Four years before the awakening of James Island

The sound of softly roaring waves crashing on a shoreline mixed with chirping birds and the hush of a cool wind, which carried with it a refreshing saltiness. Stirring awake from a deep sleep he couldn’t remember falling into, sand shifted beneath him, hot to the touch.

Blinking back against the harsh sunlight, Tallas Radagan surveyed the tropical scenery around him, trying to remember what he was doing there. He was on a beach; there was no doubt about that. A beach of soft, fluffy white sand and a blue-green ocean that stretched for as far as he could see. He was in the shade of a large tree that had a corrugated bark and long, sharply pointed leaves, which he was sure he’d never seen before. A vast jungle of similar trees spread out behind him, where dozens of tiny insects could be heard croaking and singing.

Shrill caws overhead drew his attention. Despite his pained mind and the fatigue trying—and failing—to leave him, he made out the distinct shapes of two giant birds with colourful feathers and enormous wingspans. Either they were the largest birds he’d ever seen or they were much closer than he realised.

With his focus strengthening, he sat up, ignoring the dull throb in his temple. The low lapping of the waves helped sooth him somewhat, at least.

Tallas saw the large sphere of faint white light before he noticed the figure sitting within it. Farther down the beach there was a short-haired woman sitting cross legged, eyes closed as if in meditation. She was nude from the waist up, exposing full breasts and a trim, broad-shoulder torso. Blinking and focusing more, Tallas saw that the sphere of light was indeed surrounding the woman; a hazy white glow that reminded him of a large snow globe. She was lean and impressively muscled, with an ancient look about her aged features. Her dark skin was cracked like a tree bark and seemed to be made out of granite.

Trying to rise and speak with the woman, to find some answers, a wave of nausea swept over Tallas and dropped him back to the sand. His vision blurred as his body shut down.

Then there was only blackness.

When he came to again, it was night and he was somewhere deep inside the jungle. He lay beside a campfire, whose embers cracked and spat upwards towards the far-off leafy ceiling. The nearest tree trunks reached at least fifty feet before they became lost within the dense canopy above.

Tallas saw he was still in his work shirt and trousers, but his overcoat and backpack were missing. Flashes of the experiment came back to him as he startled up, his heart beating fast.

The failed experiment.

Surely, he should have died along with everyone else on the ship. Was this some kind of afterlife beyond his known existence? While Tallas struggled to understand what he was doing there, he was even more surprised to see someone familiar. Across from the flames sat a figure shrouded in dark red robes, with a hood drawn low to hide a face. The Red Monk. The one that was meant to be their final failsafe in sustaining the energy if it became uncontrollable.

Vivid images crashed through Tallas’s exhausted mind. Dr. Ofslow reaching for the crystal. Dead bodies around him. The fierce beam of energy burning through everything.

Tallas steadied his breathing, cleared his throat, and addressed the monk. “What happened?” He was surprised at how hoarse his voice was.

The monk tended to a curved rock in the shape of a bowl, adding things in and mixing with a smaller rock, making some kind of paste. He either didn’t hear Tallas or was ignoring him.

“Where am I?” Tallas tried again. “What’s going on?” He tried to sit up and move closer to the monk but a sharp stabbing pain in his side caused him to sit back down. His head swam with a crippling dizziness that threatened to send him back to darkness.

“You should not strain yourself,” the monk said quietly. “You are very weak.” There was something strange about that voice; it sounded as though there were two voices speaking at once. One low and foreign, filled with trembling emotion, and the other light and mechanical with a stoic edge.

Tallas took a moment to let the nausea fade into something manageable. “You’re the Red Monk? From the Cyta Corp experiment. On the Mantalus One.” He looked around the dark jungle. “We were orbiting Olvaeer. Is that where we are now? Did we crash onto the planet?”

“Save your strength,” the duel-voices came from within the hood. The monk placed the bowl down, reached up to the large hood, and pulled it back to reveal a face. Tallas straightened at the sight of the woman from the beach with the short-cropped grey hair and brown, cracked skin. Startlingly cool grey eyes pierced Tallas, holding him firmly in place. He’d never seen such a person before who looked ancient and withered, and yet filled with a commanding presence that demanded attention.

