A thread of old memory rose up inside him. A boy’s bare feet padding along the rough stone floors of the Temple of Oralius, decades before it had been torn down and ground to rubble. His new master’s hand on his shoulder, guiding him away from a mother whose trade for his life now meant she could afford to feed his brothers and sisters. Young Hadlo, at first not understanding, coming to face the priestess with the mask of the Fate upon her. The sudden knowledge that he was in the presence of something greater than himself. The need to subsume himself within it.

He felt a stab of panic. The Cardassian was not sure what he had expected to see, but it had not been anything like this. Some sculpture, perhaps, or the mummified bones of an old dead saint. He held up his hands and watched the waves of light cross over his skin. His flesh tingled and the image wavered; for a moment he saw not the gray quality of his own species but the pale tones of a Bajoran.

Hadlo blinked and the illusion vanished. The box compelled him toward it, and he found his fingers moving across the wood. It was pleasant to the touch, as if it had been warmed by the glow of a summer sun. Seams parted and the ark opened to him, almost of its own accord; a helix of glittering, shifting intricacy lay there, casting its light over his face. And inside it…

Inside Hadlo saw—

Whiteness hazed his sight, burning the stone reality of the shrine away from him, casting the Cardassian into a footless void of numbing darkness.

I am falling and falling and falling—

There were voices speaking in tongues, chattering in Old Hebitian, crying out his name in Lakarian dialects, laughing and hooting. Hadlo looked down and saw pale flesh upon his hands. He raised them to his face and there were no ridges upon his neck and about his eyes, only a raised serration across the bridge of his nose. A heavy weight of metal links dragged upon his ear.

No, this is not who I am—

He felt rough caresses over his legs and bare feet, a touch like old dry parchment. Hadlo’s gaze dropped to see serpents crowding around him, rising up like a tide. Gray vipers moving about his body as if he were not there, more and more of them now, burying him under their obdurate mass.

He cried out and threw them off, stumbling away. His feet plunged ankle-deep into drifts of ash, and the cleric turned, his robes catching in a tormented wind, tearing his pastel hood from his head. Hadlo glanced up and saw the vestiges of an obliterated city ranged around him, beneath angry clouds that spat flames and lightning.

He heard the distant screech of disruptor fire, the crack-and-thump of chemical explosives. The ash was everywhere, thick in layers that coated the stone ruins, turning and wheeling in motes that clogged the air in his lungs. He made out toppled towers and shattered statues robbed of their majesty, cracked domes and piles of dead bricks. Hadlo struggled to make some sense of the murdered vista, searching to find some commonality, some indicator.

Is this Cardassia? Or Bajor? Which is it? Which one? Answer me!

From the wall of howling, windblown ashes came shapes that formed into figures of hooded men and women, the masks of Oralius tarnished and broken over their faces. Hadlo lurched forward and grasped the closest one, snatching the façade away. It disintegrated into powder in his fingers and beneath there was nothing but a bare skull, the grinning mask of the dead. He recoiled, feeling hot streaks of tears down his face.

Is this what will be? He shouted the words to the smoky air.Oralius, answer me! Is this what will come to pass if I turn back, or if I press on? I must know!

Glowing warm light fell on him once again, and Hadlo saw Orbs; not one, but many of them, emerging from the drifts of black ash, burning it away with their radiance. He reached for the closest one, sensing salvation within the turning helix of light; but as his fingers touched the surface, the object faded as hordes of snakes coiled in around it, dragging it away. He swung around, casting about, but each Orb did the same, diminishing and disappearing beneath a mass of serpents. They left him in the darkness, with no light to show him the path.

Hadlo’s hand went to his face. He touched the familiar bony ridges around his eyes and then there was nothing but whiteness.

Bennek watched his master take the cup of liquid with a trembling hand. The old cleric seemed to be barely aware of where he was. When the kai had emerged from the shrine with Hadlo at her side, the deathly pallor of his master made the priest gasp. Hadlo’s color was returning with each passing moment, but the hollow look in his eyes made Bennek wonder what sights he had seen inside the sealed chamber.

Meressa looked on with quiet concern. “The aftermath of an Orb encounter can be quite trying.”

Ranjen Arin produced a small sensor wand from a pocket in his robes and waved it discreetly over the old cleric. “If my readings are correct, he does not appear to be in any physical distress.”

“The tea contains extract of makararoot, a medicinal herb. It will serve as a calmative,” said the kai.

Bennek’s ridges tensed. “What did you do to him in there?” he demanded, but before he could say more he felt Hadlo’s hand on his arm.

“It’s all right.” The cleric glanced at the woman. “Kai Meressa, forgive my young friend. He is sometimes so impulsive…”

The other Bajoran priest, Gar, leaned in. “Are you well, Hadlo?”

The old man nodded. “Yes.” His words were quiet and muted. “I…I was unprepared for what I saw. I’m all right now. Just a little…bewildered.”

Meressa nodded sagely. “The pagh’tem’faris an intense experience. What the Prophets choose to show us can come as a shock, but we must be open to it. Only through study, through the careful consideration and interpretation of the vision, can we reach true understanding of it.”

Bennek eyed the cleric. “You…you didsee something?” He sat beside the old man. “What was it?”

When Hadlo spoke again it was like a voice from the grave, faint and sepulchral. “A future,” he husked. Then suddenly the priest stiffened, as if he had remembered where he was, and in what company. “A future,” he repeated, and this time he spoke with the same potency that Bennek knew of old. “I saw a road ahead, my friend.” He got to his feet and took Meressa warmly by the hand. “Thank you, Eminence, for this great honor. If there was but the slightest iota of doubt in my mind that our coming together here was right, it has been washed away. I am alight with a new determination, sister, and for that there are no words to express my gratitude.”

Meressa’s wary smile became relaxed. “I am so very pleased to hear that, brother.” Bennek saw the kai and Prylar Gar exchange a loaded glance.

Hadlo nodded. “With your permission, I should like to return to the Naghai Keep.” He let out a deep sigh. “I have much to think on.”

The kai bowed and turned to speak to Gar. Bennek drew close to the elder. “Hadlo?” he asked, doubt clouding his face.

The old man looked at him, and his eyes were alight with certainty. “Come. We have much to do.”

Lonnic stared at the strings of characters on the padd but did not really read them. Her eyes were unfocused, the text turning into a string of meaningless blobs against the digital screen. The glass of amber copalbefore her was barely touched; she had taken one or two sips in the hour she’d been sitting on the taphouse’s veranda, but done little else. She’d left the keep and come out into the city proper to put distance between her and her concerns—but the conceit that her worries could be walled up inside the old castle and she could walk away from them was foolish. Every word of the conversation between Jas Holza and Kubus Oak was trapped there behind her eyes, and she was going back to it over and over, worrying the issue like a haracat getting the last licks of meat off a bone.