Tyrial gathered the Gravitons being generated below him, willing them to follow his commands. These simple bosons, raw elemental particles of the universe, obeyed him. They gathered several hundred meters in front of the bow of the ship. With another command he used their energy to fold the fabric of space-time, condensing it. When the ship reached this point in space, it would travel through hundreds of kilometers as if through only one. As the ship did this, Tyrial would already be folding yet more space-time in front of the ship, preparing a path of condensed warped space-time for the ship to travel through.

He did this several times per second, maintaining the warp corridor that allowed the ship to travel relativistically faster than the speed of light. He was also bored. He glanced around at his surroundings, not needing his visual sight for his mind's eye work.

To his left sat the engineer of the ship, Tyrial did not remember his name. In all honesty, he had not bothered to try. The man was slovenly and disheveled. Two weeks’ worth of beard, you could not call it stubble after two weeks, sprouted from his face. His clothes looked as if they had been picked directly from the rag bag and tossed on to his emaciated body.

The Captain seemed to like him well enough, but he wasn’t what Tyrial would have called reliable. He was always at his post when he was needed though. And if he was a kilogram or two heavier thanks to several bottles of alcohol, who were the rest of them to complain? He still managed to keep the ship from exploding, and what more could you ask of a ship's engineer.

The ship itself was simple. A fairly modest freighter turned smuggling vessel. The gray paneling that covered the walls contrasted only slightly with the occasional black squares where the paneling had been removed or fallen off and not replaced. The ceiling grating only slightly interrupted the view of the ship’s conduits and electrical sub-panels above. At the front of the bridge was the modest one-meter square central display that showed the local star chart and vital ship’s statistics. Aside from the captain's chair to Tyrial’s right, there were three stations: engineering to his left, tactical situated behind the captain, and navigation behind engineering. Both tactical and navigation were unoccupied. Tyrial’s station sat in the middle of all the others. Nothing more than a simple one-meter diameter circular indentation in the floor at the center of the bridge.

It spoke a great deal to the importance the ship's designers placed on Tyrial’s station; that of ship’s Mage. Without a Mage, the ship would spend the next thirty or more years getting back to the nearest inhabited planet. Tyrial would have thought then that perhaps he would have garnered a little more respect from his position than he did.

Tyrial was so far into his own world that he almost missed the course change notification on the display at his feet. He wasn't sure who had decided Mages needed to have their hands in contact with the decking to perform their task, but he firmly wished that the individual had never found a comfortable chair for the rest of their natural lives. Sitting cross-legged on solid Durasteel decking for several hours at a time was not exactly comfortable.

Following the course adjustment, Tyrial felt the ship begin to turn. As it did so he had to adjust the direction of the warp corridor to compensate, maintaining the ship's relativistic speed. It seemed they were almost at Port Mevvin. Just a few minutes longer and he could finally rest. Fortunately, he didn't have to worry about timing the stop himself, the system would cut off the supply of Gravitons beneath him at the correct moment. Slamming a ship into a planet at several times the speed of light is not something one would want on their resume.

As the ship approached the planet, the flow of Gravitons abruptly cut off. The warp corridor Tyrial had been propagating collapsed and Tyrial relaxed his Will with a long slow breath. He was finally done for the day. He was tired and didn't feel it necessary to exchange pleasantries with the two other individuals on the bridge. He stood, rubbed some feeling back into his sore legs, and headed for the stairwell at the back of the bridge. As Tyrial was about to head down the short stairs at the rear of the Bridge and into the crew section of the ship, Captain Rosh spoke to him.

“When we’re done unloading the cargo, I want to talk to you.” He said.

Tyrial stopped mid-step, looking over his shoulder at the Captain. The “I want to talk to you” line was never a good sign. From anyone, least of all a captain.

“Don't give me that scowl,” Captain Rosh said, “it’s nothing serious.”

Nothing serious. Great, thought Tyrial, even worse than I thought.

Tyrial turned back to the opening and headed down the stairs without a word. He passed a few closed doors in the dim hallway that followed and opened the third door on the left. His room, for what it was worth. A narrow bunk sat against the far wall, neatly made. Directly above it and attached to the ceiling was an empty storage cabinet, just slightly less than a torso and head’s height above the top of the bunk. A measurement he had personally verified several times in his first few weeks on board. Bolted to the floor on the right and next to the head of the bunk stood a small table with a lamp attached to it. Opposite the bunk, against the part of the wall the door did not occupy, was a small writing desk. That was the extent of the furnishings in Tyrial’s living quarters. That left just about enough open space in his room to feel claustrophobic.

