CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

By all rights, neglect and age should have rendered the Chatcaava’s first space station unusable. At very least, it should have seemed ramshackle. But the Emperor’s initial impression of it was not of antiquation, but of an antique. Observing the patina of its halls and the meticulously polished grid flooring, he couldn’t help imagining a team of curators dedicated to the preservation of the station as it had been when first the Chatcaava built it. There was love here, and pride, and it surprised him, even as he knew it shouldn’t have.

In a conference room that had once been palatial in a culture new to starfaring, with a hemispherical bubble facing the planet, he was met by the Worldlord’s son and several other Chatcaava of his newest fleet. The Emperor had brought with him the Pelted captain, the Admiral-Offense, and the Ambassador. It was a small meeting, to portend so much, but the room did not permit more and that also seemed meet: that like his Empire, he was stripping his military needs to their barest essentials. To their roots. He glanced at the curling white and gray clouds on the ancient homeworld as they were served a hot tisane—by Chatcaava, he noted, not slaves—and then turned his attention to the Worldlord’s son’s presentation. If the room was too old to interface with modern technology, tablets could more than adequately project the displays that showed the scope of the war they faced, and to list the organization tables of the fleet in-system.

“…there are new people coming every day, and it became necessary to do something with them, so I have taken the liberty of making those assignments,” the Worldlord’s son finished, “Because I was elected to oversee the task force until your arrival, Exalted. If I am not acceptable, however, I will step aside for whomever you appoint.”

“Your performance is sufficient proof of your competence,” the Emperor said, studying the list of ships in his navy. His navy, because now he could face the fact that he was no longer the Emperor of a united Chatcaavan Empire, but the leader of a new nation in rebellion against its parent. Truly, he had returned to Kauvauc, who had been the fierce and solitary predator, setting his sights on a monumental goal.

The pause following his statement was delicate, but long enough that the Emperor looked up from the diagram to meet the gaze of his newest subordinate. The Worldlord’s son had orange eyes, reminding him powerfully of the Queen’s. He wondered what mate the Worldlord had gotten this son on, to give him such eyes. “Yes?”

“You will not require me to prove it by fighting a challenger?” the Worldlord’s son asked, carefully.

“You will have enemies enough to test yourself against without being forced to fight your allies,” the Emperor said. “I will not waste our time or strength on unnecessary dominance contests. We have too much to do.” He lifted his brows. “This is the new empire I will build. Does it trouble you?”

“I… no. I don’t know.” The male’s eyes had widened, but he showed no other signs of his fluster. “I have been increasingly concerned, Exalted… what Logistics-East has done, and Command-East… it isn’t right. To turn on a huntbrother this way and savage his flank. The navy has always had its ritualized contests because it is what we are. But this was no contest. No fair test. It was…” He frowned. “It was treachery. When my sire contacted me, I was already hoping for a solution to this problem. He said we should back you because you would create a more sane empire.”

That characterization was somehow amusing. “Did he now.”

“But he didn’t explain his definition of sanity,” the Worldlord’s son finished. “And my sire is… eccentric. We trust him, but do not always understand him.”

“My sane empire has aliens for allies—true allies, not pacified neighbors we raid for slaves—embraces the Change, and…” He trailed off, remembering the Knife’s first interview, and smiled a little. “Loves its dams as well as its sires.” He canted his head. “Is that alarming enough?”

The Worldlord’s son had been mouthing the words ‘loves its dams’ to himself when the question hit. He looked up, and there at last was the startlement he’d been doing so well at hiding. It made him look his age, and he was not so old. But then, neither had the Emperor been when he’d decided he wanted a throne. “I... Exalted…”

“Just say ‘yes’,” the Admiral-Offense said, tired. “He wants you to admit that it scares you. He has a strange sense of humor.”

