Chen awoke laying on the floor of the Gru forest. His shoulders ached and on his face was a moist vine which seemed to be caressing him. Scooting back a bit, trying to get away from the strange slimy plant, Chen realized he was tied up. He looked around to find he was near a small fire, in the middle of a different camp which was much deeper in the forest. There sat a small Tekniak girl and her squat companion.

  In the forest the vines on the forest floor were much thicker than at the edge of the forest. The mist had gotten thicker among the large copse of trees. On each tree, sap dripped down it's bark. Or maybe that was the humidity, which was at 100% with the temperature hitting near 36 degree celsius. With the fire next to him it was more like 39 degrees. Chen thought this would be a great place, in better times, to take off your clothes and enjoy a sauna. He heard someone laugh in the background. Chen could barely make out the small critters of the forest move along a vine and into the brush from where he laid on the ground.

  The camp was a small natural clearing where a larger tree must have fallen in the past leaving it open. The small fire was barely alive. The wetness of everything in the forest made keeping the flame going difficult. The merchant guard moved somewhere to the back of the camp with the supplies which were on a large hover cart about 6 feet squared. The blonde elf was sitting on a log examining her data pad.

  "Hey squirt, I think he's awake." the guard, Joya, said to the elf. His voice carrying a seagoing character to it.

  "Oh, good!", Gloria said in a high clear voice as she turned off the display and put it to the side. "How are you feeling? What's your name?" she asked Chen in a language that seemed familiar and crouched in front of him. "I'm Gloria, and this is Joya." pointing to the man behind her.

  "She can't be an Tekniak, they haven't been seen for centuries." Chen thought to himself.

  The elf sat on her haunches as she looked at Chen. He appraised her as being about 5'2" and barely 100 pounds. Her hair was a wild bush of blond curls on the top of her head so that you could see the tips of her ears poking through the curls. Blue eyes stared back at Chen as he looked up at her. Her shirt was on top of another, and hung from her small frame hiding a small belly and large hips. Her boots ended at the top of her knees, which he could tell by the slight bulge that she had a small knife hidden in her right boot.

  "And he looks too big and slow to be an elf", Chen added to his prior thought.

  Joya sat on top of a crate that was laying on top of the hover cart. He was a small man about 5'7" and weighed about 205 pounds. His shoulder were wide and he wore a black leather vest with lots of pockets sewn into the front. A small cap covered his head of auburn hair. His large face stood in a slight grimace with a large nose and a dominating Fu Manchu style mustache. His bushy mustache hit the corners of his mouth and grew downward past his clean-shaven lips and chin in two tapered tendrils of hair, extending past his jawline hitting the top of his chest.

  "All these years and I die like this, in the same forest. Suiting I guess." the sarcastic thought ran through Chen's head.

  For the last 217 years he had only heard the standard common language of the World Union. Over the centuries standard common seemed to change from region to region, but never died away. It didn't matter anyway as Kildra's translation software would always translate it to standard common on the way into his ear and give his brain the commands to effortlessly speak out the correct language in response.

  At that moment it occurred to him that Kildra was in fact not around, and not only that, but that his very sense of her, which he could always feel in the front of his head like a slight sinus pressure, was gone.

  He didn't know how to feel about this. He'd never known a moment without the bossy little Wisp around. He could cry for joy, or was this sadness over her loss. In fact he was crying. He laid on his side as the liquid dropped from his eyes without anything he could do about the tears. Maybe he teared for the very fact that he did not know which emotion he cried over.

  "Where is Kildra? What have you done to her!" he said in a weird sounding language that he was not used to. The surprise on his face as he spoke must have radiated because this girl, Gloria, said in a quirky version of common language that was oddly familiar, "We can talk coming if ya like. Your Ba`Tya is outta practice. I'm assuming ya really dunna want me tooda that ta this Kildra. Who's Kildra, by ta way? Ansa betta question, what's ya be callin'?" and she smiled. She had a pretty and kind smile... for a Tekniak. He hadn't actually ever seen any of the elves that had invaded the earth 100 years before the Chakalexy attacked. Like the Chakalexy he had only heard stories of them from Kildra which made him expect to see a person looking more like the germanic tribes' storied witches of the northern regions of Euro.

  Here Gloria was in front of him looking like a small human with pointy ears and baggy clothes. Missing were the long wrinkled neck, fingers with sharp claw like nails, protruding stomach with an eaten child or two inside, and large smelly bare feet. He partially wondered if her blood were in fact the fabled green noxious substance that the Tekniak were supposed to have in their veins. They were in a forest, so that much held true to the stories, and her addiction to her data pad, which she was now again holding, held true to their addiction to technology.

  "You speak Ba’Tya, I’ll speak common. Now Kildra, My Wisp. Where is she?" he said again this time in the common most used in The Last City. He was shocked at how strong his accent was and he could see Gloria screw her face together as she tried to get around the accent. He didn't even know how his dialect sounded. He heard of the oddity of having two people from different parts of the world speak the same common language with different dialects and not understand a single word, but never experienced it until today.

