They’d landed fairly easily. The natives were just figuring out how to use steam, namely because they were so well adapted to their environment that technology had only started developing out of pure curiosity and had no real selection pressure backing it up. Sleek, smooth skin with hundreds of iridescent denticles lining it, they glowed faintly in the amber light of their day. The first four had been easy to catch, they’d walked right up to the ship. There wasn’t much on the planet big enough to eat them. They didn’t fear anything, their huge black eyes blinking curiously as they used their eyelids like strobes to see the ship in UV. Hesthet found them haunting, beautiful as she seized their minds with a thought and forced them to walk into the stasis deck. They were not active – they had no mental defenses – but she could feel the horror in their bright, eager, adaptive minds and it told her that they could probably be broken. Some hive queen somewhere would be getting herself some quality slaves.

“Hest.” Her second, Mrevket, walked around the ship. He was large for a male, with long lean limbs and a lanky face, dotted with fine hairs no matter how often he shaved. Which was often, as she found body hair annoying. “We haven’t heard back from Tren, Nirren or Klahet.”

“I can’t imagine they’ve run into trouble. These things barely understand how to hunt local game.” She pointed to one of the hopping fuzzballs, which was as near as they could tell the most numerous prey item on the local menu. “Unless those three somehow got spooked off of a cliff, they should be fine.”

Nirren found her throat closed off. She strained her will and found it unable to reach anyone. Her leg was hot even through the armored excursion suit.

The heat was due to the gigantic thing made of fire that was holding her by her leg off of the ground. It looked like a Lokari, a male, except it was wearing strange clothes, was far larger than any male of her species, had facial hair, and there was that whole being made entirely out of fire thing. Nirren had already urinated into her suit’s recycler. She wished she could do it again.

There were two women standing in the clearing. One of them was dark, like the soil under her feet, with sweeps and whorls of blue and turquoise color all over her body and a face as haughty as a hive queen. More, it actually looked like a hive queen’s face, the angles of the cheekbones and jawline were iconic, sculpted by generations of genetic artisans for perfection. She was definitely a Lokar. She was holding Tren up without touching him, exerting her will casually while picking through his brain. Each time her eyebrow arched he would jerk and twitch. Nirren knew she wasn’t being gentle. Even over the smell of burning plants from the roaring fire that was holding her up by her leg oh and it was shaped like some kind of giant hair man – she bit her cheek to try and stop the panic.

The other woman was also covered in color, but where the first one was dark and sheathed in blue she was absolutely pale, the color of precipitated ice, with jagged swaths of red coiled around her limbs. Her hair was the color of an open fire, and the flames that held her by her ankle were clearly emitting from the woman’s back. She was all angle and bone, almost no spare flesh on her, and her eyes stared at Nirren.

They spoke out loud to one another. It was not a language she knew. The blue one was flat, almost without affect, but Nirren could hear a Hasrathi accent in the way she rolled her vowel sounds. The other, no idea. Never heard an accent like that in her life. She turned and pointed her hand and a plume of fire erupted from the lines on her skin, coiled into the form of a claw and hauled Klahet off of the ground, searing away the surface layer of his suit. Sparks and melting matter dribbled cherry red onto the loamy soil as he was tossed at the blue one’s feet like merchandise.

They were going to rip his mind away too. Then what? Then her? What were they and what were they going to -

“You don’t care what we are.” The blue one turned her eyes to Nirren, looking her full in the face and pushing aside her walls, latching onto her thoughts. “And it won’t matter to you if I tell you, because when I’m done with you there won’t be a mind in there anyway.”

“Just let me kill them.”

“Killing them is merciful and it doesn’t tell me who their leader is, Lizabeth.” The pressure increased, as memories rose unbidden to Nirren’s mind, were experienced and then dismissed in a way unlike remembering. “This one knows the most, I think. They’re matrilineal, and outbounders. They wouldn’t tell a male anything useful. No hivequeen would risk this kind of sloppy move, so close to unexplored space. These kind are useful, disposable. But they may have left traces.”

“So what? Even if you find out who is paying them the Old Old would never let us raid a hive queen.” The burning one gritted her teeth. “Let me know when you’re done. At least I can spare them having to live like that.”

Anyway, yes, monstrously depressed, completely in full fledged rejection of every -ism as being ultimately inaccurate, constructions from a limited perspective that do not see the world as it is and never can, and ultimately just tools we use to get through the world for good or ill.  This of course leaves me with the question “What, then, is the right choice of action” in a life very poorly equipped to answer that question. One could argue that the only correct course of action would be to engage in the search for truth while always admonishing oneself that truth cannot be found by a limited intellect that will live at most another 60 years or so, but my word that’s a depressing and exhausting notion. Live your life engaged forever in a struggle you can’t possibly complete searching for a concept that doesn’t actually exist, and which you can never define anyway. Yeah, that sounds like a party.

It’s strange that I feel humans are essentially all self-deluded hoisting flags and banners for whatever causes they favor, all of them wrong. Is that what I’m doing? If it is, what flag am I unfurling? Am I just bitter that I never found one with a really cool border?

