We went back to the arena's lower levels as soon as the post-battle formalities—as EUe called them—were finished. The crowd stood up and sang a rousing tune, praising the harvesters who brought them their nectar, the Ecumene and the regnant Nectar King, and above all, the nectar itself.

"The fluid of life," they called it. "The drops of heaven."

I was honestly fascinated by it, and would have happily stayed to watch more, but EUe insisted we leave as quickly as possible.

"What's the rush?" I asked.

"I need to get a healer to deal with the dagger wound you gave me," he said. "Also, I just don't like the lies."

I tried pressing him further, but he didn't elaborate.

The exit for victorious gladiators was the aptly named Victor's Rise, a gently inclined staircase tunnel that led up to the arena's first floor, where the time loop spat us out. The antechambers we'd been brought to before the battle's start were actually part of the colosseum's first basement level, where they kept the critters, among other things.

Victor's Rise let out onto an elevated platform overlooking the first floor. An automated fanfare played as we exited the rise, briefly drawing the attention of some gladiators sparring over by the far wall, but they immediately turned back to combat practice.

We descended the short staircase leading down from the platform.

V floated over to us in moments. "Huzzah!" he said. "You did it!" He spun around excitedly. "I was sure it would take you at least three or four more tries, but you proved me wrong."

"Thanks, I guess?" I said.

"Wait here," EUe told me. He gestured for me to stand beside an arch's column.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Healer," he replied.

This left me alone with V.

The little Vyx module floated over to me. "So…" he asked, "have the Vyxit made any progress on the cubic class number problem?"

I looked up at his glowing end (a.k.a. "face") in confusion. "I… have no idea what you're talking about."

V sighed in electronic disappointment, but then a minute later started talking about math that went totally over my head. I was quite pleased when I saw EUe walking back over to us.

"EUe!" I said, raising my arm and waving. "Over here! Over here!"

"Well," V said, "at least now you can say you understand quadratic reciprocity."

I didn't have the heart to tell the little guy that I hadn't been listening. Thankfully, though, I had a really good reason for turning my attention elsewhere: namely, EUe himself. It was as if several months had passed while he was away and his injuries had completely healed. On the other hand, he was also visibly frailer, and looked plum exhausted.

I guess magical healing must take a lot out of you.

"I take it you missed me?" EUe asked, wryly.

"I've been telling Genneth about cyclotomy!" V said.

EUe chuckled softly, but then groaned. "Alright," he said, folding his wings at his back, "let's get out of here."

I bowed slightly. "After you."

EUe led the three of us down the galleria. About a minute into the trip, the burly trainer from before sauntered toward us. I noticed he was holding something in his hand.

"Well, look at that," he said, with a nod. "You two squabs survived. I was sure you'd—"

"—Skip the fluff." EUe shook his head defiantly and then stuck out his arm in a desultory motion, twisting it to expose his forearm's green-feathered underside. "Just keybrand us already."

The trainer grunted in approval. "Straight to the point. I like that."

Waving his arm, the trainer triggered the object in his hand, which flew out and hovered a couple of inches in front of me. It looked like a guitar pick that had spilled out beyond the mold when the plastic had been poured, only it wasn't really plastic at all, but instead made from a dark piece of metal.

It glimmered ominously.

EUe glanced at me and flexed his arm, as if to catch my attention. "Stick your arm out."

I hesitated. "Keybrand—"

—But then the trainer grabbed my arm and twisted it so that the underside pointed upward. My efforts to pull away were futile; his crushing grip was just too strong. Before I could even open my beak, the trainer floated the guitar-pick thing onto the underside of my arm and then held his hand about an inch above where the cold metal pressed against my feathered skin. The thing glowed with a terrible heat. It ate into my flesh.

I screamed and fell to my knees, wings flaring and legs buckling. Readying a psychic bullet, I pushed myself up from behind, hissing as pain sparked across my arm, but then the trainer knocked me onto my back with a magically-enhanced jab aimed straight at my gut. I scraped my wings along the floor, my magic sputtering out of existence with a dry bang.

Ow.

All the while, EUe stood there, watching, not saying a thing. He hardly moved a muscle when it came time for the trainer to brand him.

