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Mirage: "NOW"

It had been long enough. Mirage knew that she couldn't expect to bring a dragon aboard the ship and not be noticed - especially by the other dragons. Since dear Vanya was a rider, he'd know. Instantly.

Treason and she had remained at the Ring of Fire for more than two years, as their dragons grew. (How undead-dragons could do that, like eating and other such functions of normally living things, was a complicated affair and not one which Mirage or Treason wanted to explore fully.) So Mirage's young new body had a chance to mature a little more, and in Treason's opinion she grew more beautiful and fascinating every day.

Sometimes she caught him gazing at her, then shaking himself as if from a trance. She had that effect on people, particularly males, and for once, Mirage found she truly enjoyed it.

I like it too, Kalyanin blurted out, making Mirage realize that she herself was staring out into the distance looking at the brilliant Ring above the mountain. Males are... um, really fascinating. Aren't they? Why don't you and Treason become mates? You like him, and he loves you.

"Kaly, every man loves me," Mirage sighed and laughed. "And he's my friend, it would feel ... weird to be with him. Besides," she swatted the dragoness on one of her feathery antennas, "he's one of my distant descendants! If we were to get together I'm afraid I would have a very strong chance of conceiving and that would be out of the question."

It seemed as though Kalyanin was disappointed by this news, for she truly thought that Treason was a nice guy. She went off to sulk, leaving Mirage alone with her thoughts again.

How would she come to explain herself to Vanya?

I've spent so long away from him, so close and so far, only able to see him... Mirage thought to herself. What if I just walk right up to them all? Surely they couldn't hate me in public...

"No one will hate you," Treason said, startling her. "And no, I was not reading your mind, Mirage, it's written all over you. You're consuming yourself over such a thing." He fluffed his shoulders out, and as his feathers were settling, added, "From your memories, I have gathered that you never used to dwell over things too long before acting upon them. I think perhaps we've stayed here long enough - you do not need any more time to worry."

Mirage was going to protest but then realized he was right. She was not really an impulsive woman, but she was usually quick on her feet.

"Maybe I'm just out of practice," she said while standing and brushing the dirt from her skirt. "Let's go, Treason," she laughed and they headed toward the dragons.

The pair who had brought them here had been plotting all the while too, it seemed, because they had it in their heads that they knew how they could get back aboard just barely shy of the moment they'd gone - 'timing it' they'd heard the term somewhere in the Nexus. Since Benyidith and Kalyanin could not teleport themselves, the trait not as universal as some dragons believed, the others were there the whole time too. They missed their home, so they were quick about porting back to it with the foursome.

***

They arrived in the main flight dome, in the middle of the ship's 'night' cycle. Most of the dragons were asleep and none of the riders were here just now. That gave them time to locate a place for both the large new arrivals to stay. Beny, with his flaming wingsails and fringe, stood out on the grassy ground and illuminated the area with a strange glow.

He's very pretty in the dark like this, Kaly spoke to Mirage, But I am always afraid he'll singe my feathers!

Good, because I don't want you getting tangled up in mating before you find the right partner for it, Mirage replied. And believe me, I know for right partners...

She did know. Over her years alive Mirage, while not the prolific parent that her father Marad was, had had more than thirty children and raised almost twenty of those herself. She hardly had much choice in bearing so many offspring, being hyperfertile and all.

Mirage wondered... Would she really be that way again? Would she throw herself at the nearest man until he gave in? That wasn't how she wanted it to be - and certainly not how she'd allowed herself to be in all but the rarest of times before! Maybe she could use that to her advantage here, when reintroducing herself to the others... Maybe.

"I thought I recognized that scent," a deep voice made Mirage's blood go cold - she thrilled to that sensation and then remembered why it was happening. She turned away from her beautiful feathered undead-dragon, to see Vanya standing in one of the wide archways that led into the dome.

"Hello, Vanya," Mirage said with only a fraction of the confidence she wanted to use.

Vanya paused, good and long. Whether he was angry with her or elated, even she couldn't detect. Apparently, Kalyanin could.

She bounced up to him, towering over him even though he was one of the tallest men in the ship, and her feathery antennae bobbed over his face.

It's him! It's him! The one you love so much! I'm so happy to meet you! She practically dove into Vanya's arms, but Mirage gave a stern mental command and cleared her throat, calming the ditzy dragoness down. Well it is him, she said more subdued. Eventually even the boisterous female realized that it was time to be quiet - she went and found Beny.

