Aleph sighed.

It turned out that even with them traveling at absurd speeds, the two ‘mountain rams’ which honestly looked a lot like weird spindly versions of terra to her were very VERY slow.

They were in fact quite a bit slower then Tunie.

The Window was extremely helpful in providing sweeping views of their surface, expounding on details of their biology and ecology as it went. Detailing what every little thing was that it knew.

She was a bit perplexed by it all, the way Pylo had said things it sounded like this was some kind of translation for Tunie. But it was a part of Tunie rather then the whole thing? and apparently it was NOT the parts she was familiar with or had spoken too.

Von Squidgie flounced onto the table from a chair and peered at the sphere with one massive eye.

"if I understand it right, we should be able to open secondary views here while waiting for the collision? Although it seems a shame to risk obscuring any of this."

The Window spoke softly in reply and smoothly in a tone that was far deeper than almost anyone Aleph had ever spoken to in person. She used to know a word for that kind of voice but it was slipping her mind.

“We shall return to these majestic beasts at the time of impact. For now there is much to consider across this volume and it’s expanse of chaparral”

The view swept and shifted. Aleph found it a little bit disorienting, the orb was simultaneous alike too and entirely unlike a window. Her eyes could not be convinced that she was not looking through it and OUT into a vast expanse. But she could shift and lean and ‘look’ out through space she had JUST seen was surrounded by table and air and the curious peering faces of Squidgie, Quarti and Omega.

She marveled a bit with her senses and how much this did not actually disturb her. Her eyes simply rolled with the effect and presented her with the lie that from every angle the ‘Window’ was somehow a curved lens that peered into some vast exterior space.

She had seen models, she had experienced visions via the choral songs and crystal simulators. She had viewed flat images at the academy.

This was not like any of those.

It was a magic window that every single aspect of the vision told her was really and truly THERE outside/inside the sphere waiting to be touched but incredibly distant.

The way it moved along the expanse of reef structure now was something she had never expected. It was like they were rushing along beneath canopies of strange plants she had never seen before.

Above at an angle that at first she had to hunker down low to catch but soon was sweeping along amongst them was strange bright blue delta shapes. Like wings, or crescents of brightest blue. Almost electrically glowing in resonance. Hundreds of them. They seemed tiny until her sense of depth caught up with her and one swept by. So vast it made her flinch back a bit.

Each was at least a one or two hundred meters across!

Quarti made a happy cooing sound of delight and then they were sliding along the broken surface amidst roots that looked like segmented metal cables intermeshed with harsh gray and black scales. Oozing along were thick glistening ropes as big around as her arm. They wound like wet cables of meat. Occasionally sizzling with white buffs of steam.

Sound began to flicker over them from the sphere, muffled like the noise of wildlife at a distance or perhaps from beyond the apparent window.

It thrilled rising and falling with hauntingly beautiful rhythms and patterns within.

Elsie seemed to perk up at the sound of it, intently listening in a way that drew Aleph’s eye before the view swept along and out of canopies of black and golden paneled leaves.

There was a shape, like a great worm or a maw. It started as a vague sense of ‘something’ glittering in the distance. The other two terrans had moved along with her to align with the direction of ‘motion’ so that they could peer ahead to see what would come.

It was as they approached slowly coming into resolution as being made of trees, of patters and plants. But as they approached it grew even more distinct. The trees became apparent as branching plants and entire cliffs of rough broken metal sheets all their own.

They approached faster, sweeping along so fast that if Aleph stood up on tiptoes she could look ‘down’ into the Window and see the reef streaking past in a smear far too rapid for her to resolve. Pillars and spikes and upwelling growths making her dizzy with how they vanished past faster than a blink.

They gaping cavity of the ‘tube’ just grew more and more prominent and Aleph felt Omega grab her shoulder to stop her from leaning so far back she fell over. It was extending to either side, bloting out the curve of the reef, obscuring the horizon. And then with a final threshold the tube WAS the horizon, the interior was the sky! Shadows and shafts of sun light streaked from above but her sense of the scale of the thing the depth humbled and squeezed down on her.

