CAVE ALIEN

by Renard, Loki

  He brings me a chalice of water from the back of the cave. It spills over the edge of a golden cup, coating his fingers with a light green tinge.

  “Drink,” he says. “You will feel better.”

  I shake my head. Instinct tells me not to take food or drink from a creature like this. Untrustworthiness dances in his eyes. I see a multitude of meanings in his gaze, a mischievous villainy which might end everything.

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “This doesn’t slake your physical thirsts, which you no longer have. It helps ease you into this new realm. You belong here, Tres. You were made for this place. When you are ready, I will take you from this cave and I will show you an entire realm of such incredible beauty you will never tire of looking at it. You will be among family. You will be surrounded by friends…”

  “I never had friends,” I say, putting my hand to my head. It is pounding terribly, getting worse by the moment. “I don’t need them now.”

  Vulcan

  Blood. There is so much blood. It runs everywhere, over my fingers and dripping through them onto the sandy cave floor.

  I think I have done this wrong.

  I have never cleaved the skull of anyone I loved. I never knew it was possible to save a life this way. I never thought about saving life at all, only taking it. Now I see her essence leaking from her and I feel the most pure despair possible.

  She is lifeless. The spirit which animated her has fled. She is just flesh. The injury to her head was too much for her to sustain, and I have not helped. If anything, I hastened her end.

  “Tres,” I say her name, knowing she cannot respond.

  I lie her on the bed of leaves I made for her, and I face the fact that I could not save her. All my power, all my strength. It meant nothing in the end. Fate wanted to take her, and now it has.

  The communicator buzzes. I know Krave’s voice is about to come out of it. Maybe he’s going to tell me I’m saved. Maybe he’s going to tell me I’m still stranded. I don’t care. Before he can speak, I pick it up and crush it in my fist until it becomes nothing but dust. I no longer wish to be rescued. I know where I am bound, somewhere where the heat of molten rock will claim my body and take this pain from me.

  I cannot be saved, because there is nothing of me left. The scythkin stranded on this planet was a creature of relentless destructive power. I don’t know what the word is for what I am now, but I can no longer lay claim to being scythkin. I have been changed so thoroughly. I have gained my wings, and lost my hope. All this power, and it means nothing because I cannot put this girl together again.

  A pointless, senseless accident has taken her from me and there is nothing I can do. Except join her in death.

  Tres

  POP!

  I feel a sudden release, as if pressure I didn’t know was squeezing me suddenly went away.

  “My head doesn’t hurt anymore,” I mutter to myself.

  “Ah,” Lykar says. “It is done.”

  “What is done?”

  “You have died, dear girl. Don’t look so surprised. You felt it coming for you, didn’t you? You heard it whisper your name on the soft winds. You were ready for it until the brute came for you.”

  I stare at Lykar, and I wonder if what he is saying can possibly be true.

  “I don’t feel dead.”

  “You’ve not been in your body since you fell back out of the fire. What you felt then was your passing, or at least, the beginning of it.”

  “I didn’t know it would be that easy.”

  “It’s not, for everybody. But you are not everybody. You were never truly of the Earth. That song inside you kept you tethered to the other side of physical existence and all its indignities. I am sorry you suffered, my child, but you have to understand that to me, all the things humans do to one another are like the battles of gnats. They are meaningless.”

  “It wasn’t meaningless being an outcast my entire life.”

  “No. It was correct. They sensed that you were better than them, more than them. But you should have known better, Tres. You should have felt the enormity of creation in your song, every time you looked at the stars or saw a flower open, you should have known you were forever part of something so much larger.”

  “I didn’t. I only knew that I was outcast, that I would be sacrificed when the tribe needed me to be. I was born to die.”

  “All things are,” he says, reaching for a quill and twirling it between his fingers. He looks at me with those laughing auburn eyes and I want to scream.

  “I found someone I loved. And I was taken away from him.”

  “That is often the way,” Lykar muses. He sounds bored, as though it is not his concern how upset I might be.

  “This is not where the ancestors are,” I say, suddenly. “I am not in the right place.”

  “Your ancestors are not human. Well, half of them are, but they’re not the important part. One drop of faun blood makes you ours - and there is much more than a single drop in you, Tres.” He smiles at me, and there is pride in his eyes, but it is not pride in me. It is pride in himself. All he sees in me, likes in me, are the parts he recognizes that come from him. And that, is not love.

  “I hate you,” I tell him. “I want to be with Vulcan.”

  “You can want all sorts of things. You can have many of them. But you cannot live a life with a beast from another world. That creature defiled you in the world of the living, but you are home now, where you belong.”

  “I don’t belong here.”

  “Of course you do. Look at yourself.”

  “I know what I look like.”

  “Do you?” He cocks his head and gives me one of those knowing smiles which drive me mad. “Look down, Tres. Look again.”

  I look down. And I scream.

  My legs are gone. My feet are cloven hooves. I am not human anymore. I am naked to the waist, my hair cascading over my breasts in an auburn flow, but everything below my hips is a sheen of white fur.

  “What have you done to me?!”

