A meager cheer went up across the hall, the noise briefly causing Halycen to flinch as she imagined it to be the ship’s continuing cries. A few throughout the hall clapped as a door on the other side of the room opened, and from the door marched a parade of armoured Aælfir, at least another thirty, filing slowly into the hall in rows of two. Each of the new soldiers carried themselves with their backs straight and heads held high, but a defeated energy permeated the group; they moved sluggishly and didn’t make eye contact with any of the Aælfir who had cheered their arrival. Their leader immediately turned from the column and headed straight toward their group, drawing a channel between the Patriarch’s own men as he moved through them. As the hurrying figure neared the group Halycen caught a glimpse of the Aelfr above the crowded heads of the nearby soldiers and groaned, audibly enough to draw a silencing glare from her uncle. Her hands still clasping her thighs she felt her thumbs trying to worry their way into her metillion greaves as she watched the figure, her father, push his way through two nearby Aælfir and step up towards their group.

“My liege,” he said, addressing his brother firstly. Thought it wasn’t apparent beneath their respective armours the Patriarch was the smaller of the two in frame, with narrower hips and thinner arms. Halycen’s father looked down at his older brother as he spoke, standing at least a head taller than him. Her father was younger than his brother but from appearance alone, that was difficult to ascertain; his eyes sat above a nest of wrinkles which betrayed long thoughts and worries, and his hair was thinned, lacking the natural sheen and glint of his brother’s. He twisted toward his daughter, unable to refuse to acknowledge her for even a moment longer, and he glanced at her with a feigned astonishment that fell short of masking his agony.

“Halycen-” he murmured with a sigh. She tried to draw away from his stare but her father’s eyes followed her as she turned her head.

The Patriarch cleared his throat, drawing both their attention back to him.

“Lord Vostoth. It seems your daughter took it upon herself to mount a solo expedition”. There was an odd quality to his tone.

Was he impressed?

“I see,” Halycen’s father said, stiffening. “What is to be done about this?” he asked. He stared at his brother unflinchingly, asking the question more plainly with his silence: What are you going to do to my daughter?

“This is a family matter-” the Patriarch said. He turned toward Sera Odill and the ranger Ardenfyrn, speaking loudly enough that any soldiers nearby could overhear his words as well. “-it is not an issue of honour,” he said. Halycen’s father nodded, satisfaction creeping across his face before a small grin flooded it. The smile curled his mouth and took years off of his appearance.

“My immediate duties will not grant me time to supervise any discipline, so I leave the task to you Lord Vostoth”. He nodded at his brother as he spoke.

“Your wisdom and mercy are legendary my liege,” Vostoth said. He glanced toward Halycen, a frown on his face as he contemplated it for a moment. “I shall see my daughter assigned to latrine work duty and the auto-filter disabled”. Halycen gagged, her mind filled with images of the task. Still, she was relieved. It was foul work but it was a much lighter punishment than she had hoped for. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a smirk settled on Sera Odill’s face. She cursed him for it internally.

“Good,” the Patriarch said, acknowledging his brother’s decision. “Hold for a moment whilst I attend to some other matters - we have something else to discuss,” he murmured. “Marshall Odill, please have one of your rangers escort my niece back to quarters and detain her until our return to the ship”. He didn’t wait for the marshall’s reply, immediately turning to bellow an order toward a nearby war-company soldier. The order was muffled beneath another of the Dwurkn frigate’s groans; a thundering of metal grinding against itself that echoed throughout the hall and caused crates and cages alike to quake in unison.

“Sire-” A tall and thin Aelfi, one of the few Aælfir in the hall not wearing the thick mechanised armour of the war-company, stepped up to their group. Her hair was tied at the back of her head in three adjoined buns, with messy strands falling over her ears and the front of her face. She wore a long silvery frocked overcoat with black buttons, under which was layered a metillion ringmail, and a pair of lenses on her face not unlike Halycen’s own. She moved up to them with such speed that she was standing in plain view before Halycen even registered a newcomer approaching. Even Sera Odill and ranger Ardenfyrn seemed briefly startled by the Aelfi’s frantic appearance. “By my observations, the Dwurka frigate is only a few hours from total shutdown- we should begin an evacuation,” she continued, ignoring courtesies and speaking without pause. The Patriarch frowned.

“Thank you, Scribe Bellea”. He turned back to the soldier he had tried to speak to before the ship’s rumbling.

“The oxygen field might fail any moment and the gravity stabilisers-”

“Thank you Scribe Bellea,” the Patriarch repeated, more sternly than before. He didn’t look toward the Aelfi but she nodded and glanced down at the floor, sufficiently cowed. “Marshall Odill,” he said, speaking to Sera Odill instead of the Aelfr waiting. “Please send your escort now”.

