Primeval Origins : Paths of Anguish - Award Winning, New Epic Fantasy / Science Fiction (The Primeval Origins Saga Book 1)

by Brett Vonsik

  This is a work of fiction. The events and characters described herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places or living persons. The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

  Primeval Origins

  Paths of Anguish

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2014 Brett Vonsik

  v3.0 r1.3

  Cover Art by Daniel Eskridge

  This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Celestial Fury Publishing

  Website with Primeval Origins Dictionary and Encyclopedia: www.primevalorigins.com

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Destruction echoes once again as this cycle approaches its end; another civilization achieves greatness only to descend into the abyss -- corrupted by the depraved, the self-proclaimed elite, the immoral…all of whom, in their undeserved arrogance and folly, offer only a fouling of the Light.

  Light…the most precious of all Creation; the everlasting essence, bright in its majesty, strong in its endurance, indestructible to all that is known; the Light…incorruptible except for the choosings of the mortal shell encompassing it.

  Purity of Light is consequence of decisions made in the moments of each existence; choosing between Creation’s absence and Creation’s embrace, between selfishness and selflessness, evil and good; each mortal shell filled with Light is graced with the freedom to choose their path without Creation’s compulsion…’tis this essence of the struggle that stands in Judgment.

  Only in the mortal struggle may the purity of Light be confirmed: in the pain of existence, the darkest of moments, in the clash between evil’s expedience and good’s sacrifice can the nature of Light be revealed; only in the raging inferno of turmoil stripping away all but the core can the true nature of Light be confirmed through Final Judgment.

  When the Light is weighed, measured, and tried for breaking, only then can it be confirmed in Judgment to receive Creation’s Offering; or if found wanting, the Light must be returned to the mortal dust to be remade and tested once more.

  Only the most pure may share presence with Creation’s Glory; only the most honorable, the incorruptible, and meek may wield a shadow of Creation’s authority; for the strength of the Light is not in the mortal but in the immortal, the everlasting: that unconquerable spirit of moral purity and honor, that bright inextinguishable Light containing all that is good in the cosmos must be found and confirmed.

  It is my burden, my everlasting duty, and my honor to serve the usherings of Creation’s Judgments; to seek the most pure Lights of each civilization and confirm them for Herald service. In the smoldering dust and ash of all remaining, I shall sentinel the remaking of the next, to try in Judgment Humanity’s Light once again.

  The Harbinger of Judgments

  Prologue

  Fossils and Finds

  Swirls of lazy white mist floated on a chilly breeze, like frost serpents of lore intently slithering their way toward prey, passing over the tops and around the flaccid sides of the three olive twenty-man canvas tents where the dig team kept their equipment and fossil finds. Old and having seen better days, the tents were all the American Embassy in Bolivia could find in the area around Sucre. They were functional, though barely able to keep out much of the rain the team recently suffered. The rains left the tents damp overall and wet in spots–unfortunately they were where the fossils had been, forcing the dig team to repackage many of the already plaster-encased fossils. The repackaging was the job of several of the less-popular graduate students on the dig, overseen by a rather excitable professor.

  Nikki Ricks slid her way across the slick packed dirt road running through the camp after having been woken out of fitful sleep by a call on her wrist-worn PDA. She had been up late reworking the plaster casts on the last of the large fossils, and was hoping to get a few more hours of sleep before returning to the tent to prepare the smaller fossils and fragments for travel. The dig’s leader, Dr. Anders, had made the call, demanding her immediate presence at the excavation site then went silent and would not respond to her numerous attempts to return his call over her PDA. How she disliked technology and how it connected everyone to everyone else all the time, except out here it seemed. Despite her frustration of not knowing what Anders wanted of her, she welcomed the opportunity to get away from the constant monitoring of hers and everyone’s activities as the “Man” did back home.

  Nikki thought Anders sounded anxious, but she wasn’t about to be his lap dog and go running when he barked. He was only a few years older than she, and a fellow graduate student before she took her needed time off. It just wasn’t right for her to now be his “go do this” and “go do that” girl. So she rolled out of her dry one-person tent, her home of the last five weeks, intending to make her way to the fossil preparation tent for a cup of the horrid-tasting black coffee she would pour herself before seeing what the “Great Leader” wanted. The coffee was her morning ritual to kick-start the day...it was her “Nikki time.”

  While carefully traversing the slick ground, the deep blue sky and dusky mountain ridges were suddenly swallowed in a brilliant yellow glow that broke over the mountain ridges high to the east. Dawn. Nikki stopped when her eyes involuntarily closed to allow her sight time to adjust to the sun’s powerful rays. She welcomed the warmth bathing her face, hands, and body while she stood waiting for her sight to return. Nikki found herself thinking and wishing she had completed her dual-doctoral degree in geoarchaeology and paleontology from Carnegie Mellon and Pitt Universities instead of taking time off to get her head right on the Florida beaches. Her self-proclaimed “sabbatical” had left her now a graduate assistant performing menial tasks on this dig, instead of being one of the principals making and taking credit for the discoveries.

