Kindred of Old - An Origins Story
My name is Thumee, though names are as fleeting as footprints in the sand of the omnipresent desert: soon I, too, will be nothing but a tale. Death skirts so close, I can feel its breath.
Two three-moon nights past, I crossed into adulthood, and with three others my community cast us into the desert as it is the tradition. At dawn, our shadows lengthened like silk ribbons across the dunes in the rising sun, and the villagers—faces alight with pride and expectation—cheered us on. We set off, hearts tethered to the Seeress’s whisper, “MoTher provides.” For thirty-six days and nights I wandered beneath diamond-pinned heavens and a merciless sun, until chance led me to a new buzzing community. There I laid down my loneliness and started to feel at home.
I dared to be happy again and neglected my desert Sense. Time and again, the Seeress had warned us: among the rocks lie GoRaks—ghostly hunters whose sting spells death. At the jagged rim near the village, I laughed with the younglings, our footsteps echoing on fractured stone. A shriek cleaved the air. I turned and saw them: eggs the colour of bleached bone, nestled in the silver sand. My blood froze. At the corner of my eyes - a flicker. The GoRak itself, no larger than my fist, crouched on spindly hind legs, its forelimbs raised in silent accusation.
My mind snaps back to the here and now. In that breath-held moment, the world narrows to the two of us. Would it break contact first? Legends say nobody escapes once a GoRak’s gaze is fixed. I try to run—but before my foot can lift, a dart finds my calf: a flicker of pain, then creeping ice. Numbness steals my strength. My vision blurs. I collapse into the sand. Each breath becomes labour; foam salts my lips. My hands, distant as dreams, cannot brush it away.
Self-pity drapes over me like a mourning shroud. I’d dreamt of sitting before the First Seeress, of unravelling why sometimes the hours slip through me like sand. Back home, the Elders shrugged when I told them I was losing time, as if my slipping moments were a quaint eccentricity. But every so often, my mind dips into the Dive— a trance I alone have named. When I sink deep enough, days can vanish in the blink of an eye.
Is it the GoRak's poison, or are my own memories thawing something in my hearts? The Dive has always been a refuge of quiet. Now, I feel it calling me: abandon this battered body, follow the song of oblivion. I feel the will to resist ebbing. Under our great blue sun, the dunes gleam silver, then vanish altogether. I am weightless, tingling with relief. Pain slides away. Here, breath is effortless, as if the world is holding me, buoying me toward the stars.
A faint tug steals through that boundless calm—an echo of anger, a pulse of regret. Regret that I’m dying long before my time. Anger that I crossed the desert like my ancestors before me, only to find death waiting. These stirrings become an anchor. For the first time, I look down in the Dive. A pure light greets me, so bright I squint—no small thing for someone born on sun scorched sands. It dawns on me: the Light is me, or I am it: a living heart of gold that throbs in this silent expanse. Alongside regret and anger, a new longing blooms: to live, to roam, to bathe in this Light’s beauty.
Horror wells up and tries to have a say in the realm of eternal calm, when I realise that the Light is tainted: black streaks grow like cobwebs all over it. The Light shudders under their weight, suffocating in a riot of shadow. Everything feels wrong. Calm offers no remedy. So, I summon a force I never knew I possessed. With the mind’s pliant limb, I reach into the Light and coax it—press it—into the thinnest veins of darkness. Each touch unthreads a strand of shadow; each push restores a shard of brilliance. Touching the Light exhausts me, but the pulse of hope surges stronger than fatigue. I will not let the darkness triumph. Not here. Not ever.
* * *
Heat. Stickiness. Pain blooms across my skin like a map of bruises. My fingers twitch—first one, then another—tiny rebellions against the stillness. One eyelid cracks open to whiteness. Numbness retreats like a tide.
I lie on rough-hewn wood, swaying. Back and forth. Back and forth. Each breath sends splinters through my chest, but nothing like the venom's fire. A realisation: I am not dead.
The whiteness is fabric—a shroud. They believe I've crossed over. They bear me homeward, this cargo of supposed death. I wait until feeling returns to my limbs, then push up onto my elbows.
Screams erupt like startled birds. The world tilts. I tumble, cocooned in white, over stones that bite through the cloth. The lingering numbness is mercy. I fight free of the shroud and stand on trembling legs.
