1.16-Harvest of Minds

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Running scared. I can’t find Zery. Clouds of lithium ion blast crimson lightning over the land against a red sky. I can feel ‘em in orbit. Zether’yin isn’t supposed to be a part of their patrol pattern. Hamark hands me the syringe of ji’fra extract. We only got a few seconds.Had to dump the Verkin sediment in the emergency landing. They won’t be happy but we didn’t have a choice. Ten seconds Hamark says. There’s this massive weight in the sky. Zether’yin’s dual moons get shoved to the side far overhead as the Ayin push closer to the planet.A hand under a fall lolo spore stem. I pull Zery out but she’s already unconscious. Hamark understands and shuts off. I hold him and Zery close before stabbing the needle into my neck.I go blank. Nothing but impulse. I’m all instinct for the next 3 hours. That’s usually long enough but it’s hard to tell. The consciousness suppressant blunts my memory but I can recall their descent.Vast interconnecting discs fill my vision. The Ayin crawl along the underside of the Oneiric Plane towards the planet. I can feel the whir of the oracle centrifuge driving this one, a complex para-voyant urge. Anagogic intuition tries to take hold. The ji’fra holds my mind down, pinning my cognisance firmly to my body. Zery stirs but doesn’t get lulled in. The lolo stem, however, roars to life. Freshly awakened to self-awareness, its only moments of sapience are cut short as the Ayin subsumes its burgeoning percipience, another disk in the giant spinning wheels of the oracle centrifuge. An inverted rain of minds ripped from bodies fly through the lithium ion clouds out into space. Like grain raised up only to meet the scythe, the planet is culled of all new born sentience. Ticks bleed out of the Oneiric plane, drawn by the rich concentration of psychic mass–a writhing mass of preternatural glut fills the horizon from end to end and I black out to a feeding frenzy in the heavens.We can feel the psychic scar on Zether’yin when we come to. The ji’fra wears off and we high-tail it out of there. I drop a message nearby on the humanoid colony Ido that an Ayin is in the quadrant and to be careful.