The second lieutenant lay on the floor of the observation deck, staring up at the trailing edge of the wyrm’s wing membrane. She had stretched herself out, limbs long across the floor and wing span extended across the hall. The thin skin was close enough that he could touch it, if he reached out. He held back from the temptation.

  “Abalone, what is it? These… visions you give me?” he asked.

  “Memories,” said the woman, she lay nearby, feet towards the opposite wall than his own. “Our past in fragments.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “Is it very important? We can and we do, is this not enough?”

  “I…” he paused, remembering in flashes things he had never experienced. Meditating in a clearing within a forest of red conifers, silver bark glinting. Hearing the wind sing over the canopy and knowing what its quiet voice was saying. Flying above a roaring ocean where it broke against the shore. Tasting the shapes of fyre. “I don’t know if it is. Though that’s what all the troubles have been about, haven’t they?”

  “Many do not listen,” said the emissary. That seemed to be the end of her statement. The second lieutenant thought he understood. He wondered if Mr. Reed would have been able to stop himself from lashing out, even if he had experienced what the second lieutenant had.

  “I’m confused on one point though, Abalone,” said the second lieutenant.

  “Yes?”

  “In the memories, I’m not sure, but… I do not feel… human. Why is that?”

  “Because we are not human.”

  “You aren’t?” He turned his head to glance at her. The woman beside him looked human, she sounded human. He was sure she would feel human, if he reached out to her.

  “We are a wyrm, in the memories we gave you.”

  It was the wyrm’s blood that he had tasted, yes, of course. The wyrm. She loomed with her presence and her heat, of course it was her memories he had walked and flown though.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot… you speak for her and I… forgive me for this foolishness,” he stammered, fumbling for the words in wyrm speak, turned his head towards the wyrm’s. “Thank you, teacher.”

  The wing spread above him flexed and closed as the wyrm curled around him and the emissary. Fractal eyes glimmered, and warm sweet breath puffed across his face. He was petrified, fear skittered lightning quick through his heart, his limbs. He was over awed, she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. His hands itched to trace the shapes in her crest, he longed to stretch out against the heat of her, his body pressed against her scales.

  She was death and radiance. Oblivion and scorching truth.

  And then, there beside the noble head and the barbed black fangs, was the woman. Plain hair plaited and drawn over her shoulder, sun touched skin smooth and scaleless. She seemed suddenly foreign and soft and alien, but her eyes held the answer, a burning, vivid certainty.

  “What is your name, teacher?” asked the second lieutenant. He moved to rise but was stopped. The burning one held him down with her gaze.

  “We are Abalone Shell on the White Beach,” said the woman. “Who are you?”

  “Christoph Grenlivt,” he said, the name escaping him like a sigh.

  “Will you show us who you are?” asked the emissary. “We promise it will not cause you harm.”

  “How?”

  “In the manner that we share with you.”

  ‘By blood, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  The second lieutenant swallowed a sudden doubt. “Why do you want this?”

  “We grow fond of you. It is a matter of trust. You do wish us to know we can trust you, do you not?”

  “I do,” he said. He wanted it fervently, desperately, and he did not know why. There was something just beneath the surface of it, somewhere in the strange dream memories of Theta Mars, a truth of some sort, a reality so similar to his own and yet so strange. “But why do you need it in blood?”

  “Blood cannot lie.”

  He sucked his lip, “may I see your spur?”

  “You may look, but you cannot touch. It is a sacred instrument,” she said, withdrawing the spur from her cloak. It gleamed in the star light, a mirror polish on the black material. It was as long as her hand and fit the curves of her grip. He knew it must be wyrm bone, he wondered faintly that it did not seem abhorrent to her. The point was needle fine, clean and precise. It could kill easily, puncture deep into flesh, but it was not a weapon. The emissary had no need of such vulgar tools. She had death for a shadow.

  “Where will you take it from?”

  She gestured with two fingers to the side of his throat. He swallowed, looked from the woman to the wyrm. “What do I have to do, for it to work, I mean.”

  “Think of yourself, your true being, the rest will pass to us,” said the woman.

  Christoph sat up, unbuttoned the collar of his uniform, “I am a little frightened,” he said.

  The emissary nodded, “you are also brave.”

  It was a strange thing to tell him, the second lieutenant thought. He was a grown man, her senior by a few cycles at least. He had flown as navigator with legion ships into hostile space, seen the death throes of stars from within their gravity. He had been through and done many things more demanding of bravery than the giving of a drop of blood, and yet it was here in this moment that it was what he needed. To be told he was brave.

  The pinch as the spur punctured his flesh was bright and sharp and over in an instant. Nothing happened and nothing changed. He nearly wept, for the complete and utter normalcy of it. The giving of a drop of blood contained nothing more sublime than any common wound. He opened his eyes, looking to the emissaries, to where the woman and the wyrm huddled with their heads close together. An empty, meaningless red smear staining the spur.

  “I am nothing, aren’t I?” he choked. “An empty vessel alone at void.”

