And one satellite watches.

Thressali Mirzen no longer orbits Mythhaler.

She's seen, twice now, that the scouts are no longer where they belong.

But she still can't tear herself free from the past – and nor does she want to. That little stretch of the Lyssil coastline, around Ilcavith – that was home, home and family, where she'd grown up and grown back to and never, ever, truly grown away from. And so, just in case the orbits do match up, a single satellite flies to the Mythhaler side of Veltha and strains for a glimpse. She still clutches onto a shred of hope, though it's thin and pale and flutters fragile as ashes in the breeze.

And if the orbits do match up, then she looks out on the blue-green-white jewel that hangs both right in front of her and impossibly far away, and she pictures how it felt, centuries ago, to be down there. She had wanted to return, and instead had broken into fifty tiny pieces. It's too many. Too many to function, too many to communicate, just too many to be.

She cannot sleep now, but she can dream – and she can dream of being one again, one and whole and warm. She had said it so easily – “we are not them any more” – caught up in the heat of the moment and her desire to convince.

And yet, now she has a moment of something that almost approaches peace, the words feel like lead in her heart. She is so close, and yet still so, so very far away.

And she will never return.

Suddenly, all that blue-green beauty overwhelms her, assaulting her eyes with its colours and the songs it whispers on the wind. She turns away, back to Veltha, that barren world now pockmarked by war.

She will write, for Therneri. And she will crush her longing and her doubt and her homesickness beneath the rigours of work, and she will be fine.

She will be absolutely fine.

(Don't blink.)

[and if that same satellite, later, turns towards Myathriri's asteroid with an anxious eye, concerned just as much for its inhabitant as for her impact on the world? Well. Nobody has to know.]

I hope the fact that this is still one major action and three branch actions comes across clearly! I just wanted to take some Thressali-style hammers to it. The idea is that she is only trying to do one of the three bigger actions, but her satellites are not working as one, three projects get started, and they all keep running into each other without her realising/noticing.

She's having a great time.

[I, conversely, am genuinely having a great time. Glitching emails and emotional destruction via printing press – what's not to love?]