"Simple," he said. "When my son hatched, he had patches of blue feathers. As my ancestry was well-attested to, this meant that my wife, eUna, had a sapphire in her lineage. The law was crystal clear on what had to happen."

I already knew I wasn't going to like what he was about to say.

EUe cooed mournfully. "They were executed 'for the sake of racial hygiene'."

I stood up in horror, flapping my wings in anger. "That's… monstrous! That's evil!"

"That's what I thought, too." EUe bobbed his head in agreement with a clack his beak. "And I wasn't willing to stay quiet."

"So you became a gladiator?" I asked.

"Yes. Work no longer had any meaning for me," EUe explained. "I could have gone to the nectar fields, but why bother? I had no reason to go on living, and it would have been shameful to let myself die an invalid."

"I don't understand," I said.

"I refused to work, and threw myself into the circuit. I thought I had the mettle to die an honorable death, but I didn't. I fought and fought, not knowing why, until one day, I became champion. That's why I chose to become a Gatherer. Gathererhood entails dreamshard implantation, and since most candidates fail to survive implantation, I figured that might be a more reliable way to off myself. Unfortunately, I survived that, too."

"Why would you throw your life away like that?" I asked him. "Didn't you have any friends or family to rely on?"

He shook his head. "My views were considered dishonorable and cowardly—kwekek. Not only was I kwekek, I was outspoken about it, too, and that ended up making me into a pariah. The scholars' castebund wanted nothing to do with an indolent kwekek like me, and, even if they had, I wouldn't have wanted it. One of my closest friends, UeUe-taka, lost his life in a duel over a contested patent. You'd be surprised how often that sort of thing happened." He shook his head. "Unfortunately, our castebund refused to take sides in the dispute. They didn't want to rustle the feathers of Ekek eHu's scholars' castebund."

"A duel?"

"It's a common method of resolving disputes," EUe said. "It doesn't need to be violent, but it often is." EUe lifted his bottle up to his beak. I watched through the glass as his darting tongue flicked up the last drops of nectar alcohol. He set the empty bottle on the table, next to V. "You have to understand, Genneth, this was the essence of the world I came from: violence where there shouldn't have been any." He looked around. "Places like this were meant to hold the spillovers."

As he set the glass onto the table, I decided to ask a more challenging question.

"Why are you here, EUe?"

"hUen-dE," he replied. EUe flicked his tongue out of his beak, lolling it against the edges, as if he was scraping off something rotten.

"What is hUen-dE?" I asked.

"Not what," V said, "Who."

"Alright: who was she?"

"A fellow Dreamshard Gatherer," EUe explained.

"Dreamshard?"

"It's how the Rubies rose to dominance. hU-U-te the Great discovered a portal to the realm of the gods: the Great Dream. We harvested shards of divine power—the dreamshards—and brought them back to be used to benefit the people. However, as the ancients went deeper into the Great Dream, they discovered that the dreamshards' own power was needed to survive within the Great Dream for more than a moment. That power could be gained by implanting one of the shards within your body, but… it was an incredibly risky procedure. Only the strongest had any chance of survival. Though there were rare exceptions, nearly all the Gatherers were like me: twEfE who had given themselves up to the arena, only to end up winning a championship. hUen-dE was one of them."

"How did you go from there to here?" I asked.

"When the Blight came to our world, it did not come alone. The Vyx can with it, desperate for my people's aid." EUe chuckled; it was a chipper, lively sound. "Though we couldn't save my world, we were able to save each other." He gently ran his hand over V, who made a soft, digital purr in response. "V became a generation ship—the first mothership of the Vyxit fleet—and transported hUen-dE, myself, and a couple hundred other survivors off UlU."

"EUe…" V said.

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EUe tweeted. "It's alright, V."

"What's the matter?"

"I gave my life to ensure the ship launched safely. But V, here, saved me. He gave me the gift of digital life and brought me into his world." EUe gestured at our surroundings.

"The Network," I said.

EUe clacked his beak in approval. "Precisely. And while I helped lead the first generations of Vyxit from within the Network, hUen-dE and the other Gatherers led our ever-growing people out in the real world. I'm the ghost in the machine, on board an unwitting generation ship. It's like something right out of fiction."

I opened my mouth to say the obvious: "But something went wrong."

"hUen-dE wanted to destroy EUe, but she couldn't," V said. "He was already too deeply enmeshed in the Network. My Network."

"Yes," EUe said, "so, instead, she conspired to have me sealed away. She had the K'rrt do her dirty work for her."

"Wait, your Network?" I asked.

"I was the last of his kind," V said. "The rest of the Vyx perished with the twEfE, victims of the Bligh. All the Vyx in the fleet are my offspring. We reproduce asexually."

I shook my head. "Wait… but why would she do all this? What was her goal?"

