“No road ends where the hearth still remembers your name.”
Writer’s Note: This story picks up on the night after the Sword is placed in the Stone aboard the U.S.S. Excalibur and is little over three months after the events of the Straits. Many of those involved in that story are strangely not at the Great Hall this particular night for reasons that will become apparent in the next forthcoming story.
Season 01 — Episode 14
Written by Alan Tripp
2412
The Great Hall — Ulfrvik
Operations Group Bastion
Hell’s Gate Nebula
“Sometimes home is not the place where the wandering stops. It is the place that keeps
a fire burning until the wanderer is ready to return.”
— Words attributed to Ka’nej Hauk
The Hearth Still Burns
Skysen’s Hall never truly slept.
Even in the deep hours before dawn, when the First Lands lay beneath fresh snow and the northern forests whispered only to themselves, the great lodge remained alive in the small ways that old homes always seemed to be. Ancient timbers settled with soft creaks beneath the weight of the roof. Wind moved carefully along the eaves, testing shutters and tracing its fingers through the carved mouths of the dragon posts that guarded the courtyard. Somewhere beyond the walls, one of the hall’s wolves lifted its head, listened to the night for a moment, and then returned its muzzle to its paws.
Snow drifted lazily through the valley.
It gathered along the broad steps leading to the lodge, softened the lines of the longboats resting beside the frozen stream, and laid white cloaks across the standing stones at the edge of the grounds. Above the mountains, the Skye Lights moved in pale ribbons of green and blue, their reflection faintly visible across the ice where the two rivers met beyond the settlement.
Within the hall, the hearth still burned.
It always did.
The circular fire pit at the heart of the lodge had been kept alive since the first stones of Skysen’s Hall were laid. The flames had risen and fallen across the years, fed by different hands and watched over by generations who had brought their sorrows, celebrations, quarrels, and silences to the same warm circle. Even when the fire was allowed to sink low during the night, someone always preserved a living ember for morning.
Tonight, the flames rested rather than slept.
Amber light rolled across polished timber floors worn smooth by countless boots. It climbed the carved pillars supporting the rafters, illuminating fragments of the stories worked into the wood: wolves running beneath stars, ships crossing impossible seas, dragons guarding mountain passes, and travelers following roads that disappeared into the unknown. Banners belonging to Clan Skysen and House Rhya hung in the darkness above, stirring faintly whenever the heat from the hearth reached them.
The lodge felt full despite its silence.
Not with people.
With memory.
Most of the household had retired hours earlier. A few lamps remained lit along the upper gallery, their glow marking the doors of family rooms and guest chambers. Somewhere upstairs, Brianna Llewellyn slept beneath the roof that had become as much hers as any place could be. Several visiting kinsmen occupied the eastern rooms. The kitchens had long since been cleaned, though the lingering scents of roasted meat, bread, and winter spices remained in the air.
Four familiar presences, however, were notably absent.
Álvyrr, Drekyrr, Eldryk, and Vaesyra had departed earlier under circumstances each of them apparently believed to be both secret and convincing. They had offered different explanations, none of which agreed with the others, and had vanished into the evening with supplies packed far too carefully for whatever harmless errand they claimed to be undertaking.
They believed Hauk knew nothing.
Hauk knew precisely where they had gone, what they intended to accomplish, and which part of their plan was most likely to go wrong first.
He had chosen not to interfere.
There were times when mischief served a purpose, particularly when undertaken by people who believed themselves too clever to be observed. Lessons learned while escaping the consequences of one’s own decisions often remained longer than those offered from the head of a table.
Besides, their story would find its way home soon enough.
Tonight, Skysen’s Hall belonged to someone else.
She sat alone beside the fire.
She had not lit the chandeliers or called for food. She had not awakened the household, sent a message ahead, or announced her return to the guards at the outer road. Sometime after midnight, she had simply walked through the gates carrying a weathered satchel and wearing the clothes of someone who had spent more nights beneath unfamiliar roofs than beneath her own.
No one had stopped her.
No one stopped family from coming home.
Her travel-stained boots rested near the hearthstones. Dried mud clung to the seams despite the snow outside, evidence of warmer valleys and distant roads crossed before winter had finally followed her north. A heavy wool cloak lay around her shoulders, dark with age and weather, its fabric carrying the faint scents of cedar smoke, sea salt, and rain.
Her satchel leaned against an empty chair.
