The ash is raining down like snow. Dark shadows loom in the sky. The world is ending.

"Glimmer!"

Bow sinks to his knees at the spot where Glimmer was standing only seconds ago, before a sickly green light took his world away. He makes a noise of anguish and searches for a word that can express how he can possibly feel so angry at and scared for one person simultaneously. He doesn't find it. He sighs, and stands up.

"Hordak?" Entrapta, only moments behind Bow, swings hand over hair across his makeshift zipline and lands in a puff of ash next to the distraught archer. "Was that Hordak? Did you shoot him?"

"Only with a gas arrow! And why do you care? He was trying to crush Glimmer with a big hunk of metal!"

"I know, so inefficient." Entrapta looks away. "Something must have gone wrong. Did his armor malfunction, or…?"

Bow is shaking with emotion. "Are you serious? This isn't a science project, it's an alien invasion! Glimmer just got disintegrated!"

"Teleported, actually, based on the energy signature." Entrapta's eyes are glued to a data pad. "Hordak was right, they do have working portal technology. They probably couldn't find us until we shifted out of Despondos. I wonder what powers it all?"

"Teleported?" Bow spins Entrapta around. He ignores the look on her face as she plucks his uninvited hand off her arm. "Does that mean she's still alive? Does that mean we could get her back? Entrapta, please, she… I…"

"You love her," Entrapta says, a simple statement of fact. It is her turn to ignore Bow's expression. "I've had that data since Princess Prom. And yes, there is a greater than zero percent chance that we can still get them… her… back. Help me look, we might be able to find something here that can help."

Entrapta's words are steady, but her hands are a fidgety blur. Before Bow can say anything, she has hurried away to the forge, trying to look anywhere but up.

The sanctum is gone, except for a burned-out shell. The portal machine is gone. The records of her experiments with Hordak are gone. The filing cabinet where he'd secretly kept all of Imp's crayon drawings, meticulously ordered by date, is gone. An uncomfortable plastic chair, never used, sits undamaged in the corner.

It is sometimes ridiculous, the things that survive.

Something clinks at her feet in the ruins. She kneels down to look and finds a purple shard, glinting in the ashes. It is familiar to her. She wipes off the grime and looks at the First Ones writing she'd etched upon its surface herself, going by incomplete notes and a sizable amount of guesswork for how ancient civilizations handled spelling.

He had loved it. Her. She knows this. Now it is one more thing lost in the fire.

Entrapta is a genius, but it doesn't take a genius to put all the available clues together. Between her last memories of the Fright Zone and the updates on the war effort Bow has been giving her, she's starting to get a pretty clear picture of how she got sent to Beast Island, and why it took so long for anybody else to come. File that under "things to process later."

Right now, she has work to do.

Bow finds her as she heaves wreckage aside with her hair, looking for anything that isn't completely destroyed. He notices the wet lines on her face before she does.

"He didn't want to go with them," Entrapta is mumbling. "He can't have. Not after we…" Her shoulders shake. "Oh, why did they have to come now?"

"Who are 'they'?" Bow asks, even though he thinks he's starting to get a pretty good idea.

Entrapta looks around. "Hordak's people. He said they'd come once the portal was open. But… I'm not sure if he wanted them to, at the end. Things just got so confusing, and then…"

Bow has his thinking face on. In his mind, puzzle pieces that seemed completely unrelated before are finally falling together: Entrapta's reluctance to return to the Rebellion. The new tech she'd built for the Horde. How she'd suddenly moved all her stuff there…

Oh. Oh, no. Bow desperately wishes he could judge her for feeling that way about a war criminal, but right now, right at this moment, he knows he really isn't one to talk.

"Look, I… I think I get it," Bow says. "Or I'm starting to. But I don't know if the others will, just yet. You can talk about it with me, but don't tell anyone else. Okay?"

Entrapta's face is miserable.

Bow tries to think of something that will help. "Or… or maybe you can talk about it with the others if you need to. Just, instead of 'Hordak,' say, I don't know…" he casts his eyes helplessly upward "...'Space'?"

"But I do love space," Entrapta sniffles.

"Exactly! So you won't even be lying. Technically."

Entrapta tries it out. "I love… space." She blinks, and brightens, a little. "Space… is beautiful. I like thinking about space. And learning about space. And talking to space, and the way space's ears move when he…" she trails off.

"We'll work on it," Bow smiles. "Together. We're going to get them back."

Entrapta takes a deep breath and nods. "You're right. Let's get to work!" She pulls her welding mask down and scuttles away into the ruins, hair stretching in every direction, searching for anything useful.

And when she is completely out of earshot, she makes a little vow, just for herself: "I'm going to space," she declares, looking up at the stars. "And I'm going to fight for space. And then… I'm going to take space back."

If, light years away, Horde Prime suddenly feels the tiniest shiver in his ancient bones, he thinks little of it. He sees all. He knows all. There is nothing in his empire that can harm him.

There is only space.