Author's Note: I mispredicted how easy it would be to write the next chapter, and can't promise whether it'll be out in one week or two (or whether the first half will be out in one week, and the second half later). But in the meantime, here's a nice long interlude to tide everyone over.

As always, please leave comments and reviews, either here or over on r/rational! Your feedback keeps me going. 3

Interlude 23

In the fading light of the final night, when all the scurrying about had reached an almost unbearable frenzy, Artem-Amorra-Gahar set aside his duty and walked out beneath the stars.

Only for a short while—a seventh of a seventh of a turn, though the slow and ponderous rotation of the ancient planet made that somewhat longer than it would have been, on the world of his youth. A seventh of a seventh, and then he would return.

He knew the end was coming. That the dawn would bring with it his third—and final—defeat. The Abomination could not be stopped—could at best be checked, delayed, its inexorable advance hampered and inconvenienced.

They all knew it, a grim unease coloring the eib, cut through with the raw and trembling fear of the younglings. Artem had felt the current swirl around him in the meeting, the suck and crash of uncautious thought. He had delayed his moment of rest for their sake, stayed behind to touch tails with them, held steady as the waves broke against him—reformed and broke again, and again—settled finally into something resembling calm. It was the least he could do—the least, and also the most, as was always the case, his hooves guided as they ever were by the straight and narrow Path.

But now, with no urgent duty before him until morning, he slipped away, the eib quieting behind him, his thoughts sinking into the deep and endless serenity of the hirac.

There had never been any question of the younglings abandoning their position, of course. Even if Artem had not been there to steady them—they knew what came for them, and they knew what must be done.

Time. It was always time that was needed, in the end—time for the people to gather, time for them to prepare, time for them to escape. And time—this time—it was an Ellimist's gift. They could give it, but they could not take it. If they tried to grasp it for themselves—if they fled, and by their dereliction allowed the tide of war to sweep past unhindered—

No, Artem was sure of it—sure of them, even the newest and least-tempered among them, the mud-hooved ensigns scarcely half a revolution past the ritual of starlight. Even they could see it, must see it.

They would not have wavered.

In front of him, the ground rose, the long, gentle slope that led to the high forgotten city. But Artem was in no mood for dead things—strange things—the hard, unforgiving geometry of ancient alien relics. He turned instead, following the stream at the base of the hill until he was a quarter of the way around, out of sight of the brightly-lit base. Only then, as the shadows folded comfortably around him, did he raise his stalks to the faint spilt-white of the Great Path.

Tomorrow, Artem thought.

Tomorrow, he would die. Die, or be taken.

This was comforting, in its own way. Artem knew what to do, when one saw the end coming—had been forearmed by his culture with the proper pattern-of-thought, the right ritual-of-action. There was no uncertainty, no confusion, no desperate grasping.

There, beneath the stars, Artem-Amorra-Gahar began his final remembering.

There, beneath the stars, Artem-Amorra-Gahar began the delest.

He started with the creature—never far from his thoughts—the strange and wizened figure that had first appeared in his seventh summer.

There had been nothing else special about the day. No unusual adventures, no sudden crises. Indeed, even the encounter itself had been entirely mundane. Artem had not realized how odd it all had been until he had tried to tell his family about it in the scoop that evening, and been so thoroughly disbelieved that he had almost come to think he had imagined it.

He had been grazing alone in the soft, succulent foliage on the edge of the marsh when his stalks had caught a flash of blue against the black and green. Thinking it was one of his friends playing a game of sneak-and-search, he had risen to tree-stretch and prepared to give chase, only to pull up short as a small, bipedal figure stepped out from behind a fallen log.

It had two arms, two legs, and a head held bulb-fashion atop a slender, almost delicate neck. Its skin was blue—darker than Artem's own, at the time, but lighter than that of his father. It was hairless save for the top of its head, where long, white strands half-covered a pair of pointed ears. It had seemed old, somehow, though it moved smoothly and easily—like a kafit bird on its sixth metamorphosis.

But most of all, Artem had noticed its eyes. They had hardly seemed like eyes at all, deep black and shimmering with starlight. He remembered thinking that perhaps they were not eyes—that perhaps they were windows, portals—that by looking through them, he was seeing beyond the creature, beyond the sky, peering somehow all the way out into the vast expanse where day and night held court together.

They had stood there for a time, each of them silent and unmoving, each beholding the other. After its first step out of hiding, the creature had not taken another, and Artem, too, kept his distance. He had spoken, sending a curious greeting out into the eib, but the creature had only blinked.

