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I was afraid to go to her, not because I did not return her love, but because it would make saying goodbye all the more difficult...

"I AM SPARTASTICUS!" I shouted against the icy blasts of unceasing, howling wind."I am the Khranoth cheetah master of Lightning War, the wielder of the War Hammer, survivor of the Martangi Uprising, victor in the final battle of Worlds!"

The words fell like blood upon sand, nourishing nothing, and I sank to my frozen knees in the snow that blasted all around me.Victory. The word was ashes on my tongue. What victory for my people, my country, my world, when we had unleashed unspeakable power, and condemned this planet to its final heat-death? When nothing remained but ice, emptiness, the approach to absolute zero... the loss of my heart's very reason for beating...

In the days before war, my love and my honor were all that sustained me, all that I needed. Trained by the finest to become finer still, I was part of the most elite of all our warriors. Ours was a species known for its speed, and we were the fastest of all, not merely in running and endurance but in the ways of the Lightning War - armed and unarmed combat, dealt in reigning blows of damage and death that no enemy could withstand. An honorable people, we did not seek power or war, but if the challenge was brought to us, we responded in swift and bloody defense. Some left us to be their own hunters of fortune, but their leaving was permanent. Legends of the history of our people preceded them, and the price of a Khranoth's assistance was high. The price to the hunter was that he could never return home. None of us wished what he might bring back with him; the stink of blood money offended all noses.

We explored worlds peacefully, making friends not through the threat of war but by the promise of peace. We had our traders, our explorers, our settlers (when allowed), even our sight-seers, and all worlds we encountered were treated either with respect to land and non-sentient life - what we called "innocent planets," where we visited carefully, leaving as little pawprint as possible - or respect to the sentient races we discovered, where we worked in small numbers until we could learn and understand what the races of those worlds wanted of us. Sometimes, they wanted us simply to leave, which we did, and in peace. With such worlds, we did perform one act of subterfuge: We hid a beacon in an unpopulated area, a simple signal that, from time to time, reported on the overall status of the planet and its inhabitants. Someone on that world was always trusted with the secret, to act as a call for help if required. Only four times did a trusted being on such a world try to use it for their personal gain; each time, we came, removed the beacon, and removed the threat and all its followers. Those worlds comprised a third class - what we called "kithood planets," with beings not yet advanced enough either to share our peace or risk our wrath. They were in no way harmed, merely left to develop. When they were united and advanced enough to find us, they knew what they were in for - peace or annihilation. We brook no middle ground.

It is why the war took us by surprise.

Wrapping my cloak and slender tail around me, bushing my fur to trap air, rubbing my numbing paws together... none of it made me warmer. I was chilled throughout and could not find a reason within myself to find warmth. We had lost so much. I could not save this planet, its people, and my love... my sweet love, so far from me... I would have shed tears, had they not have turned instantly to ice on my muzzle. Even that expression had been denied me.

The first beacon went silent some three years ago. No report of change, just the sudden loss of signal. Ships in the area went looking and discovered the first horror that actually shook us to the bone: The planet was gone. Not that the races were killed, not that the surface was destroyed, not that the globe had been broken into rubble. The planet itself was gone. Vanished. The two moons that had orbited it had become rogues; without the counterbalancing effects of the planet they orbited, their own orbits around their associated sun and each other would send them into wildly more eccentric paths. Neither was likely to escape the gravitational pull of their sun, but they had in effect lost their tether and could go where they pleased. Neither had a beacon, as neither was inhabited; a footnote in the pages of our scientific history would suggest correcting this oversight, to get more data in future.

The people of that noble world were allies, perhaps even friends; with the exception of some few thousand of their race who were off-world at the time, all had simply disappeared. We found them at once and brought them into our ranks and families, even as a second beacon disappeared. Our military and scientists made ironic history by (for the first time) agreeing to a course of action. All of our beacons were activated, their secrecy far less important than the possibility of saving the races involved. We sent out information to all of our friends and allies, even to our enemies - none of whom claimed responsibility and, in fact, were feeling just as threatened, as one of their own planets had gone missing in its entirety.

