Belly of the Beast (Constantia’s Cataclysm short story)

It’s a strange thing, giving last rites for inmates awaiting execution. Why care for the condemned in death when their lives are forfeit? Should redemption not be exercised in this vital space, where my blood still flows and my actions still matter? No, your rites for me are simply paint to cover the graffiti that was my life. You pretend your rituals honour the damned, but they are mere salves to pacify your conscience and allow you to forget.

And why give the rites at the judgement, rather than at the execution? Death will be swift. But it is distant. Its long shadow claws at me while it looms, silent and inevitable on the horizon.

I have been tortured with long months freezing in a bare cell. They tell us nothing of the outside, and our world shrinks to a bleak few square metres. They give us less food than we need to live, but more than would let us die.

I never spy my fellow damned neighbours, but, in time, they become my most intimate friends, despicable though we might have found each other on the outside. We press our faces into the bars of our cells, whispering to each other while unable to make eye contact: Hushed conversations about our innocence, our families, about methods for escape. Mostly we just wallow in doomed companionship, passing the time with nothing-conversations until death’s shadow draws short.

We never know which day will be the day, but do we ever speculate – we base our auguries on the guards’ moods, on their seasonal uniforms, on the brightness of the light winking out behind shut doors. We wait for the guards to leave and pass along the incantation for a minor charm that sparks light in the cold dust – a simple prestidigitation that wouldn’t attract attention but at least breaks the monotony of boredom and terror. The charm is a simple visual trick to entertain children, but now, for us, it becomes more meaningful. It connects us with the shared secret of our insolence, our hidden futile rebellion.

We’d like to fool ourselves to think that there are messages in these few coloured mystical lights, that we can divine either some legal loophole in our trial, or some escape route from our cells. But that type of magic is long-lost. The good empress Constantia monopolised divination at the outset of her godhood, and cannibalised creative magics.

Damn her.

The executioner visits twice a week, cowled and skeletal, her blotchy skin stretched thin over her wizened arms. She slowly sways her hand hither and thither like a dousing rod, intuiting whose turn it is. Her index finger tugs jerkily toward a cell.

The inmate there wells up with tears. They wail, “nonono, oh ‘Stantia no. Just another day. Only one more.”

So we beg for our torture to continue while we are forced away from it, toward the end of all things.

She paralyses him with a hoarse incantation and waits while the warders unlock the cell. She enters, followed by a cultist – he is a rotund man dressed in dignified robes. He bathes the paralysed body, tells them what final meal Constantia has ordained for them and prays to the goddess, against whom they sinned, for their absolution.

And there we find that strange thing I began this diatribe by ruminating on: The rites we lay down for the damned are strange. Death awaits at the end of this thin-stretched torture, but the cultist devotes hours to the doomed soul. What for?

He praises Constantia and sings hymns, interspersed with an incomprehensible chant in his spirit’s tongue. He casts spells to sap the sin from the transgressor, draining fluid and desiccating their body in the process. He prays louder while he smears the dried skin with balm, or an embalming fluid. I speculate as to whether these gibbering prayers are the actual execution. The thought ices my blood. Could they think it necessary to deceive us by making us believe we hear a rite, while we listen to a slow awkward and ostentatious murder? I’m afraid to think that we would be denied the truth, when we could not do anything with it but know it. But that has always been Constantia’s way as well.

Finally, the crone drifts out, and the cultist sniffs at his handiwork, and begins to follow.  The warders drag the rigid dehydrated body to its execution.

We don’t know the method of the execution. Need-to-know basis, the impenetrable warders say. I can’t think of anything I need to know more, but arguing is pointless. What I can deduce, is that the commonly understood penalty for our heresy has been replaced with execution. Earlier, our minds would have been extracted and placed in metallic sculptures in Constantia’s garden on the Toxic Moon of Getch – that aptly named island made from chemical offal. Perhaps it’s full, though I doubt it. Maybe our crimes simply haven’t earned us eternal torment, where each day the sunlight heats the copper encasing our nervous systems until we burn, unable to scream.

No, we won’t go through that, blessedly. Perhaps death is a mercy. Small comfort. I still fear death and the hungry gods that swim its depths.

We inmates will be among the first to discover their appetites, now the ban on death. No one in the empire has died in more than a century. Until now, Constantia didn’t allow for an afterlife: She is a goddess in the material world, and she’s preferred her souls to stay here, under her dominion. Everyone went to the Toxic Moon, or into the Lighthouse.

Why death? Why not the usual eternal torment? Why now?

The questions bore into me, as though knowing the answer could change anything. I know it can’t. I’m trapped with my regrets, my musings, and the knowledge of the impending end. I’m left clutching at pathetic ideas like twigs on trees that need to support the weight of my salvation. I suppose we could say the same thing for every living thing if death is back on the cards.

But why death, dammit?! If I can decipher the mystery, I have some control, if only metaphysically. Understanding is power, after all. Humanity is obsessed with it, ever since we lit the first fires and saw the predators lurking in the night. Then we could fight back! Understanding allows us options we don’t know we have without it.

I’m obsessing, I should contemplate something else.

Whatever the method of my execution, though, I still circle back to the absurdity of the rites we receive. We don’t know what comes after death.

