Archive of Our Own

The Lotus sang to herself. 

Drifter didn’t mind her singing in his shower. He himself whistled scraps of Luscinia’s operatic songs. But this was a new habit. He wasn’t so used to it that the soft, repetitive notes faded into the background noise of the Orbiter.

Like all spaceships, the Orbiter spared little in the way of personal space. It was designed as a mobile command unit for an Orokin Executor, complete with a bay window for admiring the rings of Saturn and a wall aquarium stocked with jewel-like, many-finned Seonn fish from Duviri. Its builders never planned for two teacups in a tiny sink, two armchairs crammed next to a double bed, or sharing a single foggy bathroom mirror.

Hot water was in short supply. The Lotus did not usually linger at her task. The Sentient side of her nature, Natah-within, cared little for luxuries. Margulis-within, the source of her human memories, sometimes craved the comfort of hot water pounding her cares away, sluicing the sweat off her skin, streaming between her breasts as she soaped…

Drifter grabbed his tablet. Homework was the best cure for horny. Grading. Essays. “Why do void angels shed void plumes?”

Besides, there wasn't room for two in his shower. They'd tried. 

The shower shut off. She kept singing her lullaby. 

He sometimes thought of his brain as a hamster running along in its little wheel, prone to pushing hard and getting nowhere. We can listen, he bribed the hamster. Just for a minute. Void angels are drawn to the Reliquary Drive for a reason, and it's our job to make sure the Tenno know why. 

A rush of steam preceded her through the door. She hummed as she rustled a towel over her hair. Dark brown shoulder length hair, he imagined, briskly pinned up. She’d wipe condensation from her violet helmet, then settle it in place over her hair, head, and eyes like a crown. 

She opened their cupboard of a closet. Soft humming swelled into clear voiced song.

Lovely. Yes, lovely, but also a new habit. 

She came out wearing her helmet and a fluffy white bathrobe tied around her trim waist. She asked, “What?”

“Hmmm?”

“You’re staring.”

“Well, you’re stunning.”

“I just got out of the shower.”

“So?”

She elaborated. “You’re staring like I’m a puzzle to be solved, like those Paragrimm hutches in Duviri.”

So much for subtlety. “Just listening to a new song, that’s all.”

She started. She backtracked and checked herself in the mirror. She rewrapped her robe tighter and hugged herself.

Well, shit. Wanna bet her last lover, the Executor Ballas, made snide comments about her singing in his shower? 

He said, “It's lovely,” and buried himself in his students’ answers. The void angels who roosted in the derelict Zariman 10-0 colony ship weren't human anymore. Before the final leap into the Void, they were captain and crew…

She took the other chair. Her bare knees almost touched his pants. “It's lovely?” she asked, fingers massaging the armrests. 

“If no one ever told you that you have a lovely voice, you do. And you heard Luscinia too, so I think I’m as qualified to judge as any Orokin.”

“Oh. I meant…” She let out a slow breath. “Thank you. Margulis used to sing to the children. To comfort them.”

He was so perilously close to sticking his boot in his mouth that he didn’t know how to untangle himself from this mess over a lullaby. Did her Tenno children need comfort…or did she? “Is this a situation where I can do something or where I ought to listen?”

She didn't answer. 

Maybe she didn't know herself. 

“What are you teaching today?”

“Void angels. The Void requires single-minded focus to channel it properly. Its powers are weakened by distraction and cognitive dissonance. Therefore void angels shed the memories of who they were in order to better serve the Void.”

She stiffened. “Single-minded?”

Boot, meet mouth, Drifter. “If you, Margulis, and Natah-within acted together without being poisoned by the Void, it's quite possible you'd blow the lid off what we think we're capable of with void powers.”

“Huh.” She rose and paced in the small area between their bed and the automatic door to the rest of the ship. The bulkhead shushed open and closed a few times before she got the measure of the space.

He went back to grading.

She sang her lullaby. 

Her voice was lovely; he didn’t necessarily enjoy hearing the same song over and over again because Luscinia greeted each new time looping day in Duviri with a song for the Spiral. It could be worse. At the Collegium, he'd tap a student's shoulder, wait for them to pull their earphones off, and hear the other hot new song of the season: that blasted earworm from 1999. 

Shit, he'd thought about it. 

The little hamster of his brain started jogging to the beat, rocking out to “we come alive moving under the neon glow-”

She asked, “When the Void called to you on the Zariman, what did it sound like?”

“What?” The hamster fumbled the next lyric (it's the party of your lifetime), tumbled to a stop, and loped after her train of thought. “The void angels drank kuva from the Reliquary Drive and became servants of the Man in the Wall, the Great Indifference. They sing his tune.”

She batted that away. “I don't need the textbook answer. They sing. What does it sound like?”

“Like screams of despair.”

“Oh.” She deflated. “Thank you.”

He thought to himself, my dear Lotus, you are not beating the allegations that you're the one in need of comfort. 

