by Norman Oro
Over the millennia since the Great War, Tol’s clergy, government leaders and teachers slowly tempered their people’s warrior soul by exalting a virtue above that of even courage: Prudence. Since it ended, every single Kek had to spend at least two years immersed in the Great War, learning what it had done to Tol and her inhabitants. One year was spent living in the ruins around Fosa, which had been intentionally left unsalvaged. In that time, most came to understand the conflict’s underlying cause. Essentially, the very qualities that enabled the Kek to brave a poisoned world and restore it also nearly destroyed them. Without any guiding principle, their bravery and indomitable spirit could be turned to terrible purposes. Soon after the war, it was clear that prudence had to be that guiding principle.
And so, even as the laws of nature themselves seemed to go haywire all around them, a sense of prudence reined in the Kek impulse to track down and punish those responsible. It was prudence that held them together even as they were given every reason to turn on one another and fight. Events ultimately bore out their restraint. Within a couple of weeks, the number of cases began to decline and within a month, they were gone altogether. A few days later, scattered reports of disappearances resurfaced; however, they were unlike the previous ones. People were disappearing then reappearing elsewhere at will.
Three days after Thusla mastered the ability to teleport and joined the millions who could communicate among themselves without speaking, Tolen Space Command detected a signal beamed from the outer reaches of known space, several light-hours away. Despite being of unknown origin, the signal utilized the government’s most sophisticated encryption protocols, which ostensibly only several people on all of Tol had access to. Running the message through a decoding machine in his office, Thusla sat back in astonishment as the projector generated an image of a man, a Kek. Speaking in perfect Kern, the primary language on Tol, the man explained that his name was Aiden Hower and that he was actually of a race of people called the Cley. He then said that he led an alliance of worlds like Tol, whose people had awakened; and if the Kek wished, they could begin talks to join them. All they had to do was beam their reply to the signal’s point of origin. Within an hour, space command was busy transmitting Thusla’s response stating that he was Tol’s president and welcoming the Alliance to his world. By the end of the week, Allied delegates materialized in Vos, where they were provided with temporary offices. The next day, they set to work drafting Tol’s accession treaty.
Euphoric from their newfound abilities and the knowledge that they weren’t alone in the universe, the Kek greeted Aiden Hower and his delegation with open arms; and subsequent talks detailing Tol’s integration into the Alliance went smoothly. However, when one of the diplomats prematurely leaked records detailing Allied efforts to foment the Great War, a riot ensued in the capital with Thusla at its head. Realizing that the Alliance was that hidden force that kept thwarting agreement on the Parthean ages ago, Thusla was barely able to restrain himself and the mob long enough to order Aiden Hower’s delegation to leave. News of what the Alliance had done almost mortally wounded any chance of joining it. A fury quickly took hold of Tol that didn’t abate for years as the deepest wound ever inflicted on the Kek soul was ripped open.
With many of his people calling for war on the Allies, Thusla couldn’t help but secretly side with them. Three billion people had died because of a statistical analysis on some cold, distant world. It was a battle unlike anything he’d ever encountered not to let his blood get the better of him. In time, though, after much reflection, he urged his people to do the same. Although his resentment still burned over the Alliance’s arrogance, he came to begrudgingly concede that after witnessing the demise of so many races ruled by a similar martial spirit, the Allies made the only choice they genuinely felt they had. When talks began again, they concluded with Tol becoming the three hundredth Allied world. The accession ceremony, as breathtaking and full of portent as it was, rang hollow for Thusla and many of his people. Nevertheless, when he heard Aiden Hower speak of peace, of progress and of new beginnings, he hoped it would be so.
Over the subsequent decades, as Tol became enmeshed within the Alliance, it was transformed. Thusla saw firsthand advances in medicine, food production and manufacturing that would’ve otherwise taken millennia to realize. With their new allies’ help, the Kek also soon discovered a hitherto unfathomable ability, control over time. Specifically they found they could slow down or speed up the flow of time within any area of space they could see or visualize. This was the secret behind the reports of withered crops and depleted soil during their awakening. Remarkably enough, it was also the secret of the Eternals.
