On the Hill of Megiddo
The eve before Constantia’s Cataclysm
The exile staggered in the riverbank mud. Blue-black circles wrapped around his rheumy eyes. He saw the world through dark swirls of hallucinogenic haze that faded to black at the periphery.
He had been trekking for days without food, and for how long before that? A week… a month? He couldn’t know. The parasite-goddess, Minaptra, carried every memory further than his previous step into an inky dreamworld where time didn’t flow, but blotted.
Minaptra’s divine call had roused him from his cave. She awoke, unfurled and gestated. She stretched herself through his nervous system as easily and subtly as her mushrooms grew through soil. Now she had called him to her heart, as was the ultimate fate for all her exiles, and he would obey, whether he wanted to or not.
He was a passenger in his own body, moving forward on compulsion rather than intention. His hands were in a rictus, claws that locked onto a heavy lead-lined box. His trembling hand instinctively wanted to fish in his pocket for the skin of repellent, though it made no move to do so. The repellent was made from the monstrous verrigal’s stink sac, and it would keep away anything below the top of the food chain. It would have been a cold comfort to his shrunken consciousness.
His face itched where the fungus grew, near-microscopically from his pores, nostrils, ears and on the insides of his eyelids. It nested in his skull and paved his nervous system with mould. It halted his steps and directed his hands to his satchel to grab more mushrooms for his masticating mouth. The world rippled and trembled as he ate. Then he stared into the clouds above, watching their pulsating glow and the curling contours that reset each time Minaptra made his eyes look away. He was motionless, mouth agape, drinking deeply of the rain to nourish Minaptra. His muscles throbbed and burned from the relentless trek, but his corpulence sustained him.
In the years before his exile, he’d been an important villager, revered as a priest, but reviled for his contagion. Even then, Minaptra clouded his judgment, making him eat as much as he could For years, his parasitic conductor pushed endorphins into his brain. It had made him ravenous and suppressed his inhibitions. As was tradition, the first time he attacked a child or domestic animal, he was sent into the wilderness. There, he glutted himself into an obesity intended to fuel this trek.
The thoughts that remained his own trickled in small rivulets. He placidly cursed the journey and tried to remember ‘home’. It was an amorphous memory now, available for recollection, but incomprehensible. The great waterfall was somewhere ahead. Its endless rush tickled at a memory of home. He expected animals to be everywhere here, but his unfocused eyes couldn’t see any, and the sounds were as likely as not to be hallucinatory. He wondered vaguely where all the animals were. They should have been teeming this close to the great waterfall, but in the umpteen days he’d been walking, the wilderness had been desolate, other than the orbs of light now bobbing erratically in the heavy mist.
“Maybe people killed everything. Maybe Minaptra.” he idly wondered, wishing the itch in his pores would cease while trying and failing to look directly at the lights. He couldn’t blink away the permanent rain, and Minaptra didn’t stimulate an impulse from his brain to focus his eyes. The fungus didn’t need him to see.
Three indistinct orbs of light hovered and jerked sporadically in the misted distance. He couldn't tell whether the lights were satellites orbiting his destination, or a pod of land-anglers luring him to his death. Still, he could make out that the glowing balls occasionally roared beams of light, slicing soundlessly through the night, searching for something.
His vision darkened further. His world shrunk to the small canopy of visibility around him. Exhaustion conspired with hallucinogens to paint monsters in the blanket of darkness and rain. Hazy shapes panted along the edges of vision and the spaces between space. The dancing sprites of light in the distance oscillated between apex predators, fairies, or emotions made manifest. He smelled things burning but saw no fire. He felt a dull ache, a matter-of-fact resignation to his imminent death that couldn’t develop into fear.
Winds buffeted raindrops, sounding like giant leathery wings, and distant thunderclaps might have been accented with low growls or yelps. Shadows stalked him, scratching at his senses and skirting the circumference of his sight. He coughed involuntarily and hacked up a small glut of ochre vomit onto himself. “The rain will cleanse,” he thought.
At some point in his absent-minded shambling, his hand twitched, as the fungus supressed another impulse to fish for his repellent. The twitch was enough for his aching hands to slip. The metal box he’d been holding fell, tumbling over the stones to his right. It stopped with a loud crack, breaking open and spilling out the glowing stone in the mud next to the river.