The Worldlord’s son looked from the older male to the Emperor and mantled his wings, uncertain how to react to the seeming insolence. “Exalted, what I do know is that our nation is deteriorating. Something must be done. Even if he hadn’t become unacceptable to the navy for cheating, the current Emperor is accelerating our demise, so obviously we require a different approach.”

The Admiral-Offense was right. The Emperor was amused. “And mine is sufficiently different.”

“Yours is…” The Worldlord’s son blinked several times, then said, “Yours is revolutionary. And I trust my sire.” He paused, and offered, uncertain, “And I know my dam? She may not remember me, though. She does not always remember things from day to day.”

“Don’t worry,” the Emperor said. “I am not testing you. And as I said, there is work to be done. As soon as we can, we will be deploying to attack Apex-East.”

“Apex-East!”

The Emperor watched him, waiting.

“I have not been in that system lately,” the Worldlord’s son said slowly. “When I was ordered to activate the reserve, I left Apex-East to make the circuit of our reserve bases. That was how I was able to keep back the ships I have brought you, Exalted. But by all reports, Apex-East is crowded with our enemies.”

“Yes,” the Emperor agreed. “But if all goes as it should, it will shortly be deprived of enough of them for us to have a chance. And for that…”

“We need to draw up plans,” the Worldlord’s son said, relieved. “Yes, Exalted.”

“You have told us what we have,” the Emperor said as the Pelted captain called up the new maps. “Now you will hear what we are bringing to the task. Let us see how many ways we might use our strength to achieve our aims.”

Servants brought a meal several hours later while the work continued. They called in two other Chatcaava who led sizable portions of the new fleet and patched in Uuvek to summarize his intelligence reports. The Pelted captain was the strongest critic of every operational plan they brainstormed, to the point that they looked in her direction whenever they suggested anything. After advancing one particularly questionable scenario, the Admiral-Offense said, “Fleet Captain, we await your ferocious claws,” to which she burst out laughing.

“So I can poke new holes in your ideas?”

“The weak must be torn down so the strong can survive,” the Admiral-Offense said.

“Ordinarily I’d find that statement objectionable, but in this case… so what do you do if you can’t find these remote sensor platforms?”

On it went. They had too little data to privilege any single operation plan over the others, but having them gave the fleet something to begin training to. By the end of the day, the Emperor felt that he had a chance of succeeding, no matter how modest that chance.

“With your permission, Exalted,” the Admiral-Offense said, “I shall return to the flagship with the Worldlord’s son to oversee the implementation of the training schedule. We have little time and a great deal to do.”

“I would appreciate the help,” the Worldlord’s son said. “I know how to command a reserve force, but I lack the Admiral-Offense’s long experience leading an active fleet.”

“Then go, both of you,” the Emperor said. “We will speak again soon.”

The Worldlord’s son bowed, wings half-spread. “Exalted. My final task was to convey to you an invitation to the Temple.”

The Emperor raised his head.

“From the Male-in-Waiting, the highest authority there. He would like to see you.”

“Thank you,” the Emperor said after a hesitation. The Admiral-Offense had paused at the door, but the Emperor made a small negating gesture in response to the tacit offer. “Go with the Admiral-Offense now.”

“Yes, Exalted.”

After their departure, the Ambassador said, low, “You will go, of course.”

“Yes,” the Emperor said.

He asked Andrea, who agreed immediately. The Ambassador was a given. The Knife he thought appropriate, because of the devout streak he’d revealed in those studies of scripture, and in his zeal for the Change. But he also asked Lieutenant Baker, and did not know if she would agree.

“Me?” she said, ears sagging. “You want me to come with you to a Chatcaavan temple?”

“I would be grateful if you accompanied me,” the Emperor replied, standing at the hatch. He had worn his true shape to make this request because doing otherwise would have been a form of emotional manipulation, and they would both have known it.

“But why?”

