EUe ended up getting an UwUkwaha Delight. The tangy accents of powdered klehe leaves went well with the UwUkwaha gel-beads’ sweetness and gooey texture as they melted on his tongue, and helped distract him from the young female’s summary execution.

He blamed himself for not being able to stop her—or hUen-dE—in time, but also worried that doing so was kwekek, and so he blamed himself for that too, and felt doubly bad as a result. A mere Berry Buster wouldn’t have sufficed as pick-me-up for that level of misery, which was why he’d gotten the UwUkwaha.

EUe wondered if anyone would still remember the female and her death after he returned from Gathering, and not just as an illustration of what happened to twEfE who defied the Cardinal Laws.

It was all so fucking sad.

A chime cut through the air, and an announcement droned: “Chosen Gatherers, assemble at the Temple. Your time has come.”

EUe dropped the empty zUzU Fresh bottle in a receptacle to be recycled and made his way across the gardens, toward the temple of old.

The Ruby Ecumene had built many skyholders over centuries, but none were as grand as the GTS. The broad, hollow cylinder of plaster, clay, stone, and steel stood at the heart of the Capital, half a mile wide, towering over its neighbors hundreds-foot-tall domes. Like its neighbors, the walls of the Grand Temple Skyholder were encrusted with nests, inside and out, being most thickly clustered near the aerial gateways built into the skyholder’s walls. In an ordinary skyholder, the egg-shaped, spellglass-roofed nests normally held families’ homes, office space, and shops and more, but in the GTS, those mundane spaces had been called to serve a higher purpose: to house the Gatherers, the government, and the Temple clergy, and to provide them and the people with spaces to learn and pray. Golden columns rose up from the parks along the skyholder’s floor to meet the glass domed roof high overhead. The nests of government—the ministries, the Nectar-King’s palace—were clustered around the columns, arranged by distance from the centermost column, in order of decreasing importance. Once upon a time, the surrounding clusters of nests would have been used by officials and nobles, though, since before EUe’s time, much of the hoi polloi had left those nests empty, their owners preferring the view from their estates on the atmospheric islands up in orbit around the planet.

The islands…

EUe remembered the awe he felt as a child whenever news broke about the latest benchmarks the islands’ construction had reached. The idea of building structures in the void beyond the sky had seemed almost too fantastical to be true. Now, more than a century later, there was talk of colonizing the other planets in the solar system.

Progress really was… amazing.

Following the winding stone path, EUe walked past the GTS’ gardens, toward the Temple.

The Temple of the Door was a skyholder within a skyholder: a cylinder off to the side of the central column. Unlike all other skyholders, this inner structure had no entry arches along its base. The only way inside was to fly through one of the openings on its walls. From there, you could descend—whether along the shelves of platforms and walkways, or by the thrust of your own wings—to reach the hallowed ground at the bottom, the place of the Door and the Blade.

Gatherers stood on guard at each of the Temple’s entrances. Trespassers would be given a warning to turn away, and the guards were under orders to petrify anyone and everyone who did not comply, and any guard who didn’t do their duty would be petrified by their comrades.

EUe hated that, but what else could they have done? Progress was truly precious beyond words. You had to cling to it like vines on a dEka-UE, and even then, there was no guarantee it would stick around. Since his earliest days, EUe had been taught that progress had to be fought for, and then defended with all your heart. It was the story of his people—the story of his world.

Before the advent of the dreamshards, twEfE had been trapped in cycles of violence and destruction. It was a brutal, unforgiving existence, one where any day might have been your last. But then Great hU-U-te discovered the Door, and through it, twEfE obtained the order and peace that they needed to finally grow. The mass nectar farms came first, followed by skyholders soon after. Never before would so many twEfE have dared to live together, but with dreamshards, audacious undertakings had become second nature.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“EUe,” hUen-dE said. “You’re late.”

The stern female fluttered down and landed on the stone path.

“I didn’t mean to trouble you,” EUe replied.

EUe’s general strategy for getting along with the other Gatherers was to avoid them as much as possible, especially hUen-dE. Though EUe certainly respected her prodigious magical talents, her keen acumen, and the indefatigable work ethic she brought to bear in everything she did, it wasn’t enough to make her pleasant to be around.

She’d become a Gatherer because, in her words, “There was nothing better” she could have done to serve the Ecumene. EUe liked to imagine that she had hatched already wearing the black-plated armor of a Gatherer. The suit was practically glued to her skin.