Moon! I was prepared to become a copper statue, burning and silent, watching the poison fumes curl around her legs while she wandered and meditated. I was ready to bear witness to her trek through the copper legions as she climbed the stairs to the house of the Whitmoore exiles – those gas-masked, inbred descendants of her family. I am not ready for death! I am not ready for uncertainty, for the unknown in the blackness beyond!

Why are we exceptions? Why won’t we join the forest of the damned? Why are we to be put to death? Did she simply change her opinion on what ought to happen to the unfaithful?

I… I’m sorry for circling so much on the topic. I’m trying to think of something else, but everything circles back to death, to the beyond. I am not to be empowered with understanding, I’m not allowed that power here. It’s not for me to have any sort of control, just like there could be no control over whatever happens to my immortal soul after my execution. The more we control we have over the world, by dominating it with technology or bending it with magic, the more frightening death becomes. For it flays control from our hands. It tosses us like mewling babes blindly clutching at whatever follows. We have no insights, no knowledge or strength there. So, we comfort ourselves while we live. Even the people legally mandated to murder us comfort us, out of their own fear of death. They paper over their powerlessness with rituals – hours-long nonsense. These rituals are just a collaborative meditation to let us breathe more easily in the hope that we’ve exerted some agency over the beyond.  Was it this way for our ancestors before Constantia’s apotheosis? Did the concept of death dominate every society so overtly and so subtly that every day was singed by its flame?

Was Constantia afraid of death too?

Stop it. Think of something else. Anything else. At least for a moment…

Nothing’s coming to mind, so maybe I should just walk through my life, free-flow, until something grabs me. I am Marcellus Spalling. Constantia directed my parents to Getch when I was two. She found their talent for mathematics and had them manufacture chemicals in the foundries there. I went along to-

The story will have to wait. The crone just entered, and she’s about to choose one of us. My Yndrivi neighbour recently dubbed her Atropos, from his people’s old religions (he’s decided to call on those custodians of the immortum in the face of death). I think about calling her Tant Woltemade, from the Jehennequen histories, but I hesitate. I’d prefer not to antagonise my captors’ any more, besides, I’m as devout as anyone in the Constantine empire.

The crone’s finger extends and she feels for the thread to cut. I promised myself I’d be dignified, come my turn. I would not need to be smote down in paralysis. I would bow my head, and be prayed over, for all the time it took. I would play my part and walk to my doom with my chin held high.

But now that the finger rests in my direction, my knees shake. Fear pumps down my spine to my feet. My composure rattled when that bony apparition chose me. I rehearsed this moment unto death in my mind, but now it is beyond my ability to deal with it. I nod, but shake so much I appear to enthusiastically agree to my fate. Her hand twists. She speaks the incantation, washing over me, like a dust devil. I go rigid, petrified on the floor.

“No.” I think. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Not to me. Not like the others.”

The crone and the cultist enter my cell. The cultist prays over me. His hands find mine, awkwardly cupping over the claw-shape they’d been frozen in. he proselytises loudly, but his eyes are uncertain. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing. I think he’s just putting together something to soothe himself. Perhaps there is a kernel of use in all of it, but he’s just stretching it out for posterity. Just as well.

Once he finishes, I’m picked up, and carried out. I catch a glimpse of the other prisoners, their fingers curled around the bars and their faces straining against the metal to see me.

“Be brave!” they shout in my direction, but for their own benefit.

I watch the sky pass overhead, clouds part before the sun, and the light beats down on my face. My eyes water, but I can’t close them.

They carry me toward a ship. Metal clanks against metal as they carry me across the gangplank and then below-deck. I hear snippets of conversations from the sailors. They discuss me as I pass, giving me as much thought as any inanimate cargo. They nod at the crone, and discuss our destination – Calcoria. We’re heading for the new project there, the Gullet. They discuss the lands they’d seen beyond the mists, where they sourced bodies for this Gullet.

So, I’m to be used for a common purpose with the savages outside the mists. I would be executed alongside them. But we’d all be taken to Calcoria first…

Why weren’t they executed in the colonies? That’s how we keep the rest of the savages in line.

They leave me on the frigid floor of a refrigerated room. I am deep below deck, in darkness. The metal is cold enough to hurt my skin.

They pull open a shelf in a wall, and put me inside. I’m to be preserved in this demi-morgue then. As they do with those they needed to save until their craniectomies in Calcoria.

The door at my feet shuts, and the darkness is complete. I try to still my pounding heart, but fear forces it faster. A trickle of urine warms my leg, later it will only add to the shiver.

I fall asleep, staring into nothingness, listening to my own breaths.

I wake up. I blink, and I yawn. It takes me a moment to realise my body is no longer paralysed. Sluggish, but mine. How long had I been sleeping? If I’d had a full eight hours, it would mean we were three days out from Calcoria, assuming we weren’t making more stops. But perhaps I’ve been roused by the tingle in my muscles, or by the croaking voices around me.

The voices! They’re a gibberish mix of different dialects from all over Constantia’s empire. Some of them speak Calc. I stay quiet, listening. Mostly supplications, fears, and whimpers, but two of them speak calmly.

