Summary: No-War, No-Factions AU. Festival of the Five: They were two stars circling a single gravitational point. One driven by faith, the other by desire. They came together only with the blessing of the Guiding Hand, and when they did all of Cybertron was caught in their orbit. They weren't destined for each other, but as Primus said: There is destiny, and then there is destiny.

Warnings: Sexual Content, including one (mild but detailed) tactile interfacing scene. Cannon-typical violence. Alien Religion and various issues thereof.

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Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

Part Two: Festival of Solomus cont…

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The shuttle ride to Altihex wasn't too bad, if only because they both used the time to catch up on their recharge. It was also uneventful, save for when Mirage was jolted from power save mode by an angry blat! of his comm system three joor in. He listened to less than a breem of his creator's angry ranting before muting the system and rolling over to get more sleep.

He woke again when the shuttle announced he would be landing at the Altihex airport soon. His systems spun up so fast it was a miracle he didn't overclock his engine. As it was Mirage was practically vibrating by the time the shuttle's wheels touched ground.

Everywhere he looked there were signs of the coming festival race. Decorations and lights, mechs stumbling around slightly drunkenly. More than that, there was an static in the air, a low-level ionization from so many excited mechs in a single city. Enforcers forced them to detour around one of the routes reserved for the Prime and Mirage couldn't even bring himself to care. There was so much to see and for the first time he was doing it without worry that his creator would notice and disapprove of his interest.

Virtue on the other hand just sniffed disdainfully at the inconvenience. Mirage had hoped that away from Virtus and Phantasm he'd take off the mask of being a copy of his creator and show something, but it seemed that Mirage had no luck in the universe. Virtue's EM field was a low-level charge of irritation at everything which flared to rigidly suppressed anger every time one of the celebrants stumbled too close to them. Oh yeah… this courtship was going to be horrible.

Fortunate they would only have this orn they'd have to put up with each other before the race; once they were back home Mirage could start trying to sabotage this courtship.

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The air was thick with excitement, a literally ionized atmosphere that ramped up everyone's anticipation. It stank of electricity and magnesium, so thick that it threatened to spontaneously ignite. Most of it originated with the crowd, since most of the contestants tended towards calmer, more analytical sparks. But even they weren't unaffected; Sunstorm's weren't the only set of wings or tires twitching or quite simply vibrating in place as the Prime took his place on the central podium to give his speech.

It was hard to focus on the Prime's words; Sunstorm could see the thick tangle of divine Will that was the Matrix. It was thickest in his chest, where it rested next to his spark, but his every movement left an afterimage of omens.

Sentinel Prime was tired, he could See in those omens. The burden of divinity was growing too heavy for his old spark to carry. There was not a single whisper of illness or frailty that anyone knew of; his frame was still strong and healthy even for one of their near-immortal race. It was his spark that suffered. It may yet be centuries before Mortilus came to return him to the Well, but Solomus had already chosen his moment, and finally Sunstorm could not bear to See it any longer. He looked away, already grieving for their lost Prime.

Fortunate for the seeker's attention span and for the electrified crowd, Prime kept the speech short. "We've come, once again, to the convergence of the gods. In the Beginning, Primus was One and He became splintered in the great battle against Chaos. Today all the moons converge, aligning with Cybertron and our Sun and Primus is One again for a short time. We, shortsighted mortals, have chosen this time to celebrate each of Primus' Fragments, to prove ourselves to each of them in their turns, and this vorn is the vorn we've chosen to dedicate to Solomus, Wisdom Incarnate."

Prime leaned forward, now addressing the racers rather than the crowd. "Most of you have come believing you can solve the puzzles Solomus will place before you. You race to prove yourselves to your loves and your gods. Each of you has my blessing in this endeavor. And if there is only one piece of advice that Solomus would pass to you it is this: remember that Knowledge is not Wisdom."

As the crowd and racers all erupted in cheers, a robust tank-alt painted in two-toned purple — the priest — stepped up to give the final blessing. The moons started moving into place, one — the one that was Solomus' physical form, as Cybertron itself was Primus' — slowly coming between Cybertron and the sun. Excitement built again.

"Racers to your marks!"

Unlike the other races, they didn't crowd together at the starting line. Instead they were spread out across the stadium, far enough away from each other that if they were inclined to talk their way through the riddles they couldn't be overheard. Over fifty scientists, a mix of car, tank and deep-space shuttle alts, and one military caste seeker, arranged neatly on the stadium floor.

This, the waiting, was only the first challenge. The anticipation made him want to fly, every instinct whispering excitement-fly melding and merging with how the almost cordite-like scent generated by the crowd practically screamed danger-fly-fight. But this was a familiar challenge to him, one he faced with every race he entered. He held himself to the ground, even as his turbines spun, ignited, already bleeding heat into the air and only a single command from rocketing thrust as well. For the race of Espistermus, it was harder with the crowd and the turbines of sixty seekers adding to the noise and the scent and the EM fields of so many flight frames all resonating with fly, fly, fly. Hardest of all, regardless of which Festival it was was controlling the radiation that was his namesake. He could flare as bright as a star under these conditions, brilliant and destructive, but he held it in. Only a flicker of glow escaped his plating.

