The cerulean fights the joystick with all her strength, but the ship is veering and there's nothing her slipping mittens can do about it. Gamblignant boarding shuttles flitter about the Aurora like sweatnibblers on a musclebeast, the battleship's canons swatting at them just as ineffectually as a rope-braid tail on a hindquarter. The ship bucks again under her palms and sends her flat on her spinal crevice.

"Darn it!"

It's a valiant effort to repeal the pirates, but unfortunately for her

YOU"RE ALREADY HERE

"Maybe give it another go?" her goldblood co-pilot says with gleeful pep as he helps her to her feet. She snaps her arm away immediately and harrumphs, "I can take care of myself!"

The goldblood is about to reply when the looming bronzeblood, the final threat in this section of the bridge if Jjaakk's perimeter comes back clean. He stands between the two of them, grunts an indeterminate grunt, and pulls them apart by the back of their necks. The cerulean pouts at first, but then she joins the goldblood in looking appropriately baabeastish.

But the machinations of beleaguered middle leafs are not my focus, for Jjaakk has just returned, and he's given me The Nod. I spring out behind the shield of abstracted archway cover, the metaphorical fins of this battleship meant to help its crew defend should ever a boarding party ever breach its insides, and unleash my attack.

SLEEP

I've only accomplished this in training before. Using psionics on three adult trolls is for mutants and accomplished highbloods, for those who have more than SLEEP at their disposal. But a twisting, un-trolllike part of me hopes that if the ship can be taken and spare a few lives in the process, then that is a possibility I must grab.

Blessedly—Sufferer watch over I—three sets of knees buckle as I press my shrike's eye into their thinkpans like an unsubtle knife. The cerulean fights the longest, but that is still less than a second, not enough to press the alarm under the command console. Instead, she smacks her nugbone on the edge of the platform on the way down, and the ship is mine.

"Showoff," Jjaakk says.

I smile. He reminds me of Gabe so much sometimes.

That thought leads to roads and winding paths so I simply choose not to follow it. I go to the console, and radio into the secured channel of the gamblignant fleet: "objective secured. The Aurora is ours."

I can imagine the rapturous cheer that that is happening on each individual fighter in the frothing sea of battle below, one of snarls of and triumphant howls and fists raised high. Does it echo in Doomfist's flagship? Is the command center there silent, contemplative?

Is Gave even still there?

It disturbs I to realize I don't even know. Gabe, the old Gabe, would have been back in his fighter before the sutures had been removed, but I have been increasingly aware over the past five sweeps that he has…changed. He's more scalpel than knife now. He calculates. He actually listens to his auspistices and Sufferer knows I never got him to do that for me. It almost makes me wish…

my fingers idly trailing along the chattering feelers of the control panel assay my wandering thinkpan, but the hard proof comes when the bronzeblood comes slamming into my back.

"Ana!"

He cracks what feels like my entire spine as he slams I into the bridge's elliptical window, a forearm as big as my waist pinning I by the throat. I were sure he was out it must not have taken entirely, and now I pay and pay again, Jjaakk's voice warbling through my consciousness as he spins his weapon on the troll holding I. SLEEP I demand, but it's so much harder while my lungs are in the process of being snuffed out. The bronzeblood picks I up and slams I again. Jjaakk's rifle fires. The combination of force and plasma and the window behind me shatters.

Space.

There's no air here, but that doesn't make it all that different than before honestly. What they never say is that it's the vacuum that kills you, the moisture getting sucked through unprotected ganderbulbs and sub-negative temperature that eat my skin my digits and my throat. They say the higher my caste the heartier but I wonder. I wonder, as I float further away from the change in pressure that shot I from the ship like a canon, how long an empress could survive in space. If the Condescension could be brought down in one fell swoop, would she survive out there, floating? Unbothered? A queen surrounded by the remains of her greatest achievement.

