Planet Origins

by Lucia Ashta

  “You’re welcome,” she said, perfectly pleasant. Perhaps she was happy to discover that we weren’t the rogue thieves she thought we were. Perhaps it was something else I couldn’t fathom. Her emotions were a mystery too great to attempt to make sense of them.

  “Remember, quiet and out of sight,” I said.

  “Yes. I remember. You only just told me, right after he’d just told me.”

  Dolpheus and I left her there, confident that she wouldn’t run while we were getting the horses; she wanted to ride too badly. And if she escaped, I suspected that neither Dolpheus nor I would mind too much, regardless of the risk that she might expose us.

  Our approach was nearly silent. We’d trained as boys for eventual excellence in combat. A great part of that was being agile and light on your feet, able to take your enemy by surprise. Even in our boots, the sound of leaves and grasses being crushed was muted by the softness of our step.

  When we drew close enough to the horses that they could scent us, we clung to the shadows to continue our approach. The horses were still dozing, beneath trees that had shaded them while the Auxle Sun was up. They rested during the rule of the lesser of the suns, just like humans, and hadn’t yet started stirring at the upcoming day.

  When the first of the horses looked up, searching for the disturbance he sensed in his surroundings, we stood from our crouch, slowly. We stepped out of the shadows. Then, we didn’t move at all. We waited for the horse to find us. Once he did, we looked at him, doing everything we could to emanate calm. We’re not a threat to you, I said to him in my mind, even though I didn’t know if he would receive my message. You can trust us, I said.

  After a long while, so long that I doubted if it would happen, the horse dipped his head to us. He did so only once, and only barely, but we got his message. We had his permission to approach.

  We did so with infinite care. Our success depended on the horses’ easy acceptance of us, which was a greater challenge than usual when we couldn’t risk even a friendly sound from them or us. We climbed the fence to their paddock. Then we waited for them to adjust to us inside their safe zone. Once they had, we took a few steps toward them. We waited. We stepped. We waited. We stepped and waited until we were finally close enough to touch them.

  I put my palm out flat for the closest one to smell me. It would have been easier if I’d had food. I didn’t and had long grown used to making the most out of less-than-ideal circumstances. He sniffed me. I rubbed his nose. I ran my hand along his mane and his back. I nuzzled him with as much caring as I would a woman. He leaned into my touch.

  When I turned my back and took a step away from him, he moved to follow me. I put my hand on his neck and led him to the gate and out the paddock. Dolpheus was right behind me. I wedged the note in the metal of the gate’s hasp.

  We walked with the two horses under the painted sky that cast everything in sight in a purple so eerie that it was almost easy to believe that faithum was possible. That we could open up this world and step right through it. We could step through to another world or remain behind to change our own. We could link worlds or we could part them. We could accomplish nearly anything—when we believed it.

  Under this Plune Moon, it was easy to believe. It was the first time I’d ever believed in the ease of reaching other worlds. It was the moment when the course of my life shifted. With each step I took, I moved one step closer to Ilara. But I also moved one step closer to worlds that were unfamiliar to me. To new things. To a different life, with a greater range of possibility than any I’d ever imagined.

  All I had to do to reach another world was to step through one eerie purple reality into another. A shiver that had nothing to do with cold ran through my body, just once, from top to bottom, making my shoulders rattle. I noticed. I paid attention. If I were a beast, I would have drawn my ears back, knowing that something was coming. What was it? I wondered. Because whatever it was, it would change my life in a way that I couldn’t now foresee. I knew it just as I’d known that Ilara was out there and that I would find the way to reach her.

  Sometimes, you just knew things, even if you didn’t want to know them. There were times when a certain outcome, a twist or turn of fate, found you. And there was little you could do to hide from it.

  I wasn’t hiding. I’d stopped wanting to hide centuries before. Whatever was coming for me, I would greet it head-on. A flurry of something—part excitement, part apprehension, part something else—fluttered through me. When I exhaled, it blew away on the purple of the night, the night that had changed something within me forever.

  Original Elements

  Tanus and Dolpheus’ adventures are only just beginning. The story continues in Original Elements, Book 2 of the Planet Origins series.

  Turn the page for a preview of Original Elements!

  Original Elements Preview

  Chapter 1

  We’d ridden long and hard beneath the Suxle Sun. It was creeping lower in the sky, edging toward the horizon and another one of its fluorescent disappearing acts, when I finally thought we might be near the fishing cabin my father brought me to as a boy. We’d been lucky. We’d ridden through the southern wilds completely undisturbed thus far.