Our people were not notified of this immediately. We are a well-informed population, perhaps more so than most, but too much was yet unknown when the phenomenon first struck. By the time it became known to all, we had discovered that seven inhabited planets, in seven star systems, had literally been stolen out of their place in the cosmos. The totality of our forces had been rallied, readied, prepared for that which no one could even begin to comprehend, much less prepare for. Our kind were spread across many planets by this time in our history, and as yet, none where we had been granted a colony had been threatened. The most grave contingencies were undertaken as every member of our species - yes, even those who had otherwise been outcast - sought out the enemy to fight.

The pattern was broken when one planet upon which we had set a beacon had gathered information before the worst had happened. A completely unexpected fluke in the frequencies of our transmissions had interfered with the cause of the planetary disappearances. We Khranoth were not merely warriors of fur and bone, fighting only the physical world. The techniques of the Lightning War were born of our understanding of lifeforce itself. The mind, the heart, the soul, the intangibles of sentience - these were at the very basis of our species existence for untold centuries. Each of us was taught, from kithood, how to handle the essence of our Selves. It was what allowed us to Know, to See, and in some cases even to transcend our Selves.

I crumpled where I stood, in the howling ice and snow, and dared to breathe a name into the frozen void._Veristias..._Ghostlike, the vapor whitened and rose into nothingness, as I remembered...

I saw her from across the square, almost as I had first seen her on that day, on that long-past day when I could still remember what warmth felt like. She rose from her place, like the sun from its slumber, to shine upon my heart with the strength of the passion that we had discovered for each other. I could name the day, the hour, the very moment that we first met, and on every occasion since, the mere sight of her caused my soul to leap from me in the sheer joy of her presence. We spent seasons joining our minds, and then our hearts, and then our bodies, and we planned for the day of the_animus conjugate,_ when we would bind our souls together for whatever would come from that day forth.

As she ran to me, the look in her eyes changed softly, subtly. Perhaps she could sense it from my posture, or my scent as she drew near, or perhaps we already were matched closely enough that she simply Knew. Even though concerned, unsure, she moved with the grace of our species, honed by her many years of dance and physical training. She could fight and defend as well as most soldiers I knew, but her first love was always the arts. For me, the arts were my second love, only after she herself. I caught her in my arms and spun her about in the fashion of lovers throughout time, and we laughed despite ourselves, despite the world, despite the grinding march of history that threatened every life around the globe, before finally we sobered enough merely to stand pressed against one another, holding on to one more moment of each other's embrace. She kissed me warmly, then tucked her chin to my shoulder, her voice whispering in my ear.

"It's been decided," she said softly, without emphasis.

"Yes."

"How soon?"

"It was to be a matter of weeks, then days. Now..."

"Hours?"

"Daybreak."

She looked at me, her emerald eyes deep with a sense of swirling mists. I could not see her thoughts, more because I did not dare than because we had not shared ourselves in that way before. "Let us have this night, then," she said. "Please, Spartasticus... come join with me."

Her rooms were warm with the fire in the hearth, with her presence, with her deep, sweet scent. We used the chair that had been designed for us by a fine craftsman I knew well. Stripped to the fur, I sat first, slightly reclined, and she upon me, her hindpaws supported on the struts behind. We joined thus our bodies and then, forehead to forehead, we stepped inside each other's minds and spent our time in every joyous memory that we had shared and made a few more that we had not known before that night. We sang softly to each other, walked in fields of long, green-dappled grass, lay near streams we had created together in our thoughts and hearts, and we merged in a joining more powerful than any we had known before. Even in this idyll, we took time to speak of what we must, and I pledged to her that I would return, that we would be bound, that we would never part again.

We stayed there, our minds made One in an endless, timeless place until, in the world where our bodies still lay enmeshed, the small hours of the morning began to grow large. She took my muzzle into her tender forepaws and smiled at me, and I was for a moment no longer sure if were in our thoughts or in our bodies. Her eyes, those mystical emerald eyes that burned with such fire, locked upon mine as she kissed me deeply. My heart warned me, my spirit suspected, but before I could let myself react, she leaned tightly against me, her sweetest flesh writhing upon my own, her lips touching the tufts of fur in my ear, and in our moment of ecstasy within and without, she subvocalized syllables that I had only dreamed of hearing. I gripped her tightly, the throes of my passion combining with the weight of her body atop me as it went limp in my arms.