Finally the artillery-alt brought here for the purpose, fired his blank shell into the sky, signaling the start of the race. The massive boom! of the shell firing was so familiar to his military processor that instinct and training and pure undiluted reaction had him startling into flight before he'd even registered that his communications suite had successfully received the riddles he was supposed to be solving.

That first burst of excited release expended, he brought himself down on a nearby rooftop and opened the message.

The Book had given him an answer that no atheist could anticipate. Something that could not be found in any science-caste research paper or calculated by any secondary hard drive dedicated to mathematics: there were five symbols, five patterns the race of Solomus followed each named for one of the gods. Each had eight points — the end goals of the riddles and the start/finishing point at the stadium — and were chosen randomly, but did not repeat until all five had been used. The last three times he'd entered this race he'd followed the scientists and flown the patterns of Primus, Solomus, and Espistermus, recognizing them only in hindsight. He'd been unable to solve the riddles for himself and so had lost the race to the scientist he'd followed from the air. He'd expected to use this observation to win his fifth race, when all but one of the patterns had been flown.

But this was not his fifth race of Solomus; it was his fourth. There were two patterns to choose from.

And he needed to solve at least one of the riddles to find out the scale of the pattern, the distance between each of the eight.

Desperately he skimmed the riddles. They were as incomprehensibly arcane as they had been the first three times he'd done this. The first was a thirty-line mathematical equation. Experience told him the answer would be a seventeen-to-twenty digit planetary coordinate, but his processor did not have the capacity to solve that equation quickly. The second was a word problem with four different answers; the clue he'd get when he reached the first checkpoint would narrow them down, but that was useless for his purpose.

The timer counted down as he went over the riddles one by one, searching for one — just one! — he was capable of solving.

The sixth… the sixth was a light spectrum, dark lines marking the exact chemical composition of the substance burned to create the light, as unique as an individual's spark scan.

Chemistry was no more Sunstorm's strong suit than mathematics was, but light. His alpha ability was intimately tied to light and that he knew with the same instinctive understanding as his own flight systems. More so even. And that spectrum… he looked around, the lights of Altihex shining in the shadow of the convergence… There! The beacon on top of Tower Stargazer, over in the nobles' housing quarter.

Immediately his navigation systems started plotting out the potential pathways, using the stadium as the starting point and the Tower as the sixth. He had his scale, his distance, but there were still two patterns to choose from. One was correct, a chance to match the speed of his thrusters against the speed of the scientists' processors, and the other only another dismal failure. And there was no way to know which of the two it was; he'd have to guess. Frustration-fueled radiation lashed the empty air around him. He had a message. He had to win this.

A glint caught his optic. Something semi-metallic reflecting his flare.

A credit chit of the sort used by the merchant caste to trade resources back and forth. Empty and abandoned it lay on the rooftop beneath his turbines. How it got there he could not possibly guess. But something about it made Prime's advice come back to him, the same words that he'd admonished Hotlink with while he studied the patterns: Knowledge is not wisdom.

In a contest for the favor of the gods, could there ever be a better answer than faith?

The chit was dull and inert to his Sight. No divine guidance prompted him to pick it up and weigh it in his hands. He ran his fingers over it several times. On one side was the blank screen that had once displayed what it was worth. On the other was an etching of Altihex's city crest. The gods watched as they did all the racers, but the chit remained only plain metal. It was his choice if he was to use it or not.

Calmness settled into his spark. Faith was not about simply allowing himself to be led by the gods, moving only when he saw their influence, but also making his decisions and trusting his fate to their hands even when there was nothing to See. He tossed the credit chit and watched it flip over several times in the air.

It seemed to take an eternity, a vorn passing with each tiny revolution. He tracked it with targeting systems that could shoot a target the size of a glitchmouse while flying faster than the speed of sound and that certainly didn't help speed it up. It followed its leisurely arc up, then down and he moved in slow motion to catch it.

It flipped one last time, flaring with the Will of the divine as it did so, before he caught it.

Had that been Solomus' guidance or one of Adaptus' tricks? He couldn't tell.

But if he doubted now he was back to where he'd started, debating uselessly over a choice he had no way of verifying before he was committed to it. He'd had faith when he'd decided to flip the chit; he would have faith now.

Smoothly he rose up into the air, transforming to his jet-mode as he did so, and accelerated. The gods had given him the chance to deliver his message; now he just had to win it. This vorn he would trace the pattern of Adaptus across the sky. A good omen for the beginning of the changes he'd Seen in the Pool.

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tbc