If you are about to meet a Candle and have thirty seconds: The organism in front of you is radially symmetrical with a clear front, approximately half a meter tall at maturity, and is on fire. The flame is a real, genuinely dangerous flame, produced by the organism's body, sustained by a fibrous wick structure protruding from the top of the head, and fed by the metabolic combustion of the organism's own lipid reserves. The flame is not a threat, a display, or an anomaly. It is the organism's primary thermoregulatory mechanism and the reason it is able to stand in front of you rather than sitting immobile beside a geothermal vent.
The body is a translucent, flexible membrane containing an opaque lipid matrix - what you will immediately perceive as a sac of warm yellow-white wax or fat. The organism's internal organs are suspended in this matrix and are not visible from the outside. Two thin, flexible antennae extend from the upper body, each terminating in a padded three-digit grip. Six eyespots are arranged on the anterior face. The base of the body rests on a broad, textured pad used for locomotion through hydraulic pressure. The overall visual impression is, candidly, that of a large candle. The xenobiology team accepts full responsibility for the common name.
The organism communicates through three simultaneous channels: modulation of breathing rhythm, variation in flame emission spectra, and gestural signing with its manipulator antennae. The gestural channel is generally intuitive to humans - pointing, directing attention, and indicating urgency translate without a mediating device. Any Level 2 translator equipped with visual adjunct channels will be able to translate the flame-bearing component of their language.
Candles (KAN-dulz): the human common name, assigned with what the xenobiology team's report describes as "an unusual degree of consensus." The organism looks like a candle. It is on fire like a candle. It is made substantially of wax, like a candle. Alternative proposals included "Lamps" and "Tapers," but the team concluded that the most obvious name was also the most accurate, and that attempting to be more creative would serve nobody.
The informal designation "Lamps" persists in some diplomatic contexts, preferred by human representatives who feel that "Candles" carries connotations of disposability inappropriate for a species that does not, under any normal circumstances, burn out. The distinction has not been resolved and both terms remain in circulation. Lucerna sapiens prefers "Candles" on the grounds that lamps require external fuel and they do not.
The species' self-designation is a rotationary glyph that cannot be rendered in human writing. It translates, through the standard chain, as "wise man" - or more precisely, as "the intelligent variant of the biospherically dominant organism of this planet," a phrase that carries the same semantic load as the Latin Homo sapiens.
The organism is a flexible, translucent membrane enclosing a lipid matrix - a dense, opaque, mostly liquid fat in which the organism's internal organs are suspended as free-floating organelle-analogues. The membrane is the cognitive substrate: distributed information-processing structures are embedded throughout its surface, making the membrane functionally equivalent to a brain that surrounds the body rather than being housed inside it. The lipid matrix is fuel, insulation, and structural medium. The organs are modular, replaceable, and subordinate to the membrane in the organism's biological hierarchy. Lose an organ, and the membrane grows a replacement. Lose the membrane, and the organism is gone.
A fibrous wick structure protrudes from a vent-pore at the apex of the body. The wick draws lipid fuel upward through capillary action and sustains a continuous flame at its tip through catalytic combustion of atmospheric hydrocarbons. The organism breathes - not for gas exchange, which it does not require, but for fire management. Exhalation delivers vaporized lipid to the flame and modulates burn intensity. Inhalation draws oxidizer into the combustion zone. The organism can hold its breath indefinitely; the wick continues to function passively through capillary action alone, producing a lower, cooler flame on ambient fuel delivery. Breathing is communication and thermoregulation, not survival.
This body plan is not unique to the species. It is the universal architecture of FV-7/14.3/891.2's biosphere. Every organism on the planet is a membrane enclosing a lipid matrix with suspended organelle-analogues - the local equivalent of the cellular body plan on Earth, or the syncytial substrate on Threshold. Different species have different relationships to the lipid matrix. Some metabolize it as fuel. Some use it as hydraulic medium. Some use it as reproductive substrate. Lucerna sapiens burns it, and that combustion - the fire at the top of their bodies, sustained by the wick they grow as they mature - is what permitted them to leave the geothermal vents where their evolutionary ancestors were rooted and walk out into the cold spaces between.
