“What is the fate of this vessel? What will happen to Demitri Von Cobb?”
He is irrelevant.
Montague La-Rose had been awake for three days, and he’d barely eaten. The little bread that Demitri’s pawns had given him was moldy, sometimes furry and blackened. On the third night, he finally fell asleep at the late hours in the Ikarus dungeon against the hard corner of a dusty cell. But when he woke, hours later, he was somewhere else.
It seemed like a cave, similar to the ones Burton would take him, but with breathtaking stonework. Whoever built this strange place assembled the rocks beautifully, he thought. But the discomfort in his back told him that he had badly injured himself. If he remained still, the pain was minimal. But when he tried to move, it hurt so bad he nearly blacked out. What happened?
There was a small fire lit beside him and a steaming pool of crystal water to his right. The floor beneath the thick cushion he was lying on was carpeted. There were small, round glass balls hanging throughout the stone space illuminating light. It felt warm and smelled clean—fresh, with the unlikely aroma of flowers and hazelnut.
As Montague’s eyes focused, the rock that he thought was beside him was actually a head—a human head. Not a decapitated head, but a head that was still alive and breathing. There was no body underneath its large face. By the mustache and thinning hair, he assumed that the head was a man. His arms stretched out from under his ears and his feet extended out from where his neck would be on a normal person. There was a second head peeking from behind the one closer to Montague.
“Hello,” the head said with an uneven smile.
“Where am I?”
“Miles beneath the surface,” said the head.
“Forgive my ignorance, but what are you?” Montague asked.
“Your people know us as trolls,” he said.
“What do I call you, master troll?”
The head lifted his bushy eyebrows, “Master? I have never been called that before. You are too kind. I am Eggward Puft,” he bowed. “And you are Montague La-Rose of course. I have been taking care of you,” he said.
The other troll held out his hands and gave Eggward a more crooked face than he already wore.
“I mean, we have been taking care of you,” Eggward said, trailing off.
“Why do I feel like my back is broken?” Montague asked.
“We had a little accident getting you out of the Ikarus dungeon,” Eggward said, looking meanly at the other head next to him. “When we collapsed the floor you were entombed in rubble. But we dug you out. Grimm here was supposed to catch you when you came down, but he dropped you instead.”
Picking his nose, the one called Grimm looked away ignoring what Eggward said. “Sorry,” he mumbled to Montague.
“But don’t worry, these dansyl cloths will heal you right up,” Eggward said.
“Gretchen,” Montague said dizzily, trying to get up.
Eggward held him down. “Please, rest. I assure you Gretchen is safe.”
“Are you human?” Montague asked. Despite the strange anatomy, their faces looked human.
“We are Nekrums, Montague. And there are more of us here, beneath the ground—many more.”
Montague examined him and he knew Eggward was telling the truth by the look in his eyes.
“We were the first of our kind to feel empathy for another species,” Eggward said. “We abandoned the Nekrum mission. But when the humans at the time first saw us, they tried to kill us. So we stayed underground.”
“Burton told me that there were Nekrums who had rebelled against their own kind. But he never called you ‘trolls’. He just called you his friends.”
“We know Burton Lang very well. For five hundred years our civilization has been part of the Resistance he organized.”
“I am aware of the disease that your people carry. When did it happen?” Montague asked.
“The epidemic began about two millennia ago. How? No one knows. But my people blame the one, creator of all five realms,” said Eggward.
“What do you think?”
“I think we did this to ourselves.”
More questions came to Montague’s mind. “So how did you all survive this long, unable to reproduce?”
“This place is not an underground cave; it is an old Nekrum scout craft equipped with some of the same technology as our mothership, even cloning. So, technically, most of us here are just clones.”
Grimm kept on picking his nose. He would look at his finger then wipe the snot across the back of his head, lifting his long, thin hair.
“But others, like myself, have been in and out of biofreeze, preserving our bodies and souls. I am the real Eggward Puft. I chose to awaken during this time. I couldn’t pass up the chance to witness the change of an age. Hopefully, one day, the Nekrum race will shed its stigma and reclaim its benevolent reputation and divine right to reproduce. Then, my people can live without the fear of extinction.”
Montague studied the dozens of heads gathering around him.
“Cloning was the greatest mistake of my ‘brilliant’ people,” said Eggward. “But it was only the beginning of their madness. The idea led to terrible things. They began to create monsters. They thought they could animate biology manually without a soul to operate it. But they soon realized that the energy a soul contains is far superior to any artificial energy source. And a soul can only enter biology when the conditions are right for the body to support itself.”
“Cloning might have led to madness, but its initial purpose may have saved your race.”
“I, myself, am not excluded from blame for I have contributed my share of damage. I am the one responsible for changing Naan’s written history,” Eggward said, shamefully.
Montague was shocked that this kind, level-headed, well-mannered person would do such a thing.
Eggward continued, “I was good at telling tales so my people forced me to write an origin story against my will. It was completely fictional although its
