String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [2]
The Betasis had been Klyrrhea’s dream, a dream she had nurtured to reality with the help of a brilliant scientist named Gora. So fervent was Klyrrhea’s literal belief in the existence of Gremadia that she had marshaled the unimaginable resources of two generations of her tribe in the construction of a ship large enough to carry them from the surface of Monorha to the space between the stars where the All-Knowing Light was said to have constructed the promised city. There, His true followers would join Him to do final battle with the Others for the freedom of them all.
Or so they had believed.
The Fourteenth Tribe’s adherence to this belief, first set down in the letters of Dagan, had sustained their faith for thousands of years, even as the other thirteen tribes of Monorha shunned them for this heresy. Over time, members of the Fourteenth Tribe had been restricted then forbidden by law to hold public office or participate in the intertribal council. Their lands had been “redistributed,” or more accurately, stolen by the other tribes, and they had been banished to a nomadic existence, difficult at best to eke out from the least hospitable regions of their otherwise fertile planet.
But Klyrrhea’s vision had been the dawn of a new era for her people. She had managed to convince them all that the Time of Knowing was upon them. Monorhans had finally gained the skill and technology needed to travel beyond the surface of their planet to the stars around them. Talk had begun within the council of colonizing new planets, though no suitable candidates had yet been discovered. When Klyrrhea had offered to end the tension and occasional violent disruption that her “heretical” kinsmen wove into the otherwise placid fabric of Monorhan culture, the council had agreed almost too eagerly to aid her in her quest to build a city-ship, capable of transporting the entire Fourteenth Tribe to the new home they believed the protector of them all had created for them.
Mainstream Monorhan culture had always looked upon the writings of Dagan with thinly veiled contempt. The idea that the All-Knowing Light had fought and lost a battle with beings as powerful as He implied first that there could be other beings that were all-knowing, and this was simply unacceptable. But Dagan was a child of the Fourteenth Tribe, a seer gifted beyond any who had come before or since, so legend told. Unable to simply disregard his difficult teachings, his tribe had embraced him and his beliefs, and now, thousands of years later, had paid the price: total annihilation.
As she laid the scroll of Jocephar upon her workstation, weighing down the edges with ceremonial stones, dimly aware that she had subconsciously begun the long, low hum that initiated the transference ritual, Dagan’s words sprang unbidden to her mind. She would have given anything to wipe them forever from her thoughts, but they rose stubbornly, just as she had recited them, hundreds of times in tribal assembly, piercing her heart with their sad beauty. Even as she wished that they had never been written, as they wound their way through her mind, she saw them for the first time in the light of these last days, and found in them an unexpected measure of comfort.
I, Dagan, Linuh-harat of the Fourteenth Tribe of Monorha, record this true vision of The First and Last Battle to honor the Rih-hara-tan Montok.
… The battle was lost, but not the war. The stench of death suffused the air, chilled by the absence of the suns, as the All-Knowing Light surveyed the fruits of His labors… the remains of His brothers and sisters scattered on the purple dunes of the Galhada Wastes. Darkness crept closer, threatening to overwhelm this cursed field that had never known life, and He feared that this darkness would be the last.
And then He remembered.
Fear was for the lesser beings, whose regrets of the past and desires for the future blinded them to the reality that this moment contained more than the substance of then, now, and beyond. The battle had been lost tomorrow. The war would