“Because,” he said, and stopped. He had no ready reply. Being asked forced him to examine all his tangled thoughts. “Because you wish to be part of the rebirth of this part of space, and it will have to begin here. And also… because you knew me as I was before, and I cannot afford to go into the temple of the Living Air pretending that I have always been what I am now.”

She had flinched. “You want me to be your reminder of evil?”

“Of my past,” the Emperor had said. “And yes. Of the existence of evil. Of what we were, too often. Of what I was the ultimate symbol of.”

She had looked away, the muscles in her jaw so taut they pressed against the flesh of her cheeks. But after a long moment, she said reluctantly, “A Chatcaavan temple.”

“The seat of our most important ancient religion,” the Emperor replied. “On our abandoned homeworld.”

“The homeworld of the Chatcaava,” she’d muttered, and he knew that she would come. That she couldn’t not come.

That was the party that stepped over the Silhouette’s Pads and onto the coordinates supplied by the Worldlord’s son. One moment, they were on the alien ship, with its cool and odorless air, its predictable lines and bounded rooms… and the next, into heat and light and a breeze that tasted more real than anything the Emperor had ever held in his mouth. He halted abruptly, aware that the Knife had too, and together they raised their heads toward a sun their bodies intimately recognized. Even the hushed noise of the surf at the base of their cliff seemed synchronized with the beat of his heart in his body: five beats, and then the surf. Five, and then again. The complexity of the scent in the air, salt and soil and sun-heated stone, the astringent green smell of kelp, made him hunger and filled a craving he’d never known he’d been harboring.

“What a beautiful place,” Andrea breathed.

And it was. They had come out on a cliff broken from gray mountains streaked in amber light. The sea at its feet was a steel gray flecked in champagne foam. And the sky, in defiance of the peaks around them, felt enormous, a great bowl, pale blue at its peak shading to eggshell white at its horizons. The sun was near one of them, enormous and orange.

Out in the middle of the water was a long finger of stone, its edge limned in amber light. The Emperor could just pick out the stairs hewn in a winding spiral around its girth.

“Is that…?” Lieutenant Baker whispered.

“That is the Temple,” said a voice behind them. A male had lit there, a lithe young male, sable brown with eyes as yellow as the sunlight. “And you are expected.” To the Emperor, “We understand your time is limited. As special dispensation, you will be allowed to fly rather than climb the stairs, as all pilgrims are required.”

“I will not go without my companions,” the Emperor said.

“They may also fly.”

“They are not Chatcaava wearing other shapes, but true aliens.”

The envoy’s neck pulled back as he straightened in surprise. “You bring true aliens to the Temple? At last?”

“At last?” Baker repeated, ears sagging.

“I will not go without them,” the Emperor said.

“Then they may come as well. But your party will have to walk.”

He glanced at the others. Andrea said, “How long? Can we bring equipment? In case we’re not acclimated to the environment, or can’t eat the food…”

The envoy replied, “It is three days up. And you may bring supplies. Pilgrims do.” He canted his head and let the breeze pull him off the cliff.

“Do we even have time to make a three-day climb?” Lieutenant Baker asked. “I thought we might be called back at any point.”

The Knife shook his head in a Pelted gesture. “We will not be gone from here in a week, huntsister. There are still ships promised to us who are on their way.”

Baker turned an ironic eye on the Emperor. “And you want to be away from your new navy that long.”

“They came because they were devout,” the Emperor said. “To fail to make the pilgrimage would dishonor the beliefs that brought them to me.”

“Well,” Baker said, watching the envoy’s dwindling silhouette. “I guess we should go pack.”

They regrouped at the cliff several hours later, where they followed the envoy down to a small boat. The Emperor sat near the prow, watching the sun sliding past the horizon, coloring the waters gold, then bronze, then a sulky reddish lavender. The Ambassador remained near, unspeaking but almost supernaturally present, as if the Emperor could sense him just by the shape of his silence. At the back of the boat, Andrea and Baker conversed quietly about the features of the world that they could observe, comparing it to other worlds they’ve seen. So cosmopolitan, these aliens… so easy to forget that they took that perspective for granted. That they might see other worlds, and that those worlds would be glad to host them. This world was nearly empty, and yet it had to be. It had consumed Chatcaavan history and endured past its depredations, and how they needed it now: this reminder of their impermanence. A world become a forgotten temple, for a people who no longer held anything sacred.