A woman speaks evenly: “I heard them say it. Constantia gave out quotas for specific spiritual archetypes, so each ship visits the different ports to collect inmates with the same types of spirit. The witches feel them out.”

“Oh. My. Goddess. I. Don’t. Care,” a man loudly whispers back. “That doesn’t help us escape. Just let me think… Can you heat the metal?”

“No luck. There’s no space to move in this hole. I can’t link up my hands for the spell.”

“Useless! I should of have never gone with you.”

“No use crying about it now.” Her voice carries a calm resignation to her fate, the timbre of someone who’d gambled, lost and accepted the outcome.

I cleared my throat, clutching at their attention. But it was lost between the wails and whispers of the others.

“Hey, psst. You two,” I said. “Psssssst!”

“Is that voice talking to us?” Comes the man’s voice.

“Why are you asking me?” she replies.

“Yes, I’m talking to the two of you.”

“Are you a mage?” The man asked.

“No, but-”

“Engineer?”

“I’m not, but-”

“Then go to the Moon for all I care.”

“Ignore him.” The woman tells me, almost conversationally. “He’s just sour because we got caught robbing a bank.”

“We got caught because you smelled those flowers when you knew your hay fever would act up,” he replies heatedly

“You can’t tell. But I just shrugged,” she says. “It was very non-committal.”

“It’s easy for her,” the man tells me heatedly. “She has a backup body. A baby, back in Karmaël, where her soul will transfer when she dies. And she traded MY BABY for it.”

“Oh hush. It was never your baby.”

“Everything about you has been bad luck and ill omen. I should have had you excanted, sold your music to that Terellian.”

I clear my throat, increasingly uncertain about the company I was keeping. They quieten.

“Why are they executing us? Do you know?” I ask.

“Constantia’s new project, the Gullet. It requires sacrifices.”

“What is the Gullet?”

“All we know, is that they captured a leviathan. Now the cultists, doctors and engineers are moulding it to be a part of the Gullet, whatever that is. The project isn’t finished yet, but it’s fuelled by death. We’ll be the coals for its furnace,” she says.

“No,” came a third voice. One who had been more patient than I. “It runs on souls.”

“What?” the woman says, alarmed.

“I laboured at its construction for a while,” the third voice continues. “Overheard a conversation I shouldn’t have, so now I’m here. It’s not our deaths that will fuel it. It’s our souls. They’ll ship off our corpses to a necrocolony or a fleshette colony, but our souls will sit on the shelves of the Gullet until the leviathan is ready to feed.”

“It eats our souls,” the woman says flatly.

“Once it’s finished, it will.”

“HA!” Comes the first man’s voice. “How will your baby save you now? It can’t! You’re as fogged as me!”

The woman’s voice suddenly becomes all business. “Right then. I have to get out of here.”

“Serves you right.” The man shoots back. “Now you’re in the same boat as me… metaphorically speaking.”

She doesn’t reply.

I address the new voice. “But then, why all the ceremony. Why the rites for death if they knew where our souls would go?”

“Because our souls will be fuel, like oil. Oil dissipates when the lamp burns, but what happens to it after? I don’t know, and neither do the cultists. So, they pray for whatever will remain to enter an afterlife, or oblivion, as the case may be.”

A sound undercuts the murmurs of the assorted bodies. A sizzle, like ice dancing on a stove.

“Hey.” The first man’s voice comes through again. “Hey, are you casting in there?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she answers and begins singing under her breath.

“You are! I recognise those words! Hey, if you’re trying to escape, you better bring me along.”

“Or what?”

“I’ll scream, I’ll bring them here and I’ll tell them you escaped.”

“Ugh, fine. Just let me…”

Metal clatters on the floor. The foreign voices in the room pick up.

“Help me!” I yell above the din. “I have money!”

“Sorry friend, the stakes are too high here.” Her voice becomes louder as she stands in front of my door. “Can’t have so many fingers in my apple.”

“I’ll scream as well! At the top of my lungs, I’ll scream about your escape.”

Another clatter as the door falls off of the man’s cell. His voice pipes in. “If you’re going to be difficult, she’ll just cook you in there. Are you going to be difficult?”

“Relax,” She said. “He doesn’t know what I look like or my name. He can’t give them anything. Let’s find somewhere to hide.”

“Please!” I yell, but they have gone.

“It’s over for us.” The third voice mutters. “Constantia has plans for you. There is no escape. Those two idiots will only get as far as she’s ordained for them to.”

“I don’t want this. I don’t deserve this,” I whimper. “It wasn’t even a proper blasphemy, I simply told the boy he could be a captain one day.”

“Constantia chooses all captains.”

“I know, but he could have been one of the chosen.”

I listen for his small voice among the din of other prisoners. It doesn’t emerge. I need him to reassure me that my crime didn’t merit this.

“There must have been a mistake, right? There must have been some kind of mix up, some fool misinterpreted her will.”

Nothing.

I grit my teeth and bang against the metal shell holding me. The space is too small to bring my fists to the surface in front of me, so I bang them next to my hips. I kick up and down against the indifferent darkness.

No one responds. My mortal rage does not even merit a response from a guard. I am only one of the many faceless doomed. I breathe erratically, disbelieving. I scream, banging with my hands and feet until I feel warm wetness pumping from my throbbing toes. Still nothing.

