Ravalor - Warrior

24.05.2026

The situation in the command centre of the Northforce was tense. But maybe that was just him.

Ravalor, the Warrior, felt horrible. He hadn't slept properly in weeks, which he thought he was getting used to, but the last day had been worse than usual. Where his night had in the recent past reduced to no sleep at all and at most stoically stubbornly pretending while laying in his bed the last night had been like the very motion of the act made the exhaustion he felt worse by a thousand folds.

He didn't understand why, nor did he know if there was anything he could do to fix it. Of course the suspicion was that something was going on with the Stargazer, but really, what did that help?

He hadn't told Aeven. Yet. He had considered the thought, but the execution eluded him as if the act of explaining had become an unsolvable mystery.

But he really didn't have to, his condition became impossible to hide. Aeven was here with him now, quiet but concerned. He saw it in every glance, every word they had exchanged today.

“Another cut out,” Nathaniel noted drily, sending a few quick commands down to engineering to compensate for the small drop in connection within the ship. Only a few seconds later Chief Engineer Dion's voice spoke through the com system.

“There is nothing here that should cause drop outs like this. We checked all the systems thrice over.”

Ravalor's gaze was fixed at the bright panels before him, or maybe on the light haze of the visible wall behind it. It definitely wasn't on any of the information or numbers displayed there. He saw them, but he didn't compute any of them. It was just an array of abstract hieroglyphs scrolling past. He blinked and it didn't change anything.

“Commander?” Nathaniel looked at him, expecting guidance, command, or only an explanation. Maybe he suspected. Aeven probably did.

It was him.

His mental state had deteriorated so badly he failed to hold the very simple and usually not at all demanding passive connection to the ship.

“Make sure the redundancies are ready to take over,” he said, not addressing the real problem. Workaround, patch ups, failsafe redundancies — it was all he had left to do, because he couldn't fix the real problem.

A light touch on his arm, Aeven pulling him slightly back. The Warrior noticed almost absentmindedly how the touch hadn't even startled him. His body was so slow to react that even what thousands of years of conditioning had taught him was lethally dangerous couldn't elicit more than a deep breath. Or maybe he had just expected it, because he trusted Aeven and Aeven was fundamentally still a human, and humans just liked to touch people. He couldn't tell anyone.

“What’s going on?”

Ravalor wanted to answer. “If the ship loses function we can for a while take over with offline redundancies — especially for the environmental systems.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Of course it wasn't.

He looked at Aeven, naturally focusing on his healthy eye, and the genuine concern in his face. He looked so worried, and Ravalor didn't want him to look so worried, even when he had every right to. Ravalor opened his mouth slightly, he wanted to tell him, he wanted to explain it all, desperately so, and he wanted Aeven to understand — but he didn't know how.

The concern he saw turned to alarm, and so he just mildly shook his head like that would explain anything. Or soothe the worry. Of course it didn't.

“Ravalor—” Aeven said quietly, and he said something else after that, but Ravalor could no longer hear him. In fact he heard nothing anymore as his entire perception turned inward.

Suddenly, he felt… peculiar. A tingling emitting from every neural pathway within his body. Every processing node lit up at once. Heat spread out from his core like a pulse that filled every single atom of his being. A purely analytical part of him knew exactly what that meant, because it wasn't the first time he felt it, every wizard was intimately familiar with this feeling. But where that part of his mind had no problem understanding, the rest of himself failed dramatically. And at once, it was there, everything, all of him, all at once, crashing into his mind; he staggered, someone held him by his arms, he might have fallen otherwise, he tried to breathe, the entirety of himself was in chaos. Literally.

The ship turned dark, red alarm lights flashed on, the emergency systems kicked in with a shudder that shook the entire ship. Aeven shouted. But Ravalor couldn't hear nor answer.

Denial. All consuming, powerful denial tried to block out everything, trying to keep him sane for just a second longer — and failed. His sense of time completely disappeared as memories spanning lifetimes were compressed down into minutes.

No— he tried to whisper, his voice failed him, but it was already too late anyways.

What have you done…? But he knew. Good lords, he knew. Everything. He remembered everything. By the lords, everything the Stargazer had done, how he had struggled to make it right — the Warrior, in that moment, where he was whole and the differences between them vanished in a haze of memories and feelings, above all denial and desperate anger, between the fear and horror, and despite his failure, felt an unexpected sense pride he barely understood in the moment.

And then the bone-chilling realisation that he was heading towards his own death.

He had to move now. All of him.

But then there was the voice of the Stargazer.

— Calm yourself. I’m here. We’ll be alright. Trust me just this once. And stay calm.

Calm. Beneath all that chaos was a weird sense of lightness. An enormous relief of finally knowing. Of being whole again. The Warrior felt like he was about to pass out as every neural pathway of his mind screamed for sleep, proper sleep as more and more memories needed to be processed, it was so tempting. But the urgency he felt the Stargazer's commenced kept him standing upright. He understood the vital importance of keeping up appearances.

— We’ll be alright.

The lights flickered on again, the alarm stopped.

Aeven was with him, grasping his arm, “Hey, what’s going on? Please talk to me.”

“I’m…” over.

But that wasn't it. He knew this was just the beginning. But the finality was strangling. His path in time had snapped into place, a suffocatingly narrow one-way street.

“... Fine.”

— Resume your duty!

“Fine?! Ravalor, please—” Aeven sounded genuinely distressed, and somehow it was that fear in the young man's voice alongside the Stargazer's unfamiliar strict command that snapped the Warrior out of the miasma flooding his own mind.

