Monster Lead Me Home

Chapter 1: How the Mighty are Fallen.

I, Shratla, was born while my people, the Krat, were in captivity. We had been trapped on the planet for 600,000 years as the humans would count time. We had lifespans for thousands of years but were in general not very creative, we get others to be creative for us. Our people had great power, almost god like, because we could extract and manipulate power from the fabric of the universe we they called Sgal. Some have postulated that two blackholes collided making a rift that dark energy became tangible in a wave and our planet was in its path. It killed many but those left behind had the ability to tap into it. The very act of tapping into it sustained the connection of dark energy to matter involved, so as long as we kept using our powers we sustained the connection but the rest of matter affected lost the connection long ago. If a child did not make the connection by the time they were six, they lost the ability. The more powerful the person’s ability to use Sgal the longer their lifespan. When the Chanaty found us our planet was in trouble as our sun was becoming unstable. They showed us the Setah, the pathway to the stars created by folded space their technology developed. They showed us other races, but we have always been aggressive and wanted to dominate and that with our powers must have frightened them. They told us that they found a new planet for us and when we had all arrived. We found that we were trapped on that planet and could not make or use the paths we were expecting to dominate the others. The Krat had for the first thousand years of their imprisonment had actually worked together to try and escape but that finally fell apart. They argued who should lead them and a literal power struggle emerged. War would become a way of life and the people devolved into regions constantly using their powers for defense and attack. For nearly 500,000 years wars raged and nearly destroyed our planet. My Grandfather, Mugurig, a hundred thousand years ago was born and he had more power than any before and he also had a vision. He called himself the Great Overlord and he went through our world during his life time and brought all the factions but a few into submission to him. My Father, Dragnar, not quite as powerful continued after him as the Great Overlord but now that there was some enforced peace, so he forced a focused creativity including arts and sciences on our aggressive people. He created the Overlord Council and its goal was to unite our people and to find a way to escape our prison and destroy our captors. During this time our captors noticed a change on our planet and sent envoys. Some my father entertained and let go back and some he kept and tortured for information. When asked about them he claimed rebels took them. That is where we learned how the Setah (folded space pathways) worked and how they were monitoring us and how we could keep our plans secret. I, Shratla was born when my father was old and my Brother, Kroller, was already assuming the Lead of the Overlord Council. I was pushed hard in learning science and arts and power crafting and I was found to be extremely powerful and gifted in intelligence. Some old timers claimed that I could draw as much as my Grandfather but could even manipulate it better. I did not have the drive to rule people as my Grandfather, Father and Brother did and I was unusual in my dispassion. What I did have was focus and I was driven to solve puzzles. Very few knew the extent of my powers except my Father and brother and a few close allies. My people usually flaunt their powers as a means of status and domination, but I never felt a need to which made me irrelevant them. Where most did crude semi controlled bursts of power, while demonstrative, a somewhat effective, it did not impress me. I used my power for discovery and daily honed it to examine things and in order to do that I found I needed to have tight control and narrowly focused power. I found that I could almost let my mind travel with my power and I examine living and nonliving matter. Even though my power may have been greater than others they could not see such narrowly focused use. My Father would bring me to the Krall prisons when I was young and had me examine them. The first few died painfully as I crudely entered them with my power, but Father would remind me to focus and learn. I made my probes thinner and I was able to discover what made us tick, making my father proud. He encouraged me to discover ways to control our powers or get through shields but he kept my abilities secret. I found that if I concentrated my power in a narrow beam at a specific frequency I could get through the shields but I knew others were to crude so I created a “gun” that could focus their power to get through shields. I found that I could disrupt the use of Sgal power by a focused circular field of power but others including my father could not do that so I created manacles that if put on and initiated with power it would disrupt a person’s Sgal for at least six months if left on. This greatly facilitated control of prisoners. Except for my brother no one knew that my devices only mimicked what I could do without them. My brother made me Chief Scientist and I gathered around me likeminded others that were marginalized for their desire to learn over domination. I came up with a symbol for our science bureau that was placed on my building and I saw it everyday. It was a vertical column representing our strength and a zig zag line that represented our past, present and future. Our past we gained power and went forward, but we were imprisoned and we went backwards, but now we will escape and move forward again. Because my team was large it was assumed the discoveries came mainly from them and that I was just taking credit and this was probably the only reason I was given respect. The reality was that most of my team did not understand how I determined things but they were good at implementing them and I could see amazement in their eyes that it actually worked. When I got good at examining our people I was allowed to examine our enemies to find a way to neutralize them and find a way to get to the Setah. I notice that the Chatney had a residual frequency on them and I surmised that by eons of using the pathways it had affected them. It took me about 100 years of finding a way to but I found a solution but it needed to be in two parts. The first was to introduce a carrier frequency that would build a harmonic tension in the pathways and secondly later to get a disruptive frequency that would affect a specific portion of their dna every time they used it. My father presented the idea to the ignorant council that it was like a virus that would insinuate itself in the Setah pathways and infect our captors. During this time my father died and a very ambitious son of a council member, Cadarn, married me by my Brothers suggestion to keep peace with in the council. I knew that he despised me and thought me weak but I would do anything for my brother. While working on live subjects my brother had captured, one in particular