Pacing has become a hobby of mine. I do it so often that I am reasonably sure there will be paw-shaped indents in my favorite places to tread long after I have departed from this world. Someday, generations from now, aspiring librarians will come to this place and look down to see my pacing prints. Maybe they'll have a plaque if I become particularly notable after the war is over.

Alternatively, we could all be dead.

"Oi! Aves!" Sweep calls.

I pause in place. Sweep pads over, looking flustered, and I immediately feel embarrassed, attracted, and terrified, all in one massive wave of emotion. "What happened?" I ask.

"You don't know something horrible happened just because I want to talk to you," Sweep says, "Geez, Aves, you and I should hang out more."

I relax. "Sweep."

"Aidan will steal you away from us again."

I chide, "It's healthy pacing."

Sweep casts me an incredulous look, slack-jawed, then admits, "Coincidentally, something awful did happen."

My shoulders shoot up and all my back far stands on end. "Sweeeeeep."

Sweep shrugs, her whole ear flattening. The other follows, after a moment of hesitation, which makes the gesture strikingly artificial. "It's the Virtues. They kind of lept into the portal we had open on the Intercontinental. I can't believe no one was guarding the back entrance... well, the former Spirit Canira population would be proud to know that even now, they continue to screw over the government. Filthy furze-brained anarchists."

I turn to pace again, cutting a tight circle."Verhamera's tails, we are so-o-o-o-o dead." I walk towards the exit. "C'mon."

"Aves. We can't go after them." Sweep says.

"The portal field's down?" I ask, my voice hardly a whimper.

"Marie, err, told me herself. Begrudgingly, but I'll take it." With a casual flick of her wings, she adds, "It's progress."

"This is not the time to be talking about you and Marie's relationship!"

"May I remind you that you were the one who stressed for who knows how long about us?" she says, but her breath catches as she scents my panic and the carefree veneer is gone. We travel down the corridors together in near silence. Her brown eyes lock mine, then look away, then tilt back my way, but I try to keep her in the corner of my vision.

To distract myself, I watch everything but her. The old architecture looks more intimidating than usual, the old wood and stone pillars arcing overhead like disapproving parents looking down on their poor, misguided children with contempt. I pass depictions of old heroes I could list by name, friends and foes of the Auspicia clustered about her manifold forms. Her golden wings, whether they be two, four, or six manifest, are always done using the same techniques, paints, and threads (in tapestries), which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There are some jarring compositions, for sure, but I've never been much an art critic.

Vivian and Lotus are depicted at the end of many halls, a way of drawing the narrative arcs to an end or beginning them, but this particular corridor has Aislyn, Vivian, Lotus, and Natrina standing side by side. They look young and cheerful, and Aislyn's two wings are white instead of glowing gold- they're not manifest, just natural. The four of them look no older and no stronger than your average Defender, than Torch or Iris, or worse, us.

"Personally, if the Hope and Determination virtues are such great heroes, I think they'll be able to handle themselves just fine." Sweep finishes, but she says this to the halls instead of me, ears tilted ahead, and tail nearly still.

I walk past Marie's personal study, which has the door flung open and several small, bipedal Sentients inside keeping up the already-tidy interior. The scent of rain and something less delicious but more visceral wafts through, not quite blood but definitely part of her natural aroma, and Sweep nearly pauses.

"See something you like?" I ask, a little too snarkily to sound earnest.

"You can't deny that she smells good, Aves." Sweep says.

We keep walking, and she falls back in step with me, towards the very center of the castle. The decorations grow more marvellous, more bizarre, until we're stepping through showers of starlight, plants of every variety, and walls made of opalescent material that pulls the menagerie together. I've always loved the scenic route to the throne room, though I don't use it often. Nothing intimidates diplomats and bewilders those of the country like the multitudinous gifts old companions have bestowed on this room over the ears.

"Yikes," Sweep says. "Do we really have to go this way? I know you and the Auspicia are buddies now, but Heilin's going to flay us."

She's still butchering the pronunciation after all these years. "First of all, it wasn't our fault. Second of all, I guarantee she already knows. I just need to know where to go from here. The Auspicia generally makes me feel... less useless."

"That's a lovely sentiment, but you won't be going on." A voice grumbles from down the hallway, husky and familiar. "Nat's talking with Heilin right now. It's heated." Marie stands near the massive throne doors, ear half pressed against the crack between the doors. The rope that opens the door is pulled just so the latter is a little more ajar than usual.

"Hey," I whisper, bounding up to join her. Sure enough, there's the echo of noise from within, teeming with so much emotion I feel my fur stand up before I can even hear the words.

"Salutations, Avery." Marie mumbles, and with a disdainful look at my company, adds, "Sweep."

"Look at us, eavesdropping like pups." Sweep says. "Real professional."

"Sweep. Please shut up." Marie responds, coldly, and we all lean in further.

There's a long silence, then we hear a single voice pierce the quiet. Natrina asks, "You didn't expect this?"

