Beware the Visitors

Beware the Visitors
by Chris Nance

Illustrious Archon, I humbly come to you with a dire prediction in the form of a tale too fantastic to be true, for the truth is oft times veiled by shadow. You may ask, Excellency, who is this humble creature that kneels before me, begging an audience, and I should reply that I am no one…just a grain of sand in the desert, though I felt it my duty to bring to you the gravest of news. I shall tell you a story of a voice that came to me in a dream, or at least I considered it so, for I was readily in my bed and nearly asleep. Softly it said, “They are coming.”

Surely, I was startled and replied, “Who can this be in my room at night?”

“We are friends,” was the simple reply.

So in my anxiety, I asked, “Which friend comes to me without warning to disturb my sleep?”

“We are you and you are us,” it stated.

“How can that be?” I wondered. “For I am certainly here and your voice is not mine, to be sure.”

“We are Sularian and you are Sularian. Not exactly you…but you all the same.”

“Indeed?” I asked. “Why is it I cannot see your shadow in my darkened room?”

“We are the mere voice of ourselves from a dead world…an echo of our people lost to extinction.”

“Now I know you do not speak the truth,” I replied. “For I am standing here in my room. I look out my window and see my familiar Prism Peaks diffusing the starlight across the landscape. I too, assuredly, hear the wind through the whistle brush. If you are in actuality the voice of Sula and what you say is true, that ours is a world now dead, how can it be so?”

“Veritably, ours is a future that, for you, remains unwritten. We have come to save you from a dire fate. Now, your mind is aptly open. Perhaps if the eyes of others were so, we may save even ourselves from a bitter fate.”

“Very well, Echo of Sula, what message have you for a modest astronomer?”

“Beware the visitors. They have traveled afar and come bearing peace, yet carry within them such suffering and death that none will survive, though not of their intent. What begins as one Sularian will become two, then four, then all of Sula.”

“Death? Suffering? Can that be right?”

Humbly, Archon, I’ll explain that I was next struck by revelation in my mind…visions of a rocket, slender and polished white. It was marked by a crook, serpent, and broken triangle, proceeded by red lines on a white field, beneath a starry sky. Then, I suffered upon a plain littered with our kin, my own skin marked by boiling wounds the likes of which none on Sula had ever seen. “Turn your eyes to the heavens,” I was told.

And truly, Magnificence, that was the last word. I was so shaken I could not sleep through morning. Beginning my regular tasks, the whisper in my mind was nearly lost to the day, and would have otherwise been discounted as a dream, had it not been so vivid. Regretfully, I kept it secret, for who would believe me, and of that I beg your forgiveness, Excellency. Rightly, for three months I studied the heavens with a diligent eye and fading expectation, my experience waning.

Then, on the eve of the Trisolar Eclipse, I discovered a spot in my telescope, the flicker of light where none had been before. At first, I thought it to be a defect in my lens, a speck on polished glass, yet it reflected the suns like the moon and I knew the truth. Highness, I was the Sularian that detected the approach of their vessel and it has taken me better than a month to secure an audience in the presence of your radiance. I have heard the talk that travels amongst our people and, while I am nothing, an unassuming astronomer from a modest cast, I beg you with humility to turn them away. For I have seen their avatar clearly in our mutually strained communications, a lengthy ship bearing the mark of stripes of red and white beneath a star filled sky. The crook, the serpent, and the broken triangle are surely letters of their alien language. Alas, I foresee a clandestine doom and if we indulge these people from Earth, we shall surely perish.