Artem had spoken again, louder the second time, and the creature had shivered, its shoulders trembling in the way Artem knew to mean confusion.

It was after Artem's third attempt that the creature replied—not in the eib, but in the stick-speak of a forest creature, all smacks and pops and slithering hisses. It spoke at length, long enough for Artem's hearts to beat seven-by-seven times, and then seven-by-seven again. When it finally fell silent, it was Artem's turn to give a shake of un-understanding, to which the creature responded with what seemed to Artem like an exact repeat of its entire warbling call.

‹I don't understand,› Artem had said. ‹I'm sorry.›

And with that, the creature had shaken its shoulders again, and then turned and walked away—not quickly, as if it were trying to flee, but calmly. Casually. As if they had simply passed one another on a path, each going quietly about his own business.

Artem had considered following, but there was little fun in a game of chase played at walking speed, and in the meantime, he had spotted a patch of sweetblossoms in the rich soil at the water's edge—

The creature had appeared again three revolutions later—a shock to Artem, who by that time had completely forgotten their first encounter, until the sight of eyes like the night sky brought the memory roaring back.

Yet that second meeting had been scarcely different than the first. Again, Artem had been wandering alone—this time on the slopes of the rolling hills behind his family's scoop. Again, the flash of blue. Again, the weighing stillness.

Artem was older that time, his thinking less wild and magical.

‹Where did you come from?› he had asked.

The creature had cocked its head.

‹Are you the same one I met in the marsh?›

Silence, and stillness.

‹Are you an alien?›

Again the shiver of confusion, and then the creature had spoken once more, its face-flaps slapping grotesquely, the sounds rolling and clicking like a chorus of insects. They were the same sounds, Artem was sure—even after all the time that had passed, the pattern was still lurking deep within in his mind, and the hisses and pops matched the memory exactly.

Then the creature had turned, turned and begun to walk away, and this time Artem would have followed for sure, were it not for the fact that at that very moment the sky turned sudden fire, the air above filling with streaks of light that outshone the sun. Terrified, Artem had dropped to river-run, the strange creature forgotten, and dashed home as quickly as his legs could carry him.

That was the beginning of his first war, stored in his memory as the Kyril Insurrection, though in rare moments of quiet reflection he sometimes recalled—always with fresh surprise—his father's claim that the home cluster had struck first, unprovoked. That there had been no insurrection, and that indeed the colony of Kyril had had fewer ships on the day of the attack than it had at its founding.

But whatever the truth of the matter—and in the end, it didn't matter—the ships of Kyril had been destroyed, the government dissolved and replaced. And Artem had been taken, along with most of the other youth—taken and enrolled in the training system of the central forces.

It was not as drastic of a change as he might have predicted, if he had been given the time to do so. Certainly he missed his parents, and the familiar sights and smells and tastes of home. But he had been only one revolution shy of conscription into the colonial forces anyway, and if anything, the experience of the home cluster was more pleasant than what he would have endured on Kyril. While he never tasted the grass of the homeworld itself, he spent his time as a cadet traveling from dome ship to dome ship, surrounded by comrades, the cycles filled with delicious food, fascinating classwork, satisfying exercise, and an endless stream of novel assignments. Soon, Artem knew how to field-strip a shredder, pilot a starfighter, navigate by pulsar, manually calculate and program a Z-space jump, set a broken limb, safely amputate a limb that could not be saved, build shelter and water collection/purification systems with nothing but his tail in twice-seven different biomes, identify every recorded sapient species—extinct or extant—by sight, smell, and sound, and—most importantly of all—how to tackle daunting and unfamiliar problems with determination and measured confidence, even if the solution meant acquiring an entirely new skill set. When it came time for the ritual of starlight, and Artem severed himself from the chorus to think his thoughts in solitude, he chose his path without hesitation, affirming his conscription and reentering military service as a willing volunteer.

The one thing he did not learn, from his training—the one thing that still could not quite be taught, no matter how clever the instructors, nor how realistic the exercise—was what it was like to actually take part in battle. To truly put his life on the line—to kill or be killed—to knowingly walk toward a situation in which he would ultimately have to kill or be killed, rather than to take any of the infinite avenues of escape.

Yet this, too, proved less of a leap than he might have thought, had he ever bothered to guess at its size.

