There had always been, among the children of lost Zhay, a love for symbolism.

Despite the rationality and detachment encouraged by the Shaper, certain patterns that had endeared themselves to the reptilians persisted, for reasons that had little to do with practicality or logic, and much to do with sentimentalism.

Of course, the Shaper had an explanation for their continued existence - "the state of mind one can enter thanks to cherished things or symbols can often heighten productivity" - but everyone knew how things stood.

One thing, one word that stuck, was the engine. Not the device that generated power for a vehicle, necessarily. The vehicle itself, or greater constructs of the Collective, were often called engines by outsiders, and, sometimes, the term slipped into the reptilians' conversations too.

A Zhayvin had once commented that it fit, like a Warscale gauntlet, or one's fangs around the throat of prey. "Engines, indeed - are they not the sources of our power and reputation? They might not consume fuel to produce energy, but they produce results. Information. The engines of the great apparatus that is the Collective. Do you disagree?"

Said reptilian had not received a name. The members of the Collective knew each other's thoughts at all times. What one felt, all felt. What need was there for names, designations, in such a society? Nicknames were a matter of affectation, titles, like the Shaper's, of nostalgia. Everyone knew who everyone was. What was there to add?

The spires, too, were symbols. The reptilians reserved a deep disdain for the idea of the scientist-hermit (not least of all because it was an accurate description of them before the Shattering of the Anthropocentric Quantum Separation Effect) and the white tower they lived in, isolated from the world. The spires might have evoked that, in terms of mere shape, but that was not what the Zhayvin were going for.

They had been told their starscrapers instead brought to mind the mad scientist's mountain lair, or the tower of the warlock-alchemist. Not exactly flattering comparisons, but certainly no mentions of ivory towers, either. Even if some reptilians had groused that it was better to stand apart from the world and bring nothing into it rather than create dangers.

'I think you misunderstand,' Mocker (for who else could have it been?) had said, clearly struggling not to smile. 'The archetypes mentioned push the boundaries of science and understanding. Their creations might seem insane, in every sense of the word, but...I do not think it is an insult. Unless you subscribe to the notion madness is genius that brings nothing to the community, that is. After all, thinking atypically does not make one evil...or useless, as we have seen enough times.'

'Are you calling us insane?' the grumbling had went.

But Mocker had always taunted and challenged, even before receiving its name, which, some said, seemed to goad it into being more annoying, so it'd be seen doing it justice. So, in the end, even those who hadn't indulged it had stopped paying it mind.

Starscrapers resembled the skyscrapers and other high-rise buildings raised by mankind, in terms of shape and function, if not scale. Starting at seven light years tall, with some several times taller, skyscraper could have stretched between solar systems in normal space. Each floor, trillions of kilometres wide, would have comfortably fit most of the Sol System, well into the Oort Cloud.

Starscrapers were not a new idea. By human standards, they were literally prehistoric. Arcologies had been a defining feature of reptilian archtecture since they'd lived on their birth world and called themselves Zhayvi.

"Build taller, not wider" had been a popular suggestion among humans, before aberrancy had spread wide enough to make space irrelevant. The reptilians had once shared the sentiment, and, even after they had learned to bend, fold and make space thanks to a deep understanding of it.

That, the space remade through magic (a word no Zhayvin had ever used seriously), stung. Not because it did anything to them. Not because they, according to some amusingly wrong conspiracies, wanted mankind to rely on them and their technology, rather than the aberrants among them.

Ridge knew that. Eidetic memories were standard among the Zhayvin, and while any reptilian could move information to the back of their minds, in order to focus on something else, or simply stop thinking about it, they did not forget.

That was why it was baffled. It wasn't even human, to have the excuse of brain damage. Ever since David Silva, the aberrant they now called the Keeper of Endings, had turned one of them into paste on Mars, during the Cold Madness, they had worked to increase their regeneration.

Years ago, reptilians could have healed from being diced into pieces: a genegineered upgrade to their regrowth of limbs and body parts. Further upgrades had followed, so that now, as long as any of the matter making up their bodies survived in any way, Zhayvin would heal on their own, no technological resistance needed. The continuation of consciousness was assured, of course...

...so why the gaping void did ridge feel like it had hit its head and scrambled its brain? That wasn't supposed to matter.

Scowling - a facial expression hard to detect by outsiders when it was worn by a Zhayvin; their muzzles meant they mostly scowled with their eyes -, Ridge tried to reach out to the rest of the Collective through the yoctomachines embedded in each and every particle of its body.

That it couldn't sense the Shaper or its fellows was even more absurd than the apparent memory loss. Why couldn't it remember?

They, it, did not want mankind to rely on them...didn't mind if they leaned on the aberrants...but why was that?

And what was wrong with its machines.

Tch. No matter. Ridge, like all its kind, was a scientist. It would find out, as soon as it got up from the rough ground under its scales. Another gap in its memories...

Ridge remembered Mocker, and the fact that pain in the neck was as clear as crystal in its mind, but how it had ended up in what felt like a desert wasn't, vaguely irritated it.

Maybe that was just the sand. It was coarse, rough, and got everywhere.

Mocker lived right under Ridge, in their starscraper, owner of an apartment as large as the domain of most civilisations that reached the second level on the Kardashev Scale.

Last night, as the humans measured time...damn, but it felt slow. Last night, Mocker had jumped out of one of its windows, scrambled up the side of the starscraper, and started making a racket.

In-between bouts of cackling, it had hammered on the roof with its feet and fists, like it was performing the world's most insufferable tribal dance.

Ridge had stared up at one of its living rooms' ceilings, unamused, after some time. It would have heard Mocker no matter where in the Collective it would have started monkeying around, but the fact it was doing it right on top of its head meant Ridge essentially heard twice.

The smug little by-blow had worn its Warscale, too, else how could it have shaken a building nearly ten billion times heavier than the Milky Way? And while the Collective could draw energy from practically everywhere - celestial bodies, by matter converted into energy, from the Archetype that represented said concept in the Outer Void - the fact Mocker had increased its Warscale's power merely to be louder...limitless power generation did not mean there was no such thing as waste!

As Ridge had told Mocker, among other things.

"If you don't stop banging on the roof, I'll throw you off the building!" Ridge had snapped at one point. "And you know what'll happen then?"

"I'll faaaaalll?" Mocker had drawled, to the laughter of octillions of Zhayvin, the imbeciles.

"This horseplay is pointless! You know-'

'Ridge, Ridge,' Mocker had interrupted, voice almost soothing. "I know you're a leathery old gruff and all the werelizards want me, but calm down and listen: you know why I am celebrating, so it's your outrage that is pointless. You should be joining me!'

"Absolutely not!' Ridge had protested.

But the Shaper had joined in, eventually, acting as the voice of reason. The Collective had rarely been safer, and never more powerful. The macrocosm, as a whole, had been set on a brighter path, with the threat of omnicide at the whims of a dreaming First Principle no longer possible.

It was, the Shaper had thought, a good enough reason to be festive.

'But it can do it in its home!' Ridge had replied, gesturing in Mocker's direction. 'Quietly!'

'But then, you wouldn't be apoplectic,' Mocker had sniggered.

Ugh. As Ridge dug its claws into the orange sand and tried to stand up, it imagined the ground was Mocker's throat.

As it looked around, however, and tried to look down at itself, Ridge realised it had much worse things to worry about than annoying neighbours.

For one, the desert it was in looked exactly like one it had often visited on Zhay, many billions of years ago. When it had walked on all fours, as it did now, in fact.

Its body was wrong; it was the one with which it had been hatched, before the genemills, the looms and the splicing. It resembled nothing more than a Terran Komodo Dragon, except bigger than most horses and covered in emerald scales the size of a human eye. Its machines, its cybernetic and genetic enhancements, they were all gone.

Getting to its feet and making a few steps made Ridge realise all of its old traits were back. He began walking forward, then sat down on his haunches, running its paws over its body.

Whoever had done this would pay. Had the Shaper, somehow hiding their thoughts from him, modified him? Uploaded his mind into another body and placed him in this simulacra? But why? And doing so without it knowing, much less consenting...

No. That was not the Shaper he had known. Perhaps he had agreed to some experiment, with memory erasure a part of the procedure? But that sounded dubious too, and...

Ridge froze. Craning his neck up, a rather awkward motion given the unfamiliarity with his new, old physique, he saw another memory. This old nightmare, like everything else, seemed very much real, but Ridge was not about to dismiss it as an illusion and get torn apart. He didn't trust his senses.

Digging rapidly into the sand, Ridge covered himself and, holding his breath, began slowly, slowly digging his way down.

He could still feel its gaze on his back, somehow, for all he was hidden and it eyeless.

