=====A Stranger to Yourself=====

[CW: mentions burning alive; insects]

In your disturbed dreams, once Annette has disappeared into the condensation of wet summer air in the dense impenetrable forest, your numbers diminish like a fire starved. The discipline you sent to watch Salithra is the second to go, his hawk eyes and dark skin diluted, cloudlike, by the mist as he walks away, abandons you. Then the next goes, and then, the next, silent, dutiful soldiers of the backdrop converted into traitors, non-believers, failures of the Trial, knowers of the truth. Those who know you. Those who know who you are.

You startle awake from the dream and into the waking nightmare of preparation. The Bastion is no Bulwark, you tell yourself, clutching an arm so tightly the half-moons of your bitten nails leave marks in your skin. The Bastion is no fire, and the empty air of speech, your preferred mode of combat, will not protect you in light of the incoming horde. Not as well as your working hands and legs will -- even then, maybe you won't be safe from the creatures of the forest, but you can assure yourself of safety in a different way entirely. If the clunking, wheezing machine of the Bastion will not serve you, you will have to serve yourself. It's an unfamiliar position, an uncomfortable one -- you have not had to serve yourself in a long time. Your hands shake. You do not recognise this from yourself.

You watch the others get dirt under their fingernails -- some more literal than others, Juno and I digging painstaking little ruts into the soil to embed land mines within, the rigging-up of an electrical fence bordering the perimeter -- and realise that none of it is for you. If you want a way out, a reliable back door, you will have to assure it. 

You scope the fence for exits, eyeing the gaps that are no longer viable exits but would fry you to a crisp if you tried. Your eye wandering along the gaps in the border is accompanied by your tongue wandering along the edges of your disciplines' generosity -- donate, will they not, their rations to the church for safekeeping? You cannot help the irrational relief you feel when your dream is proven wrong and a few hands come together to give you dry rations. Inedible and stale and your sole charge. You hide them away in the corpse of a tree, only to wrench them out when a tide of ants comes scrambling out in a panic. Too risky. The safest place for your food stores is somewhere outside the boundary, where no other living creature would risk going.

You venture tentatively out, one step, two, twenty, from the perimeter in the cold of night. You follow each step by a glance backward, all around, scoping the surroundings, squinting through dark out of fear of who you might see. Your shallow breaths and the crunch of dry soil underfoot are your only companions. You stop short at a crack, your head swivelling urgently. What was that? You hurry on, away from the source of the sound, more concerned with immediate safety than with keeping count or direction of your steps. The mist of the forest grows thicker; your steps, slower, your mind cold with fear.

An alien shape disrupts the organism of the forest. Your stride falters. Its smooth, white curve stands ghoulishly out from the deep green-greys and deciduous browns. A vessel of some sort -- an inorganic seed, its metal body cold as a block of ice as though the Light of the day could never penetrate it. Your breath clouds before you as you watch it slice itself open and its occupant uncurl their long, body-suited form out into a person taller and stronger than you. You cannot make out their expression through the cosmonautical helmet, but their stance reads clearly as confusion, as unsettlement, disorientation, even nausea.

A stranger. A straggler. Alone.

It must be a sign, and it awakens something in you. You remember what you are. Your posture grows tall and self-confident once again. You ball your hands into fists, bringing heat back into your fingers, stopping them from shaking. You, the saviour, to make first contact. You, charged by the High Priestess with bringing the straggler from the unknown wilds back to the Bastion, out of harm's way, and into the Light.

You, the saviour.

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