His first instinct was to act. Cut the Northforces beacon off, leave Mezchinhar, have the rest of himself scramble, hide somewhere, immediately — but — that would make everything worse immediately. The Stargazer was right.

He straightened up.

No matter how insane: Right now, nobody knew.

The Wizard and Scholar had been together in Mezchinhar but otherwise alone, still on semi-housarest. Both shocked, frozen for only a moment, before stoically continuing the Wizards work. The Scholar’s hands were trembling. The emotional turmoil within him was barely contained by firm words and better knowledge.

The Kingmaker was on Galast in the cave beneath the lake. He had dropped down against a wall but there was nobody to see it. All three had suffered the same strain as the Warrior the last day, and so they had naturally isolated themself to avoid anyone noticing their unstable state of mind. That shame had turned out to be a blessing now.

Nobody. Knew.

It was all only in his head. And his head felt, besides exhausted, more clear than he could ever remember.

He looked at Aeven. And took his hand.

Aeven was startled by that; it was so unexpected he flinched, but it was just a second.

Again, there was that connection between them, the same Aeven had unwittingly stumbled into when, after his recent ascension to immortality, he had grasped Ravalor's wrist in a moment of confusion.

Aeven was no wizard. But he had become a being of magic. He couldn't speak to him in Vaeh like he would to his other Parts or even, lords forbid, another wizard. But he could make him understand.

Or so he hoped. Because even here, now, inside the Northforce, he didn't dare to speak out loud about what had happened to him. Or what would happen to them.

So he tried to assure Aeven that things were not catastrophic yet by trying to believe it himself.

But there was so much in his mind now, so many memories, of Funnix, of Artlenburg, of Zenozarax. And the situation right now on that distant space station called the Edge of the Universe. And Aeven— Lords. Aeven. He was alive. He felt the guilt the Stargazer had already memorised just fresh for himself.

Instead of calming, whatever sense Aeven got from him wasn't helping. They needed to talk. He needed a diversion. He—

— Northman!

— By the almighty Nord, you will give me a heart attack one day! I don't think we want to find out how that looks in my case. What?

— We need a cover story, logged in the system. We need to go somewhere where Mezchinhar can't see or hear us.

— Okay.

Ravalor had expected questions, a lot of them, matching the amount of guilty thoughts he had; he was prepared for every move he made to be questioned in agonizing detail. But the Northman didn't ask. Instead, only a few seconds later, there was a ping at the console.

“It’s the Northman, Commander,” Nathaniel announced halfway torn between the panels and whatever was happening with him and Aeven.

Aeven looked at the panels reluctantly as well, but Ravalor already accepted it.

“Hei! Ravalor — Cap you there too?” The Northman's voice boomed through the room, cheerfully unaware of the suffocating tension in the room.

“I’m here,” Aeven said reluctantly, glancing back at Ravalor.

“Alright, sorry ‘bout that, Rav, you can have my head for this later, but we got an invite. Well, I got an invite, but since you’re basically extended family—“

“Hatir?” Ravalor asked tensely, That wasn't ideal. Not even good. Hatir wasn't… safe. He shuddered at the thought and its implications.

“Yes, from the King, but it’s Mondwache, so we’re invited to join the pilgrimage to Tyr.”

Oh. That could work. Tyr had begrudgingly accepted some external monitoring of their space but had mostly refused any internal changes to their systems. That and the mostly isolated and small-knit communities under Tyr’s ice domes made it particularly hard for any envoys to infiltrate their society. And Mondwache would be in a few days. This was good. Sooner would have been better but with how limited their options were, this was not only a reasonable excursion given their history, but a safe one as well. At least for a little while. He was aware of the danger he could bring with him — they needed to be smart about this. Careful.

His mind suddenly grabbed onto memories utterly foreign to him and he felt his awareness harden. Quadirymir was tracking them. The ship was compromised. It had been since their first encounter in the space between Hatir and Tyr. He knew exactly where and how, and it suddenly explained the weird power fluctuation they had during that time in their voyage.

But he also knew with absolute certainty that he could not remove that tracker right away. Because if the Stargazer was right, Quadirymir didn't know they knew. This tracker, while compromising, was as much a threat as it was a tactical element they could use to their advantage.

Right now, even though he would be labeled Mezchinhar's sworn enemy from one second to the next, it may even be still feasible to inform them of that tracker. A dangerous game, but an option. Although he would like the Leviathan as far away from Hatir and Tyr as possible.

“When is that?” Aeven asked, still reluctant to even look away from Ravalor who had only secondarily paid attention to the specifics of Mondwache. He already knew all that.

“’Bout three days they leave for Tyr, staying there for two weeks. We can show up any time, though. It’s more like a general open invitation to join. They’ve been hinting, strongly, that they would really like me to come for weeks already. I didn't know if we had the time for it, you know — but hey, here I am asking, because what's the harm in that, eh?”

No matter how irritated Ravalor had been about the Northmen's unplanned ties to Hatir, right now he would like to thank him to hell and back for blatantly ignoring his plea. He would need to be careful actually telling him that — the belief that his godly way was just bound to work out in the end was already strong enough.

“That sounds good. The crew can use some shore leave before we wrap up in this universe,” Ravalor said and if Aeven hadn't been confused and concerned before, he sure was now by the looks of it. Ravalor saw him mouth a silent “What is going on?” And Ravalor hoped the silent plea in his eyes just to play along would be enough.

“Well, then let’s go to Tyr,” Aeven said, and Ravalor almost sighed in relief.

Another connection request pinged at the consoles.

“Commander—,” Nathaniel began to speak, hesitated as he actually read the information, straightened up and began anew, “Commander, connection request from the Leviathan.”

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