There I was, a little mass of silver geometry quivering on the exterior of a house in the shape of a solid birdcage, staring out into the largest interior space I'd ever seen, dozens of stories tall—like a hollowed-out skyscraper—only far broader than any skyscraper I'd ever known. From what I could tell, the cylinder stood vertically, and had been subdivided into at least half a dozen floors that ran perpendicular to the cylinder's long axis. Each floor was thickly covered by buildings, plazas, and broad, walkable streets. The home I was on was affixed to one of those floors' inner wall, near the center. Gaps in the floor and ceiling let me see through to the levels above and below, but what I saw there paled in comparison to the massive, mechanical obelisk dominating my view. The obelisk's satiny, silver surface was riddled with gaps and grooves, and stood at the center of the cylinder like a pyrite spine, though, with how the angles and protrusions constantly slid about and reshaped themselves, it might have been better to compare to a waking coral or a dreaming anemone.

Whatever it was, it was hard not to gawk at it.

The obelisk was freestanding, rooted in a park whose greenery and other wild colors spread out several floors down below. Ring-shaped streets encircled the obelisk at regular intervals, which were themselves connected to the floor space by ramps and stairs that stuck out like wheel spokes from the ring-streets. The spokes and ring-streets were repeated on the levels above and below the one I was on. Combined with the annular gaps in the floorspace, it made the cylinder's core feel like one gigantic atrium.

Every single one of the ring-streets was packed to the brim with silver armored soldiers. Their bodies came in every shape and size, and were covered everywhere except for their heads, assuming they had any. Some of the soldiers were human-sized, others were as diminutive as the hummingbirds, while others towered over the crowd like haystacks.

Creatures that seemed to be hybrids of flesh and machine were scattered through the army. Not only had the silvery material been integrated into their bodies, it also extended them, often in startling ways, turning them creatures out of metal legends: chrome centaurs; titanium trolls.

The army's diversity was united by its discipline. They stood in rank and file, radially tilling the ring streets. Un-armored civilians looked on from where they gathered at the edges of the rings' outermost gaps.

My hummingbird buzzed through the air like a silver bumblebee. He set down on one of the balconies sticking out from the nearest ring's inner edge, landing alongside several imposing figures. They stood on an elevated platform, flanked by a pair of simple, green banners, with red fringes and a single glyph rendered in gold at their center.

Folding his wings, the hummingbird balled one of his hands into a fist and raised it straight up, his arm taut. He yelled, and his voice was magnified for all to hear.

"Long is the Hunt!"

If the soldiers had fists, they lifted them. Others made do with tails or forelimbs. They bellowed in unison.

"Long is the Hunt!"

The onlookers roared.

Although I understood everything being said, just by the sound of their speech, it was obvious that they weren't all speaking in a single language. The meanings of their words stood in the foreground, in front of a backdrop of sounds, the fiercest symphony I'd ever heard: clacks and whistles and voices and shrieks and whines and bellows and braying roars. Some of the soldiers said nothing at all; instead, lights flashed on their armor.

Those languages must not have communicated through sound.

One of the mechanical chimeras standing beside my hummingbird stepped forward. It had a vaguely humanoid torso—vaguely, because of all the limbs it had, not counting the four legs of its heavily built robotic base.

"We have initiated the charging sequence for the Lodestars," it said. "The weapon should be ready to fire within twenty-four hours."

They didn't use hours as their units of time, but that's what my mind used to make sense of what they were saying.

The Lodestars?

If that wasn't a superweapon, then I had a monkey for an uncle.

"With the surplus of dreamshards we've harvested, the Tears will be more powerful than ever before."

Great, it got worse.

The hummingbird raised his arms."Behold!"

A hologram appeared in the middle of the air, in plain view. It displayed a sun floating in starry space, with the fleet of spaceships hovering far away, the largest of which was covered in luminous circuits, like fissures across its surface. These fissures spewed out jets of luminous substance that orbed together at the vessel's nose. The ball of light pulsed and fluxed, swelling and swelling—coruscant and all-consuming.

