The digital space within the Curator’s facility was a harsh and unfriendly place, not designed for ease of use. In the half hour that she had spent solely focusing on the network itself, she had come to the conclusion that it was the worst network she had ever seen in regards to accessibility. Nothing was labeled, there were no network guides or explanations for what things did or how to change them - the network was akin to a tangled mess of cords that didn’t belong together and were impossible to separate into single parts without a herculean amount of effort and time.

“I can’t make sense of this - it’s like whoever made this has no idea how computers work,” Vita complained bitterly as she sifted through the incomprehensible binary data, her frustration growing with every passing minute.

“They probably didn’t,” Octavia replied with a sigh as she backed out of the network, allowing the physical world to bleed back into her perception steadily, “What are our other options here?”

“Well, sifting through it this way is gonna take way too long,” Vita remarked in annoyance, “And we have no other way to get through that door.”

“How about a full-dive?” Octavia asked curiously, “You think we can interface with it like other networks?”

“Could work,” Vita mused before letting out a small sigh, “We won’t have long though. Nothing to plug a portable network into and our power levels aren’t doing too great right now as it is,” she added shortly.

“Hopefully we won’t need long,” Octavia replied as she reached into one of the hidden compartments in her carapace, revealing a small space with a familiar metallic cylinder tucked away within.

She fished the portable network out of its housing and took a moment to eye it over, looking for anything that might have gotten damaged during her fall to the planet. Satisfied that it seemed to be in working order, she thumbed the button on the top and stood it up on top of the Curator computer. A small green light began to glow at the top of the device, and suddenly her retinal display was flooded with network updates that she had been missing since landing on the planet.

The RTTAN satellite had been destroyed by the Omni forces, leaving the Federation survivors scattered and cut off from one another. As the last reports from the network began to scroll across Octavia’s retinal display, she couldn’t ease the sense of dread in her heart as she read the last reports from the devastated military. The Longsword interceptors were scattered amongst Occulus’s ring, some of which even attempted to land on the planetoids within for safety, but no definite landing vectors had been reported.

The SFS Valiant itself was destroyed, gutted from bow to stern by the plasma lance on the Omni Throne carrier. Hastily recorded reports indicated that anyone who survived the gutting had been captured by Seraph boarding parties shortly after - the last order from Admiral Felix was a general instruction to surrender. Once again her thoughts were brought back to her conversation with the Seraph within the depths of her own mind and she couldn’t help but scoff lightly; it appeared that everyone would meet the same fate sooner or later.

Octavia had to force herself to tear her gaze away from the reports trailing across the surface of her eyes, bringing her attention to the room around her. While her heart went out to the survivors of the ill-fated operation, there was little she could do about it at the moment. Maybe there was some way to gather the survivors together again, but there was no way to do it from the Curator facility, and there’d be no way to do it at all if she couldn’t figure out how to open the inner sanctum to figure out why Remiel wanted to be there in the first place.

Turning around, Octavia lowered herself into a sitting position with her legs crossed beneath her. She leaned her back against the flat surface of the Curator computer and gave a quiet sigh as she reached up and pulled her helmet off with a pressurized hiss, setting the armored component down on the stone floor beside her. Her muscles ached, her bones were sore, her head throbbed and all she wanted to do was close her eyes and fall asleep. Sitting down for what felt like the first time all day took what little was left of her energy and sapped it straight out of her, leaving her drained and tired.

Taking advantage of the bodily fatigue, Octavia allowed her eyes to close and leaned her bare head back against the computer as well, taking a moment to breathe the unrestricted air deeply. As she focused on the portable amaranthian network, she allowed her body to fall away from her, the pain and fatigue sinking deep into the abyss as her mind separated away from it all. She felt weightless, powerful and capable as she slipped away from her body and into the digital space.

“Much better,” Vita remarked contently with a sigh, stretching her arms above her as she arched her back and twisted from side to side.

“Couldn’t agree more,” Octavia admitted with a relieved scoff, turning in the air to look back at her body.

