The Index -|-

Silence stretched across the room like a held breath. The kind of silence that comes after something definitive has ended. It was not peaceful, exactly, but it was complete. Zara stood with her Da’s hand on her back and listened to their breathing echo off the marble. Her ribs hurt with each inhalation. Her fist throbbed in a hot, insistent rhythm where she’d driven it into Na’s torso. The absence of Qon was a constant background ache, a distinct space within her that nothing filled.

Kpleeb lowered his free hand to his vest, remembering now to disable his curse. “Clemency,” he said quietly. The word fell into the silence and sat there. Nothing dramatic happened. No visible change, no sound, no rush of energy.

“What is that for?” Zara murmurred. “How did the Ja die? I- I saw you kill Ka.” She paused and reviewed her memories. “Wait, how did we escape the bonds?” Zara pulled back and looked up at her Da’s face.

“A virus I built,” Kpleeb said quietly. His voice was rough, sanded down by whatever damage the Qon threads had done to his throat. “I tested on a few Xi, and all of them turned to riiat. The suspension targets silica-based cellular structures. Nothing else.” He coughed, winced, and spat a glob of dark phlegm onto the marble. “I made sure it only destroys the Xi.”

“Are you sure?”

“I even tested it on myself and a couple of the Hkkli. Not Kanta though.” His eyes shifted away from her. “I had to know…”

There was a sustained silence as Zara processed the information. She turned to more directly face her Da and spoke quietly. “What if you had died? Did you ever think how that would hurt me?” Her eyes began to well up with tears. “Your revenge, I understand… but it can’t be at the cost of yourself.”

Kpleeb awkwardly put his arms around her. “I’m sorry. I did think of you, but I- well I had to find a way to make the Predominant pay. I had to” He brushed a tear from her cheek. “Remember, I wanted to kill every Xi, and you talked me out of it.”

Zara rubbed her temple with her free hand. Her fingers came away smeared with blood. The emptiness in her chest pulsed in time with her heartbeat. “It worked on the Predominant. I didn’t think anything would.”

“Someone had to pay, and nothing’s invincible.” Kpleeb smiled gently and then seemed to relax. “I am sorry. Are we okay?”

She nodded, though the motion sent a spike of pain through her neck. She looked around the chamber. “I’m fine, Da, I just want you to think about life after this. You said that I am not defined by Qon, and in the same way, you do not end with the Predominant. I am thinking about this, and you should be too. Promise me you’ll think about it.

Kpleeb grunted noncommitally.

“Anyways, I know you can’t see the aji Da, but Qon escaped.”

“Maybe underground,” Kpleeb said. “Into the foundations. I can’t see it though. Are you sure it’s gone?”

“It fled when the Predominant were killed,” Zara said simply.

Kpleeb was silent for a moment, his gaze moving across the devastation. He eyed the empty armor, the riiat, the broken bodies of Ganix warriors who had died without landing a blow. His jaw worked, and Zara saw the calculation happening behind his eyes. “First we need to unearth the secrets that are here,” he said finally. “Then we decide what’s worth chasing after this.”

They moved together toward the broken dais. Zara’s legs were unsteady, each step sending fresh pain through her knees where she’d hit the marble, but Kpleeb kept pace beside her, one hand still on her arm. The floor was treacherous, slick with congealing fluids, littered with debris, coated in that fine gray dust that caught the light. They picked their way through it carefully, boots leaving prints in the riiat.

The dais where the three thrones sat appeared to be carved from a single block of veined marble, purple and gold threads running through white stone like circuitry. Up close, Zara could see that the sigils carved into its surface weren’t decorative, they were writing. Xi glyphs, thousands of them, arranged in concentric rings that spiraled outward from the center of each step. She couldn’t read them. The script was too dense and too different, the characters overlapping in ways that made her head hurt to look at.

“These aren’t just pretty patterns,” she said.

Kpleeb grunted. “Nothing in this place is just pretty.”

