Chapter Text
For my wife, Beth –
She dances in a ring of fire,
and throws off the challenge with a shrug.
The Dynarri did not sleep. They did not age, did not decay.
They endured. In the folds between dimensions, where light recoiled and time forgot itself, they lingered still—eldritch minds suspended in a plane of thought and memory, whispering across synaptic oceans and rootwork skies.
Theirs was no world, but a reverberation—shrieking color and neural shadow where forgotten consciousness dripped from the walls like condensation. Bridges of calcified thought connected organic towers that pulsed with dim red light. Chasms yawned beneath them, filled with the low groan of unborn screams.
The air tasted of copper. The ground, if it could be called that, breathed with the slow rhythm of a comatose god. Veins of bioluminescent fluid branched through translucent surfaces, carrying messages older than language, older than sound. In this place, memory had mass. Trauma grew like coral. And every thought left a scar upon reality's flesh.
They built their exile, neuron by neuron, after the Pahvans sang them into banishment. Not with hands—for they had transcended such crude appendages. But with will made manifest. Each structure was a monument to their hunger.
There, in the cold and flickering sanctuary of their exile, they felt it:
A ripple. A breath. A tremor along the skein of probability. Not yet born. Not yet formed—but already felt.
The sensation spread through their collective like infection through a wound. Thousands of minds turned as one, their attention converging on a single point in space-time where something new was taking shape.
The Heartmind, that pulsing crimson sun of shared consciousness suspended above their plane, contracted with anticipation. Its surface rippled with the faces of the absorbed, the consumed, the willing and unwilling alike who had fed their eternal hunger across eons.
"She lives."
The whisper was not a voice, but a convergence—a glimmer in the great Heartmind that sent shivers through the architecture of their dimension. The collective turned, coalescing into mantis-like silhouettes—featureless, elongated—gliding across gravity-defying paths. Their bodies were suggestions rather than certainties, shifting between states of being like smoke given malevolent purpose.
"The pattern has returned."
A hologlyph bloomed: the shape of a child—not yet physical, but mathematically implied—surrounded by harmonics. Fractals of thought spiraled outward from her image, forming strands that linked her to two familiar sources. The image pulsed with potential, each heartbeat sending ripples through their psychic atmosphere.
"The female progenitor..."
A vision of Adora lying in the medical bay onboard the flagship of the "United Federation of Planets". Her eyes were wide with harmonic light, the moment before she broke away. They tasted her defiance still, bitter as ash on tongues they no longer possessed.
She had touched their essence, rejected it. The insult still burned the Heartmind.
"...and the male progenitor."
A seared memory: Orin, standing in the Sylari birthing-chamber, blank-eyed and newly remade. They had sculpted him from the genetic code of his former self, hollowed him, rewritten him. Made him perfect. Made him theirs.
And yet... he rebelled. Love—that parasitic emotion—had corrupted their finest creation.
"They carry us."
"They deny us."
"But they built her."
The Heartmind pulsed in agreement, and with each pulse, the unborn child's image grew clearer. They could see the lattice of her forming consciousness, delicate as spun glass, strong as neutronium.
She was possibility incarnate—their second chance.
In response, the walls of their dimension shifted—nerves lighting with anticipation, tendrils of living architecture writhing in slow, reverent arcs. The organic city rearranged itself, buildings flowing like mercury, reforming into configurations that hadn't been seen since before their exile.
Preparation. Celebration. Hunger.
From the chasms below came a hum—low, then rising—felt in the spine of any conscious being, had any been present. It was the song of the void between thoughts, the melody of synapses firing in darkness, the hymn of a universe learning to think.
"She carries the imprint of surrender."
"And the imprint of obedience."
"The rebirth we were denied."
The Dynarri wove through space in patterns older than stars. Where they passed, reality grew thin. Through the gaps, other dimensions bled through—flashes of worlds they had touched, civilizations they had guided to transcendence or ruin. All roads led back to this moment.
"The end of separation."
"The unmaking of walls."
"Through her, we return."
A pause filled with the weight of eternity.
Then one Dynarri turned its eyeless head toward the others. Its thoughtform flared white, bright enough to cast shadows in a realm where shadow should not exist.
"Shall we take her?"
The question hung in their shared consciousness like a blade. They had plucked so many—reaching through the veil, harvesting consciousness like fruit. It would be simple. A touch upon the forming mind. A whisper in the amniotic dark. She would be theirs before she drew first breath.
"No."
"No."
"Not this time."
The others answered not in anger, but in clarity born of failure.
"We created Optivis."
"We devoured the mind of the mother."
"And still, they resisted."
Images cascaded through their collective: worlds that fought back, minds that chose oblivion over submission, entire species that burned themselves to ash rather than join their broodmind. And always, always, the taste of love—that maddening, illogical force that made beings choose suffering over survival.
The Heartmind dimmed, processing probabilities, calculating futures. In its depths, absorbed consciousnesses from a million worlds offered their insights, their warnings, their hopes and fears. All converging on one conclusion.
And then: one thought. Singular. Inevitable.
"She will come."
Above them, the spectral image of the unborn child shifted. Her body glowed with dual tones: red for memory, blue for renewal. The pattern forming within her was something new. Something unseen. The Dynarri leaned closer, their forms overlapping in their eagerness to observe.
She was not a weapon or a vessel—she was convergence.
She would be the bridge they could not build. The key to locks they could not pick. In her veins would flow the harmony they had been denied, and in her mind would grow the power to reshape the very definition of consciousness.
And then—across the membrane of flesh and blood, light-years away in a quiet oceanside home—the child began to move.
The Dynarri felt it as a thunderclap.
Not sound. Not light. Purpose.
Their dimension convulsed. Structures that had stood for millennia cracked and reformed. The Heartmind blazed with such intensity that lesser consciousnesses were forced to shield themselves or be absorbed into its radiance.
Not mere birth. Advent.
In the physical universe, beneath stars unaware of what watched them, a scream broke through sterile air. A woman's voice—raw, determined, beautiful in its refusal to yield.
The birth had begun.
And the Dynarri, far beyond and within, did not rejoice.
They remembered. They prepared. They reached—not to seize, but to be felt.
Through dimensions that bent like paper, across distances that mocked comprehension, they extended their awareness. Not as conquerors. Not as devourers. As witnesses. As promise.
The child would know them. Not in words. Not in images. But in the spaces between heartbeats, in the pause between breaths, in the moment between sleep and waking where consciousness stood naked and undefended.
They would be her shadow's shadow. The itch in her mind that no amount of scratching could relieve.
She would not be their servant. Nor her parents' alone. She would be something else. Something unprecedented.
Soon, she would open her eyes.
And when she did, the first thing she would feel would not be her parents' warmth...
...but the weight of destiny.
The Dynarri settled back into their eternal wait, patient as gravity, certain as entropy. In their dimension of thought and shadow, they began to sing—a song with no sound, a harmony built from the screams of stars and the sighs of dying worlds.
A lullaby, a summoning, a promise.
And somewhere, in a birthing suite flooded with light and love and exhaustion, a child drew her first breath... and listened.
And in that breath, galaxies shifted—slightly, subtly.
Deep within the Heartmind, a darker truth simmered—unspoken.
They would not wait forever.
"She will come..."