For one, his first battle was indeed very much like the simulations, his role ancillary, the danger indirect—it was not until his fourth that he found himself in a position to see death directly, with his own eyes, and not until his seventh that he was obligated to deal it, with his own tail.

For another, he was always—as every Andalite always was—cradled in the warm, intimate embrace of the eib, his own thoughts able to drift only so far before the gravitational tug of the others pulled him back. He was surrounded by veterans, and so he became a veteran—not merely through experience itself, but through the way his superiors' demeanor and perspective informed and influenced his own digestion of the events unfolding around him. It was a process of coloration, of homogenization, all of them sliding together toward an equilibrium that shifted constantly—but only subtly. There was inertia in the mood of Artem's comrades, and for Artem, there was no reason not to let that inertia sweep him up and carry him along.

And so there were battles, and more battles, brief moments of electric intensity punctuated by endless stretches of boring routine. It was the purpose of a strong and confident military—his superiors repeated over and over—to ensure that the minimum number of battles need actually be fought—that their enemies would see the futility of resistance, predict the outcome of provocation, and choose the path of peace.

Yet it seemed to Artem—

—in his quieter moments, his lonelier moments, of which there were very few—

—it seemed to Artem that there were an awful lot of battles anyway, somehow. That even the rate of one new uprising every three revolutions or so was—high, for a civilization that spanned fewer than a hundred worlds and had scarcely a billion members.

At least the battles tended to be quick and easy, the uprisings confidently, almost casually subdued—

There was a thread of insight there, but it was gossamer, delicate, insubstantial—hard to see clearly, and even harder to grasp. Try as he might, Artem never quite managed to make anything of it before any given reverie came to an end. Always he found himself back among his companions, his confusion draining away, subsumed by borrowed conviction.

To be clear, there were enemies. True ones, external ones, aliens whose belligerence threatened the peace and stability of the entire Andalite commonwealth—seditionists and loyalists alike.

There were the nomadic Ongachic, whose total military might was dwarfed by even the smallest of the Andalites' twenty-one fleets, but who frequently launched massed attacks at convenient targets, overwhelming a border-world's defenses before fading dishonorably back into the deep.

There were the Skrit Na, who seemed oblivious to the concept of territory, and whose behavior was mostly innocuous, but whose vast world-hulls frequently harbored hostile forces, deadly pathogens, untested and dangerous alien technology.

There were the Hawjabran, who welcomed Andalite commerce and allowed free and unmolested passage through their systems, but who occasionally responded with sudden, savage force to perceived transgressions that they would not—or perhaps could not—explain, after which they would just as abruptly revert to tranquil hospitality as if nothing had happened.

It was in Hawjabran space that Artem had first tasted defeat. It had been two revolutions since his reenlistment, and seven since the most recent Hawjabran attack. Protectionary forces had been drawn down accordingly—optimistically, as it turned out—leaving only one war vessel for every seven commercial or personal ships.

The Hawjabran had attacked a merchant convoy—destroyed one of three ships outright, and were holding two others in place, attempting to board. Artem's frigate had been dispatched, with orders to stabilize the situation until more reinforcements could be mustered.

Tensions had run high during the brief Z-space journey. Hawjabran space was a low-security posting, and the crew, while technically qualified, had grown relaxed and complacent. They were out of practice.

They were also outraged. Artem's war-prince, for reasons known only to himself, had chosen to broadcast the unfiltered incoming communications from the besieged convoy on the shipwide channel. They had all heard the panicked cries of wounded and frightened civilians, heard the repeated insistence that the convoy had done nothing wrong, had not deviated from the same course they had followed on a hundred previous journeys, the Hawjabrans had simply attacked, without provocation—

A part of Artem had hesitated—wasn't that simply how Hawjabran aggression always began?—but the rest of him had been swept up in his fellows' righteous fury, and they came out of Z-space with their fingers on the trigger—

—only to find that eight more Hawjabran warships had converged on the convoy's position.

The battle had been brief, and violent, Hawjabran disruptors carving up the ship's engine and weapons arrays, Hawjabran spacetroopers slicing their way in through the dome in seven-times-seven places. They had lost atmosphere—lost orientation—lost the cohesion and clarity they had felt, en masse, just moments earlier. All had been chaos and confusion and death.

Artem had lost consciousness, had awakened alone in a tiny Hawjabran cell, bloody and bruised. It was a sparse and primitive affair—cold synthetic stone beneath his hooves and above his stalks, and a thick wrought-metal grid separating his patch of floor from that of the adjacent prisoners.