  Dolpheus and I cast sharp eyes all around us at all times. At first Lila had insisted on talking, even over the sound of the horses. Then Dolpheus shared some of the more gruesome of our experiences in the wilds. It wasn’t uncommon to encounter pockets of self-made communities that attempted to survive outside of King Oderon’s rule, nor was it unusual to run across the lone wanderer who often wasn’t in possession of the faculties necessary for proper society. It was also possible for rebels to abandon their usual territory of the desert wilds and travel this far south.

  Dolpheus told her a few tales of rebels that had attempted to take us by surprise when we were traveling through the wilds much as we were now. He made mention of the crude weapons they used and of their desperation to survive in a harsh world that didn’t make it easy. After that, we didn’t have to ask Lila to remain quiet so we could listen for the approach of anyone that might mean us harm. She did this on her own, wide-eyed for a while, until the exhaustion of travel without rest overwhelmed her.

  Dolpheus and I took turns riding with our captive. We didn’t want to risk giving Lila her own horse; it would have been too easy for her to bolt. She wouldn’t have gotten away from us. Dolpheus and I were excellent riders; we’d learned to ride horses shortly after we learned to walk. We just didn’t want the hassle of having to chase her down. In the wilds, any escape attempt might force us to chase her into areas safer avoided. At the very least, a chase would call more attention to us than was wise.

  However, Lila didn’t complain about having to ride with either of us. Right away, we discovered why. Even though she’d whined about wanting a horse to ride for a good portion of the walk from the splicing lab to the horse ranch, it was apparent that she knew very little about them. We rode the horses without saddles. No riding gear had been easy to grab when we took the horses from the paddock; it was likely that bridles, saddles, and the such were kept inside one of the ranch’s posts, where the elements couldn’t wear them down. Lila wouldn’t have been able to ride without a saddle, and after having observed her on horseback for almost eighteen hours, I wasn’t sure she would have been able to ride even with a saddle.

  In the frightened silence that followed Dolpheus’ dire warnings, it was easier to observe her with sympathetic eyes. She was clearly spent. She’d fallen asleep a few times sitting in front of me on the horse, her head resting against her chin, bobbing, until one of the horse’s steps jolted her awake. Our captive wasn’t as bothersome when she wasn’t talking without pause. After all, we’d taken her and bent her to our will, even if we hadn’t wanted to do so. Perhaps she behaved the way she did because she was scared. Dolpheus and I could be imposing to look at. As lifelong soldiers, this was intentional; a necessity we’d worked to grow into. It wouldn’t be unusual for a
lone, petite woman to feel nervous in our company under the circumstances. Maybe she ran her mouth because she didn’t know what else to do.

  “I see something,” Dolpheus said, a few steps ahead of me and my cargo.

  I followed the direction of his gaze. It was hard to see what Dolpheus was pointing out. There, behind a particularly dense part of the forest, one too many straight lines for nature peeked out from an array of thick and thin tree trunks.

  Within sight there was also a very old giant tree. I looked over my right shoulder. A few hundred paces away, the ground began to climb. It continued until it reached a ridge, tall enough to survey our surroundings from all sides.

  “This must be it.” I nudged my horse ahead to weave through the thickness of the forest next to my friend. I looked at Lila. I couldn’t see her face straight on, but she seemed still to be sleeping. “What are we going to do with her once we get there?” I whispered. “I’ve been thinking, we can’t leave her tied up and we can’t gag her. We can’t be sure how long we’ll be gone. We can’t leave her in a way that she can’t fend for herself if something were to keep us from returning.”

  “Agreed.”

  I paused, struck by a thought. “What’s to keep her from running and telling on us the first opportunity she gets?” It was unusual for me not to have thought things through all the way when they involved military engagement. This wasn’t precisely military engagement, but it was close enough, and all of a sudden I was disappointed in myself for not having considered all aspects of our situation before traveling this far to a remote fishing cabin.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re under a lot of stress.” Dolpheus knew me well. I hadn’t had to say a thing.

  “Stress isn’t unusual for us. My mind should be sharp no matter what. I should be able to foresee all complications. One woman shouldn’t cause me sufficient stress to distract me from rational thinking.”

  “Save Ilara.”

  “Save Ilara,” I said. He was right. Ilara led me to the edge of proverbial cliffs all the time. It was something I liked about her. Predictability was boring. Ilara could never be accused of being predictable.

  “It’s not that you didn’t think things through properly, Tan. It’s that you didn’t have to. That’s why you didn’t. She,” Dolpheus whispered while giving Lila a sidelong glance, “isn’t a real threat to us, even if she were to escape and betray us. You know that. We can rise above any of the results of her actions if that’s what it comes to.”

  A minute passed in which all I heard were the soothing steps of our horses, Lila’s deep breathing, and the chirping of happy birds in a network of branches that interconnected above us. Then, “I think the reason you didn’t think this through as you say is because you want us to be found out,” Dolpheus said.