The membrane warrants its own section because, like the Listener's skin, it is the organ around which the entire species is organized - though for entirely different reasons.
Listener skin is the site of involuntary emotional display. The Candle membrane is the site of cognition itself. Information-processing structures are distributed throughout the membrane's surface in patterns that are unique to each individual and that develop over time as the organism grows and learns. The membrane is the self. It is the one component of the organism that cannot be replaced, donated, or fully regenerated from raw materials. Non-totalitarianizing injuries do heal layer by layer, which is generally aided with bandages and patches, or a temporary stay in a low-temperature medical ward where wax becomes too viscous to flow out the wound and impede healing. Damage to the membrane is brain damage. Destruction of the membrane is the one thing that constitutes, for this species, something the rest of the federation would recognize as death - though the species itself, as discussed below, does not use that word.
The membrane is translucent, flexible, and smooth. The smoothness is thermodynamically functional: a smooth surface minimizes the area available for convective heat loss, helping the organism retain the warmth generated by its flame. The body is, in effect, an insulated fuel tank with a heater on top, and the membrane is the insulation. In warm conditions the membrane is supple and elastic. As temperature drops, the lipid matrix thickens and the membrane stiffens, until at sufficiently low temperatures both solidify into a dense, rigid, protective shell - a state the organism experiences as dormancy rather than death.
The membrane possesses only an extremely rudimentary sense of vibroreception, a similarly rudimentary sense of chemoreception analogous to smell, and no mechanisms for audition.
Six yellow eyespots are arranged on the anterior face in a roughly hexagonal pattern - three rows of two - giving the face a distinctive appearance that humans have compared, with varying degrees of affection, to certain fictional constructs. Each eyespot is a light-gradient detector capable of approximately one centimeter of telescopic extension and retraction.
Individual eyespots do not form images. They detect light intensity, direction, spectral composition, and rate of change across their receptor surface. Two or more eyespots operating in parallax - extended or retracted at slightly different depths - can produce composite percepts equivalent to image formation. All six operating together produce a perceptual model of the environment that exceeds human visual acuity at biologically relevant ranges, with sensitivity extending into both infrared and ultraviolet.
The critical distinction from human vision is that the Candle visual system is organized around surface reflectance rather than edge detection or smooth-field resolution. Where a human eye perceives an object by identifying its boundaries and filling in the interior, a Candle perceives an object by reading how light behaves on its surface - the spectral signature of the material, the angle of reflection, the micro-variation in brightness that indicates texture and curvature. Their cognitive processing computes surface normals, material properties, and three-dimensional geometry from reflectance data in real time. The closest human analogy is the process by which a 3D rendering engine produces the appearance of a textured surface from a flat polygon and a set of lighting equations. Candles do this natively, with their brains, to everything they look at.
The practical consequence is a species with extraordinary color perception - broader spectral range, finer discrimination within that range, and a cognitive relationship to color that is qualitative rather than merely quantitative. A Candle does not merely see more colors than a human. It sees color as a property of surfaces in a way that humans access only through instrumentation. The species' visual experience of a Rothko painting, per cultural exchange reports, involves perception of spectral detail, pigment chemistry, and application technique at a level of resolution that the artist himself could not have consciously controlled for - and the precision of Rothko's color-field work is, to a Candle, the most impressive technical achievement in the human visual art tradition.
Two anterior antennae, thin and flexible, extend from the upper body to a length roughly equal to the organism's height. Each terminates in a padded tridactyl grip: one broad pad (the "mitten") and two smaller opposable extensions (the "thumbs"). The antennae have no joints. Movement is hydraulic, driven by internal fluid pressure, and capable of smooth, continuous bending in any direction - an effect that human observers typically find either mesmerizing or unsettling, depending on temperament.
The thermal gradient of the body determines the manipulators' mechanical properties. Near the body, where the flame's warmth keeps the lipid matrix fluid, the antennae are soft and flexible. Toward the tips, farther from the heat source, the matrix cools and stiffens, and the grip pads - which are textured with high-surface-area ridges that actively shed heat through convection - are the coldest and most rigid part of the organism. This is functional. The rigid, cold grip pads are the tools. They grasp, they tear, they manipulate objects with precision enabled by their stiffness. The smooth, warm thumbs retain enough flexibility for fine dexterous work - bending, threading, shearing.
