She led him into the elevating platform. There was a distinct shift, as if the cogs of the universe itself had come unstuck, and then the younger Vilithe rushed into the elevator with them, no longer bound by Time Stop- easy in memory, extremely difficult in real time.

  “I mean, I could hallucinate the whole place, I know it like the back of my hand- but you wanted to see my memories, right?”

  The Knight Leader looked back and forth between the two versions of Vilithe. They were both wearing the same thing, but the older Vilithe was clearly a psionic projection. He looked back at her younger counterpart. He couldn’t help but think that, though her pupils were completely black, it was as if the older Vilithe had lost a twinkle in those inscrutable, black depths. And yet, in the older Vilithe’s eyes there also seemed to be a resparking. No, more than that- a rekindling.

  The elevator shot up and the Knight Leader had to glance away from the illuminated panels along the sides of the elevator platform that shot from above to under, above to under, seemingly endlessly, as it reminded him far too much of Avecia’s drops. It took him by surprise when Vilithe sidled up behind him and folded her hands over his eyes for him. He put his hands up to clasp hers.

  As the platform rose, the older Vilithe couldn’t help but blurt out “-A dazzling place I never knew…”.

  “What?” a puzzled Knight Leader turned his head quizzically to one side as he shook her hands away and turned to her to gaze into her eyes. Wasn’t this her home? But then again maybe she was seeing it in a whole new way. Why was he thinking of the words ‘whole’ and ‘new’ in such high pitch?

  The younger Vilithe stood a little away from the couple, stock still and stoic, arms folded in impatience towards the elevator. But her older counterpart no longer cared if the Knight Leader thought it cringe, so uncontainable was her gaiety.

  She wrapped her arms around the Knight Leader, hanging by his shoulders she swung around him like a maypole, and he instinctively scooped her up by the waist so she wouldn’t fall as she belted, “But when I’m way up here-”

  On beat the Knight Leader sang, “-it’s crystal clear.”

  And in unison, “That now I’m in a whole new world with you.”

  Unbelievable sights and indescribable feeling.

  The Knight Leader paused. “World? Isn’t that an orcan word? Don’t we, uh, call it ‘realm’”? The corner of her lips curled up, and Vilithe just put a finger up to his lips. How did he even know this? He’d never stepped foot on Reath, much less Orca.

  And as if on cue to break any awkwardness that should follow, the platform slid to a stop right then, and the younger Vilithe, oblivious to her swooning observers, strode out into the top level of the Nimbus. Here, at the roof of the gryphantene structure, the hull above was made of entirely clear material. At their height, well above the thick clouds of Phyros, sunlight flooded freely over the garden.

  The Knight Leader nearly dropped Vilithe, still wrapped in his arms, racing ahead to check it out. They skipped and tumbled and freewheeled forwards, arms slung over each other’s shoulders.

  Green! So much green! And more colors than that! Rows and rows of onions, and thyme, all sorts of herbs, tomatoes and strawberries, coriander and cucumbers, bell peppers and blueberries, endless fields of lettuce. Or, not fields, though it seemed like a great green grass field of vegetables and fruits and herbs from dead on, but rather each plant was ensconced in a holder, all lined up in columns that seemed to go on, and on, all connected by an array of clear glass tubes with bubbling, rushing, green tinted water flowing through them. It was so that if one cared to look up or down, they would realize it was a great grid of green, not just one field but stacks of fields upon another. They stretched as far, and as high, and as low, as the eye could see. The Knight Leader was acutely aware of a little string of drool falling out the corner of his lips, even though he did not know the name, much less the taste, of all the different edible plants that he could see. The symphony of smells was mesmerizing.

  “How? This is insane! Did no one ever go hungry?”

  “No one. Clan Callethe treated our own like true sisters. As elvans should.” Vilithe could not help but feel a little smug. It wasn’t lost on Eidren, however, that she said ‘sisters’ and not ‘siblings’, but he didn’t think much of it because he wasn’t quite sure how sisters were supposed to treat each other in the first place.

  “How is it possible to grow so much food? In the sky?” He was flabbergasted.

  She couldn’t help but think to herself, hold your breath, it gets better- “The magick of hydroponics,” she replied with a cheeky grin. She motioned him to come closer to the tubes and inspect the alchemical wizardry within. “You see these tubes? We run nutrients directly into the water, and as the water flows past the root, the plants absorb the nutrients, but some also excrete other minerals that other plants-” she sprinted along, the Knight Leader quick at her heels, and she trailed her fingers along the tubes as she did, “-can use. We not only recycle precious minerals, but they grow faster, and taller, and free of disease.”

