Snuck in among the blazing kaleidoscope of colors is a thin ribbon of golden light that threads the galaxy between Alced and a point somewhere still in the middle of the infinite depths of the sea. It is not a powerful light, nor a bright one. Even a talented and invested observer would struggle to look here and see anything other than the galaxy as it should be, as it always was: rippling, powerful, alive, and alone. It is no proof at all of the blazing strength a mortal defying Fate or the gods, though for that matter it barely counts as a manifestation of their will. 

It is thin and translucent. Where the solar winds blow by or chunks of rock cross through, it melts away into bits of ragged sparkles. Sometimes the trail is straight and decisive. It cuts through the sea with the confidence of a sword thrust or the stroke of a pen. Other times it is cautious and clever. It winds long and winding loops around obstacles and gracefully serpentines between chunks of asteroid and fragments of old discarded hulls as if it knew they were there all along. 

Just now, it is playful and capricious. It zips about in a corkscrew spiral and bends upwards into a series of loops for no other reason than because it can. The golden ribbon is speed. It is control. And more than that, it is Bella. Here and there the sparks break in such a way to prove that the pattern of her thread is not perfect. There are erratic jerks in her movement toward debris, toward stars, toward storms that would crush her to pieces and burn those pieces to ash in an instant. It would be simplicity itself to let those errant moods take her over. She would become the flaw, and be perfect. Her arc would carry her into a lethal obstacle, and she would disappear from the universe without pain. Everything she dreamed of for months on end, granted in a single instant that needed no effort or the slightest bit of will. All she needed to do was fall asleep.

But she corrects each mistake as it comes, as easily as she might swish her tail. She does not consider why she does this. It's simply natural to move. It is natural to swim through the sea and it is natural to move forward and it is natural to to seek a destination even when you do not know the place you are heading toward or what might be waiting for you there. Motion is the gift Apollo has given her. There had been a Bella who thought that being calm was the same as being still. But this Bella understands the serenity of motion. This is the secret that Apollo painted on her before he sent her on his secret paths. 

She banks. The void skiff is surprisingly simple to control; all she has to do is make sure she's got the controls gripped tight and from there it's as simple as flexing her wrists. But in the act of flexing her wrists, she remembers that she has them. She remembers the soreness. She remembers the burning of the acid in her muscles built up from weeks of perilous spaceflight where she hasn't been able to move her arms more than to briefly and unsatisfyingly stretch them for fear of becoming the kind of nothing she'd rejected while riding the wave. She remembers how cramped her feet are, and the numbness in her legs that tell her the vibrations of a sighing star have turned her into a useless paralytic lump. She can only tell the muscles in her calves still work because they're desperately squeezing together hard enough to force a grunt from her throat. It's the first sound she's made since she left.

Her spine is crawling with flaming ants, and the small of her back is a block of uncomfortable marble. Her hair and her dress are soaked with sweat, and her ears feel so limp she can't imagine they'll ever regain their proper perk again. Her fingers itch, which piled on top of everything else feels just as bad as dying. Voidskiffs weren't meant for the kind of journey she's putting hers through, and here in the middle of nothing she is proving why. 

But the work is not so bad. It's straightforward and surprisingly mindless, for all that it's uncomfortable. Keep her hands on the sticks that bend the sails. Sit up straight. And pray for her next decision to keep her alive, and the next one after that, and the next one after that, and the next one after that. There's no time to second-guess herself at this speed. There's no time to plan a course, and even with her Auspex no chance to see more than one in a dozen problems coming before they happen. It might think at those speeds, but she can't. There's no room to think up here. Her mind does not wander, neither to worry or to reminisce. In its way, void sailing is much the same as sewing a new dress out of ten thousand hand-crafted beads, and she thanked it for that in her heart.

Prayer is easy work. Prayer requires no song and no words from her. Prayer requires no sacrifice except the ones she's making with her body. Prayer is movement, just like freedom. If Apollo put her on this ship and sent her to die in space, he's certainly had his chances to finish her off. So she prays, with every flick of her wrists and every second she holds her arms forward in defiance of her aches. She prays with every twist and turn, and she prays with every action that carries her further from anything she knows. You put her here, Apollo. You shared your wisdom. Now bring her home. 

Her landing is not a comfortable one. The voidskiff isn't meant for landing, either. It doesn't seem to be made for much except helping Poseidon kill crazy idiots. When she touches down she immediately bounces off of the landing zone off the back of sheer momentum. Her muscles clench with every impact. Her bones rattle inside her body and send shocks of lightning up into her brain. She smells the acrid tang of something burning, but there's no time to figure out what it is. She wrenches the controls with every ounce of remaining strength in her ragged body. She snarls, because it's better than screaming, as her tiny ship skips across the length of a dock built for landing the kind of behemoth Odoacer would send here before slamming into the railing and tipping over onto its side.

"Ugh... fuck."

It takes her minutes, or maybe hours to pull herself out of the skiff. She's not sure; time's so much harder to count than she remembers it being. Her legs touch solid ground for the first time in centuries, and immediately betray her and turn to jelly before they dump her on the floor. Her blood rushes through her furiously and fills her skin with millions of sharp needles as it brings her back to life. 

She smiles, just before a wave of nausea burns her throat. She manages to cough up a bit of spit, but after that she rolls through endless cycles of dry heaves squeezing her lungs, squeezing her stomach, and wrenching her neck. But she smiled. Because she noticed as she looked that her skiff looked better after landing than the last one she'd found so very far from home.