It was about seven hours after launch that Theora noticed a light lag on the messages to and from the system. Whenever she sent one, it would appear transparent for about a second until it was confirmed to have reached the target. She was now more than half the way to the first moon, although ground control had made sure both Theora and the moons would stay well out of each other’s ways.
At the ninth hour, Theora was asked to throw a lot more blood from her attire. She only had about one hundred tons loaded. She’d already thrown a fifth of that by now; more than initially planned. The first patch was far away, and she needed to reach it quickly.
Within a few minutes of launching the blood in giant shockwaves, Theora soared past the first moon, and the second one half an hour later.
Maybe one day, if she found another Orb, she could visit the moons with Dema. Looking at them up-close, they were rather pretty.
“Miss you,” she wrote.
Dema responded quickly with a message that appeared to be a stand-in for a hug. “How’s it going?”
“I’m heading half-way towards the sun after all. They say I can steal some speed of a planet by just missing it, and having it bend my route.”
“Dang, velocity theft. I thought better of you, Bun Bun!”
Theora wanted to smile, but it just cracked the corners of her mouth a little. “I see you learned the laws of nature.”
“Yeah! They kept going on about it when I was making the blood stones. ‘No this ain’t right, you gotta do it that way and that way for the this and that!’”
Again, an almost-smile.
And so, about fifteen hours into Theora’s journey, the horror started to set in.
By now, messages were taking almost a minute to be sent. Half a minute until they arrived at her home planet, and another for the confirmation of arrival to come back to her — and a possible answer with it, if the recipient was fast. Soon, she wouldn’t be able to talk to her friends anymore, and it would instead feel like writing letters.
Theora hadn’t anticipated the light lag to become noticeable this quickly. She still called it that, despite Isobel having corrected it to the ‘lag induced by the maximum speed of information,’ but light lag was faster to say, and light and information travelled at the same speed anyway — although Theora kept that to herself, because she knew Isobel would start squirming if she actually said that out loud.
Instead, they talked about course corrections and estimates of arrival. Theora still had 20 days left until she needed to be at the last patch.
20 days left, and any course correction or mistake she made would make it less likely for her to arrive in time.
“Doing great!” Isobel lied at some point — it had to be a lie, probably to improve Theora’s morale.
“Did Bell and Dema leave?” Theora asked.
After a short pause, Iso went, “Yep. Debated whether they should stay until you hit the first magic mould patch, but there’s not much they can do even if things go wrong there anyway. So they decided to go.”
Theora wanted to nod, but couldn’t. Half her body was frozen, the other burning under the gaze of the sun. Dema had probably sent messages, but Theora had been too busy with altering her course and putting her body back together after throwing blood rocks. Plus, every time she did send a message, the wait for it to be delivered was agonising.
Everyone seemed to be slipping away.
Twenty days of travel time. Theora had imagined chatting with them and having them close throughout, but… Perhaps this would be even lonelier than she’d imagined.
At the eighteenth hour, Isobel finally seemed content enough. Theora was properly on course to hit the first patch of mould at 23 hours and 3 minutes into her journey, no further adjustments needed, so Isobel went to bed and suggested Theora slept some too.
Theora couldn’t sleep, though; she was tired, yes, but everything was a bit much. She decided to wade through her messages, doing her best not to veer off-course. Dema had been sending countless messages reporting her journey with Bell, and it took Theora an hour to read through all of it, with the warmest feeling in her chest.
Bell and Dema had never before gotten to spend much time together; at least not to Theora’s knowledge. Perhaps this journey would help them get closer. It certainly seemed that way, considering Dema had apparently convinced Bell to help her level-up immortality by wrapping her in deadly poison tendrils.
“Got her to hold my hand too,” Dema had written. “So spicy.”
Theora couldn’t help but want to smile when she read through the few messages Bell had sent during that same time.
“Gosh, your girlfriend is a lot. Starting to wonder if I should have tried finding Treeka on my own.”
