The Coming Storm_A Pax Aeterna Novel
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The Children of Zorm have no interest in trying to reach other stars, but have successfully launched probes to the other worlds in their star system. One planet supports plant and animal life, but it is too hot for the Children; they prefer their climate-controlled asteroid cities and city ships.
Having two sexes, the Children are clever, strongly family-oriented, and vegetarian.
Kurta Colonies
An aggressive, female-dominated primate species from Lomagon, a planet circling a G-type star. The kurta are very territorial. Lomagon has two moons, Keda and Pondak, and this fact had a great impact on their development as a species. Primitive kurtans believed that the universe was dominated by two warring sister goddesses living on the moons. Each goddess sought to destroy Lomagon because it blocked their view of the stars, but were kept from doing so by their mutual jealousy and enmity. Kurtan mythology is filled with tales of mortals who were victimized or assisted in one way or another by the scheming goddesses or their underlings.
Lomagon is a dry world with no oceans and only a few seas scattered here and there across the planet. Even so, with two moons, the tides on these bodies of water are sizeable, and Kurtans dwelling on their coastlines developed sailing in their prehistory and soon established trading routes and thriving coastal port cities. Land-based caravans also spread kurtan cultures. Other cities grew around desert oases, but given an innate distaste for large groups, the people did not congregate in huge numbers, and to this day Lomagon is rather sparsely populated, though wealthy kurtans have established many large estates. City-dwellers are looked down upon to some extent.
Endlessly curious about their world, kurtans discarded their primitive religious beliefs relatively early in their development, while maintaining their temples and a ceremonial priesthood—males, smaller in stature than the females, being thought unsuitable for more feminine pursuits like hunting and government. Kurtans have occasionally experimented with patriarchy, but these experiments are always short-lived.
Kurtan scientists delved deeply into astronomy and physics, and developed space travel some five thousand years after their culture founded their first cities. Their earliest space flights were of course to Keda (inner moon, rocky and airless) and Pondak (further away, but larger—almost a third the size of Lomagon—and possessing an atmosphere and lower forms of animal and plant life). Three hundred years after becoming a space-faring species, the kurtans experienced First Contact on the planet of a nearby star.
Kurtan children, though born live as are most mammals, are placed in creches as soon as they are weaned (about six months after birth) to be raised by neutered males. The bonds formed between the children (especially the males, of course) and their surrogate fathers sometimes last for a lifetime.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Valdas for his fantastic work on the cover.
About the Author
Life-long sci-fi nerd living in Austin, Texas, Trevor Wyatt cut his teeth on the works of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, eventually moving on to everything from Star Wars to Futurama.
He discovered his love of writing during college and has written off and on for the last ten years.
His novel, The Seeker is the first in the Pax Aeterna universe.
You can reach him at trevor@paxaeternapress.com.
Thanks for reading.
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