The wood was lit up, the campfire was completed, the tend moved slightly with the wind, an old man stood watching the flames. The old man had green replitilian eyes and a hand who had seen two much and now it was chaorccoal black with only a few fingers left. Even his face, once so beautiful and proud, was decaying and rooting, showing more and more of that black skin underneath. He moved his lips to speak but didn’t know what do say or where to begin. After a few minutes, he watched up, at the empty starry sky above.

“You see those stars?”

“Yes,” said a young man with brown eyes and hair next to him “I see them.”

“We came from the stars, from the great mother’s queens who colonized planets after the planet.” he paused “you should have been there, in those primal days, when we were one and the same. The great mother’s queens gave birth to thousands of us at a time.”

“Wasn’t that...you know, primitive? Unnatural”

The old man laughed “Primitive? Unnatural? That was the only we knew how to live, for all it was fully civilized and natural. Besides we didn’t have an I. We acted like a swarm, as one.”

“Ah.”

“So I was saying...yes hunting. With time we earned to imitate and replicate our prays, became one with them. Sculpting our flesh so to be identical. And once we were enough close, we killed them.”

“When the first ships arrived we infiltrated them. At first, our attempts were...naive and stupid. But we got better with time, we learned to replicate them perfectly. Their social structure, their way of talking, their habits and routine everything. Many of us, even latter, had some “alien” behaviour: eat a lot, bad with money and socially shy or inadept.”

“There are still many aliens then.”

The two men laughed.

“Why did you do those things?” said the young man.

“Instinct. Mostly instinct. We were very instinctual back then. It decided for us, and it was often for the better. However, we had to change our tactics with this new pray, rallied less on instinct.”

“We easily spread unnoticed through various worlds, like a great plague. In less than a century and a half, we colonized and conquered eighteen planets.”

“Eighteen planets? Why not more?”

“Those were the conquered planets. We were also on other worlds, but those were minorities.”

“Talking about this; there was a split from the one. We were no more a swarm, one. We were one and a few, isolated, ones. Some us had to learn how to survived and build a life alone. Without their kin. I was one of them.”

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“It must have been brutal for you.”

“Very much so. I was a group leader, someone strong, someone capable of hunting the greatest of prays. And there I was, trying to figure out how and why many of those soft leaves like things could give me food for a month. The first years, no decade, was very brutal. But I learned and adapted as always. In two-decades, I was an admiral. A spy for my kin. Yet even back then I started to feel separate from my more primitive and hunter brother. ”

“You started to become an individual.”

“If you want to put it that way.” he paused “one day coming to work there was a great fuss and noise, I asked what was it, they answered me that we were in war. War against aliens. War against my kin.”

“I won’t bother you on the various stages and development of the war. I am sure that you already knew much about them, maybe even more than me, from history books and documents.”

“They don’t always tell the truth though”

“That is true.” he paused “one day I heard from one of my friends, another spy, that a strange and charismatic hunter had talked to all the great mothers. They said that he could change appearances in an instant, speak all the languages, burn things with the mere sight.”

“Those things aren’t important, I don’t know who he was, what he did or what he didn’t. What I know is that one day I was sleeping on a ship orbiting near one of the infested planets. There was a great shock wave, my bed was thrown in mid-air. When I exited the room and went to see what it was I saw…”

“You saw the planet destroyed.”

“Yes.” he said with a tear coming down from his eyes “but not only that, but I also saw a circle surrounding the planet and a strange thing near it.”

“The circle of judgment and the judge…”

He nodded “Obliviously the government at the time told of bombs and devastating secret weapons. The truth came forth only much later. In the weeks that followed I heard again and again of aliens dying in the most strange and “accidental” of circumstances. At the end I lost all contact with the others, I believe that there was a kind of judgment. Those who had become survived, those who didn’t perish.”

“A judgment?”

“Yes. A judgment, I know that it sounds absurd but-but I believe that someone or something decided who could live and who would die.”

“Who lived?”

“Few.”

“What happened afterwards?”

The old man adjusted his posture and pause for a long time “I received a medal for my valour and command and was offered a new job as the captain of a colonial expedition. I accepted in hope to find some of my brothers. I didn’t found them, but I found your mother.”

“I heard that he found you taking care of your skin, of your dark skin.”

“Oh yes.” he smiled “a novice mistake. I thought of cutting her throat but she showed collaborative and comprehensive. With time we became more intimate and you know….had you.”

The son smiled

“At this point, I have grown old and tired. I could change my flesh, regenerate, find a way to live more. But I don’t want to. Don’t misinterpret me, I have still a century or two, is just that I lived long enough, did all the things that I wanted to. And now after all of this just want to...rest.”

His son looked at him with a bit of sadness and then looked at the sky “do you think that somewhere there are still some of us remaining?”

“Maybe...maybe.”

The end