EUe closed his second eyelids as he took flight.
Before leaving the GTS, he'd wrapped himself in a communion with eOeOan, one that would propel through the air at supersonic speeds. The thing was bright enough to make it difficult for him to see where he was going, and when you were traveling faster than the speed of sound, even a momentary obstruction of your view could prove fatal.
Flying with the wind at his back, EUe quickly passed beyond the Capital's boundaries. The urban sprawl all but died away within seconds of leaving the Capital, restricted by the need to have access to a steady supply of nectar. The networks of nectarducts that brought the golden fluid from the harvest fields to skyholders' central cisterns were expensive to build, and even more expensive to maintain, so extensions were built only where they were absolutely necessary. Buildings stippled the corridors of flat land through the forests and the hills beyond the city's spread, providing roads through land and sky. Nectar farms were everywhere. Stations where travelers could refuel themselves formed little oases of civilization out here in the wilderness, where they stuck up like skyholders from the wooded plains below.
EUe made sure to follow the directions Udo-an had given him, though he did note that the route was an odd one. Why meander among peripheral nectar groves like a lost bee? It would have been much more direct to just follow the coastal route to Uekwek; his destination was on the way. But Udo-an had insisted that EUe follow the indicated route, and EUe knew better than to try and oppose the Ecumene's bureaucracy, especially since they'd gone to the lengths of deploying airships along the route, just to make sure he followed the intended course.
At the end of the day, people were paranoid. That was just a fact of life.
Hell, no matter how much he'd tried, EUe had never been able to persuade eUna to take only one nectariat for herself. She insisted on having two; the first was a decoy, in case anyone tried to rob her, even though no one ever did.
Apparently, her mother used to wear three whenever she went into town.
The scenic route Udo-an had given him took EUe across the countryside. Unfortunately, this meant getting a lengthy exposure to the "byproducts" of the Ecumene's peace.
The countryside was a graveyard; a museum of what once was.
In eradicating the harriers, the different Colors got swept up in a mood of interracial camaraderie that lasted for almost a century. Back then, everyone had just been too busy creating, discovering, and inventing to bother fighting at all. From the safety of their respective territorial enclaves, all the Colors began to reap the benefits of the first waves of true progress that the world had ever seen.
The sight of skyholders rising across the land in mere years must have been almost otherworldly to behold.
EUe wondered if any of the other Colors ever imagined that those very symbols of progress would become the monuments of their races' tombs.
Civilization had surrendered the land back to nature the better part of a millennium ago, but there was no mistaking the stony ruins that peppered across the glades and meadows. It was a sea of statues—petrified twEfE—all the way through. Wind and rain had smoothed over many of the features, leaving abstracted blobs on the stretches of land most exposed to the elements. Many others had been knocked over by growing roots, or split in half by a curious vine. Stone nests clustered like stacks of fossilized eggshells, collapsed or broken-in.
In the middle of it all, a pair of statues stood out to him for the recognizability of its features. It was a parent and child.
EUe looked away, but not soon enough.
Time had worn away the details of their fingers and hands, leaving a gall-like lump in the middle of their outstretched arms where they held each other, hand in hand.
They were probably part of a vassal colony, likely Sapphires. The Ecumene kept some Sapphires on the outskirts of Ruby territory as laborers before the Rubies realized it was too dangerous to let them live.
Almost from the very beginning, twEfE had fought over control of the dreamshards. After the Rubies' dominance became assured, the other Colors resorted to accumulating fragments in secret, biding their time until the day came when they felt they had enough of them to stand a chance against the Ruby hegemons. Eventually, that day did come. The Race Wars began.
The best thing that could be said about the Race Wars was that they did not last long. The other Colors could have waited till the end of time, but that still wouldn't have been enough to secure them victory. After a couple years of horrific violence, the effects of which still marred the earth—here, a gap in a mountain range, there, a city-sized caldera, filled in by the sea, surrounded by stretches of dusty nothingness where not even rocks would grow—the end came swiftly. Under the leadership of Nectar-King hU-U-te IV, two dozen of the Ecumene's strongest Implanted worked together in a single communion larger than anything that had ever been attempted before: a mass petrification. tU-e-lal, it was called—the Culling. Every twEfE knew the story. They learned to sing the poems as schoolchildren.
EUe could still recite some of the verses from memory:
Then the double dozen gathered
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heartblood from the wicked jewels,
one from perfidious Topaz,
Nectar-tongued and foul betrayers.
One from Sapphires ice-hearted,
den of torturer and slaver.
One from blood-lust riven Emeralds,
beasts of death and ruination.
wUnU ehlE-EkE's famous telling went on and on. The Diamonds. The Amethysts. The Peridots. The Agates. There were so many Colors that only modern archaeologists knew which ones were real. With an offering of the blood of their enemies, the double dozen communed with Death himself, sweeping his wings of fog across the world. In one stroke, everyone but the Rubies and thin-blooded Ruby hybrids were turned to stone. Even the other Colors' works were petrified. Entire societies simply ended. Most of the other clans never saw it coming, and, if they did, then at least their suffering was short: just a moment of terror, and then… nothing.