They completed their circuit of the dais and stopped at its far side, where the devastation was thinner. The floor here was cleaner, the dust settled in delicate veils rather than thick mounds. Zara tilted her head back.

The dome above them was even more impressive from directly beneath. What she had taken for painted artistry from a distance revealed itself as something far more intricate up close. The night sky wasn’t painted, it was carved. Thousands of interlocking slate panels fitted together with such precision that the seams were nearly invisible, each one etched with patterns that caught the light and held it. The day-to-night cycle that was projected overwhelmed the delicate lines, but as the night rose, the projected stars seemed to coalesce with the carved stars.

“That looks like slate,” Kpleeb murmured. “Oiitr said that Yefrtil was a slate mine, the most well known, maybe.”

The panels formed a map. Clusters of carved glyphs arranged in familiar patterns, though the constellations they depicted weren’t any she recognized. They radiated outward from a central point where a single star had been inlaid with some material that caught the light differently, brighter, with a faint blue tinge. Around that central star, concentric rings had been etched into each segment, the lines so fine they looked like hair.

As they watched, the light from hidden sources above the dome shifted. Not dramatically. It was just a subtle change in angle, as if the sun portrayed in that artificial sky had moved a degree westward. The shift sent ripples of shadow across the carved glyphs, animating them. Constellations that had been static a moment ago now seemed to pulse, the concentric rings breathing in and out with the play of light and dark.

“It’s a star chart,” Zara said. Her voice sounded small beneath the vastness of the dome. “But not any map I’ve seen in the Xi libraries.”

Kpleeb was silent beside her, his gaze moving across the carved sky with a focused intensity. Zara watched his eyes track from the central blue star to one cluster of glyphs, then to another, his brow furrowed in concentration.

“The central point,” he said finally. “That must be Nidix. Has to be. And the rings are distance markers, maybe. Or terminal coordinates.” He shook his head. “We need Kanta- and Viinox, if its still alive.”

Zara thought of Viinox running, the flash of its gray robe vanishing down the corridor as Tiirw fell. She hoped her friend had made it back to the ships. The thought pulled at her insides in a way that had nothing to do with the absence of Qon.

Zara tapped the necklace designed and given to her by her Mama.

“Kanta. We’re in the central chamber. We need you. Bring mapping equipment and—“ She hesitated, then added, “bring Viinox, if you can.”

The response came three seconds later, Kanta’s voice bubbling through the cracked speaker with its usual measured calm. “Acknowledged. On our way.”

The wait felt longer than it was. Zara stood with her Da beneath the carved dome and listened to the sound of their own breathing and the underlying silence. Kpleeb had found a length of broken spear shaft and was using it as a makeshift cane, his weight shifted off his injured knee. Neither of them spoke, they merely walked the chamber taking in the vast array of ancient sights.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor. Not the measured tread of Xi warriors or the light, quick steps of Ganix, but something in between. Zara turned.

Kanta filled the doorway first. Her short, stocky silhouette was unmistakable even through the distortion of her airowalking helmet, the water inside sloshing gently as she moved. Behind the curved glass, her large round eyes widened at the sight of the devastation, the dust, the empty thrones in the chamber. She carried a satchel slung across one shoulder, and a small device was clutched in her flippered hand.

Beside her, gray-robed and intact, stood Viinox.

Zara’s breath caught. She hadn’t realized how afraid she’d been for Viinox. The Xi’s neck slits fluttered in that rapid, agitated pattern she’d come to recognize as distress, and its blue eyes moved across the chamber in quick, assessing the carnage before settling on Zara’s face. “You’re alive!” she said..

Viinox tilted its chin upward slightly. “I ran. I am… relieved to see you safe and alive, Miss Zara.” Its gaze moved to the empty thrones, the riiat dust, and something complicated passed across its features. Something too subtle for Zara to parse, but she thought she saw relief there, and beneath it, a quieter emotion.

“Come look at this,” Kpleeb said, cutting through the moment with his usual pragmatism. He pointed upward with the broken spear shaft.

