Tales From a Thousand Worlds

Kwaza, Slave

Part One – The Foreign Familiar

The tribe had all gathered. They were ranged about a great roaring fire that burned in the meeting commons, in the centre of the village, beneath stars at once familiar and yet at the same time strangely foreign. They were the stars that Nhaqosa had grown up with but at the same time stars that he had not seen for a great while, stars at odds with the ones that he had observed over the recent years. Whenever he glanced at them, he expected them to be different, to be the ones that he had become used to.

From the oldest bull to the youngest calf with barely formed horns, the minotaurs of the Stonemaul tribe sat and listened, in colours of grey and roan, of brown and black, mottled and splotched and more. Among them, dwarfed by the tall, bulky minoaturs, sat a number of goblins, their broad, ruddy brown faces open and earnest, as well as the three humans who had been Nhaqosa’s companions; Abasan, Niati and Lakach. They were all that remained of those who had started out with him, some having died and others having settled down elsewhere.

Finally one of the calves spoke up, a promising young girl who bore a roan patch around her white eye on an otherwise white hide.

“You have told us of your many adventures, Kwaza,” she said, “But you have not told us how you came to be there. How did you find yourself in the Otherworlds?”

Nhaqosa smiled as he looked at the burning fire. “Now that is a tale.”

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