Tyrial was tired; he wanted to sleep, but the Captain’s previous request for a conversation kept nagging at him. Deciding he could afford a few minutes rest, he laid on the bunk and stared at the blank storage cabinet above. Not that he was exactly happy here, but at least the captain treated him like a human being. He wasn’t certain that he had saved enough money over the last few years to afford to find another job. He might be a Mage, but he still had to eat and he didn't relish the idea of stealing. Keeping what dignity he had left required that he stick to at least the most basic of his moral codes.

Unnoticed by Tyrial during these dark thoughts, his eyelids began to betray him. His thoughts began to blur as his eyelids became heavier. Without warning, reality dropped away beneath him and he fell into the black void of sleep.

For a short time, perhaps minutes or merely seconds, he drifted in the void. Shards of thought floated past, none of them strong enough to coalesce into anything more than a glimmer of memory. Fear permeated this darkness, however. Even without consciousness, Tyrial knew that dangerous things lurked in this place.

Tyrial did his best not to pay any attention to the thoughts and memories floating past him, bubbling up from his tumultuous subconscious. An image of a house, however, began to tug at him. He knew it, though he wished fervently he could forget. Such things would not let themselves be forgotten, however. Even as he tried desperately to climb out of the void and back to consciousness, the memory sucked him into its depths.

He was standing in a small house. Debris littered the floor. Pieces of wood, a lamp, the remains of a small table and several chairs. All splintered and destroyed. Wallpaper hung precariously off of the walls, a light fixture hung by its wires from the ceiling, flickering fitfully.

Turning slowly, unable to stop himself, Tyrial faced what was once the front door of the house. The empty hole that once contained a door stared back at him like the vacant eye socket of a long-dead monster. With all his might, he tried to master his body, to keep his eyes from falling to the floor. For a few seconds it almost worked, but with spiteful ease, his subconscious dragged him further into the nightmare and slowly his eyes began to turn downwards.

There on the floor in front of the open doorway lay his mother in a pool of blood. Huge shards of wood jutted from her body, presumably the remnants of the front door. There was a grim frown on her face and her glazed dead eyes looked directly into his.

“Why didn’t you protect me?” the dead women croaked accusingly.

Tyrial’s mind screamed. Not this, he couldn’t live this nightmare again. He squeezed his eyes shut and threw his will against his subconscious, clawing desperately for the salvation of reality.

He could feel something shift, but it didn’t feel as though he had woken up. Opening his eyes to a slit, he saw a sink before him. Opening his eyes the rest of the way, he saw that he was in a small bathroom. In the mirror directly across from him, the face of a young boy stared back.

“Why did I have to reach puberty so early father,” the young boy in the mirror asked.

Chuckling, the ghostly voice of his father floated to him from beyond the bathroom, “You’ll be grateful for that head start when you get older Tyrial. When you're fifty you’ll still look like a teenager. Besides, now you can start practicing with your Powers.”

“A teenager when I’m fifty sounds fine,” replied the boy, “but I’m a teenager now and I look like a little kid. Nobody takes me seriously.”

“I take you seriously Tyrial,” his father said, “you shouldn’t take yourself so seriously though. Not yet, you have time for that later.”

His father had always been so kind, so understanding. If only Tyrial had known how little time he had. As the bitterness began to well up inside him, the image on the mirror swirled and became the face he currently possessed. If not for the eyes, anyone might take that face to be in its mid to late twenties. The eyes, however, held seventy years of pain and anguish.

Grimacing at himself in the mirror, Tyrial clenched his fist. He hated that face, it belonged to the person who had failed the two people who meant the most to him. Letting loose with a roar, Tyrial drove his fist into the mirror.

The room shattered into a thousand razor-sharp shards of memory. Each one biting into his mind, bringing back the pain of losing his parents, of failing them.

As the last shards fell, he felt himself falling backward. He fell into a chair behind him, a very uncomfortable chair. The stark white walls of a Conclave interrogation chamber sprang up around him.

The room did not frighten him though. Neither did the man dressed in black who stood with his back to Tyrial. With trembling hands, Tyrial’s fingers slowly moved to his neck. There, strapped around it, he slowly traced the outline of a thin metal band. As his fingers moved his terror mounted. A Ragnacite collar.

Tyrial screamed, he clawed desperately for the Power, a move as ineffectual as his clawing at the metal around his neck.

“Scream all you like,” the man in black said with a chuckle, “with that collar around your neck, you're no better than the rest of us.”

