It was a cool, comfortable night on Terrene, something rare in this season. Before them was the giant tapestry of moss, glowing brilliantly on the cave wall. There were others around, spread out in the monstrous cavern. They spoke softly and slowly, their voices little more than dull hums. From another cavern nearby came the songs of a choir. As Ka’leg ran one of his three fingers down her fleshy scales, each one beautiful and unique to him, the deep, airy tones echoed across the walls. They were the only young couple here, it seemed. The rest were much older or else here with their young children. A mother cradled her baby against a far wall; the father raised up one of his fingers against the cave rock. Ka’leg watched as a thick drop of water rolled over the tip of the father’s finger and into his palm, reflecting the purples and bright greens of the moss tapestry. Gently, the father carried the drop to the baby and let it drip down into its mouth. The baby’s eyes, all whites with pinprick pupils, opened wide.

Ka’leg turned back to her, pressing his round cheek against hers. There was the sound of the chants, the rhythmic drip of the water, and her breathing. There was the light of the moss, reaching from floor to ceiling, and there was her face, noseless and symmetrical and smooth. There was, somewhere deep in his chest, the sound of his small heart beating, slow and heavy. She smiled up at him, her nubby teeth less white than the eyes that took up much of her face. When they looked at one another, their already miniscule pupils shrunk. He smiled back and their hands pressed together. He locked his two longer fingers into hers, their small thumbs meeting within their palms.

He thought about leaving her tomorrow and his pupils dilated. They moved away from her and toward the tapestry again. It depicted an open field of green under a light blue sky streaked with purple and pink the color of a Tetran’s skin. At its center, in a velvet black that enveloped anyone who looked at it, were the silhouettes of two lovers holding one another. The tapestry was very old now, kept up by the great-grandchild of the original artist. The woman who created it many days before Ka’leg’s birth planted it from memory. She saw the scene, according to a story passed down through her lineage, in a remote part of Tetra, where the city did not reach. Ka’leg often wondered if such a place still existed there.

Tomorrow he would leave her and journey toward the planet’s surface. It would be the first time he ever saw it. There were stories, of course, told to children at school whose older brothers and sisters returned from service. There were two surface cities on Terrene, both built into massive craters under panels of thick, transparent stone that kept them from the boiling heat of the first planet’s rocky, empty surface. There was nothing up there, they said, but a thin layer of sand over smooth rock. They saw it only through the clear visors of their TR-Suits, military gear made of crystal panels. Through the suits they also hallucinated in the warbling heat of the surface. They spoke often of ghosts that never moved, phantoms that stood on the edge of the horizon. The ghosts, it was said, wore draped, tattered clothing, all in white. No matter how quickly you approached them, you could never reach them.

Ka’leg’s friends didn’t believe in the ghosts. Those, like him, who chose to enter the military after leaving school often joked about them. They were nothing more than fatigue and the adjustment of the senses to a new environment. Ka’leg wasn’t so sure. It was one of the few things he was looking forward to in his upcoming service. The military wasn’t his only choice, nor his first. Higher education was essentially out of the question for a young Terrene like him, whose brain was likely as small as his heart. But the work force didn’t seem so bad. Like his father, he could support a family on that path. Instead, like his mother but not at all to her liking, he was persuaded to leave his home and spend his upcoming days in the service. He worried only about homesickness. Terrene was in its one-hundred twentieth day of peace. Like so many before him, he would spend his days training and exploring the city to which he was assigned. He would spend his nights staring at the ceiling of his sleeping cavern and thinking of her. Of his parents, too, he imagined. His fourteen siblings and his friends, which were fewer in number.

The song from the adjacent cavern changed. The sounds became more guttural, less like humming, as the choir began to sing to the Dark Gods rather than the Light. They were in the half-day of darkness now, the rise of the sun many Tetran-months away. His class was one of the first to learn the Tetran calendar, one of the first to be born after the Interplanetary Cooperative. Such things didn’t affect the deep recesses of the planet like the one in which he lived. But when he arrived at the surface, they would. He would no longer barter for the things he needed, but would pay for them with paper money that was printed and shipped from another world. The bills would have faces he did not recognize and others, like the Terrene High Minister, that he did. The only non-Terrene face he would know, as countless failed quizzes in school taught him, would be Daniel Fallgood, High Priest of the Order of Tetra. Fallgood and the Order made most of Terrene nervous, but they complied with the Cooperative nonetheless. They used same currency and practiced fair trade between the planets of the system.

Not a word, however, was spoken about a shared religion. Ka’leg was happy about this, because he feared what would happen if the Light God ever returned to see the Mark of Tetra emblazoned on His world. From a distance, for now, the Order of Tetra seemed harmless enough.

“Troubled?,” she asked in Terrene. Ka’leg smiled. He loved her voice when it spoke in their native words. The Cooperative named Tetran its official language and so all were required to speak it fluently. But, when no one was around to hear, many spoke the tongue that came from deep within the world’s past. It sounded no different than the holy chants to those from other places in the system. Even Ka’leg could hear its musical beauty.

“Sad,” he answered.

Dur’ran pressed her face into his chest, the scales there separating slightly, allowing her to sink a little further into him. Those on her face were just as soft, softer even than the long bundle of hair that hung from the back of her head.

