The fade had already begun to crawl across the gleaming sky, the luminescent green spores filling the air, when Skthveraachk-Colony arrived at the fissure. A natural crevice jaggedly splitting verdant and shallow slopes, as though great claws had reached down and torn open the world, that had been settled as the border between Ckhehnvraahll-Colony and her own. Her former own. The brooding nests had been left for the last, the birthing queens there needing the greatest assistance to travel as the column grew, swelled, sprouted prongs as scouts and spotters were assigned to the outer limits in case drones wandered too far from the center. Each voice added to the symphony of life, and each clamored and begged answers as they breathed their stories.
They had done as she ordered. Even as she had been carried beyond the limits of reality, her colony back on the planet had obeyed her final commands; designate Ktcvahnaah as birthing queen, assign leadership roles to the thinkers. The evacuated eggs were left at the farms, menials remained or split into subgroupings to speed information’s delivery to the other nests, other colonies. Ktcvahnaah was yet a Queen, and she had ensured all knew of the threat looming on the border to the now destroyed landscape where Skthveraachk had fallen. As soldiers swarmed to the nests nearest the battlesite in preparation, Ktcvahnaah-Colony and scant thousand of her own menials and soldiers accompanied them to Hollowcore, to mark the new additions and allow the thinkers direct interface with the Queen. They did not get the chance. Ktcvahnaah had killed them as soon as they were within reach, eighteen of the thirty within the great nest slain along with the hundreds who fought to defend them. Two queenlings had tried to rally the voices and re-establish the harmony, but Ktcvahnaah had begun already spreading her tainted music throughout Hollowcore. With her own forces already within the walls, and the lack of a senior queen to contest her, the great burrow within the mountain had fallen. By the time Skthveraachk was waking aboard the Palamedes, she had indeed lost her colony. But not to the humanites; to the desires of a Queen who had seen opportunity and taken it, without care or thought for the damage done in the process.
Twelve thousand soldiers. Eighteen thousand menials. Fewer than two thousand spitters, and less than half as many specialist castes. Scouts, menders, by the omnipresence of the Founders there were even scentcrafters at long last, but flying stingers had been wiped out, entirely, and not even thirty thinkers remained across all her nests despite every single one of them joining with her. All laden with what their stomachs could carry, all on the march. It did not even comprise a third of her colony thirty measures ago. It was a thousand times her colony but a few bars ago. It would suffice.
<”Svera.”> The Band thrummed with the name only one used. Her hairs stiffened, but she did not halt. Scentcrafters are the head of the column were already concocting the needed blends, and while her colony had come to standstill respectfully outside Ckhehnvraahll’s marked warning line, the Queen rippled through the bodies of her people to be first among them when it was time to advance. <”Are you alright?”>
“Your safety is assured, Hathan-Commander, I yet live.” Fatigue from the march. The thinker somewhere in the center of the column offloading his knowledge throughout the colony. And all the while, the whine of the Wyverns following on high. The memory of their capability was fresh. Only the Queen’s constant assurance kept the colony calm. “I expect your soldiers have already relayed events.”
<”They had some words about it.”> Neutrality. Non-committal. <”*^&**^&* was under the impression you were actually threatening her.”>
“I required your weapons. Your lessers were being difficult. I ensured cooperation.”
<”Probably best I phrase it that way in the report as well.”> A voice in her symphony was assisting with the scentcrafter’s task. Filling in the best solutions, guiding towards compounds that would be received the kindest. One of hers? From the Palamedes, yes. <”Svera, I want you to understand that it is my job, my role now, to assist you. In whatever capacity you require. Officially, I am here to transport and ‘facilitate communications’. In practice, when there is something you need, be that military support or information on our targets or even weapons, to an extent.”>
“How much biomass we require. Our spatial needs. Whether our pens and enclosures are cleaned, and how we may best bow to please you.” He was making it difficult to focus. Just another voice, certainly, but one which set her mandibles spreading and claws curled.
