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It was a common enough occurrence for Negaverse agents to come to Hvergelmir's bench. She'd intended it that way -- she made herself available so that she could be easily and safely approached. It was rarer, though, for an agent to arrive at her bench before she did.

The aura, though, was bleak and radiant: a General was waiting for her.

Hvergelmir picked up her step -- perhaps it was Titan, come for a visit again at last. It had been too long, and she'd been worried. She'd though perhaps he'd given up thoughts of escape, perhaps he'd --

It was not Titan's unmistakable silhouette that waited for Hvergelmir on her bench. Not tonight.

Hvergelmir drew up short, her heart rising to a frantic crescendo's beat. Her feet might as well have been nailed to the floor again for all that she could move; her tongue might as well have been carved out for all that she could speak.

The man seated atop her bench, casual as anything, wore a hooded cloak and an air of ever-present danger. Labyrinthite.

Everything about him was more threatening here, in this place. Here, where he'd ruined her. Here, where he'd stolen her life and sent her into hiding, maimed and mute. Hvergelmir could still remember it -- a trespass that had never happened, but that she'd dreamed of until it was written clearly in her recollection.

Hvergelmir had never turned from her path. Whatever the future held, she was determined not to give up the work that had meant so much to her, work that she believed in. She'd thought maybe Labyrinthite had. Maybe just a little. Maybe just enough to spare her.

Had she been wrong?

Wary steps drew her forward. Despite her best efforts, Hvergelmir was always a little bit tense when Labyrinthite was around. That pleased him, she knew -- or, at least, he always seemed to want her to think so -- but she'd always tried to shrug that off, not to encourage him to think of her as an enemy. She did her best to take his posturing in stride.

Not today. Today she was pale and wide-eyed, and she drew her cloak around herself, but it did nothing to ward off her shivering. She wanted to run, to hide -- anything to get away from the memory of blood and pain and metal through flesh.

But that wasn't who she was. And if she wouldn't hold onto hope for the likes of Labyrinthite, then who would?

She didn't run. She stepped forward, until she'd joined the General under the street lamp that illuminated her bench.

"Labyrinthite," she greeted him, her voice barely pitched above a whisper. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Hvergelmir sighed. The way he had taken to calling her Neph wore at her quickly, reminding her of the legacy her former self had left behind. The person she'd been. The standards she'd set.

She sat -- it was her bench, after all, her home turf -- but Hvergelmir remained poised at the edge of her seat, spine straight and posture cautious.

"The Nephthys you remember would've laughed and dared you to do it," she answered his suggestion, eyes averted. "Crims or Labyrinthite, Order or Chaos, it wouldn't have cowed her. Whatever else she was, she wasn't timid."

Her gaze drifted back to his hands when they shifted: she watched as Labyrinthite reached inside his cloak for something, and then produced a small object. It was some sort of glass container, like a small vial, stoppered -- it looked old, but artfully crafted. The webbed cracks that covered its surface suggested an elegant design, some degree of value.

He wanted answers, and they probably had something to do with this. And Hvergelmir . . .

She could run at any time, she reminded herself. In a moment, with the smallest movement and a single thought, she and Eikthyrnir could disappear somewhere safe, where Labyrinthite couldn't follow her. Couldn't hurt her. She was afraid because she'd always been afraid of him, she reminded herself. Not because she was helpless.

Nephthys had a steel spine for social interactions. That had been her strength, as an ambassador and a negotiator: words were her purview and couldn't terrify her. She always had a plan, a clever answer. Hvergelmir had neither her skill nor her experience -- but she did her best, all the same, to improve.

"Do you think you have to intimidate me to get me to answer your questions?" she asked. "Or do you just do it because you enjoy it?"

Hvergelmir shook her head. "I don't have the option of boldness or the luxury of ego, in my position. I don't need you to think that I've given up my power to hurt you because of some belief that I have nothing to fear from you. I'd rather you understand that I'm afraid of you, and I keep doing all of this anyway."

Nephthys had rarely had to prove herself peaceful. Her challenge, more often, was to prove herself useful, or valuable, or formidable -- and those were things she usually knew to expect before she went into a situation. It was the way Auryn had trained her on Dionysia, and how she'd always conducted her business as a knight: based on the simple precept that forewarned was fore-armed. Given the chance, she never went into a situation without heavy study and preparation, and she knew the value and standing of her resources at all times. It served her well to be disarmingly confident.

Hvergelmir's mission in this lifetime was different -- and it served her better to remain humble. A show of arrogance was more likely to be an invitation to the Negaverse to tear her down for hubris, just to teach her her place.

She accepted the glass vial from Labyrinthite when he offered it to her, handling it carefully for fear of breaking it. It didn't seem dangerous -- just an empty glass bottle -- but one never knew.

She shook her head. "I know you think it's funny to see me squirm. I know you enjoy what Metallia gave you, and you don't want to stop." Hvergelmir sighed. "That's not why I asked. I asked because I wanted to know how you see me -- that's all. It's not a question you have to answer."

