“Yes, I know about the Archive. Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but I’ve been watching you since the moment you stepped foot onto the Solus… which I have had under surveillance since itsconstruction,” he finished sheepishly, winking at her when she glared at him.
She rolled her eyes and gestured back at the painting. “So how does this exist?”
He touched the corner of the frame with the tip of his fingers. The area was worn after years of him doing this very thing over and over. “You can’t really destroy something completely. Echos will always remain. A sliver of pottery, a dusty forgotten scroll, or a lost painting. Some I found in ruins or buried under layers of dirt and ash and others in private collections. Not all of my collection is Rijiteran, but enough of it is.”
He held out a hand and helped her stand, gesturing for her to follow him. They wandered through the rows. A miniature clay figurine caught Callie’s eye. It was beautifully painted to exactness, the dark purple hide smooth and yet rough looking. Six powerful legs ending in three clawed toes forever frozen in a languid walk, the creature's proud neck low and relaxed, the quills that would normally be standing straight up were lying flat in rest, and the long triangular head almost lazily stared at them, each tall ear perked forward as if to study them with its stunningly rendered red eyes with a narrow slitted pupil.
“The Ka’Ne. It’s the only depiction outside of my memory I ever found.”
Callie ran her hand around the figurine, careful not to break it. “How big were they?”
He raised his hand to his eyes. “Their backs came to about here.”
“So about eighteen hands. Dang. Big bastards weren’t they?”
He looked at the Ka’Ne and felt the familiar sadness stirring in his chest. “Yes. They were. Fierce, too. As were most things the Rijitera raised, but the Ka’Ne was native to Ara’Ama, and it was one of the few things that they didn’t try to ‘improve’. The Ka’Newere sacred to the Mother. They used to run wild across the vast grassy plains in the west, beyond the K’rak mountain range.”
She moved on, pausing here and there to ask a question until they came to one of the larger paintings he had in his collection and had needed securing to the wall instead of hovering over a platform. The scene was vivid, the colors bold and the brush strokes delicate.
“Is this what the Rijiteran’s and your people looked like before?”
He tilted his head. A pack of Rijitera—some holding primitive weapons and other’s children—emerged from a den dug into the soft dirt of a mountainside. The evening sun was setting behind them, outlining them in orange fire as they descended to the jungle below. Waiting in the treeline was a pack of black furred Ahar. His ancestors' muzzles were open in toothy smiles as their larger cousins approached them. There were differences to this historical depiction of his kind. The Rijitera had no belly or throat scales nor were they as large and bulky. His own people were on all fours, having not yet evolved to walking upright as they were a much younger species. Their ears were also much longer and wider than his own.
“This is our closest guess. There used to be three other paintings that went with this one to tell a whole story. I have never found the others. This was the second. The first had been the Rijitera in the cave, curled up together in sleep. The third was the reunion, a joyous occasion masterfully painted so that one could almost hear the yaps and barks as the Ahar danced around their Rijiteran family members. And then the final piece was the hunt, where the two species had worked together to bring down a much larger prey animal. It was a show of cooperation between our two species that has been the cornerstone of our relationship since the dawn of our star over the horizon of Ara’Ama.”
Callie reached out a hand but stopped short from touching the painting, curling her fingers into her palm and smiling softly. “Us humans have ancestors that were covered in fur and were more ape-like. Pretty cool how things change over time huh?”
He hummed thoughtfully and then chuckled. “Adaptation is a miraculous thing… the Rijitera just couldn’t leave well enough alone.” He laughed ruefully, shaking his head. “Did you know they meddled with my kind’s genome too? They didn’t want to leave us behind. We had to finally tell them to quit it.”
“Why did your people not want to keep up with the enhancements? Seems to me everyone here on this side of the universe are all about becoming something more than they are.”
She was not wrong.
He laid a hand over her upper back to herd her towards another exhibit. “Because, darling, myself and my kind are already perfect. You don’t meddle with perfection.”
He could feel her roll those beautiful brown eyes of hers. “How did I know that was what you were going to say?”
A dark chuckle rumbled up his throat and out through his grinning fangs. “Hmm, we are like an old married couple already.”
He grinned at her snort.
He guided her past some old pottery that used to grace the garden alcoves of the Imperial palace. It was made from a rare mineral that was worth more than all the gold and riches on her planet Earth. Of all the treasures here in his collection, the pottery was the most valuable. It always made him smile at himself thinking about some fool thief managing to break into this vault and stealing everything else but them.
Callie paused to glance at the gilded sword roughly as long as she was tall. She waved a finger at it and looked over at him. “I know that the Rijitera used plasma rifles and kinetic weapons,but I, for some dumb reason, thought only Aga ever used a sword.”
He smiled at her. “The Rijitera used swords only briefly. Claws and teeth are better for close quarter combat and it makes for a more satisfying kill at any rate.”
Her face scrunched and she shook her head. “You aliens are a violent lot, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Too many predatory species learned space travel at the same time. There were a lot of wars to be fought. How do you think the Rijitera ended up on top? It was not a peaceful transition. There are some history books in here that go into depth about the early wars between planets, I’ll find them for you. I think you’d enjoy reading about it.”
“I’d like that,” she said, looking back at the sword with a wary look on her face.
“What is it?” he asked, cocking his head at her.
She blew out a breath, her arched black brows furrowing. “Humans are really aggressive too. We are a conquering species, even among our own kind. Not everyone is treated equally and some are treated like absolute shit. Usually… because of something truly stupid, like the color of our skin,” she said holding up her own brown hand, “or because of religious differences. Hell, there are still caste systems in place in some countries. Different tribes hate this tribe because they eat something the others deem holy and so on and so forth. It's awful and we kill each other daily over these things. There are wars going on right now as we speak because one country thinks they are superior to another and that gives them the right to murder anyone who stands in their way.”
He took her hand in his and studied it, turning it over in his palm to inspect each elegant finger before looking up to meet her eyes. “I find the shade of your skin lovely.”