The four of them gathered beneath the center of the dome. Kanta’s eyes widened behind her helmet, water sloshing as she tilted her head back to take in the vastness of the carved sky. She reached into her satchel without looking and pulled out a stick of pale chalk.

“This is extraordinary,” she murmured and began to work.

Kanta’s method was methodical. She moved in a slow circle beneath the dome, chalk held between two flippered fingers, tracing lines between key clusters of glyphs on the marble floor. Carefully, she mapped the constellations above onto the ground below. The chalk left thin white trails that connected symbols Zara hadn’t even noticed were related. Kanta’s movements were quick and precise, her body rotating in small increments as she built the map from the center outward.

“These have to astral coordinates,” she said, bubbles rising in her helmet as she spoke. “But the reference frame is shifted.“ She tapped the blue inlaid star with her chalk. “The central point is Nidix, obviously. But the orientation is wrong for contemporary Xi navigation. This is so much older.”

Viinox stepped forward. From a handheld device, it projected a holo-map into the air. It appeared as a shimmering, translucent overlay of the known Xi empire, terminals glowing as bright points, orbs as softer hazes. The projection rotated slowly, aligning itself with Kanta’s chalk lines after a few moments.

“Spatial vectors,” Viinox murmured. Its three-fingered hands moved through the hologram, adjusting angles, scaling regions. “The terminal at Yefrtil corresponds to this cluster here. The First Terminal aligns with this arc. But there are deviations.” It paused, neck slits fluttering. “Significant ones. The map shows terminals that do not exist in our records and orbs that have no contemporary equivalent.”

Zara exchanged a glance with her Da. Kpleeb’s expression was guarded, but she saw the calculation happening. His mind was working through implications. “We should check the side chambers,” she said. “While they work.”

Kpleeb nodded. They left Kanta tracing her chalk lines and Viinox murmuring over vectors, and moved toward a corridor Zara had spotted along the eastern wall. It was narrow compared to the grand entrance hall, barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, and it was unlit except for the same faint glow that permeated everything in this place.

The chambers beyond were small and surprisingly mundane. A dozen rooms were arranged in a horseshoe around a central common area. Each contained the same basic furnishings: a sleeping platform built into the wall, a small desk, a chair, shelves empty of everything except dust. The walls were hung with tapestries so old the colors had faded to muted blues and purples, the patterns indistinct with age.

“No personal effects,” Kpleeb observed, running a finger along one empty shelf. “Whoever it was, they cleared out long ago.”

“Or they were never here to begin with.” Zara lifted the edge of a tapestry. The fabric crumbled slightly between her fingers, ancient threads giving way. “These might be centuries old. Maybe the retinue left a long time ago.”

They completed the circuit and returned to the main hall. Kanta had finished her chalk map. It was a complex web of white lines covering a large section of the marble floor, constellations connected in patterns that made Zara’s head hurt to look at. Viinox’s hologram hovered above it, adjusted now to align perfectly with the chalk tracings.

Kanta looked up as they entered. Her flippered hand was extended toward the far wall of the chamber, where a sequence of reliefs had been carved into the stone. Most were cracked or partially collapsed, and the figures they depicted eroded beyond recognition, but a few sections remained intact.

“Look,” Kanta said. Her voice had that particular tone it took when she’d found something important. “These tell a story.”

The intact sections showed Xi figures, but not like any Xi Zara had seen. These were taller, their proportions wrong, limbs too long, shoulders too broad. They wore armor similar to the Predominant’s, but simpler, without the intricate etchings. And they were building something. A structure that emerged from the relief in overlapping layers, growing more complex panel by panel.

“Xih,” Viinox said quietly. “These must be Xih.”

“They’re building the terminals,” Zara realized. “Or something like them. Look at the patterns.”