  “Empty Vessel Alone at Void,” whispered the emissary. “Do not doubt yourself.” She brought the spur to the hollow of the wyrm’s neck. “Would you take knowing of yourself from us?”

  “I would treasure nothing more highly.”

  In a drop, a truth was shared, different from the distant memoirs of planet life. In it the time was now, the knowing crystalline around a shifting, flowing collective of thoughts, memories at the helm of ships on commissions, and leaves on his mother’s orbital. At the core of it, a truth they had shaped into the language he was taught in the cradle and kresh, a title for him that was built of what he had become as he lived. An Empty Vessel Alone At Void. Tears sprung up hot at the corners of his eyes, “you could know all that?” he said, unable to make, in the dazzling splendor of knowing himself known, a cohesive speech to describe it.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Yes,” she said, the spur still held ready in her hand. “Would you know the same of ourself?”

  “You would share that with me?” he whispered, suddenly the prospect held daunting machinations, a soul deep trust he had never encountered.

  “We would.”

  On the floor of the observation deck, in the sprawling, light scattered arms of the spiral, in the communion of a drop of blood, a star born navigations officer knew a wyrm and a woman, a human and one of the true people. Two infancies, two childhoods, two adolescents, and then, one future, one purpose, one life. A new name, chosen together where the ocean met the sand and all things became entwined. Abalone Shell on the White Beach.

  Shuddering tremors danced through the second lieutenant, delightful and inescapable, as the shared truth settled into place in his mind, his heart, his blood. He gasped a shaking breath, blinking away a temporary blindness. He saw them, in their white robe and iridescence, long hair and serrated crest, burning eyes. The one that had been doubled, the two that was one. The wyrm that was woman, the woman that was wyrm.

  “Oh…” he sighed, slumping against the panels. “I see now, I think I understand.”

  The woman dipped her head, the wyrm trilled.

  “Teacher?” asked the second lieutenant, heart fluttering erratically. “May I touch you?”

  They considered him, still as twinned statues, hot and silent. The woman reached out an empty hand, her fingers brushed over his. He followed her, tentative in her guidance, how strange it was that her skin did not burn him, that her flesh did not radiate the fervent heat of her eyes. His fingers under hers skimmed the plane of her cheek where he knew, now, that she enjoyed to be touched. She saw the flicker as his eyes skittered between woman and wyrm, a fleeting grin lit her face, the wyrm humming an oscillating note.

  They moved his hand, fingertips slid against her nose plate, smooth as polished stone, as the inside of a shell, there was the heat, the latent excess that billowed from them, invisible clouds of power, their own atmosphere. His palm slid up over her eye ridge, she leaned against his hand, the woman’s breath feathered through his hair by his ear. She was close beside him, her hand over his as the wyrm tipped her head, and twisted her neck. The second lieutenant found himself standing, a strange wonder overcoming him. He knew them, Abalone Shell, and they knew him, and in that knowing was an ease that flowed as through siblings in the kresh and lovers in the twilight and a pilot with a little ship. He was for a brief, ecstatic moment, one of them. Allowed, even welcomed, on the fringe of their collective.

  The wyrm ran her jaw along his shoulder, he found himself nudged against the heat of her chest, his ear laid along her neck, the syncopated rhythm of her eight chambered heart rushing against his cheek. The woman pressed against his side, a wing and a taloned foreleg curled around them. Hands brushed over his head and along his neck. He laughed, one arm thrown wide, palm against hot scales, the other wrapped around the woman’s waist, the swell of her hip under his fingers.

  For a wild, jealous second he wished they were not aboard his ship, in all that space travel limited and constrained them. He craved to fly with them, to dance, sing, to watch awe struck as they composed their poetry, to hunt in the moon dark with them, to taste and know the flesh of deir.

  “Teacher,” said the second lieutenant, softly, voice teetering on the cusp of breaking. “I have fallen in love with you.”

  The woman looked up at him, dark eyes filled thousand fold by the stars. “We would understand,” she said, drawing the spur. The second lieutenant leaned his chin into her cupped hand, the wyrm warm against his back. Her long neck snaked around and with one fractal eye she watched them. He felt tears form and fall as he took in the sight of them, their touch against his body, the prick of the spur a sweet ecstasy. He saw it in their eyes as understanding dawned. “Love is the only word for it I have in trade. Its counterparts in the dialect of my orbital add nothing, but do you know it by another description, teacher? If not, then, what am I to do?”

  His was a hopeless, all consuming devotion brought on by the blinding recognition of the self in the other and the other in the self.

  “Do not despair,” they said, the woman and the wyrm enfolding him in their presence. “In this there is good.”

  “In what, exactly, is there good, emissary?” came the harsh, jarring voice of Sister Young. The second lieutenant’s attention snapped to the doorway, where the monk stood with her desk slung over her shoulder, on her heels trailed the Scholar and the Journeywoman, faces twisted in the agony of heartbreak.