“Your intentions are irrelevant,” she said. “You have seniority over me, just as Uka-yen has seniority over you. As my senior, you should strive to set an example for us, both for the good of the many, and for your own posterity. It’s bad enough that you’re kwekek. Plenty of other kwekek twEfE have made themselves useful by diligently attending to their duties and keeping their troublesome thoughts to themselves. For starters: EUe, you don’t comport yourself like a Gatherer. Why not try working on that?”

She crossed her arms at him.

hUen-dE frustrated EUe. Then again, many things did. He just wished her appearance had been a better match for her personality. Instead, since the moment he’d first met her, she’d been eUna’s proverbial evil twin. EUe could have sworn the flecks of black on her neck had the exact same placement as his mate’s. But, unlike eUna, hUen-dE responded with hostility to even the slightest sign of levity or sunshine. The only humor she tolerated were her own sardonic quips at anyone who she believed had fallen short of the exacting standards she placed on herself.

Gods, how he missed eUna.

hUen-dE scowled. “Stop ogling me, you lecher,” she said. “We have work to do.”

eUna would have laughed at the absurdity of hUen-dE’s words.

Well, maybe Uka-yen might get a kick out of it if he told him. EUe wasn’t the kind of bird who was prone to ogling, and even when he was, hUen-dE wouldn’t have even been on the list.

“Focus,” she said, hovering off the ground. “Let’s move!”

Sighing, EUe revved his wings and followed her. The female glanced back at him no less than three times as they flew up to one of the Temple’s aerial windows and passed through it and its guards.

Inside, they landed all the way at the bottom.

The Temple of the Door consisted of three dome-shaped buildings: the dreamshard shrines, each with entry arches on the bottom, all the way around. The shrines were arranged at triangle’s points around a plot of primeval forest at the center of the space, the hallowed ground on which hU-U-te had once tread. The Door hovered above the earth, its boundary ever-churning around the entrance to the hlea-ran—the Great Dream. The Sacred Blade floated preternaturally in front of the Door, energies crackling as they leapt between the two.

Hovering at either side of the Door were several clerics, identifiable by the tall, ruffed collars atop their Utal-as. Several more clergybirds stood on the ground around the dreamshard shrines, raising censers aloft as they quietly sang.

Uka-yen was already there, wings folded at his back, standing in quiet contemplation on one of the steps that lead up to the patch of virgin earth. Despite his age, the old bird looked formidable in Gatherer armor: the white paint on the breastplate and greaves of the dark, lightweight microfibril material made it stand out against the Great Dream’s dark sheen. Time’s passage had worn away the corrugations on Uka-yen's upper beak. There was a bit of fuzz to his wing feathers’ edges that no amount of preening could ever defeat. His gray gape—seen whenever he laughed or sang—was faded with age, and in that was matched only by the dullness of the greenish-brown scales on the tops of his arms and legs. Yet his eyes burned bright, as was to be expected from an epochal intellect.

Uka-yen, the mind behind the atmospheric islands.

“Is everything alright, EUe?” Uka-yen asked.

“No, not really.”

Looks of concern graced some of the clergybirds’ faces.

EUe’s life as a Gatherer didn’t have many bright spots, but Uka-yen was one of them. Yes, the old bird might have been a couple generations before EUe’s time, but if anything, that only made their conversations that much more interesting.

It almost made EUe forget his life was over.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Uka-yen asked.

But what was there that hadn’t already been said?

“Not really,” EUe answered.

“If you say so.” Uka-yen tilted his beak up in doubt. “Just remember, EUe: you should cherish the time that you have. It’s all too easy for it to be taken away.”

“Is something wrong, sir?”EUe couldn’t help being formal when he was in Uka-yen’s presence. The guy was a genius, after all.

That being said, the old bird did seem more morose than usual.

Light glinted off the top of Uka-yen’s beak as he looked up at the Door.

“It’s just the three of you, then?” one of the clerics asked.

“So we were told,” Uka-yen replied.

Walking up to the three Gatherers one by one, the cleric handed them the special nylon satchels they were to use to carry the dreamshards back to the waking world.

“You should get going, Gatherers,” one of the priests said. “Time waits for no twEfE.”

EUe nodded. “Yes, let’s… get this over with.” He folded his wings against his back before stepping into the Door; Uka-yen and hUen-dE followed.

Just like the Gatherers of old, none of them wore shoes.