They are liquid fear sealed within porcelain flesh, my Witness, these Ahslid whose service you require. I arrived as you bid, without ceremony or fleets, and for 14 journeys around their star, I have stalked them in the dark, testing them to find even one who may serve as a warrior. I offer them every opportunity to unleash wrath upon me and prove their worth, and they cower, then bleed. Is it the death of my ego you crave as you dispatch me alone against these insects?

But I comprehend the depth now of this commandment. Yours is a lesson in insight, and sweet as their hemolymph may be, it is folly to spill it all myself.

My violence inspires fear. Each new corpse come daylight substrates accusations. They need logic, a cause and effect that fits within their understanding of the universe. Even when massacre comes from the black depths between stars, they must lay its accounting at the tarsus of their most powerless.

They divide. They appoint authorities. They see lines in the parched dust that exist only in their minds, and they value these so, so dearly they will kill to define them. Achingly nostalgic. My gift of enlightenment. I am free of Lubrae, but I see its shape in these jostling masses, and this inspires me.

You have bidden me sharpen their fatuous minds into a spearpoint, as you did on Lubrae, but without showing my face to cow them. So instead, I shall press my shape into the dust of this world and cast a generation of Ahslid in my image. And they shall be my glaive.