Animorphs Fandub Audiobook Project (The Hork-Bajir Chronicles: Chapter 1)
Leafsong for Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan
One of the three main narrators and protagonists of this book, Aldrea is a young, naive, and fiery Andalite with a strong sense of right and wrong. Her father committed a great wrong so Aldrea doesn’t get along well with her kind. Instead, she finds solace with the simpler, kind-hearted Hork-Bajir species when she meets Dak Hamee and becomes a Hork-Bajir to live out the rest of her life with him, fighting their combined enemy.
She later appears in an Animorphs book as a ghost/memory, so she will be needed long-term.
My name is Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan. I am an Andalite. A female.
That was all there was to say about me back then. But later I became much more. My name became a cruel joke among my people. And later still, a curse.
But when this story began, I was just a young female. Just Aldrea. Not yet the Aldrea.
I understood very little back then, listening with my mind to the thought-speak shouts and curses around me. I only knew that something terrible had happened.
“You’re morphing a Hork-Bajir!”
“Yes,” I said, using the Hork-Bajir mouth. “I acquired Delf.”
I clutched the canister tightly. I reached for the treetop and gripped it with my Hork-Bajir claw. “We’re in this together, Dak. If the Quantum virus is released, now I will die, too.”
“I don’t want that!”
“I do, Dak. I’ll live or die with you.”
Then Dak pressed his forehead horns to mine, and I felt the tingle of a sensation I had not guessed Hork-Bajir could feel. It was a Hork-Bajir kiss, I suppose. What we Andalites do when we stroke another’s face with our palms.
We hung there from the crown of a thousand-foot-tall tree and for a moment, at least, forgot about the battle raging, and the war lost, and the canister that contained so much destruction.
At last, we swung down the tree, down to the ground.
I had lost.
We fell, fell toward certain death, plunged tail first into the Yeerk pool, and still, all I could think was that I had lost.
Lost to a human child. I’d assumed the only question was one of self-restraint. I’d believed I could seize this body if ever I chose. But the little human female had held me at bay even as she performed an act of morphing that would have made her a hero among the Andalites.
No time to think about that. No time to think about how she could have ... no, there was a battle to fight.
We plunged deep in the Yeerk pool and now Cassie was growing with a shocking speed, growing so huge, so fast that the body was creating little whirlpools.
<Now I need you,> Cassie said.
I almost laughed. It was outrageous. Now she needed me?
<I am here,> I said. What else could I say?
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