Moose

the leopard seal-eyed azhdarchid-basilosaurs that called themselves the Federation of Eaters claimed dominion over eleven planets around nine blue-white stars and were in the process of terraforming four more. it was through them that we learned of the terrified squeaking ice-rodents and pigeon-sheep that wove cloud-bread from the seeds of brass dandelions and hid behind armadas of omen-kites armed with verses of poetry that ate themselves into battleship armor and firework-warheads that rained down thermite and plutonium-chaff across continents. they claimed the protection of ancient oaths with the Monarchs and Daughters, scissor-jointed insectile dolls with enamel skin and lungs for marrow, eusocial workers tilling the floral farmlands and orchards of four hundred and ten tropical worlds orbiting vast red charcoals smeared across the sky. soldier-daughters like butterflies the size of moose with antlers twisted into the shapes of seige equipment and alien chess pieces accompanied the semaphore-diplomats with hypnotic agate eyespots, and eventually we learned of their hive-palaces stocked with vaults of eggs, factories, workshops, nurseries, refectories and dormitories, of their queens and princes and the peculiar lives of their princesses, who spend much of their lives thrusting themselves into reckless adventures hoping to bring back fortunes of enough benefit to their hive-palace to earn themselves the right to breed, the complex system of interdependencies their morphs had on each other based on their diets, the soldiers and monarchs fed on the honey-wine and bread-like Ration fermented in the crops of the workers. it was in one of the polarized glass guildhalls of the Federation of Eaters, propped up by twelve stout trees like skyscraper-tall brass horsetails, that we made a kind of peace with the bronze-feathered gryphons who raided our worlds, and with their hunting partners: predatory stormclouds with neon dreams, gelatin-boned alligator-slugs, greasy-pelted coyote-serpents who wore sweat-and-sex-and-gasoline perfumes. they claimed dominion over seventy-one planets whose ecosystems were all in various states of recovery from the not-infrequent nuclear exchanges they settled their most heated arguments with