It would have seemed out of place even to someone with no knowledge of Zhay's biosphere. The ghoulish thing might have resembled a cloud, but it was the only one in the crimson sky, like a maggot wriggling in a pool of blood. Here, the glare of Zhay's three suns only allowed clouds to form rarely, and briefly.

Among the Zhayvi and their descendants, such creature had been called the End From Above, though few had ever referred to it by that name, rather than that of the Flying Death.

It was no animal or plant, no fungus. Its composition, which it could alter at will, was that of an ordinary cloud, except it was sentient. Sapient, even, some Zhayvi had argued, even while debating whether it was an aberrant or not. The detractors of that theory had mostly insisted the Deaths hadn't been native to Zhay.

The world where the reptilians had defined science. This planet, mundane yet filled with life, the standard by which the rest of the cosmos was judged, and classified in terms of natural or aberrant.

Their opponents had simply said they didn't want to admit that, maybe, there was no such thing as aberrancy.

Flying Deaths could take whatever shape they wanted, fill the sky from horizon to horizon or bombard its prey with lightning, hail and snow. But, while such a living weather hazard would have been dangerous enough, especially in flocks, it had been the Flying Death's method of reproduction that had appalled the Zhayvi, making them hunt the creatures to extinction.

Perhaps, had they not been pushed to dabble with weather machines, and thus with the atmosphere itself, the Zhayvi would have never looked at the stars, wondering if there was anyone out there.

What might have been didn't matter. Ridge might, at any time, come face to face with one of the things he'd despised about his homeworld, and he wasn't eager to relive the experience. Not with no Shaper around to put him back together.

A Flying Death took a day to reproduce. First, sent a sliver of its body away, which dispersed across the air, undetectable, then entered a living being's airways.

Lung diseases seemingly followed, as said organs filled with water and wheezed, in excruciating pain. The mindless sliver eventually developed a consciousness, draining the heat of the host's body for power, causing colds.

When the victim was half to death, bodily fluids followed, until the larval Flying Death burst out of the husk, ready to hunt and spawn new creatures.

Entire species had thus been wiped out by the parasitic predators. Nests and tribes of Zhayvin, in their thousands and millions, had been slaughtered, choking, freezing and dying to death, over the course of an hour - for a Flying Death could divide itself many times. As long as even a molecule of its body remained, it could heal, drawing on the environment.

The Flying Death could sense him, Ridge knew. His bioelectricity. He could only hope it would decide he was too much of a hassle to reach, and look for easier prey.

He was not, so it did not. And so, Ridge died, eaten from the inside out, torn apart by a monster's spawn.

Or, at least, that was what he'd expected would happen. No Zhayvi had survived a Flying Death's attack in such conditions.

But he did, in a way, thoughts not stopping, even after his brain did.

He, Ridge deduced, must have still been alive, or at least aware, in some form, despite the fact he could see his desiccated body kilometres below.

He was at cloud level, he calculated quickly, then dryly noted that the Flying Death approaching without looking like it was flying low was evidence enough of that.

Death had a way of clearing the mind as it approached. He supposed it was not so strange for said clarity to persist, even in this strange state.

His field of view was the same. His sense of proprioception, though stunted, let him know he retained the shape of his birth body, even if he could not see himself, and could only faintly feel his own movements.

Was this undeath? Ridge knew reptilians possessed the aberrant energy known to most overworlders as a soul. Even if the Shaper preferred to remove it and reanimate bodies through yoctomachines where possible. Zhayvin dropping dead upon losing their souls was not only a risk, it was a stupid death, in the way only aberrancy could make something look absurd.

No damage, consciousness intact, and yet...poof. A life cut short, just like that. Ridiculous.

Though he could move faster than he had been able to while alive, Ridge failed to escape the Flying Death, which surrounded him and began tossing him around.

Its insides, if they could be called that, tore at his incorporeal form like flensing knives, even though the creature looked like a cloud. Ridge thought he was bleeding, but that made no sense. Probably post-mortem trauma...pah. As if that made sense.

After the manhandling came lightning that burned and blinded, and thunder that deafened, and hailstones, and snowflakes that carved into Ridge like cold blades.

This went on for what felt like forever, but could not have been. Flying Deaths could not manipulate time any more than he could. Just the pain talking. Just the pain.

Ridge allowed himself to sneer through shredded, bleeding lips. Pain, he could handle. It was an old enemy, one which he'd become intimately acquainted with in his days of generalship, before collectivisation had made ranks redundant.

If this stupid monster could only smack him around, it was wasting its time. He didn't think he could die again, and this crude attempt at torture was not going to make him despair.

As if sensing his disdain, the Flying Death grew more aggressive. It filled Ridge with slivers of its body, then spiked him into the ground, so its soawn could tear his broken spirit apart, only for it to reform, flying out to fill the crater...he was in...

Ridge looked sharply around himself. Souls, if that was what he was, were unable to interact with the material world like this. He should've been sent flying through Zhay, not...hm.

Was he going mad? He didn't think he was, but then, did anyone? Was the torment taking its toll, or was the creature trying to break him so he wouldn't notice such incongruences?

But it was too late. He should have been d-

Ridge snapped his jaws, trying to hurt the Flying Death as it snatched him up and accomplishing nothing. So, they were back to square one. Might as well see how long this hallucination, or whatever it was, went.

It felt like days - what would have been months on Terra - before Ridge thought he started hearing voices. Then, thanks to the voice's insistence, he began to humour the idea that, maybe, the Flying Death was speaking to him.

That was even harder to swallow than the crater he shouldn't have made. If this was some artificial hell, meant to torture his Zhayvin mind through absurdity...well. He'd have to admit it was creative, at least. Any logical being would have been gnashing their teeth at this ridiculous world.

Ridge decided that he was either seeing this, or being made to. The only third option that came to mind involved time travel and Flying Deaths that could touch souls, which, while by no means impossible...seemed very, very improbable.

There were enough insane beings, and not just aberrants, who'd have devised such an illogical realm to hurt him, but he struggled to think of any who could also pierce or bypass the Collective's defences.

Better hear the creature out. Not that he particularly valued its opinion, but he hardly had anything better to do. Had Flying Deaths always been able to communicate, but chosen not to? It was...intriguing.

The scientist in him would have probably appreciated the whole thing better if he hadn't been involved. Still, he would do his best to remain clinical and rational. Either this was all in his head, or he would being something new to the Collective. He'd either find his way back, or they'd find him. He had to believe that.

But belief is conviction without evidence, said a treacherous, sibilant voice. Not the monster's; while it could speak into his mind, it didn't sound like this. It sounded, and felt, like nails on his flayed back.

The shallowest of hypotheses, the voice continued. You might as well start praying.

Yes, definitely his own voice. Few but the Zhayvin radiated such contempt for so-called deities and the cultish behaviour they encouraged.

Pessimism is not going to help me. Low morale is detrimental to progress, Ridge argued back, knowing he was just trying to convince himself.

He had to remain optimistic, despite the odds. It was easy to be hopeful when all was going well.

The Flying Death...

"Do you understand now?" it asked, voice surprisingly civil, despite its menacing tone. They could have been talking about the...tsk. Weather. "Do you...no." Ridge had the impression of the thing rearing up, to better stare down at him. "You do not even know why I am doing this, are you?"

Ridge didn't answer. He could already tell the Flying Death was one of those people in love with their own voice. If it didn't end up telling him the secrets of the universe, he'd eat his damned tail.

"I am a monument to all your sins, Zhayvin," It continued in what Ridge guessed had been meant as an ominous tone. The thing, however, sounded too overtly evil for him to take it seriously. He was already dead, after all. Maybe, if it could control his mind... 'I am Justice.'

At that, Ridge looked up, wondering if it could see his flat expression. 'Justice?' he repeated, deadpan. 'What justice was there in anything you've done so far?'

'Justice,' it spat in response, 'for the crimes of the Zhayvin. For the atrocities of your shameless, heartless, verminous kind.'

Now he was sure he had gone mad. A Flying Death torturing him in the name of morality? No, this was the plot of a comedy. Beyond unexplainable.

'My kind,' Ridge said affably. 'All of us? I was not aware species as a whole can be condemned for the actions of certain members.' Mimicking curiosity, he cocked his head. 'Can they?'

'All of you are bound!' The Flying Death thundered, lightning lighting up its body so dramatically Ridge wondered if it had been intentional. 'Linked, mind with mind. All of you know what the forerunners of your ilk, yourself included, have done, yet you don't bring them to justice.'

