Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5)

by Ashley L. Hunt

  I crashed into something hard, so hard that I almost passed out. I slid along a tilted slope of ice, and I couldn't even see where I was, much less control my momentum, especially not with everything I had been working to build for the past month crashing down around me in a rain of shattered metal. I rolled and ground my armored feet into the ice, scrabbling frantically for purchase, anything that could stop me sliding down into certain death. My feet slid out from under me, and I frantically dug my hands into the ice, clawing desperately as my legs slid over a sharp ledge. Cracks in a glacier can descend for miles. If you go down into that darkness, you will never come out, a voice in my mind told me, and I knew it to be true. I was going to die on this shithole moon after all. “BARBAS!!!” I screamed frantically, tears running down my face only to be sponged away by my suit’s automatic environment maintenance system. There was no answer from the AI, from my Qarin. I was alone, and I was going to die.

  I lost my grip suddenly, without warning, as the ice beneath my fingers cracked and gave in. I fell into the darkness, and the abyss reached up to swallow me whole.

  Chapter Seven: In the Dark

  Volistad

  I woke up, which was surprising. I felt like I had been beaten to death, which was less so. For some time I just lay there, on my back in the dark, feeling the pain. It was something I had done before, a couple times. The aftermath of my initiation into the rangers had felt something like this. My body felt swollen, like even my bruises had bruises, and I couldn’t move. What made this time different was the sharp, mind-erasing pain that shot through my back and chest every time I took a breath. I would hold off for as long as I could, just lying there, not breathing, until my lungs burned. Then I would take a breath and a shaft of burning cold, a spear of frozen fire, would slice through me in agony, and I would forget where I was for a moment. Then I would remember, and the cycle would start all over again. I wondered why I was alive. I wondered what they had told my sister. Even if I wasn’t actually dead, I was as good as a corpse to the tribe. I had just lost my home, and my family, and for what? It hurt, but I let myself cry. There was no one around to see, no point in holding it back. No one cared if a dead ranger wept.

  Sometime later, an outline of flickering light appeared in some distance away from me, in the dark. It was a door opening, spilling a little of the light beyond, into the dark of my tomb. I couldn’t move my head to look around, but the ceiling of this dark space, whatever it was, was a tangle of metal tubes. They twisted and looked like vines, each one of a different color, each one marked with symbols I did not understand. Footsteps approached me, slow, and uneven, and a moment later, a weather-beaten, slightly unhinged-looking old man’s face, appeared above mine. I recognized him immediately. He was the Deepseeker. I didn’t know his name- no one did- but he was a long-standing fixture of the tribe, the only Elder of his office that anyone living could remember filling the role. His job was to seek out secrets hidden far below the glacier that covered all the world, and find things that my people could use to survive. We needed all the help we could get in order to survive the harsh cold of the Mother, Ravanur. “Elder,” I spoke, despite the pain required to breathe. “Where am I? And why am I alive?”

  The Deepseeker’s expression was unreadable, his wide, mad eyes flickering about behind his ridiculous set of copper-framed crystal lenses. He just stared at me for a long time, not quite meeting my eyes; his only movement was that flickering gaze. After some time, he spoke, slowly, his voice strangely lucid. “You live, ranger. Even I thought there was little chance you would recover.”

  “Why?” I croaked, my throat dry as bare stone.

  The Deepseeker’s lips parted, and a low, rattling laugh escaped from between his fangs. “Why did the Elder Stormcaller try to kill you? Or are you asking why I saved you?”

  I didn’t have the energy to scowl at the ancient madman- and it may not have been a good idea, anyway. “Both,” I managed. I became aware of a nauseating smell, some unholy mixture of urine and corrupted oil. I wrinkled my nose. I wanted to ask what in Palamun’s name could smell like that, but I held my tongue. At least I had an excuse not to breathe as much.

  The Deepseeker’s face disappeared for a moment, and I heard him somewhere off to my right, clanking around in the shadows. There was a loud crack followed by a sharp, acidic smell, and a little orb of softly glowing light appeared amidst the metal tubes above me. The Deepseeker reappeared, holding a small clay bowl. The offending ammoniac stench was immediately worse, and I gagged. The Elder didn’t react to my revulsion; instead he spooned up a measure of some tarry, foul substance from the bowl with two of his fingers. He spread the thick liquid on my chest, and immediately the aching pain emanating from my wound there dulled somewhat, and I realized I could breathe more easily. He began to spread more of the revolting mixture on other places I hadn’t even known I had been hurt. As he worked, he spoke, still in that strangely lucid voice but all the signs of his usual wild temper entirely absent from his manner. For the first time in my life, I detected a faint smile around his eyes, as if he were content with his place in life, rather than his usual melange of boredom and bitter rage. “I believe the Elder Council has been corrupted by the Dark Ones.”

  Despite my wounds, despite the bad smell of the cataplasm, I felt myself grow immediately cold with fear. “What?”

  “You heard me, boy”, the Deepseeker snapped and a little of his usual vitriol trickled back into his voice. “You’re injured, not stupid.”

  I swallowed my initial sarcastic response and tried again. “How could this happen? Aren’t the Dark Ones trapped below the ice?”