As his face soaked in its sickly green light, he thought apathetically: “So this how die. Mmm.” A coiling spike of pain spasmed in his muscles, jerking him into panicked action. His face muscles should have grimaced, but didn’t. Tears mingled with the rain on his face, as he picked up the green rock with his bare hands.
Finally, moving toward the sunlight-spewing spheres that were equidistant from salvation and death, his legs buckled. He stumbled over a small mound and fell, caking his hands and knees in mud. His calves burned as he was forced, limp-necked to his haunches, and then they gave out completely. His open eye wallowed in mud, slowly caking in it. His breathing became more erratic. His right hand maintained its grip on the green rock while his left hand excavated a small trench in the mud in a vain attempt at dragging him forward.
His muscles failed, despite the blinding pain behind his eyes. He coughed, and his lungs rattled flecks of flesh loose. The lights in the distance were closing in, ethereal death that had caught his scent. “Nuh” he thought, and he coughed up a thick wad of blood and meat. His body curled up like an expiring insect.
He wished he could laugh.
* * *
The rain never cleared completely on Megiddo, and its inhabitants never saw the sky. At its most forgiving, the perpetual cloud-cover sent down a dreary drizzle. Presently, dawn highlighted the pregnant roof copper, and the rain relented its charcoal torrent to give way to a fine misting. Sunlight summited the mountains and slowly spilled across the land like a sleepy opening eyelid, shading monochrome countryside into viridian valleys and opalescent lakes.
A coming-of-age ritual was afoot. A dozen groups of three hunted the verrigal. Each group was led by an adult, trying to get two children to the creature first, to harvest its stink sac. The victors would return home heroes, replenishing the village’s repellent supply. They would be recognised as adults, and one of them would be fed the tentacular mushroom that would make them a Minaptran mason.
One such group scouted in the direction of the great waterfall, guessing the creature might seek out water. They were a trio of pale children with bone-white hair and golden eyes. Their lanterns were only three orbs of light at a distance, bobbing and jerking near a dirt road; they emitted bright beams as they focused their mirrors into the retreating night. The leader, Tselentin, was seventeen. He was an adult, having succeeded in the hunt the year before. His friends were cusping sixteen, and hoped to leave childhood behind. The other two, a girl and boy, were cusping sixteen. Their lanterns ponderously and methodically scanned the ground, piercing the mist’s grey static and exorcising shadows from rocks and trees.
They walked amiably, with a languid bravado that covered their middling anxiety. Tselentin was the best tracker in any of the groups, and the other groups had swarmed to where he had found the verrigal that earned him his own adulthood. The girl closely followed him, sidestepping occasionally to find a flower to put in his long curls, and pouting theatrically each time he didn’t stop.
“What was the first thing you did when you came of age, Tselentin?” She asked.
“Celebrate. Then I Slept.” He replied, adjusting one of the flowers she’d been tying into his hair. It scented him lilac. “It took us forever to track the beast. It survived the poison for two weeks before it collapsed. The other parties gave up after a week, when they ran out of repellent. But, we” he said with a braggadocious shrug “just had to keep at it.”
“You were in the wilderness without any repellent.” She fawned.
“Wasn’t too bad. We slept every second night so we could keep watch and fight off the hungrakes. We’re all good with our slings.”
The other boy rolled his eyes “And you ate nothing but rocks and walked uphill in every direction and cut open your own dogs to sleep inside of.”
“Hey,” Said Oppon, vicariously offended. “Just because we couldn’t get it last year doesn’t mean you have to be so childish. Maybe it’s your fault for sleeping like the dead.”
“Maybe it’s the shamans’ fault for waiting this long to order another expedition.” He retorted.
“You know,” Tselentin interrupted genially, “it was a giant bird, not a dog. And I had to eat my way in, through its gut. I covered the latrine in its scales for the next week,” joked Tselentin. Khemelek grinned back despite himself.
“Weren’t you scared?” Oppon asked, kicking at a rock. She knew the story by heart, but she believed she would still love hearing it on her deathbed.
“Of course.” Tselentin became more earnest. “Even when you know that the verrigal should be dead when you reach it, you’re scared. I kept thinking that maybe I’ll be the first that wouldn’t come home, the first to become a fireside story.”
