The Reptilian Warrior

 20,001,230 Earth years ago, Orion: I was a soldier and belonged to a species we know today as reptilians. I had not decided on being a soldier, I was born one. The place where I opened my eyes for the first time was in short called camp, but it was a combination of military camp and orphanage. We were hatched from naturally laid eggs. Reptilians did not live together unless they were born and raised in a camp, so the eggs and the offspring inside them did not belong to any family. When the eggs were ready to hatch they would be brought inside the nursery, where they were kept in more spacious containers. The last few days before hatching was always a perilous time for eggs, and they needed close watching, and that was a task for the nurses who worked in the camp. They would make sure the eggs received enough heat and moisture, and that the shells did not crack as the fetus inside sometimes moved. I was born in one of those nursery rooms among others. None of us had any visitors from outside during our lives in the camp, and none of us got to meet our parents. A few days after hatching we were taken into another section where we were kept and fed with others. The previous room would be reset and cleaned out for the next hatch. After a few months we would be ready to see the area outside and right there our first training would begin, which at first was nothing but watching other kids training. As we grew up, the training also became more and more practical. We were trained there to early adolescence. When we reached the age equal to Earth’s 14-16 year old humans, we would join the army to be utilized as soldiers.  I say utilize because that was it was like. We had no mind of our own; one could say we were organic killing machines.

As it was determined from the first day of my life, I never lived a day as something else other than a soldier, nor did I think of being something else. I ended up being a good warrior too. Everything about me including the way I looked and the structure of my body was an advantage for fighting. I had a scaly skin that changed from muddy green on the back and sides into smoky yellow on my stomach and palms. I had yellow big eyes with vertical pupils and a wide slot as mouth. One sight of me was enough for the enemies to lose themselves in fear, which made it easy for me to defeat them. I had a short, thick neck and a muscular body. I was pretty strong, taller than today’s humans and could fight without the need to rest for a few days in a row. I did not wear any clothes, in fact none of the soldiers did. Only our commanders wore long cloaks that showed their higher ranks. The only thing a soldier wore was his weapons. The most common weapon we used was laser guns. My favorite was the type that leaved a clean hole in the body through which you could throw a javelin.

My brain was big enough to make me capable of following plans and agendas, but I didn’t have many, just one actually: to fight and to kill. I didn’t care or even knew who those we fought against were or why we had to fight all those wars, mainly because I enjoyed doing that. We were almost always busy. There was always some enemy somewhere we had to go to war with, which for me meant a new adventure. Whenever a war ended, another one started almost immediately. There was always a new planet to "discover,"  and by that I mean to invade, exploit and destroy. So my life as a was a combination of interstellar traveling and fighting, and I enjoyed both. Though there were things that bothered me too. Even though I was too used to it to notice it consciously, I was in a constant struggle between killing and survival and it took a lot of my energy. I never thought about it much though. In fact none of us thought too much about anything else other than war. There was no time for anything else. We were always in battles we had no idea who had started, against people we didn’t know and in places we had never been in. There was no propaganda to invoke us like there is today on Earth either, it was not needed. We were natural born fighters and did not know any other life. There was no entertainment for a soldier, but we learned gradually how to entertain ourselves alongside what was expected from us. After each invasion, we would take our time to document our victory in a satisfactory way, and nothing would give us satisfaction like the feeling of having power over others. What could demonstrate that kind of power best was annihilation. Over time it became a tradition to destroy planets after each invasion, and we were quite creative that way. We would carpet torched lands with bodies we arranged in a rhythmic fashion and made sure to leave the planet empty of all resources and life forms. Sometimes we would leave our signature as a final touch, mostly by decorating a piece of land with body parts in a way that it would resemble the Orion star system from above.