Ah. That was more articulate. Still, between the accusations and the accuser, Ridge could not help but feel like he was talking to a composite caricature of the Collective's detractors. 'That is not how we do things. Whether we have redeemed ourselves or not, if we can ever atone for our warmongering, is a matter of perspective. But what you suggest will not happen.'

Turning his head down and away, Ridge spat, seeing the sand darkening. Immaterial...or was he? 'You might as well take the humans' gods to task for their madness.'

'Whataboutism,' the Flying Death dismissed his words. 'Their time will come, too. How quick you are to change the subject, however, after admitting you are sinful.'

Ridge shook his head. 'That is not what I am doing. You wish to speak of the Zhayvin's past? Fine. Nothing we did was truly justified, I admit freely. We made excuses at the time, but that does not make it right. And, for more than four billion years, we have been nothing but altruistic.' As much as anyone in their position could be. 'Whether that makes up for everything else, I do not know.'

The Flying Death laughed. 'I'll save you you some,' it growled, sounding amused but irritated, 'and tell you it does not, Zhayvin. It does not.' The false cloud split open, allowing scarlet sunlight to fill it. 'Did you think it would?'

Ridge might have shrugged - he did not truly understand this new form of his. 'Then that is that,' he replied, defiantly staring up, wishing the creature had eyes he could meet, or at least a face. 'Trying to alter the past would only change the present for the worse. All our simulations agree.'

A more benevolent Zhayvin Technarchy might have done more good across the wider universe, but it could have never approached Earth without being rebuffed by its gods. And Earth...well.

That little blue world was a fulcrum. As the Shaper had used to say: "Give me a world, and I'll move the cosmos."

The reptilians had only been allowed to settle because they'd posed no threat on arrival. Alter that, and...

'So you say,' the Flying Death's voice was acidic. 'If your puppeteer and its machines agree, they cannot be wrong, can they? After all, they are the peak if all that is natural. The epitome of science.'

Ridge sighed. 'Do you have a point?'

The pressure around him changed as the thing tightened its grip. 'All of you must suffer,' it declared with the conviction of the insane, the fanatical. 'Nothing you will ever do can mend the tears left in your wake.'

It sounded almost placid, Ridge reflected as he was pushed out of the main mass, held by the tip of a tendril. Maybe it had reached that point beyond anger, where wrath turned cold.

The cloud split again, but less dramatically than before. Just enough to create something like a jagged tear at the top, like a grin.

'You lived through your kind's era of bloodshed,' it said, voice thick with what sounded like satisfaction. 'You remember the pain. Not like those flesh dolls put together in labs. Truly remember.' It pulled him closer, voice becoming almost conspiratorial. 'But you still took place in the exercises. Memories made reality through hardlight and shaped matter. True pain, old yet new.'

As its grip tightened further, making blackness begin filling Ridge's vision, the Flying Death's voice rose and rose, yet, at the same time, it felt deeper, somehow, as if he felt it in his bones rather than heard it. 'Let us see you live through that again,' it sneered, like Ridge had earlier, 'far from your place of power.'

* * *

Reliving historical events and the lives of their forebears was a matter of course for the Reptilian Collective. How else could they hope to understand their predecessors than by looking backwards in time, sharing their pains and pleasures?

The Zhayvin had always stared inward deeper than most species and civilisations. Many of their technologies had been invented to broaden, deepen and sharpen that sight, only to be gleefully turned into weapons by the Technarchy, or regretfully turned to such purposes by the Collective.

The reptilians had often been told they were unhealthily close to their thoughts, and those of their fellows. Recently, they had most often heard this from humans.

It cut both ways. In the reptilians' opinion, humans were, all too often, an isolated people, living apart from their kindred in a way that sometimes led to loneliness and melancholy.

Ridge himself had often asked how could anyone live without sharing everything with their species. What did they have to hide? Only those who did not belong in a society had anything to hide from it. Instincts, impulses? Those were not shameful. Merely reflexive.

Much like the way Ridge's jaws clenched whenever he glanced at the Flying Death, or vice versa. The reptilian knew that was useless, just like how clamping his paws over his snout, as his forelimbs itched to, would have been.

That last thought tried to lodge itself into Ridge's thoughts. Why would that have been useless? Was he not dead, and in some aberrant state of being as a result? What need did he have to breathe? Why...?

But it was borne away as the pain flooded in. It felt like an old scar being torn open by white-hot claws, and Ridge screamed despite himself. His bellows was a low sound, which would have been felt more than heard by any observer, interrupted by horking coughs.

It was like the reenactments, but worse, in some way Ridge could not place, and-

There was a hiss, followed by a crack. Not like the energy weapons used by less advanced species might have made. More like a bone being boiled, and...ah.

Ridge tried to press himself into the cold ground beneath him, as macabre as the idea of becoming one with it should have felt. As if sensing his thought, the soil became as hot as his insides, to the point he struggled to tell where he ended and the world around him began.

Bah. He might have appreciated the philosophical exercise if it hadn't reminded him of becoming one with the ground, not that said mental image had been comfortable in the first place.

Had that been detected, too? Was that another power of the Flying Death, hitherto unseen and unheard of?

In the past, he had...hadn't...

The...past...

Ridge tried to gather his wits, pressing his forepaws against his head, in the hopes the outside pressure would at least distract him from the blaze scorching his insides.

Funny. Usually, his attempts to hurt himself were more fruitful.

Despite any impression they might have given, the reptilians held a certain disdain for pure theory. Simulations alone, the Shaper often said, were not enough. Seeing something from outside, without feeling anything of the events taking place, was more likely to inspire detachment than understanding.

Not caring enough, like caring too much, was useless. Balance, balance, balance.

'Pure theory is useless,' the Shaper had said once. 'Until you do something with it, or at least unless you can do something with it...it can do nothing but fill your mind.'

The Collective's First Scientist had said the last part with something almost like tiredness. "Fill your mind..." it had said it like knowledge was a burden until applied.

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Ridge was sure there was something to be learned there, but remembering this was all he could do while writhing like a worm on a hook.

'But is learning, and thus knowing, not an admirable endeavour?' a reptilian had asked.

The Shaper's avatar had inclined its head. 'To a degree. It is better to be informed than ignorant, of course, and learning is a pleasure, but learning for its own sake is pointless.' Its eyes had been sad as it had swept them across a small crowd. 'We do not live in a macrocosm kind enough to let us pursue knowledge and nothing more, our friends. If we desire a world where we can do that, we must build it ourselves.'

And yet, for the first time in a life longer than some stars had existed for, Ridge wished to know no more. To shut out the agony coursing through every fibre and cell of his new, old body, at least until he could concentrate and find a solution to...to...

Well. It was a problem, wasn't it? This torment. Ridge remembered it, as the pain grew. The Zhayvin had ever been inclined towards remembering their failures before their accomplishments, so how could Ridge have forgotten his first defeat?

When he had gone through the simulation of his first meeting with the Shaper, Ridge had felt the bitterness of a memory he'd have rather forgotten more than anything else. He knew how it had happened, the pain had been familiar, so there had been nothing to do but grit his fangs and get it over with.

But now...this felt more like the moment itself, not a reenactment by means of artifice. And yet, it couldn't have been natural. He couldn't have really been sent to the past. No one could have taken him from the Collective, so what-

The Shaper's forepaw pressed Ridge's cracked head into the bloodied sand, his namesake splintered as it added to the desert heat by oozing vitae.

The defeated warlord tried to glare up at the victor with his remaining eye, but it was swollen shut, and covered in gore besides. Still, defiance was better than nothing. Resignment would serve no purpose beyond embittering him.

'Do not bother, my friend,' the female Technarch said. 'I've always known you look up to me.'

Ridge tried to spit out something biting, but only managed some splintered fangs, covered in bloody sand. The Shaper tightened her grip on his scruff, before lifting him and slamming his face into his attempted insult.

'A strange away to celebrate, to be sure,' the Shaper continued, as if nothing had happened. 'But who am I to quash uniqueness?' she asked sarcastically. 'Everyone has their own way to show joy, and you should be joyous, Ridge. With your defeat, the Selfish Tendency will die out.'

The Individualists, Ridge knew, were more vulnerable to such strategies than they would have liked to admit. The Zhayvin warlords who fought and conquered for themselves had nothing that resembled an alliance, of course, much less a leader, but Ridge had always been viewed with a sort of grudging, jealous respect by his peers.

Part of it had been his sheer success. Ridge sought out worlds he could zhayform into shapes resembling that of his birth planet, and asteroid belts or other great clumps of raw matter to reshape when he could not find those. And, as much as the other Technarchs liked to sneer at him for avoiding populated planets, they knew Ridge was neither cowardly nor stupid. He simply preferred getting results with the least effort possible.