The monk held up the rock bowl towards Tallas. The contents were dark and muddy. Fireflies flittered across the space between them, causing shadows to dance over her aged features. She could have been in her eighties, but Tallas wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she was in her forties or fifties.

“What is it?” Tallas asked wearily.

“It will help you heal.”

Tallas couldn’t detect any injuries; no internal bleeding or signs of trauma. Despite his throbbing headache and the lingering promise of vomit, he didn’t think he’d been hurt from his ordeal. But something in the monk’s steely gaze told him there was no argument, and so he reached over and took the bowl.

A muddy stench stung his nostrils immediately. He reeled back with a grimace. “It smells like a sewage plant.”

“The best medicine stinks,” the monk simply said. It was hard to understand her with the duel voices, but at the same time it made her even clearer because Tallas had two chances to hear.

Tallas tentatively brought the rotting residue to his mouth and paused, deciding if he could trust the woman. If he’d come this far and survived, that meant he had the monk to thank for that.

“You will drink it, or you will die.” The monk’s enthralling eyes drew Tallas in, as if they were looking into his very soul and beyond. “And you must not die just yet. The gods have great plans for you.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

A deep frown scrunched Tallas’s face. Mention of gods always stoked the fire of curiosity within him; a flame that had been growing his entire life.

Tallas tipped the bowl and swallowed the rancid contents. He immediately heaved and sputtered, keeling over with his hands pressed into the earth. The vile taste of mould and faeces caused him to vomit profusely, despite his empty stomah.

Suddenly the monk was on him, shoving him to the ground and straddling him with a hand pressed firmly on his chest.

“Wait!”

As Tallas protested and fought through his severe disorientation, a blinding light filled his vision. His chest burned with incredible heat where the woman was pressing down.

Once again, darkness consumed him.

Within the hazy fog of his troubled mind, images whirled into soft focus, though some were too fleeting to identify. Hannah was there, in a flowing summer dress, highlighted against a bright sun over the roof tops of Amid Essun City, where they’d studied together. Her red hair was long and vibrant, her soft features pale and warm, just as they had been all those years ago. The sight of her stirred a deep longing, mixed with crippling regret, somewhere within Tallas.

Through vivid images, he saw them both making love in his old dorm room, and the one time in the bath tub he’d never forget. Then they were alone in a medical room, where Hannah’s heart-shaped face snapped towards him with intense anger as they argued and shouted; her breaking into tears and him turning his back to her. Tallas willed his former self to turn back to his love, and actually forced himself to turn and extend an arm out to comfort her, but Hannah vanished through his fingers like fog.

No!

Tallas jolted upright and reached out for a Hannah that was not there. His fingers hovered in the damp air of the jungle that once again surrounded him. It took his unsettled mind a moment to re-orient itself.

His heart was pounding from the intense feelings that flooded him. How full of anger and hatred they’d been in those days. He just wished he could take it all back.

The sun was high in the sky now and the jungle was alive with flies and insects scuttling in the undergrowth. No trace remained of the fire from the night before, nor of the monk, but Tallas felt as though he was in the same location.

When he rose onto his feet, he was surprised to find that his dizziness had been replaced with a quiet strength. Actually, as he assessed himself and stepped around, he realized he felt stronger and more alert than ever.

Tallas made his way through the jungle, still surprised at how clear his head felt, and eventually came to the shores of the beach. The glistening waves shining off the ocean was quite a sight in the bright, fiercely strong sunlight, as was the clear green-blue sky. Under any other circumstances he might have considered the location scenic and charming. One of the many questions Tallas had was: which planet was this?

His smart black shoes—which were now dusty and scratched; a far cry from their old polished existence—sunk into the sand as he stepped along the beach, wiping a hand over his hot brow. The shrill caws of birds rang in the breezy air.

The Red Monk stood farther down the beach, once again shrouded in her heavy robes with hood drawn low. Her stillness made Tallas wonder if she’d fallen asleep on her feet. Tallas trundled over to the monk with many burning questions to demand.

In a blink, she shot into the air as if launched from a cannon. Her dark form soared into the air for a moment, before a disc of light appeared at her feet, which she used to jump off and soar even further into the air. Tallas cupped a hand over his eyes to try and follow the speck high above him.

