Chapter 7: The Half-Breed and the Hawk

Life is like a sea voyage. Sometimes things seem to be going your way with smooth tides, but then before you know it, a storm hits, and you realize that your life has been blown off course.

Tarrus: Capital Planet of the Tarrus Empire. Fernady City: Refugee sanctuary

“Ya got somethin’ to say to me, you half-breed freak,” sneered Shaver Creed, the ringleader of a hoverbike gang of hoodlums who called themselves the Preservers.

By Preservers, they meant preserving the sanctity of the human race by persecuting all nonhumans. They were technically outside the law, but no Patrollers in Fernady seemed to care; in fact, a few openly supported the gang. The gang usually didn’t do anything major; mostly they just spray-painted profane remarks about aliens on the walls, demanded protection money from any lone alien to cross their paths, and occasionally beat nonhumans within an inch of their lives. They were just raucous punks with chips on their shoulders and something to prove, but they did do the best job they could to make the lives of every alien they found a living nightmare. And unfortunately, despite the fact that he was mostly human, that treatment extended to Ryan Uruks.

To most onlookers, it would look like a bunch of street punks beating up on a human teenager. With his face in the mud, most would’ve assumed Ryan to be your average, innocent youth victimized by a gang of hoodlums. In fact, most would be inclined to help if they happened by. However, if Ryan ever lifted his head and stood up for a passerby to get a better look, most would keep on walking.

Although mostly humanoid, Ryan still possessed features that were considered strange by most people, features which became more obvious the older he got. Golden scales covered his body, casting an orange hue over his skin. These scales weren’t abhorrently noticeable. In a certain light, one might even confuse them as a tan. However, if one missed the scales, one would certainly not miss the eyes ... bloodred and decidedly not human.

Other non-human features tended to be less pronounced. Teeth slightly sharper and nails slightly longer, giving the boy an almost bestial appearance. Another thing that set Ryan apart was his bright red hair that matched his eyes. Despite these unique features, Ryan wasn’t grotesque by any means. In fact, many would say these qualities made him seem more alluring. However, as closely as Ryan resembled humans, especially when compared to nonhumanoid aliens, he wasn’t quite human enough to warrant sympathy, especially from Shaver Creed.

Shaver Creed and his cronies had already ganged up on Ryan for his daily beating, but this time that didn’t seem to satisfy them. “You deaf as well as dumb, half-breed?! I asked ya if you got somethin’ to say to me!”

Ryan had several things he wanted to say. First of all, Ryan wanted to tell him that he wasn’t a half-breed since his father had been part-human, so that technically made him a part-breed. Secondly, the new flaming red Mohawk that Shaver sported made him look more like a chicken than a threat. And finally, no he wasn’t deaf, and certainly not dumb, in his own personal opinion ... but this Neanderthal with the rooster hair certainly had stupidity to spare.

Unwilling to antagonize his assailants any further with insults, and too prideful to let them see him beg, Ryan simply glared at them with his bloodred eyes. Sometimes his glare sent guys running, but it usually only worked when he had only one baddie to deal with. But in a group of about a dozen, like the Preservers, not even Ryan’s special glare could scare them off.

However, despite his advantage in numbers, Shaver Creed hesitated for a split second, the way he always did when Ryan gave him his deadly glare. Then he bolstered up his courage to kick his victim in the head one more time.

Ryan grimaced in pain, but he didn’t make a sound. He refused to give the fools the satisfaction of seeing him cry out.

Satisfied that he had established his dominance, Shaver Creed received congratulations from his fellow morons for his bravery, kicking a half-breed in the head after he’d been beaten half to death. They walked away as usual, congratulating each other and bragging about what they would do next time.

Ryan always wondered why Shaver Creed never finished him off. He had seen them kill other half-breeds just for groveling the wrong way, but they never got around to killing Ryan ... and he never groveled. Maybe they just hated him more than the others; maybe they just wanted to prolong his suffering. However, Ryan had the faint impression that he scared them somehow, as they seemed afraid to do anything more than just beat him up a little. It didn’t really matter ... Ryan didn’t care; he’d already lost everything. The Preservers couldn’t hurt him worse than the pain that he carried with him.

