I’m sharing the opening chapters of my story, The Queen of Xeirin. This story originally appeared on Kindle Vella before it went down. I doubt I’ll be continuing the story anytime soon, maybe never, so consider this a complete glimpse into the world I created.
In the near-distant future, humanity dreams of discovering life among the stars. Misa, our protagonist, soon learns that not everyone on Earth is as human as they appear—and neither is she. Haunted by cryptic visions and alien emotions, she faces the truth of her identity and destiny.
Recognized by the remnants of the Xeir, a near-extinct shapeshifting alien race hunted by humanity’s darkest forces, as their destined leader, Misa struggles against a role she wishes she didn’t have.
Blending science fiction, fantasy, and suspense, these chapters offer a thrilling peek into an unfinished world. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy the journey—even if it ends here.
Episode One: The Door
A wave of vertigo washed over her. Distant screaming echoed through her mind like a dream only half-remembered and even less understood. The world around her spun in lazy circles as she suddenly became aware of herself sprawled across thickly piled carpeting.
She closed her eyes to the nauseating blur of colors and streaking shapes. Concentrating on the feel of the soft fibers of the carpet beneath her. She dug her fingers into the dense pile to ground herself and bring herself fully back into her body. It felt like she’d drifted a thousand miles away.
The raised design of the brocade carpet beneath her fingers told Misa that she was in the lower study towards the back of their family home in Boston. It was the only room in the house still with the original silk brocade carpeting from its construction in 1852. The whirling impression left by the spinning room on the back of her eyelids had settled into a gentle side-to-side wobble while she acquainted herself with the luxurious feel of the antique carpet. Enough that she felt she could brave opening her eyes.
It was an instant regret. Sharp pain stabbed through her eyes and ricocheted around her skull like a pinball, setting off flashes of light behind her eyes that almost blinded her to the subtle outline of the door set into the wall before her.
And behind the door, there was screaming.
No, the screaming was in her head; it was a dream; it wasn’t real, but the door was and shouldn’t be.
Still, on the ground, she cast emerald eyes around the room, lifting heavy arms to fight through the disordered mass of tangled crimson hair that must have come loose from its clip when she’d fallen. If she’d fallen, she couldn’t remember falling; in fact, she couldn’t remember coming into the lower study.
She sat up, brushing numb fingers through tangled hair, removing bits and pieces of the delicate Tiffany clip she’d used to pin her hair with that morning. It had been a gift from her father, and she felt its loss as keenly as she felt the small gash it had left on the back of her head. Her hair there was matted, but the blood was fresh. She hadn’t been unconscious for long. No doubt there’d be a knot forming there soon. The injury was likely responsible for the wretched little gnome playing pinball in her skull.
She remembered selecting the Tiffany clip from her vanity drawer that morning to accentuate and draw together the navy-blue silk blouse and creamy wide-leg crepe trousers she’d pulled from her closet. It was the last thing she could remember before waking up here. Judging by the dimly glowing window behind the solid oak desk adjacent to her, she knew it must be late evening.
She’d lost the whole day? Could she have hit her head so hard on the carpet?
It didn’t make any sense, and she knew she needed to find help; she needed to find her father. On shaky legs, she made a clumsy attempt to stand.
She was missing a shoe. The realization came to her belatedly as she went crashing painfully to her knees. She made sure to kick the useless matte cream pump to the side before once again attempting to rise on shaky legs.
A sudden bout of nausea brought her forward. Made her weak so that she braced her pale hands against the ice of the door to forestall the tangling of her slim legs in the loose fabric of her pants. The door seemed impossibly large now. Filling her vision and looming all around her.
It was impossible that the door should be there. This had been Misa’s home for fourteen years, and in all that time, there had never been a door there. She was certain that the last time she’d been in the lower study, the bookcase on this side of the room had extended from wall to wall.
When had that been? She shook her head as gently as she dared. How had she gotten here? Where had she been before?
