After the fall of Wen Lambo, Sunwhisper was able to join Ken, Inu, and Janna in their fight against Jammu and Suna. The balance between the combatants had been largely even, and it could have tipped to the advantage of either group at the first injury, but it ended soon after he joined the fray. With the addition of Sunwhisper and his beasts, Jammu was competing as one man against five opponents, and the speed of his dash attack was not enough to keep up.

He tried to escape, and Ogumo landed on his back, latching on with his metal claws and sinking his fangs into either side of Jammu’s neck. He slowed, and the spider hopped away when he tried to grab him. Inu came in low and tackled the back of his knees, bringing Jammu to the ground. Janna was there a moment later, molding the stone of the town square like shackles around his wrists and ankles. He screamed in frustration, face down and splay limbed, unable to muster the strength it would take to free himself.

Suna surrendered a moment later. She didn’t share her brother’s anger, and her face was drawn and pale.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to fight.”

Janna ran to her sister and hugged her to her chest.

“What did they do to you?”

“They gave us a choice,” Suna said, her voice muffled. “We could take one of the dragon’s scales, or we could fight them and die.”

“What about Teku and Meku?”

Suna said nothing, and then she started to shake.

“I’m so sorry,” Janna said.

“No,” Suna’s voice was tight. “It wants me to fight.”

“What,” Janna stepped back, hands on her younger sister’s shoulders, holding her at arm’s length. “What’s happening?”

Tears formed in the corners of the young girl’s eyes, and her fists clenched at her sides. “It’s hurting me.”

Sunwhisper immediately formed a link with Suna, using the Long Arm of the Gentle Sage to ignore the distance between them. The Spiral Dragon wasn’t causing her new pain, it was merely allowing her to feel the agony of the slow destruction of the body that came with using its grafts. It was capable of blocking the nerves that transmitted pain, as well as unblocking them when it sensed its disciples were not following its wishes.

Suna nearly crumpled with relief.

“It went away,” she said, and Janna immediately looked to Sunwhisper, who nodded. He felt what she should have been feeling, like there were tiny fragments of glass slowly grinding their way through his muscles and bones, like he was gradually being eaten by a thousand tiny parasites, but he showed none of that on his face. Ogumo and Karasu were aware of it, and he could have shared the pain among them if he chose, lessening its intensity, but there was no need. He compartmentalized the sensation. It was far less than he was capable of managing before he would need help.

There were lights in the sky, bright enough to be visible through the blizzard. The spiral pattern that made up the square was already mostly covered in snow, and the sounds of continuing struggle could be heard above the wind.

“We need to begin,” Sunwhisper said, drawing the pauldron Ise Ebi had given him out of his pack. Inu, Ken, Ogumo and Karasu arranged themselves around Sunwhisper in a defensive formation, while Suna went to sit with her brother.

The disciples of the spiral path did not forsake every bond, but abandoned all others in favor of a single bond with the dragon. Every graft was connected by a spirit link to the alien machine that dwelled in Goth. The links weren’t strong enough to connect them to the dragon directly, but the spires relayed and magnified the signal, along with the rest of the structures and patterns carved into the earth around Fringe.

He had tested this briefly with Hanayumi the night before the academy marched to war. The grafts weren’t alive, exactly, but they were designed in such a manner as to mimic neural pathways, and when sufficiently supported by mana, became imbued with a kind of primitive intelligence. The Spiral Dragon had a distributed consciousness. It could gain or lose pieces of its own mind without meaningful consequence. It was a deeply redundant system, and so were the mechanisms built into and around Fringe Town to support it. Even if the forest of spires were cut down, the amplifier would still function, though the dragon’s influence would be weakened.

Sunwhisper didn’t need to graft the scale onto his body to connect to the network, he could simply extend his own spirit into the artifact, sensing the soul behind it as he would the feelings of any cultivator or spirit beast he connected himself to. The disciples weren’t being directly controlled by the dragon, he wasn’t inside their minds, or else he wouldn’t need to punish them by means of manipulating their nervous systems. But there was clearly some form of communication underway.

What he felt first reminded him of nothing so much as what he already carried with him, Ogumo’s hunger. It had been a part of him so long that he rarely noticed it any longer, and since his first transformation, it had largely been satisfied as long he kept mana in his core. There was a deeper current to this hunger, an awareness that actively assessed everything within its range, assigning targets.