It stole his breath, and made the pounding in his chest hurt.

The envoy deposited them at the small apron of stone that surrounded the Temple prominence. “There will be a place to sleep each night,” he’d said, and left them to their climb. And though it was already sunset, they’d decided to begin it. “We have lights,” Lieutenant Baker had said, face lifted toward the apex. “And safety equipment. And I don’t know about you all, but I’m curious.”

Since none of them could disagree, they’d taken the first step, and then the next. The staircase was wide enough for two people abreast, cut out of the wall of stone, and it had a thigh-height wall at its lip. The Emperor had wondered at that lip, for surely fliers need not fear falling. Had they expected females to make this long journey? Perhaps it had been the fabled bell-ringers who’d needed it, for children could not fly. He trailed his hand over it and continued up.

By unspoken agreement, they’d ordered themselves: Baker first, with the safety equipment, and her ‘huntbrother’ the Knife at her heels, then the Emperor, with Andrea behind him and the Ambassador at the rear. As they continued upward night swelled over the horizon. A single slivered moon shone pale against a rope of milky lapis and cream, the distant interstellar clouds dotted with silver, blue, and scarlet stars. He had thought they would climb in darkness and instead they ascended through glory, and he kept a hand on the wall to steady himself against the power of the sight.

The place to sleep the envoy had promised was a built plateau between flights of stairs. Baker and Andrea put up tents while the Emperor walked to the lip of the plateau and stared outward.

“It’s amazing,” the Knife whispered behind him.

The Emperor scanned the horizon. “I see now why we chose the throneworld.”

“It aspires to this sky,” the Knife said. “But it is a pale mimicry. The size of it…!”

“Yes,” the Emperor murmured and together they stared at the shimmer of their ancestral stars, so vivid against the backdrop of an abandoned world.

After the Knife backed away to help distribute their rations, the Emperor sat on the edge, resting his hands on his knees and craning his head back to stare into their native night. No one approached him, not even the Ambassador, though again he sensed the Eldritch’s nearness like the warmth of a fire. And while he longed to go back to Lisinthir Nase Galare and tell him how poorly prepared he felt for this journey, he did not. He remained on the ledge as the coolth became cold and his lips and the tender skin around his eyes grew chilled, and he let the night look into him, empty him of all his ambitions, his fears, and his needs.

They resumed climbing a few hours later through the dense, complex shadows of a sunrise obscured by distant cliffs. When the light finally spilled unobstructed onto the Temple prominence they were already well on their way, and the shock of the yellow light on the steps and wall stunned Lieutenant Baker into halting. And then they all did, staring toward, though not at, an old and enormous star. How small they were, and how high; the breeze tugged at them insistently. If the Emperor were to spread his wings, it would carry him away on this air, so softly perfect for flying. But he kept his pinions tight against his back and made his way, as all pilgrims did, by foot.

Partway through the day they halted for a rest on the steps. Andrea went down the column, checking vital signs with a portable medkit. She made a face at the Ambassador and murmured something to him. The Emperor caught words in Universal when the wind allowed: ‘acclimatization’ and ‘blood oxygen.’ The Eldritch permitted an injection, which mollified the human, and she returned to her place in line to sit on a step and eat the rations passed down to her by Baker. Conversation was muted, died quickly. Their more urgent conversation was taking place in silence, with the world and the stone beneath them, and the sky overhead.

