Processing. That’s what she’d called it. This processing went on for several days and nights. After the first night, Xenon decided to match her sleep cycle so he might be a better acolyte to her. However, he soon found this meant he rarely got a full night’s sleep with his mate.

From the very first night cycle they spent together upon the furs, he would awake to the sound of her mumbling, calling out a name. Ola. The delusion she’d left behind in her time still came to her in her dreams. Those mumblings, however, weren’t as bad as when she spoke with someone she called “pahpah” in her civil tongue. These conversations most often made tears leak from her eyes, as her flame burned dark red and blue. Shame. But why?

He did not understand. And she seemed to have little desire to talk about her night fires, which she referred to with a word their mate bond translated as a “night demon”.

“Nightmares are another form of processing,” she explained the first time he pulled her out of one of her close-eyed arguments with pahpah. “I’m trying to reconcile a lot of things,” she assured him.

Then before he could ask further questions, she’d reach inside his scaling and pull down his male works. As if this act was the only thing that could erase the night demons from her mind. His male works happily responded to her request. They, like he, seemed to lament that he wouldn’t have his treasure for long.

But even the wondrous feelings she gave him afterward wasn’t enough to make up for what her unrest did to him. He was her sworn protector, yet he could not protect her from the night demons. Or the quiet pall that often fell over her during their days spent together in the lab.

“What would happen if we walked directly south from here?” she asked one morning.

“We would come to sea ice in less than a wing hour. And then several wing hours of sea before we reached a land of ice where nothing but flightless birds the size of Far Travelers live.”

Silence. Then, “Antarctica. We call that place Antarctica. Which I guess means we’re on the wrong side of the Bering Strait.”

Again, he had little idea what had caused her flame to darken so, but the pall lasted until they rested upon the furs again that night.

He found himself burning with a strange, paradoxical rage. One that made him feel helpless and frustrated, even as he began to treasure her for reasons that went beyond the new life she carried.

But then one morning, like a wish granted, she woke him with a gentle shaking during the early morning hours.

“Yes, Female 7-133. How may I honor you?” he asked, a strip of bright surprise burning in both his voice and head flames.

“I have to go,” she explained, her cheek flames brightening with embarrassment. “I know you don’t like for me to do it alone, and I’m not sure where to find the collection cup, or how to make the clothes I need to go out in the snow…”

Yes, it was time for the morning urine sample for the daily test he ran for the baby. Since much of his equipment emitted trace amounts of radiation, which Drakkon scientists discovered could lead to mutations in gestating young, he’d been forced to go to rather unorthodox measures to monitor the female’s pregnancy. He not only conducted exams with his tongue, but he also collected urine and blood samples to ensure the baby inside her was thriving.

To his surprise, the gestation process had gone well so far. The first moon was said to be the hardest milestone among drakkon. And she was already two full moons in.

A fact she did not seem as happy about this morning as she dressed. In freshly replicated clothes, since the previous ones he’d made her less than a quarter moon ago no longer fit.

“Are you sure the baby’s okay?” she asked. “This baby seems really huge already. Like, impossibly so.”

He kept his eyes on the wall he programmed to check Female 7-133’s vital signs every morning. He still had not happened upon a way to tell her about the near certain-death drakkon births entailed.

The scientist in him could see no reason to tell her. At best, she’d spend another week crying, her flame paling to gray.

Yet the strange emotion she so often brought forth in him told him he should say something to her. As soon as possible, so she could “process” it.

He snorted steam. “I believe the time has come to discuss an important Drakkon custom.”

His eyes were trained ahead so he could not see her face, but he sensed her pause in her dressing as she answered, “Okay,” inside his head.

“If the fetus you carry survives laying, it would be of unknown potential. A hybrid born to a genetically modified species; a wonder of modern science. Also, you will have granted me the boon of a hatchling. For this, I have no words to express my gratitude. In fact, on my planet, a drakkon who has been honored with a child will spend the rest of his life honoring the female who did bestow this gift upon him. Because of the young you carry within your womb, I will revere you for the rest of my breathing days without mating with another. That is the Drakkon way, and we even have a formal set of customs to go along with this tradition. We call this Reverence.”

“Okay,” she said, in a tone that seemed to imply she found it necessary to process the information he’d just conveyed. “So you’re happy to be having this baby? Even if it’s not full dragon?”