My cries wakened her maiden friend and her parents from their sleep in nearby rooms, and they rushed in to find us together, me calling out her name, knowing that there was no turning back. Her mind had left mine, and her spirit had fled deep inside me. She had made her choice. Her father took her gently from my embrace and laid her on her bed, even as her mother contacted the emergency services. The tears from the two dams in the room were not of horror but only of the pain of not having been able to say their goodbyes first. Her father asked if I had known beforehand, and he saw the truth in my eyes when I told him that I had not. He embraced me and imparted the kiss of the warrior to both of my cheeks, and then tipped my head down to kiss my forehead, his mind stepping into my own only enough to confirm what he had said before, in words - that he was proud of his kitling's choice in me, and that he welcomed me to the family, as he would have done on our joining day. My sweet Varistias' mother likewise kissed my forehead, teary-eyed but respecting her kit's choice, and me as well.

In mere minutes, the emergency medicos, cryorgeon included, had taken care of my sweet love. I held her mother in my arms for a moment, my forehead to hers as I quickly imparted to her all of my history and wishes for safekeeping, as is proper for the females of a family to honor. I left with her my deepest heart-memory of Veristias, for her own heart to know how truly, how powerfully her kit could love. With her maiden friend, I left a similar memory that Veristias had long told me she would share with her dearest female companion on our joining day. I took her father's forepaw into my own, in the warrior's bond, and our eyes told us both of pain, of fear, of determination, of victory. I pledged now for two souls, and for the return of my beloved's spirit to her cryo-preserved body.

The cold deepening around me, I shuddered, a throaty moan escaping my lips into the howling, frozen void. Veristias... I love you so, even now, even in the hell of my failure to return you, your love is all I have left to remember of what was supposed to be. How could you... why did you... all for nothing, for never again would we...

In minutes after I had left Veristias' familial home, I took myself to the military field, going through the required motions of reporting to my regimental command, gearing up, reporting to the off-world transport, and then to the orbiting station, where we were to be assigned to our star-drive vessels. Our training as warriors allowed most of us, myself included, to do what we had to do more out of muscle memory than conscious thought. For the time spent in transit, before the briefing, only one thought held my attention as my body moved me forward to the point where I would have to put all thought of her aside until my duties were fulfilled.

The joining ceremony known to us as_animus conjugate_ can take months of preparation, depending upon how long and how closely the couple have known one another. Most importantly, it is a ceremony that, to work properly, must be synchronized in such a way as to bring the couple together at the same time. The soul, you see, has its own... "name" is too weak a word, but it's what we usually call it. The simple truth is that there is a key to the soul, an essence that is so utterly unique that it is, in its own way, the entirety of the lifeforce within. The_animus conjugate_ is the ceremony whereby two souls are entrusted to one another, in a bond that death cannot part nor time break. It is carried forward in the bloodline of each couple, as each of their offspring has a shard of the combined soul that created that new life. Each of us is a unique soul, and each soul is made still greater by the souls that bonded together to create it. For the most advanced among us, the entire history of a bloodline may be held within the soul that is the culmination of all who have gone before - souls united of their own will, their own passion, and joined such that nothing could sunder them.

Veristias and I had no doubts; we were waiting only for the strange stories from off-world to be finished, the news to be confirmed or denied. The ceremony could not be performed properly without preparation, the witnesses of loved ones and family (although I'd none of my own), and in the presence of one of the spiritual Adepts or telempathic Sympaticos to help ensure that the soul Names are given in exchange and joining in as close to simultaneity as possible. There are potential issues with the endowment of a Name without the reciprocation being made in time. The body can exist without its soul, but it cannot be animate; it is the soul, the lifeforce, that drives it. Veristias had, in a way, tricked me into taking what we both wanted: She gave to me her essence, which I would have to bring back to her, if her body were to live. Should my body fail, were I to die in this war, my own soul would be set free of my body, joined with hers, and we would be together. Her body, however, could not survive without its lifeforce. She had chosen for us: Either I return alive to free her from her cryogenic suspension, or my superiors would inform her family that we were both lost. They would have to bear the responsibility, the pain, of ending the non-life of the empty shell that was once their daughter.