<”*^&* Svera, yes, that too, when Admirals or officials are present. I don’t need you bowing and scraping/baring your neck before me. I don’t want it.”>
“It is magnanimous of you to allow me my dignity.” Movement at the border. Her scouts sent alerts of spotters for an opposing column, probing pattern. “My attentions are needed elsewhere. What is required of me?” Silence. Six beats. She was nearing the shallow chasm, its ruby rocks jutting upwards in precipices flattened.
<”The *^&*/VTOLs following you are saying you’re gathering a sizeable force. We’re watching from the Palamedes as well.”> It was jarring to remember the eyes on high, able to leer down at her at all times. <”They’re going to need to either land, or return to *^&*/space soon. How many more of your nests do you need to visit?”>
“None. Ktcvahnaah-Colony has taken control of my territory in my absence. I am summoning the choir from the voices unified with me, and leading them out of her lands.”
<”I’m not sure the translator is properly communicating-“>
“Oskar-Admiral will have a force of approximately thirty-two thousand. When we arrive in Ckhehnvraahll’s Last, your Wyverns may land and begin the carrying from planet to sky. It is within two-thousand lengths of here, towards the risefade. You should be capable of seeing it upon your table of false truths.”
<”We see it.”> Warning and threat smells began to drift towards her advance scouts. She directed them back, as demonstration of peaceful intent. Scentcrafters were putting the final touches on their greeting, and it was the mender who sent information on the most suitable greeting phrases for the colony. <”Ckhehnvraahll’s Last, this is one of your nests? A neutral nest?”>
“An ally’s.” That was sung aloud. ‘I hope’, she kept unvocalized.
Two hundred and twenty. One quarter soldiers, one tenth scouts, the rest menials meant to bulk the mass as show of force. A standard expeditionary probe in response to movement on a border. Utterly incapable of actually halting the force arrayed before it at but sixty lengths. Bundles of spit and pheromones were passed up from the crafters protected at center of her column, but she retained her quiet so as not to seem intrusive on the other colony’s dominion.
“My music is of caution and my voice is sheathed but unfolded.” Their song echoed across the steeped canyon, its bottom visible, but not a tumble the Queen wished to take as she came to a halt propped on one of the outcroppings. “This place is mine. Ktcvahnaah-Colony is unwelcomed within it. Why do you amass a swarm? Do you come to take?”
“Ckhehnvraahll Queen, may our stand against the red hordes of the sopra ring clear in the Remembering.” She fanned her head as the markers were smeared beneath her by her attendants, the smallest of them still wrapped around her core. It smelled of trust. It tasted of relief in familiarity. Each wave of her head sent forth a cloud of peace, and the Queen felt her own tension slithering out from her legs. “I am not of Ktcvahnaah-Colony. I am Skthveraachk Queen of Skthveraachk-Colony, and I rejoice to once more bask in the timbre of your cautious voice. Such sounds must have shamed Ktcvahnaah when she came to collect your allegiance.”
“Soldiers remain grounded. Link is being formed at their rear.” Her scout’s assurances were supplemental. Even she could see how anxious preparation dispersed as seeds to the wind. Scent and sound combining to purer truth. Answer was not immediate, Ckhehnvraahll diverting more drones to speed her connection to the probe.
“Skthveraachk Queen, may my debts fall upon you as the alto rains. I mourned the end of your colony and final notes of your song, even as your last gifts were clutched to core. How is it you return to me?”
“All I will explain that can be explained, but I must first request your assistance.”
“Your force is great. I will begin to assemble my soldiers, that we may retake your nests from Ktcvahnaah.”
“Such would be difficult, but together, achievable.” She felt her vents tremble and mandibles click twice, knowing Ckhehnvraahll Queen could see the embarrassing gratitude filling her. “I do not come to make war on Ktcvahnaah. I must take my colony from this territory so that I may take it … somewhere further beyond.” Such talk would be complicated even with their antennae touching, let along through the linked bodies. “I ask of you permission to enter your lands and rest, before continuing my journey.”