This...

On the train trip up to the rim wall Aleph and Omega had looked out the window and seen the entirety of Terra’s sun plate. The expanse of all humanity splayed out in a dish around them. With the mountains of the rim wall stretching to a tiny lip in great sweeping arcs to either side.

She had felt a vertigo and wonder then at the sense of having a vague FEELING for her place in the world and its relationship to the sun. You could see the great sweeping wake of green from Terra’s feeding there. The arc and expanse of all of that stuck with her.

But this interior was further than the entirety of the plate of terra, she could feel it in her bones, this simple random hollow full of giant alien trees and forests and strange hulking shapes which had appeared from a distance like a hillock or protrusion on the side of the reef wall could have comfortably contained Terra with room to spare.

There were sunbeams wider then Terra shining through the canopy above.

They are all of them silent as the window ‘passes’ out the other end of the cylinder and then begins to pull back from the reef wall. It orients its view in a way that makes Aleph’s stomach do a little bit of a flip and make her have to refocus on her hand like Omega had taught her.

When she turns back they are looking at the Reef wall. Pulling back from it. There is a pattern on the foliage, settled paleness that covers the leaves and random outcroppings.

It looks like a glyph, drawn over a surface that if she was spotting the shape of the tube cave correctly over there was...

Aleph boggled... that was FAR too big.

“What IS that? It looks like... Like someone drew on the Reef!”

Elsie seemed to be absently thinking about something.

The voice of the Window spoke softly.

“There is strangeness unending in the reef, such as this one. No record available or evidence apparent explains it. The particulates and stones settle and there are hints of a rhyme and resonance between them. If disturbed, it will reform and is reforming even now although it is occuring over a pace of centuries. Ultimately why this occurs is a mystery”

Omega blinked a bit and peered around.

“Doesn't anyone investigate it more deeply? Surely something that size that just... happens inspires a lot of exploration, archaeologists? Uh whatever your geologist equivalent is?”

The window is silent, but Elsie finally speaks.

“Questions of that kind are not within the purview of the window’s ability to respond. It is a translator primarily for ecological context and identification of common species and structures otherwise known universally. But to answer your question, yes. I have found records of this phenomena.”

The view of the window shifts to the ‘map’ view of the entire hollow. Then slowly fades away to a strange inverse false color ‘sculpture’ of the intervening hollow. And then the connecting spaces with cracks, tributaries and canyons moving between.

“There have been cities larger than redweed, experiment chambers the size of star hollows, dedicated to solving just this specific mystery for millions and millions of your years. Gods in far distant empires it is said have been created exclusively for this one task.”

Like ink being dropped into the ‘sculpture’ of stellar volumes colors swelled to fill them, one after another, the shape of the cavities subtly shifting, being carved, collapsing. It was strange, like ink in water almost. But somehow more structure and orderly.

“It still remains unsolved and also has been deemed effectively indestructible. It always reoccurs no matter how the particulates or even atoms are scattered. The entire reef region has been utterly resurfaced in this volume and a wedge of it was once even removed by earlier parties attempting to decipher it. When it was most recently rediscovered while Redweed fully established itself it was discovered caches had been placed in prominent obelisks around it containing what we believe is an archive of all previous civilizations, Polity and Empires and their attempts to decipher it.”

Aleph blinked and boggled staring at the window as it swept back into a real time and true color view of the strange subtly overlay pattern of what honestly looked mostly like a seven pointed ‘star’ shape. Although there was subtlety to it.

“Redweed itself has contributed its own meagre entries to the effort but the majority of archaeological efforts to date by the ministries were spent in simply ingesting the original archives and confirming their observations.”

Von Squidgie rolled their gaze over the thing then turned back to Elsie "So this is a 'species' of pattern, that occurs in other hollows?"

Elsie shook their screen slightly and several negative confirmations flickered across the message logs.

“As a vague category of resonance phenomena it is common, But categorically they are all incredibly distinct and on average abnormal. Some have been fully explained as artifacts or natural ecological phenomena or deposits by Resonance metabolisms. Others remain undetermined. Some are related across many thousands of Lightyears to other sites. Others end up being utterly unique coincidences as far has been determined.”