Looking at herself from above, Octavia could hardly recognize the grizzled survivor in front of her. Her fur was a sweat-drenched mess of tangles and matted patches, while streams of dried blood trailed from her ears, nostrils and the corners of her eyes. She hadn’t even realized the new sources of blood, but she figured they must have been a result of the Seraph’s attack on her brain while she convulsed on the ground during the firefight. Her armor was scarred and the polished sheen had worn off, while the nanoweave fabric accents had been burnt and torn from the various battles she had survived.

“We look like shit,” Vita commented, bringing her arms down from the stretch to cross them in front of her chest as she peered down at their shared body.

Octavia didn’t reply as she gazed at her body with a small frown, eyeing the damage and her general appearance with concern. Gone was the inexperienced girl fresh out of cryostasis - in the course of only a few weeks she had turned into the ruffian before her. She briefly wondered what else she had lost along the way, but forced herself to look away before she got lost in her train of thought.

Turning her attention towards the phantom strings of binary data bouncing back and forth through the Curator complex, Octavia focused on the streams that were leading back into the room where her companions were. It only took her reaching out to grab one before she was suddenly piggybacked at light speeds into the room above her, the sudden change in scenery disorienting to her incorporeal form. She took a quick glance around the room to reorient herself and found that she had gripped onto the stream of data that ran from the computer to the hologram table above, providing a real-time feed of the planet they were on.

She could see that Merith had rejoined the others in the room and was currently sitting on the floor next to Alex with the human’s head in her lap, brushing Alex’s hair idly as she spoke whatever reassurances the poor human needed to hear in the moment. Cody had shifted to the other side of the room to stand with Remiel as they pondered the door in front of them - she could see that they were both referring to his notebook and speaking quietly but animatedly about the facility and what they had found there. None of it helped her in finding the way forward, but Octavia appreciated knowing that everyone was still present and accounted for.

Floating through the aether, Octavia came to a stop next to Remiel and Cody, crossing her arms as she peered at the woman with a frown. Everything that had happened was because of her choices, and Octavia couldn’t even begin to fathom what the human wanted out of it all. What good would Erillium be to her if she couldn’t control it? If she really wanted to wipe out the Omni then why did she send them all on a doomed mission? Octavia couldn’t even begin to guess.

As Octavia contemplated the possibilities, she noticed Vita’s purple form floating into view out of the corner of her digital eyes. She looked over at her companion and offered a small smile, “Think this is going to end with us killing her?”

“Maybe,” Vita agreed as she came to a stop and set her hands on her hips, peering over Remiel’s shoulder with a curious gaze, “The Omni didn’t explicitly tell us to kill her, they just said to figure out what her deal is and stop her if it’s something horrendous.”

“You say that like you think there’s a possibility of stopping her without killing her,” Octavia mused as she slowly floated around to face Remiel from the front, scanning over her features with an analytical eye. Under Octavia’s scrutiny the intelligence agent looked normal; a boring human woman with a resting face that suggested she was always annoyed at the world around her. She had never even gone for her gun during the entire time they’d been on the planet together.

“What’s she gonna do? Shoot us?” Vita asked with a laugh, “You know damn well no conventional pistol is getting through the Guardian armor,” she added as she floated through Cody and circled around to Octavia’s side with an amused look, “Just disarm her and slap her in shackles. Break her arms if you need to, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Then the Omni can come and take her off to computer jail or whatever they do to criminals.”

“I don’t know, I just get a bad feeling about it,” Octavia replied with a frown, “There’s something about her I can’t quite put my finger on.”

“You’re paranoid,” Vita dismissed with a sigh, “Come on, let’s get this door open and figure out what Remiel’s deal is, then let’s kick the shit out of her and get a ride out of here with the bots.”

“Alright,” Octavia agreed idly, though her gaze remained locked on Remiel’s face. There was something sinister lying beneath her perfectly normal appearance - the fact that she still looked so put together was something that Octavia could scarcely believe. The picture perfect human didn’t have a single strand of hair out of place, nor a single bead of sweat or speckle of dirt on her pale skin.

Octavia found herself being drawn in by the strange shade of purple within Remiel’s eyes - an unnatural color that Octavia had never noticed before. She had never been this close to Remiel without the human striding off in some direction or another, and she found herself slowly leaning in towards Remiel’s face with a perplexed look. What was that in her eyes? She could have sworn that there was something there.

