"What is this place?" The words were the first ones out of Kalilah's mouth after she and Lea followed you into the gently shaped section beneath the Adamant's bridge. Looking around the space, you found yourself smiling at the soothing curves present in nearly every aspect of the compartment.
"It's where the Harmonic Choir we brought from Earth have been spending most of their time," you replied. Lea, the third and final member of your group today, made a gentle sigh of recognition.
"I…see," Kalilah said at length, the confusion in her tone quite clear as she looked around the room. "Where are they, then?"
"They needed a room with a real view of Four-Fifteen for the work they're doing with Elil and Mir." You gestured the two towards the perfect circle of haphazardly scattered chairs at the centre of the room. "And I wanted somewhere a bit more connected to do this."
"To do what, exactly?" Kalilah asked you, brows furrowing. She stepped past you towards the circle of chairs, turning to face you. "You've been rather less than informative on why you wanted us both here, Amanda."
"I…I have, haven't I." You shook your head.
"More than normal," Lea agreed. The Mender matched Kalilah's movement, though her expression held a little concern to go with the curiosity. Honestly, that was fair. You were usually better than this.
"I'm sorry." You took a few steps forward, the two present members of your Heartcircle effortlessly matching you until all three of you were inside the ring of chairs. Your breath came a touch easier there, where the gentle aura of the room strengthened into something almost palpable. And you realised why, or at least part of why, you'd been being so evasive.
"I want to try and connect to the echoes left behind in this system, the remnants of what the Consolat did," you began. Truthful words, yes, but not comprehensive. "And I think I need your help to do this." You sighed. "Kalilah."
The elder Potential, perhaps the most personally lethal human in recorded history, stared at you in silent confusion for a long moment. You could see the thoughts rushing through her mind, wondering if you were joking but recognising through the link you shared that that just didn't fit. Which led to-
"Why me?" she demanded. There was only the barest of emotion in the interrogative, but you didn't need to rely on her words. You could feel the uncertainty churning beneath them, rippling from her soul out to yours. "Why not Vega, or you? You're the ones with experience in finding harmony in things."
"That's true," you agreed. You flicked a hand towards a trio of close chairs, offering and asking for a moment of motion to bring thoughts together into certain words. Kalilah nodded briefly, picking one of the outer chairs though her gaze never wavered from you. You took the middle one, Lea settling into the other in a gentle rustle of fabrics.
"But what happened here, according to what little we know at least," you said, amending the statement quickly with a disclaimer. "It was an act of destruction, Kalilah. An entire race died, and we still don't understand anything about how or why. We think we know what it did, that it was the price of the Secrets themselves."
A breath, taken slow, steadying yourself. "But we can't know that for sure. Maybe if we'd gone to the Consolat homeworld to start with, there'd be something there that could make it clear beyond doubt. But all we really have right now is guesswork, from a race that we know doesn't understand the soul in the way we do."
"Or how we suspect the Consolat did," Lea added quietly. It didn't break Kalilah's stare, but it won a brief nod. Accepting the point, that was something.
"But that's not everything, is it?" Kalilah said, finally breaking away from your face with her eyes, looking down at her hands. They were nearly as young as yours, lithe fingers with the warm glow of youthful skin. But as Kalilah stared at them with eyes almost a century old, they shook just a little.
That told you more than any words could.
"No." There was no reason to sugarcoat it. And several reasons not to do so. "You're still hurting, after we found the Gysian home system, after we found a race that the Shiplords spared. I don't think you blame the Gysians for living-"
"I don't," Kalilah whispered.
"But it still hurt you," you said. Your friend's fingers shook again. "And you've been suffering with that ever since."
"And you think that knowing…what happened here will help me?" The emotion that flickered behind Kalilah's tone wasn't quite fury, but that was a matter of degrees. And yet there was the faintest spark of curiosity, buried deep in the acrid dismissal.
"I think it's got a better chance of helping than leaving you to stew in your resentment," you said simply. "I also believe that we've got a better chance of doing this with you than on our own. And yes," you added, preempting her even opening her mouth. "Even if Vega had time to help."
You gave Kalilah a moment to absorb that before continuing, more softly now. "None of us have your Focus, Kalilah. I know you've never gotten close to the more ephemeral aspects of what Practice can do, but you know I have. Trust me, please trust me, when I say it matters."
"I do. But I also remember you worrying about what could happen if I tried to work my Focus together with Vega's." Kalilah gave you a look, the anger that had been there fading into concern. "Why would this be any different?"
"Because that was before the Third Battle of Sol." A few years ago, you couldn't have imagined anything making such a difference. But it did. "You know I spent time before Third Sol learning how to fully use my Focus in combat. That wasn't everything it taught me how to do."
"And Lea?" Kalilah asked, grimacing. "I…don't want to hurt either of you."