There were no questions Negaverse agents had to answer, with her. Hvergelmir had always done things this way: she asked questions, and she was grateful for the answers she was given. She lived with some questions going avoided or ignored. She rarely pressed an issue, because that rarely accomplished anything. A slow strategy, but nothing more aggressive was likely to hold up in the long run. She always reminded herself that she was, first and foremost, here to help, not to be helped.

"There are some things I won't give you, yes," she answered his last question, letting it sit in the air between them. "My soul. My freedom. Secrets that aren't mine to tell." She considered the vial in her hands, and what it might be for. Is that why you're here with questions now? she wondered. To test me as an informant? To see whether what I have to give you is worth more than what you can take from me? Or is it just that there's no one else you can trust to help you? "But ask first -- and I'll tell you if I can give you what you seek."

"My opinion changes upon every meeting. The way I see it, you are the shifting shroud in which my hand can't part."

It wouldn't be correct to say that Labyrinthite's words sat like ice in her heart, or like knives. Oh, sometimes they did -- sometimes he could lay her pain bare and scour it to its edges with some small word or mere reminder. But this time, what he said was less like pain and more like a burden -- like a rock, heavy in her arms or between her shoulderblades, pressing her downward, downward, downward. It was not a weight to crush her heart into pieces, but the kind to drown her heart at sea -- because the burden his words placed upon her was not the quick stab of pain but the slow agony of grief, of distance, of longing. What a thing it was, to be reminded of the distance between them even while sitting so close: to know that however often this dance circled them around each other, they were forever out of each other's reach, indefinable and elusive.

To him, she was a cipher. To her, he was a ghost.

But shifting shroud or no, Labyrinthite was right about one thing: he always let her live. He held some attachment to her after all -- and whether that came from Labyrinthite, who might see her as an amusing toy to play with, or from Crims, somewhere deep down, who had known her as a friend and a lover . . . she preferred not to speculate. There was only pain down that path.

She considered the vial instead. "I've never seen its like before," she acknowledged. But if it bore your sigil, it was meant for you. Perhaps something you left behind for yourself, long ago, in case you ever needed it. You had enemies enough, back then -- a cache with something like this, some potion to bring back stolen memories . . . that wouldn't be beyond you. You weren't the sort of person to be easily caught flat-footed."

Hvergelmir smiled at something that seemed far away: Crims laughing, or smiling, or cheekily tapping the side of his nose in some telegraphed secret -- things she'd seen in a dozen little memories at her Wonder. The flickering lightheartedness of a man who wedged his gaiety between danger and peril in the way that all the fictional pirates were known for. He had always been proof that a life on the run could still be a life well and wildly lived -- and she had loved him for that, as kin to her own wandering soul.

"You don't have to become Crims again," she said, her smile fading as she looked back at Labyrinthite. "But you don't have to hate him, either. If you knew him better, maybe you wouldn't. He wasn't like most knights, you know."

A place void of light.

Hvergelmir filed this information away alongside the rest. There were plenty enough places in this world, or off of it, where the light didn't reach. Deep underground, or in complex fissures in rocks, or beneath giant glaciers. The depths of the ocean. The shadows of Saturn's rings on her surface. Moons around far-off worlds that stayed hidden behind their planets, forever eclipsed.

Metallia's Dark Kingdom. The Dark Mirror Court's strange territory. The black holes that were said to be at the heart of every galaxy, where light was pulled in and crushed out of existence.

Darkness might persist anywhere. But Hvergelmir imagined, wherever Labyrinthite had found his strange golden vial, it was somewhere connected to their powered lives. And his assertion that it had been a room festooned in the colors of the Cosmos knights -- well, that settled it. It was something to do with knighthood, something to do with the past.

"Many places that now lay in darkness once knew light," she said. Her mind went to the Code piece that had been recovered from the Rift, tainted by Chaos but still drawn to itself, its knights, its purpose. They had every reason to believe they'd cleansed it of that. "Not all things dressed in shadow forget what they once came from. Some things persist against all odds, I suppose."

Like their connection -- a bond between them that had held surprisingly stable after so much time and so much change. They were older, more set in their roles -- and yet, still the tightrope between them held taut without breaking. Some things were sturdier than they looked. Sometimes the most fragile of glass could weather a hurricane without breaking, against all logic.

"I don't know the substance," she said. "Or where it comes from. But if it was familiar to a Cosmos knight at some point, perhaps Nephthys did. She might have written about it, or hidden away some of her own somewhere. Or maybe lots of knights kept it. I can't make any promises, but . . . if you truly want to know more -- I'll look."

It wasn't hard to guess why. Hvergelmir had made no secret of her bias in this regard -- Labyrinthite deserved to be able to know Crims as he'd once been -- and beyond that, it remained a matter of personal principle. The knight of the Cosmos didn't believe it was possible to win this war through ignorance; that was Metallia's tactic. She'd always believed that with more knowledge, more of Metallia's stolen soldiers would choose to throw off her yoke.

If Hvergelmir couldn't save Labyrinthite -- perhaps Tarren still could.

