The next thing EUe knew, he was cozy, lying on a hammock, wrapped up in a thin blanket.
Wait? Where!?
He shot upright, and then leapt from the hammock, snagging the blanket on his wings. He pried the blanket off and tossed it aside and assessed his surroundings.
He was in a nest.
Looking up, he saw through the round window in the wall that the sky was dark, with just a hint of light beginning to rise at the middle of the horizon.
"How long have I been asleep?"
All those hours of non-stop work. He must have pushed himself right over exhaustion's precipice.
He dearly hoped he hadn't slept for more than a day.
The hunger pangs hit him almost immediately, but fortunately his nectariat was still strapped to his side, right where he'd left it. Unzipping it, he pulled out two phials and slurped his fill. Then, back twitching, he revved his wings and buzzed up and out through the aerial door overhead, only for his dreamshard to spark, sending spewing static sensations across his body. He fell, wings sputtering, but managed to grab one of the rungs on the ladder on the outside wall, and slid along that wall before finally coming to a stop with a rude thump.
Groaning, his body aching, EUe pulled himself up to the balcony on the nest's rooftop, around the aerial door. He started his stretches, only to stop at the sound of a pained cough.
He turned to the source of the sound. "tlE-la!"
She chirped softly at him.
It was hard for him not to gasp. At first, he thought her eyes were bloodshot, but then he realized those "veins" weren't veins at all, but instead the dark filaments of the plague.
tlE-la's nest was a stone's throw from EUe's, just on the opposite side of the path. She sat cross-legged on the balcony around her nest's aerial door, leaning against the roof with her wings unfurled, like a wind-blown cape.
Yet still, even with black ooze curdling around her nostrils, she was beautiful. EUe found himself noticing it for the first time. She was beautiful in the light of the dawn and the fading stars and the warm yellow glow from the roof-window. The way the silver highlights painted on her throat feathers gleamed in the light would have given her an almost masculine look, were it not for the exquisitely pale hue of the paint. It was enchanting, and, given tlE-la's stoic demeanor, EUe couldn't help but wonder if, perhaps, she was hiding a deeper turbulence.
He wondered what eUna would have thought of her.
tlE-la coughed again. "W-What are you doing?"
"What happened?" EUe asked. "How long have I been out?"
"All night long. It's just about dawn now."
Good, so it wasn't more than a day.
He started on his stretches again, rolling his arms, tensing his stomach, flexing his wings. He made sure to break his communion with the lE of vitality. For once, he was well-rested. The burning sensation in his chest went away as the communion faded.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Checking that I didn't pull a muscle, or something."
Lightly, EUe flapped his wings. It wasn't enough to raise him off the ground, nor did it need to be; he just wanted to check if anything would go wrong again. Fortunately, everything seemed to be in order.
"Over the past few days," he explained, "I've been drawing power from my dreamshard to fight off the need for sleep. I guess it finally backfired on me."
Looking around, for a moment, EUe lost himself in staring at the alien vessels. They shone brightly in the distance, as did the drones. Though most of the drones were out of sight, concentrated up at the great crater, he could see a handful of the little things wandering among the wooded hills like lost stars.
tlE-la coughed again. "Had people not invented the expression 'early to bed, early to rise' in your century, Gatherer?"
"I need to get back to work with Vyx," EUe said, turning in the direction of the Impactor. He squatted, tensing his thighs, ready to leap into flight.
"Wait," tlE-la said, "don't go!"
EUe turned in surprise. "Why not? Look around you! The world is ending!"
"Many of the others are worried you'll spread the infection to Vyx and the other Impactors."
EUe patted his hands against his neck and chest. "I'm—I'm sick? I—"
"—EUe, this thing is everywhere," tlE-la said. "It's only a matter of time."
EUe cleared his throat, checking for soreness or dryness. He patted his hands over his head, trying to see if he had a fever. "I don't feel sick."
tlE-la let out a ragged sigh. "And until yesterday afternoon, neither did I."