“You were hungry and tired, and fending off monsters.” she said, dancing as she walked. Her lantern’s beam of light spiralled outward. “You were so tired when you came back, you didn’t even greet me. You clearly hated me.”
“Oh, were you there?” he said, and laughed at her wide-eyed indignation. He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “Don’t joke about me hating you. I don’t like that.”
“You don’t hate me? Well then, what do you feel towards me?” she teased. He began an evasive bluster and was grateful when Khemelek interrupted with his own question.
“What else did you do? When you got home. What did they teach you when you left the festivities?”
“I’d love to tell you, but Grik would flay my ass if I shared the revelations. We’ll just have to succeed so you can find out. But I will say I got to eat a lot of Minaptra’s caps -”
“But not the tentacles?” Khemelek asked.
“No, not the tentacles. That’s how-
“-how Minaptra roots in you and makes you a mason.” Interrupted Khemelek. He knew the answers to his questions already. His people thought about the mushrooms in terms of their tentacular stems and their caps. The caps were for communing with Minaptra, the tentacles were for rooting her, and her powers, in children. The tentacles were also an effective poison for adults.
“Right. They chose someone else for the tentacles.” Continued Tselentin
Khemelek nodded, tensing.
Oppon looked at him quizzically “Everything okay?”
“I’m fine.” He said, furtively feeling at his backpack for the texture of the mushrooms.
“So, someone eats the tentacles?” he asked Tselentin, using his friend as a foil for his own thoughts.
“Everyone who returns with repellent eats the cap, and then one of the group also gets the tentacles.”
“Only miraculous epiphanies of here and the beyond. How boring.” Jibed Oppon, elbowing Khemelek’s ribs.
“You’ve got a better head for this stuff than me, Khem.” Continued Tselentin. “They’ll explain everything when we get home. If we find the verrigal. We should get on that.”
“What happens if you eat the tentacles but not the cap?” Khemelek asked, faux casual, inspecting his fingernails.
Tselentin shrugged “The masons will know, or master Grik. But nobody does it that way. You either eat the cap, or you eat the cap with the tentacles.”
Khemelek frowned, tonguing a fleshy fungal fibre stuck between his teeth. The tentacle’s taste lingered, and he could feel something growing inside his stomach, herniating his insides. He couldn’t piece together why he hadn’t been given the cap, or why Grik had given it to him before he returned with the verrigal’s stink sac.
Tselentin thought, and gave an answer “It ought to mean that you get the powers but don’t know how to use them… but what would be the point of that?”
Oppon answered, “Maybe Minaptra just grabs you and you shamble into the wilderness, eating every living thing you can find.”
Tselentin retorted, “Or maybe you sprout fungus from all your orifices, maybe start decomposing on the spot and sprout a new batch of her mushrooms.”
Khemelek blanched as his eyes darted around mental renditions of the scenarios.
“Maybe it just doesn’t take.” Said Oppon. “Maybe it simply does nothing.”
“Or maybe it’s like when you eat it when you’re too old, and it just kills you.”
“Imagine it makes you go into the wilderness and just lay down and die while it mixes one of those animal aphrodisiacs in you that makes them hump your corpse to get infected.”
“Stop!” said Khemelek, wide eyed.
Oppon laughed, “Such a baby. It’s not like it would ever happen. It’s just not how we do it, right Tsel?” He nodded.
She twirled in the rain, her long white hair fanning crystal drops into the brightening dawn.
“So” she thought out loud. “If we find the verrigal first, it’ll be you or me, becoming a mason, trading our future for power, never knowing when Minaptra will take control, making us shamble to our death?” A smile played on her lips. “I think such an honour should go to you. You’re clearly the best candidate.”
He lowered his head and said with a gruff voice “It will.”
“This again.” Oppon set her jaw. “No reason it couldn’t be me. What makes you so special?”
“The village needs heroes, and this is how I become one. I’ll be a Minaptran mason. I’ll be the most important person I can be.” He raised his arms wide to increase his stature, which only made him look smaller next to Tselentin. “I will use her power to create wonders like you’ve never seen. And when the time comes and she calls, I will take the glowstone to her and lay my life down at her heart, to feed her, to propagate her, and to protect you.” He yelled it into the valley.
