As a god, I had never slept. Sleeping was for the vessels and vassals that couldn’t process every bit of stimuli during their waking moments. Dreams only ever came to me as visions; just waking exultations of worlds beyond, untouchable.
Reborn mortal, I did dream.
I dreamed of water and memory.
I dreamed I could see my reflection on the face of a still ocean. Then, looking beyond, I saw organic, vibrantly colored structures of coral; the crystal-like shimmer of thousands of differing fish. A shark in the water made a wide berth through those shallows, but didn’t eat one shape. I dipped my hand into the water and it roved near me, bumping into me fearlessly. I felt myself smiling. Nearby, a manta ray ventured closer to my treading form, titanic in the water. The shark swam away. The ray came close to the surface, close to me. I felt a spray of warm water hit my face and my smile widened.
The shark was fearless at the feet of a god, but the manta ray was its own kind of god. It flit around me one more revolution before returning to its path through the reef. Then the shark returned, bumping into my leg possessively.
It bit down on my ankle and my eyes opened.
I let out a howl of surprise and shock. Like fire! Like lightning! Like concentrated acid! I rose up and shucked a wet blanket from my body with furious pinwheeling. My heart was hammering in my ears as my hands went to my ankle. There were rusted scissors caught on my oversuit, stuck fast because they couldn’t cut through the material. I braced myself and pulled them from the suit, chucking them away where they disappeared under a chair near a rickety wooden door.
Then my eyes locked on the human shape sitting in that chair. I meant to cry out, but as soon as I opened my mouth, all the blood rushed out of my face and I collapsed back on the bed with a groan.
I heard the chair moan with just as much intensity as the shape in it moved. Then I heard the shift of leather on dirt, the dull thud of something leaden hitting raised wooden boards.
“There now, Girl.” A woman’s voice scratched against my ears in english. Hers was such a contrast to Argus' soothingly artificial vocals that I ached. What’s this ending become but a new beginning? If I think about it like that, it doesn’t sound so bad, does it? It wasn’t an especially reassuring thought. It terrified me. I was the Lady of Memory… with no memory of the last era.
What kind of guiding force would I be in this new world?
Who did I really think I was?
At least she speaks a dialect I can understand.
The woman said, “Our boyos found you near a bad place in the canyon. You’re in Hearthwir, Girl.”
“Hearthwir? Where is Hearthwir?” I asked, slowly opening my eyes again. I was in a hut. That much was evident. It was made out of… pine--worn pine. There were still trees. That was reassuring.
The straw bed I was in was pressed up against the wall. There was a woman to my left, now on her knees, her clasped hands resting on the edge of the bed as if she were praying to me. The woman could have passed for thirty. There were frown lines full of red dirt cutting across her forehead. They looked like tribal markings. She had a wrapping of thin cotton about her head and her clothing looked threadbare, but comfortable. She said, “My name is Holla.” She stood up and limped to the door, knocking on it a couple of times. It was then that I noticed that her right foot was a wooden facsimile.
She turned back to me as she sat down in her chair beside the door. “Hearthwir is the farthest west, near the salt flats of Retzu.” She gave me a roguish smile and said, “Welcome to the edge of the world, Girl.”
“The edge of the world…” I layed back on the bed and let out a breath. “Do you have any water?”
The woman snorted. “Wait.”
I almost nodded off again, but the door to the room suddenly opened out and a man’s shape passed over the threshold, carrying a bowl of something liquid in his hands. He placed the bowl next to my bed, hands shaking, and left. I only noted that he was also missing his leg and his headscarf covered all but his eyes which were steely in color, their whites almost red. The bridge of his nose that I had seen had possessed a leathery texture, but was far farer than my own skin.
Made a stranger in a strange land. Why did I return like this? I asked myself, but of course I didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t remember. It was frustrating… More frustrating than anyone could have begun to understand.
Holla was watching me. As our eyes met, she stood and came to my bedside, pulling a wooden cup out from under the bed and giving it a good wipe with the edges of her red-stained cotton robe. She dipped the cup into the bowl and then proffered it to me. Her hands shook a little as I took it, but after, she tucked her hands under her arms. As I drank in gulps and gasps of desperation, she said to me, “You’re from East, aren’t you? You have the look about you… but your eyes tell me you’re from this place. I can’t cut into your clothing… and you bore a staff made of metal they’ve never seen before.” She stepped back and went back to sitting by the door.
