Samaya Brown was in the dark. The woods that surrounded her were dark and the only light seemed to exist to cast eerie shadows. The crickets were loud, owls cooed loudly and there were distant sounds of twigs snapping as though heavy beasts creeped the dark.
Samaya wasn’t afraid. She was hunting something. Her clothes were tattered; her shirt and pants were ripped and her bra was exposed and caked with dirt. Her belly stuck out like a neat bump and it was the cleanest part of her body. Her hair, that was long and curly down past her shoulders, was matted with dirt and the light brown of her face had streaks of dark brown that looked intentional, as though she had smeared dark lines on her face like a soldier hoping to blend in with the forest background.
She moved through the dark, stalking through the leaves as though she had been trained to track mountain animals. She hadn’t, but she had spent a lot of time in the woods since she left her home. She’d made the flatwoods of northeastern Surry County, North Carolina her home because there was a monster in the woods of the Black Mountains. Samaya had lived in Mount Airy and people told stories of a rat the size of a bear, with a furry, long tail that ran quickly into the woods and vanished when it was spotted. Not many people had actually seen it, but it caused a panic. Samaya, who worked as a paralegal for a criminal lawyer in town, hadn’t really cared about the stories; she never spent any time in the woods and had never encountered any of the exciting wildlife of the home she had adopted when she left her hometown in Virginia to start her adult life. The stories of the rat-bear seemed to only exist to scare children and she ignored them until she saw the thing, standing on its hind legs in her bedroom over the dead body of her boyfriend whom she had met shortly after arriving in town. His body was grotesque; his neck was broken and his head was face down on his chest, the viscera of his severed neck was exposed. Samaya was petrified, staring at the man she loved who had been brutally mutilated and she cried for a second. Then she remembered the rat-bear on its hind legs. It seemed to be wearing a vest, and shoes, both navy blue with black accents, and it had something on its wrist, like a long bracelet embedded in it’s fur. It’s eyes were all black and stared with panic back at Samaya, frozen just like her in the moment.
“What…” she stammered and then the rat-bear dashed out of an open window. It all happened so fast that Samays doubted that it was real. But then she looked down at the body and she collapsed to her knees, tears streaming her face. She wanted to see his face. She wanted to look into his eyes, to see him as she remembered him next to her in their bed, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch his corpse. It didn’t even look like him anymore. She lay on the bed silently sobbing until she fell asleep. When she woke, it was dark, and she stood from the bed, refusing to look down at the body and the puddle of blood on the hardwood floor she slid through to leave the room, and then the house. She went into the woods, determined to find the thing that had killed the father of the baby in her stomach.
– – –
Eakran’s ship was impressive. Alia had never experienced anything like it. Before they left Earth, she had watched the ship during decontamination slowly change from a typical, albeit very sleekly designed, residential home on Earth, into an impersonal, metal-gray space that reacted intuitively to the needs of the crew. They wore spacesuits at all times, but Alia never felt so comfortable; the material of the suit was unlike anything she had felt against her skin. It hugged her body tight, but after a few seconds inside of it, she forgot that it was there.
Until the helmet engaged automatically as the ship around her rocked chaotically and every member of the crew sat very tense in the secure chairs that rose up from the floor of the ship’s command room. They had been enjoying themselves, talking over food, and then Eakran appeared in a panic, and before long, they were ejecting from the wreckage of their larger ship inside of an escape pod that was eventually captured by the Ointite Mind Snatchers Cabal.
Alia had panicked a little when the escape pod melted away around them, she hadn’t witnessed that part of the journey as it happened, but then Whadgaf arrived and Alia was relieved. Predicting her future exactly as it would happen was impossible, she had learned that lesson, but she had also learned that her ability to access her consciousness in other parallel realities, as well as other aeons of her own reality, gave her an extensive data set that could narrow down the possibilities for her future to a handful of scenarios that often contained similar details with slight variations. For instance, Alia knew that Eakran’s ship would be attacked and that he would be rescued by forces of the IP who were blindsided by the attack. Alia also figured that the attack would originate from the IP, so there must be some inner conflict in the organization if Eakran still had allies there.