She flushed with heat as pins and needles pricked along her skin agonizingly, and again came the faint, haunting scream. Only now, she was sure the screaming was coming from behind the door. There was no latch, no handle, no hinges. If the door hadn’t been polished black steel set into the cherry oak wood of the wall, it might not have been there at all.
There was panic building inside of her. The screaming behind the door mirrored the screaming that had started again in the back of her mind. Her body felt heavy and strange; a numbing buzz shivered up her spine, spreading outward from her head to her stocking-clad feet. She slid to her knees, losing control of her body. Feeling as though she were being transported outside of herself, she saw the door before her recede.
Desperately, she fought to return; she must open the door. She needed to be on the other side. The screaming built to a crescendo, and she was drowning in it. The door was miles away and distorted now like she’d been submerged in a pool of turbulent water.
They were hurting her! They were tearing her apart! Oh God, please, I don’t want to die!
The words tore through her mind in a voice she did not know. Misa’s heart felt like it was bursting in her chest as terror surged through her from that place in the back of her mind where the screaming had begun. No longer able to hold herself upright, she found herself leaning against the door, her body practically draped against the cold metal, and then, with a hiss of decompression, her only warning, the door was sliding open.
Episode Two: The Endless Hallway
She was falling. The door had opened quickly; a hiss of decompression her only warning, and she’d been too numb, too distant, to save herself.
Behind the door had been the opening to a dark shaft. It was seemingly endless and barely large enough to fit a fully grown man. Certainly, her brother, Boris, who was nearly as wide as he was tall, would have had a difficult time navigating the narrow space, but Misa was small if not petite. She was of average height for a woman at five four and though midsized she wasn’t large enough to save herself from what happened next.
Her first attempt to grab hold of a ladder rung embedded into the opposite wall of the shaft failed midfall. Her arms were too heavy, her reaction time was too slow. In the end, she fell down the shaft at an awkward angle so that she landed with her neck twisted oddly against the opposite wall.
Her shoulder jammed into a rung three down from the one she’d failed to hold onto. The blow was jarring. It deadened Misa’s arm from shoulder to fingertips. Her cry of agony echoed up and down the shaft, ringing in her ears until it gradually faded away, leaving nothing but the heavy sound of her own labored breathing.
She was left with her knees pressing down into the hard lip of the shaft. It bit into the soft space just below her kneecaps, sending painful prickling up and down her calves. A strangely intense burning sensation had enveloped the bottoms of her feet where they dangled inelegantly in the air through the open doorway.
Wedged with her shoulder, face, and knees against the unforgiving metal of the rung, wall, and shaft lip, she thought for one briefly hopeful moment that she might be able to hoist herself back up and into the study. Her remaining arm was weak, but she could push herself backward if she could grasp one of the rungs on the wall she was pressed against. Attempting to do just that, Misa struggled against the lack of feeling in her fingers.
She beat her hand weakly against the rung, hoping to encourage blood flow, desperate for control of her hand. Finally, she settled for pressing her palm against the wall next to where her face was smashed harshly between rungs and put all her remaining strength into pushing back against her knees.
Desperate to slide more of her body into the study, Misa shifted her feet and calves. Her toes knocked against the plush carpet. The lip of the ledge bit deep into the tendons underneath her kneecaps, and a sharp buzzing pain shot through her legs.
“Come on, come on, push Misa. You’ve got this!” She grunted, trying to drum up the effort to free herself. It hurt!
Despite the pain, for a moment, she thought she would make it. Her feet banging into the study floor lifted her knees over the lip, and she was propelled backward, her kneecaps shifting and scraping over the hard lip. The pain caused her body to jerk. Her already numb arm went weak. Her legs spasmed violently. Suddenly, in a free fall, she plummeted into the darkness of the shaft.
Thick thumping thuds and crunching thwacks punctuated her fall down the shaft. The scream locked in her throat as each impact knocked the air from her lungs.
~
She came to sometime later, the sound of her blood rushing noisily in her ears. Her head felt cushioned and buoyant. She gazed for a while up into the shaft she’d fallen from. It was pitch black. The door must have closed. It must have been after she’d slipped free of the frame. If she called for help now, it wasn’t likely that anyone in the house would hear her.
