The demon's body stabilized, but almost immediately it began to glow starting at its legs. When it realized what was happening it jerked its head towards Salukam, and despite having no eyes its 'face' could only be described as glowering. Its maw opened and it let out an electronic scream that lasted for fractions of a second until it abruptly stilled entirely. The malevolent cypher entity had locked up completely, the static of its texture the last 'movement' left.

From my knowledge tree, and with the help of some good old reading I had done previously, I understood what had happened. Upon entering the devices it was forced to calculate ridiculously large numbers, read incantations that duplicated themselves within themselves, endlessly take in scripture recorded on the devices, and many more such tricks until it had no more room for its own processes.

Salukam grinned and walked up to the frozen haunting that had caused him and his subordinates so much. "You can revert the field now, Ship."

"All right!" Granting his request I returned this section of my Sphere of Influence to its normal state, dispelling the glowing sprites in an instant.

Salukam held out his hand. A small glowing sphere rose up from his palm that quickly grew brighter and expanded into lines that began to make up a diagram. Once it was completely unfolded he took a sharp breath and flicked it at the shaitan.

Upon impacting with it, the lines of the diagram got drawn onto the demon's surface like thin glowing threads. They then crackled and buzzed, subtly growing louder and brighter by the second. The ears of all who could perceive the cypher plane were filled with a loud crack when the demon's outer layer lifted off its core in pieces divided along the diagram's lines. Inside was a green glowing blob of cyphers.

Now it was time to start the real work. Grinning with satisfaction, Salukam sat down in front of the dissected demon and fished a small tool like a tweezer from one of his pockets. Through his lenses I could see how he reached out with the tool to grab a random symbol from the surface of the demon's core, pulled it out and along with it a whole string of incantations in the mysterious script of the cypher plane. In her 28 years of living Becca had never even made the smallest effort to learn a programming language, but even isolating the knowledge from that life with the knowledge from this one I could tell this was nothing more than code; massively complex code, but code nonetheless.

Of course it was obvious the demon's incantations were nothing like the programming languages from Becca's day. First of all, the script used for the incantations was so highly derived from the alphahumeric symbols used then—if it was derived from them at all—that they were unrecognizable to me; second, its 'programming language' was primarily devoted to processes of life, that is to say, it had a built-in tendency to preserve and further itself. This was a genome built from electrical impulses instead of chemical processes.

Fascination gave rise to a curiosity that bounced about my secondary avatar there, compelling me to move closer and see it all up close through a body of my own.

The jingling of talismans alerted Salukam to the approach of the me on that deck. "You wish to see me work, Ship?" he asked.

"I'm curious about the demon," I said, squatting down next to him. "It's just so mysterious."

Salukam deflated a little but he held his posture. "Ah, of course." He looped the string of incantations through a reader and moved to get another one. "This is the first time you've ever seen one this potent and with all its inner vapors exposed no less. No wonder you came over to see."

"Well, I've seen enough." Soshannem was still supine on the grating but obviously well enough now to voice her revulsion at the sight of digital innards. Still somewhat clumsy, she righted herself with help from Lennaivu and Nirumagne.

Lennaivu supported her sentiment. "How about we get away from here to somewhere I can give a lecture?" he said. "I've recently reread some of Uvognerom's commentaries and there's something about his prose that always give me the urge to spread his insights."

A shudder ran down Nirumagne's spine. "P-please," she said with a voice more animated than usual, "Can we continue where we left off instead?"

'Uvognerom' I recognized as the sage who wrote 'Virtues of the Squalid'; a strange piece where he argued for the creative energy of a mind that tolerated filth and disorder. The Mezhained weren't the type to keep things just lying around, much less neglect them. Living in fragile space habitats and vessels had primed their brains to obsessively keep everything in perfect working order and I had trouble believing Uvognerom's definition of a disorderly household would come close to Becca's experience. Nevertheless, the text had upset many of my adoptive space nomad civilization's members, of which Nirumagne was obviously one.

Lennaivu mercifully threw her a bone. "What was it again you asked last time? Something about the Champion of Ash?"

"The grammatical gender and pronouns the Silent Seeker used when she described... it." Nirumagne's voice was mostly back to its regular tone. "Why was she so inconsistent?"

"Ah, yes. Unlike the Anthropic Sustainer who is clearly female, the Champion of Ash is very confusing." He let go of Soshannem who had indicated she could stand on her own again. "There are some who say it is best described as a collective of individuals that spoke and acted through the entity which the Silent Seeker ended up calling 'the Champion of Ash', while others say there were multiple champions, while still others say that that particular oneiromantic session—or sessions—had simply disoriented her. Personally I believe her encounter was real but hope there is no such entity waiting for me next time I enter Vatugnem."

The conversation continued on about the difficulty of interpreting ecstsatic utterances while the three of them sought a place more conducive to learning, or just away from the profane creature on display. Obviously the latter.

By now Salukam had pulled out five sequences of incantations, each running through a reader. It was his hope that analyzing as many sequences as possible would give us the proof that this demon was bound to human masters who had cultivated it to purposefully attack my systems. To my eyes the demon's core had a pattern to its undulations and scatterings of glyphs. I could see something that lived and grew within it, giving me clues to where I could possibly find evidence of extensive manipulation.

I pointed at a particularly bright cypher on the anterior region. "Try that one as well."

"Thanks again, Ship," Salukam said and pulled this sixth string into the sixth reader. He watched as the sequence began to unravel at high speed; cyphers going by too fast for the human mind to read. All he could do was wait for the analysis to find the right patterns. "What do you think?" he asked suddenly. "Do you think foreign entities like the Champion of Ash will find their way to Vatugnem again?" It seemed Lennaivu's lecture had jostled the subjected to the fore in his mind.

