Bloen [ Part IV ]
The Zooldgkors
Our companion ships orbited the planet Zoold while we attempted to communicate with its people. We were invited into the Chieftain’s hut at the center of their village and we were showered with their planet’s delicacies. From strange fruits to strange cooked animals, we found their diet to be very close to that of ours. Their planet was as vibrant and as full of life as our Earth used to be. At first we had thought that these animals they were eating would not taste good to us, but instead we realized that most of their hunted animals tasted much like chicken.
The Zoolgars were a curious specie. They kept looking at and touching our suits, which they found to be astounding. In their primitive minds they must’ve viewed us as gods of some sort. Apparently, they also thought we were there to ‘save them’. Unbeknownst to them, we were actually there to save ourselves.
We spent the night feasting with the tribe and the Chieftain, whom I continually attempted to communicate with using language, their language. I started by watching how they were talking to each other. It took me a while to associate their body language with the words they were speaking and in the process I picked up on several of these words. The Chieftain, being as wise and as intelligent as he was, realized that I was attempting to communicate with them by figuring out the meanings of their words.
He looked at me, his face was void of all expression, and he extended his hand and landed it on my right shoulder. He then stood up and signaled me to follow him into a smaller hut that stood next to his. Inside that hut there was a huge cauldron. A small fire had been boiling the solution in that cauldron from before we walked in, I figured that the Chieftain must’ve had this in mind since our arrival, whatever “this” was.
On opposite sides inside the hut, there were two ground seats. They were made from a wooden chassis and they were filled with feathers. Black feathers from an indigenous bird, I assumed they were. The Chieftain headed towards one of the corners and sat down. He looked at me and pointed towards the other seat. Mimicking his seating posture, I took the seat at the opposite corner of the hut and awaited further instructions. The Chieftain then started throwing some sort of dust into the cauldron while chanting what seemed to me like the same sentence over and over again. Smoke started rising from the boiling content of the cauldron, and bit by bit the smoke filled up the entire hut. An uneasy feeling crept over me, I felt my head getting heavier and my heart beating slower. Colors would bounce in and out of my vision like some sort of energy was eliminating and then reintroducing them. The light from the fire burning under the cauldron cast our shadows on the walls behind us and these shadows began to emerge outwards. It was as though our own shadows had become three-dimensional entities.
I slowly watched as my shadow left the two-dimensional realm and transformed into a dark ghost. The Cheftain’s shadow behaved the same way; they both met atop the big, black, metallic cauldron at the center of the hut and dove in. At that moment, I passed out.
“Wake up Reyn,” I heard a distant voice calling. I did not recognize that voice because I had never heard it before. I opened my eyes and found myself in a great forest, a strange forest. There was a river, its waters were red. The trees had purple leafs and the sky was green. The soil beneath my feet had a mustard yellow color; it felt soft and moist. A hand landed on my shoulder from behind, a hand I've felt before. It did not startle me, but when I turned around, I saw the Chieftain standing behind me.
“You must be surprised with my ability to converse in your dialect” the Chieftain uttered. That had startled me. At first I had thought that the Chieftain always knew my language but he later explained how he can communicate with me as such.
“You see, Reyn, we are both inside a dream, this state allows us to communicate directly with each other. It is only your brain that is translating that communication as it knows best, language. This is not my dream, nor is it yours. It is the dream of the creator.” he continued explaining, but I had to interrupt him.
“What do you mean ‘creator’?” skeptically, I asked him.
“The creator is a dreamer, he thought up worlds in his head and his loneliness had driven him to materialize these worlds. Unlike what you define as a ‘god’, this creator is actually capable of faults, many faults; and he had done many. The creator is not one person, but rather, a collective of two very separate minds, one creates the elements of these worlds and the other pieces the fragments together. They must have sent you here on purpose. In many of my trances and many of my dreams, they had visited me and they had told me that star-people will soon join us. They must’ve meant you.” The Chieftain explained.
“Chieftain, your kindness had driven me to be honest with you and so I must. Our planet had been destroyed by our own malice. The few of us that were wise enough to avoid the destruction had devised a plan to escape our planet. And we've been floating in space, looking for another home ever since then. Our current population does not exceed the population already existing on this planet of yours, we even have our own land that travels the stars. We intend on landing our island nation in your vast seas and prosper on this planet, helping your people grow with us. Does that make sense to you? Would you accept this?” With nothing but pure intentions, I presented my case to him.
The news I had broken to him did not surprise him, instead, a smile drew itself on his face and he continued, “Reyn, you have been sent here to save both us and your people. We have enemies here on this planet, and I do not mean other tribes. Our disputes with other tribes are minute compared to our true foe, the ground dwellers” the Chieftain paused for a while as fear crept into his eyes, he shook it off and continued. “You've met us Zoolgars, but on this planet, we are not the only intelligent specie. They dwell beneath the ground and they siphon their energy from a purple crystal. As opposed to our source of energy which we've hidden for centuries. Our golden crystal. It provides us with magical powers, but these powers would get out of hand at times so now we only use them for protective purposes and ever so wisely, we try to keep balance in our consumption of that energy. Our golden nexus was brought here and introduced to us by a majestic black winged creature that breathes black fires. The purple nexus, however, was planted here by a brown, wingless, foul beast called Bryxun.” I jumped in and interrupted the Chieftain, “Are you talking about dragons?” this confused him at first, but having the ability to use my own language to describe things to me in that dream world made it easier for him to catch on. “Yes, dragons” he said.
“The Zoolgkors are foul creatures, they feast on the flesh of Zooldgars and they had been hunting us down since the beginning of time. But now with the purple nexus’ full powers they've become a bigger threat to our civilization. They've been stealing our infants at night; at first we did not know why, but we later realized that they had been turning them into their own, transforming them into purple, ground-dwelling beasts that would come out at night and hunt down their own mothers and their own tribes. This tragedy keeps haunting us as it keeps repeating itself. You must help us Reyn. We must go back to our conscious realm now, I’ll see you on the other side.” The Chieftain said, finally.
My head got heavy again and I passed out inside the trance I was in. I had expected to wake up in the hut, again. But instead, and to my surprise, I had woken up in a strange black room. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered with shiny black tiles, the ridges between those tiles were bright white and seemed to be glowing.
A voice, an echoing voice, came out of the furthest corner from where I stood. It was too dark to see what made that sound at first, but as I walked closer towards the corner from which the sound came, I could see a man sitting on a chair. A headless man, but he wasn't really headless.
