The teeth pulled away with a sharp tug, a lash of hot, warm tongue followed and the wyrm withdrew. There was barely pain, an itch wriggled deep in the meat of her right hand. The drying saliva crackled in a smooth lacquered layer as Sister Young’s hands dropped and curled in against her chest, cradling the wound. It bled still, blood congealing into gelatinous scabs under the sheen of saliva. It was in no way the same as the long lingering violence that marked those Theta Martians who had been seen and tasted and ‘known’ by the wyrm.

  “Oh Sarah,” said the strange flat voice, buzzing with an undercurrent of the wyrm’s trilling vocalizations. Looking up, Sister Young saw the animal rising tall above her. Crouched within the sacred spiral of the otoliths, the monk knelt between the slender columns of forelegs, the crest of its pointed head blocking the Dim Beyond. Upon the scaled lips there lingered no readable emotion. No telling wrinkles creased the plates of its brow. In the fractal wells of the wide, colourless/all-colour eyes there was nothing. A burning, empty animal.

  “We know you, Seeker, we understand,” said the mimicked voice, a tantalizing half step from something real.

  Sister Young did not understand. She was still alone in the dark with an animal. A dangerous animal. What she knew was the crushing strength of its limbs, the heat of its breath, the sharpness of its teeth. What she understood was that it was too late to run.

  A tear fell from an eye she could not bear to blink, traced the hollowed cheek that stretched around her open mouth—which had not made it any easier to breathe—and hung dew-like from the curve of her jaw. She saw the faint flicker as the wyrm’s eye followed the tear drop’s passage. A moment of revulsion roiled through her as she seized on the notion that the wyrm might touch her. Might reach out with one of its five fingered talons and brush against her skin.

  Instead it brought a long claw to the hollow of its collar bone. “We would give you our accurate account, Seeker Young,” it said. “This is no light understanding, for you or for ourself. This Truth is heavy, even for a Seeker.”

  “This message…” her voice croaked through her dry throat. “This message is all you have journeyed to impart, no? You will give no other testimony?”

  “None is needed.” The words burned, a brand against Sister Young’s heart. She clamped her teeth around her contempt for the sentiment. Her helplessness won out. Over reason, suspicion and fear conquered curiosity, that light which had always been her guide, that had brought her down this path, that had put her in this place.

  “Give me your account,” she said, feeling small and inadequate in the face of the towering alien presence. “I am ready.”

  The claw pierced white flesh, black ichor swelled to the surface. The forelimb reached out, Sister Young closed her eyes to the Dim Beyond, opened her mouth and leaned back her head.

  Objectivity was lost. She had stepped out of her ordained role as passive observer and become a participant in the mad rituals of Theta Mars. Her heart broke. She would lose her work for this, find herself confined to a hermitage and contemplation for the rest of her life.

  The drop burned on her tongue, the taste a blasphemy. A bitter rage against her own foolishness, her weak and fearful mind. It was of course nothing but empty acid. The beast had tricked her, poisoned her rationality, her account was nothing now. She would never be seen as a monk of the order of Learning again. Oh, what had she done?

  She closed her mouth around the spot of pain, opened it to breathe and scream perhaps, or to cry. To beg forgiveness and mercy from her benevolent Empress—inside the mind within the human skull, Sister Young vanished.

  The white wyrm was wandering. Many did so, in their youth, and she was still young. Lithe and light and fresh with fyre. She traipsed far from her hatchling haunts, having left forever the home of her mother. Idly she let the wind roll her through lazy spirals high up above a sprawling coast. Sea, sky, sea, sky, a snatch of stark black rocks. She steadied out and peered. There was a strange little beast down there, hopping about from rock to rock and splashing in the tide wash.

  She dove and swooped near it. The creature seemed oblivious to her, standing tall—for a crawling thing—and looking at some shape in its long thin paws. Yes, there was definitely something wrong with it—it had only four limbs.

  The white wyrm landed on the wet sand. Still the creature continued its oblivious business, holding the shape in one paw as it crawled to the next pool and dipped about in the weed murked water.

  The white wyrm stalked closer. Nothing, perhaps the thing was blind. She snarled lowly, that it seemed to hear.

