The planet where the meeting was to take place had no name, not one that he was aware of in any case. He was shown only a string of symbols that he did not know, and was expected to divine the location from there. He could read well enough, which was rare, but these were something outside the boundaries of his instruction.

He still hated space travel. He would always hate it. Spaceflight was not like regular flight, where you could feel the ground pulling below you, and the sky held you carefully in its wash of colors. In space there was no down and there was no sky, and he could not stand it. The dueling forces of elation and terror the came with weightlessness made him ill.

The sky of this unnamed place was a sickly yellow that he had not known a sky could be. The clouds were orange, and the ground was the wavering deep green and blue of tall grasses. In the distance, the plain of grass ended in the vertical wall of an old, eroded ridge line. The star above was unfamiliar; too dim, and maybe too red, and it bled light into the landscape as if through smoked glass.

The air stung to breathe. It tasted of fire, and sat a little too heavy in the chest. It was not immediately dangerous, so long as he was diligent, but it would slowly dissolve his lungs if he gave it the chance. It would keep away anyone not invited, and he would not linger here once the business was complete.

He came out of the tall grasses that danced far over his head onto an open hill, having found no other clear landmarks at the meeting place. He watched the wind ripple at the blue-green as if it were waves of a lake, and waited. He had never seen such dense plant life before, and every scan he made insisted to him there was no predators or danger in it, but he could not deny the strange compulsion to keep checking.

The emissary of golden Light came to him for the last time.

He was alone on the hill one moment, and the next they were there, with him. They were tall, slender, possessing at times many limbs and at times none, and glinted in tandem with the wind and the grass around it. He thought the creature could have been the same one as their last meeting, but he could not be sure. They seemed identical in every way that he could measure, but, perhaps as creatures of energy, they all simply shared the same traits when speaking to the physical world. He did not know if they had a concept of individuality, or if that had been a restriction of the solid world they had left behind. They would not have told him if he had asked.

It did seem that speaking to one of the Artificers was effectively the same as speaking to all, instantaneously, everywhere. Elanus had heard this, when he brought her the symbols and her usual ransom of munitions, and she scoffed at him, in that way that let him know she still thought he was an imbecile. She insisted such things were impossible, that they didn’t call it ‘space’ because it was small. But he had seen a great many things, in his short life, that she would have called impossible.

He had asked the emissary, before, if it had a name, and they had declined to offer him one. He did not know if that meant they had none, they had no way to tell him, or they simply found names superfluous.

He had used the entire walk to the hilltop, the space flight, the days leading up to the meeting, to practice in his mind what he was going to say. How he was going to show them the logic of helping him. The compassion and eloquence that he would convince them with-–for, maybe they had ascended to something beyond comprehension, but they were still living creatures, and they must have had empathy somewhere, to have built a civilization that outlived stars.

The light waited without introduction for him to begin. The words he prepared left him entirely.

“You already know what I’m going to say,” he said, quietly.

“YES.” The light agreed, a wavering chorus of several voices and syllables that were not quite synchronized, and some that were not speech.

“Then why make me come here, to say it?”

“STRANGE LITTLE CREATURE, HE COMES TO US,” they answered. “BEGINS AND ENDS, BEGINS AND ENDS, LIVES AND DIES, FRIGHTENED. STEALS AND DEMANDS FROM US.”

“I stole nothing from you,” he interrupted. It was, perhaps, not the best idea.

“LIE,” the light said, flicked out an appendage that may have been an arm, and jabbed at the space between his eyebrows. Readouts before his eyes flickered and buzzed, distorting into separate bands of color, and then re-synchronized as the arm pulled away again.

“That was not me. You know that was not me.”

“ARE YOU SURE?” they asked, and he wondered if they had a sense of humor. He did not hear inflection in the mechanical chorus that suggested a mood, nor did he hear anything that sounded to his ears like laughter.

“Is it true that you eat stars?” he asked.

This time the light wavered, and there was not laughter, but there was something mirthful in the glittering form. “CHILDISH METAPHOR.”