EUe sat down, utterly defeated.
Was this it? Was this how it ended?
Not wanting to think about it, he decided to change the subject. He stepped forward, wrapping his toes around one of the perches extending from the balcony. "H-How goes the drone research?"
"I would say hopeless, but I'm worried that's too optimistic." tlE-la coughed even more intensely than before. "Everyone qualified to work on it is sick, and everyone who isn't qualified is even sicker."
EUe didn't know how much longer it would be before tlE-la's condition took a turn for the worse, and he didn't want her to have to spend whatever time she had left feeling depressed, not that he was faring much better. He wanted to have faith that the aliens would be able to help his people, but he couldn't quite overcome his overwhelming pessimism.
"By chance," she asked, "did you see any of the ruins on your journey here?"
"I did."
For a moment, the two twEfE locked eyes. Then, tlE-la closed hers and tilted her head back ever so slightly and began to sing. Barely a second into her song, EUe's wings rose up of their own accord. His heart raced. Anxious, he darted his eyes evasively.
The mathematician's song was unlike any EUe had ever heard, and that alone was enough to raise his hackles. Instead of the aural architecture he was familiar with—high notes, arched with soft, sliding whistles and mortared with chirps—tlE-la's song was at a lower pitch, with slow turns and many grace notes. Since it didn't sound like music, and since there weren't any words to it, it left EUe wondering whether it might just be tlE-la's heartsong.
That made his heart race even faster.
EUe forced himself to keep quiet until she was finished. That took about a minute. "Is that…?"
tlE-la opened her eyes and nodded. "Yes, it is my heartsong."
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
"It's beautiful. But, why would—" But then EUe stopped himself. It was already bad enough that the world was probably ending. He didn't want to be rude by trying to guess her reasons for sharing her heartsong with him.
He shook his head. "I've never heard music—heartsong or not—that left me feeling quite so… agitated."
tlE-la chirruped in faint humor, though her show of amusement crashed into a coughing fit. "That's not surprising. It and the ruins and the statues are pretty much all remain of the Sapphires."
"What…?" EUe was agog. He couldn't believe his ears.
"I think it would have made me nervous, too," tlE-la continued, "if I hadn't been hearing it since I was in the egg. Even if the Race Wars are long over, our genes still remember. Or… maybe it's something in our souls."
EUe's tongue shot out of the tip of his beak in shock. "You…?"
tlE-la nodded. "There was a Sapphire in my lineage, long, long ago. I know nothing about them. Who they were. What their life was like. All I have is this heartsong, passed down through the generations." She looked up at the dying stars overhead. "I know what the stories say, and I know the Ecumene's histories, but… I can't help but wonder: could there have been another way? There had to be a way to resolve our violence without turning everyone else to stone."
"But what if there wasn't?" EUe said.
He imagined most people thought about the fallen clans more often than they would ever admit. You never forgot the first time you saw the ruins.
Uka-yen often spoke of when he'd first encountered them, as a child.
"That doesn't make it right," tlE-la answered. She lowered her head. "Every time I fly by one of the ruins, I wonder: what if circumstances had been different? What if it had been the Sapphires who found the Great Dream? Or any clan, other than the Rubies?"
"But that's kwekek," EUe muttered.
tlE-la laughed and chirped and coughed. "Who the fuck cares?"
"Everyone!" EUe was aghast.
She leaned her head back. "So?"
It didn't help that EUe was starting to feel… off. Or, maybe, that was just the side-effect of how agitated she was making him feel.
"H-How can you say that?" he demanded. "All my life, I've faulted myself for not living up to what was expected of me. I wanted to be good and earn my praise, but how I felt always held me back. I sabotaged my future by studying a topic I found interesting instead of one that would have given me a strong position in the engineers' castebund. But I carried on, and managed to build something for myself, regardless, only to throw it all away because my kwekek thoughts refused to let me sleep easily at night." He glared at her. "You read my file. You know what I did. My wife and son were race blighted, and when they were sent to their deaths, I refused to whistle and nod like you're supposed to."
