I owed my family everything. Had Jules and Rayph not arrived when they had, the extra time I'd need to spend earning the Vyxit's trust would have doomed us all.

There was so little time left to escape.

But they were there—my kids were there, exactly when, where, and how they needed to be, and it made all the difference.

Qua'loc's hostility turned upside down the instant he understood what had happened to them. It was thrilling to watch him grasp the implications in real time. One moment, he angrily wanted nothing to do with me; the next, he angrily insisted that I come with him and follow all of his instructions to the letter.

The thing was, he wanted to do something to Jules and Rayph. After all that I'd seen, I wasn't quite comfortable with unilaterally surrounding my kids to the Vyxit.

"You are now the most important being in the universe, Dr. Howle," he said. "You do not have the right to disobey."

"These are my children!" I said. "I'm their father! I have a right to know what you plan on doing to them!"

For what it was worth, I was especially defensive at the moment, seeing as Jules and Rayph had passed into unconsciousness.

"Your children are in need of immediate medical treatment," Qua'loc replied. "They are in critical condition. If nothing is done, they will die of nutrient deficiency. If their condition is mismanaged, they will die of Refeeding Syndrome, assuming your species' biochemistry hews to standard oxygen-carbon metabolism."

And just like that, any resistance I might have had melted away, because I realized that Qua'loc wasn't just a manticore; he was a doctor.

Doctors can recognize our own.

I shook my head. "No, I completely understand. Do whatever you have to do. Please, save them."

Using my psychokinetic hold, I gently lay Jules and Rayph in Alahumadwod's open, waiting arms. The crab-clawed alien trudged up the boarding ramp; his companions followed suit. I waited outside for a hesitant moment before Qua'loc darted back out and snarled at me.

"Get in, you idiot, before I kill you!" he barked.

For a doctor, Qua'loc was quite violent.

However, both then and now, I excused his rudeness and complied without complaint. Even then, I had an inkling of the magnitude of the change I'd brought to the Vyxit way of life, though the true significance would only become clear to me in time.

For these three Vyxit, seeing my children convalescing from the Green Death hit them with the force of a religious revelation, much like what I'd felt when I'd first seen the Sword in Suisei's memories.

For eons, through fear, violence, and tragedy, the Vyxit had fought their insidious foe, proud in the knowledge that they were the only force in the cosmos working to end &alon's reign of terror. As long as the Blight continued to pose a threat, the Long Hunt could not end.

But a cure?

That changed everything.

It took only one look at the entrance ramp for me to realize that there was no chance in heck of me fitting all of my body into their ship. By this point, I'd grown large enough to wrap myself around the starfighter the way I had with the L85, and multiple loops over, at that. At the moment, the best I could was to thread the upper half of my body into the ship.

Despite my exhortations, &alon decided to stay behind, choosing to wait outside. Try as I might, I couldn't convince her going into the ship wouldn't harm her.

"You've infected ships bigger than this!" I said.

"That's not the same!"

I just sighed and carried on.

I cautiously slithered my forepart up the boarding ramp, keeping my arms flush to my sides as I advanced. Even then, it was a tight fit, but I managed to stuff my way through the back room and into the ship's central chamber. My scutes scraped against the floor as I slid myself through the opening in the middle of the chamber, down to the lowest floor beneath it. I stopped once my head and arms came to rest on the ground, right where Qua'loc had led me.

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It was the worst ergonomic set-up this side of eternity, but—fortunately—a wyrm's back was far more robust than a human spine.

I spent a moment just staring at everything. There was so much to take in! For one thing, all the Vyxit had removed (or retracted) their helmets. Qua'loc, meanwhile, had stripped out of his power suit altogether⁠. There was a set of four pods up against the wall in the medium-sized room in the corner of the ship's bottom floor. They looked like stasis pods from a science-fiction story, and I was mesmerized to watch my children get loaded into them.