“Thinking of tomorrow?” she asked.

“Of you,” he responded.

“How long again before back to me?”

“Four days gone. Half-day home. Four days gone again.”

“Too long,” she said, rolling onto her back and putting her head on his naked lap.

“Every second too long,” he whispered, putting his face close to hers as he switched for one word to Tetran, noting time in a way that was still alien to them.

Dur’ran lifted her free hand and ran it over the back of his bald, clay-colored head.

“Together forever after that?” she asked. “Promise me.”

“Together forever after that,” he said. “Promise.”

They kissed then for a length of time that could not be named in any language, for it passed differently for them than for the rest of the system. The baby began to cry and the family left. Ka’leg, young and afraid and in love, didn’t notice.

When they left the cavern hand-in-hand, the choir was gone. There was only a black mouth before them, the candles extinguished. They passed its emptiness and stepped into the central cavern of their town, impossibly high and marked with doorways and windows flickering from the inside. Others walked from home to home, from shop to shop. Some sat on the edges of the fountain in the center of the cave, foaming blue water shooting continuously from a geyser surrounded by short, stone walls. Candles burned from floor to ceiling and Ka’leg imagined the stars he would see for the first time in the upcoming days. They would be beautiful, he knew, but not as beautiful as this. Not as beautiful as her.

An alleyway led them past more shops, many of these now closed. As they passed through it, distant music came to them again. Here, heavy drums accompanied the chanting. It was faster music, infectious and fun. The lyrics did not sing of the Light God or of the Dark, but about love and youth and the stories captured in the moss tapestries throughout the town.

Ka’leg wasn’t surprised to see a group of his friends from school standing outside the door to the youth cavern. When one, a tall male, spotted him, he shoved through the others and walked toward the couple. Samuel wore an unbuttoned black tunic over his torso and held a Tetran smoke-stick between the ends of the fingers on his left hand. He lifted it to his mouth as he approached them.

“Kal, I didn’t think you’d show,” he said, approaching with a hand raised. Rather than slap it as Samuel wanted, Ka’leg pulled the stick from his friend’s mouth and tossed it onto the ground.

“Kill you eventually,” he said with a smirk.

“Come on, man!” Samuel said, watching the stick hit a nearby wall and extinguish. “Those aren’t cheap.”

“Keep complaining, I call you by your real name,” Ka’leg said, before adding with thick sarcasm, “Samuel.”

Ka’leg and Dur’ran were greeted by the others as they pushed past Samuel, who ignited another stick that he pulled from his tunic pocket. They weren’t cheap, that much was true, but Samuel’s parents could afford them. They were part of the upper-class sect that tried to adopt Tetran culture after the Cooperative was signed. There were only a few and they usually associated exclusively with one another (much like real Tetran), but Samuel was alright. He and Ka’leg had been friends since they were children, back when his name was more traditional and much longer. This would likely be their last night together, though, as Samuel was heading to the higher education center. Ka’leg’s barracks weren’t in the same surface city and they would be a literal world apart from one another. Unlike Samuel, Ka’leg wouldn’t have regular breaks in which to come home.

The youth cavern was hot and loud. On stage was the drum choir, its singers jumping around one another in the same fashion as the crowd before them. As the people danced, they drank from clear rock cups filled with fluorescent liquid in blue, red, and pink. The Terrene were not by any account good dancers. From shoulders to tips, their arms and fingers hung down to their kneecaps, their legs always slightly bent outward. Their large, egg-shaped heads moved in strange patterns and they were easily exhausted as they could breathe only through their small mouths. Many Tetran and other species often referred to the Terrene as “Mouth Breathers,” a derogatory term that even those versed in upper culture rejected.

Without letting go of her hand, Ka’leg dragged Dur’ran out onto the floor. They pressed against one another, scales parting and rippling as they jumped around in the mass. The smell of sweat was heavy, but they were cooled by the water that fell from the ceiling, shaken from the rock by the thump, thump, thump of the drums. When they knew the words, they sang along. When they didn’t, they pressed their faces close together.

Samuel jumped past them every few songs, with a different girl each time. Other friends from school would hang around them for a while, dancing and trying to start conversations about the military. Some, like Ka’leg, would be shipping out tomorrow. Others, like Samuel, knew that they would likely never see those new soldiers again.

And so there was smiling and dancing and drinking and kissing. And when the last stick fell on the final drum, the world grew silent as the youth who had known each other for so long succumbed to the fact that things would now change. They shook hands and they hugged and they walked through the youth cavern doors knowing that it would never belong to them again.

Dur’ran stayed with him that night, which was frowned upon in these more conservative parts of Terrene. But gossip be damned, this was the last chance they would have for four long days. There, with the sound of water dripping...dripping...dripping from the doorway, with three of his younger brothers asleep on the other side of the room, they loved one another for the first time. And when she fell asleep in his arms, he looked through the doorway and into the living room, at the swirling blue-and-green tapestry that he took for granted. He listened to her breathing. He listened to the breathing of his young siblings, one of them less than ten days old. He listened to the drip that had been putting him to sleep since his first night after birth.

There, in the darkness, with this love around him, his tears joined the cadence of the rhythmic drops.