Chapter 1: An Abandoned Creature

1-1 First Breath in 1000 Years

After an age of silence, there came a hissing sound. This sound was misinterpreted by a sleeping brain as the presence of a lord. Conditioned to heed such a sound, the creature gradually regained consciousness. It felt a chill, as cold air seeped into its tiny chamber.

Opening its eyes, it saw vague lights and shadows obscured through frosted glass. A dark figure approached. The figure touched the glass, wiping away frost and fog with a hand. There was something off about the shape of the hand. It seemed to have an extra finger. The figure backed away. A man's voice spoke quietly. A higher-pitched voice replied; a woman? Or was it a young boy? The words were unintelligible.

As the glass moved upward and out of sight, there came an overwhelming feeling of coldness, as frigid air entered lungs which had lied empty for so long. Exposed skin formed goosebumps.

The man said something again. There was a questioning tone to it, but the language was unfamiliar. The creature answered slowly and unevenly, its vocal cords vibrating for the first time in a thousand years. The man just stared.

There were two others with him. One was a girl who looked on the cusp of adulthood. The other, hanging further back in caution, was a teen boy.

All three of them had similar features: black hair, brown eyes, dusky skin the color of dark wood. They all had the same sort of hands: four curiously short fingers and a thumb. They wore simple, draping clothes accented with bright colors. Though their fingers and their pigmentation were strange, they otherwise looked like ordinary servants.

The creature slowly stepped out of its sleeping capsule. This simple movement was laborious. It saw a box at its feet. It stooped to open it without thinking, driven by subconscious memory. It reached in, thinking to clothe itself. But where it imagined clothes, there were only a few moth-eaten threads of brittle cloth.

Something not exactly cloth remained. It was neatly folded into a square, but it had a rubbery, scaly texture. The dried out skin of some great reptile. The creature picked it up and held it to its chest. It didn't know why, but the thing brought up a vaguely affectionate, almost reverent feeling. It put the folded skin back into the box.

There was another object in the box. Its cloth handle was crumbling, but the tool itself was one solid piece of metal, perfectly intact. It was a knife-like thing, though it ended in a round hook. The outer edge was blunt, while the tip and inner part of the hook were razor sharp. The creature didn't know what it was for, but it felt familiar and comforting. The three observers tensed up when the creature raised the thing, but when it made no sudden movements, they relaxed a little.

1-2 First Contact

The creature shivered as it beheld the onlookers. Its mind was a haze. The man untied a rolled blanket from his pack, unfurled it, and cautiously held it out.

Unable to resist the warmth on offer, the creature pounced. Dropping the hook-knife and ignoring the blanket, it clawed at the man, reaching under his loose shirt so that its fingers touched his belly. The man gasped and toppled to the ground. The creature fell on top of him, fingers held firm in animal need.

The girl recoiled, stumbling backward. But the boy, wielding a hefty tree limb which had been fashioned into a simple staff, laid heavy blows upon the creature's back. It moaned. The kick of a boot then shoved it away. Now slumped alone on the floor, the creature cowered, shielding its face with its hands. It felt another smack against its arms. But then the blows stopped.

The man, still on the ground, had staid the younger's hand with words alone. The man now looked pale and sick, and he was already shivering from the heat transference. But after the man spoke, the boy reluctantly lowered the staff and stepped back.

The creature reached out for the blanket, which was now lying on the ground. It rolled the blanket neatly, and, though still cowering, held it out with one hand. A peace offering. Still shivering, the man cautiously took it, unfolded it, then draped in over the creature's shoulders. Unfurling his pack, he retrieved another blanket for himself.

The strangers exchanged more words among themselves quietly. They inspected the man for wounds, and saw the marks on his belly were only scratches and pinpricks from where the creature's fingers had clung. Then, they seemed to debate something. The boy was animated; the man was calm and firm. The girl made some kind of suggestion, to which the man considered seriously for a moment, then nodded.

1-3 Slate Conversation

The girl stepped forward, holding a slate tablet. The boy stood to the side, quarterstaff in hand, seemingly ready to strike, but he waited. The girl's face was a mixture of caution and determination. With a piece of chalk, she drew two glyphs, a subject and a verb. Then, she added a diamond-shaped glyph before the other two, indicating a question.

The creature spoke. The girl shook her head. The creature stepped forward, and the girl instinctively took a small step back, like a scared animal. The creature persisted, took the tablet from the girls hands, wiped away the chalk and drew a triangle. For its kind, this was the first and most essential word.

The girl seemed pleased by the sight of this glyph. She wrote more.

"Mitra," said the girl, holding up the tablet and pointing to herself with the other hand. Then she pointed at the creature.

When the creature did not respond right away, the girl erased the glyph and tried again with greater care.

The creature took the tablet, then hesitated. It was a simple question, but... the creature's mind, much like its body, seemed to still be warming up. It gently slumped onto the floor. After a long pause, it wrote three glyphs.

Here, Mitra encountered her first challenge, and this made her anxious. Her ability to translate might determine the outcome of this whole encounter. She felt the creature's golden, vaguely predatory eyes on her. Her father and brother also watched.

The swirly thingy meant knowledge or understanding, which she had herself just used as a verb earlier in the same way. So she initially read it as "I know past." She wasn't clear if this was the creature's name, or if it was an unrelated message. If there was a way the ancients denoted proper nouns, she wasn't aware of it.

