Paradox Moon: The First Book of Regenesis
Page 19
They are descendants of the same race that spawned the scientists of the southern polar region. But their forbears were the industrialists who spurned the warnings of the scientists and doomed life on their planet to extinction.
As the scientists were banished to the antarctic, the ancestors of these brutes sneaked away to the northern polar region. Stranding the rest of their race to the lethal scourge of the omega strain.
While Davina’s people have been frozen in time, as scientific progress atrophied without industry to support it or commerce to give it useful purpose, Gruk’s tribe has devolved to a more brutish version of his ancestors.
Following the diaspora of others fleeing the omega pathogen, Gruk’s ancestors used their superior numbers to overwhelm and enslave the small pockets of survivors. It is the great evil of slavery, more than any other, that marked their descent into barbarism.
Like their forbears, they carry a callous disregard for all living things, save those that serve their base appetites. The sins of the fathers, who destroyed an innocent world and oppressed its few survivors, are visited upon their feral descendants who eke out a Hobbesian existence—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
The refinements of a lost civilization are lost on them, supplanted by lust, avarice and rapacity. Thus are Gruk and his band baser than the beasts of the field.
Generation unto generation of harsh treatment has reduced the slave caste to a small number of wretches, and Gruk hungers for fresh, healthy prisoners to enslave and gratify his every appetite.
Scouting close to the ocean’s edge, Grak cries out:
“Here, Gruk.
“Here are the prints you seek!
“They are smudged, but we can track them along the shore away from this place.”
Closely inspecting the blurry prints and seeing the purposeful route they blaze, Gruk orders his companion to go back to the tribe and return with a dozen of its strongest males.
As Grak recedes from view, the leader looks to the dense cloudbank overhead and howls:
“The hunt is on!”
He does not know the tracks will lead the tribe to a world they have feared to tread.
He does not know they pursue a prey more formidable than themselves.
Gruk and his band of brutes are taking their first step on a journey that will lead them across a resurrected world.
To an epic clash that will decide the fate of that world and future generations of a race once thought extinct.