Chapter 2108: Avelis

It was a new thread, as faint and delicate as the old one, running outward from the shell toward the distant presence of the Heavenly Records.

But this thread carried no record of awakening and no Calling. It carried only the quiet, ordinary record of a young man who had been born, grown up, and was about to be awakened for the first time.

<Construction complete. The Heavenly Records will recognize you as an unawakened human matching your records.>

Ning let out a slow breath and lay back on the bunk.

"Thank you," he said.

He lay there for a while, watching the stars drift past the window, and then he thought of something else.

It had been a long time since he had spoken to Crownus.

More than five years had passed since he had left the Galactic Will on the moon above Truimal and walked into the academy under his new name. In all that time, he had not reached out once. He had been busy, and Crownus had been recovering. There had been no reason to disturb him.

But they were traveling deeper into Crownus’s galaxy now, toward the heart of the civilization Crownus had accidentally shaped, and Ning found himself curious.

He did not need to call out. Crownus could read his thoughts whenever he wished, and Ning simply turned his attention toward the Galactic Will and waited.

The answer came almost at once.

The cabin did not change, and nothing appeared in front of him. But a presence settled into the back of Ning’s mind, vast and quiet and unmistakable, and a voice spoke inside his thoughts.

"Sir Host. It has been some time."

"It has," Ning agreed. "How are you feeling?"

"I am recovering. More slowly than I would prefer, but steadily. I have not yet regained the strength I spent creating the System."

"How long until you have?"

"Longer than you would like," Crownus said. "But within the time we agreed upon."

Ning nodded slightly, though there was no one there to see it. "And the System? Naysha?"

"She is doing well. Better than I expected. I see everything she does."

There was a pause.

"I see what you have just done to yourself, as well," Crownus added. "Severing your old Calling. Constructing a new connection to the Records. It is very thorough."

"I’d rather not cause a scene on Avelis."

"No. I imagine you would not."

Ning was quiet for a moment.

"How’s the war going?" he asked.

There was a longer pause this time. When Crownus answered, there was something in his voice that Ning could not quite read, something that might have been amusement, or might have been something else entirely.

"Interestingly," Crownus said.

Ning waited for him to continue. He did not.

"That’s all?" Ning asked.

"That is all I will say."

Ning considered pressing him. He knew that if he asked directly, Crownus would probably tell him everything: what the Mekharans were doing on Corvessa and the other planets, what all that metal was for, and where the war was heading. Crownus saw everything that happened in this galaxy.

There was nothing about this war he did not know.

But that would ruin the surprise.

And Ning had made his decision about surprises a long time ago.

"Fine," he said. "Keep your secrets."

"I intend to," Crownus said, and Ning could have sworn he heard something close to a smile in the Galactic Will’s voice.

The presence withdrew from his mind as quietly as it had arrived, and Ning was alone in the cabin once again.

He lay back on the bunk and watched the stars, and a few days later, the transport passed through one final matrix and emerged in the system of Avelis.

The transport emerged from the final matrix into a system unlike any Ning had seen in Crownus’s galaxy.

Avelis’s sun burned a warm, golden yellow, and the space around it was crowded with more ships than Ning had ever seen in one place.

Transports, freighters, passenger liners, and warships moved through every lane of the system in a constant, glittering stream, flowing in and out of a dozen enormous hubs that orbited the planets like rings of light. Some of the vessels were plain and practical.

Others were so lavishly decorated, their hulls inlaid with gold and painted with elaborate designs, that Ning wondered how they had survived the journey at all.

And at the heart of it all, hanging in the golden light like a jewel, was Avelis itself.

Ning had last seen this planet more than a hundred and thirty thousand years ago, standing on a mountain with Crownus while the Heavenly Records offered him a choice between Priest, Boxer, and Winemaker.

Back then, Avelis had been a developed world, but one still bound to its own surface, its civilization limited to the cities and settlements spread across its land.

The planet he saw now was barely recognizable.

Its surface glittered with cities so vast that they seemed to cover entire continents, their lights visible even from orbit on the planet’s night side.

Great towers rose from them into the upper atmosphere, some of them tall enough to reach the edge of space itself, connected to orbital stations by long, gleaming tethers.

The oceans were dotted with floating cities, and the skies above them were filled with the drifting lights of countless aircraft.

It was, Ning had been told, the center of human culture in this entire region of the galaxy. Looking at it now, he could believe it.

The transport descended to one of the great spaceports on the planet’s largest continent, and Ning disembarked into a city that was older, more crowded, and wealthier than anything he had seen since arriving in Crownus’s galaxy.

He had three days before his Calling ceremony, and he spent them exploring.

Avelis was steeped in tradition.

He could see it everywhere he looked. The Heavenly Records had shaped this world for more than a hundred thousand years, and every part of its culture seemed to have grown up around them.