Chapter Three
Now Peepi had once been a fair world like Haven, but what it was exactly like, no one knows. For The Great Catastrophe that overcame its people so altered it, that it was beyond recognition. Its surface was destroyed, its atmosphere poisoned and laced with deadly bacteria. That any survived the horror that overcame them, was a miracle in itself.
2 It is said that at the end of The Great Struggle a Lord of The Spearons called Shift, invented a terrible weapon, a great machine. His people were losing the war.
3 There was a chance some of them would survive, so he told his councilmen, "The machine I have invented will alter Peepi's orbit, fling it into the darkness of space, and none will survive. If we perish, all perish with us." And he left the council hall and went to his laboratory to start the great machine.
4 Now when Lo, his first-born son, heard from the councilmen his father's plans, he rushed to the labratory. "Father!" he cried, "Desist! Spare our world. If we must die, let us die with honor, but let us not be the death of all." 5 "Be gone, blood of my blood!" cried his father. "Go to your loved ones. Perish with them. I avenge our people. Who cares of honor?" 6 And seeing that his father would hear no reason, Lo drew his pistol and did what had to be done. He fired twice into the great machine and it exploded, killing his father and seriously injuring him.
7 Peepi's orbit was drastically changed. Its winters became a nightmare of cold and its summers barely warm.
8 But in the deep shelters the people survived. And slowly, surely, they reclaimed their world. Then, they reached for the planets of their system until there was no place that did not have life.
9 And this was how it was when The Havens found this strange, one-eyed, four-fingered race, these proud, valiant people who had survived.
Male and female Peepian.
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