1959, Earth time.
The air of Limados was alive. It danced with blue sunlight, and an effervescent mist covered the purple palm jungle as far as the eye could see. The wind surged with the music of the crimson ocean, and the skies were home to birds of every shape and size. The whole world was a paradise, and to an inexperienced space traveler, it seemed to be the most uniquely beautiful planet in the whole universe.
The three women who were walking across its surface, however, were struck by how familiar it all was. It seemed, at least to the human of the trio, Dr. Christine Jenner, that,
“We can’t get away from purple!”
Ygwa, who was a Lunan, let out a low, melodious laugh, hacking away some of the mauve brush with her machete as she did so. “We have only traveled to two worlds with purple foliage, doctor,” she said. “But I have spoken often enough of the lavender forests that covered the home of my ancient ancestors that you may have imagined you visited it.”
“That’s probably it,” Christine replied. “I’m fascinated by your stories of the ancient Sisterworlds. It sounds like your forefathers—excuse me, foremothers—lived such strange and colorful lives there. I’m intrigued by what you’ve told me of their mystical discoveries, too.”
“Those planets certainly sound much more enticing than the two purple worlds we’ve seen. Indirmog was bad enough—but Kolith was particularly irritating.” It was Iyosanda, Queen of the city of Uhmaon, who now spoke. “I only hope our business here doesn’t form a foul trilogy, and taint all purple planets in my eyes.”
Of all of the three travelers, Iyosanda was the most unique. Like her companions she was humanoid, but only from the waist up. Her body below her belly stretched out long and serpentine, and instead of just two legs, she had dozens. Furthermore, while Ygwa resembled a human woman, despite being of extraterrestrial origin, Iyosanda was not a human, instead bearing a resemblance to mankind’s primate predecessors, such as Oreopithecus. While she had no genetic relationship to humans, her ancestors had ruled over the Earth before the forebears of humanity arrived from the distant world of Tcho. On the nameless world they had adopted after their exile from Earth, Iyosanda’s people had evolved and mutated until they developed the centipede-like form that she possessed.
“Yes, I’m still hopeful we never run into that Omicron guy again,” Christine affirmed, reflecting on the Kolith caper. “I’ll probably have nightmares about those mind-controlled monitor lizards for the rest of my days.”
Iyosanda said, without looking at her, “You did a fine enough job flying that indigenous weaver ship against Omicron’s machine.”
Christine chuckled nervously, unsure if Iyosanda was joking. She had crashed the weaver, and quite badly at that—but not before she had taken down their attacker’s control satellite. Iyosanda spoke so dryly sometimes that it was hard to determine whether or not she was being sarcastic.
Ygwa hacked again at the dense clusters of vines and said, “I’d much rather relax on Sirius with our friend Micromégas than face that hunter a second time.”
“Ohh, I like Micromégas, as condescending as he could be at times,” said Christine. “I mean, he’s a nice guy, but he just makes you feel small sometimes…”
That elicited another laugh from Ygwa. Again Christine waited for a similar reaction from Iyosanda, and again she tried to repress her disappointment when none came. The Monarch rarely laughed as a general rule, and so Christine knew she couldn’t take it personally, but she wished that just once she could tickle her friend’s humor. Being unable to do so awoke a twinge of something in Christine’s chest, something she always pushed away.
But as the cerulean sunlight streamed down on Iyosanda, she found it harder than ever to push away that something. There were times in their adventures when the Monarch turned and smiled at her, and it stirred up such profound feelings—feelings she hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
There were still some tensions between Iyosanda and Ygwa from their sparrings of old, and that pained Christine. She and Ygwa had become quite good friends as of late—due in no small part to her friendship with Ygwa’s daughter. And so Christine hoped someday that her two friends could reconcile, and build a bond of their own. But old wounds healed slowly. And that included Iyosanda’s past bad experiences with humans.
Christine understood that for all she knew, she was being a damn fool for nursing this little crush on her.
She felt her cheeks flush, and at once Ygwa turned to her and slapped her on the back.
“You burn easy in this sun, white girl,” she said. “You should put more lotion on your face.”
Christine stammered for a moment, wanting to explain that it wasn’t sunburn—but then she would have to tell Ygwa of her feelings for Iyosanda. Instead she chose to deflect.
“And you should remind me of what we’re doing here,” she said, trying and failing to take on a teasing tone.
“You mean, what are we doing here on Limados? Or what are we doing here in the universe? Because one question is easier to answer than the other.”
“The former, you goofball. I’m not particularly troubled by existential concerns right now.”