"To make me a martyr for her cause," EUe said, clenching his fists. "She pinned my 'death' on the Vyxit rebels. The revolt was swiftly put down, and—from what V was able to tell me before he got locked out of the Network altogether—she's gone on to consolidate her rule with an iron fist."

"What does this have to do with the d'zd?" I asked.

"I think hUen-dE is just tying up loose ends."

"What do you mean?"

"How much do you know of d'zd geopolitics?" EUe asked.

"I know there's the Vvz'zsh of the Northlands, and the T'dzd'ch Dominion—an offshoot of the Southland powers—that is trying to colonize the North. The Dominion did horrible things to their own people, and were even worse to the Vvz'zsh, whom they were trying to exterminate. Of course, none of this makes much sense: the Vvz'zsh view the K'rrt as heroes. To make things even crazier, the K'rrt were the ones in charge of the Dominion!"

"Were you able to learn anything from the K'rrt?" EUe asked.

I spent a moment in thought. "Yes. They said they wanted vengeance."

EUe sank into the recessed step in the floor. "The tragedy of it all…"

"Would you mind enlightening me?" I asked.

"Let me tell you a story." EUe closed his eyes. "Long, long ago, there was a people, the d'zd. They split into two groups: children of the rugged north, and kingdom builders of the lush south. They hated each other for their beliefs. You see, they had the ability to move their soul from one body to another."

"The Vvz'zsh called that Passage," I interjected.

"Yes," EUe answered. "And when our fleet arrived to help them, it was too late. The Blight had nearly devoured their world. But then, the Northerners did something extraordinary: they used their greater mastery of Passage to transfer souls directly into the Vyx network, and not just for their own people, but for the Southlanders, too."

"Why?" I said. "I thought they hated each other."

"They did, but they hated the violence more. Their leaders hoped the gesture might be the first step toward a lasting peace. In the Northerners' magnanimity, they focused on Archiving the Southlanders, first." EUe shook his head. "After most of the Southlanders were Archived, the Southlanders that had yet to be Archived slaughtered the remaining Northlander shamans capable of Passage, to prevent the rest of the Northlanders from being Archived."

"They wanted to ensure their demographic supremacy going forward," V said.

So, Dzrtk was right. The South had betrayed them.

"When the archived Northlanders discovered this betrayal, it nearly reignited their old animosity for the Southlanders," EUe continued.

"And that's when you stepped in to broker peace," I said.

The pieces were falling into place.

"Yes, I did," EUe said. "Or, almost."

"Almost?"

"Not all the Northlanders were willing to set aside their anger."

Light-bulb!

"Let me guess," I said, "those were the K'rrt?"

EUe nodded. "They hated their kin as much as the Southlanders. They saw the peace as betrayal, and hated me for helping to bring it about. hUen-dE offered to alter the Archive so that the K'rrt would be its eternal rulers in exchange for sealing me away."

"How did you learn this?" I asked.

"They were gloating about it when they trapped us in here!" V said.

"They were perfectly happy to screw me over and cut their people off from the rest of Vyxit just to get their revenge. This Dominion of theirs must be how they decided to enact their vengeance. From the sound of it, they're tormenting the Southlanders with a reign of tyranny while exterminating their 'traitorous' kin and keeping their Archive cut off from the rest of the Network."

Holy shnoodle!

"And hUen-dE secretly double-crossed them by setting up a time bomb in their Archive's climate," I said, "one that will eventually wipe them all out." I let my epiphany wrest its way out of my beak. "And because the K'rrt are too scornful of the other Vyxit to call for help, no one will notice their Archive's demise until it's too late, and when it's over, no one will know the truth: that you're still alive."

"Uka-yen always told me to watch out for her," EUe said. "'She's a devious one', he'd say." He slammed his clenched fist on the table. "Dammit! Maybe if I'd listened to him, none of this would have happened."

"Was Uka-yen someone… important to you?" I asked.

"More than words can say," EUe replied. "I just wish I'd shown more gratitude to him while he was still alive. I was so bottled up, back then. He wanted me to be more outgoing, but I struggled with it."

I nodded in commiseration and sympathy. "Sometimes, as awful as it is, we need loss to teach us the true value of what we once had."

He stared at me with a deep silence. "Yes, yes we do."

I huffed. "EUe, thank you for explaining these things to me. I… I just have one question."

"Yes?" he asked.

"Why would anyone want to seal you away? Why did hUen-dE have it out for you?"

"Oh, that?" EUe spread his wings. "That's easy."

"Wha?"

"I believe you said the D'zd told you some traitors among the Vyxit tried to take over the rest of the fleet?"

I nodded. "Yes, that's right."

EUe clacked his beak and then placed a hand on his white leather breastplate. "Well, it wasn't a takeover. It was an uprising—and I was its leader."

And though it was somewhat difficult to tell with the beak in the way, I could have sworn EUe was grinning.

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