He thought of Mars when he thought about being safe. Not of Kairatos as it was now, but as it had been, elegant and colorful, a pastoral oasis on highly developed mars, with dipping waves of golden grass.

He tried to let his thoughts drift to that when he was alone. Trying to recapture glimpses from the past he'd gotten in visits, and memories from the future, when he had eagerly shown Naer and Hver the first few stands of sturdy dry grass that had stubbornly emerged from the red earth after a thousand years.

It was a pleasant thought, but the images just didn't stay in his head. They drifted out of his fingers every time he heard a muffled scream of agony or rage. Every time his muscles twitched in fresh bright sparks of agony. He kept thinking the pain would sort of settle into a single background agony but every time it felt like it was about to, something twitched, or his weight shifted, and everything hurt again.

He thought of Hvergelmer, worried it was her voice, because the sounds weren't distinct enough to identify their origin. He thought of Titan, worried if he were alright, wondered if he knew they were here, and if he would be alive, or uncorrupted, to keep the promise to be there when Titan sought purification.

He thought of the apartment he'd shared with Zia and trying to cook around Dodge and the cats, waiting for he to get home, which she wouldn't ever again. He thought about Themiscara, fierce Themiscara, and kind, who had put up with him crashing on her couch for far longer than he'd been planning to when he called her up in a panic.

He thought about the marks Schorl had etched into his skin. They hurt like fire, and he felt like a constellation, with every strange star being a particularly bright point of pain. Maybe he should say a nebula, since new little pains seemed to awake all the time.

It was exhausting, all of this. Minimal sleep, barely enough care to stay alive.

The marks were meant to humiliate, deliberate marks that couldn't be written off as part of battle, and in such intimate places. She meant to mark him like she owned him, a dog tag he couldn't remove. Not easily.

Someday, if he made it out of this, they'd be a mark instead of what he had overcome. A great evil he would remove from this earth... one way or another. If he had to find a way to rip out her damn starseed and grind it under his boot himself he'd do it, but somehow he'd find a way to stop her from doing this again.

If he lived.

No. Not if. He was going to live. He was going to. Even if he didn't know how he was going to accomplish this herculean feat. He refused to live or die on her whim. If Titan was right about the length of their life, he refused to accept that it would end here, in this place.

It just wouldn't happen.


...It wasn't allowed to.