Inside the temple was water. Cold, pure spring water from the home continent, floor to ceiling, blue-tinged and unbreathable to the human lung. Water was a contradiction, both life and death at the same time. In their airtight suit, Linear waddled carefully into the temple’s fluid interior, past elaborate and porous columns of bone and metal, down the gilded silver steps, toward the whale-skull altar in the center of it all. Light flickered in the periphery of their vision: piscine ribbons of intent, prowling the edges of the temple. Yare was hungry and resentful as ever. Hir hatred permeated the water, sending prickles crawling up the skin on Linear’s arms.
Don’t be absurd, Linear thought. Zie can’t possibly be doing that. It’s just a trick of the body. Yet Yare was a god, and who knew what gods were capable of?
Linear approached the skull and nestled the offering into one of its massive openings, saying the correct things at the correct time the way they’d memorized it. In the shallows of nighttime they often wondered if their impropriety was part of the reason Yare was so angry all the time.
The light ribbons swirled in the water, thickened, and coalesced into a shape. Axis like an eel, fins and scales a rainbow, a crown of white all loose in the water. Linear was familiar with this form of Yare’s; they had seen it often enough.
But something went differently this time. Instead of solidifying into a serpent—the way dragons were always depicted in pictures and tales, the way they usually presented themselves to humanity—the deity’s borders kept changing, shrinking into ever more compact forms, until what stood before Linear was a familiar shape. Human. No—not quite: humanoid. Bipedal. Absolutely not human. Eyes black, skin white, hair still that wild crowning halo. A rare form, one only fit to be witnessed by the most holy of the holy. Certainly not by a convicted criminal like Linear.
Yare blinked, and moved hir very bloodred lips. “So. I see it’s you.” Their voice, transmitted through water, was the sound of glass breaking over sand.
Linear bowed, unsure of what to say. Their rushed and deeply begrudged training taught nothing in the way of conversing with the gods. Yare in particular was known for being aloof. Zie never spoke to humans, instead letting hir desires be known through signs in the wind and water. How did one engage in small talk with a god? Linear didn’t know, so they thought it best they kept their mouth shut. They’d been doing that a lot lately, trading their thoughts for silence. If only this lesson had been learned earlier. Keeping their mouth shut could have kept them out of trouble.
Yare said nothing for an uncomfortably long time, simply staring at the hunched-over form of the priest-penitent until they unrolled from their bow. The water danced between them. Nervous energy built in Linear’s spine and bloomed into their body. Should they say something? Was this a test? Words bubbled haphazardly in their forebrain. Afraid of what might happen, Linear clenched their jaw to keep all those loaded syllables inside. The god’s void-black eyes were a knife upon them, carving off pieces of flesh and will until Linear thought they would collapse inward.
There had to be a right thing to say. Which means that everything else would be the wrong thing to say, and so therefore it was best to say nothing at all. Eliminate that risk. Fear swirled in their gut, watery and treacherous.
The god spoke again. “We are to spend a long time together, you and I.”
“Yes,” Linear said, through the glass of their helmet. “Ten years.”
“As each other’s only company.”
“Yes. It is our fate.”
Hair tendrilled around Yare’s face as zie moved. The dragon looked amused, and that sent more fear through Linear. A god’s amusement was a dangerous thing. “Fate. You believe in that, don’t you?”
“It’s not a belief,” Linear said, confused. “This is the path that was fated for me.”
Yare laughed: a splintery, stuttery thing. A pinch grew in the space between Linear’s ribs and their stomach. They shouldn’t have said that. That was almost certainly the wrong thing to say.
Since when had they become someone so afraid of saying the wrong thing?
“I look forward to our time together,” Yare said. Hir face split into a smile, revealing a zipper of bladed teeth. Behind that lay another sharply glinting row, and behind that yet another, so on and so forth.
Panic swept through Linear. They bowed vigorously, driven by crude instinct, then fled the temple. The water resisted their passage but they plowed through anyway. By the time they returned to the dry deck their pulse occupied their whole body down to the fingers and toes, and even when the last of the water glaze had sluiced off their suit, it had not returned to normal.
Linear made it back to the cloister deck on shaky limbs. The archpriest—a proud and senior man named Chase—took one look at them and said, “You were gone a longer time than usual. Something wrong?”
“No. Nothing.” Lying was definitely the wrong thing to say, but it felt less wrong than telling the truth. Linear hid their unsteady heart like a frightened animal in their chest. No one needed to know what the dragon had said to them.
To Linear’s relief, Yare did not manifest for the rest of the journey. The temple remained cold and silent when they brought the offerings each day. The water did not even stir. Linear knew Yare was there—the pressure of the deity’s presence was unmistakable, and escape from the ship was impossible anyway—but zie chose not to show hirself. That suited Linear just fine.
The next time they saw the god was during the ceremony. By then they had landed on 9Xcil-5L. The prison ship nested on the purple horizon, a finned alien thing against the acid sky. The priests stood in rows, sashes bright over their ENV suits, chanting as the dais-bearers brought the crucible containing Yare to the silver edge of the ocean. Linear was the last in the processional line, backed up by a dozen guards. They watched the bronze cauldron slip under the mercury. For a while, nothing happened except the constant, toxic pelt of the rain. Then the reflective surface began to bubble, and as it frothed it turned clear, as though the poison was being boiled from it. White light punched up from the expanding crystalline depths. As Linear watched, they imagined they saw the sleek white shape that was Yare gliding through the newly birthed water. Hir new home.
“It is done,” said archpriest Chase. The water deity was loose upon the world, free to bend it to hir will, in the way gods did. In ten years, humanity would return to the planet and christen it a new home, full of water to drink and air to breathe and land to till.
When the prison ship lifted from the surface of 9Xcil-5L, Linear was not on board. They watched the electric-blue take-off trail from the portcullis in their living dome, fastened to the rocky bones of the planet. Their long exile had begun.
The second of three times the dragon spoke to Linear, it was nearly a year later. By then the igneous land had begun to soften into soil and clouds amassed in the bruise-pink atmosphere with growing regularity. When they were not tending to the greenhouse or the upkeep of their dome, Linear spent their days walking the alien land, documenting these changes. In its native form, 9Xcil-5L had been geographically convenient, but environmentally hostile, as so many of these colony planets were. Temperatures below freezing for the most part, oceans liquid poison, atmosphere thin and sulfurous. It took a god to change something as vast as a planet. Yare brought water with hir, and water was the essence of life, water was the shaper of worlds. This barren rock was developing weather. An ecosystem. It was days yet before the blossoming of primitive life, but the vistas around Linear were taking on familiar shapes and colors. Their living dome sat on a plateau that overlooked the ocean, and in the absence of obscuring vegetation, Linear watched the months-long process of mercury being replaced by limpid gray, a widening swathe of crimpy surfaces that broke in soft peaks. In the controlled sanctuary of the living dome, Linear would strip off an ENV suit that had started to smell more like brine than burning vinegar.