  The Deepseeker looked thoughtful for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “They are. The Dark gods that Ravanur brought down, frozen to her breast, they are still there, cold and still. But…” He met my eyes then, his eyes wide, the pupils dilated all the way, until they almost swallowed the deep brown of his irises and tried to edge into the dark sclera all around. He was somewhere between intense, bone-rattling fear, and almost orgasmic joy. His lips skinned away from his teeth, revealing all of his fangs in an expression somewhere between a mortal Erin-Vulur threat and one of Joanna’s toothy smiles. He leaned in close to me, and I could feel his hot breath on my pallid face. I could smell the sickly-sweet edge of rot emanating from deep in his throat. The next words he spoke seemed to hang in the air in front of me, shimmering with all the encapsulated madness that had boiled the mind of this old shaman into a soupy morass. “Even dead gods dream.”

  …

  I stayed there in the strange room, surrounded by the detritus of all the ancient magicks that were the heart and soul of the Deepseeker’s craft, for three more days. The old master used blessing after blessing on me, a different one each time. Some of them were complicated devices of glass and steel, finer than anything I had ever seen before. They were spitting burning fluids into my body through great hollow needles that the Elder stabbed into my arms and legs with little consideration for the pain they brought with them. Others were simple cuffs or gauntlets, like the blessings I had worn so many times before above the surface, to protect me from the cold. One particularly memorable blessing came in the form of a single black capsule that the Elder forced me to swallow. It gave off such a sense of danger to my instincts that I couldn’t make myself take the evil thing into my mouth. But the Deepseeker, not discouraged, simply forced my jaws open with a surprising strength in his ancient, wiry frame, and forced the black blessing down my throat. I spent that night in terrible agony, my heart feeling like it was being slowly eaten by a thousand burrowing insects and replaced with something cold and dead. When I woke up the next morning, I found that the wound in my chest was completely closed, leaving behind only a dark scar on my pale skin. I could move again, and for the first time, I got up from the hard cot I had been lying on and walked around, feeling strangely strong and self-assured. Surely I could not be fully recovered. I had been utterly run through, with a spear of enchant
ed ice no less, and I should be dead, not walking around feeling like I could kick down a solid wall of stone. When the Deepseeker visited me the next time, he didn’t bring any other blessing. He just brought me a set of clothes and boots, similar to my ranger’s hides. He told me to get dressed and meet him outside the room for a real meal. I remembered then that I hadn’t eaten nothing more than a thin broth since before I had been nearly killed. My body was more than willing to show me just how hungry it was.

  I dressed quickly and left the narrow, cramped space that had been my sickbed, ducking through a door hung with a dark fabric I didn’t recognize. It was marked with the same incomprehensible sigils as all of the Deepseeker’s work, and I wondered if the perfect square of dark cloth carried some other purpose besides acting as a door. After all, if the Elder felt the need to mark it, perhaps it carried a secondary, greater purpose, like all of his blessings. Dismissing my trivial speculations, the smell of food suddenly caught my attention. Specifically, it was that of roasting meat, coming from somewhere just ahead, down the long corridor I was standing in. I followed my nose, negotiating carefully around large, uneven shapes covered by thin woolen sheets until I found another door. A sheet of some strange, hard substance hung there and it was astonishingly light. It rattled as I pushed it aside, folding awkwardly ahead of me until I slipped through the door and let it fall back into place behind me. A heavy steel table stood in the center of a large room, piled high with food, mostly varieties of meat. I recognized burug fillets and vulyak steaks, and well as cuts of meat I didn’t recognize, perhaps coming from some unknown forms of life that frequented the deeper, darker places beneath the glacial skin of Ravanur.

  Without stopping to wonder whether I was meant to eat from this fabulous bounty, I strode over to the table purposefully, barely slowing to snatch a steel stool from a place near the wall. I really should have marveled a little more at the room’s furnishings, which were all solid steel. They were obviously made of such a good quality that even the village’s best smith looked like an apprentice. However, my stomach was roaring, and I could feel an anticipatory growl starting up at the base of my throat. I sat down to the feast of perfectly roasted meat and tore into it. Any pretense of good behavior was forgotten as I ripped my way through the varieties of delicious food piled across the table. I’m not sure when the Deepseeker came into the room. I was just slurping out a section of burug mandible when I looked up and found him just sitting there, on a stool like mine, directly across from my place at the table. For a split second, I felt my lips peel back and bare my fangs, and I felt the beginnings of a growl stirring in my throat as I locked my glare on the older, weaker man. I caught myself and shook my head, blinking the predator stare away, realizing just how hungry I had been. It had been a long time since I had gone feral like that. Managing to pull together enough presence of mind to swallow the chunk of meat I had had in my mouth, I grunted out a short, “Hello Elder.”

  If the Deepseeker felt at all offended by my rudeness, he didn’t show it. “Good. Your appetite has returned. You should know that you will need to eat more than you have before, to feed the blessings I placed in your body.”

  I stopped, dropping the empty mandible and fixing my full attention onto the elder. “Inside me?”

