Prologue

Aximili Esgarrouth Isthill

My name is Aximili.

And I was floating.

I did not know how long I had been here, held hostage. Or where "here" was. Was I even myself? Was I alive? Could I be freed?

I did not know anything about my surroundings. Or my history, or even my future.

I had been an Andalite, I recalled. An extra-terrestrial to humans, but well known to humankind since the end of my last war – a battle against a parasitic species called the Yeerks, who had started a covert invasion of the planet Earth.

I had been born in the shadow of my brother, Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. He was the one who had given my five comrades the power of the Escafil device. He had told them of the power they now possessed, able to make them become other animals – anything they could touch and acquire – for two hours at a time. He had explained the war and had told my friends, my comrades-in-arms, that they could fight to push back the invasion until the Andalite fleet came back to Earth.

Jake – my Prince, that is, the commander of our team of guerilla fighters. The one who would carry the weight of most of our decisions in the war, the one who would be most worn by those decisions. Strong, mature for his age, I had been proud to serve him for the years we had been at war. With the Yeerk forces, on Earth.

Rachel, the brave and dark member of our outfit, who died in the last battle. Though she had worried and occasionally frightened us, Rachel had died bravely, in the end. Though her last fight and her death had been wasted – the Blade Ship escaping afterward. Had taken off, with the Escafil device that could bestow those who used it with morphing powers.

Marco, Prince Jake's best friend, the reluctant member beginning the fight to save his friend's mother, and staying in the fight to reclaim his stolen mother and save his father.

Cassie, the gentle member who, amazingly, had realized the way in the end to cause more Yeerks to defect en masse.

And Tobias, the troubled human boy who would become a nothlit- the Andalite term for a being who has stayed in morph for two hours, resulting in being trapped permanently in that morph's shape. Tobias was my best friend, my shorm, and also Prince Elfangor's son through meddling done by a greater force we knew to be the Ellimist. By those ties Tobias was, oddly enough, my nephew.

They found me later – dubbed as the Animorphs – and we had been through more battles than I could ever count. We had been through more battles than most Andalite or human warriors would experience in a lifetime. We had fought for years. Amazingly, we had won.

When I had left with the Andalite fleet, finally a prince myself – a well established warrior, and a leader – the ranks of our military were being laid off. The war over, there was not much left to do in the military realm other than look for the Blade Ship. The same Yeerks that had killed Rachel, who had been sent on a suicide mission in an attempt to detain the Blade Ship and prevent it from spreading through the galaxy.

I was assigned to the Intrepid, the spacecraft assigned to look for the Blade Ship and the renegade Yeerks looking to start a new empire based on the enslavement of other intelligent species. We had not found anything in spite of all our travels. Two years had gone by and we had found nothing – the chances of finding a single Blade Ship in all of space were astronomical. My team had the best assignment around in the entire Andalite fleet, and still, it was a monotonous task.

Maybe I had gotten lazy. Or just less cautious. I had drilled my officers repeatedly and had tried my best to stay on my hoofs. Still, I had caused what seemed to be the inevitable end of my team.

We had never found the Blade Ship. We had found an older but much larger vessel. A vessel that when we boarded it suddenly became alive and hostile. It had not been Yeerk, or anything I had ever known. Where in space this creature had come from was unknown to me, and my boarding crew and I had been completely unprepared with no time to morph - and hardly time to fire.

The being controlling the vessel invaded me, took my mind, had control over my body.

It was known only as The One.

As it entered me, absorbed me, and made me a part of itself I cried out for Prince Jake. I cried out for my shorm Tobias. Marco, my co-conspirator. Cassie. My human friends from the war that felt like lifetimes ago now – lifetimes since I had last seen them. And I knew that if they received the message, they would come. Prince Jake and the others would find me.

Because it is human and Andalite nobility, but also, because it was our responsibility to each other as comrades-in-arms, no matter how long ago the war we fought together had ended.