We never feared anything apart from our commanders. They were replaced from time to time, and although we never knew how they were chosen and by whom, we were equally afraid of all of them. They were incredibly cruel and did not hesitate to torture or kill law breakers and trouble makers. For that reason, even though fighting was the first thing we learned and practiced throughout our lives, we almost never fought among ourselves. We had to save our strength for the enemy, that was one of the first things we all learned in the camp. in fact any action that would sabotage the force of the army had serious consequences, and fighting with our fellow soldiers and disturbing the peace and order of the camp were on the top of the list. There were many types of punishments for different degrees of misbehavior, but the punishment for fighting was so severe that some of us had nightmares about it. My absolute horror was being kept in a solitary cell, which was the punishment for detectable physical harm of oneself or a fellow soldier. The cells were so small that it was impossible to sit in them in any position other than upright fetal. They said getting into one of those cells could lead into losing the ability to walk forever, not that one could be sure of coming out alive to test that anyway. For that reason I would make sure to avoid fighting inside the camp at any cost. Instead I would save my daily dose of annoyance for the enemy, which made me a cold blooded, cruel warrior. It also led into combat becoming my favorite pastime activity, where I got to do what I was good at and be free from all my fears. My fearlessness was shared by other soldiers partly because we truly believed there was no nation or species that could match our power. We took planets one after the other. We started with the ones in our own star system and then went after the neighborhood systems and took them too. Then we went to discovers planets that were in far away galaxies. I took part in taking many of those planets, but I never took time to learn much about them, sometimes not even their names. Little did I know that soon the course of my life would be changed forever on one of them.

Living in the camp was my least favorite time, and whenever it took long before I was sent to a new war I became extremely bored. During one of those between wars I was on day sitting in my room wishing for a new mission when I was told that I was going to be sent to Lyra, a newly discovered star system where we had just started a war. It made me excited to be on the front again, so I wasted no time and immediately started packing and departed with the next spaceship. Our trip did not take so long, and to my delight, after we got there I was almost immediately sent to one of the most problematic zones. There, I fought and killed a lot of Lyrans in the first few days, though I found them to be surprisingly strong and smart. I was exhausting to fight them. They managed to trick us into their traps many times, which were extremely painful to get caught in. A few times they also lured us into ambushes and towards the cliffs, but most of us got out by one on one fighting. Soon I got used to the Lyrans' strength but still I was not smart enough for their conning ways. Before getting there I thought I was going to have fun as I always did, but the Lyrans were starting to scare me with their bravery and intelligence. War was a game to me, and I could never have enough of it, and that was because I had never lost. But for the first time I was feeling as if I was about to lose. Being always among the winners meant that in my mind war was equal to defeating the enemy and having power over them. But what did it mean to be defeated instead? I had no idea. I was still very young in body and soul. Perhaps it was for that reason also that I was so surprised when I almost got to experience what was like to be defeated for the first time.

