Two words had become her world in the measures which followed. Two words had torn what was real and known into tatters, two words had made truths become fictions and the inconceivable now accepted reality. Two words she had carried, in trembling claws and scythes she had once thought capable of meeting any enemy or challenge, to her colony within the bowels of the unliving nest. A nest which had been as much born as built, to fly amidst the void unhindered. The first was a word of certainty. Inevitability. Sure as the tide and unflinching as the rise of the sun banishing any shadow which dreamed to stand against it. The first word, was ‘humanite’.

It had taken longer than it should have to get Hathan-Commander to understand the idea of divinity, between the gibbering attempts at clarity and the inability to tear her eyes from the view of her world. A world. One of many. One of thousands.

“There exist only two things within the sky to my people. That which resides alongside the Endless Choir, and that which is beyond the song, sent to devour all life. You will be seen as one, or the other.”

He had spoken the name as though it were dirty. Skthveraach had not had the focus to be angered.

“Uhrth.” She had tried to pronounce the name; they had names for everything it seemed, even their worlds. Hathan guided her through the phonetics, until the translator could register the change.

“Humanites.”

He did not mark her interruption. The glow of the sun half hidden behind the curve of her world filled the dim room with warmth, a cruel sort of light, but the Queen took every breath of its radiance in thanks. It was sure. It was real.

“Humanites. Your colonies, not-colonies, whatever you call your bonds. You say you outgrew your world. You outgrew these other worlds?” Trying to picture the surface coated with her people was fruitless. She had better success imagining nests cramped, spilling from one to the other with no fields or farms between them. No space. “Your children were too many?”

“How many humanites are there?” He hesitated. She regretted her asking almost immediately, as though she had asked an allied Queen for the locations and numbers of all her nests. Friend or no, it was powerful information, information which could weaken you if spread unchecked. Such was her belief, until the realization that it was not fear, but difficulty in the counting that had brought pause. Hathan-Commander stated a number the translator could not account for. Skthveraach signed the failure of communication. Hathan tried thrice more, until the Band confirmed the notion of a ‘billion’. A hundred times over the size of the Triumvirate’s joint forces, if whispers were to be believed. A notion, a concept, her people used to express the fullness of their world. A theoretical number to denote the quantity of every voice within the bounds of the song. Skthveraach signed understanding. Then, Hathan-Commander signed the ‘billion’ fifty more times. She swore so violently and fearfully that the Queen stunned herself to momentary silence.

“No.” She did not question his words. She did not challenge them. Wasted effort. It was. Accept and proceed. “It is not relevant. You came here to make my world yours, one of yours. A place for you to live, room for your species to grow?” Even before she had finished, both of the Commander’s graspers had flattened and raised along his sides. Halting, though the Queen had done little more than shift in place as subtly as her size would allow. Calming sways to keep her mind focused as she screamed and floundered within against the enveloping ocean of the new.

He waved to the infinite beyond, as though it somehow aided his explanation.

“And your first action was to engage in a war of obliteration.”

She did not need the Band to understand the pain her music had caused. Haste and fear were coloring her song, and it shamed her. Skthveraach performed a bow, and Hathan returned it. They stood together in silence then, gazing out at that slowly turning orb. That canvas of the faded sky. He must have caught the way her mandibles spasmed, but her shock was in the way he seemed to grasp what it meant. Her confusion, and desire to query.

“Hathan-Commander has acted with truth and goodness. I believe Hathan-Commander wishes to assist and preserve my people, my world. Whatever was done towards this goal was done to save individuals, birthing queens, nests and entire colonies. The decisions were correct. They were right.” The Queen could no longer view the Commander as equal, as a Queen as she was. Nor could she imagine, spin a future in which she had been forced to confront these new truths without the male’s presence and assistance. “When this danger arrives, I will aid you in confronting it. My colony of eighteen and the Palamedes, as one voice.” He wanted to explain. He had opened his head, prepared to continue, before sealing away his thoughts in closed thinness. The pulling up of the flesh at either corner of the entryway was, she could only assume, an attempt at congeniality to disguise the changing of intent.

“Humanites.”

The edges of that line smothering hole of face pulled higher.

“This Band tells me you speak my name, but I watch your hole. I hear the sounds and feel your intent, and it is not ‘Skthveraach’.” She was careful to keep accusation from her rhythm and a steady tempo rather than rapid pounding. “The Pod makes a noise, and the Band tells me my name. You make a noise and the Band tells me my name. Neither are correct, and neither are my name. I cannot, I will not, return to my colony or, eventually, my world, and tell them we have been visited by beings from beyond the bounds of creation… who call themselves ‘hoo-mahns’. It is not a name. It is not a species. You may translate it to something more appealing, as such is within your powers.”

