Command Lair Volisk
Agdemnar
“How many today?”
“Three. A quick-print Brood icon in the third hall, a couple of Harvester sign paints in the corridors on the other side, and this.”
With a flick of his ramified tongue, Thraas switched on a lateral monitor on the large mound of machinery that filled the center of the wide, squat domed room. Its even electronic glow cast bluish shadows on the smooth cemented walls as the three skirol leaned in, amid the clanking of their motor vehicles’ mechanical limbs, to get a better look at the cramped display. The jagged characters of Srynn Universal on it assembled into rather dry and formal-looking stylistic spirals, but the semantic clusters that formed them were bombastically fanciful as only propaganda pieces could be.
Fellows in superior genesis! We approach a new age of wealth. The old hand that closed around our throats is dead and we eat its remains. Its shields will not stop us, nor will the lesser scavengers that flock to it defeat us. We are born the devourers of life and carrion, and we abide no equals in our domain. Let the feeble prey-things that walk upright break themselves against our jaws of stone! Death waits for them on this world, and triumph for us. We will prevail. We will consume. We will harvest.
But the greatest threat to our supremacy is not from outside. The cowering reactionaries who call themselves your leaders refuse to see the potential of the bounty that lies before us. They would use it just as another weapon. Another tool on the field where our kind must abase themselves before scum that would not last an hour on Vesereth. The brave among us say no! Enough!
No more politics! No more crawling before weak prey-things! The brightest minds of the cycle are with us. We will take the power from the corpses of the Ashtar and no one will have strength to stop us. The universe will be remade in the image of its rightful masters. Come with us, and you will rule over suns beyond counting.
We are the Genome Harvesters. We are the one future.
Veissk folded the pale flaccid skin over his eyes, closing them away from the rambling drivel on the screen. This was the kind of thing that brazenly circulated over the lair communication network under his command. To think that everything had been so quiet at the start. Every member of the expedition had gone through extensive vetting, or at least so he had been told, and he had been assured by the ranks on Vesereth that his officially rogue force did not have anything to fear from the flocks of rumours that surrounded it long before launch. And yet here he was, staring at something out of an espionage pherofilm.
The distant, regular rhythm of the artillery batteries aboveground pushed him out of his moment of lethargy.
His lateral eyes glanced over Thraas, the head of surveillance attached to the expedition to contain just this sort of trouble, who was twisting more buttons on the hub, and Cyret, his lead technician, who nervously ran her tongue back and forth over the edge of her cockpit. As if things were not bad enough, that was it. Those two were the whole of his command anrak. Good people, for sure, but so very few, enough for neither a good command or a good trezklin. This was a sensitive mission, they had said on Vesereth, they had taken precautions, but it was better to limit risks. Taking his trezklin was out of the question, and they could not make the anrak too big. He understood that, but three?
“What do you make of it?” Thraas was asking, evidently done with the hub. Veissk’s left mandible twitched with mild annoyance. Who was supposed to be the expert here, he or them?
Cyret seemingly felt the same way, as her tone had a small edge to it when she replied “What do you think? Some radical fasthead’s ranting. You don’t have to tell us we’ve got a clutch here.”
“That’s the thing.” Thraas leaned back in his cabin. “How many times have you two dealt with the Harvesters?”
Bundles of Veissk’s nerves pulsed under his skin as he remembered. “Once when I was on border duty and they’d been harassing Jalaryias again. Never actually saw one of them, but they made a ragged mess that time.”
“Haven’t seen them either,” Cyret assented, “Just ran through some hardware that got taken from them in a raid. Dangerous stuff, I told you that other time.”
“Right.” Thraas’ head bobbed downward. “And how often have you seen them send out stuff like this?”
“I haven’t, they weren’t recruiting-” Veissk began, but his anrak-brother cut him off.
“Even if they’d been, you wouldn’t have known. The Harvesters don’t work like that. They’re professionals, much as you and me. They don’t need this kind of trash to tell them what to do, when they’re on an op, they already know everything. Running their jaws would just risk blowing their cover, and they know what it’s worth.” He lashed his tongue at the writing on the screen. “This doesn’t look like them a bit. Maybe the Brood or Omniphage or some other religious crackcoil, or our friends in the Pure Circuit, but Harvesters sure as teeth don’t sign their messages.”