Tselentin laughed, “You take those sermons too seriously.”
“I have a sense of fate. I recognise my destiny is tangible. I don’t just come looking for the verrigal so I can go home to drink and to spend my nights with girls.”
“Which girls?” Interjected Oppon.
Tselentin cocked his head to the side and squinted at her. “Only with you. You’re Judiah, right?” she smacked his arm a few times with the front and back of her hand.
“It’ll be me, you’ll see.” Khemelek brooded theatrically.
“Alright then, oracle of your own fate.” Oppon replied. “I suppose you’ll get to prove it when the time comes. I still think it’s even-odds.”
“Mock away. When I manifest my powers, you’ll see how magnificent I can be. Everyone will.”
Oppon replied. “Your life isn’t one of the epics about the fate of the whole Megiddo, it’s just your life, and everybody who’s living that way isn’t trying to personally insult you.” She softened “I wish you’d stop taking everything so seriously. This is supposed to be a happy event. We’ll find the verrigal, obviously – Tselentin is with us. We’ll go home heroes en route to adulthood. They’ll feast in our honour and make the whole day about us.”
He was about to reply, but mumbled something unintelligible while averting her gaze.
“Oh, forget your parents.” She answered, startling him. He’d forgotten how sharp her senses were. “They must have had a good reason not to see you off on the hunt. Possibly rooting out spies, possibly diarrhoea.”
Khemelek didn’t respond. Oppon squeezed his shoulder. He looked up at her, pained.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because they love you. Everyone loves you, despite your best efforts.”
“You’re alright.” Tselentin chipped in with an infectious smile.
“You love me?” Khemelek asked, hopeful.
“Like a brother, Khem,” Oppon replied, “like everyone in the village loves you.”
He looked away. Oppon sighed, caught between irritation, exasperation and pity and looked back to Tselentin for a change of topic. “What else did you do that night? Of the whole night, what was your favourite part?”
Tselentin followed her lead. “Drank, until I couldn’t remember, and then they tell me I drank some more. Someone has to stop me if I ever get close to that again. I thought I was keeping up with my brothers, but those bastards didn’t drink at all. Then I ate Minaptra’s cap. I ended up in a fistfight with the bonfire.”
“I had to nurse you for a month.” Oppon sighed wistfully.
“Everybody focuses on that part. Nobody mentions that that bonfire was never seen again after I was through with it.” He elbowed Khemelek playfully.
“You enjoyed your time with Minaptra?” asked Khemelek.
“Oh yes. They say it isn’t always good, but it’s always what you need.”
“How about you, Oppon?” Asked Tselentin “What are you most excited ab-?”
“Marriage.”
Tselentin and Khemelek stiffened and answered at the same time.
Marriage? Asked Tselentin
To whom? Asked Khemelek.
She batted her eyes at Tselentin. “Yes, marriage. I'm ripe, and as soon as we find this stupid verrigal corpse and harvest its stupid stink sac and go home and do some stupid drinking and stupid celebrating, I'll be a woman.”
“Whom will you marry?” Asked Khemelek again.
Tselentin rubbed the back of his neck. “Why the hurry?”
“Because this is it. You've done your ritual. You've grown up a whole year before I could. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of tipping my toes and hunching my back to skulk around the village.”
“What have you been hiding?” Asked Khemelek, slightly more insistent.
She threaded her fingers from her free hand through Tselentin's. “Our love.” She searched Khemelek’s face, then cocked her head to the left, incredulous. “You’re the dumbest smart person I’ve ever met. Tselentin and I love each other, Khem. He’s the only one I’ve ever wanted. Ever since I heard him sing, felt him dance, and saw him sling down two vultures with one bullet. When I hear his voice, I know our love is enduring, timeless, the subject of prophecy and the absolute conclusion of all creation conspiring to spin the greatest golden yarn.”
Khemelek deflated, but Tselentin threw up his hands in exasperation. “Can the both of you relax about your destinies? You have your whole lives planned out before you’ve even had your first hangovers.”
“Just means I’ve got a clearer head.” Oppon answered, winking at him. “And I have two lives planned out, I’ll have you know.” She tapped her index finger on his chest meaningfully.
“Why does everything have to be so damned big with you two.”