Mirage stood still as long as she could, and tried to keep her periwinkle-blue eyes up, but eventually failed to do so. Vanya stood as though frozen, not angry but not friendly either.

That didn't last a moment longer than it had to either. He took four great strides toward Mirage, and picked her up to embrace her as they had never before.

"I knew it was you, I knew it," he whispered fiercely into her ear, "I felt something, like the dead would sometimes speak through me, I felt it. Felt you - for the first time one of the spirits was still here."

"But not a spirit any more," Mirage said, crying. "I'm alive, alive..."

"Thanks to Treason," said a woman's voice, Viridia the mistress of the ship and basically everyone's ancestress. "I am sorry we've had to decieve you Vanya, and everyone else who will so wish to see you again, dear Mirage." She remained far enough away that Vanya and Mirage didn't feel obliged to part from their embrace.

"You're... shorter," Vanya said.

"I'm hardly two decades old!" Mirage said, "And you've grown taller every time we set down somewhere..."

"Oh he has not," Viridia pshawed, and left them alone, laughing to herself down the hall.

***

Contrary to what anyone (shipboard or reader) might have thought, Vanya and Mirage did not have mad weasel sex that night - nor the next. They waited, both of them seeming to have the same idea that she just wasn't grown enough. Perhaps they would wait for her first hyperfertility event, or perhaps not. But either way, they decided silently to merely be by one another and talk.

As one might expect, Vanya was a bit put off by the deception of the revival. But he understood why, too. Had she appeared as a young infant or child, he would have grown too protective of her to treat her as he had before - an adult. They spoke at length of how she had survived, and more than once Vanya rang Treason on the ship's communication network to thank him. But her survival as a spirit, before then, was what Vanya was interested in and most curious about.

How so very few of the spirits from old Zekira had survived - he knew there were one or two others, and like Mirage, he did not speak of them. They weren't always welcome spirits, being powerful enough in life to have lasted more than a million years in spirit form? Mirage had only touched through Vanya once or twice while she was dead, using her own powers throuh him. As a conduit, this immortal body of Vanya's was ideal. It all but ruined him though, on Zekira.

"I wonder though," Mirage asked as they strolled through the higher areas of the flight dome as their dragons chased one another in the air, "this new place we're going to, this Planet Twenty? The people there shine brightly in my mind. Even Kaly can feel them, can't you dear?"

The dragoness trilled happily in her last pass around the dome before she tired and landed near their artificial pond. (Well truth be told everything was artificial, but here in the dome it was all big enough and real enough to be 'the pond' - and Jolie welcomed the intrusion along with her water-born dragons.)

"They will be able to be trained up," Vanya said, having been told of the psionic strength - he had no way to witness it himself, all his own 'powers' rested within his body.

"Then will they become ghosts?" Mirage asked.

"I would imagine so," Vanya pondered. "We'll be around to see, anyway. You will -- see them I mean," Vanya chuckled. "I just almost hope they don't start using me like the others did..."

Mirage pawed at his shoulder, "aww, they were helping people. I was helping people."

"At the cost of their own energy," Vanya said. "I would think that in the future I want to warn them not to do that..."

Mirage and he spoke about such things until they reached the control room up front in the ship, where Viridia was instructing the pilots where to place the ship into orbit.

((For more of what happens next view the Twelve and One tribe page!))

***

Their new home, now called Zekira the city in honor of their old homeworld, was shaping up nicely. There were numerous members of the Zekiran ship who could manipulate matter, or just plain build things with their hands. The locals however, were of far more use than anyone imagined. Their powers were so like the Zekirans, only in their infancy!

Mirage was very fond of the tribe that they had befriended, but they were all the way across the ocean. She was hardly going to fly with Kaly across that much water! The cheetah kin didn't much care for water journeys, and that was another thing they and the Zekirans had in common! Though she was shapely and had the right amount of padding on her still-growing body, Mirage like all Zekirans tended to sink rather than swim...

But she was also finding that the local Steedlike kin were enjoyable company. While she'd never really liked riding or owning them on Zekira, Mirage certainly had an appreciation for their form and strengths. These weren't the winged kind, like they brought with them from their world - who may even become wild out here, no one quite knew what they and the dragons would do - and they were humanoid. But they also had strong mental powers of perception and calming. More in groups than anything else, they were still herd creatures after all, the horse kin gathered around Mirage when she would come down to the river side port.