That drive, that friendship, was imperative to the next planned attack.

The One was a thing that absorbed other creatures that put them into suspended animation indefinitely; it fed off of the memories of those it absorbed as it kept the ones it "appreciated." It was an old thing of collective memory, remembering a planet that had once been nothing but water, a planet decaying. A planet that it had managed to escape from.

A chance as species who investigated the planet for resources left. It soon had the species and its craft hostage. Its species – not even an animal – had evolved to survive without the complete submergence of water and had become, oddly enough, almost like one of the socialized insects of Earth or Gahana Har – multiplying while all working for the main piece and referring to its collective identity as The One. It was a fast, efficient machine at absorption and manipulation of living things. Not as powerful as some things on its planet had been – but it was a trade. Less power, more motility and the escape from its planet that had been doomed by rot and decay of some lesser known genetic relative.

And I knew in my hearts, when it accessed my memories, that it would go looking for the remainders of my team. The other beings who with an army of six staved off an entire planet's invasion.

It would do anything for us.

The One needed beings new, live, well-lived. It was a bored thing, looking for a new game. So I called, to my friends, knowing they would come if anyone delivered my message. So The One would be ever-so-slightly delayed in its quest for Earth and the Andalite Home World: My two homes.

The One had disposed of most of the Yeerk crew my spacecraft had been searching for when it had first taken the Blade Ship. We had been tricked – The One only kept alive what it found interesting. Which meant the disposal of most of the Yeerk and Andalite crew, save three or four each. The Controllers – people infested with Yeerks – had been kept to maintain the Blade Ship elsewhere; they had some of The One with them, looking for others to infest. Most of The One, however, stayed in this older spacecraft, to play games.

I was most interesting to this creature. I was an Andalite: The creature my friend Marco had described long ago as appearing to be part blue deer, part scorpion, and part human. The creature that had no mouth and ate with its hoofs. The creature with the deadly tail blade. The creature with stalk eyes.

The creature that had been feared by all the Yeerks on the Blade Ship.

Not to mention my war experience. My memories. Prince Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, of the Animorphs during the Yeerk invasion of Earth? The one who had been under the command of Jake the Yeerk-Killer?

Every Yeerk The One had absorbed had known who I was. Not a single controller had not known my name by the end of that war.

Because of these things, The One kept me. Alive, feeling, seemingly active.

But I knew I was merely a puppet absorbed into The One. That my body lay tethered somewhere in a large spacecraft somehow left in suspended animation. I knew my disposal, if I became boring, predictable, unimpressive, would be fast but painful.

I had "seen" much of my crew die. Their deaths, while real, had of course only been perceived by me as The One had allowed me to perceive them. The One had not given me the control I needed over my body to open my true eyes and see what the fate was of someone who was disposed of. But I didn't need to see it: The One had shown me what we looked like in the beginning as a threat.

I was, perhaps, more enslaved than even a Controller could ever be.

The One played games with me. I had opportunities to save remaining the host bodies of human-Controllers and Andalites from my team aboard the spacecraft. I would have to win a challenge against The One. Challenges that usually consisted of reliving the battles in my mind with my old team, though I could never win. And the numbers of the humans and Andalites both went down greatly.

I pleaded. I cursed. I begged. The One kept me indifferently to my suffering. I would have to beat The One in order to save anyone from the fate of being disbanded and eliminated from its spacecraft, which I began calling The Cage.

Until there was only one of each left.

At that point I blackmailed The One: If it killed the last two survivors of either spacecraft stuck in The Cage, I would not cooperate with any games. I would stop playing. It would get nothing new from me. No playing whatsoever, or ever again.

‹Please, leave me these companions - do not make me see another death,› I had told it, ‹Or I will not cooperate. I will not play your game any longer. And you will become bored with me.›

The One could invade my mind and make me do whatever it wanted, of course. I knew it. However, without my own cooperation The One would always get a predictable answer: The answer it made me give. The One was a bored, lonely creature that needed the companion of its living slaves for its own well-being.