Then, grabbing the "key"—tossing it up in his hand—the trainer turned around, and—with a laugh—walked away. "Have fun, you two."

I tried pushing myself up again, this time using my uninjured arm. I flapped my wings out once I'd gotten to my feet.

I wanted to make sure nothing was broken.

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V floated over me in concern.

"W-What was that?" I asked.

"One of the unpleasant parts of being stuck here," EUe said. He glanced at the charred feathers around my brand-new branding mark. "It's the key to our quarters." He looked toward the rising passage opposite where the trainer had gone. "Come on, the worst part's over—at least until tomorrow."

I looked at V and then back to EUe. "Why did he say, 'you two'?"

"Show him," EUe replied.

The next thing I knew, V flew straight through EUe's body, and then mine. He moved like a ghost.

"I can't move through walls or the ground," V said, "but everything else might as well not be there. Genneth… you're the first person other than EUe who I've talked to in a very, very long time."

I scratched the back of my head. "I'm sorry for not being a better listener."

"It's alright," V replied.

We left the arena through a tunnel on the first floor that let out onto a galleria'ed veranda overlooking a twEfE village contained entirely under a dome.

The resemblance to the twEfE city I'd seen in Lantor was uncanny. The decorative plants, the grassy spaces, the scenic, winding stone pathways? They were all a perfect match. The buildings were charmingly egg-shaped, with many of them built atop small hillocks. Some of the eggs stood on their own, while others were melded together in clusters, often with one of the eggs jutting out from near the top of another to form an upper floor. Flowerlike lampposts peppered the stone paths, all of which converged on a large, open plaza. A large object stood at the center of the plaza; I could only describe it as a tall, slender funnel. The top was covered, while the sides were decorated with abstract patterns: squares, zigzags, and artful swirls. The buildings surrounding the plaza had rooftops like layers of broken eggshells placed side by side. Several of them were stacked, one layer atop another, supported by peristaltic columns, forming plazas in the sky.

Was it some kind of temple, maybe? Or maybe businesses and a marketplace?

Yet, more than anything else, what struck me about the village was its emptiness. It was a settlement without any people. The emptiness ate away at the beautiful vacuum, leaving me with an eerie tension.

I lingered for a moment near the central funnel to look up at the dome.

The dome was huge; not nearly as big as the arena, but still pretty darn big, and more than enough to encase both the village and its immediate airspace. It was made up of a self-supporting polygonal frame of plastic panes arranged in a checkered pattern. The pattern was the same lozenge-like one at the top of the colosseum, only here, it was extended to form a completed dome. I caught glimpses of the rest of the twEfE city through the gaps.

I whistled⁠.

It really was the spitting image of what I'd seen in Lantor. Those same broad, hollow skyscrapers lingered in the distance, along with the forest of giant herbs. At the foot of some hills, I saw a laboratory castle, like a cluster of glassware plucked from a chemist's closet: alembics, beakers, flasks, distillers, bulb-topped condensers, and many other shapes whose names I didn't know. Except for their windows, none of the structures appeared to be made of glass, themselves.

I turned around and I looked over the side of the colosseum rising up behind us. It was as empty as the village, and just as silent.

"What the heck…?" I muttered, turning to EUe. "Where'd everybody go? Why is no one here?"

EUe turned around to face me. "I'll get to that," he said, "but first, tell me: why are you here?"

"Several reasons," I replied. "As I said, I thought the K'rrt—the good K'rrt, I mean—were trapped here. I wanted to free them, in the hope that they'd help me climb the Tower. The big glory thing in the middle of—"

"—I know what you meant," EUe said, sticking out his hand. "It used to be my aerie. From there, V and I worked to oversee his and—eventually—the fleet's systems." EUe crossed his arms. "So, I know first hand just how much a person can do if they get access to it." He narrowed his eyes at me. "What do you intend to do if and when you get there?"

"For starters? I want to stop the D'zd Archive word from freezing over."

"Freezing over?" EUe asked.

I nodded. "Yes. Their climate has destabilized. It's a runaway freezing effect. If it isn't stopped soon, all of them will die."

