Chapter 1
“What-what is fear without words?”
She sniffed, covering her eyes. “Or a hero?”
The weight of her injury reminded her of the drama of this situation. She gripped her leg. Why did this have to happen? She unraveled her sleeve, wiping her face and the tears away. Why did she have to be so stupid? Why did she ever think she could be happy? Everything was on it’s end; the Virus had been released, her planet, her dimension, was dead, and he was still here. Hiding in a refuge camp and trying to plan a revolt didn’t work out. She found others. She found people that she actually cared about. She’d been so stupid. Like anyone one could love her after what she did.
They were good people. All of them where, then she happened. This could’ve worked. Right? After all, this started when she was just a kid. A child, with giant dreams that could never happen except in her own mind. An idiot, that’s what she was.
She looked normal, that’s for sure, Brown hair, big brown eyes and a tiny body. Freckles dotted her face, skin pale and lips full.
But, she honesty wasn't on the inside of her skin. She always was dreaming. Maybe, she thought, she could escape one day. Something amazing would happen, and she would be taken away, become something more than human. So she drew; sketches of herself in costumes and capes like some sort of superhero that could always save the day. She would always be the winner, the imaginary villain taken away where no one could be harmed again.
Capes and costumes never last.
She knew this, but playing ‘Imagination’ meant you were powerful. The strength in you was great, even as weak as you were. Dreams meant colors; gold and tangerine shades would litter the sky, magenta blending into the soft cirrcus and cumulus clouds as they littered the atmosphere, stars of unfathomable numbers iridescently breaking through the colors as indigo hills filled with bright green wildflowers and giant lavender trees bled into your mind. Dreams meant freedom; kingdoms of dragons with governments of Democracies, birds with the heads of cows and music playing from water. Dreams meant everything was okay.
But having dreams meant you were capable of nightmares.
It was a planet called Tethon.
The planet, compared to the human’s Earth she would learn about, was mammoth. The land, ripe with vast areas full of certain crops, winding hills and sunny skies, cool breezes drifting over the fair growth of the dirt, nearly consumed the entirety of the planet, small seas dotting the rest like freckles. There were no seasons, or countries, or slaves, or viruses or wars. There were animals who were kind and helpful to the growing environment and healed it. The sky was a darker tint of cyan perked with cumulus clouds painted gold, the ground a shaded peach.
It was a Hegemony, the upper, civilized class ruling over a secondary class, a semi-constructed class at the bottom. They identified with colors; The top with Gold, middle with Silver, and the elected group at the end was commonly considered Bronze. She lived in the Silver class, having a family consisted of a grandmother, grandfather, three uncles, seven aunts, a brother, and a mother and father. Many of these people held tight to the Bronze class, poor and not fully educated to their greatest abilities. They all, however, worked hard for the succession of the two children.
He wasn’t that much older than her. A few eons, at the most, but still enough to be her brave ‘knight’. He protector, her guardian. He was an angel, as some said, with his beach blonde hair with dark hazel roots, eyes as blue as the feathers of a bird, and he was her angel. He loved to tell stories. He loved to tell stories of the big, giant dragon and a boy who went on mighty adventures with a sword that was yellow and hair that was blue. She’d laugh, then tell him a story of her own.
Stories, he figured, were the images we wish we could be, the dust of our hope creeping away from our bodies as we breathe. They were good at telling stories. They came up with one which they expanded, which would grow farther than they thought:
A girl on a planet was abducted one day, told that everything would burn. She escaped, managing to find a new home and a new family. The new adventures consisted of everything the siblings could think of, never making a lot of sense. It was a fun story, full of excitement and life. They did this everyday before resting, he’d sit on her pod and start it off, letting her take it from there. He would watch her, then just sit and smile. He was like that, loud and quiet at the same time.
She noticed this, along with several other things. He would slip gold chains under his silver coat, always checking to see if anyone saw. Once, he snuck out past the restricted curfew. How did he even get out of his pod? He would tell her that everything was going to be okay, but she knew he didn’t believe that. He was just a liar.
He was just a storyteller, after all.
But what happens when a prophet’s prophecy unfolds, when a teller’s tales are told?
Death.
A corrupted government corrupts it’s ties, those ties seeping it’s poison into it’s ties and so on. The Silence Algorithm, a formula that destroy dimensional barriers by finding wormholes and expanding them until they combusted, sending theoretically unstable and unknown energies into the extra-dimensional barriers and chewing them down, was stolen, and several accusations were made. Everyone was possibly a criminal, everyone a victim. She stopped reading her info-pads, and going outside of her dome was limited.
Once upon one of these days, she snuck upon a backwash alley and discovered a blue box. She was often told not to mess with the unknown until further clarification; it was not polite to sneak and divulge. But, something stirred inside her as she ran her slim fingers over the torn container, the exterior chipped and peeling. It groaned, and she quickly pulled away. She frowned; what was she doing? She had to go.
The box hummed as she left, a small silver puff of powder exiting it’s opening. It was almost time, and they had found someone to save.
