Avalon is gone. Night after night, Astrophyllite sits on rooftops with her ouija board held neatly across her lap and she waits and she listens and she feels and Avalon’s overripe apple cold steel moist earth signature never appears. Which, of course it doesn’t. Avalon has gone to England. Astrophyllite knows this, like she knows there are eight planets in the solar system and there is water at the bottom of the ocean and clouds are made of water vapor. She knows because she has been told, and though she holds out scant hope that she may have been told wrong…

She has almost certainly been told right.

Natron is a good mentor, she thinks, He is experienced and he is wise and he believes in aliens but he is not Avalon. Avalon showed Astrophyllite kindness in a way no one else ever had, and like a neglected dog, she is forever loyal to her first taste of compassion. She wants to be a general like Avalon, smart and strong and self-assured.

You will never be smart, the lieutenant thinks, and she believes it.

Rising, she turns to the east, and she thinks she can smell the sea. On some nights, you can, when the wind is right. She feels the world moving around her: senshi in their too-sweet light, officers in their comforting darkness, resonating on the same wavelength as she does, knights shining with bright nobility, everything it its place, everything spinning delicately like a tiny clockwork town.

She thinks she sees a ripple across the moon.

The wind kicks up. It is strong, and sweet, and it smells like apples and steel and dirt and home and her. Astrophyllite stares at the horizon, eyes blown wide. Avalon, she thinks.

“Avalon!” she cries, and she leaps from the rooftop with wild abandon. She is here somewhere, she thinks, if she looks hard enough. Her dark queen has come back and everything will be okay--

The next rooftop rises up fast. Too fast, and she hits hard, too hard, and she forces herself to her feet with every lesson she learned under Bischofite’s cruel tutelage: you must rise and rise again. You must fight or your existence will be found invalid. And no one in life is here to be your friend.

She hopes that Avalon considers her her friend, and everything is apple blossoms and pain and steel and sweet, sweet sorrow. Astrophyllite looks around. She calls out again: “Avalon?” She must be here. If she is not here then where is she? England had might as well be the moon, had might as well be fairyland. Astrophyllite has never seen it and if she has never seen it then it is just a word--

The wind dies down. Astrophyllite looks around, and if she smells apples then it is just the aftertaste of them, sweet juice at the back of her throat. All around her, the world turns, everyone moving along their tightly-manicured path, and none of them are Avalon. There are no more ripples across the moon, no more blasts of wind from far away, no more tidal-waves of strange power to leave her reeling in her own smallness.

Far away, there is the sea.