I keep falling forward. Now it’s controlled, desperate. I kick off as I drop and slide right between his legs, black fur, soaked from waiting outside for me. I didn’t have anything prepared for this. Naked except for a poorly fitting pair of jeans with blown out knees, the wind and rain stinging my face from the ruined window. He snarls as I kick the back of his knee a lot harder than I should be able to.

A clawed hand tries to disembowel me. My body does the work of getting me out of the way and up to my feet while I can feel blood running down my neck from where I hit. My eyes still won’t clear. Everything is dark, the light from the moon between clouds. There’s no time to do anything fancy. He, or she, hard to tell, drives in that black muzzle and tries to bite my throat out.

I grab it by the neck and lift it squirming off of the floor. Even with my bell rung, I can tell it didn’t expect that.

“I once broke the neck of the Lone-created Bull. I culled the verdant one, and sent back those that death refused.” I’m croaking, which completely ruins the effect. Irritation makes my fingers dig in deeper, flesh squeezed between them, black coarse hairs like spines. “You tell her that I’m insulted. A werewolf? One werewolf? I killed the Wild Hunt and defied Attertag to his face and she sends one werewolf?“

I turn and throw him out the wreck of my window. It’s three floors down, so he won’t really be hurt by the fall, unless he lands on something silver. Does silver actually work? I’m not sure. If I knew where my Lewis Spence was I could look it up. I touch the back of my head and pull my hand away sticky. The back of my head feels like tenderized meat.

Every year I hate this holiday a little more.

One lunged into her path, barely visible, a blur of moonlit warts and yellow teeth. She dropped her shoulder and rammed herself hard into its chest, bringing the mace haft-first into its gut and letting the impact push her back, bowling the creature over. It bounced in her path. She used the momentum to spin herself around, sliding her hands up to grip the mace and bring it up and then down. The head caved in from the blow and flattened into the stone, bone crushed. The kick she dealt it wasn’t even necessary.

Leaving the bodies in her wake slowed them down. They stopped to eat their own. Despite their fearsome appearance, hideous mottled skin, claws like razors and teeth like a mouthful of broken glass, they were easier to kill than a man for her. Oh, they were stronger, faster, but there was nothing about them that inspired hesitation. Nothing that made her remember that these were someone’s sons or daughters, nothing she felt any sort of sympathy for.

Sympathy for her required some ability to feel kinship, and she refused to feel that. Not for them.

The faint light in the distance became brighter as she ran. Unlike most priests, even priests of Galia, the Daughters trained as battle chaplains, going into war alongside the armies of Alron. Standard bearers for the war goddess. She’d trained for years, but even so, she could feel herself growing short of breath. Her trainers and teachers had always emphasized that ignoring pain could only take you so far, that you had to become inured to it, used to it. Pain was your body telling you that you were exceeding your limits. It could stop you, or it could goad you, if you understood it.

She felt like she was reaching the limits of her ability to understand it.

Staggering, she finally came into the circle of light thrown by a large fire, and realized it was a burning set of wagons. There were streaks of lamp oil along the side of the closest one, and broken glass in the wood where a lantern of some kind had been smashed into it. In the circle of fire made by the crackling wood, improvised bonfires, she could make out two shapes that were clearly not the same as the ravenous, snarling, slobbering monsters trying to eat her.

One was an eight foot tall white bear. At least eight feet. The sight of it was strange enough. She’d never seen a white bear before, although there certainly were bears in Nazren forests. This one would have been striking enough for being a huge white shape in the dim moonlight, but that wasn’t what nearly rooted her where she stood.

The bear was holding a massive crescent blade mounted on an even larger wooden stock, and swung the thing with wide, easy stroked that crushed four or five of the things at a time. The weight of the four foot blade cleaved or tore them in half when it hit them, spraying their flesh in arcs. The disadvantage of the bear’s weapon was that it was huge, slow even for so gigantic a creature.

I’m standing here criticizing a bear’s choice of weapon. Without taking her eyes off of the bear she drove her metal-shod foot out and back, crashing into a knee with a satisfying popping sound and rolled forward under the burning rear gate of one of the wagons. She came to her feet out of range of the enormous axe, letting the bear see her clearly. Aside from its white color and a certain cast of thought to its eyes, it looked similar to bears she’d seen mounted in her uncle’s home years before.

Next to the bear, nearly hidden by the shadows cast by it, a smaller figure was firing arrows from a Tarsen-style laminated bone bow. He was very fast, and she saw him nock and draw and aim one directly at her before his eyes visibly widened and he changed his position very slightly. The bow hurled an arrow over her shoulder and into a throat a few feet above her, and as it fell clutching its ruined windpipe she smashed her mace up in a stabbing motion crushing its pelvis from below.

There was no time to do more than acknowledge each other as not those things and continue killing. The bear continued to sweep the giant poleaxe in arcs that scattered limbs and what they used for blood, even though the blade had long since gone dull from use. She fell back inside the bear’s generous reach and played defense for it, her faster strikes covering for the axe’s long return. The archer (he was actually a couple of inches taller than she was, which made him a very tall man) kept firing until he was out of arrows, then started throwing knives until he ran out of those, and finally drew a long curved blade from a back scabbard and took up a similar position to hers behind the bear.

The night passed in this fashion.

