Twelve-hundred years after the human race fled planet Earth, their space station became low on oxygen supply for the two-thousand people aboard its ship. They decided to return to Earth, whether it'd kill them or not; they were all ready on the brink of death. They were positive that there had been absolutely no life on back on Earth, but they were wrong.
While the Vessel's people fled, Earth's did not. Due to remaining on the planet, the humankind evolved into a more intelligent species then ever thought to exist in the universe.
P R E F A C E
She was nine when the Vessel crash landed on her village. She remembered it being taller than the mountains in the Wastelands. It looked nothing like anything in the Hutch, where her brother would catch her trading their mother's belongings for food.
"Osir don dina," he'd say after yanking her out of the Hutch and drag her back home.
"Nou pleni," she would mutter back at him. It was a constant back and forth between the two of them. They were walking towards the village when the Vessel landed on their home.
Enoch kept his sister behind him as he heard the cries from the village. All they could hear were the screams of the injured and dead. "Ste hir," he instructed and looked back at the villagers who were trying to get away. There was so much blood, she remembered. She didn't listen to her older brother. He went to aid the injured; she just wanted to see what had happened.
It was a day later that the new heda had been announced. The people of the Shadow Lands were not too excited to find out that the former heda's spirit had been reincarnated into a man, into Enoch. To the Terra people, a woman leads her people; a woman is the supreme of the species. Their legend says that the last man to rule was the ninety-second President, but they truly weren't even born a man.
Due to the destruction of the village, she hid in a tree to get a better view in the wreckage; that was when the first war between the Terra's and Vessel's started. In her eyes, it was Enoch's fault that the Vessel war broke out; it was his call as heda to attack.
About a week's time of sleeping in a cave, she and Enoch would go to when the maunon would scout the land for sport; she went to the heda's quarters in the Shadow Tunnels. It was an eight hour journey.
Enoch was eighteen years of age when he was announced heda. And Nola was scared for her brother's life.
When she entered his quarters in the Shadow Tunnels, she barely recognized him. He was not a full fledged warrior until that moment. He had the armor, the war dirt cloaked around his eyes, that had the look of vengeance embedded them.
He was not Enoch; he was heda Inok gon trikru, commander Enoch of the tree people.
Before Nola left for her journey back to the cave near the Vessel, Enoch handed her the first weapon, besides a knife, she'd ever truly held. It was his duty as her older brother to protect her with his life; he promised his mother, when Nola was born, that he would do that exact thing or he'd die trying. That was before he was ranked as heda. On her journey back, the sun had set and the moon had crept out from behind the clouds. While walking through the forest, she'd stumbled upon the small, winged creatures that'd fly among the trees. They'd glow with a bright blue hue on their wings; Nola began to chase them.
It was not at all wise for Enoch to allow Nola to journey back to the village unescorted; he regrets that now.
Nola was laughing, chasing the winged-creatures when she heard a branch snap. She stopped moving. She ran and his behind a tree to concentrate on how Enoch taught her to focus her hearing on the slightest sounds; she heard a rhythmic heart beat that was off beat than any other one she'd ever heard; as if the being only had half an organ.