“Really? That’s not what you were saying last night.”
“Last night I said a lot of things—and that’s the fault of your Lunan liquor. When you flashed us here, my digestive tract nearly turned inside out. I told you both that we could’ve waited another day for my hangover to pass.”
Iyosanda looked back and said, “If you had not had so much, perhaps you wouldn’t have forgotten why we came here.”
Christine blushed again from embarrassment. “I recall that it had something to do with those damned Venusians…and the Scaled Ones?”
“I think I am going to have to permanently cut you off from the lunala,” Ygwa said. “You’ve forgotten too much. Please tell me at least you remember Ghorgeaux.”
“Yes…I couldn’t forget Ghorgeaux…”
She allowed her mind to drift back in time, past the barrier of her hangover. Not long ago, the trio had found themselves on the agricultural planet of Tehused, courtesy of Ygwa’s teleportation power. Their sudden appearance in a flash of rainbow light had shocked and frightened the gastropod Tehusedans whose village they had appeared in—however, the adventurers were quick to assure them they meant no harm. But the peace they secured did not last, for soon the skies of Tehused were swept over by a fleet of silver flying saucers. These disc-shaped ships deposited a legion of cycloptic octopi-like foot-soldiers, who proclaimed themselves to be conquerors from Venus. Christine had suspected that they were from one of the many Venuses that populated the universe—there were duplicates of various bodies of Earth’s solar system scattered all throughout the galaxies. Ygwa herself came from a wandering alternate version of Earth’s own moon, which had, before the arrival of her ancestresses, once been the home of a long-vanished civilization, whose ruined living-complex was adorned with the enigmatic glyph “α.”
None of that mattered at the time—only the evil intentions of the invaders did. Christine and her friends did battle with the Venusians, but before too long the ground troops were joined by their true masters: one-eyed, one-horned abominations that stood the height of buildings. Ygwa had declared them to be the pawn-offspring of “the vile Wuuley’Shub,” but Christine still didn’t know what they meant. These titans would have mopped the floor with the three women and the villagers if it had not been for the arrival of a pair of beings whose kin had ruled the ancient Earth alongside Iyosanda’s.
The first of these was one of the serpentine Winged Ones, who the three had met before. In fact, they had encountered this particular flying reptile during the adventure four years prior that had introduced Christine to Ygwa and Iyosanda—the same adventure wherein Ygwa was exposed to the radiations that awoke her ability to teleport through space. It was good to see their emerald-scaled comrade once again. The second of their saviors, who was one of the lumbering Scaled Ones of the land, was a stranger to them. The Scaled One’s resemblance to a Tyrannosaurus rex inspired fear in friend and foe alike. The two reptilians drove the Venusians back to their ships, and destroyed as many of the fleeing vessels as they could. Christine had remarked they probably didn’t have to go that far, but Ygwa replied, fairly enough:
“Are you going to be the one to stop them?”
It was at that point that Christine had the scare of her life: Iyosanda seemed to drop dead in front of her. It was as though she had died of exhaustion in the heat of the battle.
But she was not dead. Instead, the Scaled One who had helped them was communicating with her through mental channels, as was common on the ancient Earth. The Queen was in a psychic trance. And when she awoke, she explained to her friends what the great lizard—“Ghorgeaux,” he was called—had told her. He had issued her a warning.
The Earth in its younger days was home to a variety of pre-human civilizations, spanning from the deepest seas to the highest atmospheric heights. Most of these were indigenous, but there were colonizers as well. Among these were the nameless race of “Elder Things” who battled Iyosanda’s forebears for supremacy over the icy mountains of the world. These star-headed experimenters reared a species of polymorphous shapeshifters to repel the great hominids, but their artificial creations ultimately turned on them and destroyed them. Before their final demise, however, the Elder Things fused together hundreds of their spawnlings into a singular being. The primitive minds of the being’s constituent parts formed a psychic gestalt that fed on the raw energy of emotions—specifically, fear. This abomination escaped and began feeding upon the mind of the saurian Scaled Ones. It would have driven them into terrorized, paranoid insanity had it not been for Ghorgeaux. In a mythic struggle he battled and defeated the slippery demon, which had stolen his own draconic shape for its own, and drove it off the Earth. Ghorgeaux sensed that the ejected Monster eventually crashed down on a distant planet, whereupon it lost consciousness, falling into a seemingly-endless slumber.
But now…now the far-distant thing had awoken. Something unseen had jarred it back to wakefulness. And so Ghorgeaux knew he had to seek out the Queen of Uhmaon, who knew the Old World, to warn her of what was coming.
