Star People Legacy by Smith, T.L. (feel good books to read .txt) 📕

could return home. If we failed we would be condemned to this world until the Great Mother selected another of her daughters to be the Ci’in.

I reached out to the star. Great Mother, please let us come home.

No! I turned to Casey. He gave her his blood, endured the pain as our people tortured his resolve. She gave him her promise, as he had given his.

No, she was me. My mortal-self.

The feathers were so heavy. I pressed them between my hands and thighs. Casey’s blood smeared my mortal hands, burning them with his pain. The rope cut into me, even though it still hung loose around my waist. He held the ends as I gasped for air, he held onto her just as he’d promised to do for his short mortal life.

They were Bound together already, in that mortal way of their kind. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. A larger promise controlled me. They circle around me, singing of the life we once had, the life I would give back to them.

But her promise bore as much weight as mine. I felt the heaviness of so many promises.  I looked to the priestess, her mother, confused. Why do I feel like this?

I already knew. I was of the stars, inhabiting a mortal body until my task was done. I couldn’t make a promise to him. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t deny this mortal vessel. Her desire to be with him bore as much weight as my desire to go home.

I wanted to go home. Where the sheer energy of the universe flowed through us as blood flowed through them.

“NO!” She screamed to be heard over the flood of my memories.

She made me look at Casey, but I only saw images of other men, of other times. The mortals I’d Bound myself to in other lives. I had learned to love them as did my mortal being, then watched them die. I wanted to go home, but…

“It is time to choose.” I heard the priestess’ voice and hands touched my mortal’s skin. I stiffened, afraid he was touching me, but then saw it was other Ci’in. They laid me down on the blanket. My mother on one side, Casey on the other, still holding the rope in his hands.

The priestess chanted over me, blowing a smoke over my mortal body, into her face. I recognized the smell. Calea. With a few more puffs her breathing eased.

“Great. I hope this stuff is out of my system before I go back to work.” I laughed. “Work, really? I’m about to go after a life-sucking demon from Alpha Centauri and I’m worried about a drug test?”

I didn’t laugh. “The Maxa’xak aren’t from Alpha.”

“I know that!” “What?” My thoughts at the same time as hers. “Oh great, now we’re both in here? I answered myself. Of course they weren’t from Alpha. “Why are we here together?”

The answer was there as the schizophrenic split in my head continued, along with everything she ever knew. Thoughts rushed through my head faster than she could answer me, unless this was her answering me.

In the universe all things existed in a duality, light and dark, hot and cold, gentleness and brutality, Ci’in and Kwia, the Great Father and the Great mother. All things existed in balance. Countless life forces dependent on each other, yet so different, maintaining a careful balance. Any disturbance yielded either social lethargy or chaos, and ultimately, death.

But their careful balance wasn’t perfect and after a millennia, dissenters Ci’inkwia found a dying species and merged their duality into those singular mortal beings. The Maxa’xak hybrids were fearsomely vicious and brutal, to the point of madness. They were also unable to propagate themselves. They needed suitable hosts to grow their larvae.

To find hosts, they ravaged worlds, creating such an imbalance, the Great Mother extracted a vow from her loyal children to put their wayward siblings out of their insane misery. We obeyed and we turned our powers against them.

The Maxa’xak knew we were capable of destroying them. Their survivors fled. We could have let them go, but we saw the death they left behind. If they reached another inhabited system, they would destroy whatever civilization existed there. If they found suitable hosts, they would bide their time, gain strength and return to wage war again.

We had given our vow and pursued them to this planet.

We found their ship, but the Maxa’xak were gone. They had found a water world, a primary element necessary for them to survive, and escape. Using the waterways, they scattered across the continent to find new hosts and start regrowing their horrific army.

The Ci’inkwia revealed themselves to the intelligent species of this world and learned of terrible beasts rising up from rivers and lakes, to snatch away anyone who wandered too close to the shores. Great serpents that primitive spears could not kill. This was what we sought, the Maxa’xak. We followed the stories, hunting them down one by one.

Fully enraged, the Ci’inkwia energy radiated hot, giving us the appearance of bird-like creatures who cast bolts of lightning down upon our enemy. We exposed our dual natures. The Ci’in and the Kwia, protective and merciless. Ci’in, the seekers. Kwia, the destroyers. Lightning and Thunder. Thunderbirds. Our battles thundered across the countryside as we delivered death with no mercy to the Maxa’xak and their offspring.

One battle at a time, our war carried on from years to centuries, spreading further across the large continent, with no end in sight. To preserve our life forces, brave young humans sacrificed themselves to a select number of Ci’in and Kwia, creating a new People in the Nations. The Ci’inkwia. The Star People.

Those of our people not selected went dormant, sleeping until the first generation of children were conceived. Our Spirits transfer into those embryos, born into children, but sleeping until old enough to understand what we were, until old enough to battle a cluster of Maxa’xak. At which point one