A/N: at last! presenting my entry for 2014's Resonance Bang! if i had to describe my experience in a single word, i'd have to say transformative. i feel like i've grown a lot as a writer and as a person (self-confidence +1000 because I DID THE THING AND LIVED!). in addition, i've met many amazing people in the fandom and had a lot of fun. shoutouts and endless thank-yous to therewithasmile, monkkeyslut, fabulousanima , and marshofsleep (all on tumblr) for being amazing betas, and an extra-special thank you to marsh for the time she took to bounce ideas around and create the fabulous fanmixes and art. i also want to give the lovely burdge thanks for taking the time to draw fantabulous things of beauty for this thing. hugs to all of you wonderful people! :D happy reading!

(cover art by burdge)

(khione)

Retrospectively, perhaps it would have been better - for Earth, at least - if they had waited just a few more centuries.

The Cellanists were unified in their desire for peace, but disagreed on how to do it. Some argued that the insurgent colonies should put down their arms and once again consent to domination by Earth. Others argued that Earth should bend and allow the colonies the independence they so craved. The issue came to a head once the tides turned in the revolutionaries' favor. It became a matter of when, not if, the rebel forces would come to destroy Earth for good. Fed up with the pointless politicking, believing it was only a matter of time before the rebel colonies crushed Earth like a bug beneath their collective heel, a certain portion of the Cellanist party fled.

The radicals hopped on a starship to safer locales: specifically, a recently-discovered planet called Khione, a comfortable one hundred light-years from Earth and fifty from the nearest colony world, Meili. The planet was young: only nine hundred fifty million years old. Cold, harsh, desolate, unmarred by the presence of life - there, they reasoned, they would be safe, and could live their lives without the threat of annihilation hanging over their heads.

How very wrong they were.

At first, all was well. The radicals' disappearance was hardly noticed. The Cellanists back on Earth continued to argue amongst themselves and with the hundreds of other factions vying for total control. And Khione remained safely at the back of everyone's mind. But as the pioneers, slumbering peacefully in stasis, hurtled towards Khione at almost the speed of light, something went imperceptibly, horribly wrong.

A wormhole, explained the chief scientist once the ship had touched down on the planet's surface. It appears it transported us about ten thousand years into the past. For a short time, panic reigned supreme, because if Earth hadn't invented the technology to help them in that particular point in time, surely everyone was going to die, marooned on a miserable world that never seemed to stop being cold, dammit!

It took several shots from a pistol and even more shouting to restore order. The scientists assured everyone that things weren't as bad as they seemed. They brought Terran plants and Terran animals, as well as embryos, seeds, and spores that had been frozen and were now ready for use. They would not starve. It was all going to be just fine.

But as it turns out, the scouting probes sent to Khione were a century old and thus not as precise in detecting life of the microscopic sort buried deep beneath layers of snow and ice. Almost as soon as the colonists dug past the permafrost and into the hard, cold earth, the microbes sprang into action, leaping at the chance to inhabit that warm, safe paradise that was flesh and blood. They were unlike any other organism the scientists had ever seen. The creatures were ruthless, ravenous - disrupting the electric communication between cells with their own strange, wild signals, sometimes stopping a heart, killing a limb, making veins burst and organs halt and causing the brain to stutter, malfunction and eventually perish. The colonists' bodies were turning on them, traitorously dissolving into lifeless fleshy messes consumed by chaos, rendered unable to function. Fear took root and sprouted, its foul tendrils choking the small, helpless colonists to death. People barricaded themselves in their homes, afraid to venture out. Some fled into the featureless wilderness as if that would save them. It seemed like the end, everyone doomed to die as anachronisms - ten thousand years out of their proper place.

But in the deepest, most fundamental parts of a certain few, where their genes spiraled on and on for miles, where electricity flashed through their nervous systems, where the heart beat and the brain thought and each and every cell sparked and crackled with life, the microbes found a home. Rather than receiving rejection, they were embraced.

Out of the original five hundred thousand people, only ninety thousand remained. And as the ten thousand lost years passed, as the colonists finally arrived at the time their ancestors originated from, the microbes dwelling within the survivors altered them radically.

