Just as the scene would have carried on, a wash of cobalt surged in like surf and drowned it. Aphelia snapped back, breath snagging like a moth in glass. What had unfolded felt hard as stone, so vivid she still waded that memory like a river at dusk.

With the mind she wore now, no borrowed memory could stain her, like rain sliding off lacquer. Her soul had been tempered in Crimson Fire, a kiln that leaves iron quiet and wolfish. If she willed it, any intruder became dry kindling, seized and eaten by crimson flame.

"Well? Did the memory feel like standing inside the storm?"

Heron sat beside Aphelia, a calm bird by a moonlit pond. She and the girl in the white dress watched Aphelia, smiles thin as frost lines.

"It did… painfully real," Aphelia said, voice low as wind through pines. "As if I wore one of their skins. Are these the memories you spoke of? The ones extracted from the Insectoids?"

If Insectoids held human-like memories, what hid beneath that horror shell? Souls of species aren’t cut to human measure, like seeds meant for different soil. She never worshiped the human shape; she treated forms as weather, not gods.

Memory shards born from the soul should mirror the truest state, like a lake reflects its sky. An elf should read as elf, an orc as orc. Yet the memory showed a human, pure as fresh bone.

Seeing Aphelia’s faraway look, Heron nodded, a reed tipping before rain. "You see where the crack runs, don’t you?"

"Then why did humans twist into that nightmare, into what you call Insectoids?" Aphelia’s words struck like flint. "Even a half-elf needs elven blood to go pure. You don’t just become another species like frost turning to flame. Don’t tell me the Insectoids were once a human civilization with insect blood."

Emotion surged first, a tide before reason. If humans truly turned into that, what shattered the world’s rules like ice under spring flood? Even with insect-blooded humans, a whole people changing at once smells wrong. You might as well say they were Insectoids from birth.

Even with knowledge out of joint with her era, she couldn’t map their conversions, like a traveler lost in fog. In her age, any species purifying its bloodline needed the seed first, then depth like ink sinking into cloth.

Implanting a dragon’s blood never birthed a dragon, no matter how you refined it, like carving wings onto stone. Human essence barred that final step. To be a pure-blooded dragon, you had to smash the human core like a shell.

Madmen had tried, sparks chasing oil in the dark. Their end was ash on the wind. They over-boosted their blood, shattered their essence, and vanished before the blood could congeal like cooling glass.

In her time, those madmen made a secret covenant beneath damp stone, candles guttering like sick stars. They studied how to drive bloodlines to the edge, masking human lack with borrowed fire.

No one could trace their first footprint, like tracks washed by tide. Some said the method rose in the dark age, when humans forged crooked roads to live among beasts. It bought breathing room, like a torch held in rain.

By Aphelia’s era, that creed was folly, a scarecrow in a spring field. Humanity, chasing its own horizon, had outpaced such peril. To ascend as a True God was a lighthouse above any grafted blood.

"Even by your era’s lights, that shift should be impossible, right?" Aphelia asked, her tone a blade kept in velvet.

She remembered their so-called evolution, a slow river cutting stone. Humans changed genes over long ages to fit the weather. Genes named the essence, like a seal in wax. If insect genes ruled, humans wouldn’t wear these faces, nor fill the earth like grass.

If they became insect-like, how many walls of isolation must crack, like frozen lakes under noon sun?

Heron only smiled, a crescent boat on still water, and began to speak of that planet. She trusted Aphelia’s insight would catch fire without more tinder.

It was Heron’s third day deep in enemy ground, a hawk flying the canyon. With raw Aether she had slain many hive-brains, the minds behind the swarm.

Those strange central organs looked like pale brains at a glance, like moons behind mist. But studied up close, they were root-forests, tangled and deep, a wood of nerves reaching everywhere.

Nerves made the better metaphor, like rivers feeding a delta.

Heron smiled and shook her head, a bell in a quiet shrine. She evaporated another hive-brain with Aether and knifed forward like rain on slate.

Mixed-arms carpet bombing had scorched the land, smoke layered like old ink. The Insectoids’ Aether-sense was faint now, a blind eye. With her control, they never felt the blade slip into their gut.

Yet two days in, even the heartland showed no honest weakness, like a fortress grown from rock. The Insectoids spread a mycelial carpet over the ground, harvesting everything down to trace elements to feed their war-ecology.

Through Aether-sense, she felt wasteland under the mats, a field sucked dry. In its place sprawled organs and systems, a menagerie humming like beehives.

Yet the drained land was being fed back, a strange rain after drought. Elements leaked from those organs, reawakening soil like embers coaxed to flame.

If the early plunder answered war, then why this feeding now, like sowing grain before winter? They weren’t hit-and-run raiders by the book. Such high burn and fast evolution should eat resources bare.

Origin, what are you plotting, old sea under the ice? Heron could not help the thought.

If the Insectoids were Origin’s war-walkers, then Heron, who held Aether to its depths, was its voice against the wind. In truth, that held.

Through a mind-to-Origin communion that felt like thunder speaking in dreams, she’d guided the newborn civilization back onto a rail of light.

Now the two sides were at war, yet Origin played dead, a whale gone to sound. The silence gave Heron a headache like storm pressure.

She didn’t rely on Origin to move, like a sailor who knows his stars. Without it, she believed she could still lift this civilization higher than clouds. But she fought Origin’s war-walkers now, and she dared not stir the hornet’s nest.

So she only broke the exposed organs along her path, pruning branches not burning forests. She never used Aether to erase their surface and underworld together.

Bottom line, she lacked the certainty to wrestle Origin, a mountain in fog. Her power tied to it in ways like roots under stone. The chain reaction might crush more than bones.

Thinking so, Heron pressed deeper toward the Insectoids’ belly, a diver into green water. Soon she saw organs unlike the hive-brains.

Transparent chambers twined through limbs and vessels, like glass fruit in a thorn bush. They reminded her of human wombs, and they proved the likeness in function.

"So that’s it. The stronger, special cast come from here," she murmured, words quiet as falling ash.

Strange Insectoids kept hatching in those chambers, lanterns growing in a cave. She even saw the so-called Mammoth war machines, still small as calves.

Amber-orange high-energy solution poured in like honeyed fire. These Mammoths would soon swell into brutes that rampaged across fields of steel.

Staring at the clear chambers, Heron loosed a filament of Aether, a silver fish into a pool. She sent it to invade the systems within.

She didn’t plan to wreck them outright, a hunter choosing snares over wildfire. She knew their regeneration was monstrous as tide.

Even if she uprooted every organ and camp within ten miles today, tomorrow a darker swarm would roll in like locust clouds.

Holding to the current pace of attrition favored the newborn civilization, a controlled burn. At least they needn’t fear the native civilization stirring the pot behind them.

The thought of those natives lit a coal in her chest. Her fleet had been lured here like gulls to glass and paid blood for it. After the war, she would settle the ledger like thunder over hills.

With that in mind, her Aether sank deeper into the chamber, a river under ice. She severed the root-plexus of nerves, clean as a scythe through reeds.

Then she replaced them with her own Aether, a web of light, to keep the chambers running like hearts in jars.

The moment she did, shock flashed through her, a stag spooked in snow. She opened her eyes to taste the Insectoid world again, and the whole view had turned over like a sky before storm.