Keith was there early the next day to pick up his begrudging participant. The Blades had arranged the trial for Lotor on one of the smaller liberated planets. They had no desire for the prince of the Galra to know the location of any of their bases even if there was a possibility of becoming a member.

Lotor's trial was set up a little differently than Keith's had been, and when asked Kolivan explained that the majority of Galra who come asking to join the Blades of Marmora had a specific reason behind doing so. These reasons range from things like revenge, or justice or simply wanting to change the way the Empire rules. The trials were put into place to test the resolve of their reason and determine whether the individual had the wherewithal to put their life on the line to make that reason come true. The luxite blade could only be awakened if the individual had absolute certainty in their goal and determination to fight against the Galra. Long story short, the trials were created to weed out the weak willed. Kolivan didn't have the luxury of allowing in anyone in who might threaten his team's strength, and so many had either abandoned the trial altogether or hadn't been strong enough to pass.

Keith's motives had been different. He came to the Blades asking for knowledge, and his trials proved his determination to reach that goal. Kolivan had been thoroughly impressed with his resolve and he was warmly welcomed to the team when he later expressed interest.

Lotor wasn't deciding to join the Blades on his own accord, but he had chosen to join the coalition for a reason. He seemed intent on hiding that reason, so this trial was to draw out whatever he was hiding. If Allura was growing frustrated with Lotor's tight lips and didn't trust him in her castle, then what better place to send him than the one place that had the ability to figure out his real intentions.

Today's true trial would be to see how long it would take to make him break his silence.

Everything was in place, and once Lotor had suited up he was left alone in an empty room with only Kolivan, who watched him carefully from behind his mask and held out a blade.

Lotor approached him to take the blade but hesitated when Kolivan spoke. "You chose to join the coalition for a reason. If you expect us to trust you as an ally, you cannot continue to keep secrets. Your refusal to indulge us in your intentions will keep you from achieving any goal you have in mind, be it a just goal or otherwise. So I will ask you again: why did you choose to side with the coalition?"

Lotor took the blade from him and made note of its weight in his hand. It was a short blade, but it would do. "As I've plainly stated before, I came for the protection of Voltron, being that the entire Empire is out for my head. You seem to believe that I have some ulterior motive, and I'm sorry to disappoint, but with the position I was in, I had little time to come up with some devious plan."

"So why give us any information at all? You've gained your protection. If that's all you wanted, then there's no reason to do any more." Kolivan folded his hands behind his back, carefully observing Lotor's features as he gave his responses.

"It wasn't likely that the Paladins would accept my terms with nothing to offer. Besides" He set the blade in the sheath on his hip and pulled his hair over his shoulder, tying it into a low ponytail. A small smile was tugging at his lips. "I would get bored with nothing to do."

"If you feel such a mundane reason is worth risking your life, please, feel free to undergo our trial." Kolivan stepped to the side to allow him access to the entry door. "But once you pass that threshold, I will not guarantee your safety. You made a bargain with the Paladins for protection, but I agreed to no such deal."

"Well then, let's make this fun, shall we?" Lotor smirked and stepped towards the door with confidence. When he stepped inside he found himself in a large oval shaped room. Around fifty masked Blade members stood in a semi circle around him with their weapons activated and at the ready. His smile remained and he readied his own.

There was a moment where everyone was still, deciding who would make the first move and as his eyes dragged across all of the members he had to hold back laughter. The entire room was filled with the typical tall, broad shouldered Galra that he had spent his entire life sparring with. He had confidence in his ability to counter them, but the one who made the first move was what made him hold back a laugh. The odd one out, who stood barely half the height and frame of the others and needed no mask for him to know that it was Keith. As soon as he made a move, all the others quickly followed suit.

He parried Keith's attack and quickly dodged to avoid being hit by two other blades. So the approach was to overwhelm him with numbers then. He only hoped they didn't expect him to go easy on them either.

