Cassie woke up hungry.

She could hear the ship whistling around them, although that also might have been the pipe in the ceiling that should not have been visible. She didn't envy Dusty, although she wasn't sure if he was having a hard time because the ship was difficult or because he was being difficult, so the ship was having a hard time. Either way, she had this sudden urge to kick him in the face. This was followed by another set of overwhelmingly violent thoughts which had no right being there this early in the morning. She trod through the corridors and found herself in the gleaming edifice of the kitchen once more.

At the very least, Cassie knew what god she followed. She was indiscriminate in tearing the plastics open. She was indiscriminate in eating. She could feel all the ambiguity of the night fade back into complacency. She felt the right thing inching up her neck. She knew that there was someone behind her, watching, because of course there was, and it was too late for breakfast, and she'd been too nice to herself, and she should be morally repulsed, and she was, wasn't she! It was bad to hurt your family, but Cassie hadn't talked to hers in years. It was bad to turn on the planet, which is why Pechi was in the right, because her family had been bad. It would be bad, at the same time, to turn on Tabai, but if even the slightest pressure was applied to either of them, they'd just give. It'd be that simple. They could keep maneuvering around a coherent narrative for themselves, indefinitely, and it would be fine. It would be great! At least Tabai knew what she wanted. Cassie knew what she wanted. Cassie wanted to go home and for everyone to look at her straight instead of sideways! What kind of a tragedy was that? What kind of a tragedy was she asking for? More of one? Less of one?

Paper littered the ground. Cassie kicked one across the room with a back hoof. There was blood on the ground. There was blood everywhere, like a portent. The fountain was barely working, damnit Dusty, but she managed to cleanse herself at that too.

She went downstairs.

"A-a-are we good?" asked Pechi, in the elevator. The descent seemed to be tugging both of them down, but Cassie's stomach stayed aloft, the weightlessness making her queasy as her organs were forcefully rent from her body.

"I don't know," Cassie said.

"S... Sorry." Pechi said.

"You have no reason to apologize to me," Cassie said. "So don't."

"I'm sorry for being in love with you, and for making you worry, and for associating with you, a-at all," Pechi said.

"I'm not sorry about that," Cassie said. "Don't make ultimatums in liminal spaces, please."

Pechi looked up. The elevator stopped.

"I'm taking the next mission," Cassie announced. "We'll be taking off soon, won't we?"

"We were just about to," Alexa said. "Dusty was just leaving."

Tabai was in her corner already, in the pod.

"You've got us our coordinates?" asked Pechi.

"I was hoping you could help. Since Aurum's Twenty-Fifth Law of magical tracking apparently has nothing on a few trees," Dusty said.

Pechi bristled, although it was far more subdued and almost playful than the defensive, rigid stance Cassie had seen her take last night. "F-firstly, y-you do not w-want my help, y-you want t-to humiliate me. S-secondly, I c-c-can not believe that anyone w-w-w-would have the time in th-their already busy professional career to make twenty-five laws on magical tracking."

"It's not that hard. You just need to be a field-defining genius who managed to extend their life over a hundred years through magical-mechanical interplay," Dusty said. "You'll never believe how many laws there are for that. We're talking in the hundreds--" The Canis's stupidly smug expression at last met Cassie's, where it dropped into something lacking in its usual smackable irreverence. "What's with the long face?"

"Nothing. If we're going on the next mission, you two should leave," Cassie said.

"Finally," Dusty said.

"Are you sure you're going to be okay?" asked Pechi, her ears perked in a way that almost broke Cassie's heart.

"I'll be fine," Cassie promised.

The door slid shut behind them with a surprising finality. Alexa turned to her remaining prisoner on the undocking ship. "You've got a little something there," she said, generously gesturing to all of Cassie's face.

"It's water," Cassie lied.

"Looks like blood," Alexa said. "Did you hit your head on something?"

"No," Cassie said.

"Fair. Your antlers would block the worst of it if you tried to truly ram something," Alexa said. "At least the left would, the longer one. Does it bother you that it's so much longer than the other? All Canii horns happen to be more or less symmetrical."

Was that a veiled jab at her species? It wouldn't surprise Cassie. "You want to know what I can see with it?" asked Cassie.

"Not particularly," answered Alexa.

"Everything," Cassie said. "I can see the end of the end of everything."

Alexa's reflection's expression softened slightly, though if it was from unease or in incredulity, it was nigh impossible to tell. Not waiting for a confirmation for either of her hypotheses, Cassie returned to the pod, and let it take her away.

They opened the ship into a forest. On pure intuition, or otherwise recklessness, Alexa cast off her oxygen mask the second they got offboard. She looked to the other pair and said, "Air's safe. We have these trees back home."

So a calculated decision, then. Cassie hesitated before taking her own mask off, gaping at the world unfurling around her. Sunlight made its gentle way between trees, following paths down through the forest to where it kneaded the ground and turned it a special shade of gold. Everything glowed with a familiar warmth, and Cassie found herself in the forests she had stood on the edge of as a fawn, tinged with the yellow brush of nostalgia. She could not have painted something more wonderful, nor familiar.

