Somehow, on some level, she was beginning to recognise that she and the ship were not one and the same. That spoke against everything, but when he was here, it made sense.
He was not here now. She could feel him, but not talk to him. He had been called away on a matter of some urgency. He was an important man, with many responsibilities.
Captain David Corwin. She knew his name. Once she had known her own, but the light had come, and had grown stronger and stronger. There had been screams within the light, and some of them she had been able to identify. Some of them she had even been able to name.
But now all the screams were becoming one. The network was consolidating. Those newly brought into it were losing their identities, their names, their faces.
She still had hers. A little. She had a name. She knew at least that much. She even knew someone who knew it.
The screaming all stopped, and there was silence. Total and utter silence. She looked around, seeing nothing but darkness.
'Captain,' she said. 'Are you there?'
<No,> said a voice, a voice that came from nowhere and everywhere.
She knew that voice. It was the voice of God. He was talking to her, His voice echoing throughout the silence.
<Your time is done. You are no longer needed.>
She meant to ask something, perhaps what was going to happen to her, perhaps what her name was, but she never had the chance. The light returned, brighter and more powerful than before, and it scourged everything from her, memory, mind and soul.
She died, in a sense, never recalling that her name had once been Carolyn Sanderson. In another, more real sense, she would be alive forever, with only the dark and silent void to mask her own screams.
It was a ship only of the dead, a place where a man who had striven all his life for greatness had faced his end, screaming to the heavens in defiance, promising revenge, pleading for mercy. It was a ship where the Enemy had sent one of their darkest, oldest and most powerful minions to destroy someone they had only ever seen as a tool.
It was the place where Sonovar had died.
The ship had been left where it was, a ghost ship to give rise to myth and legend. Maybe, in decades to come, young warriors would search for it, seeking it out as wanderers sought the Holy Grail, the Sathra Stone, the lost worlds of the First Ones and other legends.
He knew of the legends that would come, that Sonovar was not truly dead, that he would return when the time was right. His creed, wrought of inferiority and near–insanity, would rise again, and others would follow in his footsteps, dreaming of the day when Sonovar the Great would return.
So be it. The Minbari now carried their own destiny. Let them dream of lost heroes. That was their place. Besides, in one respect, they would be right. Sonovar was not dead.
Somewhere, in a wall in one of the oldest space–faring vessels in the galaxy, was a globe, within which raged a spirit, cursing the denial of his chance at reincarnation.
In a thousand years, he would return. There always had to be a balance. Sonovar did not understand that now, but he would. There was enough time for both of them to learn.
For now, this was a ship only of the dead. Which was fine, for it was the dead that Sinoval, Primarch Majestus et Conclavus, had come to meet.
He found the chamber where the final battle had taken place, where he and Sonovar had fought the undead monster the Shadows had sent against him. Sonovar's body lay where the last breath had left it, slumped in the corner, the wounds from the Shadow Beast still terrifyingly visible.
'You had decided for yourself by the end, Sonovar,' Sinoval said softly. 'You knew what you were, and what more can any of us ask for?'
He said nothing more. It was not Sonovar he had come to see.
He sensed the new arrival long before he heard or saw or smelled him. Sinoval had trained his five senses as well as anyone, and his perception was acute. Lately, however, he had discovered a new sense one of life and death, one of many minds speaking and thinking as one. The Well of Souls was a part of him now, just as he was a part of them.
Then came the smell, the smell of death. He knew who it was to be then, and straightened, his hand brushing against Stormbringer, his darkly forged pike. A soft warmth greeted his touch, one that he could sense even through the fabric of his glove.
'Greetings, Primarch,' said the voice, one filled with age and understanding and great wisdom.
'Greetings, Forell,' he replied. 'Or would you prefer another name?'
Even without his new senses, he could tell that the thing before him was a dead body. He had been a warrior before he was a Soul Hunter, and he had been one of the best. Even a child could see that the wounds that marked Forell's body were fatal. Half of them would have been fatal. But still he moved, still he spoke, still a dark light shone within his eyes.
It was Sinoval's other senses that could detect the dark cloud hovering above the Minbari's body, sense the forces moving him, manipulating the husk for their own purposes.
For one, final message.
'Names are forgotten now,' he said. 'We are the nameless, the lost, the reviled. All we wanted to do was help them to the stars. How did you know to come here again?'
'I just knew.'
A faint, revolting smile touched Forell's mangled face. 'As we knew you would.'
'You have a message for me, yes?'
'Yes. One last message.
'For millennia we tried to create people, to change the younger races for the better, to mould them and shape them and make them better, make them better in every way there is. We wished to show them the stars.
'The being we tried to create is you. You, Primarch, are a force of pure chaos, a bringer of anarchy. Where you walk, buildings crumble, cities die. You bring change. You brought change to your people, to the Soul Hunters, to Cathedral. You are everything we wished the younger races to be.
'But now we are gone. We are lost and reviled. Our teachings will not be remembered. Our ways will be forgotten. They have won.... or so they think. Let them have their brief triumph. Let them have their single few moments of cold, sterile, passionless order.
'We have you.
'Destroy them all. For us. For yourself. It does not matter. They tried to kill you. They will try to destroy your people. They will try to destroy the whole galaxy, by making them things they are not. There can never be order, never be the uniformity they demand! And in demanding it, their discipline will go so far as to leave only death behind. Only the dead are ordered.'
'No,' Sinoval replied dryly. 'They aren't. Believe me. I know.'
Forell smiled again. 'You would. Well then, not even the dead are safe from them. You are the only hope now, not just for us, but for all that lives.
'Avenge us! Remember us! Help them all to the stars. Free them from order, before it kills them all.'
'A galaxy of order will destroy all that lives, yes,' Sinoval said softly. 'But so would a galaxy of only chaos. Did you ever realise that?'
'No.... but now we do. Such is the prerogative of hindsight. After all, why do you think we left?'
'You have told me nothing I did not already know, and everything you have asked of me, I would do already. Maybe you made me too well. Or maybe I just made myself.'
'Maybe. Well, our last message is delivered. Now we can rest.'
'Wait! There is one thing I wanted to know. One thing you can tell me.'
'Yes?'
'What is it like.... beyond the Rim?'
Forell smiled again, and in that one instant, everything changed. The hatred, the anger, the death....