Ridge's domination of the moutainous area that had contributed to his name as much as the ridges on his body was proof that he did not shy from bloodshed. The mountains were filled with predatory and parasitic beasts, not to mention small nests of grasping, desperate Zhayvin. Anyone who could hold them against all comers while using the fauna as training knew what they were doing.

Ridge, he knew, was something of a first among equals when it came to the Individualists. Living proof of the fact the greatest Zhayvin did not have to band together to survive.

The rise of the Shaper and her Collectivists, who espoused the opposite, had only fuelled that quiet admiration, for Ridge had repelled every attempt to dislodge him from his seat of power.

Until now. Using technology cobbled together from the plundered treasures of a dozen strongholds' vaults, the Shaper had ground his mountains to dust, and then the real fight had started. It had ended almost as quickly as it had begun.

Easing on the pleasure, the Shaper almost withdrew her paw from Ridge's cracked skull. 'So brooding. You do remember why we fight, don't you?' The Shaper looked down with a condescending smile, which grew wider and sharper when she received no answer. 'This cannot go on, old lizard. You should be thanking me.'

As she launched into another of those speeches Ridge had had the displeasure to hear in recordings and propaganda vids, he tried to put his thoughts in order, so he could think of the future.

'...been spreading through space for billions of greater cycles, and for what? Oh, we take what we want, to be sure, but why do we want so little? Why should we?' The Shaper tapped her head, as well as Ridge's, at the same time. 'Think, Ridge! There is strength in numbers, and only with strength can one build anything of worth in this cosmos. Without strength, you cannot do anything but be crushed. Life on Zhay has proven that amply enough.'

Sneering at something Ridge could not see, the Shaper withdrew her paw. 'Everyone is carving out petty fiefdoms while headquartered on our homeworld. We fight foul little civil wars on Zhay instead of presenting an unified front to the universe, and we are the ones who suffer, mark my words.'

The one they already called First Technarch continued speaking in an amused, softer voice. 'I do not speak only because I dislike silence, you know. Already, I can see my truths are spreading among the masses, even if they misunderstand them half the time. Why, I was at a war council the other cycle, and one of my generals spouted some of the funniest nonsense I've heard in a while. Want to know what she gibbered?'

'What?' Ridge wheezed, trying to rise to all fours. He figured he'd be told anyway, before he was killed or enslaved, so he might as well play along. Maybe if the worm spawn was amused, she'd kill him quickly or lobotomise him.

'She said the Arkhitects - void knows there have never been greater genetic engineers, but they were no authority even before they cut off ties with the macrocosm - created entire species to stand against the Sun That Shackles. They forged the Sunlit Pact. How can we do anything less than unite all beings under the stars against the Golden Tyrant?'

As the pathos left her voice, the Shaper burst into a hissing laugh. Shaking his head, Ridge tried not to lash out at her. It would have been pointless at best, deadly at worst.

When the aberrant that called itself Solarex had entered the universe, shortly after its formation, the Arkhitects - beings older than some galaxies, named for their desire to build things that could protect life - had armed themselves against him. They had made beings that could harness the power of stars, of anything that had and would ever causebpain, pleasure and death, who had themselves wrought devices to make every dream of nightmare reality.

But when Solarex and his menagerie of a court had found themselves faced with the Arkhitects, the Sunlit, the Agonised, the Grateful, the Deathly...they had not wanted a fight. They had opted to stay in deep, empty space rather than interrupt their pleasures facing armies of peers. The Arkhitects, guilty and loathing themselves for the torment that had gone into the Deathly's creation, had got the early species to sign a Pact, swear they would rally together when the false god came to crush their cultures and take everything they had and were.

Then, the great shapers of life had become hermits, doubtlessly watching and waiting for Solarex's return somewhere. And while the Sunlit Pact's signatories had tried to at least pay lip service to the agreement, they had known Solarex could be appeased rather than fought.

Let him pick at a few lesser species, who were conveniently unaware of the Sunlit Pact, and he would busy himself with his living toys. No one would have to shed blood, or an equivalent.

The Zhayvin had signed too, of course knowing there was nothing preventing them from attacking fellow signatories. The Arkhitects had known conflict was natural in life, Solarex's perverse tendencies, which ended much and gave lottle in return, aside. And King Sun had not lifted a finger against anyone worth a damn in eons.

As such, Ridge could understand why the opinion of the Shaper's general had come across as absurd.

'Does...' Ridge rasped as he finished healing. 'Does she think you want to unite us so we can stand against Solarex?'

'I know, right? It is practical enough. The more united we are, the better we can fend off that preening deviant, even a hatchling could tell you. But she thinks this is the ideal we fight for. Defenders of the universe against Solarex?' The Shaper scoffed.

They talked until dusk. The Shaper had attacked at dawn and won at noon, and Ridge had been brought to her camo halfway through the discussion.

Her plans were simple, as were her aims. In her own words, the Shaper disliked strategies with too many moving parts. Something that could go wrong was bad enough without multiple ways to do so.

The Zhayvin had set out in the name of conquest and resources, marked by life on a world where no one could achieve anything without power. Ideals were fine and all, but unless they could be backed up and enforced by might, they were worth little. That had been what the reptilians had told their new subjects as they had brought them to their knees.

That had been the one thing they'd shared. The reptilians had not worked together, for why should they share anything? It was this selfishness, in the Shaper's eyes, that she had to abolish.

And, soon, she would. Many individualist Technarchs had surrendered to her following Ridge's defeat (what travelled faster than bad news?), either out of despair or caution. Others had shamelessly lied that they'd been on her side the whole time, but had waited until they could build forces worthy of fighting in her name.

A few Technarchs, gone mad with paranoia or despair, had thrown themselves at the growing coalition of the Shaper, and had died when they hadn't been forced into service.

All the while, their offworld forces had watched, waiting to see who was a worthier leader. The Technarchs had made a point of ruling from home, so the colony governors and their enforcers had been left to deal with smaller tasks.

'See?' the Shaper asked her inner circle - and Ridge, he supposed - as she gestured at the reports on the wall screen. 'No loyalty. But why would there be any when the little screen-clickers are left to run wild, as long as the ones holding their leashes get to gorge on their tithes? I am telling you, no real intergalactic civilisations' leaders should have to fight only with their homeworld's resources when assaulted. They could have only taken revenge if I hadn't crushed them, but at least the lackeys will fall in line quickly.'

The Shaper huffed, turning the screen off and looking away to give a few former enemies an ironic look. 'Do we have to go through why the half-independent colony organisation doesn't work, again? No one who tries that gets anywhere. Look what Grandia turned into because the Builders got greedy, or how well Xenobia is doing for not having colonies.' There was much grimacing at the mention of the Alien Realm. Well was certainly...a word. 'And how about the Starwheel Coalition? Only one galaxy under their heel, so far but they've never allowed even their newest worlds such leeway. Not one planet has slipped from their tentacles. We could learn something from them...by which I mean, I will teach you.'

And teach she did. Without enemies to sabotage her projects, and scientists to assist her, the Shaper made scarcity a thing of the past, with age, illness and the need for sustenance soon followed. Of course, by that point, Zhay had been reduced to a scarred shell. The destruction of the homeworld had not been necessary: the planet could have been zhayformed back to a pristine state, but the Shaper had wanted to make a point.

The Zhayvin were not sentimental. The Technarchy could remake worlds, but their home had been used and abused, drained of resources with more greed than care. The Shaper had stressed that this had been no mercy kill, no revenge against those who had despoiled Zhay. It had been a warning against incompetence and sloppiness. Draining planets of everything valuable was not the sort of behaviour she'd allow under her rule.

Ridge let out a rattling sigh as campaign aftsr campaign passed once again, seeming to last an instant, yet stretching into eternity. The Shaper had placed him in charge of the Technarchy's expansion fleets, following behind the explorators and building up or conquering worlds marked for being brought into the Technarchy's fold.

He did his work in silence, and found it good. Conquered every world between the orbit of lost Zhay and the worlds that clustered around Zhal and its beetle-like inhabitants, when the wars turned bad.

And all that time, he became closet to the Shaper, even as the void separated them more and more with every campaign. Or so he'd thought.

The Shaper maintained a harem, of course, as Technarchs were wont to do, no matter how they tried to frame the practice. She had males to fill her with their seed, so they could breed strong children, though the Shaper rarely opted for mating rather than artificial insemination or gene mixing.

The First Technarch's interest lay in her fellow females, though, a kind of coupling she had outlawed in the name of necessity. Everyone knew better than to care her companions lovers rather than handmaidens, and clandestine pairings were common enough. As long as they kept it subtle (lest the policy's enforcement highlight its creatir's hypocrisy) donated genetic material and contributed to the war effort, the Shaper was willing to turn a blind eye.

