Tales of Reign Read online

  REIGN

  Part I

  Chapters

  A Birth 8

  A Garden That Grows 17

  Commitment and Rite 28

  Don’t Shoot the Messenger 37

  I Come in Peace 47

  Pluto’s Belt 54

  Prisoner of Mor’h 62

  This Gilded Cage 69

  Once More with Feeling 77

  The Root That Travels 86

  Falling Quietly into Cracks 96

  A Human Condition 107

  Tek or Die 117

  One Last Wrong 129

  Sovereign

  Part II

  Chapters

  Innocent Minds Suffer Fragile Hearts 143

  Soul to Keep 154

  The White Tower 164

  A Desert Tale 175

  Soul to Take 185

  Ab Infantia Usque Ad Finem 196

  Of Life and Men 210

  The Rootknot 222

  Exodus 233

  To Die to Live 244

  No Man’s Land 259

  Zealot 272

  Sharing 281

  Reign Eternal

  Part III

  Chapters

  What if God Were a Child 286

  Peace Without War 299

  The Vo’ Luma Sentinel 310

  The Artemis of Mars 321

  Perpetual Mind 336

  Unending Division 349

  Everlasting Solace 361

  Sustaining Mythos 379

  Folk Dissonance 395

  Hunting the Pri 407

  Gods and Their Ilk 418

  The Mortalien Treatise 429

  Undying Devotion 444

  Lost Tales of

  REIGN

  Itou’s World

  Wearing the Mask 456

  Jessie’s Girl 470

  Same Old, Same Old 484

  Gorgon’s Song

  The Divine Eyes 497

  Choking on Words 511

  Control and Abandon 527

  A Day in the Life

  Sunshine 537

  Rain 549

  Season’s Change 561

  “The First Voice”

  “In the beginning there was silence, it was the voice of the universe.

  Amongst the chaos there were no tongues. No language was necessary. The only communication was existence. As eons passed by, the stars lived and died. The planets lived and died. Gas giants swelled on their own breath. And the debris from this community formed asteroid belts, moons and the celestial satellites like comets and meteors. The universe existed; constant and repetitive. All governed by the rules that none challenged.

  After all there was no language, no voice of dissention. Only the silence. The quiet was patient and still. The universe was politely present. There was no need or necessity, no competition for resources. There was order and endless serenity.

  In one act of defiance in the precession of perfection and order came the first communication-and then there was life.”

  Q’ua Z Lo’Mor’h; unknown date.

  Chapter One: A Birth

  In those first moments I can remember fear most of all. My body strained against elements I had never experienced; cold, sporadic motion and my own voice shrieked loudly and hearing it for the first time only encouraged my anxiety. I was being torn from my home, from my mother-from the womb.

  Life became knowledge.

  My vision was impaired by all of the information I had never dreamed of. Light stung and brought tears flowing forward, monstrous creatures celebrating my extraction with loud cheers and noises that cannot be distinguished as language frightened me. This new level of life brought me no comfort. I struggled to find my center only to be further antagonized by dashes of movement from place to place, carried and deposited from grip to grip. I could sense each of their anxious attempts at being gentile. I began to find calm when laid next to a familiar form; but their life no longer flowed with mine. I was alone and separate for the first time.

  My mother lay more still than I had remembered in our travels as one; too still. Her warmth faded and I had lost the soothing sound of her heartbeat. Its rhythm kept me at peace as far as I could recall and I panicked as I knew the last moments we shared together were her last. Motion again was forced on me and I was quickly placed in isolation! It was some container that whizzed and whirled with unnatural noises. The voices in the room became muffled and sounded more aggressive. I can only assume they were attending to my mother.

  I knew death in this instance.

  I began to record their sounds in my mind, to decode or understand in some later time. What was completely evident is that this wasn’t normal. Nothing felt right about the place I came into. Nothing about the beings around me gave me solace. They were like me, or at least they seemed to be of the same people as I but I felt no attachment. They were cold and indifferent. From what I could tell, my life to them had begun in loss and it was my fault.

  I was touched by covered appendages. A lifeless material traced my skin and moved my form but I remained housed in this sterile container. I was devoid of what any of this meant. I writhed with a sudden pain; a prick of my skin let my life leak from the wound! Then another and another! Why were they doing this?

  I learned to be aware.

  Everything suddenly stopped! An ambient light filled the space, the room of the infirmary as I came to know it later with its occupancy were enveloped and silent, held in stillness. This is where I first felt the presence of another life. My person was being calmed and my mind was being caressed. A new sense outside of odor, sound, sensitivity, taste and sight soothed and lessened its brethren.

