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4 million years before human civilization:
The man’s name was Lathan. You could call him a man for he very much resembled a human male – at one time. He was old and he very much knew it, and so did Tia. He stood on the surface of the moon which he now chose to call home. He shied from the thought of calling it his tomb, but if all went well he planned to die here. Soon.
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Lathan was old for his kind; three times as old as any before him, yet his body was alive and full of vigor, thanks to Tia. She would not let him die. There were a lot of things Tia would not or could not let him do. Again, he cursed the day he found her.
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Tia was not a female, but he referred to her as a girl because of the way she “felt” towards him. She was attached to him, not only physically, but emotionally, mentally. She felt that she loved him, but Lathan did not agree with her definition of love. She simply needed a companion and any companion would do.
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She was a hybrid creature that did not breed, but formed from natural phenomena within the caulderous depths of gravity wells on special kinds of neutron stars. She was, perhaps, several billion years old. She did not die and neither would she let Lathan die. Tia did not like being alone.
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There once were many like Tia. The way the legend goes they started out as trinkets and jewelry for a race that roamed the galaxies long before the Builders. At first it was nothing more than a contest, a form of amusement, if you will. They wanted to see if these creatures that lived in such a dense and turbulent world could be adapted to live in the Void.
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What is not just legend is the way Tia‘s kind was manipulated into fearsome and destructive weapons. Only, Tia wasn’t truly a weapon. She was meant to be indestructible. She was to protect her host at all costs. Others were meant to be destructive and they continued to destroy long after war’s end.
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But, Lathan knew very little about the weapons that once riddled the galaxies. Again, his mind began to wander. He pondered his inevitable mortality. Giving up on trying to remove her, he now longed for death.
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She could keep him safe, warm, and even happy, but he would never enjoy the kiss of a woman. Never again would he be able to splash and frolic in the water. He hadn’t been able to really enjoy life for many, long years.
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Though, she continually confessed to him that she was his slave, to do with as he wished, he could not remove her. Though, she only consumed dead cells she was never the less a parasite that had replaced his skin.
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Lathan had tried many times to end his own life. On one occasion he had plunged into a star thinking he had done himself in, but Tia had allowed this. Once the ship dissolved away Tia was right at home. With ease she surfed the currents of the star and, using Lathan’s own navigational abilities, she flung them towards the nearest population.
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Smashing into this isolated moon was part luck and part genius. The luck part had to do with faulty readings on a fuel gauge. The genius was, ironically, in the way he learned to play dumb.
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It's hard to play dumb when someone knows your every thought. Tia could even influence his thoughts and cause him to have sensations. Most of the time these sentations were pleasurable, but sometimes she would punish him.
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Tia was punishing him now. She even contemplated killing him and getting it over with, but loneliness was