Thalassa Commonwealth Colony of Elyas Summer, Year One

My name is Torin Clase, and I have been charged with writing the story of Jani Kilian. Who she is, and how she came to be.

A quarter century ago a Vynshà priest named ní Tsecha Egri prophesied that one day his race, the idomeni, and my race, the humanish, would blend in the fullness of time to form a single people. In his quest to promote his vision, Tsecha compelled his people to allow humanish to live on the idomeni homeworld of Shèrá, and to establish a consulate on the outskirts of the dominant city of Rauta Shèràa.

Tsecha also compelled the idomeni to allow humanish into their dominant educational institution, the Academy. That first class of six students learned documents protocols from the race that devised them  as tensions grew between those bornsect idomeni who feared the humanish presence within the Shèráin worldskein and those few who believed that Tsecha’s blending prophecies defined the future.

When these tensions erupted into civil war, one of those six humanish graduates, Jani Kilian, had attained the rank of Captain in the Commonwealth Service. As she worked to mediate relations between humanish and idomeni, she learned of illegal dealings between them that would have given victory to the ultraconservative elements of the idomeni and bolstered repressive forces within the humanish government. But when she acted to expose this conspiracy, she was killed, murdered as the transport in which she rode exploded on takeoff outside the hospital-shrine of Knevçet Shèràa.

But killed and dead are two different things. Kilian was saved by a humanish physician named John Shroud, who re-fashioned her using idomeni genetic material. He believed he had inactivated what he considered the undesirable aspects of that material, but he had not.

As the war drew to its bloody conclusion, Kilian escaped with her life. For almost twenty years she lived a fugitive existence in the colonies, on the run from her past, each day growing more aware of the change that had begun to claim her. Last year, she traveled to the Commonwealth homeworld of Earth for the first time, to the capital of Chicago. There she investigated crimes that provided her with the links between her past and her future, and revealed to her the path she was destined to follow as the first of her kind. The first hybrid.

She lives in Chicago still, working with the idomeni embassy and studying the ways of a priest with ní Tsecha, whom she calls “inshah.” Teacher. Doing that which she is bound to do, for she is, as ní Tsecha named her, the Kièrshia, the “toxin,” the bringer of pain and change. She is also, as I have said before, the first.

And I so wish to meet her . . .