  Sister Young felt caught out, wrong footed, as though the gravity had fluctuated. Her fist clenched around the shoulder strap of her desk as she watched the second lieutenant stutteringly detangle himself from the coiling embrace of woman and wyrm, desperately attempting and failing in the attempt, to subdue a wide smile that lit his flushed face, while tripping over whispered words of apology. He got free, one hand fastening the loosened collar of his uniform, the other lingering, as he passed alongside the wyrm, in making tracery of her scales, before, finding itself unoccupied, it sought work in the ruffled plume of his hair.

  “Sister, Scholar, Journeywoman,” he said as he approached, dipping a polite if slightly unsteady bow towards them.

  “Are you feeling… quite alright, sir?” asked Felsdam, as the ship’s officer stood before them, swaying and smiling and trying to look sheepish while managing instead to radiate high spirits.

  “Oh, quite, Scholar,” he said, with an abrupt nod that nearly tipped him over. “Absolutely marvelous.”

  DuCourt emitted a sort of low whine, like the begging of a dog, and passing the second lieutenant, fell to her knees and crawled towards the emissary, a scratching, trilling diatribe in wyrm speak spilling past her lips. The second lieutenant turned his head to watch her, frowning, and listing sharply. Felsdam caught his arm and steadied him.

  “Woah there, sir!” said the Scholar, cringing around a strong sensation that was clearly affecting him due to his wife’s prostration, now hunched at the woman’s feet, fingers brushing the hem of her white cloak as she coughed and spat her frenzied supplications, blood flecking the flooring along with spittle.

  Felsdam, holding up the second lieutenant, turned to Sister Young. “Sister, I believe I had better walk with Mr. Grenlivt to his quarters, my apologies, I am sure we might reschedule.”

  Sister Young couldn’t find in herself anything worthy of saying, sending the Scholar on his errand with a flicking benediction. He slipped down the passageway, the second lieutenant draped against his shoulder. As they vanished, she made out a few notes of giddy laughter, and the steady rumble of Felsdam’s calm recitation.

  Sister Young stood frozen, as she tried to hold objectively what she had observed clearly in her mind. She was not having complete success. From the observation deck, a world shaking vocalization announced that the wyrm, here, now, finally, would speak. Sister Young turned, teeth grinding, to witness the creature’s great head bent over the woman’s shoulder, fang filled maw twitching around the speech of animals.

  DuCourt sprawled on her knees, tears shining in her eyes and hands clutching at her shawl as her head bobbed in acquiescence. She hissed through blood flecked lips some croaking words the wyrm replied to in kind. Their conversation seemed to calm her frenzy, that as the wyrm withdrew to lay, long sleek limbs extended under the starlight, DuCourt’s frantic tension faded as well.

  “Emissary,” said Sister Young, approaching with a purposeful stride.

  The woman nodded in her direction, “Sister.”

  “I had hoped we might speak, I asked the Journeywoman and the Scholar if they would join us as translators, should that prove more amenable to you.”

  “On what matters were you interested in discussion?”

  “A great many, but now I find my mind turned in curiosity upon your relation to the second lieutenant.”

  “That we will not discuss with you, Sister Young.”

  “Is the matter private?”

  “Personal, and nascent. It is not yet known fully.”

  “This is a new association?”

  “Please, Sister Young. Desist in your questioning, we will not answer at this time.”

  “And why not?” Sister Young pressed, following as the woman took steps toward the passage. “Is there some offence I have given? Do you hold history in contempt?”

  “No, Sister Young, we hold the knowing of past and present in the highest order, we are Seekers.”

  “What is it then? That I have failed in, that you refuse all catalogue?”

  “Sister, please,” said DuCourt tremblingly. “Do not press this now, I will speak with you. Appointment with them can be made at a later hour.”

  “Inform me of my shortcomings, emissary. If they are within my power to remedy, I shall forthwith.”

  The woman made no remark, she turned and stalked towards the passage. Sister Young surged forwards, saying, “I beg, if I must, as eyes of the empress, please, allow me the fulfillment of my purpose!” she grabbed the emissary by the wrist, surprised how slender, how human she was, surprised that she did not prove a phantom, a spectre of Theta Mars, haunting this ship.

  In an instant, Sister Young saw the emissary turn and recoil, an animal snarl twisting her face, the skin of her arm shivered in her grip. Then she found herself on the flooring, her desk clattering away, the latch popping open and spilling recyc and graphite across the deck. A heavy weight pressed down on her chest, the face of the wyrm loomed against the stars, great billowing clouds of hot dry air buffeted Sister Young, choked her squeezed lungs.

  “You will not touch us,” came, as if from a great distance, the calm, flat voice of the woman. The wyrm filled the air before Sister Young’s face, all teeth and talons and latent fyre and promised death.

  She blinked, flinching away from the heat and fangs, they were gone when she opened her eyes. The observation deck was empty but for Journeywoman DuCourt, who was at her side, shaking hands helping her to sit up, coughing away the crushing weight of the wyrm’s forepaw.

  “DuCourt,” Sister Young said, between great heaving breaths. “DuCourt, what am I missing? What, and how? How am I supposed to understand when no one will tell me the truth?”