The soldiers stomped in unison.

The ship fired the orb at the sun. The orb moved rapidly, quickly crossing the great distance to the star, until it was little more than pinprick in the dark. Suddenly, a two-dimensional shockwave shot out from the sun, and the star grew with it, becoming impossibly large. In seconds, the darkness was gone. The ships were black silhouettes against a wall of light that expanded out in every direction. The ships winked out of existence one by one, zipping away at speeds faster than thought. Then the hologram filled with white.

The soldiers cheered as the image slowly faded.

"This day," the hummingbird said, "we will strike a blow the Blight will not soon forget, and this time, it will not escape."

The soldiers stuck up their arms once more.

"Victory will be ours!"

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The feeling in the air was positively electric. Everyone in sight was utterly transfixed, myself included. Were it not for that, I think I would have run away screaming.

The mechanical centaur stepped back to make room as another one of the figures on the balcony stepped forward and spoke.

"To you, the brave," it said, "let us remember. As we depart for the Hunt… let us remember."

The soldiers lowered their arms.

"We remember who we have become. We, the lost ones. The wanderers. The desperate few."

Another one of the figures on the balcony spoke. Not a single other sound stirred as he did.

"We remember how we became. Our ancestors, rescued in their darkest hour. The Vyx brought us into their fold. To them, we owe our sacred obligations."

My hummingbird stepped forward. "We remember what we fight."

The army belted out in hate. "The Blight! Mother of Serpents! Eater of Memory!"

If I had a spine, it would have shivered.

"As we were saved," the hummingbird said, "now we will save. You, brave souls, who have given yourselves to the cause; you, who so nobly pay your ancestor's debts; to you, who shoulder our righteous crusade; you, the honor-bearers, the promisors of victory; you, we salute!"

Everyone raised their fists, even the children, watching from high above.

"Serpents be slain!" they chanted. "Survivors be saved! To the fold, we return; the Long Hunt beckons!"

Then, as one, the soldiers turned, and as one, they marched.

"Death to the Serpents! Death to the Blight! Death to the Serpents! Death to the Blight!"

I didn't need any help figuring out how to return to my body. The recoil from my terror did it for me. I willed myself back to my mental body, and returned there with a not unpleasant popping sensation.

It took a few seconds for me to get used to the sound and the wetness of my not-quite-physical body. The feeling of suddenly having limbs and skin after an extended period away from them was probably even more jarring than having them taken away in the first place, though not half as jarring as the hate-filled murder rally I'd just witnessed.

"Fudge!" I cursed. "Fudging fudge!"

I pushed off the smooth, color-blended wall and stepped away from the porthole.

"What happened?" Ileene said.

"W-What do you mean?" I asked.

"You just looked into it and turned around," she replied. "What happened?"

I guess time passed differently when you were looking through a porthole.

Now that I had a spine again, the shivers ran rampant up and down. I sighed and shook my head.

Gosh gosh gosh.

I stammered as I pointed at the porthole. "They… they…"

Instead of trying to explain that I'd just seen tens of thousands of people calling for my extermination in a blood-curdling unison chant, I lowered my head in defeat, stepped away from the porthole, and said, "See for yourself."

With a wave of my hand, I made everything I'd just seen play out for us in the middle of the room, much like the hologram the Vyx had shown of a star exploding.

"My word…" Mr. Himichi said. He pressed his hand down onto his beret to steady himself.

"It's like the Innocents' wet dream," Ileene said, in reference to her lobotomizers. "Did you see the way they were chanting?"

Suisei nodded. "They're out for revenge."

Ileene crossed her arms. "That's putting it mildly."

"These beings seem to live in a highly regimented, militant society," Mr. Himichi said. "Even their buildings seemed to have been laid out with mechanical precision."

I tried to focus on the positives.

"Well… on the upside," I said, "although I can't be 100% certain, I'm pretty confident we just saw a glimpse of what it looks like inside one of their big ships."

"The word you're looking for is 'motherships'," Suisei said.