They had been Andalites, mostly, the facility clearly having been hastily repurposed, many of the other inmates doubled or even tripled up. But there were only slightly fewer Hawjabrans, and a scattering of other aliens.

The wizened blue biped had been four cells away.

They had noticed one another almost instantly, the strange creature's attentiveness dispelling Artem's uncertainty—affirming that it was not, for instance, merely another member of the same species. Artem had called out to it—uselessly, as before—had spoken to it at length, asked his fellow captive Andalites for information, begged the scattered other aliens for help.

None had any to offer.

Late that night, as the cells quieted and the cold crept in, the creature had repeated its curious string of sounds—twice, each recitation taking precisely the same amount of time. Artem had again cast his thoughts about the prison, seeking any who understood, or who could identify the language, or the creature, or its origin.

Again, none could.

They had been extracted three cycles later, thanks to a diplomatic arrangement whose details Artem never learned. Hawjabran guards had removed them from their cells, one by one, delivering each of the captured warriors to a holding location from which they were retrieved by an Andalite military transport. The creature, seeing them come for Artem, had given its strange soliloquy one last time, though they had been long out of earshot before the creature could finish.

Artem had hoped, perhaps, to secure the creature's release—to bring it aboard ship, where it might be studied and questioned.

But two full cycles passed before he had the ear of an officer of sufficient rank, and that officer was uninterested. Unknown species were not common, precisely, but neither were they unheard of, and two previous sightings—on a border world that had rebelled against the central government, no less—were not sufficient to make this one particularly worth investigating. In fact—now that the officer considered it—was it not possible that Artem had imagined those alleged previous sightings?

Artem conceded that it was indeed possible.

It was easy, after all, for childhood memories to deceive—was it not?

Artem agreed that this was so.

Would it be a prudent expenditure of military resources—especially given the tension in the wake of this unfortunate incident—to attempt to persuade the Hawjabran government to provide access to this lone prisoner of theirs?

Artem did not think that it would be, no.

Were there any other ways that this humble military servant could be useful to this young repatriated hero, before they each returned to the ordinary duties that were currently on hold during this conversation?

There were not.

And so Artem found himself returned to active duty as if nothing had happened—as if the entire incident had been nothing more than a pebble striking the surface of a pond. He was assigned to a new ship, with a new commanding officer. Soon enough, his preoccupation with the creature receded, buried beneath the thousand tiny distractions of military life.

There were drills.

There were inspections.

There were double shifts and training exercises, mock battles and their corresponding ceremonies. There was combat practice, and target practice, and flight practice, and survival practice, grazing time and resting time and unstructured time, new recruits and new deployments and new duties, the sweet anticipation of shore leave and the exquisite, almost dizzying first taste of grass grown under an alien sun.

And always, there was war itself. War like summer storms, and battles like flashes of lightning within those storms—rare and radiant and ephemeral, slices of time so thin they nearly vanished, compared to the vast stretches between them, and yet somehow those moments outweighed and outshone everything else. Somehow those moments were the story, and all the rest mere contrast.

There was the day that Artem's task force, on routine patrol, just happened to arrive in orbit around Kahani mere moments before an Ongachic raid. Outnumbered four to one, they nevertheless held strong, laying waste to a third of the invading force and driving the survivors back into the black.

There was the disastrous first contact with the Kelbrid, eight Andalite ships vanishing into dust before Artem made the key connection that allowed their engineers to neutralize the aliens' shield-penetrating antimatter beam. He had been summoned to the citadel for that one, and personally decorated by Chancellor Jaham-Estalan-Forlan. There was a youngling there, after the ceremony—an eager cadet brimming with surprisingly penetrating questions, who Artem had only realized much later had been Alloran-Semitur-Corass.

There was the time his squad had been ambushed groundside, during the investigation of the disappearance of a science vessel on a dark, frozen rock on the edge of Anati space. They had lost Ascalin-Oe-Salawan and Golubar-Ashul-Tahaylik in the initial salvo, but had rallied and fought their way out of the trap—had regrouped, rearmed, and hunted down every last one of the Nausicaan pirates that had thought them easy prey.

There was the Secession of the Seven, in which a coalition of colony worlds somehow suborned the commanders of nine whole fleets, declaring themselves independent of the central government. Artem had captained his own support vessel in that battle, with a crew of four under his command, and had taken orders directly from Alloran himself, after the flagship was destroyed and the young prodigy assumed tactical control.

