GRETA

Static tickles my ears.

The whiskers of Enoch's beard scratch against my face as I come to in an uncomfortable bed.

"Wah!"

"Relax, Greta," Enoch says in a firm voice. He sits up beside me, undoing a strange harness keeping me pinned down. "We are with the Eyuul. Two weeks ago, we traveled by way of Zard's craft. We landed here, on this planet, it's name is Eyu. We are of the Eyuul people now," he warns with a cautious gaze. His voice quietens, as if he is afraid to be heard, "So you must behave."

"Zard tried to kill me!" I shout.

His face is impassive as I shove him to give myself room to scoot off of the horrid marble bed.

This room is tiny. A strange contraption borders the entryway blocking my path of escape.

"Greta, calm down."

I don't recognize the tone Enoch uses on me.

The door is cold to the touch. It neither will be pushed open or slid. My heart races as I hear a voice I wished to never hear again on the other side.

Suddenly, a loud series of clicks comes from the closed entryway. Then, the ugly murderer enters with a gross smile looking me over.

Out of habit, my hand goes to my neck, but falls flat.

My Fluff is gone.

"Adler warned me you would do this," my voice shakes. I look at Enoch. He does not appear alarmed by the presence of the man who tried to kill me. "I will never forgive you."

The long-nosed man grabs my arm tightly.

"Adler is dead...and so is your noisy rat. Both you will never see again."

With a grunt, I yank my own arm back.

Catching both of them off-guard, I bolt out of the room.

"Stop her!"

Everything here hurts my eyes. The hallway is covered in glass walls and the ceiling is too. I pass by several other claw-handed people.

Thunderous footsteps follow closely behind. The ground is shiny and slippery.

Eventually, I make it outside finding my surroundings very similar to that of Ashtium except I can see the millions of stars in the sky here.

Am I truly no longer on my home star?

Why can I not remember anything of my journey here?

My sandals hit the ground hard as I scurry into a busy market where even more stranger looking people gather. Some have horned heads...others have tails.

One woman with a strange stud on her chin waves at me as if understanding my panic. I know the guards are near but in this crowd I have lost them.

"Hurry!"

I follow the stranger, ducking under the overhanging cloth above her food stand. We sit on our knees while a large man on a stool behind us continues helping market-goers browse his selection of pickled fish.

Beyond the barrier of the stand, the loud voices of Zard's guards pass by.

"I'm Hida. You aren't from around here, are you?" the woman whispers with an excitement I don't understand. Her hand is ultra soft. I watch it curiously as it moves over the muscles in my arm. "What's your name?"

Her hands return to her lap.

My name? I cannot tell her such a thing now that I am being sought after.

Maybe here I can start over.

"Keon."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty three moons."

I do not understand why she watches the floor and not me.

"I'm twenty!" she rushes out. She grabs my tunic suddenly and looks up at me under her long eyelashes. "This is very luxurious cloth-"

"Do you know somewhere I can stay?" I hurry out.

"Tell me who you are running from first."

With a sigh, I rub my chin.

"I have been brought to this place against my will."

Her face lights up as if the news is wonderful. "You are an intergalactic soldier?"

"Yes...I'm an empirical soldier from a neighboring star."

Hida stands up, tugging me with her.

"Father! May he stay with us? You heard he is a soldier," she announces. Hida whispers in my ear, "My father despises Zard too!"

The large man is not claw-handed either. Like Hida, his tongue is forked and strange spikes protrude from his shoulders.

What species could they be?

Hida wears a wrap around her head. Her tunic is made of patches of different cloth and so is her father's.

He looks me up and down briefly before returning to helping the market-goers browse his food.

"He may."

Giddy, Hida claps her hands.

She moves the hanging beads of the entryway aside. Their home is right behind their market stand. It is small.

A stove has been carved into the corner wall out of square stone. A round table is situated in front of it. A long cushion, perhaps a bed, rests aside the wall. The floor is made of cold glass like the fancy building I woke in.