I nodded. "Yes. And, not only did I get a peek inside one of their motherships, but, I think I was tapped into their hive mind or their network or whatever you want to call it."

"I'm more concerned about the fact that the Vyx seem to have the ability to blow up stars," Suisei said.

"I am, too!" I said. "That's part of why I came here, to try to find a way to get them to stop, and stop them if I can't. &alon said they have a superweapon, and I'll be darned if these 'Lodestars' they were talking about weren't it. Besides, any weapon that has an ominous charge-up time is basically guaranteed to be a superweapon, especially if it can blow up stars." I fidgeted with my bowtie. "Honestly, I'm freaking out here, because, holy moly, they're gonna kill us, they're gonna kill us, they're—"

"—Calm down, Genneth," Mr. Himichi said.

"That's easy for you to say!"

"Instead of arguing over how we should feel about this," Suisei said, "we should be focused on finding a way to prevent it."

"I know!" I said. "But how am I supposed to convince them to not murder every last wyrm?"

"You don't!" Mr. Himichi said. "You do what you told your wife and kids you would do: you find the Sword of the Angel and use it to stop &alon."

"I don't know if that will be possible," Suisei said. "If the Angels couldn't stop &alon, what makes you think you can?"

"I don't, and that's part of the reason why I'm freaking out!"

"Also, don't forget—granted, we don't know very much about the full extent of the Sword's abilities—but… its powers were drained. The Èrboss Tor were very clear on that point." He looked me in the eyes. "I'm sorry, Genneth, I know you want to have faith in it—I do, too—but… we have to face reality."

"If push comes to shove," I said, "I'll take Kléothag's power myself if I have to, in order to set things right."

"But what if you fail?" Suisei asked.

"You could try running away," Mr. Himichi said, "as you, yourself, suggested."

I shook my head in shame. "I don't want to lose you, either. I don't want to lose any of you." I looked each spirit in the eyes. "But, come on, let's be reasonable here. We can't let &alon continue to spread. No matter what, her evil has to stop! It has to. And… if that means having to sacrifice ourselves to save the future, I don't see how we have any other choice."

Suisei sighed, nodding in agreement.

"If you have access to their network," Ileene said, "maybe you can find out the Vyx's weaknesses. Everything has to have a weakness, right?"

She had a point there. Still…

"But how would that help us?" I asked.

"If they don't want to cooperate," Ileene suggested, "maybe you can learn from them a way to deal with &alon. Find a way to use their technology for yourself."

Suisei crossed his arms and shot Ileene a wordless glare.

Ileene shrugged. "I mean, yeah, it's a long shot, but it's better than giving up!"

"Not by much," Suisei said. He stared me in the eyes. "Genneth, there's another possibility you haven't considered."

I spread my arms. "Suggest away!"

Suisei grimaced, as if there was a foul taste in his mouth.

That was probably a bad sign, wasn't it?

"I know you won't like this suggestion," he said, "but… you don't need to get the Vyx's assistance. It's yours to take, if you so choose. Infect them, absorb them, and harvest the knowledge in their souls."

I glowered at him. "You're right, I don't like it."

"I can't guarantee it will lead to a solution," Suisei said, "but, I can say that if the Vyx know of an alternative, infecting them would ensure that you learn it."

"Even if I was okay with doing that," I said, "which, again, for the record, I'm absolutely not, I'm not sure it would work! Anything I can do, &alon can potentially sabotage."

Suisei shook his head. "Not if there's a way to use the Sword to prevent her interference."

"Do you think that's possible?" I asked.

"Genneth, at this point, I think we should assume that anything is possible."

Closing my eyes, I shared what I'd learned about how to move while looking through the Vyx's "eyes" with Ileene, Suisei, and Mr. Himichi. "There," I said, "feel free to take a look for yourselves."

I walked off toward another porthole.

"Uh… what are you going to do?" Ileene asked.

I pressed my thumb against my sternum. "Looking for a way out of this mess."

In a matter of moments, everyone had taken to a porthole of their choosing.

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