But therein lies the problem. The only way the universe can be "deathless" is if there's literally nothing left to die. Oryx's way of justifying this is that he and his Hive are already "dead." But Oryx's philosophy has two other major weak spots: First and foremost, Oryx is a brazen hypocrite. He denounces the Traveler as coddling "weak" races and giving them power they don't "deserve." Oryx forgets where he came from. Those frail, short-lived krill on the Fundament should have gone extinct when the God-Wave swamped their continents; Aurash, her sisters, and their people would be dead if nature had been allowed to take its course. Instead they were given power by the Worm; power that, according to Sword Logic, they didn't deserve because of how weak their species was to begin with. The Hive praise the Worm and curse the Traveler in the same breath, despite the fact that the Traveler does for other races the [i]exact same thing[/i] the Worms did for them. The Worms and the Traveler both bestow great power to species that would otherwise never have it; the only difference is that the Traveler does it free-of-charge and the Worms only do it for their own benefit. The Hive's entire crusade is based in hypocrisy. Second, when we get right down to it, Oryx is driven by little more than jealousy. He resents that the Traveler chose the Ammonite over his own race. He tracks down civilizations the Traveler visited and destroys them out of spite. But I think it goes beyond just the Traveler; Oryx hates [i]any[/i] race that's "luckier" than his. Races that - even without the Traveler - lived much longer than his, and did so on peaceful, stable worlds. True, Oryx is intellectual and introspective. But he's also incredibly [i]petty.[/i] In my opinion, Oryx's personal motivations can be summed up as "If we couldn't have the Traveler, no one can."