Whatever they were, the creatures seemed to finally have enough as the sun rose. She had been panting, waiting for more to come leaping over one of the wagons (they burned themselves as they came and didn’t seem to care) when the edge of wine red light began cresting the mountains to the east. It occurred to her then that there had been no new attacks for minutes. Sagging, her arms and chest throbbing with effort and sweat pouring down her face, she planted the head of her mace in the soil and leaned against it.

“Are they gone?” The man’s voice sounded as strained as hers, surprisingly reedy for a big man like him. She turned to look at him and opened her mouth. Then the bear drove the poleaxe into the turf like a flagpole and dropped onto all fours.

“I can’t smell anything. Too much dead, too much fire.” It snorted the air and turned to look at her. “Where did you come from?”

Panting, she pulled her helmet off of her head and dropped it onto the ground.

“I could … ask you … likewise.”

“She’s a Galian.” The man stood up straight by leaning himself against the closest burned out wagon. “She’s got to be headed to or from Null.” His hair was the same color as the steadily brightening sunlight burning its way across the east sky, as were his eyes. His skin was pallid with a dusting of light red dots across his cheeks and a scar on his throat. She’d seen similar scars years before. He seemed to know where she was looking. “Yeah, it’s a Naeth mark. I was five when they got me, fifteen when I got out. Did you fight the Naeth?”

“It was before my time.” She shuddered to get air. “So, is anyone going to explain the bear?”

“What’s there to explain?” The bear spoke again as it plopped onto its ass, sitting and swinging its head from side to side. “I’m a bear, you already know that part.”

“You can talk.”

“So can you. Are we going to trade the obvious?”

“Do you have a name?” She pulled the mailed coif back next, letting her short hair feel the air blow across it to cool down. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have many talking bears in Nazrean.”

“I call him Bely. It’s a Hentre word for white. You can call me Mark. It’s not my name but you Alronians absolutely butcher Hentre words.” Sliding down the wood until he crouch-leaned against the wagon, Mark took deep, slow breaths and leaned his head back against it. “I think we burned all the food. Oh, I hope not. I’m so hungry.”

However, none of these cities can truly be said to be masters of more than its own borders, and all pay tribute to Alron, the Ringed City, on the banks of the Enethyri Ocean. Alron rules half the continent by virtue of its ruthlessly efficient military, its vast wealth earned via trade and domination of the Enethryri (called the Alronian Lake in some quarters), and most importantly its ability to make cooperation with it more valuable than battling against it. If all the little kings, princes, potentates, pontiffs and diverse other self-styled rulers of various cities ranging from towns of a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of souls all rose up at once, Alronia might be able to hold onto its power. It would definitely be a near thing, however.Alron was founded so long ago that our sources disagree as to when, exactly. We know there were other nations before Alron. In her infamous White Mockery, Shizan Tir argued that the continent was settled by the original inhabitants of the Benarian island chain, driven from their homeland by volcanic eruption and inimical beasts. There is some evidence for a bronze wearing warrior people along the northern coast of Etrea, in the relics still found in domed tombs and the occasional lost settlement found in the Hentre mountains. Whoever these primordial Etreans were, they ranged the land, coming into conflict with the ancestors of people today known as the Naeth, the Aghat, even the Gobinar of the distant east. Those they could not conquer, they drove before them. The entire north and west of the continent was theirs, and traces of their presence can be found as far south as the modern bored with the Tarsans. Pottery with their strange pentagonal glazing patterns adorns graves to the far north and along the entire shore of the Benar and Enethryri Oceans. Many cities bear the track of their presence to this day in their names, from Husqyl in the furthest reaches of the Naethdar Marches to Nazreal itself, originally Nuzrahel.

Why these ancient people no longer dominate the land is unknown. The domed tombs, a few lost cities, the occasional shaft grave and the closely guarded secrets of the Hentre mountains are all that is left of them. In the epic poem Andakol we are told of how two brothers, Andak the Wolf and Broklar the Bear went to war with the kingdom of the Tall Sails to the south and west, and united the Etreilar for ten seasons of ceaseless battle. While the king of the Tail Sails is not named in the saga, his proud son Tarhal, his daughters Censka and Briezen, and extended families all feature in the tale, as do the various kings and princes of the Etreilar, including wise Enceydi the Hawk-Blessed, Shenamaol the Sister to Serpents, and diverse others. In the end, Andak dies after being lured to a rendezvous with Censka, and Broklar avenges his brother’s death by literally tearing down the walls of Tan-Dero, burying the entire court of the Tall Sails and himself in the process. Whether this war happened, or if the ancient people of Etrea were anything like the tales is beyond my purview. It seems likely that our distant ancestors and those of the peoples to our south and east waged war on one another, for do we not do likewise? The enmity is perhaps perpetual.

At any rate, Etrea proper struggled in undocumented chaos for many centuries. What I am next to relate is legend, told as fact in Alron, and viewed skeptically elsewhere. According to the city temples, fifteen centuries ago was born Alronius Mejur, a shepherd boy who tended his flock on the slopes of the Eboniral mountains that reach down to the shore of the Enerthyri forming the spine of the peninsula we today call Alron after the Ringed City. The boy Mejur may well have tended sheep his entire life and never been of particular note, had he not shirked his duties one day to explore an ancient domed tomb nestled in the sloping hills.