  “Nothing,” he says with that same irritating smirk. “This what you are, Tres. It is what you have always been.”

  “I have not always been half goat.”

  “You’ve always been the daughter of the faun king,” Lykar smiles. “You’re only just taking your true form. You should embrace this. It is proof that you are no mere mortal, that death does not touch you as it touches pathetic humans.”

  “So I’m not dead?”

  “Not in the way you think you are,” he says. “Tres, it is time you were introduced to society.”

  “Nobody can see me like this! I’m a monster!”

  “You are no monster. You are a great beauty. You just don’t know what it means to be beautiful, here in this place.”

  “Give me my legs back! I want to be human. I want Vulcan! I want…”

  “What you want will change when you realize who you really are,” Lykar says. “You don’t know yet. Your human life was confusing for you, and it has not been long enough for you to understand otherwise. Embrace your nature, Tres, it is the only way to be happy.”

  “Turn me back! Release me! I am alive! Send me back!”

  “No.”

  “Do it… or I will scream.”

  “Scream all you like, princess.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say. “When I scream, the world tears.”

  “I don’t…”

  REEEEEEEE!

  I scream at the top of my lungs, a clear, high pitched sound which rings out around the cave and makes the walls resonate, dirt falling down from the uneven roof. How stable is this place? Can it withstand the power of my voice? The faun-king covers his ears and squints his eyes and I have my doubts.

  I wish I had known how much power I had when I was alive. I wish I had embraced all I was, rather than believed what I was told, that I had no value other than as a sacrifice. I scream my rage, my pure fury, I make a sound of agony and triumph and refutation of dea
th, and I see it begin to tear the cave apart.

  “STOP!”

  Lykar throws himself at me, knocking me to the ground. As powerful as my voice might be, I am still vulnerable to physical attack. He pins me down and pushes a silken scarf between my teeth, holding it either side of my mouth in his fists, pinning my head against the rumbling rock.

  “No more,” he says. “No more screaming.”

  But I don’t have to scream, because the walls themselves have taken up my cry. The vibrations echo like ripples on the water, and I know that I have changed this world. I have power here. Goat legs or not, I have the voice, and the vibration.

  “Let me go,” I mutter through the scarf.

  “I cannot do that,” he says. "And you wouldn’t want me to. I could set you free, but there are more places to be lost in this realm than you can imagine, and screaming will not save you then. Stay with me. Learn about yourself. Discover what those legs mean.”

  “I know what they mean. They mean you betrayed me. Disfigured me.”

  “Or they mean you have power and place here. There are more like us, Tres. There are a myriad of fauns in the forest beyond this cave. They are your subjects. They answer to you…”

  “I don’t want them to answer to me. I want my lover. I want Vulcan.”

  He sits back and pulls the scarf from my face. “All the screaming in the universe will not bring him back to you. Accept what you have lost. Discover what you have found.”

  Chapter Seven

  Vulcan

  I walk down the mountain, no longer concerned with hiding myself. The end is nigh. Everything of value has been lost. Tres is gone. A simple, stupid, freak accident has taken her from me, and all the power in the world will not bring her back.

  I thought about throwing myself into the volcano, but that is not how a scythkin ends life. If I fall, it will be in battle against the same humans who killed a warboy. They must be out here with their spears, nothing more than sharp stone between myself and eternity. I will die a human death, and perhaps I will somehow find the human afterlife. If it is true place, and not merely a legend, I might find Tres then.

  SCHLOOP!

  Before I can reach the village and stride through it creating fear and chaos in the hearts of the humans, I am torn from the Earth, dragged through time into the future - all the more perverse for the fact that I know I do not have one.

  “NO!” I cry out. “NO!”

  “Stop yelling. I’ve just rescued you.”

  I am on board a scythkin ship. Krave is before me, two more of my brood by his side. They all look pleased with themselves.

  “PUT ME BACK DOWN THERE! I HAVE TO GET THE GIRL!”

  “Stop. Yelling,” Krave says. “We tried to lock on to a female signature near you. We couldn’t see one.”

  “It’s her blood on my hands,” I say. “She’s gone. She died. Because I’m not a fucking brain surgeon. Because you were a few minutes too late!”

  He looks at me a little longer than usual, then shakes his head. “I’m sorry she didn’t make it.”

  “So am I. Put me back. Put me back one day before you picked me up. I want to save her.”

  “You can’t change time, Vulcan.”

  “I can change whatever I want.” I know I sound petulant. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything anymore. This ship, I used to consider a vessel just like this my only home. I used to pilot it through countless stellar systems, battling for dominance, destroying worlds…

  “I’m sorry your human passed away,” Krave says. “I truly am. Do you want some synth?”

  “I want to go and get her,” I growl. “I know she’s not gone. She was too strong.”

  Krave makes a gruff sound under his breath and grabs a bottle of synth. “There’s no shame in mourning a human’s passing, and there’s no weakness in accepting the past as the past.”

  “It’s not the past!” I smash the bottle on the wall of the ship and start jabbing the sharp edges into my skin. They do nothing, because I am made of harsher stuff than the bottle. I start laughing hysterically. I could not save her, and now I cannot die. What hell is this, to be trapped alive at an impenetrable distance from the one I love.

