Axa was tired. It had been a long day, and he’d been kicked a few times too many. Pigs were often mean, especially during the impaling. He was getting old and was feeling his years in his bones. It would be his time soon. He wasn’t afraid of being impaled. He had trained his crew, and they’d stick him well. He wouldn’t feel a thing. Those who eat will, in the end, be eaten. That is the way of life. He accepted this.
The only worry he carried with him was for his humans, the young male and the very old female. He had found the female at the beginning, when they first began farming this planet. Back then, there were humans everywhere. When impaled properly with good weather conditions, they became flavorful and fetched a sizable return on the open market, off setting the meager amount of meat on the average stock. But human domestication proved difficult. The humans were stubborn, disease ridden and prone to violence. Despite their size and lack of biological weaponry, they were resourceful, able to use tools, and often organized in reaction to threat. After many incidents of conflict, it was decided that the humans were not worth the effort when compared to pigs and bovines, which produced far more meat and were not so difficult to manage. Human breeding was stopped and most were slaughtered quickly. Some live specimens were shipped out through the trade routes finding cache in private collections and the occasional zoo. While the elimination of the human race was unfolding, Axa kept the female, protected her, and managed to save her life, thanks mostly to his rank. So she stayed with him, while the rest of her kind was exterminated. Like Axa, she was also growing old, sick, and weak. He would have to impale her soon. He would give her a good death. It was the boy for whom his worry had no solve. The boy had too much life left in him to waste.
The boy came to Axa when a pod of wild humans was discovered in the mountains, caught and shipped to Axa’s processing field for impalement. Axa impaled the adults without conscious thought until he came to the male child. There was something in the infant’s eyes that made him hold his stake and he came to the realization that he could not kill the whelp. So he gave it to the old female and she cared for it. As the boy grew, his propensity to creation was obvious. He seemed to find the human form in almost anything he saw, and built sculptures out of wood and metal, littering the impaling yard with his humanoid statues. The others in Axa’s division feared this and wanted the boy dead, but Axa would not allow it.
So as Axa’s day of impalement came closer, he would have to set the boy free somewhere in the wild. There are legends of human tribes living wild in the deepest forests of the planet, and that is where he would send the boy. If the boy were the last human, then he would have to survive alone. Or die alone. All Axa could do was give him a chance. The rest was up to luck and fate…and a young human male, named Ranne.
-I was cleaning out my office and I found this drawing.
I remember doodling it in a story meeting about a year earlier. While I was trying to recall what kind of chemicals I'd been on at the time, I thought that maybe there was a story in the scribble. So I wrote a response to the sketch and redrew the image to make it prettier. You never know where an idea will come from...so save everything.
Kris.-
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