11
The time portal that connects us now flickers, as my memory flickers regarding my sojourn on Mars. I will try to give you bits and pieces, very difficult. The memory is for myself somewhat blocked. By whom? I am unsure, maybe by myself, perhaps an internal shield. There was, is...much pain.
I arrived somewhere in a Northern continent. The region was already in a state of devastation.
I cautiously approached an eerie strip mine on a high plateau. The mine appeared recently abandoned--or unworked; there were a few indigenous people, yes, humans, still alive amidst much destruction--thousands of graves.
The survivors had retreated deep into caves.
At first the Natives were afraid of me thinking I was one of the "Overseers"--my pale complexion, red hair and blue eyes was in resemblance to those they said "came to destroy and persecute." The natives were brown-skinned peoples much like your Native Americans, a clue actually of adventures that would unfold during my stay there.
The people took me to their Clan Mother, an ancient woman inside a cave on a moss bed. She was dying.
She recounted to me the Native history which went back eons, and she told me that they themselves had migrated to the "Jade World" from a more massive planet that had long been destroyed. There were still on Mars great cities, in ruins, with immense structures that housed vehicles that could travel between worlds. She begged me that I take the strongest of her "warriors" south and east to go into a port city with intentions to retrieve the "Blue Star" craft and hopefully flee the planet towards earth.
The old woman explained that when the Overseers landed up on the mesa they were at first welcomed because they were outwardly handsome and beautiful in appearance. Later it was discovered that the intentions of the invaders where evil. Her people had become enslaved to work in the mines.
I was assigned a companion warrior from the Mesa Clan, Nimru, by name. He had been selected from birth to partake in an ancient ritual tradition, knowledge that set him apart as an "Open Door," a Shaman, capable of traveling between inner worlds. Together we were capable of travel by vortex-jumping; however, first Nimru chose to travel downriver from the mesa by raft to spy on an Offworlder encampment and air base. This actually proved to be an extra hazard.
The Overseers were in fact a stunning people, tall and luminous with a hard-technology much advanced that afforded inter-sun travel. Why they had chosen to terrorize this simple people was at first beyond my understanding. It would seem that their level of development would have precluded such strong-arm tactics. Later I was to find that the "comely appearance of the Offworlders was in fact only an integral aspect of their technology--to caste such appearances upon worlds and upon peoples they drained of purpose and life.
Nimru explained, "they are actually from the same stem as my own people...and yours as well...but they have fallen captive to their own creations and thus have become as machines themselves, a fate to which we almost once fell prey. These ghost-men are in fact most powerful, like fear itself is powerful, but they have become addicted to certain materials for which to obtain they destroy entire worlds."
Although in our surveillance of the camp we maintained great discretion and stealth, the Offworlders in fact detected us on their sensors around the base. We escaped with a spirit-jump or vortex-jump.
The jump placed us in an ancient city, a port city, overlooking a vast emerald sea. The city although in ruins was of immense proportions much like earthly cities of the ancients found in Egypt. As though built by giants the architecture took my breath away. Immense!