The pods reminded me of the darkpox beds we had back at the hospital. They had long basin in which the patient could comfortably lay back, covered by a curved, transparent lid that slid in place with a soft, satisfying whoosh once Alahumadwod tapped an icon on the black display screens up on the wall directly above them after placing Jules and Rayph in pods of their own.

Qua'loc turned to me as soon as the lids sealed shut.

"These are… regeneration units." He glanced back at the kids. "They will—"

"—Will it do them any harm?" I asked.

"No. The machines destroy ill-health, and nothing else," he replied.

"Then do whatever you need to do."

Qua'loc went to work, tapping various icons and controls. Tubes emerged from the inner walls of the regeneration units and snaked their way down my kids' throats. Things flashed and beeped.

It was while this was happening that I finally managed to make sense of Qua'loc's body.

He really was a manticore—stinger-tail and all. His fur was a mix of browns and blacks, with rouge highlights and hyena-spotted haunches. His face was by turns apish and leonine, and I could sense a great intellect in the intensity of his gem-bright eyes. Qua'loc's clothing and accessories were anachronisms compared to our surroundings. Many decorative rings and beads were scattered across his mane without any clear pattern or symmetry. His clothes were a mix of leathery plating and trailing, silken white garments that parted around his bat-like wings and to either side of his furry, stinger-tipped tail. It brought to mind tales of the pagan priests that once prayed beneath the Zidian continent's desert Moon.

But then a terrified scream stole my attention.

"What the fuck is going on here?!"

The words were clear as day, and not the least bit mechanical in sound, though I lost track of that latter detail once I turned my head to the source of the noise. At that moment, if I still had a jaw, it would have hung so low—open so wide—that it would have probably fallen right off my face.

I found myself staring at a human face, and it stared right back at me, transfixed with terror. He was copper skinned, with a bang-belted mop of short, straight hair, the edges of which dyed in a gradient that ended in blue. His head stuck up from between the shoulders of the Vyxit power suit that covered the rest of his body. He raised his arm at me, hand curled into a fist and pressed a button on his forearm, the surrounding circuitry of which had begun to brightly glow.

Alahumadwod trudged out from the medical bay and raised his lower pair of arms in a defensive gesture. "Tal, stop!"

Tal—the human—screamed. "Have you all lost your goddamn minds!? You've just killed me—and yourselves, too!"

I raised my arm and pointed at the spores pooling at the bottom of my psychokinetic fishbowl helmet. (I'd conjured the thing as I'd slithered inside the ship.) In the process, I accidentally scraped my claws against a wall. The soundwaves looked as bad as they sounded.

"In my defense," I said, "I'm keeping my spores bound in this forcefield."

Qua'loc leapt onto the floor and slunk toward us. "Genneth, dispel your forcefield."

Tal gawked and grimaced. "W-What?"

Qua'loc pointed his stinger at the regeneration pods. "The serpent's children are in the regeneration pods. They are recovering from the Blight."

Tal blinked. "W-What…?" Instantly his fear crossed the short gap between terror and the hope that was almost too beautiful to be believed.

The manticore sat down on his haunches and gestured at me with a thumbed paw. "Dr. Genneth Howle, here, claims the Blight is now harmless."

"You believe the snake?" Tal asked.

"No one has ever recovered from the Blight, Tal."

"It could be a trick!" Tal rebutted.

Qua'loc locked eyes with me. "Genneth, spray some of your spores on me."

"Are… are you sure?"

"Yes," he said. "Other than opposing hUen-dE's tyranny, I have never been more certain of anything in my life."

"So be it," I said.

Tal watched in horror as I turned my head toward Qua'loc. I made a hole in my imaginary fishbowl and breathed out a stream of acid-free spores. The manticore was inundated with green particles. I didn't stop until they dripped from his fur like sleet and snow.

Everyone watched in stunned silence. We counted the moments as one second became two, and then a minute, and more.

And, for once, everyone was absolutely fine. Nothing bad happened to anyone at all.

Alahumadwod's faceless, silver-coated body stared at the manticore in disbelief. "The Martyr's promise has come to pass."

And Qua'loc laughed.

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