“I will not refuse you.” The scouts and menials tapped their antennae together, clacking laughter, and her own colony made a rumbling as it laughed in response. “I could not refuse you. Your respect for my borders is seen. Now enter and be welcomed.”
Menials were called from the column, interlocking their claws and stretching themselves across the gap so that the colony could progress. The pit sealed over by firm chitinous forms, across which thousands strode beneath the green glow of the arial spores. Two hundred and fifty would not be nearly enough to mark her entire column, but others would be sent along the way.
“Disperse. Single column, fourteen wide. Designate approaching drones allies. Allow contact.” Her thinkers, save for one stubbornly preoccupied voice, called for her to return to a safer middle within the colony. She acquiesced, allowing the swarm to flow around her. Ckhehnvraahll arranged her own lines to a sixteen width, spaced them evenly, so that it was as through gates of bodies Skthveraachk flowed. Rubbing, stroking, mingling the scents together as each of her children made way through corridors of paired forms ahead. Emerging freshly marked. Freshly identified. More barren and rocky landscape giving way to the lowlands of treelines and fungus, the trail a slope downward as they traveled further from the mountain range.
“Hathan-Commander, I am proceeding to the nest. I will signal areas where your Wyverns may land safely, and cover them with my markers to show them friendly, but your drones should remain within.”
<”Stand nearby/wait…”> She clawed to a halt, and the disturbance was a wave throughout the column as immediate confusion was a shockwave centered on her stillness. Thirty thousand bodies hesitated, but she had given no order for their halting, and so tentatively they resumed their pace. <”Received. There’s things going on up here, changes for when you get back. Projections are showing it’ll take around thirty bars to move that many of you from the planet to the ship. And there’s more.”> Thirty bars, she would need to take advantage of Ckhehnvraahll’s kindness!? More, of course, what more could there be? <”Command wants to put a *^&* on the planet.”>
“That word did not translate. May I move again?”
<”May you m-…yes, of course?”> His confusion only irritated her more, and she pushed forward with increased pace to make up lost ground. <”*^&*, a small number of soldiers and thinkers and menials within one of your nests. Or very near to it, in order to study your world.”>
“They wish to put a nest on my world?” Thank the Founders and the black sky both the humanites could still not determine alarm when they heard it.
<”No, not a nest. Smaller, and temporary. A *^&* of troops, along with a sort of lesser-queen from my world. Someone who can better learn to communicate with your species.”>
“As I have no nests, Hathan-Commander, this will be difficult to achieve.”
<”Then you’ll need to convince this ally of yours to house them. Assuming she will not harm or obstruct them.”>
“I am imposing greatly upon Ckhehnvraahll Queen already.” That was not an answer to the question, and the Commander knew it. When he did not respond, she swatted irritably to cut low-hanging bulb from stalk and posed the hypothetical to her thinkers. Now, the five-legged male was the lead voice amongst the uncertain collective, and his response was immediate. “She is a former vassal, and bound to me by time and unity of purpose. If explained properly, it will be allowed, if unhappily.”
<”Get it done, then. It’ll be ten, fifteen bars before *^&**^&* arrives here, but I’ll start sending down the *^&* ships immediately for your people. Thank you, Svera.”> Skthveraachk did not reply to his appreciation, letting the emptiness be her response. The mender from the Palamedes was requesting position alongside her, and the Queen acknowledged. Already seeing the clearing ahead from beneath the trees and shrooms. Already feeling the anger driven from her by a wall of memories which refused to let their pleasantness be tainted.
Hollowcore was a marvel, a bastion of power in the lands to the alto of the great mountain range. A nest so sprawling and populous, that had stood for so long, it had been named long before Skthveraachk was ever lain. Ckhehnvraahll’s Last had been mocked in some gatherings, the presumption of naming a nest not even half the age of Hollowcore and what was more, naming it after a colony that had not achieved any tales of note. When Skthveraachk had first raided the lands, the memories told that they too had found it amusing, assumed the Queen juvenile and her colony one of pomp. But in ten cycles of raids, Skthveraachk-Colony had been forced to satisfy themselves on spoils taken from foraging columns, from the reserves and forest itself. Never once had they managed to breach the nest itself.