Four priests in indigo robes and the traditional blue scarf regard me with cold eyes. The Priestess towers among them. Villagers retreat, some dropping to their knees, foreheads pressed to the earth. Not celebration—fear.
"Can you walk?" The Priestess's voice cuts through the silence. I had expected joy, relief. Not this. I nod, and we move forward.
* * *
They brought me to the heart of the temple, its walls heavy with incense and whispered prayers. SiRae, a young priestess whose hair gleamed like midnight silk, kneels beside me and, with coarse sand, coaxes the grime of battle and despair from my skin. Naked and vulnerable, I crawl into a shallow pit of fine, warm sand. Once I am buried nearly to my shoulders, she places hot stones at my sides; their heat seeps into my bones, a quiet kindness I scarcely dare to believe.
Since the day I arrived, we have been forging a fragile bond. Yet tonight her golden eyes, once rimmed in gentle copper, are streaked with sorrow. I try to catch her gaze, to ask what pains her, but the words die on my tongue. Instead, I murmur, “I am glad to be alive.”
A distant sound of boots on flagstones drifts from the corridor. SiRae presses a finger to her lips. “Pretend to sleep,” she whispers. My hearts still: the low echo of two voices, the scrape of each footfall. A shadow comes to rest at the edge of my sand pit.
“Is she…?”
The voice belongs to the Senior Priestess. SiRae’s answer is soft: “She is exhausted. I gave her Ranae roots—one draught sent her into a sleep that will hold for ten hours, at least. Time for her to heal.”
“Thank you, SiRae. You may leave now.” The priestess dismisses her.
SiRae slips away on silent feet, and the chamber grows tense with the laboured breath of the priestess and the crunch of sand beneath heavier boots. Another presence prowls the edge of my refuge, who is addressed as Chief by the Priestess. The man looms closer; I tense beneath the stones’ warmth. In a low voice under his breath, he asks: “What do you intend to do? The villagers are… unsettled.” His tone sharpens. “No one survives a GoRak’s sting. This is… unnatural.”
A tremor of panic ripples through me: they all fear me. Even the priestess. In a hush, she answers, “I have sent for the First Seeress. In four 2-moon nights she will arrive to counsel us.”
The Chief’s voice rings with contempt. “We do not have that time. This is too grave a matter to leave it to the priests.”
The Priestess bristles: “What are you suggesting, Chief?”
A long silence, then his uneasy confession: “A faction grows in the village. Some say she is a demon commanding GoRaks. Others worship her as a goddess.”
She snorts. “She’s just a girl—barely a priestess.”
“Are you certain? They bowed when she awoke. What authority remains to you?”
His pacing resumes, sand crunching beneath heavy boots. I lie motionless, hearts hammering. He leans so close I can feel his breath on my face. “The Elders say we should send her away.” Silence falls like a shutter slamming. “We send her away—with water and food—and let her go,” he concludes, as if tallying the obvious.
Anger flares in the priestess’s voice. “Are you calling for her death? The next settlement is twenty-four days distant. In her condition, she would not survive five.”
He shrugs. “Perhaps we underestimate her?”
“Begone,” she spats. His footsteps retreat; the chamber sighs. For a long while, I lie between hot stones and cool silence, daring not to open my eyes until even her footsteps dissolve into the hush.
* * *
It is before sunrise, and the desert breeze drifts through the open arks of the chamber like a silent promise. I lie half-buried in the sand, reluctant to rise, turning over the last day in my mind. The pain is gone— and it ought not to be. I fell from a makeshift stretcher onto jagged stone; bruises should bloom across my skin for many turns of the moons. More a mystery still, I survived the sting of a GoRak. The Chief said no one ever did. I remember slipping into the Dive. I felt unaccountably tethered to the Light. It was under attack by the rapidly spreading darkness, each smothering smear of darkness gouging at me until I forced the Light back into them, at terrible cost to my body. My memory frays after that—only the sense that I kept pressing, pushing, until the darkness parted and the Light shone again, until somehow it healed the poison in my veins. Does this explain my unbruised body?
A soft scuff of footsteps rouses me. I wriggle free of the sand pit.
“You’re awake. That’s good,” SiRae says, her voice taut. She stands pale and worried by lantern glow. “Quickly put these on. There’s no time. Meet me at the South Gate when you’re ready.”
