Read the very beginning of the Laenif trilogy and meet the characters that populate the first four chapters of Book 1. You can buy book one of Laenif here.
Meet the Characters from the Beginning of Book One of the Laenif Trilogy
Each book of the Laenif saga is divided into segments separated by a series of seemingly random "notes." Before getting to the first such message and the brief prelude before chapter one, let's meet the characters that are introduced in the first such segment, which contains chapters 1 through 4 of the first Laenif novel.
There are four main character, three of which are aliens from the planet Laenif. The fourth is a human, our first person narrator, but their gender and age remain ambiguous throughout the books.
The Elder Being
At the start of the novel, an elder being of the Laenif foest Phoresion with three eyes finds a newly enlightened but naive being. Both are members of the species called "the Indopi." The younger three-eyed alien blindly follow his elder's words, which carry undertones of control. His eyes linger too long, his phrasing feels rehearsed, his encouragement to travel to Earth is almost too insistent.
Can he trusted? Or are his instructions more sinister, just cloaked in wisdom? With a mix of reverence and unease, he sends a young alien named Ghoid to the planet Earth, a proclaimed spiritual sister to the planet Laenif.
Ghoid
Enlightenment balanced by his innocence: he knows all through intuition, but can't see past those who deceived him. He steps into the vastness of Earth's wilderness in awe, trusting, and unguarded.
Ghoid arrives on Earth as a being both radiant and fragile, his newly opened third eye shimmering with the innocence of untested enlightenment. He is discovered by a lonely human in the woods and, hidden away in some unnamed surburbia,
he becomes captivated by humanity’s chaotic beauty. In hidden refuge, he recounts his tale of awakening, the surreal mushroom trip that carried him across worlds, and the fragile wisdom he barely understands himself. The human who finds him and conceals the alien from the rest of humanity is a mysterious character named Marsle.
Marsle
As an ambiguous lens through which the reader engages with Earhly portions of Laenif: Book One. With their age and gender left undefined, they are driven by a selfish impulse to keep Ghoid secret from the world. Their voice is intimate, confessional, and tinged with guilt, knowing their choice to hide the alien is both protective and possessive. In Ghoid’s company, Marsle becomes a captivated witness to revelations: the alien’s past, the allure of human art, and finally a psychadelic and overwhelming hallucination of humanity’s entire history.
After Marsle awakens, abandoned yet altered, there is now a third eye upon their brow. Both a gift and burden, Marsle embodies the reader’s own transformation: forever changed by contact with the alien’s vision. The remaining book's scenes on Earth depict Marsle struggling to fulfill Ghoid's impossible mission of saving the human race's spirit and the powerful visions and sensations received via the third eye. "Everything felt different with Three Eyes..."
Aetheticia
Possessing fleeting beauty and cruel indifference, she is a figure who dazzles Ghoid's heart before abandoning him, lost in the woods on Laenif. To Ghoid, she was once a playful, intoxicating, and affectionate. But her love vanishes, revealing itself to be nothing but a passing indulgence. Now alone in the labyrinth of Phoresion, Ghoid discovers a cave in which he finds peace and inner-wisdom. When Aetheticia reappears months later, wandering past his cave of meditation, she is unchanged: aloof, and untouched by his suffering.
She is a paradox, warmth and coldness. And this represents the crucible of Ghoid’s transformation. Aetheticia is neither a villain nor a muse, but a catalyst who unknowingly plants the seed of Ghoid's enlightenment.
The First Anonymous Message
"Now don’t start somewhere or try and write it down. It doesn’t have to have or be defined. Not now. Just stop what you think you’re doing and look around. There’s a whole lot of stuff anywhere and I think at the end of the day, after wallowing around in the saddened reality, I don’t know what’s going on. Something happened once, though. And now we’re just dealing with it. There was a magical union of consciousness and flesh and that was it. This can of course give the sense of multiplying, but somewhere the thought of infinity just spirals out into interpretation. There’s the thought of life, there’s a strand that reaches so far out into possibility that this organized mass of flesh, blood, and organs actually connects with the beauty and majesty of… the unexplainable consciousness… and then there’s death. I don’t care for any of it, though. I don’t know why I was created. To consume? To live? Nothing more? Was I not created for something more?"
Prolouge: "The Beginning: 1990s on Earth"
“What are you thinking about?” His voice was so calm and curious, like nothing mattered more to him than my thoughts.
“Life, mostly,” I replied, hesitant. I was trying my best to say something profound, but as I talked I could feel my voice, my words, getting to his brain so it could eat them up. And this caused my brain to go numb. He nodded in response with wide eyes, giving me room to extend my answer. I felt like if I didn’t elaborate, his soul was to be crushed in an overwhelming disappointment.
But I waited for a response from him before I could allow myself to speak as freely as I wished. “What about life?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything about it…” I struggled to make my words as comprehendible as possible. But how do you describe your soul? How do you describe feeling? How do you describe God? How do you describe life if the mere thought of being alive is enough to conquer death?
“What is there you want to know about life?” he wondered. “Are you curious to how it got here? Are you frustrated at its complexity? Or… maybe, you’re in a holy awe of its simplicity?”
His name is Ghoid and I met him walking home from work one day. I love him. He lets me think and he keeps me alive.
“I’m all of those things, overall anyway. But now, in this single moment of our existence…” I wasn’t getting a solid enough question out of my mind to effectively communicate what I wanted to say. “I’m just confused at life’s reason, life’s purpose.” I knew Ghoid had answers. He was never without them. What I lacked were questions to ask.
I ask ‘why’ to a lot of things, but I’ve come to realize if questions start with ‘why’ then almost any answer will do. There is no truth to the answers we have for the ‘whys’ of this world. Every explanation is depending and leaning on a bigger explanation, and after explanations grow into beliefs… nothing can be proven. Everything falls into infinite regression. Our minds can understand so many possibilities, but I think that’s just what life is, though: the ability to manipulate possibility.
He held my hand and spoke softly, “If life has any purpose, my friend, it is to not be dead.”
“Hey Ghoid…”
“Yeah, Marsle?” I hated it when he said my name…
But I ignored it to ask: “What was your life like?”
“Well…”