Kolivan watched the trial from a separate room, focusing on Lotor's movements and expressions. He twisted and spun around his attackers with nimble fluidity. He understood their body frame and speed and how to counter it. His unfaltering smile held confidence and enjoyment at the battle, but with a few hits and a little exhaustion, things would change for him.

Lotor held his own for a considerable amount of time, managing to knock out at most at one time over half of his attackers. But the odds were stacked against him and the Blades never stayed down for long. He ducked quickly to dodge an attack and pushed forward, elbowing his attacker in the gut. He focused on an enemy to his left who was coming in for a swing at his head, so he lowered himself and kicked out the enemy's legs, but before he could steady himself again Keith was moving quicker. He came from behind and kicked out Lotor's ankles and set him crashing to the floor. Before his head even made contact with the ground, Keith was on top of him, holding him down by his wrists, but that was his weakness. He was light and although that helped with his speed, it didn't help him here and Lotor quickly pulled his knees up and kicked Keith off of him, getting back to his feet. He rapidly fell back into stance as the others also recovered. But that smile was gone, and he was finally going to take them seriously.

The battle continued along a similar course. He would take down a large amount of Galra, but the thorn in his side was Keith. He could move more quickly than the others, and while Lotor had the mindset of fighting larger, slower enemies, he would seem to get caught up and forget that there was someone small hidden among them. Kolivan watched as frustration grew in him whenever he was taken down and he focused on that expression. There was something more behind it. Something that pushed him to keep getting back up. It was that which was his reason behind fighting against his father and joining the coalition.

With each take down he could see Lotor taking his enemies a little more seriously and fighting with a little more respect in mind. These were not people simply following orders and lazily following in the shadow of their emperor. These were people who were fighting for their lives and giving their absolute all to achieve a goal. These were people who would be hugely valuable assets to him if they were on his team. They fought with passion and skill, and with sweat dripping down his face and his heart hammering in his chest he felt like he was in the ring again with his generals. He wasn't fighting against worthless enemies anymore. Instead, he was sparring with Acxa, Ezor, Zethrid and Narti.

The scene changed only slightly as his memories manifested themselves and the Blades stepepd back to allow the scene to play out.

Three of the four Galra half-breeds zipped around the room at speeds that most of Kolivan's men couldn't. Lotor's focus was taken up by Acxa's incredibly accurate shots that skimmed just past his face as he dodged. Zethrid acted her role as the tank and ran at him full force, with Ezor and Narti flanking him. He focused his energy in his legs and jumped, twisting himself so that he soared over Zethrid's head and avoided the simultaneous attacks, but winced when Axca managed a shot that hit him in the chest.

"You already got hit?" Ezor rolled her eyes with hands on her hips. "You're going to have to do better than that. I haven't even broken a sweat."

She had to jerk to the side when Lotor threw his sword at her with incredible speed and it grazed her cheek just slightly. He got back to his feet and laughed. "You have too much sympathy for your enemies, Ezor. Just because I am down does not mean that I am defeated."

"You missed on purpose. Hypocrite." She ran a finger along the scratch. Lotor stepped forward to retrieve his weapon, but found himself unable to move a muscle. This elicited a smirk from Ezor. "Looks like you're the one who needs a lecture. You should have been focusing on Narti. She's the winner of this round."

Narti. As she released her hold over him he could tell from her posture that she was happy at her victory. He had learned to read her body language well since she couldn't express emotions with her face. It was because of that skill that he had known that it hadn't been her that day. What had she been feeling then? Trapped somewhere behind the witch's dark magic inside her own body…? What were her last thoughts? Everything he was working towards was to make the Empire a better place for them and for Narti. Everything they had worked towards would have been destroyed by the witch. Narti wouldn't have wished for their loss to be a result of her weakness. But yet he couldn't get the thought out of his mind. Why was he so powerless against the witch? Why couldn't he have thought of any other way to stop her than by killing Narti?

