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CHAPTER 32

GHAR

The shrine station is too quiet for a place built around grief.

It hangs in the recovery vessel’s lower observation ring, a small oval chamber tucked between medical storage and the civilian contemplation deck, as if the League designers believed sorrow could be filed between supplies and scenery. The air is warm, faintly dry, and threaded with incense from three different traditions trying not to offend one another. Vakutan cedar-smoke curls from a recessed burner beneath the central stone, but the scent has been diluted by Pi’Rell meditation oils and the sterile bite of recycled ship air. The floor vibrates gently under my bare feet as the vessel’s engines maintain distance from the debris field where Nareth-Kul once turned in darkness, and beyond the viewport, fragments of the dead world drift like black bones through cold starlight.

The shrine itself is simple.

A slab of dark volcanic stone rests on a low plinth, its surface carved with the old Vakutan spiral of endurance. Not Precursor geometry. Not First One contamination. Not archive notation older than physics. Only my people’s mark, shaped by hands that wanted pain to become something bearable. Along the stone’s edge, small copper bowls hold ash, water, and powdered red mineral from some Vakutan colony I do not know. A rack of prayer blades stands to the left, ceremonial and dull-edged, each one meant to represent a burden surrendered to purpose.

I used to feel something when I entered chambers like this.

Not comfort. Vakutan worship is rarely comfortable. Comfort is not the point. The old rituals were a discipline of memory, a way of standing before the dead without demanding that grief soften itself for convenience. The smoke would enter my lungs, and the carved spiral would hold my gaze, and some part of me would settle beneath the familiar weight of sacred order. Pain belonged somewhere. Sacrifice belonged somewhere. Love, loyalty, injury, loss, longing, rage, restraint, all of it fit into the Grand Design if a warrior had the strength to stand still long enough to feel the shape.

Now I stand before the stone and feel only stone.

That should terrify me.

For a while, it does.

I close my eyes, inhale the cedar-smoke, and wait for the old answering pressure in my chest. Nothing arrives. No ancestral presence. No solemn thread drawing my wound into a larger pattern. No sense that the men I could not save became part of anything wiser than memory. The ritual blade in my hand is only metal warmed by my palm. The spiral is only a mark cut by tools. The ash is ash.

I open my eyes.

“Well,” I say quietly, “that is inconvenient.”

The door behind me sighs open.

I do not turn, because I know the rhythm of Anita’s steps now. Light, quick, not quite careful enough to hide exhaustion, and currently softened by medical slippers because the medics confiscated her field boots after discovering three pieces of ruin glass embedded in the soles. The door closes behind her, and the cedar-smoke shifts as she enters.

“I can leave,” she says.

“No.”

She stops several paces away. “You sure? Because I am not trying to accidentally wander into a private religious crisis wearing socks with traction dots.”

I look down at the ceremonial blade. “The crisis is not private if it has occupied most of my personality.”

“That is a fair point, but I was trying to be classy.”

“You succeeded briefly.”

“Rude.”

I hear the smile in her voice, but she does not come closer immediately. That restraint matters. Anita’s instinct is to rush toward anything painful with questions in one hand and a knife in the other, yet she holds back because she knows this is not a locked archive. It is a wound.

The knowledge loosens something in me.

“You may come in,” I say.

“Good, because I already did.”

“I noticed.”

She moves beside me, leaving enough space that her shoulder does not touch my arm. The viewport casts silver light across her face, softening the exhaustion beneath her eyes and catching in the loose curls she has not bothered pinning properly since the med-bay. A thin healing strip marks the cut along her cheek. She wears a borrowed shipboard tunic too large for her, sleeves rolled twice at the wrists. The shard case is not with her. For once, she is only Anita.

No archive.