Illiiks could feel his flesh peeling away from the inside of his carapace. He stretched his limbs with a dry, gristly crackle. The constant pain of Ether deprivation was now a dull roar. He willed himself back into the present, where the Prime Archon addressed his House from atop the ruins of their once-Ketch. "…No need for the ways of the past. The shackles of Kiir-Ohn. Here, the Giver has gifted us something beyond nourishment for our bodies. It offers ascension of the spirit." Is nourishment not enough? Illiiks thought. Are our bodies worthless? At least we never starved under Szuurin-kel. "Nor did we flourish," the Prime Archon bellowed, looking directly at Illiiks. The Dreg recoiled. Had he heard that? "For an eon in the Drift, survival was enough. It was all," the Archon continued, turning his attention back to the larger gathering. "And survival became our way. But a new era approaches: an age of revival. For both the Giver and our House." The Prime Archon held aloft a glass cannister, attached to a large rebreather. It once held shining white Ether. Now it brimmed with a dimly glowing vegetal sludge: the dark matter. "Accept the Giver, and you will become more than a survivor. More than Eliksni." Later, as Illiiks lay convulsing on the ground, phosphorescent blisters bubbling up through the joints in his carapace, he felt the dark matter surge through him. Mindless. Turbid. Powerful. His hunger unsated but forgotten. See? Illiiks thought, in a voice not quite his own. Take what is Given, and ascend.