‘No,’ said Mersadie. She heard the word in her mind and felt it come from her mouth. The presence behind her, the shadow in her mind, recoiled. ‘I think that his story ends somewhere else.’

And, slowly, with all the will and rage that gathered to her, and the voices of the dead shouting from memories, she turned around and looked behind her.

Blackness…

Stars…

Moon rising above bare trees…

Cold light caught in the water of a black pool. A shape like a man, fur and flayed skin, shadow and blood. The man in her shadow.

‘The end,’ she said. The thing snarled, its ragged shape looming to the sky. ‘And the death.’

The sword struck the daemon in its throat and punched out of its back. Yellow eyes went wide. Shadows collapsed.

She jerked back, dragging the blade free, turning. And the vision of cave and moonlit night blurred. Substance became translucent, and for a second her sphere of sight was not narrow, but broad and infinite, and she could see along all the paths to the fragments of Samus’ presence. She saw Rogal Dorn, blade locked with a thing of claws and flame; she saw the ships trying to dock with the Phalanx while coils of darkness gripped them.

Then the vision went and she was looking at Loken trying to rise from the floor. The chamber around them was whining as energy poured from reactors out into the ship. The ground they stood on was not a spit of rock but a gantry, the abyss the glowing light of the plasma junction.

There was a dead weight pulling her arm towards the deck. She looked down and saw that she still held Loken’s sword. She let go of it. The blade struck the deck with a clang. Loken’s eyes opened.

‘Loken,’ she said. He looked at her and there was suspicion and rage in his eyes. He was already halfway to his feet. Fresh blood scattered from tears in his armour. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. She could feel a burning presence building in the distance of her thoughts, rushing towards the present like a thunderstorm racing across a still plain.

‘It is you now,’ he said, his voice hovering on the edge of a question. She looked just as she always had, bloodied but still the same. But that, of course, did not mean anything.

She nodded.

‘It is me. The… the daemon is not here now, but it will be coming back. And this needs to be over before it does. If it cannot overwhelm the ship it will breach the reactors and burn it to nothing. It wants to make it a nest but if it cannot, it will make it a pyre.’

Loken was rising, his armour grinding, blood seeping from breaks and joints.

She stepped back, shaking her head. The skin across her back prickled with static.