Remiel’s gaze turned towards her and Octavia felt her heart grind to a standstill as she swore the deep pools of purple were boring straight into the back of her mind. Remiel’s gaze didn’t waver, they locked on directly to Octavia’s own eyes as if the veil between the digital world and the physical one had been stripped away in an instant and the gap between them had been bridged by Remiel’s fury alone. And just as quickly as their eyes locked through the infinite distance between their realities, Remiel’s eyes turned away, breaking the spell as Octavia’s heartbeat returned to her and a rush of fear bled out of her like a drain had been unplugged.

“Octy?” Vita asked, floating into the corner of her vision with a concerned look.

“Sorry, just got distracted,” Octavia dismissed quickly, shaking her head as she turned away from Remiel to face the door. Somehow she still felt as though Remiel’s deep purple eyes were boring into the back of her skull, the creeping sensation of being watched sinking deep into her mind and refusing to let go.

“Well, get distracted over here - I could use your help,” Vita chastised as she grabbed Octavia’s holographic hand in her own and began to drag her towards the glowing stone door.

Forcing herself to focus on the task at hand, Octavia put the creeping sensation out of her mind as she turned her gaze towards the door in front of her. She couldn’t immediately see any connections in the network that led to or from the door, but at the same time she realized that the connections were so tangled that even if there was one she likely wouldn’t be able to sense it without some deep diving. She floated closer to the door and peered at it, setting her hands flat against its surface as she dug deeper into the network around her.

Somewhere beneath the surface there was a stirring that drew her attention, drawing her into the stonework and through the confusing layers of primitive network code. She could feel the presence of a connection that led back to the terminal her body was still sitting against, but she couldn’t quite grasp it. Every time she reached for it the connection slipped further and further into the stonework, shying away from her grip.

“Vi, help me with this,” Octavia instructed as she turned her head to the side, glancing at her purple companion with a pointed look.

“You take high, I’ll take low,” Vita replied with a nod, turning her attention towards the stonework.

Together they approached the connection once again, assaulting it from both angles as they worked to pin it down somewhere within the convoluted network they were trying to access. Octavia wasn’t sure how long they spent trying to grasp the same string, but as time ticked away and the battery of the portable network began to drain, they drew closer and closer to the connection until it was painfully and tauntingly just out of their grasp. Then somehow, somewhere, Octavia found the connection solidly in her grasp, the rhythmic sounds of the alien binary pinging phantomly through her head as it communicated with the terminal back where her body was.

She held the connection aloft like a prized animal she had been hunting for ages. It was painfully simple, as easy as flicking a switch, and yet it had eluded her for so long within the twisting confines of the network that she held the elusive connection with veneration. She wasn’t even entirely sure how she managed to catch it in the first place, but there it was cradled in her grip. With a simple command through her mind, the connection accepted her request and the stone door shifted suddenly, dispelling a thin layer of dust that formed a cloud around it.

Every face in the room turned towards the door as a distinct, loud thunk echoed across the stone surfaces. In the silence, it began to slowly roll upwards, the stone door grinding noisily against the stone of the wall as it slid into its housing, revealing the room beyond. As the door settled into its hidden slot within the wall above it, Remiel and Cody strode forth into the next room without waiting for so much as a confirmation that it was safe.

“Come on, let’s go check it out,” Vita insisted, floating ahead of the corporeal beings to scout the room beyond with an excited expression.

Octavia didn’t say anything as she followed the purple avatar of her companion, making her way into the darkness that lay beyond the atrium. The door opened up onto a bridge made of the same stone as the rest of the facility, and below the bridge was a dark void that Octavia could barely comprehend. She paused a few feet into the room to look around, but to her surprise she couldn’t find any walls, ceiling or roof beyond the bridge that the two humans were walking across.

It wasn’t the lack of things that made Octavia stop, however. It was the one thing that took up the entire space. The only thing that she could define in the void around them other than the bridge and the anomalous doorway that they had shifted through.

A tree.

