Why do the Children thrive? Erykon’s will.

   Why did the lightning strike my Mater’s nest, incinerating her and all my sisters?That too was Erykon’s will, they told her. Rejoice.

  She couldn’t at first. After her family had died, she couldn’t even believe, though she knew enough to pretend. All she really had left were her questions and the punishment for asking.

  Then the Guardians took her, telling her that her mind was right for a working they had made, a great woven working that was as much alive as it was mechanical and as large as any of the Spires that the Guardians made home.

  “It needs a mind to move it, A’churak’zen,” the Guardian Mater had said. “Yours may be the one. Will you try?”

  She asked questions then, many, about the nature of their working, about their intention for it, about the particulars of mind that would be necessary to be chosen to be its mistress.

  The Guardians didn’t punish her for those, only kept silent and told her to proceed with her work. They would inform her if she was or was not the one.

  She did as she was told, running their mazes, taking their tests, eating the strange lichens they had grown exclusively for this purpose.

  They never showed her the working though. The sight of it was only for the one who would one day bond with it and bend it to its unknown purpose. But she knew where it was kept, all the Guardians did, just as they knew to stay well clear unless their Mater told them otherwise.

  But the question burned in her, What was it they had made? Why had they kept knowledge of it from the rest of the Children? How did this new working serve Erykon’s will?

  The need to know burned so hot in her she was sure its fire could be seen and smelled for hectares in every direction. She was a beacon of desire, and yet none of them, not even the Mater, could see.

  She was just a Hunter to them, a Hunter who had been raised by Dreamers, a Hunter who had enough evolutionary variance from the rank and file to warrant inclusion in their secret plan. Yet they knew nothing of her thoughts and less of the questions to which she must have answers. And, even more significant than the ignorance of her fellow Guardians, was that of Erykon.

  Why was she still alive? She didn’t believe in Erykon’s divinity anymore, and yet she had not been punished for this, the worst of all transgressions.

  All through her testing she had thought, today they would catch her. Today Erykon would know her heart and she would be punished, perhaps even killed. Every day, she won through, defeating the other test subjects, solving all the logic puzzles, passing all physical exams. Nothing ever happened.

  The Daystar rose and fell. The Children lived and ate and bred and died. She went on thinking her blasphemous thoughts absolutely unmolested.

  One day there were no other test subjects and there were no more tests. A’churak’zen had outlasted and survived them all and now stood alone in the testing chamber waiting for the Mater to speak.

  “You are the one,” she was told. “Now come and see our working.”

  They had no name for it as they had none for any mechanical working beyond a description of its function. This they only called “the vessel.” To A’churak’zen it looked like the triple-pronged head of a spear.

  It was huge, massive, its topmost portions easily approaching the roof of the cavern the Guardians had cleared for its construction. It was a little bit alive and a little bit mechanical, and even while dormant, it both radiated and absorbed waves of energy from its surroundings.

  It was made to use the waves, made to eat them and convert them into waves that could be directed, modified, used for many purposes. It would slide sideways out of the chamber, passing through the earth and crystal above, going up and up away from Orisha until it floated free in the space beyond.

  Before she could stop herself, still marveling at the thing before her, A’churak’zen asked the Mater why the vessel had been built.

  “To approach the Eye,” was the response. “We must know Erykon’s nature. We must know Erykon’s will. The Eye has slept for so long and we have built too much for it to open again and destroy us.”

  There had been pain in the bonding of her body to that of the vessel. There had been pain that she could never have imagined in a thousand cycles.

  When the pain was over, when every bit of her was somehow bonded to or wired to some bit of the vessel, when it responded to her wishes as quickly as her own now-useless limbs, when she could see with its eyes, feel with its sensing mechanisms, when all that was done, they told her to go.

  “Go to the Eye and wait,” said the Mater. “Wait for some sign.”

  “How will I know?” she said.

  “You will know.”

   How stupid they all were, she thought.

  As the vessel moved like a ghost through Orisha’s soil and then like a beam of light up through the clouds, A’churak’zen rejoiced.

  She would certainly approach the Eye. She would certainly wait for the Mater’s sign. She would certainly make contact with Erykon. But she wouldn’t ask the Mater’s questions. She wouldn’t work to preserve the Orishan civilization or even its people. She had her own questions for Erykon and her own response should the answers to those questions prove unsatisfactory.

  The vessel had weapons, terrible destructive wave-folding weapons that she had been given in order to shatter anything that might threaten either itself or the Eye.

  She would ask Erykon the question she had been asking since she had lost her family. If she didn’t like the answer, Erykon would feel the wrath of A’churak’zen.

  Only there was no sign. There was never an inkling that the Eye was even aware of her presence. She hung in her vessel, her new body really, circling the Eye like a flesh mite waiting, waiting, waiting.

  One cycle became four, four became ten, ten became a hundred, and one day she realized nearly five hundred cycles had gone by.

  There had been no word from Orisha in as many as forty. She had been forgotten as she danced in the Void with the Eye. She no longer needed food; the vessel sustained her. She no longer slept; the vessel turned off the bits of her that needed periodic rest and kept perpetually alive those that did not.

  She fell eventually into a sort of half dream in which only she and the sleeping Eye existed at all. She began to feel it was speaking to her and only to her. She began to feel that she had been wrong all those cycles ago. She began to feel that she was not a Guardian, not a Hunter, not even one of the Children anymore.

  She was something new.

  She had been sent to probe the Eye, to learn something of its wishes for her former people. She had meant to take revenge on it for allowing her family to die. She had meant, at the very least, to confront it and demand to know why Erykon had made life so cruel and unyielding.

  She had meant to do all those things, but now, after dreaming and gazing at the Eye for so long, she knew that she was meant to be its servant. Why else had Erykon stripped from her everything that could tie her to Orisha? She was to be remade, to serve and protect the Eye.

  So it had gone for cycle after cycle. Orisha thrived below and above, intangible and invisible, A’churak’zen danced before her god.

  And then the soulless beings came with their ugly little wave projectors and their hideous jabbering speech.

  She had failed to destroy them, failed to protect the Eye, which had rewarded her failure with an explosion of waves that had looked to consume everything-the soulless ones in their little metal box, the planet Orisha, and, she hoped, herself as well.