“Explain it to me, then.”

“NO,” they responded, and the wavering ceased. “YOU WERE CONTENT WITH THEFT, WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS ENOUGH. YOU HAVE CHANGED YOUR MIND.”

Whether or not they had recognizable emotion, they had decided they did not like him.

He was quiet for a long moment, and looked away from them, to the rocky horizon, pushing down frustration in an attempt to remain diplomatic. “I took out the entire royal line, and they manufactured a new one. I boiled an ocean, and they steal comets. I destroyed a moon and they mine the debris,” he showed his palms in defeat, only to realize this likely meant nothing to a creature that had evolved beyond hands. “It’s like digging a hole in dry sand.”

“YES,” the light agreed. “WASTEFUL.”

“Wasteful,” he repeated. “Is that what offends you here? That we’re not dying efficiently?”

“DO YOU THINK YOU ARE THE FIRST SPECIES TO DISCOVER MORTALITY?”

He took a breath, felt it sting his throat, and refocused. “You burn out the universe to extend your own lives. You don’t seem so callous when it’s your existence.”

“STARS DIE IF WE ARE HERE, AND IF WE ARE NOT.”

He was not sure what to make of this. It tickled a part of his memory, something old and buried, but he could not find the right thread of thought to pick at.

“They are going to exterminate us,” he said. “I am running out of things to throw at them.”

“TIME IS LONG AND TIME IS SHORT, SMALL THING. ALL SMALL THINGS WILL STAY SMALL. BY FIRE OR BY CHAIN, IT IS NO MATTER. THE END OF ALL COMES, BUT THERE IS ELEGANCE IN THE DYING,” the light extended an appendage and jabbed him in the chest this time. “THE STARS WILL OUTLIVE HALF OF YOU.”

He stood in silence. He should have known better. The Artificers were an old thing, older than most everything else, and they had the attitude of all old things. They were not interested in anything but their own preservation. His own problems were immaterial to them. The Saurians could expand to consume the entire spiral arm of the galaxy, and it would not matter. The Artificers would vaporize them the moment they crossed an invisible boundary and became a threat, and up until that point, they were disinterested. It makes no difference to a deity what exists outside the throne room, so long as it has a well behaved domain.

He had been foolish. He had been foolish to think he could take on the Empire, and more foolish still to ask the Artificers for help when he could not do it himself.

“WE TOLD YOU THE TERMS OF AID,” they said. “YOU CAN ENJOY QUIET. FLOW ABOUT YOUR SMALL STARS, WITH SMALL LIVES. OR YOU CAN BURN, AND THEY WILL EAT YOUR STARS, AND THEN WE WILL EAT THEM.”

“Why come here at all then?” he asked, gesturing at the plane of grass around them, the yellow sky. “If it makes no difference to you, why not destroy us all and have all of creation to yourselves?”

There was a pause there, as if the creature were considering. There was a buzzing about the thing, and he realized that perhaps he was speaking to far more entities than one after all, and the swarm was not quite as unified as he had assumed. Perhaps he had asked something they could not agree upon. It had not occurred to him that they would posses enough individuality to disagree internally.

He did not like the idea that they could disagree over whether or not they should eliminate sentient competition.

Elanus had been right, he was an imbecile.

“POTENTIAL,” they finally answered. “YOU ARE INTRIGUING.”

“Well, I’m glad we amuse you, I suppose,” he grumbled.

“NO. YOU ARE INTRIGUING,” they corrected.

He stared, and realized that they were being literal. “Me.”

“FASCINATING APPROACH. WE DISCARDED, MESSY, ILLOGICAL, PERHAPS PREMATURE.”

“Excuse me?”

“THE STARS WILL OUTLIVE HALF OF YOU,” they repeated.

He quirked a tight smile, because it seemed a better choice than expressing the full fury he felt in that moment. “I didn’t do any of this for the benefit of your curiosity.”

