She offers the rock back and adjusts her sitting position. I'm ready.

And-

Flowing lines of color that aren't quite color. A web of red and brown warmth, an aura of blue wetness. The feeling of being surrounded by vast structures, dwarfed by the world. This is all that remains of a proud animal. A thought, a memory, of defiance so thick you can almost taste it even unto death. By fighting, it shouts its existence to the world. Nothing will pass without tooth and claw being turned against it. With a small body that requires little sustenance it is weaker than the huge things that surround it but it knows that if it fights everything, nothing will find it worth the trouble.

And so: Anger, fury, spite at the world, and pride at its combative and confrontational way. It asked to die fighting a Draak instead of growing slowly quieter and sicker. An end its children would be proud of, an end that shows its instincts and body at their best. A Draak heard this and thought that it was good, and here is the fight whirling tooth and claw and pain and the struggle of two wills and - the animal died, fire in its eyes even at its last breath, and thought that it was a good death.

What was that?

That was my best attempt at singing what I see in this small treasure into your mind. I apologize if it was too strange.

I think it is beautiful.

I mean what were the contents, the - creature -

Oh. I call it Furyclaw - A species of small predator that lived on Oldhome. Its evolutionary strategy was hunting small herbivores while being fierce and dangerous enough that larger predators would usually find the risk of injury not worth the meal it would be. This is what I remember of it challenging me, stored into hard stone once I learned the technique to do that, so that I could never forget. It's not quite a song-photograph in the sense of recording something exactly as I sensed it... Perhaps it was a bad choice to show you. I wanted to show off one of my favorites.

I don't know that it was a poor choice, I just needed a little more context. Are they sapient?

...They're smarter than fish and insects and rodents but not nearly so clever as a Draak?

It seemed like a pretty complex thing to want - a good death.

Is it? Many creatures have reasonably complex desires, even if their minds are small. Most creatures do not want simply to eat, avoid being eaten, and reproduce. Furyclaw would not have understood going to a different world and meeting aliens, it could not have added two numbers or done any kind of tactics or strategy or long-term planning... But it understood death, and it had feelings, and it felt the difference between two kinds of death and was more repelled by one of them, and it knew that Draak are mighty and dangerous.

I've had cats, I know they're more complicated than bacteria... conceptualizing death seems different.

It certainly feels to me like the animals in my territory have an understanding of things beyond mere senses and reactions. If a living thing is going to conceptualize anything, why not creation and death? Those are the first lessons sung to the egg, the two things all life experiences no matter what it is.

Are most of the animal species from your world telepathic like you, if less so?

Much less so, but yes. Almost all animals on Oldhome were telepathic to a greater or lesser extent even without a Draak involved. Very few on Newhome. It would be interesting to see if any Amentan animals are natively telepathic.

I wouldn't expect it but it would certainly be curious to learn.

One of my theories is that there was a general evolutionary race for greater intelligence and telepathic ability, facilitated by the existence of telepathy. But my best field has always been physics, not biology.

Does developing telepathy provide more of an advantage in an environment where other creatures have it?

I expect so, yes. My other most likely theory is that the entire Oldhome ecosystem, Draak included, was deliberately or accidentally seeded or possibly designed at one point. It is hard to tell. I do not rest my theory solely on the creation myth, there is evidence, which is tedious to explain... Broadly, the fossils seem wrong for life to have developed from single cells.

Huh, I'm not green but my understanding is that our fossils do seem that way.

There is a lot of stuff out there. Would Tapa be interested in learning about the aliens I know of? I assume and encourage you to think I may be biased and make your own determinations later.

We'd love to hear all about them!

Humans. They seem a lot like you in many ways... Things there are no words for, impressions. Your love for each other, your complex hierarchies, the creation of vast quantities of tools and strange art... I was much younger and less understanding when I last saw humans. I do not know as much about them as I would like and I do not dare return to Oldhome in case they have devised some way to follow my trail to Newhome. When humans first came, they flew in great starships like mine. The ships deposited colonists and began clearing land and killing Draak. They saw Draak as beasts and pests, something dangerous to be exterminated, and began this project with guns.

When the Draak rose up to fight back in the first war, these lesser ships were mostly destroyed and we began hunting the colonists to eliminate their threat. Then, greater ships came - larger vessels, and in vast numbers. They used weapons that we still do not understand, that seemed to tear apart space itself. A famous Draak invented an incredibly destructive technique or tool to fight back with. It could burn entire forests to cinders in seconds. Very little is known about the course of the first war from that time on and many, many things were destroyed. Only Draak living secretly and remotely escaped destruction, but the human ships left and never returned again, leaving their colonists behind, unable to sustain their technology.

And centuries later, they had pried themselves out of their suffering with tools of bone and stone, then bronze, then steel, and multiplied to tens of millions. That was when we knew they would end us and the second war began. Humans. Aggressive and expansionist.

The Surveyor Orbs. I discovered and analyzed reflective spheres of machinery that were travelling methodically over the planet. They did not respond to any attempt at communication, but I eventually determined that they were searching for some natural resource and sending their results to a distant controller. I was not able to tell what the resource was, or where the controller was, even when I began intercepting their transmissions. Eventually they self-destructed. Surveyors. Confusing but benign.

The Collectors. The aliens I adapted the white projection from sent robots. They busied themselves collecting samples of every species of life on the planet, non-violently. They would 'taste' plant leaves, take small samples of blood or other things from animals, never killing. They also took on the forms of beautiful versions of female humans and Draak and tried to get males to have sex with them. I believe they wished to create new humans and Draak in some far-away place. When I refused and demanded an explanation, the robot seemed to be replaced by an alien who conversed with me, but they refused to explain themselves, only saying that they meant no harm and that I would not understand. Collectors. Confusing and worrying, but ultimately benign.

The Miniscs. A race of insect-sized bodies which formed a gestalt mind capable of complex reasoning and intricate tasks. They landed in a meteorite on Newhome and expanded quietly, building a glittering city in miniature, until the one who is now called Guardian of the Great Green heard their minds singing. They claimed they were sent on a sacred mission, and asked to trade - the Guardian would collect samples of local species and they would create Treasure for her. She accepted, and the Miniscs lived peacefully without reproducing any further. I do not know what ultimately became of them or what their purpose was. Miniscs. Confusing but benign.

The Blueblight. An extremely effective and aggressive parasitic fungus-like species. Even a few cells can cause an infection that kills in days or weeks. Full-grown Blueblight infections have visible minds in the song, but the individual spores do not, making them extremely dangerous. They appear alien and almost mechanical in the song, growing, developing, and releasing spores in ways that seem designed rather than evolved. It would consume many, many kinds of things if left to spread, though it was less good at overcoming plants than animals. I don't know where it came from. Possible rogue bioweapon.

And lastly... I am not actually sure it was an alien or a disease... But some humans became 'infected' with a new pattern of thoughts and actions that significantly altered their personalities, caused them to want to live away from uninfected humans, and caused them to want to kidnap other humans and torture them. Sometimes the tortured humans would become 'infected' as well, or they would die. It was... Disturbing. The humans eventually killed them all.

Well, that's not the most promising possible group of species to have as neighbors. I think I'm glad we met you first. Draak didn't talk to the humans to explain that they weren't beasts, or this went ignored?

I don't know. I was not yet created then, and Darktooth the Wise is the only one who remembers the first war firsthand, and he says that it was already too late. They must have realized we were intelligent when we became organized and used weapons against them, but... I simply do not know the history there. You keep better records than Draak do.

Why are the Draak records sparser?