Grayson stepped backwards and tilted his head in confusion.

  "I'm human. We just made modifications through technology instead of magic... then I made some modifications through magic." He tried to downplay his weirdness a little. When a literal Goddess is asking what you are it is time to be concerned. Grayson considered that line of thought and how it really should apply to Perimis. For some reason he seemed to feel more comfortable with her in his head than with other deities, in his head or otherwise.

  "Humans, modified or otherwise, only have one soul," the avatar said flatly. Grayson shuffled his feet.

  "Lady Perimis was there at the time. She can explain it better than I can. I only learned that I had a soul at that time..." Grayson tried to evade the insinuation. Especially after the presence of liches in this universe had been confirmed, breaking his soul in two and storing part of it in his skeleton seemed like a pretty lichy thing to do.

  "And the rest of your body? Not one of your cells are truly human. Your very DNA is completely different. Humanity is there, but buried." The avatar's voice was still mildly hostile.

  "That's an incredibly long story," Grayson said uneasily.

  "We have time."

  "Then we'll start with my name, Grayson of the Lost World. The humans here seem to be around the same evolutionary period of Earth in the year 2000 of the pre-Faster Than Light era. That era ended in the year 2890 with the beginning of the Faster Than Light era." Grayson began the tale of human history in his own world.

  "What do you mean faster than light? Nothing travels faster than light without magic, and you have made it clear several times that your world has no magic and no Gods. Even with magic, the only way to travel faster than light is magic that has not yet been developed in these civilizations." Bolan's avatar seemed both intrigued and concerned.

  "We began with travel within our own solar system. In approximately the year 2090 fusion energy as a reliable, stable, and profitable power source became available." Again Bolan interrupted.

  "The power of the stars. Surely you received just comeuppance for such hubris?" Bolan seemed almost offended, recoiling from Grayson as if he was unclean.

  "Not really. It gave us the solar system. There was a space race between the competing organizations that ruled Earth to take over the different portions of our stellar system. Stations were built around the gas giants to syphon gasses for use in generating fusion power. There were bases set up on most of the major celestial bodies within a century. Mastery of the system itself was declared in the year 2130." Grayson continued his story. The avatar's body language wasn't hard to read as the visible shock of the Goddess was written on it's face.

  "Anyway, shortly after that, people started building generation ships and sending them out into the universe..." A quick flash of confusion prompted Grayson to explain. "A ship designed to last for multiple generations of crew without resupply. It has to be able to last for hundreds of years at once." There was pure shock on the avatar's face.

  "How?" It felt like the question should have been a whisper, but the voice of the avatar was, for lack of a better word, wooden.

  "Fusion power, carrying thousands of tons of water, combine all that with a backup source of fission power, and you have a way to maintain life within the ship for as long as the environment is sealed. The ships we built from hollowed out asteroids could hold thousands of people comfortably. That gave us everything we needed to reach other stars."

  "Other stars..."

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  "From there, it was approximately six hundred years before the invention of FTL travel. The earliest generation ships had all reached their target systems or catastrophically failed. The later ones arrived to find systems already populated by people who had left centuries after them. The time that became known as the First Great Diaspora ended on the 277th year of the FTL era. There was a period of consolidation where travel between planets owned by the various organizations that sponsored the early colonies was relatively free. A few hundred years after that, was the First Interstellar War." Grayson took a breath. The avatar was staying perfectly silent now.

  "The governments of Earth had been trying to maintain control of the organizations that called it home. They made rules outlawing the production of warships without their sanction. The organizations wanted sole control of the planets they colonized, so they built fleets in secret. Earth saw it coming. They weren't totally stupid. They started their own secret production with colonies started by government ships."

  "You speak of organizations and governments as if they were two different things. Is a government not an organization and the organization controlling a whole planet not a government?" Bolan asked.

  "They are different in a historic sense. People considered the organizations as organizations that weren't governments. It wasn't until after the war that that change got sorted out. Instead we got a war." Grayson shook his head. "We weren't good at it. Not back then. Immense ships served as carriers for smaller warships. A holdover from early minor conflicts where planets weaponized their generation ship and sent it at their enemy."

  The whole clearing seemed to gasp. Grayson just nodded sadly.

  "Something built for peaceful expansion becoming a war machine. You've seen it before here, just never on that kind of scale. The early battles were focused around killing the enemy's carrier. If there wasn't a colony world nearby, the losers were simply written off. Millions froze to death in those early engagements, waiting for life support to run out... I was there for a few of them. The worst was called Brian's Rest..." He paused, almost unwilling to tell the story, but took a deep breath and continued.

  "Four carriers of the Amazon alliance against the six carriers of the United States Space Corps and Eurospace battlegroup three. Over five hundred smaller ships involved with thousands of fighters. Both sides had contingents of marines. The battle was an accident. Both forces went to stage against the other and attack the other's home system. That happened a lot, where fleets would use the same strategically placed stellar system as a staging area to attack an enemy. Most of the time, they passed each other in transit. Here, they met at the same time. The carriers were destroyed in opening salvos." Grayson shuddered as he remembered his own vantage point for this battle, on one of the ships known to have survived intact. There had been several other time travelers among the crew, most from Grayson's time but one from further ahead.

  "I'd known this ship would survive. I wouldn't have been allowed to go there otherwise, you understand. But even so, in the moment you don't rationalize that knowledge. We didn't know that the ship was one of the last to leave the USSS Iwo Jima. The missiles that killed the ship hit right as we cleared the bay. The force of the detonation tumbled the ship, even in near vacuum. It survived because it was effectively dead. The fusion generator was damaged in the explosion and were forced to shut down... lest they detonate and destroy the ship." Grayson started to pace in agitation at the memory. It was surprisingly raw.

  "There were over three thousand people on board. It was a battlecruiser, designed to move fast and hit hard. They had broadside boarding launchers for the marines aboard. There was never even a chance for them to get off. We time travelers all ended up getting in the same escape pod. We hacked our way into the ship's systems running on backup power to watch the rest of the battle." Grayson chuckled in a hopeless kind of way.

  "You'd think that with all hope of evacuation gone, the survivors of both sides would pull together. That they'd pool resources for survival... They kept fighting until the end." Grayson stopped, then started to sing. It was a slow, mournful song, though the chorus was far more energetic. Grayson had preferred the chorus before visiting the battle. Afterwards, he much preferred the final verse.

  "In that silent stellar sky,

  Men were never meant to fly,

  Amid debris in soldier's stead,

  You'll find all bodies of the dead.

  That silent sky, around that star,

  Every family too far.

  They gave it all and did their best,

  They lost it all at Brian's Rest."