Turning, the man faced Tyrial. Two empty bleeding eye sockets stared out from a maniacally grinning face. “Your mine now boy,” the specter laughed.

Tyrial could not master his terror, he felt himself begin to slip into madness. Suddenly the world shuddered, and then like a ripping tapestry it fell apart in tatters. The haunting sound of the laughing madman the last thing to disappear.

Tyrial stood in the middle of a wasteland. The remnants of a building lay around him, skewed walls, and broken doorways. Above him, the lack of a roof was accentuated by the roiling red clouds overhead. All around him lay bodies, lifeless and broken. Their dead eyes staring at the unnatural clouds above.

Only two people still stood among the living beside himself. A young man stood about ten meters in front of him. His clothes were ruined and hung off him in tatters. He clutched a stone in one hand and seemed to be breathing heavily.

Twenty meters or so in front of the young man stood an older man. The dirt-stained grimy clothes he wore still showed a hint of the blue of a Conclave uniform. He held a sparkling blue crystal in front of him as if it were a ward against evil.

“You can’t touch me,” screamed the older man, “not if I have this. You can’t touch me!”

Suddenly Tyrial was standing in front of the older man, in his left hand, he held a small rock. Grinning, he lifted his hand and held the rock before him. His mind screamed at him to stop, but he had no control over this avatar. Tyrial could feel his Will building.

He knew he couldn’t reach the older man, not directly with the shard of Ragnacite he was holding. But he also knew that Ragnacite was no protection against simple physics. He wanted to close his eyes, but the avatar ignored him. It shifted his Will to the stone in his hand and with a whoosh, it flew forward at the speed of a bullet.

With a loud thunk, it struck the older man in the chest and threw him backward several meters. With incredible effort, Tyrial tore himself from the avatar. Standing once again a few meters away from it.

The avatar turned towards Tyrial. It wore a younger version of his face, but the eyes were replaced with glowing red embers that bored into his soul. With a twisted grin on its face, the avatar said, “Kill them all.”

Tyrial awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright. This act unfortunately caused him to make yet another accurate measurement of the space between his bunk and the cabinet above. Laying back down he brought his hands up to his now aching head. Wincing, he opened his eyes and glanced around his room through the stars dancing in his vision.

Nothing appeared to be bent or broken this time. At least he wouldn’t have to explain yet another piece of destroyed furniture to the captain. Thinking of the captain he suddenly remembered why he had been trying not to fall asleep. Doing his best to ignore the pain in his skull, he slid off his bunk and headed back out into the hallway.

A short walk down the rest of the dim hallway and out two bulkhead doors deposited him on the observation walkway of cargo bay two. Looking down, Tyrial saw the Captain and the engineer whose name he still could not recall, overseeing a few dock hands as they unloaded the last of the cargo. Large, nondescript gray freight containers, about one-meter square each, were being moved with gravity skids out of the cargo bay and into a truck at the end of the docks. No one was supposed to know what they contained; that’s usually how clients preferred it when it came to freighters of opportunity. The containers were even made of Ragnacite impregnated durasteel to keep curious Mages from peaking.

Tyrial made his way down the stairs that led from the observation walkway to the floor of the cargo bay. The engineer may have kept the ship from exploding, but he didn't seem to do much else beyond that. There were pieces of the cargo bay floor that had been removed to access some ship system or other and never replaced. Grease, deep gouges, and bits of debris littered the floor like a disease. The only respectable area of the entire bay was where the cargo currently being offloaded had previously occupied.

Once the last piece of cargo left the ship, the engineer shuffled off in the general direction of the mess. Most likely, in Tyrial’s estimation, to go find some quantity of alcohol that had somehow escaped consumption. Given the ache in his head and the conversation he was about to have, Tyrial was almost of a mind to join him. Instead, he walked over to Captain Rosh and steeled himself. He was still having a hard time shaking off the nightmare from earlier.

“What,” Tyrial said flatly.

Captain Rosh put away the slate he was tapping out his transactions on and eyed Tyrial for a moment.

He briefly glanced at the obvious bruise on Tyrial’s forehead but then wisely ignored it, instead he said dryly, “Ever the one for eloquence, as always.”

Tyrial didn’t reply, he was trying not to jump to any rash conclusions. Not that he particularly liked the captain, but at least he paid Tyrial a wage on top of agreeing not to turn him over to the Conclave.

After a short pause, Captain Rosh continued, “A man in my profession prefers a few key traits when it comes to his crew members. One of those is predictability. You, my friend, are very predictable. I like that about you,” said Captain Rosh.