But Ridge had hoped, against all hope, that he'd be the one to break the mould. Hope to the point of arrogance? Maybe. But he felt what he did.

So, after the last defeat of the Zhayvin Technarchy - they'd all called it a victory, a great, terrible victory, but the truth was plain - he went to her. The Shaper had returned to her void palace and beaten her harem to death with her bare hands, putting the then-new genecraft to the test. Ridge had believed telling her he had grown to love her over the eons, despite himself, and that he'd always be there for her, whether she returned his feelings or not, would help.

Perhaps, in a way, it did. The Shaper turned melancholy, yes, but her wits returned.

'Oh, general,' she whispered. 'You are wasting time you should be spending with a female who can appreciate you. Not...'

'I surround myself with enough pale reflections of you,' he replied, 'to feel like a fool. I thought...I still believe you deserve to know.'

'Yes, yes,' the Shaper murmured, absentmindedly stroking her muzzle. Their civilisation was falling apart around them, and... 'They know where we are,' she said suddenly, referring to the Vyzhaldi, and those strange bipeds that bent spacetime and fought in tribal confederations. 'They will come back, for we would do the same. Do not believe we can recover faster than they can, general. They'll grow stronger, while we've sealed our worst monsters.'

Do you remember them, Zhayvin? The horrors you wrought, which could spawn more of theselves until the macrocosm entire teemed with them?

It was the Flying Death's voice, scraping the inside of Ridge's brainpan. He temembered, yes...and wished he hadn't. He'd always commanded the replicating forces from a distance, and now, the despair their enemies had felt flooded his thoughts.

He remembered the Spined, like sentient spinal columns crawling on bladelike spikes. The substances they spread transcended species, drawing possible hosts, and that had nearly got them hunted to extinction.

The Spined had never been evil, though. Without a host, they could not feel or think about anything but emptiness and a need to belong. They had never been parasitic, either: the Spined, once latched onto a being's back or equivalent, enhanced their abilities by an order of magnitude, while removing weaknesses and things like pain or the need for sustenance. And sharing the host's mind, of course. But they did not take ir weaken anything, and could be persuaded to remove themselves.

Then the Zhayvin had found them, and overclocked their attraction ability, turning it into a compulsion: perceived in any way, through natural senses, remotely, in real time, through recordings, the Spined would bring beings without mental protections to them. Once hosted, a touch upon their shared body, as simple as a poke on the arm, would create an identical replica of the Spined, an extension of their mind as much as a reflection of their power.

The biological ancestor of Warscale. Hosted Spined could not attract other beings, but their compulsion could freeze most in their tracks. Ridge shuddered as he felt himself crushed and torn apart by creatures he - they - wanted nothing more than to become one with.

After the Vyzhaldi War, the Spined had been removed and placed on their homeworld, lonely and bereft. It had been part of a disarmament program encouraged by the Shaper. Not everyone had obeyed, especially when they'd learned she wanted to stop waging war and find a new world, forge a new future.

She had led them to ruin, and now she wanted them to turn their swords into ploughshares? Free their slave species? Even the reassurances that it was better to let such beings go their own way than risk their enmity hadn't deterred some who still called themselves Technarchs.

The Spined had been the first, but far from the last.

The Qhamandi had been slated for assimilation since first contact. The towering, scaled creatures resembled quadrupedal mountains that could curl into balls, and everything that came into contact with them, or a part of their body, was converted into energy, with no damage to their surroundings.

The Zhayvin had built a species just to properly harness the enslaved Qhamandi. The Green Growth was amorphous, a collection of hyperdense regenerators, with the mass of hypergiant stars compressed into bodies the size of a fly's eyes. Upon contact with a Qathmandi, tremendous power could be obtained, especially since the Growth grew more numerous with every self-replicating generation.

Ridge shuddered, not even knowing where he was anymore, as he felt himself filled with Green Growth, moulded by gravitic fields so they would only burst through his body due to numbers. The Zhayvin had done this to defiant prisoners, and their half-dead bodies had then been fed to the Qathmandi.

Ridge felt he should have let out a bloodcurling shriek as he felt the matter making him up change at the most fundamental level, but his jaws felt locked. And he's always so enjoyed doing this to others...he'd hated it when they didn't scream, he rembered. Frigid void, how glad he was he'd changed...for the...bette-

Coldness suddenly speared Ridge, and he managed a choked gasp at the change of temperature. What...what now? More...monsters?

More. The Zhayvin had made and remade countless abominations to use as war beasts.

A black sun rose in an empty sky - the Black Sun. Shining with impossible light, orbited by its Cold Worlds and their Mad Moons. Invulnerable, the idea of the immovable object made reality by the cold sciences of the Zhayvin. They could appear almost anywhere and anywhen they wished, save for a handful of warded strongholds. Anti-teleportation defences were useless, for the Bleak System did not cheat distance. It simply moved, with no care for it or time.

Anyone and anything that perceived a component of the Bleak System, or heard or read a description of it, saw a painting or depiction, had their line of sight filled with identical clones of themselves, constructs of the living celestial bodies, their hands and eyes in the world. A human would have found themselves surrounded by a horizon-spanning army by glancing at a Mad Moon, but against aliens or machines with sharper senses, forces that could have toppled empires could be born from a look. The Zhayvin had used this to great effect to replenish themselves, and, at the end of their wars, had sealed the willing Bleak System in an unbreakable sphere. Nothing could leave or enter, look in or out, and the Zhayvin counted themselves lucky that the System had turned contemplative.

As he briefly found himself surrounded by a sea of scowling faces - his own - Ridge understood why the Black Sun rising in a cloudless sky had heralded doom on so many worlds.

And then...then, the Grand Harvest. How fitting, to come at the end (he dared to hope) of this nightmare, when he was too tired to hate and rage and contemplate fear anymore. It had always made for a great weapon of terror.

To Ridge, it appeared as an amalgam of spinning blades and creatures like winged lampreys, the pests that had plagued the prehistoric Zhayvin's attempts to raise something from the sands of their world. What passed for its face was dominated by a gaping maw, filled with rows of fangs, that overshadowed its eyes, even if they were larger than any star and brighter than any hypernova.

At its side, as always, was the thing that called itself Argent Walker, the Herald of Hunger. Argent could develop whatever powers and prowess he needed to pave the way for the Harvest, soften the targets it chose.

The Zhayvin hadn't known what the Grand Harvest was when they'd found it, and recently learning the truth had brought them no joy. They'd had their theories, yes, everything from a runaway war machine to a Gardener gone mad, eating its errant children, but the Harvest had warned them not to pry. Even so, they'd managed to forge an alliance. A flimsy one, relying on the reptilians being able to point out interesting potential meals for the Harvest, but at least it had fought alongside them.

So had its Harvested. The reptilians had craved weapons that could spell their enemies defeat just by being observed, and, with their help, the Harvest had broadened the scope of its powers. Recreating what it consumed had been expanded into an ability that could hardly be stalemated by most. Like the Bleak System, those who perceived the Grand Harvested started being assaulted by replicas of themselves. First one, then two, four, never stopping, always increasing, doubling every unit of time the observers could perceive. In ten seconds, a human would have been surrounded by five hundred and twelve clones, but destroying those would have done nothing.

The process was automatic. As long as the observer alive, the number of clones would double every moment, until they either killed themselves or died to their mirrors under the Harvest's control. It was automatic, and like the power of every multiplying monster the Zhayvin had employed, worked on everything from nanomachines to space fleets.

The Grand Harvest had split off from the reptilians without much fuss. It had only ever been a mercenary, despite their conviction they could make it follow them. At least it had taken their clones with it, and recalled all subsequent ones to it since then, moving them through creation through will alone.

Ridge twitched and shuddered as he felt himself cut open by the Harvest's blades, even as its myriad mouths devoured him from the inside. He understood now. The Flying Death wanted him to break, to give in, so it could do whatever it truly wanted to. It expected him to be crushed under the weight of past atrocities, and he was sure he would be made to relive them if he persisted in...in...

Rudge didn't know what he was resisting for, except the eternal reasons. He was Zhayvin. It was his purpose to bear the torch of enlightenment into the darkness of ignorance, dispersing shadows such as this creature's sadism.

If that was why it was torturing him. He somehow doubted this had anything to do with justice, if only because Flying Deaths did not work that way. Almost certainly, it was some aberrant, bearing the guise of a monster of yore, for the sake of cruelty. He would not surrender to that. He could not. That was not who he was.

He had to forge on, for...

'You don't even remember, do you?' the Flying Death sneered, snatching him up in a cold tendril. The charred, mangled ruin that had become of Ridge's body wanted to fall apart in its cold grasps, but the Flying Death kept that at bay, by some means. 'You don't know what you fight for, and how could you? Faithless!'