She didn't back away when the General shifted his position from the back of the bench to the seat of it, drawing closer. She smiled, instead, without quite realizing that she'd become slightly less nervous over the course of their conversation. More fluent. More fluid. If Labyrinthite had possessed more memory of his past self, he might have noticed the subtle shifts in her posture and the faintest relaxing of her shoulders -- the softest echoes of Nephthys at the edges of her smile or in the way she idly twirled the vial between her fingers. But as it was -- without context and unobserved -- there was no one to mark the subtle resemblance to her former self that Hvergelmir slipped into when telling Labyrinthite about his former self.

"When I met Crims of Saturn the first time, we were both still fairly young. Not teenagers -- I'd been a knight for a good few years by that point -- but old enough to be stubborn not like kids are, but in the way that only grown adults can really be. Pride, I suppose -- we were both proud sorts of people, in our way, and certain of ourselves. The knight Crims had abandoned his post, away without leave -- and I was given the mission of finding him and bringing him home. This would've been considered the, ah, the softer option than letting the knights of Mars take the job."

Hvergelmir searched Labyrinthite's eyes for any sign of memory, any spark. How much of this did he know? Anything? Nothing?

"Is any of this familiar to you?"

The mark on Hvergelmir's shoulder -- the sign of her oath -- was an odd thing, and even she marveled at it on occasion. To his touch, Labyrinthite might find it just slightly warmer than the rest of her skin -- and it reacted visibly to contact in a way that no normal tattoo did. It always had a glitter to it, tending to sparkle under any lighting; but although it held its shape when touched, the shimmer of it seemed to move beneath her skin like silt, like a jar full of water and glitter that had just been shaken.

"Yes," she smiled, and the enthusiasm of it bubbled up through her voice, resonant. "That was me. You do remember."

She remembered too -- or at least most of it. Even now, after all the time she'd spent at her Wonder, cleaning the place or weaving at her loom, it felt like there were whole pieces of her previous life that still eluded her. There had to be more memories still to be uncovered, and she'd tried . . . but for all her tricks and strategies to strengthen and access the human memory, some things remained out of reach and impossible to draw to her shores. She hadn't found the right tethers yet.

But this . . . she knew this.

"You weren't an easy man to find. You wouldn't have been much of a pirate if you were. It took me weeks of research to track down leads I could follow, which was unusual for me even at the time. I had pretty extensive resources. But I set myself up for a time at one of the few ports of call you were rumored to periodically frequent with your crew and waited until finally you made berth. Then I convinced you to fly me through a particularly dangerous part of space in exchange for a particularly large bag of money. And you agreed because you wanted to know what I was up to." She looked askance, amused. "Well, that and the large bag of money."

'But you were the strongest memory and pull.'

Hvergelmir would be lying if she said she didn't take some satisfaction in that. Whatever nightmares Labyrinthite had caused her, Crims had been an important part of her previous life; it validated her remembered feelings to know that she remained an important part of his, too. And then, there was this mysterious vial, with no certainty of its exact intent or function. Did it simply unlock memories, and were they simply at random? If so, it seemed an odd happenstance for his clearest memory to have been such a significant, impactful one. And if not, what exactly caused some memories to bubble to the surface, and not others?

Was it simply that Labyrinthite had a strong connection to Hvergelmir in this lifetime, and that made memories of her seem relevant?

Or was it something else? Was it Tarren himself, buried at the deepest depths of Labyrinthite's heart, trying to use this opportunity to cast out some kind of lifeline in hopes that Nephthys would find it and catch hold, would somehow use it to coax out the parts of Labyrinthite that still were and always would be Crims?

She had no way of knowing. Not on so little evidence.

But she supposed it wouldn't alter her approach in this case, regardless.

"The shadow you cast is very long and very red, now," she answered his question, reaching out a hand to study the tattered hem of his cloak. She always expected to find it blood-spattered, the dark color of it the only thing to hide his misdeeds. "You dare people to find you. When you were Crims, you were bold and elusive, one step ahead. Now it's more like . . . " She considered this. "Even when you want to enjoy the chase, you ache too much for the confrontation. You seem . . . restless, in a different way. Not lost, so much as," she shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. Consumed. Even if it weren't easier to find someone in one single city than in an entire galaxy -- you'd still be you."

Hvergelmir wondered who else Labyrinthite had dreamt of. Certainly Crims had had other connections, other friends and lovers -- some whose closeness to him was more known to her than others, including his extended relationships to some of his Saturnine brethren -- but though Nephthys had considered herself a gatherer and stockpiler of information, cut from the same iridescent cloth as her mentor, she'd afforded her friends the respect of not prying deeply into the parts of their lives they didn't want to share with her. Personal matters were often far too personal, after all. This other person in his dreams could've easily been anyone.

"I told you my secrets," she said. "Eventually. After I'd already learned yours -- and what kind of person you were." Her gaze strayed down to her own arm for a moment -- but not her left arm with her oath-mark. The other one, bare and unremarkable. She didn't say why. "I thought you were pursuing a good cause. So I explained to you that I'd been sent to bring you in, but that I'd changed my mind. That was the first secret I shared with you. And from that point on, I tried to help you wherever I could."