DOTLAN EveMaps

u'I was with the Blood Raider Covenant for nine years. I left for reasons I will not detail here. I want to be clear that I did not join Sariel\'s Reclaimed, and I want to be equally clear about why that distinction feels less stable than it should.

I encountered Rize Iwasawa once, at a station I will not name. She was not recruiting. She was not performing. She was sitting at a table doing nothing in particular, and when she spoke \u2014 briefly, to someone else, about something I did not fully hear \u2014 I understood that she had reached a conclusion I had not permitted myself to reach. I cannot explain how that understanding arrived from a partial sentence across a room. I know that it did, and that I recognised it the way you recognise something you have been trying not to think about for a long time. She stood, finished whatever she was doing, and left without looking at me.

I stayed at that station for two more days before I could articulate why I wasn\'t moving.

I looked into her afterward. What I found was this: she carries a document she stole from a Blood Raider archive, classified at a level I did not have clearance to access in nine years of service. The document is sixty-three years old. It was recovered from a wreck in a dead system \u2014 a hull no one has been able to identify, manufacture that matches nothing in any database her people have found \u2014 and it contains her name four times. Written before she was born. Not as author. As subject. Cited in past tense, described with an accuracy her former colleagues in the hierarchy have never been able to explain and have chosen instead to bury. She broke into the archive and read it anyway. She spent three days alone after reading it. On the fourth day she left the faith she had given eleven years to and has not looked back at it since except to dismantle it.

The corp she built is named for the angel the Blood Raiders removed from their own scripture \u2014 Sariel, the one who stood at the threshold with the offering in hand, looked at what was on the other side, and put it down. Sariel did not fall. Sariel looked. She considers herself Sariel\'s continuation and the Blood Raiders\' charge of Apostasy an accurate description of what she did and intends to keep doing. The document named them before they existed. She did not choose the name. She arrived at it. The document was already there. I find that either the most significant thing I have encountered in my life or an extraordinarily compelling coincidence, and I have spent enough time with it now to know I no longer believe in the coincidence.

I have not joined. But I have not stopped thinking about a woman at a table who was not recruiting, and a document older than she is that already knew her name. I am writing this account at a station three jumps from the last coordinates anyone had for them. I do not think that is a coincidence. I am not certain I think anything I do at this point is a coincidence.'