“Best to kill it at its point of impact, he said,” Iyosanda had explained. “I know the name of the planet we seek…”
Christine, Ygwa, and Iyosanda had spent a little while longer among the Tehusedans, helping them to rebuild what the Venusians had damaged. Ygwa had needed time anyway to psychically surf the rainbow boundaries of temporal distance, so that they might find their way to their destination. After many weeks she found it, and it came time for bittersweet parting. They’d passed last night enjoying their departure party, which had seen Christine consume too much of the lunala. It was all in good spirit, for they’d made many friends among the snail-like alien during their stay here, and it was hard to leave them. But destiny had other plans for them; it always did. It saw fit to draw them here, to far-distant Limados—
—and to the lair of the Fear Monster.
Back in the present, Christine shuddered as the air around them shifted. They could each begin to feel something at the boundary of their senses: a prickling chill. It unsettled them, made their hearts race. It was fear—they were coming upon something that was made of fear. All the essence of all the nightmares of the Earth were contained here, primeval and modern alike. The leaping shadow, the dancing flame, the streaking missile and the ruined city were all one in the mind the unseen beast. All the depravities of man and animal and nature alike were waiting for them.
But courage was alive in all of them. Ygwa, sister to the Lunar Queen, was always confident in her strength—moreso now that she could travel between the celestial spheres. Iyosanda, a Queen herself, dedicated the whole of her spirit to the betterment of her people, and that spawned in her an unbreakable will. And Christine had her faith in science, and in her own understanding and her intuitive powers. They kept on walking.
Their chosen masks held firm, at least for a time. None of them showed the struggle of resistance on their faces. Even as they fought back, however, ancillary emotions manifested in their minds—symptoms of the pain being instilled in them. For Christine, fear was often accompanied with melancholy. The specter of depression had lived in her since her youth. That feeling manifested in a few different ways—but it almost always tried to tell her that her life was purposeless.
“Maybe it’s worth it now to discuss why we’re here,” she said.
“We were just discussing that,” Ygwa said. “Your memory failures are starting to worry me—”
“No, I mean the other why-we’re-here.” Her shoulders slumped, as though taking on great weight. “The stuff we were talking about last night.”
“Now you want existentialism?” asked Iyosanda. “You want to talk purpose?”
“I do,” Christine said, nodding. “It’s been a strange four years. Perhaps it’s time for some self-appraisal.”
“It has been a bizarre quartet of years, yes. Your world changed forever when you met us,” Ygwa said. Christine couldn’t help but notice that Iyosanda feigned a flinch when Ygwa said “us.” She hated being group with the Lunan. Their rivalry was alive and well—even if it was starting to seem more performative these days than anything else.
“And yours didn’t?” Christine replied. “You were reunited with your daughter, and your husband. You have a family now, across two worlds. And Iyosanda, your people have begun doing what was formerly unthinkable—seeking peace with humanity on Earth.”
Iyosanda made her people’s gesture of agreement, a quick wave of a stiffened right hand. “Everything has changed forever, this is a fact. It is what the True God calls ‘the inevitability of the sea.’ All is sanded away, dragged out into the depths, and replaced with newness—newness born of those same depths. There is no use fighting it.”
“I always thought I’d be content to be a researcher in some university back on good old Earth,” Christine said. “But now the path ahead doesn’t seem so clear.”
Ygwa’s face showed a hint of pain, and at the urging of Christine’s eyes she spoke.
“I, too, must find a new place in existence. Even all these years later, I am still unused to the idea of being a mother. I—” She sighed. “I must confess my relationship with my daughter has become strained.”
“Strained?” Christine asked. “What do you mean, strained? What’s happened?”
“It is…complicated. I do not believe there is time now to explain. All I will say for now is that I underestimated the feebleness of you humans. I did not foresee the weakness of those of you who seem to possess the most power.”
“Humans are indeed complicated—and they are indeed feeble, in a lot of different ways. Cruelty is one way that feebleness comes out. I’m very sorry, my friend.”
Ygwa said, “It is not pleasant facing uncertainty for the first time in one’s life. White people like you, on your homeworld, pose a threat to my child. And it seems sometimes I can do nothing.”
“It’s so easy to believe you control everything when you are young,” said Iyosanda. “Only for life to—what is that expression you taught me, doctor?—throw a curveball. Life throws many of these curveballs, in my experience.”