“Because we’re children, obviously.” She answered.
“I’m not a child.” Said Khemelek. “I shave and everything.”
He stroked a patchy beard that had been failing to grow for upward of a month. They burst out laughing and he joined in. Oppon hugged Tselentin, who shot Khemelek a panicked look of a man caught in the unstoppable predetermined lifelong current of a sixteen-year-old girl’s devotion. Khemelek gave his friend a genuine smile in return. He was infatuated with Oppon simply because Oppon loved Tselentin. He saw her devotion to his friend, and realised that there are few things as attractive as a woman in love with another man. He got to see her soft side while she remained unattainable. So, he sniffed out all the parts of her that were attractive – her perspicacity, her middling beauty, and her straightforwardness. These eclipsed all her faults, including her disregard for authority and flippant attitude to danger. He knew where her heart lied, but he struggled to avoid competition with his friend. It simply seemed catastrophically unfair that, just because Tselentin was tall, athletic, beautiful, and could sing, that he was magnetic. He could afford to be humble and so easy going because his virtues were so obvious. Meanwhile, Khemelek was smarter, but had to work harder for anyone’s attention. Being the pursuer made him smack of the desperation that was anathema for the girls his age. He found it incomprehensible that his interest in someone was inversely proportional to their interest in him. He objectively knew he didn’t love Oppon. It would just take a while for his heart to catch up with his mind.
“Look there!” cried Oppon.
“What is it? The verrigal?” asked Tselentin, immediately serious.
“Dredgebloom!” she yelled. “My birth flower!” she skipped ahead towards the river and picked the purple, pink and blue flowers, and fastened them to her hair.
“Don’t I look beautiful?” she asked.
Both boys nodded.
She beamed and twirled. Her foot caught on something, and she stumbled to her hands and knees in the mud.
“Wha- ” she squinted at the muddy mound, and gasped.
Khemelek felt a tug. The fungus growing in him recognised Minaptra in the still body.
The boys closed in and uncovered the mason. His raincoat had come untied, and he was soaked through. They packed away their lanterns.
“Tsel… is he…” Khemelek left the question hanging.
Tselentin’s humour and cultivated laid-back attitude evaporated. “Breathing, but only barely. I think he can make it if we take him to Grik immediately. Oppon, keep a lookout.” Oppon hovered her eyes on the pathetic pile. She caught Tselentin’s insistent eye and turned to study the night while the boys looked through his things.
“He’s too far gone.” Oppon hissed without turning back. “He poisons the air around him.”
“Common misconception. Stupid superstition.” Khemelek replied. Then he continued more thoughtfully. “He’s not supposed to fail this far from the heart though. And he’s facing the wrong way. Something’s wrong.”
Tselentin studied his body and peeled a piece of sloughing skin from his hands with sickening ease. Golden spores followed and wisped through the air before rain pelted them to the ground.
Khemelek dug his hand out of the pooling mud, yelped and jumped back, dropping it in the same motion.
He hissed: “Glowstone.” The trio stiffened, there was no debate around the dangers of exposed glowstone.
Oppon grabbed his arm to quieten him, her eyes darting around the dawn for predators or hostile villagers.
Tselentin swore under his breath. He put his arm in front of Oppon, moving her slightly further away from the deathly glow. Khemelek rummaged through his backpack.
“What are you looking for?” Asked Tselentin.
“Foodbox.” Grumbled Khemelek.
“His one is lead-lined,” said Oppon out of the side of her mouth, “guess we shouldn’t have mocked him for insisting on it.” She still refrained from looking at the mason.
Khemelek had his back turned on them and didn’t respond, but he allowed himself a small, vindicated smile.
They emptied the man’s backpack into the box. The boys picked him up like a ragdoll.
Khemelek looked at his friends, while shouldering the man.
“So, we won’t be adults tonight…”
“Another time.” Tselentin replied empathetically. He took out his skin of repellent and gingerly sprinkled it on the caveman. He dabbed a cloth and put some on his own neck.
“Some for the two of you too.” He whispered. “Careful, I don’t have that much left. The other groups had better find the verrigal.” He grunted and he adjusted the man’s weight away from his knife. The man was taller than the boys, and heavy, after the year-long binge that preceded a mason’s trek.
