Books of Sorrow: Difference between revisions

Aurash reflects on all that has changed since they escaped. She tells of how Xi Ro and Sathona used their various tricks—Xi Ro's bait stars and Sathona's cunning—enabled them escape from the Helium Drinkers, and laments the loss of her home. She mentions how Xi Ro hates Taox with a burning fury.

Aurash thinks back to her expedition to the Tungsten Monoliths, of how she first learned the truth. The Timid Truth, she again says, was their philosophy of life, that they are the bottom of the evolutionary chain, "the smallest, most fragile things alive", and are meant to be prey. She adds with contempt that Taox's teachings say that their species came here to flee a cold universe. She then speaks of her dead father, of how he died afraid. Not because of Taox or the Drinkers, but because of what he saw in his orrery. He told her—"screaming"—that the physical laws were bent and the paths of the moons were different, indicating a syzygy.  

She paints a picture of the Fundament's fifty-two moons—not necessarily all of them, she amends belatedly, but this is her deepest fear—aligning together and exerting their gravity upon the seas of the gas giant. This combined force, she recounts, would create a bulge in those seas that would collapse once the moons passed, and then turn into a colossal tsunami that would wash over the world sea and annihilate all of the civilisations on Fundament, including her species. She calls this a God-Wave.

Aurash resolves to find a way to stop it, but despairs of getting back home, to her father's Royal Orrery, of learning exactly when this would come to pass. She recounts how Xi Ro comforts her when her fears become too great to handle, and how their growing reliance on Sathona's wit seemingly brings them good luck. She notes Sathona's odd and sometimes erratic behavior, but dismisses it because of the good luck it has brought them.