Ckhehnvraahll-Colony had but a single nest. Thirty thousand, compared to colonies five or ten times that size, did not seem an impressive number. Until all thirty thousand were contained in a single area. The fungal forest made combat savage, and the frontline would be a constantly shifting thing as soldiers fought both on the ground and around the great bases of the stalks, suffering constant flanks from above as their columns were infiltrated. Clearance had only been made fifty lengths in a perimeter around the nest, forcing attackers who made it through their living barriers onto open field. The ground itself was still hard stone beneath the layer of soil, Ckhehnvraahll having found seemingly the one spot of deep earth that burrowed through a gap of weakness in the crust. And over this entrance, like the rounded tip of an egg, a great curving of wood and thorn had been grown for generations. Rising from the topsoil, held down by chains of bodies for measures, for cycles, to force their shape to bend and curve unnaturally. A mighty dome, reinforced with sealant and interwoven with toxic barbs, rising from the world’s lay. Ckhehnvraahll’s Last. The sight before her was even more beautiful than she remembered.
“Skthveraachk Queen, come.” Attendants of Ckhehnvraahll-Colony flowed through the gaps in the wooden barrier to guide her to its entrance. She signed acceptance, though could no longer delay the work needing to be done.
“Ckhehnvraahll Queen, there will soon be creatures here.” She began to direct menials to form wide circles in the field between nest and forest. “From the sky. They come in flying… constructs, of hardstone.”
“The flying not-rocks!?” Alarm raced through the attendants, and as they slipped through the guardian woodwork, the soldiers encircling the great raise of matted dirt adorned with the crests of a hundred slain Vhersckaahlhn similarly began to rear in preparation.
“You know of them, from my messages sent?”
“From experience and conflict!” Skthveraachk took in a dry heave of air. “We managed to slay two, following the strategies you employed against them. But since the fall of your brooding nest, they have been sighted three times within my territory. Always in our fungal fields, though they never destroy the crops. They arrive, they fill their bellies with the meat of our lumbrites, and they depart. We attempted to kill them, once, but they rained fire upon us. We have only watched from afar since, and if we do not approach within a hundred lengths, they do not attack.”
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“These will not attack.” She tried not to hork at the mention of the wiggling meat. Into the tunnels they traveled, attendants forming chain to keep the Queen connected to the colony clustering outside, filling the land. “They will not attack. They are designation non-hostile. So long as they are obeyed.”
“Obeyed? They are capable of communication?”
“Yes.” Words that would convey meaning without terror and discordance. “The notrocks are mindless beasts, controlled by the creatures. They are known as humanites, and they are from a place far beyond here.”
“I have never heard of these creatures.”
“They are from a place beyond the sky.” It was only the second time Skthveraachk’s own colony had heard the claim. The rumble of tens of tens of thousands of unsettled feet shook dirt from the ceiling as they descended. Hollowcore was a hard nest, a clean nest. Hundreds of menials labored until their mandibles were stumps to carve out the passageways in the rock and stone, to design and scribe the patterns and set the luminescent blue fungi into hollows that lined the great central passage. Ckhehnvraahll’s Last was a soft nest, a free nest. Each diverting passageway was overhung with greenery, mossy lengths which stroked down your back and made your vents tingle when you passed beneath. The smell of still water in pools of sleek granite filling its corridors. Ckhehnvraahll’s attendants were shaking. It was not caused by the tickling moss. “A place beyond what we know. It is where I was taken when I fell in the battle. It is where I must return, soon.”
“Skthveraachk Queen, sing sense and reason to me, your music is terrifying. Your claims are truth, but they are not possible.” And as the chambers were entered, the darkness was driven away by the light of glowing spores. Set high into the arching ceiling, positioned to reflect themselves in the shine of hardstones of emerald hue. Even some of ruby tint, gifts from Hollowcore to her, to strengthen the bonds of their unity. All of which hung above the Queen herself, the verdant greens playing off the orange and grey carapace still enshrouded in the smell of eggs freshly lain. Skthveraachk was not halted, not even threatened, as she advanced to lower her head and touch antennae to Ckhehnvraahll, a sloppy and shamefully awkward greeting that nonetheless felt as though the last thirty measures of near isolation was already a trauma relegated to memory. “And what in the name of all the Founders is that thing on your head?”