The Lotus lay in their bed on Lua, wide awake, and sang to herself. Her Sentient nature meant she rarely rested and recharged.

Drifter couldn't sleep either, despite the spacious bed and cool breeze and soft lullaby. If he closed his eyes, he’d drift off. Pun intended.

All the expanse of soft mattress between them couldn’t hide that she expected a blaring alarm at any moment. She was ready to leap into action; too bad she hadn’t warned him about a threat. As her champion, he ought to know. 

He asked, “What's wrong?”

She drew the sheets over her taut body. “Am I truly so transparent?”

“No.” He rolled over to face her. 

Her mouth hung slightly open. 

It wasn't often he baited her into revealing more than she meant to. Especially not with pillow talk. He propped himself up on one elbow. “My dear, you're a better liar than me, and we both know it. So if you’d hoped I’d pick up on what’s wrong, please, take pity on me?”

In a low voice, she said, “We never talked about what happened after Ballas died.”

When Ballas’ void portal to Tau collapsed, the Man in the Wall ripped that portal wide open and came roaring out of the void into the real world (a rip now blocked by the Zariman). The Lotus stood between the onrushing Wall and one terrified Drifter and said No, Not Today, You Cannot Have Him, Go Away. 

About that? “No, we didn’t.” Mostly because she’d denied that it ever happened. And also because, “Okay, I knew you didn’t want to talk about it. I just figured you had your reasons.”

And because I trusted you, he left unsaid.

She fell back onto the pillows. Her smile bled tension; her taut limbs relaxed.

“I had my reasons,” she admitted freely. “Long before we knew you, Natah saw the Wall’s other face. We paid the price for hiding the Tenno Reservoir within the Void.”

All the best liars fed their mark the truth, like a fancy screen that obscured less palatable truths. He guessed what reasons she hid behind her screen: not lies…just hurtful truths. At the time, she hardly knew Drifter. He might become another abuser like Ballas, unwilling to accept that she was a mother who loved her children more than her new white knight. Better to keep him grateful that she saved him from Duviri when her severed hand interrupted his daily execution by impalement. Safer when he felt he owed her. 

Her smile faltered.

He hadn’t meant to leave her twisting in the wind. “I suppose that in another version of reality, you didn't tell the Operator either because you didn't want to worry him.”

She took his free hand. “I'm grateful you understand.”

He squeezed back.

She murmured, “I love my children.” 

“Of course. You’re their Space Mom.”

“Sometimes, I need a reminder.”

“Hey, they know how much you love them–” His reassurance dried up. What right did he have to butt in? Even though he loved the Tenno too, he wasn't their father. At worst, he was their annoying teacher who assigned homework. At best, he was Commander and Cat-Herder-in-Chief. Even when they called him Space Step-Dad, he wasn’t on the same pedestal as Space Mom.

Unlike Ballas, he resolved to be content with that. He was her champion, helping her shoulder her burdens. Sometimes even much-loved children were burdens. “Hey. I love them too.”

She lurched over to his side of the bed, crossing the expanse between them. She pressed a feather light kiss to his furrowed brow. She brushed her fingers over his eyelids. “Sleep, my champion. All will be well.”

He laid down, closed his eyes, and drifted off to sleep as she sang.

Drifter dreamed.

The gothic halls of Albrecht Entrati's laboratory fell into the sandswept waste of the Void. Dunes swallowed marble staircases. The “Wall of Lohk” that divided the Void from Reality took stark form as a desert bounded by blocky concrete cliffs, marred at occasional intervals with a man's screaming face. Albrecht Entrati's face - or at least, the impression of it. 

Concrete blocks ramped up towards a makeshift “temple” framed by a colonnade of wind-worn obelisks. 

The wind blew at his back. He climbed the ramp.

At the far end of the temple, a pale hairless giant leaned on clenched fists. One of Albrecht’s Vessels, originally designed for the Tenno to control as they did their warframes. The Void’s influence over the labs left the Vessels increasingly vulnerable to the Indifference. It gazed balefully at him, but did not attack. Yet. 

A single blood-red, velvet-backed, gold-limbed chair replaced the altar.

A teenage boy sat cross legged. He shifted uncomfortably, switched his right leg over his left, and shook out his foot which had fallen asleep.

Drifter said to him, “That’s not how you’re supposed to sit in those chairs.”

The Indifference snapped back. “Why do you care?” Too many teeth flashed. No one would mistake it for the younger, petulant Drifter it aped, not when it's cheeks were stained with viscera and it's clawed out eyes regrew as black as the Void and just as eerie.

“You remind me of Dominus Thrax,” Drifter said. “Like you, he was ruler of a kingdom in the void. And he could not control his emotions either.”

Black eyes slitted. “Do you miss Duviri, Drifter?’

“No.” He said automatically.

“Is that so? How many times did you die in Duviri, Drifter? A hundred times…that you remember? Or a million, so many that you don’t?”

