Seht burns, and the armada drifts in ruin.

Te'Qal guides what remains of the Qugu toward the last operational jump gate to their last safe star. They do not leave their command sleeve for the weeks-long duration of the journey. They have addressed the fleet many times, sought to bolster morale, to give them hope—what hope existed. Their speeches hang in concert but have no presence in the mind of the fleet. As repairs are completed to ships too damaged to continue, the rest wait to jump.

Tired tendrils slip from the command sleeve as it unwraps from Te'Qal's body. Their legs and forelimb tentacle numbly fold against the ground as atmospheric waste expels from hissing tubes that suspend the sleeve. The command chamber is small. Te'Qal lays in a circular perforated indentation in the floor. Most of the surrounding housing maintains the sleeve, and keeps the Warden alive, alert. The remainder of the ship houses drones, support systems, and automated functions.

Exhaustion keeps Te'Qal motionless, centered in the indentation in the floor, the fleet orbiting around them. They need rest. Sustenance. But most of all they need guidance.

Isolated from an ark-ship in which to seek the ceremony of a jaw-beast, Te'Qal depresses a plate in the floor and releases a mist of nectar into the command chamber. The name Te'Qal begins to fade, but as they dream, they hold it in their mind…

…

…They stand across a dark, domed room fifty paces from Te'Daru: the Qugu whose tentacle pulled Te'Qal from the silt. Who taught them to commune with the line of warriors and become a banshee shrieking across space. They recited the legends that tamed foreign stars.

"What do you intend to do, Te'Qal?" Te'Dura's voice echoes through the dim room. Between them a large holographic display clarified from the dark blur of unfocused memory. Two fleets oppose each other in the display, one is surrounded. Te'Qal looks to Te'Dura again, now wrapped in a command sleeve. "Do you concede?"

"No." Te'Qal remembers this day. They defeated a superior officer and earned command. This was a test they were intended to fail.

"No?" Te'Dura asks, flicking a tendril to motion their ships closer. "To the last then?"

"I remember this. You believed I would concede, and closed in, then I detonated my fleet and took yours with it."

Suddenly Te'Dura was beside them. "Another form of victory."

"I've failed us. I did not understand our ancestor's warning," Te'Qal whispers.

"Then listen closer," Te'Dura says. "This," they gesture with a tentacle. "An unwinnable scenario…"

The display shifts to a different theater.

"This," Te'Dura begins.

"Murin invasion, at the outer rim," Te'Qal finishes, now viewing twenty incoming carriers from a command sleeve.

"Our line of Te, your ships, broke them." Te'Dura's voice cuts cleanly through the dream. "Your maneuvers…

Te'Qal strains to maintain control over dozens of war-pearls. The aggressors chase Te'Qal's unpiloted ghost fleet across space, distracted, as other Qugu-piloted combat sleeves sabotage each Murin carrier one by one.

"…lone-flew the battlegroup. How many others can do so? And when at last you engage them…" Te'Dura exudes a wheezing laughter. "Their fighters won't launch. Their weapons overheat. Their shields lose power. One battle and war-tides turn."

Te'Qal coils and flicks their mane-tendrils in consideration. "I have won great battles. They do not come without sacrifices. I have averted great losses by inflicting my own, but these Hive…"

The display shifts to a different theater.

Te'Dura pays Te'Qal's doubts no mind.

Te'Qal drifts through space within a thin, bloodied, combat sleeve. Mechanized tendrils still hot with fusion discharge. "When the gate fell silent…"

"Se'Tar lost concert with Se'Ugn. The Qugu fractured. I felt it bring despair to your spirit, as I said to you then." Te'Dura says. "Years of existing out of concert drove them to uprising. Your decisiveness ended it, your diplomacy forged peace. It is why you were made Warden."

Te'Qal remembers their decisiveness differently. A clandestine detachment of combat sleeves. A raid of burning spears. "You remind me."

"Not because you forget, but because you have been hopeless before." Te'Dura rears into a taller posture. "There is victory in that darkness. A kind. Find it."

*****

The fleet passes through the gate a few vessels at a time. As each ship slips from Te'Qal's awareness, tiny etchings incised into the gate flare with jade flame.

Te'Qal slips through the gate and exits into wreckage and confusion. Ark-ships fracture and implode as holy ground bleeds into the vacuum.

At the other end of the gate they did not find the last Qugu star of Se'Otan, but instead a wall of Hive Tomb Ships surrounding their bone white flagship, flanked by the Qugu's desecrated Mountain, now a black void of malice carved into the fabric of space.

:oldfear:

In the shadow of the Pyramid, Te'Qal grasps the fleet through the command sleeve, and rallies their captains and battlegroups into defensive murmurations around the remaining ark-ships. Fusion beams cut in every direction, Hive Rippers pierce Qugu warships and combat sleeves like screaming needles. Behind them, the gate is nowhere to be seen. There is no tear, no exit through which to flee. Before them the Hive ships outnumber their fleet hundreds to one. A strange realm—a mirror of reality—encompasses them.

Dozens of Hive ships fall and countless Rippers burn for every Qugu vessel lost, but attrition does not favor them. Te'Qal holds the fleet against the horror of the Hive, but their strength wanes. Te'Qal wades through the silence of his ancestors' fear.

Suddenly, a dreaded pillar of darkness—another Hive ship—tears through the nothing of space and bursts into the fray, crashing through several Tomb Ships and dashing them against its hull. Hive ships turn to confront it as it barrels directly for their bone-ring flagship.

The two massive vessels exchange destructive barrages of fire, decimating all other surrounding ships in thundering bombardments of soulfire cannons and axion bolts. The pillar-ship emits a thin pulse, as the dark Pyramid had done as it burst forth from the Mountain on Seht. The pulse slices through the ring ship like a cleaver; waves of green fire erupting through its hull.

Te'Qal, seizing the moment, capitalizes on the distraction. They draw in all remaining Qugu vessels and press forward toward the Pyramid.

Te'Qal communes their intention to the fleet and maneuvers them into a valiant charge. If they could not destroy the Hive, they would take back the Mountain. Te'Qal places themself at the point of the assault. Qugu ships snap into formation behind them. Te'Qal draws the entirety of the fleet into concert to hear their voice, their words impel the charge into being.

"For Seht."

The armada surges, agile combat sleeves racing ahead to clear a path for the larger host of ships. Te'Qal feels the presence of the Qugu line, extending back to the first. They move as one, weaving between ship-fire and debris. Te'Qal closes their eyes to feel the fleet through the tension of their link. Te'Qal reaches beyond them, to the death-grove cores of the ark-ships, to their ancestral line. To those whose memories they carry with them. The Darkness that binds them resonates through the fleet.

Te'Qal flexes their tendrils and commands the deployment of all drones in attack mode. The Qugu collapse to form a phalanx and drive forward to impale the cursed thing that was their Mountain. Te'Qal calls to their ancestors, drawing their energy from the ark-ships and into the fleet, fusing the beam with ancient power.

"Guide our fire."

The Darkness-linked fury of generations turns the beam Resonant. It strikes true, impaling the Pyramid's obscene hull in a fatal wound. Their final stand forever branded into the Pyramid's flesh.

The Hive battle falls silent.

A flash of orange.

With the Pyramid's dying wail, Te'Qal feels the presence of their ancestors, not as a distant guide, but as equals. The Resonance wave washes over them, and Te'Qal hears voices as if echoing from a dream, "Noble Commander, do not fade. Take our hand and find Salvation."

They see the line of their people extend through them, through all Qugu, through Darkness, and death, and memory. All swept into an obliterating Echo. And then nothing.

They extinguish, together.