I weighed the different responses I could give her, but settled on a question instead. “You’ve given up water for me… out of curiosity or generosity?”
Holla actually looked surprised for a moment before she smiled and said, “We need you alive to feel alive ourselves.”
I squinted at her. “What does that mean?”
She shook her head. Whether that meant she didn’t know or couldn’t answer, I didn’t know. She asked, “Did you come from the stars or from the earth?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “From the earth,” I admitted.
Holla looked relieved. “Then you are human,” she stated.
“Y-Yes,” I said, blinking rapidly. As human as a god can be.
“This is good,” she said, showing jagged, browned teeth. She let out another breath of relief like all the tension between us was resolved.
“What else could I be?” I dared to ask.
Holla looked at me sharply. Her mouth turned into a red line that cut her face into pieces. “Take care that no one else hears you being ignorant… They may take advantage of you.” She sighed then and said, “You came from one of the shelters. We’ve heard of people doing this in the east… but there are no shelters like that in the west. The tombs in the west are all empty… or desecrated. If you came from the earth here, that gives me hope. Maybe there’s hope for us Westerners yet.”
I didn’t want to dash her hopes, but I asked, “Shelters?”
She blinked. “They made places for the best humans to stay while the rest of the world died… Except the world didn’t perfectly die, did it? Else I wouldn’t be here. None of us would.” Holla narrowed her eyes then. “You came out of the ice in the earth… didn’t you?”
She was talking about cryogenic freezing. Was that how some human beings had survived? I nodded my head excitedly, crafting the story I could tell--the lie I could live until I found my own truths. “Yes! I only just woke up. How long has it been? What does the world look like? What’s happened? Who did this?”
The woman shook her head. “The Mordis Eyes preach that Papyrus did this,” she said, spitting. “She ended the world. She made the ‘phage. She killed all the other gods, besides Mordis, and damned everyone. But human beings…” She tapped her forehead with a wry smile. “We don’t lie down that easily. Mordis knew this. He helped us prepare as much as we could… It’s been a hundred years since the brightdark. We’ve come far since then… Farther than we ever thought we could. I remember when my father told me of his grandfather… how he withered and waned from the ‘phage. But it’s slowly disappearing. And magic is returning! Already, we’ve recovered a crystal that purifies our water… It’s the only water in almost three days travel. They say we may have crops next year… Mordis willing.”
Mordis… I recognized that name. It sent a chill down my spine.
“Mordis willing?”
“It’s just a saying. Mordis is Man’s god. Even if He’s… apart sometimes, there’s some comfort in speaking His name. Some people say He tried to kill Papyrus before She could succeed, but you can’t kill some gods.”
I wasn’t going to argue her there. Some could have been killed. Some could not have. But Mordis… Man’s God? The title didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t sound right.
I asked, “Then where have they all gone if they’re not dead?”
“Other… Not dead, but not alive,” Holla said with a shrug. She wasn’t concerned by such things. Why would she be? Gods had no bearing in this world, besides Mordis and his acceptable absence apparently. Then she eyed me. “I forget that you lived in the time of gods. I’m sorry to say… things may be painful for you to bear in the coming days. Just stay strong. Hearthwir needs you at your best.”
Hearthwir will be well behind me before long if I have my way, I thought to myself, but I swallowed the last of the water and set my cup down in the bowl beside me. “Hearthwir… How many are you?”
“We’re fifty-five strong and getting stronger everyday… but food is getting scarce, you understand. For the last twenty years, if anyone tried to dig more than a few feet down into the dirt, they would stir up the chronophage.”
I thought, Time and Eater. A creature? “What is it? A disease or…?”
Holla narrowed her eyes at me again. “The ‘phage was released before the end... They put people in shelters because of it. You don’t remember?”
“I remember… little,” I said. “I don’t… I don’t remember the end.”
“Hmm. Some people who come out of the ice, their memories are broken up. But as you thaw, perhaps those things will come back to you,” Holla suggested thoughtfully, rubbing her chin. Then the woman said, “We will help you as best we can.” She smiled broadly and I had to contain my urge to grimace. She had a smile that could crack brand-name plexi.