A tree made of solid, white crystal that Octavia had never seen before, glowing with a faint and ever-present pure white light that made Octavia’s digital eyes hurt even as she gazed at it within the safety of the digital world. The bridge led to somewhere amongst its uppermost branches, but the tree was so large that the bridge and the small platform that the bridge ended in could barely be considered a singular grain compared to its overwhelming size.

Octavia’s brain simply couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing as she hovered in the digital space above the bridge, eyeing the impossible structure in front of her. Its crystalline leaves fluttered faintly in a phantom wind, the shifting of the glowing crystals creating a faint and ethereal lightshow across the bridge as the light refracted and reflected off of its own surfaces. A kaleidoscope of color fluctuated across every solid surface within view, creating a dizzying array that caused twin sensations of nausea and fascination within Octavia’s incorporeal form.

“What the fuck is that?” Vita asked as she came to a stop, hovering above the abyss off of the side of the bridge to get a better look at the tree.

Octavia didn’t have an answer for her. Nothing she could possibly think of could explain what she was seeing. Her eyes began to trail down the side of the tree - falling down and down, further and further until its trunk stretched into the endless abyss far below them. The glowing form of its crystalline roots stretched out in all directions endlessly, even beyond where she would have expected walls to have been. Roots stretched out below the stone doorway at the entrance of the bridge and even further out beyond it, stretching as far into the void as Octavia’s eyes could see and beyond, disappearing somewhere around an ephemeral curve within the endless darkness of the void.

There was something else within the edges of her peripheral senses that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. There was a sound. A sensation. Something was pulling at her, calling to her, drawing her in. It felt familiar, and yet so alien at the same time. Loving, but hostile. It made her confused, dizzy, and a rising wave of frustration began to eat away at her.

Octavia didn’t understand what she was looking at, what she was hearing, what she was feeling, and it was beginning to wear at her in a way that she couldn’t quite put words to. She felt out of place, and the sight of the reality-defying crystal tree in front of her set her on edge. She felt as though she were looking upon the face of something that should never be looked at, as though her very presence in the room were some great taboo against nature and she had insulted the very Laws she swore to by existing in the same room as it.

The sound droned at the back of Octavia’s mind like a jackhammer, pounding away at her resistances and mental barriers as she stared at the tree before her. Its light played tricks in the corners of her visions as she saw tropical, sandy shores and a city of stone in the light of a sunset. She saw wooden ships sailing across the seas, racing to war against ships of metal descending from the skies. A tower emerging from the ocean from whence a great beam of energy pierced the heavens.

Suddenly her hands were on the bark of the tree, her face meere inches away from its perfect surface. There were no imperfections, no details to feel, only the unnaturally smooth crystalline surface that sent chills through Octavia’s digital mind. The sound grew louder and louder at the back of her mind, deafening her to the world around her, the light blinding her to all but the one thing that mattered.

The tree.

A sensation of gravity shifting suddenly hit Octavia as though she had been strapped by her wrists to the back of a starship which was blasting off at full speed. Her body lurched forward so hard she thought her head was going to rip clean off of her shoulders, and despite her digital form she felt a pain and wrongness that she couldn’t even begin to describe. The sensation of otherworldly motion ripped through her to the core, and as she was pulled by the hands into the tree itself she briefly felt as though she were being stretched and squashed through a hole much too small for her body.

The sensation of being stretched lasted forever, and somehow also only the briefest of moments. She felt as though she were pulled the distance of the entire universe against her will, stretched from one side of creation to the other at the width of an atom, only to snap back to her regular size in less time than it took for her to even process the alien sensation. As her mind snapped back into its regular state, a wave of dysphoria washed over Octavia in a tidal wave.

Why had she allowed her aunt to put her in cryo stasis? The Empress had killed her mother for power and used her for a pawn! She was supposed to be on a quest for vengeance and honor, not following orders like some lost pup who didn’t know right from wrong. Octavia wasn’t supposed to be so meek, so obsessive, so wrapped up in the minutia. She was supposed to be a warrior like her mother, a hero, someone who could change the world through her will.