It contained little. Several changes of clothing, a field knife, a small collection of objects acquired without explanation during her travels, and a few personal things she had never been willing to leave behind. Three months of wandering had taught her how little a person truly needed when they no longer knew where they were going.
Shallana Ironwolf sat forward with her forearms resting upon her knees, watching the fire as though it might eventually answer a question she had not learned how to ask.
Her dark auburn hair had been gathered loosely behind her head, though the journey had pulled several strands free. Firelight traced the fine lines around her eyes and revealed exhaustion deeper than sleeplessness. She looked older than she had when she entered the Straits.
Not by years.
By burdens.
Three months earlier, the Crazy Horse had died around her.
The gravitational forces within the Moskstraumen Straits had twisted the frigate beyond anything its frame had been designed to endure. Bulkheads had screamed. Decks had folded. The ship had been crushed piece by piece while Shallana and her crew fought to keep enough of her alive to reach the next minute.
She had saved them.
Every one of them.
People continued to tell her that as though survival erased what came before it.
They spoke of command discipline, impossible decisions, and a captain who had refused to abandon a single member of her crew. They called it victory because everyone who could be brought home had returned.
Shallana remembered the people who had not returned from the wider disaster.
She remembered the cries carried through the jungle before they found the Sparhawk survivors. She remembered the torn ground, the blood, the sudden violence of creatures that had learned how to hunt intelligent prey. She remembered faces looking to her for certainty when she had possessed none.
Most of all, she remembered the sound of her own ship dying.
Afterward, she had found herself unable to remain anywhere for long.
She could not stay aboard the facilities where the survivors were examined and questioned. She could not remain with Brianna while her daughter watched every expression and pretended not to worry. She could not face the officers who praised her for bringing the crew home, nor the admirals who spoke about replacing the Crazy Horse as though a new hull could fill the space left by the old one.
She had walked instead.
Across the First Lands and beyond the borders of familiar settlements, following roads whose names she never asked. She crossed mountain passes where stone cairns marked paths older than the people who now lived beneath the Skye Belt’s constructed sky. She slept in fishing villages along cold northern coasts and beneath pine shelters in forests where no artificial light reached the ground. She shared meals with strangers who knew nothing of Starfleet and asked no questions when she gave only her first name.
Sometimes she spoke.
Often she listened.
Mostly, she kept moving.
She had not been looking for herself. That sounded too clean, too deliberate, and too hopeful for what the wandering had truly been.
She had been trying to discover whether there was anywhere the dead could not follow.
There was not.
The flames shifted within the hearth.
A log collapsed inward, sending a small cloud of sparks upward before the chimney draft caught them. Shallana watched until the last ember disappeared into darkness.
A floorboard creaked above her.
She did not turn.
Measured footsteps crossed the upper gallery and began descending the broad staircase at the far end of the hall. The pace was unhurried, familiar, and heavy enough that she recognized the walker before he came into view.
Ka’nej Hauk had always risen before dawn.
Old habits rarely surrendered to rank, age, or the accumulation of injuries. He slept lightly, woke early, and generally knew when someone entered Eldryk’s hall long before they reached the hearth.
He paused halfway down the staircase.
From the shadows above, he studied the woman sitting before the fire, the satchel beside her, and the untouched mug someone had apparently left near the hearth earlier in the evening.
A small smile moved beneath his beard.
“I was beginning to wonder how long you intended to make me wait.”
Shallana kept her eyes on the flames.
“I was trying not to wake anyone.”
“You did not.”
He resumed his descent.
“You woke the dogs.”
The corner of her mouth moved despite herself.
“They still remember me?”
“They remember everyone worth remembering.”
Hauk reached the bottom of the stairs and crossed the hall without hurry. He wore a simple dark tunic and loose trousers rather than armor or uniform, and his long hair had not yet been bound for the day. In the low firelight, he appeared less like the Dahar Master who commanded fleets and houses than the old warrior who had spent decades learning how to remain standing after everyone else expected him to fall.
He stopped beside the hearth.
A battered iron kettle hung above the coals.
Shallana glanced at it.
“Eldryk left that there deliberately.”
“He knows I often desire tea before sunrise.”
“You never drink tea before sunrise.”
“I occasionally host stubborn travelers who arrive without warning.”
He lifted the kettle from its hook and poured water into two heavy mugs. He added nothing to his own. Into hers he dropped a small twist of herbs taken from a wooden box kept beside the hearth, then waited until the water darkened before placing the mug near her hands.
Shallana looked down at it.
“You knew I was coming.”
“I suspected.”
“How?”