The textured grip pads serve an additional function as the organism's primary feeding apparatus.
The inner surface of each mitten pad contains a thin region of membrane that can be opened through deliberate muscular action, exposing the lipid matrix beneath. To feed, the organism grips a food source - typically another membrane-soup organism, living or recently dormant - punctures or tears the food source's membrane with its rigid grip pads, inserts the manipulator tip into the interior, opens the thin membrane of the mitten, and absorbs the food organism's lipid matrix directly into its own body through contact. The thumbs work the opening wider. The rigid pads hold the food source steady. The process is efficient, direct, and somewhat graphic by human standards. Human analogies to "eating with your hands" are, while technically accurate, inadequate to the specificity of the arrangement.
The ventral surface of the body is a broad, textured pad - similar in structure to the grip pads of the manipulators but larger and more densely ridged. It is roughly analogous to the gripping surfaces of the padding on various gecko species (such as Correlophus ciliatus), using a combination of anatomically similar physical structures, viscous non-wax excretions, and clamping to achieve outsized anchoring forces relative to body size. Locomotion is achieved through hydraulic peristalsis: waves of pressure move across the pad surface, propelling the organism forward in a smooth gliding motion similar to a terrestrial gastropod. The textured ridges provide grip on surfaces. The grip is substantial - a healthy Candle on a textured surface can support its full body weight vertically or inverted.
Speed is modest. Lucerna sapiens is not a pursuit predator and never was. Their evolutionary ancestors were sessile vent-dwellers; the entire history of the species' locomotion is a history of expanding range from a stationary starting point. They move at a pace that a human would describe as "deliberate," and their architecture, urban planning, and social expectations are organized around the assumption that getting somewhere takes as long as it takes.
The flame is not an organ. It is the output of two organs - the respiratory tract and the wick - interacting with the atmosphere, in the same way that a human voice is not an organ but the output of the larynx interacting with air. The distinction matters because the flame can be extinguished and relit without damage to the organism, whereas removing the wick would be a serious injury.
The wick evolved as a metabolic innovation in the ancestors of the current species. Early membrane-soup organisms clustered around geothermal vents for warmth, metabolizing slowly, unable to move far from their heat source without cooling to dormancy. Some lineages developed vent-pores that released volatile metabolic byproducts, which occasionally ignited on contact with the reactive atmosphere. Organisms whose accidental combustion produced useful heat - maintaining membrane flexibility, creating convection currents that improved atmospheric intake - were selected for. Over millions of years, the vent-pore developed into a dedicated structure, fibrous tissue accumulated around it to sustain fuel delivery through capillary action, and the accidental flare became a controlled, continuous flame.
The flame gave the organism its own heat source. It no longer needed the vent. It could walk. This is the central fact of the species' evolutionary history. Every other adaptation - the manipulators, the eyespots, the cognition, the civilization - is downstream of the moment an ancestral organism grew a structure that let it carry its own warmth.
Lucerna sapiens does not die.
This is not a poetic overstatement or a cultural self-perception. It is a biological fact that requires careful qualification but is, in its essentials, accurate. The organism does not undergo the cascading, irreversible system failure that Terran biology calls death. When deprived of heat - whether through flame extinguishment, environmental cooling, or voluntary choice - the lipid matrix solidifies, the membrane stiffens, the suspended organs enter metabolic arrest, and the organism becomes a dense, rigid, waxy object that is, for all practical purposes, inert. The self - encoded in the membrane's distributed cognitive structures - is intact, and the organism is merely sleeping.
When heat is restored - through relighting of the wick, proximity to an external heat source, or ambient warming - the lipid matrix liquefies, the organs resume function, the membrane's cognitive processes reinitialize, and the organism wakes up. It does not experience the intervening time as anything except a gentle sleep. From its perspective, it was warm, it was cooling off, it was warming up, and then it was warm again and there was nothing in between. The gap could be an hour, a year, or ten thousand years. The organism does not care, because the organism was not present to experience the duration.