Lea smiled. "The way my Focus expresses itself makes me far less vulnerable to feedback from someone with your Focus," she said. "I accept the need for some things to break so that they can be whole."
"How you make that work so easily, I still don't know," you muttered. It was not common for that to be the untrained expression of a Mender's Focus. "It took me months to even get close."
"You can make star systems shake, Mandy." Your fellow Mender's dark green eyes sparkled with gentle humour. "I'm not sure you get to complain about that."
You waved the dread logic away with a smile, returning your focus to the matter at hand. And, more importantly, the part that you wanted Kalilah to play in it.
"I think I could connect to what's left of what happened here." Kalilah's gaze sharpened at the admission, but she didn't interrupt. You didn't try to rush this time, either. "But I'd be drawn to the parts of it that feel like they can be healed, and I'm struggling to believe much of it can be."
"And something we probably couldn't keep hidden," Lea added, reaching over to tap you on the shoulder. "You've shown a trend for spectacle."
"That would be another concern, yes," you sighed. It wasn't exactly something you enjoyed admitting, no matter how many times that passionate strength had saved your life. "But it's also not the only problem. Where I'd want to look isn't where we need to. We need to understand some of what happened here, how the Consolat really died."
"Which was an act of singular destruction," Kalilah said slowly, her eyes flicking around the room nervously. "I think I get what you're trying to do, Mandy, and it makes sense now. But are you really sure you want me to be part of this?"
"Kalilah," you said, chiding the woman several decades your elder. "You know me. If I didn't want you here, if I thought it could hurt any of us, or our chances in this system? I wouldn't have asked for your help."
"Not even because it would give me something to do?" The question was delivered calmly, but you felt a bite behind it. It was hard to hide something like that with how your Unisons connected you, especially now that Asi - Kalilah's Unison - wasn't restricting their shared output so much.
"Not even then." You shook your head. "I'd have found another way."
Kalilah considered that for a moment, long enough to make you a little nervous. Then she shook her head with a sigh of her own, and smiled. The expression transformed her face, even underlined by stress and unexpressed pain.
"Alright, Mandy." She flicked a hand up, taking in the room with the singular motion. "I believe you. You're too earnest about this to ever lie." You felt a hot flush spread across your face, and Lea laughed. Kalilah didn't pay it any mind. She was only a few decades older than you. That shouldn't mean so much when you were both past seventy.
"What do you need me to do?"
"Trust me?" You asked, offering her a hand. She took it gingerly, but didn't pull away when you tightened your grip.
Lea took your other hand in a firm grip when you reached out, and you smiled your thanks to the Mender. For all your outward confidence, you weren't sure you'd have wanted to try this without her here. She probably knew, too.
"Just try to breathe." Then you suited action to the word. In the first breath you reached down, tapping the wellspring of your soul through the crystal lens of your Focus, twining nonexistent hands into the endless stream of power. In the second breath you reached out to those beside you, spinning ephemeral workings of Practice and power into the points of physical touch.
You felt Kalilah's breath hitch for a moment, the sensation still unfamiliar. She'd never experienced a Trance before, certainly never so deeply outside of combat. And that was a very, very different experience, you knew. Reassurance flowed out from Lea to the First Awoken and her breathing steadied.
So you took a third breath, and reached further. This time you were pushed beyond the physical. Past the body, past the mind, to the impossible power of the two souls – no, that wasn't right. Only two Focuses, yes, but there were four souls beside you. And a fifth, twined within the space of your own existence.
Beyond the worlds of flesh and thought, one of the only souls that could truly match your strength stirred, reaching out into the world on brilliant trails of burning space. It was her Focus in its most primal state, destruction to all that she touched or saw. In that light, you understood why Kalilah had never gotten very far in more esoteric studies of Practice. Why would you try too hard, when all you could see and feel was nothingness?
This time, however, she wasn't alone. You reached back to those sightless strands, enveloping them in the truth of your Focus. You felt Kalilah breath out in silent wonder as her soul was able to recognise the world around it for the very first time. The emotions were almost painfully bright: the light of a newborn star, illuminating the world for the very first time.
:I can see.:
You saw her reaching out further, trying to find the shape of the space she could suddenly understand. It reminded you of every Potential you'd ever seen take this step, but it wasn't exactly the same. Not all of her movements were quite so blind, and you thought you knew why. What she'd done at the end of Third Sol, almost burning herself out to save you all, that had needed to draw on parts of herself that could only be found here.
She must never have realised what she'd done – but then how could she, given the limitations her Focus gave her. And there was no time to think about it right now, because none of this was done. You could feel the power of your Foci intertwining, building towards something.
Pain hissed against your soul, fizzing burns running across them as she reached out again, this time with far more deliberation. Reaching out across the star, and for a moment you saw a holo of the star system floating around you. Prismatic energy flowed and radiated from your joined hands and none of it mattered as Kalilah reached up, body following the edict of her soul.
