Embedded Files
The Visitor begins as a story about a mysterious interstellar traveler, but ultimately is a story about the reapers, a sophont species near the end of its time, but who are not ready to lay down and simply give up just because things might not work out the way they might have hoped. Fellstar, in life and eventual death, is the catalyst for change within Eve, influencing her direction in life, and so continuing on an ancient chain of ideas shared from one race to another, even after the sea stewards have long left this world. There are intentional parallels in this story to those before it, for they are all connected in this way.
The decision to present The Visitor story arc through primarily illustration with two first person narrators - Eve, and in the epilogue Dusk - meant that some of the details of the characters, not plot-relevant but still established for their backstories, were not easily incorporated into the short story.
Eve is almost sixty, but she doesn’t remember exactly when she was born. Her mate Ebb is in his 40’s. Eve spent ten and half years with Fellstar and one year with her foxtrotter, Baby, before meeting the colony. The epilogue covers about 3 years between meeting Ebb, Dusk and Haze, and having her children.
Dusk is a blind reaper in their eighties, and their mate Haze is a one-winged reaper in their sixties. Though their roles in the story are not huge, they are some of my favorite Serinan characters. Dusk lost their eyesight in middle age from cataracts, and stopped flying at that time as they now find it too disorienting. Haze was born with only one wing and has never flown at all (a reaper would not survive such a debilitating injury as an adult.) Though they have never known any different, and so are well-adjusted, this would have required major changes to their parents’ lifestyle and the fact that Haze was not simply abandoned at birth is testament to how precious any surviving child became when their population grew so low. Historically reaper chicks, which didn’t not gain personhood until a year old, were treated with a survival of the fittest mentality. Injured ones would not be expected to make it, and not given special care as Haze was.
Dusk’s and Haze’s sexes and genders are intentionally ambiguous. So while Eve is explicitly female and Ebb is explicitly male, these two are only referred to as “they” throughout the story. It doesn’t make much difference to either of them what they are, because they are happy together. As a monomorphic species with no sexual dimorphism and no different social roles, gender binaries in reaper culture are much less emphasized than in human culture.
The pair of young adult reapers who appear at the end of the epilogue are a male named Spirit and his mate, a female named Thorn who are both in their 30's. Spirit has a disfigured face; this is from a bite by a wild aukvulture at an adolescent age when he was orphaned and spent his teen years alone. Thorn is heavily leucistic and has mostly white wing feathers which are weak and fragile. Prone to breakage, she must pull them out often. Her flight is weak, and sometimes she is left grounded, so that this couple has avoided long-distance flight or sea crossings and so avoided meeting Eve, or anyone else, for a number of years before finding the colony on Serinaustra.
Their one-and-a-half-year-old child is named Hope, and has just recently found her soul and begun learning to speak.
Reapers do not generally name their children until a year of age, as mortality before then is significant. Yet the colony does things differently than how reapers historically did, and Eve is not exactly traditional. She would name her chicks shortly after their birth, as a show of good faith in their survival. Star for the first-born, and Dawn for the second.
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