The brig is a humid, spartan place, awash in deep blue light. The courier is alone in a small cell, bare but for the futon he sits upon. A glowing forcefield separates him from a long hallway, lines of bright energy flickering across it to light the walls and floor with etheric ripples.

It feels like a cavern at the bottom of the ocean.

He’s the only person there.

He wonders if that’s because his captors aren’t in the habit of taking prisoners, or if they just don’t keep them around very long.

He considers, with a shiver, what that implies.

‘Wee kids…’

The vision of little silhouettes in the pods flashes across his mind, again, again, again.

‘I was spiritin’ wee kids.’

His imagination, usually a blessing during long spans of solitude, turns on him with malice. Thoughts tear through his mind of huddled children in dark rooms, frightened, crying out for parents who will never arrive. Of their mothers and fathers, hearts shredded with anguish, searching the streets night and day in panic and desperation until hope abandons them.

The nightmare. Those screams which haunted his sleep echo now in waking, because it was him. He’d seen their faces in dreaming as he ferried them away into the black unknown.

He’d helped monsters steal children.

Grief, shame, and anger wash through him in an endless whirl. He doesn’t fight the tide. The least he deserves is to drown awhile in it.

He isn’t sure how long he sits alone with his thoughts. This place of haunted blue reverie is without time, moment and eternity all at once.

After what might have been one hour or several, a sound cuts through the heavy silence—a small chime, then footsteps along the hallway, their rhythm beckoning him from the harrowed tempest of his mind. The courier glances through the barrier. It's the brawny elf, Duke—still barefoot and shirtless—and the shapeshifting dog from the cargo bay. Duke presses his hand to a screen beside the cell and the kinetic forcefield fizzles away.

“Up you get.”

The courier takes a shaky breath. His hands tremble slightly as he stands and he shoves them in his pockets to still them before stepping out of his cell, his movements stiff with pain, his posture wilted.

“Follow me,” says Duke. “Behave, and I won’t cuff you.”

The courier isn’t sure if he means handcuffs or a cuff to the head, and as Duke looks more than capable of both, he nods mutely and doesn’t question.

The strange dog, back in the form of a tan boxer, leads the way as they walk toward a blue elevator door, its sleek curved sides meeting gently in a pointed arch. Duke presses a few buttons on a panel to the side and it slides open to reveal a large, circular elevator with walls of thick glass. Three other doors decorate its sides like compass points. Duke waves the courier through first, and he feels himself wither under the elf’s observant gaze.

The elevator begins to glide upward.

At first, the courier is too lost within himself to notice the shifting of the light. Eventually, motion behind the glass walls catches his eye.

He glances up.

“Woah—!”

They are ascending through the middle of a vast aquarium, verdant with sea grass and a festival of corals. Fish of every size and shape orbit around them, alongside stingrays and stripy little octopi, while bubbles shimmy upward in an eccentric tango. But most spectacular of all is an abundance of bioluminescent jellyfish, spectral lanterns which set the water ablaze in iridescent blue. Gentle pattens of light filter through the aquatic circus, dancing across his body and along the elevator floor.

It’s implausible. It’s impossible.

. . . It’s beautiful.

Duke chuckles softly from where he leans against the glass. 

“Pretty, huh? Makes you feel like you’re sailing on the ships of old, flying across the waves.”

The courier can’t summon words to speak. He simply stares, the turmoil in his mind and heart slowing for a moment to the rhythm of the ocean life twirling around him.

All too soon, the elevator glides to a soft halt with a sweet chime. A door slides open next to Duke, and he motions for the courier to follow him along a glass walled passageway, passing through more of the impossible aquarium to some kind of . . . command room? Maybe? It’s nearly as improbable as the glowing ocean he just walked through. The floor is a miniature meadow, with soft, sweet-smelling grass growing in organic counterpoint to the holographic screens flickering against black, gently curved walls. At its heart sits a silver, knee-high slice of a once colossal tree, ringed by twelve large cushions in place of chairs.

And standing at the edge of that strangest of meadows, where the grass and sprinkled flowers meet the stars beyond, waits the blue-haired Elven woman.