But it was the final relief that caught her eye. Set apart from the narrative sequence, carved into a curved section of wall near the chamber’s northern exit, was a radial engraving. Concentric circles emanated from a central point, with lines connecting key locations in a pattern that mirrored the star chart above. One line in particular stood out: etched more deeply, running from the center toward a cluster of symbols that Zara recognized immediately.

Yefrtil.

All eyes settled on it. The engraving caught the pastel light from the dome and held it, the deep-cut lines throwing sharp shadows that pointed like arrows.

“That’s our next move,” Kpleeb stated confidently.

Zara nodded. Her body ached in a dozen places, her shoulder throbbed, and the emptiness inside her felt vast and cold. But the engraving on the wall was clear, and the path forward with it.

“Yefrtil,” she said. “We were just there! Whatever the Xih built, whatever the Predominant were hiding, we will find more clues there.”

The Index -|-

Kpleeb hung in the invisible Qon web and let the pain become a landscape. His right shoulder was in tremendous pain, and his left knee was definitely going to hurt for days. Blood from his nose had filled his mouth and dried there. Each breath drove the Qon threads deeper between his ribs, and each exhale was a wet, ragged thing that tasted like dying.

But his right hand was still working. His fingers found the seam in his armor vest, just below the collarbone, where he’d crafted a clasp himself months ago in his room aboard the Greki. The clasp was made from kerflk just like the vest. Inside it was a reservoir no bigger than his thumbnail, filled with a suspension so fine it was almost not there at all.

He had tested it on several Xi subjects and each had turned to riiat within minutes. The virus was elegant in its specificity: it targeted the silica-based cellular structure unique to Xi physiology, leaving everything else untouched. Humans, Ganix, Hkkli, and others. Only the Xi were destroyed.

He drew a breath. The threads cinched tighter, and something in his chest gave way with a hot, tearing sensation. He ignored it. His fingers found the clasp and pressed.

“Defile,” he breathed hoarsely.

The word left his lips as little more than a whisper, lost beneath the murmuring of the Predominant and the faint hum of the chamber. But the virus heard it. It moved in the air, invisible, odorless, a ghost of particulate so fine it caught the light only as a momentary haze, like heat rising from a tundra stone during the hotening.

No one noticed. The Predominant were still enjoying themselves.

“—pathetic,” Ka was saying, its voice carrying haughtiness. It had moved closer to Kpleeb, close enough that Kpleeb could see the individual etchings on its armor and notice how the light caught the swirls and made them seem to move. “All this way for vengeance, and you die without landing a single blow. I almost respect the commitment.”

“The child held Qon for so long. That’s a record. We should document the decay rate before…“

“Before I’m done with her,” Na finished, and its glow had warmed to something almost amber, eager and maternal. It circled behind Zara, one hand reaching toward her hair with terrible gentleness. “Such a waste of a child.”

Kpleeb waited. For several long seconds, nothing happened. The Predominant continued their performance, Ka pontificating and Na weirdly caressing the air near Zara’s terrified face. Kpleeb’s vision grayed at the edges again, and he forced himself to breathe through it. One breath. Another. The threads bit deeper.

Then Ka stopped mid-sentence.

Its brow furrowed. Not dramatically, just a slight crease between those piercing blue eyes, a momentary confusion, as if it had forgotten the next word in a well-rehearsed speech. Its hand, raised in some grand gesture, paused in the air.

Ja noticed as it noticed everything. Its bioluminescence flickered, a quick, irregular pulse, and its hand went to its throat.

“What—“ Na began, and then made a sound. Not a word. A small, puzzled noise, like a child who has touched something hot by accident. Its glow stuttered, the warm amber fading toward something pale.

Kpleeb steadied himself. The pain was still there, vast and consuming, but beneath it he felt something new: a shift in his bindings. They hadn’t completely loosened, not yet, but the tension had changed. The Predominant’s control was wavering.

Ka took a step backward. Its neck slits fluttered rapidly, then slowed, then fluttered again in an irregular rhythm. It looked down at its own hands as if they belonged to someone else, and something in its throat made a low, grinding sound.