  It turned its funny round head to her, shaking a long shock of fur that grew only there. It swiped in her direction with a gangly, clawless limb. “That’s not a very nice way to say hello, cousin!” it shrieked.

  The white wyrm was amazed. “You talk, bug?”

  “I talk!” snarled the little thing in a high, pitchy voice. It was almost impossible to make out its words through its abysmal tonal punctuation. “And I am not a bug!”

  “No? What are you then?” asked the white wyrm. She had been intending to eat the creature and find out, but considering it could talk, the situation had become more complex.

  “A person!” it howled, making humorous contortions of its soft flat face.

  The white wyrm snorted. “That’s impossible, you look nothing like a person. You lie, bug.”

  “I do not!” it shrieked, stamping its long flat feet and splashing in the pool. “You are very rude, cousin. The rudest of my relatives I have met so far!”

  She sat back on her haunches and said proudly, “you are surely no relation of mine. I am too beautiful, and you are too ugly.”

  The creature whimpered, and began climbing down the rocks to the beach. “You’re just a stupid baby, cousin, who doesn’t know anything yet. I hatched in the east. My mother is red.”

  The white wyrm watched the bug creep across the sand with long swinging strides, swaying to and fro with each step. There was a nest in the east, she knew, and she knew the mother there was red. She was always on the minds of the Old Ones. But the white wyrm wasn’t interested in knowledge yet. She was still wandering.

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  “Did you come from a bad egg?” she asked. “Why are you strange?”

  “I’m not strange!” the bug said. The white wyrm though her tone sounded affronted. “I have ninety nine siblings who are just like me.”

  So the whole clutch had gone off then. That would be why the Old Ones were always thinking about it. A shame, a tragedy. The white wyrm was too young to feel much about tragedy, but she was curious about her strange crippled ‘cousin.’

  She followed behind it as the bag egg hatchling splashed along the beach, stopping to crouch and turn over shells and poke at seaweed.

  “You can’t fly,” stated the white wyrm.

  “Haven’t got wings,” growled the ugly hatchling, wriggling so a single pair of shoulder blades rippled its flat back.

  “You have no fyre,” she said next. She wasn’t sure about this one, but the bug person didn’t smell hot enough. In truth it smelled terrible and slightly sickening, like an odor from a long forgotten dream.

  “Not inside, but I can make it outside,” it claimed proudly, and threw a shell into the surf.

  “Really? How?”

  “With my hands,” it said, flexing the long digits on its forelimbs.

  “Do it now.”

  “I can’t do it now, stupid. I’m all wet, and I haven’t got my tools.” The bug chattered some chittering inane noise.

  The white wyrm decided it was lying. She felt superior, she would never tell a lie. “I am wandering,” she said. “I only stopped to look at you because I was curious.”

  “Well, I am exploring. You can stay and play with me if you want.”

  “What would we do?”

  “Look in tide pools, maybe make a sand mountain.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The white wyrm shook her wings. “I am going now.”

  The creature bared its flat teeth at her and swiped its ‘hand’ through the air. “Goodbye, cousin, have fun wandering.”

  “Goodbye, bug.”

  The white wyrm crouched small on a little ledge high on the inside edge of the mountain’s mouth, peering down down down to the heat in the centre where the Old Ones were meditating. She had wandered long and far, the sun had traced its elliptical dawn several times. She had learned to recite poetry and to dance the annals of the long histories.

  Once and again she had found herself in the east and had seen the wretched flightless flameless clutch. She had looked upon the still form of the red who was mother there. Seen her little bug-like ‘Brother’ who crawled and crouched in her shadow and seemed old as well as young and very very sad.

  She had learned there had been some sort of tragedy, as she had once suspected. She had come now to the Old Ones mountains to learn what it had been. Others had come, the many of her clutch who were tired of wandering and ready to Seek. The red Inferno was there below, among the Old Ones and yet still, to them, so young. At her shoulder, as he always was, sat her brother the Teeth. The white wyrm would have called him gold, maybe, for the shine of his head fur, but like all the bug people he was dull and brownish and had no scales.

  For a long time, the white wyrm watched, as other young Seekers fluttered down to taste the Inferno’s knowing. She watched them hiss and whine and fall to snarling arguments among themselves. It must be truly horrible, the tragedy of the east.

