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"Hydra, do you have a minute to talk?" Callisto calls through the beads as she pushed them aside and stepped into the healer woman's hut. She wandered around the home until she found the elderly serpent in her kitchen silently brewing three different potions over her huge fires along the far wall. Her pale eyes lifted from a bowl of mashed roots and mushrooms and she motioned for her to join in on helping make her various herbal salves and soothers. The blue-hued female fell into smooth motion with the older hybrid.
"Cordal came to my home last night. It wasn't anything bad, we just talked. Is it true that he killed to be the leader?" The old woman nodded as she dumped her crushed mix into the middle cauldron of the fires, the swampy green mixture darkening into a brackish brown. Hydra motioned for Callisto to do the same and pour her mash of dragon fruit and some plant leaves she didn't recognize into the far left cauldron, this one brightening to a soft milky white with swirls of pastel teal from the dragon fruit.
"He looks so much like a benevolent pacifist that I couldn't imagine him being that violent." Hydra quietly nodded as she frayed out the ends of a plant stalk she has cut the roots and flowers off of. She peeled back strings of the stalk and tossed it into the right cauldron, watching the bubbling liquid inside glow a brilliant lavender shade.
"We were different people then." Callisto looked at the woman as she spoke then down at her own clothes and royal blue hands.
"Everyone was a different person when they started out, it seems. The old lady I grew up with used to say 'ain't nobody been born a concrete human. We are all sponges, we soak up our environment and grow either in conformity with those around us or we grow in our own way. And when you grow in your own way, you're bound to bump around and make a good many around you angry. Think you can handle the rage?' I never really knew what she meant back then, guess that was because I was growing like everyone else, but now that I'm starting to learn to grow in my own ways I'm starting to understand her odd life lessons. You remind me of her sometimes, Hydra. Except you talk much less than she did, that geezer was the definition of boisterous and obnoxiously obscene." They shared soft smiles as Hydra gave her a large handful of small and lemony yellow berries then motioned for Callisto to wrap them in thick and glossy leaves to be placed close to the smoldering embers at the edge of the licking flames.
"Not why you came." Callisto softly chuckled at being found out so easily by Hydra. But then she wasn't surprised in the slightest, the serpentine elder always seemed to know what truly bothered her patients and she was no exclusion.
"No, I came because I don't know who I am anymore. I've always just been Callisto the soldier, Callisto of the S.T.A.R. Corps. But since I've been here it doesn't feel right anymore, there's no need for a soldier on a world with no wars for them to fight. I know I'm the outsider here, the alien that doesn't belong, but for some reason I don't feel the urge to go back. Doesn't that make me a deserter to my home planet? A traitor to my people?" Hydra was silent as she pondered and mused over her question about who she had become and who she was supposed to be.
"Origins don't matter dear, what matters is where you grow best and where you feel you belong." It took Callisto by surprise, the words that Hydra spoke- in part because that was the most she's ever said in one sentence since the soldier knew her. A smile pulled on her lips as she nodded to the woman for her wise words. Hydra seemed to have a knack in always knowing the right words to say and when it was the best time to speak or stay silent.
"No matter where I end up, I hope I'm as amazing and wise as you." The snake woman brightly smiled, showing off her yellowing teeth that Callisto could see were growing blunted and rounded by age. The younger hybrid surprised her elderly friend by wrapping her in a soft but firm hug of gratitude.
"I never thanked you for everything you've done for me. So, thank you for it all, Hydra. I'll try to make you proud." The smaller and older mutant relaxed and hugged her back with just as much gentle strength and feeling as Callisto did.
"Been proud of you, dear." Callisto let the woman go and they finished making the rest of the potions and brews that she needed before the blue female decided she would surprise Ursa with his favorite dragon fruits from the tropical grove of them not too far from the village. The mentioned Tao Cat was currently at her own hut napping with Nightlight and Deimos as he recovered from his poisoning via the same feline.
It didn't take long for the girl to find the place she first bonded with her pride partner, but it was hard for her to pick out which dragon fruit Ursa would take the most liking to he has stolen her fruit that had teal tips but that felt more like what he settled with so as to initiate the binding ritual between them. Callisto spotted a tree at the very far side of the grove that grew a version of the fruit that started maroon and brightened to the same beautiful orange as the Tao Cat himself.
"He better like these because they took forever to find." These fruits were a great deal heavier and bulkier than its pastel hued brethren, but Callisto worked a little over a half dozen in her arms before she called it a good harvest and turned to head back to the village.
Her home was on the far opposite side of the village from the dragon fruit grove and she knew that the other villagers highly disliked it when she walked through what was their sacred grounds. This left her with the only option of taking the longer path around the perimeter of the village to her outskirt home. It took much longer going this extended way but it saved her the headache of trying to ignore the angry glares and the mothers as they hid their children like being an alien was a contagious disease and their sweet little angels would catch the virus of they weren't properly shielded from her presence.
Callisto was almost to her door, she could see her isolated tree and porch through the branches, but she felt eyes watching her. Hungry eyes. Predatory eyes. Deadly eyes. She claws to a stop and swivels her head around to see what had her instincts on edge. At first she skimmed right over the brilliantly arctic blue eyes but she froze when she recognized those orbs of ice. They searched through the corpses for survivors. They shone with delighted bloodlust as they reflected on the screaming Scouts it shredded and ripped into gasping and moaning bits of blood slathered flesh and agony. Callisto hated those eyes. Those eyes watched her die alongside them so long ago. She turned back around to meet with those bright orbs, the lacking pupil giving it an even more abominable expression of sadistic enjoyment at watching her fear freeze her bones and turn her blood to ice.
"So that's what it really looks like. The Mors Magna."
YOU ARE READING
Spacial Illusions
Science Fiction"Those aliens are not my concern, the Earth and her populations are. Now, Callisto of the Scout Regiment to Salutem, as a citizen of this planet and a soldier under my command-" "I stopped being a soldier a long time ago. And those aliens have done...
