"Are you alright?" I asked.

Suisei shook his arms in irritation. "Enough! I appreciate your concern, but there are more pressing concerns right now that we really need to talk about, so… let's skip the pleasantries and get to work, alright?"

"You're welcome…?" I said.

"Anyhow…" Suisei turned to point at the Vvz'zsh chieftain. He stuck out the crystal in his hand and then glanced at the crystals on the shelves. "With Krr'kt'zz's help and the information from the Vvz'zsh's storystones, I've been able to determine the location of the Lodestar superweapon."

"Wait… really?"

"Yes," he replied.

"And there's no catch to it?" I asked. "No secret downside that makes it all for nothing?"

Suisei turned his flower to Nina. "Oh, he's in one of his moods again, isn't he?"

Nina nodded.

"You would be, too," I said, "if you knew that &alon and 'the Darkness' that she's kept prattling on about are not, in fact, the same thing."

Suisei squinted his flower tight and then opened it again. "…What?"

"Yes, they're completely different," I explained. "And, if we don't resolve things quickly, the Darkness will destroy everyone and everything."

"Fuck," Suisei said. He quivered his head. "Is there anything &alon can do to—" but then Suisei stopped himself and shook his head. "Actually, no. This can wait until later. Let's first discuss what I have to share. You can get me caught up on what I missed afterward."

"Alright, you were saying?" I asked.

"The Lodestars," Nina said.

Suisei nodded. "Yes, I've found their location."

"Where are they?" I asked. I almost asked Suisei if they were here in D'zd world, but then decided against doing so, out of the fear that I'd be setting myself up to have my hopes crushed. Again.

"You remember the tower we saw off in the distance in the Vyx Network's labyrinth?" Suisei asked.

"I couldn't forget it."

"The Vyx call it the Tower of Light. It's the Network's nerve center. That's where we need to go."

"Wait," Lark said, "are you saying that the Lodestars are just sitting up at the top of that tower?"

"Not quite," Suisei replied. "I've been reflecting on some of the discussions I had with Mr. Pfefferman back at the self-help group, and, much like Genneth had suggested on our first foray into the Network, I think it's best to view the labyrinth as a representation of the Vyx's mental structure; specifically, the architecture of their software and its underlying programming."

"How so?" I asked.

"The Network is a way of physically navigating through an inherently digital realmspace. To that end, it's not that the Lodestars are physically located atop the Tower of Light. Rather, that's where we can interface with the weapon."

"So, the control panel, basically?" Lark asked.

Suisei nodded, bobbing his stinger tail behind him. "More or less." He stuck out one of his hands and shook it dismissively.

That was a tell.

I tapped my right fore- and hind-legs on the floor in anxiety. "Alright, what's the catch?"

"I don't get it," Lark said. "How is this anything other than 100%, grade-A great news?"

It was at this point that Chief Krr'kt'zz finally stepped forward. It was like watching a statue come to life. "If I may interject?" Ze asked.

"Go ahead," Suisei said.

"Vvz'zsh storystones speak of the Lodestars gathered atop the Tower of Light," the Chief explained.

"When did this happen?" I asked.

"Generations ago, before EUe was slain."

"Was the Tower already there beforehand," I asked, "or—"

"—Yes," Krr'kt'zz replied, "but it was different from what Zz'zz told me ze saw. You must understand, the Tower was not built all at once. It grew over the ages, thanks ot the Vyx and the Vyxit's efforts. They devoted their hearts and souls to understanding the Lodestars and discovering their use, out of the hope that they would be strong enough to vanquish the Blight once and for all."

"Where's all this going?" Nina asked.

"The Tower will be guarded." Krr'kt'zz glanced at Suisei. "Zz'zz told me about the dangers you encountered in the Network."

"The AVUs," I said, with a nod.

"The opposition you have faced so far will be nothing compared to what you'll be up against if you try to climb the Tower. As Zz'zz said, the Tower holds the heart of the Vyx, and they will defend it with everything they have."

"It will be the fight of our lives," Suisei said.

My shoulders slackened. "Fudge," I muttered. But then something occurred to me. "What about the Imprisoned Ones?" I asked. "The… Keret?"

The chieftain's composure instantly fell. Zyr stinger tail lifted, erect. Ze tensed zyr arms and legs.