  She dropped down to the flow and sniffed at the ugly smell of the Teeth of the Lion. He watched her with strange small eyes, quietly waiting.

  “You are ugly,” she said, “like a bug.”

  “This is true,” he answered. He had a better voice than the hatchlings, deeper, richer.

  “You are not of here. I have been everywhere, and nowhere have I found your kind.”

  He raised a spindly hand and pointed up. “My kind come from beyond the sky.”

  The white wyrm considered this, questioning whether this bug was a liar the same as the little one on the beach. “I think you are a liar.” The Teeth of the Lion did not defend against her accusation. She looked to the Inferno That Consumes All. “I will learn of your tragedy.”

  The mother keened and bared her teeth. “It is a terrible knowing, young Seeker. Preliminary truths are required.”

  The white wyrm agreed to this. The Teeth offered her his thin, red bug-blood. She took it hesitantly.

  He was, to her surprise and horror, a person. Trapped inside that ugly crippled body. He had been born in it and would be bound to it until he died—as would all his unfortunate kind. On the fraying edges of his mind, she found the curling burns of the Inferno. They were Together, burned into each other’s flesh and spirits. The white wyrm shivered and cowered. How horrible, how terrible, and yet, she was a Seeker. Her curiosity longed to know more.

  From the Teeth she took knowing of a valley of human enterprise, a colony of these aliens that had come down from the stars. A youth spent watching the people and yearning. A meeting that both had had the misfortune of surviving. From the Inferno she took a brief history of strange and violent crimes. A young bronze shot down at sea, his bones hung in a ‘house’ suspended from wires. Herself imprisoned, the seam between herself and her heart brother picked at and cut and examined. Escape from the torturing hands came at the loss of her heart brother, and with him, the loss of half herself. In grief, she became mother, in cunning, she defeated the Golden Tyrant and liberated the nest of the east, and then… the knowing stopped abruptly.

  “My tragedy is clearest through my own eyes,” said the Inferno. “But it is a terrible knowing, young Seeker. You may deny it.”

  “I do not deny it,” said the white wyrm proudly, though all over her scales crawled and her fyre churned in her belly. “I will know.”

  “So be it,” said the Inferno. The white wyrm did not then understand her grief.

  The Inferno stepped gingerly between the wriggling carpet of small black bodies towards the nest entrance. Their chirping and mewling betrayed their depthless hunger. They nipped at her legs and talons, desperate to be underfoot. At the entrance, the cliff stretched vertically. Down, the long drop to the rocks and the surf. Up, to the kresh on the cliff top, where the sun was warm and her children could stretch their limbs and play.

  She led the climb, trilling to encourage them to follow her, but she did not look back. Invariably some of her brood would fall to die upon the rocks. It was the way, but she could not bear to witness it. The human left in the shadowy corners of her heart did not understand the nature of a brood. It wished she could nurture every hatchling in beautiful individuality, but she could not.

  There had been interference with the nest site. Spying prying egg thieves digging raat tunnels into the spiraling heart of the brood chamber, leaching heat from the bone furnace. She had dealt with them. Once she had caught and killed and gleaned their designs, she had destroyed their tunnels, torn down the square of stone in the jungle beneath which they lurked. Burned to the metal skeletons their rumbling machines

  She hated the human animals. Hated them for the pain they had caused her. Hated them for the mind-death of her wretched brother, who was dead now while he yet breathed and dreamed. Deeper still, she hated them as mother, hated them for their trespass on her sacred duties at the nest. Hated and destroyed them and secured her children’s safety.

  Now they were gone and she need delay bringing the clutch cliff-side no longer.

  She pulled her long body over the cliff edge, stood tall and watchful, where her father had stood when her brother had first witnessed the People. She had torn the cameras down out of trees. No longer would the ritual of childrearing be observed, catalogued, made into that biting thing called Science. That wicked thing they had used to tear her flesh and mind. The thing they had killed her brother with.

  A soft click from the trees, she turned, head striking forward, fyre already blossoming in her throat. She saw the gleam of the dart, felt it strike her flesh and punch deep. She leapt forward, one stride, two, fyre poured forth for a moment then faded as she slipped and toppled, falling onto her side unmoving. Her offspring gained the cliff top, emerging into a world overrun with human vermin.