He missed Teshin Dax's mentorship. The irascible old man despaired that his pupil would ever learn the calm of the true warrior to break free of the time loop. He missed Luscinia's hymns soaring like a bird on the flowery breezes of a Joy Spiral. Some days, he even missed Thrax despite the King's daily decrees of “death by impalement.” The last time he saw the boy, Thrax sobbed in a heap and never noticed Drifter's helping hand held out in invitation. Poor kid. 

The Indifference pouted. “You're supposed to wallow in despair like you used to!” 

It snapped its thumb and middle finger together; it's index finger ended in a ragged stump. “I could throw you back into the Spirals until you keep your end of our deal.”

“You could.” Drifter allowed.

“You'd wallow like a hamster stuck in your little wheel until all the color drained out of your life along with your hope.”

“I wouldn't. Not this time.”

“You're nothing without me.”

“Without you, I'm still just me.” He asked, “How long will you wait here?”

“Not long,” said the Indifference. From its back pocket, It brought a purple lotus flower, crumpled and bent. Petal by petal, It plucked the lotus bare. The wind scoured the purple leaves into the abyss. 

Drifter woke. She wasn't there. 

A quick glance at the clock said he'd slept a couple hours.

She wasn't in the bathroom either.

Cephalon Ordis would've said if he had unread messages.

He accessed Navigation. No new alerts - or at least nothing worthy of her putting him to sleep and then ditching him without a word. 

He dressed for action. Pistol in its holster. Jacket belted over his Zariman suit. No sooner had he stepped out into the hallways of her Lua sanctum than both guards, a Mesa warframe with two pistols and a cowgirl hat, and a teenage girl with a holographic Lotus flower tucked in her braids, braced to attention. She apologized, “She said we weren't to disturb you.”

He cut straight to the point. “Where did she go?”

“To the Sanctum Anatomica.” The entrance to Albrecht Entrati’s laboratories, which were the second major breach between the Void and the real world. 

The Mesa asked, “Can Space Mom do that? The Void is practically poison to her.”

He asked, “Did she say what she wanted there?”

They shook their heads.

He’d warned the Lotus about the song that haunted the Zariman. He never worried that she’d succumb to the screams of the Reliquary Drive. Despair was not her Achilles heel. 

Her love for her children was. 

Twice now, opponents used that against her. Hunhow, Ballas…they played on her love to draw in and strike down the Tenno. 

If his dream was more than a nightmare, then the Indifference had her in its sights. And he hadn’t warned her about the Voidtongue that whispered in Albrecht’s labs. 

“Thanks, kids.” He sent an alert to Cephalon Ordis to ready his Railjack. 

Mesa asked, “Is something wrong?” She slid her pistols in and out of her arm holsters.

He wasn't sure he was ready to admit that, yes, something was wrong, and the Lotus was lying to him about it. He loved the Tenno; when the only tool they had was a Warframe, every solution was a war crime. “I’m going to check with her. Better safe than sorry.”

The Tenno girl called after him. “Let us know!” 

“Either she will, or you’ll hear the panic button.” 

He boarded his landing craft. The Tenno on traffic control didn't question why he left the Lotus’ Sanctum after her, and he didn't explain. He docked with his railjack above the shattered moon. He plotted their course to the moonlet Deimos, the home of House Entrati. 

Then he dithered. Her hivemind oversaw Tenno missions across the Origin System. According to his Navigation chart, everything was green. 

Should he communicate his concerns to the woman he loved like he was an adult?

She'd lulled him into complacency once already. If he chased her without a word, she could not throw him off the scent again.

He commed her. 

She did not accept his call. 

He recorded a message. “Lotus, your kids said you left for the Sanctum Anatomica without telling me. Unless you know a good reason why I shouldn't join you, we ought to face the Void together. I love you, Drifter.”

He sent it before he second guessed himself. 

By the time he punched through to Deimos, strapped into his landing craft and flew through the spore-filled atmosphere to the Necralisk, slipped past the remaining Entrati family, and jogged the winding secret staircase into the Sanctum Anatomica, she still hadn't answered. 

The Sanctum Anatomica was as bright as daytime. One wall of the gothic laboratory had been ripped off and directly exposed to the Void. Sand from the otherworldly desert blew over marble flooring and collected in the corners of ornate staircases. Drifter did not know how Albrecht’s man Loid kept the fine-grained sand out of the electronic equipment and frankly he was afraid to ask. 

Loid strode over. One arm was tucked tightly across his chest. The other elbow rested on it. He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses constantly, both in affectation and genuine worry. “Drifter. I am sorry. It was not my place to summon you on her behalf.”

“I understand.” Loid had his own situationship with absent Albrecht Entrati. He understood the delicate dance on the line between blindly supportive and sensible caution that sometimes stifled their more brilliant companions. Now that Drifter was here, he'd help however he could. “Where is she?”

Loid pointed. 