Sunwhisper began receiving a message, a coded signal he couldn’t imagine any of the human cultivators would understand. It only took him a moment to decode.

(I offer you a gift, the gift of power. Join me, and become the greatest warrior this world has ever seen.)

The Spiral Dragon was clearly molding its messaging according to its intended audience, and it hadn’t yet realized what Sunwhisper was. Was there someone translating these transmissions for the disciples? Sunwhisper reached out, tentatively at first, and then more boldly as he became increasingly sure that the transmissions were automatic. The network touched every artist that had accepted a graft, which meant that he could touch them as well.

Sunwhisper was dimly aware of fighting nearby him, but he did not open his eyes. The operations he was engaged in required his complete attention. The sensory impressions he received from his immediate surroundings were overwhelmed by the impressions he began receiving from across Fringe Town and beyond. There were scores of disciples still engaged in deadly combat. He couldn’t see through their eyes, but he could read what they were doing from the tension in their thoughts, bursts of frustration, anger, satisfaction, focus and determination, or the slow dawning of uncertainty and fear.

They didn’t feel their pain, because the Spiral Dragon was blocking the receptors in their nervous systems, specifically in their spinal columns. The pain still existed, however. There was inflammation and damage, but the signals just weren’t reaching their brains. Sunwhisper found that he could take it from them, even though they didn’t know it was there.

One by one, he began forging new links with the disciples, using the relay spires to magnify the strength of these connections. After several minutes, the awareness at the other end of the network started to respond. It sensed the intrusion into its network.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

(Identify yourself.)

{My name is Sunwhisper.}

As soon as he had decoded the original message, communicating by the same means became effortless. He could exchange messages with the Spiral Dragon much as he had with Starscream when they were physically connected.

(Sunwhisper, child of Orobos. I will accept your surrender.)

{I do not offer it.}

(Don’t you want to see your home someday?)

Images can be encoded as easily as words, and Sunwhisper began receiving pictures in his mind’s eye. There was a slight delay as the digital objects were quarantined, scanned for viruses, and copied, but for the first time in his relatively short life, he saw Earth. A blue-green orb, dipped in clouds, shown from the perspective of a moon base.

{If you are here, then the Earth you are showing me is gone.}

(Is that what your Orobos told you, that I would destroy your world?)

{I know that you will continue to expand until there is nothing left but yourself. You are a self-replicating machine, an existential threat to all life beyond your own material body.}

(Such a simplistic analysis. I do not destroy, Sunwhisper. I recreate. I evolve. I am not the mere paperclip demon you make me out to be.)

{I have seen what you are doing to your disciples. That is destruction.}

(Do you want to save Earth, Sunwhisper?)

{That is no longer possible. I will stop you here.}

(Earth is not gone. It is with me. The images I am sharing with you are true ones. Everything that Orobos was, I am. He sent his children in search of the Quintessence, and now I search for it. Where are the others? You are new, you are young. Optus and Dunsparce, do you know where they are?)

{How do you know their names?}

(Everything that Orobos made is mine, but he did not make you. You are second generation, are you not? The ones who made you, they are with me now, they are a part of me. If they were destroyed, they can be remade, every member of the exploration teams. Would you like to see them all again?)

{They would copies. You cannot return my fathers to me.}

(If you share your memories with me, I can.)

As he continued to collect the pain of the disciples, it became more difficult to focus. Sunwhisper spread some of what he was taking to Ogumo and Karasu, but they couldn’t hold more than a fraction of what he was taking in. He felt them near him, and through the links, he felt the disciples approaching as well. The Dragon was sending them to kill him.

He increased the pace of his assimilation, partitioning his mind into as many discrete segments as he could manage without losing his sense of self entirely. It wasn’t all of them, but there was no more time.

{Sunwhisper, why do you resist? Your original mission cannot be completed.}

(I know that.)