Na had both hands pressed to its stomach, where the bioluminescence was pulsing in frantic, disordered patterns. Its eyes had gone wide, pupils dilated, and it was making a small yelp over and over that increased in volume.

For a moment, all three stopped talking, and the chamber fell quiet. They stood in their triangle and gazed unexpectedly inward, breath labored, faces confused.

Ka’s knees buckled first. It folded at the joints as if its bones had turned to water. Its neck slits fluttered in wild, panicked rhythms, opening and closing faster than any Xi’s should. One hand rose toward its own throat and hovered there, trembling, fingers curled inward.

Kpleeb watched the confusion become fear. Soon, fear become something worse. Ka’s eyes rolled, the whites showing as they rolled back, then forward, then back again in shuddering spasms. Its jaw worked silently, mouth open, and a thin gray fluid began to seep from the corner of its lips. The virus was in the crystalline structure of whatever passed for its organs. Kpleeb had seen this before, but never in a Xi as large or powerful as this one. The effect was similar and a bit slower.

Ja made a sound like a pipe cracking. Its bioluminescence stuttered and died out, then flared bright enough to throw stark shadows across the marble floor, then reduced again in rapid, disordered pulses. It dropped to one knee, hands braced against the stone, and its breathing came in jagged, whistling gasps through fluttering neck slits. “I don’t—“ it managed, and then the word dissolved into a long, rattling exhalation. Its fingers curled against the marble, nails scraping thin white lines in the polished surface, and it began to shriek loudly.

Na was the quietest. It simply folded, curling in on itself, arms wrapped around its stomach where the warm amber glow had gone sickly and pale. When it looked up at Kpleeb there was nothing there but animal bewilderment.

Slowly at first, then all at once, the invisible web unraveled around Kpleeb and Zara like a net coming undone. He dropped.

His knees hit the marble with a crack that shot pain up both thighs. He caught himself on his palms, fingers spread against the cold, stone floor and waited there for a moment, breathing. Each breath was a ragged, painful thing, and he could smell sweat and riiat in the air. His chest felt like it had been stepped on, ribs creaking with the expansion of his lungs. Dried blood from his nose adorned his upper lip, and his mouth tasted of salt and iron tang. The threads had left burning lines across his neck, wrists and forearms, but it had been unable to pierce through his armor. He could feel every one of them, a map of pain written across his skin.

Zara landed beside him with a thud and a gasp. He heard her choking, coughing, drawing air in desperate lungfuls. He didn’t look at her. Not yet. He had one thing left to do.

He planted his right hand flat on the marble and pushed. His shoulder ached deeply, and his knee screamed at him. He pushed through it, teeth clenched, and rose to his feet in one graceless, swaying motion. The room tilted around him, then settled. His right hand went to his back and found the sheath hidden beneath his armored vest.

The kerflk blade came free with a soft sound. Yellow stone, made by the Xih, shaped by Kpleeb’s own hands and voice over long nights aboard the Greki when sleep wouldn’t come.

Ka was on its knees now, head hanging, gray fluid dripping from its mouth to spatter on the marble below. Its armor glinted dully, the etched swirls of cloud and storm gone dark. Kpleeb stepped toward it, each footfall deliberate despite the pain that lanced through his knee. He adjusted his grip on the kerflk blade. The stone was warm against his palm.

He drove the blade into Ka’s ribcage from behind, angling upward beneath the armor plates. The wet crack of bone fracturing echoed through the chamber, and it was a sharp, definitive, sound that carried to the dome and back. Kpleeb felt the blade bite through whatever passed for cartilage in a Xi, felt the resistance give way, felt the warm rush of fluid around his knuckles. He grunted and shoved with his left palm against Ka’s shoulder blade, driving the blade deeper, twisting it slightly.

Ka made no sound. Its body went rigid, back arching, neck slits fluttering in one final, desperate rhythm.