“What were you doing before?” I asked slowly. “With the scissors?”
Holla shook her head, waving a hand dismissively. “Pay no mind. Only meant to cut you out of those clothes. They looked hot as stone, but you seem to be doing alright, now.”
My oversuit resisted most cutting. The scissors had pinched me. “Yes, it’s fine,” I reassured her. The water had restored a bit of my equilibrium and it was cooler in the shack than in the sun by a huge margin. Sans the sweat and the deadness in the air, I felt almost divine again. “You said you found me with a metal staff… Did you also find a haversack, by chance?”
“Haversack?” Holla stated, then she said, “A soft white square that hugged you like a bug?”
“Yes, that’s it!”
“They cut it off you… Thought it was what caused you to pass out.”
“Nerts,” I breathed, closing my eyes. Well, it could be worse, I thought. I could be dead.
Ever the optimist, I.
“You might like the return of your belongings, yes?” Holla asked.
“I would.”
“Wait then,” she said. “Matron Weska will want to see you first.”
“To decide if I’m not a true threat?”
“Something like that,” Holla said. “You’ve convinced me, but I don’t speak for the rest of Hearthwir. I hardly speak for myself, Girl.” She stood and went to open the door by its hemp handle, but she paused and turned and asked, “Do you remember your name?”
“Papy--” I began, but then my mouth clicked shut. “Poppy,” I said.
“Poppy,” Holla said, her eyes again narrowing on me like she could see right through me. I destroyed the world she never knew: the world with no ‘phage, no aging, no war… and I felt like she could sense I was a time thief in some way. A time eater… Then she smirked. “Whatever you say, Girl.” She opened the door and disappeared.
I wouldn’t see Holla again for a long time.
The minutes dragged by and I began to get anxious. Restlessly, I stood up and began to pace in the small room. Sunlight poured into the shack from cracks in the wood paneling. There were no other light sources or windows. In a state of mild panic, I went to door and pushed on the hemp rope. It was stuck fast.
Stone’s bones, I thought to myself. I think I’m a prisoner. The notion made me giggle to myself nervously. A god… A prisoner? Ha! It was so ridiculous. It was unheard of. It was--I’m not a god anymore. Stop dwelling on what is and isn’t absurd. You’ll drive yourself insane.
My hand went to my suit’s temperature reading. It was almost thirty degrees in the room, but there was no humidity. The air was stagnant. The smell of meat and dirt was ever present. It reminded me of pork. Pigs? Did pigs survive the end?
I was a soldier in the United States Airborne Infantry. I had been taken prisoner along with my company. All of us were bound, dirty, stripped to our underwear. The officer looked us over like cattle and passed a clipboard to his enlisted counterpart. Then the company man started barking orders in Japanese.
They shot the first man in line with a pistol and drug his body into the brick building. Goodbye Conroy. Through the archway, we could see them take him by his feet and his bound wrists. With three swings, they had him on the metal sheet. Then, with a decisive push, they pushed him into the oven and shut the door.
Everyone in the line flinched when the door closed.
They shot the next man then, three down from me. I felt my bladder release. Goodbye Roswell. They wanted information. None of us said a word of it. None of us did anything except flinch as they pushed each man down to the last into the oven. I remembered the smell as the enlisted man at last approach me and cocked back the action on his pistol.
The last thing I ever smelled was cooked person. It made my stomach growl. It smelled just like pork ribs on the grill. I missed my wife. Julie. Julie Breanna. I used to cook for her.
Now I would cook one last time.
I fell out of the memory as the dull click of a trigger pull sounded in my ears. I took a shaking step back and fell back on the bed. “Stone’s bones,” I hissed as I put a hand to my head. Pain began to throb in time with my heart, right behind my eyes. I felt his fear… Who’s fear? I didn’t know. Rather, I couldn’t remember.
All I knew for sure… was that this place was not right. Hearthwir was not right. “They’re cooking people,” I whispered as soon as I got my breathing under control. “They’re eating people.”
We need you alive to feel alive ourselves, Holla had said.
I had to get out of there. I had to escape!
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