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"A bit ominous this time, eh?"

Of course she'd gotten her princess new canvasses, a supply of paint. A trap, a ploy, to keep Satarella trapped on her ship, her ever-more-willing companion? Sasfsets wished! Satarella was doing increasingly poorly. It had been an attempt to keep her from walking off the side of the ship while everyone was asleep, something Sasfsets was considering increasingly likely, especially considering where the princess' artwork had just gone.

"It's of the destruction of the seventeeth mustering," Satarella said.

"Yaya, when the Free Islands weaponized the sky."

"When the Void descended on the world."

"A modern classic. I've seen plenty of paintings of it. It isn't like you to do something so derivative."

"Derivative!" Satarella hummed. "Not every work of art has to be some great expression. I just wanted to play with the contrasts."

"You are, I assume, not an iblin, but the same and very exact princess who told me every stroke of the brush reveals something the artist can only desperately attempt to keep hidden?"

Satarella was quiet.

"Princess, tell me where your thoughts live these cycles, as we sit locked upon the shore waiting for this dull business to be done with?"

Satarella worried the wood of the deck with a heavy, half-limp hoof. "I don't really have any choices left, do I?"

"You have an infinity of choices. The world expands out before you waiting in desperate anticipation for what you will do to it."

"My family is dead. My only way back home is if I--if I legitimize my cousin's coup, I might be allowed to live. Given some, some honorary position and kept a close eye upon and then I could still just be killed off when everyone's forgotten about me."

"So fuck home, a bad choice, the consequences undesired, give me your next motion."

"I die."

Sasfsets rolled her head around on her neck, letting the joints crack and pop. They didn't used to do that, did they? Imagine if she was getting old! She was hardly old at all. Imagine if she became some rail-thin, crackling thing, dragging herself around on auroral limbs. Imagine if her body turned on her and refused to cooperate to the point she'd crawl herself right out of it. It would happen anyway, wouldn't it?

Hah! Got you, you wild thought, she had baited you for this very purpose, now you were trapped and owned and put away for late.

"Death," Sasfsets said, "is an option that is always open to us at all times, but its result is always the same, and it is a very final one, so it's best to hold on to that as our last resort. You have so far tried an excess of choices up to and including a number which is zero. Do you know the history of zero? The idea is so Void-born that Hoalhorm never reached it and couldn't consider it without pain until Gammerlern floated it to them gently. Give me a choice that is less painful than looking up."

"I don't know. I don't know!"

"You were to be a queen and a simple challenge like this stalls you out! Satarella! If you accept your death as the necessity now you say to me you were never prepared for anything of life at all. But I have seen your art. It has only become so bleak now. Where is the struggle inside you? I can see the soul pour out of you even yet and it is not dark still."

"Give me one, show me one then. If you want to be an expert on living, don't just bid me do more, instruct. There. That's my challenge back."

"I am so glad you asked, because I have a surfeit of ideas of what to do with you, countless plans, and they only wait for you to decide which one you want. Primarily, and of the utmost importance, my current plan is for you to get inside the ship as fast as possible."

Satarella paused at that, which was the opposite of what Sasfsets had asked of her! "Why?"

"There's a voidsniper about to shoot you, and before anything else we really should deal with that."