Ryan groaned softly in both torment and relief as the Preservers soon sped out of sight on their hoverbikes. The Preservers’ vehicles screeched loudly and irritably in the distance with a shrill noise as the engines ignited, allowing the anti-gravity boosters to lift the crafts off the ground and attain speeds capable of breaking the sound barrier.

The annoying noise that the hoverbikes made rather reminded Ryan of the Preservers themselves; obnoxious and begging for attention. Had Ryan possessed the temerity to fight, he might’ve thrown a broken bottle at the back of Shaver’s head as he sped away. But as such, Ryan could barely muster up the willpower to get up every morning, let alone fight. He wondered if he had lost more than his family five years ago; he wondered if he’d lost part of his soul along with his will to fight.

Then Ryan heard a familiar sound. “Caw!”

The persistent cry of a hawk with unusually bright and shiny yellow wings woke him from his stupor. The hawk took up its usual perch on Ryan’s head and pecked him profusely upon the forehead in a customary ceremony for demanding food. Ryan called this particular hawk Tyrant because when he started screeching, he had the insistency of a slavedriver yelling at his slaves to work faster. Tyrant had beautiful golden-feathered wings, a sharp hooked beak, and shiny red eyes. Even though Ryan had decided to call the hawk Tyrant, the bird accompanied him after the Massacre of Toramirese, and that somehow made him precious.

Despite the agony that it caused him, despite the delicate emotions of fear and pain that would begin to stir, Ryan desperately tried to remember what happened that day five standard years ago. He couldn’t recall much of anything about the Dark Creature that still haunted his dreams at night. He had no memory of what became of his mother, or his father. All he could remember was blacking out when the Dark Creature in the cloak appeared before him and his mother.

The next thing he knew, he woke up in some hospital on Tarrus. The doctors told him he was one of the few survivors of the Massacre of Toramirese. He begged them for hours to tell him what happened to his parents, but they assured him that no one who had survived the attack bore any resemblance to his mother or father. He was alone.

He wanted to go back to his home, but the government wouldn’t allow him to leave; said something about him being under the protection of the Tarrus Provisional Government. Apparently, right before the attack on the colony, a disruption occurred on Tarrus as well. The Imperial Family was slaughtered as well as all their cabinet members. A new government would soon be put in place of the old one, and a new Emperor as well, a young senator named Alexander Chissler.

Normally, Ryan wouldn’t care about politics, but because of the unrest that resulted from the fiasco, he’d been restricted from leaving the planet and relocated along with many thousands of other alien refugees to the waste disposal settlement of Fernady. And that’s where Ryan had remained ever since.

At first, his new life overwhelmed him. It seemed like someone stole his old life from him and replaced it with a crumby, tragic backstory. And then a little hawk came out of nowhere and started pecking at his hand. They say first impressions are important. Ryan’s first impression of Tyrant involved having some chicken-fried hawk flesh ... if only he had a fryer. Despite the number of times that Ryan had tried to eat the little pest, Tyrant just kept coming back. The bird became Ryan’s constant companion after that.

At first, Tyrant served as little more than an annoyance. But slowly, Ryan started to feel a strange bond of companionship to the dumb animal. Maybe because he didn’t have anyone else. Maybe he just needed a friend. Or perhaps he felt a strange sort of kinship with the tiny creature; after all, the bird seemed to be alone as well.

For whatever the reason, the bird followed Ryan wherever he went, and Ryan found its presence an immaculate respite compared to complete solitude. He even helped Ryan find food and shelter when he needed it. The bird even acted as a sort of alarm system as it would whine and hop around in circles when danger approached.

Shortly after each irritating display, Shaver Creed and his gang would appear around the corner moments later, and Ryan would have to high-tail it out of there. In many ways, the only reason that Ryan had survived so long could be credited to Tyrant and his general annoyingness. For some reason, whenever Ryan would look at Tyrant, it reminded him of his father, and then his heart would feel heavy.

“Do you have any family, Tyrant?” Ryan asked the bird.