“But…?” replied Tyrial levelly. There was always a but, especially when someone started a sentence with praise like that. Very much especially if that person was Captain Rosh.

Captain Rosh sighed and straightened his already pristine extremely expensive-looking suit. The man always dressed as though he was going to have tea with a king. Tyrial had never seen the man show any signs of nerves before. He usually portrayed an emotionless automaton better even than Tyrial himself. Tyrial was honestly jealous of the man's ability to hold a poker face. Now, however, he could see the captain seemed nervous about… something.

Rosh continued. “But, your type of predictability is not exactly the kind of predictability I prefer. You listen a little too much to your heart and not enough to your wallet.”

“I suppose I could be accused of worse traits,” said Tyrial. “So this is goodbye then I take it?”

“Not necessarily,” the captain said. “More like an opportunity I am extending your way. I have a colleague, let's call him a friend. His… methods are more compatible with your own, I think. All I’m asking is that you go meet with him and talk. If you don't like him, you’re welcome to keep your position here.”

Tyrial didn’t believe a word of it. Captain Rosh was not a man to extend an opportunity for profit to anyone, most likely not even his own mother, if he had one. He also seemed uncomfortable for some reason. Captain Rosh had never been particularly at ease around Tyrial. To be fair, Tyrial had never been particularly comfortable around Captain Rosh, or to be more accurate, around the shard of Ragnacite the captain always carried. This time, however, he almost seemed… afraid of something.

“That scowl again,” said Captain Rosh. “Right, well... that skepticism has probably served you well over the years I imagine.” He looked at Tyrial leveling for a moment then said, “If I give you the straight version will you at least agree to talk to him?”

“We’ll see,” said Tyrial flatly.

Rosh’s lips twitched for a moment as he looked at Tyrial. Letting out a small huff, he said “The captain I’m asking you to meet is a bit of a bleeding heart, does things just to help people, no profit at all. It makes no sense. Anyway, he lost his Mage not long ago and the replacement appears to be a little too monetarily motivated for Gabriel’s tastes. I can’t imagine who wouldn’t want a nice predictably greedy crew, but whatever. I mentioned my ship’s Mage might get along with him and his crew better than his current selection and convinced him a trade might benefit us both.”

Tyrial had not heard so much presumably straight forward honesty from the man's mouth in all the time he had ever known him, never mind all at once. Tyrial was now even more suspicious of the captain's motives, especially since the man with a perfect poker face was either not using it or failing badly. Stepping closer to the captain, Tyrial narrowed his eyes and asked suspiciously, “What’s got you on edge?”

In a flash, the captain’s features took on a somewhat hurt expression and he asked, “Is this how you treat everyone who offers you an opportunity?”

“Right,” Tyrial said, not believing a word of it. Tyrial sighed, Captain Rosh wasn’t likely to stop bothering him about this meeting until he agreed. “Fine,” he said, “where do I meet this virtuous new captain.”

“Excellent,” said the Captain. “You’ll meet him at the Trella House in about three hours.”

Tyrial’s frown deepened, “A brothel…” he said disgustedly.

“The Trella House is an elegant gentleman’s club,” said the Captain indignantly.

“Sure...” said Tyrial. He knew the type. He had never been to this one in particular but he had heard of it. Filled with people trying to forget where they’d been, paying for the services of people who were trying to forget where they were. So many hollow eyes on both sides of the counter. Tyrial was always bothered by places like it, the looks reminded him too much of what he saw in the mirror every day. Tyrial was about to turn down the offer, just based on the meeting place alone.

Almost as an afterthought, Captain Rosh said, “I know you’ve expressed some interest in the Opposition lately, not exactly a healthy pastime I should add. At any rate, Gabriel might be a good place to start with that.” Captain Rosh very pointedly did not look at Tyrial while saying this. In a low voice, Captain Rosh finished, “You didn't hear that from me.”

That definitely piqued Tyrial’s interest. Even if this other Captain wasn’t worth the time of day, he might know someone who was. Convincing people to talk about the Opposition, though, wasn’t an easy task. It wasn’t a topic people with a long life expectancy were often willing to talk about. Still, it was probably worth a try.

“Alright,” said Tyrial, “the Trella House, at fourteen hundred. I’ll be there.”

Captain Rosh just smiled. For some reason, Tyrial just couldn’t shake the bad feeling he had about this meeting or the captain's odd behavior. But he just couldn’t pass up an opportunity to find out more about the Opposition. He hoped this Captain wasn't a lecherous deviant, he would hate to have to kill the man.