We do not know what he found there. The original tomb still exists, today buried beneath the Palace of the Mejurian Mystery, where the ruler of Alron lives and eschews a title, calling himself or herself merely the Mejuri. This family name serves to denote the power that does not claim to rule, and yet which no city within its reach would defy. How Alronius conquered the nearby cities and, without directly unifying them, forged an army for further conquest is also unknown to us. Alronius himself claimed that the goddess Galia, she who wore her father’s stained robe, appeared to him and granted him divine mandate to rule mankind as mankind had proved unable to rule itself. Shizan Tir claimed that the Mejuri line consorted with ancient demons and spirits. What is clear is that despite heavy opposition, no army that met Mejur’s in the field survived. No city he claimed successfully resisted him. Not a few that tried were destroyed utterly.

While Alronius himself never knew defeat, and neither did his daughter Zanre (who conquered Nazrael, then further north to the Danhaeli River, extended Alronian rule to the very center of the continent) it was the misfortune of his granddaughter Jalinia to be ruler of this patchwork nation when it collided with the Tarsans to the east.

“I’m sorry. Just remembering.”

“Khayyin brought you here?”

“Yes.”

“If he was then as he was when I knew him, he took you immediately to Oldest. Always with theatre, that one. Everything he does is a performance.” She smirked, and it was such a human expression that it took Elizabth back to see it. “Oh, he thinks he is so straightforward, but he plays a role he invented for himself. Make no mistake. His grief is real, but his manner is feigned.”

“If his grief is real …” Floating together a few hundred feet off of the ground, the two women presented contrasts. Elizabeth’s frame was taut, muscle over bone with pale skin, while Belan was lean and languid in manner and dark as rich soil. Elizabeth’s jagged stripes of red chain lashed across her naked skin while Belan’s graceful waves of blue formed arches and curves. Belan flew in a gentle blue aura while Elizabeth’s crackling red caused the air to shimmer around her in heat distortion. “I don’t follow. He seems genuine enough to me.”

“I make it sound as if he lies. He does not lie. But if given a choice between a simple, quiet act and one that will make a scene, he will make the scene. He has forgotten himself. He is not pragmatic, as you are. Both of you ache, yes, but he uses his ache to make a theatre, to make an impact. He wins battles with spectacle as much as action.” She waved her hands in circles. “I sound uncharitable, but while it is pretense, it is pretense done sincerely.”

Elizabeth didn’t interject. Once Belan got herself on a subject she tended to worry at it, trying to express herself perfectly and be fair to everything and it was best just to let her. She knew little about Khayyin, even though he’d brought her there and understood to some degree her own grief and loss. He tended to brood, it was true enough, and she preferred to keep busy and take on assignments from one of the Azi or Krimat above her in seniority. Rank itself was hard to determine here, as there wasn’t much of a hierarchy to speak of. The Blue One, who had been one of the Azuria for thousands of years, held a great deal of respect and most deferred to it, but it wasn’t as if she had to obey. She could refuse if she wanted to, but it rarely asked her for anything she wasn’t willing to do.

It did once ask her to let go of her hate, and she hadn’t done that, of course. Her hate was precious to her, it warmed her and fed her. Theatrical or not, the Orphan had understood that much and it was why she was a Krimath and not Azuria. The paths were metaphors, but the metaphor of fire lit the black corners of her, she could feel it keeping her from closing down, shutting off, and she cherished that white blazing roar of outrage when it came.

They descended to land in a large plaza, arranged in curling lines around a central series of pictographs that seemed to represent the original inhabitants of the planet. Even the Blue One knew little of them, only the Eldest of their anarchic order was believed to know what they meant. Now, they were mostly decoration for an area that many of the Azuria and Krimath used to gather and eat and converse.

A floating creature made up of dozens of segments coiled in the air, turned away from the two forms it was speaking to and ribboned through the air to meet them. It cooed softly, a rainbow of chitin and limbs.

“Belan, Elizabeth! I was just telling Ga you were on world.” Despite looking like a cross between an eel and a centipede made of glass, the bright chiming tone of its words in her mind set Elizabeth at ease. I Who Float On Light understood why she sometimes flinched at seeing him, as she had been a patient of sorts when she’d first arrived on this wholly alien soil. “Come come, there are foods for you somewhere, I will acquire! I will get them. You stay and talk, we have not talked, I have missed listening to you talk.” Floats rocketed away, slicing and coiling in the air as it went, leaving the two women with Ga.

Both of Ga’s bodies were made of what appeared to Elizabeth to be flesh, although it wasn’t. Ga had explained it once, but she hated to admit it had made no sense to her. Ga’s mind existed in two bodies, both large spheres with several rugose tendrils dangling from each side. Despite looking absolutely nothing like a human, Ga could eat the same kind of food as Elizabeth and Belan, and did so by absorbing it into one of her bodies.

“How have you been?” Ga’s mind sounded like rocks grinding against each other. “I did not realize you were back, Elizabeth. What were you doing?”