  “Be still child. Your rescue is upon you. Sleep.” Came a voice and understanding from an odd form in both my mind and the waking world.

  I slipped into a deep sleep like I had before in my mother’s womb. My fears subsided and I found myself gaining new consciousness. Part of me already knew this would happen. Portions of my existence already felt as if they had a purpose and being born into the world when I had and where I had, under the very circumstances that had happened were all an expectation preconceived; or at least set to happen.

  An understanding washed over me. That motion from my conception to birth to the physician whisking my body about the delivery room and placing me into the incubator paled in seconds to the knowledge I was gaining now. I knew my mother’s elation at the news of pregnancy to her willingness to sacrifice privately, life and soul for my chance to live. I felt my father’s empty resignation and calculated study about what I meant. And I also understood the resentment I sensed in the group of people present at my birth. I had breached as I am too soon. They did not know me. They did not understand.

  I was an orphan; and family to all.

  On the surface I was human. I was as mankind has always defined themselves to be; both flesh and conscience. I was aware of the world and the universe through the same sense that had always perceived conventional life, made up of carbon, elements, chemicals and energy to have form and to share. To share and communicate on the level as primitive as man had always shared. The men present at my wake held these simplistic understandings and tainted them with the same fear I held when rushed into their world. Their evolutionary mechanics designed to protect them from difference and threat, performed as they should.

  I was different. A portion of my DNA was not human, my father knew this as a man of science. I wasn’t the first of this discovery. Other’s referred to as Halfers were being born for the last twenty years or longer and thought to be the mutation of a newly established star-born humanity. It was no coincidence that man had ventured from traveling into space as visitors to living in space beyond their natural confinements of Earth when these incidents occurred but the tru
th though is much more profound.

  I am alien. I am a new beginning.

  

  “Your telling has improved Reign.” Spoke Q’ua Z with his mind. “I do wish you would not consider yourself alien. You are much more than this humanistic interpretation you keep wearing. Remember your perception of who you are is reflected in your sharing. Spoil the link and the sharing is broken.”

  Qz continued; “The sharing takes place in both words of simple context and the complex projection of your history and experiences into the mind of the being you share with. If you do not control how you feel you may very well create those feelings in the one who perceives your sharing and effect their embedded knowing of you. Or memory.”

  I am now twenty-five Earth years old and the reality of my situation is still new. Q’ua Z, a Mor’h and those like him, have raised me. They are not human or even a portion like me. Although I may be the only me in existence, I am more human than Mor’h. Him is also not a term that fits when describing a multi-reanimated clone of a dying race, he lacks gender but the pronoun I have attached to him is only a way to acknowledge him as something other than it. It, as it were, is how I feel about myself. I am told it is my age and maturity causing such an irrational point of view. I even know this but the feeling remains.

  “I will do better Qz.” I say with obvious remorse.

  “You should embrace your reality for what it is. This is the only way. I feel you need some time to your thoughts, or your thoughts alone, I will leave you until morning.”

  I feel Q’ua Z separating his presence and mine. The link I have known since my first moments in life after my birth dissolves away. My birth was a calamitous event, learning how to deal with it is something I am not alone in. The telling while sharing this link is a way for Qz to know that I am adapting both genome and cultural realities in a healthy psychological growth. I do not believe there is an easy way to develop as I have. In moments I literally had the knowledge of lives before me and of existence on a level both human and Mor’h right after being born. The understanding that came with it allowed me to remember my exact first moments years later as if they just happened. I am told this is not natural to humans.

  The Mor’h side of my genetic structure is small on the surface but immensely other than human. I cannot fully understand it. I have also been told there were many failures before I came into existence. The notion has remained a vague unexplored area of curiosity and according to Qz, an irrelevant quandary that I should ignore for further perfection in the who that I am not the what. In my reflection, I am a human being. A male by distinction and aside from a lowered pigmentation I am no different than the human males I have observed from Qz’s visual records. I am anatomically human in form.

  My eyes however are nearly as pale as my skin leaving a somewhat emptiness to my gaze, at center laying a dark pupil. I have found unease in it myself. I am much taller than the Lo’Mor’h who are what Qz is designated. His race is part of a very distinct divide in designation of his people. The Mor’h are dying. A millennia of genetic manipulation to prevent their extinction has diluted their population and so greatly changed their beings that they have nearly nothing left of their original natural forms. Some relics, art and recorded history still hold their images, and of course their sharing through mental preservation passed down in memory transfers save their culture. They are not quick to share these memories in the sharing, but they slip every once in a while in moments of complacency or distraction. Slipping unintended sharing of your telling is called spoiling. I repeat these things to myself like a mantra.