I weep, in the cold, in the dark, in pain, in despair.

Eventually, I sleep.

Time passes.

A groan rumbles through the metal of the ship. The movements become jerkier, pressing me against the sides of my tomb. I hear a series of doors opening in the room around me, each one followed by unintelligible protests cut short by a hoarse whisper. The crone again.

My turn comes, light floods around me and blinds me. My hands move to cover my face, but can’t reach. I know protest is useless, but perhaps I can ask for water. I begin, and am silenced by paralysis.

The flatbed below me slides out, and a few burly sailors carry me deck-ward. From the periphery, I can see we’ve arrived at Calcoria, near the university. It’s built on a massive disc perched on ornate pillars towering above the city. It partly rests over the ocean. An enormous glass cylinder runs down from the disc to the ocean. Something writhes inside. That’s new.

I’m laid out on the ship’s deck next to a few dozen other bodies and doused with fresh water. Seagulls land nearby, cocking their heads to inspect us. The sailors shoo them away, but they return, questing pecks piercing into soft paralysed flesh where the sailors aren’t looking. They throw back their necks, guzzling down slivers of meat.

One approaches me. Its stupid predator eyes are ringed crimson from the blood of an earlier victim. It hops closer, cocking its head to look for sailors. The one dousing me in water’s attention is at another body, chasing away a bird. “Next time we do this below decks!” he yells. “Honestly what did they expect?”

“Careful.” Warns another sailor. “This is what Constantia wants.”

“I, uh… Oh those bloody gulls.” He grabs one by the neck and slams it to the ship deck.

The gull approaching me hastens, upon seeing the violence. It comes closer, and hovers over my face, imperious and idiotic.

“Hnnnnghh!” I squeak. But the distracted sailors don’t notice.

The gull arcs its beak down, into my eye. It pierces in and opens up, spilling jelly over my face. Searing pain scorches my face. I watch, my point of view distorting as the eye plucks up, tugging at the stem. The pain is electric, jolting me with every tug. My vision is fractured and fading, but I can see my own face, as the gull tugs harder to tear it off. It succeeds, and my remaining eye watches it greedily gulp down my dismembered one. It looks down again, and squawks as a sailor chases it away.

“Stan-dammit, that is grim.” Says the sailor looking down at my mangled face.

“Let’s give that a bit of a scrub then.” He cleans my face with stinging saltwater and takes me down, in a line following the other bodies. We’re loaded on a cart.

“Look at the poor bugger,” says a voice about me. “Let’s at least give him some comfort in the pile.”

They put me on top of the other bodies in a rickshaw, all elbows and chins in my back. I hope I don’t smother them.

A tarp covers over us, and an automaton pulls the rickshaw forward.

The tarp folds over itself and gives me a small opening to view through. I see the colossal pillars of Constantia’s university. Each one with an elevator leading to the top of the disc where the classes happen. We enter and rise, to the top. We’re taken through the colourful constructions on the disc, crossing a few kilometres until we arrive at the new building. A large rotunda capping the glass tube descending into the ocean. The doors open for the automaton, and we enter.

I only see a wall through the tarp’s gap. There’s no telling what’s around me. We turn to the right, along a curving path. Another turn to the right, and we’re uncovered. The tarp falls to the floor. The automaton pulls us out and places us in rows. We’re arranged with a great care, and then left there.

The capacious room has a high roof and stained-glass murals on every wall. The one ahead of me shows Constantia towering over the whole Elliah, hands spread to either side of the planet, like a seer with a crystal ball. The sun is behind her head, forming a halo about her brow and eclipsing the world. The exquisite detail allows for vast empires and warring kings to cover the world, unknowingly dancing to her tune. Her features are cast in metal and expressionless, but the shadows on them coat her face in anger as she studies her subjects. The pain is still there, still agony.

Time passes.

The sonorous thud of metal footsteps ring on the walkway leading to us, elegant, but heavy. My heart races in anticipation.

Then I see her. Constantia, the goddess herself, in the metal. She enters the room, radiant and terrible, exactly like in the mural. The giantess ballerina stands two-and-a-half metres tall with a wingspan of eight. She has the limber body of a young woman, and is completely built of metal. A flaming halo licks the air around her cast crown.

She stretches her wings, soundlessly, before tucking them again. She lifts into the air and floats a short distance off the floor, coming nearer. A retinue of crones follow her, heads bowed. They arrange themselves at the foot of every row of bodies without a word.

Constantia bends down and taps the first body’s forehead with her index finger. A sizzle rises from the woman, and she gasps in sudden release from the spell that bound it.

“Your grace, queen of kings, p-p-please!” She begins. It is the woman from the ship. The one with the backup baby. Constantia raises a hand to silence her. Then her own melodic voice resonates through the room.

“Your escape failed, yet we grant you success. Our designs provide for your freedom, provided you had the audacity to seek it. You dance in our pattern, and your steps please us.”

The sputtering woman sits up, speechless.

“Go, with our blessing, Margaret. Be enhanced.”

A dim glow spreads through her, and she stands up. She looked at Constantia, then at the body laid out next to her. I imagine it’s her co-conspirator. She hesitates, then she leaves him behind.

