I have to put the good of the populous before the good of the few who stand in the way of its survival. It's simple math and it can't be avoided. I'll avoid meaningless death as much as possible, that's always been my intention, but I have a job to do. He would have prevented me from freeing the Wroplings, I can't have that." I said softly. "I'm sorry for yelling. I think I was mad at myself, not at you. At the end of the day I justify the killing, that doesn't mean that it's easy for me to stomach it."

She looked at me hesitantly, I'm sure I looked like a demon slathered in blood and viscera.

"You sure are different." She whispered.

"Consequence of time." I said my voice dead. I felt like I had scared her off, like she was going to be asked to be sent home.

"I understand where you're coming from, I lived for two thousand years after all. You've seen the world with an even wider lens. I mean seriously we are on some alien moon right now."

I managed a lopsided smirk and an exhale through my nose.

"Things need to die so that new ones can be born, it's part of the circle of life. Maybe before I was putting a little too much value on the living part." She smiled the same smile that had irked me earlier. She still had qualms about what was going on, but at this moment she wasn't willing to discuss them with me. I was relieved at that, it was better than her leaving outright. This way we would at least still have time to talk it out.

I suddenly had an idea. "Do you have any of your weapons with you?" I asked.

"No, they were left behind on earth when I went to the stars." She said.

"Well then." I walked away from the limp body of the Gracian I had killed. I plucked the bow from its mounting hardware on the wall and scooped up the arrows as well. I walked back over to Zoe and presented them to her. "This should do for now. A reclaimed weapon for a new more valiant purpose, I think it's fitting." I tried to force my best smile.

Zoe accepted the bow awkwardly. "Uh, thank you."

This was all going horribly, first she had grilled me about Chaos, and now we had an intense moral dilemma about killing people. I had wanted to be the kind of friends who got ice cream on a Saturday and complained about their dead end jobs. Not the kind of friends who constantly bitched about the state of society and global politics like there was anything they could do about it.

"What do you want to name it?" I asked, probably even more stiffly than my initial attempt to make stealing the dead guy's bow seem positive. She laughed. Though weakly, it was a start.

"What?" I asked.

"You can still be a child. I suppose I should ask what you named your new sword?" She spoke with the nearest thing to nonchalants since our conversation sitting on the surface of the moon when we had first landed.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had never named the sword. My face turned beet red. "I never did, I guess."

"Thirty years with the thing and you're telling me you never named it. It was practically the first thing you thought of just now." She was smiling again. That made me happy, but I knew the answer to her question wasn't all that sunshiney.

"It never crossed my mind, I was always worried about other things. I didn't name Anaklusmos so I think I took it for granted that the sword just had a name." I said sadly. I didn't have a real excuse, I knew that. I had spent literal years with the sword being me sole focus in life, and I had been in such a tarnished mental state that I hadn't even thought to name it.

"Well what are you going to name it." She asked it. It was an innocent question, she couldn't have known the pain it would cause me.

I laughed darkly. "Amigo."

She cocked her head at me. "Why that?"

I laughed again, more hollowly this time. "It was the only friend I had on Inus, the only constant in my life. The one thing I could always rely on. Just naming it friend would be too pathetic though."

"So naming it friend in Spanish makes it less pathetic?" she asked.

"Marginally." I said. I was at a loss for words.

"Well I'll name this bow Homie then. The kids say that right?" She asked with a genuine look of curiosity.

I laughed at that, I really laughed. For the first time in a long time. Zoe smiled and laughed along too.