  The Knight Leader shook his head. As comprehension dawned, he realized that the giant cube of hydroponics had layers, each layer a different plant, each plant feeding the plants below it. It was a crystal lattice ecosystem, perfectly designed. How come such magick didn’t exist on Aryss? Did it even exist on Reath?

  Without missing a beat, Vilithe responded – he almost forgot she could read his mind so lost in the memory was he – “The problem is trapping enough air on Aryss in the first place. But here, the very presence of breathable air-” she spun on her heels, spreading her arms wide as she twirled “-is all you need to attain lift! All of the space you need, none of the sandstorms, none of the conflict!”

  “Could you build these on Reath?”

  Vilithe suddenly scowled, “She did.”

  And then the Knight Leader understood, for he still could piece together bits of lore in his broken mind, and by drawing supplementary understanding by sneakily scrying Vilithe, who seemed distracted in her unpleasant recollection, then knew that she was referring to the Empress, who had stolen Clan Callethe’s magicks to build her void reaching palace on Reath composed of three parts – the Celestial Escalator, which made it easier for dragons to enter the void, with no need of navigation through the Reathean Cage of orbiting debris, a single titanic spire that was anchored onto the Crown, a structure so massive that it too orbited Reath and indeed it was the Crown that pulled the supports of the Escalator up, so that it could tower so preternaturally tall at all.

  And then there was the Strata, a series of habitats for the upper echelon of the Clan, beneath only the Goddess, the Princesses, and Clan Amallark’s highest psions themselves, that branched out from the Escalator, buoyed by helium and hydrogen aerostats. The Knight Leader had never seen these things, but now he imagined that their structures would probably be very similar to these Callethean Nimbii. He pried no further.

  The younger Vilithe now was jogging towards the mess hall. She must have been late. The elder Vilithe turned her head to look back at her younger self and followed. She beckoned the Knight Leader to come.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  They entered a majestic circular dining room, members of Clan Callethe gathered around great round tables with lazy susans piled high with fresh fruits and vegetables. In the corner there was a Phyroan stove – spirit woven meats would be securely skewered on a spit and then dropped through an opening underneath, dangling from a long gryphantene chain, and when the meat dropped down kilometers below to the scorching heat of the troposphere it would quickly be yanked up, perfectly seared – being operated by a cook. With the rehearsed sureness of a master, she would alternate between slicing freshly pulled up blocks of the magick meat and skewering the next one to be dropped.

  Vilithe glanced at the Knight Leader, noticing the line of drool hanging off the corner of his mouth. She hallucinated it away, a ghostly wipe of his lips.

  “Want to try what it tastes like?”

  “I have never wanted anything more.”

  As the younger Vilithe feasted, the older Vilithe and Knight Leader placed projected seats next to her, sat back, and let the sensations pour all over their taste buds. The Knight Leader was surprised by the tartness of the tomatoes, he had imagined them to be sweet, especially after trying the strawberries. He thought the many little seeds upon the strawberry’s surface had to be spit out and Vilithe couldn’t help but clasp her giggles to hide them from him. The cucumber was so refreshing! How was it so cool? As far as the Knight Leader could tell, the gourd was of the same temperature as the rest of the fruits, so why did it feel cooler to the tongue? And then he tried the spirit woven meat.

  “Ohhh- ho- ho- Gods,” he closed his eyes and tried to exclaim his delight despite the illusion of his mouth practically overflowing with half masticated food. He had never eaten anything approaching meat before, it had all just been different tuber-based gruels formulated for rote-to-rote survival. He loved how it was both satisfyingly chewy and yet so soft once the buttery spirit forged fat melted in his mouth. Even when he was down to chewing gristle, he yearned to eke just another morsel of gamey, rich, umami flavor, and chewed and chewed until it fell apart to nothing.

  Vilithe took a moment to consider this was all an illusion, and that in reality the Knight Leader’s stomach was still churning with need, and it made her feel very bad about herself. He might eat more, and more, but it wouldn’t ever be enough. She decided to hallucinate extra fullness for him.

  Now she could feel the happiness radiating from his glowing repose, and she leaned back on her seat with her hands folded across her chest to bask in it. All the time her eyes were fixed on his orgiastic face.

  “This is the best rote of my entire life!”

  “Imagine all your rotes being like this.”

  The Knight Leader ran his fingers through his hair as he leaned back and looked to Vilithe once he had reached as far as he could without toppling backward. Now their faces were so close, they were but just a breath's length away.

  “No, I can’t. I really can’t.”

  The Knight Leader held her gaze and felt himself wondering if he should kiss her. But then he quickly banished the thought before Vilithe could pluck it out. After all, they were imaginarily teetering precariously on the hind legs of their chairs.

  Vilithe, of course, plucked it right out, but if she felt anything, she concealed it. “Let me show you my bedroom,” she said, seemingly nonchalantly.