It started small. An adjustment in eye color. A paling of the hair. Perhaps a slight sharpening of teeth. Nothing serious. Nothing noticeable. But something in the fundamental human genetic code had shifted, morphed, caused by the slow integration of the microorganisms' own DNA into their hosts' bodies. The microbes were swallowed, consumed, digested, dissolved, and with that came a gift: electricity.

Six small disc-like organs, three on each side of the neck, manifested visibly as round, sunken dark patches about the size of the finger pads. Miniature versions of those in the neck peppered the palms. With nothing more than a deep breath, lightning could fork from their hands. With only a slight frown of concentration, they could sense the electricity - quiet and intricate and omnipresent - that each and every single living organism produced, as a tingle, a hum, a shiver in their necks. The people of Khione were strange and wonderful and they gloried in their abilities, and when the ten thousand years were up and their hair was bleached white and their teeth were sharp like sharks', it was decided that contact with Earth would be made at last.

The Terrans were surprised, to put it mildly. Questions were posed, answers were given. Yes, a wormhole. Yes, we traveled back in time. Yes, we've been here for ten thousand years and would like nothing more than to reconnect with you (peacefully).

The Khionian representative saw a flash of fear, of revulsion, in the Terran leader's face, hovering in the hologram. It was there if only for a millisecond, less than the time it took for a nervous impulse to travel from brain to finger, but it was there as the Terran and his advisors took in his white hair and red eyes and sharp teeth. The representative felt a hard, cold knot of fear form in his stomach but he smiled as nonthreateningly as he could and explained patiently what the microbes had done to them all those years ago.

Whatever its implications, the representative reflected when he got home, it was definitely a historic meeting. He felt a brief moment of satisfaction that whatever else happened, his name would be forever remembered as that of the man who made the first tentative contact with the mother planet.

Of course, in the coming years, he would begin to wonder if that was such a good thing after all.

Some of the Terrans, it seemed, were not very comfortable with the idea that an advanced civilization had been existing for thousands of years alongside their own, unchecked and with the capacity to do enormous harm to Earth. After all, the fearful ones reasoned, wouldn't it be better to neutralize the threat while the Khionians were still unsuspecting, still believing that all was going according to plan? This angered the people of Khione, and tensions grew and grew between the two worlds. In the end, it was decided that Khione would aid the insurgents in their struggle for freedom against Earth, the same struggle that the original colonists had fled so long ago.

(you)

Your mother was from the great city-state of Oika, located on the planet of Khione. She grew up in a middle-of-the-middle-class home in a quiet apartment complex on the southern edge of the sprawling metropolis. Tall and slender and tan, with long white hair and laughing eyes the color of ripe apples, she captured your father's heart as soon as she smiled at him.

They bumped into each other on the sidewalk, in the middle of the Deep Cold, that seasonal menace when the planet hardens into ice, hardly able to see for the snow and wind buffeting everything about. It was her fault, really. She'd slammed into your father, thinking him perhaps a lamp-post to anchor herself to, but when he fell, goods flying everywhere, she realized her mistake and offered to buy him a hot drink to make it up to him. As soon as she unwound the layers of clothing that had been covering her features in that café, your father felt like a fist had slammed into his gut, driving all air from him. Instantly he loved everything about your mother's face, from her sleepy eyes to her wide grin to the barely-there smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. After a whirlwind courtship they were married within the year.

Your brother was born in the brief, cool summer, and once his teeth came in he was something of an oddity in the small village where your father lived all his life. Blue eyes were exceedingly rare among the inhabitants of Khione - couple that with flat teeth like those of the Terrans, and you had a very distinctive creature. His strange appearance never bothered him, though, and his first year and a half of life was spent living happily with his parents, exploring the nearby forest, and visiting his paternal grandmother, who lived close by.

When Wes was almost two, your mother became pregnant again. But you came a little early, entirely unexpected, the day a raging snowstorm blew in and almost buried the small house in several meters of snow. Your father was powerless to save her as she bled to death in his arms. You, however, were a perfectly healthy baby boy, squalling loudly, completely oblivious to the fact that you didn't have a mother any longer. You were called Soul, as she wanted. It was the first and last time your father would give you anything as a parent.