The Shell and the Star - Part 34 (EPILOGUE)

Welcome back to the conclusion of The Shell and the Star.

This final link will be added to ongoing story which, if you aren't up to date, you can read in its entirety by click here  >> The Shell and the Star 

Thank you to everyone who has followed these excerpts since they began posting earlier this year. I appreciate all your thoughts and feedback. :D

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EPILOGUE

 

Standing on the shore of a pond, Jinn closed her eyes and opened her mind. The soft wind sang to her, the voice of the earth calling her name. Her father had always told her she needed to trust in herself, that great things were within her. She’d never believed him.

Not until now.

Not until her love for Trey helped her discover the strength of her heart and the promise of her destiny.

They were no longer alone in their garden. Others like them had come to their little paradise. Whether they hailed from the sea or the sky, now they were all Land dwellers. All twelve—and more arriving every day—were learning to walk on the land, to tend the crops, harvest the bounty and build a village. Their permanent new home.

Jinn heard a shout of greeting and looked over her shoulder to see Trey appear at the crest of the path from the sea, followed by two others, all hauling nets of sea grass and fish mulch from the Shell, hand tools and gauges from the Star. Already the newcomers had adjusted to moving in gravity, working the farm, even carrying burdens.

Jinn went back to her chores, throwing handfuls of food into the teaming fisheries. Watching across the ponds as four others harvested fruits from the orchard and vegetables from the gardens. In the calendars to come, the gardens would be expanded into fields, and the fields into plantations.

Not all the flora she surveyed had been planted. It seemed that nature wanted to play a part in the transformation, as well.

The stream rushed and tumbled within its banks, a gift from the clouds that lingered all morning atop the mountain peaks to the north. The fresh water fed the irrigation trenches and filled the many underground cisterns that would see them through the drier season ahead.

Jinn paused to take a deep breath and feel the wind lift her hair. Just over the hill, they had staked out large sections of the flats where they would soon build structures to house centers of learning and commerce.

Jinn felt the welcome warmth of Trey’s hand on her shoulder and his deep voice near her ear. “How do you feel?” he asked quietly.

That was her Trey. Always concerned with her comfort, especially now that she carried their first child. Doubly so, now that the child had been confirmed by Talstar’s doctors as a…

Well, certainly not a throwback. That label had now been proven wrong in so many ways.

“I feel free,” Jinn replied. She looked into Trey’s eyes and touched his proud smile with her fingertips, sliding her hand down to thread her fingers together with his. “I feel we’re where we belong, creating this new world with ties to both the Shell and the Star, but bound by neither.”

“Bound only to each other.” Trey whispered, raising her hand to his lips to kiss the blue Star tattooed on her palm. And then the symbol of the Shell freshly tattooed beside it. He closed her hand on the images and held it tightly in his own. “And to the future we’re going to shape, together.”

 

THE END

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I hope you enjoyed this story, which may have never come to light if not for this blog and the devoted readers who followed it week-by-week.

I hope it had some engaging twists and turns, and a surprise happily-ever-after you loved. Feel free to leave a comment about the story or characters, or contact me privately with your thoughts, if you prefer.

My plan is to make this novella a free offering in its entirety in the future, probably through BookFunnel or a similar service. 

I've added a little more below about how this story ties to The Inherited Stars Universe. 

Final Word

A few years ago I had a stroke of inspiration and started writing one of my on-a-backburner-in-my-head stories that had been simmering away on my creative stovetop for many years. It started out as a lighthearted SFR story about two misfits who fell in love. But over time it evolved...just like the characters.

In my head, I gave it that tag line. "An evolving story. A story about evolution."

After a meteor all but destroys their world, a small group manages to survive on an orbiting space station designed to last for 100,000 years. Those who read the earlier books in the series may have caught the identity of this man made orbiting super-structure. It's none other than Talstar Station--once home of the Universal Flight Academy and the Carduwan Fifth Fleet Headquarters in the long, long ago and all but forgotten. (It also served as a location in a past Pets in Space story, Courting Disaster, which I plan to re-publish in the very near future.)

When their population later outgrows the station, the inhabitants divide into two distinct cultures -- one that finds refuge in very different habitat of the oceans on the planet below -- with a necessary but tenuous reliance on each other. But in time, the ties between the cultures begin to weaken and unravel. The growing populations put a strain on their resources. And two friends who are leaders in their separate cultures see an opportunity to betroth their "mutant" children and forge new bonds between The Shell and the Star.

But as you now know, things don't go quite as planned.

This story is meant to pose an unspoken questions to readers. “Who are these people and why do they believe they are the only humans in existence? Why were they abandoned by all the other advanced cultures and subspecies in the known universe of Inherit the Stars, StarDog and SpyDog? When the asteroid struck, why were they not evacuated to other worlds instead of being left to struggle for survival on their own for over 50,000 years?” 

What could have possibly happened?

A very large clue to that mystery is revealed in one of my four StarDog stories that was first published in Pets in Space 5 and which I also hope to release in the near future. That story is titled Juggernaut. 

Thanks for joining me on this journey.

Have a great week.