She showed us the rooms that had once been ours. Some of our fabrics still hung from the walls – she folded them up one by one and gave them back to us. Amma said goodbye to the rooms of my dead sisters, and your mother turned away to let her do it, without even peeking to see if she would steal.
The one where a catgirl betrays her emperor when he starts nuclear war by fleeing the planet with his disarmed flagship containing tens of thousands of people, who promptly start killing each other.
A Thceyn birthing takes the inverse shape of ours. A new Thceyn forms as a thin, flexible membrane around the Thceyn world. Micrometers thick at first, it grows until it strains to hold the world in and the pressure hurts its taut, flattened organs. Its birthing organ starts spiraling into the world-barrier.
"mom, dad, the reason I flout traditional norms and do all this crazy-to-you stuff with bigamy and hormones is that I’ve reached a level of affluence you can't understand. you worked so hard to make sure I could make it in the USA, and I did. this is what making it means.".
In the radioactive mantle of a nameless planet dwelled the kahaldans, who lived in an air bubble in the rock and coated its inner surface with glowing farms of fungi. They enjoyed making new kinds of sounds and naming things, and would have named their planet but for their total ignorance of what a planet was.