She literally gave to me her life to defend.

Wind shrieked at me, seeming to come from all directions, like a whirling vortex of unimaginable agony, a cold so deep that numbers could no longer go low enough to define it. My lungs ached with air that burned ice crystals deep inside, my limbs already unable to move of their own volition. Sounds in the emptiness mocked me as I heard names, echoing from inside my head - fallen comrades, family, my beloved Veristias... all lost to me...

The filthy creatures were called Martangi, or that's as close to what we were able to call them. The briefing was fast and, despite our training, terrifying. The beings who were waging war on our galaxy came from a dimension outside of it, which was why our beacon's signal had disrupted their attack on the planet of Ontongen V. We Khranoth, as a species, developed our mental and psychic abilities alongside our mechanical technology, so as a result, they were to a great degree woven together. The beacons that we left behind gathered information like sentient observers, relaying that information back to us along both electromagnetic frequencies and, for lack of a better phrase, psychic wavelengths. When we activated all of our beacons on our variously visited planets, they had the unintentional effect of disrupting the energies that the Martangi were using to loot entire planets from this dimension into another, pillaging and raping the worlds in their own time and space where even the best trained fighting forces of each planet were faced with sights, sounds, even physical and psychic constructs that were not meant to be understood by any creature from this side of the tempero-spatial rift that they had created. One can't fight what one can't understand, or even perceive correctly.

We could not be sure that we had all the information that we needed, but what we did know was enough to petrify the strongest among us. These extradimensional creatures had been kept in check by forces we did not yet know, and they had somehow managed to break free of their masters and, in search of ways to fight them and never again succumb, they broke out of their own dimension to seek other technologies, other elements, anything that they could bend to their will to fight back against those who had kept them at bay for untold centuries. There was always the chance that they were once some honorable species who had been enslaved by evil forces, but we had no way of knowing, and no choice in fighting them, to send them back to their own universe or kill them where they stood. Our purpose is to protect, to stabilize; after that, we would know more and act accordingly.

Our arrival at Ontongen V was, we first thought, unmet by the invaders. No ships hung in the space around the planet, no technology, no psychic traces... nothing we could detect. The planet itself had, by our instruments, changed its obliquity of ecliptic by a few degrees; its orbit also was predicted to be eccentric by some four degrees of its norm, but still within the limits of its inhabitants' sustainability range. The effect was if someone had tried to take it away but had managed only to move it slightly. We mustered swiftly and dropped down-planet within an hour of our arrival. Only then did we discover what we were up against.

Even before we opened the hatches of our transport, we knew things were bad. Everything had changed, not severely, but enough to disorient us. The air was somehow thinner than it should have been. Gravity had changed from the planet's usual 1.06 of Khranoth norm to 0.81; our own speed and physical prowess would work against us as we adapted to being lighter. It also meant that a very large portion of the planet's mass had vanished, although it was nothing that could be seen from the surface. Whatever grotesque paw had reached across space-time to take away the entire planet had succeeded in removing some large part of it from the inside. We were, more accurately than not, standing on the shell of a world, and the tectonic instabilities had already started to make themselves known, rocking and splitting the ground under our paws in random tremors.

I still couldn't say, even as my fore and hindpaws became too numb to feel, whether or not this age of ice had begun with the battle, or if it had developed as we struggled. It wasn't until we had begun to seek out the Martangi that we realized the true horror of their attack. The planet's resources had not been limited to elements, minerals, technology; the sentient life of Ontongen V had been completely overtaken to become the new army of the Martangi. Every last male and female, from yowens to those nearing their end of days, all were now only articulated flesh for some Martangi overmind to use as tools of war. The control of a world's population was of such an alien nature that we could not recognize it for what it was by our own psychic means; there are some things that one's mind simply could not grasp.

