The year was 4189, and the Great War had come to an end. The System Collective military might had beaten back the Sarian Hive Mind out of the Plastic Galaxy, and the horde was scouring their home territory for new victims. Under the command of then-High Chancellor Frederick Werner the leader of the 84th Star-Arms Regiment, a man whose name was forgotten to history, hunted down dissenters to his leader's rule. When Werner was poisoned by his successor, Aubrey Sanchez, the loyalists were found and persecuted by the new High Chancellor's edicts.

The leader of the 84th Regiment would be found on some nameless asteroid in the Medial Belt, hiding among a group of war-survivors. He integrated into their society, helping colonize and terraform the asteroid into a real, proper home. Many of their worlds were destroyed in the war, entire planets and systems torn asunder by the violence of the Sarian Hive Mind and the efforts taken against them. The man admitted he had done his best, and that was enough for the survivors to accept them into their ranks.

A year passed, and through that year bonds were formed and the community blossomed. The man told the survivors his codename, the one that the 84th used to call him because of his proficiency in the war; Bonechill. It was through their help that Bonechill was able to reconcile with the evils of the war. And it was with Bonechill's help that the survivors could find a family once again.

He had met someone, a wonderful Stellarian with eyes so spherical and vast that you could get lost in them for eons. Her skin was dark, painted with a splattering of stars and galaxies, a microcosm of the cosmos. Her hands, soft to the touch, and her voice was unlike anything he'd ever heard before. They'd met out of sheer happenstance, working together on a fruit farm on the far side of the asteroid away from the sun.

When the System Collective found him, they had unjustly deemed him a war criminal and the survivors were found guilty of harboring one such criminal. The Galactic Counterintelligence Police descended on the asteroid and slaughtered everyone there.

Everyone except for him.

He didn't remember how much time passed between that day and the day he was branded with his Sigil of the Damned, but he remembered the day that he was selected to command the Elysium. That was the day he met Pythia, and the day he realized his role in the cycle of violence he would play for four hundred years.

"No," The Woman in the Void spoke, "You're remembering it wrong."

Bonechill opened his eyes as the memories faded into wisps of nothingness. He was in that place again, the place he goes every time he was fatally wounded. The place he wished he could stay.

The Void.

"Think carefully, Bonechill," She continued, "Who are you? Really."

Bonechill shook his head. His head was all that had manifested from the nothingness then, "I don't know anymore."

The disembodied voice cradled him in her arms, "I wish I could make it all better. I wish I could heal you."

"Can I stay? Please?" Bonechill asked, touching a face that wasn't there with his hand.

The Woman in the Void shushed him, pressing her non-existent fingers gently on his teeth. She lifted his hand and traced over the Sigil, adding, "We're almost out of time."

Bonechill shifted his weight, sitting up, "Please."

The Woman in the Void embraced him, kissing his cheek, "Goodbye, Bonechill."

Inside of a dark room, the skeleton sat bound to a chair. He felt the barrel of a weapon against the back of his skull, and could hear the wielder of that weapon talking. It was drowned out at first, but as his faculties returned, Bonechill could make out what he was saying.

"-op him now, while we have the chance!"

Another voice responded. It was an older woman, one Bonechill couldn't see. She had an authoritarian heft to her voice, "Relax."

Bonechill stirred in his seat. He tried to move his arms and legs, but they were bound to the chair.

The woman speaking to him was tall and slender. She had her hands clasped behind her bacl and was leaning forward with an abundance of egotistical stiffness. Her hair, shaved on one side and long, purple, and fluffy on the other, danced on Bonechill's face. Her eyes were green and uninviting, like staring into the soul of a predator. She smiled, a wicked, toothy thing, before speaking again.

"Gotcha," She said, bopping him on the nose hole with one of her fingers.

Bonechill said nothing. He was in a different room than the one he had passed out in. There wasn't much to take note of, however. It was dank and decrepit, much like how he expected the rest of the building to be. There was mold on the floor and walls, and the ceiling was riddled with enough holes you'd be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of swiss cheese. The people in front of him weren't armed with much. The woman didn't have anything on her, but the man had a knife on his hip. Suspended above him were three barrels of… something. He couldn't tell what, but judging from the smell it was likely liquid carbonite.