"You did what you felt was right," tlE-la said. "Shouldn't everyone?"
"But it wasn't right!" he said. "It was wrong!"
She coughed again. "But then why did you do it?"
tlE-la had him there. He wouldn't have protested if he hadn't felt it was the right thing to do.
"Because it's what I believed." The words whistled dully out of his beak.
"What are you really upset about, Gatherer? That you were wrong, or the fear that everyone else might be?" tlE-la asked.
Her words cut him.
"That's a bold thing to say." He noticed one of her arms was twitching.
tlE-la raised her beak to the sky. "You're not the only one who regrets their student days. There was this conjecture that everyone believed to be true, but which no one knew how to prove. I tried to take it on. I got further than anyone else had. I was so close. Then a researcher from zUkO-aka-O published an elaborate counterexample that showed the conjecture was wrong. No one saw it coming, least of all me." She wheezed. "Everything I worked on was in tatters. My advisors approved my credentialing, even though the counterexample meant I had barely anything to show from my years of effort."
"I'm sorry you had to go through that."
She coughed again. "I'd rather go through that again than have to deal with this shit." She moaned. "Gods, it hurts so much."
"Why are you telling me this?" EUe asked.
"Because… it taught me the importance of being wrong. I don't think most of us give enough thought to the possibility that we might be wrong. And it's okay to be wrong. I don't think that's a bad thing, EUe, and I don't care what anyone says about it. I mean… how can we find our way to what's right if we can't even recognize when we're in the wrong?"
tlE-la's words caught EUe completely off guard. It was as if they'd cut straight through to the deepest recesses of his struggles.
It's okay to be wrong.
"No one's ever said that to me before," he said. "About being wrong, I mean. I… I never thought of it like that."
"You're welcome," tlE-la said. She raised her head to the sky again. "Who knows, maybe we're wrong to try and stop this plague? Maybe the Gods willed it," she added, mournfully, "to cast the last of the Colors into the grave, as punishment for what we did to the others." She shook her head. "They're gone now, the Sapphires, the Emeralds, the Topazes…. EUe, I want to believe you when you say the aliens will save us, but… what if this is our final hour? What should we be doing to bring meaning to what time we have left?"
"I—"
—Suddenly, an explosion rocked the air, knocking EUe from his perch. Instantly, he recovered, setting himself into a hover.
He turned to face tlE-la. The explosion had sprawled her onto the balcony floor. She pushed herself up and looked around in shock.
"E-EUe, what's—"
"—Don't worry, tlE-la, I'm on it." EUe flew toward the source of the sound, moving more on instinct than anything else.
He heard screams: "Help! Hel—"
—The sounds were violently cut off.
There!
His eyes narrowed as he spotted a silver form skittering down the camp's main path, right beside one of the laboratories at the center of the camp.
The drone!
It was like a pyrite spider, only without a head, and with the wrong color for fool's gold. Two twEfE stood in its way, on either side, while the drone held a third scientist in a pincer-like growth that had emerged from one of the sides of the cubes that made up the drone's central body.
Behind them, fragments of wood and ceramic spilled onto the flattened earth around the laboratory. The lab was a collection of six rotundas bound into a single structure. Yellow light poured out from the hole in the wall the drone had broken out of the lab.
EUe slid down his second eyelids right as one of the scientists began to wove up a communion.
No, it wasn't just a "scientist", it was lU-twO!
EUe didn't have time to inspect the astrophysicist's prayer; the lab was about to collapse, with cracks rapidly snaking up from the hole and along the lab's exterior. EUe was still yards away when the cracks reached the ceiling.
Hovering in place, EUe channeled his dreamshard, gathering not-light in his hands and shaping it into a supplication for ekUtle-la. The weave was like a piece of art; its intricate tangle grew bigger and brighter with each passing second.
"Goddess of Time," EUe prayed, "Mistress of the Hours: help me."
