[[Cfar here: Die, two-form! Die.]]

Kira couldn’t stop coughing, and every time she exhaled, the tentacle tightened further, making it increasingly difficult to breathe. She twisted in a frantic attempt to free herself but to no avail. A terrible conviction filled her then. She was going to die. She knew it. The Jelly was going to kill her and take the Soft Blade back to its own kind, and that would be the end of her. The realization was terrifying.

Crimson sparks filled her vision, and Kira felt herself teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. In her mind, she pleaded with the Soft Blade, hoping it could do something, anything to help. Come on! But her thoughts seemed to have no effect, and all the while, the sense of strain increased, rising until Kira felt her bones would snap and the alien would reduce her to a bloody pulp.

She groaned as the tentacle squeezed the last bit of air from her lungs. The fireworks in her eyes faded, and with them, any sense of urgency or desperation. Warmth suffused her, comforting warmth, and the things she’d been concerned with no longer seemed important. What had she been so worried about after all?

…

…

…

She floated before a fractal design, blue and dark and etched into the surface of a standing stone. The design was complicated beyond her ability to comprehend, and it shifted as she watched, the edges of the shapes shimmering as they changed, growing and evolving according to the precepts of some unknown logic. Her sight was more than human; she could see lines of force radiating from the infinitely long border—flashes of electromagnetic energy that betrayed vast discharges of energy.

And Kira knew this was the pattern the Soft Blade served. Served or was. And Kira realized there was a question inherent in the design, a choice related to the very nature of the xeno. Would she follow the pattern? Or would she ignore the design and carve new lines—lines of her own—into the guiding scheme?

To answer required information she didn’t have. It was a test she hadn’t studied for, and she didn’t understand the parameters of the inquiry.

But as she gazed upon the shifting shape, Kira remembered her pain and her anger and her fear. They burst forth, hers and the Soft Blade’s combined. Whatever the pattern meant, she was certain of the wrongness of the graspers and of her desire to live and of her need to rescue Trig.

To that end, Kira was willing to fight, and she was willing to kill and destroy in order to stop the graspers.

Then her vision sharpened and telescoped, and she felt as if she were falling into the fractal. It expanded before her in endless layers of detail, flowering into an entire universe of theme and variation.…

Pain roused Kira. Shocking, searing pain. The pressure around her torso vanished, and she filled her lungs with a desperate gasp before loosing a scream.