I dealt the final blow to the mutant clam with a downward slash of my naginata, striking at the soft mantle through the gap between its shell's venomous spikes. The creature's dark blue blood spilled down a nearby drain, where it intermingled with the nectar current falling through the floor grate from up on high.

EUe and I shared a glance as the crowd went wild. We wicked the curdled blood off our feathers and treated ourselves to one of the nectar fountains before it retracted into the ground.

I have to say: V was the kind of friend most people would never be lucky enough to know and have. I don't think I'd have been able to get through to EUe without the little Vyx assisting me. Unlike EUe, V hadn't been blinded by hardwired rage.

In the end, the strength of my pain was what got through to him. The tormented twEfE had lost everything not just once, but twice, and broken men knew how to recognize one another, no matter the species.

With our victory in the proving round, we were free to depart the Cage for the gladiators' village. As I'd promised, I started sharing my story with EUe and V on the walk back to our flopegg⁠.

We took our darn time on the walk back. It was night by the time I'd finished. The village's streetlamps had turned on with the coming of the dusk. They towered like giants the short bioluminescent plants growing by the sides of the paths. Apparently, the flowers had been engineered to glow like that.

There was a public bath not far from the village's central plaza. It lay at the end of a path that curved around to the back of the Philharmonic Temple. The bath was a square-shaped pool, shallow enough that the warm water burbling down from the simple spout at its center never rose past our hips when we sat in it cross-legged.

V hovered over the water, as I shared the rest of my story, listening attentively.

The experience left me feeling like I was being drawn into the twilight, into a dark night of the soul whose reign might never end.

Angel's breath, it hurt.

I held myself low: head, wings, tail feathers, and all. I managed to raise my head and look EUe in the eyes.

"I don't know what to do," I said.

"I already said I'd help you," he replied.

"I know, and I appreciate it, but… I feel stuck."

"Dr. Howle," V said, "though I understand the difficulty of your circumstances, I wonder if you might have been looking at all of this the wrong way."

Of all the takes I'd been expecting, that hadn't been one of them.

"Well, why don't you enlighten me?" I said.

"You're predicating your struggles with &alon on the assumption that she has the decision-making abilities and sense of responsibility of a mature adult," V explained. "You've told us how she can't grasp the consequences of her actions. Forgive me if I'm being blunt, but, as you are a mental healthcare professional, shouldn't you be able to separate the patient from their disorder?"

My wings and feathers bristled at that. The Vyx's words made me angry. Thankfully, I cupped some of the warm water into my hands and poured it onto my head. The warm water had a way of helping me keep my cool—ironic pun intended.

"I mean, obviously, I know that," I said. "But… it's just so difficult. This isn't me in the office with a patient. This is big! Bigger than big! And it's so screwed up!" I twittered with pain. "Just by what she's done to me, personally, I think I have a right to be resentful, don't I? She destroyed my world and life. She got my wife killed. She's basically made me into her slave for all eternity. And if it wasn't for the Sword, I'd be powerless to resist her."

"And now, to save yourself, you have to help her," EUe said. He shook his head. "That's a terrible weight to bear."

"I know," I said.

EUe crossed his arms. "Still… if you don't mind me asking: you had no problem helping Geoffrey, despite knowing that he used biological warfare to commit mass murder. Why? You can't say he did it unknowingly. He clearly knew what the consequences would be, yet he did it anyway, just as you helped him."

I nodded. "Actually, that one is easy," I said. I glanced at V. "And it connects to what V said, too." I looked up at the stars twinkling through the panes of the village's dome. "Geoffrey accepts his guilt. His remorse was all-consuming. There's a saying in psychiatry, you know: a person has to want to change, otherwise therapy is as good as useless. I don't need to forgive someone to show them compassion, but I need to know that my compassion will be worth something, because I only have a finite amount of it to give. That's what breaks my heart about &alon. She doesn't understand what she's done wrong, and I just can't let go of my hope that there's a way to fix that. The alternative is just so gosh darn sad."

"Some things are sad," EUe said. "Look at what my ancestors did to their fellow twEfE. You have to accept that sadness, and all the guilt that comes with it. But… that guilt—that pain… it's a beginning, not an ending. No one is perfect, and there's no shame in that. If anything, it's what gives us the chance to be better. You can't be right if you don't know how to be wrong."

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"Yeah," I said. "&alon doesn't know how to be wrong. She thinks she's right, no matter what."

"As does hUen-dE," EUe said.

"So… what do we do?" I asked.

"If even half of what you told me is true," EUe replied, "it's all the more reason for the Long Hunt to end. The wyrms are as much &alon's victims as the Vyxit."

"I know that! But…" I sighed, "what happens after that? What happens after we've left this world? For the life of me, I can't see how the vicious cycle won't start all over again. What's to stop &alon from destroying more worlds?"

"You said she responded to your music, right?" V asked.

I nodded. "Yes. She says it's her 'soul'," I said, derisively finger-quoting her with my fingers. "She says I'm her family, her home. Ergo, she concludes that I'm her father."

