Cenz returned his focus to Jophiel.

"Your people have never hurt each other, have they?"

"We are not capable of it. There are legends, stories, of some that learned ways . . . but if there was ever any truth to it, it was lost a long time ago! For as far back as any of us can truly remember, we have never hurt each other. But . . . But humans, Dessei, these other species - they revel in it!"

"It was the play, wasn't it?" Cenz asked.

"I knew they'd had conflicts," Jophiel said. "But I had never seen it. I did not know how . . . horrible it was. They cut into each other, their life bleeds away slowly. They suffer - they cause each other to suffer! How could they do that?"

"This was a great problem for my people to tackle as well," Cenz told her. "When we first met them, we learned of their wars. They could not even count their conflicts. They could only even estimate how many died, for so many were lost that it proved impossible to know the exact numbers. They had invented ways of killing each other of incredible complexity and nuance - developed defenses and then new methods to counter those. It was a terrible form of evolution that all of them, even the Bicet, had done for ages."

He let out a sad light that translated into a sigh. "We could not understand that. How even the wise Bicet could do such things - even if much of it was in the past. But then we were attacked by an enemy. We could not exchange Polyps with the Aeena, nor would they speak to us. We had very little in the way of defenses."

"Did you learn to fight and kill?" Jophiel asked, voice laced with horror.

"Yes," Cenz said. "We did not like it. But those other species of the Union came to help us. They fought for us at first. They sacrificed themselves - they died - to protect my people. They did so without pausing to ask what reward they would get. It was, to them, simply something they must do."

"To kill?"

"To protect," Cenz corrected. "They did not want to kill. I saw them attempt to show mercy, to not kill their foes. It happens in all of their wars, to some degree. At times, their sense of love, of mercy, overcomes their other instincts.

"But most importantly of all, Jophiel, I understood finally; my people all did. They did not fight out of cruelty or malice. They fought in their history because they had reason to. Sometimes it was wrong. But many times it was because they wished to survive against a danger that could not be talked to or dissuaded. For them, their history is not one of total cooperation and friendship. They struggled in many ways. They are what their reality created them to be - but they have also striven to rise above it. They have imagined a universe where they can be peaceful, and see it as a goal worth seeking. They sacrificed themselves to save my people because they could do no less."

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Jophiel fell quiet again.

Cenz wondered if his words had any effect upon her. Perhaps the ideas were simply too strange for her to understand. Star Angels were, so far as he could tell, nearly innocent beings.

"Do you think that Tred could ever kill?" Jophiel asked. Her words were soft. Barely a fluctuation in the spectrum.

Cenz took time to consider it.

"Yes," he said. "I do not think he would ever want to. I think it would cost him a great deal - he would always remember it and feel great guilt. But he would, if he felt he had to."

"What could compel him to do such a thing?" Jophiel asked. "I thought I knew him . . . but if he could do that, I do not know him at all."

Cenz spoke again. "He would do it only to protect another. Or himself - but I suspect that he would hesitate to do it for himself. No - I think most certainly that he would only do it for others."

Jophiel was quiet again.

He waited. A minute passed, then two. Five.

Time had less meaning to her people, he knew.

"Thank you for coming to speak to me," Jophiel said finally.

"I hope I have rendered some assistance," Cenz said.

"Yes," Jophiel replied. She disconnected the call, and Cenz was alone.

He sat there for a time. The plasma fields had all fallen back into normal levels. The techs were still trying to puzzle out what had happened. Later, Cenz would have to tell them that it was simply a difficult moment for the Ambassador and to not fret it too much.

He saw, too, that Jophiel had turned off all outside camera views again, returning to her isolation.

He sat a little longer. He, too, looked inward, focusing on himself. When he did that, he could suss out each individual in his collective; take a sample of the thoughts and mood of each of his members.

There was one among him, an elder by his species' terms, that had been on a colony world that had been on the front of the war.

It had been in a different collective then, a being who had stood out of the water, away from all shelter, watching as the fleets of the Aeena and the Sapient Union had clashed.

They'd been in orbit, and he'd seen the Union ships dive deeper into the atmosphere than had been wise. The Aeena pushed them further, hoping to put them into destabilizing orbits, knowing the Union ships would put themselves between their enemies and the Corals below who they defended.

Some ships had gone down as a result of sinking too far into the atmosphere. A blaze of glory, the veterans called it with a stinging pride later.

They'd not attempted much maneuver; they wanted to take the shots so that they'd not reach the surface of the world and the civilians below.

It had been a brutal battle. The casualties had been in the millions.

But almost entirely among the crew of those ships. They had not broken, no matter how much damage they had taken.

They'd had the numerical superiority over the Aeena. They'd had the tactical superiority, when a second force had come in, catching the Aeena between two combat fleets.

They'd let the Aeena escape, rather than risk sending more debris down to the world.

A terrible defeat, some had called it. To the surviving crews of those ships, they had called it their finest hour.

That last part of himself that had seen it, he communicated with directly.

"Did I tell it well enough?" he asked.

It mattered, he knew. And he did not know if he had done well enough in explaining it to Jophiel. If he had failed to impart just how important it all was - he felt that that would be a failure, an unworthy act on his part to such a memory.

The old Polyp could only communicate slowly and simply when viewed in isolation like this.

"Yes," it told him.