by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Voyage of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer to read in e-book or paperback form, learn more here. Or if you want, skip ahead to the next chapter.
Kynnis put four of her pudgy green hands against her face and wrapped another two around her nauseated middle. She could feel the soft skin of her face wrinkling and cracking, preparing to split open. It was too early. Much too early. She wasn’t supposed to go through her chrysalis phase for years yet, but she could feel it happening. “I’m scared,” she said.
“Should I take you home?” Korvax asked, his pointy muzzle twitching to one side in the funny way he had. The quills on his back rattled, fluffing out with worry for his young friend. She was only a child. He shouldn’t have agreed to bring her up in his spaceship to see her world from a distance. But she’d pleaded so prettily, and he was a sucker for enthusiasm. A fool, as all of his own people had always said. That’s how he’d ended up traveling so far away, making himself part of an entirely different world, surrounding himself with an entirely different people — aliens who looked like butterflies when they were fully grown. He loved living among them.
“I think… it’s too late,” Kynnis said, and those were the last words she ever spoke with her caterpillar lips. They shriveled away, leaving a smooth, crystalline surface underneath. A faceless face.
Korvax crouched beside his young friend, pleading and coaxing, “Don’t die, don’t die.”
Kynnis wanted to reassure him, but her old mouth was gone, and the new one wasn’t finished forming. She wasn’t dying. But she was changing. Korvax had never seen one of the Ollallans he lived among transform from child to adult. Mostly, he lived among the children, knowing they transformed but not knowing what it looked like. So, he didn’t know this was normal. Technically, normal. Physically, normal. Just… early. So very, very early.
Kynnis wasn’t ready.
But she had to be ready.
It was happening.
Like her mouth, now her eyes began to crack and crumble. Her vision fractured, then grew milky around the cracks. The milkiness spread, placing a film between herself and the outside world. She could still see Korvax, but the vision was blurry. Only a dark shape, kneeling over her. Then even his voice began to grow muffled, as if he were speaking to her through a pane of glass.
And Kynnis found herself separated from the outside world. All the parts of her that had interfaced with the outside world — eyes, aural canals, mouth, and even her pudgy green hands and feet — were withering away as replacements grew inside. But right now, she was a soupy, gooey mush of organs, rearranging and restructuring. Maturing. It was terrifying. And exciting.
Why was this happening? Had she done something wrong? Something that triggered her chrysalis phase so many years earlier than it should have come?
Kynnis spent all her time with Korvax, the funny quill-backed Xantrosian. She ate the strange foods he cooked, played with the high-tech devices he’d brought from his world, and had even let him take her up in his spaceship to see her world from above the sky.
But questions of why faded from Kynnis’s mind as the world outside faded farther and farther away. Questions of why were related to memories, and the deeper her mind fell inside itself — with nothing external to draw her thoughts away — the more she found herself pondering different futures.
“The past is already chosen. The future is full of possibilities.”
The words echoed in Kynnis’s mind, larger than any thought she’d ever had before. As if someone was speaking to her. Someone so large, so large she could hardly conceive of them. As large as an entire world. Her mind felt almost too small to hold such words. And yet, the meaning of them became crystal clear to her: she could see the threads, the pathways, the different options for the future, as if she were looking at a tangle of yarn. A spider’s web of futures opened up in front of her, and she saw the threads glisten, sparkling like dew drops on strands of nearly invisible silk.
Her mind was at the center. All she had to do was: choose.
Choose a thread.
Choose a path.
Choose the reality that would become real, the one she would emerge into as a full grown Ollallan, wings still wet and waiting to unfurl.
She would have wings! In every future, she would have wings.
Kynnis had always known that one day she would have wings, but that day had always seemed so far off. That was why she had begged Korvax to take her beyond the sky on his funny metal spaceship that didn’t look like it should be able to fly. She hadn’t been able to wait.
“Which path will you take, little one?”
The voice was filled with warmth and love.
Kynnis considered the possibilities. She saw paths that led to long lives surrounded by children — caterpillars of her own, who she would hatch and raise with Korvax’s help. In every path, he stayed her steadfast friend. Kynnis’s mind slid from one path to another, each bright and shining. There were so many choices, but many of them were marred by a great darkness, looming and overshadowing the happiness.
Then — away from the great tangle of threads, all twisted together, all similar in many ways — Kynnis saw one path, unlike the others.
A short life. A single egg laid which she wouldn’t live to see hatch, but Korvax would tend to it and raise the caterpillar who hatched.
And oh, the life of that child!
Kynnis saw faces around her potential, hypothetical, possible child — funny, fuzzy, furry faces. More mammalian creatures — like Korvax, but also different — would come to her world, and her child would meet them.
Could meet them.
If Kynnis chose that path.
But better yet?
The looming darkness, the overshadowing cloud didn’t mar that path. The thread glistened brightly as far as Kynnis could see into the future. Somehow, the funny, fuzzy, furry faces kept the darkness away.
If Kynnis understood what she was seeing with her newly multi-faceted eyes, still growing inside her chrysalis-ensconced self, she had the chance to save her entire world by choosing the right path.
Her choice became no choice. How could she choose a long life for herself at the expense of her entire people?
Kynnis’s mind snapped into place, and the visions of alternate realities, a whole multiverse of possible futures, began to fade. All that was left was a singular, certain vision that would haunt and tantalize her for the rest of her days, the entirety of her life to come, her life with wings.
The image was of a feline face, gray and fluffy, with piercing green eyes that stared mysteriously at Kynnis from a future she wouldn’t live to see.
But her daughter would.
Continue on to Chapter 2…