Questions throng my mind, but I tuck them away. Better to trust now, inquire later. I don the desert garb - a loose hooded tunic and trousers of sandy cloth - and slip from the chamber. Dawn hovers on the horizon; soon the village will stir. I skirt the low huts until I reach the South Gate, where the wind sighs through wooden slats like a warning. From the gate’s shadows SiRae emerges.
“What’s happening, SiRae?” I whisper.
Her shoulders slump. “You have to leave.” She inclines her head toward the desert beyond the gate.
“Out there?” I call out in disbelieve.
Her voice cracks. “The Elder Council met through the night. They overruled the Priestess. They believe you’re a demon. Even the Chief could not sway them. He wanted to send you away, but the council finally voted to execute you at sunrise.”
Shock and sorrow twist in my chest, tempered by gratitude for her devotion. One road ends beneath their blades; the other in endless sand. I choose to live even it’s just for a short while.
SiRae’s hands tremble as she presses a water pouch into mine. Four mouthfuls - I will have to ration them. I pull her into a fierce embrace. She unwraps a length of blue cloth - the priest’s stole, a talisman for desert pilgrims - and hands it to me. “Take this.”
I wrap the cloth around my neck and pull it over my hair. “Thank you, SiRae. May we meet again.” We both know it’s hope, not promise.
“May the Desert Goddess guide you, Thumee. Hurry.”
I step into the dawn light and turn back once. In the three moons past, the Goddess has done me no small mercy—yet I will need more than mercy: dealing with the desert is one thing, what the villagers will do another.
* * *
The sun has risen a delicate handspan above the horizon, and the long shadows that once danced upon the dunes have surrendered to the furnace of the morning. The desert’s breath is already scorching my skin. I have slipped away from the village two miles back, crawling on belly and elbows to erase my footprints, and then risen to stagger blindly across the sand, directionless— any horizon would do.
My hearts’ beat thunders when a lone bell tolls across the haze. The village has awakened and discovered my absence. I scramble up a nearby dune, sand grains slipping beneath my fingers, until I can make out the settlement: tiny, thrashing figures by the South Gate. Too swift for feet— they ride PonYons. Panic lights my lungs, hot and suffocating, but I force two short breaths out to quell it. Anger remains: Is it not enough that I vanish into the desert’s embrace?
I gaze across the unbroken waves of sand. Soft dunes stretch forever, a sea without landmarks, brilliant and empty. If anywhere can hide me, this place can. A nascent plan flickers in my mind.
But time moves against me, the swift riders would soon crest these ridges and scan the desert for miles. I drop to my knees and begin to dig, thrusting my hands into the yielding grains of soft sand. I need coolness beneath the sunbaked crust, but not so deep that I would suffocate. With each handful, I measure hope by inches. From my pack, I draw SiRae’s gift—the blue scarf of a Priestess—and loop it around my head and mouth. When the pit is wide enough, I sweep back until the warm blanket of sand claims me completely. My breath hitches but remains steady—a faint rhythm in the hush of buried sand.
The villagers would expect this. They know that I cannot survive more than half a day immersed in the sand and will watch for me resurfacing. What they don't know….
I close my eyes and listen: my hearts’ relentless pounding, the rush of blood in my ears. Then, I slip into the Dive. Losing time has always been a nuisance, and at last, becomes my ally.
* * *
Darkness envelops me as I emerge from the Dive. Not the artificial darkness of my sandy cover - true night has fallen. I've never gone this deep into the Dive before. Time stretches differently there; what felt like hours on my personal clock might have been much longer out here in the real world. The sand falls away as I pull myself free, grain by grain, into the cool air of the night. Silence. Two moons hang suspended in the vault of the sky, washing the dunes in ghostly blue. My pursuers must believe the desert has claimed me by now.
But something catches my eyes. The light—it's wrong. Too bright. The stars above are pinpricks of white fire against infinite black. I lift my gaze higher, past familiar constellations, and there it is: a third moon, full and impossible, suspended alongside its two sisters. My hearts stutter. The triple alignment comes only once every 82 days. I've lost nearly three months in what felt like two hours. I claw at the sand where my water pouch should be, fingers finding only a brittle, sun-bleached husk of leather. The desert has drunk my water, just as the Dive has drunk my time.
* * *
A single day without water reshapes a body. At dawn, I surrender any hope of reaching plenty and set my mind on finding even a single drop. But when I cast out my Sense, the desert returns only emptiness—no hidden spring, not a single KuuLar root to squeeze life into my dry palms.
