Years had passed since his survival necessitated drinking whatever Rift trash wound up in his possession, but as he looked down at the glass vial in hand, he still felt no hesitance about drinking it. He couldn't remember the flavor from last time, but he remembered the dreams — strangely cognizant things, not quite like a memory but more like an experience he was having in someone else's body. That 'someone else' just happened to be the other boy who piloted this starseed, however many centuries ago.

Faustite's understanding of Velvet was limited, but as he dealt more often with old relics and battleaxes from worlds away, becoming more familiar with Velvet seemed like a tactical utility. Some of them, like the winged one, recognized something about Velvet in him. Better that he could leverage that.

So he would let Velvet have the chance to surprise him. Popping the top off the strange hourglass vial, Faustite knocked back the contents as irreverently as the dregs of someone else's drink. The memories came as soon as the liquid touched his tongue, depriving him of the chance to taste it.

These ones were scattered — disoriented. Like reaching into a frenetic, scattered part of his starseed that was nearing whatever disintegration or oblivion tailed every starseed on their situationally neverending journey. They came with no context, no explanation, and no indication of time.

But, for a moment, he was there: standing amidst a bustling city, the likes of which he had only seen in the video games that Lauri played. Sweeping buildings made of stone that stretched up toward the sky, overhung by some enormous cave mouth where pockets of waterfalls spilled down perpetually. Only Faustite was not wowed by the sleek architecture or the impossible geometry of the cave, for he was at once Velvet, and the boy had seen these lands far too many times for them to retain their novelty. He was waiting for someone — scanning faces for the recognition that he didn't find. Panning back and forth, then standing on the edge of some sculpture to ascertain a better view in a populace that was far taller than him.

One person, who looked no different from the rest to Faustite's — Eion's — untrained eye came up and joined him. They spoke, but their exchanges were fractured. The person who joined him — he couldn't recall their face. Only the shape of their lips. The rest may well have been a mosaic fractal.

What he heard wasn't the beginning of a conversation.

"And you think she's still here. She can't be. I told you."

"I know. But it doesn't make sense."

He looked away, and it felt like a sense of vertigo. The same land, the same city, the same sculpture. Someone so close to human, hewn from living water, the endless decorum of their jeweled skirts fanned out like waves whorling about their legs. It felt warm, hummed beneath Eion's palms and exposed thighs, but he felt almost melancholic around it.

He was looking at the sky. People pulsed frantically about as if chased by an inevitability. Someone called, and Eion's attention drifted toward the crowd that largely shifted to his left. Someone asked why he wasn't — something. The thought was gone. Was she asking about praying?

Back again. Tension hung in the air like ozone after a lightning strike. People's faces looked drawn and resigned, though he couldn't really see them. Again, just mouths — none smiling. He was on the other side of the statue this time, taking notes he didn't recognize but must have been long familiar. Faustite didn't recognize the language but he knew what it said.

Probably that bunch of rebels from our sister colony. They're going to rip this world apart.

I saw the sky light up that horrid, eerie blue. That's when I knew they awakened the old pantheon. It's only a matter of time now.

The storms haven't stopped since then. They flooded most of the Lower Planes.

I don't know what it was and I don't care. I'm getting the hell out of here.

"I'll tell you right now, I don't have the answers. We don't have the answers. We've extrapolated the origin from the trajectory of light and sent ships to investigate. All I can tell you is we haven't been able to make contact with our sister colony. It's as if they just vanished."

"It was near midnight when it happened, you know. That… Horrific blue glow ate up the entire sky. Took ages for it to fade. Hate to say it, but if your girl's up there? Those idiots probably blew themselves up and took her with them."

Faustite felt like he blinked and his old self was sitting in a pool of his clothes and dreadlocks, penning his thoughts into a well-preserved journal. All across the floor he witnessed the delicate, gilded bend of metals framing glass, and that glass afforded a glimpse into infinitely intricate mechanisms that ticked and turned and pistoned and shifted in the layers below. The walls were blank — the fishbowl-like structure only showed the endless expanse of Pluto's yellowed storm clouds and a view of some distant time pool on the ground below. They were floating, Faustite knew innately. They were always floating.

And Eion was always alone. It didn't seem to bother him half as much as the words that struggled to leave his pen.

Vanished in a flash of light — what an unsatisfactory bookend to someone's story. Unlikely to get paid again.

Thus did the last of such strange memories leave him, and thus was Faustite left with only consternation. Was that related to the Calamitous Hollow? He heard no such name in the fractured remains of memories that he just tapped. Some of the pieces fit, certainly — sudden loss of contact with some other planet, storms. But a blue glow? Did this serpent thing just ******** explode them with its electrical nonsense? Or was that the glow one could expect when a planet cracked under the pressure of teeth? Whatever it was, it didn't give him a damn shred of good news.

Was rather a waste of a vial, but there was some vindication in knowing that Velvet didn't know s**t after all.