Squidgie nodded sagely.

Omega and Aleph exchanged a look with one another as Elsie continued.

“Of course each similar site has also oscillated in the established explanation between all of the above and occasionally new evidence proves or disproves long standing explanations. To date Redweed and It’s trade partners as well as the accompanying archives as researched so far have found category matching inconclusive.”

Quarti leaned towards the Window and barked at it.

“Oiy! Show me the big blue wings again! What’re does ya?”

The view ‘swelled’ and ‘shifted’ in a way that made Aleph blink and rub at her temple with a slight ache of confusion.

Then they were once more amongst the sweeping ‘arcs’ of bright incandescent blue. It was like Resonance mirages. But she could tell from the surface of the wing, and the just as bright red streak along the forward edge of each wing, that they were ‘riding over’ for one that it was actually just the texture and reflectivity of their skin. There were hundreds of them going into the distance.

“A local variety of Astroplankton feeders. They school in small numbers such as this in many stellar volumes. These in particular are recent arrivals from the deeper wilderness, possibly for mating and breeding, or simply as a momentary refuge from predation or territorial disputes deeper into the wilderness. They carry extremely potent memetic and metabolic toxin payloads within their flesh as indicated by the extremely prominent radiative surfaces. Ah and now the Mountain Rams are closing...”

The view swam slowly, and much less alarmingly then when Quarti had demanded a view of the ‘astroplankton feeders’.

The view was sweeping along the surface of one of the massive things that they had seen at the start.

Aleph once again felt the need to brace herself. Gripping the table. Each of these things was smaller than Terra. She knew that much with certainty, but they were the size of lesser mountains, bigger than any but the most sprawling of the midland nations. Vast landscapes of beings rather than things she could safely hold in her head as animals with them riding along one’s surface like this.

They were closing now, they seemed to almost be touching already. She found herself catching her breath tight in her chest and holding it.

And then almost blinding light flared where the two stoney domes met.

The creatures compressed, coiled and their fine coats of ‘fur’ which Aleph was realizing might very well be feathers as large as Tunie’s primaries flared and then seared hot reds and purples.

The domes were cracking and turning molten under the impact. Jets and great spewing arcs of white hot material were spewing in a wide ring around them. The momentum of the creatures seemed to continue. Seizing into each other. Roiling and spewing material in every direction. All from the single ongoing impact.

The voice of the window spoke in hushed awe that echoed her own feelings.

“The collision will continue for days, venting and ablating the domes, looked on and carefully scrutinized by the observing females across the volume. If the males survive and recover they will each be given the chance to sire the next generation. The quality and strength of their recovery afterwards as well as the strength of their collision signal will determine the quantity of females attracted and thus the number of sired offspring”

What looked like bolts of lightning rippled across their surfaces, and out into the expanse of the volume. Sudden searing bursts marking where they eventually touched the surfaces of the reef in the distance.

“Furthermore several species of local wildlife will be greatly nourished and trigger their own spawning in the energetic wake of this mating display. In the decades to follow the local wildlife will grow bountiful and rich and the favored food sources for the ram’s young will be cascading into abundance. Fueling and fattening them for their first migration out of the local hollow to find sustainable pastures beyond”

Aleph, Omega and Quarti were silent, staring as the two titanic creatures continued to slowly grind and mash

"The only other two males of age in the pod are still recovering from their own collision twenty years ago. The strain of breeding displays and the rapid expenditure on recovery afterwards for mating takes a toll. Most males do not survive past fifty such collisions and a great many die in their first. This pod is unlikely to see another for centuries as the males rebuild themselves. Despite this, on the scale of the hollow a display like this will likely occur somewhere along the chaparral every two years."

The scope of things weighed on all of them.

Elsie broke the hushed awe with a chirpy tone.

“Well thank you for the gathering Aleph, Omega and Quarti. I now have duties I must attend too amongst the Clerks. Have a pleasant shift!”

And with that the three of them were left alone with the great marble of The Window onto the Reef.