Echo from the Void (Lunar Lives Book 2), page 1
Echo from the Void
Lunar Lives Book 2
J.T.R. Brown
Copyright © 2024 J.T.R. Brown
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Cover Design by Deranged Doctor Design
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Appendix
A Humble Request from the Author:
Chapter 1
Esrit heard the rustling of prey and readied himself. He assumed the now-automatic position he always did before a pounce: head low, knees slightly bent, feet spread as wide as possible, each claw puncturing through the leaves, moss, and fungus to the wet soil beneath; knots of muscle in his thighs pulled taut, trembling with tension like a string waiting to be plucked; front claws protracted from his hands, pressed gently against the ground, ready to be dug into the plant-flesh of the drosera to tear out its stone heart.
Eddies of mist swirled through the forest, moistening the vibrant pink flowers that clung to vines draped haphazardly throughout the trees. The fog obscured the trunks, turning their hulking, moss-covered surfaces into shadowy specters. The creatures of Echo’s cloud forest created a constant din of noise: buzzing, humming, chirping, howling, and moaning. Esrit waited. His elongated ears sifted through the noise for the wet slap of the drosera’s vines as the mobile plant made its way through the thick foliage. He’d hunted drosera for thousands of years in his lunar life, yet a familiar thrill still went through him, the rare spark in a long existence that often felt bland. A bead of sweat welled in the crease between his eyes and ran through the light, sparse fur on the bridge of his nose before dropping to the forest floor.
Just as he started to relax his legs, convinced the sound had been something else, it came again—a distinct slict, shirk, creak, slict, shirk, creak. He readied himself; it approached from his left, moving toward his center, about ten carriages away. Once the drosera reached the space directly in front of him, Esrit sprang into action. His powerful legs shot him forward, and he became a tawny blur between two ethereal trees obscured by clouds.
When he died on Chancel, he’d been an elderly Indulgent, long since retired from the holy brothels and barely able to stand without a walking stick. When he was reborn on the moon of Echo, he had the body of a strong, lithe, apex predator. Thousands of years after he transmuted into lunar life, he still marveled at his own physical abilities. His preternatural sense of balance and depth navigated him through the tree roots and tangled vines without any conscious thought. He closed the distance between himself and the drosera in a fraction of a wave and was close enough to taste its musty hide on the back of his tongue. The light fur on the back of his neck stood up as he sprang off the ground in midsprint, soared over a waist-high toadstool, and saw the drosera before him. In a split wave he noticed this particular drosera must have been very old: it had at least twenty tentacle-like vines twisted in branches of the trees or coiled up and ready to strike, a thick-looking carapace of bark at the round center where the tentacles spawned from, and a row of thorns edging the bark, promising a painful experience for any hunter who lacked precision.
He landed a few wheels from where the plant hung, suspended between two trees by its prehensile vines. It shot two vines at branches farther up, trying to put distance between itself and Esrit, while at the same time unspooling two vines with sharp thorns on the ends down toward him. He sprang from the ground to one of the tree trunks, digging his front and back claws in as he heard the thorny vines pierce the ground where he had been. His leg and arm muscles flexed, and he jumped from the tree trunk to the suspended plant, feeling the grim satisfaction of his front claws puncturing the plant creature, ripping it from its perch, the two vines suspending it tearing off from its main body.
He’d never gotten used to his prey’s silence. No yelping, mewling, or bleating. Just a frantic rustling on the bed of dead leaves as it thrashed and the damp-sounding uncoiling of its defensive vines at him. He reflexively raised his elbow where the sharp bone spur protruded from his fur in a forward-facing curve, splitting one of the vines. It fell in half in front of him, but the other vine’s thorn caught the fur at his shoulder and grazed his skin. Hissing, he flicked his other elbow spur and cut that vine as well, then tore the plant open with his claws, careful not to catch a thorn as he opened up its body. The vines sagged, curling and uncurling weakly as it lost its animating energy.
He looked down at the drosera for a wave. He’d noticed that the more intricate and developed the defensive vines, bark, and thorns, the bigger the resocite—and this was the largest drosera he’d ever brought down. Twenty vines! Unbelievable. He had often philosophized with his kindred about if the resocite energy simply animated whatever it encountered, or if there was some kind of sentience to its cultivation of a drosera around itself. There were many debates, some fun, some heated, about the nature of the creatures they hunted and the stone within them.
Esrit dug his left claw in deeper and tore a huge hunk of bark from the drosera’s body. A final vine shivered and then ceased to move as he used his right claw to open its torso. Inside, cradled in sinewy plant matter, was the aquamarine stone called resocite. He dug out the valuable item from inside the drosera, then retracted his claws, marveling at the size of the stone he held. It glowed faintly against the skin of his hand, and he licked the sap off it as he rose to his feet and started walking back toward camp. If he wasn’t hunting he preferred to walk as the human he’d been when alive on the home planet of Chancel. It felt like a small connection to the person he had been in his first life.
