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I stumbled back and landed hard on my ass. No matter how much I denied it, there was no mistaking that the bird-dragon was real, very real. And if I didn’t want it to swoop down and pick me up to eat for lunch, I needed to get my butt in gear and literallyget off my ass.
I scrambled to my feet, kicked my ridiculous high heels off, and made a run for the trees, hoping they would hide me from the flying creature… or at least give me coverage so it couldn’t get me. Years of sitting in libraries and behind desks, as well as a ton of pastries and junk food, came back to haunt me, and I promised any deity who would listen that I would take better care of my body if I was spared from becoming a creature’s lunch—a creature that shouldn’t exist.
Huffing and puffing, I ran my thirty-pounds-overweight body closer to the trees while the screeching became louder. I could almost feel it breathing down my neck as I imagined its sharp teeth and talons digging into me. Panic caused me to run toward the trees in a straight line since it offered the shortest distance.
Some long-forgotten lizard brain part came to life, making me realize the kind of easy target I was making for a predator aboveme and I veered to the right. Just in time for sharp claws to miss me by a hair's breadth.
As it was, I felt the air stir around me, heard the loud flapping of oversized wings, and cried out, throwing myself to the ground. Scraping my knees, I somehow stumbled back onto my feet. I didn’t dare look behind me, sure that the sight of the beast would paralyze me.
With a jump I would have never thought my body capable of, I catapulted myself forward, straight into a thick bush. Thorns grabbed for me, ripped my clothing and some of my skin, but I didn’t care because, as I looked up, I caught sight of an elongated beak with sharp teeth, readying to make a go for me.
I kicked at the beak, while crab-scrambling backward. By the mercy of some god, I made it deeper into the forest. The bird, robbed of its prey, let out another protesting screech. Blindly I ran through the foliage, where the dense trees made it impossible for the bird and its ginormous wingspan to follow. I only stopped when I nearly collided with a thick trunk. I used the tree to lean on and catch my breath. My heart hammered so wildly inside my chest, I feared I would die of a heart attack now that I had escaped the bird.
A hysterical giggle ran through me because, in my mind, I was still calling the creature a bird. The giggle, however, died instantly when words like Pteranodon, Archaeopteryx, Pterodactylus, and Quetzalcoatlus—the names of long-extinct flying dinosaurs—entered my mind.
I was a paleontologist, I should have known the name of the bird that had nearly killed me, but it hadn’t stopped long enough to allow me to study its wingspan, beak, and bone structure. And without knowing what era I was in—
That stopped me cold.
Era?
I shivered violently. Had I somehow traveled back in time? Or had somebody brought dinosaurs back to life, like in the movies? For some reason, my mind remained reasonable enough to discard the latter theory based on my strange surroundings. If somebody hadmerelybrought dinosaurs back to life, there was no reason for my hotel to have vanished into thin air. No, this was bigger.
My heart rate, which had barely slowed, picked back up. There was only one explanation.
I had traveled back in time.
Another dreadful day loomedahead of me. No matter how beautiful it was here, the fact remained the same. I was stranded on an alien planet.
The Manx, whose prisoner I still was even though I was free, had attacked my home planet, Jahrle, nearly causing the extinction of my species. They had killed most of my people and taken over our planet to incorporate it into their greedy, ever-consuming system.
I had never seen it as a mercy from the gods that I had been spared, like some of my fellow ex-prisoners did. For me, it had always been a punishment to be alive while so many were dead.
Never again would I be able to explore the green mountains of my home, or dive into the deep waters of our oceans. I would never fight in the Calt Games again—a contest that marked the strongest, most fearsome warrior of our clan.
Being a warrior was everything in our society. A warrior protected his people, his town, his family. It was all I had ever wanted to be, besides being a good leader. Unfortunately, the Manx came right before I was able to defend my title.
Like so many other species before, my people—the Vhar’Khyngs—didn’t stand a chance against the Manx’s advanced technology. Over the thousands of years that they have been attacking other planets, nobody had ever been able to defeat them, as I later found out. We hadn’t even known spaceflight existed at the time. My people were killed or taken prisoner, like me, and brought aboard ships that would take us to Primus 2, a planet filled with who they deemed undesirable—a prison planet.
Aboard the ship, I discovered it was filled with males whose home worlds had been similarly destroyed, as well as rebels and hardcore criminals, even pirates like Xano, my now second-in-command and best friend. He wasn’t a Vhar’Khyng like me, but a Groxon. The Manx didn’t care where we came from or what we had done, we were all going to share the same fate on Primus 2.
Only, we never reached Primus 2.
The ship taking us there crashed on this alien planet. Many of my group were injured, a few died during the impact, but by some miracle, I was unscathed and ready to escape when a band of prisoners arrived to open our cell. Together, we fought the Manx guards and fled the smoldering wreckage of our prison ship.
Fifty males had been held in my cell, forty-six survived the impact and ensuing fight to follow me away from the ship. On our way, we grabbed what we could as more fighting broke out among the diverse species who had survived the crash, vying for control over what was left of the wreckage.
We wanted nothing to do with the crashed spaceship or the other ex-prisoners, and made a run for the surrounding mountains.
Over the course of the next few months, my clan grew until we were seventy-eight warriors strong. In many ways, this planet was similar to the one the Manx took us from, and we tried tomake the best of our situation. We meticulously explored the vast mountains surrounding us to get better acquainted with our new world. It took only a day to find a lake that offered plenty of fish as nourishment, and the forest teemed with game to be hunted.
There were also monsters, though. Some large, some predatory, some largeandpredatory. However, none of them were a match for us with our stolen blasters.
Seasons changed, and before long, five years had passed since we had arrived on this strange new planet. Though we were trying hard to make it our own, we were also mostly failing. Vhar’Khyng weren’t meant to live in the mountains; Vhar’Khyngs sailed longships across furious oceans to find new lands, or to conquer other clans. We didn’t hide in caves like we were forced to do, worried about the Manx returning to imprison us again.
Xano, who had fought the Manx before as a pirate, had assured us that as long as the Manx ship hadn’t sent out a signal, they would never be able find us on this uncharted planet we called Limbo because none of us wanted to be here, but we also couldn't go anywhere else. It was neither heaven nor hell. We were in between.
But the worst of it all, for most of us, was the fact that we would never find our szaria—soulmate—because, as far as we knew, there had been no females aboard the prison ship.
