Never cooperating.

One shape is a cone of stacked rings or toruses, diminishing with height, girdled by a fringe of lithe tentacles that grasp a long pole, using it to push tree roots away from the hull. Nearby, a pair of broad-shouldered, green-cloaked bipeds paddle the water with great scooplike oars, their long scaly arms gleaming pale in the slanting sunlight. The fourth shape consists of an armored blue hump of a torso, leather-plated, culminating in a squat dome, rimmed by a glistening ribbon eye. Five powerful legs aim outward from the center, as if the creature might at any moment try to run in all directions at once.

He knows these profiles. Knows and fears them. But true despair floods his heart only when he spies a final figure, standing at the stern, holding the boat’s tiller, scanning the thicket of vines and corroded stone.

It is a smaller bipedal form, slender, clothed in crude, woven fabric. A familiar outline, all too similar to his own. A stranger, but one sharing his own peculiar heritage, beginning near a certain salty sea, many aeons and galaxies distant from this shoal in space.

It is the last shape he ever wanted to see in such a forlorn place, so far from home.

Resignation fills him as the armored pentapod raises a clawed leg to point his way with a shout. Others rush forward to gape, and he stares back, for it is a sight to behold-all these faces and forms, jabbering to one another in shared astonishment at the spectacle of him- then rushing about, striving together as a team, paddling toward him with rescue their clear intent.

He lifts his arms, as if in welcome. Then, on command, both knees fold and turbid water rushes to embrace him.

Even without words, irony flows during those seconds, as he gives up the struggle for life. He has come a long way and been through much. Only a short time ago, flame had seemed his final destiny, his doom.