She checked for offense. The humanite still spread his face and stood relaxed. It was not anger. Pointing to the hole of his head, the flabby frond inside wriggled when he opened the gap wider in illustration. Revulsed, though amused, she scraped her antennae together as her laughter filled the room. Her eyes, for the first time, truly removed from the immensity of the reality to her right, to focus on something so simple and utterly irrelevant below her.

“Say it again. My name.” Her Band spoke ‘Skthveraach’, and she disregarded it. Watching, twice more, the humanite fumble and fiddle as she had with his ill-refined and graceless designation. Watched with morbid fascination the shaping of fatty triangle as it wormed through slick interior, until she was satisfied it was an effort best made. “I understand, Hathan-Commander.”

“That thing is your mouth?”

They had stayed in that room, lifted above the entirety of the world below, for long bars after. So long, that the room had been forced to come to life and sing to Commander in warning of duties awaiting. And to Skthveraach, that her colony had awoken and was in a state of restless displeasure upon discovering her absence. They would wait. She had bid the Commander farewell, tried not to let the discomfort of letting drones she now knew truly belonged to no colony guide her from the awning room. And as the Queen had traveled under escort to the box of two exits, then from there to an eagerly awaiting Pod within room of singing rocks, she was given the second word. The second concept that, unlike the dwarfing scope of the humanites, was not a cold scythe of terror stretching out from across the sky. Was not a realization of how small they had now become, how fragile they were. It did not tear down, but built upwards. Did not cause her to withdraw, but to lean forward in eagerness. The second word, was ‘technology’.

Skthveraach felt the shape of the note, the word, while Jhenaafhur of not- Jhenaafhur-Colony hopped to elevated stand and began to touch upon the Queen’s skull.

“You would create such a marvel simply to ease the journey? No,” Already, she caught alternative benefits. “It would decrease the area required to transition between layers. It would speed movement on the vertical axis.”

Her mouth did not speak Skthveraach. It was a ringing, single-syllable she used that the translator adapted, and the Queen found the realization unpleasant as an undigested vetex shroom.

“This does not make sense. You cannot move an item, so you… build, something larger that can?”

Something wet, something sticky was being smeared across the space above her eyes. Her central eyes were all but obstructed by the body of the Pod, but those without could still regard the others in the room. The enthusiastic whispers spoken too soft for translator to catch, the way the pale shelled humanites strayed nearer and nearer her body each time they passed. Guards, soldiers remained present and posted by doors, but they did not twitch at each move she made. Did not protest how Jhenaafhur stood boldly between her mandibles, even pressing flat her grasper on their surface for support as she worked.

“We call for another to aid us.” The sound of the whitestone pillar crashing down to crack the shell of the chaerilite was recalled with chitter of excitement. “Until the obstacle is removed.”

“Incorrect. Invention, creation, has been the deciding factor in many of our epics. It was Vhklervheen who first discovered how to float a nest upon the drowned bodies of the fallen, saving his colony from destruction. Many colonies claim to have discovered the secrets of the spitter’s creation first, but their inclusion to our armies changed the course of the war against the sky-sent.”

“What are you doing?” There was a pressure now, and while it was not at a level of discomfort, she was actively resisting the urge to touch or feel with her antennae. For fear of disrupting whatever work the Pod was embarking on. Were it not for how strangely soft and delicate the humanite’s waifish graspers were on her carapace, that concern would be far greater.

“Earth.” Her mother would utter laments to hear how Skthveraach kept interjecting into other’s songs. With Hathan, she let fly her music out of turn because of trust and a thirst for knowledge she knew only he would provide her. With the Pod, it was because she could sometimes hardly follow the looping and spiralling currents of the female’s thoughts as they churned from one idea to the next.

When the spindly digits were removed from her, the pressure lessened but did not abate. The weight upon her now fastened to her chitin as thought by sealant. Names, followed by the incredible. The Queen had been left reeling at the image of landscape bathed in perpetual darkness as the Pod hopped down and away from her.

“But you are not singing a measure. Or speaking of a rise.” Antennae still forward, it had been like having an itch just above her eyes she was not allowed to touch. “And you are not using my name.”

“What is your word for me, Jhenaafhur?”

Waggling her forelimb, the Pod bared the bones of her revealed mouth-hole. Again the Band confirmed that the Pod was using her designation. It was incorrect. And she hated it.

“That is not my name. That is not any name.”

She was guided through the steps, spasmed when Jhenaafhur clambered atop her to grab at her antennae and guide them. The thing, the device, the ‘technology’ she had found affixed to her skull was a thing of crevices and grooves, indentations into which she could seamlessly press and slide the feelers. They would give and clack, giving ground only to pop back up when the pressure was removed. Details which would have taken carvers measures to properly etch.