“The Hessonians asked us for help with a slaver group outside of their space. I found them on a small pre-industrial rockball and cleaned them out, but they were harvesting organs before I got there.” Elizabeth swallowed at the memory of seeing those Hesson corpses, split open along their thorax-like structures, their bodies hanging empty. “The slavers were from Dulkarniz, so I knew taking them in wouldn’t serve any purpose.”

“So you burned them.”

“So I burned them.” Ga was a Krimath much like herself, and Elizabeth smiled. “Burned them all, actually. I may have gone overboard, but you know me.”

“Yes, you are irrational and you expect more from other bilaterally symmetrical beings.” Ga chuckled at that. “Ask Belan about her people’s history of slaving.”

“No two Lokar agree on anything, why would we on that?” Belan’s mask of seraphic indifference didn’t even twitch. “I do not defend the behavior of my entire race any more than you do so.”

“Na, na, I scold without teeth, you’re right.” Ga’s two bodies turned slowly and dipped closer to each other. “We are what we are. Where is Floats with our food? Guilt makes me hungry.”

Elizabeth felt her body lurch at the suggestion. She didn’t feel guilty, but she was ravenous.

He drifted in the void a few hundred thousand kilometers away from the planet and watched its methane ocean burn. Watched its atmosphere glow with the heat. The ‘holes’ he’d opened between the molten iron core and the basins that held the methane oceans were now closed. They weren’t necessary any longer: the jets of molten iron tunneling through otherspace, passing through dimensions to ignite the planet, had created the chain reaction and even now were seething columns of superheated slag floating to the surface. Quakes from the loss of stability, of matter below the surface sent surges of burning liquid in waves that drowned and burned the lattice cities of the metal spiders.

He forced himself to watch it all. To watch them, uncounted multitudes of them, burn. Their cities, the masses of them drifting in what to them was a birthing matrix, a liquid womb from which their species was born. The planet was a mother to their kind, and it was dying at his hands. So were they. They had other worlds, older worlds, younger worlds. There would still be Taklarsaza, not metal spiders, in the universe after this day. But there would be many, many dead ones on this world.

He was a killer on a scale few could possibly understand. He had never killed anything a few scant days ago, and now he was genocide’s handmaiden. So he made himself watch. He opened his senses to the electromagnetic spectrum, and he made himself hear their shrieking pulsations, flares of static, ululations of x-rays.

It took a very long time.

He did not leave until it was done.

His return to Throneworld was unheralded because he did not tell anyone he was coming back. He’d considered telling Rythe, but after he’d abandoned her on Klarakashton he felt empty yet ashamed of himself. He’d taken on this task with her as his second, played the showoff, his patience exhausted and his years of craft and guile abandoned in the frenzy he no longer felt. Several of his brothers and sisters had killed for the Dy’Tariex before.

He never had. It had been something he was proud of, and now he’d tossed it aside in the fury born of mind to mind contact with the Not Metal Spiders. As he spun through the thin atmosphere of the world he was born on, feeling the heat radiate back up from its massive rock barrens and sparsely populated deserts he couldn’t summon anything like fury. He looked down at the world’s empty expanse and saw the hundreds of thousands of tiny little settlements. People who would never see the Shining Mountains, never.

He looked down upon them and realized with a cold certainty what he’d read before as an abstract. Their lives, their deaths, so short and so fragile. Lives lived and over in a blink while he would endure, live on. It wasn’t at all the gift he’d thought it was.

He allowed himself to fall, grateful for the silence inside his skull. His armor, living metal that swaddled him as a baby, grew as he grew, drew its life from him, protected him and guided his steps and took whatever form was suitable. It also knew when not to talk. So in silence he descended to the scooped out bowl known as The End of Harra and landed, many many kilometers from any living things.

He walked the perfect glassy sides of the bowl crater, scooped out thousands upon thousands of years before he was born. Fused into the glass were the shadows cast by bodies when the explosion occurred. His black and gold metal skin hardened into plates, responding to pain it felt but could not protect him from as he turned and looked at every inch of it.

The Wrexxakt had done it. Before his people had even dreamed of space, when they fought on this ragged floating ball of radiation and rock and sand for a life free of the ancient presences. Legendary monsters, who grew ever more terrible in every telling. Magnified by how much the Tislath hated them. Kyrian could not know how valid the old stories, the old memories were, but he could do what all of his people could.

He could sit in the melted black glass and look at the shadows etched on it from the explosion, and know that they were at least this terrible. They had unleashed this, and blown a crater kilometers across unto the surface of the planet. It had killed many of the people who were not Tislath, not Qualsilath, nor Naratsilath yet. They were just the Silath then, and they died en masse here.

Today I have become Wrexxakt.

He felt his armor, his brother, as it recycled the liquid leaking from his eyes. He had learned the lesson his father had always held back from him, from Tatris, from Rythe and Arktiesh and Malan. His disdain for his birth siblings evaporated in that moment as he finally, truly understood what he and they were and why they were necessary.

He felt at last a small touch of a mind to his mind. It was his mother, Siharra, and for the first time in his life he could finally feel her without any mask or shield between them. Not hers, and not his. Her thoughts brushed across his like the wind that blew sand across the lip of the vast crater, sand scouring black glass.