There was a brief silence, punctuated by the dull thumping of artillery.
“And what does this mean?” Veissk finally spoke up.
“Either this and the signs are a plant and it’s really the Brood that’s at work here,” Thraas replied, “but you know that can’t be it. Or else the Harvesters are so confident they’ve brought in preachers.”
“So confident…” Cyret repeated half-silently as if distracted by a calculation in her mind, “How many are there around us?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I’ll run a deeper background scan than what I’ve got now for everyone, but I need Veissk here to give me clearance for that. I can also try to trace this present they’ve left us, but I can’t guarantee anything there.”
“You’ve got it. Do what you can.” Alarming as it was, Veissk was just eager to get this business out of the way for the moment. “Cyret, you’d said you had something about that transmission?”
“Cracked it.” Cyret bit the air with a satisfied expression. “The code was a basic one, the message a standard hail. Whoever sent it was taking no chances with misunderstandings.”
“So we still don’t know who it is.”
A tongue-whipping of denial. “Completely new signature. Haven’t got any matches with wartime records. I got them a first contact data pack - had to update some pieces there. Nobody I know has sent one of those for a long time now.”
She tapped something inside her cockpit, and one of the screens before them flickered to a looping string of ”welcome - welcome - welcome - welcome - welcome - welcome”, while the one next to it began coursing through columns of encoded language.
Veissk snapped his jaws impatiently. He was no specialist. “You’re clear to send it. If it comes to the worst, we’ll let orbital handle it.”
“Speaking of orbital…” Thraas pointed at a steadily burning red light near the top of the hub. “I think communications’s been waiting on our line for a while now.”
With an irritated gnash, Veissk flicked the comm channel on. What did they want now? The next push against enemy positions was due in four lesser cycles, he still had no idea of what troop readiness was like, and the Harvester markings were not a good sign. “What?”
“Fold Warleader One, we have an oddity.” The comm overseer’s voice was indistinct without the pheromone signals backing it. Downsides of remote technology. “Unscheduled drop from orbit. They must’ve taken advantage of the skirmish up there to get close enough. Looks like a tactical transport unit, but we can’t be sure.”
Just what they needed. More complications. “What do you mean, can’t be sure?”
“They’re not responding to hails. Their trajectory’s too far for visual contact.”
Now as grim as the dull metallic chassis of his vehicle, Veissk pulled a small lever near the hub’s top. A loosely set projector crackled, and a rough holographic schema of the surface in a wide radius around the command lair sprang into being over the mound of machinery. Key locations gently pulsed as purple sphericles caught in the bright blue mesh; the inbound transport’s projected path cut a broad red arc overhead, burying itself in one of the lightly breathing purple points.
Veissk gaped. “That’s where the Asrians set up camp,” he hissed to one in particular, “we’re not supposed to hit that until we know for sure what they’ve got there.”
He looked at both his anrak-siblings in turn with consternation, and was met with equally lost stares. The only thing they were almost sure about was that the blame for something or the other was going to eventually fall on their heads.
Administrative Hub 409
Traysk Centre, Isvest
Vesereth
...said actions on the parts of major powers like the aforementioned present a clear threat to the integrity of the Treaty of Madrigasa and the terms thereof. The implications of this for the preservation and balance of galactic peace are evident. It is therefore the duty of any sincere adherent of the Treaty, and more so any sincere proponent of peace and stability, to formulate a reaction to the aforedescribed infractions, irrespective of whether they are legally sanctioned by their respective governing bodies. The preservation of peace and balance takes precedence over recognition for a nation’s ability to follow its laws, as well as, regrettably, the original unaltered word of the Treaty proper.
The Joint Commissions of the Harmonic Conflux of the Innumerate Suns, with the approbation and support of their constituent authorities, have thus reached an agreement regarding the emendation of the Exegetic Corpus of the Treaty’s terms. In accordance with this motion, several points of the disarmament conditions will be subject to revision in the near future. A committee is being formed with the task of ensuring that these revisions are conducive to the further preservation of a stable and balanced state of forces within the galaxy. The most salient excerpts eligible for emendation include…
Skenyrr slumped back in her walker, letting her eyes drift away from the tightly regimented letters on the workstation display. The text was obviously written as a declaration to the international arena - the awkward, stilted language and rigid stylistic lines were designed for easy translation - but circumstances dictated that it be framed as a news article, and thus written in Srynn, however bad, for authenticity’s sake. Nobody in the Suns was going to learn anything new from that, of course. The local media had already come up with thousands of clearer ways to say the Commissions were rewriting the Treaty so that they, and only they, could have dreadnoughts and new warships to supposedly counter threats to galactic peace.