"It is because you are weak." A deep, familiar voice spoke up from behind him. He clenched his jaw at the voice and turned to face his father, who seemed to loom tall above him. "You will never be strong enough to rule this Empire. The blood of that filthy race runs through your veins."

These were words he'd heard since the day his mother had died. Since the destruction of Daibazaal and the passing of Honerva, his father had seen him as nothing but a disgrace to the Galra name because of his Altaen lineage. To his father he was nothing but a memory of the wretched race who destroyed the Galra home planet. He had come to terms with the fact that he had lost both a mother and a father that day.

But he could not agree with his father's disgust in the Altaen race. "You say I am weak because of my blood, but yet your Empire falters now because you refuse to alter the way you rule. Your only interest is power, yet you are blind to the opportunities right in front of you. If we cooperate with the people we rule over, we can have a stronger Empire. Rather than fighting internally, we can focus on expansion. How do you not see that?"

These words had left his lips many times, but as every time before, they fell on deaf ears. "Half-breeds are stronger than your Galra. They would make better soldiers and better men. We must work alongside the planets we colonize if we hope to gain power. Your old fashioned views are skewed."

"I have no need to listen to the words of filth like you." Zarkon turned his back on him, sneering his words. "Haggar's decision to allow your temporary rule was foolish, and now the Empire is suffering for it. You will never have the power to surpass me. You are weak."

I will prove it to you. Those words felt too childish to speak aloud, but yet they burned at his throat. Those words had solidified themselves in his brain. I will prove that I am stronger than you.

He gritted his teeth as Zarkon walked away from him, feeling anger course through his veins. Everything he knew, all his training, fighting ability, intellect and skills he had had to teach himself because of his father's rejection. He had come so far, and yet Zarkon would still refuse to acknowledge him. It was infuriating.

"Lotor." The voice that spoke his name this time sounded foreign to him. He hadn't heard her voice in so long, yet he knew immediately who it was. "Lotor, come here."

When he turned, he found himself in his mother's lab. The room had warped into an exact replica of the room she had spent so much time in when he was a boy. The glow from the rift lit up the room from its viewport in the center of her lab. Screens were running tests and machines were whirring from activity and this place felt like home. His childhood had been spent here.

He spotted her on the far end of the room, waving him over. She looked exactly how he remembered her, young with her purple hair pulled back into a neat bun. Her eyes shone bright with eagerness at whatever she was working on and her smile lit up her face. "Come here."

He obeyed and as he approached her, she held out her hands to him. He looked at them, a little confused until she coaxed him to set his hands on her. When he did, she squeezed them tightly and looked into his eyes, turning very serious. "Lotor, why are you content with mediocrity? You have so much more inside you. You can be so much stronger. Why do you refuse to learn more?"

He opened his mouth to respond, but she squeezed his hands a little tighter, leaning in close with a fire in her eyes. "You haven't discovered anything at all! You're hardly half of what you can be! You haven't pushed yourself. When did you become so lazy?"

Lazy? He had been forced to teach himself everything he knew since her passing. He'd been abandoned by his father and exiled, and yet he was here today, a formidable Galra soldier and a tactician. How could she call him lazy?

Her hands felt unusually warm against his and he had to break eye contact to look down. Her hands were glowing a soft blue and his palms felt warm and tingly, like there was a comforting energy flowing into them and up through his arms. It was such a nice feeling, but how was she doing it?

That spark in her eyes refused to disappear and she drew her hands away slowly, but the blue glow remained on his palms. He could feel his own energy surging through his fingertips, waiting to be transferred to something or someone who needed it more than him. She set a gentle hand against his cheek. "Don't refuse who you are. There is much strength in your Altaen blood. You can discover so much more if you stop denying yourself. Don't you see? We can manipulate quintessence. We can give and we can take away. We can restore, or we can destroy. There's so much that we can do with our Altaen abilities, and so much more we can learn. You should only want to learn more, and go farther. Push yourself to your limits and be the strongest person you can be. If you only acknowledge half of yourself, you will stay weak. Aspire for more, my son. Always search for more. Stop refusing who you are."