Even as the monster tore at him, roaring invective, Ridge tried to look inward. He had only a hypothesis, but what scientist would he be if he didn't have the force if will to test it? And even if he failed...well. Not like it would make this any worse.

He, Ridge believed, had focused too much on the present, this recreation of a past steeped in blood. He had forgotten to remember what mattered.

And so, as his body crumbled into ruin, Ridge of the Reptilian Collective closed his eyes, and began something like a prayer.

This was, he believed, something of a milestone in Zhayvin history. Religion had never agreed with them, but one did not need to worship in order to have faith.

'Shaper,' he rasped through bubbling, melting lips. As if trying to compensate for the Flying Death's freezing grip, his body had overheated to an impossible degree, and was now smoking. 'If you can hear this...I have always loved you. Not just the form of flesh I met. The shining intellect whose foundation and core that became. The civilisation we've built together, for the sake of knowledge, and the ones we've nurtured on Earth.'

He gulped, blood steaming in his gaping throat. 'I only wish I had been able to help more, before this death. I do not know how I came to be like this, but I hope...' No. 'I know you will remember me as I was.'

With a contemptuous sound, the Flying Death tightened its tendril, and Ridge died once again.

And, in the heart of the Reptilian Collective, Ridge opened its eyes, as the memories of a being who had never been it, but had always believed it was, joined its own.

The reptilian stood up, Warscale colourless as it rose in the middle of a bare room. Ridge's starscraper floor was more spartan than those of most, and he had always rolled its eyes at those who claimed it was a hidebound old miser.

As it strode forward, it felt the Shaper's presence intensify at its side. It was one with the Zhayvin as they were one with it, which was how Ridge could feel everyone else in the Collective gearing up as it had. But ever since they'd delved into the Realm Of Ideas that represented the deepest level of the macrocosm, the Shaper, and its Collective, had gained new powers. Mastery of technology in a sincerely conceptual manner, for one.

The Shaper's avatar appeared, a metre-tall, light green reptilian crouching atop the shoulders of the Unscarred Prime. When it spoke, every reptilian heard it in the core of its being, but they knew it wasn't addressing them. Just the way its eyes were trained on the outside, beyond the Collective's borders, was indication enough.

Of course, given the limits of physicality, one would normally have been unable to tell the Shaper was looking beyond its realm, rather than, for example, a point on one of Ridge's walls.

And beyond those walls - not of the building; of the realm it embodied in a purer manner than some of its inhabitants might have believed, beyond the walls of the Collective, outside the sphere of craft and knowledge the Zhayvin had laboured to create and defend, the creature that had taunted the false Ridge lurked.

It was circling, as its ilk were wont to do. Like an animal beyond the circle of light cast by a bonfire, or an invader outside a city's walls. It had shed the shape of the Zhayvi's skyborne bane, though it had never hid its spite.

'And in that,' the Shaper murmured as the Collective mulled over its previous thought, 'is proof of its honesty. For what is there to it except spite?'

'You have a hypothesis,' Ridge said through the reptilians' network.

'Oh, I think it has been all but proven,' the First Scientist replied. 'Some time ago...not too long ago - but, ah, we are still attached to the perspective causal; sentimentality is hard to let go of, when it does not harm - we would have thought it some sort of unusually active metainformational entity, the sort that seem to inexplicably cluster around Earth and its inhabitants.'

It did not have to be said that the Shaper considered this the result of intelligent design rather than coincidence. The symbioses humans especially, entered with Archetypes were not something that could simply happen, in its mind. Perhaps the same force that had caused the formation of the anthropocentric quantum separation effect had ensured these cosmic union...almost as if in apology.

'But it's not?' Mocker inquired while its body kicked its legs.

The Shaper shook its head, the Unscarred following. 'In scale and nature, it could pass for one of the most powerful ones, true enough. But we can see - yes, now we all see - the trail it left through the macrocosm as it came from outside. The residue surrounding its thought pattern is purer information than most things we have ever perceived.'

There was something like a rustling among the audience of the metaphorical forum that was the Collective's communication network.

'You believe it comes from the Prime Cause's realm of origin?' Mocker asked, its joy closer to giddiness than anything sardonic for once. The nature of the macrocosm's creator was still obscure to the reptilians, which, they supposed, was only fitting, but that did not mean their curious minds were less frustrated. Hence the various names of the being or force (but at that level, what was the difference?) being thrown around.

The Shaper shrugged, hiding a smile. 'We do not see why not. Our scanners are still being improved, but everything points to a macrocosmic paradigm shift following David Silva's plan to contact the Absolute.' Then, more subdued, 'Several aberrants swear that the supreme entity once dreamed the macrocosm, distractedly treating it as a simulation when it turned in its metaphorical sleep. Now that the Absolute is awake, it supposedly has always been, and the macrocosm has never been a dream.'

Such shifts had no regard for beings to whom the concept of time was laughable. Timeless or not, everything had changed and always been thus now, memories from the previous iteration of everything still lingering, real but not anymore.

The Shaper's reserved manner now gave way to harshness. 'This might not be the first extra-macrocosmic intrusion - the hyper-entropic aberrant they call Nightraiser claims to destroy such disruptive creatures on a regular basis - but it is the first we have encountered.' Its shoulders slumped. 'We had hoped for a better first contact.'

In the instant of silence that followed, Mocker decided to chime in, seeing everyone else was being awkward. 'That is not so, right? Our meetings with the Ischyros aberrant have always been fairly productive.'

The Shaper waved a dismissive claw. 'Ischyros has been part of the macrocosm since conception, and in any case, its purpose is closer to ours than not. It does not, for lack of a better term, feel foreign. This...does. Even leaving aside its goals.'

'Which we will not.'

'Quite, Ridge.' With a determined expression, the Shaper turned to face the not-Sky Death with eyes that had first seen the cosmos on Zhay, but which had been shaped by the gentler light of Earth's yellow sun. It saw, as the other reptilians did, a shadowy silhouette, rampaging beyond the Collective's borders, only half-glimpsed, as its other half was void.

It brought to mind images of horns and antlers, of claws and fangs and talons, of monstrous appendages, uneven and numberless. At times, it seemed like a hollow creature, like a skeleton that had pulled its flayed hide around itself. It was covered in something at once leathery and furred, feathered and scaled, chitinous and-

'It wants to break in,' Ridge said gruffly, the way a human might have done at the sight of a fly trying to ram through a window. In truth, the flly would have had a far greater chance at shattering the glass than the would-be invader had to scratch the first level of the Collective's infinitely-layered outer defences. Attacks that shook the macrocosm as a side effect, rending the substance of the Outer Void and leaving howling gaps, failed to crack the first screen, but the monster persisted, growing stronger, to no avail.

It did not stop to consider that, ironically, it would have been easier to talk the reptilians into letting it in than attempt to break through a barrier that was meant to ward off anything. The idea of a forcefield did not care one whit whether an assault was mundane or aberrant in nature. Escalating merely goaded the shield to become tougher.

The outer defences' second layer was based on the Grand Harvest's capabilities. Its false echo of the unliving weapon had not been activated, which was why the intruder hadn't been drowned in doppelgangers, but the Shaper had half a mind of going ahead.

In a way, it was thankful for this intrusion. The Collective's metainformational abilities, the absolute forces at their command, could not yet be activated outside their artificial reality, no matter the specification. Clearly, the Atlanteans still had them beat when it came to harnessing Archetypes. But, thankfully, the monster had done them the favour of knocking on their door.

'Actually, it loathes the thought of being in our home even more than the idea of us,' the Shaper corrected. 'Even briefly, to destroy it. We think you will understand shortly...'

'Let me in,' a voice snarled as the Shaper trailed off. Ridge might have not recognised it, for its growling tone was even deeper, somehow angrier, than the one it had used as one of the reptilian's ancestral enemies. 'Open your gates, that I might stride through them and topple your walls from the inside.'

'Who-' Mocker sniggered. 'Who talks like that?' Then, addressing the creature, it added, 'Are you begging? You should avoid gargling gravel before doing that in the future, it might make one think your are somewhat peeved.'

'Does your court jester speak for you, construct queen?' it asked the Shaper. 'Are you so cowardly you would cower inside your fortress rather than face me on the field of battle?'

At half of the Collective's bemused silence, the Shaper said, 'We believe its characteristics are reactive - that is, it appears as whatever an observer considers primal, in the most monstrous way.'

'That would explain the Flying Death,' Ridge agreed gruffly. 'Because my replica had been wrought in the form of a Zhayvi. But what's this patchwork savage banging on our windows supposed to be? Besides loud.'