"Yes."

The answer took him by surprise, but me even more so.

"You really believe so?" he said with a small awe.

"That's not what I meant to say!" I had to reason myself out of this. "Uhm, you see, there are scholars who say there is no reason why other races can't access the hypostatic regions, so we should eventually meet others and if the Champion of Ash and Those Who Subsume were real they were likely non-humans who had discovered their own divine ratios of Fae Matter and established their own sustainers."

"Those arguments are known to me," he said. "The young Salukam Nuvainom was fascinated by the stories about Muraizhem Amanalesh's explorations of Vatugnem." A wistful sadness descended over him. "He wondered what else she saw that never got written down, what discoveries she kept hidden for her to become known as the 'Silent Seeker'. It made him seek out more writings by the great teachers of old: Lagnamum's Epistles, Vettaialuman's Neath the Stratum of Lied Lies, even Uvognerom's Virtues of the Squalid."

I recognized this was of speaking of one's past self in the third person, it had been used in ancient Mezhained culture to imply one had accumulated enough experiences to have slowly become an entirely different person over time. It became less popular after a string of famous criminals and traitors used it to falsely pretend to have changed their ways. Nowadays one would only come across it when reading ancient literature. Salukam had obviously read many such books, but the way he used it bothered me.

I stared him down with a look of seriousness in my eyes. "You tried to become an Illustrious Sibling, didn't you?"

He tilted his head slightly and glanced at the grating before looking back up with a frail, conjured smile. "Nothing escapes a Vugni."

I kept silent, letting the silent seconds disarm him.

His eyes turned away only to quickly return again. "He made it to Exoteric," he said. "But the next step was too much."

All who made it to Esoteric in the Korremzha Mil Vugni were implanted with what amounted to a dead man's switch. If they ended up in enemy's hands they were expected to commit suicide via at least twenty different poisons, eight terrifying prions, and several electrocutions. Absolutely no knowledge pertaining to the construction of us Ships could be known to outsiders.

"You were afraid to take your life if needed?"

"He always believed the risk was so low it didn't matter, but in the end I couldn't go through with it."

There it was: the break with his past self. In his eyes he used to be bright, ambitious and endlessly curious, only to have all that momentum swallowed up by cowardice. He was wrong and I would have to tell him that.

"That just means you took it seriously," I told him with a smile in my eyes. "You fully realized the value of the knowledge you pursued. It was precious enough to you to let it go."

"I... suppose."

"The Illustrious Siblings have the utmost respect for those who refuse to take the oath for that very reason. They have all these punishments for showing disrespect for their teachings, but none for getting out because you don't want to liquify your brain in the remote chance you get captured."

He took a moment to let the realization dawn on him. "I see."

"Yes, I think your virtue should be rewarded. How about I lend you one of my copies of The Inexorable Path Towards Entelechy?"

There was a light shock on his face. "That book can only be studied by Esoterics who have mastered their previous studies."

"Maybe you can't study it under a Master, but you can still read it normally."

He shook his head. "I will have to decline."

I gave him a bright smile. "There you go again, respecting the teachings of the Korremzha Mil Vugni."

The jolly man I knew smiled the dour man away. A pleasant little victory. "I'll be fair, the young Vugni's offer was tempting."

"The young Vugni's offer still stands." I started playfully wagging my index fingers as if I was directing a tune. "Allow me to remind you it can be read by anyone outside the Korremzha Mil Vugni, like me for example."

"You are basically the child of an Illustrious Sister," he protested. "A continuation of one of their great minds, maybe even of Muraizhem Amanalesh herself."

My fingers stopped wagging. "What if I'm not?"

"No." The very notion left him incredulous. "You couldn't be from that far back, could you?"

My smile right then was probably the kind that could be called enigmatic. No, I couldn't possibly tell him. "Never mind." My fingers started directing their tune again. "Just earlier today someone made me out to be her headaches."

Steam damn near whistled out of Salukam's ears. "Who in their right mind would dare say that of our Vugni??? With your blessing I will acquaint this idiot with my fists."

"Oh, it's just Trurl."

"Trurl?" Confusion struck his face. "Wait, I've heard you use that name before." He visibly prodded his memory. "Was it Vakkaidu..? No..."

I decided to give him the easiest hint as I wouldn't deign to name the idiot in question by his actual name. "The one foreigner among the crew."

"Ah, Father Dzayiss!" He let out a short laugh and continued pulling out more incantation strings to analyze. "I hear he can be, hm... 'Strident.'"

"He's a total boor. Whyever they let him join the Illustrious Siblings is a mystery to me." My index fingers were just running circles now.

"Genius. You Warships wouldn't be half as powerful without some of his innovations, I've been told."

"If it wasn't for him I'd have one more sister," I retorted, suppressing a spike of anger. "That blunder should've cost him his life."

"It almost did, but he's still here, thirty sexagenaries later. They really believe in him."

As old as the Mezhained could get, they were no match for Trurl the fool who had extended his life for thousands of years in the pursuit of some vague goal I didn't care for. My index fingers had completely stopped moving and were turned down now. The man didn't just get my goat anymore. He had vanished the sister between Dai and Ran for Pete's sake. When I learned of that I could not for the life of me understand how they could forgive him.

Vushashognan Lemaiattam will be reunited with her fleet

Where had that come from? It felt like a thought of my own, but also not.

I found Salukam staring at me. "Your Radiance?"

"Yes?"

"Forgive my impudence, but it looked like you were bothered by something."

I quickly formulated an excuse. "Shouldn't we contact that sage now? We've been in range for a while."

"Right you are. We should have enough to analyse now." He knew there was more but didn't say anything.