Rising from the Ashes

Landing on Earth

Lumna's POV

When the hyperjump had finished, I must have passed out because, when I woke up, I was laying on the ground next to a pile of crushed metal, surrounded on all sides by blazing heat, but I felt fine as the flames brushed against me thanks to my fire element.

I got up from the ground to see people trying to escape from the flames and I followed them out of the wreckage past a damaged sign whose remaining text said in a foreign language “Narora”.

When I came up to them to ask where I was they yelled some kind of foreign language that I understood as “Monster!” and began to throw things at me, so I ran away from them as far as I could get.

When I got far enough away, I looked at myself in a puddle of muddy water and saw that I was covered in soot, dressed in dirty and slightly ripped clothes, and I looked different from the beings I had encountered and deduced that that was the reason why I had frightened them; I was different than them.

I kept walking away from the wreckage I came out of until I came across a small place that I thought to be a “village”. After disguising myself in some stolen native clothing as well as a mottled dark brown cloak, I pulled up its hood to conceal my face and was walking through the small civilization I had run to and was walking through while attempting to hide my face every time a being had come close to me. I found a small space between two homes that I settled myself in and went to sleep that night. 

From then on, every morning I would find or steal some food to eat and go back to hiding in the home I made for myself.

A few weeks had passed and I was adjusting to this civilization just fine until the day I found out about my affliction. 

When I was walking past what appeared to be a gathering of the beings I had come to know as humans, I saw a group of them gathered around a pile of what I recognized to be wood as they were arguing amongst themselves in their language. I walked around them quietly, scared to be seen, past the woodpile and it instantly burst into flames as I passed it. My scalp was starting to feel like it was being stabbed by tiny points that spread to the rest of me and out in a strange-feeling aura when the people stopped their arguing to yell,

“Denav!” (Demon) and, once again, I was forced to run away to avoid being hit by thrown objects.

I settled to leave this town for another one as everyone in the area eventually found out about my abilities and the people who had been around at the time were said to have gotten sick after I had run away from them due to unknown reasons at the time.

When I later heard about how they died because of “radiation”, I figured that when I had crash-landed onto this planet, I must have been changed somehow and was now more dangerous than I was before.

After everyone in the village found out and forced me to leave, I traveled around from town to town, but everywhere I stopped, even for one night, I was always chased away after people heard about what I was capable of.

After my first experience in one of those turmoils, I soon learned that, when I became scared, more and more people got sick and a few of them perished because of whatever was wrong with me.

Often, I would spend the nights sleeping under the stars away from civilizations, trying to sort through what memories I could recall about my home planet, but I could never remember anything about it, only that it had been attacked by beings I no longer remembered. It seemed that my crash onto this planet had given me a mild case of amnesia, I could still remember myself, my family, and my best friend because of my locket, but I could not remember much of anything else about my home that was no longer existent.

After wandering around various areas, I learned a little about the language that was spoken and spoke it myself at times, but it was never enough to convince them that I was not a threat, unless provoked. I had given up hope of ever finding a place I would never be forced out of, until one fateful day...

777 Words