Then, she realized the swirl was vertically flipped here. She recalled her studies. An inverted glyph conveyed a related but opposite or otherwise inverted meaning, often denoting that the right-side-up noun was missing or hollow. You could flip "communication" to get "deception," for example. So flipped knowledge was... ignorance or misconception, maybe? Something like that. And it was related to the past...

Self (subject), Ignorance (verb), Past (object). Reasoning it out, Mitra spoke aloud to herself quietly. "So you don't remember." The creature, of course, didn't understand the spoken words. For another moment, the girl talked with the man privately. Carefully and with some visible uncertainty, she wrote a longer construction.

It was the creature's turn for confusion. The first three glyphs were a straightforward sentence, "we are friends." But the last three formed a complex modifier, likely to denote what exactly they were friends of. The water and body glyphs together meant blood. The last glyph was an inverted heat glyph. An odd choice, but perhaps the girl didn't know the glyph for "cold."

That didn't clarify much, however. The creature wrote a reply.

Mitra pointed to the creature. "You."

The creature considered this. Its ability to consider things was rapidly increasing as time went on. This was good. Judging by the abundance of warmth it was able to absorb from the man, these strange people were warm-blooded mammals, like wolves or monkeys. "Coldblood," then, was a sensible label from their perspective.

Mitra talked again to the man. The boy chimed in this time, too. Mitra wrote more glyphs.

The creature -- the coldblood -- stood up. Mitra wrote more. This time, she wrote at length and with confidence.

The coldblood understood the question, but ignored it. Instead, it wrote:

The coldblood watched the girl for an answer. The girl only frowned. A hint of sadness seem to come over her. Then she led the coldblood to a nearby chamber in the cave, and pointed. There were two more sleeping pods. But no light came from them. The coldblood approached and looked closely. It wiped away frost from the glass, revealing the shriveled flesh of a long dead creature. The other chamber was the same.

Mitra wrote on the tablet. Here motions were less eager, more solemn. Twice, she began a message and erased it, before settling on something simpler.

After holding up this simple message for a minute, the girl continued.

Mitra hesitated again, writing more.

But the coldblood didn't answer. It refused the tablet. It turned away.

1-4 Leaving the Cave

When the coldblood's eyes adjusted to the overwhelming whiteness, shapes became clear. The cave opened onto a mountainside with a brilliantly lit vista of the mountains beyond. The jagged outline of these mountains on the horizon was familiar. But the colors were wrong. Everything was white. The coldblood felt a vague memory that these sights were supposed to be green and brown, with lush vegetation growing through sandy soil.

Quite close by, on the sloped mountainside, a group of people were gathered. They were the same sort as the other three, with similar clothing and features, about fifty in all. Among them were two dozen beasts. They were a kind of bird, stocky and flightless, with long flexible necks and strong, bony legs. They were the size of horses and were loaded with an assortment of travel packs.

One by one, the people took notice of the coldblood. They talked among themselves. Some were trying not to stare, while other stared openly.

Mitra quietly appeared beside the coldblood, writing on the tablet.

Leading the coldblood into the midst of the others, she gestured to a pot of water which had evidently been recently taken off the fire.

the coldblood walked toward it instinctively, not out of thirst -- for its desire for food and drink was still dormant -- but because the puff of steam was a sign of warmth. The coldblood cautiously touched the metal and found it was just cool enough to touch. It held its face over the bucket and felt the steam.

In the bucket, the coldblood saw its reflection. It saw a woman not entirely dissimilar from these travelers it now stood among. But not entirely like them, either. Her skin was a colorless light gray with a smooth texture, like wet clay. Subconsciously, she found this grayness reassuring. A sign of health.

Her nose was only a small bump, with nostrils almost flat against her face. Her eyes were golden, with a faintly metallic sheen, like a cat's eye. Pale blonde hair framed the face. She smoothed the hair down with water as she examined her face carefully. It was not the face of a stranger. Between the sight of it and the warmth of the bucket, a sense of self came into view. She felt an ongoing shift in her mentality, a shift which had begun from her first awakening but was now becoming clearer. A shift from the instinctual to the intellectual. She still could not call to mind any clear memories, but she did not feel entirely lost. She felt calm, after the disposition of her kind.

She looked at her hands, which she had not consciously done until now. They featured three long, bony fingers and a thumb, tipped with sharp, claw-like fingernails. These, too, were familiar, unlike the oddly small, five-fingered hands of the brown-skinned travelers. She glanced at the group of them on the hillside. Many were still watching her, others were at least pretending to get on with their various tasks. Humans, Mitra had said they were called. They seemed to be a primitive race, but at least they were communal, civil. The structure of their hierarchy was not immediately clear.

She drank the water, savoring its warmth.

Mitra was nowhere to be seen, but a few moments later she appeared again, together with the man and the boy. The coldblood got the impression they had just discussed something at length. Mitra presented the tablet.

"Menesa," said Mitra aloud, pointing at the coldblood. "Menesa."
Mitra wrote more.

Questions for Writing Workshop

1. How interesting is the language stuff to you?
2. How can I improve the use of perspective here? We're mostly seeing things as the coldblood whose mindset changes over time, and then there's brief detours into Mitra's POV. The labels for characters also change as the scene goes on. I wonder if it's too messy or complicated.
3. The physical conflict near the beginning (where the coldblood pounces the man) is something I added later in order to better tie into later events. So, it wasn't really considered when I wrote the slate conversation that follows. Do you think this conflict was resolved too quickly or without enough apparent consequence?
4. What do you think of the mood and atmosphere?