Our forces were nearly overcome by the sheer numbers of unaware life forms sent to attack anything that was Other. Somewhere amid these animated corpses, there may have been Ontongenese who I had met, some years ago, just as many of my fellow warriors may have done. The only thing that kept us fighting was that we realized quickly that there was no light in their eyes, no control of each individual Self, and we prayed as we killed that there was no remaining consciousness to know the horror of the violence that we inflicted. The shipboard medicos eventually assured us that there was not; the few we had managed to capture "alive" (if that term could be in any way applied) were taken aboard for analysis and comparison to the knowledge records we had on file for them. There was no more consciousness within them, no trace of their sentience. Each brain-pattern that we scanned was identical. These beings, these revenants of a once proud and worthy race, were nothing more than meat-puppets.

Even as we fought, we relayed our information to the military Sympaticos aboard ship - the Khranoth telempaths who had been trained and modified to be supercomputers of fur and bone, absorbing the experience of the warriors with whom they were linked, then providing all that to the technologically-based computers via direct upload. The sum of this information, the results obtained, was analyzed by the best minds, cheetah and cybernetic, and the solution was found. Even though each world taken had been from a different part of our known galaxy, the source of the power that took them was currently focused here on Ontongen V. The rift, the tear in space-time, was here, opened in hope of taking the planet. The wound had to be sealed, cauterized. There was no longer a sentient race to be saved, and to save the quintillion other known sentient life forms of this galaxy, this world would have to be the last victim, and its sacrifice would be absolute.

Six of us were chosen, one for each point of the three-dimensional axes of the remains of the planet. I was one of the six. I already knew that my chance of survival was slim to none. Even as I flew my scout ship to my designated destination, I reached inside my own mind to make what contact I could with Veristias, to tell her somehow, to feel her strength. We would be together after my death. I could not truly explain or grieve with her parents and loved ones when they would have to destroy her body in its cryo-suspension. I had left my last emotions with my onboard Sympatico Q'narra, to give to them. It would have to do.

The devices that we would utilize had been deployed only once before, but not for this reason, and with greater time to plan. An unstable planet in a star system threatened cataclysmic damage to its neighbors through its explosive destruction. We created a means of generating a far less dangerous implosion of the planet by forcing a conjunction of focused gravitic waves, at the center of the three-dimensional axes, to create a microscopic quantum singularity within the core of the planet itself. In essence, the planet itself was sucked inward upon itself through the singularity that we created. The area around the singularity itself was carefully marked with buoys to avoid trapping any other vessels within its event horizon, and we've continued to study it ever since. I grew up with the stories of the Cyrellian Black Hole and the further advances in our science that it led to. The remaining planets of the Cyrellian star system continued to thrive, and we were smart enough not to try the same trick again.

Until now.

Now, when we had to use this impossible force as a weapon against an unseen foe. Now, we had to make history in the worst possible way. The action would save the rest of the galaxy, but it would forever make the technology into a power that would change the way that all other races would see us. Changed to create a larger singularity, to affect the implosion more swiftly, the process was given a name designed to remind us just how much power and horror we were commanding. I was one of six to wield the War Hammer.

All that I can recall, in this vast and frozen place, is that I followed orders precisely, as I had been trained to. I landed the ship, placed the device, and waited for the telempathic command to fire. We chose places on the globe of Ontongen V that were uninhabited, or minimally inhabited, yet still conformed to our needs; this ensured that the overtaken population would not try to rise up against us before the device could be activated. The sphere of the world was oblique by 1/257th, and we adjusted accordingly. The measurements, though swift, were exact. The word was given. I know that my Sympatico guided my paw to take the action at the same time as the five others. We were guided by a single paw, and the reaction was as near instantaneous as makes no odds. I remember feeling the Symptico's satisfaction, knowing somehow that we had accomplished our mission. It would not be long now until Ontongen V would cease to be.