“Caw,” responded the bird.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so; otherwise, you’d find better things to do than torment a poor kid like me.” Tyrant puffed up his yellow feathers as if he could understand Ryan, and he didn’t appreciate the comment.

In moments such as these, Ryan couldn’t help but think of his parents and the funny looks they gave him, much like Tyrant, when they acted angrier than they really were. Ryan desperately tried to swallow back the tears as he attempted again and again to remember something, anything that would give him a clue to his parents’ whereabouts.

Once again, he remembered nothing but darkness. He knew only of their absence and his isolation. Somewhere in his heart, he hoped that they still lived, but feared such a thing as well. If they still lived, it meant that they had just abandoned him ... that they didn’t want him anymore.

Or it could’ve even meant that they’d been taken captive by the Dragons and subjected to unimaginable tortures. Those thoughts seemed more terrifying to Ryan than all the Preservers or Black Dragons in the universe. The thought that he was no longer needed or wanted by anybody, it left him too depressed to move. He quickly swallowed his anguish like always and let himself just forget about it all.

It was just a painful memory! They don’t matter anymore, right? Why should I cry if nobody cares about me? I don’t care for anybody either.

And with that, Ryan picked himself up from the mud and wiped down his tattered clothing. He looked himself over in a puddle to see how bad the damage was. Constant rain filled ever-present puddles. His injuries didn’t seem too severe. Just the usual cuts and bruises, nothing to get bent out of shape about. He also took note of the small scar that started from his neck below the chin and ended just past his jawline on his left cheek.

It was a thin white scar, slightly jagged, like it had come from a knife, or a claw perhaps. This scar, he knew, had not come from the Preservers. Unlike any wound he received from the Preservers, this wound never healed. He was still unable to remember where it came from, only that it had appeared on his face the day he woke up in the hospital here.

Tyrant assumed a casual perch on Ryan’s shoulder, and then they were off. Ryan went barefoot as he had no shoes, but that didn’t matter much to him as he always preferred traveling barefoot. Besides, the scales on his feet were so hard that he hardly even felt the pavement beneath his soles. Ryan possessed few clothes, but he usually preferred the simple arrangement of a sleeveless white shirt and black jeans. His clothes were old and tattered, with many holes throughout the worn fabric, but it was still slightly better than tromping around naked.

Ryan walked down the lonely streets of Fernady slowly, trying to conserve his energy. Fernady wasn’t a very cheerful place, to say the least. The dark gray cement buildings towering over the streets seemed almost as depressed as the people. Litter and gunk in the gutters clogged the drains, leaving puddles that sometimes went knee-deep. Just another waste disposal town where everyone else in the galaxy came to get rid of their trash, and then leave just as quickly.

Many alien refugees came to this town for various reasons. Plague, poverty, escaping planetary destruction ... things like that. Quite a few humans lived there as well, but mostly the low-life types like Shaver Creed and his gang. Clouds and smog filled the skies as usual. Some people grew sick from all the damp, but hardly anyone could afford effective medicine, not with doctors becoming so expensive and scarce from the absurd health care system in place.

Fernady was one of those places in the poor regions of Tarrus that most decent people just wanted to forget. Cheap pay and even cheaper living conditions didn’t make Fernady ideal, but many people like Ryan had nowhere else to go where they could live and work. Not that Ryan had a job, or a house for that matter. Only a lucky few of the aliens here had a consistent job. The rest, like Ryan, would fight over the government meals when they came, scrounge around for any temporary work they could find, dig through the garbage, or they just starved.

Ryan didn’t fault the humans. The aliens that came here usually had lost all hope and would just content themselves to living in the mud, possessing neither the desire nor the motivation to better themselves. Ryan understood their pain. But that alone was still little comfort to him. Because of the treatment Ryan received from other humans, he tried to reach out to nonhumans. But they treated him like he had the plague too. At first, Ryan thought it due to him being a half-breed, but as Ryan looked into their eyes, he sensed something more than contempt. They feared him.

At times, just the solitude could be too much to bear, but no matter how miserable his life had become, Ryan knew that he would never just give up and let himself die. No matter the cost, no matter how much time it took, Ryan knew that he must find the answers to his sordid past. He must find out what happened to his parents, and if they really had died, he must find the creature responsible. The one in the cloak with the evil eyes and the dark voice that had called him by name like some old acquaintance.