Not just because she rode beautiful Kalyanin, who was a big hit with the locals of any breed. Mirage, they said, had a mind and spirit that they had never seen. She felt odd pangs of ... shame? Embarrassment? Unease? When they looked at her and knew that she'd been dead all that time.

But they never mentioned any mistrust, they were more often than not asking about how to do a particular thing, or how best to train themselves to work alone, or at a distance... All things she felt quite comfortable with teaching.

Suddenly though, Mirage wanted to do something else.

She wanted to photograph them. After all, for decades on Zekira she made her fortune at that task. She wasn't even sure if the world had camera equipment. They were more than a little primative out here. Would they have developing chemicals? Would she simply need to learn to paint instead?

Fortunately, the Zekiran colony ship had more than enough in the way of supplies. She had one of the mechanical-shapers make a camera and someone else fuse glass for a new distance lens. She had to have the right equipment after all. She would have to get used to the idea of electronic storage and printed copies instead of developed ones.

She chose as her first subjects (after a bit of re-training - it was millions of years! she couldn't be expected to jump back in and be good at it! ... okay she could, but ...) a pair of pregnant female horse kin. Mirage gazed at their glossy fur and long silky manes, almost giggling at how they were halfway imbalanced by their pregnancy. But they enjoyed the time they had in the early morning as the sun came up over the forest, beside the tributary river that fell from the mountain that the Zekirans had populated. They bathed, dried, washed their simple clothing, and relaxed talking to one another in their gruff voices.

Mirage captured every moment - well, sweet moments anyway. Sixty or seventy clicks later, as the sun had neared noon and the pair of women went off to help their tribe again, Mirage made her way back to the glade where Kalyanin waited for her. Everyone who got the chance to see her working - that is to say some dozen Zekirans and half that in Kin - stood enrapt with her professionalism, as well as her ability to seemingly vanish into the background and capture things that only nature ever had before.

She really was that good.

A few days later, once she'd had the chance to look through the results and narrowing it down to a few dozen she really liked (and the rest that everyone else swore were better work than they'd ever be able to do) she printed a number of copies out and went to the horse clan to distribute them. They went over very well indeed, for very few Kin had any permanent record of their own past. Now, at least two young would be able to look at their mothers and themselves before they'd dropped into the world!

They were fascinated but not in the way that a truly primative society would have been had they never seen a starport or had psionic powers! While the women praised her, others wanted to pay her - which of course Mirage flatly refused. This was something she wanted to do for the joy of it. Maybe later, she would take comissions and work for hire. But for now, she was interested in getting her life back.

One photo at a time, one dragon or inhabitant of Zekira City at a time, she did so.

***

Perhaps another year later, when Mirage was around 26, was when the Twelve and One (along with another smaller tribe) gathered and fought off an incursion of the Other - the chitinous race of non-human folk who had captured a third of the galaxy and wanted this planet for their own. Humans entered the fray as well - and finally the Zekirans and the dragons. Mirage did not fight, as that was simply something she didn't know how to do. She knew that Treason and his Beny had joined in, enjoying every moment of it.

What if they were hurt? Killed? Well - the dragons? It would be years before the Glenn colony here was established from the clutches of those paired up in the ship, and the Kin's dragons were all rather young. The Zekiran's dragons were all but elderly, having lived unnaturally long lives on the ship with their immortal companions. Perhaps all of their lives depended upon their rider or bond? Who knew.

Well, the genetic engineers could find out, but they didn't really bother yet. Again, it would be years before their City was even truly as built as they wanted it to be.

You are worried we do not have enough dragons? Kalyanin asked. I would like someone to talk to more often, I do not like it when Neres Storm visits, she is talkative but she is very difficult to shut up sometimes. Do you know what that's like?

Mirage sighed and laughed to herself that yes in fact she did...But the dragoness was right, she did worry about the others. If they were injured? And the Kin... they only lived so long. They had shorter lives than typical as well - it took many generations to breed out and engineer animal life spans out of Zekirans with animal traits as well. With the Zekirans help perhaps the Kin here would live longer, but that too was out of their grasp so far.

Mirage stood and sought out Viridia's mind, then mounted Kaly to ask a favor of the elder.