Suisei nodded. "I told you they'd suggest it," Suisei said.

Krr'kt'zz crossed zyr arms. "What can I say? You were right."

"What's going on?" Nina asked, looking over the two D'zd.

I swear, if Suisei had had a face, he would have been grinning. "In addition to everything else," he said, "the Tower is where the Krr't were sealed away. I was thinking: if we could get their assistance, we might actually stand a chance of reaching the Lodestars."

"Before we came here," I explained, "we were guests of the leader of a Dominion town, T'kznd. Ze told us what their legends said about the Imprisoned Ones."

"Yes," Krr'kt'zz said. "The T'dzd'ch believe the Krr't murdered EUe."

"Did they?" Lark asked.

"If you weren't a guest and a stranger to our people," the Chief replied, "I might have cut you down where you stand just for suggesting such a thing. But, no, the Krr't did not murder our Savior. The Krr'ts' might was the only force that could have opposed the Dominion's advance. It was the T'dzd'ch that murdered EUe, and they framed the Krr't for the deed to concoct a pretense to seal them away."

"Would the Krr't be able to help us reach the top of the tower?" I asked.

"Yes," Krr'kt'zz replied. "If Krr't are even remotely like what the legends say of them, you should have no trouble getting to the Lodestars with their strength at your disposal."

"If you don't mind me asking," I said, "why are you helping us? What's in it for you?"

I didn't want to be going into this blindly.

"Zz'zz explained your goals clearly enough," the Chief said.

I flicked my stinger in curiosity. "Oh? And what did Suisei tell you?"

How much of the truth had Suisei shared with them?

"The Vyxit are on the precipice of a second civil war," Suisei said. "The Lodestars need to be secured, in case either side tries to use them against the other."

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So… Suisei lied to them. He told the Vvz'zsh he was working on behalf of the Vyx.

I… I didn't know how to feel about that. If he'd been in a position like us, where it was a matter of life and death, I might have been able to accept it. But… what if he hadn't?

Unfortunately, this was neither the time nor the place to discuss that.

"Our ancestors fought alongside EUe," Krr'kt'zz said, bobbing zyr tail in agreement. "It would be an honor for us to aid those who work in the Winged Savior's name."

"And we would be honored to accept your assistance," Suisei said. "Besides," he added, "there's something even more important we can do for the D'zd: we can try to stop the Fossil Wind."

"What?" I said, confused.

"Don't worry," Krr'kt'zz said, "Zz'zz will tell you, just like ze explained it to me."

"Come," Suisei said, "this way." Bending down, he opened the double doors in the floor in the middle of the room and skittered into the tunnel.

Nina followed after him, with Lark and I not far behind her, and Chief Krr'kt'zz in the rear.

"You should see it for yourselves," Suisei said. He glanced back at me over his shoulder, "Especially you, Genneth."

Mercifully, the tunnel Suisei led us down quickly leveled out. Not long after that, we came to another pair of double doors. Suisei pulled his cloak's hood around his head before he opened the doors.

A cold wind wafted in, making us shiver.

"Quickly," Suisei said. "They'll get mad at me if I let in the cold."

We closed the doors behind us as soon as Krr'kt'zz walked through, cutting ourselves off from the warm air drifting out from the open tunnel.

Gosh, it was cold!

We stood on a cloistered balcony of sorts. Instead of arches, however, the openings in the wall were a mix of narrow, vertical slits and pinprick-sized holes. Lightwaves streamed through the holes, projecting an image of the landscape upside-down on the balcony's inner wall behind us in a camera obscura effect. I could also see the images directly by bringing my flower up to one of the slits, but doing so for more than a moment made my petals' edges sting from the cold.

Suisei crawled onto the ceiling, and after an awkward, embarrassing moment, so did everyone else, me included. The upside-down projection on the wall turned right-side up as I made my way up to the ceiling. Fortunately, there was an extra incentive for going up there: there were heating slates mounted on the ceiling. The warmth they radiated was a great comfort. The floor's cold stone had left my feet feeling numb, so my legs briefly felt like incense sticks as the heat from the ceiling slates flowed into my limbs.

It felt really nice.

Noticing that Krr'kt'zz and Suisei had settled down onto the ceiling with their abdomens flush against the heating slates, Lark, Nina, and I did the same, in that order.

I spread my petals wide, deeply contented.