“One finds oneself getting old and having not yet found someone to settle down with.” Christine almost didn’t care that the words left her lips. To her surprise, Iyosanda paused for a moment, as if transfixed, and stared at her. Their faces suddenly seemed to share the same loneliness.
It was hard to say who was more shocked to see Iyosanda vulnerable like this: Christine, or the Queen herself.
At once the look disappeared, though a whisper of it remained on her visage. “I find myself challenged by my new role as a bridger of worlds,” she said, trying to change the subject. “It has transpired that I need fresh perspectives to govern. My advisors are wise and clever, but they have only known a few different standards of life. They sometimes can’t—to borrow another human expression—think outside the box.”
“Collaboration is better than isolation,” Christine said.
“Yes. Yes—” Now a shudder passed them all, as one. “We all must stand together.”
They were now coming up on their goal—it was hard to mistake it for anything else. A great, black hole in the ground that seemed to drop down into Hell itself yawned wide before them. Here, the feeling of fear deepened and broadened into something richer: terror. Mindless fear, fear unfettered. But they pressed on, against that terror, against the visions it inspired in them.
That didn’t mean that they were exempt from momentary lapses of will.
“There—there’s still time to go somewhere else,” Christine said. Once the words were out she couldn’t take them back. But as the fear deepened she clung to her statement. She hoped that maybe Ygwa would sympathize with her. But instead her friend’s face was hard and focused—devoid of forgiveness.
“We are not turning back when we have come this far,” she said plainly.
Christine looked to Iyosanda, but found that she, too, had no mind for retreat. Her eyes were closed and her lips were whispering a solemn prayer to her God.
For an instant the human scientist felt like nothing could be worse than descending into that pit. But when the Queen’s prayers ended, and they set their hands to scaling the slimy stone walls, Christine felt her awareness drift away…as if she was sinking into a deep but restless sleep.
* * *
It emerges before them, still dragon-shaped—still a grotesque parody of Ghorgeaux and all his splendid kind. It laughs upon glimpsing them, for now it once again has lives to feed upon…
Feeding is its path to freedom from this place. From this violet globe that chains it and keep its terror caged…
They are stunned at the first glimpse, and it takes advantage of the opening. And it begins its age-old game.
* * *
“You should’ve known.
“You’re not human, but that’s no excuse. You should’ve known.”
“No.”
Ygwa stands in darkness, the darkness of the cave. She is not alone. Before her stands a young woman, one she knows well, but not as well as she’d like: her daughter.
“You should’ve understood what was waiting for me on Earth. The discrimination. The hatred.”
She knows it’s not her, not her girl, but the Monster—the Monster. Trying to cripple her with shame. Shame for failing the people in her life. Shame for failing her family.
“You are not my child. I did not abandon her to the pitilessness of Earth. I entrusted her to her father, and—”
“My father,” the illusion scoffs, “my fool of a father. My father who idiotically followed that oath you forced him to swear, to give no hints of your identity—he should have known the danger. To say nothing of what it meant to me that you would keep secrets meaninglessly! No wonder I reject you both. He should have told you the reality of things—but you, in your stubborn pride, were never one to listen. It would have been a wasted effort…”
“Your father—” She stops herself. “My daughter’s father has his faults, it’s true. He holds privileges in the world that my daughter does not—his perspective is often limited. But that is a fault of his, and more grandly, the corrupt systems of his society—not mine! I am here now, and you will try me and me alone—”
“You’re just looking for an excuse for the fact that you abandoned me. You said you wanted to keep me safe, but you didn’t want the duty of maintaining that safety…”
“No.”
“Yes! You saw my helpless infant form—a newborn—and you cast me away from you. You did everything you could to build chasms between us…”
“No!”
“And you left me in the hands of a moron pilot who couldn’t be trusted to keep me safe! And when at last we were reunited…”
“No!!”
“…you pushed me away, threw me into the jungle. Then you tried to destroy yourself! All to escape the responsibilities you’ve feared and avoided since you were a small child! But you are a small child, Ygwa! You are! You are unfit for the throne, and unfit for your own family!”
Her pride stands—her will endures. She does not accept the thing’s evil speech.
But she cannot stop a cry of lament from issuing from her throat.
* * *
The Monster speaks to Iyosanda too, but it takes no shape. Instead, it is a mere voice in the shadows—an echoing whisper that pierces all the defenses she keeps over her soul.
For it is a matter of the soul, of eternity, that confronts her now. It is her God who speaks to her.
“you know that you shall die alone, woman.”