It is with this image, of flakes of metal fluttering around like stars, that I feel a hand close around my wrist.

It isn't Jjaakk. He was too far, I am gone, gone…aren't I? Yet there are voices, and back in through the shattered hole of glass, then finally to a section of ship re-pressurized as an airlock closes behind us. "Stay awake, Captain," Jjakk says, and I do not do as he says. Though, that only lasts for a minute and then I am

bombarded

with psionics. Though not like any psionics I've ever felt before, my own nor those I've on the rare occasion battled against. This…I open my eyes. Eye. my shrike's eye is woefully damaged, I can feel it, but I can still see the un-alternianly yellow light surrounding me in this tiny little airlock at least four others are crammed into with me.

Jjaakk is one. But the psionic is the one that draws all attention, the one who is glowing, who is healing me instead of turning my mind to mush. Her hair is free of its tie and there is no doubt it the light is coming from her.

Because she has wings.

When the light fades, and I sit up and pat myself over, I give her a look. "Well now. I see why our Aspirant is so keen on you."

She flushes mustard in her cheeks.

The wings are a pale yellow and gossamer, just like the legends of the Summoner's mythical mutation. Apparently there was more truth to those tales than even I realized, and I still breathed when the Summoner walked Alternia.

Jjaakk shakes his head. The others, which I am finally taking stock of, are less surprised. Mercy's moirail, I can't recall his name, is sitting by her side, steadying her after what was most certainly an extreme exertion of psionics energy.

And there. The one who I know is called Pharah because I figured this all out rather quickly and couldn't help but ask.

My descendant cannot decide to shyly avoid my eye or to stare in abject wonder. For my part, I cannot but help but muse how such a thing could come to be, so soon after my own hatching, to spawn something a whole caste above my own. Yet here she is. To look in her face, there is now denying it. I reach over and pat her hand.

"There there ḥabībti. It takes more than that to kill me."

It makes sense that my first words to her would be as such.

Cut short is our reunion. Our Royal One is boarding.

Less than an hour after being dead and I salute straight backed as the Aspirant and Doomfist come to see what I have claimed for them. (For I am of the fleet, and centuries do not change in sweeps, no matter how devoted I am to the cause.) The bridge is no longer a suitable place to receive them thanks to my little oopsie, so instead the 'inspection' takes place in a grand amphitheater where the ceiling bubbles itself upwards into the grand dome of the sky. Ships still flit about as the Successor makes great sweeping paces of the ship, and untroubled and victorious grin on his face.

He is still grinning that grin when he forms as sweeping bow to the Aspirant and offers the ship to her in its entirety.

Zarya obviously isn't expecting it. No one in her entourage is, and if I know anything of her Strategos from the brief times we've met, I'd bet their mind is a bunch of little cogs someone is shaking around in a desk drawer as they try to calculate their next move and the political ramifications of being awarded a war prize.

But spoils and political dealing are beyond me. There is something else that needs my attention. The violets are at it again.

Over what, I do not know, only that they are like this, and they will find any open scab to pick and pick until it bleeds lavender over everything Overwatch has seeded here. We can't have that. It is unsustainable: the Aspirant has tried, and she knows how much hinges on the flower-delicate quadrants of her inner council. It has stabilized yes, but again, not forever.

I will do this for her.

"Enough," I say. Widowmaker opens her mouth, and I repeat, "enough."

Aa, how I have missed this. They say it is the most unfulfilling of the four, but I have never found it so.

"Another time, my dears," I say, so gentle, so condescending, and oh what a thrill to see them shut up. "It is a day to celebrate. Widow, why don't you go congratulate Zarya? Truly, one of hear dearest hatefriends should at least speak to her after gaining her own battleship."

Widow growls. I look at her sternly. Show cows, and walks off. Moira takes the stern talking to more stiffly, but is a victory none the less.

The amphitheater is a mess of cheers and calls. Jjaakk still manages to sidle up and say, "showoff."