“Ckhehnvraahll Queen!” It was not Skthveraachk who cried out, but the pale gray mender who wound in a rush through the mixture of attendants, clasping herself to the thicker abdomen of the larger female. Hesitance. Uncertainty. Testing tap from the Queen, which became more frantic and searching, until the contact was returned without reservation.
“Ckhehnvraahll mender! Does the sky reject us all this day? How many dead will be returned to me before the next rise?”
“Not dead, no. Fallen. Stupid, inadequate thinking.” The mender wound legs around the other Queen, touches flowing from her as information was drawn out against shell. “Tried to reach our wounded soldiers. Was struck by the white light of the humanites. Pain, such pain, such damage, yes? No. Thought myself dying. Was not. Pain, but no damage. Was struck, bound. Taken up. Taken to the sky. Imprisoned within unseeable walls, separated. Found by Skthveraachk Queen, given purpose again, yes?” The pair touched close. “Yes. Yes, protect another stupid Queen who never listens to her mender. Yes.” They laughed together. Skthveraachk managed not to interject her own mirthful thoughts. Managed not to let the hurt and darkness taint her image when the mender turned to reciting all that had transpired, from their binding to their hunt to the sights they had been shown. The Wyverns’ landing caused no small stir, even panic, amongst the colonies. But her children knew her. They obeyed, when she told them to smear the pap across the hulls of the vessels. And with the marked scents, after long beats of waiting and watching, the lack of fire or lightning spat from the mouths of the Wyvern constructs too convinced Ckhehnvraahll to keep her soldiers at bay. Then it was a music of the now. The failures. The losses. And of informing the Queen that the beings from the beyond would come here, and perhaps some measure take her up into the sky as well.
“Nothing returns from the sky, Skthveraachk Queen.” The mender had taken to checking over Skthveraachk’s damaged chitin as Ckhehnvraahll murmured, though the damage was superficial. Barely breaking through her crust. “But you both rise past it, then sink back down from its heights. Bearing the marks and armor of these humanites themselves.”
“It is not armor. It is but creation of theirs to allow my understanding of their grotesque music. Measures I have listened to it from rise to fade, tolerating their ungainly pitches and pauses, only to discover that my efforts have not saved my species, but doomed it to servitude.” It was not just the mender to touch upon her. As the story had been sung and the melody made somber, Ckhehnvraahll had brought cleansing lichens soaked in water and bactum. A dozen nimble attendants now rubbed down each sodden inch of the Queen, the browning fronds carted off for disposal as they spoke. Two of the other Queen’s nesting drones stood waiting nearby, and Skthveraachk could smell the fermenting jelsaah inside them. “My nests taken, Hollowcore lost to a usurper I cannot spare the soldiers to unseat, because I must marshal my forces against the very same humanites who, with but a fraction of their power, silenced the voices of thousands.”
“Has she been like this long?” Ckhehnvraahll had folded herself down onto her core, letting her own attendants similarly scour free her carapace. The mender sawed with claw to shave off sealant which protruded from smoothness of Skthveraachk chitin.
“Disagreeable? Overwhelmed? Yes? Yes. I had thought you were trouble as a Queen. You at least do not personally enter combat. Skthveraachk Queen has been injured more in twenty measures than you have been in fifteen cycles. Physically. Emotionally.” A biting retort was already drumming up from her legs. It shifted to an elongated groan as one of the attendants reached into her vents and pulled free sticky length of mucus. The elastic snapping as clinging goo was pulled from walls leading to lungs making her shudder with pleasured relief.
“Sing to me, then, of their music.” She dragged her head up, giving one of Ckhehnvraahll’s antenna a smack.