He cut a path down the ravine, instinctively ducking tree limbs and stepping over thorny ground cover, knowing the path from the hunting ground to the colony of his kindred by heart. A sixth of a tide passed as he walked. He felt the familiar post-hunt emptiness he’d been dealing with for the last few centuries. Lunar life sometimes felt like a boring, repetitive string of monotonous cycles interrupted by occasional moments of excitement that seemed to have a gradually diminishing return. Even sex in the sanctum with other members of his colony felt like a brief distraction, nothing more. He sighed, walking the path with only a cursory awareness of the experience itself. The trees became less dense. The ground less damp. The air less pungent. Finally, as if stepping through a wall, he exited the fog and entered a glade.
Laughs, animated talking, and the sound of wood being chopped filled his ears. At the far edge of the clearing he saw the colony: a few dozen leather tents tied to wooden frames surrounding the larger sanctum tent. A fire burned in the fire pit beside the sanctum. He looked up; twilight had crept in while he’d been hunting. Chancel—a colorful orb of brown, green, blue, and, near the northernmost point of the planet, a perfectly round lavender lake—took up a quarter of the sky. The gray bulk of the moon Edifice began to faintly materialize in the dusk sky, accompanied by the leathery brown hide of Chasm.
He couldn’t imagine worshiping one of the other gods and resurrecting on a different moon. The worshipers of Lunt spent their lunar lives toiling on Edifice in the hive-like network of interconnected stone structures. Gleenites transmuted to Chasm, where their eternity consisted of scrabbling across the surface of a living animal skin that was scarred and mangled by endless storms. No, he thanked Bexlan-Ansibe he’d been reborn on Echo. After many centuries, Echo was his home.
“Esrit, how goes the hunt, my friend?” said Pelsor from where he reclined against a tree, picking dirt from his foot claw.
“Fruitful,” Esrit murmured, holding the resocite up in front of him.
“Son of a Forbearant! That can’t be real,” Pelsor said, jumping up and running toward Esrit, his mane of white-blond hair dancing behind him.
Esrit smirked.
A look of disbelief crossed Pelsor’s face, which then resolved into a grin of boyish wonder. “That’s like the biggest one this cycle! How do you keep finding them?”
Esrit shrugged. “Good ears,” he said, wiggling his oversized ears comically.
Esrit looked at Pelsor and wondered what he had looked like in his first life. All Indulgents were reborn in a body that seemed to be about three-fourths human and one-forth feline. Having seen himself reflected in pools of water, Esrit knew he looked mostly like he’d looked in first life but taller, more muscular, with an overlay of faint fur, claws, longer ears, a broader nose, and sharper teeth. Did Pelsor have blond hair in life? It wasn’t uncommon among Bexlan-Ansibites, but he really didn’t know.
Pelsor snatched t
“That will make our colony popular at tribute time, Es,” came the purring voice of Rekine, a female Indulgent and the informal head of the colony of Indulgents who lived on the east side of the cloud forest. “Maybe you’ll be first into the sanctum tonight.”
She rubbed against him and wound her clawed hands in his mane. “And maybe it will be with me, before the rest of the kindred join,” she whispered, her long tongue flicking against his ear. He purred as she stroked his fur.
A sudden pressure behind his ear disrupted the pleasure of Rekine’s touch. The sensation wasn’t painful, but felt like a rope being pulled taut in the back of his head between his ears. The slight bulge in the back of his head then moved, like a muscle spasming gently. Across his vision, a spectral overlay of his brother in the desert background of his home appeared, speaking and gesturing.
Meet at the usual place in the savannah at Sprel’s Summit, brother, said the psychic imprint of his brother with a gesture of his mole-like claw. The message started over, his brother’s image flickering as he turned his head and lifted his claw. Meet at the—
Esrit pressed behind his left ear and the psychic image ceased. He then pressed behind his right ear and spoke. “Awfully terse, my echo! You never were much for small talk, but a bit of warmth next time you intuit me would be nice! I’ll meet you there at Summit tomorrow.”
Every pair of echoes shared an organ called a conduit at the base of their skull that stretched between each ear that let them communicate with their twin. He knew the message he intuited to his brother would reach his conduit instantly. The brief shudder of his conduit indicating his intuit was received. He loved his brother very much, but he often wished conduits worked with other people besides just your echo. “Sorry, Rekine, if I have to get to the savannah by Sprel’s Summit tomorrow I’ll need to turn in early tonight,” he said, not even trying to hide his disappointment.
Rekine gave a sad little purr. “Pity,” she murmured, then bounded off toward the fire.
When Esrit woke in the morning, he started walking away from the colony, passing the half dozen Mukjalite lunar life refugees. He shivered at their macabre appearance; Mukjalites retained the visual evidence of how their first lives had ended. One young man had a large scar on his chest, having obviously been one of their sacrifices. A woman sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, her twisted spine causing her legs to point away from the group while her face pointed towards it. Had it been an accident? Esrit shivered. Maybe something worse. A female named Urkvlek he’d briefly interacted with a few seasons ago was sharpening a stick with a sharp-edged rock, her neck a collar of purple bruises.