It needed me.

And so, the human woman Leah and one of my team, Ondrean-Nefaral-Itskeillat, were left with me as companions for both off-time and in games. Ondrean-Nefaral-Itskeillat had been a simple but honest Andalite – not the brightest energy-beam thruster as an Andalite might have said, or "not an Einstein" but an honest Andalite. Leah, too, was not a human of great ingenuity – unlike Marco, though she was not less intelligent than the average human. But they were real, unpredictable, and most importantly to me – alive.

But The One had a favorite and more lasting punishment for my act of defiance and blackmail. From that day on, my perceived form in any off-time from games or challenges initiated by The One was that of a human, the old morph I had created by acquiring my human friends years ago.

Ondrean pitied me, though I told him that while I missed the notion of galloping I at least had a human mouth and the ability to imagine eating cinnamon buns. Internally I felt far less optimistic about my condition.

Being human full-time even if only a mental perception left me feeling as conflicted as I had occasionally in the past amongst my human friends. I had missed being human. I had missed my human friends, and eating human foods. I had forgotten how comfortable it had become over time to be in human morph and interacting with things as a human. How I had almost gotten used to being without stalk eyes much of the time as a result of frequent morphing. And I knew The One had acted on that to make my days with the companions I had saved miserable, even as I could also re-create and visit all my favorite human restaurants as a human.

I had missed the Cinnabon.

The more games we played, the less The One let me see of Ondrean, my present-day Andalite comrade. The One was more entertained by my internal conflict, I supposed. After all, what could my relationship with another Andalite provide it? There was nothing controversial about an Andalite acting as an Andalite or having Andalite friends.

So I was left human in its created world during any off-time with the young woman Leah. who could not morph and lacked any specialty I could see – though I suppose that was to be expected from anyone who had been a Controller as long as she had - before she had ever hit her years as even an adolescent. And in the mean time, with all my questions. And all my concerns and plans to be laid out to rest while waiting for the next match. And remembering all my past turmoil resulting from being of two worlds, and having two loyalties that had become equally important to me emotionally.

As Leah and I were forced to interact for longer periods of time without Ondrean around, I taught her to fire a Shredder and a Dracon weapon to the best of my – and her – capabilities. Though Ondrean would have been a better shot. I had not fought with a Shredder during my years on Earth.

We discussed military strategy or what the thing was here, and I told her about Andalite history. And I found, while not particularly gifted or ambitious, that Leah did have the strength of having a shallow breadth of knowledge in quite a variety of topics.

I had a difficult time not comparing her in my mind to my human friends. She was knowledgeable in some ways with zoology that surpassed my human friend Cassie during my time on Earth, though her knowledge was not as experienced or well applied. She was not the natural fighter Rachel had been, but she had learned to work passably and took risk, getting more aggressive the more she trained. I saw that with time Leah might even learn to become reckless in the right scenario. And I imagined, from the little she discussed, that her home life had probably been more similar to Tobias than to the other Animorphs, even as she tended to keep the subject rather private, instead moving into other topics as quickly as possible. I wondered if perhaps it was for the best she had never obtained morphing powers.

I had decided the comparisons made sense. I missed my friends. I was alone, a slave in ways I had not even imagined existed before meeting The One. I was hoping my friends would save me, or at least manage to defeat The One before it moved into Andalite or human space zones. So I tried to find them in the one human I knew. Though it was difficult, because as I felt human most of the time it was hard for me not to get attached to her as a human.

And knowing The One had anticipated and took glee in such a success in torturing me, my hatred was renewed. I did not know how, or when, but we would find a way out.

So I continued to assess Leah, to train, to learn for battles. We would play the game, and we would continue to play games against each other and train for the day we could win. In the meantime, I hoped for the arrival of my friends, once hailed the "Animorphs."

Leah and I, we waited.