Chapter 1

Jax was a Prol, well; at least she knew her mother had been one.

Jax had worked out at a very young age that she wasn’t like other Prols. For one thing, the brothers and sisters birthed by her mother, all ten of them, couldn’t do what she could. Also, she looked different from them, other than a vague resemblance to Ala, their mother.

Ala had given birth to five sets of twins, boys, girls, boys, girls and then boys again. This isn’t that unusual for a Prol family. She’d had them roughly two to two and a half years apart and then hadn’t had any more for five years until she fell pregnant with Jax.

Ala had been very sick while pregnant with Jax, having caught some virus that had been going around. She then had trouble delivering Jax as she was a bigger baby than she had birthed before. Hence the community wasn’t that surprised that Jax was Ala’s last child.

Unlike her other children, Ala never bonded that well with Jax. She hadn’t been able to feed her due to her reoccurring illness, which plagued her for the year following Jax’s birth. This wasn’t such a problem, as the Prols had a formula they used to supplant mother’s milk.

Hence, the oldest girls took turns feeding and caring for Jax. Ala told the girls that it was good practice, as they were now thirteen. This meant they weren’t far off marriageable age. Typically, this was fourteen to fifteen for Prol females.

While the girls were not considered adults until sixteen or married, they could be sexually active. Since Prols have much shorter life spans than other Keltrian races, this was normal for them too.

Most of the parents of Jax’s community didn’t let their girls marry until they were fifteen or sixteen unless something happened to the parents, and their rules were invoked.

The Prols didn’t believe that their females should be left unmated unless they lived with or under the protection of a male relative. They did make the rare exceptions for older women who could support themselves and weren’t considering or able to have more children.

Boys didn’t tend to marry until they were closer to the eighteen-year-old mark, as they had to prove they could support a wife first. They could get dispensation and marry as young as the girls could.

Getting a girl pregnant was a sure way to find themselves married.

The Pickon family lived in a village called Pimol.

Pimol was on the north side of a mountain near the northernmost point of the island called Sigma. The conclave only consisted of about five hundred souls, as their race wasn’t common in the Tear Islands.

The Tear Islands were in the northern hemisphere of a planet called Tara. Not including the tiny ones, more than twenty islands were in a group that was strung out from close to the Northern Pole to near the equator. Sigma was one of the largest and southernmost of these islands.

Being 6km to the north of Pimol, Alpha Point was their nearest township and major port. The processing plant for the iron ore that the Prols dug up was between the two settlements. Hence the two lanes wide road that led up to the community was well used and had, over time, been paved.

Most of the townspeople living in Alpha Point were of the Burgis and Pix races. While Prols could breed with both races, particularly the Burgis, who were a cousin race, it was their tendency not to do so.

Prol men were rather protective of their females and their way of life. It was a common practice in their society to adopt any females under fourteen or marry off those females who were over fourteen if they no longer had a male protector.

Hence, a man could end up with several wives. Not all Prol women liked this practice, but it was what it was. Miners die, and wives become widows.

The Prol race didn’t tend to live much longer than fifty-five to sixty years, with seventy being an extreme age. This was a short life compared to some of the other races like the Pix and Genteli. They could live twice as long as the oldest Prol.

The Burgis people lived some twenty to thirty years longer than the Prols.

Jax’s brothers were typical Prol males.

All of the brothers had slightly shorter limbs than the Pix people, big feet, stubbier fingers, and heavy-set bodies. They were very strong and had large, roundish ears - compared to the Burgis, and big, broad noses were commonplace.

Prol women tended to be more proportioned like the Pix people, but they also had a heavier frame with wider hips and larger breasts. Shades of brown were the most common colours of these people’s skin, eyes, and hair.

Milky-chocolate skin tones and light brown eyes with gold flecks ran in Jax’s family, except for her. Most Prols were darker-skinned, but not many were lighter, except for Jax, and she had dark-blue eyes, not brown.