All things considered, our thirty-six-day journey went well. It may have been fraught with anxiety, but actual threats to the ship were scarce. The Rim has already emptied most of their strength from the Belt to bolster the Dragon and Dust armadas in their attack on Mars. Only a few of their hunting parties gave us pause. As for the fabled Obsidian pirates, we saw not a one on our sensors. That is not surprising really. The Belt is so large it feels like an existential threat to sanity if you try to comprehend the expanse its asteroids fill.
But fill is the wrong word. In the Belt, asteroids float so far apart they are more like islands on a sea so vast only metaphors can help the human mind understand it: if you poured all water from all the seas on all the worlds ever sailed by man into a giant ring and then dropped one grain of sand into it, that grain would not even represent Earth’s size against the tremendous expanse of the Belt.
Of course there is no celestial object out here so massive as Earth. Instead, there are tens of millions of asteroids in swirls, shoulders, clusters. Of those, only two and a half million are larger than a kilometer in diameter. Few are inhabited. Fewer still are populated with anything larger than mining outposts or pirate hideouts. Those asteroids that host actual cities are so rare and estranged from civilization, they are precious, the last lamps before the abyssal dark of the Gulf. That light from those lamps was once white, the color of the Republic. Now their bulbs either glow Raa blue, or they don’t glow at all.
Past those last outposts lies the Gulf, which once was the moat that separated the Dominion and the Republic. It seems abyssal, but its darkness is not endless. Beyond the Gulf lies the realm of shadow and dust—the gargantuan Gas Giants and the moons on which the Golds of the Rim have made their homes for centuries. House Raa presides over that far-flung civilization from its seat on the volcanic moon of Io.
There are asteroids out there too, with cities of their own, like Priam in the Trojan Cluster or Agamemnon in the Greek Cluster. Though these cities lie on Jupiter’s orbital path, they are cloaked by the mystery of distance and obscured even further by the hermit-like nature of their inhabitants. Even I know very little about those cities, their peoples, their ways.
Past Jupiter, of course, lie the orbital paths of Uranus, Saturn, Neptune. Places I have never sailed, and places I probably never will. And beyond that…far, far beyond that, twirls lonely Pluto—where civilization ends—and then, eventually the Kuiper Belt where sparks of the Society have flared occasionally against the edge of the true dark, but never for long.
It feels strange to contemplate what life is like on those spheres. In the Belt, I feel as if I am already deep inside the realm of darkness, but those who dwell in the shadows of the Giants would barely consider me on its threshold.
The last time I was so far away from the sun was when I was sailing for Luna aboard the Morning Star. Now Lysander is sleeping in my old bed on the Morning Star, and I’m sleeping in his bed on the Archimedes. Strange, the twists of fate.
It is scary out here, and not because of the Rim Golds or the Belt’s fabled Obsidian pirates. It feels like the sun, like life, has forgotten you and you could just slip away into the dark without anyone ever knowing where or when you vanished. In some ways it makes me doubt I’ll ever see the godTree forests and fog-swaddled highlands of home again.
I notice that dread and let it pass through me.
Then Cassius throws me a live grenade made of anxiety. “What if Quicksilver’s not in there?” he asks. “This Lyria girl sounds scurrilous indeed.” He glances back to make sure Sevro isn’t behind us. “I mean, she stole your kids, man.” He nods to Pax’s key. “I’m no father, but that’s not just something you sweep under the rug. I don’t want to be a pessimist. But what if Virginia made up this fleet so you wouldn’t go on a suicide charge only to get nabbed by the Raa trying to get home?”
“You mean what if she’s just preying on my hope and lying to prevent the enemy from obtaining a political and propaganda weapon that could drive a stake through the heart of Mars?” I ask. “Namely my head?” I sip my caf. “Then I’d say she’s doing her job.”
“Shit.” He leans back in his chair. “I wouldn’t want to marry a Sovereign.”
“I didn’t. I married Virginia, and she married me. The Sovereign and the Reaper, they’re the shadows that come with us.”
He mulls that over for a time. “So…if Quicksilver is not here, or if he is and he won’t help?”
“Worry is a spiral with death at its center, Cassius,” I reply.
I feel Aurae smiling. Cassius rolls his eyes. “Worry is a spiral with…I mean, come on. You trying to outdo Stoneside?”
I shrug. I am not as confident as I pretend to be, but how can you lead if you cannot walk—and how can you walk if you fear every step? Whenever I find myself doubting I’ve made the right decision, I force myself to examine our situation through the lens of The Path to the Vale. A portion of the book’s tenth understanding comes to me often during these moments:
Forgetting is essential to learning,
just as exhaling is essential to breathing.
Breathe out, then in.
Find the self,
then lose it once again.
Thus, the path goes ever onward.
Stilling myself, I breathe out the memories of past mistakes and doubts, and then breathe in fresh perspective. My worries might be founded in uncomfortable truths, but they are—according to Aurae—born of an idle mind and an idle body. Worse, my worries only create more feelings of powerlessness. Rather than fretting about whether I’ve made the right choices, I instead focus on preparing for the next one, whatever that might be.
I was just like the Marcher, I realize now: trash from the past, circling the drain. But I realized on the morning after we turned away from Mars that I faced a choice: I could look back and see the light of home shrinking day by day and miss its warmth more and more, or I could resist the urge to look.
I resisted that morning and found strength in the resistance. That physical choice has since become a mental one. I have not looked back since, and I will not. Virginia has given me a mission: come back with strength enough for one last chance to win this war.
I am now an arrow shot by her bow.
There was no downtime on this voyage. I learned from my enemy and aped Apollonius. I made a syllabus and divided it into three parts: body, brain, heart.
For my body, I train with Cassius six hours every day cycle. Three after I wake, three before I sleep. My body is bruised, my muscles ache, my hands are blistered, and my ego is smashed every day. He is a fantastic classical swordsman, and whenever he puts me down, he says with a smile, “Steel sharpens steel.”
He is not wrong. In the chaos of the battlefields, I have grown sloppy, my confidence obese from success while my enemies have studied how to beat me and the Willow Way.
Thirty-six times six is two hundred and sixteen. Those are the hours we have put in. I feel the change already. I also now eat ten thousand calories a day. My mass is returning like the hair on my head. I’ve kept the beard. For some reason it helps me to feel like I’m on a mission.
My heart is nourished by the book I write and the book I read. I write to my son, like I did on the Marcher before I go to sleep. It grounds me in my past, and keeps my head up, eyes on the future he’ll have. I find the lessons in my losses, my grief, and hope I pass those on instead of the pain. And I read The Path. Aurae suffers me daily, but if she’s annoyed at my litany of questions about The Path or Athena, she hides it well.