It is so slippery. I do not understand how Hida walks so quickly over it.

There is no bathing pool here or any decoration such as I grew accustomed to on my home star. The smell of animal waste is strong. A bucket across from us on the floor is covered in larvitch making my skin crawl.

Hida presses my back, nudging me forward into the only other room in here. A small room big enough for only one cushion to lay across. To think my distorted god had hundreds strewn across his private chamber.

Here only one can fit inside this space!

On top of it, a pile of rags are shoved against the wall. A strange object radiates a flickering light but it is not fire. Hida closes the curtain quickly.

She pushes me once more.

I stumble over the cushion. She follows me down onto the surface and watches me silently with a gleeful look.

"What?" I ask.

"You are beautiful. Do you have a wife?"

Do I truly look so much like a man?

I suppose she is much thinner like Cephine. Her hair long while mine is newly bald. I do not have it in myself to morn my hair loss. I have bigger problems to address.

"No," I grunt thinking her reaction to meeting me childish. "I do not wish to settle yet-"

"What are these?"

I tug my tunic back in place annoyed by her growing curiosity. However, she grabs my tunic again with a determined look and exposes the scars of my needlework and healed lacerations.

"Nothing."

Her eyes are so innocent.

Strange stones are embedded in her pointy ears. One is even pierced through her upper-lip.

"You have many treatch. Are you married?" I speculate.

"No! Now, tell me more about where you're from. My father will want to know as well if we are to house you."

A painful feeling shoots through my head. I squeeze my eyes shut. When the pain subsides, I open them and find not the silver body of Hida. Tones, so many shades of color, flood the room around me.

Tears well up in my eyes.

"My god must be here! I can see!" I shout with realization.

I can feel it in my heart.

This city may just be Elysium.

"Our planet is very healthy. Of course you can see here! What was your home star like? I don't mean to be rude...I have never seen such unhealthy skin. Not to mention your eyes...they are grey as well with a strange sickly yellow tint in this lighting," Hida says an inch away from my face.

She is too close. I nudge her back by the shoulders.

"You must promise not to tell anyone about me," I begin. I watch her closely to make sure she is listening. "Promise?"

The curtain behind us opens revealing her father. A ladle of something steamy drips in his hand.

"Hida, please bring your friend out here. The stew is ready and there is much needed to be discussed."

***

BROMMY

By the gods, Zard managed to handicap Adler. Enoch shot a dosage of his ray gun, a power unknown to our people, right at the clout.

The energy blasted Adler from it and electrocuted him, but what laid within, as he intended, remained unharmed.

Unharmed...but kidnapped.

Zard won't be able to tolerate Greta for long. She will be enslaved, or worse, sold off into a whore craft. Such galactic ships are notorious for selling whores to those of royal standing.

Oh, how the heat is intolerable.

One step outside and one would be dead as we have witnessed from the windows in our tower.

In the darkness, Adler sits alone in one of the last pools. The water is no longer deep but shallow like a puddle.

His eyes are black having been cut by Zard. The lids are wrinkled awfully inward leaving his eyeballs shrivelled up behind the puffs of blackened skin.

Covered in boils is his tongue for Zard and Enoch cut off chunks of it before departing from our dying star with Greta. The bastards assumed once his tongue swelled, as it did, that he would suffocate and die.

"Adler, you mustn't be alone during this trial. We need to leave."

"There is no escaping," his voice comes out in a hiss. He picks his teeth clean with the bone of a fish. "Misery and torment are eternal."

"You are speaking nonsense. Greta has been stolen! Are you truly going to let this go and rot here while Enoch lives it up? You have forgiven him one too many times! Or is it because you think you deserve this?"

"Leave me."

There is something off-putting about watching him now. Even without working eyes it feels like he still is watching me behind that shadowed stare.

Surely, his sight has fallen into complete darkness now.

His tunic is covered in soot from the ash falling down here through the cracks in the ceiling of the cave above. Wrinkled and stained.

I myself am covered head to toe in sores and blisters from the sweltering heat.