Within and around each Eternal, Alliance scientists discovered thousands of micro-thin fields where time flowed at different rates. Further tests revealed that those temporal anomalies slowed each Eternal’s aging to a standstill, while imparting supernormal speed, reflexes and invulnerability in battle. After their awakening, all Kek could control the flow of time locally; however, only the Eternals were able to do so to such effect without conscious effort.
Centuries later, as Thusla neared the end of his fifth term as assembly president, he decided that it would be his last. By then, the rift between the Kek and their allies stemming from the Great War had healed; and it was time for new leaders untouched by the war to take the reins. When the time came during his final term to consolidate the defense forces of each Allied world into a single, interplanetary one, the choice for its headquarters was obvious. And so, after over a half millennium serving his people in the assembly, Thusla negotiated and signed the treaties making the Kek the Allied Defense Force’s primary battle contingent and Tol its command center. After the signing, Aiden Hower discreetly pulled him aside to speak about life after the assembly. Feeling there was still more he could do for his people, Thusla listened closely.
Mystery of the Steppe
He eventually received and accepted an offer to lead the Central Development Ministry’s outpost on a desert planet called Shiva. Looking out from a hidden observation tower, it reminded Thusla of Tol before the Great War. In fact, if the Kek religion didn’t require living on Homeworld for at least half of the year, he would’ve built a house there and stayed once their work was done. The Alsafa people who called Shiva home were very much like the Kek, as well. Mindful of the pain and anguish that Alliance intervention had wrought on his planet, Thusla sought to foster beliefs, customs and institutions immediately that would preclude the need for drastic measures down the road. With guidance from the ministry’s social scientists, he and his team succeeded. Though still fiery by temperament as their awakening approached, the Alsafa only waged war in their business dealings with one another, not through force of arms. Also, customs were firmly entrenched to bring disagreements quickly to the fore to confront them rather than letting them fester unspoken until they exploded. Monitoring their progress and discreetly intervening as necessary over the course of millennia, Thusla and his team looked on with pride as the first reports began surfacing of mysterious disappearances in Shiva’s sprawling capital, Gaul. The ministry placed the probability of the Alsafa successfully awakening at greater than ninety-five percent.
As the eventful subsequent weeks played out, the institutions and traditions that Thusla and his team helped develop held strong. Once he saw indications that the Alsafan global consciousness had begun forming, he reviewed first contact protocols with the development ministry in Ohnz. The next day, he watched the latest news recorded by probes displaced around Shiva. Reports about disappearances were gone and replaced, as expected, by stories of elated Alsafans discovering their new abilities. However, three hours into the media feed, it inexplicably went silent. Given the probe’s tolerances, a mechanical failure was impossible. Remembering clips he’d seen from the Allies’ very first interplanetary missions, Thusla quickly donned his encounter suit then displaced himself into Shiva’s orbit. He materialized above millions of Alsafans clumped togeth
er, floating lifeless in the impersonal void of space like so much debris. Feeling uncharacteristically weak-stomached, he threw up in his suit. After returning to Halcyon to clean himself, he checked telemetry from the sensors arrayed all around Shiva. There was no longer any field activity on the planet. Against all expectations, the Alsafa had succumbed to their awakening.
Over the following decades, as Thusla rose to become head of the ministry, he watched alongside his colleagues as planet after planet fell despite millennia of careful guidance. Each and every time, he could barely restrain himself from ordering an all-out intervention. However, the Alliance had learned from hard-earned experience that intervening at that stage almost always made the situation even worse. And so, he watched stoically as thousands of worlds went silent. His statisticians, sociologists and historians were at a loss as to why their methods had suddenly been rendered useless. All they knew for certain was that the failures were localized; the ministry’s efforts elsewhere invariably succeeded. It was only in that horn-shaped cluster of star systems known as the Steppe where everything seemed to have been turned on its head.