There was the battle over Gara, after Alloran's Fall, seven Andalite dome ships against the full might of the newly ascendant Yeerk menace, a massive fleet of twenty-six stolen vessels piloted by slaves from six species and led by Seerow's own frigate (though mercifully with no Andalites aboard). They had won that one by the width of their tail blades, after which Gara had become a symbol of Andalite prowess, a rallying cry across the entire commonwealth.

Artem was proud of those battles, for the most part. Proud of their purpose, proud of his comrades' courage and skill, proud to be a working part of his people's grand machine.

He was even—though it was hard to express, and not something he spoke of openly—he was even proud of his own experience with sedition, for all that it had come to naught.

It had been three revolutions after the Secession of the Seven, when the reformations of Alloran were just beginning, and had not yet made themselves felt among the rank and file. Artem had been serving as the commodore of a three-vessel task force in the ninth fleet, assigned to guard the colony worlds of Ordin and Calomir from possible aggression by the nearby Naharans.

And guard them they did—but not from the Naharans. From the homeworld, which—shockingly—interpreted news of Calomir's independently negotiated trade agreement with Nahara as an act of rebellion, and sent an armada to seize power from the local governors. Artem's superior, Gafinilan-Estrif-Valad, had blockaded the armada in orbit, calling for clemency, arguing that no irreversible action should be taken until the situation could be clarified. The commander of the armada had fired, the ninth fleet had fired back, and with the speed of a spreading wildfire the entire sector was embroiled in civil war.

Artem's side had lost, in the end—Alloran, by now the vice-Chancellor and the de facto head of military strategy, had come to the system in person, and carved his way through the defectors like a tail blade through thick grass. Artem's own ship had been destroyed in pitched battle, though the crew had managed to evacuate—he had given the surrender-order to his other two vessels from inside an escape pod.

Yet he felt no shame. Neither at the defeat itself—it was Alloran, after all—nor at his overall decision to stand with Gafinilan and Calomir. The whole affair had been—confused, there was no other way to describe it, a war of accidents, a series of tragic mistakes. But Artem and the ninth fleet had acted with honor throughout, discharging their duty even as the central government hunted them for it.

Alloran had understood—Alloran, whose reforms would eventually tear the weed of rebellion out by its root, Alloran who saw that the root was insularity, the once-continuous eib shattered into fragments by the vast distances between worlds. A fragmented disunity that encouraged divergence, fueled an endless cycle of self-fulfilling suspicion and distrust.

Alloran seized the fraying threads of the commonwealth and rewove them, drawing the scattered worlds tighter and closer than ever before, reshaping the military into a vast circulatory system that ensured a constant exchange of people and ideas between every Andalite settlement, leaving none in isolation.

And he wove the ninth fleet in, as well—pardoned the survivors, reinstated their ranks, forbade any formal censure or permanent mark of record. His only punishment, as it were, was to disband them, distributing them evenly across the twenty remaining fleets, planting each of Gafinilan's veterans in loyalist soil.

Which is how Artem found himself the auxiliary commandant of the third largest military spaceport on Shiroyama, until quite recently the eighth-most-populous of the rimward colony worlds. There had been other events in between, of course—other battles, other victories (though thankfully far fewer once the Andalites ceased cutting their own backs every three revolutions). But it was Alloran who had set Artem on the path that had brought him to this moment, and it was Alloran's example he pondered as he turned his thoughts to what was coming.

Stain.

The black stain, spreading across the sky, all-consuming.

The Abomination.

It had come shockingly far already—farther and faster than Artem would have guessed. Shiroyama was not remote—was nearly a quarter of the distance inward along the path that ran from the edge of Andalite space to the homeworld. Yet all beyond it had fallen silent, and much behind it, too—empty, evacuated, the scattered millions packing into overcrowded dome ships, leaving only the warriors behind to face the darkness.

There were whispers, from the survivors of earlier battles—those who had been overlooked in the carnage, or who had fled the battlefield carrying the wounded (or who had simply fled). Rumors, which Artem's superiors had moved swiftly to quash—rumors made more frightening by the fact that his superiors had felt it necessary to quash them.

They said it was the Visser.

They said he had a million bodies.

They said that he was taking bodies—not merely enslaving them, Yeerk-fashion, but consuming them, somehow—that every body was the puppet of the same mind—that they all moved together, saw together, thought together.

