Page 5 of Caveman Alien's Terror

I hand him the salen fruit. “It looks all right to me.”

He turns it over in his hands. “Still, don’t eat it. He may have cast some kind of magic on it.”

I do my best to not roll my eyes. Of course it’s expected that a tribe of cavemen will call things they don’t understand ‘magic’, and it’s understandable that they’ve named some other alien species ‘the Darkness’, because they don’t know any better. But I have to try to interpret their legends and myths and primitive attempts at understanding the world around them, so that I can make some real sense of it.

“Or maybe it’s a perfectly fine fruit,” I gently try. “It would have been strange to save our lives and then give me a poisoned salen fruit right after.”

“It is our sacred fruit,” the old shaman says darkly. “It’s sacrilege for an agent of the Darkness to even touch it. The Darkness is everything we are not. They’re evil. And youwerebrought here by the Plood. They are the servants of Darkness. Perhaps this blue terror has a specific reason for seeking you out.”

And perhaps he’s our way back home to Earth, for exactly that reason,I think to myself. “We must certainly take that into account,” I say out loud. “Should we take precautions, now that we’ve seen him?”

“You can obviously not go into the jungle on your own,” Melr’ax thinks out loud. “You must bring three warriors each time. Two to fight the Darkness and one to keep you safe, if he were to attack you. Four would be better. ” He closes his eyes. “The chief must be told about this so he can send hunting parties out to kill this terror. I don’t like that it has already shown interest in you.”

“I’ll be careful,” I promise as I quietly put the pot of salen sap on the floor and open the door to leave. I’ve tired the old man out, something that takes nothing these days.

“Astrid.”

I quickly go back inside. “Yes, Melr’ax?”

His eyes are still closed. “You remember how to kill it?”

“I remember,” I assure him. “You told me. It’s the ultimate duty of a shaman. To be the anti-dragon, the anti-Darkness. That means killing them. I will not forget. I have the dragon dagger on me right now.” I feel for the hard outline hidden in my dress.

“From now on, always keep it with you,” he says for the tenth time, having the old man’s need to repeat himself endlessly. “Inside its sheath. That’s very important. Only reveal the blade at the last moment.”

“Yes, Melr’ax,” I reply patiently.

He doesn’t say anything more, so I leave and softly close the door. I worry that this sweet, well-meaning old shaman won’t last much longer. When he’s gone, I’ll be the full shaman with nobody to ask about things.

I make my way to my own cave, halfway up the red mountain that the tribe just calls the Mount, and is like a miniature version of Uluru in Australia.

Little Luna is curled up by one wall. One of her three eyes opens when I enter, and she uncurls, stretches, and splays out all her talons. Then she goes back to sleep.

“It’s a hard life, huh?” I tease her. “Don’t get up on my account. You need your beauty sleep.”

She’s what the cavemen call astevikand classify as a Small. So she’s not a dinosaur and not an insect, but some kind of mammal. Being a pup, she’s the size of a big housecat, but Melr’ax says she will grow to about three times that. The fur on her upper half always reminds me of astroturf, because it’s a vivid green and stiff. She has short, pitch black fur on the rest of her body, showing the cat-like muscles beneath.

Normally the Borok tribesmen don’t like having living creatures inside their village, because nearly all of them are wild and deadly. But a shaman is allowed, and Melr’ax claims to have had a stevik as a pet for years in the Foundling clan.

Luna has six legs and two tails, one fin-shaped along her back and one tiger-like one in the normal place. She’s clearly a predator of some kind, but it should be possible to tame her. So far it hasn’t taken much effort, just feeding her and petting her on the rare occasions when she lets me. Each time it takes a bit of bravery on my part, because she has an impressive set of fangs and bird-like talons for legs. I’ve seen her rip slabs of raw meat apart like tissue paper.

“But you're really just a big goof,” I blatantly lie, hoping to persuade her that she is, so that she'll be more cuddly.

Leaving Luna, the pot, and the salen fruit there, as well as my spear, I climb the carefully carved steps up to the plateau on the top. We call it ‘the penthouse’, because the view from up here is incredible and because there’s a very nice cave that’s Chief Korr’ax’s and Bryar’s home.

We girls usually hang out here. But Piper and Bronwen are usually in their Foundling camp, and only Bryar and Alba and I are left in the village now.

I sit down by the fire, where Bryar is cooking some stuffed veggies on an iron grate that she’s had made specifically. The cavemen didn’t have anything as fancy as that to cook their meat on before. She’s wearing the same kind of dinosaur-skin dress as I am. It’s not stylish or even that practical, but it’s easy to make and it helps keep us somewhat protected. We tried making pants and shorts, but the dino skin is hard to tailor and those garments just made us sweat and chafe in the most inappropriate places.

She looks up, squinting against the alien sun. “Action-filled trip to the jungle, I hear.”

I sit down on a flat, dinosaur-skin covered rock opposite her. “I’m starting to think that the jungle is always like that. Last time I was out there, Alba met Anter’az for the first time. This time, we both meet a blue alien who made us want to run away screaming.”

“But the tribers must have seen those before, right?”

I adjust my belt. “Oh, they think it’s the Darkness. The old arch enemy from the legends and the wall paintings Bronwen found. Dragons, basically.”

She glances up at me. “And you?”

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