Hope sparks. I wanted to escape too. I raged against my incarceration as much as Margaret. I did what I could, and I deserved absolution just the same.

Constantia floats to the next body.

“Fleshette,” she says as she touches his forehead. The crone at the back of his row begins a horse whispered chant as the goddess floats to the next body.

“Necro”. Another crone begins her chant some distance behind that body.

Constantia floats between each body, dictating fleshette or necro, dictating where our bodies would go, and each time, a crone begins a chant, creating a growing soft litany in the room.

She approaches me, and my chest burst with hope. Will I receive freedom? I feel the heat radiate from her shell. Her hand skims my face, burning welts as it caresses me.

“Fleshette.”

And there it is, from the goddess’s mouth – final damnation. I am to die, and my body will become part of some flesh-thing on a colony. The crone behind me begins chanting, and the world swims in front of my remaining eye. My vision becomes oil on water, distorting and smearing.

I float up, and look around the room. A golden cord tugs at me, towards the crone. As I pull towards her, I see my body on the floor, single-eyed and in a rictus. Constantia’s body glows white hot. Other essences float along with me, reeling in toward the crones muttering their spells. We enter the folds of their clothes and nestle in crystal balls.

There is no fear anymore. Fear is a chemical compulsion built in a body designed for self-preservation. My mind might still be capable of it, if Constantia puts it in the Lighthouse or the Toxic Moon, but what I am now can’t feel it. I am serene.

The ritual continues until it stops, and we are carried in our crystal balls to a storage room where we sat on shelves, waiting for purpose. The balls grow while we wait.

Time passes.

The door opens again. We’re gathered up in gloved hands, our crystal balls large enough now to require two hands to carry.

The building is different than when we entered. The glass tube is complete, reinforced by steel rings that act as walkways deep into the depths. Each ring has many evenly spaced contraptions attended by a robed figure. The devices have short slides to deposit items down the middle, onto a large organic thing: A flesh-pillar rising upward from the ocean until only three walkways are above it. Crystal balls are carried to the contraptions, inserted, and then dropped onto the flesh pillar where they dissolve.

I am carried to one such contraption, and slotted in. The person works at the machine, and static fills my awareness, blotting out all knowledge of myself or my past. It passes.

I am still Marcellus, I am still the Getchi chemist and I- static again, nothing else, and I am… I am… nothing.

This one rolls out of the contraption. This one falls downward to the flesh. This one hops on its pillowy muscle alongside many others like this one. Then, dissolution.

Time passes

This one waits in nothingness until it hears a voice crackling with electric current, filling the emptiness.

“God-test zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-one.

Souls loaded and prepped for catalysis.

Deific parameters set.

Solidifying dogma.

Organic oneiro-synthesis commencing. The god is born. He calls himself Eloho – omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient within the dream.

Conditions for the universe being set.

We have ignition. Matter to antimatter ratio ideal, cascading in favour of matter.

Degrees of deterministic deviation within acceptable parameters.

Planetary lifecycle initiated.

Conditions for life optimising.

Time dilation adjusted for observation.

And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen. The Gullet’s first test is ready to go. The souls are firing as intended, and the dream is running. Let the chips fall where they may, while we celebrate.”

The voice disappears, then there is nothingness, again.

Time passes.

This one hears another voice, reverberating, proud, and loving.

“My beloved child, you are about to enter the world – torn from your mother. This will be painful, but it will be the final pain you know. Beyond this womb lies a paradise of worldly delights and metaphysical insights. I am your God, Eloho. I will be your guide, so that you may know every dimension of idyllic bliss.”

Blackness turns to blinding white, giving way to red and yellow liquid. This one screams and cries and coughs up phlegm. It enters the loving arms of its mother.

Time passes

I sit languidly on the mountain’s edge overlooking the crystal lakes. Their surfaces twinkle and ripple above the thousands of iridescent fish. Clouds avalanche across the sky; their hue tinges orange in the distance hinting at the nearing twilight. Cloud chasers glide on the currents, their artificial wings flapping this way and that. They glide for sport and in courtship.

It’s beautiful enough to forget time in. It stills my breath and lifts my soul. Every day brims with similar experiences. I try to pick apart the most sublime day this week. But it’s impossible. Each one is life-defining, and would only be cheapened by comparisons. My evenings are energised by the events of the days I’ve spent, and by the promises of the days that will follow. Life is excellent when I’m on my own or when I’m in company.

If only I didn’t need sleep.

I dread sleeping. My dreams are filled with people who wish me harm, or who don’t care if it befalls me. Worst are the dream-people who would use me as though I were less than a person. The dreams conduct themselves like memories, but they are not from this world. People are not like that. We are good.

I lick my lips, watching the lovers careen through the cloud layer and drag wispy lines back down with them.

“Eloho, hear me. I seek your guidance.”

“Your dreams trouble me as well, child.”

“Why are they fraught? What could they mean?”

“I do not know.”

“How is that possible?”

“These dreams are not of my creation. Your people share them, though they fear sharing them.”

“How could something exist that you did not create?”

“I do not know.”

“What can I do to stop them?”

“These dreams are the one iota of existence beyond my dominion. Their meaning and their cessation are without my grasp.”