Are you and then the thoughts stopped because she could not think of an appropriate thing for him to be, and he smiled despite almost choking on self pity.

I am. At last, yes. I am, finally.

He felt her embrace him as if she were there.

I would have spared you this. He leaned into her presence for the first time since she had given birth to him, remembering that moment of stark, sudden solitude, when before had been her surrounding him, always present, always thinking to  him and around him. I had thought you would hide forever, and I will admit it was what I wanted for you, bodychild.

Together, they mourned what had been lost. He would return to his father, the Dy’Tariex, but not yet. First he and his mother had to bury what he had killed.

She had a hard time keeping track of years, considering she had never been back. She knew it had been many, but how many? Twenty? When aging slowed, and life became mission after mission, did it even matter how long? Every time she closed her eyes, she was back in dead Edgersall and they were coming through the door. She lay on her front and applied tension to her shoulders, feeling the pain where her neck pulled against the taut muscle of her upper back, and closed her eyes. She wasn’t going to sleep.

She didn’t really get hungry anymore. She just felt sick when she tried to live too long on energy pulled from the zero point instead of eating. She could go days without food, without sleep, longer if hunting. She wished she was hunting now, instead of laying in a dark room trying to force herself to sleep while memories spun around inside her head.

The room itself was sparse, made of white material most likely spun out of a zathrak’s crystal glands. She hated to admit it, but the zathrak still creeped her out. Too many limbs, with two huge carapace-like structures on either side of their bodies. It wasn’t their fault they looked like her nightmares. She was supposed to be better than that.

“Lizabeth?”

She opened her eyes, and knew they were glowing like banked embers. She forced herself to breathe, to calm her pulse, to let the fire recede. She knew the voice.

“Belan.” Her neck craned up to look at the woman she shared a room with. “Back from wherever it is?”

“Hasrath. It’s one of my people’s old colonies, actually.” Belan, like many she’d met over the years, looked vaguely human. She spoke a language that was as much gibberish to Elizabeth as english was to her, but both were strong enough senders and receivers to make up the difference. Belan was tall, thin, but not wire and sinew like Elizabeth, and rather than seething flashes of fire etched into her skin she wore colorful blue streaks from cyan to azure to sapphire and turquoise. It was as if her body had tides of color. Her skin was dark, almost mahogany, and she had an effortless grace that would have made Elizabeth jealous if she had the capacity.

“What did they have you doing?” She liked Belan, as much as she could.

“Monitoring politics. The hives are in disarray, many of the people are retreating deeper into Lokari Mantruus and leaving the outsystem colonies to fend for themselves. We don’t know why.” The glowing yellow eyes of the taller woman looked over Elizabeth critically. “You haven’t been eating? We should get food now.”

Knowing there was no point in arguing with Belan (she’d simply frown and be upset) Elizabeth merely nodded.

It was the only city on the surface of the planet. This was in part due to the fact that at some point long before any records they had, someone had bombarded the place with every kind of attack imaginable, and it had never recovered. The biosphere was in fact transplanted in great strips of protected habitat visible from orbit. She knew this because she’d gone up to see it.

It had no name as such. It didn’t need one, being the only city on the entire planet. Some called it Biv. Her first teacher had called it that, but he never explained it to her. It was a city built without streets or vehicle paths, because almost every being making use of it could fly or walk anywhere they wanted to go. The atmosphere was mostly nitrogen with argon, with just enough oxygen to make it possible for her to breath once she’d learned how to extract it. She still hated the sensation.

The city had a crazy quilt appearance, as the structures had in many cases been rebuilt from ancient, ancient buildings native to the planet or built as newcomers arrived. The sweeping domes of the original inhabitants were interspersed with the huge, cylindrical towers of Belan’s people, or the corkscrews of the zathrak, or a collection of floating hexagons, or filaments rising to a central point. There were organic life forms, crystals, completely synthetic, methane and polymer beings, colonies of beings too small for her to see and all sorts of alternatives.

She remembered when the Orphan had brought her there, led her to the huge central sphere floating in the very center point, where all the structures seemed to radiate from and warned her.

“You are about to meet our eldest. You will not understand yet, so please just try and respect.”

Then she knew how to not burn, as thoughts, memories, lives upon lives showed themselves to her. She did not live them. they merely clawed their way into her and were there in her mind. She didn’t even scream, just shuddered as the shape on her arm melted and resolved from a tendril into a chain. Many chains, thick red and black shapes, lashing around her limbs. She could feel raw heat climbing down the skin of her back and could hear hundreds of voices explaining that the path of flame was a metaphor. A means to an end. A way of using force, of approaching the cosmos. She didn’t care. In that moment only the body on the ground staring up with dead eyes held any reality for her.

A black stone body pushed itself up through the ground, dust and grit clinging to the spinal lobe in the center of its elongated disc body. She imagined the chains on her arms lashing out, and that’s exactly what they did, crashing down on its body and cutting it in molten halves. Her teeth were bared, her swollen lower lip bleeding and staining her teeth. She’d bitten it. Her hair whirled around her head in the updraft from her own body, and she knew she was covered in fire. She was fire. She hated, and the hate was a bright burning up and down her spine.

