The Didact, when he designed our nuptial house, demonstrated a style some would call severe, but still inclined to majesty. I have seen ancient fortresses with less grandeur. Our central quarters were cut from blocks of lava filled with the fossils of Nomdagro’s only indigenous species, a lovely variety of silicon worm, long since extinct. They seemed to have swum through the lava before it cooled, but that had likely not been the case; more true to imagine them having died in great, contorted coils, their immensely strong cuticles and cartilaginous members resisting as the lava washed over, entombing them until masons split the solid blocks.

The Didact had picked those stones with me in mind, and they were lovely, in a forbidding sort of way. The fossils bore enough residual thorium and uranium to glow softly at night, lighting our way as we went to that last supper before he entered his Cryptum.

I remember those hours with crystal clarity. An associate of Haruspis had been called and had arrived the night before. Those were brilliant nights indeed. An unstable star on the far side of the Orion complex had supernovaed one hundred years before. That long-traveling radiation was now, to our eyes, lighting up the vast nebula, washing over the far-spreading clouds and wisps of gas as if in preternatural warning.

“A well-chosen occasion. The delay of space is profound,” the Haruspis’s associate intoned. Its attitude—it was a self-gelding like all associates—irritated the Didact. More so was my husband annoyed by the implication that we might have chosen this occasion to highlight the occasion, to grandstand.

Still, he controlled himself, and faced off with the associate under the burning streamers of yellow and orange and deep purple. At the associate’s signal, the Didact’s armor lifted from his hard light under-sheath, uncoiling and separating, protruding wedges and spikes as if preparing for battle—and then slumped into a compact egg.

The Didact lifted his hands to receive the cup containing the first full measure of inchukoa and drank it back in one swallow.

This began the process of living desiccation.

Our conversation around that spare supper was mostly gentle and loving. The Didact and I had been a highly unsuitable match, and yet we had been married for thousands of years. What some might have interpreted as disagreement, debate, barely contained irritation or competition, was in fact the fire of our deepest love. We still took delight in the sparks we struck.

I remember this so clearly.…

Household monitors arranged towels and cups around the Didact’s chair as his skin wept salty drops. The skin of his broad, noble face stretched tight.

Face glistening—shedding his water—flesh turning to leather, blood a glassy gel.