Guardians (ePub)

The war had been going on for years - almost generations; the enemy, the Cerfcum, was a bug race something like ants or perhaps bees, where the queen is the foundation of the nest and the population of the nest was dependent upon the queen. The Cerfcum queen had complete control of her population; she controlled whether her eggs were workers or warriors, or whether they were fertile males or females; she even controlled their shape, but the bug shape had worked well for a long time.

When Reed came of age, he joined the mercenary school and became an accomplished mercenary, completing several assignments successfully. When the call for new guardians came, Reed came forward to do his part. It wasn't easy, becoming a guardian, and it wasn't reversible, but it was then that he found out what had happened to his father; if his father could do this, so could he.

The resonance that made a guardian what he was, occupied the same place in the brain normally reserved for memories. A guardian knew what they knew, but memories of everything that had happened before the procedure were gone; his existence began the moment he woke up after the procedure. Under the guidance of the one and only friend he knew, Paul, Reed learned how to use his magic. In time, if he survived, he would become quite powerful, and one day, he and his team managed to kill a queen.

The Queen Mother wasn't at all pleased about this and she decided to try to figure out why these soft creatures were being so difficult. Though the hatching of the human infant was successful, it was very disappointing. But just in case there was something to come later, the queen ordered more captures; they would make their own human forces and win the war that way. The bugs started coming up directly into human habitations to facilitate captures and they were reemerging on previously cleared planets. Before long, the term 'mobile infantry' earned a whole new meaning.

The assault on the Queen Mother wasn't at all easy, but they did manage to come away with a miracle. To hide Adam's true origins Reed forged the necessary paperwork and he became a member of the family. As Adam and his brother grew up, Adam's bloodline began to show, and when his sister on his mother's side discovered him, she felt sorry for him. But she wasn't the only sister out there, and not all were willing to be benevolent.