More of them were coming out of the hole that had been tunneled out of the ground near her feet. She could vaguely feel something from the grey man who had touched her hand, but she wasn’t focused on him. He could do whatever he was going to do. She was going to burn.

And so were they.

The wall of flame in the shape of a wave came down from the mine entrance as he pulled all he had left back into himself, allowing himself to contract and her to expand. She was younger, and still fresh in her hate and fear. Her fire banked hotter, his needed fuel. He watched her as the instruction became integral to her, saw with a faint smile how she mastered it rather than allowing it to master her. She would use the memories.

It was better than he had done, but he had been given a path incompatible to himself. She was not incompatible with fire. Had he found her before, she still might have burned. Now there was no doubt.

Her will scourged the very ground with a snarling, burning beast out of her mind, a creature of flaming hair and crushing, searing claws. He watched the monstrous creature, easily ten times his size, crash into the mass of black stone segmented creatures and destroy with jagged swipes and teeth that melted through stone. She didn’t even seem to feel it, maintaining the beast while lashing out herself with the lashing chains she’d called up as manifestation. Several of them were pulverized or divided by the constantly waving, sweeping, smashing links of chain called up out of fire.

She had lifted herself up off of the ground, without even bothering with any sort of wing or edge to hold her aloft. He took the time to observe how she was working, what he could show her to improve, and what would require better teachers. Most of it, she was already beyond his skill to teach, meaning she’d absorbed everything he’d imparted. Perhaps it was due to growing up on a world where the zero point was so difficult to contact.

He felt more static welling up around them. They were moving again. He was out of time. He turned to her, driving her monster of fire through their ranks near the opening into the earth.

They’re going to try and tunnel up again. We need a way to destroy them all at once, we’re wasting time.

“Gas.” Her voice was ragged, harried by the need to gasp for air from the exertion of pulling fire into being. Her mind and will knew what to do, but it was all unfamiliar effort to her. She was glad she’d been thinking about track, the weeks of running meant she was capable of enduring. “There’s gas pockets. Underground. My mom…”

I understand. Hold them just a little longer.

She felt grief cutting at her mind, trying to drag her down to cry on the ground again, and it simply could not be. She could not cry again. The anger she’d felt before at the black bugs collided with the grief and roared in the pounding of her heart and the panting exhale inhale rhythm, like some idiot camper dumping gasoline on a wood fire. She’d wanted to kill them before, but now she felt wounded. She couldn’t even mourn.

They burst out of the ground, a fountain of black stone. Adhering to one another, they poured themselves into a coherent shape. The smallest ones like scales, larger ones near the bottom, forming a giant segmented three lobed creature out of aggregate. It was bigger than a building and growing. The static they emitted was now a single hum, a unified distortion that clawed at the brain. It turned ‘eyes’ that were hundreds of smaller bodies to look at her, tried to push that static right into her eyes.

She laughed. It was hate made sound, barks from burning lungs. The pain in her chest only drove the fire higher in her mind. It shifted position, tried to force that static past the hate.

She imagined talons the size of barns, wings that blotted out the night sky, and that sky was blotted out. Flames exploded across the air above them, taking the form of a great reptile made of fire. A neck that coiled in the air, a smashing tail with spines, a monster out of stories read years before. She screamed, and it screamed, joined by the hate she’d used to call it into existence. The width of its wings eclipsed the quarry itself.

It crashed down on the mass of blackness and struck, and slashed, and breathed the fire it was made of in huge gouts. The heat was so intense that paint bubbled off of the scattered equipment, and the lighting towers started to sag as their struts weakened. Flames washed over Elizabeth, burning her clothes, but she knew no fire could harm her now. She was the fire. Her eyes blazed orange and red as her will drove gigantic claws down again and again and again into the black stone, shredding and burning.

Prepare yourself. I have found the gas you spoke of, and it will explode now.

She lifted herself up off of the ground and hurled upward in a trail of flames, still focusing her hatred into the huge yellow-white blaze of a dragon when she heard the first thud under the earth. Then another, and another, followed by the shattering of the ground. It was like seeing a whirlpool form in stone and soil instead of water, with jagged cracks and collapsing ground pulled back. She watched as jets and plumes of fire roared out of the ground, and then all was covered in dust and obscured from her.

She didn’t even feel herself land. When he landed next to her, she was crouching on a stump, looking downhill at what had been the mine. Now it was just a vast collapsed trench, and she could see it extend uphill to where the town had been. Edgersall had fallen into the same giant hole. There was no trace of her life.

“What … happens … now?”

“You can stay here. The mineral your people were digging up is a fuel that will keep the fire burning underground for years. No one will ever live here, and those things will be melted and destroyed. If you stay here, once the zero portal closes you will find yourself unable to call to fire. Everything I taught you will be wasted.”

She didn’t look at him, her eyes swirling pools of orange and red, her naked body covered in glowing, searing chains made of fire crawling along her skin.

“Or you can come with me. I will take you to those who taught me, and they can teach you to walk the path you chose tonight, and you may find purpose in it.” He turned to look skyward. “The zero portal is there, if you have had enough of this place.”

“It doesn’t look like I’ll ever get to.” She stood up, still light headed and short of breath, and looked down at the blasted, burned hole where her mother’s body was likely burned to ash, and swallowed once. She wanted to cry. She’d never cry again.