Stupid! You should have called for help when you were stuck in the shaft Misa! Why don’t you think, you never think! It’s too late now. She knew she would never be able to climb back up the saft. Even if she could reach the bottom rung, the parts of her body that weren’t numb ached fiercely. She was in serious trouble, and even more seriously injured. Misa knew that if she didn’t start moving now, she would soon lose the ability completely.
Before her, a long, bright corridor stood empty. It seemed to go on and on forever, silently mocking her. How far had she really fallen? The tunnel must have cut through the basements of dozens of townhouses, possibly extending further into the commercial districts beyond.
Ridiculous, utterly ridiculous. Not even Father has the power to hide something like this! There’s no way this could be real.
The fear and adrenalin had cleared her mind enough that the sheer improbable nature of her situation caused another wave of vertigo to wash over her. Even as her mind cast about desperately for some sort of purchase in reality, she sought to come up with a logical explanation. Each possibility was discarded one after another almost as quickly as they came. The swirling of her mind brought back the nausea she’d felt in the study what felt like ages ago.
The fluorescent lights of the hallway seemed to grow brighter, and the distant scream came again, louder and closer than before. Agony ripped through her body. The pain radiated from all the wrong places and felt bone deep in a way she knew she shouldn’t yet be able to feel. She felt herself flying through space, away from the body splayed haphazardly at the end of the hallway. Her body, that was her body lying there in a mangled heap.
Her astral journey ended suddenly with a wrenching suction and a confusingly out of place pop. After a terrifying moment, her disorientation cleared, and she found herself in another room, someplace unknown to her but somehow infinitely familiar. She seemed to know the white, white walls and cold tile floor of the small room as intimately as she knew the plush brocade carpeting in the study above. Just as familiar was the terror that flew through her, or was it above her, beyond her? There was a figure hunched over her, their face obscured by the bright incandescent lights buzzing behind them. Misa desperately wanted to cry out to them, to beg for her father, demand answers.
No, no, no. Don’t make any sound, don’t make any sound. Please… please!
The thought slithered like oil through Misa’s mind, foreign and alien in a way that made her inexplicably aware of herself as something separate and distinct from the body splayed across the filthy tile floor of the room. Had it always been so filthy? Had she always been so afraid? Terrified? Fear was all she knew; all she’d ever known.
No. No! She fought hard against the foreign thoughts, the alien fear. Before her was the hallway, endless and uncaring of the horror its existence had inspired. The figure loomed larger in her disjointed, fractured vision. A menacing, nameless instrument in hand. The scream that came now was closer than it had any right to be. The scream was hers, and it was not hers. It tore her throat to shreds as efficiently as it ripped her soul apart. Misa felt herself fracture and fall apart. Shattering like so much glass.
Episode Three: Jade
Jade lay in a puddle of her own blood, sweat, and bile. A single ugly mar on the pristine white of the sterile exam room.
It made her long for the small, padded cell that had been her home here for—
How long?
She couldn’t tell, but she’d been dizzy with hunger by the time someone had come for her that first time.
They’d been two men, doctors she’d thought, dressed in hospital scrubs and white coats. Swaying, her legs like jelly and her head filled with soft cotton, she’d demanded answers in the strongest voice she could rally. It had been pathetically weak.
Even if she hadn’t fallen flat on her ass. They’d hit her with the overpowered taser she’d now become intimately familiar with before she’d finished her breathless tirade.
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. It wouldn’t have changed a damn thing.
The first time she’d been brought into this room, they had given her no reasons and asked her no questions. She’d waited for the questions, prayed for the questions. Prayed for answers she could give to stop the pain. Until she had caught sight of their faces, curled in on herself on the floor, trying desperately to protect herself. She’d only glanced up once. It had been enough. Enough to tell her that this was only the beginning.
Their faces were just as stoic and immobile as they entered the room now. There would be no questions today. Not that Jade had been expecting any. It hadn’t taken her long to discover what they were attempting to do anyway.