"Greta trusted you," I try. "Imagine how afraid she is being apart from you on some faraway star."

His lips downturn. "My sweet knows little of my wrongs. I belong here. This is justice," he says while standing up.

"Well...what about Cephine and your child? Will you abandon them too?"

"Damn that whore," his voice shakes as he steps out of the water. Recollection reduces him to a whimpering incubator as he covers his mouth dramatically. Red blood leaves the corners of his eyes. "My little pearl nearly died!"

He picks up a small tunic using it to wipe his tears. I watch with growing unease as his stare appears to be on my necklace. Shit, I had meant to hide that behind my tunic but the shells were beginning to irritate my sores.

Rigid, he points at it with darkening skin.

"Where did you receive that?"

"I made it," I answer simply hoping it will be enough to end the discussion.

Clearly, it won't be seeing the amount of steaming cloud unfurling from beneath his feet.

"No," he argues curtly. He folds his arms. "My sweet made me something similar! I do not recall you taking up the hobby of weaving. Do not lie to me Brommy. When did she give you the item?"

"In the nook-"

"When?"

"A few days before we left to return here she accompanied me in the fountain."

I honestly thought he had figured this out the day we left the nook. He seemed in a foul mood. I assumed it was why he decided to dwarf himself.

His bloody eyes bore into my own.

"Don't think I don't know what your true intentions are. Your soul was bred from my own in chronos. We are not so different at all, dear brother. It is only natural you desire her-"

"No!" I rebuke. "I do not desire her-"

My lungs are on fire as he grabs my neck violently shaking me anyway.

"Do not lie to me!" he gnashes through his teeth. "I witnessed your little shared bath with her," he whispers with menace.

"She thinks she's dead, Adler. Let her be the man she wishes to be. Believe me when I say nothing happened. She desires...women!" I choke out. "Can we blame her?" I finish in a wheeze.

Roughly, I'm released and fall painfully onto my knees. Greedily, I gulp in air.

Adler speaks above me, "An incubator is not logical. Her emotions have warped her mind-"

"And what about your mind, Adler? Did you mind anything while you whored it up on yule? Imagine Greta's pain. She knows this side of you now. Admit it, she knows too much. You have made her become a man! What rights do incubators get anyway? I'd want to die too after being used by you!"

"As though you spent the night differently." His voice catches, and I know I've got him, "And I've n-never used her. I would never be able to make love with my little pearl! I do not wish to ruin her youth...or her trust in me. I suppose I have tried though, I will not lie."

"It does not matter if you have or haven't. The matter is you wished for it and she refused you. This is a first for you, and in order to feel validated about your perceptions of women, you become unwilling to believe she is a man. If our souls are born in chronos then you should accept her identity as the truth. Let her become a man, Adler. This will allow you to focus on yourself more. We do not have time to become...distracted by what cannot be changed if we are to go to Eyu."

A hair-raising humidity drifts between us making me certain I have said too much.

"I will become distracted by what I want," he cuts back. With a shaky hand, he grabs the collar of my tunic dragging me to my feet. "And you will not question me again!"

Sparks shoot out beneath his feet with life. I freeze watching his clout's thunderous collapse. Its volume scatters, blanketing the entire floor of the chamber as angry streaks of blinding light race through the clusters in terrifying streaks.

What energy!

If only he had the mental capacity to use this strength when Zard and Enoch arrived.

I catch my breath watching him move in a hurry around the chamber space. Instruments and spare tunics he stuffs in a weaved bag over his shoulder.

"We are leaving now!" he screams. I tread carefully over the dangerous fluffs of white lightening zig-zagging around my feet. Adler suddenly looks down, clasping his hands together as one crooked rod of light travels to him through the giant mass of condensed stardust. It rises up and out of the collapsed clout carrying a familiar writhing rat. "Of course, we won't forget about you," he finishes in a sinister voice.

The limpnut shrieks awfully as he grabs it by the tail and stuffs it in his bag.

☁️