The only event that constitutes irreversible cessation for this species is total membrane destruction - the complete physical annihilation of the membrane substrate in which the organism's cognitive structures are encoded. This is extraordinarily rare. It requires either extreme thermal events (sufficient to vaporize the membrane entirely), chemical dissolution, or deliberate, thorough physical destruction. Puncture, tearing, even substantial membrane loss are survivable - the community response to severe membrane damage is discussed under Culture - but complete destruction is not. It is so rare, and so far outside the species' normal biological experience, that they do not have a native word for it. They did not develop one until federation contact introduced them to species for whom the permanent cessation of an organism is a routine, expected feature of biological existence.
The Candle cognitive architecture is shaped by three features of their biology: their sensory system processes the world as continuous fields rather than discrete objects; their episodic memory is limited; and they do not die. Each of these produces downstream consequences that make up the totality of the species' psychology.
Continuous-field cognition. The eyespot array processes visual information as light gradients, reflectance spectra, and surface properties rather than as bounded objects in space. This perceptual bias extends into the species' cognitive architecture. Their native mathematical intuition is calculus - rates of change, continuous functions, local maxima and minima, optimization across smooth gradients. Where humans count and enumerate as cognitive primitives, Candles differentiate and integrate. Where a human looks at a crowd and estimates "about thirty people," a Candle perceives the crowd as a function - a distribution of light-gradient peaks - and derives the count from the number of local maxima. The primary percept is the shape of the function, not the number of peaks.
This cognitive bias produces a species that is natively extraordinary at optimization, topology, geometry, and any form of reasoning that involves smooth variation across continuous domains. It also produces a species that finds discrete mathematics effortful. Counting is not difficult - instead, it is laborious in the way that mental arithmetic is laborious for a human - achievable but not natural, requiring conscious attention rather than intuitive processing. Their numeral system is rotationary, expressing quantities as subdivisions of a wave cycle rather than as cardinal symbols. A human would find it elegant and entirely unintuitive.
Thick present. Lucerna sapiens has robust procedural memory (skills persist indefinitely), robust emotional memory (relationships, trust, affective associations persist), and limited episodic memory (specific events, sequential details, and autobiographical narrative decay rapidly). They know who you are. They know how they feel about you. They cannot tell you what you talked about last week unless they wrote it down.
This is not a deficit. It is a cognitive architecture optimized for an organism that does not die. A species with indefinite lifespan and human-grade episodic memory would, over centuries, accumulate a cognitive load of stored experience that would eventually become unmanageable - or would require a brain of impractical size to maintain. The Candle solution is elegant: retain the emotional and procedural residue of experience, release the episodic detail, and externalize long-term memory into the environment. Their civilization's extraordinary archival culture - discussed below - is not a cultural achievement built on top of a functional memory system, but is rather a cognitive prosthesis that compensates for a biological limitation, and it has been essential to the species' functioning since before they had a word for civilization.
No death, no urgency. The absence of mortality produces a species without the time-pressure that shapes every human institution. There is no deadline. There is no running out. The organism will be here tomorrow and next year and in a thousand years unless something very unusual happens, and the things that would constitute "something very unusual" are so rare that planning around them would be irrational. The result is a species that is simultaneously unhurried and intensely engaged - unhurried because there is no scarcity of time, intensely engaged because the thick-present cognition keeps them anchored in the current moment with full attention. They are neither bored nor anxious. Instead, they are here, completely, and if they become bored they go dormant until the world has changed enough to be interesting again.
The elders who choose dormancy are not dead, retired, or withdrawn. They are on call. A Candle settlement's deep knowledge base is not stored exclusively in archives. It is stored in dormant individuals who can be relit when their specific expertise is needed. The institutional practice of waking an elder - relighting an organism that has been dormant for decades or centuries, waiting for it to reorient, explaining what has changed and what is needed - is routine and carries a specific social protocol. The elder is not obligated to help or to stay awake. The request is made; the elder considers it; the elder helps or returns to dormancy as they see fit.