  What she was concealing, of course, was a fast-racing heart, and an excited squeal that pitched too obviously eager for her modesty to allow the reaction to be unedited by hallucination of the Knight Leader’s senses. Encontro el príncipe azul. But she also forgot that the Knight Leader had stronger psionic intuition than most soldiers, and so now he sauntered after her, confident in his luck now.

  Past the mess hall, extending along one of the spokes off the top of the Nimbus canopy, was a hallway of plexiglas dome skylit rooms. Like a carapace’s spines, it protruded off the top of the Nimbus hull, giving each room a transparent view of the sky. And as the Nimbus soared along the gusting currents of gale draped across Phyros like ribbons, reaching up to three hundred clicks an hour, it meant limitless sunlight as the Nimbus traveled with the sun.

  “Welcome to my bedroom,” they stepped into one of the rooms, the two Vilithes and the Knight Leader, and the older Vilithe pirouetted as she presented her sleeping space, while the younger Vilithe hurriedly got undressed. The Knight Leader, in an awkward panic, turned aggressively away – she was still just a broodling! – and the older Vilithe laughed as she pushed him onto her old bed.

  It was a perfectly circular bed, packed to the brim with porous polystyrene under cotton sheets, and the Knight Leader felt himself sink deep into it. All he had ever slept upon before was hard hexcomb sleeping tubes. If he hadn’t just slept eighteen hours straight, he could swear that he’d fall asleep immediately upon landing.

  The room was sparse and spartan, but that also gave it a minimalist zenness. Peaceful. Ringed around the room were hangers for her various clothes – her basic psion’s jumpsuit for when she was milling about the Nimbus, various dragonrider’s suits of varying levels of protection for increasingly dangerous rider’s tasks, and of course an assortment of her own garments, like tank tops or dresses or simple baggy shirts to wear over her underwear on lazy rotes, jackets and cardigans and fuzzy coats for when the Nimbus ascended to colder heights – but they did not ring all the way.

  Across from the main entrance was another doorway, into which Villi had disappeared. Wisps of steam curled out from under the crack, and the Knight Leader could scarcely believe his sharp ears when he heard soft, subtle, sibilating sounds of a shower.

  “You have your own personal bathrooms?!” He turned his head to look at older Vilithe, now splayed upon the bed beside him, incredulously.

  She just smiled, because she was determined to kiss him now…

  But then something triggered.

  The rekindling embers of her memory had, in her blind passion, unwittingly stoked to roaring flame. Plumbing into such depths – where she was most vulnerable – had risks, when one is frayed.

  The entire room began to shake violently. The Knight Leader instinctively rolled off the bed and took a warrior’s crouch. Vilithe suddenly felt the deepest cold, so deep and icy in her heart that it felt like if she tried to hold tight to warm it, she would plunge into a wintry abyss. The sunny warm tones of her bedroom flashed burnt umber. The Knight Leader rushed to the skylight window to see wreathes of flame consuming a faraway Nimbus. His eyes followed streaks of light coming down from the sky to the unmistakable, unnerving aerial wriggling of-

  Dragons.

  Everywhere.

  Together- or say we’re only drea-ming.

  A whole new world! It was Princess Jasmine singing now, and Malevolent and the little bacta worked together to simulate a recreation of Vilithe’s own voice singing it. Vilithe of course was aware of their shenanigans and thought to tell them to cut it out, guys, but, after hearing her own voice lilt, couldn’t help but start singing herself.

  For Malevolent and the little bacta had made sure of it, so attached to their performance that they were not going to let him leave the duet unfinished.

  Hey, you know, Malevolent and the Little Bacta would make a great cover band name. Shut up, little bacta.

  That song is about losing your virginity, you know. Shut up, little bacta!

  Way to ruin the moment, thought Malevolent.

  She remembered now that Princess Jasmine was indeed her favorite Disney Princess. How strange to think of the word Princess so positively, instead of signifying the power crazed daughter duo of the Traitor Empress! She relished this rare remembrance. Just a little bit of herself, her identity, reclaimed.

  Of course it did.

  Clan Callethe had cracked the code, kept some cultured cells of a cryptic taurus to clone and craft, and so it tasted a lot better than Beyond, or Impossible, or, for that matter, any 3-D printed meat that the Godlikes ever managed to put together before they blew themselves up in the Million Wars.

  Oh, my love, my darling. I’ve hungered for your touch, a long, lonely time.

  These words just popped in her head, but she could tell this wasn’t the common tongue.

  You could say he was stoked to be getting laid.

  O! Water Hot is a noble thing.

  Ensuite. Ensuite!

  I knew it, Malevolent thought. The last dragon ride! Why did Vilithe take them all when? She had forgotten. Why was it always like this with elvans and their semi-organic brains?