Episode 28: Independence
Life is fragile, its parts, more so. Our world hangs on a delicate balance, an ebb and flow of birth and death, cycles repeating like breath. We crown ourselves apex, convinced our tools and fire secure dominion over nature. But power is a story we tell ourselves. Beyond the edge of comfort, behind the light, things hunt us whether we know it or not.
Stranded on Earth, the parasites from another world, would fracture over the fate of humanity. How to engage. How to feed. To live beside, or above mankind. These creatures will rule this planet one day. The more we terrorize and butcher them, the more they’ll learn to fight back.
ANU: Death over the weak prevails here. It’s inevitable. It’s natural. We can be seen as Gods.
RAH: Anu, stop thinking like a conqueror.
ANU: When did the mighty Rah turn pacifist? I’ve never met another who’s killed as many species as you. If anyone were to understand the necessity of control and power through death, it would be you.
RAH: It was highborns like you who forced me into service as a Hunter. I followed orders and murdered in the name of progress and ritual, war and genocide. But no matter how many lives I took, standing in victory was never enough for our kind, as once power by oppression is gained, it can never be enough. Because death, must follow death, must follow death. It can be different here.
Ezath watched Rah and Anu collide. She could have been the bridge, the voice of compromise. A path to live among humans as rulers or prophets, guiding them past her people’s failures toward a power no world had seen...but she didn’t.
Ezath on Earth - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Before the crash on Earth, Ezath was being groomed for a leadership role on her home planet. She’s studied diplomacy, was skilled in strategy, recon, and concealment. High-born parents. Fair-complexioned, blonde, prized stock in their society. Her appearance alone held power over others. There wasn’t much Ezath wanted for out of life. But potential isn’t experience. And for all her training, she’d never held a world in her hands, never tested theory against consequence. And when the choice came, she remained silent.
What Ezath truly wanted was to live without supervision. She’d been told how to act her whole life, she wanted to live, to err, to learn. Military service was expected, leaders were forged by wide experience, but volunteering for the exploratory mission that would strand her on Earth was her deviation from the script.
Her parents objected. Ezath countered, furthering colonization fit her training as an officer-apprentice and matched her ambition. Secretly, she craved distance. Room to choose, to flourish –- and the mission would be her chance.
But she soon found in space, and following the crash, being the youngest and least experienced of the crew, she had little say or opinions on decisions made by the group. And so, she’d fall into the same submissive familial patterns, yielding to Anu’s iron certainty, and studying what she could under Rah’s brilliant, patient quiet...All while desiring to be on her own. Although there were no bonds to keep her from staying with the others, they all felt a sense of duty in remaining together. But constantly having to prove herself, pushing boundaries, and arguing for control took its toll on the maturation of Ezath.
While she saw both sides of Rah and Anu’s war of ideas, she was uninterested in dominating the humans or lifting the species up. Ezath simply wanted to live within the ecosystem mankind did. Humans fascinated her, but they were sustenance. So for her, sitting atop the food chain was one thing, but ruling a planet, playing gods without reinforcements from home, that seemed like a losing gambit.
One night, hunting alone in the hills, Ezath drove a human woman into a cave. Stone pressed close. Breath steamed. Ezath struck, then chose an experiment. She let the woman bite, and draw blood. A few drops was enough. Within a matter of moments the change came. Violent, but beautiful. The woman was remade, the first human-Vampire clone.
Cornered in a cave - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Ezath knew this was the way her kind had endured for eons. Worlds taken by blood. But having never been in battle, having never witnessed the outcome of the mutation, she was in awe of creating an Underling. Marveling at how quickly the human mutated into a being just like her. Nearly instantly she had a subordinate, another female, a daughter of sorts, family born of her blood. But how would the others feel?
For days Ezath kept the clone hidden, using her Tuning abilities to keep the woman under her control. Ezath first told Rah. While he objected, he saw it as a way to ease the process of integration with the humans. Together they approached Anu, with the idea to select others to make like them. Ambassadors to help branch out, to colonize, and pioneer the planet. But Anu answered with violence, killing the subordinate on the spot. He cited contempt for the humans and a disgust at “playing with their food”.
In that moment, the trio understood, together they were less than the sum of their parts. The experiment, the restraint, the conquest, none of it could live in one body. That was the final break. The final straw for Rah. Anu would not bend. Ezath agreed, this wasn’t working.
On a calm, starry night, the three travelers said goodbye. There were no emotions, no soft words, no sentiment.
The remnants of their ship, long rusted away from the weather on Earth. Most of the tools and technology they traveled with were destroyed, or eroded past the point of usefulness. The parasites held no other advantage over the burgeoning humans, other than their heightened abilities... And so they parted. Three different directions into a strange land, under a sky that knew none of their names.
Alone at last, Ezath moved north through the Fertile Crescent and into the lands that would become Europe, skirting the edges of Stone Age camps. She shadowed the migrant bands, watching how they touched and traded, how their faces signaled meaning, how words braided into pattern. Free of handlers, she had no one left to tell her no, and freedom made her reckless.
Something stalks the shadows - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
She came from a culture that had never learned horror. And at first, she openly hunted the weak at the fringes and fed. Then, emboldened, she stepped from the dark to establish contact with the humans. She didn’t account for her appearance, tall, pale, blonde -- a stark contrast to the coarser features of the hunter-gatherers. To them, she was a ghastly spirit out of the night, the thing that stalked the shadows. Fear rose to rage. Stones and spears answered. Ezath was forced to flee.
She moved on, close to new tribes, but not too close. Waiting to be allowed to be present, without aggression. She fed in secret and, piece by careful piece, earned their trust. When the moment felt steady, she chose with care and made what was to be the first member of her Brood, a young woman named Tali.
Ezath and her Underling, Tali - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
But as a Vampire, Tali, unequipped emotionally to handle the abilities gained, was uncontrollable and violent. Quickly exposing Ezath as a monster in disguise...Her attempt at creating a partner backfired. The frightened tribe violently fought back. They hunted Tali down and executed her, then turned on Ezath, driving her off, leaving her wounded, nearly ending her.
To the humans Ezath was a horror of the natural order. Letting her in was a weary lesson in trusting strangers from the dark. She was a demon, an affliction, something to fear. Word of her spread. Her existence spawned stories that carried to other camps, a blood-sucker, a night ghost -- she became, the Vampire. More than just a predator, she was a monster, because she looked like them.
For Ezath it was a lesson in boundaries. She’d have to hunt smarter. Choose Underlings with greater care. And if she wanted to mix with the humans, and not just stalk the shadows, she’d have to work a lot harder.
TO BE CONTINUED…