“There’s something you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?”
The old bird grabbed him by the hand. “Listen to me, boy: you don’t deserve her slurs. It isn’t kwekek to worry about the direction our society has taken. Reasonable doubts aren’t kwekek. In fact, sometimes, a doubt can be an act of tremendous courage.”
EUe sighed. “You don’t need to coddle me, sir. I…” he stared down at his toes. “I know I’ve messed up. I know I’ve fallen short.”
“Don’t say that! What would your wife think if she heard you talking like that?”
“eUna would have said neither of us were at fault,” EUe answered. “How could she have known that she had Sapphire ancestry?” He stared into the dark. “Or that her murky heritage would show itself in our son?” he added, in a whisper.
Miscegenation between the Colors had been always unthinkable, even in the Barbarian Ages. There was already enough strife among clans of the same color! Why make it worse by having kids of mixed color? They’d spend their entire lives without any place to truly belong!
Unfortunately, stupidity blessed all the Colors equally. Worse, the legacies such indiscretions left behind had a very long shelf-life. Every once in a while, a mulatto’s descendant would be born showing the colors of their non-Ruby ancestor.
“The law was crystal clear about what had to be done,” EUe said. “I wish it had me, you know, instead of them, but… my family history was well-known to the archives. Our bloodline has never been in doubt. Meanwhile, eUna’s family were farmers by way of UkU-wEwa and were of murky heritage. She…” EUe’s heart caught in his throat. “She went willingly. The peace is just too precious to risk for the sake of a single person.” He flattened his tail feathers and clenched his fists. “I should be proud of her! But… I’m not, and never have been. And that… that is kwekek.”
He flapped his wings, sending sand grains tumbling down the dune.
Uka-yen looked up once more. “My father, of blessed memory… he used to say that history is written by the winners. Success and merit pursue each other like star-crossed lovers, and all too often, tragedy keeps them apart.”
He looked EUe in the eyes. “My great-grandmother was a Topaz hybrid, you know.” He tapped his claws on his rubescent neck feathers. “She had a couple of sprigs of golden feathers right here. When she was just a fledgling, her parents cauterized her neck and chest with boiling oil.”
EUe stared in shock. “What? How could they do something so horrible? Kill the child first, don’t condemn it and its posterity to a life of pain, deformity, and hidden lies! How could they be so cruel?”
“They were tired of all the fighting, EUe. The heart can only take so much. Can’t we just live and let live?” The old bird whistled happily. “And that’s what our family did. We kept as many Topaz traditions alive as we could, in secret. They passed it down, generation after generation; the old songs, the old tales. I was one of the last who knew the truth in full. By now, my family and our descendants are likely oblivious of the true significance of the special dinners they have from time to time, or the off-beat ways in which they pray. They don’t know that they’re perpetuating a culture that has been all but lost to time.” He shook his head. “I imagine there are tens of thousands of twEfE, or more, who live with lost traditions without recognizing them as such.”
EUe looked up the dune, toward hUen-dE.
“Sir, if anyone but me heard you say this, they’d…”
But the thought was just too horrible for words.
“I know the stakes, EUe. I always have.”
“But why? Why would you—”
Standing still, Uka-yen spread his wings, moving hesitantly at first, but then more boldly and self-assured as he widened his stance.
“EUe… have you ever stopped to wonder if we might be… wrong?”
“W-What?” EUe practically whistled the words out of his beak.
“What if everything we thought was true was just a lie? Or, worse, a misunderstanding?” Uka-yen looked up to the darkling sky. “I wouldn’t know how to live in such a world anymore. What would be the point?”
“I… I don’t know,” EUe said, softly.
He couldn’t take any more of this. This was insanity! Wanting to get away, EUe sped ahead, leaving a trail of light in his wake as he followed after hUen-dE. His mentor’s words had left him deeply disturbed. EUe told himself that everything would be fine, just so long as hUen-dE hadn’t heard them. No one else would ever need to know that the great inventor Uka-yen wasn’t just a kwekek, but a traitor to the peace and to the Ecumene that upheld it. But really, what scared EUe most of all was the nagging feeling that the old bird had a point, one which had been brewing deep in his own soul since his wife and fledgling son’s executions, if not earlier.
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The three twEfE walked in a line, one after another, with a great deal of space between them. They might have separated entirely, were it not easier to share the effort of using their dreamshards to protect themselves than to do it on their own.
The dune flattened out as the group reached its peak, subsiding into a gentle grade as they pressed onward. They trekked up and down across the dunes, following alongside the footprints of Gatherers who had come before, trying their best not to disturb them. The only means Gatherers had of knowing which routes had already been taken were the tracks left by their predecessor. There was no point in constructing lampposts or bringing stones to stack up in cairns; by the time the next group of Gatherers ventured into the Great Dream for the next harvest, the constructions would have long since dissolved into the void.
