In the darkest hour, the air sang of her Thoughts. I saw it all. My ears began to fill with the sound until my head was full of her Way. My eyes burned and went blind and were brought back to vision with an explosive snap, but I could not tear them away from her. My body shook and sobbed, and yet I did not move a muscle or dare take a breath. The sky was full of Her, this monstrous Body in the image of my old commander.

Her Skin was a patchwork of colours and images, changing and pulsing and teeming with life. The words of prophecy, unheeded till now, echoed in my head: She shall don the fabric of the universe. The stars shall be her Skin. Her Hair fell in waves of galaxies that curled at the edges and clung to her Skin as if wet, rose-pink and spring-green veins swaying to a cosmic breeze. Her Arms were long and muscular, or perhaps they were slender and bony, or perhaps there were so many of them that it did not matter. All that mattered was that in each six-fingered Hand, she held a planet, shining and singing with the voices of billions of wayward souls. They all cowered behind her in the face of the darkness that consumed All, crying for their goddess’s Love and Protection.

And she gave it. She turned her Face, Eyes closed, to every small planet, every single soul, and she smiled upon them and the air sang of her Thoughts. Her Fingers tightened around the planets, protecting them. I could recognise them, even if it was just from pictures and vids. I saw my home planet, red and scarred, in the Hand of her fifth Arm.

Slowly, her Arms spun around until they slid into place, holding every planet before her, her Face heartbreakingly soft and affectionate as she regarded her countless doomed children. One planet she held at her Temple...my planet. Another she held over her Throat, and another at her left Breast, one before her Womb, her Hip, her Stomach, her Knee, out in the air before her. Her Fingers held each planet, but not as if caged. They were not caged. Her Fingers were not the bars of a cold iron prison but the arms of a mother in a long-awaited embrace.

And then she turned her Face to the right. And then her Eyes opened.

Two where human eyes physically were, and one upon each shimmering Cheek. The final I could not see, but I knew, I knew it was behind my home planet at her Throat, and she was looking through the tons of rock as if they did not exist. The Eyes of the Goddess saw all, and in the blink of a mortal eye, no, faster, the Goddess Judged.

The universe exploded in green and black and all within the Hands of the Goddess saw the destruction, and were not afraid.

---

Sometimes she forgot. It seemed like it was a strange thing to forget, but she did. Dr. Junvi, the therapist the board’d assigned to her to keep her under control, always seemed to talk as if she had some kind of alter ego that emerged when she was needed, but that was far from the truth. It was so much more unnatural than that, so much more habitual and ingrained in her being. It was neither convenient nor deliberate.

She knew that her control slipped a little bit, when she forgot what she was supposed to do as a mortal, but she never really gave it much thought when she did. Tali walked in on her once making coffee, floating several inches above the ground, five of her arms in use as she worked, humming to herself in many voices in many languages. It had taken three hours for her to calm down enough to speak, and then Anya had smiled, just trying to show her everything was alright, and she had started crying again.

Dr. Junvi always asked who he was talking to. He failed to understand how annoying that question was, because no matter what form she took, no matter how many eyes or arms or voices she had, he was always talking to her. Whatever he said to the woman, the goddess heard, and whatever he spoke to the goddess, the woman understood. They were one and the same. Sometimes it frustrated her beyond belief, and other times she resigned herself with the knowledge that he didn’t really understand, but he was trying very hard to.

She didn’t talk to him very much about it, not at first. She figured she might as well take advantage of what she had, so she talked about her parents and her aunt and her uncle. But then she admitted to him that it had gotten very lonely, when everyone she loved avoided her out of fear or reverence, and she could hardly speak to anyone without seeing how they hurt and wanting to fix it. She never admitted to him that she had seen other Vessels, and how badly she wanted to speak to them, to call to them, to hear their godly voices against hers. She didn’t think he could handle it yet, the knowledge of her brothers and sisters in the flesh.

She remembered one session, when three of her eyes had opened and she was using one more hand than was physically natural to tidy up, he had said, “We must seem so small and insignificant to you.” He said this to the goddess, of course, not even considering what the woman must think of her fellow mortals, but Anya’s heart was so full of love in that moment that she just chuckled and shook her head no.

"You are not small,” she assured him, many voices in her throat. “You are all exactly the same size as I am. Perhaps your bodies are smaller than mine, your lifespans shorter, but you are by no means insignificant.” She thought a moment. What she had said was not quite right. Relatively, her lifespan was no longer than theirs, in comparison her form was no bigger or smaller. “There are some gods, those who separate themselves from the mortal plane, who see the individuals as unimportant, their lives too short to have meaning. But I am not those gods. You are all born of me and you all live within me and I love you all as a mother should love her children. ” She smiled at him to assure him she was not of that unspoken dark ilk, and he burst into tears.

---

He hesitated, his hand not even rising to meet the door. His heart hammered in his throat and his head spun with a thousand thoughts, a thousand bad endings and mistakes. His every digestive organ went on riot, and he gulped to keep his lunch down. He tried to tell his arm to raise, to knock…

"Hello?”

He jumped back, startled, but the door did not open. The comm flickered to life again and the cracking, static-y voice came again. “I’m busy at the moment...you can leave a message with the VI.”

This was it. This was his out. He could walk away now, leave a purely work-related message in the computer, and forget he’d ever had this ridiculous notion. But whatever excuse he came up with fled, along with every other thought in his mind. His brain abruptly went silent, and his mouth was stuck open in a halted reply.

