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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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Boltchovik Shiev was the last of a long line of great carpenters. As a master carpenter he made a fair living and thus was elected to take care of the Dochani child. The letter written under the instruction of the fourteen thousand year old Dochani woman was now two thousand years old and written in a dialect long since abandoned. If it had not been wrapped in an oil soaked cloth, it would not have been legible and would have decayed a long time ago.

He had to get a scholar that specialized in the study of ancient languages. For the life of him, he could not understand why they had buried the egg in the dirt floor of his cellar. He wondered why they had waited so long to unearth the egg, since it was to be dug up about eighteen hundred years ago. Boltchovik thought that it might have been because the Shiev’s did not have possession of the land and it took almost two millennium to reclaim it. After many wars between different tribal groups his family had acquired the plot of land that was necessary for the egg to be dug up.

Instructions were given to build the house he lived in now, and his father gave it to him. Twenty years later when he was cleaning up the attic he found the letter and dug up the egg, which was larger than four good sized men. He needed more than a dozen strong villager men to help him lift it out of the crater sized hole and place it in a safe place where he could wait for it to hatch. It took nearly fifty years for the egg to hatch. Since Boltchovik was already thirty when he had dug up the egg he was eighty years old when it finally hatched. When the egg did hatch, the woman inside appeared to be between seventeen and twenty five, but looking into her eyes he saw that she had to be far older.

He and his wife, Katherin, were surprised when she was found to speak an ancient dialect of their language. The same dialect that was on the parchment in the attic is what she spoke, which meant that they needed the same scholar that had translated the letter in the first place and the likelihood that he spoke the ancient tongue was very little. Unfortunately, that scholar had been over eighty at the time they needed him and thus they had to settle for his apprentice who happened to be around sixty five now to translate the spoken language.

This new scholar also had to help instruct her in the local dialect of Sevlin, which is what passed for the common tongue on the planet Sevle. In three short months the Dochani hatchling learned to speak, read and write the Sevlin dialect spoken in the small village of Bannian. Soon after Boltchovik and Katherin learned that the Dochani woman’s name was Alexandra. Alexandra knew from the start that her mother had died during the release of the egg that she had recently hatched from and her father was somewhere in the universe.

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Sometimes she was found staring towards a certain spot in the sky, when asked she said that her father was out there. She could pin point exactly what planet he was on just by looking into the sky. What kind of creature has that kind of power, those Sevlin's were known to think and gossip about her? These were not her parents, but still deserved her respect since they made the necessary arrangements for her to hatch from the egg even though she was waiting for a long time to be released from the darkness within the egg.

Spending lots of time with the scholar helped her learn the culture and history of Sevle. She learned of what her mother did up to her death on Sevle and of what she tried to do for the people even if they were stubborn at times and most times refused to listen to her mother. A lot of time was spent in reflection upon her existence and the existence of others like her. She was found at the beach prostrate in deep meditation early in the morning and late at night contemplating the metaphysical.

It was not known when the time was that the Fenshians would arrive and begin their slaughter, but the alien knew that it would not be long to her even if it felt long for the Sevle being short lived peoples. Alexandra knew that many innocents would die in the battle that could not be avoided.