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Floresia: Out of the Shadows
Princess Floresia, in her garden state, sits grooming her belly fur, aware of being observed. Not only by the advancing predatory humans, clambering with their dragon-claw necklaces to the top of the food chain, but visible also to the anthropological tourist.
Aware too of a hidden destiny hovering, a guiding spirit rooting for her as the evolutionary underdog.
Her human species has lived a million years in peace and safety on a remote island.
With nowhere to flee from the long-feared El, how she and her people face the danger and live to tell the tale?
Floresia, self-styled princess of the primeval forest, emerges out of the shadows of a forgotten history to chronicle the last days of her people. This half-size human, Homo floresiensis, thrived on the Indonesian island of Flores until fifty thousand years ago, and the invasion of the El, Homo sapiens.
The way Floresia saw it, we are all part of Earth’s creation. Why not coexist, with enough for all?
Yet, it stands to reason: an island under novel human pressure quickly runs out of space.
How to continue, when the pygmy elephant is driven into mud, the giant stork fallen to one-way arrows?
Undeterred by losses to the resident Komodo dragons, the warchief Fexis is bent on conquest. But a chance meeting of a wounded El warrior, Crowman, leads Floresia to a quest for connection, a dream of impossible love, and a last desperate hope for survival.
Review by Paul Cudenec, at The Acorn:
Floresia: Out of the Shadows has set me dreaming. I dream of the life I might have lived, should have lived, had our world not been gutted and defiled by the industrial demonocracy.
The holistic wisdom received and expressed by Gray’s central character is obviously his own, although she is a young woman of a forgotten race whose world and desires have been conjured into existence by his remarkably vivid imagination.
And Gray has a crucial message to impart to us via Floresia: “I say don’t weep for me, but look to your own fate. Will this freedom I speak of also be lost to you forever? If you hear me, I think not. Because we both know that freedom is a well as deep as the earth. Even when you are gone, it will run, tapping roots core deep. So while you are on this precious earth, please use it.”
Book Categories: fiction.