“The wolves stopped watching the northern road.”
“That tells you I was coming?”
“It tells me they had found what they were waiting for.”
That answer would once have irritated her.
Tonight, it merely felt like Hauk.
He lowered himself into the chair opposite hers with a quiet exhalation brought on more by old injuries than age. One knee resisted before bending, and he settled his weight carefully against the carved backrest. He wrapped both hands around his mug and turned his gaze toward the fire.
For several minutes, neither of them spoke.
The silence between them was not empty.
It carried years of shared service, grief survived in different places, and the rare comfort of sitting beside someone who did not require pain to be translated before they would believe it existed.
Shallana lifted the mug.
The warmth seeped into her fingers.
“You have been gone,” Hauk said at last.
“I know.”
“Brianna worried.”
“I know.”
“I told her you would return when you were ready.”
Shallana looked across the hearth.
“You knew I would return?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Hauk took a slow drink.
“The same way I knew to remain downstairs tonight.”
She studied him for several moments, searching for amusement and finding only certainty.
“I could not stay,” she said.
“No.”
“I could not go home.”
“I know.”
“I could not remain with Brianna while she watched me every moment and pretended she wasn’t.”
“No.”
Her fingers tightened around the mug.
“I could not face Miles.”
Hauk’s eyes shifted from the flames to her face.
There it was.
Not anger, though anger had once guarded it.
Not confusion, though confusion remained tangled through everything that had happened.
Grief.
The quiet, stubborn kind that survived long after a person had grown tired of carrying it.
Shallana looked down into the dark surface of her drink.
“I struck him.”
“I heard.”
“I struck an admiral.”
“I have done worse.”
A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. It was brief, dry, and almost unfamiliar, but it existed.
“What did you do?”
“Which admiral?”
That earned another small breath of laughter. It faded quickly, though not completely.
“He crossed half a galaxy to find me,” she said.
“He did.”
“I still struck him.”
“You did.”
“I thought I hated him.”
“No.”
Her gaze sharpened.
“I was there.”
“So was I.”
“You were angry.”
“I was.”
“I hated what had happened.”
“Yes.”
“I hated the years that were taken from us.”
“Yes.”
“I hated looking at a stranger wearing the face of the man I loved.”
The fire popped between them.
Hauk waited.
Shallana stared into the flames until her eyes blurred.
“I never hated Miles.”
“No,” Hauk said quietly. “You did not.”
The admission settled across her shoulders with a weight unlike the others. It did not crush her. It simply remained, a truth she had been avoiding because accepting it made everything else more difficult.
“I don’t know who he is anymore.”
“No.”
“I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Hauk’s attention left the fire completely.
The real wound had finally spoken.
Not the loss of the Crazy Horse.
Not the Straits.
Not even Miles and the years that separated the man she had known from the one who had returned.
Herself.
Hauk leaned back in his chair, studying her with the patient expression of someone examining damage without yet deciding what tools would be required.
“There is a story,” he said.
Shallana closed her eyes.
“Of course there is.”
“A blacksmith spent years forging the finest sword he had ever made.”
“I have heard this story.”
“No, you have not.”
“The sword breaks.”
“Yes.”
“And the blacksmith forges it again.”
“No.”
She opened one eye.
“No?”
“He throws it away.”
Shallana frowned.
“No blacksmith would do that.”
Hauk lifted his mug slightly.
“Exactly.”
She stared at him.
He allowed himself the smallest hint of satisfaction before continuing.
“He carries the broken sword home. He studies the fracture. He learns where the steel failed, where his hand had been too certain, and where the blade had been asked to bear a burden it was never shaped to carry.”
“And then he reforges it.”
“Eventually.”
“What happens first?”
“He accepts that it is broken.”
The words found her more cleanly than any comfort might have.
Shallana looked back into the fire.
“I do not feel reforged.”
“No.”
“I feel broken.”
“I know.”
For a while, only the flames moved.
Shallana’s hands trembled faintly around the mug. She tightened her grip until the motion stopped.
“I watched them die.”
Hauk said nothing.
“I could not stop it.”
Still he waited.
“I watched something hunt my people as though they were animals. I heard them call for help when there was no way to reach them. I saw what was left when we finally found them.”
Her voice weakened, but she forced the words through.
“I can still hear them.”
Hauk did not interrupt.
He had learned long ago that there were wounds no argument could close and memories no reassurance could make less true. Sometimes the only gift one soul could offer another was the space to speak without being hurried toward healing.