“Of course my liege.” Odill turned to Ardenfyrn and nodded. The helmeted ranger stepped beside Halycen and placed a firm hand on her right shoulder, giving her a slight push to encourage her to move. Halycen considered resisting, the goings-on of the hall appealing to the same part of her that had spurred her on to the ship in the first place, but her more tempered instincts won out. She turned to follow Ardenfyrn.

Glancing over her shoulder Halycen watched as the hall disappeared, the broken Dwurkn door which they had passed through growing smaller and smaller as she and Ardenfyrn walked away from it. The corridor outside of the hall was formed from the same charcoal stone that Halycen had become accustomed to, but she suddenly found herself yearning for the sleek bright hallways of the home-ship. Ardenfyrn’s shoulder-mounted flashlight lit the rocky walls in an eerie show of thin shadows, each cast from the bumps and crags of the uneven surface, giving the otherwise natural-looking wall a thoroughly unnatural appearance.

“You are luckier than you deserve,” Ardenfyrn said suddenly. The remark surprised Halycen. Annoyance had seeped into her words where previously only sympathy had existed.

“Some luck, didn’t you hear? I have to clean latrines”.

“Most dissidents would have been banished for what you did,” Ardenfyrn retorted. Halycen shivered, the memory of a previous public banishment rocketing to the fore of her mind.

“No-I- uncle wouldn’t do that-”

“Exactly, not to you”. Ardenfyrn’s annoyance curdled, becoming outright anger. Lost for a response Halycen dropped back into quiet, walking in tandem with the ranger. The rest of the walk was spent in the same silence, marching through the corridors of the empty Dwurkn ship until at last one of the corridors opened into a warehouse-like room that Halycen recognised. The breach.

There was no door as their corridor reached the home-ship’s breaching point, only a wide maw as it joined with the empty space where the Dwurkn frigate was open to the deep and the dark beyond. The blackness beyond the missing walls was broken only by the landing channel, a nanotubing enclosed bridge that extended from the home-ship itself to the Dwurkn frigate. In the distance Halycen caught sight of the massive Ulmadr flagship, a scintillating silver starship that housed the entirety of her family house and its vassals; bowed trusses encircled rising and falling ridges across it, creating a curvature that was more aesthetic than functional, and an intimidating magnetic-accelerator cannon, at least one-third the ship’s full length, sat fixed to the bow.

Ardenfyrn held up an arm, stopping Halycen in her tracks.

“Mask on. Air’s going to be thin.” the ranger said. Halycen nodded and unslung her knapsack, removing the exospheric breathing mask that sat above her other belongings. She placed it at the top of her hauberk, waiting for a moment as the smart-clips registered its presence, and then breathed deeply as the mask started to filter the air around her. The feeling made her light-headed, the filtered air hitting her head much more pleasantly than the thin oxygen aboard the Dwurkn frigate. As a smile crept across her face Halycen caught sight of the tunnel which Vievel and she had landed beside using their jump-rigs, the entrance of which they’d stored the rigs for the journey home. She neglected to mention it to Ardenfyrn, knowing Vievel might still need one of them.

“On three,” Ardenfyrn said, bending her knees and pointing at the landing channel’s opening. It sat some ten feet across the floorless space of the breach. “One-” The ranger didn’t get an opportunity to finish her count as Halycen leapt into the deep and dark, feeling the weightlessness take a hold of her the moment she crossed the corridor threshold. Unrestrained by the frigate’s gravity stabilisers she flew across the empty space, headed straight toward the channel’s mouth.

I never want to land, Halycen thought. The exhilaration quickly faded once her feet touched the landing channel’s surface, and as Ardenfyrn landed behind her.

“I said on three,” Ardenfyrn growled.

“Sorry, it’s just I nev-”.

“Quiet. Come on-” she grabbed Halycen by the wrist, agitating the already sore spot with her strong grip.

“Ow, hey-” Halycen protested. The complaints seemed to fall on deaf ears as the ranger dragged her across the landing channel. The home-ship glistened majestically as they approached, reflecting the light which occasionally escaped the Dwurkn frigate. As they drew nearer to the end of the channel, and the airlock it was attached to, a voice rang out from an unseen speaker, a slight crackle revealing the presence of an artificial sound system.

“Welcome home Ranger,” the voice said. In the absence of her house identification, Halycen wondered if Ardenfyrn’s occupation was known to her family. A rush of automatic motors engaging broke her speculation, as the airlock detected the presence of Aælfir. A bright light split the wall of the home-ship as the airlock door sunk back into a recess, dividing itself into two parts which then detached themselves from each other, revealing the see-through interior door of the airlock and the Ulmadr sigil on the adjacent wall.

Welcome home.