A diary entry on a torn out page, folded and hidden inside a small hollow of a dead tree. Translated from a Domus language.
We’re not allowed to talk about it. We’re not allowed to say if things were bad or not great. Domus is gone so Domus is perfect so Earth is terrible and awful. But it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t. There. I said it. We were not some magical utopian dream, we were a world that had problems and conflicts just like Earth. But it’s dead so we can’t talk about it. I didn’t want to be a Sun Singer. I was happy as Beast Kith, with my family, with my friends, we ran wild through the trees as they grew and withered beneath our feet. You had to jump or you’d fall but someone would always catch you. But then the leylines shifted beneath our feet and the Sun Singers followed, claiming providence and they called up a sun within the forest it shied away. We fought. It wasn’t like the wars they told me about from Earth’s history, no bullets or shells filled with the power of death. But that’s not because we were better than the humans, it’s because we didn’t need weapons like that to be terrible. And when the silence rang out, we had to trade numbers in reconciliation. Some of theirs become some of ours and some of ours becoming some of theirs. To help the communities learn, the elders said, to ensure this didn’t happen again. I didn’t volunteer. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t want it. They chose me because they said I was the most able to teach. Each brush of that golden blood upon my skin felt like a brand, a shackle, a noose. And it wasn’t like I could go back. But here on Earth, maybe I could find Beast Kith who were like me. Maybe I could go back to what I was. Maybe here, there is a different kind of freedom.