The shrill yelp of her Band had caused the Queen to rear, but the Pod barely noticed.

“You, alone, created this? It thinks on its own, without your assistance?”

“The danger. Yes.” Excitement was tempered by reality, a thankful draw back to the now when she had begun to feel herself lost in the ‘what if?’ “He sung to me of my world, of your worlds, of your Queens set to come and determine the fate of my people. That he would do all he could to convince them to spare us the fires you rained down upon my nests and colony.”

The affirmation was odd, but accepted. As odd as the way Jhenaafhur had eyed the surrounding area, caught the eyes of other pale shells who seemed to darken in feature and the soldiers who cast glances aside. The Pod lowered the pitch and volume of her music, forcing the Queen to lower her body to better hear. Skthveraach had not liked that gap in translation. Skthveraach had not liked it at all.

“He spoke of a risk to himself, but not to any great degree. Not to a level of distress. But I have sworn my voice to his, conjoined and united. If he is beset by danger for his role in ceasing the attacks on my people, I shall stand in his defense.”

When she had signed a lack of understanding, the Pod was all too eager to continue its impassioned tirade. The more animate the female humanite became in her wringing and shifting and waving of limbs, the more pleased the Queen knew her to be. And though Skthveraach could not fully take hold and harmonize with the meanings behind the frantic melody, she confirmed the truth she could distinguish.

“If my colony learns more before your Queens arrive, it will be better for Hathan-Commander, and better for us?” Jhenaafhur had nodded. She had nodded a lot. The Queen had dipped her head once, then, in return. “I request you teach me more.”

The music had descended to nonsensical clamor with promptness, and the Queen made to trail behind the Pod as the female led way from room to hall. Unintelligible, the journey had provided Skthveraach opportunity enough to test one facet of this technology. This power which elevated the humanites from beings of flesh to something greater. By the time they had emerged into the vast hardstone cavern to the buzzing welcome of her colony, after long beats spent fiddling and prodding the device affixed to her head, she would no longer suffer lies from the Band. Pri would be Pri.

That was eight, ten bars ago now. For half that time, Skthveraach did nothing but rest flat on her core, directing the efforts of her colony. Humanite, and technology. She had brought these words down from on high, carried them as messenger from entities somewhere between mortal and touched by the voice of the Composer. The Queen had thought herself capable of explaining them in their entirety to the colony which waited upon her, clasped arms to her, listened in horror and fascination and no small amount of simple lacking comprehension to her recitations and slow droning cantata. When the Pod had arrived with strips of hardstone on rolling spinners, circles attached to squares laden with treasures, Skthveraach had discovered not a scentcrafter alive or dead could have prepared the formulas needed to bridge the gaps between them.

Wheels. Cut stone, wood, anything at all to circle and affix a rod through it. It would roll and trundle, spin as it suspended weight above. The attendant could not understand a number like fifty billion, but it chittered and cheered as it pushed in circles a cart it should have had neither hope nor prayer of moving. Stick and dully cut triangle? The thinker had betrayed his own insistence and denied again and again that they could be outside the song, that they could suspended by machination and invention outside the boundaries of their world. He could not deny his own eyes as a mass thrice his own was placed on floor by the humanites, and with a stick propped beneath and braced on triangular bulb, lifted with only the use of his single forelimb. No tricks. No powers or inventions. ‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it’, the Queen had translated at the behest of the Pod’s assisting pale shells, ‘and I shall move the world.’ A message from one of the creature’s thinkers to hers, spoken across the generations. He sat there, staring at that stick, for bars on end.

There were no shells. They had no spitters. Her soldier prodded and chewed, until it was taken from him with loud indignation, one of the cuirasses their own soldiers wore. What use was armor when the average drone lived only long enough to kill one, two others at most? Why seek to attack at range when you had been born a soldier, not a spitter? The humanites did not ask these questions. They crafted their own shells, adorned their bodies with protections as if each was as valuable as a Queen. Locked themselves in coats of layered protection capable of staving of the inevitability of the end. Her own spitter flinched away when one of the pale shells tore the elongated plated shaft from its arm, knowing full well the power of the creatures who spat the white lightning. But it was not of them. It was made for them. Built, not born, and as easily given from one to the other as a mender parted with their spittle. Her entire colony watched with awe as the silent spitter, trembling at the nearness and way one of their pale shells touched at him unafraid, guided tentatively one of the male’s hooks beneath the length of the device. The weapon. And showed him how to squeeze and give birth to the heated lance which crackled down across the room. The humanites slapped their graspers together. Her spitter had soiled the ground in fear signals.

