Gathering — a time of excitement for the young, work for the skilled, and farewells for those nearing the end of years. Already there had spread rumors — portents — that this assembly would be momentous. More than a usual quota from each clan had come. Along with sages and roamers, grafters and techies, many simple folk of two legs, four and five-and of wheel and ring-followed drumbeats along still-frosted mountain tracks to reach the sacred glades. Among each race, manifold had felt the tremors — stronger than any since that provident year when the Egg burst from Jijo’s mother soil, shedding hot birth-dust, then settling to rule our fractious passions and unite us.

Ah, Gathering.

This latest pilgrimage may not yet have solidified as waxy memory. But try to recall slowly wending our now-aged pile of rings aboard ship at Far Wet Sanctuary, to sail past the glistening Spectral Flow and the Plain of Sharp Sand.

Did not those familiar wonders seem to pale when we reached the Great Marsh and found it in bloom? Something seen once in a traeki lifetime? A sea of color — flowering, fruiting, and already dying gaudily before our senses. Transferring from boat to barge, we travelers rowed amid great pungency, under avenues of million-petalled sylph canopies.

Our companions took this as an omen, did they not, my rings? The humans in our midst spoke of mysterious Ifni, the capricious one, whose verdicts are not always just but are ever-surprising.

Do you recall other sights/experiences? The weaver villages? The mulc-spiders and hunting camps? And finally that arduous climb, twist by twist of our straining foot-pads, through the Pass of Long Umbras to reach this green vale where, four traeki generations ago, geysers steamed and rainbows danced, celebrating the dark ovoid’s emergence?

Recollect, now, the crunch of volcanic gravel, and how the normally obedient rewq-beast trembled on our head-ring, mutinously refusing to lay itself over our eyelets, so that we arrived in camp barefaced, unmasked, while children of all Six Races scurried, shouting, “Asx! Asx! Asx, the traeki, has come!”

Picture the other High Sages-colleagues and friends-emerging from their tents to walk, slither, roll, and greet us with this epithet. This label they regard as permanently attached to “me” — a fiction that i humor.

Do you recall all that, my rings?

Well, patience then. Memories congeal like dripping wax, simmering to coat our inner core. Once there, they can never be forgotten.

On Jijo there is a deep shine in the section of sky farthest from the sun. We are told this is rare on worlds catalogued by the Great Galactics, an effect of carbon grains — the same ones that seed the hollow hail-grains sent by Izmunuti, the glaring star-eye in a constellation humans call Job’s Torment. It is said our ancestors studied such traits of their new home before burning and burying their ships.

It is also said that they simply “looked it all up” in a portable branch of the Galactic Library-before consigning even that treasure to flames on the day called Never-Go-Back.

There was no hollow hail that spring morning, when the other sages emerged to salute our rings, calling us/me Asx. As we gathered under a pavilion, i learned that our rewq was not the only one grown skittish. Not even the patient hoon could control his translation-helper. So we sages conferred without the little symbionts, fathoming each other by word and gesture alone.

Of all whose ancestors chose hopeless exile on this world, the g’Kek are senior. So to Vubben fell the role — Speaker of Ignition.

“Are we guilty for the failure of rantanoids?” Vubben asked, turning each eye toward a different point of the compass. “The Egg senses pain in the life-field whenever potential is lost.”

“Hrrrm. We argue the point endlessly,” the hoon sophist, Phwhoon-dau, replied. “Lark and Uthen tell of a decline. Rantanoids aren’t yet extinct. A small number remain on an Yuqun Isle.”

The human sage, Lester Cambel, agreed. “Even if they are past hope, rantanoids are just one of countless species of root-grubbers. No reason to figure they were specially blessed.”

Ur-Jah retorted that her own ancestors, long ago and far away, had been little root-grubbers.

Lester conceded with a bow. “Still, we aren’t responsible for the rise and fall of every species.”

“How can you know?” Vubben persisted. “We who lack most tools of science, left to flounder in darkness by our selfish forebears, cannot know what subtle harm we do by stepping on a leaf or voiding our wastes in a pit. None can predict what we’ll be held accountable for, when The Day comes. Even glavers, in their present state of innocence, will be judged.”

That was when our aged qheuenish sage, whom we call Knife-Bright Insight, tilted her blue carapace. Her voice was a soft whisper from one chitin thigh.

“The Egg, our gift in the wilderness, knows answers. Truth is its reward to an open mind.”

Chastened by her wisdom, we fell into meditation.

No longer needed, the errant rewq slipped off our brows and gathered in the center, exchanging host-enzymes. We took up a gentle rhythm, each sage adding a line of harmony — of breath and beating hearts.

My rings, do you recall what chose then to occur?

The fabric of our union was ripped by booming echoes, cast arrogantly by the Rothen ship, proclaiming its malign power, before it even arrived.

We emerged to stare, dismayed, at the riven sky.

Soon sage and clanfolk alike knew The Day had finally come.

Vengeance is not spared upon the children of the fallen.

The paper-crafter had three offspring — A number worthy of his noble calling, like his father, I and his father’s father. Nelo always supposed the line would go on through his own two sons and daughter.

So he took it hard when his strong-jawed children deserted the water mill, its sluiceways, and wooden gears. None heeded the beckoning rhythm of the pulping hammer, beating cloth scavenged from all six races, or the sweet mist spread by the sifting screens, or the respectful bows of traders, come from afar to buy Nelo’s sleek white pages.

Oh, Sara, Lark, and Dwer were happy to use paper!

Dwer, the youngest, wrapped it around arrowheads and lures for the hunt. Sometimes he paid his father in piu nodules, or grwon teeth, before fading into the forest again, as he had done since turning nine. Apprenticed to Fallon the Tracker, Dwer soon became a legend across the Slope. Nothing he sought escaped his bow, unless it was shielded by law. And rumors said the fierce-eyed lad with jet-black hair killed and ate whatever he liked, when the law wasn’t looking.

As focused as Dwer was wild, Lark used paper to plot vast charts on his study wall, some parts almost black with notes and diagrams. Elsewhere, large spaces gaped blank, a waste of Nelo’s art.

“It can’t be helped, Father,” Lark explained near wooden shelves filled with fossils. “We haven’t found which species fill those gaps. This world is so complex, I doubt even the Buyur ever fully grasped Jijo’s ecosystem.”

Nelo recalled thinking that an absurd thing to say. When the Buyur leased Jijo, they had been full citizens of the Community of the Five Galaxies, with access to the fabled Great Library, dwarfing all the paper books in Biblos! With a word, the Buyur could beckon any answer under the sun. Under a billion suns, if tales of the past could be trusted.

At least the sages approved of Lark’s work. But what of Sara? Always Nelo’s favorite, she used to love the smells, rhythms and textures of papermaking — till age fourteen, when she stumbled on a talent.

Nelo blamed his late wife, who had entered his life so strangely, long ago, and used to fill the kids’ heads with odd tales and ambitions.