Like all the gods, Bexlan-Ansibe had dutifully taken their share of the Mukjalite refugees who were willing to leave Scab after Mukjal’s banishment and the moon’s abrupt return to its pre-Mukjal state of rocky, gray lifelessness. They stuck to themselves, interacting little with his kindred and used their own devices for hunting the drosera, though they were technically part of the colony.
Urkvlek looked from the semicircle of Mukjalites and nodded to him from her seat on the tree stump. The others all stopped talking. Esrit raised his claw in a tentative wave. None of the refugees were particularly friendly, but Urkvlek did acknowledge the Indulgents and even occasionally interacted with them. Their lunar lives of torture, both as victims and perpetrators, created an uneasy mix of pity and distrust among his kindred. They watched him as he walked down the mountain path, some eyes registering curiosity, others hostility. Urkvlek barked something at them in their dialect and they returned their gazes to watching her fashion the weapon she was making. Esrit smoothed the hair on his back that stood on end, an unfortunate feature of his lunar life body that made discomfort difficult to disguise.
He continued down the mountain toward the spot in the savannah where he and his brother always met. Esrit didn’t give it much thought, but did sometimes wonder how much of his lunar life, and Echo itself, was a literal reality, and how much was the projection of Bexlan-Ansibe’s mind.
In his first life, the worshipers of the gods Bexlan-Ansibe were always born twins, one to be entered into the life of sexual indulgence when reaching maturity, the other set aside to be a Forbearant who would live a life of chastity. Once they died on Chancel and were resurrected on Echo, the twins were separated into groups called kindreds who lived in colonies. The Indulgents lived around the cloud forests in the mountains and hunted drosera to retrieve their tributes to Bexlan-Ansibe, whereas the Forbearants dug intricate tunnel systems in the desert to find the colonies of tubers that contained resocite. The desert environment was terribly difficult for the Indulgent body: nothing to dig their claws into but sand, oppressive heat that made their fur insufferable, and little to no water. Likewise, if Itames, his echo, tried to lug his short, stout, mole-like body up into the cloud forest, he’d be overcome by the humidity and would probably be incapable of even getting up the simplest ravine.
So, twins met in the savannah when they wished to be together, a place of scrub grass and twisted trees, not too dry, not too humid. Not ideal or particularly comfortable for either sibling, but better than the alternative. Esrit guessed Bexlan-Ansibe designed it that way to keep them about their mission of retrieving resocite as opposed to getting too comfortable hanging out with their echo and wasting time.
The walk was a fairly pleasant fourth of a tide from dense cloud forest to flat savannah. The monumental trunks and broad canopy of leafy branches gave way to short, wispy trees no taller than Esrit himself. He waded through the germinating grasses that brushed against his thighs. Spikelets snagged him on occasion, tangling their seeds in his fur to be carried and deposited elsewhere, spreading the prairie’s reach. He saw his brother, Itames, sitting under one of the stunted umbrella trees in the distance, the typical Forbearant satchel, which held some of their smaller mining tools for delicate extractions of resocite, over his shoulder. Far behind Itames, the heat haze of the desert danced, obscuring the rocky brown and orange sand.
As he approached, Esrit raised his clawed hand and snaked one hand held vertically across the palm of his other, the sign of the echo that twins made to each other. Itames nodded and raised his shorter, broader hands, also clawed, but for the purpose of digging as opposed to hunting, and returned the gesture half-heartedly. Esrit cocked his head quizzically, surprised by the less-than-enthusiastic greeting.
“I haven’t seen my echo in a season, and that’s what I get?” Esrit said, smiling.
Itames did not return the smile. He looked thinner. His hairless body barely filled out the wrist-to-ankle linen canvas all Forbearants in lunar life wore. Only his face remained similar to Esrit’s, and you could see they were twins in the shapes of their eyes and curves of their lips. Sweat ran down the side of his face. Itames glanced back over his shoulder, as if wishing to be back in the desert. Forbearants spent most of their time underground, so it wasn’t totally surprising to see him looking sweaty and uncomfortable in the savannah. Still, Esrit could sense something was wrong. He stopped a few wheels from his twin. “What’s wrong, Itames? Tell me, my echo,” he said gently.
Esrit noticed his brother was carrying a pulverizer—a cross between a sledgehammer and pickaxe used by Forbearants to break up rocky soil too hard for simple claw work.
Hesitancy froze Itames’s posture momentarily. A sorrowful look moved across his face like a cloud, and then it was gone, replaced by grim determination.
“Itames, what is this? What’s go—” Esrit started, and then his twin lifted the pulverizer and sprang at him.
Itames’s heavy shoulder struck Esrit, knocking him into the prairie grass. An explosion of insects burst from the disturbed grass and took flight, their indignant chirps ringing in the still air. Only Esrit’s superior reflexes saved him from being cleaved by the pulverizer his twin swung down at him. Esrit sprang to the side, gasping for breath as the pulverizer head buried itself in the dirt.
