Lady Lance jumps off the well’s low wall and moves to stand near me, facing Princess Celyz who is approaching with her swaying gait.

“We Rykz have a slightly better sense of smell than humans. I simply asked Jessica to provide me some clarification because I can only recognize the most basic smells among a myriad that other species produce.” Princess explains, head inclined sideways despite the lack of question.

Is she curious about how this will go? I really wish she stayed silent and moved on. I fucking know she does that when she doesn’t want to answer. I shift on my feet and stop biting my tongue, too late to stay silent and act like I didn’t hear my Lady’s question.

“And what was the question, exactly?” Lady Lance asks, curling her lips in a teasing smile. Of course she isn’t letting it go. Argh!

“It wouldn’t be very fair if I told you, it was a private conversation between us.” Princess Celyz says, still inclining her head with curiosity. “Perhaps I could tell Jessica something of yours in exchange, Lady Lance, if she agrees to that trade.”

My Lady’s eyes widen when she hears the proposal, one of her legs taking a half-step backward.

“No!” Lady Lance coughs. “I mean no, after careful thought, it is best if we respect each other’s privacy.” She speaks very fast, rushing the words out.

“You folded rather quickly, my Lady, as soon as there were real stakes on the table for you actually.” I frown in suspicion and then make a teasing smile of my own as I turn to her. “Friends don’t keep secrets for one another, my Lady!”

“Oh? Are you feeling brave, Jessica?” She faces me and makes a threatening frown. “Not two seconds ago, you were frozen in terror at my innocent inquiry. Do you think we should take the Princess up on her proposal after all?” My lady asks me.

“Nope, no, no, no, I’m sorry, my Lady, that was completely inconsiderate of me.” I rapidly wave my hand in front of me sideways, desperate to make it clear that I refuse.

“Very well then, Jessica, if you will accompany me?” Princess Celyz asks, but it sounds more like a request from captor to captive to me, I cannot truly refuse.

“I should come along, Jessica is still healing from several injuries.” Lady Lance takes a step forward towards the Princess.

“She will be perfectly safe, Lady Lance. Lord Patrick is already back in your lodgings. I am simply trying to get to know all of you a bit better.”

“I …” My Lady starts, trying to argue the point.

“Put your worry to rest, Lady Lance. We will speak and nothing else.” Princess Celyz interrupts her, using a calm resounding tone.

I shrug at Lady Lance, signifying my powerlessness. I don’t think I can refuse without suffering consequences. I don’t know what will happen if we don’t play her game, but the Princess was very clear when she said that our decisions could result in our own deaths. I don’t want to test her.

The Rykz Princess turns around, abruptly, she decides that the conversation has ended without a word as usual. I follow her, accelerating my steps to both catch up with her long legs and keep up.

“When you speak … you … make your voice resound inside your head, am I correct?” I ask.

“You are, we make the air that we breathe vibrate inside our heads to produce a sound that you can hear, it is a learned skill that not all Princesses posses.”

“I don’t mean to be insulting when I ask this because you are obviously intelligent, but … where is your brain if you breathe inside your head?”

Princess Celyz starts making her odd chuckle halfway into my question, having guessed what my question would be, no doubt.

“We are very different from humans, the twelve openings on our heads are only used to speak and smell. As for my brain, well the truth is simply no, I do not have an organ that fulfills the same function as your brain.”

“What? But, … even the cold bloods have brains, they only use them to sleep, raise cattle, and raid on horseback, but they do have one. How can the Rykz not have brains?!”

“Oh, the Rykz do have brains. Hum, this is … complicated.” The hum sound that she makes isn’t the discreet sound that humans make but a deep resounding expression that I hear as clearly as her words. “Workers, scouts, and warriors, have brains. As I recall from the ambush survivor’s reports, you ripped a scout’s head off, correct?”

“I …, he was … yes, I did.” I shiver, as always when the memory of the scorching heat that devoured my left arm resurfaces.

“Well, that wouldn’t work on me.” She makes her chuckling sound. “It would prevent me from speaking and smelling but that’s it. Well, that and the blood that would flow from the gaping wound, so please don’t rip my head off.” She chuckles once more.

We take a left street, avoiding a group of four workers carrying more of that nourishing dust for the Queen. Their obsidian black skin brings another question to the forefront of my mind.

“So Princesses and Queens are different from the other Rykz types. Brown skin color instead of obsidian black despite sharing the same rubbery skin.”

“Indeed, but that is one of the lesser differences. It is for the same reason as humans, the environmental conditions that we lived in as we evolved affected the pigmentation that our skin took.”

“Humans are all white, though, or somewhat tanned by the sun. Cold blood scales can take every color of the rainbow, I’ve heard.”

“I believe you are mistaken about the tones of skin that humans can take, we have records of humans with ivory skin far south, while all the way east, we know of some kingdoms populated by humans of dark skin color.”

“Oh.” I say, surprised that she knows more about humans than I do. “But how do you know what the color of their skin is?”

