Space.

The final frontier.

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Or, you know, thought Megiddo, something like that. She’d been less than impressed by her wonder the one time she’d been there, but then again the only point of comparison she had was Mistral. The Mercury knight’s wonder was huge, sprawling, and deadly. Megiddo was sure that she’d be more enthusiastic about her own wonder if it were something actually worth exploring, the way Mistral’s was - but her Wonder was compact, a tiny courtyard that she could walk the whole perimeter of in two minutes or less. There were spires beyond the walls, great gothic towers of some ancient city - but they were off-limits to her. The girl in her vision had barred the gate against her leaving.

The city was not her wonder. She knew from the sense of foreboding it had given her.

She went quietly, departing from her dorm room in the dead of night and arriving, equally unnoticed, under Saturn’s heavy, purple-gray skies. The towers, tall as ever, disappeared into the clouds - how far up did they go? What was in them? Had they been homes and businesses and when the Moon Kingdom fell, had its citizens fallen with it and been left in their little sky-high penthouses to rot forever, until their chalk-white bones melded with the carpet?

The back of her throat felt warm and wet at the thought, but Megiddo knew it was not her place to ponder. She circled the courtyard twice, looking for holes in the fence, although if pressed later, Megiddo wouldn’t have admitted that was her purpose. The city, after all, was not her wonder. It simply was. It was set dressing to the subject at hand, the courtyard and the gate and the well…

The well.

Megiddo approached the pit and peered over the brick siding. The well was deep. She could see a sliver of liquid at the bottom, ages and ages away. On her last (and only) visit, she’d drawn up the bucket and found it dry, playing lockbox to her signet ring. She ran her thumb over that now, conspicuously conscious of how it slotted into the second ring from Mistral. That one had been bought and paid for with blood, and she was a little bit jealous that she had not been present for more of its earning.

At the bottom of the well, she heard a wet plink.

Rila took hold of the rope in her white-gloved hands, and pulled up the bucket. It sloshed, the sounds of the water echoing against the well’s dark stones, and she reached into the well to grab it by the handle. The water was dark, glossy as hematite, and she poured it carefully into her pitcher without spilling a drop.

Raising the pitcher, she turned to face the courtyard. The worshipers stood in a tight circle, their shoulders and heads covered with lacy hoods.They were few in number - six, today. Yesterday there had been eight. There was talk that the water in her well had lost its magic, but Rila was sure that was not the case. The magic was strong as ever.

It was just that the visions had all turned dark.

She approached the first worshipper and poured dark water into the woman’s open mouth. Five more worshipers, and she repeated the rite five times. They were all silent for a long while after that, their eyes taking on that dark, far-away look that people got when they were having visions.

After a while, they got up and left.

Rila raised the pitcher to her own mouth, and she drank, and drank, and drank, until when she lowered the pitcher and looked around, she saw the city aflame around her.

All of her visions lately had been of destruction, she thought calmly. Soon, the worshippers would stop coming.

The knight touched the cameo at her throat and wondered: what shall I do then?

Megiddo pulled her fingers away from her throat. She could still feel moisture in her mouth, taste the mineral tang of the well water. Her pitcher was heavy in her other hand - full. It sloshed when she moved it. Megiddo didn’t recall filling it - but she must have. Perhaps… perhaps she had, when she’d been acting under Rila’s sway. (Rila, she thought. My name was Rila. I’m learning new things already.)

She raised the pitcher to her lips again and drank from it. It tasted like drowning - not that she knew what drowning tasted like - and the more she drank, the more thirsty she became. Megiddo drank until the pitcher was empty, and it was only when the last drop crossed her lips that she felt sated.

The towers around her began to crumble. The sky burned an angry, bloody red - but only for a moment, and then everything returned to how it had been, quiet and gray and still.

She realized that the pitcher in her hands had changed, becoming larger and more ornately decorated and studded with jewels.

In fact, all of her had changed.

Megiddo, newly forged as a knight, bit her lip. “If I’d known it was that simple,” she said, “I’d have done this ages ago.”