“Did you not receive? I am being taken. To the sky.”
“And one of the sky will soon be coming here, to my nest, for how long neither of us know. I will be subjected to the same melodies you have, and you tell me I cannot do anything but accept their wishes.”
“You cannot.” Despite the many graspers working at her body, Skthveraachk ensured the note rung true. “Trails of pain await you if you try.”
“So, sing to me of the dangers and darkness of their music. That I might prepare myself.” Vents fully unclogged, the exhale made was the freshest breath she had parted with in ages. And despite the anger welling within her, accuracy demanded correction.
“It is not all of darkness.” She struggled as the truth slipped her. Averted her head from the other Queen’s curious touch. “But there is much darkness. Their bodies are weak, their air is cold … they sing only with their voices.”
“Only of sound?”
“Yes. They at times make small gestures, they dance timidly with two of their legs, arms, but only at times. Most often they stand motionless and exude sound, without any touch or even giving any smells to assist their meaning. They have only two eyes, their mouth is always open so that you can see inside of them, and they wrap themselves entirely in multicolored shells like armor made of leaves and silk.”
“Skthveraachk Queen, you are supposed to be aiding me in comprehension, but all you are doing is making my stomach clench.” Soft clacking of her antennae reverberated off the walls and, catching Skthveraachk giving the nesting drones another look, bade them come and deliver their treasure. Basins fashioned from the chitin of the now songless were laid before each Queen before the drones clenched their guts, spewing free the juices held within them for what smelled like a cycle. Skthveraachk drank full of the fumes with chittering appreciation before properly extending her tube to drink of the fruitful bile. Ckhehnvraahll always did know how to make a meeting of Queens special.
“That is but them as individuals, Ckhehnvraahll Queen. They make up for their weakness by harnessing the power of light and heat. This Band I wear? Without a single drone, they may use it to speak to me over … over ten thousand lengths. A hundred thousand.” How many bodies would it even take to reach the Palamedes, right now hovering unseen above them? “They could be listening to me now through it, for all I know. But,” Addendum was made quickly at the sudden visible discomfort in the other Queen. “Such is not likely. When they have need of me, they call.”
“Then you are right to fear them. As should we all.”
“As should we all, and I do. Fear them.” Taking another drink, the mixture was almost perfect as it slid smoothly down through her. Just the right amount of nectar mixed in. Under the gentle touches, the warmth of finally being below ground once more, she could not help but loosen her joints. “But it is not entirely darkness. How long we have known our world to be rounded, contained, yes, but to see it floating out before me as the sun gleamed behind it…” It was hopeless, but even now she tried to draw the memory onto Ckhehnvraahll’s head. “To watch one of my attendants glide about a room a hundred times the size of this one, bearing a load that should have crushed it. They sing things that are not to you, but you believe them, because you know they can do anything. It is terrifying. But it is also wonderous. They will change our entire world, now that they are here. I only resent that we do not seem to have a voice in their chorus.”
“Perhaps not yet.” Drinking from her own basin, juices clung below Ckhehnvraahll’s mandibles, and Skthveraachk seized one of the lichen pads from attendant to wipe free the drippage before it dried. Her forelegs more practiced and agile from combat than the other Queen’s. “But it would be inadequate to think this would be forever. Even you who have spent such great measures amongst them make it plain you cannot yet begin to grasp their intricacies.”
“If you can call them such.”
“I do. They are beings we do not understand, but we do understand that they could destroy us, and have instead chosen not to. In no small part, it is now murmured, thanks to your efforts. You have been separated for too long.” The Queen leant forward, and the claw bearing lichen slid further to nearly touch at underside of her neck. Skthveraachk quickly sought to retract, but found her limb halted by grasp of a nearby attendant. When the other’s pair of slowly reaching antennae came down to light on her head, the found herself angling the humanite device away, accepting the feelers lower across her face.