“A FORTUNATE COINCIDENCE FOR YOUR NEGOTIATION,” they replied, and waited for his response. The light stayed still, but the shapes that made it danced and glinted, throwing sparks on the hill. They would not say anything else to him. They waited for him to say yes or no.

It should not have been him that made the choice. He couldn’t even comprehend the full extent of how little he knew. He barely understood what he was agreeing to, though he could grasp that it was an unfair bargain. He knew it was going to harm at least as much as it helped, but could not picture the full extent of what that meant. They had him at an impossible disadvantage. He was the absolute last person who should have been making this bargain.

But they would not speak to anyone else. He had caught their attention, and it did not seem to matter that they disliked him; they would speak to him. He wasnot sure that he could keep the bargain, but he suspected that if he couldn’t, they could easily enforce it.

It was a choice of extermination or stunted growth. It was not a choice at all. It was a manipulation that was twisted into the appearance of a choice. A cruelty packaged as mercy. The Artificers would benefit either way, it seemed.

It was an absurd thing, for something to important to happen in a place with no real name, with no witnesses but grass and the wind. It would come and go without record or fanfare, or even evidence beyond footprints that would be scoured away in days.

He should have had a speech prepared, some heroic monologue that marked the moment, that he could have pointed to later when his bravery was questioned. He had no words, and they would have been wasted in any case.

“You win” he told the light, pushing down the rising feeling of sick in his stomach. “We agree to your terms.”

The emissary of Light vanished instantly, and that was the only acknowledgment he ever received. There was no sound as it went, no ceremony, it simply left him alone on the little hill to contemplate the undulating waves.

He worked his way back to his own landing site, distracted, muddling through his thoughts, eyes only on the ground directly in front of him. He had done a terrible thing, he thought. No, they had done a terrible thing, and rested the fault on him. The Artificers were beings older than his own gods, and they were not infinite in power or scope, but they had the ability to intervene at any time. They had chosen not to, withheld their help until they received something in return. They needed absolutely nothing, and exacted a price anyway. They offered a larger cage. Meet the new masters, same as the old masters.

He made himself furious, tangled in his thoughts, and forgot about the air. Old instinct made him cough up the blood that came from the carelessness.

When the fit ended, his hands were splattered with red and he was bent over his knees, and he gave a long, hard thought on whether or not he should continue walking at all. It would have been easy enough to let the poison air overtake him completely. To just let it rip through his lungs and drown him in his own blood. He was so tired, and the thought of stopping, of resting forever, that was a tempting fantasy.

His deed was done, and the Artificers would take care of the rest. They had no need of his help beyond today’s coercion. He could sleep.

He had suffocated once before, smothered in the smoke of a burning mansion, on a cold mountain night under an entirely different sky. How long ago had that been? He couldn’t quite remember. Perhaps a decade. He had sorely deserved that death, as well. That conflagration was supposed to change him. Supposed to give him new life—give him inspiration, of all morbid things. Give rise to poetry and song about how clever he was, how brave, snatching victory after falling so low.

Maybe he wasn’t a fool, after all. Perhaps it was simple delusion, perpetuated and carried forward alongside everything else that survived that fire.

He ripped the Mask off his face, suddenly disgusted with it, and blinked away the glare of natural, blood red light.

It had been a long time since he had even seen natural light.

Begins and ends, the voices had said. Begins and ends.

It was time to die, he was sure of it now. Time to come out the other side of it someone else, again. Try to be better, again. Maybe this time he would even manage it.

Without the readouts, he had to pay closer attention to retracing his route. The air attempted to claw at his eyes now, too. The ground broke away under his feet as he found the incline that would take him out of the grass again, to the clearing with his borrowed ship.

Drake DuCaine died on a little hill, in the sea of tall grass, under a sun he had never seen before. He died much as he did the first time, terrified and afraid and impotently angry, suffocating in every sense of the word, and dead long before any element came to claim him. As with the first time, no one would know to come looking for him.

Someone else set aside his things, took only what was important, and flew away into the open yellow sky.