I curse myself. I have lasted thirty days in harsher sands, every warning from the First Seeress still echoing in my mind—and yet I threw those lessons to the wind. Can I blame the hunt that ceased days ago? It is a feeble excuse: no tracker has crossed my path these last suns.
Fatigue seeps into every thought. My vision blurs. Then, with a stumble atop a dune, I slip and tumble—landing with a muffled grunt between rock and sand… and fall into the Dive. I did not see it coming: do I always find myself in the Dive when I am almost dying?
This time, I do not drift toward the stars but toward a single Light, hovering over an expanse too vast for words, beneath a silvered sky. I know this Light is me, or whatever I am in the Dive.
Pity wells up: that fierce blue diamond I once was on better days now flickers grey and wan. Deprived of water and food, I will go out like a candle in winter’s draft. With feelings just a distant echo and with the eternal calmness being the inherent nature of the Dive, I can hear its deceptive whispers: Why struggle? Let go.
With an effort that nearly fractures what little strength I have left, I reach out and enfold the Light. Its surface yields like soft velvet, and each embrace sends a pulse of brilliance into the Light - then another wave of exhaustion through my mind. I do not know whether I give my own life-force or draw from some deeper well beyond my knowing. Still, I press on, until the dim glow warms to a steady ember.
I drop out of the Dive and close my eyes for a moment. When I open them, I lie on a great stone slab—the very rock that broke my fall. Above me, the sky burns red as late afternoon enfolds. I draw in a slow breath; my ribs do not flare with pain. I scan my body—no ache, only the familiar fatigue. I rise, steady on my feet. I feel replenished.
A swell of joy leaves me breathless. I bury my face in the warm sand and scream my thanks to MoTher. I have neither food nor water, yet the Dive loosens hunger's grip and makes thirst fade. I do not know from where the sustenance comes, nor the how or why—only that I will take this gift.
* * *
The Dive is what I am. My days dissolve in that trembling space between waking and dreaming, where the world’s sharp edges soften into silvery horizons. From this place I draw a curious vitality: I walk as though propelled by wind, and exhaustion drips from me like water off a stone. I roam by the sun’s track, harvesting hours without fatigue.
The shock of my last community’s betrayal still pulses through me, slow drumbeats beneath my ribs, urging me onward in search of one safe night’s rest. At night, I slip again and again into the Dive, where the sky’s tapestry unfurls at my fingertips, and time slips through my grasp. Hours vanish; I awake at random suns, hearts hammering, fearful that some prowling creature—or worse, a living soul—will find my body prostrate in the desert’s trance.
On what I reckon to be the eighteenth day—though the world around me may have spun many more turns— I stumble on water pooled in a rocky hollow. My throat sings at the first cold taste, and I press my lips to the earth’s gift. KuuLar roots, bitter and fibrous, fill my belly with a dull warmth, reminding me that, despite the mysterious Dive, my body still remembers hunger. I can borrow sustenance from the Dive, yes, but this: this simple feast is rapture.
Sixty-two suns later, I crest the rim of a stony ridge and spy mountains rising like silent guardians against the haze. Once I would have skirted these heights, terrified of GoRaks, those leaping nightmares with poisonous darts. But now I fear only people: those who might drag me back to a world that now calls me a demon. I tell myself I can survive a GoRak’s sting with the Dive, but it is hubris, perhaps. Still, the mountains promise water etched into the rock, hidden—they say—in cavern veins. I cannot live from the Dive forever, or can I?
As I climb, my thoughts coil around those words I cannot unhear: “Nobody survives the sting of a GoRak.” And if one does—if it is I—why am I dubbed demon rather than miracle? I am sure, rumours of a desert demon with ghostly vanishings already claw through the settlements. No hearth will shelter me now, no sheepfold open its gate. The stones beneath my boots crackle in cadence, guiding me deeper into exile until the desert’s gossip scatters like windblown ash.
Anger kindles, hot as midday sun. Have I repudiated all humanity? I taste in my mouth the memory of SiRae’s laughter—soft as moonlight on still water—and realise I have not severed every bond. I only need a refuge, a hollow beneath these ancient peaks, where I might wait—years, perhaps—until the world’s eyes shift and the name “demon” fades into nothing but dust.
* * *
Day 143 though this is merely my count of being awake. I long lost the feeling for how much time has past around me.
