“Raymond, before you ask, I know who they are, where they have been, and where they are going.  I know, perhaps, why you are all so happy, but I am puzzled as to why there’s so little dissention amongst you….I’ve been told things that amaze me, excite me and fill me with awe.”

Raymond smiled, put a hand upon my shoulder, and said “Yes, we’re all going, Joshua.  But you knew that.”  I fell silent, and he motioned for us to sit at a small table, the private corner.  

I related to him how Khostra had imbued my dreams.

Her people were of an antiquity that we cannot encompass.  One that even their own scribes fall short of in their stories, ending at a guess.  Their origin was in the star cluster we know as the Pleiades.  Over millions of years, their civilization grew in power and influence, and they began a push to explore their known universe.  Of their ancient homes, our Earth was one, until the great calamity of the Cretaceous period.  Their numbers were decimated, and those that remained fled in search of salvation.  Some had settled on the planet Mars.  The hearts of others desired a return to the lands of their peoples’ birth.

The Martian choice proved well for the new settlers, who prospered for millennia.  In the end, as we know, that planet became desolate after losing almost all of its atmosphere and water, and they had no natural protection against asteroid and meteor strikes.  Over hundreds of years, they prepared their great leaving, most heading across the void to the Pleiades.  Some few chose to return to Earth, found it to be habitable again, and stayed.  They became teachers of men when humanity sprang from the dust.  But their numbers eventually dwindled, and those that lived on became secretive, building underground bases that few had stumbled upon but had somehow forgotten.

And now, in this hour of Earth’s shame and destruction, they were leaving once again.
But not all.
Khostra and some of her hundreds would remain.  They had a plan.  I held a hope after these last lonely years.  I thought I had lost my brother in this time of our world’s chaos. In her magic, Khostra knew that this was not so.  She had more to tell me….

to be continued…..