"Isn't it beautiful?" he said, softly. A chitter quivered through his wings.

"I've never seen anything like it."

Uka-yen…

I pointed at the statue. "Is that Uka-yen the same—"

"—Yes," EUe said, somberly. "It's the same old bird that I came to know." The weight of Uka-yen's memory pulled EUe's gaze down to the tiled floor. "It's strange, isn't it? Even though we were wrong, we still accomplished so much. You'd think the two wouldn't be correlated like this."

"I'd like to think that there are many kinds of wrong," I said. "Some are more dangerous than others."

"The only reason my people were able to create these wonders was because we'd a way to stop killing each other."

"Yes, by killing all the other races of twEfE," I said.

EUe's eyes twinkled with emotion. "Yes. But… that's the thing. For all our progress, we hadn't made the one changed that mattered most. Even though we'd been finding ways to manage our aggressive tendencies, we hadn't rejected them in full. The Barbarian Ages were vilified because they were chaotic, not because they were violent. Meanwhile, the Ecumene's peace wasn't true peace; we'd merely eliminated the rest of the competition." EUe stretched his wings as he turned to Uka-yen's statue. "Uka-yen discovered that the Ecumene was covering up outbreaks of violence between twEfE in the lunar colonies and twEfE from the planet. He was convinced that war was inevitable. Then, one day, while in the Great Dream, we found the largest dreamshard ever to be discovered. It was more than enough for the Ecumene to begin colonizing the rest of our solar system in earnest. Once that happened, the colonies would go their separate ways, declaring war on UlU and one another. It would be a second Race War, only this time, there would be no survivors."

EUe dismissed the image with a twist of his hand, reducing the spherical projection to an empty pallid shimmer.

"Why?" I asked. "How could he be so certain?"

"I was taught how to hold a knife before I was shown how to read," EUe said. "That was just the way of the world. The Cage⁠? Proving grounds? Duels? Bloodsport? It was all humdrum. It was just the way of the world. The strong triumphed over the weak by the right of their strength."

Images of young twEfE sparring with one another crossed the sphere's surface.

More than a handful died from their injuries.

"As children, we would be taken to the ruins of the dead Colors' cities. Our teachers encouraged us to desecrate whatever we could find. I remember feeling like a failure when one of my schoolmates found a petrified head buried in the dirt while I had nothing but broken fingers. A friend came over to tell me, and I flew back with him to see what the fuss was about, but by the time I got there, they were stomping on the fragments of the shattered head beneath their feet." EUe turned to face me. "Tell me, Genneth, what kind of peace did we have when violence was still the most popular pastime? Kwekek—hesitation, doubt, weakness—was frowned upon. You were supposed to be hUale or kUa-de; nectar-blooded; spear-like." He put his hand on his chest. "For the longest time, something in me, something quiet and brave, had told me that that was wrong, but I ignored that voice. I never liked doing so, but I put up with it for the sake of my future, and, eventually, for my mate and my son. Even when I dared to open my beak when they were taken from me, I still had reservations toward my own convictions. I felt ashamed of them, and myself." He shook his head, wings trembling. "No one wants to announce to the world that they are a failure. It wasn't until Uka-yen spoke the words himself that I started to wonder if my convictions might have actually been worth something."

"What did he say?" I asked.

"Did they really deserve to die?" EUe let the question hang in the air before continuing. "I was always told the answer was 'yes', and though I could never bring myself to believe it, I also never had the courage to speak up and condemn it in plain terms." He lowered his head in solemnity. "It was only when the Blight came and ended my world that I realized how much of what I'd lost hadn't been worth protecting."

V bobbed in affirmation. "And I helped!"

EUe nodded. "That you did." He let his wings hang behind him. "It's ironic: when I was alive, I didn't want to leave the arena. I wanted to die there. But now, when I've found a reason to live, the arena keeps me as its captive."

"What changed?" I asked.

"I remembered just how small we truly were in the grand scheme of things," he said, "and rediscovered the joy of exploring all the questions that came with it."

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Closing his eyes, EUe waved one hand over the dial and another in front of the sphere. Images passed before me in a steady process, and each one was a thing of wonder. I recognized some of them from things I'd seen in my travels through the Vyx Network: the tentacle-creatures' mist-shrouded world; the Treefathers' world, with its castles and parapets and elfin souls. Other parts of the vision were completely new to me. I saw a planet hairy with the superstructures of world-city and watched diamonds rain in a sea of sky. I saw twilight kingdoms squabble at the foot of a fractal wall and watched dragons sail past galaxies.

And I saw life; life in infinite diversity in infinite combination.

"There's an old twEfE legend about the stars," EUe said.

"What is it?"