  “What?”

  “I think that you don’t want to have to hide anymore. You’re not the kind of man that hides, and your affair with Ilara made you do lots of hiding. I think that you don’t give a shit about what your father thinks anymore, or at least that you don’t want to. He hasn’t been a real father to you in a very long time, and you don’t want to tiptoe around his unreasonableness and his readiness to anger anymore. You want to be out in the open about all of this. You want to be the man you are without concealing it. You want to take strong, confident steps without worrying about who finds out about them and what he might think. You want to tell the King to go fuck himself. You want to stretch out and let your dick hang out, if you get what I mean.”

  I did get what he meant, but I wasn’t sure he was right. It was true that I hadn’t liked to have to keep my love affair with Ilara secret, but I’d understood the need for it. She was a princess of royal blood, in line to inherit the throne of all of Planet Origins. I was the son of a family with suspect prestige. I was the heir to a family name that had only just become rich and powerful. My noble standing had been more or less bought, not inherited through traceable bloodlines.

  I understood that Ilara needed to protect her reputation, for the sway she held over the people of O depended upon their view of her. She needed to be inviolable in their eyes. Her authority and actions needed to be beyond reproach. An affair with a nobleman, as I theoretically was, didn’t amount to the biggest of potential problems. The most significant obstacle to our love affair was that a royal princess was expected to be pure and virginal until she married. The people of O were naïve enough to believe her to be what she plainly was not. Anyone that looked with an objective mind would see that her sultriness couldn’t be denied and was beyond what a virginal maiden was capable of possessing.

  The most sensual woman on all of O wasn’t allowed to indulge in her sensuality, despite the rapidly advancing levels of degradation and depravity that infected the nobles and courtiers in particular. Ilara’s love for me couldn’t be made public until such time as we agreed to marry. And Ilara thought that her father wouldn’t approve of the match. Principally, the King knew that my father was trying to kill him and all of his family, and I had to admit that the ideal father-in-law for Ilara wasn’t a man looking for an opportunity to kill her.

  Damn it. Olph was right. I wasn’t neglectful in not anticipating what we’d do with Lila once we arrived at the fishing cabin. My mind hadn’t gone soft. My subconscious had been sneaky, taking matters into its own hands to accomplish my secret will.

  Fuck my father and fuck the King. I didn’t want to hide any longer. The woman I was keeping secrets for didn’t even live on the same planet as I did anymore. I wasn’t afraid of my father. If he grew furious, then he could choke on his anger. He’d already spewed enough emotion on me to last several of my long lifetimes. I wasn’t afraid of the King either. The worst he could do was order his minions to kill me, and I’d faced death many times before and escaped it. If I didn’t escape it next time, well, then I would die and the anguish of life would finally be over.

  Of course, I didn’t really want to die. I didn’t think I would. I wanted to hold Ilara in my arms again.

  And what of Ilara? Lila did pose a threat to her well-being if she were to run her mouth about Ilara surviving the assassination attempt. Still, who would believe one woman’s word over the King’s? Who would believe that the Princess was alive just because one woman said so, without any proof whatsoever? No one.

  “You’re right, Olph,” I said. “You’re totally right. I don’t give a damn about my father or the King anymore, if I ever did. I’m done hiding. I won’t announce my plans and make it easier for them to figure out what I’m up to. But I won’t choose my actions based on fear of their reactions. Fuck ‘em.”

  Dolpheus nodded, with as much enthusiasm as I’d seen him express in a while. “Fuck ‘em,” he said. Then he smiled brilliantly.

  Pussyfooting wasn’t our style.

  You can continue reading by purchasing Original Elements. Thanks for reading!

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  Also by Lucía Ashta

  THE WITCHING WORLD

  (YA fantasy)

  Magic Awakens

  The Five-Petal Knot

  The Merqueen *

  The Ginger Cat *

  The Scarlet Dragon *

  PLANET ORIGINS

  (Space opera)

  Planet Origins

  Original Elements

  Holographic Princess *

  Purple Worlds *

  Planet Sand *

  THE LIGHT WARRIORS

  (Paranormal romance)

  Beyond
Sedona *

  Beyond Prophecy *

  Beyond Amber *

  The Prophecy of Arnaka

  The Secret of Namana

  A Betrayal of Time

  Whispers of Pachamama

  “Daughter of the Wind”

  (* coming soon)

  About the Author

  Lucía Ashta, a former attorney and architect, is an Argentinian-American author who lives in Sedona with her beloved and three daughters. She published her first story (about an unusual Cockatoo) at the age of eight, and she’s been at it ever since.

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