"It's how the Blight travels," EUe explained. "There is a world beyond those portals, a fungal world, where the Blight lives. It uses these portals to spread itself across the cosmos. In regions populated by spacefaring civilizations, the Blight makes infected worlds into bridgeheads from which it mounts its invasion."

"Why doesn't it use the portals to instantly conquer everything?" I asked.

"The Blight's realm itself travels," V said. "While it can open portals between its world and outside space seemingly at will, moving its realm appears to be more energetically expensive. It will draw entire planets into its realm, to feed on them."

"That's… terrifying," I said. I shook my head. "But what does this have to do with my original question about the practicality of finding survivors?" I asked.

"You're right," EUe said. "Finding worlds out of the blue that just so happen to be encountering the Blight for the first time is very rare." He chirruped sadly. "However, finding stragglers struggling to survive is much more common. And if we discovered large, spacefaring civilizations, we'd try to evacuate as many as we could—if they believed us, that is."

"They didn't believe you when you warned them about the threat?" I asked.

EUe shook his head. "Not always. But, even if they did, things could still go terribly wrong. Sometimes, they tried to destroy each other, to ensure one group was rescued at the expense of another."

"Like the D'zd," I said.

"Yes," EUe replied. "In the worst cases, the worlds we hoped to save tried to conquer us."

Riceroni sandalfish, that was awful!

"That's horrible," I said. "No wonder you wanted to abandon the Long Hunt."

EUe nodded. "Yes. As the centuries became millennia and our numbers grew, this way of life took its toll on us." He waved his hand again, bringing another change to the Philharmonium's images.

I recognized what I was looking at as a variant of the skycylinders I'd seen in my first romp through the Vyx Network. These ones were smaller, though, no bigger than a medium-sized shopping mall. The cylinder's walls were studded with buildings. Several levels of promenades ringed around a central plaza, where a jagged monolith stood like a fossilized horn.

In my first encounters with the Vyxit skycylinders, I'd seen people who were preparing for war. Bold banners hang from their walls, and the promenades were packed full with silver-suited warriors, ordered in a perfect lattice. But here, I saw none of that. The difference couldn't have been starker. Individuals of various species mulled about the promenades, walking and talking. Children played in the parks.

It was people just being… people.

"What you're seeing is a clanstead," EUe said. "It's how Vyxit live together. There's usually several thousand individuals per clan—up to several tens of thousands, depending on the constituent species."

"What's the monolith in the middle?" I asked.

"The Keeper," V explained. "Each clanstead is a massive Vyx module; the Keeper is the module's core. It attends to the needs of the community, and serves as the custodian of the clan's memories."

"We developed a culture of our own," EUe said. "Our histories are sacred to us, not just as individuals, but as a community. Clans vote on which information to preserve, and which to share with other clans. Information was the fabric of Vyxit life, and not even hUen-dE could change that. We developed new traditions from it. Sovenance was my favorite. That, and the potlucks!"

"Sovenance?" I asked.

EUe nodded. "It's from an old word meaning 'remembrance'," he explained. "We didn't just gather our stories and knowledge to hoard them. We gathered it to share it amongst ourselves, and with our posterity. Sharing it, touring exhibits: that's Sovenance"

"I suppose that makes what we're doing here Sovenance, doesn't it?" I asked.

"Yes, it does." EUe looked up at the Philharmonium, and at the statues beyond it.

"D-Do I need to do anything special?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No, just listen, ask, and learn."

He fluttered his wings.

It made sense. With so many different species living alongside one another, a common culture had to evolve to keep the Vyxit united. It was natural that they inevitably embraced community, cosmopolitanism, and a deep devotion to public service.

"What about the Long Hunt?" I asked. "I assume that played a part of your traditions, too."

Nodding, EUe folded his wings against his back. "Yes, we trained the next generations to fight the Blight and gather more survivors, but… there was a balance to it. But hUen-dE changed that." He lowered his head in shame.

A new image swept over the Philharmonium. Instead of a clanstead, I was now looking at the interior of a dwelling; another twEfE egg, no less. A family of three sat in the recessed area in the middle of the ground floor. A silver monolith with beveled corners extruded from the wall. It was a solid hunk of Vyx metallocrystal.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

I realized I'd seen something like it before, in the twEfE dwelling I'd visited in my first foray into the Network.

Spots of light bubbled up along the monolith's surface.

The mother twEfE stood up. "Are the results in?"

Lights flashed softly across the monolith's facets as it spoke. "Yes, hea-hea-dE." Disappointment tinged its polite, composed voice's next words. "I'm afraid you were not selected to bear children this cycle."

The father twEfE twittered in mourning. "B-But—"

"—I'm sorry, hUen-en," the monolith replied. "If it's any consolation, both you and hea-hea-dE had aptitude scores in the 95th percentile of this cycle's candidates. Unfortunately, resources are limited, and the twEfE population is large enough already, meanwhile, many other species' numbers have yet to recover. But fear not, the doctors want you and your mate to know that you'll be among the first for consideration once space is allotted for new twEfE."

The mother's wings drooped. "But… that's what you said last time, Eka-hE, and the time before that."

"If you like, I can schedule an appointment with a clan physician," the monolith replied.

The scene froze.

"Behold…" EUe said, "the Beholders."

"Beholders?"

"Each dwelling is an individual module," V said. "hUen-dE suggested we allow the inhabitants to interact with a personification of that module. This was how the Beholders were created. They attend to their inhabitants' needs. At first, this was in a merely assistive capacity. The Beholders respond to their families' wants and assist with networking and community integration. They also provided companionship, especially when population constraints prohibited individuals from producing offspring of their own."