Communication operates across three simultaneous channels, none of which are auditory.
Breath modulation. Rhythm, intensity, and duration of exhalation through the wick produce variations in flame behavior - flicker rate, flame height, combustion character - that carry information. This is the channel with the highest temporal resolution and the one used for rapid conversational exchange.
Flame emission spectra. The chemical composition of the combustion products determines the flame's color and spectral properties. Metabolic state affects this naturally, producing baseline spectral signatures that convey physiological information (analogous to, but less detailed than, Listener bioluminescence). Cultural augmentation through metal threading - the practice of braiding metallic wires into the wick to alter flame color and character - extends this channel into deliberate, controlled expression. Green flames (copper), blue flames (various), red flames (strontium), crackling flames (iron filings), and combinations thereof constitute a visible vocabulary of aesthetic, professional, and social signaling.
Gestural signing. The manipulator antennae produce a spatial language of remarkable expressiveness, exploiting the full range of jointless hydraulic movement to create fluid, continuous gestures in three-dimensional space. The gestural system is notable among federation communication modalities for its partial cross-species intelligibility - pointing, directional indication, urgency markers, and attention-directing gestures translate with minimal mediation to any species with manipulators and a concept of directed attention. Human and Candle gestural vocabularies are interoperable at the basic deictic level from first contact, a fact that has contributed substantially to the ease of the diplomatic relationship.
Mathematical communication relies heavily on the gestural channel. A Candle mathematician working through a problem produces sweeping, continuous manipulator movements that describe curves, indicate slopes, and trace functions in space - a process that human observers consistently describe as "conducting."
Candle engineering begins from continuous optimization rather than modular assembly. A human engineer specifies discrete components - bolts, beams, panels - and combines them according to a design. A Candle engineer starts from the field constraints - what are the stress gradients, thermal gradients, and load distributions this structure must satisfy? - and derives a shape that meets them. The resulting structures are smooth, curved, and organic-looking, not because of aesthetic preference but because continuous optimization produces organic shapes for the same mathematical reasons that evolution does.
In practice, construction involves joinery and discrete components, because metallurgy and materials science impose constraints that pure continuous optimization does not account for. The aesthetic tension between the ideal continuous form and the necessarily discrete fabrication process is a recognized and productive feature of the species' architectural tradition - their best builders are those who minimize the visible distance between the optimized form and the built reality.
Navigation technology is the species' most widely valued contribution to the federation's technical infrastructure. Their homeworld's opaque methane atmosphere meant they developed spacefaring without astronomy - they could not see the stars until they got above the clouds. The existential reorientation that followed the discovery of the wider universe was profound, and the navigational challenges of three-dimensional space were severe for a species whose thick-present memory makes dead reckoning unreliable. The compensatory systems they developed - positional tracking, orientation reference, coordinate logging - are overengineered to a degree that reflects genuine cognitive necessity rather than mere technical ambition.
Every component is hardened against electromagnetic interference as a baseline engineering specification, because the species' home star produces frequent high-energy flares and every piece of technology they have ever built was designed to survive them. This is a default assumption so deeply embedded in their engineering tradition that the concept of non-hardened electronics strikes them as approximately as sensible as a house without load-bearing pillars, or walls, or a roof. The federation values Candle navigation and communication hardware for operations in high-radiation environments, near active stars, and in any context where electromagnetic resilience is critical.
Their archival technology is similarly robust. Physical records - inscribed, etched, or pressed into durable media - are maintained alongside analog and digital backups in systems designed to survive stellar flares, geological events, and indefinite dormancy periods. The species' relationship to its records is existential, rather than curatorial; the archives are the species' long-term memory. Archival maintenance is basic civic infrastructure, funded and staffed with the seriousness that humans reserve for water treatment or power generation.
The foundational social act of Lucerna sapiens is relighting - restoring another organism's flame after extinguishment. A dormant organism cannot relight itself. It requires an external ignition source: another organism's flame, an ambient atmospheric spark, or a prepared device. In practice, relighting is almost always performed by another Candle, because waiting for an ambient spark is unreliable and prepared devices are a relatively recent technological development. For most of the species' history, the only way to wake up was for someone else to choose to wake you.