“That I refuse to accept,” she hisses. She has no weapons, not even a dull knife, but she has her hands. She readies herself for battle, but her opponent is as bodiless as summer fog.
“so violent for one so faithful.”
“The path of the warrior is necessary for my people. An unpleasant but irrefutable truth. We are exiles, in a hostile jungle. You have seen fit to pit us against the degraded descendants of both the Scaled Ones and our own cousins.”
“ah, yes, your ‘inferiors’ among the apes. you serve me well by suppressing those ‘less evolved’ than you. for i am a god of blood and horror and disease. i am a walking blasphemy…”
“No. You are the source of relief, kindness, piety. You are worthy of our faith in you! You will guide us back to our home planet!”
“you are lost. you are lost because you are just a brute. you are too hard, too cold, too lost in warrior’s logic. and you will never transcend those limitations…
“you are a creature of hate. how ironic, that those hated and scorned would someday become the oppressors of those weaker than themselves…”
Now the abomination begins to take shape—now her “God” comes into visibility…
It takes the form of a lunatic drenched in blood. A savage lunatic, dripping with red-hot gore…
The Monarch hears a cry in the dark. For a long moment, she feels like letting out a sound of her own.
But behind her eyelids lives her people. Their courage is her own, resonant and pure.
* * *
Christine senses somehow that she is the only one of her group who is alone. Ygwa has the illusion of her daughter. Iyosanda has the God-impostor.
But she is completely and utterly alone.
There is nothing to see, nothing to hear. Nothing to touch or even smell. All is still and neutral. Unchanging. Unliving.
That solitude would be one thing, but it is not enough for the Monster. Instead the solitude eats away at Christine, dissolving her memories of her knowledge and expertise. With them vanishes her sense of validity—and the loneliness holds sway over every inch of her heart.
An empty house—an empty bed. The tolling of a grandfather clock. A wind without music—
Like the others, she tries to fight back. Even without her hard knowledge she reaches out for aspects of herself. Her love of flowers—her love of beautiful women—the taste of quiche, the smell of ammonia, the crisp smoke of a cigarette. Memories, sensations, crystallized moments in timespace.
She cannot find them.
Her programming takes over, telling her to continue onward against all odds. But…this hopelessness is absolute. The loneliness is complete.
There is no place for you here.
Other women get to have men, because they’re normal. But not you. Even if you met a girl like you, who was one out of teeming millions, she probably wouldn’t even like you.
You wouldn’t know what to do with a lady if you had one.
The anxiety that infects every tender moment—
—it overrides her determination. Her peerless focus.
Iyosanda appears before her, flickering and vague. The image haunts her, twisting up her guts with shame and longing. It is another piece of the thing’s foul mockery. Placed there to remind her of her inadequacies.
But there is something glimmering in the image of the many-legged Queen—something that cannot die, cannot be reduced.
It is the thing that Christine sees in her all the time—the nameless quality that transcends strength and courage.
There—
There comes a yielding…
* * *
She takes Dr. Jenner in her arms and holds her close, bridging their gap with hope. Their strength becomes one, a strength born of unmasked affection. Trauma and terror part, allowing them to remember the one who came here with them.
They reach for her as well.
* * *
And before the thing knows it, they are together—they were always together, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, but they see that now. It cannot keep them apart, no matter how hard it tries. Though it conjures up fresher demons to battle them, their mere proximity to each other reinforces their bravery. Even as a conglomerate of many beings, the Monster itself has a phobia of its own; it is the same fear that haunts Christine.
Furthermore, it is one of those dull binary creatures that is strengthened by one polar attribute and weakened by that attribute’s opposite. For all the courage that flows through them, it grows that much weaker, pound for pound.
But it refuses to give up. It tries changing its form, becoming one of the titanic Venusian war-leaders they battled on Tesuhed, who had nearly killed them all. The image shocks them, but nothing more. They saw those giants defeated, and they know they are far from indestructible.
Next it takes on the form of a great spiny cephalopod, trying to awaken ancestral fears within the trio, from the times when beings beyond the stars ruled Earth. This means nothing to them, and in fact it reinforces that they have the advantage.
Probing Christine’s mind, it summons something that neither Ygwa nor Iyosanda has seen: a bear. A huge devil-bear, smaller than the octopus but armed with long, dagger-like claws and the fangs of a bloody killer.
Christine assures her friends that bears tend more often than not to run from humans. Humans are too brave for them.
The Monster wavers with desperation as it takes on the figure of a man—a tall, pale, emaciated man, with stark, jagged dark clothes and a smile that stretches up over his cheekbones. He has a knife in his hand and insanity in his eyes. But they laugh at the drool that escapes his lips—it’s too camp.
