The light on the holo-display blinked again as the message repeated. Marah simply stared. The ship was not supposed to be there - no one had ventured into that sector of space in over eighty years. Yet a ship was there, all the vaunted technology at her disposal confirmed its presence, and it was not a run-of-the-mill merchant, flux runner, or even a mil ship. It was *the ship*, the last flux runner to venture into the Cassi Expanse eight decades ago, the ship that went missing and became a legend of the spaceways. The _Black Dog_ signaled a third time.

He heard the car engine quit and the door close, but he let his visitor find his own way. Nick frowned as he turned over more rich, black earth with his trowel - visitor was too kind a word. Only a handful of people knew where he lived, and he wanted nothing to do with any of them. He had caught a glimpse of the car as it slipped down the long drive towards his house, and he knew who would be in it. Nick felt the other's approach but he kept his eyes and will bent upon his garden and the soil beneath his hands.

"It's been a long time, Nick."

Bradley hunched over his laptop, fingers dancing across the keyboard like possessed imps dancing in the unholy, green glare of the monitor. He'd been sitting there, transfixed, pounding out paragraph after paragraph for longer than he knew. The only thing that he could be sure of was that the sun was, in fact, in the sky when he'd first hearkened to the siren's call of inspiration. Now, he sat in the long, still time after the dead of the night had long passed; the eternally blinking cursor taunting him - burning a hole into his brain.

Oh, how it mocked him...

The squeaking of the shower knobs down the hall and the full-bore hiss of the water nearly made Bradley jump out of his chair. Initially it was just the sound itself, shattering the near-silence he'd woven around himself like a silky shroud. Then, the realization hit him like a old model Lincoln and his blood crystallized in his veins...

Bradley was alone...or, rather, had been alone.

Booted feet pounded on boards. Nick stoked the fire, intently watching the pictures and papers, the detritus of life, char and curl before bursting into flame. The young man did not hear the racket at the door, he was lost in the half-life, the farce of the past that they had fooled him into believing.

"Your steel is no match mine," Miyoto taunted. He held his blade over his head, it's point forward and angled down. The warrior was ready to forcefully respond to any move Sasaki made.

The blood-stained ronin shook his head. "My weapon is as strong as my will. It was forged by Muramasa himself."

The tiny globes of light, as many and colorful as the bands of a rainbow and as diminutive as hummingbirds, danced in the gloaming. They cavorted through the lower branches and about the trunk of a tree that was at least as broad as four men. He approached the forest ancient slowly, cautiously, and with his sword drawn. It was already dusk, but the forest grew even darker under the expanse of the tree's thick tangle of branches. A tingle ran down his spine. He wondered if the shifting shadows that he thought he saw amongst the canopy were only his imagination.

The light started as a soft ambient glow, almost too subtle to notice. It intensified, rising from weak candlelight, to pre-dawn gray, until it reached the brilliance of a pure summer morning - complete with sunlight streaming through high windows. Marah finally saw what her suit's sensors had been telling her, she stood in a great room that looked exactly like the interior of a great cathedral. Exactly like the holos she had seen, at least.

Her eyes swept the room and what she saw caused her mouth to go dry. A raven haired figure, an achingly beautiful man, dressed in resplendent white robes stood on a small dais before her. An indicator on her HUD distracted her, a red light winked to green, what had once been hard vacuum was now filled with a standard atmosphere.