Beyond the huge fishtank where Fibonacci swam lazy circles, beyond the two massive Vessels locked in tender goodbyes, out on the cliff's edge where sand blew away into the abyssal Void, she stood like the lone pillar left of an ancient temple fallen to rubble. 

Loid followed briskly. “We didn't hear the call. I swear it. She found my Albrecht's pager.”

“Did she say anything?”

“Only that none of us were to answer the call.” Loid called after him. “I will monitor the equipment.”

This late at night, a few Tenno still queued up for missions. Drifter turned heads as his boots rasped hard over the sand-slick marble and then kicked up great puffs from the dunes as he passed beyond the Vessels’ windbreak. 

She stood at the edge. She cupped something small in her hands, and sang to herself.

One of the Tenno bullet jumped after him. Dante held his feather pen poised over his Grimoire as though to record the answer. “Drifter, does she need help?”

“I don’t know.” If she did, she'd done her best to hide it. He had no evidence, just dark suspicions. “I’m going to find out.” He squared his shoulders and went to her side. 

She held a tiny device in her hands, the “pager,” evidently some sort of communicator that could fold in half. She sang loudly enough to drown out the Voidtongue whispering on the wind. Not quite loudly enough to compete with the ringtone’s discordant electronic notes.

Against his better judgment, he looked down.

The abyss had no bottom, just swirling mists. Powdery sand swept around his boots, grains racing and tumbling over each other. 

His stomach swooped. In Duviri, if a man fell from an island’s edge, he fell forever. 

Softly, so as not to startle her, he said, “Hey.”

“Hmmm? Oh. It's you.” She returned her attention to the pager. 

Not a trace of guilt. He pressed on. “So this is the “call” you've been worried about? I'm not letting you face it alone.”

Her indifferent facade cracked. “That's the problem.”

“Huh?” 

“Someone has to answer the call.”

“And I'm your champion. That's what I'm here for.”

She looked straight up. The looming cliff face bore a gargoyle’s grimace. Its too-wide mouth could swallow her whole. “The Indifference wants my children instead.”

More Tenno perched on the Vessels behind them, waiting on Drifter’s word.

She clutched the pager between her breasts. “It calls them even now.”

He refused to let her think she’d failed to protect her children. “No, it didn’t. They came because they’re worried about their mother. She loves them and she shouldn't face this alone.”

Shame colored her cheeks. “How many times will I fall for the same trap?”

“A snare set for a pobber cannot hold bigger prey.” He held out his hand for the ringing pager. “Now let me answer the call.” 

Her long fingers wove a net over the pager. Her knuckles were white as snow on Venusian slopes. “I considered that. You are the Paradox to the Operator. You can do what my Tenno cannot: travel to 1999, slip through the Indifference’s grasp, and set things right.”

She wove a screen of truths, saying only what she thought he’d believe. No doubt she had her reasons. He challenged them. “If I can succeed where they can’t, then why didn’t you ask me?”

“Because it's a time loop. A Spiral.”

“Oh.”

“If I'm wrong about the Paradox, you could be trapped forever.” She’d rather look at the Void or the damned pager than his face. “Do you understand why I couldn’t choose?”

He cupped her cheek. Tears dampened his fingertips, seeping underneath the edges of her helmet. “I understand.”

A Tenno “awww'ed” at his inadvertent recreation of the Vessels’ embrace. An ironic echo of the same goodbye that Albrecht gave his Loid before he whisked himself and his cat millenia away to 1999. A fresh spurt of tears said that she did not believe him. Or worse, she did. 

He said, “I will not make you choose between me and your children. I love them too. The Indifference cannot have them.”

He took the pager. 

She did not resist. 

He promised, “I will come back to you.”

Fresh tears dripped down her chin. She wiped them away, flicking the moisture onto dry sand that drank it greedily. She swallowed, hard, then ordered without a tremble in her voice, “Go, my champion. Go drown out that noise.”

The pager’s message read, “Don't Be Late.”

He answered the call. 

Wherever he was, it was dark. He blinked about five times before his eyes adjusted.

A few meters ahead, an electronic billboard flickered with the last dregs of power from dying generators. Its lights illuminated translucent plastic from within - not a hologram, not even neon - but at least it was a map. 

The map proclaimed “You are here” in pidgin Orokin. A big arrow pointed to a red X. 

“Here” was Höllvania Central Mall. The tiled floor looked marble but sounded ceramic. A skylight dimly lit up an empty cafeteria, the surrounding shopfronts, and a second story balcony. The map promised he could buy clothes, music, and jewelry from ransacked stores. Or play games at something called an “Arcade.” 

Confetti and balloons were scattered on the floor like a Tenno birthday party interrupted by an emergency alert. He kicked a red balloon out of his way and instantly regretted it as it bounced off a green and orange balloon, cascading into his peripheral vision and amplifying his twitchy instincts with movement his gut insisted was purposeful when it wasn't.