Through his contacts in the Department of Science and Exploration, Thusla heard of the Owghen, Cley who were said to be able to answer any question posed to them. He was skeptical at first, recalling the soothsayers from Tol’s distant past; however, a few hours of research convinced him otherwise. He spoke with the head of the department and the liaison to the Owghen, Ide Meadow, to arrange a meeting. When he first saw them, he was most struck by how self-contained they were. Otherwise, they were no different from any other Cley, or Kek for that matter. He explained the failed awakenings in the Steppe and provided them with all the background information the ministry had. Once he was done, they simply nodded then adjourned to a conference room. They emerged three days later, their composure noticeably shaken. The Owghen reported that, despite appearances, those races hadn’t succumbed to their awakenings. Rather, a powerful race of predators called the Grell had murdered them. Once they were done with the Steppe, their domain would likely target the Alliance next.
With the development ministry’s outposts facing an insurmountable adversary, Thusla soon began hearing calls for an evacuation. In his long life, he’d never faced a more gut-wrenching decision. Every fiber in his being wanted to draw a line across the Steppe to make a stand against the Grell and their domain. According to the Owghen, however, that would’ve endangered the entire Alliance in return for a shining moment of valor. The Grell were masters at commandeering a global consciousness, absorbing its knowledge, murdering its people then using that knowledge to find other races to extinguish. The Kek, with their in-depth familiarity of every single Allied world, would therefore prove invaluable in enabling the Domain to extinguish the Alliance one shared consciousness at a time. All the Grell would need was visual contact with a single Kek to set that in motion. Despite his grave misgivings, Thusla knew there was often little point in arguing with the Owghen. Within a few days, the once formidable Alliance presence in the Steppe was dismantled. Thusla felt obligated to be there personally to evacuate the Central Development Ministry’s final outpost, thus abandoning the innumerable sentient races there to the Domain.
Eternal
Nearly two millennia later, the Grell offensive against the Allies began. To that point, the Owghen had been perfect in anticipating the Domain’s scouting patterns. However, a few days earlier, they noticed that their prescience had become significantly impaired. Answers that would otherwise have been accessible within seconds instead took hours and sometimes even days. Though it arrived too late, they issued an evacuation for a mining colony they believed the Grell were observing in their hunt for the Alliance.
The planet was called Ehrts and lay at the cusp of the seventy light-year wide buffer zone encasing the Steppe. Most of the mining operation was dismantled and teleported away just minutes after receiving the Owghen warning; however, not all of the personnel had been accounted for. A team sent off-world earlier that day to survey Ehrts’s moons hadn’t yet reported in. Yas Keng, a Tessite, volunteered to stay behind to evacuate them once they returned. Literally seconds after teleporting the final person from the survey team to safety, a Grell probe materialized a dozen yards in front of him. Within minutes, millions of his people were displaced thousands of miles above their homeworld. As the defense of the Alliance began, the Ta’oh started teleporting them back to the surface. The order then went out from Ohnz to launch the counterattack.