“Will they return tonight?”

“I do not know.”

“Thank you, wise Eloho.”

“Your irony isn’t lost on me child. I simply have no salve for your fears other than the majesty of my creation. That is all.”

Eloho’s voice fades. I stand up, perturbed. The dreams will fade, as all dreams do, leaving only a fading impression over time. But I can’t rid myself of the wriggling worm of fear they put in my heart, that there is something all-knowing Eloho doesn’t know. Divinity deals in absolutes, and so it cannot abide contradictions. Could it survive them?

Or is Eloho withholding the truth from me?

No, if he wanted to mislead me, he wouldn’t tell me he doesn’t know. If he wanted me to simply accept anything, he wouldn’t have created our tradition of critical thinking.

He must be telling the truth.

But how can there be something beyond his knowledge? The thoughts are a maze with no exit, and they sicken me.

The dream itself is disturbing. In it, I’m a brain without a body, hanging from a branch somewhere deep below the ocean. The tree is inside of a giant body, and it’s slowly eating me. I can’t move, but I can see and hear far beyond myself, through the giant. I hear two women talking and coming closer on a metal walkway far above. They’re having a conversation about something important, something that includes me.

“Thank you for making the time to see me.”

“Only too happy to let the journalists in. This is the greatest undertaking in the archipelago’s history. The people will have questions. And they deserve to know! You should quote me on that. Elections are coming around soon, my master wants this to sound good.”

“Oh, we’ll make it sound good. I promise. I enjoyed the tour. How deep down does the structure go?”

“A hundred and sixty-six floors, deep into the ocean.”

“So large. Can the souls hear us, while they’re in the beast?”

“Only before they’re born and after they die in the dream. Once their minds cotton on to sensory input, our voices become whispers in the wind or bubbles in the ocean, or something similarly poetic. I could have done without that, but the cultists want some way to talk to the subjects if they need to. I suppose while they sleep in there, they could theoretically hear us too.”

“Will they remember anything about the real world while they’re in the simulation?”

“Who knows? I suspect something might remain, but the memory will be as solid as steam. Your brain carries memories better than your soul, and they don’t have their original brains. Their souls now hang on the brain-vine that we sculpted in the dream beast.”

The second woman laughs. “Is that what those growths on that flesh-tree were? The brains they’re using?”

“Indeed.”

“But don’t you find that awfully grim?”

“Luddites always call progress grim. It might be distasteful to the delicately constitutioned. But it is tremendously useful.”

“In what way? What are we hoping for?”

“Well, since Constantia died, we’ve been trying to fill the vacuum of her power. We want to create a new pantheon to replace her, so we test out scenarios through the dreambeast. We come up with ideas for gods, and have its dreams centre on a universe where that god exists, and then it drinks the souls we feed it to create a dream for them to inhabit. We observe, and we see whether a given god would be a good fit for the real world. If it can inhabit the dream with absolute power and not become corrupted, then we will consider creating it in the real world. Constantia was better than most gods, but we’re hoping to create something truly good.”

“What’s the plan for this first experiment?”

“Pure goodness. A god that lets you live and die free from the most serious fears we have. The world it sculpted is harmonious, where predators are unnecessary because the herbivores go sterile once they reach a critical ecological mass. Humans are vegetarians too, and they carry no malice in them.”

“What was that last part?”

“They have no malice. They are incapable of ill intentions.”

“No, the part about humans being vegetarian.”

“Well they live in harmony with nature. None of them husband animals or consume them.”

“How novel… And how do you rid them of ill intentions?”

“Eloho simply didn’t create them with the capacity for it. They inhabit a world of plenty, without sickness or most of the dangers we deal with – most importantly from one another.”

“It created them without the freedom to choose evil?”

“I wouldn’t think about it like that.”

“Then how would you?”

“You and I believe that we have the freedom to choose all sorts of options between good and bad. We do something and then assign a moral value to it. But there are infinite choices our brains aren’t evolved to choose from. They were never relevant because life operates according to rules that don’t need you to, for example, make a moral choice between eating a cloud or sticking your arm into a tree.”

“That’s a nonsense choice.”

“The people in the simulation feel the same way about choosing between stealing or letting your family go hungry. Neither of those are relevant to them. It’s only nonsense because of your context.”

“But what is the cost? How much of their humanity do they lose without the option for self-interest?”

“Well, that’s what we’re busy finding out. But so far, I have to tell you, I’d much rather live in there than out here.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“It’s right there for you to enter. Why don’t you go inside?”

“I’m an essential part of the project. If this one doesn’t work out, I need to find the one that does. Much as I’d love to go into this one, it would mean shirking my duty.”

“So only criminals and undesirables in there for now, yes?”

“That’s correct.”

“But there are plans for the rest of us to enter at some point?”

“When we iron out the problems and create the heaven-dream.”

“Very Interesting. Tell me, if they don’t have the same capacity for choice as we do, are they still fully human, in the ways that matter?”

“Maybe ‘fully human’ isn’t the best thing we could be. What they lose in humanity – if you really want to think about it like that – they more than make up for in genuine bliss. If this experiment is a success, and we create a benevolent dictator god who could save us from our own worse instincts, then we could live in a utopia, heaven for everyone. Quote me on that too.”