  The Deepseeker smiled with his eyes, the very tips of his fangs appeared between his cracked old lips in a dangerous counterpoint. “Yes, ranger. While you slept, I placed some of my strongest magicks within your flesh. You will no longer require any other blessings to survive the hard cold of Ravanur, though you will need to eat almost twice as much as before to keep your new heart running.” I just sat there, gaping at him with wide eyes, my hands unconsciously clutching at my chest where my heart was, just to the left of the thick, ropy scar that marked the place I had been stabbed. The Deepseeker only laughed at my confusion and revulsion. That hideous, rattling sound raised all of the hairs on the back of my neck. “You should thank me, boy.” Some of his usual manic hate threaded its way through his words, reminding me that the old shaman was absolutely insane. He might have been a mostly functional insane, but it didn’t change the fact that something was missing behind those frenzied eyes. “I just made you the greatest ranger to ever walk the ice of Ravanur.”

  “What do you mean?” I managed to say. My appetite was suddenly erased as all of my thoughts were consumed by thoughts of what steel and glass contraption could be riding around inside of me.

  The Deepseeker held up one wrinkled hand, lifting a single long, gnarled claw from his clenched fist. “First, you are invulnerable to all but the worst cold. Nothing short of a Great Storm, one of the Old Winds could even disturb your body’s temperature.” A second finger lifted into the air, the claw on this one broken off at half the length of the first. “Your body is also stronger, and will heal a little faster, making it a bit easier for you to survive, without me putting you back together again.” A third finger rose into the air, and I was surprised to see that this one ended at the first knuckle, leaving it little more than a stump. “Lastly, I tweaked a few of your reflexes. You will find your reaction time higher than any of your former brethren. If you are caught by any of the Erin-Vulur under the command of the corrupted Council, you will need this edge to avoid capture or death.”

  I stood quickly, aware as I did that my feet seemed steadier on the metal floor than they had ever been. I became aware, suddenly and without a doubt that I could pick up the steel table before me with one arm and throw it, feast and all, against the far wall. I considered it. The edges of panic started to trouble my brain again, and for a moment there, I wondered if being revived from the edge of death had been worth the old shaman tearing down and rebuilding my body as he saw fit. “Why do this?” I hissed, my hands curling in claws. “Why did you put your…” I spat the word like a curse, “blessings inside my body?” I laughed bitterly, the memory of all that I had lost in the last few days coming down on my skull like a sledgehammer. “What’s the point of this? Why didn’t you just let me die?”

  The Deepseeker watched me impassively for a moment, and then the rage, I knew that lived behind those mad eyes, boiled over in an instant. Suddenly, the ancient shaman was lunging toward me, tossing aside the heavy table and its succulent burden with a casual motion of one hand. His roar was impossibly loud; his fangs bared a hand’s width from my throat before I could even shift into a ready stance to receive his attack. My head spun with the sheer speed and ferocity of his abrupt assault. I felt all the fury and panic go out of me, chased away by the pent-up wrath trembling on the edge of violence just a breath away from me. The cavernous roar ended, chased by echoes into silence, and for a moment all I could hear was a toneless ringing in my ears. The shaman’s lips were moving, though, and I struggled to make out his words by reading his lips.

  “I made you like this,” the Deepseeker growled, shaking with mad rage, “to save the Erin-Vulur. Too long have we been slaves to the fear of the dead Dark Ones, trapped in their tombs beneath the ice.” He drove the knuckle of one spindly finger hard into my chest. It felt like being tapped with an iron mallet. “We will be slaves no longer. We will no longer let them slumber beneath us. You will go, to the place where the new god’s tower stood. You will descend into the darkness within the ice and you will find her. You will help her build a new tower, grander and greater than its predecessor.” The Elder seized my shoulder in his inexorable grip and leaned close, whispering in my ear, all rage suddenly gone from his voice and replaced with something much more terrifying. His voice cracked with rapture as he whispered with mad urgency and certainty, “You will find her and she will bring Ravanur back to life, a green paradise beneath the loving gaze of an unveiled Palamun. And when the Dark Gods are revealed, when the ice melts back into the mythical seas, the Erin-Vulur will destroy them, burn their bodies, and rid our Mother of their blight once and for all.”

  The weight of the command crashed down on me like a hammer on an anvil, and I slipped from the shaman
’s grip to fall to my knees. My new heart was pounding in my chest in perfect rhythm, making the blood in my eyes pulse with each tremendous beat. I had been brought back from the darkness of death, made stronger than ever before, imbued with the Deepseeker’s strange dark magicks, all for the low, low price that I was to save the world. Where could I begin? How could I even try to do this? And how did the Elder know where to look for Joanna? If her tower had been brought down by the corrupted elders and the warriors of my tribe, the god could be anywhere, starting her work again. She could even be dead! The Erin-Vulur knew full well that gods could be killed. After all, even Ravanur had fallen.

  “How do you know?” I pleaded with the Deepseeker. “How do you know she is still alive?”

  “I know,” he replied simply. “She is alive and whole, deep beneath the ice, deeper than any have gone but I, alone.”

  “And why would she need my help?” She was a god. What good could a warrior do for her?