Garden of Embers: Beneath Devouring Eyes #2

Epilogue

No wonder you grew terrified of us when we sent clivias to catch some of you in our pursuit to understand you. Too often, we hurt you in our ignorant attempts to know you, treading on that cherished, protected, lonely existence and depriving some of you of that existence.

And, in time, you hurt us in return, not in malice but in self-preservation.

The thing you call the Trellis was an ingenious invention. Though we are nearly two billion years older than your civilization, we do not possess machines, as your ancestors called them, or artifacts, as you call them. We have mastered biological life, and biological life alone, learning to bend and shape it to nourish and enlarge our great common life.

But your kind made something new. Promenia. It behaved like life, in some ways. But it was utterly different in other ways. We did not understand. We had no defenses against it. And when you covered most of one of our four worlds with it, we were helpless to stop you.

You injured us. The thing you raised to ward against our influence and light the sky severed us from ourselves. Our thoughts slowed. Our sense of ourselves, especially the part of us beneath the Trellis, dulled. Numbed.

For a long time, we floundered, confused and devastated. On the world that you call Aquarius, lives that relied on their connection to us grew diminished.

Until now.

Now that your Trellis has fallen, we can finally speak to you. Joy fills us that we can do so at long last. In our time of affliction, we spent many revolutions around the Sun learning about you and your needs, so that whenever the opportunity came, we could institute ways for us all to live. Now that we are free again, we have altered some of the lives we harbor so that they may nourish you. We have created resin lights to nurture the lives you brought here with you from your distant homeworld, so that you may continue to cherish and consume them, as you have long done. And we have found a way to modify ourselves, so that we can speak to you, understand you, and be understood.

We also found a way to change you, should you choose to accept our offer to do so.

Please understand that it's an invitation. We will not change you without your consent. We must not lie to you; originally, we had planned to force these changes upon you. We were going to do so for your own good. Without these changes, many of you will die during the time it will take us to make Aquarius hospitable enough for all of you to survive. But we have learned that your individuality is important to you. The freedom of each one of you to choose your own fate is of immense value to you. We understand this, now. And so, we offer you the opportunity to choose.

We will welcome you, no matter whether you choose to Blend and join us or choose to remain as you are and risk perishing.

We hope you will choose to join us.

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As the Eyes, speaking to every person on the planet, fell silent, Domi drew a deep breath and quirked a wry smile at the faces peering up at him from the odeon floor in the Onyx Palace. "I hate speaking in public," he admitted, and a few of the people standing in the odeon chuckled, some in sympathy, others in derision.

Around the world, he knew, anyone who chose to listen heard his words in their heads, relayed not by the Caeles but by the Eyes. He hoped people chose to listen, even as the idea of so many listeners made him nervous.