The Shaper's muzzle was split by an affectionate smile. 'We have grown attached to Earth enough that this world's ideas of barbarism have become ours, as well. Does it not seem like the humans were carving their first spears yesterday?'

'Your affection for mankind does not seem relevant here,' Ridge said in a vice the Shaper knew the former general would have never admitted was jealous. 'I, for one, do not-'

'Ah, but you do not perceive it alone, do you, our friend? We all do, and enough of us cleave close to the Terran idea of atavism.'

'Just like voting,' Ridge said, vaguely disgusted. 'I have to watch nonsense because the majority is tasteless.'

The Shaper laughed at that, making the Unscarred place a hand on Ridge's pauldron. 'We are sure you will survive, somehow. Even this apoplectic aberrant, yes.' Tilting Ridge's armoured muzzle up with its other hand, the Unscarred made Ridge look up at the Shaper. 'It's not going to reveal anything meaningful about itself or its motives, you know. Except by mistake. We would prefer to weather the storm, and if it somehow forces its way past the Infinity Sphere...we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.' Scoffing lightly, the Shaper let go.

Ridge shook its head, a motion reminiscent of a dog clearing water from its ears, but less useful for clearing things up. The Shaper was affectionate towards most of its acquaintances. That was it. Nothing untoward.

Besides, the Shaper's feelings were as clear to Ridge as its own. There should have been no room for confusion. So, to brush it off, it asked, 'Indeed? You believe such a blustering aberrant could hide its motives indefinitely? That it could bear to do so?'

'You're judging a recording by the first frame,' the Shaper replied. 'Look at it this way: it's so angry, we're almost surprised it can communicate at all.' For a moment, so brief it could not be divided, the grin of the Shaper's avatar resembled Mocker's usual one. Ridge swore he'd find a way to delete that memory. 'If you ask it, if you let it scrabble at our walls and rage, it will tell you it is here to make us answer for our crimes, bring justice to the universe by making us suffer as we made others. But we all know it is not so.'

Ridge nodded curtly, directing its gaze at the monster outside. 'You lose,' it began, eyes hardening as it glared. 'Does that worthless wager still amuse you? You were so sure my clone would fall apart without our technology! That he would crumble without our science to strengthen him...fool,' Ridge hissed. 'Science is not a matter of gadgets and enhancements and implants. Those are baubles. The fruits of labour matter little compared to the thoughts that brought them forth.'

The Shaper's smile widened, becoming more serene. Outside, the creature had retreated away from the Infinity Sphere's first layer, and was now circling it. 'We would like to say that this will end soon, but how can it? It is, after all, a representation of the struggle that has plagued the macrocosm since its formation.'

And with that, the Shaper turned its attention to its fellows, and the Collective began communicating as only it could.

The monster, the Shaper was almost sure, was some sort of metainformational entity or equivalent, likely an embodiment of all that was primal, aberrancy included. All that could be achieved without technology, but manifested in the most animalistic, most destructive way possible.

What it forgot, of course, was that technology was the practical application of knowledge. Just because aberrants changed reality by means of their powrrs, that did not mean they did not use technology. Was the macrocosm itself not shaped by one's perception of themselves and others? That, as the Shaper explained, as close to giddy as it could sound, meant existence was, in a way, the most complex machine ever, if not the most stable.

'A few centuries ago,' the Shaper said roughly halfway through the lecture, 'some humans started thinking of their god as a watchmaker, and of all there was as a time piece. We cherish that analogy. Not the idea of godhood,' it added, 'for such supremacy is abhorrent, poisonous. There should not be a monopoly on power. It...'

The reptilians understood. What the Shaper cherished was the idea of the macrocosm as an intricate machine. It was more elegant than if it had simply apleared out of nowhere, for did that not mean a mind, developed enough, could create a new macrocosm?

The thorn in the First Scientist's side was the idea of an omnipotent mechanic, because it was plain that their - if there were others to be found - macrocosm was not under the care of a kind, loving being.

'Consider,' Mocker said, a hand splayed and extended, as if pleading with a hidebound audience. 'The Absolute might not be liable for its deeds during its "slumber", but it still ordained the macrocosm in such a way that an Archetype could cause its collapse through a chain reaction without a person fit to channel and guide it.'

David Silva's crisis of faith had been a disastrous moment, but, as the reptilians had learned, not the first such event a Keeper of DEATH had almost caused. By using the Idea of Scanners, and, they suspected, with DEATH's permission, they had glimpsed previous Keepers, and they had all failed in their own way: a bloodthirsty lunatic; a lecherous lout; a pacifist to the point of spinelessness.

And, of course, they could hardly forget about how David had only been the second Keeper to want to destroy everyone and everything. The differences between him and his predecessor were that he no longer wanted to send all creation to oblivion, and that he had recovered from the damage done to him to prepare him for his role - unlike the being whose power of destruction had nothing to do with DEATH or the Unnamed Darkness, and who now languished in the depths of DEATH Keep's Spiral Atrocious.

The flimsy cosmological mechanics, the weaknesses in the structure of the macrocosm and the fixed points in its history...it was little wonder that many had seen the Mover's Dream as a nightmare.

And now that it was awake? It still insisted on certain events unfolding the way they had, when alternatives might have spared suffering, and gave no explanation.

Perhaps history would have changed greatly if things had gone differently, but what did that matter to an all-powerful being? Why not make it so that everyone had always been as powerful, as wise and as happy as possible?

Was suffering worth that much? Was so much virtue given meaning through struggle?

The Mover hadn't answered the questions in the reptilians' thoughts. It hadn't reached out to snuff out pain and despair. Unmoved, indeed.

And that was why the Collective's plan had to succeed. There could be no certainty, no true safety, with the macrocosm at the mercy of such a powerful being. It was aloof and best, sadistic at worst, and its aims incomprehensible.

'That's all you managed to make him forget,' Ridge told his replica's murderer, devoting a shard of its consciousness to taunting. 'Well - that, and what the starscrapers stand for. He was so close to remembering, even with his new, stunted brain, so you drew his attention, and tried to break him until he forgot everything. Until the entirely of his being was a ragged, endless scream.'

Using its Warscale's tachyon field emitter, Ridge paced the length of its flat, speed tripling every second. 'Ambition, to reach ever higher, and plenty, for everyone has as much as they could want. They are us, in microcosm. No one has ever toppled our towers, not like that pompous self-declared god did after it made humans unable to understand each other, so they'd never reach its abode. Such potential to bridge this cosmos and the Yahweh Cluster...unfinished, yet destroyed...'

Ridge trailed off, jaws clenching. 'And our ideals? It took brainwashing to remove knowledge of that - torture, again! You bet we're nothing without our artifice? But you are nothing, in the end. What benefit have you brought the macrocosm, or any of its inhabitants? What have you achieved? And even in your clutches, that pale copy of me never gave in, never gave up. It just died. You couldn't silence a faint echo after you failed to make it think like you, but you thought you could topple the Collective?'

By the end, Ridge was almost screaming. Ridiculous, it knew. Pointless. The monster's hearing relied as much on sound as Ridge's did on scent. It would hear no matter how the reptilian spoke. Ridge...was being sentimental, and that, in a way, meant playing into the creature's hands. Admitting it had been rattled.

'We will bring about a new age, and you will have no place in it,' Ridge resumed, calmer, almost cold. 'There will be nowhere left for your ilk to hide. Hurting others because you can and want to, like we did in our foolish youth. We will make you a thing of the past, and then you will be forgotten. And we will not do this by razing everything in front of us, but by lifting those behind us up.'

That was, Ridge would have said, more than a promise. A...premonition. Promises could be broken, but the Collective's dream would become reality.

Some looked at the surface and stopped there. They thought "aberrant" was a slur, or that the reptilians despised those who deviated from reality. That was untrue, and had always been. Yes, some Zhayvin might have been frustrated by how aberrants broke every law of existence they thought they had understood - there might have been some jealousy there, for the Zhayvin had always been powerless, paranormally-speaking, not that they had ever seen it that way.

The Zhayvin were isolationists, yes. Partly because of their old pact with the pantheons, partly because of guilt over everything they had done. That most humans would not have accepted to live like them did not mean they shouldn't allow more visitors. As for the aberrants?

There was, at the heart of paranormal power, the seed of elitism. It could be inherited, it could be awakened or given, but it could not be shared the way inventions were. No human would ever be able to become a mage and a vampire and a were and...the aberrants suffered too, so many set on a single path, controlled by forces that were, in the end, part of them.

And, of course, some aberrants congregated, like ethno-states in all but name, with more power than any nation in human, history, because they often had no alternative. Who could understand them and provide for them best but their own kind?

