Thun had talked for hours with Psychee... A long discussion, with enigmatic meanings and mysterious undertones. But once again, Psychee had heard a man talk about destiny, about choice, about not choosing. About a miracle, about a precious gift, too. Thun knew things about her that she did not know. The very wise leader of the Sap Guardians had not come to her out of curiosity, but with more about her than Psyche knew, and could understand...

    Thun had talked for hours with Psychee... A long discussion, with enigmatic meanings and mysterious undertones. But once again, Psychee had heard a man talk about destiny, about choice, about not choosing. About a miracle, about a precious gift, too. Thun knew things about her that she did not know. The very wise leader of the Sap Guardians had not come to her out of curiosity, but with more about her than Psyche knew, and could understand.

    This morning, as she watched the day slide its light over the great roots streaking the sky, she could only wonder. And smile.

    She was a Guardian. Still on probation, but she was so hopeful that she would pass the tests the Guardians would impose on her. And she had time to discover who she was. She was finally safe, welcomed into a warm and gentle family, welcomed among the first homins she recognized herself in.

    She still didn't know if he was there? Her old and disappeared Zorai friend, who had told her so many things about the Guardians, when she was a child. Was she even sure she recognized his mask? She didn't know if even Zorai changed their masks, or if they kept the same one their whole lives. And, so long ago, she wouldn't know it anymore.

““And me, will he recognize me?... I have grown so much...””

    Her thoughts wandered to her companion, lying peacefully beside her. Leonil was sleeping. Quietly. He had watched over her all evening, and the night had been theirs, long after the last songs had ended.

    In one day, she had sworn before the kami, before Leonil, before Tryker spectators, at the Guild of Guardians. And Leonil had proposed to her. In the same hour, she had committed her life twice without hesitation, for the two most overwhelming and wonderful things she could have wished for.

    The Zorais were waiting for her now. Thun had answers, which he had refused to say in their discussion, and it would be there that the Leaf ceremony would take place... And her wedding. It would be there that she would rebuild her life. And there she would get answers.

    Her mind flew for a moment to her memories, to her fears, to her past. She remembered the words of Thun, and those of Xerius, her dear friend and mentor, the same words, in the mouths of two Guardians:

“Your innocence is a miracle. The Goo could never touch you. Protecting you is the most important act.”

    She hardly knew what the Goo was... and understood even less what precious thing her innocence could be, even if she had one. She wanted to get close to the kitins. Everyone was afraid of them, but not her. She wanted to know if they could be spoken to, if they could communicate. If they came from the Roots, they were nothing more than an integral part of the world, of life, of the kami. Killing them would only fuel their anger... Had anyone, anywhere, ever tried to talk to them?

    She looked up. The birds were singing the dawn. Leonil had moved for a moment, looking for her in their bed.
It was time for happiness again. Even though she had not learned what it was, she had always believed that it existed, somewhere.

    In a few hours, in a few days, the ordeal awaited them. She lay down against her beloved, and closed her eyes...

    Just a little more happiness...

The ground quivered.
    A gigantic kincher rose above the savannah, its titanic mandibles whipping the air with such force that it killed the flock of birds that tried to escape it with its shock wave. It rushed at its prey, leaving behind it, as if suspended in the sky, three great sagan trunks uprooted under its fury, disregarding the tons of wood that this could represent...

    Xerius screamed, running with all his might straight into the middle of the grass:

—- “Don't look back, don't stop!”

    The trunks crashed less than twenty metres behind him, while four small figures, insignificant homins in the face of the fury of mad nature, ran for cover. Behind them, the rest of the convoy, half a dozen people, were totally surprised by the monster's rampage, which crashed into them in a blinding display of magic and steel, a last-ditch attempt to stop the unstoppable. Psychee stumbled, in front of Xerius, and he caught her hand and pulled her up with all his strength. In front of them ran one of the last survivors, while Leonil closed their frantic race.
    Psychee screamed over the unbearable howls of the monster:

—- “We can't leave them!”

Xerius replied in kind, between gasps:

—- “They’re dead! Run!!!”

    Leonil, the last to flee, turned around. Behind him, those who had been their companions were turning into sprays of blood exploding in the grass, the kincher striking and striking again with its mandibles. The last ones standing, who had not had time to hear Xerius' scream when the beast had caught up with them, were living out their last seconds.