Shallana lowered her head.
“I keep thinking that if I had chosen differently…”
“You would be dead.”
She looked up sharply.
Hauk’s expression had not changed.
“What?”
“You would be dead,” he repeated. “So would everyone whose life depended upon the decisions you made.”
“You cannot know that.”
“No. Neither can you.”
The answer stopped her.
“You punish yourself with an imagined path in which everyone survives because you chose perfectly. That path does not exist.”
“I lost people.”
“Yes.”
“I lost the Crazy Horse.”
“Yes.”
“I lost command.”
“No.”
Her brow furrowed.
“The ship is gone.”
“The ship is not command.”
“She was my responsibility.”
“And you carried that responsibility until there was nothing left of her to carry.”
Shallana’s throat tightened.
“I lost part of myself in there.”
Hauk nodded once.
“That, I believe.”
The acknowledgement hurt more than denial would have.
He returned his gaze to the fire.
“You crossed half the First Lands.”
“I wandered.”
“You walked past a thousand homes.”
“I suppose I did.”
“You could have remained in any village. You could have gone to Brianna, to Starfleet, to one of the old crew, or to any of the people who would have opened a door for you.”
Shallana looked around the hall.
At the timbers darkened by years of smoke.
At the banners above them.
At the long table where arguments became stories and stories eventually became family history.
At the empty chairs waiting for Álvyrr, Drekyrr, Eldryk, and Vaesyra to return from the mission of mischief they believed no one had discovered.
At the hearth that had been kept alive because someone always expected another traveler to come home.
“I did not know where else to go,” she admitted.
Hauk smiled.
“No.”
She looked at him.
“You knew exactly where to go.”
The fire cracked loudly, and a shower of sparks rose toward the rafters.
Outside, snow continued to fall across the valley.
Within Skysen’s Hall, something in Shallana finally loosened.
It was not peace. Peace remained too distant and too complete a word for what she felt.
It was smaller than that.
Warmer.
A place within herself that had been clenched for three months finally remembered how to breathe.
Home.
Hauk finished his drink and rose carefully from the chair.
“Sleep.”
Shallana looked up at him.
“I am not tired.”
“You have walked for three months.”
“That does not mean I can sleep.”
“No. It means you should try.”
He took her empty satchel from beside the chair and placed it over one shoulder.
“We will decide where the next road leads after breakfast.”
A faint smile touched his face.
“Assuming our four missing conspirators have not accidentally destroyed the kitchen before then.”
Shallana blinked.
“They are not here?”
“No.”
“Where are they?”
“Engaged in a secret undertaking about which I know absolutely nothing.”
The innocence in his voice was so thoroughly unconvincing that Shallana stared at him.
“You know exactly what they are doing.”
“Of course.”
“And you are letting them?”
“For now.”
“Why?”
“Because they believe they are deceiving me.”
His smile deepened.
“It would be cruel to spoil their evening.”
For the first time since arriving, Shallana’s laughter sounded like something that belonged to her.
Hauk turned toward the stairs, then paused.
“Oh.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You should speak with Miles.”
The warmth left her expression.
“He is in another galaxy.”
“Not anymore.”
Shallana sat straighter.
“What?”
“It is classified.”
“Hauk.”
“But while you were wandering through mountains and wrestling prehistoric nightmares, a group of stubborn civilian explorers discovered an ancient network of artificial wormholes.”
She stared at him.
“The network is real?”
“It is.”
“And one reaches the Typhon Expanse?”
“One opens near Starbase Lazarus.”
The hall became very quiet.
Shallana turned back toward the fire.
Miles.
Not a memory.
Not a voice carried across impossible distance.
Close enough to reach.
“You could be there tomorrow,” Hauk said.
Her fingers tightened around the edge of the cloak.
“I do not have a ship.”
Hauk stood at the foot of the stairs, watching her with an expression she could not read.
“Not yet.”
He climbed slowly toward the upper gallery, carrying her satchel as though its presence in his hand settled the question of whether she would remain.
Shallana stayed beside the hearth for several minutes after he disappeared.
The fire had burned lower, but it had not gone out.
Beyond the walls of the lodge, snow covered the roads she had traveled and softened the world into silence. Somewhere in the First Lands, four members of her family were undoubtedly creating the sort of trouble that would become another story by morning. Somewhere beyond an ancient wormhole, Miles Llewellyn existed beneath another sky.
The path before her remained hidden.
For the first time in months, it no longer seemed empty.
It had simply not yet been revealed.