This produces a social architecture organized around mutual dependence of a kind that has no precise human analogue. Every organism in a community is, at any given moment, potentially responsible for every other organism's continued consciousness. If you go dormant - by choice, by accident, by environmental cooling - you are trusting that someone will relight you. If someone near you goes dormant, you are responsible for deciding whether and when to relight them. The act of relighting is not resuscitation in the human medical sense, because the dormant organism is not injured or dying. It is restoration of agency - the return of a person from a state of inert waiting to a state of active participation in the world.
Extinguishing without consent is the species' most serious interpersonal violation. It is not murder - the organism is not destroyed, and relighting is straightforward - but it is the forced removal of another person's agency, consciousness, and ability to act. It is the closest thing this species has to a concept of violence, and their legal and ethical frameworks treat it with corresponding gravity. The right to remain lit is foundational in a way that is structurally similar to, but experientially different from, human concepts of bodily autonomy.
Wick maintenance requires temporary extinguishment. The wick must be periodically braided, repaired, and augmented - threading in new metal wires, replacing worn fibers, adjusting the structure for better fuel delivery. This work cannot be performed while the wick is lit, for obvious reasons. The organism must extinguish, remain warm enough (through external heat or a heated environment) to stay liquid and cognitively active, perform or receive the maintenance, and then relight.
The powder room is the social space built around this necessity. It is a warm, enclosed environment - heated by geothermal taps, communal flame, or technological climate control - where organisms extinguish in the company of trusted individuals and perform wick maintenance together. The intimacy of the powder room is physical and social: the organism is in its most vulnerable state (extinguished, soft, unarmored, unable to flee or defend itself), engaged in grooming behavior that requires assistance from others (threading and braiding are difficult to perform on one's own wick), and trusting the assembled company with both its physical safety and its consciousness. If the room's heating failed while everyone was extinguished, the group would solidify into dormancy together and would require external rescue.
The social dynamics of the powder room - who is invited, who is trusted with your extinguished vulnerability, who helps braid your wick - constitute the species' primary framework for intimate social bonding. It is, in the assessment of the xenopsychology team, the closest functional analogue to human familial and romantic intimacy that the species possesses, though the mapping is imprecise and the species does not organize its intimate relationships along lines that correspond neatly to human categories.
When an organism is severely damaged - membrane punctured, lipid matrix lost, organs crushed - the community response is collective donation. Other organisms contribute lipid from their own reserves, delivered through manipulator contact. Organs, which are modular and regrowable, can be donated from healthy individuals to replace those destroyed in the injured organism. The donors temporarily lose body mass and functional capacity while their own reserves and organs regenerate. Healing a badly damaged individual is a community investment that makes everyone temporarily a little thinner, a little less capable, and a little more vulnerable, in exchange for restoring a neighbor to full function.
The social expectation is not that any individual sacrifice dramatically but that everyone contribute within their means - a norm that has scaled from small vent-communities to planetary civilization without significant structural modification. The only damage that cannot be repaired through donation is total membrane destruction. If the membrane - the self - is intact, the organism can be rebuilt from community resources. If the membrane is gone, there is nothing to rebuild around.
The basic unit of social organization is the "hole" (their term for a geothermal vent), which consists of you, the individuals you trust for wick maintenance, and any children you have contributed to, which usually consists of around 5-25 individuals. Any sufficiently large number of holes comprise a "reef", typically connected by chains of reproductive contribution, and any arbitrary quantity of reefs over one form a "circle", which is analogous to both a city and a political structure at the same time.
Circles derive policy based on affinity groups organized by self-interested individuals with extremely loose confederation. Individuals can be part of any number of affinity groups as they desire, limited only by their own personal time, and can remove themselves by striking their names from the record also at any time. Circles regularly engage in trade and intraspecies diplomacy primarily for artistic products and territory (the most chemically delicious geothermal vents, the best spots for catching solar flares, etc.), as the Candles achieved post-scarcity relatively early after becoming spacefaring.