    The journey had been a terrifying ordeal from the start. The “Bounty Beaches” in Aeden Aqueous had shown the terrible traps of its predators, and it had taken hours of watching and waiting to reach the vortex that led to the Prime Roots .

    Psychee had never seen them. A dark and yet bright world, of a strange serenity, where danger seemed to do its best to be forgotten. They had found Zoraï guides, who had come to harvest the precious raw materials of the place, and who had taken the initiative, after discussion with Xerius, to guide them to the other side. To the Zoraï lands, to the Sick Country. To the goal that Psychee had been waiting for.

    But everything had changed on the other side of the wormhole, once they had left the Prime Roots.
    The valiant and powerful Zorais had slaughtered the monsters that sat, like ancestral guardians, in front of the vortex. The march into Zorai land had begun, when suddenly the kitins, as if answering the calls of their dead brothers, became inebriated with vengeance. The march became a mad flight. The five Zorai stood their ground as the rest of the convoy fled, holding back the wave of gigantic insects, and no one saw them disappear under the mass of monsters that pounced on them.
     And until the kinchers caught up with the fugitives, leaving only four survivors running for their lives.

...

    Hours later, Zoraïs met the survivors at the gates of Zora. Xerius told them everything. They looked for a moment at the three other refugees. Two Trykers, and a Matis. Was it worth the death of six of them? They never said, and turned away as Xerius led the survivors into the Guardians' Guild hall, to nurse their many bruises, and hours of exhaustion.

Psychee remained silent for a long time, remembering the agonized screams of those who had perished, slaughtered. But more than that, she remembered the kitins... their calls to each other when they lost three of their own, their monstrous and implacable revenge. And of those they had met, in the Roots. Of those who had watched them go by, without doing anything...

... Perhaps, perhaps, if they had been able to understand them, if they had been able to speak with these monsters...

She forgot her thought, shaking her head.

But the thought would remain...

    They were not attacking...

    They were there, taunting the sky with their gigantic size, screaming their power with a sound that exceeded all the ear's capacity to understand, to interpret. Any animal that had been confronted with these vocal organs would have already died, its body driven mad and definitively destroyed by this sound.... How can we ever imagine imitating it?

Six kinchers...

    Their mandibles whipped the air with a hiss, their legs repositioning their biologically perfect bodies in ceaseless rotary movements, their eyes staring at a small point against the cavernous walls of the immense Prime Roots.

    Six giants whose power rivals their ferocity, six monsters whose violence is so inhuman that one can only deny them any thought, or emotion. Just the instinct of gigantic bio-mechanical machines of unparalleled perfection, created to kill everything homin in their path, traced with such regularity that one would think they were perfect geared toys.

    Their only life? Six pairs of eyes, with an almost dead reflection, behind a layer of translucent chitin, but rapid movements, which can only certify that they see, that they observe, that they analyse, that they know. And to know, to become aware, is to live...

    These six monsters, perfect mechanics yet very much alive, were staring at a homina trapped in their gaze.

    But they were not attacking.

Psychee had found her way to the Prime Roots. With the help of her beloved betrothed Leonil, she had been able to reach a very strange and spectral Kami, within the immense halls of silence and darkness of the Roots, and thus find the means to teleport alone, whenever she wished.

This place had a magic too enticing to resist it. As soon as she could, she returned there, even alone, to enjoy the calm of this landscape whose only light was that of the plants that illuminated their world with their photo-luminescent organs. Noise seemed to be banished from these caves and, despite the dangers that Leonil had repeated to her, and repeated again, she could not resist this place... To this peace. The same peace that burned in her heart. The peace of a world that wanted to believe that struggle, survival, war, anger, hatred, and hunger could be banished and forgotten.

The Roots were still not inhabited, but visited. The best prospectors came there to harvest the most remarkable raw materials of Atys, and the place was never without a hominin presence.
And it was a cry from a zoraï prospector that alerted Psychee...

—- “Kitiiiiins!!”

    Immediately, the prospectors abandoned their work, and ran to take refuge in the narrowest gutters... the very gutters where Psychee, Osmoz, and Leonil had found Goo... even here. The prospectors knew their cavernous corners well, and would then stay for long minutes, listening to the rattling and howling of the monsters, watching, hidden, for their departure.