"One or two of Vanya's.... others?" Mirage said, "had been there, it is a starport after all. It would be nice to visit a higher tech-level place now and again."

"Well I can't see why not," Viridia said, tapping her fingers against a book, "but would Kalyanin come with you? Would that affect the outcome? And she's no longer a small dragon," Viridia glanced behind Mirage and noted with a grin that the flighty dragoness was chasing her own tail feathers. "It would require a strong teleporter to do that."

"Yes, I know," Mirage said, "we have those in quantity, though," she gave the elder woman a strong image of several of the 'White Valley' Zekirans who still even now somewhat sequestered themselves in their own little section of the mountain. Some of them were made of energy. Some of them had never had a body to begin with.

They could travel the Nexus as adeptly as any dragon, and with the amount of time they'd had to practice Mirage was sure that they would be able to ride with her on Kaly's back and bring them to Star City's companion: the Abstract Destiny.

Now that she knew well what would be expected of someone at a dragon hatching, Mirage had time to pack her few things (her camera! more memory for it! the beautifully woven and colorful sarape wraps that the horse Kin had given her!) and mentally prepare. Kaly clearly remembered her own hatching, in fact she remembered before her hatching. To Kalyanin, Mirage was eternal - she had always been and would always exist. Their minds might as well have been joined at the moment that Kaly was conscious in her shell, even though thousands of light-years separated them at that time. The dragoness could pick through Mirage's memories, and often had an inadvertent insight from one of them.

I want to find a sister, not a mate, Kaly asserted. It would be nice to have someone ... that looks up to me.

"You want practice for when you become a queen," Mirage said, "I can understand that."

You have done it tons of times!

"Hardly tons!" Mirage squeeked, as they waited for the teleporter to arrive. He was a strange naga-bodied male with what looked like electrical fields for wings. Mirage could tell he was intensely powerful but in very narrow ways. Narrow, exotic ways - the powers that the White Valley people had put together with their isolation. He asked Mirage to provide him with their destination, so she gave him the image of the Abstract Destiny's main dragon-sized hall.

"It will have people in it, though," Mirage said, looking at the printed-out plastic sheet. "I think this was taken of it when it was first made."

"It doesn't matter, I know where to go," he said. Momentarily - literally avoiding every moment of the Nexus as traveled by dragonback - they appeared on the Abstract Destiny's deck. A few people jumped out of their skins with surprise, but Mirage's mental command of calming influence had that settled quickly enough.

They made their way to the hatching bays and information center, where Mirage had a strange sensation of shock.

"It says this ... biosynth," she claimed while looking at a tack board having lots of notes on it, "involves pure hearted folk... Ones who aren't deceptive..." Her stomach dropped. Like a stone, like a great weight settled into her through her tightening throat and into her gut. "Oh Kaly, I lied for so long, I made Treason lie for me, I kept myself from Vanya all that time... What if they won't come ... what if--"

You held back the truth, my rider, because you knew that the truth would hurt him, and you would never want to hurt Vanya. I like him, his dragon, everything about him. And he forgave you for telling Viridia to keep the secret. Kaly fluffed herself up, I do not think that keeping a secret for the right reason is a bad thing. It is not a mean secret, you are not evil. I will make sure they know that!

That almost made Mirage run for cover, the thought of her dragon - airheaded as she was - defending her own actions? Well, there was nothing for it now, they were here and this was the clutch that she wanted to stand for. If they decided she was not up to their standards, then she would ... well, maybe wait for another. Or something. Her hands fidgeted, her mind fluttered.

You are not like this when you are at Zekira City, Kaly reminded her bond. You like being around lots of people all the time, so if you have two of us to keep you company maybe you won't be so nervous when you're alone.

Mirage hugged her dragon's fluffy neck, "thank you Kaly, I needed that. Let's go find somewhere to stay..."

**Next**

In contrast to her intelligent bond, Kalyanin is somewhat of an airhead. She has a tendency to be tactless and jumpy, sometimes not thinking to seek out the most logical solution to a problem. Her sweet and gentle temperment, however, redeems her view in most people's eyes. She only wants the best for everyone, truly; though before that is her desire to make her bond happy. While Mirage is so 'experienced' and cool-headed around the men, Kaly' is much more shy when it comes to boys; but with her slightly ditzy nature and surprising photographic memory, she can't help but be charming.