When the monk reached the apex of her jump, the dark shape of one of the large birds intercepted him and the two seemed to become as one. When the monk fell back down, Tallas saw she was holding the large bird in her arms.

His heart raced as he watched the incredible feat before him, hardly believing what he was seeing. A faint white light seemed to waver around the monk’s feet as she fell, and then Tallas realised her free-fall was slowing. She eventually reached the beach at a controlled pace before the light vanished beneath her and she softly landed.

His heart still pounding, Tallas jogged over to the monk, who held a slack bird in her arms. The thing was as big as a large dog, with long feathered wings that reached the sand. It was indeed a creature Tallas had never seen before, with a long, scaled neck and a bulging belly covered in blue and yellow feathers. A long tongue lolled from its dangerous-looking, sharply pointed beak.

“I demand to know what’s going on,” Tallas said with a fire within him as he came to a stop several feet away. “Where are we? Why are we here? What do you want?” He held back asking about the monk herself, not caring about who his captor was.

Several seconds of silence passed between them as Tallas stared into the depth of the monk’s hood. The bird thudded to the ground, throwing up sand, as the woman pulled her hood back and regarded Tallas with a curious severity.

Tallas stared her down. “Wherever we are, I want to leave. Now. Where is the nearest spaceport?”

“You have been through a great ordeal and must get your strength back,” the woman said with her dual-voice.

Tallas raised his arms and dropped them to his sides. “I feel fine. I want to know what’s going on.”

A terrible firmness behind the monk’s serious, tense eyes gave him pause. A few steps brought her closer to Tallas, who almost flinched from the close proximity. Yet he didn’t think she would harm him. If she wanted to kill him, she was going about it the wrong way so far. Being so close to the woman now helped Tallas note the sharp lines of her strong face, the fullness to her lips, and the depth of her keen eyes.

Rough hands grabbed Tallas and suddenly they were both hurtling into the air. Thundering wind rushed against them as the world fell away. Tallas became paralysed with fear in the open air, his stomach lurching as they soared higher and higher. A light below them caught his eye as a white disc appeared beneath the monk’s feet, a second before she pushed off it and rocketed even further into the air. Tallas wanted to scream and tell her to stop but couldn’t find his voice in the thin, rushing air. A wave of nausea washed over him when he saw the horizon and the endless ocean all around them.

He soon realised their ascent had slowed as they finally reached the peak of the monk’s jump. For a moment, everything was serene, out there in the expanse of sky. The woman’s steely-grey eyes locked onto Tallas, so close to his face, though her expression couldn’t be read.

It wasn’t until Tallas’s stomach heaved and his breath left him that he realised the monk had let go and he was falling back to the world. His hands scrambled to reach for the woman in his desperation but gravity forced him downwards with a startling, gut-wrenching velocity.

Flailing and spinning through the rushing air, Tallas caught sight of the entire island below. Not even the birds were this high up. His earlier thought of the monk not wanting to kill him felt almost laughable now. He hurtled back to the island with sheer, crippling dread and every muscle in his body tense, but an acceptance of his fate overcame him now.

He was going to die.

Was the monk still above him in the air? Was she coming down to save him? Tallas lost all sense of space and time as the beach reached up to him, growing larger and larger. He held his breath as he braced for impact, and didn’t think any more breaths mattered.

Tallas flung his arms over his face and squeezed his eyes shut, howling with fear as he hit the beach. He realized he was still crying out when he should’ve hit the sand by now. Blinking back his focus and slowly moving his arms away from his face, he saw he was several feet over the beach, somehow stuck in the air. What he’d mistaken for bright daylight, harsh against his blinking vision, was actually a faint glow of light beneath him. A disc of solid light had somehow caught him. The light buzzed and crackled with energy; energy that seemed to be coming from Tallas himself. He could feel that same buzzing sensation reverberating in his body.

A jolt of shock snapped him to attention and he flailed in the air as the light vanished, leaving him to drop the remaining distance onto the hot sand. He coughed and sputtered as he lifted his sand-covered head, trying to make sense of everything. But nothing made sense anymore.

He turned to see the monk slowly descending, her feet almost lost within a hazy air of light. The same kind of light that Tallas had somehow summoned.

She landed softly and cast her stern gaze over Tallas. “We have a lot to discuss.”