She knew that no one would die. She hadn’t seen the deaths of any of her fellow crew members, though she knew at least one of them would suffer unspeakable agony. She knew that another would find their best self on an alien planet. She also knew that she would leave them, and she could not say if she would see them again before the Hyperion.
When she makes it to the IP headquarters with Eakran and Giovanni after Whadgaf’s rescue, they are treated like contraband. They are wrapped in dark robes and always completely surrounded by guards that Alia assumes are the same species of alien as Eakran. They wear sleek armour that appears to be as light as a suit made of fabric, but is actually more durable than most metals. They carry what Alia knows to be dangerous weapons that dangle innocuously like small batons at their hips; Alia had watched Maria train with the thing that morphed into a giant weapon that should have been too heavy for Maria to wield but, she said weighed as much as it had in stick form.
Now, Alia and Giovanni sit in a nicely decorated room that is like a lounge with a musical instrument in one corner that Alia recognizes as a harp. It is on a stage and the rest of the room has similar furniture to that on Eakran’s ship, only it isn’t bland and gray; the tables have what appear to be yellow table cloths draping them and the chairs are like padded thrones. Giovanni sits first and Alia smiles at him in his oversized black robes that make him look like a child.
“This is so strange,” Giovanni says, not slowly, but deliberately. “I knew it would be strange, aliens and all, but this is wild. Where’s Darker?”
Alia sits next to him. She can tell that he is beginning to panic.
“It’s all right,” she says. “It’s not, but it will be. I promise you Giovanni. Just don’t let it get to you. You should try to enjoy it.”
Giovanni smiles at her. “How are you calm? Did you know all of this would happen.” Alia nods. He continues, “Why did you let us come? Darker is probably dead. Maria is with a bird woman fighting those scary brain guys. They are trying to kill Dr. Eakran. Why did you let this happen.”
“Giovanni,” Alia says seriously and she leans close to him, “have you ever wondered why you are where you are? I mean, think about where you come from, and look around you. Why are we here? Of all the people on Earth, why were we Eakran’s crew? I’ll tell you why. Because we have something to do. I can’t tell you what exactly, I can only see it and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But it’s there, it’s important, and it’s for us. Eakran couldn’t stay on Earth forever. He had to come back to the IP some time and I think this would have been waiting for him no matter what. And who does he have looking after him? Giovanni Montovani. No one is dead. No one will die, but we are here. We all have things to do. Knowing what that is, exactly what that is, is impossible and I can’t know if I’m right until things happen.”
She is interrupted by the sound of an argument outside the room. She and Giovanni approach the door, and before they reach it, Eakran enters with two others who follow him. One appears to be a moose standing on two legs, with hands and feet in boots, and he is very tall compared to Eakran, almost two feet taller, and his horns make him appear even bigger. Alia thinks him handsome in the standard issue IP spacesuit. Eakran’s other companion looks almost like a dog or a rodent and he is slightly shorter than Eakran. He doesn’t wear the standard issue IP suit, but a long robe that is like a poncho. He has relatively small arms and he seems to walk on two legs with effort. He is covered in short brown-red fur and something about the texture of it reminds her of a fox. His big ears that are situated at the back of his head, and the tips of his tail that slides along the floor behind him, come to points that are bright white. Alia notices a patch of the fur at his arm missing and she can see a large scar along his femur that is like a giant vein.
“There she is,” Alia hears the rodent man say through the translator of her suit. “I cannot express my gratitude to see you alive, and full grown. You were so tiny at birth.”
“She can’t be who you think she is!” Eakran yells. He isn’t speaking English and Alia finds it strange to have the translator replace the voice she is used to hearing. “When have the Eeling ever been to Earth? You must be thinking of a woman from Wiis. They are practically identical, except for the sexual aggression.”
“You came to find us,” the rodent-fox says to Alia. “Tell him, you are the Alia.”
“Alia,” she hears Eakran say and she watches his face as he realizes that she knew all of this would happen. He had looked angry, and then his face slowly settled to disbelief with his mouth open and his eyes long. “Is James ok?”
“He is,” Alia says. “And I have to go to Eel. I wish you all were coming with me. Hopefully I will see you soon.”
“Why are you going to Eel? What is happening?” Eakran asks.
“I wish I could say, but it will make sense soon I hope. I can only know so much. No one can really see the future. Stay alive Eakran.”