It wasn’t long before the footprints thinned and the three Gatherers found themselves in unexplored territory. Lights began to appear in the darkness not long after that, taking the form of faint clusters of cool-hued, multicolored motes and wisps that speckled the dunes here and there, like the fingerprints of a desert’s forgotten rains.
They found the dreams at the top of the next dune.
To EUe, the sight still held as much wonder for him as when he’d first laid eyes on it.
Beneath the darkling star’s fading light, a crowd of dreams did play. Particulate aurorae swam in undulating sheets and billowing clouds, lilting in the vacuum like pollen on a summer’s day.
Walking forward, EUe peered over the back end of the dune. Beyond the edge, the sands sank away into a shallow valley. The world’s dreams drifted through the valley, their diaphanous forms fading in and out as they moved.
“The Dreams are thick here,” hUen-dE said.
Uka-yen nodded. “An auspicious sign. Perhaps this will be a short harvest.”
“Look at that!” hUen-dE said.
Turning around, EUe saw hUen-dE pointing with her claw. His tail feathers quivered in astonishment.
The top of the dune was studded with dreamshards, but that was to be expected; you wouldn’t get this many dreams with anything less. The shards themselves were dark, smoky crystals, semi-opaque like frosted glass, but gave off a many-colored iridescence when moved about under true-light.
Other than the first generation of dreamshards, found by hU-U-te around the Blade itself, all dreamshards came from the Great Dream. The shards ranged in size from boulder to fingertip, and everything in-between. They precipitated from the aether and coalesced within the sand, waiting to be unearthed by passing Gatherers. When brought out of the Great Dream, the shards revealed their power by shining with not-light bright enough to blind, and by channeling that not-light, skilled mages could commune with the Gods more deeply than ever before.
One of the thicker dreams passed over the apex of the dune, revealing a massive dreamshard protruding from the sand.
EUe slowly stepped forward. “It’s huge…”
The shard had to be as big as a fully grown twEfE.
With tears in his eyes, Uka-yen plopped onto the sand, falling to his knees. There were tears in his eyes.
“It’s the largest shard I’ve ever seen,” he whispered.
hUen-dE nodded in excitement. “It’s the find of a lifetime.”
“Yes, EUe, it is,” Uka-yen said. The old Gatherer chirruped softly as he locked eyes with EUe.
Uka-yen looked up, pointing his beak at the dark sky, bearing the ruffled feathers of his gorget. The hues no longer iridesced; the colors were muddy and frail.
Swallowing hard, EUe took a single step forward. “Uka-yen?” he asked, anxiously raising his wings.
He had a gizzard feeling that something big was about to happen.
From down on his knees, Uka-yen looked EUe and then hUen-dE in the eyes and then shook his head.
“Have either of you ever wondered why I became a Gatherer?”
“Yes!” EUe said. “You had everything!” EUe asked. “Why give it up?”
That was the one thing that never made sense about the old bird. Back in his time, Uka-yen had everything he could have ever wanted: fame, fortune, happiness, and enough nectar to drown yourself in it a hundred thousand times over. With such success, he wouldn’t have even needed to get the Engineers’ Castebund to allot him nectar rations to spend his days working on personal projects. His time would have been his to do with as he pleased.
What EUe wouldn’t have given for that…
Uka-yen rose to one knee. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I became a Gatherer because I needed to see the future. Already, in my own time, I had an inkling of the changes my creations would bring about. I wanted to ensure my work wouldn’t be misused, and to be able to do something about it if misuse ever came to pass. But now…” He placed his hand on the giant dreamshard. “…with this dreamshard, the Ecumene will have all the resources it needs to realize its interplanetary ambitions. The terraforming and colonization of UlU-twE-E will be only the beginning. This dreamshard heralds the start of a new, golden age. And that age will usher in a nightmare so great and terrible and that it will make the Race Wars and the Culling seem like petty squabbles in comparison.”
Not-light trickled into the space around Uka-yen, but then he glared at hUen-dE, and that trickle became a torrent.
“No!” EUe screamed.
Uka-yen was going to destroy the dreamshard!
“I won’t let y—”
—But the old bird’s yell was cut off by a blitzing cone of not-light that shot out from hUen-dE’s hand and impaled him in the chest. In the blink of an eye, Uka-yen’s body collapsed into a quivering mass half the size of EUe’s hand that hovered above the sand.
hUen-dE clenched her fist shut.
For a brief moment, the mass burned like the brightest of all suns. Then hUen-dE opened her fist, and the mass erupted in an explosive shockwave. Uka-yen’s dreamshard fell from it, landing on the sand while the motes of fire and ash that had been the atmospheric islands’ inventor scattered into the dark, dissolving amongst the dreams his creations had inspired.
hUen-dE let out a sigh, more irritated than disappointed. Then she crossed her arms and turned to EUe and asked, in a very calm voice: “Did you have any idea that Uka-yen was a traitor?”