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.
When we met them, we loved the Daughters of the Holographic Dream, three-headed giraffe-necked mantiswomen with magenta carapaces and iridescent manes. We loved them for their delightfully improbable breakfast parties, rose-colored glass rods and osmium-shelled eggs and delicate origami arrangements of metallic foil, the olfactory organs on their forelegs flaring like rows of broccoli as they sawed through the aromatic loaves of oily rust that they so loved to cut slices off for us. We loved them for their delightfully improbable homeworlds, a swirl of planets and moons around an orange dwarf that itself orbited a blue giant, beautiful incandescent winds blowing pollen and airborne seeds and small torn brass branches from planet to planet. We loved them for their delightfully improbable air- and spacecraft: tiny coracles rowed from one mountaintop to another by means of solar rudders, kites with shivering sails of gold and silver and black, lighter-than-air ships with solar rigging. We saw, adrift on the aurora streams or en route from one star to another, stranger craft still: wide carpets of their woven supercomputers, and concave dishes meters across whose inner surfaces glittered slickly with runemath; when we asked the Daughters about these latter crafts' means of propulsion, and how they retained their habitable conditions seemingly open to hard vacuum, they simply laughed and told us that they would sell us the technology if we wished but that our shipwrights were already skilled far beyond their own. We loved them for their coronation-bondings, elaborate ceremonies in which Daughters would place quartz-columned crowns on each other's heads in recognition of certain deeds or the swearing of certain oaths, and for the days or weeks of parties and feasting that accompanied them, with poetry and music recitals, archery and riddle contests, light shows and even small theatrical productions. We loved them for their partially-habitiformed meadow worlds, for the garden labyrinths enclosing cozy estates where we basked with them in sunlight (they ate talonfuls of black diamond pastilles, and told us that they loved them because their carbon sweetness reminded them of us), and we loved them for their more fully habitiformed forest worlds where the Daughters of the Holographic Dream lived in cities where rows of townhouses were stacked five deep or on farms where they grew crops and raised livestock: fungal iron nails sprouting from the soil like rows of grain, sulfurous yellow stumps blossoming at twilight into succulent bracts, and decapodal ruminants that fed on them both - tick-like beasts furnished the Daughters with their wool, milk, eggs, wax and meat, abdomens ballooning behind and above them not with blood but with chambers of lighter-than-air gases and expanding to be the size of two-story houses in the best springs and summers. We loved them for the sets of glass prisms they carried everywhere, never comfortable in a space until they had set at least one, and usually two or three, in the path of light to scatter its constituent colors across the floors and walls. We loved them for the bells and jewels and audio players that they wove into their manes, and the whistle of air through the pneumostomes on the backs of their carapaces where their triplet necks merged into one. We loved them for their languages of romance and vendetta, communicated through daggers and pistol-axes gifted or embedded in scenery; we loved them for their storied mercenary companies who fought, under tasseled parasols, with both weapons, and with the double-barrelled muskets that fired microwaves or x-rays as their wielder desired.