  A strong burst of anger swept through Nikki, still harboring anger at her parents for withdrawing their financial and more important political support after she took time off from school, telling her she wasn’t taking her education seriously. When she decided to return to her studies, she had to beg her way back into the PhD program…a political favor granted by the head of the department, and only after a painful search for a private scholarship to cover much of her costs. Since then, she had worked any and all jobs she could find to pay for the rest, as she didn’t qualify for the government’s student loan any longer. She cursed at everyone for her pain, starting with her parents for making her beg others for permissions and money, and at the chaos called the US government that had complete control of student loans and determined which degrees warranted eligibility for government financing, and which degrees did not. And it seemed to change with the wind as to which degrees qualified. Her degrees were not high on the government’s list, as she discovered when she returned to school. Then there was that favoritism thing and being told she wasn’t the “right race” or a “foreign student” to make her eligible for reconsideration for a student loan. The almost bored-looking government representative working her student loan application told her she just wasn’t “loan-worthy.”
What the hell was that?

  Nikki recalled leaving the applications office feeling as if she was the lowest form of life on the planet. Then, luck found her when she applied to one of the few surviving education scholarship programs and received money to continue her education. Why were things so difficult, now? With eyes still closed, Nikki saw her Bubba Jules and heard her wisdom, usually given to her at times when Nikki felt the world was against her. “Always look for the bright spot in everything.” Nikki’s smile came and went with thoughts of her grandmother. Accepting her death was still difficult, even after more than a year. Feeling the sadness of her loss darkened her mood. She sought a distraction and tried to focus on why she was amidst the camp’s tents instead of snuggled in her sleeping bag…another thing darkening her mood. He probably wants me to wipe somebody’s butt. Though, Anders does have a nice one to look at, Nikki thought with a snicker.

  Nikki pulled her yellow jacket close to fend off the chill air as she slid her way toward the center tent’s wood steps. The smell of diesel from the camp generator made her scrunch her nose in protest. Diesel made her stomach turn. Why they didn’t have a micro-fusion power supply for the camp baffled her. Looking to the fossil preparation tent, she recalled the tedious and boring job she made of cataloging and packing the re-plastered fossils into crates. Most of the remaining fossils were small or fragments, the larger pieces having been repacked into crates. All were destined for the Carnegie Museum back in the United States. She dreaded returning to yesterday’s tasks, as she had more fossil fragments to catalog and pack away, but that would have to wait until later. She was summoned, after all, but her summoning would wait for coffee.

  Beyond camp, the pinging sounds of chisels, hammers, and unintelligible voices at the dig site were washed out by the low rumble of the generators powering the equipment in the tents. She heard their voices, a number of them excited, but they would need to wait. Coffee first. As Nikki approached the wood steps, the flap entry to the center olive colored tent pulled back revealing two men standing in the entryway. Nikki heard them speaking in the regional highlands dialect of Spanish, but they spoke much too fast for her to follow the conversation. Their conversation went abruptly silent when they realized she was near. One of the men dressed in bright clothing and a round-brimmed hat quickly departed, without uttering a word. He walked briskly toward the sounds of muffled metal chisels and hammers before Nikki could see who he was. The other man, unmoving as if made of stone, waited as she climbed the wooden steps to the platform that served the purpose of a porch to the prep tent and doubled as the evening gathering place for the team to discuss the day’s activities and speculate about their discoveries. Nikki strained a little to see the man’s face as she climbed. It was the camp’s handyman, but she held her tongue at greeting him, fearful of embarrassing herself if she were to be wrong about his name. After all these weeks, she still was unsure of his name.

  “Buenos dias, Señorita Ricks,” Luis Sebastian Fernandez said in his thick ascent and rough English. “Is that you sneaking?”

  “Yes...Luis,” Nikki answered carefully, hoping she had his name right. Ashamed she didn’t care to learn his name after all these weeks, she pressed on, hoping to slip by him and avoid further conversation. Her coffee and the dig site were already on the schedule.

  Luis eyed Nikki as if he were measuring her. It made Nikki uncomfortable and caused her to break stride before the tent opening. The unremarkable handyman and camp scrounge spoke “Señorita, what do you think of the new find?”

  “What new find?” Nikki asked.

  “Up there with the big head bones.” Luis pointed in the direction to the dig site beyond the tents. “They found blue bones.”

  “What...?” Nikki gave Luis an “Are you stupid?” stare before stepping into the tent, seeking to put distance between her and the confused scrounger. He unsettled her. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but the almost-nightly occasions she found him lingering around the showers did nothing to endear him to her. A shiver rippled down her back and a soiled feeling swept over her.