It was just after sunrise when Aiden Hower’s message reached Vos. Legions of Kek from every corner of the Alliance immediately materialized on Tol in her hour of need. As the sun rose on Vos’s Plaza of Heroes, Thusla donned his battle armor then started walking towards the sea of Eternals assembled there. Once he took his place beside them, he quieted his mind then joined his people as they prepared to reach out into the heart of a Grell sun. His spirit soon quickened at a sound thundering through their collective consciousness, a chant he hadn’t heard since antiquity:
‘Tis Death… Yes… ‘Tis Life… Yes…
Today I die… Yes… Today I live… Yes…
The Great Sun rises into the sky honoring me… Yes…
Like a thousand kisses showered upon my head… Yes…
So my sword never errs… Yes… So my body never tires… Yes…
We are the Kek… Yes… Invincible and eternal… Yes…
4
The Grell
Hope and Piety
Dr. Rys opened his eyes as himself once again in the Onavean sea. Glancing downward, he noticed that his hands had grown old and wrinkled. To his right, he saw that his son, Pedro, had also aged and now appeared to be well into his fifties. He closed his eyes a second time knowing that if he never saw Onav again, his son would take what they’d learned back to Earth. When he opened them, it was as Pret Zin, a Grell. Suddenly an entire lifetime of memories started asserting themselves in his mind. He was an artist living in Ehdl, the inland capital of his homeworld, Prime; and shared an apartment with his childhood sweetheart, Alma, whom he’d recently married. He came from a long line of artists who specialized in working with metal; and many of the reliefs that adorned the city’s buildings, parks and museums originated in his father’s and his grandfather’s studios. Just recently, his own work was beginning to receive plaudits from some of Prime’s most influential critics. In fact, he had an interview in a few weeks with an architect who’d read some of their reviews. He was interested in commissioning Pret to create the mural for an office complex he was designing, the largest of its kind in the world. As excited as he was about the prospect of working on such a high-profile project, he had other things to take care of first.
He’d spent the past several months on a relief for Thrace Merrick, a wealthy businessman-turned-philanthropist and his newest patron. When he asked Thrace what he wanted, he paused for a moment then replied that he wanted Pret to create something capturing hope and piety. Of course, it had been a maddening exercise ever since. In addition to being almost impossibly vague, hope and piety were cornerstones of Grell culture, themes that for ages had graced some of the finest works of his people. He’d spent months etching one study after another with only a thick carpet of zinc shavings on his studio floor to show for it. Nothing ever seemed right and uncharacteristically he even began to question whether he was up to the task. Still, as he sat in front of a pristine slab of gleaming metal, laser brush in hand, he felt he was finally closing in on what he was looking for.
Off in the distance, the far-viewer was on, reporting yet another instance of someone going missing as they slept then inexplicably reawakening miles away. When the reports first began, only the tabloids picked them up, and like many, Pret dismissed them as hoaxes or publicity stunts. However, seeing the looks of embarrassment and bewilderment on the victims’ faces, he could tell it was all real, at least for them. Once the news was over, he turned off the far-viewer, took in a deep breath then began gently sl
icing into his canvas.
He spent most of that evening talking with Alma about the disappearances, idly wondering what it would be like to be able to do such things at will. They both agreed that if they could, they’d teleport themselves immediately to Gem, which orbited exactly on the other side of Celestia, their planet’s sun. Scientists had predicted it for centuries, but it had only been fifty years since a probe actually reached it, verifying Gem’s existence. A manned mission four years later found it uninhabited, but otherwise a mirror image of Prime. With its untouched splendor and its mystique, Gem had since captured their world’s imagination; and commercial space flights began just a few years earlier. Though ticket prices were exorbitant, they both dreamed of visiting it one day.
When they got up the next morning, Pret turned on the far-viewer to see if there were any more disappearances. It wasn’t something he was particularly proud of, but he was becoming transfixed by them. Logging onto Ether, the largest message-sharing service on Prime, he saw he wasn’t alone. The disappearances ranked second on the list of most frequently discussed topics in Ehdl and third on all of Prime. Once a report regarding the latest cases did come on, it was a somewhat light-hearted piece about an elderly man in the island city-state of Cadence who woke up in the bed of his young, exceedingly attractive and exceedingly startled co-worker. Despite its humorous tone, the news clip ended on a troubling note. Apparently the prior victims had all since fallen gravely ill and were hospitalized in critical condition. Physicians examined them and believed it was a severe respiratory infection, but couldn’t determine its cause. As word of the victims’ plight spread, so did community efforts to support them. Later the next day, Pret and Alma briefly attended a prayer vigil for them organized by local churches.
