Cave Alien (Ancient Earth Aliens 1)

Before Mira can refuse, I have stood up, and Flo has taken my place. She sits down looking smug and starts telling Mira that she wants her to use extra red berries, which will stain her hair red. Much like mine, I would point out, but what use is a petty squabble before the end? I learned a long time ago that it is better not to speak to these people. My words offend them. My thoughts themselves are against nature - and nobody wants to be tainted by the speech of a condemned woman. When I was small, the others of my age would taunt and torment me. They would throw rocks at me. Hit me with sticks. I was never allowed to retaliate, because I am the one who bears the sins of the tribe. All wrongs are borne on my shoulders, and will be purged when my body meets the molten interior of the mountain.

Though I will die tomorrow, nobody pays the slightest attention to me as I walk out from the village toward the fields where we cultivate grains to go with the fish we catch from the river’s waters. The mountain looms above me, but I refuse to look at it as I walk through the fields and let the song inside me begin to grow. Singing has always been my release and my pleasure. It sets me free, and in a way I cannot explain, it makes me feel powerful. When my voice is cast across the land, it becomes one with it, it joins the beauty of the birds and the trees, it melds with the winds. It travels around me in all directions, and I am no longer the condemned little outcast kept to die. I am, in the truest way, myself.

Standing in the thick of the tall grain, almost completely obscured from view of everything, I sing my last song.

Vulcan

It all started with a big bang.

One moment I was standing on the bridge of my ship, disregarding the orders from the first-hatched of our clutch, Krave, while also preparing to open fire on a Galactor peon ship. The next, that ship had been utterly vaporized into a spray of rainbow liquid shining with the strength of the old gold sun, and space was warping, a big wave of nothing sweeping toward me, taking the hull of my ship and making it twist until there was only the concept of ship left.

I expected to be wrung from space, contorted into a little mass of atoms and spat out to form part of an asteroid, my carbon harvested by the anomaly and turned into little black shards. But that did not happen. The nothing respected the organic living form of my body in a way it did not care for the soulless atoms of my ship.

But cold physics was waiting for me in the space left where my ship once was, and that had no mercy. A scythkin warrior is always prepared to die in battle. I drew in my last breath as the oxygen in my lungs escaped into the great beyond and I waited for the end which was coming on swift gravitational wings.

Instead, I found myself hanging in space, completely alone but for the planet rushing up to meet me. Big and blue and green, the mass of the new world overwhelmed me as it emerged from the cosmic womb of time.

Suddenly, a sense of falling overcame me. The planet was exerting its massive field upon me and I was brought down to stand upon it.

Now I find myself staring out at the kind of landscape a scythkin dreams of. Endless resources stretching on for what seems like an eternity. The ground where I stand is covered with green tendrils blowing in a morning breeze as the burning globe which once powered the scythkin refueling station now lends its energies to this place which has snapped into existence, fully formed.

I would find it difficult to believe, but for the fact that it has clearly happened, and I must believe what my eyes tell me, even if my mind insists that it is not possible for a planet to form in an instant like this.

It should be a ball of molten rock. My feet should be bathed in lava. I should be breathing sulfur and slowly sinking into the magma core, but somehow this planet has skipped all those transformative steps and emerged in a state perfect not only for the existence of human life but…

Boing… boing… boing…

A spotted deer bounces by, stops, looks at me with its little mouth chewing on a face full of grass, then decides that I am not a threat, lowering its head to graze right in front of me. I watch as it eats, and then is joined by several more beasts of a similar kind.