[h2]Vitiafa of Endiohon[/h2]

[hr]

From the window in the station, Vitiafa stared down at the surface of Eden and felt the enormous sorrow tightly knot itself in her chest. A year ago, Eden was lit by a well ordered network of cities and towns forming an almost geometric web of civilization across the planets surface. It was a long built and hard fought prosperity that was now being wiped clean by the Metacer below. The darkness greeting her, interspersed by out of control fires, brought her localized conception of the ongoing apocalypse into the global scale with all the weight and tragedy it deserved.

"What unknown hubris of ours wrought this fate?" Vitiafa vocally mused before wiping the sweat from her face with a cloth. Was it some hidden sin by the central government that brought this curse on the Edenites? Was it arrogance regarding security due to a relative and splendid isolation? With a sigh, she decided these would be thoughts for later.

As she turned away from the window, she eyed the arrangement of busts behind the empty podium. They stood out in the otherwise spartan setting of the station's kiellar temple, most anything of artistic or aesthetic value would have been taken or built to a more permanent location on Eden or out to one of the colonies. She read a stern disappointment in the Patriarch's dour look, while the Mother seemed to look back with a sorrowful reassurance. The Twins seemed to match the circumstances around them with a grim determination as many a fighter most assuredly did over the past few weeks. The Traveler's confidence was still etched into the ceramic. He would still move on, as he had so many times in so many odysseys.

"Our fate shall mirror that of our Terran ancestors, so guide us on this exodus," she added before grabbing her luggage and making her way to the door out of the small temple. She paused just before crossing the threshold, and twisted one of the rings off her finger. She dropped it in the offering bowl with a satisfying clank. 

"ESS 3822-01," she vocally confirmed with herself, "our last ship out."

[hr]

Vitiafa was uncomfortably sticky with sweat by the time she arrived at The Drink, and was scowling quite intensely. After placing her luggage next to an open seat with what care she could muster, she took one of the increasingly few open stools. She flagged the bartender with a wave of her hand. "Wine, just a glass please," she placed her card on the bar. "And it should be chilled, ideally.