He couldn't seem to look away from his hands. What all could he do with this power? Would this be his ticket to surpassing his father? To be the best of both Galra and Altaen…was that the answer he was looking for? But he had no idea how to use these powers and no idea what they could do aside from his mother's few words. He finally lifted his eyes to question her, but when he looked up, she was gone. He was back in the room where the Trial of Marmora had taken place, now emptied of enemies.

But that blue glow remained on his hands and a purple glow radiated from the blade that was sheathed against his hip. When had he put it away? He grasped it's hilt to see why it lit up, and when he drew it from its sheath, it was no longer the small blade that he had fought with before. Now it was a long one handed sword with a glowing purple hilt. He had to admit it was much more suitable this way.

He looked back at his open palm as the blue glow slowly began to fade. Maybe he had received one answer, but now a thousand more questions ran their course through his brain. There was so much more he wanted to know and there was only one person he could go to for some answers.

The halls of the castle were filled with the sound of tired feet shuffling to bed. Everyone aboard seemed eager to retire and put behind them the exhausting day. Soon enough the sounds of yawns were replaced with snoring and the corridors were dark except the sound of someone plunking away at a keyboard somewhere deep within the inner rooms.

Pidge was so engulfed in her work that she didn't hear the door to the Green Lion's bay slide open and didn't realize anyone was there until Matt set a plate of food on the desk beside her before collapsing in the seat next to her. He let out a groan and practically melted into the fabric. "How are you still working? I'm exhausted."

They had spent nearly the entire day trying to evacuate the people of Yianus to their closest liberated neighbor planets. With Matt's entire rebel fleet and four of the Voltron lions they had spent eighteen hours helping people in and out of ships, gathering belongings and shuttling between planets. Yianus was a huge planet compared to the others they had liberated and in the end they had ended up transporting just shy of a million aliens. He silently uttered a thanks that the Galra hadn't taken over Earth, because he couldn't imagine trying to move 7 billion people in their handful of rebel crafts. And he thought today was hard.

But he wasn't one to be complaining. There was someone else who had a harder day than he did. "How's Allura? How did the ritual go?"

"She's resting." Pidge responded without looking away from her screen. "She probably will be for the next few days. It went exactly as we expected. Badly. With both her and Coran they were only able to restore another 15% of the planet's quintessence and that was with Allura putting everything she had until Coran had to stop her. She's lucky she's not dead. She may have been able to heal the Balmera and power the teleduv, but healing a planet of this size? It's not possible without more people. It's just too far gone."

"But she's still going to try…" Matt muttered what they both knew to be true and Pidge gave an agitated nod that clearly said she didn't agree with the sentiment. Matt sighed and twisted in the chair so that he could see her screen. "What are you working on?"

"I took a new scan of Shiro's arm earlier because he said it was acting up yesterday." Her eyes darted across the text on screen at an incredible speed. She was scrunching her eyebrows and had her bottom lip jutted out and Matt recognized the face as one she made when something was momentarily baffling her.

"What's up?" He straightened up in his seat so that he could see better.

"I don't know, something's…weird. Look." She pulled up a dual monitor and dragged a wireframe 3D render of Shiro's arm onto the screen. Then she placed an identical render onto the second screen. "These are two scans I took of Shiro's arm. That one is the last scan I took and this one is the most recent. They're a good span of time apart, I think I took the last scan like almost six months ago, before Shiro disappeared. It wasn't causing any issues so that was the last time we looked at it."

"Okay, so you're comparing the current data to the last backup, basically, to find what might be going wrong?" It made sense. If it was some kind of programming issue, she could see the inconsistency and do some work to fix. If there were no inconsistencies then it was a mechanical issue. He watched as she pulled up the data for both scans, which was a wall of text and programming lingo.