Their plateau that night faced the ocean, not the cliffs from which they’d sailed. The veil of stars was reflected on those black waters, and from this height it was hard to hear their waves. The Emperor sat on the lip and gazed as if into infinity, and his skin prickled along his sides for reasons owing nothing to the cold. He kept this vigil until he passed out of humility and into self-abnegation, and then he sought the tent where the Ambassador was lying on a pallet. He was welcomed into those arms, and needed them to remind him that he had a shape, and that the shape still had meaning, no matter how fleeting his span in it.

They reached a final plateau in the third afternoon, with the sun slanting low against the stone walls, and this smaller ledge had a single basin carved from the wall and a plaque beside it. Incised into that plaque, in letters worn with wind and hands, were the words, ‘Be clean before your god.’

The Knife touched the last word, eyes wide. His incredulity needed no translation—the Chatcaava had long since ceased to swear by any god, and even when they’d worshipped the Living Air few were the sects that had called it by that title.

“What does it say?” Andrea asked, hesitant. “I can’t read.”

“We should use the water to wash,” Lieutenant Baker said after telling her. “I guess symbolically, since it’s too small for a whole body.” She stepped to the basin and cupped her hands under the water. The spout lacked ornament, just a stone tube from which water trickled in a continuous stream into the equally austere bowl. With that water, Baker splashed her face and patted her neck and arms, then backed away for Andrea, who followed her example. One by one they made their ablutions, the Ambassador pushing back his ornate sleeves to expose white skin washed by the late sunlight before bending his face to the water. The Knife too bent his head directly, tilting it to fit it in the space between spout and basin, and backed away gasping.

The Emperor’s horns did not allow him to follow suit. He was not blind to that symbolism. Cupping his hands under the water like the two females, he washed more sedately and looked at the final landing, more of a decorative ramp than anything like the stairs they’d been using. This time, Baker hung back so he could lead, and he did, up the spiral, into the light, and to the flattened top of the prominence where the Temple rose, a squared-off tower like a single talon. He’d expected flourishes, carving, lacework arches, architecture like that of the palace which had been built as a monument to Chatcaavan power. This looked more like an extension of the mountain. Like…

“An aerie,” the Ambassador murmured.

The Emperor mantled his wings and walked inside.

The smell in that dim, vast space was indescribable. Sweet with incense. Bracing with sea-salt. Complex with the scent of the world, carried on its highest winds, which whistled and sang high, fluting songs in the roof of the Temple, where the converging pylons were perforated with delicate openings. That music, the richness of the smell, the poignancy of the vacant hall, so large to be so empty… he stopped abruptly, his heart pounding hard. The station overhead had been an antique. This… this was ancient.

“The Emperor comes to the Temple, at last.”

The voice was soft, sonorous. A male’s voice, and that male resolved out of the shadows swathing the furthest wall. He wore a loose robe in some dark color, and he himself was some dark and difficult-to-discern hue, as if a statue had separated from the Temple’s stone.

“Dare I ask if there was a prophecy?” the Emperor found himself saying.

A laugh. “No. A hope, perhaps. But never a certainty. Few are the certainties in this life.” He drew closer, and there were blues in his skin, in the folds of the robe. His eyes, though, were the pale, luminous green of a new leaf.

The Emperor said, “No. There are not. I was told… I was invited.”

“And you have come, which was more than expected.” The priest turned his face to the Emperor’s entourage. “And you bring alien guests.”

“If they are guests, then I am as well.” The Emperor shook his head, fighting vertigo. “High Priest… why did you invite me?”

“That would be the reason,” the male said. “I am not the Breath of the Living Air. I am the Male-in-Waiting, Most Exalted Emperor, and I am hoping you will one day bring back our High Priestess so that our faith will once more have its voice.”

“Your… your what?” the Knife whispered.

“Our High Priestess,” the male said. “The head of our religion is, has always been, and must be a winged and shapechanging female. But we have nearly succeeded in breeding them from our ranks, and so our Temple waits.”

The Emperor swayed, knew it only because the Ambassador caught his elbow.