EUe should have been edified by the sight of the vanquished enemy. But he wasn't. Worse, he couldn't stop thinking about what their last moments must have been like. Had they known what was happening to them and their kin? Or had they died without ever understanding their appointed fate?
The Gatherer shook his head against the wind, closing his second eyelids.
What an awful way to go…
It was fitting that sea-blown fog had settled over the ruins. Fog was the symbol of Death, after all. Old superstitions said that the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead thinned wherever fog grew thick.
EUe prayed that the dead might find some measure of comfort.
Angling himself, EUe zoomed ahead, his beak slicing through the air.
It wasn't long before he made it to a nectar grove: tUel-tEa station. The giant flowers—dazzling red blossoms and white-spathed arums—crowned tall over the horizon atop their mighty stems, and on the spreading branches below. The grove had clusters of egg-shaped nest buildings, some to house the flower tenders, others as hotels or hostels for travelers. This close to the Capital, the hotels were owned by the major chains—tlUen-kat, and seUtslE. A tiny dreamshard fragment kept the plants robust and healthy all year long, allowing groves to be built in even the most hostile environments, from the deserts in the north to the frozen southern pole. The nectar bars were painted with a bright, ultraviolet color, to make them stand out from the other nests. twEfE could bop in for a quick refill, or take their time, sitting on the chairs by the tables out on the balcony platform.
Travelers often stocked up on nectar at tUel-tEa before making the inland journey to Uekwek City, or flying across the water to hlU-lE-E. EUe had been planning on taking hU-nOan and eUna to the resort island's capital to celebrate his son's second hatchingday, before…
Ugh.
EUe dismissed the painful nostalgia. Now was not the time to dwell on the past.
The future was waiting for him; but first, he needed to stock up on some nectar.
EUe landed on the aerial patio outside one of the nectar bars built onto the side of one of the massive elU stalks at the center of the resort. He was in and out, lickety-split, filling himself up for the journey and then some, stuffing his nectariat to the brim. The proprietor was stunned to see a Gatherer step into his shop, to say the least.
With the nectar's sugar still sweet on his tongue, EUe set off on the last leg of the journey; he just needed to cross over the mountain range and he'd be at his destination.
The air thinned slightly as he rose higher. His breaths slowed without him even thinking about it, filling his lungs and sacs with extra air to compensate.
The world spilled out beneath him as he crested over snowy tors. Past the mountain range, the land spilled down in a broad sweep of trees. Foothills undulated all the way down to where the sea's low waves lapped at the rocky, sandy shore.
EUe landed on a flat outcrop of rock near one of the range's secondary summits. It was cold, and splashes of snow still covered the gravelly nooks, but EUe had to stop and breathe, and standing at this particular spot gave him a panoramic view of the land below.
He didn't want to waste energy hovering while he stared.
High overhead, airships rose into the upper atmosphere, bound for atmospheric isles, or perhaps even the moon. But he wasn't looking at them. If anything, he wondered if the ships' passengers were staring, too.
Something new had come to Planet UlU.
The Impactors had littered the coastline with the scars of their impacts: long, deep troughs scooped out from the earth. There were outright craters in places, trees and earth blasted away by a fiery impact, leaving large swaths of forest charred to one extent or another. EUe hoped that the damage would be undone by the Ecumene's scientists once they finished their work here.
The Impactors themselves were objects of silver and geometry, like pyrite, but not quite as brash—a mix of cubes and dodecahedra. The forms were relatively small, and clustered together in solid, roughly ellipsoidal shape, often bearing extrusions or branches, like a tuber's root. Some even had openings in their sides.
His blurring heart thrummed a little faster at that.
EUe pulled out one of the phials from his nectariat, stuck his beak in, and lapped up the sweet, viscous fluid.
Had it been just the Impactors and nothing more, the scene before him would have probably counted as the most profound scientific discovery since the dreamshards themselves, but, to EUe's amazement, it didn't stop there.
There was movement—like ants on the prowl. It took a while for EUe to understand what he was seeing, but then the mystery resolved itself when a piece broke free from one of the Impactors and fell to the ground, only to twitch, sprout a comfy number of limbs and skittered off to join the rest of the swarm.
These… drones moved with intent and intelligence. They didn't seem to have a set form, other than lots of legs—four to six—and the general air of a creepy crawly, like an abstract arthropod. Marching across the rolling hills, the drones converged on the largest of the craters, a great basin of raw earth, scooped out of the mountainside. The drones were busy digging, finishing what nature had started. Many tunnels had already opened into the ground, leading EUe to think it might be some kind of mine, though, if it was a mine, he had no idea what the drones were mining, nor what they intended to do with it.
With any luck, he and the advance team would be able to get to the bottom of that mystery, as well as all the others.
When he focused, EUe could make out portions of the drones' limbs that were thicker than most. Once again, bees came to mind. The drones' legs were burdened with minerals, much like how bees would load their legs up with pollen. Through his second eyelids' spiritual sight, they shone like fireworks.
Had he been younger and less responsible, he might just have flown over to the big crater to see what was going on for himself, but he was better than that. Though it was pretty unlikely that the drones and the Impactors had the power to kill a Gatherer, he would still rather play things safe.
He couldn't be of use to anyone if he was dead.
First things first: he had to report to the scientists on duty.
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