Affinity groups vote in any configuration that they can agree upon, with no real intraspecies standard. Federation affairs are managed by "The 30-Latitude Block/25-Longitude Block, 3rd Circle's Interstellar Engineering Guild", which numbers approximately 800,000 individuals. By collective agreement, non-federation spacefaring affairs are managed by whichever Interstellar Engineering Guilds did not win the prior election. As you can imagine, this process is what humans would consider "politically messy".
Lucerna sapiens reproduces through communal egg-pooling and fusion.
All members of the species produce eggs, with no apparent biological sex. Egg production is triggered by a combination of caloric surplus and the cessation of a UV signal - on the homeworld, this corresponds to the interval between stellar flare events, when the atmosphere has been charged with energy and food is abundant but the immediate flare stimulus has ended. The species learned to induce the UV signal artificially early in its technological development, giving it voluntary control over the timing of reproduction.
Eggs are small protoplasmic bubbles, extruded through the thin membrane of the manipulator's mitten pad - the same structure used for feeding. They are deposited in communal clutch sites, typically warm, protected locations maintained by the community. Anyone may contribute eggs. Parentage is not tracked in any way that corresponds to human kinship structures, because the eggs do not develop individually.
Once deposited, eggs in contact with each other undergo membrane fusion. Where two eggs touch, the membranes thin, merge, and the protoplasmic contents combine. The fused mass continues to merge with adjacent eggs, producing a composite cluster whose genetic material is drawn from however many contributing organisms' eggs happened to fuse together. Organ differentiation begins within the fused mass, directed by the developing membrane - the membrane forms first, the organs follow, grown according to the membrane's encoded developmental program.
The resulting juvenile is a warm, breathing sac of protoplasm with developing organs, a functional manipulator set, emerging eyespots, and a vent-pore - but no wick. The juvenile is sessile or semi-sessile, dependent on the community's warming infrastructure for the heat that keeps its matrix liquid and its cognition active. It can eat. It can interact with its environment and with other juveniles and adults. It is, by increments, a person.
The wick develops gradually - fibrous tissue accumulating around the vent-pore over a developmental period of weeks to months. As the wick matures, the juvenile begins venting volatile metabolic byproducts that occasionally ignite from ambient sources or parental flame, producing brief, inefficient flares - "oil-lamp mode." The juvenile can move, but burns fuel at an unsustainable rate, limiting its range to the immediate vicinity of the warm zone. As the wick matures further, fuel delivery becomes more efficient, burn rate stabilizes, and range extends. The transition from oil-lamp mode to sustained candle-mode combustion is gradual, not binary.
First-lighting is the cultural ceremony marking the community's recognition that a juvenile's wick is mature enough for sustained independent operation. Wick-preparers - specialists in supplementing and reinforcing the biological wick structure - inspect, braid, and augment the wick before the ceremony. The community gathers. The juvenile's flame is formally established at full sustained output for the first time. The juvenile can, from this point, walk away from the warm zone under its own fire.
FV-7/14.3/891.2 - the designation is the species' own, translated directly into federation standard notation. It describes the planet's orbital position (seventh body from its star), rotational period (14.3 local time-units), and orbital period (891.2 local time-units). The species named its planet with a filing designation because, for most of its history, it did not know there was anything else to distinguish it from.
The star is a K-type orange dwarf with high flare activity - periodic bursts of UV radiation that drive atmospheric photochemistry and recharge the planet's reactive atmosphere. The planet orbits close enough to receive substantial flare energy, and the flares are frequent enough to constitute a regular environmental rhythm, though less dramatic and less biologically deterministic than the warm/cold cycle of Threshold.
The atmosphere is dense, reducing, and opaque. Methane, hydrogen, ammonia, and volatile organic compounds form a thick haze that blocks visible light from the surface. The sky is not visible from the ground. For most of the species' history, there was no "up" - no stars, no sun, no visible celestial objects. The conceptual expansion that accompanied the development of instruments capable of penetrating the atmospheric haze - and, eventually, spacecraft capable of rising above it - was, by the species' own historical records, the single most disorienting event in their civilization's existence. They discovered that they were on a rock in a void, and that the void contained other rocks, and that some of the other rocks had organisms on them, and a vanishingly small amount of those organisms used the membrane-soup method of biological organization.
