In what was left of his childhood backyard, there was a boulder big enough to sit atop or lay over convex. Raev Sturlusson was out there, in leather pants and shirtless like usual. It wasn’t exactly the way he pictured himself when he first spent his days here, but life has many surprises.

A lit pillar candle was affixed atop the rock with its own wax. Raev lay across the boulder, writing on individual leaves of paper, then burning them.

i haven’t really thought of myself as someone living out a vendetta, though i know it reads that way in the articles. it seems to me that my part in this is coming to a close. i’ve assessed utility enough times to see the limits of my own. there may actually be an end to this; i know that for some the fight of a lifetime will last their entire lifetimes. if i can get out with this peak triumph, what would i become? i have normal skills for ordinary life, but would they seek me out again and again as they have?

this can’t become some kind of blood feud. i remember celebrating the ending of blood feuds in my childhood, when my father was a speaker. they so often undo any accomplishment. i should end my role before it becomes more and ever more of that. i wanted no throne nor to be a tool of a throne. our children were not required to inherit power.

yet i ask, what more can i, must i, do for this world? for people, the people, other people, and for myself as my responsibility? i remember having ideals, and i’m left with a lingering trace of them. what can my hands do with those now?

In the middle of everything and far from anything, Arcta Hydraia still enjoyed pursuing research in her field, now embodied in her world by her sole person – that is, she was the only one who named massive sphere dynamics as a discrete body of knowledge in the human fashion, while the Vedani wave of interest in her results treated it like any other flexibly applicable information. She was just pencil pushing, though unsupervised and alternatively inspired in a setting only she among her colleagues had accessed.

The Mothership Jottings, as she termed them, were casually released into aetherscape discussion, to go whichever way they would. They did make ripples there, which Arcta could sense, as someone who had already made quite a few. She wasn’t really held answerable as in the way she’d be in the human academic professions; Vedani held the information itself to task, and worked it collectively as they pleased till it yielded or rang true.

She had the feeling this work was being seized as something with immediate relevance, but she herself was under no direct pressure, and it was the unfettered playtime of a skilled mind in semi-retirement. She trusted learners to quickly outstrip originators, especially when the body of learners was unrestricted. The jottings may already be applied and in effect, but she was unconcerned. Arcta had stopped feeling conflict over whether she was abetting enemies of her kind, because the personhood of Vedani was so evident around her.

By now, she’d read every last poem given to her that Raev had written about his time in stillfreeze. She could access this mysterious experience, feel the extent of it beyond what words could touch. It was familiar, haunting, a world apart tangential to her own – as it seemed to him. There was a timeless sense of what he might be thinking from some other where. Arcta wondered if she should burn them.