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History
Addendum 1. Rays
of Moonlight
Ignace looked up at the main buildings of the Whispering Plains
with his grey eyes and wondered if he should make his presence known to the inhabitants of the planet. Somehow he thought he might better wait a little while longer. Ignace wasn't psychic, not at all, his talents lay elsewhere, but he had learnt that trusting his instincts usually proved to be better in the long run.
The young man, his head framed by a set of fuzzy curled blond hair hanging
to his shoulders, turned away from the large structure that dominated the plains on this locale. Stars twinkled over his head in a way he had not seen on Earth, but his memories gave him enough visions to not be taken in by the sight. There had been other places of equal beauty. Usually, beautiful places meant trouble. There was always someone around to chase away intruders, and he could not deny to himself that that was what he was. An intruder.
Reaching his hideout in a small cluster of trees and a pleasant grassy bed, he went through the actions that had gotten him there once again. Two years ago would probably have been the start of the events. A cold and harsh winter was sweeping over Europe and it had been hard for someone of his talents to stay in the cold outside...
***
"You!" a harsh male voice had called.
Ignace looked up startled and saw that his body had brought him out of the cold's reach and inside the house where he lay in front of the fireplace. Shaking his head wearily he jumped to his feet and ran as fast as he could. Safe, he remembered laying down in the stable of the mansion, but not entering. This was not an isolated event. As long as he could remember, he had been sleepwalking, changing places as he slept. He had never had a real home, and after his mother died, Ignace had just stopped caring where his sleepwalking brought him.
Ignace sighed and vanished in the crowd of people walking to and fro on a morning market. His stomach grumbled and he knew that there would be no food unless he begged, or stole. Of the two, stealing was the most appealing.
Looking for just the right stall, intent on finding food, he failed to notice the two men watching his every move. If he had, he would have known that running was the appropriate thing to do to stay alive. The two, both tall, muscled, wearing trench coats and sun glasses stared at him with a cold gaze from behind the morning paper. They had been after him for a year know.
If only he had known that morning, so many problems could still have been avoided then, if he just had known. But he hadn't. Sighing, Ignace continued with the movie of his life, playing in his head.
He had seen the apple, juicy, green and nobody to watch it... Grabbing it and walking away he had still been noticed. There weren't many strangers in this part of France. Running for his freedom again, Ignace looked frantically around... and saw them. The two that he thought he had gotten away from were on his tail again. With the crowd parting before them, expecting them to arrest him for theft, they advanced far faster than he.
The two started smiling as they got closer. Their smile was like that of a shark's, mad and
rabid, with the knowledge that they had their prey. Running behind Ignace into the dead end street they saw nothing.
"Merde." one of them exclaimed angrily, looking behind crates and containers, but it was clear to both that Ignace was gone once again.
*
Ignace opened his eyes wide as he found himself back in the forest he had been in earlier that week. Why was he here? How had he gotten here? Turning circles he started looking for the two men that
had followed him. Half and half, he expected to see the busy street on one end of the forest and the trees on the rest, but he could not deny what his eyes saw. The same forest, the same clearing where he had spent the night last
Monday.
Sitting down sadly he vaguely remembered other occasions like this. Sleeping in a park and then being half a city away from it without anyone having seen him pass through the richest neighbourhoods. He laughed bitterly.
"Not to mention being in that house this morning. Did you see a stable in the yard?"
Fearing he had lost his mind, Ignace set to pacing. he needed to solve this now. How had he gotten here?
"The same way you always go." a voice inside his head told him, "The way you and your mother used to travel before."
Shuddering he tried to push that voice down. He didn't want to think of his mother, long dead and burned to ashes. Losing her had been like dieing himself. But soon memories bubbled to the surface. Being in city, after city, after city. Cities he
now knew lay half the country apart from each other. He remembered nights spend in houses and early wakes to leave without opening a door.
Memory after memory he pieced together his early years where it had seemed no more than normal that things like this could happen. Magic had still been represented in his view on life and reality, but it had faded over the years when he had learnt that not one of the fairy tale
creatures existed for real, that not one of them had helped him in times of peril. That realisation had been hard, but necessary. he wouldn't have survived if he hadn't learned to say goodbye to his childhood dreams.
And now this.
Looking at his hands, he wondered if he had made grand gestures with his hands before he had vanished. He could remember nothing of the sort, but the entire event was hazy in his mind. He could remember turning the corner and that was about it.
Thinking of the street he had been in, he wondered briefly if he might have lost the agents for good. But the chance was that he had pulled this stunt in his sleep before. They had found him
still. He wasn't at all sure if he would ever be able to lose them as long as he was on the planet. He would never be safe from them. That realisation was very depressing, seeming to weigh down on him like a house.
Seeing the street in his mind he couldn't help but wonder where his apple was.
Suddenly he was there again. Startled, he looked around and saw the two agents look at him with
big eyes. Ok, so they hadn't known how he managed to escape from them time after time, but they would suspect it now. He needed no spurring to want to be in his forest again more than anything, he could smell the soil, feel the absence of wind and hear that same wind rustle in the tops of the trees.
Opening his eyes he was there again. With his apple. He couldn't even remember grabbing it. Or had he just taken it from the street as he had gone back to the forest?
Things remained cryptic for a good while after, but slowly, Ignace managed to take advantage of his skills. He soon learned to teleport into stores he saw, being able to take what he needed and be gone before anyone noticed him. He pondered about doing more than just stealing what he needed, but decided against it. He just might as well curse his luck that way. For he still was lucky.