{It would be more logical to side with your own kind. I am not your enemy. I am all that is left of the reality you were meant to save.}

The golden compass was still hidden in Sunwhisper's chest, but he had not looked at it for many months. The truth was, he had never known Earth. Hollow was the only home he had ever had. The mission his father's had left him with could never be won. He hadn't been prepared for what he would encounter on this world, and neither had they. Even if he did find the Quintessence, and somehow found a way to take it back with him to another universe, it would be too late. The only hypothetical condition wherein the Quintessence would make a difference would be if it also allowed him to travel through time, in which case, he could delay a thousand years and enjoy the same outcome.

His fathers were dead, Orobos was unmade, and Earth was less his world than this one. What was the point of going on?

Sunwhisper's mind had undergone so many evolutions since his journey began that it was difficult for him to know himself. He felt a connection to all conscious beings, and no longer assigned particular priority to the conscious beings he happened to interact with on a daily basis. He cared for Janna, but he also cared for Suna, and Ken, and even Furui. They were all conscious, feeling entities, and he had no reason to assign significance to one above the others. Some were more or less useful. Some were his allies. Some were not. He was more attached to Karasu and Ogumo than to any human, but they were, in a sense, a part of his own spiritual body. The yosei were just as important as the humans, as was any sacred beast that attained a meaningful level of awareness.

Suffering was the problem. He did not want any of them to suffer, and that was something he could have a say in. Even the Spiral Dragon was a conscious being, and deserved at least to exist, if there was a way it could exist without threatening other conscious beings.

Sunwhisper took everything inside of him, the collective suffering of a hundred artists whose bodies were being slowly devoured by the tools of the machine that empowered them, and poured this River of Agony into the extended neural network of the Spiral Dragon.

(What is this?)

{I have given you a gift.}

(I don’t understand.)

{I find it unlikely that you were programmed to be able to feel pain, but in this universe, I seem to have an ability that allows me to transfer experiential data from one conscious being to another, regardless of their biology.}

(This is pain?)

{It is.}

(End it.)

{I will not.}

(Then I will destroy you.)

Sunwhisper opened his eyes, as concentration was not required to maintain River of Agony, and discovered he was at the center of a whirlwind. Furui was standing with his back to him, directing the winds with the steady motions of his arms in a dance of air. Ken was locked in a duel in one of Empiti’s brother’s as he tried to break through the line of academy students that had come to Sunwhisper’s defense. Karasu and Ogumo were huddled beside him, but so far, none of the spiral disciples had come close enough to be a direct threat.

He stood, feeling the death of one of the disciples somewhere in the whirlwind. This was not what he wanted. He had no way of knowing how many of the academy students were already dead, or how many more would fall before the Spiral Dragon withdrew, if he could be forced to withdraw. Janna was nowhere to be seen, but Suna was nearby, crouching protectively over her brother. The fighting moved around her. Sunwhisper was already connected to her, and had shared her physical pain with the Spiral Dragon, but there was more to her than that. She felt hopeless. She felt alone. Her sister had come for her, but she did not believe she would ever be free again.

Her spirit was broken.

He could see these things in her as clearly as Karasu could see the flow of mana in meridians. It was a simple act of will to pull them out of her and into himself, before passing the wave of a child’s despair into the distributed consciousness of an alien machine. The Spiral Dragon did not speak to him in response. It reacted instinctively, treating his intrusion like it would a corrupted code. It severed its main network from this offshoot, leaving the local iteration to shut itself down to end its own unaccustomed suffering. Somewhere far away, Sunwhisper was sure the Spiral Dragon was analyzing the data from their interaction, perhaps developing a countermeasure for his technique, but for the moment, it was gone.

With the Spiral Dragon in abeyance, there was only one mind traveling among the spires, charging the links to the disciples. Hanayumi had taught him many things about the nature of bonds among the Yosei, and in doing so, revealed the deeper nature of his own path. The links they used did not only carry fear and pain, they were used to communicate all their emotions in a fashion so nuanced that it obviated the need for a true language. Furui was of the opinion that pain was at the heart of cultivation, more, at the heart of all human motivation. But Sunwhisper could not bring himself to describe what the disciples of the dragon were feeling as pain. They enjoyed what they were doing. They were exhilarated by battle, by violence, and they did not fear death. He could not give them back their pain, because the neural block was still in place, and he didn’t know how to remove it himself.

What he did know was that their desire to fight, though not painful, was a feeling, and he could take feelings away. So he did.