It happened when I was guarding an arsenal in the forest as others where searching the area for traps and mines. I was tired and about to doze off when a Lyran soldier appeared in front of me out of nowhere. He had his dagger out in his hand which was glowing under the blue light of the evening sky among with his glittering teeth that he showed as he smiled. He then jumped and took a leap towards me, bringing down his hand and aiming for my neck with the fatal tip of his dagger. I did not have time to use my laser gun, so in the very last moment before he could stab me I grabbed his daggered hand and kicked him in the stomach with my knee. He was strong and stubborn, and did not flinch. Though I felt his breathing stopped for a few moments as my knee met his stomach. It gave me enough time to take out my own dagger. It did not take long though before he recovered and forced his hand forward as I had his wrist in my grip. The tip of his dagger was getting closer and almost reached my neck, it was so close that I could feel the coldness of the metal. I knew I was going to die unless I did something, and fast. Any movement in that situation was a risk that could end up with a cut in my throat, but I could not survive that situation by hesitating either. In the last moment right before the definite touch of the dagger I docked my head to the side and swung behind him by shifting my weight to my left leg and stabbed him in the other side as my upper body slid over his right leg. It all happened in a split of second. I had acted so fast that he had not being able to respond except with shock. He trembled with pain as I took the dagger out and stabbed him again in the back. He screamed as my dagger penetrated the space between his shoulder blades and went directly into the heart. He did not collapse immediately even though the wound was absolutely lethal. Instead he turned around and clung to me to stop himself from falling. I grabbed his daggered hand again that I had released when I moved, and he grabbed my shoulder with his other hand. We stood there in some sort of embrace. He didn't seem to be ready to give up, perhaps still hoping he could take me down with him somehow, maybe by squeezing my throat or using his dagger on me before his last drop of strength left him. His grip was loosening now, and his dagger was no longer a threat to me. But I was still holding my dagger as I pressed my fist to his back, holding his body close to mine to make sure he would not have the chance to attack again as he was slowly going soft in his knees. His eyes started to close, and his head slowly dropped down. He was sliding down when suddenly his head snapped up and his eyes flashed open. That took me by surprise and I instinctively tightened my grip on his hand. But all he did was looking at me directly in the eyes with his big, glowing ones. I stared back. It was a very long moment, and it lasted until the light left his eyes and he fell motionless on the ground. He was not the only one who could not move though. I sat there beside his body motionless and confused for a long time. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I had never gotten in such a close contact with anyone, had never been looked at by anyone like that, alive or dying. This contact had left something in me, or perhaps had taken something from me, I couldn't tell which one, maybe both. I did not know what it was that I was feeling, but I knew I had never felt anything like that before. It was mostly inside my chest. It made me self conscious in a way that had never been before. I touched my chest. Usually I hated what I did not know, and that was a feeling I had never known. But at that moment I was too confused to hate anything. I had no name or any other means by which I could describe how I felt. Was it regret? Was it sorrow? But why was I feeling like that? I had survived, I had won the fight and my enemy was dead. I should be filled with relief and triumph. Instead it felt as if I had lost, as if something important was taken from me. I didn't know what it was and how I could take it back, or even if I wanted to. But knew one thing; that fight had changed everything for me. I understood that much.

The first change that I experienced after that night was that I had no longer an appetite for the battlefield. I had no desire to kill, and the war game did not appeal to me like it did before. My thoughts were changed too. In fact I realized that I had not even been aware of my thoughts until that point, but now I suddenly had noticed them. It was as if I discovered the person who lived in me and saw the outer world through my eyes. First time I became conscious of my thoughts was when I realized that whenever I closed my eyes I saw those big eyes in front of me again. It was as if I had absorbed them and they had pushed all other images out of my mind. I was feeling a range of new emotions, so unknown to me that I didn't have any words to name them. I was seeing everything with new eyes and it was turning me into a different person. It was as if I was turning into my reflection in a mirror; I merely looked like myself but I wasn't really there anymore. Soon I realized what I was feeling was what Lyrans felt. All those new feelings I had was what they had been feeling, what HE had felt. It was as if the space between me and the Lyran I killed that night had worked like a carbon copy, imprinting a bit of his soul on mine. In that last moment he had sown the seed of his soul in mine.

In the coming days I realized my skills was starting to fade away. My reactions were slow and my initiatives sloppy. I knew I was not going to last long if I continued like that, but I had no power and no motivation to change that. So that day that I got killed I was half expecting that. We were ambushed again, and my group was waiting behind the rocks to avoid getting shot, forcing the Lyrans to come closer so that they can fight them one on one. I had not done much though, not even bothered to run fast enough as everyone was rushing behind the rocks. I almost stood there as the laser beam penetrated my chest. A crazy thought passed through my mind; that it's good I was not going to survive that because otherwise I was going to be punished for getting myself shot easily. For a split of second the thought made me smile before I felt a burning sensation in my chest, and my knees lost the ability to support me. I looked at the hole in my chest on my way down as I was falling. It was a clean hole, exactly my favorite kind. I felt the air passing through it, and another thought passed my mind; that perhaps someone would come back later to try to throw a javelin through the hole in my chest.

