Still Earth Series: Book I, Hum

PROLOGUE

My name is Hum. On the day I came forth from my mother’s womb, a great tremor shook the land — or so my village has told me. It was an omen, a call by the Great Mother herself. Exactly what she was trying to say, I’m not sure. If you were to ask the village Elders, each would tell you, with absolute conviction, something different: 

The child is to wield unfathomable power. 

The girl will be our next great leader.

Her birth is a sign of bounties anew. 

It is our tradition to set newborn children upon the Earth to draw their first breath. The Tribemother must yield to the Great Mother. She knows, as we all do, that a child’s first breath is a gift of the Earth, as is every breath thereafter. Tribemothers only give life for nine months of their short lives— the Great Mother spends every moment of eternity breathing life into her children. And so, Tribemothers come second to the Great Mother. Always.

My Tribemother, Vetta, tells me that she thought I was dead, after she gave birth to me. I didn’t cry when I was placed on the ground. All babies cry, she had been told. Vetta had spent months dreaming of the moment that she would hear my pathetic wailing, my tiny pink face twisted and passionate. And yet it never came. She craned her neck around the Elderwives, fearing the worst. It didn’t help that the women surrounding me had all gone silent. When she finally sat up, shoving the nearest Elderwife out of the way, what she found made her heart skip a beat: a bright-eyed, breathing newborn — on her back, feet planted firmly on the dirt, chest vibrating with a steady humming. Not crying, humming.

You can see where I got my name, strange even for my culture. It was that day, I’m told, that our Tribe began to hum as we Channeled the Earth. Well, during ceremonies, at least.

You might think that such a spectacular arrival would grant me some kind of status or privilege in our village. On the contrary: if I was to lead us, protect us, foretell our great fortune, I must know the Tribe as any Tribemember does. I would be a limb of the body, a leaf of the tree, a part of the whole. Each of us serves the Great Mother and her children, prodigies included.

Perhaps that is why I did what I did— perhaps I felt some obligation to the Earth that bore me, or the need to protect the community that raised me. Or perhaps I felt compelled to rise to the foreshadowing of my birth. I suppose it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I knew, I knew, it was the right thing to do.