The nascent Empress joined with her heart brother in her youth. A flameless, wingless animal, he seemed, and yet in his chest beat the heart of one of the People. She knew then that humanity, those wanderers which crawled now upon the soil of Theta Mars, were capable of intelligent thought.

  —Abalone Shell on the White Beach, A New History Of Theta Mars

  The second lieutenant found Scholar Felsdam in the mess hall. He hadn’t been looking for him, entirely, though the emissary’s words had been on his mind.

  “Scholar Felsdam, well met,” he said, pausing by the table the man sat alone at one end of, a picked over tray before him and a book of scrawled notes open in his lap. He had been mumbling hisses and growls under his breath.

  He looked up, blinking, “ah, lieutenant, greetings. All is well with the ship and our course?”

  “Yes, we make good time. Void willing, we’ll continue to,” the second lieutenant said, taking the liberty to occupy the empty seat across the table from the Scholar. “What are you working on, if you do not mind my intrusion?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said, appraising the book in his hands as though he hadn’t realised he held it. “Brushing up on my wyrm speak, though I doubt it will help much. Our teachers never thought it was worth the effort to correct my pronunciation. Didn’t have the knack for it that Maddie did.”

  “You can speak the language the emissary does?”

  “If you consider grumbling my way through the phrases ‘thank you teacher,’ ‘I understand,’ and, ‘please tell me more,’ speaking, then yes.”

  “Where did you learn?” asked the second lieutenant. “I’ve never heard it spoken anywhere before.”

  “And you likely never will,” said the Scholar with a sad smile. “A wyrm taught my wife and I, before the Expulsion.”

  “Really? I hadn’t heard that they…” The second lieutenant hadn’t heard anything actually, about wyrms, beyond that they had burned the Theta Martian colony to the ground.

  “No, you wouldn’t have, would you?” Felsdam sighed. “The colony leadership doesn’t like to let that sort of thing get out. It doesn’t fit their imagined reality that such bloodthirsty monsters might be capable of civilised notions such as teaching.”

  “They taught the emissary well enough,” the second lieutenant said before he thought better. “She seems almost as much a Scholar as yourself.”

  “Oh I have no doubt she is far more so,” said Felsdam, a brief shadow passing over his face. “If wyrms could be said to have two favorite pastimes, they are learning and poetry. An entire planet’s worth of giant, scaly philosopher poets.”

  “Poets? Really?” asked the second lieutenant. “What do wyrms write poetry about?”

  “All the usual themes,” said Felsdam. “Only more abstracted. You’ve never seen wyrm fyre though, have you?” The second lieutenant shook his head. “Well, if you’ve a minute, I know we’ve got some footage on the drive. Come.”

  He stood in a whispering of grey robes, book tucked under his elbow. The second lieutenant followed close behind as he left the mess hall. “Would you teach me a few of your wyrm words? Might be useful.”

  Felsdam shot a gleaming look at him over his shoulder, “might be interesting, you mean. I can see it in your eyes, sir, half the fun of space travel to you is trawling through the flotsam of diverse ideas, is it not?”

  “You caught me out on that,” said the second lieutenant with a smile. To the crew they passed as they crossed the ship to the Scholar’s quarters, it must have seemed that the pair had decided on imitation of dogs or wolves to entertain themselves. The second lieutenant thought perhaps he had reached the full extent of Felsdam’s meagre vocabulary by the time they reached the doors.

  He soon found himself leaning close to the convex monitor of a very old isolated computing unit, watching wyrms spit gouts of multicoloured flame into the night air.

  “It’s very beautiful,” he said, as a copper-red wyrm launched a blue starburst from within the dark flesh of its maw, the fyre curling to golden and green around the edges, licking over a mouthful of barbed, black needle teeth. The second lieutenant could not help a flicker of unease that a creature capable of the same ignition shared the ship with him. If something like this fyre ball were created and got into the ventilation and reoxygenation vests… “but what does it mean?”

  “That is for wyrms to know and men to guess at,” said Felsdam. “They see more colour than we do, sense the heat and convection currents. It is all informative to them, execution as highly praised as intention.”

  “Have you seen it? In person, I mean.”

  “Yes,” said the Scholar. “And on occasion I almost understood it, too.”

  “Your teacher showed you?”

  “Yes. Aurora, that’s her there, the green, she tried to impress its significance on me, but, as soon as the heat passed, the ichor dissipated, all her insights left me. I was mortal man once more.”

  The second lieutenant watched the clips of the green wyrm, blossoms of fyre, red, violet, and turquoise, unfurling in a sky of constellations. “The Expulsion must have been beautiful, then, in its tragedy,” he murmured, visions of a kaleidoscopic inferno consuming all playing across his mind.

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  “It did not look anything like these poems,” Felsdam said, sobering. “Wyrn fyre can be altered by consuming chemical compounds in exact ratio’s, and timing rates of partial digestion. These Symphonies of Light are works of art. The Expulsion was not. They left their fyre in its natural state, white red and unchanged. The Colony Capital burned the way every city does, sullen and orange, smoke filled skies hiding shadows that may have been monsters.”

  The second lieutenant did not understand, not truly. He was starborn. In space, orbital colonies burned fast and quiet, smoke—if it got loose in the void at all—dragged into the centre of the gyro.

  Into that heavy silence, he asked, “do you have footage of their dance?”

  Felsdam nodded, shaken out of reverie, “you’ll want to see the Haddock tape.” He pawed over the directory, columns of files scrolling past.

  “Haddock?”