Getting smaller now: a warthog, frothing rabidly at the mouth, tusks at the ready.
They’re still laughing—and that laughter is building. They’re driving it back—back—
Back into the darkness it dreads. The darkness that means oblivion—even to one such as itself.
A feral cat—a tiny imp—a plague-germ—
It sees in them a glimmer of the Old One Ghorgeaux, its old nemesis. It snarls toothily and flashes its claws, but it’s already on its way out. Fading—shrinking—
And then it is gone completely. Taken by the dark.
And soon even the dark is gone.
* * *
The survivors emerged clammy and weary, but alive. The chill of the deep cavern would linger on them for some time, but the warmth of the blue sun would eventually drive it away.
There was also the warmth that came from within. The warmth of triumph. And of friendship.
And for two of them—something more.
“Well,” Christine said, shaking out her tangled hair, “nothing like a little near-death to get the heart pumping.”
“And nothing like a pumping heart to clear the mind,” Iyosanda said. “God works in mysterious ways, my dears. It was not coincidental that we were debating purpose before we crossed that shadowy threshold.”
“What do you mean?” Ygwa asked.
“I think I know what she means,” Christine said. Ygwa was walking ahead of the other two, and so didn’t see it when their hands touched and mingled. “Er, that is to say—I shouldn’t jump the gun.”
“I think perhaps it is time that I seek a consort,” Iyosanda said.
“Oh?” Ygwa replied, still oblivious. “That example helps clarify things. I—”
She turned—and then she saw the hands. And a smile broke out across her face. An approving one.
“I was considering a new role for myself,” she continued. “One which you may both find unexpected.” Then, in a gentle voice: “It seems, however, that we are doing all sorts of unexpected things now.”
Iyosanda, to Christine’s rich surprise, started laughing. “And what is it you desire for yourself, my friend?” Friend—that was an improvement.
“I want to build a better connection to the world my daughter inhabits,” Ygwa said. “And related on that, Your Highness, I have long considered representing your interests on Earth. My role as a mother and traveler has inhibited my dreams of feeding a craving I’ve had my whole life. I want to become an artist. Specifically…a filmmaker.”
“A filmmaker?”
“Yes—making ‘B-movies,’ as my daughter calls them. Low-budget motion pictures. I believe they would make a powerful tool for opening minds to the reunification of your species and humanity. Science fiction can be a great asset for inspiring change.”
Christine found the idea to be a little odd, but she understood it well enough. Iyosanda said:
“Then…you are volunteering to be my—what would we call it?—my public relations representative?”
“Why not? I have always wanted to make art that broadens the view of life across the universe. With your backing, I may have a chance to make that change.”
The ape-queen smiled and said, “I cannot refuse such a sincere offer.”
Christine mirrored her expression, satisfied in her crush’s approval. “Well, Ygwa,” she said. “It seems we’ve answered the harder question. The harder why-we’re-here. At least for now.”
“At least for now,” Ygwa laughed.
The air of Limados was alive. It rang with breezes and birdsong, and the sound of whispering purple palms. Beams of light shimmered like auroras across the sky. And all throughout there could be found the music of hope, of new beginnings.
THE END
~ ~ ~
Kolith was created by Mickey Lewis and appears with his permission.
Kolith weaver ships were created by Scott Alan Woodard and appear with his permission.
Dr. Christine Jenner is from James Tinling’s film Strange Journey (1946), which is in the public domain.
Micromégas, from Voltaire’s 1752 story of the same name, is in the public domain.
“Ghorgeaux” is based on Gorgo, from Bruce Cassiday’s 1960 novel and the 1961-1965 Charlton Comics publication of the same name, which have both entered the public domain. Cassiday’s novel and the first issue of the Charlton series were released prior to Eugène Lourié’s 1961 film Gorgo, which remains copyrighted; the portrayal of the character here is derived exclusively from the original public domain sources. The Venusians, from Joe Gill’s stories “The Venusian Terror” in Gorgo #10 (Dec. 1962) and “Monsters’ Rendevzous” in Gorgo #12 (Feb. 1963), are similarly in the public domain, as is the Fear Monster from Gill’s “The Monster” in Gorgo #8 (Jun. 1962).
The Elder Things and shoggoths were created by H.P. Lovecraft and are in the public domain.
The Lunar Queen is from Doris Wishman’s film Nude on the Moon (1961), which is in the public domain.
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