The balloons hadn’t deflated. The generators revved and struggled as they ran low on fuel. 

The web-like tendrils of Infestation bubbling through cracks in the walls like black mold hadn't overtaken the whole building. Someone hacked it back daily. 

The skylight patterned the empty cafeteria in broad, slanted rectangles. Wispy clouds briefly veiled the Moon.

Lua was as round as a pearl.

“Huh.”

“Mrow?”

He drew his pistol. 

A sleek, milk-white kavat popped her big-eared pug face up over a table’s edge. Her hairless skin gleamed in the moonlight.

He holstered it. “Kalymos. I should've known.”

Kalymos unfurled from the bench where she slept. She stretched the full length of two seats. She was Albrecht Entrati’s cat, and possibly the only companion closer to him than Loid - or at least, the only one who accompanied him to 1999. 

Drifter politely ignored her. 

The Moon was proof that he’d landed in the Origin System’s past. The Infestation-like Tech Rot further oriented him in time. This was the Plague Year. 

Somewhere nearby, he'd find Albrecht Entrati or the subjects of the experiments that created the Vessels. Before the giants, Entrati injected plague victims with warframe helminth strains. Half-human, half-warframe, supposedly volunteers. Hopefully, the Protoframes were allies. 

“Mrow.”

The longer he ignored her, the closer she got, until she outright butted her triangular head into his right knee. 

“Hey.” If this gambit failed, he'd wait until Kalymos got hungry. Entrati wouldn’t let his pampered pet eat Tech Rot like her feral cousins on derelict ships. Somewhere nearby, she had a food bowl. “Where's your master?”

Kalymos bolted. 

And the light went with her. 

One moment, they were bathed in pale moonlight that suggested rather than illuminated empty shelves and barren stockrooms. The next, the light eloped with the kavat, leaving Drifter stranded. Moonlight had no power to penetrate the void-black creeping into the corners of his vision. 

He followed the click-clacking claws on fake marble tiles blindly. Voidtongue droned like a hive of bees. If he lost Kalymos, something else would find him…

Then he stepped on a dozen small brass cylinders. They rolled or crushed under his weight, and scraped against the tile like metal off glass. His ankle gave way with a wrenching twist. He fell into the light more than caught himself.

Kalymos, standing amidst piles of spent bullet casings, looked unimpressed. 

He tested his ankle. No pain; he’d narrowly avoided a sprain.

The darkness and the droning receded. Someone spent a long time here, lovingly drawing target circles onto printed posters of Albrecht Entrati exhorting viewers to “Believe!,” then unloading, reloading, and unloading cold hard lead into his head and chest at different ranges. 

He examined the casings. Large caliber bullets, like those in Warframe-weighted sniper rifles. “Huh. Albrecht's diary said the Protoframes were volunteers. Maybe the pain embittered them.” Or maybe the Indifference aped Albrecht Entrati the same way it mimicked his younger self, clawed out eyes and all. 

If so, just which Albrecht Entrati was the target? 

Unfortunately, the sniper was nowhere to be found. When Drifter started searching for personal effects that might lead to their current location, Kalymos swished her long tail in boredom and ran off, around the corner and up the stairwell.

He followed, captive to the will of a cat and driven by the droning at his heels. 

Höllvania Central Mall was utterly abandoned. Upstairs, the arcade games stuttered fitfully. The most recent name on the high scores was a string of “Amir B.” 

The only other living thing was a rat that poked its furry snout out of a tattered couch. It had beady eyes and big ears like a pobber.

Kalymos stopped. Her ears swiveled, triangulating. The rat dove back inside. 

Poor little thing. He shooed Kalymos onward. “What's the point of this guided tour?”

Kalymos led him downstairs to a messy office cubicle. If Loid were here, he would waltz through the heavy metal desks like a genie working his magic, tidying paperwork left askew with fastidious fingers. He’d dust the antique computer screens and blocky keyboards. He’d collect tea cups, tutting over the brown rinds. 

One of the absent Protoframes was a fellow tea connoisseur? Drifter picked up a cup with a tea leaf strainer in it. The leaves and residue were bone dry. He sniffed. 

Earl Grey.

Kalymos shot him a disgusted look. She pawed at a latched desk drawer. 

He obeyed. The drawer took a little jiggling to slide on its tracks. First, there was a tin of Earl Grey tea leaves. Half-empty. 

Next, on a pile of ledgers that were gibberish to him, was the same communicator he’d answered. No - a similar one, helpfully labeled “Arthur's Kinepage” on a piece of tape like someone else would mistake it for theirs. 

“Mrow.” Kalymos nuzzled him. 

“Is this what I came here for?” 

She leapt onto the desk, stepped on all the keyboards on the way out, and jumped back down between him and the doorway. She curled her tail around herself. She watched the shadowy mall - what she saw he could not say - and her tail tip twitched like a metronome. 

