I turn left for no reason except that right feels too much like compliance.
The ship revealsitself in pieces, each turn exposing new evidence of the man who commands it.
Gothic, I think, is the word for it. Not in the historical sense but in the feeling it evokes. Dark arches instead of right angles. Grating floors that let me see into mechanical depths below, all churning pistons and glowing conduits. Walls etched with symbols I don't recognize, sharp and angular like warnings written in a dead language.
Everything built for intimidation. For psychological warfare. For making anyone who walks these halls feel small and temporary against the permanence of metal and void.
It works.
I pass crew members in the corridors. They stop when they see me, conversations dying mid-word, tasks abandoned. Cyborgs with more metal than flesh, their organic eyes tracking my movement with unsettling intensity. Void-born with skin so pale it's nearly translucent, adapted for environments where light is memory rather than reality.
All of them stare.
At my skin, which suddenly feels too warm, too alive, too saturated with color against the monochrome nightmare of this ship. At my hair, which has apparently shifted to something close to honey-gold in my agitation, strands catching what little light exists and throwing it back like defiance. At the faint luminescence I didn't realize I was producing until I see it reflected in their augmented pupils.
I glow.
Not bright. Not like a star or a weapon. Just. Gently. The way bioluminescent algae glows in dark water. The way life itself glows when surrounded by so much that isn't.
"She's the one?" someone whispers in a language I shouldn't understand but somehow do, words filtering through my consciousness like roots through soil.
"The harvest daughter," another voice confirms, the title dripping with something between reverence and horror.
"Haid actually did it," a third whispers, and there's genuine shock in those words, as if they'd all assumed their Lord incapable of whatever this is, whatever I represent.
I keep walking. Spine straight. Chin up. All the posture Demeter drilled into me since childhood, all the performanceof confidence I've perfected over years of being displayed like a particularly valuable crop yield.
But inside, I'm screaming. Inside, I'm that girl on the Star Deck again, desperate for silence and air and a single moment where nobody wants anything from me.
The ship tilts around a corner. Gravity shifts with it, smooth but noticeable. My stomach lurches. I brace against the wall and the metal is so cold it burns.
Then I feel it.
A pull. Not physical. Deeper than that. Something crying out in a frequency I shouldn't be able to hear but can't possibly ignore.
Pain. Loss. Slow death in darkness.
My feet move before conscious thought catches up, following the sensation like thread through a maze. Left turn. Down a narrow stairwell that spirals into the ship's lower decks. Past engine rooms that roar with contained power. Past storage bays filled with crates marked in those same angular symbols.
The pull gets stronger. More desperate.
I push through a door that shouldn't open for me but does, sensors reading something in my biology that grants access, and then I'm standing at the entrance to what the ship's designation system probably calls the Arboretum.
My heart breaks.
It's not a garden. Gardens are living things, messy and wild and determined. This is a mausoleum for the idea of growth.
Grey soil fills raised beds along the walls, desiccated and sterile, all the minerals and none of the life. Recycled air hisses through vents, cold and flat and tasting of metal. Grow lights overhead flicker on ancient cycles, half of them dead, the rest producing wavelengths too narrow for anything complex to thrive.
Dead plants everywhere. Husks of what might have been vegetables once, dessicated vines clinging to trellises like skeletal hands, pots holding nothing but dust and failure.
Someone tried here. Someone put in effort and hope and hours of care. I can see it in the careful arrangement of the beds, in the hand-labeled markers still standing among the corpses, in the irrigation system that clearly once represented someone's best attempt at replicating natural cycles.
But this ship wasn't built for life. This ship is a weapon that travels through nothing, and nothing is exactly what grew here in the end.
I kneel without meaning to, knees hitting the deck plating beside the nearest bed with force that will leave bruises. My hands sink into the grey soil and it's cold, lifeless, every microscopic organism that should live in healthy earth long since suffocated by recycled atmosphere and isolation from any real sun.
"You tried," I whisper to the dead garden, to whoever planted these seeds in such spectacular defiance of reality. "You tried so hard."
