February 3,390 BC
He had no idea how long he'd lain there before he became aware that a presence had entered the ship. He reached for his sidearm, but daggers shot up his arm. Gasping like a fish, he panted small, painful breaths, trying to get enough oxygen into his brain to clear the fog. He couldn't remember his own name, but if he didn't extricate himself from this wreckage, he knew he was a dead man.
Sparks crackled in the smoke, giving everything an unearthly, hellish appearance. The rod which had impaled him scraped through his chest, threatening to drown him in his own blood. Without the ability to inflate his lungs, he couldn't even scream.
Crepuscular rays of golden sunlight streamed down through a crack in the ceiling, the entrance to the dreamtime, the place he needed to go. Through that light stepped a beautiful, dark-haired spirit; the rays reflecting off of her skin and giving her an ethereal, translucent appearance as she climbed over the rubble. She kneeled next to him, choosing to assume the form of a creature of legend. The root race? A disembodied sense of awe flitted into his mind and was gone before he had time to contemplate what ‘root race’ meant.
"O-kim-olduğunu yardım etmek için beni buraya gönderdi ise,” the spirit said. “Ben sana zarar demek.”
He tried to focus, but her voice sounded very far away. Darkness clouded his vision as he struggled to get himself free. The hand which touched his cheek and sympathetic look in her tawny-beige eyes was understood. There was no surviving such a wound. This spirit had come to guide him into the dreamtime.
An overwhelming sense of relief flooded his body with warmth and dulled his pain. Not alone. His worst fear had just been alleviated. Despite his pain, he smiled as he placed his fate into the spirit's hands.
The pain was too great to endure. He slid back into the darkness.
Chapter 5