Moose

When we met them, we loved the Huntresses Above Their Own Legend, proud cranewomen gleaming in blue and purple, in copper and silver and black bronze. We loved them for their fourteen worlds of salt and sand, Huntresses flocking in the thousands and tens of thousands to soar above beaches lazily lapped by the waves, offshore fields of bannerweed, clam beds and crab hatcheries. We loved them for their cities, tiered bastion fortresses of concrete and woven reeds alight with casinos and eateries and mud saunas and dance halls and hourly-rate inns, surrounded by arcs of neighborhoods burrowing into the sandy soil and scattered conical hunting lodges on the far outskirts. We loved them for their poetry, ancient lines of verse spelled out in geoglyphs fifty yards across, boundary-stones recording the sagas of the families that had placed them there and the feuds and romances between them. We loved them for their alchemist-princesses robed in ebon and gold, viewed by other Huntresses with a kind of religious awe for their role in the discovery of gunpowder and for their monopoly on its production, hectares of sprawling shallows where technicolor pools synthesized this or that reagent, squat domed laboratory-palaces of lead glass rising over everything like sullen toadstools. We loved their Phoenix Empress whose throne-perch was carved from the immense amethyst geode that the Huntresses Above Their Own Legend called the Eggshell of the World, whose halls were decorated with hundreds of rifles and thousands of hunting trophies: green-gold boar carapaces, tiger pelts of violet and streaked silver, sapphire roc feathers as long as canoes, broad soot-colored manatee-mole skulls the size of cars.