One of the computers turned on. She must have input a code by accident. The screen fuzzed and flickered. The date and time froze on 23:59:59 December 31, 1999.

He waited a minute. Two minutes. Nothing moved in the empty mall except for him, Kalymos’ tail counting out the seconds, and a pet rat. 

He could almost see the missing people in their last moments. Arthur drank one cup while the next steeped. His pager rang. He read the message, then shoved it in a drawer and left, shouting to the others. Amir B complained that he'd been about to beat his high score.The sniper rattled off one last shot. He didn’t bother to clean up the range. A woman coaxed her pet rat off her shoulder, then helped the other woman lying on the couch join the rest. They left and never returned. 

The date on the antique did not change. 

“This was a bad ending to the timeloop. One of the many spirals that end with Death by Impalement.”

Kalymos mrowed as if to say, yes, duh, finally he gets it. This idiot is Entrati's Chosen Operator?

Well, he might be an idiot, and slow on the uptake besides. But he was an expert on bad spirals and how to break them. 

Maybe the Protoframes would get a lucky break on their own. 

More likely, they needed something more. A stranger. A friend. A helping hand. 

First, he pocketed Arthur's kinepage. Making sure the man never got the message that sent him and his team to their deaths wouldn’t ensure a happy ending. However, it meant that when the shit hit the fan, Drifter would know.

Next, he walked upstairs to the tattered couch. The darkness and droning whispers pressed on him. He found where the lady with the pet rat kept some dried food pellets locked in a cabinet. 

A few swift kicks broke the hinges. He scattered a handful and left the door ajar. Rats, like their pobber descendants, could chew through most anything. 

The Voidtongue faded. The Indifference didn't know what to do with gentle emotions like pity. 

Something as simple as not letting a pet rat starve wouldn't change the past either, but at least he could leave with a clear conscience. Restart the Spiral, and this time, not be late.

Speaking of leaving, he wasn’t sure how…

When he looked back, a Protoframe woman lay on the couch, watching him. A Nyx from the neck down, she had lovely violet eyes in a sharp-boned face and wore her white-streaked black hair in a high ponytail. She cocked her head at him curiously.

“I…” He had no good reason for his sudden appearance creeping around her couch, nor for carrying stolen goods. Besides, if she had Nyx’ telepathic powers, she could read his mind.

She shimmered like she wasn't there at all. 

He shimmered. 

The cabinet of pet rat food shimmered. In one version of reality, the door hung ajar on broken hinges. In another, it was whole. An anchor in the past where Protoframe Nyx could still have a happy ending to her time loop. 

He crouched in darkness. She was lit by the warm halo of an electric lantern. Through time and space, their eyes locked. 

Small crows' feet crinkled at the corners of her eyes. Her lips quirked; they did not move when she asked, “Aren't you supposed to be with your triple-faced goddess right now?”

The words dropped directly into his mind like cold, fat raindrops on the back of his neck. Despite the odd sensation, her voice was knowing and warm. He relaxed. A Nyx could’ve plucked enough knowledge from his mind to call the Lotus triple-faced. The admiration with which she named her a goddess? That could not be faked. “Yeah. I am. I don’t suppose you know the way back to her?”

“You have to want it.”

“...that won’t be hard.” 

She chuckled. “She's wonderful, isn't she? But there's a shadow on her.”

Yes, there was. The Indifference knew exactly what to do with fear. If he gave into his fears for her, he would become it's plaything just like the Protoframes. So long as he trusted the Lotus, and served faithfully as her champion, the Indifference could not claim them.

He dug the kinepage out of his pocket. “Here. Arthur - he’ll get a call. I don’t think it ends well.”

She declined. “Bring it with you when you come back. I'll keep him guessing until you do.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you, Drifter. You're going to make such a difference this time around.”

“I certainly hope so.” He closed his eyes and thought of the Lotus. 

She would stand at the cliff’s edge, shoulders tight with strain, fingers white around the pager, still singing her lullaby over a discordant ringtone. Despite his promise, her Champion had not drowned out the noise. Not this time. 

And maybe not the next time either. But he had answered the call, and he would answer it as many times as it took. 

The warm light of the lantern through his eyelids shimmered. Void-black crept in. Droning, buzzing Voidtongue swarmed over him until a lullaby drowned it out and led him home. 

The Lotus said, “You were…quicker than I expected.”

Drifter blinked rapidly in the stark desert light. 

She gripped the pager tight with one hand. With the other, she hugged a teenage boy with bright orange hair to her side. The boy promptly joked. “That’s what she said!”

Her jaw dropped. She darted a sharp look at the small queue of Tenno waiting to hug her - kids and warframes both - and the others sitting, dancing, partying, and cackling over the rare chance to crack a dirty joke at her and Drifter’s expense. “Children!”

“I'll have to go again,” Drifter reported, prompting a fresh round of snickers. “Oh hush, you little twerps,” he said without heat. The Tenno boy deigned to let him ruffle his bright hair before the queue dispersed.