Ahhhhh…

"Alright," I said, after I'd gotten sufficiently cozy. "So… what am I looking at?"

"See for yourself," Suisei said.

I did.

The scapes of life and land of the world of the D'zd were poetic in their alienness. They had the same vocabulary as the earthly geography I was familiar with, but the grammar that governed their arrangement couldn't have been more different, doubly so, when you considered I was experiencing them through the natives' point of view, rather than my own. Even so, what I saw differed starkly from what little I'd come to know about this world. It took me a moment to make sense of its haunting beauty.

Out of everything in view, the land's contours were the easiest for me to follow. The earth projected onto the wall in front of us spread out in a broad valley which rose up into hills at its far end. Ocean subsumed the land at the right, which was edged in fractures and sharp angles where it met the water. A river cut through the valley, winding through otherworldly forests as it spread into a delta that fed into the sea. The ammonia waters of the river and the ocean were serenely calm, barely moving at all.

Strangest of all, however, was the light. The view was aglow like nothing I'd ever seen in the D'zd's Archive world. There was so much light. The forests' trees were gleaming prisms, coated in dust and spicules of powdered starlight. The constant stream of light descending from the Sun overhead bounced off the mountains and the sea, forming glorious halos that sprayed their fireworks into the air. And it sang. Every inch of it sang in a soft, transported ecstasy.

"Well?" Suisei asked.

"It's… beautiful."

Suisei crossed his arms and nodded. "That's what I thought, too, before I understood what it truly was."

"What's there to understand?" Lark asked. "Pretty is pretty."

"The Deathlands' beauty is a fatal one," Krr'kt'zz said, in somber tones. "The Fossil Wind ensures that any living thing that ventures into the Deathlands will be turned to stone before long. Even the ocean has been petrified. Every day, the Deathlands spread a little further."

"The T'dzd'ch told us about it," I said. "The Brrk'zk said the Vvz'zsh were to blame for it. The Dominion believes your use of Passage—which they call soul breaking—has broken the world, causing the Fossil Wind to spread."

"I'm aware," Krr'kt'zz said. "It's ridiculous. If we had the power to turn the world to stone, we would have destroyed the Dominion long ago." Ze looked longingly at the glistening wastes. "Lost Nzrk-Dz (Enzerk-Diz) would not have been lost."

I sensed a sad story in my immediate future.

Fate did not disappoint me.

"Dozens of generations ago," Krr'kt'zz said, "my people did not live in the Hollow Mountain. We lived out there," ze pointed at the Deathlands, "in Nzrk-Dz. We were the Vvz'zsh of the Islands and the Seas. The Halls of Lost Nzrk-Dz were built by the first Vvz'zsh to arrive in the Archive. They carved them into the cliffside, facing the sea, as their homes had in the Old World. We frolicked among the tchnt't pods high above the seas, grazing from the archipelagos, before we communed with the creatures of the deep."

"What happened?" Nina asked.

"The Deathlands took it all away," Krr'kt'zz said, lowering zyr abdomen in shame. "The cold grew and grew, leaching the Charge from land, sea, and sky. By the time the oceans turned to stone, everything in them had already died. The tchn't't pods migrated south. Everything fell apart. My ancestors were forced to abandon the lands we called home, before the Deathlands consumed us all. We made an Exodus and settled here. The Hollow Mountain's natural caverns reminded us of the home we'd lost. Make no mistake, I love them dearly, for they are my home. And yet… Archetypes know, I would like to walk in the halls of my ancestors, and Passage through the sea creatures, as we did in the old days, before the Fossil Wind took it all away."

"I'm so, so sorry," I said. "I know just how painful it is to lose your home."

I couldn't help but think of my own, ruined world.

Angel, would the tragedies never end?

Krr'kt'zz lifted zyr flower. "Some chose to stay behind in Lost Nzrk-Dz. According to legend, if you could somehow make it to the old city without dying, you'd find the bodies of those who stayed behind, turned to statues in the tombs they once called home."

"Fucking hell…" Lark muttered.

I looked at Suisei. "Why are you showing me this? Why is Krr'kt'zz telling us this?" I asked.

"As soon as I arrived in this world," Suisei replied, "I recognized it from what you'd shown me of your misadventures in Lantor with Dr. Nowston."

"Yes, I recognized the connection, too," I said.