There is no reply from Heilin, save for perhaps a low growl. I look into the room to see Natrina standing at the foot of the throne. Her face is hidden from view, but Heilin's pained expression is obvious. She appears less furious and more unnaturally still, as if trying and failing to hold in thousands of years of emotion.

The green Canis inclines her head upwards, vines trembling on her massive horns. "You can't hold them under your paw, Heilin. It's never worked before. I could never do it to you."

Heilin's face erupts with fury. All three of us flinch away from the door, unable to hold sway with the divine rage, and her voice sounds throughout the room with the full force of its acoustics. "Don't talk about them like they're me. Don't you dare."

"You had no problem with it a few incarnations ago." Natrina says, though even she has dipped back down. My heartbeat pulses through my throat. "Do not pretend you've forgotten the pasts we've shared. You know I can't shoulder them alone."

"If this really is it, Natrina..." Heilin says.

A noise rises and dies out in Marie's throat.

"Please don't say anything sentimental."

"I was going to say that we made it far without Elysium's help. Further than anyone ever could have imagined, and we did it together." I shiver behind the door. A longing stretches out between the two of them, and Natrina's sigh is so sweet that for a second all those age-old rumors of a romance between them is more than true. I see Aislyn's eyes gleam from Heilin's sockets, a familiarity old as time passing between them, and it is gone, resigned to the past where the Canii they used to be died.

"What're they going on about?" Sweep asks, punctuating this with a prod to the side to ensure she has my attention. "Elysium. The world with the dragons? The one we went to war with, where the water Canira get the dragon heir-" Sweep looks down, to Marie, who seems undisturbed by our sudden aside. "Point is, help?"

I shake my head. "There's no legend about this. Nothing."

"We'll do what we can." Heilin says, her voice continuing to drone on in the inside. "What we've always done. I'll warp the Veil, you'll man the front lines, we'll-"

Marie shuts the crack in the door. Her pupils are dilated until they are little more than pinpricks in her green eyes, which seem to have paled. She steps away from the throne room. "There's really no plan, is there?"

"There have been generations of strategy and potential solutions to Obsidian invasion. Heated grates, the Veil openings, means of fighting shapeshifters... that's a plan, Marie. I've been implementing some of it in the simulators, running through some of my more obscure data, and it's..."

Marie interjects, "I know what you've done. It's not enough. Do you know the kind of casualties we'd sustain from the invasion alone, not even counting all the Defenders we need to send into the Factory, which we know nothing about, and-"

"And you were hoping," Sweep finishes glumly, "That the god-queens in there were going to swoop in and save us, miraculously, from our misery."

"You-" Marie rounds on Sweep's face with a high yelp, and the two of them are so close their noses are almost touching, that they are breathing in the other. I can feel the heat vibrate from them both, and their eyes lock. There are no words to finish the sentence. None.

My heartbeat is erratic, but I've stopped thinking of them and am now watching the door.

"They're outside." Natrina says.

"We should be working." Marie says, the dark lines beneath her eyes tensing up as she looks towards the door, half frozen. "We should- we need to leave." Her paws tense like she's going to run for it.

"Seriously?" I ask. "Isn't spying on the Auspicia an act of treason?"

Sweep and Marie look like two pups who just got caught sniping extra sweetbreads from the kitchen.

"If you'd like to discuss the legality of your actions before we catch you, you're free to come inside." booms the Auspicia's voice, dry but with a mocking, almost teasing ring to it.

"I- I think I've got this." I offer. I don't have this. I'm shaking. Still, I have the best connection with the Auspicia, and I would probably die for either of them, individually. I keep this going through my head as I walk into the throne room, letting it still me. I watch their faces disappear behind the door, which closes, and a slight yellow shine moves up from the bottom of the crack between doors all the way to the top.

The Auspicia and Natrina watch me, the latter with disinterest, the former with a half-smile traced across her features. "Well." Heilin says to Natrina. "Looks like we have her all to ourselves this time."

"The door was ajar and unsealed." I state.

"A coincidence," Heilin says, somewhere between the intonation of a question and a dismissal.

"She's old enough to know there's no such thing." Natrina responds. "Fate, fickle master that she is, plays with even the smallest aspects of our lives. A door sealed, a door unsealed- even this, the smallest of motions, can create split timelines of high difference."

"Are you testing me?" I ask. Not long ago, this would have thrilled me. I would have died seven times over to be important enough to be tested.

Heilin lowers her head, her voice dropped to an almost-mortal level for my comfort. "No, but admittedly, I was hoping you would be here."

"Why did you come?" asks Natrina, doing the same. I still can't help but flinch under the glare of her brown eyes, which promise centuries of pain and loss, but I attempt to fill my lungs with air regardless.

"I wanted to know what the plan was," I say, "Going forwards.What we were going to do about the Virtues."

"Well, you certainly didn't get much of that." Natrina mumbles.

I shuffle my paws and ask, "Did you really have to deal with the Elysian council?"

"In its infancy." Natrina says, with a lengthy sigh.

"If anything, they were more influential than than they are now. There was little opposition to their reign."