“We ask.” Oh, right.

We approach a building with a wooden door painted black, but as we get nearer I notice that it isn’t covered in paint but by a tar-like substance. We saw the same thing in the mine tunnels, the first wooden beam support we ran into was covered with the same substance. Lady Lance did say that it wasn’t tar at the time, I wonder what it is. The acrid smell it emanates makes my nostrils sting.

Princess Celyz unfurls two tendrils and pushes the door open. I walk inside behind her, finding a room full of … bookshelves, rows of them filled with innumerable books. A large desk occupies the whole center of the room, its surface covered with parchment rolls and wide open books.

“I thought you couldn’t see.” I stand, staring at the room. She closes the door behind us and the room fills with darkness as there isn’t even a single window on the walls.

“Just because we do not have eyes does not mean we cannot see.” The Princess says in her resounding voice. I hear her walk by me, I cannot see anything in this darkness. “I have told you before that we can detect heat, it won’t come as a surprise if I tell you that we also have the sense of touch, correct?”

“The possibility that you may not be able to feel the things you touch didn’t even come to my mind.” I admit.

“Come, I’ll show you directly.”

“I can’t see.”

“Oh. Hum. Right, that was silly of me. I forget that you need light while speaking of senses, how thoughtless.” I hear her walk back to the door and push it wide open, letting light enter the room once more.

“Let’s say that you were charmingly scattered while immersed in conversation.” I smile.

“Yes, that. Much more flattering to me, thank you.” The Princess chuckles. “Come, I have just the item that will perfectly illustrate both our earlier conversation and this one.” She walks by me once more but this time I follow her towards the desk.

“Our oldest records about humans date back to … let’s see, we date it at about four times the amount of time between now and when humans invented agriculture. I apologize for the imprecision but our record keepers have used an … an abstract approach to keeping historical records until recently.”

She unwraps six tendrils from around her torso, she sends some to pull drawers in the desk while others push aside parchments and displace books. She pulls out a large roll of parchment, pressing it down on the desk and unrolling it, using the free space that she just cleared.

“This is the copy, of a copy, of a copy, and so on, of the first record we have about humans.” She adds.

I observe closely as she unrolls the parchment. It becomes clear once it opens fully that the parchment is actually the canvas of a painting, an odd painting. Only a single color of paint was used, a dark gray.

The paint wasn’t used to draw lines on the parchment canvas, instead, it was applied in thick layers to create embossed shapes. The Rykz Princess passes a tendril over the entire surface of the painting, brushing against it.

As she … reads the painting, the twelve holes on her head start pushing air outward with no deliberate sound other than the air brushing against her rubbery skin as it is expelled.

A sigh coming out of twelve tiny openings, the sound of it is foreign, odd, but the feelings behind that action are so very easy to recognize. It really doesn’t surprise me coming from her, she has been answering all my questions with an eagerness that makes the passion she has for the subject evident.

“You can touch if you want, there are many copies of it.” She says.

“My eyes should be able to figure it out, I don’t think I could read it in the same way that you did without spending a lot of time learning how.”

It takes me a while to isolate each of the shapes and find what they represent. The first I decipher is that of a human holding two sticks, a very crudely shaped human. The other one is very close to the human and likely to be a Rykz. After a while of scrutinizing the painting, I find the four legs of the Rykz, with that information, the trunk is very easier to distinguish.

I decipher the rest of the painting easily once I have those two elements. It is a depiction of a Rykz holding a stick that is stabbed deep into the human’s chest while that human is piercing the Rykz’ upper trunk with his own weapon.

“While I have no doubt that such a scene has happened during our long history, this is most likely the abstract expression of a state of war between our two species.” Princess Celyz explains, probably seeing my expression harden.

“Weren’t we speaking of skin color?” I ask.

“Ah, yes, well. The color of the paint used here is not an accident. Our record keepers of old have traditionally used the skin of our fallen enemies to make the paint that they used to depict scenes of a warlike nature.”

“This, this was made with human skin?” I ask, taking a step back.

“Oh, no, that would be barbaric. We would never murder another intelligent being just to make paint. I’m afraid I do not know what the record keeper used to obtain this color, but I can assure you that no one has died in the process of making it.” Princess Celyz assures me with reassuring sounds.

“I understand, I apologize for my reaction.” She nods once in acceptance. I take a step forward and observe the painting again. “So, how long ago was this war?” I ask.

“We think that it was forty thousand years ago, but it is an unreliable estimation. It could be twenty thousand years or fifteen or even seventy.”

“You’re saying that some humans had dark gray skin then?”

“No, I am saying that all humans had gray skin back then.” She raises a tendril to stop me from speaking up. “I know what I said, that humans can have many different skin colors. I will explain. This record was made by a hive that has always remained in the central plains area, the current cold blood territory. It is one of the largest Rykz hives, they have built a dozen cities spread out across the plains. The most ancient of those cities have records dating from similar periods of time, many of them depicting humans and all with the same color of paint. We think that those were the only humans that lived at the time because no other Rykz hive has records of encounters with humans dating back so far.”

