As they drifted toward the city’s heart, a metal spire rose like a pine of steel through morning fog. That was what Heron wanted the Zerg Maiden to see. It wasn’t a relic the Star Remnant had left like bones in sand. It was a High Tower the Newborn Civilization forged for the Star Remnant’s children, a lantern pinned to the sky.
“Come,” Heron said, her voice a bell under rain. “Look at how the Star Remnant’s heirs live, and the veil will lift faster.”
They stepped into the Iron Tower that seemed to stitch cloud to earth like a needle. With Heron’s Aether as a light-key, doors opened like water parting around a stone. Since the reforms, identity wasn’t paper or stamp like brittle leaves. Identity was Aether, a pulse of dawn unique to each soul.
Compared to the last-epoch proofs that flaked like old paint, Aether was a straight road in clear weather. The past had been full of borrowed faces and sold names, like masks traded in a market. Aether cut through that fog like a clean wind over a lake.
With Aether as proof, no one could hawk someone else’s life like stolen grain. Sensitive offices no longer bled secrets like a cracked jar leaks rain. Spies built for “the state” had vanished like wolves after the snowmelt. Only rivals still picked at each other like crows, and Aether left tracks like footprints in wet clay.
Given Heron’s standing, the Tower’s arteries flowed open like a river in thaw. With her privilege, she could pass unseen like a shadow in noon light. She was the planet’s governor, a reformer young people looked up to like a star on a cold night. Better to avoid a stir and watch quietly, like a crane by a reedbed.
“These children… why are they in incubation pods?” the Zerg Maiden asked, feeling a soft warmth rise like sunlight on her palms. “Are they hurt, like the Valkyrie sisters were hurt?”
Before the pods, infants floated like seeds in clear spring water. The Zerg Maiden smiled without meaning to, as her mind brushed a world pure as fresh snow. That purity soothed her like cool wind under summer leaves.
“Not injured,” Heron said, shaking her head like a willow in a breeze. “The Star Remnant—no, let’s call them Avalon—can’t yet adapt to today’s air and soil. The world after war isn’t gentle enough for their first breath, like a winter field not ready for sowing.”
Heron reached out, and her Aether flowed like warm milk over glass. She read their small bodies the way one reads rings in a tree. She began to reshape what was bent, like a potter easing clay on a wheel. The old sickness left by fungal carpets and Star Remnant bioweapons melted like frost under dawn.
At war’s end, Avalonian zealots used a bioweapon like a poisoned wind. It collapsed immune systems and whipped cell change like a storm over wheat. At first, the Newborn Civilization paused, because that element wasn’t of Earth, like a strange star in a known sky.
The infected fell into coma like stones sinking through a pool. Their systems failed, and their Aether wouldn’t answer, like a bell with no tongue. They became targets for microbes, like flowers swarmed by locusts. Cross-star war already strained bodies, and Aether had been the fire that kept the hearth warm.
Three days later, the knot loosened like hair from a comb. With help from others, an infected person’s Aether could be roused to fight like a tiger from a cave. Aether came from Origin, a spring under all living soil, and it favored its own like blood favors blood. It rejected foreign filth like a body spits out a thorn.
Then the weapon snapped back like a trap on its maker’s leg. The Star Remnant caught their own flame and burned, with most dying before our hands even reached them. Only a few infants and toddlers bobbed like driftwood after the flood.
Heron pulled those young ones out like nets hauling bright fish. She placed them in medical pods, and healing rose like steam from a bath. Outside the Newborn Civilization, no star-culture we’ve met uses Aether, like ships that never learned the wind.
“The residue of war is the root,” Heron said, her smile cold as moonlight on steel. “Avalon’s old residents were zealots, not a few reeds but a marsh of them. The whole species leaned toward self-ruin, like moths to a torch. Faced with an enemy, they thought not of victory, but of dragging all into the abyss like stones in a net.”
Some would say the Star Remnant were the last wild thread on Avalon, and cutting them would unravel the loom. They’d fear the ecology would collapse like a bridge of rotten wood. But Heron only laughed softly, like a knife tapping porcelain. People always underestimate Nature, and they underestimate Aether, which rides deeper than root or rock.
Humans once crowned themselves masters of the mountain like tigers in painted scrolls. Then the Wasteland era answered like thunder over dry grass. Nature strikes harder than man, and any living pattern can be swept and redrawn like a garden after fire. For fools who chose self-ruin, even rescue feels like pouring water into a cracked jar.
If not for development and rest for the planet, Heron wouldn’t have saved a single seed, like a farmer skipping blighted rows. After taking their science and words into account, you can call it inclusion, or name it domestication like halter and rein. In a century, their heirs would be our tributaries, like streams folding into a river.
It sounds grand, like a tower reaching a star, doesn’t it? Yet human ancestors did it again and again, like tides touching the same shore. The interstellar road only repeats old steps under new constellations.
Still, the Newborn Civilization is young on the starlit path, like a foal on thin legs. Aether is vast, but time is the measure like rings in a trunk. The core war-engine took two centuries, like seasons stacked in stone. Only a flash between Heron and Origin made the forge leap like lightning down a tree.
We need time, the way dawn needs a horizon. Against the universe and Origin, we’re a baby opening its eyes, pupils filling with sky like a bowl with water.
“This isn’t right… children shouldn’t be treated like this,” the Zerg Maiden said, a frown tightening like a knot in silk. The wrongness weighed on her chest like wet cloth. Her likes and dislikes were simple as spring and frost. Before these infants, she couldn’t help but mirror herself, like a blank page beside another blank page.
“No, it isn’t right,” Heron said, her smile drifting like a leaf, then vanishing like smoke. “But this is war, where ethics burn like paper charms. The side that wins writes the book like a scribe with the only lamp. The defeated are swept into the ash pit of history like chaff.”
She led the Zerg Maiden upward, steps winding like a spiral shell. The words sounded tangled, like reeds in a current. The Zerg Maiden tucked them away like seeds in a sleeve and let them steep.
Higher up lay the work of decoding Avalonian culture and craft, crammed into this Tower like tools in a travel pack. Research ran on Aether like oil in a lamp, with planetary energy braided in like rope. Staff looked past them, too busy to lift their heads, like ants building a hill. Aether could read a creature’s intent like heat from a hand, but not script, not glyph, not the bones of a language.
So the old scholars mattered, like patient stones along a path. Sometimes they made a Star Remnant read, then swept the memory with Aether like a net across reeds. That left the subject hollow as a husk, yet no “democrats” cried out like crows. Heron had culled those shrill throats in the first century, and pragmatism ruled like iron under velvet.
“Mother, what was your original world like?” the Zerg Maiden asked, her voice a drop in a busy stream. The flurry of work before them stirred the question like wind stirs dust.
“My original world?” Heron blinked, surprise flickering like a moth at a wick. “Why ask now? The Valkyrie sisters should’ve shown you the histories. I haven’t fenced your access like a garden with thorns.”
She had opened the library to the Zerg Maiden like a gate to a courtyard. Reading required a Valkyrie beside her, yet the core computer held most of it like a hive holds honey. So the question landed oddly, like a sparrow on a wolf’s back.
“I read,” the Zerg Maiden said, eyes clear as rain over stone. “I saw you led the world’s change, like a lighthouse in storm. But the records don’t hold your thoughts, like a lake without its moon. I want to know why you chose to reform the old civilization, Mother.”
