by Loki Renard
“Don’t threaten me, Vulcan,” he growls.
“It’s not a threat. It’s a promise. I would do anything for this woman. I would destroy Earth for the rest of all time if it meant saving her tonight. So take this rinky dink piece of shit medical kit, and shove it up your…”
The communicator goes dim and silent. Either Krave terminated the call, or he lost connection.
I have never felt this helpless. Tres needs my help. If we were up in the ship, she would be healed in seconds without so much as a scratch. Here, on this primitive planet, she will die from the blunt force swelling of simply having hit her head.
At least Krave managed to send down antiseptics, clean medical tools, a drill, bandages, and antibiotics. There are even drugs to help control the swelling, and an IV. He’s given me everything I need - except the will to drill into the woman-I-love’s skull like a coconut.
She is twitching and making noises which aren’t quite coherent. Her eyes are open, but they do not see.
“Tres,” I whimper, pulling her body into my arms and holding her close, as if proximity alone might somehow undo what has been done. “Tres. Please.”
Chapter Six
Tres
I feel nothing.
This peace, is it what death feels like? Just a casual lack of everything? Is this good? Is it bad? Is it… anything?
“Ow,” I complain to myself as my head suddenly throbs. “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.”
I open my eyes to discover myself bathed in a soft golden glow. It is the kind of light which makes me feel as though everything is going to be alright. The kind of light that heralds a new dawn, on a new world. I stretch, and aside from the ache in my head, I feel a softness and a lightness in my body which wasn’t there before.
“Good morning.”
A voice I don’t recognize welcomes me to the new day. It is rough, and faintly animal. There is a smell in this place, a musk of some kind. I don’t recognize the smell, or the place. Lichen and moss cling to the roof of the cave above my head. I was in a cave before. This might even be the same cave - but it is a different place. I can feel that in my bones.
“Who is that?” I look around and see a trickle of water running down a far wall into a pool which is ringed with stones that stop the water from flooding the cave completely. It must flow down somewhere deeper, I suppose.
“It’s me,” the voice says. Unhelpful.
I sit up slowly, my head pounding. “Ow. Ow,” I complain, reaching for the place that aches.
“Your head doesn’t actually hurt. You just have memories of pain. They will go away soon enough.”
“It feels like it hurts,” I mumble, looking around myself for the source of the voice.
“You can’t feel pain anymore, Tres,” the voice says. There’s a warmth and an amusement to it, as well as a familiarity I cannot quite place.
“I’m over here,” he says.
Now I see him. He’s a man. At least, I think he is a man. He has a head like a man, arms and chest like a man, but the legs of a goat and horns perched atop his head. His eyes sparkle with good humor, and his horns are two small points poking through an abundance of curling auburn hair - the very same color as my own.
I feel an immediate kinship with this creature who is lounging in a seat made from covered furs. The ground beneath my feet is sand. The walls and ceiling which curl up and around us mimic the cave I left, but I feel that I am very long away. I have never felt time before, but now I sense it streaming around me, the same way I might feel the wind blowing past me if I were outside on a windy day. It catches the tendrils of my consciousness and makes them flow in the time breeze.
The man-creature holds up a finger to me, as if I have interrupted him doing something else. He is looking into what seems to be a mirror, and speaking to his reflection.
“Call it the cheeseburger,” he says. “Because there is cheese and also, the intangible quality of burger. What’s that? Hm? What does burger mean? Well, you know. Burger. Okay. Love you. Bye.” He touches the mirrored surface. It ripples and his image disappears, which is unsetting because now he has no reflection.
I am deeply disoriented in both space and time. I feel sick, but I also feel as though I might not have a stomach to be sick with anymore.
“You’re early,” he says. “Or maybe you're late. I’m very bad with linear time. Cause and effect are tedious and more complicated than you might think.”
He’s talking to me as if I should be able to understand him, but the truth is, I have no idea what any of those words he just said mean.
“What has happened to me? Where am I? Who are you?”
“All useless questions,” he says. “What you should be asking is when happened to you, what are you, and why… am I?” He cocks his head to the side and smiles in a way which is impish and reassuring at the same time.
I open my mouth, but I can’t understand what he said, so I close it again.
“This happens,” he says more to himself than to me, “when people cannot behave. And they never behave. So it always happens. I don’t know why I bother, really.”
“What are you?”
“You could say I’m the creative director,” he says. “Of you know, Earth. I’m also, I suppose, technically speaking, your father.”
With those words, I forget about everything which has happened before this moment. My entire life, I have wondered who my father was. I was told he came from another tribe on the other side of the mountain. I took that to mean that he was from the hunting tribe around Hyrrm’s back. But perhaps that’s not what that meant at all.
“You… are my father.” I say it flatly, because it is not a question. I can see my eyes in his eyes. My hair in his hair. We have the same chin. Though thankfully, not the same beard. In an instant, I make sense.
I was not fathered by someone in another tribe. I was fathered by a… whatever this is.
