Chapter 7 Rael
She asked me to tell her about Lucis on a Tuesday.
I knew it was Tuesday because I had learned to count the human days.
They organized their time in cycles of seven, an arbitrary division that seemed to have no astronomical basis, unlike their months and years.
But the healer marked her notebook entries with the day of the week, and I had been watching her write long enough to recognize the pattern.
Tuesday. The day she drew blood. The day she brought new instruments — she had found a different kind of measuring device, something she called a thermometer, and pressed it against my skin with focused precision.
The day her visits lasted longest, because she was documenting and documenting required questions, and questions required answers, and answers — from me — required the slow, effortful translation of thought into spoken word that left me feeling scraped and raw and, paradoxically, less alone than I had felt in years.
"Tell me about Lucis," she said. She was sitting cross-legged on the tent floor, her notebook in her lap, her pen poised.
Her dark hair fell across her forehead and she pushed it back with an impatient hand, leaving a smudge of something (ink, probably) on her temple.
She did not notice. She never noticed the marks she left on herself.
She was too busy studying everything else.
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything. Start at the beginning."
The beginning. I was not sure where the beginning was.
The oldest memories in the network predated verbal language.
They existed as impressions, textures, the accumulated psychic sediment of a civilization that had communicated through shared consciousness for millennia before anyone thought to push air through a throat and call it speech.
But she was waiting. And I found, to my continued astonishment, that I wanted to tell her.
"Lucis was warm," I said. "That is the first thing the network remembers.
Warmth. Not heat, not the scorching atmosphere of the Vampyren homeworld, the one they call Vampyr, with its deserts and thin oxygen.
Lucis was temperate. Gentle. The light came from a star that was older and cooler than this planet's sun, and it cast everything in silver. "
"Silver," she said, writing.
"The sky was silver. The vegetation was pale — adapted to the cooler light spectrum.
The water was dark. Deep, cold oceans that covered most of the surface.
We lived on the islands and the coastlines.
" I paused. These were not my memories. They were the network's memories, inherited impressions that lived in the deepest layers of the psychic web, accessible to any Lucian who was willing to go deep enough.
I had spent much of my youth diving into those layers, hungry for a home I had never seen.
"The cities were built into the cliffs above the ocean.
Stone and glass and the bioluminescent materials that our builders cultivated from the native organisms. At night, the cities glowed. "
"Like your skin."
"Yes. The luminescence is vestigial. Our ancestors developed it to navigate the coastal cliffs in the dark season, when Lucis's orbit took it farther from the star and the silver light dimmed. It was beautiful. Even the oldest memories in the network carry the impression of beauty."
She had stopped writing. She was just looking at me.
"What happened?" she asked.
"The Vampyren came."
I felt the old weight of those words settle onto me. The grief of generations funneled through the network, compressed and accumulated like geological pressure turning organic matter into stone.
"The Vampyren were already an empire when they found Lucis.
They had conquered their own system, expanded to the nearest habitable worlds, built a military culture around conquest and hierarchy and the biological imperative to feed.
They needed blood. They needed bodies. They needed worlds with populations that could sustain them. "
"And Lucis had a population."
"Lucis had a civilization." The distinction mattered.
"We were not animals or primitives. We had mathematics, philosophy, art.
We had a form of medicine that used the psychic network to diagnose and heal at the cellular level — what you do now with your instruments and your notebooks, we could do through shared consciousness.
A healer on Lucis could feel a tumor in another mind, could direct the network to repair damage at the level of individual cells. "
"That's—" She shook her head. "That's incredible. That's beyond anything we—"
"It is gone," I said. "All of it. Gone."
She went quiet.
"The Vampyren conquered Lucis in three of your years.
We did not fight — not at first. We had no military, no weapons in the way you understand them.
The psychic network was designed for communion, not combat.
We tried to communicate — to reach the Vampyren minds and share understanding.
But the Vampyren were psychically opaque.
We could not touch them. It was like screaming into a void. "
"Cold-blooded," she murmured. "Their biology blocks psychic contact?"
"We believe so. Something in the Vampyren neurological structure is impermeable to the frequencies our network uses. They cannot hear us. We cannot reach them. In all the millennia since Lucis fell, no Lucian has ever successfully formed a psychic connection with a Vampyren."
I did not add: but I have formed one with you. That was a truth I was not ready to give her.
"So the Vampyren couldn't hear your people trying to communicate. And they attacked anyway."
"They did not perceive our attempts at contact. They perceived a planet with a large population and no visible military defense, and they did what the Vampyren have always done. They conquered."
"And the Lucian survived."
"Some. The psychic network saved us — not as a weapon but as a warning system.
When the first cities fell, the trauma echoed through the network instantly.
Every Lucian on the planet knew at once that we were under attack.
Those who could flee, fled. They took ships — small ones, designed for coastal transport, not interstellar travel — and they left Lucis before the Vampyren could consolidate control. "
"How many?"
"Thousands. Out of millions." I let that number sit in the air between us. "The rest were... processed. By the Vampyren hierarchy. In the same way they later processed humans."
She flinched. It was small, a contraction of the muscles around her eyes, a tightening of her hand on the pen. But I felt it through the connection between us. The reverberation of empathy. The first time I had ever felt a non-Lucian respond to my species' pain.
"Breeding pools," she said. Her voice was flat. "Blood farms."
"The Vampyren used the same systems on Lucis that they later used on Earth. Your species is not the first to experience this. You are the fifth. Or the sixth. The records in the network are incomplete for the earliest conquests."
She put down her notebook. She pressed her palms over her eyes.
She breathed. Three deep, deliberate breaths.
When she lowered her hands, her face was composed again, the professional mask back in place.
But I had felt the storm underneath it. The fury.
Not at me. At the universe that had produced this pattern.
"So the survivors fled," she said. "And then what?"
"And then we wandered. For three hundred of your years.
The ships were not designed for long travel.
They broke down, were repaired, broke again.
We had no destination because the Vampyren had already claimed every habitable world within range of our technology.
Every time we found a planet that could sustain us, we found the Vampyren already there, or arriving shortly after. "
"You followed them."
"We followed the only trail that existed.
Not out of aggression. Out of desperation.
The Vampyren break open planetary defenses and claim the habitable zones.
What remains, the margins, the wastelands, the territories too remote or too dangerous for the main occupation...
that was where we lived. Scavenging the edges of Vampyren conquests like animals picking through the bones of a predator's kill. "
"That's—" She swallowed. "That's centuries of homelessness."
"Yes."
"And you?" she asked. "Where were you born?"
"On a ship. Between Kallos and the unnamed world the Vampyren designated as Conquest Twelve.
I have never stood on soil that belonged to my people.
I have never seen a silver sky or a dark ocean or a city that glowed.
Everything I know of Lucis, I know through the network — through the memories of people who died before I was born. "
She was quiet for a moment. I could feel her processing through the small, human signals I had learned to read: the way her breathing shifted, the micro-tension in her jaw, the way her eyes moved as thoughts reorganized behind them.
"You've never had a home," she said.
"No."
"Not once? In your whole life?"
"The ships were not home. They were survival.
Cramped, dark, recycled air that tasted like metal.
The network was saturated with grief — every mind connected to every other mind, and every mind grieving.
When I slept, I dreamed other people's memories of a world I would never see.
When I woke, I was in a metal corridor between stars. "
"God."
"I do not say this to elicit sympathy. I say it because you asked, and because—" I paused. "Because you are the first person who has asked."
She wrote something in her notebook. When she looked up again, her expression had shifted. Harder, more focused, the professional mask reassembling over whatever she had felt.
"And Tyvor?"