Metal Swarm - Kevin J. Anderson [234]
He did not mean to destroy this great city, but to save it. Cleanse it.
Sadly, the chrysalis chair, his rightful throne, had been unable to endure the magnificence of his presence. It lay scattered about him in remnants of ash and pooled precious metals that flowed across the floor. Everything inside the Palace was dead and burned.
He felt sated - temporarily. He had lost two of the great fireballs because of Adar Zan’nh’s attack, but high above the Prism Palace, the pulsing fireballs expanded, throbbing. Reproducing, at last. They began to split apart - doubling, then tripling their numbers as they spread across the Ildiran sky.
Meanwhile, the rest of the faeros had embarked on great battles against the wentals. The final conflict was just beginning.
Thanks to the green priest he had found here, the one who began his own -telink network, Rusa’h had access to a new conduit - directly into the vulnerable worldforest. The faeros incarnate sent out his thoughts like a flaming javelin. Sparking and rushing, the fiery elementals followed him along the soul-threads until he encountered the exotic, oddly familiar network of green priests and their telink.
In the past, humans had been disconnected from Ildiran , but now Rusa’h plunged irresistibly toward the waiting green priest minds, through open connections that Kolker and his followers had unwittingly created. He found one, then another, and another. The fire raced invisibly toward the heart of the worldforest.
One hundred and forty-six
Celli
When the worldtrees enfolded her in a verdant embrace, Celli felt as if she were being surrounded by leaves and fronds, vines and roots. A brief sensation of fear, of smothering - and then the whole forest, the whole world, the whole universe opened up for her.
During the metamorphosis, she drifted far from her body, her mind racing through the infinite pathways of interconnected trees and green priests around the Spiral Arm. During that brief time within the verdani mind, she saw and experienced more than she had absorbed in the nineteen previous years of her life. Celli plunged into millennia of history, of towering battles, destruction and defeat, the wars with the hydrogues and the faeros. She also saw hundreds of worlds through the eyes of the green priests who lived there.
The Spiral Arm was more wonderful than anything she had imagined. Finally, after years of missing Beneto, her mind rushed outward, and she was able to directly contact her brother in his immense verdani battleship guarding Theroc from space. She could feel herself as part of him, sense his enormous thorned branches as extensions of her arms and legs. It was wonderful! In her own mind Celli could feel Beneto laughing with her.
After an unknown time that might have been days or mere minutes, she emerged from the thicket. Celli felt the feathery strands of her hair falling out. Her skin had shifted from a coppery tan to a smooth emerald green, and now it tingled at the touch of sunlight. She flexed her fingers, looked at her forearms, touched her face. She had never thought the colour green could be so beautiful. Celli was the same as always, but better, enhanced, and filled with greater understanding.
Exhilarated, she sprinted back to the fungus-reef city. Kilometres passed in a breeze, and she barely felt her feet touching the forest floor. Then with a new energy, she sprang to one of the lower fronds, pulled herself up. Like an arboreal creature, she bounded from one branch to another, spinning, flying, leaping, landing. Treedancing had never been like this before! She seemed to be in the embrace of the whole forest, and she could never fall. Was this what Solimar felt