[i]"All is hushed / all is hushed / for the song of Orpheus..."[/i]
- Ashes Ohvan, "[i]Fragment for the Underworld.[/i]"

***

A shiver runs through Redana, her skin pricking as a silence fills her up. She embraces that silence, the one hiding behind ordinary silences, and lets go of the grips on the controls. She leans forward and feels the shiver on the back of her neck as she watches the slow eddies of fragmented, twisted debris. [i]Flotsam and jetsam.[/i] She never remembers which is which, but she loved saying those words while she read to her purring bedmate, a better solace at night than any stuffed lion. [i]Flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore of Cloudcuckooland, and with them came November, missing her shoe and her way...[/i]

The colors seep inside her. The impossible violet of the gun barrels, against the mottled slate of void-scarred adamantium. The cold blue and indigo of the... oh, what's the scientific name? The whale trails. Poseidon's paints. The sapphire crystals that drift by, each one glinting where the light of distant stars catches them. The silence grows to fill every part of her, and her eyes water with the force of it. She stares. Every scene, every detail, needs to be etched down inside of her. This is what is wordlessly demanded of her by something so, so much vaster and more meaningful than her. So what if she's a hero? Some things are much, much bigger than heroes. This is less than a fraction of a percent of the wonders that the universe holds, and what is she in comparison to [i]this?[/i]

How can something be so meaningful without having a meaning? How can something be so important without being made? How can she be expected to go back to Tellus and rule over cramped tenement buildings and starving servitors in alleyways and issue permits for acceptable genetic modifications that do not dilute the essence of humanity when [i]this[/i] would go unbeheld? How could Mother limit humanity to subculture wars and silly shirts when...

She's crying, now, soundlessly. Her elbows are pressed up against the glass, and her eyes are wide, but not wide enough. They need to see. They need to see [i]everything[/i]. She needs to be able to rise to the implicit challenge, the command, the roaring need for this to be acknowledged. It is alive, the whole and totality of it, a living thing made up of unliving things, a [i]genius loci[/i], and her perception of it is what causes it to stir in its sleep. It was always waiting for her to be here, in this moment, shivering and crying because it is beautiful and alone and nobody was here to see it, and if she goes back, then this will still be here, forever, unseen. And that cannot be so. No, it [i]should[/i] not be so.

By the time the Plover shakes with the impact of one of the vast iron-bound chests of plunder and tribute, gathered by violence and tossed free by violence, Redana has stopped crying. She's wiped her eyes and sat back in her seat and taken up the grips with trembling fingers, still overwhelmed by seeing the [i]genius loci[/i], but able to activate the thrusters. Sputtering, shaking, the Plover course corrects ever so slightly; it would be a waste to fly all the way into the [i]Vespine[/i]'s wound, carved into its helm, when she will need delicate handling inside its vast hallways. Each passage she floats down is shaped like a hexagon, with broken mirror tiles on every side; in its heyday, it must have looked like a glimpse of infinity.

She drifts lazily into the hangar, and sets the Plover down carefully as close as she dares. Pop the plug's hatch; pull the helmet out from under the seat and pull it over her head; smooth down the seals built into her clothing that keep the chill out. And then she swings the hatch open and steps out into that abandoned cathedral, silent save for the almost imperceptible rumble of the still-beating heart. She crosses herself in a silent measure of thanks to Hermes, and then takes the plug in both hands and begins the march to the port.