  “Sedate him,” Krave says to the others. More scythkin keep appearing. He must have the entire brood with him. All here on a rescue mission I wish they hadn’t undertaken. Why could they not just leave me alone?

  “STOP!” I growl.

  “We’re trying to save you, idiot!”

  “There’s nothing left of me to save. Not until I find her.” I stand up and run for the door. Three of my broodkin latch on to me, but it is hard to handle a scythkin if he doesn’t want to be handled. They cannot get a real grip on my extended blades and ridges, not without slicing into their digits. There are shouts and curses and in the end, a few thousand volts of the highest current imaginable coursing through my system.

  I shut down. The world goes black. My last memory is of trying to reflexively choke someone. I don’t know who it is, my vision has been taken offline by the current, but I know they deserve it.

  * * *

  When I wake up, I have no idea how long I have been out. It doesn’t matter. Time is an irrelevancy now. I have to get back down to the planet. I am sure I can throw myself down, the same way they threw the communicator down. The settings will still be in the ship’s computer, I’m sure. I just have to get to it and hope we are not yet out of range. I doubt they moved away at any great speed. The resurgent Earth is inherently unstable. Disturbing it with gravitational fields accompanying fast travel would be foolish, and Krave would never allow that.

  My plan is immediately derailed by finding myself secured with an almost endless series of straps and chains. There is a small white dog sitting on the floor, watching me with interest and maybe confusion. It cocks its head at me, dark eyes filled with animal wisdom. I never liked animals. I thought they were clockwork meat. But since I found myself surrounded by them on that planet, I now yearn for them almost as much as I yearn for Tres herself. That animal was made out of Earth. It is a conduit.

  “Pants! Come here!”

  A far-off female voice calls the animal and it responds with impressive alacrity.

  “KRAVE!” I shout my brood leader’s name as I tug at my bonds. This is his doing. Nobody else would dare authorize this. I would turn them into slivers of scythkin and serve them to the rest of the brood as an appetizer.

  Krave doesn’t come. Instead two others do. The medics. I never liked them.

  “Let me out now, and I’ll spare your lives,” I threaten. “Make me find my own way out of this, and I cannot guarantee your survival.”

  They look at one another, and then they smirk. They don’t believe me. They should.

  “I’m sorry we’ve had to do this to you,” Tzan says. “But you’re going to feel better soon. Vrel and I are the best medics our clutch has, you know that. We’re going to take really good care of you.”

  “Do not talk to me like an errant hatchling,” I growl. “Let me free. I have time to break.”

  “You’ve broken enough time,” Tzan says. “It’s time you got better.”

  “I’m not sick, you blazing idiot. Let me go. Now.”

  But they don’t let me go. They leave me right where I am and they start talking to one another, discussing plans for my ‘treatment’. While they talk, I am gathering my strength. Nothing can hold a scythkin who truly wants to be free. We are capable of ripping through a shuttle’s hull with our bare hands if we want to. These chains and shackles tell me that they think I am weak. I will soon show them what a mistake that is.

  And then there is a pinch.

  And then there is more blackness.

  I like the nothing. It is all I feel I have left, so it is appropriate to bask in the darkness. I hope I never emerge from it. I no longer have any business left in the world of the living. This is all that is left to me, the eternal void.

  And then, it speaks.
<
br />   “Vulcan…”

  I recognize the voice immediately. It is coming to me from very far away, but it is her voice. She still has one. Death might have taken her body, but it has not claimed her essence. Some souls are too great to be taken by eternity. Hers is one of them.

  “TRES!?” I roar her name into the blackness.

  “I’m here,” she sings, her voice a hymn on the breeze. “I’m waiting for you.”

  “I’m coming for you, Tres. Wherever you are. Whenever you are. I’m coming. Stay strong.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I love you.”

  We can only touch via our words, but our words are enough to let me know that she survives in some form. Maybe the girl in the cave died, but that was never who Tres really was. She was always something more than herself, an angel trapped in a limited body. I will find her again. I swear it. If it takes a thousand lifetimes, I will find her.

  “LET ME OUT!” I growl the words as I come back to consciousness, yanking and writhing against my bonds. I will fight every moment they try to keep me restrained. These chains will lose their battle before I do.

  “Still can’t do that, chief,” Vrel says. “You’re still heavily sedated. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you are.”

  “I heard Tres. She’s waiting for me. I have to get to her.”

  The medics exchange looks. “You might experience some hallucinogenic side effects. Try not to let them get to you.”

  “It wasn’t a hallucination. It was her.”

  They look at one another again. It is as if they are speaking without words. Vrel and Tzan were double hatched, both coming from the same egg. They are, in essence, the same scythkin in two bodies. It’s difficult to decide which one of them deserves to be destroyed first. Tzan tends to take the lead, so it might be more effective to eliminate Vrel.

  Murder within the brood is so rare as to effectively never happen, but I would kill endlessly if it meant being able to find Tres - and I will certainly never find her while I am trussed up like a chicken, being poked at and thrown repeatedly into unconsciousness by these two.