“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Chinua Achebe (1958)

The Watcher hung above the dolorous sea, whose turbulent roiling motion and ebullient spray had defined the very metronome and rhythm of life since the formation of the Galaxy and was as ancient as relative time itself.

From the crush of abyssal – depths where no visible light had ever dared cleave, to the seething expanses of the moving ranges of nomadic – waves with their turbulent peaks and troughs, The Watcher had borne witness to countless variations of life that had begun their nascent ascendance upward through natural selection, the strongest surviving – myriad others lost from memory forever.

Lifting its shining, melancholic gaze to the conflagration of the heavens, The Watcher wondered if this might signal its own species’ inevitable descent into evolutionary oblivion?

High above, the very firmament itself was defined and punctuated by awesome detonations of blinding light, as jagged and brilliant expressions of lightning described their ecstatic exhortations of chaos and release across a canvas spanning continental distances.

With each detonation of light and release of staggering amounts of ionic discharge into the crackling atmosphere The Watcher, untouched and unmoved by the howling gale – force winds that tore purposeful tracks across the whitecapped ranges as it hung several meters above the clamorous waves, felt the storm’s effect permeate the very core of its being.

A fission of invigoration coursed through its form, scouring away the malaise that centuries of bondage had shackled it with. The fierce course of brilliant, beautiful, cleansing light felt effervescent and enthralling and The Watcher felt the entrancing connection that its kind had always formed with the sea and the sky fill the core of its existence as it became a living conductor of exhilarating energy that linked it to the antipodes of the depths and the heavens.

The Watcher, to those with the eyes to see, was transfigured between crackling bolts of lightning from tide to cloud and its humanoid form was transformed from an indistinct specter, gradually glowing and increasing in magnitude until it was if the very candle of gods hung above the ocean like a pillar of blinding flame.

Sensations of joy and belonging suffused its consciousness and The Watcher instinctively felt its mutual bond to all of its kind across the planet. It could feel every individual’s consciousness soar with its own a hymn of joyful reprieve, as the storm fed their souls and promised deliverance from their damnation.

But as a wave, all things pass and with a keening lament that was taken up by the attendant souls that it communed with, The Watcher felt the surety of the storm’s comforting energy begin to wane and as it was lost to the eye of the storm, it felt the mesmeric peace of existence and connection begin to rescind apace and the figure slowly began to lose it joyful corona of light and it’s soul felt the wounding grief as the power flowed from it and the voices were silenced.

A profound sadness settled back upon The Watcher as the tempestuous seas continued upon their inevitable course. It lifted its fading face to the heavens and prayed for a salvation that it knew would not come.

Presently these thoughts turned to the horizon, and it was forced to confront the very reason for the fall of its people and their seemingly endless suffering and exodus from this world that they had always known.

Far out in the distance a different kind of light could be discerned.

It was a strange, alien light that illuminated the unfathomable waves below as they contested their passage against a number of stout and immense columns that rose straight up out of the undulating waves.

Up, impossibly up these great legs of unyielding material soared and, as The Watcher’s gaze ascended with them, these columns began to spread outwards – widening to a broad platform as they climbed, becoming enveloped in other shapes and protuberances that were as alien to it as the unfamiliar power emanations that it could feel washing out from the structure – their eerie signatures making it feel sick and further dividing its connection to the natural realm.

The structure teemed with activity. Beside the clamor of competing energies that vexed it so, great tendrils of steam issued from serried – vents and climbed defiantly into the wind – torn skies. Strange gantries swayed in the wind and pendulous bundles of pipes and tubes thrummed with the passage of stolen seawater – like the veins of some awful leviathan that sucked vampire – like at the sustaining medium of the deep. Other movement, smaller still of strange contraptions that glowed red at the front and blue down their sides – lifted confidently into the jet – stream and persisted up into the clouds until they were lost from view.

The Outsiders.

Before the coming of these people from the skies, all had been harmonious in its world. The perfect storm sustained all and everything was as it ever was and should be.

Then The Outsiders came, and they calmed the storm with their strange machines and The Watcher & its people did not have words to bid them to cease and (inevitably) their elemental – bond with the creator was sundered and all began to fade.

The sadness that The Watcher had felt also began to fade as it hung unseen above the ocean – depths and that emotion was replaced with one far more compelling, as it looked upon those that had come and had casually destroyed everything that mattered with their seemingly – insatiable & endless greed.

For the first time in eons, it felt a wholly unfamiliar emotion – both troublingly new but pervadingly apt.

Anger.