  The inner tent was nothing like she had left it last night. Standing in stunned silence with mouth slung open, Nikki stared at chaos. Boxes and crates everywhere had been hastily opened and the meticulously packed contents were in disarray around the tent. Plaster, burlap, and foil wraps once encasing the large chest sections were everywhere except where they should have been. Small fossil fragments were scattered about, with Doctor Hugo Ramirez Costa sitting on the floor cross-legged in the center of the chaos, wearing the same khaki pants and shirt Nikki left him in last night when she went to her tent. Spine, rib, gastrile, and upper arm bones of the big theropod, along with the rock encasing the fossilized bones, lay arranged on the floor in front of Ramirez. He preferred being called Ramirez instead of Costa for some reason he wouldn’t share with her. He was so intent on studying a set of rib bones that he didn’t notice Nikki enter.

  “What the hell is this?” Recovered from her initial shock and with anger boiling at her work being undone then tossed all about the tent, Nikki wanted answers. Ramirez sat up stiff-backed, eyes wild with excitement. She and Ramirez had become friends over the past few weeks, but this...this tested her sensibilities.

  “Nikki!” Ramirez acknowledged her presence. His short, dark hair was disheveled, eyes bloodshot, and his usually clean-shaven appearance lost to a day’s heavy growth. It looked as if he had not slept at all.

  “You must see this.” Ramirez announced with a sparkle in his eye and a broad smile, pointing to the fossils in front of him. Nikki would have sworn she was watching a child opening gifts on Holiday Season morning, with his excitement. “You not believe what I have found. Look!”

  The large rock he pointed to show the exposed rib bones of their extinct carnivore. Some of the rock had been chipped away by Ramirez, exposing sections of the largest two bones. Nikki approached, unsure of what she was to look for. Ramirez -- his excitement high since the team realized they had found a massive meat eater, potentially larger than anything previously known, possibly a tyrannosaur or a hybrid, the first of its kind in South America -- was nearly overcome with his new find. Ramirez leapt to his feet and crossed half the tent in a couple of bounds to take hold of Nikki’s arm to hasten her along. He pointed to one of the large ribs -- the bones showed obvious signs of stress fractures. Nothing unusual. Ramirez spoke, almost out of breath. “Rub your fingers over this separation.”

  Giving Ramirez a skeptical smile, Nikki crouched to examine the ribs. The fossilized bones, as thick as her arm, looked as if they had been placed under tremendous pressure, from their flattened shape. Nikki discerned the fine details of the dark bone from the dark, but lighter-colored surrounding sandstone; all she saw were the stress fractures before noticing what she believed he was so excited about. Running her fingers across a smooth, straight break in the bone, Nikki looked at Ramirez quizzically. He could barely contain his excitement, “It’s a clean edge: straight…completely linear and with no irregular structures associated with a break.”

  “The bones are well-preserved,” Nikki stated. The team had not been able to stop talking about the excellent condition of the find since the day they uncovered the first bones, the left foot. The speculation was that the animal must have been buried completely in hardening sediments at its death or soon afterward, to have been so well-preserved. The fossilized remains didn’t have the typical backwards articulation of the spine, neck and tail caused by the dehydration of the spinal ligaments retracting them prior to burial of such a complete specimen.

  “That’s not a natural break,” Ramirez stated with conviction. Pointing at another rib bone with a break, but one with ragged edges and numerous stress fractures surrounding the break, Ramirez continued, “See, this break is unclean, not a clean shear as first one. And neither has signs of healing. Both injuries had to occur just before or at death, but unlike the break with uneven edges and stress fractures…a wound from a blunt trauma
, the separation in the ribs I showed you must be from a cut of some kind.”

  “Cut!” Nikki challenged. “By what?”

  “Unknown,” Ramirez replied with a calm voice.

  “It’s an aberration.” Nikki stated, half challenging, half dismissing.

  “See the next two ribs,” Ramirez continued. “Identical and follow same line as if all three ribs were cut at once. What type of animal could have made these wounds?”

  “Wait a minute, Hugo,” Nikki protested. She was a bit surprised that Ramirez was jumping to conclusions without a detailed study. “We can’t conclude this injury came from another animal. For all we know, this carnivore fell or ran into something with a sharp edge…if it is a cut.”

  “I thought so too, at first,” Ramirez stated. “But the cut is clean. Each rib cut is identical. Something inflicted these wounds...maybe it was its death, but with no signs of predation or being eaten. Its killer might also be buried out here. That would be a find. Think of it…a creature that could kill the largest carnivore that ever lived.”

  Nikki wanted to argue with Ramirez over the facts and stop his speculation, but he made a case…something made the cuts, and it didn’t look as if they had been caused by geologic stresses after the bones fossilized. She had to be careful with such positions as a student, as her professors might find her lacking in her pursuit of her PhD, being undisciplined and all. As a student, she was constantly challenged by her fellow students and professors. They forced her to gather facts, form conclusions from evidence instead of speculation, and then articulate those conclusions in a logical structure to effectively communicate her ideas. Looking at the rock-encased bones, enticing as they were for wild speculation, and recalling discussions held by the team over the past week, Nikki thought of another possibility.