Politics, however, called for a show. Skenyrr never did understand, as many skirol did with her, how other polities managed to have one person or small group representing them who could make announcements to the whole galaxy. Something like that might have been possible for pre-space primitives with countries of a few hundred million at best, but when a government stretched over suns on suns, it was absurd. No single thousand beings could possibly be a reliable mouth for the whole system, let alone the one making a speech at a single moment.
And so it was that the Conflux had no real face to show to the galactic community, only an enormous, shapeless mass. Communications were never signed with a name, and proclamations were done this way, as if through incidental news pieces. It really did make much more sense that way.
The skirol glanced over the wide white-plastered hall, brightly lit by several large windows high above anyone’s head. Before her, the brightly chromed bodywork and softly curving pale backs of her family sat before their own stations, checking the day’s news or already tapping away at some diplomatic dispatch. The work was not as glamorous as that of the people making the actual decisions some floors higher, but someone had to organise their disjointed notes into something presentable for foreign governments, and she had never minded the living it afforded them.
Wincing a couple of eyes, she was able to see Inoksh, her second-mate, waving at her with his tongue from across the chamber. She waved back and sank down to the level of her display, flicking the monotonous flow of the declaration away from it. Her neighbour, her clutch-aunt Vnissrin, was already at work, and tossed her some document over the connector fibre with a light tap.
“Message from Rolvius,” she nodded at the notification symbol lighting up on Skenyrr’s monitor, “Already cleared to answer. They had to split it up between Trade and Distribution and the emigration people. Check the first part, it’s better than yesterday’s comedy.”
Skenyrr opened the letter with a tap, and her jaws gaped wider and wider open ash she read.
“...They want the Maw closed?” she was finding it more difficult by the moment to hold back a spray of hilarity pheromones strong enough to cover the whole room. “Because they saw something on the news? Srin, is this a joke? Tell me you wrote it.”
Vnissrin whipped her tongue. “Wish I did, but it’s real. You’re our expert in letting prey-things down, go and bite them hard.”
“You got it.” Try as she might, she could not suppress a chuckle of a spurt. “So, what’s the verdict? I’m guessing telling Lisrak to deal with it isn’t the solution?”
“Not that easy. They’re already antsy about Theniax muscling them out on the Maw’s profits, so we at least try to throw them a bone or they’ll give us all the headache of the rotation. I tagged the administrators’ orders with the thing.”
There were indeed a couple of laconic notes attached to different sections of the letter - “denied, seek alternative; admin. 7” for the first and “not authorized, prepare inspection; admin. 31” for the second. With an exhilarated breath, Skenyrr began to tap out a response.
She let her tongue rest for a moment and glanced at Vnissrin. “I’m not sure about these smaller dealers they’re writing about. You think we should get Lisrak a backup supplier in case it doesn’t work out with them? Maybe send a suggestion upwards?”
“Already thought of. There’s a message to the Lokoid queued after yours, this one by courier. They had me prepare the ground a bit, have a look.”
Another notification flashed to life on the display.
Skenyyr clicked her jaws in amazement. “That’s as good as offering a military pact. You think things really are bad enough to start thinking that way?”
Her clutch-aunt wobbled indecisively. “You’ve seen the news, they’re bringing out the guns again. Maybe it’s still going to be nothing, but don’t quote me on that.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got enough quoting for the morning.” She let the gelatinous sides of her bulk lightly slide down the flanks of her cabin, in a half-studied way by reflex. Vnissrin did not really care about her showing off her girth, but she had gotten into the habit since meeting Inoksh. Speaking of which. “Few of us are going out for comm-feeding this noon, there’s a new place past the river we haven’t been yet. You coming too?”
“Count me in as long as it’s not Lokoid. I wouldn’t want to starve the poor hatchlings on Giaxil.”
The gentle wafts of their laughter drifted over the rows of clerks. A few joined in on the missed joke with a cautious puff. Srynokk shone brightly overhead.