The Pod had repeated herself more than eight times and more than eight times had Skthveraach translated and confirmed to her mender before it had been permitted to touch two of the humanites brought forward without their protections and armor. The others had all been excused, dismissed to another area of the cavern out of sight. To be seen without covering was not done in their world. Skthveraach tried to picture a reality in which no drone could appear before another without being draped in the shells of fallen prey, and startled her thinker from his ruminations when her antennae beat together in abrupt laughter at the absurdity. Her mender used the delicacy of an egg’s inspection to brush and squeeze the bodies, a male and female, and reported that the humanites were their opposite. Inside-out. Meat and thin coating of binding flesh wound their exteriors, but within was a rigid hardness, an internal support system. Graspers on arms were mobile and responsive, while legs ended in far stumpier and less functional fronds of their own. An endoskeleton structure that bound and concealed their organs, overlayed in muscle and tissue. The Queen had been correct, too; though nearly indistinguishable in size and mass, females were laden with frontal sacks of unknown contents. The males much more sensibly seemed to conceal theirs between their legs. Her mender was deeply disheartened when her request to peel open and examine their internals was vehemently denied, and could only take what she could learn from surface touches.

And her delver? Her delver had sat beside her, to take and feel and lick as items were withdrawn from one of the carts and passed in line to her waiting forelimbs. There was little reason she could see in their order, or why they had been chosen. Perhaps each existed only to throw wide gates of possibility. She knew of the stories of the Silent City, of the wonders contained within, and her delver was quick to identify what he had seen before during his repairs and role. Yes, he had seen a hinge before. But one that was a fourth the size of his eye, used to open a box barely capable of fitting in a single claw? Yes, he once been permitted to clean a carving of the Founders, a lifelike representation hewn from the living rock. But a carving which moved, walked of its own accord, danced and spun and flipped with only a touch of a button? Discs the humanites fashioned with gold and silver inscriptions with no purpose but to hold their food. A crystal trapezoid that, when squeezed, burst forth with a scent that bore no name and sung of a beauty indescribable. Glass. Copper. Iron. Steel. Compounds of hardstone gifted one after the other as the delver licked and tasted and cradled as he melted into babbling exultations and prayers to the Composer, wailing thanks.

She had asked for knowledge. They brought to her one of the notrocks that could spit with the force of a dozen of their soldiers, and showed her its hollow insides. Demonstrated how they could crawl within and control its movements and turns. She had asked to be taught. They pointed to the screens upon the walls and made them change from white and green lines to sapphire and opal hues. Bade them turn from shapes to patterns, images, moments captured in time like the strands and markers of the Remembering to teach the daughters of her daughters of her daughters. She asked to see more, and all eyes within her colony were angled upwards as the displays were filled with valleys of verdant greenery, trees that had no name. Of creatures beneath the waves of oceans, inexorable beasts with tentacles and beaks and bodies a hundred times larger than the humanites stood proudly atop them. A hairy quadruped squatting in a landscape dusted white with snow and ice, but lumbered unburdened. A slender protrusion on pastel wings so thin, the sun shone through them from behind as it drifted amongst the clouds. Each flicker of the screen brought something new. Something wonderous. Long after the other pale shells had departed, and only the Pod remained, they watched. The Pod, slumped against one of the rocks that were not rocks, but intricate collections of cords used to transmit energy from somewhere deeper in the ship to the computer terminals now utilized to broadcast the images from database to readout, who drowsily tapped away every few beats to the next creation. Her colony around her, their contraptions and constructs held or clutched, stared upwards at worlds and colors and sights vast. The thinker alongside her touched his lever. Watched the weighted ball rise for the hundredth time. Laying her arm against his back, she tickled her hairs.

“Do you understand it, Thinker?”

“No, Skthveraach Queen.”

“You do not sound upset by this.” He did not answer. He was silent for so long, that she decided he must have fallen asleep after the day’s exhaustion of brain. It was not so. So silently and carefully did he murmur, using only touch to ensure none other but her could hear, while his vents shivered with emotion only just contained.

“There will be times ahead I will find myself in opposition to your plans. In antagonism to your desires. When these times come, understand that I will never owe any of our people, or theirs, the thanks I owe you for what I have been given this measure. May you trust in that, and know it to be truth.”

She sought a response. A reply. The screen flickered, and upon it was a city build into and out of and up the sides of a flattened red mesa. Windows black glinting in the fading light, a backdrop of purple and orange as twinned suns set on a curved and sweeping crystal sea. The thinker’s breath caught in his sides, and her own inhale wiped clean any desire to speak further. They sat together. They watched. They learned. She had asked for knowledge. Alien horizons stretched before them, and welcomed her to their new existence.