"Oh." I say. "They're not in any legends."

"They haven't been since the war we had with them, eons ago when the Veil could be punctured regularly. Legends have a way of taking on life of their own, and well-"

I nod again, thinking of books burnt, information destroyed not by the rulership but by the ruled- no, there's no way they weren't at least complicit, and that hurts me. Steeling myself, thinking of Marie and Sweep, I continue, "You're not leaving it up to fate," When they look startled, I add, "Things will work out. It's under control."

"Things have never been entirely 'under control'." The Auspicia says. The incense at each of the previous Auspicias' tapestries flares, and scent wafts through the room. I recognize the pine of the forests where the Siege of Grimalkin was fought with the Felis, the strange aromas of worlds beyond our own where we battled with dragons, and even the sadder scents of internal warfare, a world seeping out from within. The room bares no battle scars, but the scents are the strongest memory any of our kind have, and they remember. Heilin looks skyward. "In the time before time, a shooting star pierced a great darkness, and the first race, the Terreskians, awoke with the stars glimmering in their fur. From among them stepped Verhamera, who had ears that fell to her sides, unlike their free-standing ones, and her head was adorned with three sets of glimmering horns. She lead the Terreskians for untold millennia through time without time into what we call being, but despite her company-"

"She felt alone," I finish. "She used her millions of tails to fashion, with great precision, beings in her image and theirs. She scattered them across the worlds, but there they grew lonely, so she pulled her own tails into a great sphere and sent the Terreskians to throw stars across the sky of every world. When her creations followed this, they came to this sphere and the Terreskians breathed life into it. Beings in the shape of the Terreskians, Canira, recieved this breath and took from it the powers of every element, as well as domain over all places. Canii, who had two sets of horns as Verhamera's blessing, ruled the new world in her name and honor. When danger came to this world, Verhamera made you from her own heart and fashioned your wings from its arteries."

"You've heard the Obsidian's origin too, I trust," she says.

"A Terreskian who would not follow Verhamera. Nethre, the void, the empty heart. Nethera, who pours out a legion of formless beasts." I conclude.

"So I do not need to tell you that we are facing gods."

I nod.

"Gods we could not beat." Natrina finishes.

I nod again, feeling nauseous. "Please tell me there's a chance."

"It's not us, so there has to be." Heilin says. "Our legend was destined to end how it ended."

"You saved the world." I say, eagerly.

Natrina, pained, looks to Heilin. They share something unfathomable between them, a history I couldn't pierce for all the stories and all the knowledge of ancient Sentients in the world. It stills and humbles me, but my chest still bursts with a need for reassurance, for something.

"We did," Natrina offers, finally, "And now it's your turn."

I nod.

"You have somewhere to be."

I do.

***

I enter HQ to find Sweep and Marie already there, wide-eyed, and I give them a look over the snout like the kind they flash at me when I dream (or occasionally, yes I'll admit it, in the stories I've written about them). I look confident and maybe even a little fierce.

Either that or I look like an idiot. Take your pick.

Plumeria whisks me away before I can speak with them. She pushes me towards the screen, where a whole table of strategists are waiting. Some of them I recognize from the meetings but others are total strangers, and even then, this is no idle meeting. Everyone's expression is dire and the map in front of us, a three-dimensional model of the Storm Teeth mountains. "We're trying to get Skye connected, then we'll get the squadron a plan from there." she explains.

On cue, a voice, raspy from interference, calls through a large crystal on the table, fashioned into a spiral that serves to magnify the communications. "Ello, ello? Hey!"

"Skye of Sable, Evelsca. Do you copy." asks one of the Canii, a massive storm-furred male who has his paws on the table and his head almost stuck inside the amplifier.

"I copy!" peeps Skye. "Things going well on the front. Um, Virtues are well and cooperative. We've assigned Icarus to chaperone them tomorrow."

Ascella grimaces. "He's a bit... much. I trust him, though. Assignment approved."

Skye begins reading off more statistics, and Ascella approves most of her assignments, and the tacticians at the table begin messing with the map. I, too, look at it like one of the simulations in the basement and begin assigning members to a small task force to go ahead, cloaked by an invisibility-inducing Morfa, and take out the vitals of the system before they're even seen. It was one of the ways I figured out how to avoid casualties in Obsidian simulations I've run through.

The others look nervous when I suggest this, but Plumeria approves it, and we assign Skye and a few Evelscans to the job, as well as Epanza.

"If anyone knows Heaven's Arc's tricks it'll be her." Ascella explains. "Much as I'm loathe to trust her. Skye, can you put Echo on?"

Echo, one of the strategists who happens to do field work, and somewhat of a liaison between the parties because of this, takes over the auditory link and begins describing what the scouts have heard of Heaven's Arc. The conversation picks up, ideas are tossed around, and everyone gets involved, serious but optimistic. I see in my mind the gleaming zero and wish for it with every movement, every placement.

I believe we can do it, sitting here beside them, but something even deeper in my heart thrums that I never should have doubted us.

Why do the best feelings always have to be ephemeral?