Chapter 1
The miniature hamlet bustled with activity. The sun’s punishing rays were blocked by the horizon, offering the scaly little inhabitants a reprieve from the day’s heat. They crowded the few streets at this time of growing shadows, croaking to one another in their language and hurrying to the market before the chill of the night took hold and they would need to retreat back into their warm homes.
Placing his shaded goggles onto his forehead, Kupper surveyed the scene from the top of a squat, rounded house like a massive, black-eyed vulture. His reflective pupils shimmered a bright copper in the fading light.
Perhaps he could have passed for human, if humans had totally black eyes, tall pointed ears, or even came near to his size and strength. No, the humans shunned him and his kind. They had shunned him since birth, forcing his human mother to raise him among the little lizard people native to this world.
Taking a deep breath into all 3 lungs, he easily dropped to the ground from the roof top which was not even as tall as he was. He was large enough among other humans, but here among these simple little people he truly felt like a god worthy of the legends they told of him. The tallest of the reptilian natives only came to his waist, while the tallest of the humans hardly reached his stalwart shoulders, which were often too wide for these narrow streets. Their colorful houses were entirely too small for one like himself.
At least, that’s what the natives thought.
His size belied a delicate stealth honed by centuries of living as an outcast among humans. They told him he was a monster. An abomination. An alien. His heritage was well known by them for wherever there were humans, there were their most feared predator.
The Q’Ra.
The name alone would cause a great many humans from a great many planets to shudder in fear. Long before he was born, the elves had created these soldiers to fight the humans in their early years of space exploration, making them specifically to prey on human fears with ashen skin, gaunt faces, predatory teeth and large black eyes with reflective centers. The elves had thought themselves clever to neglect creating any females, hoping their iron willed creations would perish once their service was complete. Countless millennia meant nothing to the ageless Q’Ra, however, and neither did peace treaties. Knowing their superiority was threatened by extinction, the hunters began to experiment and found that, though difficult, breeding with humans created a greatly superior species than with their own ancestors, their dominant genetics lasting for several generations.
These unfortunate offspring had been dubbed the Q’Hu.
This Q’Hu walked among the small people that greeted him in their friendly manner, the young ones craning their necks back to stare at him in innocent, wide-eyed awe. They knew him to be generous with the work he did for them, gentle and mighty. Though, in the heat of the day that they slept, he helped himself to whatever trinkets and gems he could find in their homes.
Honestly, it was just for the fun of it. These people did not find such things nearly as valuable as the humans did. It kept his senses sharp, at least so he told himself.
Those senses were beginning to dull. While a human only slept every day and a half for this world, he could go four with ease. Tonight just happened to be that time. He would need to be moving on. The genial natives were becoming curious as to where their items had disappeared to. It didn’t occur to them that someone would take anything without asking.
Sometimes, he returned a few of the things he took to make them seem misplaced. So they didn’t suspect him– really, for the fun of it. He didn’t feel like being fun this time.
Amid lush crops and trees laden with fruit, he had found himself a lovely little pastel orange barn. Fragrant flowers neatly bordered the outside, a little garden stretching out beside it. He knew the sweet, scaly people who tended this land, had watched the care with which they took of their home and their property. Though he did not pay them for his comfortable bed, he repaid them by leaving no trace of his existence. Not that they would mind, but he felt best to take as little advantage of their charitable nature as he could should he return this way and require a favor or two. It wouldn’t be the first time in his life such a thing had happened.
With a heavy sigh, he laid out on his bed roll behind some barrels to stay out of sight in case one of the small folk decided to come in. His mind wandered as he stared at the ceiling. Perhaps he would try visiting a human town next. Moments like now were often lonely and his own merits to alleviate his desire were hardly as satisfying.
It would not be difficult for him to acquire female company. There was no need to force. Humans naturally flocked to all elf-kin, like bees to flowers. A great many women found his excellent physic and roguish looks irresistible. His dark, glowing gaze was mesmerizing, his voice inhumanly deep and clear, and the satin purr he could produce due to his elven heritage was often a done deal.
However, unlike the natives who looked upon him with awe and curiosity, he was often met with scorn by humans and even attacked. He wasn’t human, they said, no matter what his mother had been, what mattered was that his father had been one like him. An ageless mongrel. He knew well the ridicule any woman faced to be with him, even for a night. The same his own mother had faced to raise him.
That had been a great time ago. Centuries. He had stopped counting. Now was not the time for such memories anyways. He would want to start going early in the morning before the heat.