“I’m begging you, when you read this, tell Dema I’m not a plushie,” and, “I tried to kill her once. I can’t ask her to stop hugging me now, it’s impossible,” to which, yes, Theora could relate.
Bell also wrote, “Ugh. Not going to tell anyone else, but since you seem busy anyway, I guess I’ll put this into the void. I miss None already. I’ve been travelling with them for almost half a century and now we’ll be apart for months. It hurts. I hope they’ll be okay,” and, about twenty minutes later, “You know, scratch what I said earlier. Don’t tell Dema I’m not a plushie.”
Meanwhile, Balinth had written, “Sorry for the countless messages in the group chat. I thought it would be fun to add everyone, but now I’m worried you feel left out since you haven’t written much.” A while later, she added, “Actually that might be because you are busy. I apologise. I assume you have muted notifications so they don’t pop up all the time. Hope you are doing well.” Then, “Ah, and if you ever need a distraction, I’m reading this book right now and I could go on for an hour about how good it is. I should read more things by younger authors. The characters make a lot more… mistakes than they used to in the stories when I was younger. It’s nice to see authors allow characters to be imperfect.”
Somehow, then Balinth went on for an hour anyway; not about the book she was reading but about the changes in the genre she’d witnessed in her life. There was also a message from Balinth’s wife jokingly accusing Theora of hogging up all of Bal’s time to the point where they skipped their ritualistic daily afternoon coffee.
Harrik had been asking some panicked questions about the time dilation device and if it was still properly sealed, and Theora felt bad when she realised they’d never told him what was up. As he rightly pointed out, it was impossible to predict how the device would act in zero-gravity space conditions; it might fall apart or malfunction, like many other magical artefacts.
This was the first message Theora actually responded to, giving a detailed answer to show that the dangerous item was contained safely with Dema inside the Shade, inside a meticulously well-crafted barrier put up by Bell to limit its range, and that they wouldn’t use it in any way.
Then, she wrote responses to everyone else too. By the time she was about to hit the magic mould, the lag had grown to over two minutes. It was late evening for Balinth, who was still going on about her current story after Theora had encouraged her to, and it was deep at night for everyone who’d seen her off at launch.
Isobel checked in at some point to let Theora know she was awake again.
And so, eventually, about three minutes after schedule, Theora plunged into the magic mould.
It was a nebulous, cloudy substance in many muted colours, but beautiful and glowing. It looked like the stardust clouds astronomers could see in the skies — except, of course, the fields of magic mould were smaller. Much smaller. This patch here was only the size of a peninsula. It was so small Theora wondered how the Protans had found and mapped it.
As predicted, the mould absorbed all of Theora’s momentum. Like a sticky mud, she could barely move inside, and felt the substance draw power out from her like she was food. It was a peculiar feeling, the type only magic phenomena could invoke, because while the substance slowed her down, she still couldn’t swim in it nor push it aside.
The Orb of Seven Wishes helped. Theora was folded into a higher dimension to stay afloat in the muddy mould, and the propulsion of the Orb managed to overcome the resistance, barely. She also tried to throw blood stones, and yes — that worked out, even though it didn’t get her far.
It was like the glowing orange substance needed a moment to react, but then absorbed whatever momentum Theora had. Like starchy dough. Of course, she tried to fetch some magic mould for Dema by opening a fold in her attire, but it was really hard to judge whether it had worked.
For now, though, she had to hurry.
Theora didn’t manage to leave the mould patch within the last hour of the first Orb’s runtime, so she had to throw additional blood stones to fully get out. From then on, they decided she wouldn’t try to go through it again, and instead leave the next patch as soon as she sunk in, and then use the Orb to navigate around it.
On the other side, she took careful aim, and then threw more weights to propel her to the next patch. The weights sunk into the mould; she didn’t even have to [Obliterate] them afterwards.
Isobel kept asking for corrections for a few hours until she was satisfied, and then signed off.
And so, Theora went back to watching the light lag crawl up.