I live in shadow. My hut—three walls of stacked stone, one of woven branches—sits wedged between two sheer faces of granite. Only for twenty minutes each afternoon does sunlight reach the floor of this crevice, turning the stones briefly molten. I've become skilled at finding places to sleep. Never the same hollow twice. Sometimes I return to find my few possessions rearranged—a cup moved, my blanket folded differently. Not humans. Animals, I tell myself.
But this morning. Something different vibrates in the air. From my observation point on the ridge, I see nothing amiss, yet feel everything changed. A presence waits inside my shelter. Not danger—something else. Something that makes my pulse quicken with possibility rather than fear.
I approach in measured steps, ears straining against the silence. At the threshold, I inhale deeply and step through.
"Hello, Thumee." A voice like water over stones. "Don't be afraid. I am IlaRia, traveller from the star system Cradle of Light, 2,770 lightyears distant. We met in – shall we call it - your dreams. I am your family."
* * *
I press my back against the rough bark of the tree that marks my entrance, feeling its sap-sweet warmth through my thin tunic. She stands before me, speaking words I do not understand—yet they tumble from her lips in my own tongue. She cannot be of my people: outrageously tall, impossibly thin, her eyes mismatched as if painted by two different artists. Where should I begin? Everything about her is wrong and yet— I do not run. She radiates such calm, such secret heat, that I am held fast. And when she speaks of family, my hearts strain to catch the meaning.
“How do you know my language?” I gasp.
She tilts her head, as if considering the question like a curious child. “I wear a neuro-link implant. It translates my thoughts into your speech and grants me words.”
Well, I believe it means she does speak my language. She hardly moves, save for the graceful poise of her hands. When she does shift, it is like watching smoke curl in slow motion. Yet she keeps just enough distance that I remember I can retreat.
“How did you find me?” I demand.
“You called out.” Her voice is soft, certain. But I have called no one.
With a flourish of her slender hand, she brushes dust from the raw-hewn table before me. The gesture is so theatrical I can't fail to notice, and it puzzles me since I wiped the table clean just yesterday.
“Do you know what your people call these mountains?” Her head tilts. I shake mine, uncertain whether she can read my gestures.
“Ghost Mountains. Folks avoid this place.” She nods at my silence, as though we share a secret. “Every now and then, someone swears they glimpse the phantom of a young woman: she wears the tattered robes of the desert and a blue scarf like a priestess of an age long gone. Hunters chase her through the crags, but at dusk she vanishes—only to reappear not before two decades later. Do you understand, Thumee?”
Her question resonates in my chest, but I cannot decipher its weight. My gaze drifts to the stone slab beside me—a sheet of volcanic rock scored by shallow gouges, one for each day of my exile. A few hundred marks at most. Unless…
Her next words shake me like thunder. “You are the ghost, Thumee. I heard your call on my home world the moment you entered the Dive.”
The Dive. She knows of it. My pulse flutters.
“I heard you,” she continues, voice low as distant starlight. “I immediately made my way to your planet. This was 5,000 years ago.”
My knees give way. The blood in my face drains away, leaving me hollow, as if someone has scooped my hearts from their cage. Did I lose so much time? 143 days for me, five millennia in the real world—my prosecutors, the villagers, SiRae—all gone. Gone beyond recovery. My chest collapses; air bursts from my lungs in one ragged gasp. The world tilts, then fades to black.
* * *
My skull throbs. The floor is hard beneath me.
"You took it rather well, Thumee." IlaRia hovers above, her cool fingers against my neck like river stones in autumn. Once, this touch would have sent me scrambling away. Now I lean into it, grateful for the chill.
I rise unsteadily. The room tilts, rights itself. My palms find the table's edge. Now I understand IlaRia's grand gesture: Twenty years of dust—not just yesterday's as I'd thought—swept away by her hand. My calendar scratches tell a story I failed to read: early marks faded to ghosts, newer ones sharp as fresh wounds. The tree-slice table, my faithful companion, reveals its age with splintered edges. Five thousand years. How had I missed this?
IlaRia' s hand finds my shoulder. " Follow me in the Dive," she whispers.
I close my eyes. My consciousness sinks like a stone through dark water. She waits for me there, in that boundless realm. Our minds touch—no words, only understanding flowing between us like current. She is right: Family. The revelation blooms inside me, undeniable.
Her laughter ripples through my thoughts. Then: ' Let me show you your brethren and your immortal future. We are the Kindred of Old.'