"The memories are incomplete," Annatiki said. "I wish to tell you about the war between House Renna and House Marunavi that changed the shape of the world led to our current order. This is important knowledge that will aid you in the quest to subjugate the etherborne. However, you must prepare yourself."

Annatiki handed Kiera a helmet of some sort, it appeared to have some material lining the inside.

"Wear this for a full day, it will block all forms of vision. Light in the visible and vendark spectrums will not be able to reach your eyes. Your eyes need time to adjust to a total lack of senses, because otherwise they filter out what you need to see. Return to me after a day has passed."

Kiera was given an executive apartment in Spire Annatiki while she wore the helmet. The lower face was open enough that she could eat, but she had to be fed her food by the Spire staff. She sipped on cherry wine and listened to a bard play music until she fell asleep. Later the next day, Annatiki entered her room. She was wearing a very cute little white dress with a matching handbag. It was quite fashionable. Her long red hair was neatly braided and draped over one shoulder.

"It is time," Annatiki said. "Follow me."

Annatiki led Kiera through the spire to a special turret on the outside edge of the spire. Annatiki described it as extending far out over the spire. She guided Kiera's head at a specific angle, and then said "Shift your focus into the vendark spectrum fully, no visible sight."

"Done," Kiera said. It was still pitch black.

Then Annatiki removed the helmet. Far, far away, there was a bright pink star in the otherwise empty black sky. The star was surrounded by a vague cloud of pink and green gas. It was absolutely the most beautiful thing Kiera had ever seen in the sky. Far more beautiful than the normal stars or galaxies of the night sky.

"What is that?" Kiera asked.

"That is called the Ven," Annatiki said. "It is an ancient word for beacon, and it is a short word, an easy word to say and remember. It is believed that this word was very important to super-ancient civilizations. The Ven is a terrible omen, and is considered a sign of the end of the world."

As Annatiki was talking, the Ven and the cloud around it slowly faded and then vanished into total blackness.

"It's gone!" Kiera said.

"No, your eyes have just decided to filter it out. The parasites must have evolved the ability to filter out things that it knows are very far away so as to not confuse the simple fishes that it infects."

"How far away is it?" Kiera asked?

"The Ven is an object that orbits our star once every twelve thousand years. It is believed to contain a portion of the core of a super planet. This super planet was struck by a very fast object and split into two planets before it had cooled. These two planets are our own world and the Sister World. The object kept going, carrying a portion of the core of our planet with it. That fragment of the core of our planet is called the Ven. It produces a third type of ether, called venthys. Ether, sien, and venthys are the three that we know about.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Venthys is what creates witches. And once every twelve thousand years the Ven orbits close enough to our worlds to bathe the surface of our worlds with venthys. Can you imagine what would happen?"

Kiera gasped. "Everyone would become witches all at once! Mother summer!" Annatiki began to walk out of the overlook. It had a stone floor and a glass bubble around it with the open sky outside. After they left the overlook, Annatiki and Kiera continued talking as they walked through the Spire hallways.

"And now you understand why the Ven is associated with the end of the world, why it is such a short and simple word. Now that you have seen the Ven with your own eyes, you can believe me when I say that it is the cause of the war a thousand years ago."

"But it's so far away," Kiera said. "How long until it moves close to us?"

"About three thousand years from now it will arrive," Annatiki said. "During the war, it was about four thousand years away."

"And that caused the war? Something that would take four thousand years to arrive?"

"You must understand that a major discovery was just made. We landed on the Sister World for the first time, and found all the ruined cities there. Far, far more infrastructure development and far larger cities than existed on our world. There were buildings that were miles high, that could support the population of an entire city, and there were entire cities made of those buildings.

"Scientists found records in some ancient language, preserved in vacuum containers for tens of thousands of years. The records included many images, associations between words, and associations between words and sounds. There was millions of hours of entertainment, music, written literature. A record of an entire civilization. They fed all that information into a learning machine, and the resulting machine was able to translate all of the content, language, and art into our own language. That civilization existed over forty-eight thousand years ago."

"But, the atmosphere of the Sister World is poisoned!" Kiera said.

"It was not, at the time. In fact, our world was an absolute desert. Not a single drop of water. That civilization stole all the water from our planet to use in their own civilization. There are records of this. One faction wanted to try and terraform our world, but a different faction wanted to take the water for people in need. The latter faction won out.

"That civilization had also developed flying machines that worked in the darkness of space outside of the ferryway. There was a detailed record about the actual final terraformation of our world. They crashed high-water asteroids into the atmosphere and created oceans. They seeded this world with their own plant life, and it became the chosen resort of the extremely wealthy.

"It was a thriving civilization, until the Ven arrived. Then everyone became witches, the wealthy witches on our world had access to ethermancy using both sien and ether, which is much more powerful than using one or the other by itself. There are many more non-linear interactions between the two types of ether. The wealthy elite destroyed all the spaceships flying to the resort world, and then they found a way to poison the entire atmosphere of the Sister World. That ancient civilization was completely wiped out. There are detailed video records of the fall of such a large civilization. Experts estimated that fifty billion people died.

"Civilization here on this world would rise and fall many times in between then and now. There would be times of peace and then the Ven would arrive and everyone was transformed into witches. When Renna learned of this she computed the probability that humanity would survive the next time the Ven arrived. The probability was astronomically small. When she published her paper, that triggered the war."

"Wait here," she said. "I need to get Diana for the next part of the story."

When she returned, the was walking with another woman. She had cropped purple hair and purple tattoos on her face. She appeared to be wearing some type of very dark military officer's uniform. "So this is the one," Diana said.

"Diana, please tell her about my father," Annatiki said.