"Eventually," EUe said, "the Beholders began sending the data they gained from surveilling their inhabitants to the clan Keeper."

"Wait," I said, "they were under perpetual surveillance? Why would Vyxit approve of that?"

EUe crossed his arms. "I told you, Genneth: information was sacred to us. The thought of being able to chronicle more and more of their lives appealed greatly to the Vyxit." He shook his head and then flicked his tongue. "Little did we know what it would cost us. Though I can't know for sure, I strongly suspect that was hUen-dE's plan from the very beginning."

He swept through to another scene. The smooth swiftness of his movements suggested he knew these records like the backs of his hands. It made perfect sense, considering how long he'd been trapped here.

The Philharmonium sphere grew to accommodate this next recording.

"My word…" I muttered.

"Yeah," EUe nodded, "the Senate chambers are quite impressive."

My heart sank at his use of the term "the Senate". If there was one thing any science-fiction and/or fantasy fan worth their salt knew, it was that almost nothing good ever happened in "the Senate".

Still, it was a marvelous scene to behold. The room had the shape of one bowl stacked atop another, rim to rim. Balconies covered the walls like silvery flower petals, bearing colorful, sigil-inscribed banners. The balconies were grouped according to color and symbol; here, a swath of blue; there, a dash of red. Between one and three finely dressed individuals stood on each balcony.

I figured they had to be the Senators.

They came in a dizzying array of species. I saw a balcony with a custom environment held in by a forcefield to accommodate the d'zd standing inside it. A feather-winged dragon in elegant robes sat alone in a balcony large enough to contain them. One of the tentacle creatures stood in view, wearing a magnificent headdress of many textures and colors.

Giant Vyx monoliths stuck up from the apex of the ceiling and the base of the floor. Several of the balconies had floated over to the monoliths, where they adhered to them, like shelves. The chamber was a five-lane pile up of dozens of languages crashing into one another midair. Yet, somehow, I understand them all.

Just then, a crone's voice cut through the morass with an assertive yell. "Order! Order! There will be order in this chamber!"

Light blossomed around the balcony where the voice's origin stood as all the other voices fell silent. On that platform stood the oldest twEfE I'd ever seen. Her feathers were frazzled and dull. Patches of bare flesh visible on her arms and her sunken face, though they were hidden by her bell-sleeved robe and its tall, frilled collar. It was as if she'd been pickled alive. Her wings were folded against the back of her robe. Some of the gaps between her wing feathers were as wide as fingers. She rested both of her hands atop the head of her simple staff, whose wood was nearly as gnarled as she was. Yet her eyes were bright and alert, housing wiles undimmed by the passage of time.

"Peoples of the Vyxit, we are not barbarians," she said. "If you have your concerns, you can voice them in an orderly fashion!"

"Clan Téfula requests a greater share of reproductive privileges," the dragon said. "Our member species cannot function in isolation."

A sharp-eared, gray-skinned humanoid clothed in svelte whites immediately leaned forward. His balcony lit up as he spoke his reply. "If Brightweather Hold's clans contributed more to the fight against the Blight, perhaps you would deserve it."

The dragon snarled, clicking her claws on her balcony. "Not all of us reproduce so quickly. Would you have us condemn ourselves to extinction?"

The gray-skin slapped his hand on the balcony's ridge. "We are in this together! Extinction—"

A tentacle-headed lizard interjected. "—As this issue appears to be going nowhere, if I may raise my concern, Lady hUen-dE?"

The twEfE crone raised her hand, which muted the other two Senators. "You may," she said.

Wait, that was hUen-dE?

I raised my hand. "Pause it, please."

EUe nodded; the recording paused.

"That was hUen-dE?" I asked.

"Yes."

"When is this happening, relative to the start of your… Synespera?" I asked.

"Many hundreds of years," V said. "Later, thousands."

What?

"How has hUen-dE lived so long?" I asked. "Or… is it normal for twEfE to live for centuries?"

"She ended up becoming our supreme military commander," EUe explained. "As she aged, she began to put herself into suspended animation whenever she wasn't needed."

"Isn't that a bit extreme?" I asked.

"She had always been afraid of death," EUe said. "Maybe it was seeing her own mortality face to face in her old age that broke her, or maybe she'd been a lost cause from the beginning—most of us were. But she refused to give in."

"What do you mean, it 'broke her'?"

"She refused to accept death, not while the Blight still lived. Instead, she found a way to cheat it." He looked up at the recording and let it resume. "Watch."

The Senate-lizard voiced his grievance. "Here, I speak not for my clan, but for my species. On our homeworld, Sh'meshesh beloved, we lived in harmony with the flora. That harmony goes beyond mere biology; it is the essence of who we are. Across the fleet, Beholders in g'shem pods have sent me reports of my kind being denied the space and freedom we need to perform our ancient rites. We are mocked and belittled. Opportunities always seem to pass us by."

A twEfE spoke up. "If you g'shem modernized like the rest of us, maybe you wouldn't be having these problems!"

This triggered a reply from a d'zd on one of the balconies on the ceiling's monoliths. My twEfE eyes couldn't see any light emanating from the d'zd Senator's flower, but the d'zd's balcony still lit up as it broadcast its Senator's words.

"You're one to talk," the d'zd said. "It's an open secret that twEfE are overrepresented in high-ranking positions both on and off the battlefield."

"We are first among equals," the twEfE replied.

A chorus of voices erupted in protest.

Stomping her staff on her balcony, hUen-dE spread her wings and shrieked. "Enough!"

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