The clustered battleships grasped the burning trunks with thorny branches, then rose upward until they uprooted the trees. Inside the verdani wood, the newborn faeros thrashed and fought, knowing they could not win, could not escape. Beneto and the other verdani battleships rose far above the worldforest canopy, dragging the sacrificial trees into the rarefied atmosphere, passing once more through the wental-infused thunderheads.

Beneto took the tainted and doomed trees far, far from Theroc.

Originally, after the defeat of the hydrogues, all of the verdani treeships had departed from Theroc in what should have been a majestic seeding journey, never to return. Though Beneto and his comrades had been called back to assist Theroc, they remembered what they had seen along the way — and Beneto knew of a perfect place where he could dispose of these treacherous young faeros.

The burning verdani battleships flew at breakneck speed, as if they could outrun the agony from the elemental flames. They swiftly approached what had once been a binary star system; one of the stars, a blue giant, had exploded in a supernova, leaving behind an ultra-dense remnant.

A black hole.

Its companion star had also swollen, becoming a red giant now. The black hole’s gravity pulled streamers of loose gas from the red giant’s outer layers, siphoning it in an ever-accelerating spiral down to the infinite vanishing point.

Dragging the fiery, uprooted forest through space, they followed the river of hot gases being pulled from the red giant. The syrupy threads of gravity pulled them closer, and soon their grip would be irresistible. The living flames within their treeship bodies became frantic, blazing brighter, struggling to get away. The additional shockwave of pain inside Beneto made Celli cry out, far away on Theroc.

Although his treeship flew in a procession of inferno-infested worldtrees, he remained connected with his little sister. Though the flaming verdani battleships could barely endure their pain, they kept the young faeros leashed within their wooden forms. Ravenous living flames continued to eat away at the branches, and Beneto knew the treeships had to hurry before they succumbed. He could not let the faeros loose now.

Through telink, he saw Celli standing in a scorched meadow surrounded by the wental-drenched worldforest. She blinked once, looking skyward, and when she blinked again, she was with him surrounded by the empty gulf of space. He knew she could feel the searing damage in his heartwood, his bloodsap, his outspread branches. He could not hide it.

Many green priests could not bear to maintain a telink connection, but Celli’s love for her brother gave her the strength to endure the pain. She refused to let go, and even as he raced across the gulf of space, he could feel the hot tears burning down her cheeks, hotter than the faeros fire in his heartwood.

The giant, thorny ships swirled around the black hole’s vortex. He and his companions released the uprooted trees, and one by one, they vanished with silent gasps, telink echoes of both dismay and victory. One at a time, the remaining verdani battleships spiraled in, passed the event horizon, and dropped into the blackness.

As each one disappeared, he knew that Celli could feel a permanent loss. She sucked in great breaths, no longer aware of her surroundings in the meadow. “Beneto. ” Hearing her, he drew strength from her companionship.

Beneto had done what he needed to do. He had dragged the faeros away from Theroc and saved the rest of the trees; he had brought the fiery elementals to a place from which they could not escape to cause further harm. He felt Celli shaking as she lowered herself to the singed ground. His sister would grieve, but she understood what Beneto had accomplished. She loved him, and she was loved. Love and hope had the power to heal. She and Solimar had taught the verdani the truth of that. Beneto was glad.

Celli turned to Solimar, buried her face against his muscular chest, and let the sobs come. She knew it was over.

In the last instant before he passed the point of gravitational no return, Beneto embraced the distant worldforest again with his mind and poured himself into it. His pain dissolved as his worldtree body fell into clean ash that mixed with the cosmic dust and gases. then swirled down forever.

20

Hyrillka Designate Ridek’h

The entire population of Ildira could not hide from the faeros, but they scrambled for whatever protection they could find. Young Ridek’h, the true Designate of Hyrillka, took shelter deep in the old mines along with Prime Designate Daro’h.

Digger kithmen worked to expand the tunnels and create large grottoes in the bowels of the mountain, as well as numerous new escape passages, should they be needed. Watchmen stood at posts outside the cave openings, always alert for faeros fireballs.

Ridek’h preferred to sit under the overhang, staring across the sunlit openness, trying to come up with some solution that he could offer the Prime Designate. On Hyrillka — the planet he supposedly ruled — the great, windy plains had been used for agriculture. He wasn’t meant to live underground in tunnels. No Ildiran was.

Though engineers had brought blazers to light the underground chambers, it had become Ridek’h’s habit to slip out and use surreptitiously gathered brushwood to build a modest fire — asafe fire. Sitting by the bright flames outside the mine entrance, he looked out into the never-ending daylight of multiple suns, and contemplated. Though he was no more than a young man with little experience who had become Designate completely by accident, Ridek’h was determined to help.

When the ten thousand Ildirans who had attempted to escape in a single warliner had lost their race against the faeros, he had felt the dagger of pain as all those innocents were incinerated, their soulfires stolen. Ridek’h had considered going with them, but more than a million of his displaced people were here on Ildira, and he would not leave until he found a way to save them.

While he was deep in thought, Tal O’nh joined him. Oftentimes he and the blind man sat side by side for hours without speaking, just drawing strength from each other’s company. The veteran’s face was still scarred and burned by the faeros; one socket was empty, and the other eye was milky and sightless, partially covered by a shriveled lid.

Upon becoming the new Hyrillka Designate, Ridek’h had gone to visit his planet and all the splinter colonies in the Horizon Cluster, accompanied by Tal O’nh and a septa of warliners. Their encounter with an enraged Rusa’h and his obedient fireballs had left all of the warliners’ crews dead, two of the warliners destroyed, and the tal’s eyesight blasted away.

Blindness would have driven most Ildirans insane, but O’nh was strong. Outside the mine opening, the orange glow of the small fire played across his face, though he couldn’t see it. “I can endure,” he told Ridek’h. “Long ago, knowing that I might lose my remaining eye, I made up my mind never to live with anxiety and fear. Humans can tolerate darkness whenever they choose, and if humans can survive this, then I certainly can.”