“Let’s go.”

When the helicopters arrived hours later, there was no one left to tell them what had happened.

He pivoted his body in a form he’d learned long ago, when he’d first traveled to Biv. Snaking ropes of fire rippled off of his skin, slashing out at the terribly silent blackness. They did not reflect the lights aimed down at them so much as they ate light so thoroughly that you could tell where they were by how much darker it was. Looking at them caused his eyes to water and twitch. Horrible static emitted from the mass of them, a thousand scraping nails down shale. If they thought at all he couldn’t hear it.

He made a fist. Above him, a fist of pure seething red-orange plasma appeared and crashed down into the mass of them. Even as their figures tumbled and melted from it, more came up. It was pointless. He backed away, contemplating his next move. Flight was an option, if destruction couldn’t be successfully achieved and containment seemed improbable. He had no idea how many living things were on this planet. If it were heavily populated, it should have been like a beacon in the dark and the zero tunnel should have been easy to establish. Instead, he’d only found it by pure accident, following a trail of dead worlds that should have or could have supported life.

He could feel the radio emissions that suggested life, or at least intelligence, perhaps artificial. But the life itself was hidden. If he had not left the zero tunnel up he might have been trapped there. If these things had already killed off the world’s native life he had no reason to stay. Six tendrils of fire lashed out from his shoulders, striking in great sweeping arcs to clear tendrils composed entirely of the smaller black ovals. Scattering them in molten stone spraying backward, glittering trails of red hot rock and severed oval bodies.

He prepared himself to ascend when he felt coherent thoughts behind him. Someone was alive.

The thoughts themselves were fascinatingly familiar, and yet completely unlike his own. He didn’t force himself into them, simply let them come to him. An overriding concern for something, fear, confusion. He felt them crest over him like a wave, could sense that his appearance had stopped whoever it was for a moment, could taste her (her? Yes, a female, so much like his own people they even have two genders) and then knew she was running directly past him, trying to reach the bodies on the ground.

She wouldn’t make it.

He ground his teeth and forced himself to imagine a wave, like the water that used to break itself on the hills south of where his small domed house rose out of jet dark soil. He could see the moss clinging to the sides, remember the sea air. The wave that he imagined was not at all like the roaring wall of fire that appeared. It shimmered, heat waves warping the air. He sent that yellow-white wall of fire forward, feeling as if the back of his head was going to cave in from the pain, hearing the popping and hissing sound of the creatures being melted or driven back.

He inhaled and exhaled, knowing he was drawing too much from his own reserves. Even with the zero tunnel open he couldn’t draw nearly enough from elsewhere. His limbs began to shake.

The female (she looked only half grown to him) was cradling one of the corpses, speaking to it. Her voice rasped, and she convulsed. Even through the red haze of holding the wave against the cave entrance he remembered seeing small round shapes descend from the sky, and the end of days by the water pulling tube eels out in hooked nets. The end of running down the beach with his snarling pet by his side, its fur the color of the dawn sky. His own mother’s face, when they dragged her away. Fire and death, and him left alone surrounded by it.

He looked into her now. The strange leaden emptiness of the planet made it hard, but inside her was as strong a mind, a self as any he’d seen. And there near the top was that which he himself recognized, and knew he could make use of, if he could just make her understand him. A sharp stabbing pain in his left eye reminded him that he couldn’t keep the flame on that hole forever. He could sense them massing underneath the ground, static everywhere.

Elizabeth had pulled her mother out from underneath a flipped over mine cart and dragged her back, away from the fire and the monsters. She sobbed, feeling sick and hoarse.

“Please, please please please no please I got here momma you have to get up now I got here I got here you can’t be dead.” She wept, and screamed, her dirty blond hair hanging in sweat-tangled hanks. Her mother’s face was pallid, her teeth locked together, blood from a wound on the top of her head clotted into a purple streak across her forehead. “You can’t be dead.”

“Yes, she can be.”

Elizabeth nearly dropped her mother in shock. The man with the burning wings had floated over to where she was kneeling, his left hand extended towards the mine opening. His eyes were the same red and orange color as the wings on his back, flames that snapped and hissed in the air.

He didn’t say anything else to her. He simply looked at her, and she knew what he was thinking as if she was thinking it herself. By himself, he could not stand against the things, they were already looking for a new way to the surface. He would have to leave if he couldn’t get help, there was something wrong here that kept him from calling for help. Her planet would have to deal with these things by itself until he could get that help. More would die. More like her mother, like Dave, like everyone she had ever known in her entire life.

He showed her a beach, somewhere far from there, and a small boy with grey skin screaming at a body. He showed her a blue light, and a figure like nothing she had ever seen, tendrils and edges, and felt it offer peace. He showed her how he had failed to accept peace.

I don’t offer you peace, Elizabeth Sheridan. I don’t offer you peace at all.

She looked down at her mother’s dead face, her staring, empty eyes. She laid her down gently on the ground, and kissed her, and stood up.

“It’ll hurt.”

“Yes, very much so.”

“Can’t hurt worse.” She threw Dave’s shotgun to the side. “Do it.”