Patin’s Lessons to the Prophets, Vol. 47B: The Loyal Ones
Posted on Wed Oct 15th, 2025 @ 3:12pm by Patin
995 words; about a 5 minute read
Mission:
Character Development
Location: Celestial Temple
The Celestial Temple pulsed like the inside of a storm, the clouds folding over one another as if embarrassed by how much they’d just felt. Patin hung there in the center of it all, arms crossed, boots dangling in empty air, her spectral jacket puffed with pride.
“Alright,” she said, exhaling light instead of smoke. “Lesson Forty-Seven-B. This one’s about loyalty, or, as I like to call it, love with a death wish.”
Loyalty.
The echo filled the chamber, resonating like wind against mountain stone.
Patin snorted. “Yeah, yeah. You say it like it’s some holy word. Where I’m from, it’s the reason most of us lost teeth, limbs, and a few good eyebrows.”
She clapped her hands together, and the clouds reformed, this time into the jagged outline of Bajor’s southern peaks. Cold. White. Unforgiving.
“There,” she said, pointing at a speck moving between snowbanks. “That’s me. The idiot who thought loyalty meant doing whatever the cause asked... blowing bridges, sabotaging rail lines, telling my lungs they didn’t need air as long as the detonator still had juice.”
The image grew clearer, a younger Patin crouched behind a broken hover-cart, assembling a crude bomb from scavenged mining equipment. Her hands moved fast, precise, confident. Her eyes... tired.
“See that look?” Patin said, floating beside the image. “That’s loyalty. Not to a flag. Not even to Bajor. To her.” She pointed to another figure — Rhenora, blonde hair whipping in the wind, barking orders through the comm. “Nozzie. The only woman I’d ever let boss me around without biting back.”
This bond returns.
Patin grinned. “You notice patterns quick, huh? Yeah, loyalty and love, they dance. But loyalty’s got sharper teeth.”
She snapped her fingers and the image jumped forward: an explosion tore through a Cardassian outpost. Snow and ash mingled midair like confetti from a god’s bad party.
“That one,” she said with fondness, “was a work of art. Perfectly timed, beautifully executed, and only slightly illegal by resistance standards. Nozzie said I was crazy. I told her that’s why she kept me around.”
Destruction once more.
“Of course! Loyalty’s just love that needs to make a point.”
The Prophets stirred uneasily, the light trembling around her as though struggling to understand why devotion would take such a violent shape.
Explain devotion through ruin.
Patin tilted her head, thinking. “You ever try to explain gravity to fire?”
We are not fire.
“Could’ve fooled me. You burn through everything trying to understand it.”
The air shimmered again, and now they stood, if “stood” could apply to eternal beings, before the memory of a Sunfire holodeck. Bonnie, bright-eyed and twitchy, stood next to Patin as she unpacked a crate labeled ‘not explosives’.
“Oh stars,” Patin muttered, rubbing her temple. “This one still gives me hives.”
She turned to the audience of Prophets. “You ever teach a kid who thinks safety manuals are just suggestions? Bonnie was like a warp core with legs. I tried showing her the art of delicate fusing, the patience of precision, but she decided to ‘improvise.’”
The memory played out: a blinding flash, and Patin shouting, “Get down!” as the Sunfire went careening into a nearby planet, trailing smoke and a very surprised looking Lieutenant. Flashes of dinosaurs floated across the visage.
The Prophets recoiled as if the explosion were happening all over again.
This was… loyalty?
“Sure was,” Patin said proudly. “Bonnie didn’t give up on me even after the crash. Neither did Nozzie. That’s the thing, loyalty isn’t about perfection. It’s about staying through the mess. About choosing your people, over and over, even when they set the damn ship on fire.”
Fire again.
She winked. “What can I say? I like metaphors that bite back.”
The clouds began to pulse in rhythm with her voice, flashes of orange, gold, and deep blue painting the Temple in memories. Resistance skirmishes. Long nights in smoky bars. The hum of a warp core.
Through it all, Patin’s spectral self narrated like a storyteller who’d seen too much and laughed anyway.
“You see, shiny folk, loyalty’s the last thing they can take from you. They can rip out your world, your home, your lungs, but not that thread. It’s what holds the universe together. Even after the war ended, even after Nozzie found peace and Remal found something to fight for again, I stayed close. Because I didn’t know how not to.”
She crossed her arms, softer now. “And when the Brotherhood came, when the fire started again, I didn’t hesitate. Loyalty’s not logical. It’s instinct. It’s the hand that moves before the brain catches up.”
Loyalty binds.
“Yeah.” She smiled faintly. “And it blinds. You forget to save yourself. You forget to ask who you’d be if the person you’re loyal to stops needing you.”
You regret this.
“Regret?” Patin snorted. “Regret’s for people who didn’t mean it. I’d do it all again, every scar, every lost limb, every ship crash. Loyalty burns bright, and if it blinds you along the way… well, at least you get a hell of a view.”
The clouds dimmed, leaving her bathed in a fading gold light. Her shadow flickered in impossible directions.
“Lesson Forty-Seven-B,” she said, tapping her chest. “Done. Loyal to the end, even when the end comes sooner than you planned.”
Loyalty binds.
It also blinds.
Patin gave a crooked grin. “Now you’re starting to sound like me. Careful... next thing you know, you’ll be drinking spider venom whisky and building bombs for the moral good of the galaxy.”
The Temple shimmered, and somewhere in the infinite, a sound suspiciously like laughter rippled through the light.
TBC
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