"It’s…” He stopped, coughing to clear his throat of the reedy whine that had replaced his voice. “It’s me.”

"Oh!” The door opened almost immediately, but she was not standing there to greet him. The muffled thumping that had first drawn him near was now a near-deafening rhythmic roar, punctuated by grating screeches and scraping beeps. Her head peeked out from a far corner. “You should probably close the door before I get another noise complaint.”

He had been frozen to that point, and with his head empty as it was, could do nothing more than stumble through the open doorway. Belatedly, he remembered to close the door.

"Back here,” she prompted, and he walked slowly.

Every step felt like an eternity, and with every eternity his terror grew. He could not put a name to each individual fear, but they were many and specific and bordering on crippling. But habit meant she would not be kept waiting, and he turned the corner, his breath held and his heart hammering and his mind white with the overwhelming static of his fears.

She was sitting at the table, coffee in her hand, blowing on the surface before taking a sip. Her eyes darted between him and the clipboard in her hand, and her lips were pulled into a familiar smile. She wore a slightly fancier version of her old uniform, which was unsurprising. She had no doubt been promoted. Her hair was very short now, and he could see the tips of her tattoos creeping at her throat, black and red and bleeding into her dark skin. The music was pounding and her foot tapped the air slightly off beat.

It was so normal… He reeled back and waited for something to happen, for the other shoe to drop, but nothing did and it didn’t. She looked so normal and casual, so very unlike the last time he had seen her, that he wasn’t sure what to do.

"Hold on...I’m almost done reading this,” she said, her voice disappointingly, mercifully, flat and singular. She gestured absently to the couch across from her with the coffee, sending a few black drops flying to disappear forever in the inky depths of the carpet.

She read quickly. He prepared himself for another long silence in which he would lose himself to his fears and uncertainties, but he had no such luck. The awkwardness and disbelief had only just settled on him when she threw the clipboard onto the table and leaned back with a sigh, taking another sip of coffee and wincing at the taste.

"Jacki was messing around with the settings,” she grumbled, “and I forgot to fix them. Too much sugar.” But she drank it anyway. She stared at him fondly and with a touch of the awkwardness he felt, and her voice shook slightly as she asked, “So what have you been up to? I haven’t actually seen you in...gosh...this is going on...almost a year, right?” She looked uncertain, but after a minute she nodded in that self-assured way of hers, so he didn’t bother to correct her.

Oh Anya...it has been so much longer than a year.

"You look...good,” he found himself saying. Dear gods, he hoped he didn’t sound as constipated to her as to himself. His throat felt tight, and every word was shoved through like…well. “I mean, the new uniform? Is that your new uniform? It looks good.”

"This? Yeah.” She smiled, lopsided and easy. “One of the perks...the few perks…of getting promoted. Sweet new threads. You should see my dress uniform. You could cut steel with those hemlines.” Her every word, though spoken with no unusual emotion or inflection, caused him to pause and panic. She continued talking about...other officers or something, but he was watching her too closely to pay any attention to her actual words. Her voice washed over him and he just stared. He watched her eyes, clear and brown and shining only with the light of the lamp behind him. He catalogued her sides, pushing at the hem of her uniform. He took careful note of her hands and arms, waving every now and then to punctuate a word, but for the most part resting, a count of two each, casually thrown over couch or knee. Her throat was hidden behind her collar, and her cheeks held spots of color from the excitement and hot coffee.

Abruptly, she sat up, and his heart beat wildly in his chest.

“I forgot to ask if you wanted anything!” She sounded so genuinely distraught, and that was so abnormally normal, that he found himself laughing. “Don’t laugh at me! Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? I have coffee still, and some ham and I think Hunt left some meat you can eat in the freezer last week…” She trailed off unhappily. She was attempting to wring her hands, but was foiled by the coffee cup occupying her left hand. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out suddenly. “I just...I’ve missed you and I wasn’t expecting you and I haven’t had guests in a while...well, other than…” She trailed off again, looking more and more distressed as the seconds passed. As her awkwardness rose, so too did his panic, and he sat up abruptly, waving a hand at her.

“No, no, no, it’s perfectly alright,” he assured her, in a tone that assured her it was perfectly not. “I am a bit hungry, but… It was my fault, really, showing up out of the blue like this. You probably didn’t even know I was aboard or…”

She didn’t stop wringing her hands, looking as if the thought of leaving him hungry or thirsty was enough to shame her whole line. “I knew,” she interrupted softly, moving a strand of hair from her face with a pale finger. “I knew you were aboard, and I, uh…” But after that she really refused to say more.

She moved into the kitchen to get him something to eat, and even though he didn’t ask for it, she brought him some coffee too. She also brought something for herself. The awkwardness didn’t pass, but slowly his panic did. She took off her jacket, loudly claiming she felt too formal in it, and he had nothing to do but unhappily copy her (it was strange, having her outrank him so thoroughly now). He stopped worrying about how many eyes, how many arms, how many voices she had.

They laughed and she told him a little of what she had done, and he told her very little of what he had done. She offered him a ride home, and he declined, pointing out they were aboard a ship and his quarters were two levels away. She looked mortified to have been reminded and was quite adamant at that point to get him out the door before she embarrassed herself further.

It wasn’t until he was on the elevator that he realized that she had made his dinner with four arms, and that while they had said good-bye, she had said a joke and winked at him with a wide green eye situated on her throat.