Agdemnar
“How many today?”
“Three. A quick-print Brood icon in the third hall, a couple of Harvester sign paints in the corridors on the other side, and this.”
With a flick of his ramified tongue, Thraas switched on a lateral monitor on the large mound of machinery that filled the center of the wide, squat domed room. Its even electronic glow cast bluish shadows on the smooth cemented walls as the three skirol leaned in, amid the clanking of their motor vehicles’ mechanical limbs, to get a better look at the cramped display. The jagged characters of Srynn Universal on it assembled into rather dry and formal-looking stylistic spirals, but the semantic clusters that formed them were bombastically fanciful as only propaganda pieces could be.
Fellows in superior genesis! We approach a new age of wealth. The old hand that closed around our throats is dead and we eat its remains. Its shields will not stop us, nor will the lesser scavengers that flock to it defeat us. We are born the devourers of life and carrion, and we abide no equals in our domain. Let the feeble prey-things that walk upright break themselves against our jaws of stone! Death waits for them on this world, and triumph for us. We will prevail. We will consume. We will harvest.
But the greatest threat to our supremacy is not from outside. The cowering reactionaries who call themselves your leaders refuse to see the potential of the bounty that lies before us. They would use it just as another weapon. Another tool on the field where our kind must abase themselves before scum that would not last an hour on Vesereth. The brave among us say no! Enough!
No more politics! No more crawling before weak prey-things! The brightest minds of the cycle are with us. We will take the power from the corpses of the Ashtar and no one will have strength to stop us. The universe will be remade in the image of its rightful masters. Come with us, and you will rule over suns beyond counting.
We are the Genome Harvesters. We are the one future.
Veissk folded the pale flaccid skin over his eyes, closing them away from the rambling drivel on the screen. This was the kind of thing that brazenly circulated over the lair communication network under his command. To think that everything had been so quiet at the start. Every member of the expedition had gone through extensive vetting, or at least so he had been told, and he had been assured by the ranks on Vesereth that his officially rogue force did not have anything to fear from the flocks of rumours that surrounded it long before launch. And yet here he was, staring at something out of an espionage pherofilm.
The distant, regular rhythm of the artillery batteries aboveground pushed him out of his moment of lethargy.
His lateral eyes glanced over Thraas, the head of surveillance attached to the expedition to contain just this sort of trouble, who was twisting more buttons on the hub, and Cyret, his lead technician, who nervously ran her tongue back and forth over the edge of her cockpit. As if things were not bad enough, that was it. Those two were the whole of his command anrak. Good people, for sure, but so very few, enough for neither a good command or a good trezklin. This was a sensitive mission, they had said on Vesereth, they had taken precautions, but it was better to limit risks. Taking his trezklin was out of the question, and they could not make the anrak too big. He understood that, but three?
“What do you make of it?” Thraas was asking, evidently done with the hub. Veissk’s left mandible twitched with mild annoyance. Who was supposed to be the expert here, he or them?
Cyret seemingly felt the same way, as her tone had a small edge to it when she replied “What do you think? Some radical fasthead’s ranting. You don’t have to tell us we’ve got a clutch here.”
“That’s the thing.” Thraas leaned back in his cabin. “How many times have you two dealt with the Harvesters?”
Bundles of Veissk’s nerves pulsed under his skin as he remembered. “Once when I was on border duty and they’d been harassing Jalaryias again. Never actually saw one of them, but they made a ragged mess that time.”
“Haven’t seen them either,” Cyret assented, “Just ran through some hardware that got taken from them in a raid. Dangerous stuff, I told you that other time.”
“Right.” Thraas’ head bobbed downward. “And how often have you seen them send out stuff like this?”
“I haven’t, they weren’t recruiting-” Veissk began, but his anrak-brother cut him off.
“Even if they’d been, you wouldn’t have known. The Harvesters don’t work like that. They’re professionals, much as you and me. They don’t need this kind of trash to tell them what to do, when they’re on an op, they already know everything. Running their jaws would just risk blowing their cover, and they know what it’s worth.” He lashed his tongue at the writing on the screen. “This doesn’t look like them a bit. Maybe the Brood or Omniphage or some other religious crackcoil, or our friends in the Pure Circuit, but Harvesters sure as teeth don’t sign their messages.”