"Oh, so you already figured it out, too?" Suisei asked.

"Figured out what?" I asked.

"The 'water' down there is ammonia," he said, as if that explained everything.

"Yes, I'm aware of that. And?"

"So," Suisei replied, "when Krr'kt'zz showed me this same landscape and explained to me what it meant, the fact that this was a world of liquid ammonia rang in my mind like a bell."

"Where are you going with this?" Nina asked.

"Albedo."

"Which is?" Lark asked.

Suisei stuck out his arms in frustration. "Am I the only person who paid attention in Chemistry class? Is public education better in Mu? Or just in my world, specifically?"

I imagined Lark would have been rolling her eyes at this point.

"Just get on with it, Egghead," Lark said.

"When light hits an object, some of the light's frequencies will be reflected back, while others will be absorbed," Suisei explained. "The specifics depend on the object and its properties. The term albedo is used to refer to the amount of incoming light that a given material or surface reflects back. Coupled with the D'zd's explanation of the Deathlands as a place where everything turns to stone, it wasn't too hard to figure out what was going on."

"Yes?" I said, urgently.

"The Deathlands are frozen," Suisei said. "The D'zd have no concept of this."

"Why not?" Lark asked.

Yet again, I found myself convinced that if Suisei had had his human face, he'd have been smiling.

He really was enjoying himself, wasn't he?

If only I could have said the same of myself.

"Frozen water floats in liquid water," Suisei explained. He shook his head. "But the same isn't true for ammonia."

"Oh fuck me." Nina shook her head. "I remember my science teacher, she once told us that water is special. When it turns solid—when it freezes… it floats."

Suisei clapped. "Exactly right, Nina. Ice cubes float in our drinks just like icebergs linger on the sea. The tops of rivers and lakes freeze over in winter, but thaw in spring. Human beings take these things for granted. But your science teacher was right, Nina: water is special. At least where I'm from, it's common knowledge that water is one of the few substances which is less dense as a solid than it is as a liquid. Water expands when it freezes; that's why it floats."

"And let me guess," I said, "frozen ammonia doesn't float in liquid ammonia."

"Correct." Suisei replied. He looked over the panorama projected onto the wall. "In a world with ammonia in place of water, when a lake freezes over, the ice will not stay at the surface. Instead, it sinks to the lakebed, freeing up space for more of the liquid to rise up to the surface and freeze. Then that ice falls, and still more fluid floats up to be frozen, and the process continues until the lake is frozen solid and everything living within is dead." Suisei turned to face us. "This world's climate is changing. The seas are freezing over."

"And ice reflects heat," Nina said, "right? Albedo, 'n stuff?"

"Right," Suisei said. "This makes the process into a positive feedback loop. As more of the seas freeze over, more of the Sun's warmth gets bounced back into space, making the planet grow colder."

"It literally snowballs," I said, with grim finality.

"The Deathlands spread," Krr'kt'zz said, "and the Fossil Wind brings its endings. Civilization collapses. Everything dies. Life itself grinds to a halt."

"Holy crud…" I muttered.

Say what you will about &alon, at least my world wasn't conspiring to kill us all.

"It certainly explains the uptick in inclement weather Krr'kt'zz's people have been noticing," Suisei said.

That's right. The storms we'd seen were battles in a climatic conflict. It was the war of life's warmth against cold's death.

I turned to the Vvz'zsh chieftain. "You weren't aware of these things?" I asked.

"Our knowledge is not as great as yours," Krr'kt'zz replied. "Not even the Dominion, with all their might, could explain it as Zz'zz did."

"Most importantly," Suisei said, "I think we can stop it, before the process becomes irreversible."

"How?" Lark asked.

"The D'zd can't leave this Archive to explore the Vyx Network," Suisei said, "but we can. And there's a chance that we will find the controls for the D'zd's Archive in the Tower of Light. If those controls exist—and there's no reason why they shouldn't—we should be able to stop this climate catastrophe before it kills them all."

"That's a big if," I said.

"Yet, if we do nothing, it is certain we will die," Krr'kt'zz said. "So, we must act." Ze turned away. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm needed at the war council. Walk with the Light," ze added, before walking down the walls and back into the mountain.

I turned to Suisei. "War council?"

"I'll show you."

"Alright then," I said, "lead the way."

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