There was supposed to be some means of collecting us, the chosen six, and bringing us back to the remaining ship. We would have had to fire the hyperdrives at a dangerously accelerated rate in order to ensure that we wouldn't become caught in the event horizon of the singularity as it grew rapidly to consume the planet. I could not remember what happened; I know only that it must have failed, at least for me. The planet grows colder around me as the mass of the planet continues to shrink; soon enough, it will not hold enough atmosphere for me to breathe. Even now, I sense the vast beast-whistle of the void screeching in my ears.

Veristias... my beloved one. We will not be much longer apart.

Spartasticus...

I can hear her now. I am closer to death than I had thought. I do not feel fear, only the regret that I could not save us enough to be together in this life.

Spartasticus... you are not alone.

I know, my love. I will be with you soon.

I am with you now. Not in death. Can you not feel me, my beloved? You still hold my soul, but it is not yet our time.

My head tries to move, in confusion, my frozen ears pivoting roughly, seeking the voice. How strange death must be, the transition from life to new life. Have the Sympaticos felt this, I wonder, my last few thoughts trying to arrange themselves in some semblance of curiosity and discovery, even as I am about to give up my body.

No, my love, my Spartasticus, my soul-keeper. Do not give up. Do not give in to the cold. You are a born warrior. You must fight.

The war is over, my love. Our people have won, and we yet will triumph over our own death...

Strike once more, Spartasticus. For me. Strike once more at the ice of your world. Please, my love, strike one more blow against the cold.

My paws are frozen, my arms and legs stiff and uncooperative. There can be only death on a dying world.

You are home, my love. You are with me. Reach for me. Reach out to me. Strike one more blow, beloved. Rouse yourself. One more strike. You must. You are home, and you must reach out for me.

Illusions of my beloved appear before me. I can see her. Are spirits visible to other spirits? As we leave our bodies, do we then See in some other way? So beautiful, so very beautiful, my beloved Veristias... My arm rises, almost impossibly to reach out for her. So cold... so frozen...

...frozen...

My arm moves again, to push against the icy ground, to make myself move, to face death on my hindpaws, to be there as the last of the planet dies with me. I stand against the howling, the winds, the crystals of solidifying air, forcing myself to breath. My sword is once more in my forepaw. "Veristias..." I manage. "I shall love you always."

The syllables of my Name fall from my lips as I jam my sword into the last of the planet...

* * * * * * * * * *

Air burned as I gasped great, painful lungs-full and screamed. I felt paws on me even as I shook with a cold that still cramped every muscle in my body. My eyes registered light, my ears, sound, but I could not understand. Was this death?

No, Spartasticus. The voice in my head was not my own. It was... my cracked and crazed lips tried to work. It was...

"Q'narra...?"

It is I. The voice could not help sounding the slightest bit smug, but it also radiated joy.And it is she.

The paws on my body were working swiftly. I felt the plastic of a heating blanket over me, warming me slowly. Other paws held my trembling head still as yet another put a mask over my nose. "Breathe, warrior," said a voice, one I heard through my ears. "Your mind will clear soon."

Spartasticus... A voice, in my head, but one I could not mistake.You brought me home.

You are One, the Sympatico's voice was once again in my head.You may still have your celebration, and I'm sure her dam and sire will wish it... but you have brought her home.

"Can you hear me, warrior?"

I blinked, felt my head nodding.

"You are in hospital, on Khranoth. The Sympatico was with you during your voyage. You sustained injuries during the mission. Your ship was recovered remotely, and you were put into suspension. You are warming slowly. You may feel pain as the circulation begins properly."

"It will be as nothing," a stronger voice smiled, "compared to what you have experienced."

Veristias' father moved into my range of sight. He smiled at me. I felt his forepaw on my own. I could not return the warrior's grip properly, but he seemed to understand. He took my forepaw and moved it to touch another, a paw not quite as cold as my own.

One, said Q'narra in my mind.

"Veristias...?"

"Here, my love." Her voice was as rough and throaty as my own. Effects of suspension... "You brought me home."

Some would say it's unseemly for a warrior to weep. Some are fools. Our touch gave us enough, even in our weakened state, to unite through our Names and our love, and I knew that we would never again have to part, even in death... which, the gods willing, would not be for a very long time to come...