Cave Alien (Ancient Earth Aliens 1)

“How did you know my mother?”

“In the carnal sense,” he says. “She was beautiful. Lost. Drawn to me. And she sung so beautifully, I could not resist her. I shouldn’t have been in your realm. The agreement is to leave things alone once humans take their first steps in the sand, but there’s hardly any oversight in the matter.”

“So it was no grand love affair. Just a chance fling and you inflicted me upon the world, tore me screaming from the darkness and made me live a life of pain and suffering.”

“If it makes you feel any better, that is how all humans come to be.”

“It does not make me feel any better.” I fold my arms over my chest and stare at him with narrowed eyes. I have always been so timid, afraid of my own shadow. I have spent my life trying to stay out of trouble, make myself small, stifle my song. But I cannot now, I have been freed of the thing that held me back… my body. I know instinctively that I am no longer inside my skin. Whatever I am now is the essence of me which was always weighed down by all that heavy meat.

“Did you try to save her?”

“Excuse me?”

“The way Vulcan is trying to save me. Now. Did you try to save my mother when she was executed for the sin of being with you, growing me inside you?”

“Your mother was just a vessel,” he says. “And she did not belong here.”

I did not think it was possible to loathe anyone more than I loathe Trelok, but I hate this faun more. I hate him so deeply, and so completely I did not know I had this capacity for hatred.

“She died alone. I almost died too…”

“It would have been better for you if you had. Then you would have been born into my realm as an infant and grown up here. You would not be having this difficult time now, trying to adjust when you are already fully grown as a female human, or, what you think is a female human.”

He does not seem to notice or care about my emotional state, or, if he does, he considers it an unfortunate side-effect of my not having died earlier.

“Do not look so furious,” he says. “Everything you are learning today, including the news of your death, is nothing more than a much delayed new beginning. You are in a place of power, and you are a woman of power. My magic runs through your veins. You are only beginning to understand what that means.”

“It’s not your magic. It’s mine.”

“Is it?” His eyes twinkle as he cocks his head.

“What does that question mean?”

“It means,” he says. “Have you claimed it? Made it truly yours? Or have you batted at it, like a kitten with a blade of grass, then run scared from what it might truly be capable of? You have a voice, Tres, a voice unlike any other. It has real power, but you have not used it. You have whispered like a mouse when you should have roared like a lion.”

“I might have known how to do that, if I had a father to raise me.”

“You do realize that I saved you, ungrateful whelp,” he says, still good-natured. “You are, at this moment, undergoing impromptu brain surgery from an alien who has about as much knowledge of human anatomy as you did of your true heritage yesterday. There is every chance you will die and be sucked into oblivion, the soul grinder of the cosmos, but I have pulled you free. You could say thank you.”

I do not say thank you.

“I thought you said I was dead.”

“Well, you’re close enough. Your lover is going to finish you off, would be my guess. Doesn’t strike me as a brain surgeon.”

My death, at this moment, is not my main concern. I have felt the ache of this man-creature’s absence all my life. Father. I so often wondered what it was like to have one. I have been left to wonder what I was, because I always felt the strangeness at the core of me and yet could not make sense of it. I spent many moons watching the daughters of Trelok and wondering why I did not feel like them, look like them, speak like them. The answer was in front of me every time I looked into the shining river. I come from somewhere else. And where you come from matters. Even if you don’t want it to. Even if you try your best to fit with a tribe which does not share your soul, as I did my entire life.

“What am I doing here? Why did you bring me here now?”

“Because you belong here.”

“I don’t,” I tell him. “Maybe I would have if you’d loved me, but you didn’t. You abandoned me. You can’t claim me now. It is too late. There has been too much hurt and harm. I no longer need a father. I have Vulcan.”