“I am.. hey!”
His exclamation is prompted by the fact that I just picked up a heavy ceramic something and threw it at him. It shatters against the far cave wall, unbecoming whatever it was, and turning into a scatter of shards.
“What did you do that for?”
“You…” I seethe. “Are my father.”
“Oh, I see the confusion,” he says. “Yes, I am your father but in the same way as I am the father of the turtles and the beetroots and the blackbirds and…”
“You’re lying. You’re my father. You are the one who begat me.”
“If that means you’re going to throw things at me, then no,” he says. “You have to be more careful here. These aren’t objects. They’re decorative concepts. You just broke the concept of shame. You know that? I’m going to have to remake it before all the humans start going around naked and fucking each other even more than they already do.”
This creature is claiming that he is a deity, but I have seen the power of the future, and that seems to me to be what he has. I do not see bird, or root in him. But I do see myself reflected in him, and along with my features, I feel his negligence.
I wondered, when I was small, where my father was. Why he did not rescue me. I cried some nights, because the others all knew who their father was–Trelok– and I did not. I thought I had forgotten that pain, but seeing my face in his brings all that pain surging to the fore.
“You left me there to be tortured,” I say. “You left me to be outcast in a world where being outcast means death. Why?”
“You’ve learned a little about time,” he says. “You guess.”
“Because it had to be that way? Because it already had been that way?”
“It did.”
“Why do you have goat legs?” I change the subject. There are a million questions to ask, and I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about time, and the inevitability of everything.
“Oh, these?” He looks down at his legs. “I like them. Also, I am a faun. Quite a special faun actually. King of the fauns, if you stand on cere
mony. Which makes you…” he looks at me suggestively, as if he expects me to finish the sentence.
“Dead?”
“I don’t feel as though you’re following the thread of this conversation, but I suppose you’re new. You need time to settle down. You’re actually the youngest of thirteen daughters of mine. You can meet your sisters soon.”
I have a family down here. Or up here. But I feel like it is more down than any other direction. Earth was a middle place. This is not an improvement on it.
“You’re a princess, Tres,” he says. “And as soon as you lose connection to the flesh you inhabited in the human life, you will see that for yourself.”
“Lose connection?”
“You’re still technically dying,” he says. “That beast of yours is attempting to save you.”
“He is? He is!” I beam. “He will save me. Vulcan will never fail me.”
“Well. We will see about that.”
“What happened? Did Hyrrm claim me? Did Trelok kill me?” My memories of the end are non-existent.
“You cast magic too powerful for you, fell back and hit your head on a rock. Pretty standard human death, aside from the magic,” he says without concern.
I curse. I did not expect to be confronted with my father, let alone discover that he is a faun. My tribe speaks of many different beasts, half-natural, half-supernatural. We know that the world we see is not all there is. I have been accused of unnatural origins many times in my life, but I never suspected that the rumors were true.
“How did you know my mother?”
“In the carnal sense,” he says. “She was beautiful. Lost. Drawn to me. And she sung so beautifully, I could not resist her. I shouldn’t have been in your realm. The agreement is to leave things alone once humans take their first steps in the sand, but there’s hardly any oversight in the matter.”
“So it was no grand love affair. Just a chance fling and you inflicted me upon the world, tore me screaming from the darkness and made me live a life of pain and suffering.”
“If it makes you feel any better, that is how all humans come to be.”
“It does not make me feel any better.” I fold my arms over my chest and stare at him with narrowed eyes. I have always been so timid, afraid of my own shadow. I have spent my life trying to stay out of trouble, make myself small, stifle my song. But I cannot now, I have been freed of the thing that held me back… my body. I know instinctively that I am no longer inside my skin. Whatever I am now is the essence of me which was always weighed down by all that heavy meat.
“Did you try to save her?”
“Excuse me?”
“The way Vulcan is trying to save me. Now. Did you try to save my mother when she was executed for the sin of being with you, growing me inside you?”
“Your mother was just a vessel,” he says. “And she did not belong here.”
I did not think it was possible to loathe anyone more than I loathe Trelok, but I hate this faun more. I hate him so deeply, and so completely I did not know I had this capacity for hatred.
“She died alone. I almost died too…”
“It would have been better for you if you had. Then you would have been born into my realm as an infant and grown up here. You would not be having this difficult time now, trying to adjust when you are already fully grown as a female human, or, what you think is a female human.”
He does not seem to notice or care about my emotional state, or, if he does, he considers it an unfortunate side-effect of my not having died earlier.
“Do not look so furious,” he says. “Everything you are learning today, including the news of your death, is nothing more than a much delayed new beginning. You are in a place of power, and you are a woman of power. My magic runs through your veins. You are only beginning to understand what that means.”
“It’s not your magic. It’s mine.”
“Is it?” His eyes twinkle as he cocks his head.
“What does that question mean?”
