The majority of the survivors of Akopos had been consolidated into a number of aquatic refugee camps by the Eldrid who safely ferried them off of their homeworld during the veiling of their star. Alani was placed in the largest of these. The sheer diversity of those varying species who'd fled to the Solus System was astounding; remnants of cultures and peoples and genetics from across the entire galaxy. So it shouldn't have surprised Alani, nor any of her compatriots from Akopos, that they weren't the only marine race to find safe haven on Ekkunar and the Eldrid's protection.

The refugee camp itself was more pleasant than it could have been. The Vigilant Order had recommissioned the ruins of an ancient Aztanti city that had millennia ago been swallowed by one of Ekkunar's fresh-water seas. Even in the state of the universe as it was, though, segregation naturally happened; even if it wasn't done out of fear or hatred or racism. Each and every person in that camp shared one thing in common: everything they once knew had been taken from them. With that in mind, and the stark newness and foreignness that surrounded them, it was understandable that peoples would flock together; clinging onto anything familiar.

To that end, the survivors of Akopos were on the outermost and lowermost fringe of the Aztenti city. The ruins themselves were situated on a high shelf of rock that held the sunken structures within sight of the surface, glittering overhead. But Akopos had been far from its galaxy's star, and the dimness that was afforded by those temples on the edge of this shelf, facing outward to the open darkness of deeper waters, was a comfort. Alani was grateful for the Vigilant Order and the Eldrid and what aid the UPR gave. She was grateful that her kin had a place to rest their fins, even if it could never compare to their home.

She just wished that the other Akoposians would leave her alone.

When Alani first appeared before them, they'd been overjoyed. The Emula were perhaps the most revered cultural and religious subset of Akopos; even those who detested the order at least respected them. But it had been unavoidable - the truth, that is. Telling the people of Akopos that the rest of the Emula had been massacred by the Imperium harvester ships had been... difficult. If not for the fact that it forced her to confront her own grief about it, then because the news razed the seed of hope that her appearance had planted in the other pilgrims from Akopos.

Only a scant number of weeks had passed since she had claimed a single, lofty room in the top of one of the temple structures that was now being considered the "Akopos District" of the refugee camp. Only a scant number of weeks, but it felt like much longer. There was no shortage of things to occupy Alani's time - to help her bundle up the icy depths of her dark depression in Akopos and the Emula's regard. She wanted to help, anyone and in any way that she could, and her healing powers were in high demand, particularly at the start. Alani was courted by many of the refugees from Akopos ("cornered," she felt best described her feelings). Consulted for spiritual guidance.

Alani struggled to give it. She envisioned what her masters would say if asked the same questions, or presented with the same inner turmoils. But she felt quite the fraud. Because Alani had kept one detail carefully private about the events of the Emula's genocide. That she had swallowed the Jennerit ship responsible in her wrath; had meted out her vengeance on every crew member save one. That... Well... It was in stark contradiction of everything the Emula stood for. And Alani was wrestling not only with this feeling of betrayal to her order in the days since, but a hidden secret that she fought to contain and smother, all the while it festered and grew in her like rot: she wanted more.

She felt that the Bluemother and the spirits of her ancestors were grieved by Alani's guarded desire to further loose the wrath of the tides on the Imperium. Yet, riddled with guilt as she was, she couldn't help how she felt. She found any and every excuse to keep away from her temporary dwelling, where the vestiges of Akopos knew to find her; helping the ailing; volunteering to assist in construction or relief efforts; and secretly making inquiries into the Vigilant Order and the Woodsworn, possessed of the secret want to join their ranks and indulge in the shameful pull of revenge and hatred that plagued her. When not taken up in these pursuits to busy herself, Alani found she craved, above all, solitude.

To that end, she'd found a small, secluded ridge on the shelf edge of the ruins where she would flee to meditate, reflect and recharge. It was here, in one of those quiet moments, that distant pandemonium intruded on her sanctity. Alani rose to investigate and through the panic rippling through the camp found the first person who knew enough, and was calm enough, to tell her. An Imperium spacecraft had suffered irreparable damage in a fight with the Vigilant Order within the confines of Ekkunar's gravitational pull. Desperately, the vessel entered its atmosphere and, barely holding itself together, was forced to land on a nearby isle of the freshwater sea upon the edge of which the aquatic camp was nestled.

The Vigilant Order was still entrenched in the battle still raging in space above, and wouldn't have any hands available to scout out the shipwrecked Imperium craft for some time. Alani couldn't formulate an answer to the random refugee's news. All she could do was nod and back away, fading into the agitated crowds. She swam without real direction, lost to her own thoughts, wrestling between all that she'd been taught and comparing it to the fire in her blood. Soon she found herself in a reef that had become the graveyard for the refugee camp, which was blessedly empty. There in the near total dark of that depth, Alani paced so swiftly she left a train of bubbles.

At length, her internal debate reached its zenith. "You can't... You shouldn't... The Masters would say that revenge is not the way of the Emula." Alani's spoken point steeled herself. She nodded to her own statement. Then her eyes fell, as if by fate, on a simple monument she'd instinctively swam to, retracing in her pondering the same nautical path she'd taken every day since landing on Ekkunar; an Akoposian flower, the symbol of her order, forged by her fellow survivors of Akopos in honor of the fallen monastic culture. Her entire, lean frame tensed, every muscle standing out beneath pale blue skin. "The Masters are gone," she said acidly. "They live on with me. I am the Emula. Just..." her anger sputtered out for a moment, replaced by inconsolable sorrow and she added, in the quietest voice, "just me."

That righteous fury reclaimed her a moment later. Her Syl blazed forth of a sudden, bright as lightning in the dimness. She made up her mind in that instant: she would go to the nearby isle. She would find the Imperium waste that survived the landing, and she would send them into the depths. Her glowing eyes turned skyward and with a mighty gesture of thrown arms and stiffened legs, Alani launched off, her will contorting the surrounding waters, churning them and using their force to shunt her toward her objective like a bullet.

Tag: Thorn