"Deceptively nice," Alexa said. Brusquely, she asked Tabai, "I trust you want to go find the natives?"

"As a matter of fact, I might," Tabai snarled.

"And then what? Save them, I take it?"

"I might want to assist them. Don't twist my narrative into something garishly appropriative."

"The destroyer of worlds made their savior! And of course, they'd be ever so appreciative for your intrusion. Never mind that you know nothing of their customs, nor their morals. They might be better off under the seraph than under your misguided ideals of free will, but you seem to have such a strong gut sense of right that I'd hate to dissuade it--"

"--as opposed to feeling nothing at all? I know you're empty inside, Alexa. Empty all the way down! Should I aspire to that instead?"

A dark shape flickered through the woods. Cassie recognized its wings, and in the light she could see its muzzle, which was, somehow, at once dark as a shadow and light as freshly fallen snow. It was as if her eyes were playing tricks with her, and here was the figure, drawing her mind into the game.

"Are you seeing this?" asked Cassie, timidly.

No. Of course they weren't.

Tabai yelled louder, "And you think that will fix anything?"

"We don't need to fix anything."

Cassie stepped away from the fold.

Walking through the woods felt like entering the depths of a pool, but the waters were warm and friendly here. The figure was always a few trees off, flickering, and when Cassie looked back, she found the others already covered by forest that had surely not been so dense beforehand. She closed her eyes. It had to be a temporary mistake, didn't it? She would have a confrontation with the Lamb, or whatever it fancied itself, and it would let her go when she failed to give to its childish attempts to play with her psyche.

"Listen, I know you're screwing with their minds, and mine, at that, but if you could just--" Cassie began.

"I need not do anything," said the seraph, moving out from between trees and into the freckled clearing. Trees whistled overhead in the tune of Pechi's. Living things had been so far removed from Cassie for so long that it stirred something deep inside of her, even though this soil was sterile, unlike her home's. "This 'messing with minds' you speak of is merely the nature of sentient creatures. Not your Sentients, but, in effect, all of them. The free will you so value allows you do strike out on dangerous missions, trust the wrong beings, accidentally (and I stress accidentally) get your entire family murdered."

"And that's better than being unable to make those decisions? Does obedience mean anything at all if it's entirely ensured by an outside being? Fixing the scales means depriving them of any bad they could do, but it also entirely deprives these creatures of being able to do lasting good. I'd ask if that weighed on your conscience, but you're likely an absolutist. I don't want to sway you. I just want to go back to the group."

"Do you really? They'll argue all the way there. It would be easier to lead you there, so you could grab it and return to the ship."

"You'll--" Cassie began. "I'm going to get petrified if you do that."

"If I wanted to petrify you, I would petrify you. I am not interested in your petrification, but your influence on these creatures, my favorites, would be terrible, and I would prefer that you got this particular leg of the journey over with as quickly as possible," the Lamb said, already turning to leave. Cassie found herself following, but she couldn't quite convince herself it was from compulsion.

"Promise me that I won't be petrified or killed until I return to the ship, at the very earliest," Cassie insisted. "Promise this mission will lead to no harm."

"No physical harm will befall you, and the stress will be similar to any other mission. I will lead you to the village where you will find the horn," the Lamb insisted. "I am honest and free with my conditions."

"Will it do terrible things to the inhabitants when we take it?" asked Pechi. She sounded like a baby. This was ridiculous.

"Momentarily, at most, but Alexa was right. I will go back and fix it. However, this is a privilege I will no longer have once you take all nine of my horns, destroying my corporeal form."

"Then why are you giving us the opportunity?"

"Free will gives you the opportunity to take whatever you want. I am curious to see if it does not first impede you from your own goal. Think of it as a kind of bargain between us." The Lamb's voice grew soft and silken. "I've been watching you, nonetheless, and I am not angered, only deeply saddened. I've learned of your homeworld, which seems to be a place of great discrimination and violence. Cassie, are you certain that world is worth saving?"

"Yes! There's good there. So much good. It's just that-- it's only-- there are bad things, too, and that's inherent to the experience, but it doesn't need define us or the lives we've lived."

"Oh, Cassie," the seraph purred, in a voice that would have been reassuring had it not been tinged with such visceral poison. "You're so good. You'll love the village."

The seraph walked through the trees and disappeared.

Cassie's heart went cold. She looked around in the woods, which seemed to have darkened. Her companions were gone, and the woods seemed to slope up around her, to the point that the land was curled up to be impossible to climb not far from where she stood. There only lay the road ahead of her.

"I was promised that I wouldn't be hurt," Cassie told herself.

It didn't sound true.

"Oh, stars, help me now," whispered Cassie, but it was too late. In her heart, she was prey again, surrounded on all sides and abandoned by everyone but her own wild impulse and the trees.