He started at the notion that he might be anything less than happy to have a hatchling on the way. One that was becoming more viable by the day, according to this morning’s wall readings.

And he turned to face her, rushing to say, “I am a drakkon exiled. I would have never dared to hope for, much less believed, a mate and child would be possible for me. This is truly nothing less than a wish fulfilled.”

“That’s…great to hear. Um…so tell me, why do I feel a ‘but’ coming on?”

“Because, Fated One, I am afraid the tradition of Reverence is rooted in a period of mourning. You see, we revere our mothers forever because most drakki do not survive childbirth. When one is mated, when one volunteers to take her mate’s seed so his line might continue forth into future generations, it is with the understanding she will most likely not survive the laying. Our reverence practice is a direct result of this knowledge. The mothers of our race are our most exalted heroines, and this is why males only mate once.”

“Let me get this straight. What you’re saying…” she smoothed a hand over her round belly… “is that you don’t think I’ll survive birthing…whatever is inside of me.”

He answered with a short nod…and watched her visibly swallow, her neck flame waxing a deep red with fear as it rolled down her throat. And behold, even the voice inside his head quavered as she asked, “You keep saying ‘lay.’ Does that mean I’m going to, like, lay an actual egg?”

It seemed a strange thing to be frightened of given he’d just told her she’d most likely die in childbirth. But he assuaged her fears as best he could. “At first I assumed this would be the case, but now I do not believe it so. I can smell no shell in your womb, so I must assume this babe will come out in the mucous shell of this planet’s hominids.”

With his words, the fear diminished from her flame. And she gave a short chortle, before saying, “Okay, well, not having an egg crack open inside me probably increases my survival odds by at least a thousand, right?”

“You have told me already of this ‘joking’ your civilization engages in. Is this one of those jokes, or do you not have the intelligence required to calculate the odds?”

“Wow…”

“Because in either case, your odds are still very low.” Then remembering his manners, he added, “Reverence.”

Yet though his words were true, she shook her head and said. “No, no…I just can’t believe this is how God wanted me to go out. I mean, I don’t. Believe it, that is. Especially if I’m not expected to carry this baby for nine long-ass months, which I’m suspecting is the case since you seem more closely related to a lizard than a human.”

“A lizard,” he repeated, the reverent tone slipping from his voice. “You would compare a great drakkon to those specks that scuttle about your planet?”

“Calm down. I’m just saying lizards usually have two to three-month gestation periods, and I’m hoping it’s the same for this birth, even if there are no hard shells involved.”

He waited for his flame to cool a bit before admitting, “Well, yes. A typical drakkon birth only lasts about three of your moons. However, already the babe gives you painful carry. I doubt you will be able to walk in a few weeks. Or, as I already mentioned, survive the laying.”

She appeared to brush his predictions aside. “But we’re…fated mates, right? The best DNA link possible in, like, the universe, or at least on this planet. My cousin, Koko, and my Aunt Alisha have been working on a theory about the time gates. They believe the gates provide an improved fertility system, which accounts for the high birth and survival rates of those mothers who found their mates via the gates.”

“Is this always the case?”

“Well, no…” she admitted. “My mother only had me. But she got through the birth just fine. And my grandmother survived three childbirths during the Viking age.”

He remained silent, not wanting to dash her hopes, but still too much of a scientist to encourage her belief.

“Look,” she said, as she took his hand and placed it on her chest, right above her heart flame. “Do you want me to survive?”

Of course. The question caused his flame to crackle with desire for that very outcome. However, “Wanting and probability are not related when it comes to childbirth.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

He looked at her for a long time before saying, “Yes, I wish for you to survive the laying and to raise this hatchling with me. I have wish to pay you living Reverence, not mourning Reverence.”

“Okay then…living reverence sounds nice. Let’s go with that option,” she said.

Her lips were quirked upward, and he couldn’t tell if she had once again engaged in “joking.” But his flame burnt with a strange emotion. One he was beginning to recognize as hope.

Xenon had come to this planet in exile. Hopeless he’d ever find a mate, not daring to so much as imagine a life with any companionship. But now, for the first time, he was not alone. He had a companion. Not just that, but conversation beyond the crude gesture-based language of the Far Travelers. And the mating. Constant and nightly, despite the female being so heavy with child. How it delighted him. No, he could not forget the mating. He feared he might never forget the mating. Or her.

