The Beauty of the Night

Beautiful Landing

The next time Morgan opened her eyes, she was no longer encased with that healing fluid, though its effects seemed to still linger. She was now lying - rather, hovering - a few inches off of a white exam table. It was clear now that she was in some sort of laboratory, and that the full range of her emotions were being filtered through some strong cocktail of drugs. She felt that she could think -- truly think, in that heightened, sharpened way that her other senses now explained the world. But her emotions were just beyond her reach.

Her fear was just beyond her reach.

A person entered the room through two doors that hissed silently open. With a couple of light touches, a panel near the door was revealed and long, delicate fingers tapped a few buttons which brought the temperature of the room up, and raised the lights.

"Morgana, you are awake. How do you feel?"

Morgan tried to sit up to address the person but found that she couldn't. Some invisible bond kept her firmly in place.

"Trapped, if I'm being honest," she said, happy to hear that she now had control of her voice, though it sounded louder than she remembered it. Stronger, too. "My name is Morgan."

The person approached her and regarded her from behind thick laboratory goggles. They were humanoid, but not quite human, the details that she would've missed before were now obvious. It was in the pupils; the way they dilated and contracted near constantly and almost mechanically. As though they had been programmed to behave that way.

"Where am I?" she asked. "Who are you? Why can't I move? How did I get here? The last thing I remember--"

"You are on the War Planet Zix," the person replied. "I am X'sei, a researcher for my people. We are in the capitol, and as you will see, we share much in common with the people of Earth. We-I brought you here. Because your genome called out to us, from the other side of the universe. You were moments from perishing in your timeline, but in others, we have found you."

"My timeline?" I asked, confused, trying to sit up again. This time, the person - X'sei - waved a hand, and Morgan felt the soft press of the exam table beneath her skin. She sat up, and her head swam momentarily.

"Move slowly for now," X'sei said, putting a calming hand on Morgan's shoulder. It's hand was smooth, softer than anything Morgan had felt before. And warm, almost burning. "The gravity on Zix pulls you more strongly than that on Earth. But our atmosphere is more enriched with the oxygen you breathe."

"You don't breathe oxygen?" Morgan asked, a dizzying blend of questions rushing through her, each vying to escape her lips. But of course, that's the one that emerged. The person laughed.

"No. The Xoix do not breathe oxygen."

"The Xoix," Morgan repeated, fumbling over the strange consonants. "Is that your species? How did you learn English?"

"We did not," X'sei answered, the mask they wore shifting as though they grinned beneath it. "You speak Ya'tu, the language of Zix."

"What?" Morgan exploded, trying to reconcile this information with what her brain had known for its entire life. "How? How can that be possible, I-"

"Calm, Morgana," X'sei said, reaching for a syringe that appeared menacingly in Morgan's view. Before she could say anything, or even pull away, X'sei plunged it into her shoulder, the sharp prick temporarily enraging Morgan before her emotions faded away again, further from the surface than before. Entirely out of reach. She wanted to be pissed, to be angry at the removal of her agency. But she couldn't.

"It is your technology, actually," X'sei said gently. "You developed it in your third timeline, the one where you had not been in the crash. We have been able to refine it according to the knowledge of our people. We are grateful to you."

"Third timeline?"

X'sei nodded. "This is one of the special gifts of the planet Zix. All of her native inhabitants possess the ability to bend time, to see through it and manipulate it as one might manipulate water. We all posess it in varying degrees of strength."

Morgan laid back down on the exam table. She couldn't feel overwhelmed, her feelings had been muted. But she felt off-kilter, dizzied and disoriented by the sudden information overload her brain was being tasked with processing.

"There is much to understand about Zix and the Xoix," X'sei said reassuringly. "You will have the rest of your life to know it. Rest now. Tomorrow, I will bring you to the blood dens."

"What are the blood dens?" Morgan asked weakly, a headache beginning to trickle in from the sides of her skull. "Why do I have to go there?"

"Our planet is a War Planet. We birth soldiers. To survive here, you must emerge from the blood den, a warrior."

"I don't know how to fight," Morgan whispered, darkness tugging at the edge of her vision. The sweet, heavy rock of sleep made her limbs leaden. "I'm a scientist."

"You have been many things, and you will yet be many more. Tomorrow, you will go to the blood dens. And when you are ready, you will be a warrior."

Sleep claimed Morgan before she could answer, heavy, strong, and deep.

When she opened her eyes again, she was dressed in a material she had never felt before. It was a soft fabric, though clearly meant to be tough and durable. It clung to the curves of her body, highlighting the swell of her breast and the tuck of her waist. It clad her legs down to her ankles, dipping beneath the tightly laced boots that reached up to her mid shin. Over the garment, she had a fur wrapped around her, keeping her warm.

She peered around her, and realized that she was in a container of some sort. There were two other figures slumped over in the far corner, which she thought might be humans. Or Xoix. Or something else.

"Hey," a quiet voice called. Feminine. Achingly familiar. "Are you awake?"

Morgan turned and looked into a set of the deepest blue eyes she had ever seen. The girl smiled at her. "Thank the suns someone else is awake," she said. "What's your name?"