  "So Ba`Tya it is than, yes?" she said in an almost off hand way in the Tekniak language.

  "He's looking for his worm, thing, whatev-er", Joya said, in his weird accented form of Ba`Tya. He was sitting on top of a box on his hover cart. Chen noticed that a familiar side arm was on his belt next to an older pistol. Peeking down to his waist he could see that he had been disarmed.

  "That thing had a name!? Disgusting! That wasn't a person., umm... again, what's your name? -- what do we call you!?" Gloria spat the rebuke out as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. Her body posture changed as she said this, no longer was she the caring doctor at her patients side. Her hands grabbed at her wide hips slightly outlining her figure through the baggy shirt she wore over her cargo pants. Chen could see Joya's eyes turn in appreciation toward her back side as she did this than turn away as if he remembered it was impolite.

  "I'm Chen. Her name is Kildra. Where is she?" Chen said sticking to By`Tya, stressing the first 'is', with a forcefulness that surprised even him considering who he was talking about. He could feel the surprise on his face as he asked for Kildra. Damnit, he thought to himself. He just remembered that the Gru has something in it's chemical make up that relaxes people letting their guard down; their emotions run wild and their lips are looser -- as an aside he thought how perfect it was a setting for an interrogation.

  "That Wisp was left right where cha threw it up " Joya said pointing to the imaginary ice on the floor from the prior camp, "of course after that big vine " pointing at a similar vine at Chens feet " took cha for one hell of a ride that is! Ya must've been 6 feet in the air for a while there. haha ".

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  Chen could remember the ice which was more like little square chunks of glass than ice. Unbeknownst to him that was the effects of high voltage forcing the nanobots to evacuate the host and than coalescing into synthetic shards shattering to the ground as the unit effectively died.

  Chen felt a pang of sadness when he thought of his... friend? Was she his friend? Over the years they had plenty of disagreements, but they weren't enemies and they had some great years together, right? He'd have to think about that, especially after that dream of the wildling family. Did she possess him and force him to do those awful things? Was it even possible? She couldn't read his thoughts, so how could she make him forget that entire event even if she could possess him.

  A thought occurred to him at that moment: How am I alive? He had seen a Herald die before. Divan was adamant about changing his herald every 100 years and the last time he "retired" his Herald as he called it, Chen and Kildra had accompanied him. This is the first time Chen had remembered this memory too. What the hell was happening to him?

  "How am I alive? I should be dead right now. The Separation Illness is immediate." Chen asked.

  "You are dead, well as far as the Consensus is concerned. You're a free man now!" Gloria exploded with glee as she said this. Yes, she was in fact cute when she smiled Chen thought and instantly dismissed it. Gloria blushed as she looked at him. Joya continued to grimace by his cart.

  Chen laid back a bit to make himself more conformable. "Ok, but how? No Herald survives de-bonding from a Wisp. It's biologically impossible... or so I have been told.

  Or was that a lie? No... I've seen that happen with my own eyes." Chen said.

  "No, you're right, debonding will kill you. We actually had to rebind you in a way. Now before you ask", raising her hand to stop him from talking, " I've installed a Lash into the small of your spine. In the past there was only one ever made it seems, and we have no idea by who because it stopped working centuries ago. But it was intact enough that I learned from it and rebuilt working copies of it in order to learn more about Union era nanobot technology." She said with a touch of pride to her voice. She turned to Joya and said "and please, no jokes about grave robbing" to which Joya shrugged with a smile and than she turned back to Chen still on the floor, bound with his hands behind his back which he lay upon -- a sharp rock now in his hands trying to loosen his bindings without letting them know.

  "The Lash sends out it's own nanobots -- the old ones were corrupted even before it broke, so we're using my own version -- and they go into the sections of your brain that the Wisp interface with, the parts they evacuate when you debond, which is in fact what kills the host. Fascinating actually. The Wisp replaces your brains natural communication paths with it's nanobots. The Lash simply fills in those nanobots with it's own, as well as adds some cool benefits I must say.

  Without the Lash's nanobots, well... your organs would stop working or your blood vessels would get confused and hemorrhage, or maybe ..." she said as she was interrupted by Joya saying "Ya debond cha die; ya Lash cha live. We don't need a science lesson here beautiful. Especially a lesson based on things cha don't fully understand yet do cha."

  Gloria smiled at the friendly banter. They must have shot darts at each other for a long time to get such a close friendship. 'Did I ever have that with Kildra?' Chen thought to himself. 'No he was never as close to Kildra as he is to his Leah. Leah!'

  His eyes exploded as he started thinking about his wife at the hands of the Cult of the Wisp fanatics who could finally show his wife and his children what happens to the spawn of heretic Heralds. They had only stayed away from his family these few years because they knew the will of a Herald, sanctioned by his Wisp, was law in their eyes. Now that he was dead...

