"It is a treasured thing of the Monjit clan," Uros said. "I wish you to carry it, Taisen of Kharsat, so that the Monjitari will not be forgotten, whatever comes for the rest of us."
Taisen studied the ring a long moment before taking it: genuine surprise crossing his face for the first time since Lyn had met him. She noted it and kept it, quietly, with the short list of cracks she'd found in a man who rarely let anything reach his face at all. "Thank you," he said. "I'll keep it somewhere it's owed."
Uros bowed, low and formal, and turned back to rejoin the others; the whole party filed out through the hatch without another word, the bay's lights dying behind them a moment later: Uros, Taisen guessed aloud, reinforcing whatever illusion he'd need to explain the encounter away to anyone watching from above.
Lyn turned the ring over once in Taisen's palm before he closed his fingers around it: pale, silvery metal, a cluster of small curved shapes at its center flanked by two larger ones, coiled and open-mouthed, straining upward as if they'd been captured mid-strike.
"That seems like it matters," she said. "You should wear it."
"I don't trust them not to matter for the wrong reasons," Taisen said, tucking it instead into his breast pocket, where she noticed, without saying so, that his hand lingered a moment longer than the gesture strictly required. "If a people can be made to betray Ashera's own memory to survive the Reza, they'd throw me to Malkor without a second thought, and I'd understand it completely if they did. I'll carry the ring. I won't pretend it makes me safe."
They limped the Arctic home by a longer, quieter route than the one that had brought them out, patched and short one shuttle bay's worth of confidence, until the ship's own systems had recovered enough to make the crossing to Arkania Prime without drawing attention they could no longer afford.
Taisen spent the transit doing what he always did with time he hadn't planned for: working. He reviewed Uros's testimony a dozen times over, cross-checked every detail against Vessyr's archive and Ashera's borrowed memory until the origins of the Falmeri sat as solid in his mind as anything he knew about his own two lives, and in the quiet hours between, when there was nothing left to cross-check, he let himself run down the rest of the ledger he still owed answers to.
Ness's raider fleet, still building itself in secret somewhere in Kharsat's outer belts, waiting on a war he hadn't yet decided how to authorize without breaking Simika's fragile peace. The Skyforge itself, silent now for months, exactly as silent as it had been the day he'd left it behind to chase a threat he hadn't known existed yet: he still didn't know if that silence meant patience or abandonment, and some nights that not-knowing kept him awake longer than Usyk's death did. Whoever had sent Lieutenant Masako to put a blade through Herman Wrath's ribs, and through Lyn's, all those years ago: a question two lifetimes old now, and no closer to an answer than the day he'd died asking it the first time. And Link, three systems away by now, sitting patiently with a corrupted data core and a promise Taisen had extracted from him in a Whitehall corridor, hunting whoever had scrubbed the Hermes's comm logs and cut an antenna wire by hand.
He set it aside the way he set aside everything he couldn't solve today (not resolved, just deferred, stacked somewhere with room for it later) and told himself, not entirely successfully, that a man could only carry so many open ledgers before one of them came due at the worst possible time.
They reached Arkania Prime three days later, the Arctic settling into a cautious high orbit while a shuttle went down to fetch the one passenger Taisen had specifically requested by name.
Queen Venemis had never set foot aboard a human warship before, and it showed in the careful, deliberate way she held herself crossing the bridge: a woman cataloguing every unfamiliar console and unreadable readout as though expecting one of them to bite. She had spent weeks now catching obscure, half-formed visions of some distant threat drawing closer, shapeless and unplaceable in the way Third Sight sometimes handed her the shadow of a thing without ever quite handing her the thing itself. She had not expected that threat to resolve, in the end, into a dark-skinned stranger from beyond the Chaos Region standing at attention beside his own command chair, bowing to her with a formality she hadn't been offered by an outsider in longer than she cared to remember.
"Greetings, Queen Venemis," Taisen said. "I am Commander Taisen of the UNS Arctic."
She studied him a long moment: this close, she decided, he read as far too young and far too foreign to have earned a rank like Commander among his own people, whatever their customs turned out to be. "Greetings to you as well, Commander," she said, and dipped into a small, practiced curtsy three feet from his chair, the cheek winglets that marked her as Falmeri fluttering once against her jaw. "You're a cautious one. How may I serve you?"
"We need guidance back through the Chaos Region to the Cell system," Taisen said. "My crew and I would like to go home."
Something flickered behind her expression: amusement, or its cousin, fear dressed carefully enough to pass for it. That system sat under heavy watch by Malkor's own ships; she knew it better than she'd ever admit to a stranger, and she weighed, in the space of a breath, whether warning him now would buy her anything worth the risk of explaining how she knew. It wouldn't. It would only raise the exact question she couldn't afford anyone asking.
"Very well," she said instead. "I will do this, for a friend of Ashera's memory."