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"Is this everything you have here on their extinction?"

"Mostly," the man said. "There's more of course, but this is all that we have dug up."

He was a man in the broad sense; within the bounds of the general template. I had seen quite the range in my work. It is hard to believe that when we were uni-planetary humanity had consisted of a single pattern. Yet, that is what the archaeology shows.

Before me were clear-walled vaults of climate-controlled jewelry, burial goods, and garbage. Historians used gloves as they peeled the stories off them. The prize of the collection was a black granite standing stone that glowed in radio: waste heat from its self-repair circuits. Maintained on its surface as fresh as the day they'd been carved, were inscriptions.

"Can you read it?" He asked when I got to it. “We've not seen it's like in even our oldest databases. Yet, it's mathematical roots are obvious though we have not been able to derive beyond a point with certainty."

"It was called Volm;" I replied, I recognized the symbols like old friends in a crowd. "It was a geometrical languages derived from proofs so humans could decrypt their ancestors’ records rather than remember their languages.”

"That seems awkward."

"Your culture is too young to know the event horizon of memory. Volm was meant to be a language of deep time. One for leaving notes for a reader who may not come for millions of years."

"Is that why you can read it? Because the Empire has endured so long?"

"I can read it because it was written to me."

He seemed surprised at that.

"To an Imperial officer?"

"No. To ME. It tells of the coming of the Dragon; its speed, mass, and rage."

"The Dragon? That's a myth!" He laughed.

I gave him a look and his smile disappeared.

"It's a myth to YOUR people. Among the ice palace tribes it is a hungry demon their dancers recall in songs. In the Book of Diamond Leaves they thought it was a comet, right up until it burned their moons. The Dragon is real. I have been following it for over a million years."

The man opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it. He had the disturbed frown of one whose worldview had just been smashed with a hammer.

"You-you follow it?"

"I’m hunting it. These are the carcasses it leaves behind," I gestured around the vault. "Often another culture will settle among them, and produces these when I arrive and ask."

"If what you say is true, that this Dragon must be thousands of years ahead of you. How could you possibly hope to catch it when buried ruins are its spoor?"

"Because dragons like to double back."