She had allowed herself to be swept away by the current, abandoning her destiny in favor of the easy route. Where were her nerves a hundred years ago? What ever happened to her spine? And after all of that, why did she care so much about what other people thought of her? Why had she become so obsessed with the first person who loved her that she refused to let her go, even in death?

Octavia’s mind was a sea of horror and hatred, self-loathing and regret. She was supposed to be a hero of her people, how had she never seen that before? How had she let herself get pushed so far down as to be a pawn in a universe-sized game of chess? It was never meant to be her destiny.

As she struggled with her racing thoughts, her mind galloping at a million miles a second, she scarcely noticed that she was in an opposite void - the entire world around her was the purest white she had ever seen, glowing with the brightest light in the universe. There were no shadows, no darkness, and nowhere to hide from its endless influence. To her side she could see Vita illuminated in the glow, but to her surprise her friend was no longer holographic.

Vita stood there naked in physical glory, her deep purple fur as real as Octavia’s own sandy variant. Her body and face bore striking similarities to Octavia’s own, the shape identical to the body that they shared, but minute details in the stylings were enough that Octavia could differentiate herself from her companion. Curiosity drove her to look down at her own body and she found herself in a similar state of undress and physicality as her companion, the coarse fur on her chest ruffling in an unseen breeze that tickled at her flesh.

“Finally, you have come to me,” a glorious woman’s voice rang from the white void, permeating Octavia’s very being from all directions in a tone that set every single one of her hairs on end as a sense of powerlessness settled into her core.

“Who are you?” Vita asked, her voice ringing clear without the mechanical filter of her digitalized voice.

“Where are we?” Octavia added, her eyes trailing through the void as she searched for the speaker.

“I am known by many names by those who I create. The Tree of Life. Yggdrasil. Wacah Chan. Dryas. For most of my existence I have been known as the Cradle of Creation. This place is not a question of where, but a question of who. The answer is me,” the voice replied in a melodic tone, each syllable driving emotional spikes through the back of Octavia’s mind. She could scarcely identify every emotion she felt as the being spoke around her, all she could conclude was an omnipresent, overwhelming storm of emotions and sensations that would have driven Octavia to the floor if there was one, “I am Life Itself on my planets.”

“You’re the one who saved me after the crash, aren’t you?” Octavia managed to force herself to ask, ceasing her search for a body in favor of speaking into the white void as a whole.

“Yes,” the Cradle replied in a loving coo, “I could not allow you to expire before you reached me. It was not your destiny.”

“Why? What’s my destiny?” Octavia asked with a frown, her confusion welling within her.

“It is your destiny to be a hero. But you are not of my creation, so I could not bestow upon you this mantle until you arrived,” returned the voice, her lovely tone ringing perfectly with every word, forcing a desire to scream and laugh and cry all at the same time to the forefront of Octavia’s mind.

“What mantle? You’re not making any sense,” Vita interjected, saving Octavia from having to bite through the overwhelming sensations that threatened to subdue her.

“The mantle of a hero. On my worlds, a hero is not a concept, but a status. A blessing. A curse. A way of looking at the world. The desire to influence. The need to change,” the Cradle explained in a blissful hum that would have brought Octavia to her knees if gravity still existed.

“What difference does it make? Why do we need to be heroes?” Octavia asked, though the whining tone in her voice surprised her. She had thought her voice was being projected strongly, firmly, but instead it escaped her as though she were begging the Cradle for an answer. She hadn’t even noticed that her ears had pinned back against her skull and her tail had tucked between her legs in a display of subservience to the voice.

“Because only a hero can challenge Fate,” the Cradle replied simply. Its words swept Octavia into another spiral of thought, her imagination running wild as she thought of all the ways her life had gone wrong. How long had she been a slave to life? How long had she wanted to make a change but could never bring herself to do it? She could have been the Empress if she had just woken up before her aunt had put her in cryostasis!

“What fate needs changing?” Vita asked, though her voice escaped her in the same pathetic mewl that had escaped Octaiva’s own maw. The power of the Cradle diminished all thoughts of importance and independence - Laws be damned, the Cradle didn’t abide by them.

