Erra Deali
Chief Mate
Ship log
Date: Unimportant (xx/xx/25711)
Time: 33 years for me
I realize, writing this now, how naive I was. Sitting in Aft Observation, watching the forests of my homeland shrink beneath me. I thought how much I would miss that place, and I thought how much I knew.
I didn't know anything.
As a child, I was never very curious, or ambitious. This made me a perfect candidate for my elders to mold me into the Chosen One. When our Goddess Mother made our world, another god became jealous and destroyed it. With the last of her strength before returning to the fabric of the universe, Our Mother remade what she could and left with a warning: the jealous deity would return, and the Chosen One would stop him.
I was raised to fight God.
What always gets me is that there had never been a false Chosen One before me. How did the elders know the End would come in my lifetime?
Well, they were wrong about enough, anyways.
Oh! Ashra is here.
I still remember the day I met him like it was yesterday, when I first learned there was more to the stars than the spirits they were named after. Ashra came down from the sky in a giant metal ball. Gave the dragons a good scare. We didn't know what we were chasing or that there was a 'him' inside it. It made a horrible humming noise. It skittered across the sky like a water bug, zipping away and coming to a full stop instantly, something our dragons couldn't do. We couldn't keep up with it, and no wonder. There it goes! Off in the other direction. Quick, turn around!
Of course we thought it was the End.
I wasn't convinced, being a skeptic, but it was otherworldly enough that I had a thought, ha, maybe the elders are right!
I suspect Ashra got tired of playing with us—with no ill intent. He doesn't think that way—but he disappeared into the distance. Not straight up, but to the horizon, which is lucky, or else I might never have met him.
The other elves and dragons regrouped at home, but I kept going. My Chosen upbringing had given me more confidence in myself than I had a right to. I traced Ashra's metal ball with my ears through the Great Wood.
My forest is a grand place. You don't see anything like it anywhere else. Giant trees, trees as big around as shuttles and taller than mountains, branches whole ships could land on, if they made it through the thick canopy. Branches twisting and winding like pathways. If one listened to the subtle vibrations that moved through the trees, one could hear the world, footfalls, a bird landing in a nest, calls, even the crashing of waves in the lakes on the ground would reverberate up. I understood these vibrations, more than any of my people. We called it the language of Trees.
I can't do that here.
Ah, I've lost my place.
. . .
Where was I? That's right, I was tracking Ashra's spacecraft through the Great Wood. Its existence affected everything around it, the way a dragon's wings might blow leaves aside, but more obvious. That horrible humming. It got louder through the branches the closer I got. It led past the Great Wood, where the trees became shorter, their branches thinning until they could no longer provide a sure path and I was forced to descend.
I still remember the unease I felt whenever I had to step foot on the ground. You have to understand. I spent my life hearing the world through the trees. The noise I heard from the ground was nonsense.