"Ela-tU, the king of the gods, Golden Herald created the twEfE deep back in time. He fell in love with Uahea, the goddess of light and day. As her dowry, Uahea brought a gift of never-ending daylight, so that the elU would grow tall and rich as it basked in the sun, ever producing nectar for the twEfE, who Ela-tU so loved. But the endless daylight eventually angered the other gods, who, in their rage, wove a blanket and pulled it over the sky, plunging the world into eternal night."

"Ela-tU and Uahea tried to solve the problem, but to no avail. As strong as they were, they could not overcome the other gods' combined might." EUe looked up at the ceiling. "In their curiosity, the twEfE flew up to the blanket, poking holes in it with our beaks. Eventually, we drew pictures with the holes, to honor the gods and their works. Our efforts so impressed the gods that they agreed to remove the blanket for half the day, and cover the sky again with the un-mended blanket for the other half, so that all creation could rejoice in its beauty. That is how the stars came to be."

"That's… lovely," I said.

He nodded. "I agree. The story meant a lot to me as a child, and it still does to this day. The night is full of stars, Dr. Howle," EUe said, with humble reverence. "It's filled with radiance, and music, and wonder. It's the god that's here, instead of at the far side of prayer. And there's just so much of it. There's more than I could ever have imagined, and more than I could ever hope to understand." He cooed kindly at V, who circled above us. "Even so," EUe said, "I want to understand it, because I'm a part of it—we all are." He glanced at V. "Before I met V, I used to believe that reality was fractured along the lines of things called lEs."

"Lees?"

"What makes a tree different from the sky, Genneth?" he asked.

I shrugged. "They just… are."

"I was raised to say that we had the lEs to thank for it. A lE for treeness; a lE for skyness. A lE for every mode of being. But now… now I think differently."

"How so?" I asked.

"I think there's only one thing: everything. Trees and sky might seem different at first look, but they're not. They're both jumbles of matter, differing only in how much they have and how it's arranged. All our distinctions are just that: ours. There's no law that separates the trees from the sky. It's all in our heads. We're stardust, Genneth; everything is everything; differences arise only in how it's cut up or modified." EUe lowered his gaze, looking at his hands. "Even now, in this strange form of death, I haven't changed. I'm still the same as I always was, only… rearranged. The same would be true, even for death of the more conventional kind."

His words had transfixed me.

EUe seemed to discern this. He whistled, clicked and looked me in the eyes. "We're all part of the same fabric; it's all the more reason to treat each other with kindness. We've embarked on this great journey together. And I want to savor it to the fullest, even as I share it with the world."

V flew in close and nodded. "As do I." He glanced at EUe, and then me. "You could have all the knowledge in the universe, but if you had no one to share it with, you might as well have nothing."

"Yes," EUe said. "That's why I want others to have that chance for themselves, and for their children and their children's children. That's the message behind the legend of Ela-tU and Uahea. Alone, none of us were strong enough to bring back the day. It was only together that we succeeded, and to the benefit of all." He looked up at Uka-yen's statue. "Not everyone has to answer that call. We all march to our own drummer. But… I think people should be given the choice, and the chance to make it, and the chance be wrong, and to find a way to be better. I think that's something worth fighting for, don't you? To fight for wonder, rather than out of fear? To create, rather than to destroy?"

My body sang the emotions I lacked the tears to show. My feathers stuck ruffled of their own accord. It made me rather… fluffy.

"It's a beautiful thought," I said.

EUe clacked his beak twice. "I'm glad you agree."

"I've tried to help EUe make his dream a reality since the earliest days of our Synespera," V said.

"twEfE were the first," EUe said, "and as our community grew, I helped teach the next generations of hatchlings. I wanted to share with them the lessons I'd learned."

"What happened?" I asked.

EUe puffed out his gorget. His tail feathers stuck up at a tight angle. "It worked! In pursuing the Blight, we found worlds under siege, and twEfE volunteered to rescue as many survivors as we could, and then those survivors became rescuers in turn."

"Wait," I said, "I don't understand."

"What is it?" EUe asked.

"The Blight killed nearly all of the living things on my world in under two weeks," I said. "If it can destroy worlds so quickly, the window of opportunity in which you could find and rescue survivors would be incredibly small. Wouldn't that be a problem?"

"T-Two weeks?" EUe said, feathers sticking up in shock. "That's awful!"

"You mean to tell me it usually takes longer?"

"Yes," V said. "Though the Blight's widespread devastation of the planetary biosphere does occur very quickly, depending on their technological capabilities, small pockets of survivors can persist for years."

V turned to face the Philharmonium, whose display changed to show an infected world hanging in starry space like a sewage-strewn marble. Fungal behemoths—even entire islands of fungus life—hovered in and above the planet's atmosphere.

But it was the portals floating among them that made my beak hang open. Wyrms and other fungus life swam out through the windows in the air. Through them, I caught glimpses of a twilight, mycotic realm.

One was large enough to swallow the planet whole.

I pointed at one of the portals. "What are those?"

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