If it was true, Artem ruminated—

—trying his best, as he sometimes did, to think like Alloran, to imagine himself cleverer than he had ever been, himself—

—if it was true, then there was no real hope in their current strategy. Falling back, delaying, holding the line—if the Abomination was feeding on the fallen of every battle, if it had access to the contents of a million Andalite minds—

Where was there to flee to?

How would they even manage it? How could they ever be confident that no one with the crucial knowledge would ever be taken? That none who had already been taken could rederive the answer?

Randomness, perhaps. Or perhaps they would simply fly so far that it would not be worth the bother to pursue—forfeit all they owned, all they knew.

The others, anyway. Artem's own fate lay here.

He rose to tree-stretch, looking up toward the stars with all four eyes—not to the glow of the Great Path, but to the orphans, the outliers—the billions of tiny sparks that stood separate from the stream.

All of them are separate, in truth—

Artem knew, but he chided the thought, gently, hushing it as if it were a child.

Those that stand apart, and those that stand together—the same components in opposite configuration—

He reached for insight—for epiphany—hoping, straining—

Nothing.

He did not know what to do, could not see the way out. Knew only the tired, ordinary wisdom—how to fight with courage, and die with honor.

Even if there was no point.

Even if nothing would be bought by his death. Just time—time that his people could not usefully spend, time that would soon trickle away.

For that matter, why hasn't it already? Why would an invading force proceed in an orderly fashion, star by star, when it could just as easily—

There was a sound in the air—a sound that his instincts told him should not have been there.

Instantly, Artem sank to root-lie, his tail held low and ready, one of his stalks turning to face the treeline where the sound had originated, the other pointing in the opposite direction.

He was a soldier, after all.

He waited, unmoving, for seven-times-seven heartsbeats.

Silence.

An animal, no more.

Artem knew that it was almost surely so, yet still he lingered, patient, disciplined. It was just such patience which had saved his life in the jungles of Secundus—

A part of him noted that he was still adrift in time—awash in memory—a lingering, reminiscent mood in the wake of the delest. Another part wondered—idly—almost defensively—if it might not be the creature—

It is not the creature.

No, of course not. But he had thought he had seen it here once before, shortly after he had first arrived—a flash of blue too narrow to be an Andalite, seen from the corner of his eye as it vanished behind a boulder—

It is not the creature.

Time passed.

Almost—almost Artem had tired of waiting, run dry of self-restraint. Seven more heartsbeats, and he would have stood, and chided himself, and begun to make his way back to the spaceport.

But the other moved first—a silent, shifting shadow. It stepped out into the open, and Artem tensed—

‹There will be no need for any of that.›

He was a soldier in his bones—had immediately recognized the figure as a stranger, and had been readying himself to strike. What innocent Andalite would be here, now, on this night of all nights, with death drawing near and the last shuttle gone two cycles past?

But he had not struck.

He could not strike.

Artem stood, willing himself to motion, commanding his limbs to move, but his body refused to answer, his muscles pretending stone.

‹What—› he began.

‹You have shown so very little interest in thought-speak,› the figure intoned, drawing closer in the starlight. ‹Perhaps because your physiology keeps it contained, stops it spilling over to the rest of your brain, the way it does in other species.›

Artem understood, then, his mind leaping ahead to what—in retrospect—was obvious.

The Abomination was not coming tomorrow.

The Abomination was already here.

Artem strained to move his tail blade—to force it toward his own head, deny the enemy his mind and body. If he were to fail to return—if his comrades were to come to alert—

If it takes me—

If it took Artem, it would take the entire planet. Would have no trouble doing so—could use Artem's knowledge and access to lower the shields, recall key ships, shut down communications—

‹But of course, that's merely a technical problem.›

The figure was in full view, now. It was larger than an Andalite, and darker, covered in scales that glittered as if they had been cut from the night sky—

Artem tried to close his eyes, but they did not obey.

I am the servant of the people, he thought, and—thankfully—the fear did not come.

I am the servant of my prince. I am the servant of honor.

Artem-Amorra-Gahar prepared himself for his fate.

The figure stretched out a hand, and something silver within it seemed to unfold—rose into the air and shot toward Artem's head. For a moment, he felt a surge of hope, of triumphant anticipation—for, like every Andalite, he had long since been fitted with implants to guard against infestation, neurotoxic gates that wrapped around his aural passageways—

But the object did not go for his ears. It shot straight for the space between his stalk eyes, instead—dug into the flesh there and began to spin, to drill, a mechanical whine giving way to the sound of shredding bone.

Artem-Amorra-Gahar screamed, and none heard but the Visser.