There was a brief silence, punctuated by the dull thumping of artillery.
“And what does this mean?” Veissk finally spoke up.
“Either this and the signs are a plant and it’s really the Brood that’s at work here,” Thraas replied, “but you know that can’t be it. Or else the Harvesters are so confident they’ve brought in preachers.”
“So confident…” Cyret repeated half-silently as if distracted by a calculation in her mind, “How many are there around us?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I’ll run a deeper background scan than what I’ve got now for everyone, but I need Veissk here to give me clearance for that. I can also try to trace this present they’ve left us, but I can’t guarantee anything there.”
“You’ve got it. Do what you can.” Alarming as it was, Veissk was just eager to get this business out of the way for the moment. “Cyret, you’d said you had something about that transmission?”
“Cracked it.” Cyret bit the air with a satisfied expression. “The code was a basic one, the message a standard hail. Whoever sent it was taking no chances with misunderstandings.”
“So we still don’t know who it is.”
A tongue-whipping of denial. “Completely new signature. Haven’t got any matches with wartime records. I got them a first contact data pack - had to update some pieces there. Nobody I know has sent one of those for a long time now.”
She tapped something inside her cockpit, and one of the screens before them flickered to a looping string of ”welcome - welcome - welcome - welcome - welcome - welcome”, while the one next to it began coursing through columns of encoded language.
Veissk snapped his jaws impatiently. He was no specialist. “You’re clear to send it. If it comes to the worst, we’ll let orbital handle it.”
“Speaking of orbital…” Thraas pointed at a steadily burning red light near the top of the hub. “I think communications’s been waiting on our line for a while now.”
With an irritated gnash, Veissk flicked the comm channel on. What did they want now? The next push against enemy positions was due in four lesser cycles, he still had no idea of what troop readiness was like, and the Harvester markings were not a good sign. “What?”
“Fold Warleader One, we have an oddity.” The comm overseer’s voice was indistinct without the pheromone signals backing it. Downsides of remote technology. “Unscheduled drop from orbit. They must’ve taken advantage of the skirmish up there to get close enough. Looks like a tactical transport unit, but we can’t be sure.”
Just what they needed. More complications. “What do you mean, can’t be sure?”
“They’re not responding to hails. Their trajectory’s too far for visual contact.”
Now as grim as the dull metallic chassis of his vehicle, Veissk pulled a small lever near the hub’s top. A loosely set projector crackled, and a rough holographic schema of the surface in a wide radius around the command lair sprang into being over the mound of machinery. Key locations gently pulsed as purple sphericles caught in the bright blue mesh; the inbound transport’s projected path cut a broad red arc overhead, burying itself in one of the lightly breathing purple points.
Veissk gaped. “That’s where the Asrians set up camp,” he hissed to one in particular, “we’re not supposed to hit that until we know for sure what they’ve got there.”
He looked at both his anrak-siblings in turn with consternation, and was met with equally lost stares. The only thing they were almost sure about was that the blame for something or the other was going to eventually fall on their heads.
Administrative Hub 409
Traysk Centre, Isvest
Vesereth
...said actions on the parts of major powers like the aforementioned present a clear threat to the integrity of the Treaty of Madrigasa and the terms thereof. The implications of this for the preservation and balance of galactic peace are evident. It is therefore the duty of any sincere adherent of the Treaty, and more so any sincere proponent of peace and stability, to formulate a reaction to the aforedescribed infractions, irrespective of whether they are legally sanctioned by their respective governing bodies. The preservation of peace and balance takes precedence over recognition for a nation’s ability to follow its laws, as well as, regrettably, the original unaltered word of the Treaty proper.
The Joint Commissions of the Harmonic Conflux of the Innumerate Suns, with the approbation and support of their constituent authorities, have thus reached an agreement regarding the emendation of the Exegetic Corpus of the Treaty’s terms. In accordance with this motion, several points of the disarmament conditions will be subject to revision in the near future. A committee is being formed with the task of ensuring that these revisions are conducive to the further preservation of a stable and balanced state of forces within the galaxy. The most salient excerpts eligible for emendation include…
Skenyrr slumped back in her walker, letting her eyes drift away from the tightly regimented letters on the workstation display. The text was obviously written as a declaration to the international arena - the awkward, stilted language and rigid stylistic lines were designed for easy translation - but circumstances dictated that it be framed as a news article, and thus written in Srynn, however bad, for authenticity’s sake. Nobody in the Suns was going to learn anything new from that, of course. The local media had already come up with thousands of clearer ways to say the Commissions were rewriting the Treaty so that they, and only they, could have dreadnoughts and new warships to supposedly counter threats to galactic peace.