If they were Otrokári, they would already know it wouldn’t work. She was too human to shift.
Whoever they were, they were not the Otrokári. And she’d spent enough time in the iron cages beneath the city streets to know the difference. These people were too organized, too sophisticated, and too rich.
Freaky rich. Like government rich.
She couldn’t help but wonder if anyone was looking for her, hopeless as the thought was. She curled her arms around her torso, holding herself still as dry sobs hitched at her ribs, sore and aching from that morning’s session.
It wasn’t unusual to disappear; she’d been so new to the flock. Vale would not risk the others to save her.
Not that he could, not that he should.
The Otrokári had had millennia to gather and excel in their brutality as they broke apart what was left of the Xier.
Only small pockets of them still existed. Even fewer survived that knew the histories. Their elders were few and far; almost none left from the beginning. She knew only of Vale. He could not be risked. He would know that truth.
Jade felt her chest seize. An iron cage clamped tightly around her lungs. The aftershocks of her torture still riding her, heightened by her grief. Grasping through her own filth along the hard floor, beating ineffectually at the tiles, her breath gasping, she felt hope slipping through her numb fingers.
Movement at the door jerked her drifting mind back into the room.
A shudder wracked her body as one of the men walked towards her, headless of the filth that stained the bottom of his white tennis shoes. The taser-like instrument in hand.
She couldn’t suppress the jagged, chirping cries that emerged from her throat, bubbling up from deep within her chest. The man loomed over her now, an excited gleam in his dark eyes.
They think they’ve won. The bastards think they’re getting close. Oh god, I’ve never been this close.
Jade felt her muscles bunch and pull at bones incapable of shifting.
It was always the same. The men never spoke. They’d nearly ripped out her tongue to silence the questions she’d begged of them that first day. She’d learned to keep her silence for as long as she could. That resolve ended with a jolt of electricity that gave way to pain racing along her overwrought nerve endings, and suddenly, she was screaming.
The instrument she’d first taken for a taser was pressed into her abdomen, its sharp barb-like probes puncturing cotton and skin. The smell of burnt fabric and flesh mingling with the cloying odor of vomit that permeated the air.
They were hurting her! They were tearing her apart! Oh God, please, I don’t want to die!
Amid her terror, it took her several moments to realize the pain had lifted. Not gone, but far away, like a dream fading into mist. The man, his hand now around her throat, his knee pressed into her sternum while he jabbed the scant meat of her arm with a dripping syringe, was like a mirage, hazy and incomplete.
Caught up in her confusion, she almost missed the moment it happened. The touch was so gentle it sent delicate shivers racing down her weary and twisted spine. The presence poured into her like cool water. Wrapping around her soul with all the imagined comfort of a cloud. It brought to mind the stories her grandmother used to tell when she was a girl before she’d been taken by the Otrokári and forced into the fighting pits.
Her grandmother had told stories of the Xeir, of their great home, worlds away, where they had learned to touch the sky with the power of the sun, and the earth was covered from end to end in verdant green gardens and sparkling oceans. In those stories, her grandmother had spoken of the Great Family—the Xeir-Iin—those who ruled the Xeir and the awful power that ruled them in turn.
The connection was weak, fading in and out in a way that left her disoriented even as the brief respite from the pain grounded her. The clearer the connection became, the more she transcended her current painful existence and the more clearly her grandmother’s voice whispered to her from across the ages. Thin and reedy, it joined a chorus of voices rising from the far reaches of her mind.
And then, like a void opening in the pit of her stomach, it was gone.
There was no breath to rip from her lungs, and yet still, the absence left her bereft, alone to face the agony. Convulsions racked her body, limbs locked in place. The acrid taste of the foam bubbling from her mouth burned her dry, cracked lips.
Tears burned eyes that had long since run dry. Unable to bear the loss of the other presence in the face of her agony, Jade did something she’d only ever heard of in the stories. She reached out with her soul and found her.
Yes, Her. The Xeir-Iin. The Queen.
