We hunt.

We are not the Assassins, not the perfect killers shaped like one death. None of us contains that inside of ourselves, and that's why [i]we[/i] don't burn out and die after the perfect climax of that one death. No. We are Ceron. We are nothing when we are alone, but when we are together.

Oh, when we are together.

The Assassins are brittle. They shatter. We are like a school of fish; we scatter and then reform. We reformed around Bitemark; we reformed around Bella-Mosaic's hand; we reformed around her Ember; we reformed around her ship. We take new forms, new shapes, new plans, new deaths; none of us is as perfect as all of us.

It takes us days to prepare for this one. We gather our panoply around us: our own maps of the ship, our Princess Alpha's knowledge of the side passages and the worker's tunnels, our nets and our syringes and our wooden paddles. The Summerkind swarm and the Pix nervously try to scout our meetings. We silence them, overwhelm them, imprison them; there will be no chattering of silly vulpine voices warning the quarry.

When it begins, it is almost silent. We move in our teams, clearing deck by deck, tunnel by tunnel, room by room. We come together in knots around the prey of Beri and Piximander; we study their scents and their reactions and the taste of their lips, and then we release them. There will be no hiding from us, not in the herd, not in the bones of the ship. Our best engineers are drumming and listening for the spaces in the echoes; no hidden chamber will remain so. No secret ally will remain so. No disguise will remain so. We do not rest until we find a weakness; we do not rest until the pack is satiated.

We are Ceron, and we are the thousandfold conquerors.

We hunt.