Ryan walked by the dozens of waste disposal plants, and he heard the roar of thousands of tons of trash and junk sent into the great furnaces to be recycled. Gregory Industries. The name of the company that ran the waste disposal factories. Ryan had heard that all the toxic sludge their vessels dumped came from weapons manufacturing. That alone should’ve made those ships seem intimidating, but to Ryan, they represented a hope. He would look up at the vessels which would fly above and dump the trash into the factories. As they flew away in a flash of light, he wondered how it would feel to be on one of those ships, and where they might take him.

Ryan knew he dreamed of the impossible, but maybe someday one of those transports would come for him instead of trash, and it would take him to the place he wanted to go. The Ministry of Fire; rumored as the most powerful Ministry of the twelve that dotted across the planet of Tarrus. Ryan had heard stories of Elementals his whole life. Ryan’s own parents had been retired Elementals regarded with reverence and respect by many inhabitants in Toramirese Colony.

From what Ryan could remember, most people considered Elementals to be the most powerful warriors in the universe, possessing the ability to influence nature itself. If that was true, then they might be the perfect means for Ryan to find out more about his past, and the perfect means of seeking revenge. Ryan felt the vague notion that somewhere in the Ministry of Fire hid the answers that he so desperately sought. But for now, he would focus on the most important aspect of his life, namely survival.

After a long walk, Ryan caught up to the Preservers at their headquarters and peeked out from an alleyway across the street. Shaver and his thugs slovenly lounged around a big pile of hoarded government plums on the hover table. They stored the rest of their loot in their vault buried deep within their filthy garage hideout. Ryan knew that they hadn’t bought a single one of those plums for themselves; that they had bullied and intimidated the meek aliens in town rather than earn their own living.

Ryan had come a long way from his old prankster days. Nowadays, he put his devious intellect for mischief to use as a means of survival. Ryan didn’t always steal from the Preservers, but they usually had the most food. They deserved it when he stole from them anyway. Besides, what choice did he have? When the government meals came to provide for the needy, usually the biggest and the strongest aliens got first dibs. When the factory owners needed aliens to work in the waste disposal, they couldn’t pick Ryan because of the law against under-aged workers.

Ryan was always careful to steal only from people that he knew could afford it, and he never got caught. In fact, he had acquired quite a reputation for himself from the local authorities who had yet to ID him as the perp because no one had ever seen him stealing, or at least no camera could record him.

Secretly, he started referring to himself as the ‘phantom thief’, and he would sometimes leave trademarks displaying his title, though no one really caught on to it. But despite his lack of notoriety, Ryan had grown rather proud of the fact that people were often baffled by his crimes. It was a testament of his cunning. Just as he thought about how good he might look in a mask and a cape, Ryan noticed that his chance had come.

When Shaver Creed and his goons finished stuffing their faces, they rose lazily while burping. The punks mounted their hoverbikes and rode off listening to the loudest and most annoying music Ryan had ever heard; something about beating up a zebra man.

Despite the fact that they had left, Ryan knew that stealing from their stash wouldn’t be easy. Sometime over the past five years, the Preservers had set up a security system to protect their loot. Nothing fancy, but still enough to keep most non-suicidal people away from their hideout. In the bike garage that served as their base, they had acquired some super sensitive cameras with lasers attached that would fry anything that moved in the garage when the Preservers left. Ryan thought that they had bribed one of the Patrollers to set it up for them, because no way did these guys have the brains to do it themselves.

Fortunately, Ryan had discovered a little trick that had served him well over the years against high-tech motion-sensitive cameras. Ryan would cover himself in some of the polluted sludge that came out of the waste disposal factories. Disgusting, yes ... but very effective in fooling the cameras and making him virtually invisible to them. He didn’t know why the stuff had a label that said, ‘Danger! Toxic Waste’, because it never seemed to do anything to him, although he might’ve changed his mind if he woke up one morning with an extra head. He thought his immunity might have something to do with his alien heritage, but then he would think of the other aliens.