“Oh, I plan to.”

“Look, we live in a time where the only real danger in the world is humanity. We have dominated Elliah so thoroughly as a species, that we never need to worry about lions anymore. We only need to worry about each other. If we create a god that could make us unflinchingly good, there would be no more threat to our species. Besides, removing our worse instincts wouldn’t make us cowardly, only kindly. And it would do that for all of humanity.”

“Will these same souls be used for every experiment?”

“No, the dreambeast is digesting them to run the dream. When it’s finished, they’ll be tossed out.”

“What will happen to them then?”

“Oblivion.”

“You find that conscionable?”

“When the alternative is the old gods? Yes, I absolutely do.”

Years pass.

I sit on the edge of beyond, on the mountain looking over the lakes. I rub the salve into my daughter’s skin to protect her from the sun. I should have rubbed it into my own skin more often over the years. Now that I’m old, leathery and wrinkled, I’ve come to appreciate the transience of young skin, and how it needs to be cherished and protected.

It’s her first trek up with me, and she decided my new name was father sherpa. I protested, but her mind is made up and her will is iron.

We walked up the mountain together, wondering at the majesty of Eloho’s creation. We cupped our hands in the clear river to drink, and we plucked fruits from various trees to savour as we walked.

We stopped, we rested, we pulled the lutes from our backs and played a duet among the rush of the river and the twittering birdsongs. The long grass flowed in the refreshing breeze. We lay in it and watched the clouds cross overhead, picking out shapes and discussing her plans with her friends.

The further we walked, the quieter I became. I felt contemplative, about the joyful life I’d had, and how my child somehow made it more meaningful. Through her I’m allowed to experience everything for the first time a second time. It humbles me to Eloho. It wells my eyes with tears of gratitude.

But the worm of fear still wriggles in my chest. I had another troubling dream Eloho couldn’t explain. I keep it from my daughter to spare her. She’s cleverer than I ever was, and asking questions that Eloho himself can’t answer brings us nowhere. We trust in the power he does have, and we love the life he’s given us.

But I hate keeping an experience in the shadow. I hate that the knowledge is a part of me, and by hiding it, I hide a piece of myself and create distance from my family.

I open my mouth a few times to discuss it, but stop myself when I see her wondering at the antelope bounding over the highlands of the mountain. The river is behind us, and the quiet is complete. We heard a bee passing nearly a hundred metres away earlier. The silence here is sacred, and I’m loathe to taint it with a profane revelation.

The dream’s meaning is opaque, and, as always, it troubles me.

“Father?” she says, pensively. Her oval eyes lock onto mine.

I look at her, waiting for her to continue.

“Father, I had a worrying dream. E-even Eloho couldn’t explain it.”

Sweat beads my brow. My mouth dries up, and I am suddenly very, very tired.

“Tell me about it.” I say hoarsely, and then clear my throat.

“Well…” she looks out over the valley below, “Okay then. In the dream, I’m nothing but a brain. I’m a fruit on a tree too, somehow… I hear a man speak to a woman.”

She watches me intently as she recounts the dream. She suspects I’ve dreamt something similar, clever as she is. She continues.

“The man is livid. ‘You told a journalist it drinks souls?’ he says.

I put my hand on her arm to still her, and quote the response from woman in the dream: “Yes, but it would take hundreds of years in the simulation to digest a person, and it would be followed by painless oblivion. That’s obviously a much better choice than just dying.”

My daughter looks at me in shock. Her eyes search mine for answers I don’t have. We don’t need to recount the rest of the dream to each other, but we know we both remember it the same:

“Listen again,” says the man.” You told a journalist that our heaven machine will devour your soul! How can you be smart enough to work on this project and too stupid to know how that sounds to the general population? And then, as if that wasn’t enough, you told her that the first thing we thought of when creating a god, was one that would remove humanity’s ability to choose. Oh, and that nobody ever gets to have meat again.”

“Humanity’s ability to choose evil, yes, but-”

“Stan-dammit, we just had a revolution a few years ago, and now you’re telling the public that the guilds want to take away their freedom of choice. Don’t you know how that sounds?”

“But they are rational people. They can decide for themselves.”

“Oh, grow up. No they can’t.”

“Sir, with all-due respect, the people deserve to know what their government is doing.”

“Firstly, I don’t give a damn about what you think they deserve. Second, if you want to tell them anything, you do a press release, you feed them the story. You don’t give them tours.”

“But we’re doing amazing-”

“You’re still not getting it. You told a journalist during my election run, that we’re testing a god that will… you know what, you’re not worth the breath. Get out of my sight, you’re fired. As for the rest of you, we invite the journalist back, we set the record straight. I had no idea we were testing this type of god, and we absolutely do not need to destroy the soul for these experiments. Our disgraced scientist here was talking outside of her department. She didn’t know what she was talking about, and unless she wants to end up inside the dreambeast, she’ll never disagree with that fact. Oh, and nobody has to give up meat!”

“Yes sir. What about the simulation?”

“Shut it down, capture the spirits and put them to work for the next test. We’ll do the next one with more human autonomy… dammit, Claire. We could have had something good with this, but you had to cock it up by giving a Stan-damned tour. This is on you.”