One year passed and he found himself in America. He had been practicing teleporting to pictures
he saw on TV and in books, appearing there at night with no-one to watch him. Sleeping there, he found, was hard. For some
reason he always teleported to some fence on a dirt road. He knew not where it was, but he kept appearing there when he let his attention slip for a moment or two.
Believing again in the power of magic, though not as hard as he had once before, he sought to learn as much of it as he could. Which was little. It was a military facility, classified and considered a huge secret. Whenever he did manage to teleport inside he could not even get close to the laboratories or archives, though he did see people running about, a woman with a mechanical toy lizard. A woman with a skull, a man with cold blue eyes and the uniform he expected to see around here. But also at times, a young man with a guitar,
a man constantly mumbling to himself about work that needed to be done, and a woman in long skirts and blouses with a devious smile on her face. She was the one that scared him the most.
And then they were gone. Wherever he went in the buildings he could not find them anymore. A few months after, still trying to figure out what had happened, Ignace found a note hanging on a blackboard. Carelessly asking for people to embark on a lifelong mission in space. Why ever people would want to join such a mission was beyond him. But he felt himself drawn to the possibility, thinking that if he went in space, he could make an entirely new identity for himself. The agents who he still saw occasionally, chasing him away in an instant would not follow him in space.
Three months later still he had found himself on Cyatri. Given only the basic of information about the goals of the mission. Dragons, a new weapon of mass destruction. It all seemed so unlike the people he had seen. And as he learnt more of the planet, he saw that it was in fact different. The bond between dragon and human was needed by both, deeper and more friendly than he had held possible.
He had teleported of course. Living of food he could muster from the separate colonies, dragon communities they were called. Somehow the calling had diminished, but it was still there, as he would soon find out...
***
Waking, Ignace found himself outside his hideout of trees.
"Great." he mumbled, "Just what I needed, "Another teleport."
Looking up he found himself in a forest. For a moment it looked like the forest he had been in when he had learnt of his gift. It was a dreadful moment in which he feared teleporting back to earth.
Soft chirps reached him and a flimsy creature flew up to him. The animal was pink with a small grey body and huge transparent wings that seemed to float through the air as if in water. There was only one place he could be seeing this creature.
"Eiken Forest." he knew, "Still on Cyatri."
The flimsy dragonfly flew toward him and gently placed itself on his shoulder, leaving a cold-hot-tickling sensation where it touched his face. Humming happily the dragonfly seemed not about to let go.
Sighing Ignace pondered if he could teleport the dragonfly with him, or if he should just leave the extravert creature where it was. Deciding on the latter he envisioned his
thicket and tried to make contact with the image, as if stepping through a mirror with his eyes closed.
When he opened them he was still in the forest. Ignace barely could remember the last time that had happened. He was certain he had mastered most of his talent, but then why couldn't he teleport? With a suspicious look he turned to the pink dragonfly:
"Well, maybe you can point me in the right direction." he shrugged. he had learned early in his year on Cyatri that the critters might look placid and no brighter than a fly, but in fact knew more than they let on. And indeed, the dragonfly lifted one of it's tails and pointed South, where the sun was just climbing toward the top.
Ignace shrugged again and headed South, it was as good a direction as any.
***
"I should have never trusted something with as tiny a brain as you." he said irritated when half an hour later he was deeper into the forest than where he had entered it.
Standing knee deep in thorny bushes he could move only slow if he wanted to keep his clothes together.
Since he hadn't brought a spare change... He had tried several times to teleport, but something was blocking his powers he felt. Something he couldn't pinpoint, but was not the pink dragonfly. Apparently that wasn't in it's reach, though chirping the same cheery song over and over was.
He had looked angrily into it's direction, even yelled at it, but never had the dragonfly so much as stopped to consider if it might be the cause of all the aggression.
Suddenly the dragonfly flew up and started floating a few steps before him.
"So you want to go there?" he asked, "Well I'll just go the other way and then I'm sure I'm heading out."
Ostentatively taking a step to his right, Ignace suddenly felt the ground below his feet give way. Yelling and cursing in fluent French he fell into a nest of some sort. Bears came to mind, as did rats and bunnies though the hole seemed too big for either of those possibilities.
Getting to his feet at the bottom of the nest, Ignace heard Pinku - the name he had given his dragonfly - chirp happily. Apparently the little pest thought he was playing a game.
Ignace opened his lighter and took a step back when he saw a clutch of eggs guarded by a very angry looking camouflage dragoness. Ignace immediately took a step back, tripping over an egg that lay behind him, crashing to the floor with his arms and legs getting tangled with the egg and the loose branches that lay all around the nest.
The dragoness roared as his clumsiness endangered one of her children and towered above him with fiery eyes, when suddenly a smaller form, dark green, with a ridge of thorny spikes on it's back looked from under her at him.
"I like this one mummy. please don't kill him."
The way it was said, so matter of fact, made Ignace seriously doubt the reports the researchers had sent to earth about the calm nature of these dragons.
"I am calm." the male hatchling said to him, "Ignace."
"How do you know my name?" he asked.
"You know mine too." the hatchling said, "Remember."
"Tepiek." he said, "But that doesn't make any sense."
"The best things in life don't make sense." the hatchling said, "Just accept and you'll be happy that the sky is blue and that the snow on the mountains can be both cold and warm."
"Somehow I think you didn't pick your name at random." Ignace snorted, "If you're a forest dragon
then why do you talk of the mountains?"
"They're pretty, of course." Tepiek said with a blank look on his face, "Mommy will help you up and out of the forest. She also insists that I take you to the main buildings to register for a job."
"A job?" Ignace asked.
"Finding people to bond my brothers and sisters. We could use the likes of you around here." With an all-knowing childish smile the hatchling nudged his legs and said: "No more hiding for you."
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