“The world is vast, why would humans stay solely within the southern plains?” I ask.

“Well, we are. The Rykz are to blame for your inability to spread across the world. During that time period, there were hundreds of small hives spread across the world and traveling across their territory would not have ended well for a human tribe. I could go deeper into the history between our species but that isn’t the subject of this conversation. What I am saying is that humans have only begun to spread across the world around ten thousand years ago, when your conflict with the cold bloods begun.”

“And all of a sudden, the Rykz let them pass through their lands? A sudden change of heart?” I ask, skeptically.

“There are many things that I cannot tell you. Hum. I’ll just tell you that, not long before the wars between humans and cold bloods over the plains begun, the hundreds of small Rykz hives spread across the world at the time experienced wars of their own. The territories previously occupied by Rykz hives had been deserted for a couple of centuries when humans began fleeing the plains in every direction.”

“I’m kind of curious about your history but I assume you stayed vague on purpose. Did the humans fleeing the cold bloods have dark gray skin? Do our historians even know about that?”

“We only know because of our old record keeper’s disturbing ways. I know that human records of history contain rather extensive compilations of songs and poetry about your long-lost home plains, but I have never heard those go into details such as the skin color of those fighting or fleeing. The humans living in this area, the one that the Empire now occupies, have only invented writing about two thousand years ago so many things were lost during the oral transmission of your history.”

“This is interesting. I wonder what makes our colors change.”

“We know that it likely caused by the environment that you live in since the humans we now encounter around the world tell us that they all have similar skin colors within the same region. The Rykz seem to be the same way, their skin color darkened drastically when the first hive reached the surface of the world and saw the sun for the first time. Before you ask, yes, our old record keepers have always used crushed body parts to create paint. I believe it was a way to be authentic, by using paint made of skin to draw skin, paint made of blood to draw blood. The smell of it must have spoken to their memory of the event.”

“I wonder if I’ll turn green if I start living in a forest.” I say, desperate to say anything to change the subject.

“Why green?” She asks.

“Because trees are green.” I say.

“I was told they were brown.” She inclines her head.

“Well, I mean, … Trees have brown trunks and green leaves … most of them, … most of the year. It’s complicated.” I fumble my words.

“Interesting, is your skin uniformly white? Is mine uniformly brown?”

“Well, yours is brown all over, yes, except your tendrils that are a bit lighter in color, and the tips of your toes and tail are a bit darker. My skin isn’t really white. It’s naturally tanned, something like a mix of pink and light brown but nothing resembling your deep brown color. I think that’s the best I can do to describe it.”

“Colors seem complicated but useful to differentiate individual things from each other, almost as useful as the sense of smell that is.” She comments.

“Is it hard to see different shapes by detecting heat?” I ask.

“It depends, the details of living things are easy to distinguish, but fire is much harder. Wood is usually uniform in heat so we can easily see the general shape but not the detail. Stone is similar in that, but we notice stone because it is very cold, by its absence of heat compared to the ambient air. I would need to touch a stone to be able to distinguish any details beyond the general shape of it.” Princess Celyz explains.

“Could you tell me more about the war of the plains?” I ask.

“There never was a single war or a single battle like your songs seem to suggest, it lasted for three whole centuries. Pacts were made, broken, betrayed, respected. You would need to read many things and hear even more songs to understand that war in detail. I am afraid that it is not a conflict that I have extensively studied. Hum. Perhaps I can explain in simple terms why the humans lost. I was taught that deep down the conflict boils down to the differences between two very simple discoveries. Agriculture and herding. Humans and cold bloods discovered those two things concurrently, but each species focused on one of them to the detriment of the other. Humans tribes stopped hunting and gathering their food to start cultivating it, assembling in large sedentary communities to exploit the land around them. Cold blood tribes stopped hunting for their food to start herding aurochs, capturing as many of them as they could to create herds. Both of your species gathered their numbers, humans formed large sedentary villages across the plains while the cold bloods assembled in nomadic hordes that traveled through the plains to find fresh grass for their herds to feed on.”

“Ah, I think I understand.” I say.

It was hard enough for us to protect our crops against our neighbor’s cattle when his pastures were flooded. I wouldn’t want to have to fend off a herd of them sent specifically to eat my fields by the cold bloods guiding them.

“The human feudal system that you know was born back then, it began with the creation of two castes, warriors and farmers. It became necessary because it was simply impossible for humans to both cultivate and defend their fields at the same time. Cold blood hordes fought against both humans and other cold blood hordes. Yet, after three hundred years of bloody conflict, they won, humans left the plains in droves. They chased humans out of the plains despite their own internal conflicts.”

“Do you plan to do the same thing to the Izla?” I ask. “Strangle us by taking our food. That’s what the tunnels are for, that’s why the entrance we found was in-between two cornfields.” I realize, speaking out loud before I can catch myself. Shit, I shouldn’t have told her what I figured out. Did I say too much?