  “Yes, no one else could get as close as he did, not mad enough to. Here, this is the one. The start of all our troubles, more likely than not. He gave it to Capstone as a guarantee to get his funding. I’m sure he’s sitting on his mountain cursing himself for it to this day,” Felsdam said, loading the file, brushing his sleeve across the monitor as if its faltering, fuzzy diodes could be cleared as one does dust. “But then with a secret so large, it was only a matter of time. It either kills one or gets out.”

  The playback began, of Theta Mars’ dark sky, the split cone of a mountain rising steeply out of a dense dusky violet jungle. Chlorophyll was rare on Theta Mars, inefficient in the quality of light Eros bathed the small planet in, other phototrophs filled its empty niche, nature’s pantheon never lacking for little gods. Wyrms poured into the sky, rising in thermal spirals from the cone of the mountain. The colours of them surprised the second lieutenant, vibrant as gemstones and precious metals. Silver gleamed in a swath of light, and yellow glowed with topaz clarity, but no iridescent white shone as would a second sun. He had thought—mistakenly—that the wyrm was a white creature by type.

  They spun and twirled, dove, clasped talons and split apart again. Fyre made its flashing appearance and each individual blended with those around into a murmuration, painting fables into the sky.

  As it was ending, a red streak broke away from the formation, a wyrm sleek and powerful, it descended with purpose to destroy, directly to where the camera swayed, held by unsteady hands. The playback ended.

  “Beautiful and terrible, no?” asked Felsdam softly in the quiet of the darkened screen. The video had no audio. The second lieutenant still felt as though he could hear the rumbling outrage humming from the red wyrms snarling maw. Hear the sharp intake of breath as the person behind the camera realised what was coming.

  “Were they killed? The one filming?” asked the second lieutenant.

  “No, she didn’t kill him. James Haddock was the only human on Theta Mars she couldn’t destroy. Though back then, we’ve come to understand she wanted to,” Felsdam said, flipping back to a still of the red wyrm, wings spread, talons reaching, amber eyes squinted above a snout crinkled into a hissing scowl.

  “What—who, is she?”

  “This is the Empress of Theta Mars in her youth. The Inferno That Consumes All.”

  “So she really is a wyrm,” said the second lieutenant quietly. This red creature caused the Expulsion of an entire thriving colony from an otherwise peaceful planet. “She looks ready to tear anything apart, why didn’t she kill him?”

  “The blood, I suspect.”

  “Blood?”

  “Ichor, really. They bleed black, all denizens of Theta Mars. It has… properties. From what pieces were recovered from the journal he burned, she’d already had a taste of Haddock by then, and he of her. To kill him would be akin to suicide,” Felsdam explained. “It’s a special magic of the wyrms, their ichor.”

  “Magic? I never thought I would hear a Scholar talk of magic.”

  “If we had been able to study it, I would fill your ears with the science, but they refused. Too much harm had already been done by the time it came to light, too much trust had been broken, faith in us lost. All I have to share of it is the testimony of a precious few first hand accounts, and nothing more. A little cult of believers.”

  The second lieutenant had nothing to reply to that with, the Scholar had withdrawn inwards, gazing in contemplation at the still of the wyrm. The one who would call herself an Empress, who would, through her proxy, the Teeth of the Lion—a wyrm name the Journeyman James Haddock had given himself—steal one hundred children, murder Joseph Capstone, and raze the colony lands of Theta Mars.

  “Yes, it is in the blood,” Felsdam murmured, brushing idly at the mottled and pockmarked skin of his chin and lower lip. “Maybe the children have it, maybe they will—” he broke off his speech abruptly, drawing in a sharp breath. He sat up, a shaking hand splayed on the table, and looked around wildly.

  “Scholar Felsdam, are you alright?” asked the second lieutenant, standing and reaching out in a halfway gesture of support should the man need it.

  He stood, a hand to his heart, and paced the quarters to the door. “Thank you lieutenant, for your concern, I am quite alright. I believe we will have to take this up again another time, something has upset my wife.” He opened the door and ushered the second lieutenant into the passageway.

  The second lieutenant chuckled, “really? No offense, Scholar, but by what means do you know this?”

  Felsdam pinned him with a dire look, “believe that I wish desperately I had the science to explain it to you, sir.” He turned, marching swiftly down the passage with what limberness his stiffening body could muster and caught DuCourt in his arms as she came flying around the corner into the hall.

  “Oh Liam, I hate that woman!” she sobbed into his robes, shoulders shaking and dirt stained hands knotting in the fabric. “She’s going to run this whole expedition like one of her missions of truth! She doesn’t listen, and she doesn’t understand a damn thing!”

  “I know, Maddie my love, I know,” he said softly, smoothing her hair. “It’ll be alright. The emissary will speak on her own behalf.”

  “She had better Liam,” sniffled the Journeywoman. “Or else we’ll be back where we were post Expulsion. Oh, why wouldn’t they speak then? When the galaxy was listening?”

  Felsdam continued to comfort his wife, tears falling from his eyes in profusion to match her own. The second lieutenant took another passage and hurriedly left the pair in privacy. They were unsettling together, too close, always a half step into the other’s space, their feelings.

  As he went, his mind revisited the images Felsdam had shown him of wyrms. Striking, beautiful creatures, alien and yet intrinsically familiar. Their flaming poetry and spiraling dance flight turned over and over in the surf on the shore of his mind’s ocean.

  Was it art? Was it ritual? If a human could not comprehend its meaning, did it have meaning at all? This talk of ichor and blood, of faith and magic, made him uneasy. He thought perhaps he should see the ship’s monk of Right Being, then thought better of it. He found the droning chimes of the mantra’s grating. Time on the observation deck would cure him of these swirling fancies, as anchoring himself by the stars always did.