Return to Io
by Henry L. Palek
Return To Io
Did you know that all babies are born with blue eyes. At least they’re supposed to be. It’s the melanin, a skin pigment, that also controls the eye color. It doesn’t become active until the babies eyes have been exposed to ultraviolet light. Then, anywhere from one to six weeks the baby takes on their true eye color: blue, hazel, brown and whatever in between.
But every now and then, Nature plays a trick, and a baby is born with brown eyes...very unusual, but perfectly harmless. The baby will grow up to be a normal, paranoid denizen bewildered with the world we’ve created. There is however, a bit of folk lore...a legend if you will, that has been passed down from eastern European ancestry.
Centuries ago, when Attila the Hun was ravaging most of Europe, he had in his army an unusual group of warriors. They were a hundred or so men from one family. A family that were gallant and the most brutal warriors. Aside from being the hardened warriors, they also developed a knack for animal husbandry. They cross-breed cattle, horses and have even been accredited for developing the breed of enormous dogs that are known today to be the giant mastiffs.
All this certainly made for amusing historical analysis. But there was something else. Quite by accident they came across a certain precursor for the males in the family...born with brown eyes. They had no real control over the feature, but they breed with women specifically to produce the brown-eyed baby feature. There success rate was probably five percent or less.
While the great Hun Attila was making his way to Rome, he positioned this family to the east as his rear guard. The exact location has never been determined but some say it was the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukraine or western Russia.
While establishing themselves in the area they came upon a small encampment of strange women, who by today would be dubbed as witches. The Huns didn’t know this of course and treated the women with the same disdain as all the other villages they came across. It was with this group of women that they decided to continue their breeding of brown-eyed sons.
The women quickly realized what it was the men wanted and were able to provide the Huns with brown-eyed sons...at a remarkable rate.
There was something else very peculiar about these brown eyed babies...not only were they astute warriors, but they also inherited the strange abilities of their mothers. They were capable of doing things...with their minds: changing events to suite their needs, bringing about good fortune, causing cataclysmic destruction, even altering the weather.
The family maintained their position for many years. And then suddenly they disappeared. Some say it was the drink and opiates that were available in the area. Others feel it was a lack of defined leadership. Whatever it was, nothing more was ever seen of the family that once prospered and helped conquer the world as it was known in the Fifth century. However the genetic makeup was still passed on, but their strange abilities forced them into hiding among the tiny villages and they eventually scattered all across Europe. There was another feature that limited this prolific group of people . . . these babies were born unusually large, ten to twelve pounds, often resulting in the death of the mother or the baby, or both.
Over the centuries these stories continued among the eastern European countries: Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine and even Russia. They believed the babies born with brown eyes were descendants from this stock of once great warriors and witches and were looked on as good luck charms. Because of this, they often invited the brown-eyed one's into their homes on Christmas...for luck.
The stories were brought to America by the immigrants from these various countries and the stories were told to their children on dark nights. Eventually with our other amusements taking over our lives, the tales have been forgotten and remembered by only a few of the older family members.
With the coming of modern medicine, these brown eyed babies are now appearing in our societies around the world. Return to Io, by Henry L. Palek is a strange paranormal romance about babies born with brown eyes, the descendants of these great warriers and witches.
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