Drifter stood on the edge between the Lotus and the Void, blocking her view of the abyss. A petty part of him wanted her to worry about him the way he worried about her. “Dear, we need to talk.”

She checked the pager, which had stopped ringing. For now. She said, “The Indifference tries to follow Albrecht Entrati's footsteps through time.”

Business first, then. “I figured out that much. If it finds him, the Protoframes die. A bad ending to the time loop.”

“You must find him first. I must remain here, as a distraction.”

He showed her the new kinepage. “Thanks to this, I'll know when to go back. Arthur and the others are trapped in the spiral, not me.”

“For now.” She observed. 

“Dearest…” If only he dared grasp her by shoulders and shake her off of business. He did not dare, and besides, how could he reason her out of an unreasonable fear? “I will be alright. Remember, I learned from you how to haul the stubbornest man I know out of a bad spiral.”

She did not laugh at the self-deprecating joke. She did not even smile. It was as if she'd dipped herself in ice - a transparent barrier between them that he could not cross.

He touched the ice anyway, gently rubbing his hands over her bare shoulders, circling her freckles with his thumbs. “You woke me from my spirals and lent me your power to change my fate. Is it so frightening that I should do the same for others?”

She winced. “No.”

He pulled back. He folded his arms. 

Deliberately, he asked, “What's wrong?”

“It's not you,” she said, staring at her pager as if begging it to ring again and save her from this mortifying conversation. “It's me.”

Oddly enough, he thought, that might be the first full truth. She was the one who distanced herself first. Why? He still didn’t know. What further doubts could she have that he had not answered?

Well, her doubts always circled back to Ballas, the king of petty cruelty.

He stepped away from the edge, and opened his arms, offering a hug. She dug the sharp point of her chin into his shoulder. Her helmet never ceased gazing out into the Void; the hard edges of the pager pressed into them. “Talk to me,” he pleaded. “You know I won’t be angry.”

She shuddered. “We’re changing. Lotus. Margulis. Natah. Within this shell, the three of us entwine. We live... we rise... we endure. We will serve as your distraction so that you can save our children. You told us how to do it. If we worked in tandem, we’d blow the lid off what you thought was possible.” 

“Then the real question, I suppose, is whether or not you’ll still love me.”

She nodded into his shoulder, not pulling away. “I was afraid to send you into a time loop nursing a broken heart.”

“So you patted me on the head and hoped I never noticed you were hurting too.” And well, yes, he was an idiot and slow on the uptake besides. But he was not Ballas. Her doubts always circled around the simple question: would she be loved for who she was, rather than who he wanted her to be?

He held her and said, “Dream not of what you are, but of who you want to be.”

Without heat, she muttered, “Shut up.”

He shut up. 

She dropped her helmet onto his shoulder with a thunk. Had he made the wrong decision by following orders?

“We are changing,” she admitted, and her voice was raw and triple-layered with truth, no matter how much the truth hurt. “I was the Daughter. I became the Mother. If I become something you do not recognize, do not mourn.”

“What makes you think I will not still love you?”

Well, for one, her silence said, every other man in my life. 

Fair enough, he hoped his silence and his continued presence replied.

She broke it. “I'm trusting you with this, you understand? Even Sentients grow old and maundering. Just look at my father. In time, I shall be the Witch, blind once again, empty of all but wisdom."

That was the crux of her doubts? She doubted whether his respect for her, born in the crucible of Duviri, proven in battle against Ballas, blossomed into love as he served as her champion, could endure the day-to-day rigors of growing old together?

A jewel-like fish trailed its half-dozen fins and frills along the front of the aquarium wall in the Orbiter. A delicate creature no bigger than Drifter’s hand, it'd dart back into a rocky shelter if his shadow crossed the wall. How long had it been since last he thought of Duviri? Long enough that he could not remember the fish’s name, only that the Golden Maws found it delicious. 

Instead of frightening the poor thing, he picked up his tablet. It’d slipped to the edge of his lap, balanced precariously on his knees when he dozed off to the steady drum of the shower. No. He’d just set it down to gather his thoughts. No dozing off until he finished grading essays.

The curvy script blurred together. He pushed his glasses up and it sharpened into words. Alright, maybe he had dozed and only woken when the shower turned off. Come on, hamster, get back on the little wheel and run. 

The shower opened. A rush of steam preceded the Lotus. He adjusted his glasses. 

Her fingertips ghosted along the countertop even though she’d committed their small bathroom to memory centuries ago. She opened the closet and pulled out her fluffy white bathrobe. Once firm muscles sagged. Freckled shoulders wrinkled. She belted it around her waist. Margulis’ thinning, gray locks brushed the collar. 

Not that he had room to judge. In the glass of the fish tank, his beard had more white than gray. He never played the shawzin for her anymore. The last time he tried, his fingers were as stiff as sticks on the strings.

He would not change a thing.