Politics, however, called for a show. Skenyrr never did understand, as many skirol did with her, how other polities managed to have one person or small group representing them who could make announcements to the whole galaxy. Something like that might have been possible for pre-space primitives with countries of a few hundred million at best, but when a government stretched over suns on suns, it was absurd. No single thousand beings could possibly be a reliable mouth for the whole system, let alone the one making a speech at a single moment.
And so it was that the Conflux had no real face to show to the galactic community, only an enormous, shapeless mass. Communications were never signed with a name, and proclamations were done this way, as if through incidental news pieces. It really did make much more sense that way.
The skirol glanced over the wide white-plastered hall, brightly lit by several large windows high above anyone’s head. Before her, the brightly chromed bodywork and softly curving pale backs of her family sat before their own stations, checking the day’s news or already tapping away at some diplomatic dispatch. The work was not as glamorous as that of the people making the actual decisions some floors higher, but someone had to organise their disjointed notes into something presentable for foreign governments, and she had never minded the living it afforded them.
Wincing a couple of eyes, she was able to see Inoksh, her second-mate, waving at her with his tongue from across the chamber. She waved back and sank down to the level of her display, flicking the monotonous flow of the declaration away from it. Her neighbour, her clutch-aunt Vnissrin, was already at work, and tossed her some document over the connector fibre with a light tap.
“Message from Rolvius,” she nodded at the notification symbol lighting up on Skenyrr’s monitor, “Already cleared to answer. They had to split it up between Trade and Distribution and the emigration people. Check the first part, it’s better than yesterday’s comedy.”
Skenyrr opened the letter with a tap, and her jaws gaped wider and wider open ash she read.
“...They want the Maw closed?” she was finding it more difficult by the moment to hold back a spray of hilarity pheromones strong enough to cover the whole room. “Because they saw something on the news? Srin, is this a joke? Tell me you wrote it.”
Vnissrin whipped her tongue. “Wish I did, but it’s real. You’re our expert in letting prey-things down, go and bite them hard.”
“You got it.” Try as she might, she could not suppress a chuckle of a spurt. “So, what’s the verdict? I’m guessing telling Lisrak to deal with it isn’t the solution?”
“Not that easy. They’re already antsy about Theniax muscling them out on the Maw’s profits, so we at least try to throw them a bone or they’ll give us all the headache of the rotation. I tagged the administrators’ orders with the thing.”
There were indeed a couple of laconic notes attached to different sections of the letter - “denied, seek alternative; admin. 7” for the first and “not authorized, prepare inspection; admin. 31” for the second. With an exhilarated breath, Skenyrr began to tap out a response.
She let her tongue rest for a moment and glanced at Vnissrin. “I’m not sure about these smaller dealers they’re writing about. You think we should get Lisrak a backup supplier in case it doesn’t work out with them? Maybe send a suggestion upwards?”
“Already thought of. There’s a message to the Lokoid queued after yours, this one by courier. They had me prepare the ground a bit, have a look.”
Another notification flashed to life on the display.
Skenyyr clicked her jaws in amazement. “That’s as good as offering a military pact. You think things really are bad enough to start thinking that way?”
Her clutch-aunt wobbled indecisively. “You’ve seen the news, they’re bringing out the guns again. Maybe it’s still going to be nothing, but don’t quote me on that.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got enough quoting for the morning.” She let the gelatinous sides of her bulk lightly slide down the flanks of her cabin, in a half-studied way by reflex. Vnissrin did not really care about her showing off her girth, but she had gotten into the habit since meeting Inoksh. Speaking of which. “Few of us are going out for comm-feeding this noon, there’s a new place past the river we haven’t been yet. You coming too?”
“Count me in as long as it’s not Lokoid. I wouldn’t want to starve the poor hatchlings on Giaxil.”
The gentle wafts of their laughter drifted over the rows of clerks. A few joined in on the missed joke with a cautious puff. Srynokk shone brightly overhead.