EUe nodded. "Yes, that's right. The albedo would cause the planet to snowball."

V hovered close. "Freezing over?"

I nodded. "That's what I said."

The little Vyx module shook from side to side. "No no no, that's not possible."

EUe glanced at V. "I told you to not make the Archive's simulation that realistic, didn't I?"

V bobbed up and down. "And I didn't. The environmental simulation is designed to be homeostatic. It's physically impossible for a runaway planetary freezing event to occur." There was a pause. "Unless…"

"Unless what?" I asked.

V turned to me. "Unless someone changed the simulation's settings."

EUe let out a sharp whistle. His feathers bristled as he ruffled his wings and tail. "And I've got a damn good idea who might have done it."

"Who?" I asked.

"First," EUe said, "tell me your other reasons for wanting to climb the Tower. You said there were others, correct?"

I nodded.

This was something of a moment of truth for me. As the Treefathers had told us, if there was any Vyxit who might deign to listen to a wyrm's pleas, it would be EUe.

"Does the phrase 'the Lodestars' mean anything to you?" I asked.

EUe stiffened his wings and tail feathers. His features tensed as he shifted his stance.

"I know it all too well."

"What is it?" I asked.

EUe looked over to the horizon, visible through the panes in the village's dome. "Picture three icosahedrons," he explained, "dark gray. Each one is about five times my height. They float about preternaturally, orbiting each other in an endless dance."

"That's… very specific," I said.

"I'm an engineer, Genneth. Specificity is my nectar, especially when I have few, if any, useful hypotheses to give." EUe shook his head. "Really, we don't know what they are, nor who made them, nor how."

V chimed in. "The Lodestars were discovered at the heart of the ruins of an extensive complex of alien origin on a lifeless, dusty rocky planet in orbit around a dead sun."

"A… dead Sun?" I asked.

"Yes," V explained. "Main sequence stars with sufficiently low mass end up ejecting their outermost layers, leaving a compact, white-hot residual core of degenerate matter that smolders very, very slowly, until it is totally dark, producing neither light nor heat."

"We don't know who built the ruins, or why," EUe said. "The archeological team that recovered the Lodestars speculated that the Lodestars themselves significantly antedated the ruins."

"They were there before the ruins were built?" I asked. "How much time are we talking about?"

"Several hundred million years, at least," EUe said, "if I recall correctly."

"This sounds ominous."

EUe nodded.

"Though the Lodestars' original purpose remains unknown," V said, "it was eventually determined that channeling a focused energy pulse through them produced an emission beam capable of destabilizing stellar cores."

"Which means…?"

"It means you can use them to detonate stars," EUe explained. "White dwarfs, red giants. Even pulsars and magnetars. You can wipe out entire planetary systems in a matter of minutes."

That stopped me cold. "Do you mean to tell me that your people can blow up Suns?"

"Oh yes," V said, "very much so."

EUe cleared his throat, ruffling his ruby-iridescent gorget feathers in the process. "I'm probably going to regret this, but… why did you ask about the Lodestars?"

"The Vyxit are currently on schedule to use the Lodestars. If that comes to pass, they will awaken and empower a great evil."

"What kind of evil?" EUe asked.

"The kind of evil that can feed on the corpse of a dead dragon god," I said. "That's the other reason why I came here. I need to climb the Tower in order to stop the Lodestars from being used."

EUe stared at me, feathers quivering. And you know what the scariest part of it was? I think he was worried for me.

He shook his head. "Genneth, you're going to have to tell me more than that."

"And I will," I nodded, "provided you start answering some of my questions."

"Then let's get moving," he said.

"Is something wrong?" I asked.

"Yes, I'm too sober to have this conversation right now."

"But we're still going to talk?"

"At this point," EUe said, "if you tried to avoid it, I'm afraid I might have to kill you."

"Oh," I said.

EUe started walking down one of the side paths. V and I followed along behind him.

"Can you at least tell me why there's nobody here?"

EUe looked up at V, who bobbed in the affirmative.

The twEfE sighed. "Though there aren't any d'zd here, Genneth, you were right about one thing: this place is a prison. My prison."

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