I didn't realize it at first when I came out of my body. I was completely baffled, not remembering what had happened, where I was and why I was there. It was maddening. I wished I could call for help, but I realized I had no voice. As if to answer my silent call, something soft and warm embraced me. It was like a cave whose walls moved with some sort of wavy motion. As it surrounded me completely, I found myself to be in the dark but somehow I still could see. There were sounds around me, most of them muffled as if they were passing through the soft walls around me. The closest and most clear ones were the sound of a flowing stream and rhythmic pulses. Soon I discovered I had hands. It happened almost by accident as I was trying to change my position and instinctively had pushed my hands against the walls to move. The walls were warm. I remembered I had been somewhere like that before, but the walls had been hard and cold there. I stayed there for a while and then suddenly I felt intense movements around me. The walls were moving faster and harder. Their wave like movement became stronger, and it started pushing me. It was going to kill me, I thought. I was suffocating, and I was scared. I decided to resist with all my might, but the walls were stronger and they finally pushed me out. I was angry and in pain, and I cried from the bottom of my lungs. I noticed I had voice now. I was cold, hungry and confused. It was awful. But then I felt I was in someone's hands, hands that embraced me with a lot of love. It calmed me down. I was still crying a little, but I couldn't remember why. Then a warm delicious liquid poured inside my mouth. It was wonderful.

 As I grew up I learned that we called ourselves Lyran felines, and that we were at war with reptilians from Orion. Hearing their name made me uneasy even as a kid. Sometimes it reminded me of yellow eyes with vertical pupils but I had no idea why. It made me confused because I had never seen eyes like those in my life.

Soon I learned life was not easy; it was full of dangers as we were in the war, and saturated with emotions not so easy to handle, especially when we lost someone close. Throughout my life as a feline I had one question, why did we have to go through all that?  But I never found an answer to that until my life as a feline was finished. As I came out of my body I remembered my life before that one, and the irony made me smile. I had been a reptilian soldier, the very creatures I had hated and had been afraid of my whole life. I knew now why I was remembering those yellow eyes. They had been my own! I had lived two lives that were almost complete negative images of each other. It almost made me laugh. And then I heard someone chuckle.

"Who is that?" I asked, somewhat startled.

"I'm you. Well, the so called higher you. The part of you that knows it all, so to speak, hehehe. You are a multidimensional being, you exist in many places but you had been concentrating on one of them for a long time. How should I put it... you had been an extensions of mine in that particular dimension, and you were one of my favorites too."

This explanation made me even more confused. What was this being talking about? Was this some sort of trick?

"You are me? Why don't I see you then? Why don't I remember you? You say I'm your extension, then why is that I'm not attached to you?"

"We don't need to be visibly attached, but we are the same being. I just have access to more dimensions than you do. That's why you can hear me so clearly. It's as if I'm inside your head, isn't it?"

I did not like that explanation more than I liked being confused, which I still was by the way.

"Oh come on. Can't you take a little joke? Look. You are me, I am you. We planned this together. All of it. You have just finished two really intense lifetimes, and it is perfectly natural that you are experiencing amnesia and confusion. Give it time, you will remember. But for now, why don't you go play on those hills behind you? Some young souls are playing with a very interesting animal there that has just arrived from a very interesting planet. It can stand almost upright and it has opposable thumbs too, but it' not that intelligent. I heard this morning that the elders of the council are thinking of changing its genes and making it smarter and see if it can develop some sort of civilization. Crazy, huh? I say they're just bored. Can't blame them though. Eternity can be boring, unless you get amnesia from time to time, if you know what I mean, hehehe.

I did not answer, I was only half listening. I felt as if the memories were coming back to me slowly through a thick fog. I turned around and went towards the hills where those young souls were playing with something dark and fury. It had long hands and short legs. It was jumping around and making sounds that I thought indicated that it was having a lot of fun. That made me smile, but it faded away as I remembered what my higherself had said. They were going to experiment on it, making it somehow smarter. Then what? Would it ever know how it had happened? How would it feel if it did know?
I sighed. Let's just focus on my own problems for now. I thought to myself. Where was I? Right. The memories...