  The Mor’h remain a culture of many sects in two greater parts. The Lo’Mor’h make up the largest portion of the population, only a few thousand of the Lo’Mor’h are active at a time, a number I am unsure of. They are redundant clones. By redundant, clones are grown to maturity as needed based on the life cycle of the current clone. A clone remains active through a degradation cycle of two years. I find this disturbing. They degrade quickly and before your eyes. I have seen Qz recycled several times. As he says, he dreams one night to wake in a new body and it happens. They share themselves wholly with this empty clone until nothing is left in the old one. I believe it is the reason they do not ponder life and death like a human would.

  The Tah’l are the decision making sect of the Mor’h race. I would assume they are closer to the last remnants of the original people. And they are tall, and I am not sure if the moniker is the result of cultural observation or an old assignment of dominance in their nature. Unlike the Lo’Mor’h, the Tah’l have growths on their heads like crowns made of scaled shell atop leading to a fleshy growth of petal-like hair. Again some lasting trait for a dominance display. If it weren’t for the sharing I would have been greatly afraid and intimidated by both sects. They are often expressionless and even though they are very careful to be diplomatic in their communications, a race so old and so desperate with their technology and authoritative system could easily be a menace. Yet I have seen no evidence they have or would.

  And there it is, human curiosity. I find myself dwelling on things the Mor’h do not. I can’t help it. Something makes me see differences in things at a level that is strange to them and myself at times. Qz only refers to it as human nature. But I need more of an explanation. Something his sterile account won’t offer. I need a human perspective. I need human contact like craving a taste, having a desire, missing a touch or listening for a song I have never heard. Like a mother’s heart beat from the womb.

  But no humans are born here. No people are born here.

  I have never been alone but I have always been alone. I can’t help but live the constant skeptic in an environment that doesn’t reflect anything I resemble. The idea of being an alien within your own home is something the Mor’h can’t grasp. No matter how hard I try to give the feeling in to the sharing they resist. Their fear of having the sharing spoiled is like a fear of being tainted. This furthers that alien perspective. Nothing they can do will make that better. And if anything I have done on my own, I have built a framework in my mind to hide this.

  Every day I wake up in some shell within a shell. Some things become more clear and I adapt to the Mor’h way of life even though deep parts of who I am, what I am; struggle to conceal a longing to be whole through experiencing both sides of my existence. This is completely confusing! When the Mor’h appeared on Luna, the people of Earth should have shared this knowledge with each other. The Mor’h say they have not. Why? Why would humankind not want to understand their neighboring life?

  No humans seek us. No family waits for me.

  I get so tired of this self-loathing. When I look outside into such a beautiful world I feel confined to live out my life in this self-contained room. Under watch, under the tutelage of beings I share a minutiae of biology with. I am a man among a people who know not what it is to be a man. The lack of faith I have in myself to be what it is I can’t define by experience or mimicking is unsettling. I hope it passes.

  

  Reign Chapter 2

  A Garden That Grows

  I have never seen the sky on Earth or anywhere else other than Mor’h for that matter. The clouds are always in dense patches with large breaks in between. Beyond them the colors overhead fade in and out of red to pale blue. At times they blend together giving off shades of purple and lilac casting down like stained glass windows I have seen in viewings of Earth’s history. I imagine sometimes in the early mornings when the blue is more prominent that I am under an Earthen sky. But I have read and observed their mornings have oranges and shades I cannot begin to perceive. And that it depends on where you are for those colors to truly be enjoyed.

  Each day I leave my Column to visit what Mor’h really has to offer. The nature here is a thick garden of flora, fauna and small waterways. There are no hemispheres of oceans like on Earth, instead large seas are scattered in more frequency. Everything here is an evolution of plant or insect, and crustacean, l
et’s not forget those. No mammals, fish or reptiles have ever existed here as far as I know. Insectae or insects are very versatile here. Smaller ones will buzz you in flight and are always close to the plants they consume or maintain in pollination. Gargantuan Insectae like the beetle crabs stay in the lowland much like the plains of Earth. I once picked up a habit of calling the Insectae bugs from a study of Earth biology. Qz quickly corrected my slang to not insult the species. I found his correction funny but humor is not the greatest trait in Mor’h!

  A good distance away I turn and look to the hive-like city of central Mor’h. Their structures are organic and synthetic, no steel or deep earth materials. Their strength is uncanny.

  The Mor’h build up as their nature intends, from what Qz says, as they evolved from plants. There are many references to roots when they share with each other in a group. The Mor’h have no real concept of privacy because that is deception. Deception is also something the Mor’h consider unnatural. They share nearly everything. This takes eavesdropping to a monumental level of new understanding.

  After looking at the city for a while with my alien eyes, I begin to run.