The Warrior
Posted on 28 Jun 2026 @ 1:39am by Captain Sabrina Corbin
1,500 words; about a 8 minute read
Mission:
Time After Time
Location: Sherman Oaks
Timeline: A continuation of Smalltown Boy
Liora’s eyes widened.
Only a little.
That frightened him more than if she had shouted.
“One pod?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Several adults. One small one. Maybe more behind the edge.”
“You opened a Veylith migration lane into a conflict window above a non-warp human fragment?”
“I didn’t open it. It slipped.”
“Aster.”
“I know.”
His voice broke on the words.
“I know. I know all of it. I know the order. Observation failure. Unscheduled intervention. Cross-window contamination. Sentient displacement. Local panic. Boundary stress. I know the violations. I know the report language. I know what they will say.”
“What will they say?”
“That I was not ready.”
Liora’s expression softened then, and he wished it had not.
“They may say that,” she admitted.
Aster shut his eyes.
“But they will say it after everyone is safe.”
He opened them again.
“Can you fix it?”
“No,” Liora said.
The answer was clean and immediate.
Aster stared at her.
“I cannot fix it from here,” she continued. “Not through this channel, not while you are still folding the frame around yourself, and not with Veylith inside the upper layer. If I push from outside, the pod may scatter, the ships may resume firing, and your displaced observers may become harder to retrieve.”
The baseball cards trembled.
“I thought you would know what to do.”
“I know what you need to do next.”
“That is not the same.”
“No,” Liora said. “It is better.”
He hated that answer.
It sounded like something adults said when they intended to make difficulty sound useful.
Liora knelt, or appeared to kneel, so that her face was level with his. “Aster, listen. You cannot hide and hold this frame together at the same time.”
“I can.”
“No. You can hide, or you can stabilize. You cannot do both while frightened.”
“I’m not frightened.”
“Aster.”
The room answered for him.
The closet door became a tree.
Then a corridor.
Then a wall again.
Liora waited.
He looked away first.
“There are people looking for me.”
“Yes.”
“They think I did it.”
“You did.”
His head snapped back toward her.
Her voice stayed gentle. “You caused it. That is not the same as intending harm.”
“They will be angry.”
“Probably.”
“They will try to stop me.”
“Maybe.”
“They are from the ship. They have devices. One has something with him that talks from a ring. It saw the correction before they did.”
“That may help you.”
“It is loud.”
“That may still help you.”
Aster made a small, miserable sound that had no useful classification.
Liora held out one hand through the narrow light. It was not physically there, but the room believed in it enough that the carpet bent beneath the offered shape.
“You need to give them something stable to find.”
Aster shook his head. “If they find me, the people will see. The humans will scream again.”
“Then do not stay near the humans.”
“I moved.”
“Good.”
“No. I made the room unreachable.”
Liora’s mouth tightened.
“Aster.”
“I didn’t want anyone to come in.”
“You made a pocket.”
“A small one.”
“You are inside a pocket, inside a fragment, inside a distortion envelope, linked to multiple unstable windows and at least one migration lane.”
When she said it that way, it sounded worse.
“It is a very small pocket,” he said.
Liora exhaled.
The gesture was borrowed from human form, but he recognized the meaning.
“You are going to open it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
“They will take me.”
“They may ask you questions.”
“They will be angry.”
“They may be afraid.”
“They should be afraid.”
“No,” Liora said, sharper now.
The word fixed the room for one entire second.
The baseball cards dropped gently to the dresser. The curtains stilled. The plastic dinosaur became plastic again.
Aster froze.
Liora’s expression was calm, but her eyes had become very deep.
“No, Aster. That is the thought you do not keep. They should not be afraid because you are powerful. They are afraid because they do not understand what is happening to them, and because you have not told anyone who can help. Fear is not proof of your importance. It is proof that you are no longer the only person inside the consequence.”
He could not answer.
His throat hurt.
“That is why you called me,” Liora said more softly. “Not because you wanted me to make you unresponsible. Because you wanted someone to help you be responsible without being alone.”
The line of light between them flickered.
For the first time, Aster looked less like a boy wearing the wrong jacket and more like something tired trying very hard to remain small enough not to damage the room.
“I lost control,” he whispered.
“I know.”
“I didn’t mean to take the two from the ship.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t mean to bring the Veylith.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t mean for the humans to see me.”
“I know.”
“I wanted them to be happy.”
Liora’s face softened again.
“That is the part that matters later,” she said. “Right now, the part that matters is what you do next.”
Outside the bedroom window, the frozen sunlight shifted.
Not much.
Just enough.
Aster felt it before he saw it. The fragment was trying to move around him again, correcting pressure along lines he had bent too far. Somewhere, the Veylith turned in the upper sky. Somewhere, the D7 and the Bird-of-Prey waited beneath the attention of a starship that did not belong to their war. Somewhere, three of the five people from the ship were still searching. Somewhere else, two displaced minds lay in a fold he had made by accident.
“What do I do?” he asked.
Liora gave him the answer he had been afraid of.
“You let them find you.”
Aster shook his head once.
“You open the pocket. You stabilize the seam around the two you displaced. You stop trying to repair the whole frame at once. Then you speak to the nearest calm observer.”
“They are not calm.”
“One of them will try to be.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they came down instead of firing from above.”
That logic was irritatingly sound.
Aster drew in another shaking breath.
The body accepted it this time.
“And if they hurt me?”
Liora leaned closer, the line of light thinning around her. “Then I will come through the hard way, and everyone will have a much larger problem.”
For the first time since the sun stopped, Aster almost smiled.
It did not last, but it existed.
The house groaned around him.
The hallway beyond the bedroom door tried to reassemble itself. Voices flickered through the walls, not from this house, not all from this time. A woman calling for Danny. A man shouting about the sky. Someone from the away team speaking with practiced quiet. A machine voice, golden and too clever, naming temporal shear with theatrical offense. Ryan Collingway’s fear. Steve Remington’s curiosity. The Veylith calf singing one frightened note too high for human hearing.
Aster flinched.
Liora’s voice steadied him.
“Small steps.”
He nodded.
“Open the room.”
He raised one hand.
The bedroom door became a door again.
“Good. Now anchor the two observers. Do not pull them out yet. Just keep them where they can be found.”
Aster closed his eyes.
The seam appeared behind his thoughts, bright and folded and full of moving pieces. He found the two displaced patterns. One restless, one dimmed by impact. He did not move them. He only placed a boundary around the holding frame, soft enough not to trap, strong enough that it would not collapse around them before someone found the way in.
Done.
The word did not need to be spoken.
Liora heard it anyway.
“Now,” she said, “make yourself findable.”
Aster opened his eyes.
He did not want to stand.
He stood.
The jacket settled at last into the faded blue windbreaker with pale cream panels. His hands looked human. His eyes did not. He tried to make them ordinary, but the stars remained beneath the surface, frightened and bright.
The closet light flickered. Liora’s image began to fade.
“Will you stay?” he asked.
“As close as I can.”
“That is not yes.”
“No,” she said. “But it is true.”
He nodded because truth was useful, even when it hurt.
The line of light thinned further.
“Aster.”
He looked at her.
“When they ask your name, give it.”
The channel closed.
The bedroom returned fully to itself.
Rocket curtains. Baseball cards. Comic books. Plastic dinosaur. A closed closet. A door that opened onto a hallway.
Aster stood in the middle of the room, alone and no longer hidden.
Outside, the impossible evening waited.
So did the people from the ship.
He took one step toward the door.
Then another.
This time, he did not run.
Aster
Juvenile Stage Four of the Meridian
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