“You will bring her home to us, won’t you, Exalted?” the priest said, staring at him now.

“Wait, I don’t understand,” Lieutenant Baker said in her flawless Throne Chatcaavan, startling the priest into looking at her. “You’re telling me a woman is the highest authority of your only religion? How can that be when women are chattel?”

“Because without females, there would be no Chatcaava as we know them. It is through females that the patterns we learn are passed on to our get. They were the ones who Touched fliers to give us wings. They were the ones who touched the armored predators, to give us the hide that protected our spines and the horns that guarded our heads. Every advantage we could derive from the creatures we shared this world with, they secured for us through the Change, and they made those Changes permanent,” the priest said. “We are what we are because of them.”

“How is that possible!” the Knife said, stunned. “Unless females with four arms can shift and are unaware of it…?”

“No. The wingless females were created generations and generations ago. We made one Change too many, and gave birth to monsters, and that trauma scarred us.” The priest looked at the Emperor. “We fought over the decision, you understand. Whether to seal ourselves in our bodies forever, and bar the possibility of future abominations… or to risk everything to remain who we are.”

“And you chose against the Change,” the Ambassador breathed.

The priest inclined his head. “The decision was made. Overwhelmingly, in fact… for in those times there were no intelligent aliens. All the patterns that could be learned were those of brute animals, so no one could see how to prevent the Change from returning us to savagery ourselves. The females Changed themselves so they could no longer Touch or Change, so that traits could no longer be heritable. So that any mistakes would be fleeting, make monsters only of individuals who would die without passing them on. The misbegotten were erased from history, sent far, far away. But not all the Chatcaava agreed with what was done. You find their descendants here.”

“A dead religion,” Andrea whispered.

“A nearly dead religion,” the priest answered with a faint smile. “But what few females we could save, we have, and it is through them that we have preserved ourselves as we were born on this world. Because we deemed that the Living Air gives no gift it does not intend us to use. Our ability to Change allowed us to fly. We thought that one day it would once again save us.” He looked at Andrea and Baker. “And strangely, here we are. Which brings me back to you, Exalted.” He returned his gaze to the Emperor. “We know why you have come to the Source. We know you aim to retake your Empire. And we have heard you have befriended aliens and that through them you know the Change. If you succeed, you will win your throne on the strength of the poetry in our ancient litanies, and the promises they make the Chatcaavan people. Will you restore our worship?”

“Your worship does not need my permission for that,” the Emperor said. “That this fleet orbits your world is proof enough that belief in the Living Air never died. And that it cannot.”

“A person might survive but not thrive, Exalted. A belief system is not so different.”

“If you ask me if I will welcome your temples, then the answer is yes,” the Emperor said. Glancing at Andrea and remembering her bickering with Emlyn, he added, “I will not forbid other temples, however.”

The priest blinked, laughed. “Truly, a Changed male.” He bowed, wings spreading. “That suffices as promise. Save the final request. We are absent the Breath, and without the Breath we cannot live, Exalted. Find us our High Priestess.”

His heart was racing, painfully. “I will.” I have. “I swear it.”

The priest smiled, bright teeth in the dimness. “Then we have all that we might ask for from our Emperor. Is there aught our Emperor would ask of us?”

“Tell me,” the Emperor said. He felt the presence of the companions at his side. “Tell us.  Everything you know about the Change.”

The Temple was not absent technology. Its members lived in a complex carved beneath the building like the aerie to which the Ambassador had likened it, and in that sanctuary they had access to most modern conveniences. It was an eerie reminder that this world had seen the Chatcaavan rise to space, that they had built those ships and satellites after modifying themselves genetically and convincing themselves the Change was poison. Had he not said it to the Ambassador himself? That he had not Changed because he had never wanted to descend to the level of the animal? To sully himself with the cell-deep knowledge of wingless freaks?