“Oculus was corrupted during the end of the last age, when Erillia was shrouded in ice and snow. It now holds the power to destroy the very concept of reality - if it were to fall into the wrong hands, the destruction of the universe would barely scratch the surface of the consequences. Fate has determined that the only way to prevent this outcome is to destroy Oculus,” the Cradle explained, its voice unchanging as it described the incomprehensible nature of the destruction that would unfurl.

Octavia’s mind was awash in the possibilities of such destruction, but she couldn’t even begin to fathom what the Cradle meant. The destruction of the universe was the end, full stop - and yet this being was telling her that it didn’t stop there. The destruction of the universe was but the surface, and Octavia couldn’t even begin to understand what would happen beyond that. Her mind ached as she tried in vain to comprehend the implications.

“If Oculus is destroyed though, won’t that prevent the destruction of the universe?” Octavia asked, her voice meek and quiet as she sought answers to her endless questions. Every answer the Cradle gave only served to add ten more questions to Octavia’s growing list, and still she barely understood what was happening to her.

“It would also result in the destruction of me, and the death of billions of innocent lives. Heroes like yourself who are not supposed to die in such a way. Civilians who just wish to live. And countless creatures who wouldn’t even understand as their death approached from above. No. This is not to be. There is another way,” the Cradle explained, her voice drifting through the white void like a chorus of the most beautiful instruments the universe could produce.

“What should we do?” Vita all-but pleaded, her voice escaping her instantly as she begged the Cradle for guidance. Octavia couldn’t judge her, she felt the same desperation, the same need for the Cradle to tell her more.

"The Agent of Fate will seek to use my connection to Oculus to reverse the flow of what you call Erillium. If Oculus's energy becomes too great, it will destroy itself and all of us. However… if you can interrupt the ritual and leave it only partially complete, Oculus may yet collapse, but it's worlds will be spared," the Cradle explained, her voice pressing in against Octavia’s mind as though it were a miner seeking a fracture to exploit.

“How do I do that?” Octavia asked, barely above a whisper in the endless white void around them.

“When you leave here with the mantle of a hero, you too will possess great power. You need only touch the Source and you will bring about the end of Fate’s plan in favor of your own. Defy her to the end, and you will prevail,” the Cradle reassured, her voice seeping further and further through the cracks in Octavia’s mind, filling her with a jittery sensation of restlessness and unease.

“Who is she?” Octavia breathed, her voice barely audible even to her own ears as the Cradle pierced her skull and sunk within her very being.

“The Agent of Fate. The one you call…”

An indescribable pain and pleasure slammed into Octavia from every conceivable angle, penetrating every single pore and microfiber of her skin. Her atoms were ripped apart, the quarks composing her mortal fiber thrown to the wind and scattered across the multiverse with the impact of reality itself. She felt everything in the universe at once in a rush, the sensation of countless lives passing her by from the beginning of time to the heat death of the universe and beyond stretching into eternity with a fraction of a microsecond. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t form words, she couldn’t even begin to understand what words meant. All she could do was feel, and even then she couldn’t even hope to comprehend everything that she felt in that moment.

All at once the sensation ended and Octavia was thrown bodily back into the world as though she had been thrown from one side of the universe back to the other and impacted a wall at the end. The impact was enough to drive every last gasp of oxygen from her lungs in a horrendous scream of terror, pain, agony, pleasure, bliss and everything in between. She didn’t know how long she screamed for, how long she sat there for, but reality snapped back around her instantly as if her life had only just begun.

The sensation faded and Octavia gasped for breath, filling her lungs with air for the first time as her eyes shot open and her retinas were assaulted by the dim blue light of the facility around her. The very first thing she ever saw was the small five-by-five stone room in the basement of the Curator complex, her legs crossed beneath her and the sensation of cold metal pressing against the back of her head. Everything assaulted her at once through new senses, clear and sharp like never before, as though everything up to that point had just been a preamble for her at that moment.

Octavia felt powerful. She felt energized. She felt unstoppable. Everything snapped back together at once as she let out the lungful of air she had grasped onto, revelling in the sensation of the lifegiving air escaping her. Everything coalesced into a single word, one single name that her life had been leading her to - a purpose, a meaning, the single reason why she had been born in the first place. Everything led her to that moment.

“Remiel…”