And the goddess woke, answering the Gatherer's call.
EUe's not-light expanded into a surreal orrery sphere dozens of body lengths in diameter. Time slowed to a crawl within the magic's reach, while not-light flared around him in a veil of spiritual flame that insulated him against the temporal distortion.
EUe stuck out his arms, his left toward the drone, his right toward the lab, weaving power around both.
"Ela-tU," he yelled, "hear my call!"
In the slowed time, the lab's roof buckled, collapsing on itself.
EUe flicked his right hand toward the roof and his left hand toward the drone. The former shot out not-light that flew at the collapsing roof and then swelled to encompass it, while the latter snatched the drone and lifted it up, like a dropped egg.
EUe jerked his right arm upward, and the roof ripped free from the rest of the lab. Flying higher, drawing on Ela-tU's might, he lifted both his arms over his head, moving his two handfuls along either side of an arc, intending to crash them into one another at the time-bubble's apex, drone against stone.
But the drone stayed in place, even as the section of the roof shot upward. EUe was still turning toward the drone to see what had gone wrong when the communion he'd shot at the drone shuddered.
Not-light spewed from the drone's body. An instant later, the light's inflection changed to match EUe's prayer, and then hurled multiple bolts of energy at the time communion's circling rings.
EUe yelled. "No!"
How could this happen? ekUtle-la's intervention should have slowed the drone's thoughts! Or was its mind just that swift?
The drone's blasts crashed into the EUe's time rings, shattering many on impact. Others were knocked away. They sputtered, and then vanished a moment later.
The next thing EUe knew, his connection with the Goddess of Time was broken. His illuminous veil petered out as time returned to normal. The broken roof he'd been levitating overhead fell.
Drawing from Ela-tU's strength once more, EUe raised his arms and caught the roof and held it up. The thing had to be almost a dozen times his size.
"Uwen-ka" lU-twO screamed. "Uwen-ka!!"
Glancing downward glance, EUe saw the drone had ripped lU-twO's brother in half.
Gods…
Hurling the roof and its levitating fragments at the ring of earthworks surrounding the camp, EUe flew toward the drone as quickly as he could, wings thrumming at his back. Even as he charged at the drone, he engaged in another communion, closing his second eyelids all the way to block the wind rushing at his face.
"EUe!" lU-twO screamed. The physicist took flight.
A bright light blossomed on the drone's exterior, erupting into a thin, fiery beam that swept across the air in a long arc. The beam cut through two of the camp's nests as it chased after lU-twO, setting the buildings aflame.
Was it targeting the infected? EUe wondered.
But he didn't have time to think.
EUe launched two force communions at the drone, which cut off its beam and darted out of the way with its many legs. As it fled, a new limb sprouted from the drone's core. Extending itself, the limb wrapped around another fleeing scientist and hurled him at the earthwork ring, and by the time EUe redirected his attacks at the drone, it was already too late.
The electrocuted earthworks fried the poor bird, filling the night with an overpowering sweet, earthy tang, along with the stink of charred and blackened flesh.
Rage pumping through his veins, EUe grabbed the drone with both of his force communions and lifted it off the ground.
"EUe!" tlE-la shouted. "Stop! We—"
—But EUe didn't hear her; or, maybe he did, but it didn't matter. The result was the same. Battle rage didn't let twEfE second guess themselves.
EUe sensed the drone attempt a counterspell, but it wasn't fast enough.
With the machine firmly in his communion's grasp, EUe thrusted his arms out to either side, ripping the drone in two with Ela-tU's might. Quickening his wings, EUe rose higher, willing the not-light to rip and whirl, shattering the drone into smaller and smaller fragments, until it was an argent eddy-sphere flickering in dawn's true-light.
Then EUe brought his fist to his chest and squeezed it tight.
Shards exploded in every direction, scattering around the camp like shredded leaves. Their true-light gleam faded, and their circuity's not-light followed suit a moment later.
The drone was dead.
If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.