“Perhaps so. Had I been connected to my thinkers, to my colony, I would have seen the obvious.” She ceased trying to pull her claw back, and instead let it extend fuller. The backside glazing at the unarmored tenderness beneath Ckhehnvraahll’s throat, watching as her mandibles clacked and tightened mere tengthlengths from her eyes. “I could have done more, Ckhehnvraahll.” The loss of the other Queen’s title was not insult. Not here. “Killed more. Fought harder. Succeeded beyond their expectations. I do not fail. I do not falter.”
“You did more than any could expect of one in your position, War Queen.” Her vents flared and spasmed, one of Ckhehnvraahll’s attendants beginning to feel within the trembling slats. She motioned for her own to encircle the other female, her pulse quickened. “Without stories to rely on, without songs or histories to guide you, you did all that you could. Your last act before your expected death, to attempt the protection of vassals and enemy colonies both. Thank the Composer, or the Founders, or the Triumvirate, but all will also come to thank you for what you have done.”
“I have told you not to call me that.” There was no anger to muster. Frustration, at how she was already drawing closer, giving more of her head to the other’s ministrations. Though not before ensuring both basins of beloved jelsaah fruit had been safely taken to the sides of the room.
“Because you still consider it insult. Still unsheathe yourself when they call you a Queen in a soldier’s body.” Her abdomen was curling closer, the back of her carapace forming a reverse crescent. So long her senses had been invaded by nothing but hardstone and sickly, salty gasses from the humanites. Ckhehnvraahll was like the wind after a battle. A breeze carrying sugars and the smell of fresh pods blossoming from the grass. Skthveraachk broke the contact of heads with a drag of her mandibles across curved features, her own gaster brought up as she crawled onto side, their bodies forming a ring on the floor with backs arched and antennae tapping up on the other’s hard surface. “We do not choose our true names, War Queen. We may only make them one with the music of our cores. Only teach those who disparage them, take advantage of them, to fear the truth of their strength.”
Her touches were paced so peelably fast, her drones crawling over and between them to reach into the vents raised to ceiling, the others pinned to floor. The rippling shockwaves beating through her body setting a tempo that matched her heartbeat. Skthveraachk drummed back on the trembling frame of orange and grey, letting those beautiful colors fill all four of her eyes. Scythe extended on her forelimb, and though Ckhehnvraahll hissed in engrained fear, it was a different hiss that escaped her when the edge was pressed into the groove where carapace and meat met. Knowing now as she had times before just how much pressure the other could take.
“You must have been ready to invade Ktcvahnaah yourself when you learned it was her who had assumed leadership of my nests. Knowing how she peels my name, believing I am not told of it.” It had been intended as humor. The touch of the Queen faltered, even as the scraping of a pair of attendants under Skthveraachk drew forth music of clearest joy. Ckhehnvraahll’s bodies wound about her, submerging her in a pile of nearness and warmth.
“I had thought to never hear you sing again.” Warmth and nearness. Touches from every direction. Ckhehnvraahll’s hundred legs reached out, and Skthveraachk met them with her own. The pounding of her heart and of her antennae mimicked by paired attendants all about them as room itself seemed to beat and breathe with their rhythm.
“I am Skthveraachk War Queen, Ckhehnvraahll Slough Queen.” The other female crooned as the sound of her name danced and sprung across her, and for once, Skthveraachk wished the walls could indeed raise their own voices. To join in the music reaching crescendo. “It will take more than a few billion sky-sent to bring an end to my song.”
“Ckhehnvraahll-Colony is your vassal, be you here or within the sky. One voice.” A claw was under her neck, and Skthveraachk tipped her head back so far that she swore she could see her own gaster. “Under yours.”
“Our voices, together. Until the ending of music, and sky falls on us all.” Perhaps that would be the next rise. Perhaps it would never come. In that moment, as she vaguely acknowledged messages that the first of the Hathan-Commander’s ships was landing, the sun itself could burn through the void and burrow into the world for all she cared. She would once more be within the battle lines of a war for her new masters soon enough. This fade, this measure, was hers. Thoughts of the elsewhere and later were driven from the Queen’s mind, and she sunk into the dreams and joys of the now.