When that morning came, he was roused by the croaking of the town folk coming out of their homes for the few hours before it became too hot and bright for them. They tended to the fields, their gardens, sold their wares at the market, and socialized in their genial manner.
Changing his clothes and packing his few belongings, Kupper slung the pack over a massive shoulder and started toward the road that led out of town. Many of the children ran after him and asked him if he was leaving. When he confirmed his departure in their own native tongue, the youngsters bid him a safe travel as was their way and chased one another back to the town as the brilliant red sun crested the horizon.
Placing the dark goggles over his eyes, Kupper continued his journey into the alien forest. The trees grew at strange angles, all at once trying to reach for the life-giving rays of the sun and escape its brutality. The purple trunks and vibrant red and orange leaves were certainly lovely to behold but offered him little shade for he was as tall as many of them and they were spaced far enough apart to allow for their odd growth.
Sweat began to bead on his skin. Though he had removed his shirt and walked as much in the little bits of shade as he could, the heat grew steadily until he decided it was time to stop and cool down.
Settling under a tree, he glanced about his surroundings and found a hefty stick. He wasn’t all that good at carving, really, but it often helped pass the time. He carried several daggers on his belt of various lengths and chose one to begin. He never knew what he would make when he started. It would eventually end up looking like something.
Not that he cared to finish it this time. He didn’t like what it was looking like and the heat was particularly oppressive today. Tossing it out into the sparse underbrush, he placed his hands behind his head as he laid out, looking up at a green tinged sky through the leaves.
The sun was dying, or so he had heard, but it would be a few hundred million years before nothing could live here anymore, so it wasn’t a concern to him. Not even the Q’Ra could live that long.
Some day he would leave here, when there was enough reason to. He wasn’t sure what that reason might be. Most of the other Q’Hu left this world after a while, going to places they at least weren’t held in such contempt. That was because the others wanted to be around humans. He liked the natives. They neither feared him nor hated him. They called him a god while the humans called him a monster. They had taken care of him when his own kind turned him away.
Blinking lazily, he allowed himself to doze off. There wasn’t much else to do but reminisce and what good did that do?
A twig snapped.
He sat bolt upright, noticing a fleet figure already disappearing through the trees, his bag in their hands. With a loud growling curse, he leapt to his feet. The night had started to close in so he tore the dark goggles from his head and gave chase.
Even from his glances of the figure he could tell it was a humanoid, tall and slender, hair cropped short, and were those… pointed ears?
He was catching up to his prey when he had to jump over a log. With a startled cry, his feet were taken right out from under him. Slamming into the ground took his breath away, a sharp pain in his ankles as his whole weight was forcibly jerked up into the air. Blood rushed to his brain, roaring in his ears. As he swung, dazed and confused, he found himself relieved of his belt before he could react, prompting a silvery laugh as someone stepped into view.
The self-satisfied snickering belonged to a pair of heterochromic eyes, one ice blue with a pearlescent shimmering pupil and the other gold as a ring with a bronze hued shine. Elegant eyebrows arched up in merriment, one of which pierced multiple times.
“Silly Q’Hu.”
This trap had been laid just for him and he had been foolish enough to fall into it. There were few materials that could be holding his weight much less stand against his attempt at twisting his ankles free. Baring his dangerous teeth as he helplessly swung in the air, his arms a half meter off the ground, he growled at her as one might expect from an animal.
“Stupid H’elfling.”
Lifting her chin, she grinned triumphantly, exposing delicate, elongated canines. A silver ring shined on the side of her lower lip. Gracefully pointed ears with their multitude of piercings gave away her elven heritage but she was too robust to be pure, her shapely hips too broad for an elf.
“I’m not the one hanging upside down.” She giggled, stuck out her pierced tongue in a sassy taunt, and turned away as if that ended their encounter.
Kupper swung up and tried to grab the woman. Much to his dizziness, he discovered he was dealing with an air elementalist. The stiff gust she shot at him with a thrust of her palm spun him around, his brain swimming in his head.
“Bitch!” he roared. “When I get down from here…!”
“I'll be long gone! Thanks for the money, thief!”
She pulled the pouch that jingled with his stolen prizes out of his pack and dropped his bag and his belt in an unceremonious heap. With a cute, crooked smirk and a flirtatious wink, she casually trotted down the road, her sweet voice loudly singing a little rhyme.
“Silent are we, so soft of foot,
Brash are we, with no chagrin,
Shadows are we, dark as soot,
Thieves are we, to steal from our kin.”