"I didn't expect the Reaper of all people to show up to my operation," She continued, "I'll admit the I thought the precog was wrong about you. I shouldn't have ever doubted it, especially when, well, you know."

"Carbonite?" Bonechill asked, jerking his head toward the barrels.

The woman grinned. "Just enough to slow you down and keep you in place a while. Long enough for us to escape. We could never hope to kill you, let alone take you in a fair fight, so this was the next best thing. You'll be fine, but I'm hoping to not have to resort to that."

"What?" The couldn't possibly intend to try to flip him, not when he'd been loyal to the System Collective for the last four hundred some-odd years.

"There's… someone very dear to me that SysCo stole not too long ago. A human, like us. Or… like me, I guess. You report back to them, right? Been inside the Singularity or whatever other federal prisons they have?" She fished something out of her back pocket; a polaroid, and said, "Have you seen her?"

The woman in the picture was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen by his best guess. She looked remarkably like the woman in front of him, hair half shaved and fluffy, almost the same shade of purple. Her eyes were amber, though. He checked her for any other significant markings to confirm his suspicions but couldn't see any from the angle the picture was taken. Bonechill remembered those eyes, not her's specifically, but he knew that amber eyes were indicative of one thing and one thing only; this kid had a Sigil of the Damned, just like he did.

Bonechill shook his head and tried his restraints again. They were looser now than before, but still enough to keep him in place. A few more jostles should give him the wiggle room to break free when the time was right.

He just had to keep her talking.

"Yeah," He told her, "I've seen her."

The woman's face lit up, "Where is she being kept? The Singularity?"

"No." A lie, "It was one of the colony prisons in a Mid Rim system. I forgot which one but it's real high security stuff. Underground, on an asteroid close to the star. Hard to break into, especially given the warden, guards, and gravity."

"You didn't say it was impossible."

"No, I did not."

"A couple dozen barrels of pytherium should kill everyone there. Besides her of course. I'll have to consult the precog again with this new information."

Bonechill tilted his head, "That fucked up looking thing back there?"

The woman's smile widened, "He's wonderful right? When the Etruscan we befriended told us it wanted to stick it to SysCo, I was more than happy to oblige. It took a lot, and I do mean a lot, of tinkering with biology and metamaterials and breaking more than a few laws of causality but. A splintering of the mind here, a fusing of biological material there, and boom. Through that together in a stasis chamber and you've got yourself one whole precog."

She was right, almost. Bonechill was well aware of how the precognizant ones were made. He'd seen it happen on more than one occasion in the forty-third century. It was a gruesome process, largely done by madmen pretending to be professionals who took so much joy in violating the laws of nature. When they took a body and twisted it inside out, then shoved it into a higher dimension only to drag it back down to this one atom by atom, things fundamentally changed. With the added stability of metamaterials, substances that "fell" to this reality from somewhere else, the newly reformed body was capable of sustaining itself in this dimension. While the survivors of this process were still living, they were changed forever.

No longer did they cry or laugh of feel anything. To them, they had experienced it all an infinite number of times. To them, reality was birth and death happening simultaneously. It was old babies attending the graduation of their great grand children. It was your mother being an eight year old girl at the same time your grandson was a seventy year old retiree who's kidneys just failed. They lived in a house made out of each other, out of each instance of the universe all at once. And they saw it all. They knew it all.

And there was one in this very building.

"Do you know what they did to her?" The woman asked, "SysCo, I mean."

"No."

"They marked her. Just like they did to you. And then they took her away. I intend to get her back."

"I'm sure it was for good reason."

"Everyone's got a good reason for doing horrible shit in their minds, wouldn't you agree?"

Bonechill said nothing.

The woman's grin faded, "Well, agree to disagree, then."

She nodded to the other person and he acted swiftly. He pulled a lever, which tipped over the barrels and started to spill out the carbonite. He would be flash frozen in place by thick, highly durable crystalline material.

But Bonechill was faster.

He had broken free of his restraints milliseconds before the carbonite flash-froze the chair and bound it to the ground. He rolled into the man and, before the man could let out a cry for help, Bonechill grabbed his head and twisted it one hundred and eighty degrees. Blood pooled in his mouth before he let out a terse death cough, spitting out a puddle of the stuff before falling to his knees.

The woman's eyes widened as Bonechill snatched the knife from the dead man's hip.

"Shit."

She ran, and Bonechill followed.