"Exactly, but when I ran my program to find the inconsistency, that's when things got weird." She pressed a button to run the program as a demonstration and he watched as it highlighted line after line of text that was inconsistent with the last scan. Pidge crossed her arms and watched it go as Matt stared wide eyed.

"Besides basic commands, it doesn't match at all. This is an entirely new program."

"Exactly. I mean, Shiro said when he vanished from the Black lion he woke up in Galra captivity. So its not that surprising that they would go in and do some updating on their programming. But this? This is a complete rebuild. Which means that either someone on that ship put the time into revamping the programming in this arm even though they never should have seen it again, or they were planning on making a better one and just got the opportunity to implement the changes on the first version when Shiro showed up.

"But it gets weirder." She continued and returned to the 3d wireframe models. "The arm has basically the same functionality as the original. So why would they bother changing the programming so drastically if it didn't impact an upgrade in ability or functionality? So I looked into the mechanics of the thing and there's only one difference, and that's here, in the cylinder along his forearm. In the original, that cylinder holds the fuel that the arms uses to power up and be capable of attacks. It's filled with a Galra fuel. It only uses a minuscule amount to power the arm, so unless Shiro lives to be 150 years old, he doesn't have much worry about running out of power there. It shouldn't be a concern."

"But apparently the Galra thought so." Matt observed the models. "The new arm doesn't have any fuel tank at all."

"Exactly. I had Hunk take a look and even he said he couldn't see anywhere where fuel was being used at all. I haven't figured out what's powering it yet, but I know it isn't Galra fuel. Dad taught us enough about cars to know that you can't pump a gas powered car up with diesel fuel if you want it to last for long. This arm had to be built with its fuel source in mind. Which means that-"

"-there's no way that this is the same arm as before." Matt mimicked her words as she spoke them. "But why would they replace his arm?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. I would assume to make it stronger, but why would they want to make their enemy stronger? I'm sure they didn't expect him to escape a second time, but you would think after one time they'd think 'hey maybe we shouldn't equip this guy'. Whatever their reason was, it makes it a lot harder for me to figure out why it's acting up when I don't have any previous data on it to compare it too." She sighed and fell back in her seat. "For all we know the Galra could have just bugged it to spite him."

"You've got your work cut out for you." Matt glanced back at the program which was still highlighting inconsistencies in the thousands upon thousands of lines of code. He grimaced at the idea of reading every single one of those lines.

"I know." She groaned and rubbed her eyes with a yawn. Today had already been a long day and the idea of pulling an all nighter staring at Galra code wasn't all that enticing.

"Why don't we save it for tomorrow?" Matt stood up and stretched his back out before holding a hand out to her. "I'm sore and ready to pass out but I'll help you if you save it for tomorrow."

"Fine." She made no effort to grab his hand and get out of her comfy chair. Instead she held her arms out to him. "Carry me."

"Pidge, you're sixteen years old now. I am not going to carry you. Besides, I just told you I'm so tired I'm about to pass out." He retracted his hand and turned to head for the door.

"I'm tired too. Come oooon." She whined and flexed her fingers to get his attention. "I travelled across space to save you."

"I was doing fine in my little base."

"Maaaatt."

"No."

"Ugh." She let her arms flop to her sides and just closed her eyes. "I'll just sleep here."

Matt frowned because he knew she would. She could be a stubborn little brat at times, but it was because of that stubbornness that they could bicker together today, so he let her win this time. He went back to her and knelt down. "Get on."

"I knew you would come around." She popped right up and climbed onto his back and he lifted her up in a piggyback ride. He just shook his head with a scoff that made her chuckle a little because she had heard it many times during their arguments when he knew he had lost.

"You're a little brat sometimes, you know." He carried her out of the bay as she set her cheek on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

"Yeah I know." She squeezed his shoulders in a hug. "And you wouldn't have me any other way."