"Praetor."

She speaks the word with reverence. Her breath imbues it with power. An almost nostalgic warmth gives it kindness. The sharpness of the final syllable fills the title with lethal precision. Here is a woman who will not miss. Here is a woman who [i]cannot[/i] miss, because her spear has already struck true before she has even thrown it. Here is a friend, a confidant, and the keeper of what was lost. 

If Mosaic's voice has any kind of power, then a Praetor should stand above a Princess. Even an Empress would hitch a breath at the mention of the name. While kings and petty nobles are locked in useless dreaming and far off gazing at the horizon that they reach for with greedy hands before their eyes have even comprehended the wonders they seek to control, a Praetor will have defended everything already worth loving. The weak made whole and the strong cut down whenever their strength is misapplied. Where the roaming judge walks, justice blossoms in her wake.

And what could be more injust than this endless dream of nothing? This cycle of misery and the wheel that lifts all-powerful kings over their peers only to keep on spinning and crush them again beneath the ego of the next comer to the scene? This infinite plain of misery and squalor that looks upon a stagnant, sterile world and brags, "Ah! I have conquered death itself!"

"Praetor," she says the word again with even greater respect and strength, "When you throw..."

They lock eyes, if only for a moment. Jil's eyes are shining daggers in the dark. Mosaic's are like her name: a patchwork of uneven pieces that shine with a beauty called determination. They draw strength from one another, and this is how it should be. What they mean to do would be impossible without a bond like this. A bond earned on the back of journeys either of them at best only half remembers, but the sword in Gemini's hands glitters in approval. This is enough, it says. This is love beyond love. Maybe someday a scholar will give it a word less tainted by association, but today they make do with their limited understanding. It, too, is enough. 

"Remember what you're aiming for."

And she leaps. Mosaic cuts a graceful arc through the storm as she leaps off of her perch and leaves the safety of the ship for the sake of the ship itself. The wind billows inside of the longer portions of her suit. Her claws cut through raindrops and spark with power that lightning refuses to strike. She lands on the sea, but it suffers her to walk across its surface. Bits of flotsam and shattered vessels that dreamed as deeply as hers but less successfully are her silver road. She flies across them in singles bounds, and her feet barely touch against a plank, a barrel, a rotting scrap of sail before she's skyward again and heading ever farther away from comfort. 

It is a Princess' job to lead the way. It is her power to buy time for the miracle to happen, and her place to trust that it will. All she needs to do is survive. She is one tiny speck in a storm, standing against the might of a hundred devoured planets. The Leviathan could swallow her whole and not even notice. 

And yet.

(Keep Them Busy (Alone, Briefly, Against the World): [b]9[/b])