The surface is geothermally active, with extensive volcanic and hydrothermal features. Hydrocarbon lakes and rivers coexist with liquid water. The landscape is rocky, warm, and dim - lit not by the star (whose light does not penetrate the haze) but by the biosphere itself. Organisms glow, burn, and luminesce across every surface. Atmospheric ignition events - lightning, plasma discharge, spontaneous combustion of accumulated volatile pockets - illuminate the haze from within in flares of color that serve the same ecological function as rainstorms on Earth. The visual experience of the surface is of a dim, warm, living cathedral, lit by its own inhabitants.
The biosphere is organized around access to geothermal energy and reactive atmosphere rather than around access to sunlight. Primary producers cluster near geothermal vents and in areas of high atmospheric chemical activity. The trophic structure is built on chemical energy rather than stellar radiation, and the "plant analogues" - membrane-soup organisms that metabolize geothermal and atmospheric chemistry directly - are, by Terran botanical standards, profoundly strange.
Humans encountered Lucerna sapiens at Year 19 post-reconstitution, through the standard diplomatic introduction process managed by the Bureau of Interspecies Affairs. The species had been a federation member for approximately 110,000 years and was well-established, well-documented, and well-integrated into federation institutional life. The contact was, by the standards of interspecies first encounters, notably smooth.
The immediate mutual impression was positive. Human diplomats reported finding the species "intuitively comprehensible" in a way that most federation species are not - the gestural communication channel provided a basic interaction framework from the first meeting, and the species' patient, present, intensely attentive conversational style was experienced by the human team as warm rather than alien. The Candle delegation's assessment, per translated diplomatic records, noted that humans possessed "remarkably functional eyes" and a visual art tradition that demonstrated "unexpected mastery of color," with particular reference to the color-field painters of the mid-twentieth century.
The primary point of friction - if it can be called friction - is the Atma question. Lucerna sapiens is a member of what the Bureau of Interspecies Affairs classifies as the biocultural gap group: species whose biological experience does not provide the conceptual substrate necessary to engage meaningfully with the Atma debate. In the Candle case, the missing concept is death. They have abstained from every Atma-related vote in the 72,000 years of there being an Atma project to vote on, and their diplomatic representatives handle the topic with a courteous, consistent avoidance.
The first one I examined - alive, cooperative, holding very still for me - I kept looking for the brain. I knew the briefing materials said the membrane was the cognitive substrate. I had read the federation's biological survey. I understood, intellectually, that the distributed processing structures in the membrane surface were the organism's cognitive architecture. I still spent three minutes probing the lipid matrix for a central nervous structure that was not there, because my hands would not believe what my briefing materials were telling me. Once I accepted it, I pulled my hands back as if I had been touching someone's face without permission. The candle thought it was quite funny, and made a gesture that meant "yes, that's me!"
- Dr. R. Okonkwo, field xenobiology, Bureau of Interspecies Affairs, Year 19 post-reconstitution
They have records going back to before their wick technology was universal. Scratches on rock near geothermal vents - "food here," "danger here," directional marks. I spent fourteen months embedded with one of their archival facilities as part of a records-management exchange program, and what I can tell you is that their record-keeping did not begin as a cultural achievement. It began as a cognitive accommodation. They could not remember things, so they wrote them down. It seems almost too obvious - why don't we do that? I don't know what to do with it except admire it.
- V. Asante, archival systems, Terran Transitional Authority, Year 22 post-reconstitution
The gestural thing is real. Day one, before the translators were set up, I pointed at a chair and my counterpart followed the point. I made a "sit down" gesture and they sat. Not because they understood the specific gesture — they don't have chairs — but because the underlying logic was the same. "I am directing your attention to a thing. Now I am indicating an action relative to that thing." Their entire gestural language is built on that foundation and so is ours. We spent the first hour of first contact playing the most sophisticated game of charades in human history, and it worked. It's... a nice change of pace.
- K. Otieno, diplomatic corps, Bureau of Interspecies Affairs, Year 21 post-reconstitution