“What about James? How do we get him back? What about our trip? We were supposed to go to Druont together.”
“This is the trip,” Alia says somberly. “This, all of this, is why we’re here. Darker is alive, you’ll find him. I don’t know if you all will make it to Druont, or when, but I’ve got to go to Eel to figure out exactly why I’m here. And I hope that we find each other again.”
With that, Alia turns to the rodent-fox who introduces himself as Kazi Lograt, and the two head for Eel.
– – –
Samaya was in the woods for months and she ate what she could steal from nearby homes when she came across them. She also learned what was safe to eat by watching a black bear she had spotted from a distance and followed because she thought it might be the rat-bear, but the black bear had dark fur.
The bear made a home in a large tree that was long dead but still standing, or leaning against nearby trees and a formation of rock. It had hollowed the tree at it’s large base where many of the roots were exposed, and the black bear rested there at night after a long day looking for food with a Samaya shaped shadow always at a distance.
Samaya hadn’t found any trace of the rat-bear after following the black bear for weeks. They were at the pond where the black bear liked to get water when they both noticed a brawl between two other larger bears that seemed to fall into the pastoral scene they enjoyed next to the water. The bears rolled into the small stream and there was water splashing and claws trashing the air. Samaya dropped back into thick vegetation and watched her bear companion as it headed for a nearby tree. But just as her bear companion was trying to flee, the conflict rolled after it and soon it too was engulfed in the commotion. Samaya was horrified as the three bears growled and tousled and when two of the bears ran away, Samaya saw just one on the ground struggling to breathe. She approached it and recognized her companion. The bear had a bad wound at its neck, blood spilled out, and Samaya cried until it stopped breathing.
That night, she slept in the hollowed out tree where her companion had slept. The situation that had caused the bear’s death was strange, but Samaya didn’t know anything about black bears. She was convinced that the rat-bear had something to do with it, though. It hadn’t been one of the bears in the fight, but maybe it had agitated them somehow.
From then on, Samaya always found the hollowed out tree when she was ready to sleep and her clothes became grungy and covered with the remnants of the bear’s fur. She spent days hiking the mountains, and then she would spend just as many nights searching for the thing that had ended her life as she knew it.
And one night, as she crawled over rocks and slanted trees, she heard something moving, something sniffing the air and approaching her.
This is it, she thought and she stood to finally face the thing. But when the thing emerged from the vegetation, it was a black bear and Samaya was frozen with fear. It was too close for her to run away and she could only hope that it would be spooked and retreat. But the bear kept sniffing and approaching and Samaya felt her body become more rigid as it got closer.
It was right in her face and Samaya cried silently, hoping that if it was going to kill her, it would be over quickly. She felt the bear’s nose poking at her body, and then she felt the bear curl up at her feet. She opened her eyes and looked down. She felt the weight of it on the tips of her shoes and she saw the bear curled up like a rug. She slowly moved her feet and when the bear didn’t move, she moved slowly away from it. She moved as quietly as she could until she had the nerve to run, and she headed for the hollowed out tree that had been her bed. She slept there when her heart stopped racing. She woke to the nose of the same black bear from the night before poking at her.
Samaya screamed and the bear back away growling. Then it whimpered and approached again.
It was the grown son of the bear that had lived in the tree before Samaya. He had moved on long ago and hadn’t smelled the scent of his mother since he was about four year old.
Samaya didn’t know this, but the bear was obviously very friendly with her and she walked with it into the woods where he showed her places to eat.
Weeks passed and Samaya and the bear were inseparable. She often rode on his back, and when she didn’t, the bear would poke at her back with his nose like she wasn’t walking fast enough. By this point, Samaya was nine months pregnant and despite her appearance, she and her baby were healthy. She was riding on the bear’s back when she went into labor. The bear was concerned and he whimpered loudly when Samaya was in pain and screaming. Maybe it was chance, or maybe the bear thought that Samaya needed other humans who could help her, but they ended up at a small log cabin that was easy to miss in the density of the woods. The house was something like an armory for a gang that hid illicit materials deep in the woods, and on that day, when a woman giving birth arrived on the back of a concerned black bear, the house was full of plotting gangsters.
It would be the birthplace of Alia Zephyr.
PRL Serials 