Even though drakkon lived long lives, and by the end of them forgot more than they ever knew, he had the feeling this fragile female of his would be in his mind until the very end, no matter how short their time together might be.

“Come, we will journey outside,” he said, going to the door so he might palm it open for her.

She nodded, and they walked through the exit tunnel in silence. He thanked the mothers when he saw that the two moons did not linger in the sky this morning.

Female 7-133 hated the moons, once confessing they ashed her flame with an emotion she called “the heebie-jeebies.”

However, once outside in the brisk air, he found the need to empty his bladder as well. So he shifted, as he still found it easier to perform his biological functions outside his shell.

But when he looked down from his now increased height, he found his mate wide of eye, her flame burning dark orange with fright.

“You have no need to fear me in this form,” he told her. “I would never hurt you inside nor outside my shell.”

Still, she continued to look at him in a way that sparked her flame with black spikes of disgust. Which gave Xenon pause.

He revered her for the chance at continuance she had bestowed upon him with their mating.

Yet he disgusted her. Injured pride and reverence tangled inside him as he studied her flame….

In the end, reverence won. He reshelled himself, and though he had much pondered morphing back into drakkon form as it was the one he preferred for sleep, he resolved to remain shelled for the little time they had left together.

As if to reward his decision, the lupine clasped his shell hand in hers as they walked back into the tunnel.

“I’m looking forward to my morning examination,” she told him, resting her face briefly against the side of his arm.

Her words cheered his fire. This was a coded compliment of sorts since frequently her examinations resulted in more mating between them.

His Reverence. Usually, a drakki’s new Reverent titles were withheld for the mourning period after birth, or on very rare occasions for the days of celebration after her survival. But Female 7-133’s blanket rejection of her certain death prognosis gave him a strange, tentative hope. And in his mind, Xenon began to refer to her by her mated titles: Fated Mate, Reverence, Treasure—even though they’d had no ceremony declaring them such.

Over the next moon, they fell into a routine. Despite her grim prognosis, she seemed to sleep through the night more easily. In the morning upon waking, he’d often escort her from the cave, then bring her back into the warmth of his lab for a thorough examination that would end with her shuddering beneath his forked tongue.

However, one morning when they stepped out of the glacier station’s entrance, they both stopped short. For what looked to be the entire Far Traveler Experiment Group 7 village had set up camp outside his glacier station.

“Whatthahhellisthis?!?!”

His mate’s native tongue, spoken out loud, interrupted his surprised musings.

Xenon did not understand either, but soon more lupins began to emerge from the mammoth fur and bone huts. And what seemed to be every male and female lupin, adults and children combined, in the village came to stand before him.

“King of Us! King of Us!” they chanted in their Far Traveler tongue, tossing hunks of gold and jewels at his feet. “King of Us!”

“What are they saying?” his mate demanded inside his mind. She moved closer to him, perhaps remembering her last encounter with these people.

“I am unsure,” he answered. “Perhaps they are upset about the deaths three moons ago. They chant ‘King of Us’—which was the title of one of the men who tried to give you claim.”

“Wait,” she said. “You mean you killed this pack’s alpha?”

“Yes, he was their leader,” he admitted. But his eyes stayed glued to the chanting group, watching them for any sudden movements. “You must away to the lab, Fated Mate. I can deal with this alone. And I would not have you hurt.”

“No, wait, hear me out,” she answered. “They wouldn’t be chucking gold and gems at your feet if they were here to kill you. They probably also wouldn’t have set up camp, and brought their kids along.”

“Then why are they here? And chanting?” he demanded. He wanted very much to protect her. But he was afraid to shift for fear of hurting her in some way.

Yet her voice registered no such fear. Instead, she made that odd chortling sound again before asking, “Are you the kind of guy who reads the manual on how wolf culture works, or are you like my papa and just sort of bang around until you figure it out for yourself?”

Though he would never have described himself in this manner, he confessed, “I did not read the Royal Geneticist’s report in its entirety. It was…excessively long. And I had much work to do with regards to setting up my station.”

“So what you’re saying is you never got to the part of the manual about how if you kill the pack alpha, that makes you the new pack alpha?”

At first, Xenon failed to understand her meaning, and then—quite suddenly—he did.

He’d killed the “King of Us,” and now these chanting wolves had given him a new title.

“KING OF US! KING OF US! KING OF US!”

With one kill, he’d gone from being the Prince of the Drakkon, to the King of the Lupin.