He asks for nothing, this boy. No favor. No quarter. He lives every moment of his life in pain, but still, he lives it. And he stands, where others would have long ago fallen.

She is smoke and starlight, she is blood and fire, she is a song in my veins as old as time and deep as the Void...

Warbreed fear no death. Warbreed fear no pain. Warbreed fear only to never taste victory.

My girls are too big for this uniform.

And I'm a tumult of midnight-blue mental energy, laced through with vicious threads of silver, exploding in every direction.

The wild power I briefly controlled on Octavia III is still lurking inside me- I can feel it there, swirling and rolling behind my ribs...

And I'm nineteen and a million years old and standing in a see of rippling blue-green as the people who were my friends bundle inside that little ship. And I can feel the spores dancing in the air around me and bubbling under the mantle beneath me and all the knowledge in the singularity waiting to embrace me. I'm a million light-years from where I was born and yet I'm right at home. And I'm exhilarated and I'm terrified and I'm laughing and I'm screaming and I'm everything and I'm nothing and I'm Cat and I'm Ra'haam and as the shuttle door cycles closed, as I look on them with eyes that are still mine for the very last time, I see him turn and look back at me.

The silence between us is as wide and cold as the Void. For a moment, I cannot imagine an end to it.

I reach out, grab her hand. I feel a cold so fierce it burns. I feel the deck drop away from my feet. I feel the vastness around me, how small I am, one tiny more of animated carbon and water amid an ocean of infinity.

I can feel Aurora sitting nearby. Her presence is like the light of the sun on my skin. I feel bathed in it, though I try to ignore it...

They're not the heroes we deserve. They're just the ones we could find. Nobody panic.

Her pain had gathered here, among the knick-knacks and clay plates, quilted blankets with frayed edges and tired furniture.

Purity?

It was a haunting. He had buried Juliette like a corpse beneath the floorboards, content to live with the ghosts that whispered to him in his sleep.

And he mourned for her. He didn't wish to, but he did-he ached with the knowledge that the softness of their youth was gone forever, that the Juliette he remembered was long dead.

Those sparse moments just as the sky was brightening-and before the rest of the household rumbled to life-were the most peaceful few minutes one could get in this house.

Fear was a concept for men without guns. Fear was reserved for people like Alisa, small and slight and always looking over her shoulder. If Lord Montagov was afraid, the rules were changing.