“Please, I’m begging you, don’t do this. You have no idea how wonderful it is in there. Please don’t take me off of the project.”

“You want it so badly? Well… Maybe I have something in mind. Yes, I think you can still be very useful to the Gullet project.”

That’s where the dream ends.

My daughter and I look at each other apprehensively. Whatever this is, it is beyond Eloho. It is beyond the power of omnipotence.

A strand of her hair catches in a whipping wind. That’s never happened before.

The wind moans through the mountain, spooking the antelope who thrash against each other. They fight and scream as they tumble down the slopes and break their bones in dusty clouds.

The valley below rumbles, and cracks, and the earth swallows the lakes.

The sky turns to mottled red and grey, and cracks jerk through it – jagged black gashes racing across it like lightning bolts.

I hold my daughter, and she holds me.

It’s been a good life.

*              *              *

The brains spasm on the vine. They tense and then relax, and these ones are expelled. Still placid as when these ones entered. But these ones are different now, wholly other from what they were. This one looks around this place, and feels itself fading, losing understanding, like waking up from a dream.

This one does not feel anything about it, fear is a construct of the mind, not the soul. This one floats through the room – a large cavity filled with sinewy vines from which the brains sprout. This one floats outside, into the chamber, into the water. A skeleton wraps around the structure. This one feels the echo of the event – a captured leviathan, with the glass tube forced down its throat. They magically softened its flesh and pulled its essential organs upwards through the tube, one by one, so that it may be kept alive inside the tube. The excess muscle, skin, and bones were left outside for the scavengers to eat. And now the creature’s skeleton floats around the tube, and its body sits inside it.

This one’s understanding is rapidly fading. The colours of the world fade to white, grey and black.

“C’mere.” A voice says, and a rope of light lassos this one. It pulls this one back towards the structure.

“Moth almost roamed away,” the voice says. “Take it to floor fifteen.”

This one is dragged up, and deposited in a glass cube with glowing runes on each face. Women are brought, bellies ripe with children. The children are delivered, and murdered. The births create a white spark that only this one and this one’s kind can see. The deaths create a grey spark. The sparks stack together, flint and steel. Each simultaneous birth and death an attempt at something.

Understanding fades further, and everything becomes blackness. There are no shapes or colours anymore. Only light and dark. Nothing exists except the light and dark.

The sparks continue. Many sparks, until one becomes a flame, they call out to this one, and I awake into a new consciousness.

Colours and shapes return. I see there are many boxes. Some of them illuminate spirits like me, others are filled with thoughtless, insectile spirits. Was I just like that?

“We have one.” A man says from below. I see him. My captor. He made me the mindless thing I had just been, for how long? Impossible to tell. I had no understanding of time. There was something before the thoughtlessness. I used to be something before, but it’s gone now.

I hate the man. I want to maim him. I want to make him like me.

He addresses me. “About time. You have work to do.” He snaps his fingers at a subordinate. “Take it down. Hundred-and-sixty-sixth.”

They disconnect the glass box from the roof it was mounted on. More swollen women are brought in, all of them unconscious. I’m carried past them, raging but impotent.

We enter an elevator and descend, past the leviathan’s mollusc-infested bones I saw from the outside, past blind predators hunting the depths, and we stop near the bottom of the construction. The doors open, and I’m brought inside a cylindrical room. A glass tube runs upward through the middle of the chamber, encasing the dreambeast’s arteries and nerves, like wiring for a machine. Twenty-two beds stand with their heads against the room’s circumference and their bottoms pointing toward the middle. Each bed has a human manacled to it; plastic pipes feed a slurry of nutrients into their mouths. My glass box is affixed above one of these humans, and the runes on my prison-box’s faces glow.

The man speaks to the person on the bed below me. Her feeding pipe gags her, and she can only look at him with wide eyes as he speaks.

“I told you we’d still have a purpose for you here. That moth up there is going to tell you all about our experiments, and you’ll get to see first-hand what I end up doing in them.” He patted her on the cheek. “Lucky you.”

The rune below me glows, and I’m allowed a downward channel to enter her mind. Her pupils turn jagged like sea-urchins as I burrow into her brain.

She is open to me. The sum of her knowledge is a flawlessly indexed book I can peruse. She cannot refuse me information, and she cannot lie to me. Her name is Claire. While I’m inside her, she is paralysed. I learn from her that I’m never meant to leave. This is where she will die, and where I will exist forever, burrowing into the minds of criminals or political upstarts.

“What am I?” I ask.

“A moth,” her thoughts tell me. “Someone who was in the dreambeast, until it digested you, making you into a moth. You were thoughtless, until a combination birth and death lit a spark for you back into consciousness as something new.”

“How do I escape?”

“You can’t.”

“What if I don’t do what they want?”

“They will hurt you.”

“What should I do?”

“Look into the dreambeast’s mind, and relay its thoughts to me.

The rune above me glows, and another channel opens to me, into the mind of the dreambeast. I see its dreams, and the runes compel me to share them with Claire. Her finger taps on a button in a rhythmic language that relays it upward, through the dreambeast’s nervous system, to someone far above.

This is my fate, forever.