Kpleeb watched the black lines reach into Ka’s eyes and turn the piercing blue to something dark and vacant. He pulled the blade free. Ka remained upright for one impossible moment, balanced on its knees, head tilted back as if still issuing some silent command to the empty air. Then it crumbled.

The dissolution was swift and complete. Its body collapsed inward, armor and all, compacting into a swirling plume of gray-white dust that billowed outward across the marble floor. The dust caught the light from the dome, each particle glowing briefly before settling. It drifted in slow, lazy currents, settling over the cold stone in a thin, fine layer. The armor pieces clattered and rang as they hit the marble, empty shells with nothing inside them.

The echo of the bone crack faded into silence. Kpleeb stood amid the drifting plume breathing the dry, chalky scent of riiat, kerflk blade dripping Ka’s internal fluid. Ka was gone. Reduced to dust and memory as it should be. He turned toward Ja, but saw only a pile of riiat.

###

Qon’s golden tendrils were leaving.

Zara watched them from the floor where she’d landed, her palms pressed flat against cold marble, breath coming in short, painful gasps. Threads of Qon unwound from the air around her, pulling back from the walls, from the dome, from the shattered remains of the Ganix warriors who lay scattered across the chamber. They retracted like the tentacles of some vast, wounded creature, coiling inward toward the center of the room where the three thrones stood. For a heartbeat they gathered there, a knot of brilliant gold light pulsing with what looked almost like panic, and then they fled into a wall behind the thrones.

The light seemingly dimmed as Qon went, at least to Zara. Golden brilliance fading to amber, then to a dull yellow glow, and then nothing. Her muscles ached from hanging in those threads, her ribs throbbed where they’d been compressed, and her right shoulder felt like it had been dislocated and roughly shoved back into place. She pushed herself to her feet, swaying, and the world tilted sickeningly before righting itself.

She saw her Da pull a long, kerflk knife out of Ka’s back, and turned to look for the others.

Na was on the ground ten paces away, curled on its side, twitching violently. Its bioluminescence had faded to a sickly, pulsing glow that made its gray-green skin look jaundiced. One hand clutched at its stomach where Zara had punched it earlier; the other twitched weakly.

Zara remembered Na’s hand reaching for her hair. Remembered the soft, maternal tone as it said “Let me have the girl. Just for a little while. I want to feel her break.” The memory landed in her chest like a hot stone.

She launched herself forward with no plan. No Qon to guide her. Just her body, hurt and furious, driving forward off her back foot with all the strength she had left. She swung her leg back and put her whole weight behind the kick. It impacted Na’s head like a wrecking ball. The edge of the bottom dais step and Na’s head connected with a sickening thud. Something in its neck gave, and Na stopped moving. In a few moments, the body began dissolve, a finger first and thn slow, the rest followed until riiat was all that was left.

Zara sighed heavily and turned to look for Ja. As she moved, she staggered backward and stumbled, arms pinwheeling for balance that wouldn’t come.

Kpleeb’s hand closed around her upper arm. His grip was firm, steadying, his fingers warm through the fabric of her sleeve. He pulled her upright and she leaned into him, breathing hard, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

The chamber fell silent.

Their ragged breathing was the loudest thing. Zara’s came in short, pained gasps; Kpleeb’s was deeper, slower, each exhale carrying the wet edge of damage to his lungs. Flickers of light played across the devastation. The dome above cast shifting pastel hues over scattered debris—broken weapons, fragments of Ganix armor, the empty shells of Xi plate mail lying where their wearers had dissolved. Spent riiat dust covered the marble in thin, ghostly veils, catching the light in brief flashes before settling. Near the center of the room, the three thrones stood empty on their raised dais, gold and purple cushions undisturbed, as if their occupants had simply stepped away for a moment.

The Predominant were gone. Reduced to dust and memory.

Zara remembered the poem Viinox had quoted. “They rule with wisdom, age, and fear. Their power increasing every year.”

Kpleeb wheezed out something that might have been a laugh. “Not anymore.”