For a time...I only knew darkness. It enveloped my heart, destroyed my body...destroyed my mind. Even now I realize that I have fallen far from grace, fallen far from the great mountain I once stood on. I realize that things have changed and I have led my people astray, that I have led them into great turmoil. But even as I find my lost home, even as I discover weak being infesting it...I know what must be done. I can fortell what must exist. They live in my home, but they are weak, diseased, and corrupt. They require protection, they require aid.
But this is not that story, this is my story, the story of the Prince of the Zeta. The story...of what is and what could be.
----
The Zeta were a race of noble warriors. Our eyes were red and our hair naturally blonde or black. We existed in perfect harmony with the rest of the universe. Our planet sat next to a subspace rift in space that could be seen from our planet. Being this close gave us strange powers of the void. We could use telekensis and telepathy, but there was a far more mysterious existance to our being that no one could figure out...we existed for a reason, and no one knew why.
My father was our King. We lived on a small world just outside the Galaxy. I could always the Galaxy's spinning arms from my room in the palace. I barely remember those days now that it has been so long. But I can still remember the feel of my bed, the smell of the fresh linen. I can still remember the smell of dinner being cooked. The smell of my mothers clothes as I ran up to hug her.
My father wasn't a very talkative man, but he loved me more than the entire populace of our kingdom. He kept his feelings to himself. Bottled them up inside. Some would say that wasn't the best thing to do, but he didn't care what others thought about how he did things, and that is what made him such a great King. He did things for the best of the kingdom, regardless of what the others thought...but then that day came...the day came where a sinister threat emerged on the face of our small humble planet.
An infant born with a strange illness. Orange eyes, and uncontrollable power. It's energies lured the attention of an even more sinister threat. An outside threat came to our planet and sought our power. We were a warrior race and we faught them until we could not fight them any longer. They killed my mother and father...and I, too weak to fight their large forms, took me as a trophy. The rest of my people were enslaved and beaten into submission...we were forced to fight their wars, do their dirty work, and kill relentlesly. But there was an unforseen cause to removing us from our home. The subspace rift that gave us our power from evolution, also caused us to age...taking us away, prevented us from our one birthright.
Death.
We lived for eternity...until finding a subspace rift to die near...but these vile monsters avoided them, had us fight their wars, until their new King had had enough he rose to power, rose to control his people, and broke free of his prision. The following hours were the most bloody in the history of the Zeta. The captives turned on their masters and butchered hundreds of thousands of them. Their warriors and army never stood a chance. And as I approached the king's quarters. I relished in the thought of destroying my enemy. Destroying the one who had killed my loved ones all those years ago. But I thought of a much more evil way to punish him.
I dropped the body of his dead queen at his feet and laughed.
"Your army is no more monster and your Queen is dead. You are powerless." I said standing before him, clothes torn and ragged, my body beaten from constant war. The King looked up to me in anger and stood from his throne, his incect like body walking down the stairs quickly to meet me. As he neared me he lunged and I dodged to the right quickly, allowing him to slam into the beam of his temple. In anger he roared and charged me again, this time I jumped into the air, but misjudged and was thrown through the wall into the other room.
"%$#@ that hurt." I groaned as I rose slowly to my feet. The king charged through and I hardly had enough time to roll under him and lunge my sword into his chest. He stopped and fell limp to the side as I sheathed my blade. The king groaned and tried to rise to his feet.
"You...will...fail..." he croaked.
"You already have." I said and stepped on his neck and applied pressure.
*Snap*
He fell limp.
"I'll see you in hell."
I walked slowly outside of the palace and raised my bloodied sword into the air. My people cheered. "All hail the King! ALL HAIL THE KING!"
I looked to the horizon...There was a storm coming...a violent storm of unforseen mass...and I was to lead it.
I stared ahead at what they called "Sirius". Such an interesting race, so much like our own back then. Back before things changed.
"Orders sir." said the young Zeta at the helm.
"Begin the sequence, but to not engage."
----
Their planet was dangerous to our health.
That was what our leading scholars had said. The many deaths of the monsters had lead their blood to have dangerous abilities, one of which including being toxic to both the atmosphere and land if allowed to seep out in mass quanities. There was only one way to escape this place...we had to find their stockpile. We had to find their escape plan. The escape plan they had in place incase we rebeled.
That's what you call irony.
It took us a few days to discover it near their capital city. The planet was large and dangerous, scattered around were monsters and plants that were quite hazardous to our health. But after only a few days, we had located it. We turned on the lights in the bay and ship after ship after ship was illiminated. They had enough ships to send their entire race into space. They knew we would one day rebel against them, we had simply caught them off guard. Guards exited out of every doorway including the one from behind us. Those poor souls.
Poor poor souls.
We engaged the enemy with horrendus violence and blood rage. With in a few hours, all of the guards were dead. We had lost several of our people, but we all said a silent prayer to our god and began to tear apart the plans scattered throughout the bay. We figured out how to start the ships, but could not discover how to get them off the ground. We were stuck, without a plan...we were trapped like rats on this world...doomed to die from the atmosphere collapsing...and that is when I had a sudden thought.
"You." I said pointing at a nearby Zeta. "Scour their database, look for anything about our technology before we were enslaved. There should be some data on us in there. Locate a electromagnitic pulse diagram. You." I said pointing at another Zeta. He stood up with pride. "Locate the starter system in these ships and prepare for my mark." He nodded curtly and ran off into one of the ships. I smiled, we would escape this hellhole yet.
"Found it my Lord." said the woman at the computer. I walked up beside her and hugged her with one arm. "You did it!" I said with a laugh. She could only smile as I began to direct the automated system to put together the drive. As it did we removed the other drive out of the vessel, suprisingly similar to our own with key adjustments to it. As the system completed designing our new drive, we compared the two...they were strikingly similar.
"Try and start the altered version the way we do ours." I said and someone reached out and focused his energy. As he did so, the drive spooled up and began to run. I laughed. "Put that old one back in the ship, we're getting the hell out of here!"
A day later we were jumping away from our prision, and into what we could only hope was a better life...
...if we only knew what waited for us in the great unknown. If we only knew.
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