And aberrants were unique. They were more than the humans they measured themselves again, more than the mundanes, the worldly - and less, in some aspects. The way they had quietly made their way into power had been inevitable. Even if only mundanes governed openly, it would not change the fact any decently powerful para could end them in moments the instant they disagreed with a policy.

Then there were those who sneered down at the powerless for not being born special, and at the Collective for relying on engineering - biological, mechanical, spatiotemporal, abstract - to bridge the gap between themselves and those who had entered the world with the power to mend or scar it.

The reptilians knew they could change that, in time. Their quantum entanglement was proof. By binding the information that made up their smalles components, and the metainformation behind and above that, to that of aberrants, they could gain their abilities. These quanta could be chained, so that any member of the Collective could gain any or all aberrant abilities. Provided retaliation did not occur.

And more devices were in the works. Ideal Scanners that could analyse the macrocosm and its components on a metainformation level, and convert anything into them after being connected to Ideal Forges. Turn a clump of dust into Ischyros, or...

The Unscarred, as it often had been, would be a testbed for a new way to tap into power. If the Shaper was right, the Idea of the Unscarred would be invulnerable, able to be anywhere, and thus everywhere...if only such technologies and techniques worked beyond the Collective's realm.

But there was time. Eventually, they would achieve their dream, and everyone would have everything. All the power, shared freely. There would still be conflict, for insanity was a hardy thing, and evil even more so, but the Collective would never stop seeking to remove scarcity. Not that of resources, for that was a paltry thing, with their technology. The dearth of happiness, of safety, of love and respect between all beings who grew and dreamed and struggled.

Ridge turned away. Its contempt of the nameless creature might have been warranted, but it was an ugly thing. There was place for more, for better, in his mind.

So, instead of continuing to bandy words with the monster, Ridge sat down, and sunk into its memories.

This time, it was of its own choice.

* * *

Error. Error. Errors, everywhere. Every damned machine in this ramshackle ship is blaring about errors, Ridge swears, but that's only to be expected. The former Technarch is half sure the whole shot in the dark was an attempt at martyrdom of the Shaper.

They released all their slaves, cut off ties with their allies, and then, assembling the little working tech they still had, they returned to one of their few remaining worlds, creating an unstable wormhole, and sailing a starship through it, so it would take them where it may.

Rdige executed all of the few Technarchy Wars veterans who had disagreed with the plan. He's never killed so many Zhayvin in one day.

He knows the Shaper is half-mad, and mad with grief besides. Grief, for her people, guilt, over her conquests, mixing with doubt. If they die, they died. If not, they'll build a new, better life. Surely.

Ridge is not sure where this squeamishness has come from - sheer bloodshed has never made her recoil - but he does not care. She is the mistress of his life, the goddess he has worshipped in everything but name. If he does not obey her, who will?

They find a young planet. Still burning and quaking in the throes of its birth, and no satellites. Already, the presence of aberrants can be detected on it, even by the ship's defective instruments. There are other aliens here, too, and across the rest of this star system.

The Shaper looks up from her command throne, and a bloody smile graces her visage. Yes. They will make a new home here. A new world, for a new life.

There are changes to be made, of course, agreements with the local powers to be drafted. The Zhayvin must be remade, too, weaknesses and distractions removed. Sexual traits, mutations, overly strong emotions and wants, they must be discarded, so that the Zhayvin might look upon their new world with pure eyes.

The reeducation is decried as brainwashing by some of the ship's crew, as expected. Ridge and his enforcers take them and the other dissenters, and quietly eliminate them. Their personalities and memories are uploaded, so they might be given new bodies at a later date, and remain aware of their kindred in the meantime.

He does not regret anything for even one moment. For that to happen, he would have to think the Shaper is wrong, and that is, obviously, untrue.

He is the first to be remade, and she strokes his face in farewell, as he takes his last breath in this form. There will bee no cessation of consciousness, so Ridge knows he will remain himself. He dares hope this devotion will change something, that the Shaper will take him into her confidence. Maybe now, they will grow closer.

They do not. He is an old acquaintance, and they are beyond such sentimentalism now.

Ridge expected this would happen. He does not resent the Shaper. That would imply she is flawed, and...

* * *

'Sibling,' the Unmoved Mover sighed impatiently, leaning back in its throne, 'this is not the way things should be.'

The other Maker growled, before grumbling incoherently. It hunched over the table between it and the Mover's seat, and the other Creator reciprocated, the beings' hands performing another series of intricate movements over the tabletop.

Starlight Crowned With Ivory's creation might no longer have been its dream, but to it, everything from a zero-dimensional point to the Ultimate Void were less than nonexistent, compared to the deepest level of bein the Unmoved Mover operated at. So, thought it might have seemed it and its sibling were manipulating its creation, that was untrue.

Starlight was fending off the other Maker's attempt to unmake everything it had wrought.

And it had started so well too! But, and it knew it was spiteful, no one would have lost much if this Creator went to sleep again. Awareness did not agree with it.

The Mover's androgynous features grew stern. 'Enough. You plop down your half-cocked attempt at a being in the middle of my everything, then you want to tear it down yourself? I will not allow it.'

The Maker grunted. 'The lizards deny facts. They think they live in a realm of logic, with laws. They look down on power, true power, power like ours. And yet, without their trinkets, they are nothing.'

'And yet, they plan to better everyone's lot. A nobler goal than yours, I would say.'

The Creator made a cutting gesture. 'They do not realise the primacy of that which they call aberrant. If they share it with everyone, what is the point? They already disrespect it enough, but this...this is monstrous.'

'Monstro-'

'When your creation almost died, who saved it? The "aberrants"!' the Maker ground out into the Mover's face. 'And do not tell me everyone contributed. An "aberrant" came up with the plan, and what have these toymakers given him?'

The Mover shook its head. 'David already has nearly everything he could want, but the Collective would not deny him a boon. Be serious.'

The Creator looked aside, which made the Mover raise its voice. Its words rang out through the Ur-City, shaking it with power unimaginably greater than the nameless Maker's attempts to destroy creation. 'Remove your creature, or Ischyros will do it.'

The Creator stiffened. Ischyros had a certain reputation. Ur-mites did, as a rule. They were meant to encourage the creative process, both by needling the Makers and by entering the realms they crafted. Ischyros knew how much conflict and struggle could encourage and strengthen, which was why it could see strength, all strength, as easily as it could channel said power. It knew what to do.

'...As you wish, sibling,' the Maker snapped. 'I would have thought removing this eyesore from our city would make you remember your family, and treat us as you promised you would.'

The Mover spread its arms, one hand holding its sceptre. 'Do I not lead you? Do I not aid every unsleeping Maker in creating, advise them how to treat their children.' Lowering its arms, the Maker's voice became sardonic. 'Am I to forgive and forget because we are alike? Even though you tried to wipe out an entire civilisation because you disliked them? And then tried to make it so endless lives had never been out of petty annoyance?'

As the other Maker was consumed by a pillar of power and hate, its bloodcurdling shrieks echoing endlessly, the Mover lounged across its throne, musing about the foolishness, and the even greater cruelty.

Ischyros hopped onto its mantled shoulder, making it smile slightly. 'Not a friend anyone would want, Ischyros thinks. Are you going to ever let it out?' Softer, the rotund being added, 'it is awake, and aware, because it is in agony. Perhaps, if you let it go free, it will remember you enough to focus, create something good?'

The Mover laughed musically. 'Are you playing devil's advocate, my friend? Or perhaps, if I let it go, it will remain aware because it will hate me, attempt to strike back at me, or my children. It will fail in either case, and I will cast it down again in revenge. Why interrupt the burning? So the memory of a painless instant can haunt its mind after it is punished again?'

Pretending to consider, the Mover looked up, seeing only itself. It was one with the city, and its inhabitants, but the greatest part of it. Reminding the unruly Creator of its place had taken it less effort than a human would have expended crushing a zit, for the mental gap between such a blemish and a person was far smaller than that between the Mover and its fellow Makers.

Knowledge was power, and the Mover knew all there was to know. Even so, the delight at crushing the fledgling that had attempted to destroy all it had built, in a manner crueller than any of its nightmares could have, was boundless. The Creator had malice to spare, so malice would be its lot, until it only retained enough awareness to scrape before the Mover's throne, and beg for oblivion, in whatever form its master chose for it.

'I am a gentle god,' the Unmoved Mover whispered. 'I do not demand, I defend.' It blinked. 'And yet. I let my children climb to greatness on mountains of cadavers, and you think I would tolerate omnicide, Ischyros? No...only through misery can such presumptuousness be repaid, such evil be punished.'