    Psychee, on the other hand, found herself trapped by her unfamiliarity with the place. She was far from the prospectors, unable to follow them into the right hiding places.
    She ran, not seeing the monsters, trying to guide herself by the calls of the homins in the distance.

    And then she found herself facing them.

    Six kinchers, marching like a relentless, mechanical horde.

    Straight towards her.

    She started to run, hoping to outrun them enough to call the kami, and be teleported. Fifteen seconds... she needed fifteen seconds.

    The kinchers never let her have them.

    They sped up, panicking the teenage matis, causing her to stumble again and again, her heart racing with terror, as the monsters sped by at a frightening speed, tearing up and flying around them clods of earth the size of an adult bodoc. She hit a wall of the great cavern so hard that she was knocked unconscious, and had just enough time to turn around in the fog of daze to see, in a blur, six titanic figures coming to pounce on her, their ravenous tars raised for the attack, for the slaughter.

    She screamed, terror at its peak, amidst the monstrous tumult of the kinchers' charge.

    A flash, time standing still in the terror of her impending death.

    A flashback, to her eighth ring, to her childhood.

    She holds her mother's hand. Her name is Elenaa, the name of her own grandmother, given to her by her mother.
    She had never been able to find her own name.
    Her mother is worried and looks around. The little girl looks up.
    The convoy is large, nearly fifty people, as many, if not more, mektoubs. No old people, but more than twenty children.
    She remembers asking if grandpa and grandma were coming. Dad replied, with a blur in his eyes, that they were not... She didn't understand why. Nor did she understand the flight from Avalae, in the middle of the night, with those people who had joined them.
She had only heard: “the Zoraï, only they will help us”. She didn't know what the Zoraï were.

    A scream.
    Of a woman.
    In her vision.

“Kitins!!!”

    Everyone ran, while her father embraced his mother, holding a huge sword in both hands, and ran to the rear of the convoy. The distraught mektoubs were left to their fate, and her mother lifted her from the ground and carried her in her arms. Psyche cried in terror and incomprehension, like all children suddenly carried by their parents.

    A noise, which Psychee had never heard before. The howling of the kinchers, slashing at the tail of the column. The homin screams in response, the outburst of the mages, and the warriors, their final resistance to save their children, their women, for one chance. Her mother's howl, her own howl, her tears. She didn't even have words to warn her mother when the kincher rose, six metres above them, to fall on the women and children.
Her mother didn't let go, even when nearly a metre of spur went through her abdomen.A fall to the ground, a blinding fury, all that lived here was slaughtered in a few seconds.

    Psychee opened her eyes, her mother had not let go, in her last breath, in her last gesture before death. The kincher looked at his prey, the last one alive, the last homin trace to kill. His tarsus raised, he could cut the child with a gesture. He looked. He looked for a long time... Then he turned away, with a sound of mechanical clanking, and the sliding of muscles.
    Psychee lost consciousness...

    And time resumed its course.

    Psychee opened her eyes, her back to the cave.
    They were there...
    The six kinchers had stopped in front of her, and were waiting. They were watching. It was impossible to read anything human, or even animal, in their eyes.

— “Why?” she whispered. “Why don't you attack?”

The monsters remained unanswered, and how could one even guess at the language of the eyes or the body in these things? How to find the slightest empathy for such alien creatures?

— “But tell me!!!”

    She had screamed. A kitin had straightened up, as if surprised. He moved his body towards her with a gasp, and Psychee looked away, his eyes closed, gripped by a terrifying fear.
    The kitin stared at her. If he could ever do it.

    Then he straightened up and with his incredible rotary motion of perfect mechanics, stepped aside, to resume his patrol, followed by the other five.

    Psychee remained alone, prostrate, huddled over herself, in the dim light of the Roots. This lasted a long time. She could no longer erase the images of that childhood memory that had been relegated to the back of her mind for so long. Her mother's face, an almost ecstatic mask of death as she collapsed, her father's last look, filled with love, and at the same time terror, before joining those who tried to resist. Her life, spared by that monster... and all the others, all the others.

    She cried, sitting in the grass, she cried, unable to stop anything...