I was but a child when the Ka’un invaded my home world; just fifteen years old, two or three years away from my metamorphosis.
And I remembered how we young ones were amused when the alien spaceships first appeared in the sky. We made a game of swiftly dodging their bombs as they crashed to the ground, scattering earth and terrifying the land animals. And then we ran home and told our parents.
My parents comforted me, and told me we would be safe. But they did not fight, they fled, using flying ships to convey us at speeds faster than sound, as far away as we could get from the alien ship. And when the bombs continued to fall from the sky, we and millions of our kind took refuge deep in the earth’s crust. We would, my mother said, wait it out. When the enemy tired of destroying our cities and houses, such as they were, we would emerge and rebuild our planet. Or we would find another planet. It would be easy enough.
But when the earthquakes began my father was crushed by a wall of rock that collapsed on to him. He cut himself free, knowing he could, eventually, regrow his lost limbs. But he was worried now.
Then poison gas came through the rock and my brothers and sisters died in agony. My mother nursed them all, stroking them with her tentacle tips and mouth and thus absorbing the poison into her own body. And then she too died, while holding me in her tentacles, exhaling deadly air upon me, killing me with foolish love, for by then she had lost her senses with grief.
My father found me in time and sucked out the poisoned air out of my lungs and into his own body, dooming himself but saving me. Then he wrapped me in protective shielding, and placed me in a space capsule. And he fired the capsule into orbit, with a course set for another of the worlds occupied by our kind, so that one of us at least should live.
When he said goodbye, my father vowed that I would live a happy life, and that these invaders would not find it so easy to invade our other planets. For mind-messages had been sent with instantaneous effect to all my people-to those living on alien soil and also those who lived on artificial orbiting cities and those who chose to slowly drift in space, living on the energy from distant suns-to warn them that the ways of peace must come to an end. We must, as a species, resort to war, using all of our formidable powers.
All this he told me; and I marvelled at the rage in his voice, and the anger-fuelled expansion of his normally compact body. And I sorrowed for him, and for my dead mother; they were kind and full of joy and I loved them, and they will live for ever in my memories and in the depth of my soul.
Then, as I grieved, a child forced to confront evil for the first time, my father sealed the capsule and I was shot out into space in a cylinder of metal that was, my father hoped, to be my home for the next one thousand years.
However, his plans failed; and I was captured by the alien invaders as my craft made its way out the atmosphere. I lay in semi-sleep and woke abruptly when I felt my capsule lose all its momentum in a moment.
And later the capsule was broken open and I was confronted by an ugly tiny creature with two legs and fur, which I later learned was clothing. This was a Kindred; but at the time I thought it was a Ka’un.
I clambered out of my capsule to confront the creature, and lashed at him with my tentacles; and found he was made of air. A projection.
I realised I was alone inside a huge room shaped like a globe, made of some kind of glass; and beneath me and all around was the blackness of space, and the stars. And shining in the midst of the emptiness of space was a planet, my own planet; which our people had called Tendala. I knew this view of Tendala well; for I had flown in orbit around her many times; and as I looked now at the planet in space, I saw the oceans that I had swum in, and the mountains I had climbed.
I was confused, and frightened, and baffled. My confining shell was large and had no features and no visible doors; and because the floor too was made of glass it felt as if I were floating in space.
And, there, from my vantage point inside the glass belly of the Ka’un spaceship, I saw my planet start to break into pieces.
It was an impossible yet haunting image. I saw none of the terror and destruction that must have existed on the ground-the cities and forests burning, the seas racked with storms, the volcanoes erupting. All I saw was a beautiful blue globe breaking apart like smashed glass, and fragments the size of entire countries tumbling into space.
And my soul was rent with pain.
I knew I would never seen my loved ones again; never again would I feel the winds of Tendala, or swim in the Parago Seas, or watch the beauteous birds of Tharbois in colourful flight. Child though I was, I knew by now that these monsters took joy in the extermination of other sentient beings. And I knew them to be, by our own moral code, “evil.”
But though I was full of rage back then, my anger eventually, over the ensuing months, dimmed into a calm acceptance.
I was, I admit, grievously disappointed that others of my kind did not come to rescue me; but I did not resent them for this failure. Perhaps, I mused, they had decided to forgive the alien invaders? For forgiveness is the way of my species. We will, if absolutely necessary, fight; but continuing hatred is not in our nature, and indeed runs counter to our philosophy of life.
So I did not, as many Kau’un captives do, wallow in thoughts of vengeance. Nor did my captivity terrify me; and the prospect of spending eternity as a slave caused me little grief. For my kind are long-lived, and patient, and we endure.
And yet!
Even now the memories of the horrors that I saw in those early years on the Hell Ship cause me pain. The savagery! The cruelty! I arrived, a fresh slave, and was greeted by a slavering mob of creatures of all shapes and sizes, with claws and beaks and horns and soft pulsing flesh and hard scales and thick hides, creatures who flew and creatures who crawled and creatures who walked on a hundred legs and others who were nightmares made manifest. And all these monsters taunted and mocked me. And then they advanced upon me in a ruthless mass and savaged me, and tried to rip the outer shell off my three segments with their teeth and claws and horns and feelers and feet. One of the creatures spat acid upon my skin. Another wrapped its coils around me and tried to crush my body into a state of suffocation. And then one of them, a giant flying biped, picked me up in its claws and carried me up to the summit of the mountain range, over bleak and terrible terrain, and there he dropped me from a great height upon the sharpest crag. And I tried to fly away to safety, but my cape was shattered and I could not see because my eyes had been pecked out, and I could not hear because small worms were crawling in my brain and affecting my ability to sense my surroundings or to think.
When I hit the rocky crag the wind was driven out of my body and my carapace was cracked and my heart ruptured and my back spine was shattered.
And I was in agony for many months until I managed to drag myself down from the mountain. And then I hauled myself across the grasslands in the baking heat, until I found a well full of soothing water and dived in. And this, I later learned, was the well of the water of life; and these waters healed me.
Within months, I was restored to health; my spine was restored; my eyes grew back; my wounds healed; though my fear of my fellow captives was undimmed.
Carulha was the dominant warrior on the Hell Ship back then. A giant red polypod with spear-like protrusions on his flesh and a hundred bony arms that could cut and sever flesh and a thousand snake-tails that could spit venom and lash like whips. Carulha had led the mob that tortured and taunted me. And when I was healed, it was Carulha who sought me out and told me the laws of my new world. I must obey him, and him alone; for I was his slave, just as he was the slave of the Masters of the Ship. And I must, he told me, at all times use my strength to intimidate and humiliate the smaller bipeds (though not the Kindred) and the arboreals and the sentient aerials and the multi-legs and the swamp-dwellers, for that was the way of things on this ship.