In the pit below, Tank has won control of the music box, fiddling with color and temperature, squaring waves and pushing envelopes. The music turns deep and throaty, edged with sinister intention. Sunyata Diamond is a figure of legend across the Empire, in the vague way one becomes a legend through headlines and two-minute blurbs, all nuance and context stripped away. A few bare-bones lines of verb, object, and consequence, the spaces in between subsequently filled by the febrile human imagination and its propensity for tale-telling. An accidental collision becomes a herald of fate, a strangely shaped birthmark a harbinger of doom. Misery first knew of Diamond as a beacon of great brilliance, one of the youngest in Faithful history to captain a destroyer. The reams of holos and picture waves of that ceremony, the woman in her twenties with her crisp uniform and shorn hair and fierce expression. A few months of silence, and then she’s in the news again: as a victor, a survivor, of a vicious attack by the Heretics. A creature named Esse Temple had commandeered her loathsome fleet and attacked Diamond’s ship during a routine patrol. The stories about this Esse Temple were wild too: a Heretic who had inhaled the nullvoid whole, who could turn her body to stone, who could turn herself the size of a mountain, an asteroid, a sun, who had obliterated a deep space station with one blow from her godlike fist.

What Misery knows concretely, for sure, the part that isn’t made up, is this: “You fought a Heretic fleet that attacked you. There were ships that we’d never seen before. Somehow you survived and defeated them. It was a miracle, you were a hero. Who knows what would have happened if you didn’t stop them. That patrol was in a straight line to the Capital itself. We guessed that was the fleet’s final destination. It was a clear violation of the terms of the Truce of Logan. Unprecedented and unprovoked. The incident nearly destroyed the truce.”

“I see.” Diamond swallows the rest of the cremoline and puts the canister on the floor. “So that’s what everyone believes.”

“Is it not what happened?”

Diamond’s gaze seeks something else parsecs away. “It’s…” A long exhale. “It’s close to the truth, but it’s not all that happened.”

Misery says nothing, just tilts her head to show she’s listening.