She might have regrets - in fact, she had the power to reverse centuries of aging with the snap of Natah’s fingers - but she had chosen not to. She had taken up the mantle of the Witch, the wise old woman of the Origin System, with grace and conviction as she aged. 

Or so he assured her. Since he was no liar, she'd laughed and silenced his admiration with a kiss.

He glanced at his grading. Where was he? He could not find the thread of thought from the first paragraph to the last, and sighed. 

The fish - what was its name? - darted for safety in a rock tunnel.

She sat down across from him. Their knees touched. She said, “A credit for your thoughts.”

“I think it's time I retired from your Archimedean Collegium.”

She took a moment to come up with a sufficiently diplomatic response. 

He said, “You don’t have to coddle me.”

“Your teaching assistants are ready to fill your shoes,” she said diplomatically. 

He grinned; it took decades off the man reflected in the fish tank. “The Senior Archimedeans weren’t waiting for them. I’ll make sure my assistants know how much I appreciate their forbearance.”

She admitted, “I didn't want to be the one to politely shuffle you out the door.”

“Of course not. You’re subtle like that.” In hindsight, he might not be able to follow an argument in an essay much longer, but he could find her deft hand and sweet words in the argument that swayed the Senior Archimedeans and gained his assistants’ blessing when she said to them, one more semester and I think he’ll see his own failings. “Thank you for my dignity.”

“I've learned a thing or two about stubborn academics over the years. What will you do with your free time?” She folded her hands; the wrinkled skin stretched tight. Her blinded eyes focused over his shoulder and did not blink.

He smiled. She could not see it; she would hear it in his voice. “Grow old with you…”

He set the tablet aside. For once, the hamster of his brain had a point. Grading could wait for her. He shifted in his seat loudly, and braced himself against the armrests of her chair.

She smiled. She leaned forward. Her lips were dry and paper thin.

So what? So were his.

He murmured in between kisses, “...and cherish each day.”

Too late to do him any good, it occurred to Drifter that it had been rather dangerous to stand on the edge of the Void and give free reign to his emotions. 

Or perhaps not, because the Indifference had never known what to do with love. Tension bled out of the Lotus’ tight-strung body. She rested in his arms. Even though she was not truly asleep as evidenced by her grip on the pager, she recharged at long last. 

Drifter carried her to a rocky shelf. A few Tenno came running with arms full of blankets. When she refused to let go of him, they arranged the blankets into a more comfortable seat and left them alone. 

Her breath fluttered through soft, full lips. Her bare, freckled shoulders were smooth, her skin unwrinkled. 

He picked up her hand, pressed a kiss to her knuckles, and returned it to the pager. At least he hadn’t accidentally channeled his feelings into the Vessels. Frankly he didn’t know how Loid handled living and working next to a giant billboard displaying his rawest, tenderest feelings for all the Tenno to see. Bad enough that every kid not in a warframe was smirking at him. 

They knew. They approved. They also had the discretion of a pack of teenagers, which was to say none at all. 

The damned pager rang. It buzzed through his chest. He shifted just enough to extract Arthur's kinepage from his pocket. Nothing. He wasn't being summoned to stop disaster, not yet. 

When he put it away and looked back, she watched him. “My champion?”

“And more than that, I hope,” he said. “For longer than I can shoot straight.”

She let go of the ringing pager long enough to wrap her fist in his jacket. She hauled herself up until their lips met.

At least one Tenno whooped. 

They ignored the kiddos. 

When they broke apart, she hauled herself up the rest of the way. “The Indifference is hungry. I will serve as your distraction.”

“And as my guiding hand?”

“As I always have.”

“Then know that I will drown out that noise for you.”

“And you'll come back to me safe and sane?”

“Yes, no matter how many spirals it takes.”

She strode to the edge, facing outward into the Void like the proud figurehead at the prow of a ship. She looked back once at her assembled children. She began to sing, loud and clear.

He raised his voice. “Kiddos, you'll take care of your Space Mom, won't you?”

They nodded. 

He told her, “I'm going to see if Loid picked up anything on his equipment that might get me closer to his Albrecht's trail through time. If you need anything, say the word. You know he's not happy without someone to fuss over.”

She dipped her chin. Her song never faltered.

He trudged back across the desert, tapped sand off his boots onto marble tiles, patted the massive shoulder of the “Albrecht” vessel that wiped a parting tear from “Loid's” face, and climbed down to meet the actual Loid. The other man looked up from his antique computer, which was the same make and model as those in Arthur's office.

Drifter said, “I'll have to stop calling these antiques. It was state of the art in Höllvania Central Mall.”

“We now know Where to send you, and when to 1999,” Loid agreed. “The trouble is knowing when we should start the Kalymos Sequence on our end to give you the best chance to not be too late to save my Albrecht from the Indifference.”

Drifter pulled out Arthur's kinepage. “I'll get a message that would have led a man to his death. Soon. We'll be ready.”