The shuttle landed in a valley of wind dancing grasses. A river flowed through it, heedless of the name it had once been given. The sea glittered in the east. Mountains rose snow topped in the north and the west. Red pines crowded the jagged hills in the south. A pinkish blush smudged the horizon of a deep blue sky, cradling—as gold does diamonds—the white star that stared balefully down on the upturned face of Theta Mars.

  The second lieutenant of the ship Divine Messenger, the shuttle pilot, and a single engineer stepped down from the hatch of their vessel, and stood among the flattened and charred indigo grasses. They needed no masks to breathe the air, no suits to shield them from the radiation of the pale sun, and no weights to hold them planet bound. This was a place that had been shaped as if by the hands of god to receive the legions of mankind.

  The three were the first guests the lonely mars-like planet had hosted in a quarter century. They did not wander. They were not welcomed. Though no ambassador had come to greet them upon making planetfall, they knew they were watched.

  The second lieutenant traced the undulating line of the river. It meandered as does any wild thing, chasing joys and whims and ease. On its banks and in the waist height grasses that twirled and sang to the petulant stroking of the wind there was no sign of ruin. Not a hillock of rubble, a charred husk of a building, a half remembered leveled span where autos might have trundled. He might have thought, had he not spent the voyage at the maps terminal, that they had landed in the wrong valley. There was no trace above the red soil that this had been the site of a sprawling colony city.

  All that remained of it was ash to feed the roots of the dancing grasses.

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  They arrived in the valley as a shadow out of the sun. The wind of their wings stirred the grasses before the shuttle, the talons of their clawed limbs sinking into the red soil. Their coming was swift. If, thought the second lieutenant, they had been tasked with the death of the visitors, they would have managed it before the shuttle crew noticed their presence.

  A white animal had landed in the valley, cloaked in a shimmering skin of iridescent scales. Membranous wings rose from its second shoulders, the white light of the sun shining through them, illuminating a tracework of blood vessels. A long tail slithered through the grass behind it, the deepest point of its narrow chest brushed by the tallest of the blue blades. Plates of natural armour covered its muzzle, climbed in ridges over slit-pupiled, fractal filled eyes, and flared into a crest at the back of its arrow-shaped head.

  The shuttle crew had never seen an animal of its ilk before, and yet it was familiar. A fairy story from the mother world made flesh. The beginning and the end of the troubles of the now defunct colony. It was a wyrm, the apex of Theta Mars.

  The wyrm stood marble still, a statue to evolution’s glorious humour. The second lieutenant had a moment to doubt. A moment to remember the stories of fyre. A moment to look at the valley wiped clean—cauterized—of the trappings of mankind.

  A woman stepped forward, from nothing, as the fear of the wyrm had blocked sight of her in the minds of the shuttle crew.

  She was young and plain. Brown hair trailed down her back in the uneven splendor of locks never cut. A white silk cloak floated around her, shrouding her body from shoulders to ankles. Her skin held the soft glow of a planet born colonist. Her brown eyes held the burning heat of the wyrm that stood behind her in place of a shadow.

  “We are Abalone Shell on the White Beach, emissary of Theta Mars,” she said in trade pidgin. The wyrm did not speak.