"So, use that!" EUe said, standing up and spreading his wings. Water trickled down from his armor and feathers. "Her fixation on you must give you some kind of leverage over her! Maybe you can use that to set things right!"

"I'm sorry, but I…" I shook my head. "I just don't believe that."

"Why not?"

I slapped my hands down onto the water's surface. "Because it makes no sense!"

V hovered close to me. "Does it have to make sense?"

"How can I trust it if it doesn't?" I said. "I'm done acting on faith. I'm done with being let down! And just think about it: what happens if &alon finds out she made a mistake? We'll be back to square one, and who knows how many more will die!"

EUe chirruped softly, shuffling his wings behind him. "If long-term viability is a problem, we could always use the Lodestars."

"What?"

He looked up at the sky. "If the Lodestars are used in close proximity to your world, Kléothag's corpse will be exposed, letting the Darkness take his powers for itself, right?"

I nodded. "Yes."

"Then it's simple," EUe said, sitting down on the edge of the pool's square wall. "We wait until we've made it to another world, and then we threaten to use the weapon on &alon and the wyrms."

"You'd intimidate her into compliance?" I asked.

"It's certainly a more ethical solution than simply destroying her outright and killing all the wyrms and their cargo of souls," EUe said.

And he wasn't wrong about that.

I got up and shook myself off, and then started to pace. I kicked up water with every footstep, and then hopped onto the wall and continued pacing there, turning around once I reached the corner.

"Even with your blessing, why would the other Vyxit care to listen to a wyrm like me?" I asked. "What's to stop them from thinking that you're the turncoat, not hUen-dE? And what's going to make them set their wyrm-hatred aside?"

"Self-preservation?" V suggested.

I clacked my beak at that. It was a stupid idea.

"I'm sorry," I said, shaking my head, "but… speaking from experience, relying on self-preservation is just stupid. It's not reliable in the least. Behavior-wise, yes, it nearly always kicks in, but," and here, I raised a finger in defiance, "that says nothing about how it will manifest! On my world, every day, the ancient Maikokans would ritually sacrifice their own people—ripping their freaking hearts out!—all because they believed that doing so was the only way to ensure the Sun would rise on the following morning. When Lassedite Athelmarch and his crusaders arrived in Maikokan lands, they rescued people who were set to be murdered that day to appease the Sun, and do you know what happened?"

"No," EUe said, "so tell me."

"The sacrifices got angry with their rescuers! They berated them! They said, 'What are you doing, you fools? You'll bring eternal Night upon us all if we don't die!' And when the soldiers tried to free them, the sacrifices fought back. They killed their own rescuers! And why? Because they believed their deaths were an act of self-preservation." I waved out my arm. "Whole nations have gone to war against each other, or even against themselves, because they believed it was in their best interest to do so. And that's the thing: we can't always be certain about these things. Sometimes, making the obvious choice is a fatal mistake; other times, it's exactly the right thing to do, and you can't always know which is which. You could tell the Vyxit they need to work with us in order to survive, and they might turn around and decide that that makes murdering each other the proper course of action. Heck, it's not unlike what happened to the twEfE," I added.

EUe folded his wings against his back. "You're right." He clacked his beak and chirped. "Even so… I still think there's a way to make this work."

"How?"

"Get &alon to share the souls she's accumulated," he said. "Let them interact with the Vyxit. At the very least, let us have access to all that data."

V bobbed in agreement. "That's an excellent idea, EUe. I think it would go a long way to convincing the Vyxit to trust you and the wyrms."

"Again: how?" I asked.

"How?" EUe crossed his arms in consternation. "How wouldn't it?" He bristled his tail feathers in consternation. "Genneth… just look at everything you've seen. The Treefathers spend their existence sharing stories about what they've learned. The D'zd war amongst themselves to learn their people's history and enforce whichever version of the truth that they prefer. Every single one of the Vyxit peoples once had an identity before the Blight ripped it away from them. That loss was what let us band together in the first place."

"But what about the Long Hunt?" I asked. "Isn't that the glue that holds your people together? It's Vyxit culture's core myth; it's the story you tell yourselves to understand yourselves, and your place in the world."

EUe looked at me in thoughtful silence. "Yes… I suppose you're right." He glanced at the water. "It is our founding narrative, and it's brought us far. I myself have used it to help stay sane all this time."

"Exactly," I said, "and the Vyxit would be loath to just throw that all away! It's what made them what they are."

V booped at us. "It's also what made hUen-dE into a tyrant and what got EUe trapped in here. Though I can't say for sure if they still exist in the present, enough Vyxit wanted to change the narrative that they were willing to join EUe in a revolt in order to break away from it."

"It's not a crime to make mistakes, or be immature," EUe said. "A female I knew long, long ago taught me that. It's not a crime to be wrong, or to believe too strongly, or be misled. Even if Vyxit progress as a people depended on the stories that helped us find our path, those stories don't own us, and they don't own our progress, either. We can move past our mistakes while still holding on to the lessons they taught us. That's what true maturity entails."

I swear, if twEfE bodies could weep, by now, I would have been a waterworks.

"I've been thinking the very same thing. It's why I disassociated in the middle of the fight. Everything… everything just hit me, all at once."

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