  And, he was dead. Kildra was dead. But, Wisp don't die they just reboot from a backup. And once she was back and didn't sense his presence on her side of the connection she would rebuild him from her last backup. The Wisp quantum backups also contained their current Heralds DNA3 updates to restore long term memory on resurrection. Short term memory was always lost -- a good incentive not to die she would say. But the minute of memory loss was nothing in the greater scheme of things. Soon there would be a duplicate Chen out there being welcomed home by his wife.

  "I need to get back! I need to send them a signal that I'm alive!" Chen said struggling at his bonds using the extra activity to cut harder through the bonds.

  "Are you crazy? Why would you want to be captured again by that thing!" Gloria said pointing to the phantom memory of glass on the bare forest floor.

  "You don't understand. You're not safe here either. She's not dead. She has a quantum backup and has probably already recreated her unit, it only takes a few minutes. And after that she'll recreate a copy of me. We can contact her before than and have them pick me up back where you found me. You can be long gone before than." Chen said with the confidence that he had thought everything through.

  Gloria took a step closer to Chen and kneeled so that her face was in front of his and kindly asked him "Ah, I see. Chen, what day is today?".

  Chen stopped moving and looked at her and thought to himself, 'Did she think he had brain damage? What an odd question to ask a captive obviously trying to escape his bonds! Haven't they ever had a prisoner before? Surely Joya looked seasoned enough to must have had some times where he had caught a prisoner.' Chen looked at Joya and decided to edit his previous thought -- 'well if not than surely he must have been a prisoner a time or two.'

  "Nope never been a prisoner before" Joya said as he took a bite out of what seemed like an apple. "Damn forest!" Chen said aloud not certain if he thought that or said it aloud as well.

  "Yea, is a bit of a trip isn't it. Teaches cha to guard cha thoughts well. Ya should tune it out inna few days lad." Joya said while eyeing Gloria who was still in front of Chen looking him in the eyes.

  "You're not a prisoner of ours, nor do we want to kill you, if we can avoid it. Would be a waste of all that effort I put into that operation right?" Gloria said getting up to look over at Joya; a look that he nodded back at, pulling Chen's sidearm out and pointing it toward the man on the floor.

  "Chen, today is Prede. You've been unconscious for 2 days, going on 3 days". Chen was previously planning on grabbing Gloria and hold her in a choke hold to force Joya to give him at least a communicator in return for her safety. Now, instead he just broke through his bond and casually sat up to untie his feet. Joya told him to stop where he was but he continued to untie them any way. When he succeeded he just sat there.

  How was he supposed to feel now? His clone would have been created 2 days ago. He hadn't really lost his wife had he? He'd still be there for her as she grew old and be there as she passed away. But yet in that one moment he realized he, this version of Chen -- the one currently in the forest, hadn't died but had in fact lost his life. A single tear rolled down his cheek, this time he cried for himself.

  "Besides" a nervous Gloria had started "how would you go back to them with the Lash on? Wouldn't those Wisp cultist castrate you or something like that?". To this Chen laughed. Yes, these folks here knew of the cultist apparently as well as he did. And she was right, a Wisp has a Herald -- only one. With no Wisp as his ultimate sanctioning authority, they would gleefully tear him apart while his clone probably watched. Would he cheer on his own death? Or maybe worse, maybe Divan would convince Kildra to change her Herald which would than put his wife and entire family at risk again. No that risk was too high. Decision made.

  "So, are either of you going to Myrsport by any chance?"

  Myrsport was the only large town in the region. So large was it that they had been able to see the smoke of chimneys rise from the town as they were landing. In truth, the Town of Myrsport was more of a small city these days. The most logical place to for him to start a new life.

  "Are you actually married? I thought husk were forbidden to marry. I mean it makes no sense to let you -- it would only divide its power over you" Gloria blurted out, stressing the word 'its' as if Wisp were a contagion of some sorts.

  "I said that out loud again? Shit. Damn forest!" Chen said in a beaten tone. He looked over at Gloria and said "It's a long story. And a personal story at that".

  Glorias cheeks blushed to a deep shade of red as she felt the embarrassment of her comment run through her. "Sorry, must be the forest's affect. So, actually we're headed to the Bazaar in The Clearing.", nodding to the cart full of illicit cargo. Joya moaned at the unnecessary divulgence of information. Unperturbed she continued," It's about a 4 hour walk from Myrsport" she said when Joya butted in with "a 10 hour walk at least, be'd better for cha to walk there from here". Gloria rolled her eyes and blushed again saying "Wanna tag along? I have like a thousand questions for you!" her cheeks whitening out with just a peek of red in anticipation.

  Shrugging, Chen replied "Sure. But, I'll be expecting my things back now Joya" as he pointed to the man.

  "We'll see" the wide man said while he ate a second apple, continuing to point Chen's sidearm at it's former owner.

  Coming up in Chapter 6:

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