:I can-: Her voice was a terribly distant thing. :There's something. Something here, I feel it. I don't know what you feel as Menders, but I know destruction. And this, it's more than even I am.:
:Where?: Lea's voice came from all around you, merged into the very fabric of the space. How lucky had you been for her to find her way first to the Unisonbound, and then to your Heartcircle? Someone with her precise expression of Mending, and exactly what you needed here right now.
It was almost enough to consider religion.
:It's on the world,: Kalilah sent, still in the depths of what might be her very first half-trance. It wouldn't last much longer; it couldn't. :Their world. And I feel it, everything else. It's like us, but just not. Feels like forged metals, a design. How did they do that?:
You hadn't the faintest clue. Yet feeling the power around you, the tenuous merge born of three breaths and the willingness to trust, it didn't matter.
So you took one more breath, and this time held nothing back. You'd survived exposure to Kaliah's soul before. The day fifteen years ago when she'd found herself stuck in her attempt to synchronise with her Unison. Your (former?) bodyguard had grown a great deal in that time, but it hadn't been her words that had shaken Sol.
:Let's find out.:
Echoes: 98 + Don't Even Ask = I Don't Want To Talk About It.
Trance Roll: 11. Trance
Kalilah's Focus tore your attention from the world around you as power flooded through it, and you rushed to reassure her before she could try to pull the unconscious action back into her control. The effort was too quick for words, a bare structure of emotion pulled together on a level of gut instinct, but it proved enough.
The suddenness of the connection came as a shock to all of you, Kalilah most of all. In the depth of your shared power, her nature called out to the world. And, for perhaps the very first time in her life, something seemed to reach back.
It came with a flood of alien emotion, rendered frayed by impossible age, but not beyond your ability to translate. You'd learned how to do something similar during your work with Observer Lorelli, trying to understand her people's Reveries. In the depths of a Trance, it was entirely automatic.
None of you found much in the way of context for all that feeling, and you somehow knew - Kalilah knew - that it was only an echo of the echo that still remained. There was confusion in there, the blank-faced shock of one whose certainty in what they believed to be true has suddenly been overturned. Shock and concern, that turned rapidly to fear, surging out from a point somewhere on the distant orb of the Consolat homeworld.
Loss as deep as anything you could imagine pricked your eyes, fear forcing out your breath in short gasps, but not for long. For an instant you felt the shadow of a vast spire around you, the pulse of the universe rising to sweep everything you were away. You recognised the shape of that looming shadow, you knew you did, but where-
:Elil found this place.: Sidra's voice was as distant as your own thoughts, but they made it through. :Was this where the Secrets were created?:
It just might be. Where everything began. And if that-
The last of the emotions drained away, leaving only a final kernel of stubborn resolution in the face of what was to come. You tried to hold on, to see more, but you might as well have been trying to wrestle a star. Light overcame you as the echoes that had protected you faded. And then there was nothing but light.
You came back to yourself only slowly after that, your reactions hampered and senses blurred from connection to something so entirely alien to what you were used to. Kalilah's symptoms were even worse than your own, almost debilitating for the First Awoken, though certainly not dangerous. Lea, by contrast, had been insulated from the majority of the event. Acting as the link between your Focuses had protected her, it seemed.
In the days that followed, all three of you would struggle to piece together the truth of what you'd seen. It proved at least one thing, that you were in fact able to connect to the energy structures that the Consolat had left behind, different as they were to human Practice. What you'd felt likewise seemed clear, the last moments of the Consolat in this star system, but there the certainty on the matter ended.
You'd no real context to the emotions you'd found, and the Trance hadn't been able to find memories to go with them. Vega, on examining your shared gestalts, warned the three of you that she wasn't sure much more would be possible without a Miracle that none of you wanted to risk. Or being physically present at the source of the echoes.
Fortunately, you'd been able to hold onto that piece of information. The spire at the centre of a city largely choked with plant life. You'd never doubted Elil, but the value of secondary confirmation about its importance was hard to understate. When you did get to the Consolat homeworld, it would be just one more reason to go there. If Vega was right, you might actually be able to get a glimpse of what had happened there, instead of only emotion.
And, almost more thankfully, Kalilah seemed better for the experience once she'd recovered. There were still guarded things in her manner, pain she'd not shared. But it was less than it had been before, and you weren't going to be anything but thankful about that. The process of debrief following your Trance had also given her some chance to talk to you and Lea, and she felt more settled than she'd been for weeks.
Ability to interact with the Consolat echoes confirmed. Option to refine this process available, building on Reverie techniques available. There is, here, the possibility to trigger something similar to the Metaconcert event, focused on the destruction of the Consolat. Doing so would require being present at or preferably inside of the spire on the Consolat homeworld.
And that was only HALFWAY across the country!