Episode Four: Vale
Vale gazed out over his little sleeping flock with sharp avian eyes.
They glittered amber and gold in the pale moonlight, missing nothing, assessing every subtle twitch, shift, and sigh. Though there wasn’t an Avus among them, he couldn’t help but think of them as his own children, battered and exhausted from their lives on the run.
This moment of rest was sorely needed.
The Otrokári would catch up all too soon, and though it chafed at his heart, there was no place left for them in Boston. While migration was a deeply embedded part of his nature, this wastrel wandering life on the run settled the weight of all his years more firmly on his shoulders.
He could hardly remember what it meant to have a home. Many of the children he now guarded had never known such a luxury.
They’d managed only a few short months in a proper house this last time before the Otrokári had begun to case the neighborhood. It was wearing on his little flock of ramshackle orphans. He had seen this life drop them as effectively as any slaver who hunted them.
Once, so long ago as to be irrelevant, his people had been gods, daemons, and fair folk to the humans. Revered, respected—feared. Yet now, as never before, humanity was closing in on them from every side. There had been barely a moment of abundance on this strange planet before the humans had outpaced the Xeir in sheer numbers. They’d crawled across the Earth like ants, swallowing forests and rivers whole until there was no recourse but to hide among them.
Those who had survived anyway.
The Otrokári were only the latest practitioners in the time-honored human sport of murdering his people. Nearly all that had been left of the Xeir for a thousand years or more had been hybrids such as these he’d taken under his wing. The blood of Xeir dwindled to almost nothing in their veins.
Vale knew he could never abandon them.
A shift in the moonlight, a cry, and a whimper propelled Vale to his feet. He flew silently over the dirty concrete to the small figure lying curled and shivering apart from the rest. With a brief stirring of dust, he lay beside the young girl and gathered her into his arms.
She shifted restlessly in the protective cage of Vale’s grasp as a figure melted from the shadows.
The figure spoke with a voice like warm butter, “You’re missing one of your little chickees, Vale.”
Revealed was a woman’s figure, slim and tall with the athletic build of a swimmer. Her bright, nearly iridescent hair was pulled into a braid that trailed over her right shoulder, nearly touching her hip. Shining green wisps seemed to escape every other braided knot—feathering out from the chain to catch what little light penetrated the tall, dirty windows.
Vale could not see her eyes through the shadows that still clung to her black-clad form. But he did not need to see them to know they would be the color of cinnamon fire, piercing and cold.
Vale’s delicate features twisted in distaste, creating lines where none yet existed. “Danika. Why are you here? And how did you get in?”
Gently removing the child from his arms, Vale rose to pace the edge of the large room—careful not to wake his slumbering flock. He’d set basic protection pods around the perimeter of the warehouse days before he’d moved his people, and he’d put more around this room that very morning. While the pods weren’t nearly as powerful on Earth as they would have been under the dual suns of Xeir, they still should have alerted him to Danika’s presence.
“Your stealth tech is shit, Vale.” Another step forward brought Danika more fully into the moonlight, illuminating the old judgment in her narrowed eyes. Her golden skin was dark in the shadowed room, and he could see that 100 years had done little to change her.
It was easy to slip back into the same rhythms of derision they’d shared for all the time they’d known one another.
“Where is the girl? I was told you’d found her.” A feathered brow rose as she swept a censured gaze about his sleeping flock. Searching, he knew, for Jade’s blue hair peaking above one of the blankets.
His stomach clenched. She wouldn’t find her. Jade hadn’t been home in days.
“Told by whom?” Really, he should have been expecting her, but he’d so desperately wanted more time.
“There are whispers in the underground. We old ones talk, Vale.” Danika had said it like he wasn’t one of them. Like he’d never felt the light of the twin suns of their home planet. Warm on his feathers. Gleaming in his heart.
“I have not heard such whispers in an age.” And neither had she. Whatever had brought her here, it had not been the sure silence of the dead.
“Yes, you’re far more interested in our hybrid—cousins these days.” Her thin lips curled in disgust.
Fucking purist.
Fin
J.M. 