Sitting outside the Temple, waiting for the shuttle summoned for them by the priest, the Emperor wondered how many generations ago they’d stopped questioning the origin of that belief. Had it already been embedded in their psyche when spacefaring Chatcaava had met the first aliens? It had to have been, or they would have become some different society. One more open to the alien, the new, the different. A society that throve on knowledge and delighted in diversity.

Joining him, the Ambassador sat with his knees up and his arms resting on them, staring not toward the cliffs or the sea, as one would expect of a wingless alien, but at the clouds in the endless sky. “The Knife is beside himself.”

“Unsurprising,” the Emperor said. “This revelation is shattering.”

The Ambassador glanced at him. “You say that with a certain quality, Exalted.”

“That quality being?”

“Less hyperbole and more prophecy.”

The Emperor closed his eyes. “Can you disagree? When this knowledge is made public?”

“So you will? Make it public?”

“Perfection,” the Emperor said, chiding. Softer. “Lisinthir. When the Queen becomes the Breath of the Living Air, how then can it be kept secret? How would it be right?”

The Ambassador dipped his head with a quiver and closed those expressive alien eyes. “You had the same thought.”

“Who else?” the Emperor asked, voice low. “If she is willing. But she has always used the Touch and the Change to understand the universe. Who better?”

With his brow against his knees, the Ambassador said, “My lovers become luminaries.”

The Emperor curled a wing around the Eldritch, surprising him into looking up. “Do you fear that you will be outshone by us?”

“No,” the Ambassador replied with a lopsided smile, and leaned into him. “I am a luminary myself, though I did not know it when I first came to you.” When the Emperor canted his head, the Ambassador finished, “While I was away I discovered my abilities are grown more significant than typical. By my people’s standards I am now a thing out of legend. A mind-mage, they call me.”

“A mind-mage,” the Emperor said, bemused.

“I can command bodies against the wills of their owners,” the Ambassador said, leaning into him. “And even, at times, the air itself.”

“Appropriate for a lover of dragons.” The Emperor rested his head against the Eldritch’s and said, “O my Perfection,” very, very low.

“She lives,” the Ambassador whispered.

The Emperor did not ask if the Eldritch was sure. As the priest had said, certainties in this life were few.

“What will you do?” the Ambassador asked at last. “With the information about the Change.”

What else? “Practice.”

Their return to the Silhouette was not heralded with sufficient fanfare for the magnitude of the revelations they’d been granted. Three days in orbit had seen more ships join their force, and the Admiral-Offense and the Fleet captain had coordinated and run several training exercises with the Worldlord’s son. The Emperor’s arrival occasioned a conference discussing the results of those exercises and detailing the strengths of the new arrivals, and he gave them his customary attention. He approved of the industry of his subordinates and authorized them to continue their work, and then he repaired to the gym. Alone.

Standing before the mirrors, he drew a deep, centering breath and said, “Computer. Single foe. Engage.”

His simulated opponent darted from the corner of the room and he leapt for it, talons extended. As it fisted a hand to punch him, he Changed into a Seersa to take the blow on a more solid torso before ducking behind the fighter. Without allowing himself time for doubt, he reached for the Eldritch shape. It ached, moving into it, and the Change was slow and jerky. He took several kicks while finishing the transition, but he made it and spun out from the foe’s reach, panting. Behind the solidigraph’s shoulders he saw his white body, his flat face and long mane.

You can always Change, no matter what form you’re in. Your shape is not you. It is not capable of limiting your abilities or you would be unable to switch back.

You are always, at core, Chatcaavan, and Chatcaava Change.

A moment of triumph, of vaulting triumph twined in grief and loss, for all they had given up and all that others had suffered, and all the choices they’d made that had seen them to this terrible turning point. And yet, they were still Chatcaava, and it was not too late to Change.

Then the simulation punched him in the gut. Shocked back into motion, the Emperor resumed practicing. Live for me, my Treasure. Live for us. We're coming.