Planet Ignis | Epilogue

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…good conversations over the years.

Trother didn’t know about the legend of the phoenix. He and I both agreed it was a poetic accident. The mythical bird who can rise from the ashes of death is a good analogy for the Ignian people.

On one occasion, I asked him how he was sure that Eli was the right person to train so that he could harness the power of Statera. He told me about Eli’s life and how he had become a great teacher despite the challenges caused by his eternal hunger. He had taught Gro, the current queen of the Burrows. He was as resourceful as his son Brodnir and as kind as his late wife.

If he says the boy can do it, I choose to believe him. Let’s hope that the training we…

Notes on Ignian Societies, by Hitori Himura, PhD

“Must. Have. More. Space.

Incapacitate. Old man. Hitori. Boy. Archimedes. Fahrenheit.”

The Raptor cruised along the valley, always in the shade, out of the Flare’s grasp. After barely missing the humans, it had traveled day and night toward the estimated settlement location. There was nothing to fear. It was unlikely that there were any blues left since it had killed two of them a few days earlier. The repeated efforts to buy time suggested that the humans weren’t confident in a confrontation.

A blue sun lit up the valley. The Raptor, catching the energy fluctuations, activated its shields even as it triangulated and zoned in on its opponent’s position.

“The. Boy.” The same young man had thrown him off the mountain days ago. But the energy readings were significantly different. The boy stood on the cliff’s top, shielding the valley from the Flare most of the year.

The Raptor had determined it was statistically unlikely for there to be one more individual capable of emitting this type of energy. It stood corrected. It pondered whether it should chase after the attacker. No, it would keep going. Its shields were powerful enough to deflect it. It kept racing toward the estimated location of the human village. By terminating the target’s headquarters, there would be nothing left to fight for, and he would have won the battle already.

The raptor kept traveling through the valley. Within an hour, it should arrive at the location. His attacker kept shooting blue flames and plasma beams into his shield from above. He tried to avoid the plasma beams he could and took the brunt of any flames with his energy shields. The attacks seemed to be growing more desperate. Its choice of strategy had been correct. Crushing the spirit of the adversary was half a step toward disabling them.

After twenty minutes of an intense barrage, the human attacker disappeared. The drone kept flying until it saw the spaceship that had taken off the summit one day earlier. It scanned the cliff walls and found vestiges of human activity. He had found the entrance to the Settlement. It dashed toward it. It was a tunnel. As he traveled down the tunnel, he found an increasing number of statues. He used his sonar to locate an entrance that led to a tunnel complex ahead. It was time to eradicate one more human settlement and appropriate the cores here.

Behind him, an energy signature it couldn’t ignore was registered by his sensors. It was a starship’s purple plasma cannon’s shot. His shields could take very few of these. Within this enclosed space, there was no way of avoiding it. It activated its shields to total capacity. It barely held. Where had the humans found this amount of firepower? There shouldn’t be any spaceship-level artillery on this planet! This changed things. It had to go out and meet this attacker. This level of attack posed a real danger to him. It ran out of the tunnels as fast as it could. At least, in the open, it had space to avoid another barrage.

As it exited the tunnels, it was hit with a golden plasma shot from the human targeting it from the valley’s top. The raptor sped towards the valley’s wall and swiftly climbed it, determined to neutralize this threat. As the Raptor hauled itself off the valley, it detected the human running away and went after him. The Raptor engaged all its AI cores and checked the route. It had been thrown into a Flare Zone before. It couldn’t let that happen again.

Every time the Raptor closed in, the boy accelerated and sprinted out of the Raptor’s reach. These mutants could have great bursts of speed, but they couldn’t outrun the Raptor over long distances. Their energy reserves were pitifully low compared to his.

After a few kilometers, the boy stopped and turned around. The Raptor halted as well. “This. Should. Not. Be. Possible.” The boy was standing in a Flare Zone. As it tried to compute a possible strategy, it zoomed in on the human. All its skin had turned green. He stared at the Raptor. The human seemed to be in pain, but there was no explanation as to his ability to stand or survive more than just a few seconds in the sunlight, based on the Raptor’s experience.

The human stretched its hands, and the Raptor detected energy readings that corresponded to the power level of a star cruiser’s cannon. A purple plasma beam scored a full hit on the Raptor. Its shield could hold out, but its energy reserves had just dropped fifteen percent at once the Raptor started to run.

“Retreat.”

The shot he’d survived earlier in the tunnel wasn’t a starship. It was the human!

After a few seconds, another purple plasma beam hit it, bouncing off its shields. The boy was somehow harnessing and weaponizing the Flare’s power through his skin. There was no way the Raptor could take two more hits like this. The human had drawn him to a shaded area near the Flare but without cover. He had drawn him to an open field in a Twilight Zone where the Raptor could not reach him but where he could hit it.

As the Raptor simulated the battle’s outcome, it realized that if it continued to run away, it would die. There was only one strategy left. The Raptor turned around and went towards the human. The boy was not moving. These attacks had to be taxing on the human. At least, that was suggested by the fact that the boy hadn’t moved since he started to shoot him with purple-grade plasma.

Another hit. red warnings flashed in front of the Raptor. “Reactor. 5%. Warning. Critical. Levels.” The Raptor closed in on the boy. Even if it had to go dormant again in a Flare Zone for centuries, at least there was a chance of survival. If it could just…

Another hit. The Raptor’s energy was drained, and collapsed lifeless on the ground. The Raptor was no more.

Eli, the Flarewalker arrived back at the Burrows, dragging the Raptor drone behind him. The Statera mutation had been successful. The amount of control needed to make photosynthesis and to control purple-grade energy wasn’t something that an average human could do. Still, Eli was a genius sitting on top of the shoulders of geniuses. He had been cautious not to damage the AI cores with his emissions. There would be a use for them, as the crew of the Phoenix had initially intended it.

Fahrenheit and Medes remained in the Burrows. Now that there was more computing power, children could grow in a world of green and blue instead of one of never-ending whiteness. In time, the Anaximander AI core was salvaged from the Raptor and was taken to the Centigrades’ settlement, the Hollows. The twisted remains of Schneider were deleted from the Raptor’s AI core, and the unit was completely reprogrammed. It and the Mendeleev’s core was sent with a group of oranges in the Plume lifeboat to resettle one of the abandoned Settlements, the Harrows. Without fearing being targeted by the Raptor, Stellaris linked all the Settlements, leading to a time of prosperity and a free flow of information in Ignis.

All of Hitori’s and Trother’s books became the object of study of the most brilliant Ignian minds. The study of faster-than-light travel was particularly promising because it opened the possibility of opening a gateway to Earth. But that would take time. Besides red children, orange batteries, Miners and Smiths, yellow Guards, and blue kings, new members of society soon appeared. The starved Eli became the first Purple Flarewalker, someone who could use the Statera mutation to travel freely through the surface of Ignis.

After traveling through the Flare Zones and letting their cells drink in the starlight, the flarewalkers would come to the Settlements bringing energy that they deposited in the Hearth. Not having to resort to asking tribesmen to burn away their lives so that their tribe had enough energy significantly improved life expectancy in Ignis.

Thanks to Statera and Tardus mutations, some, who would have had to terminate before, were now able to go to sleep in what was called in time the Cradle and live the rest of their days doing research, writing, or reading in the peace of the Nexus.

If you travel to the Burrows and you reach the end of Howner Avenue, close to the end, you will find three statues together. Hitori, Trother and Brodnir. In the Ignian script, you will find written above them:

“Here lie three teachers, three friends, three sacrifices. Here lie the heroes of Ignis”