“It means,” he says. “Have you claimed it? Made it truly yours? Or have you batted at it, like a kitten with a blade of grass, then run scared from what it might truly be capable of? You have a voice, Tres, a voice unlike any other. It has real power, but you have not used it. You have whispered like a mouse when you should have roared like a lion.”
“I might have known how to do that, if I had a father to raise me.”
“You do realize that I saved you, ungrateful whelp,” he says, still good-natured. “You are, at this moment, undergoing impromptu brain surgery from an alien who has about as much knowledge of human anatomy as you did of your true heritage yesterday. There is every chance you will die and be sucked into oblivion, the soul grinder of the cosmos, but I have pulled you free. You could say thank you.”
I do not say thank you.
“I thought you said I was dead.”
“Well, you’re close enough. Your lover is going to finish you off, would be my guess. Doesn’t strike me as a brain surgeon.”
My death, at this moment, is not my main concern. I have felt the ache of this man-creature’s absence all my life. Father. I so often wondered what it was like to have one. I have been left to wonder what I was, because I always felt the strangeness at the core of me and yet could not make sense of it. I spent many moons watching the daughters of Trelok and wondering why I did not feel like them, look like them, speak like them. The answer was in front of me every time I looked into the shining river. I come from somewhere else. And where you come from matters. Even if you don’t want it to. Even if you try your best to fit with a tribe which does not share your soul, as I did my entire life.
“What am I doing here? Why did you bring me here now?”
“Because you belong here.”
“I don’t,” I tell him. “Maybe I would have if you’d loved me, but you didn’t. You abandoned me. You can’t claim me now. It is too late. There has been too much hurt and harm. I no longer need a father. I have Vulcan.”
“You mean, the monster covered in your blood?”
“I mean the only hero I ever had.”
“You don't even know what you’ve been saved from,” he tells me in that sneering tone. “You could be a thin smear across time right now if it wasn’t for me. You could have been turned into space dust. Instead, I caught your soul before it completely disintegrated. You owe your existence to me. I begat you, and now I have claimed you for your rightful place.”
“And this is?”
“There are many names for it,” he says. “I call it home.”
“I never will.”
“Dying has made you bold, little one,” he says. “But wait until your body goes cold. Your lover leaves. Your flesh is consumed by biting mouths big and small. Your bravery now is nothing but a remnant of the world you no longer belong to.” He lets out a sigh. “I did not want to argue with you, my girl. This should be a happy day. You have finally arrived.”
He does not understand. He thinks that the life I had before this moment was nothing but a fleshy irrelevance. But he’s wrong. My life with Vulcan, short as it was, was everything. There is nothing else to care about, nothing that matters.
“Please,” he says. “Sit down. It will be over soon, and you will feel better.”
Sitting down sounds good. Dying is tiring. I feel drained, as if my energy isn’t all in one place. Part of me is here, but part of me is still somewhere else. At the faun's behest, I sit down in a fur lined chair and take the weight off my barely existent feet.
“Yes,” he says. “Get comfortable. It won’t be long, one way or another.”
“What is your name?”
“I cannot tell you my name. It is a word of power too great for you to contain. If I told you, and you spoke it, it would tear you apart instantly - and you are already in delicate enough condition, my child.”
“I have to call you something.”
“Call me Lykar.”
“Lykar.” I wrap my tongue aro
und the word and feel it buzz against it. He’s right. My voice has always had strange power, enough to unsettle Trelok and the villagers, but here it is unfettered. It is as if the safety protocols have been stripped off my true nature. I suddenly know words, like protocols, which I know I never knew when I was nothing more than a girl covered in painted handprints waiting to die in a cave.
He brings me a chalice of water from the back of the cave. It spills over the edge of a golden cup, coating his fingers with a light green tinge.
“Drink,” he says. “You will feel better.”
I shake my head. Instinct tells me not to take food or drink from a creature like this. Untrustworthiness dances in his eyes. I see a multitude of meanings in his gaze, a mischievous villainy which might end everything.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“This doesn’t slake your physical thirsts, which you no longer have. It helps ease you into this new realm. You belong here, Tres. You were made for this place. When you are ready, I will take you from this cave and I will show you an entire realm of such incredible beauty you will never tire of looking at it. You will be among family. You will be surrounded by friends…”
“I never had friends,” I say, putting my hand to my head. It is pounding terribly, getting worse by the moment. “I don’t need them now.”
Vulcan
Blood. There is so much blood. It runs everywhere, over my fingers and dripping through them onto the sandy cave floor.
I think I have done this wrong.
I have never cleaved the skull of anyone I loved. I never knew it was possible to save a life this way. I never thought about saving life at all, only taking it. Now I see her essence leaking from her and I feel the most pure despair possible.
She is lifeless. The spirit which animated her has fled. She is just flesh. The injury to her head was too much for her to sustain, and I have not helped. If anything, I hastened her end.
“Tres,” I say her name, knowing she cannot respond.
I lie her on the bed of leaves I made for her, and I face the fact that I could not save her. All my power, all my strength. It meant nothing in the end. Fate wanted to take her, and now it has.