Metal Swarm - Kevin J. Anderson [80]
The Prime Designate turned to Jora'h, his healing face full of conviction. The faeros are the cause of this. Rusa'h warned that he was coming for us.'
Forty-six
Faeros Incarnate Rusa'h
Resplendent in vivifying flames, Rusa'h returned to Hyrillka, the heart of his domain. His fireball ship was alive with attendant faeros, shooting toward the planet he intended either to reclaim or incinerate in the process.
Back in his human incarnation, he had done holy work all around the Horizon Cluster. Starting with Dzelluria, he had kindled a fire of epic proportions, burning corruption from the Ildiran psyche and establishing his own web. Rusa'h had saved part of the Ildiran race by giving them the true soul-threads and untangling their knotted misunderstandings.
And all of that had been stolen from him by Jora'h, his own brother.
He had thought he'd lost everything, until he plunged into a living manifestation of the Lightsource. Baptised in the flames and then reforged, he had been transformed into this new persona of elemental energy.
And he had come back. Recently, he had felt the exhilaration of liberating the soulfires of every Ildiran on Dzelluria. The battle-weakened faeros had drawn vitally needed new energy from consuming those people, their bodies, their minds, their lives. Because Rusa'h had already laid down his pathways of there, he had found it easy to cut Dzelluria off from the false Mage-Imperator. When he reopened the web, the Dzelluria populace became combustible fuel, seeds for new faeros, to help the fiery beings recover from the near-genocide the hydrogues had inflicted.
Rusa'h had left Dzelluria a smouldering ember, its surface scorched and lifeless. He had done the same at Alturas. Then Shonor. And Garoa. Finally, he had arrived back at Hyrillka. Home.
His fireball and ten others swept down like a shower of blazing meteors. Rusa'h wanted to appear in all his coronal glory before his people. He would reawaken their reconfigured and pour revelations through them like lava. The faeros would reap a great harvest of soulfires here, and they would be strengthened again. Both Rusa'h and the flaming entities would benefit.
But he found Hyrillka empty, abandoned. The world felt silent to him. The flaming ship around him brightened as his thoughts churned and the faeros picked up on his unexpected anger. Through the eyes and thoughts of the faeros, who had not understood what they were seeing, he 'remembered' great numbers of warliners evacuating, a flurry of Ildiran traffic that had taken place during the titanic battle of faeros and hydrogues in Hyrillka's primary sun.
Now Rusa'h understood. The Ildirans would have been concerned that Hyrillka's sun would die, just like Crenna or Durris-B. The Solar Navy had used those warliners to whisk everyone away. His people were gone. All of them!
But the faeros had defeated the hydrogues after all, saved their sun--and still Hyrillka remained empty.
Feeling angry fire in his reconstructed body, Rusa'h soared down to the surface, creating a wake of heat vapours. He cruised over the beloved city around which he had planted vast fields of nialia vines. All were destroyed, the soil blackened. Many city buildings had been partially rebuilt, but they were all empty again.
At last Rusa'h noticed a small inhabited encampment of newly erected huts and sheds - a research station. He sensed a handful of scientists and engineers, climate specialists and meteorologists, the bare minimum for a splinter. They must be studying Hyrillka to see if it was once again habitable. The near-death of the sun had no doubt frightened them greatly.
But Rusa'h would frighten them even more.
From inside the fireball, he extended his mind, pushed his powers forth, and connected with the faeros, which made his stronger than ever before, and different. He cut off this small number of Ildirans from the rest of the network, isolating them.
Bereft and confused, scientists