kept talking to me about their worlds and what amazing things they had done. I was detached but intrigued and kept working on the “virus” but even after he died what he said kept running through my mind. The Emissary, that came just before I finished crafting the virus frequency, had dinner with us and Cadarn and I were present. I kept asking questions about their worlds and I was truly engaged. My brother was smiling but Cadarn was looking uncomfortable. After the emissary left my brother congratulated me on making the Emissary feel comfortable about us, but Cadarn on our way home scolded me about my acting impressed with our enemies. I did not say anything, but I WAS impressed. In the next year we were ready and 20 years later another Emissary came and the Setah path way was infected with phase one and the last Emissary to visit us would bring back the doom to their peoples. I had made a cure as I thought that after we conquered them we would incorporate them in our power circle. When I told my husband, he hit me hard and I fell to the ground and told me to destroy it, but I knew I could not but said nothing. My husband did not understand the cure was not a physical thing, but a process of neutralizing the frequencies on an individual kind of like demagnetizing metal so they would not be affected. I did not get angry or want to retaliate with my husband, I was just confused at how small minded he was. I had given Cadarn three children, girls, that I had hoped would follow in my footsteps but they adored their father and had his temperament. He had turned them against me while I was working so hard to free our people. After the “infection” it took a couple of hundred years for the watchers to abandon their post and stop maintaining the shield. I found a way to open their weakened walls around us. When we entered the Setah, I was thanked but I was told that I was not needed now. Our people ravaged the Captors who were at this point mostly insane. I was hoping we would create a better universe, but all I saw was that we were becoming what we were before Mugurig had pulled our people together. Even my brother counseled us to hold back but he was outvoted, my husband Cadarn was the chief critic. I tried to contact the underground Chenaty, our Captors, that I knew must still exist and it took many years to get that meeting. I took my daughters to visit a world and thought I eluded them and met and gave the plans needed to neutralize themselves and a way to neutralize our frequencies that they did not know existed in the Satah pathways. One of them stuck a pin through my skin under my hair on my scalp so that I could contact them later. But my daughters had followed and recorded that meeting. When Cadarn found out he praised the girls and bound me by the very manacles I had created. He used that time to make a power play and had my brother killed and he assumed the head of the council. He showed his true hatred for me and wanted me to suffer long. So he used a machine that they had captured from the Chenaty that was used to test the Setah. It created a Setah path in folded space that ended on itself and had a finite lifetime but would eventually collapse to nothing. Since it had no final destination, once an object was in it had no way out. His hope was that I would slowly die alone going crazy and eventually dying and as it collapsed, leaving no trace. My daughters smiled and laughed at how weak mother was and complimented their father as to his strength. This was the first time I felt what I was later to call anger. Something broke inside of me and a rage that exploded inside. My brother was dead, my children against me, my people despised me. I screamed and shouted obscenities at me husband but my powers were stifled. My manacles were heating up and he smiled and said “Finally the Ice woman thaws” I wanted to wipe the smiles off their faces and hurt them especially Cadarn. They dragged me to the machine and threw me in but I put my manacles in the door as it closed. He turned the machine on and it start to pull me in and he shot the manacles with power and they exploded and as the door closed I was sucked in and I used my power as soon as the manacles failed to protect my body. I raged for a long time and I drew more power than I ever had but it could not break my prison. I did notice that my power bursts did affect the surface. When I calmed down, I tried to analyze the walls around me and probed them to see how they were affected and what it was made of. I remembered the device on my head tried to contact the Chenaty. The communication was faint and eventually I was able to get my situation to them but they said that they really could do nothing. I was frustrated and the walls where contracted when they told me they found my positon and the only possible thing they could do was to open a pinhole that could possibly stop or slow the contraction. They did indeed create an almost imperceptible opening that greatly slowed the contracting. I felt out the opening with my power and by letting it look smaller and smaller and I in my crazed state came up with a solution. I noticed that the walls of my prison were slowly leaking out through the pinhole. I figured that through my powers I could imprint myself and my memories into the walls as frequencies. If I could find something, someone to attach to, I could squeeze myself wrapped in my powers through the opening but it would take centuries if I was attached to a solid object but only decades if I could materialize and use my powers. So I planned what directions or parts would go first and I would send an object, my gold ring through the hole first with a part of me attached and I could bring the rest of herself and my memories. So I let my gold ring melt and I attached myself to it and started to attach myself to the walls and I shot the gold through the pinhole. After a bit of time she had succeeded in dissolving all her corporal body into the walls and she lost consciousness. The machines on the other end were not designed for material coming through them and before the gold reached the underground base, the ephemeral line snapped and like a loose line the gold emerged molten above the surface of the same planet but because of time dilation two centuries later, and far away in an obscure part of that planet and fell solidifying to hit the ground and got buried. It was still attached to Shratla, but the Chanaty lost contact and could not connect again and they mourned that that had lost a brilliant comrade perhaps their best chance at defeating the Overlords, but it not their only way. Shratla had put a mission in that initial link to find a host. And for Centuries it remained buried waiting searching for those around that would be worthy as bits of her kept surrounding the gold. The forest where it abided became disturbing to people and creatures and was considered haunted and abandoned except for one broken soul that was thrice cursed. It could hear the call but was rejected long ago, yet it lingered like a lame animal. Then one day the gold piece detected a suitable spark and called as loud as it could in its noiseless way.