The three of them eyed the road home. They guessed that the caveman was taking the stone to Minaptra’s heart for a sporing, but he had become lost. They weren’t allowed on Minaptra’s sacred ground, so they’d have to deliver him to the village authorities. They were two days’ travel away at a brisk pace without the decomposing cargo, unless they took the shortcut up the waterfall. They looked at it, and each other, and nodded in silent consensus.
It was troubling that the man had collapsed away from the heart before he could assist in a sporing. The man himself concerned them less. They’d seen the shambolic struggle of masons on their dying pilgrimage before, and it had lost its horror before they could draw a bowstring. They made a sport of watching the tiny masons walk to Minaptra from mountainous vantage points, taking bets on which one would reach her first. Superstitions about getting close to the exiled masons remained, but the pity had left them when they were young.
“Maybe he only ate the tentacles.” Khemelek said and laughed weakly.
Oppon and Tselentin chuckled at the throwback.
“Just our luck that there are migrating masons where we’re looking for the verrigal.” Oppon said. “It’s no wonder we’re not seeing any animals. Everything knows to stay away from the spores and the stones. But here we idiots are hauling both.”
The boys shared her frustration. Khemelek and Oppon would need to wait until the next shaman’s verrigal-dream allowed them to go hunt a poisoned verrigal. It could happen as rarely as once a year, or as regularly as every month.
To the endless river with a few petals.” She continued. “I’m bathing in flushroot tonight.”
The boys nodded thoughtfully. The root would cleanse her of the airborne poison and any spores trying to settle in her lungs. They would partake as well.
They were closing in on the massive waterfall, where the bank was made up of sheer eroded rocks from the pressure of the rapids. The only way to the wall they’d ascend was over a small bridge of stones. The masons were perfectly capable of fashioning something elaborate and convenient, but they left some natural stones as they were out of sentimentality or tradition. In this case, the ascent was kept difficult as a rite of passage. The trio had mastered the slippery bank long before. Years of experience and jagged bits of iron in their shoe-soles helped them keep their balance as they came to the bottom of the waterfall. Slipping meant a careening slide down the god-snake’s gullet, or so they’d been told.
So, they moved confidently, but carefully. The waterfall drowned out their heavy breaths and punched into the river like a massive fist, spraying up a thick mist that made them soaking silhouettes, shimmering in the haze. It was framed by two walls of plants that gave the first climbers something to grasp while they hammered handholds into the rocks. The peak disappeared into the mists above, while the frigid river was nearly twenty metres across.
Tselentin adjusted the twitching mason again and shrugged at the others. He jabbed his index finger upward twice.
The climb was a long-solved puzzle, they knew which holds were safe, which roots were treacherous, and which ledges allowed for rest. The added weight of the man would make it more interesting, which could have been fun if they weren’t pressured for time. Tselentin visually marked the stones he would use, eyes sparkling at the challenge. Oppon chewed her cheek and shook her head at him incredulously. She kissed his cheek, and they both nodded at Khemelek.
They began their ascent. Each climber had four short ropes with iron clips attached to their belts. Tselentin and Khemelek tied a rope around the man, and attached him to one of each of their belts. The children connected their belts to each other with a single rope, then began the laborious tandem climb. They clipped into the ebony carabiners in the steep slick cliff. Oppon periodically stopped to scan for the verrigal or any birds of prey.
“You know nothing’s coming close.” Tselentin huffed at her as she made one such stop.
“We lose the disciplines we don’t maintain when they’re unnecessary.” She quoted master Grik.
Khemelek nodded in approval, and added “Nothing wrong with that view either.”
Tselentin pulled himself up and lifted his legs above his head in an upside down frog-like pose. He locked his feet into a foothold and let his arms dangle to let the blood return while the mason hung limply between him and Khemelek. He surveyed the world below. It was deadly and teeming with life. Mesophytes spread powerful roots into the soil and stone, while hydrophytes corralled around the rivers and dams. The land was always wet, and life had developed an unquenchable thirst in response. The greenery was hedged in by Megiddo’s mountain range that encircled everything and rose into the clouds. Pink and orange pastels drifted through the early morning’s cloud-light. Colonies of insectile hungrakes fought eternal wars in tessellated hives that honeycombed into the mountains. Herbivore-herds rolled on their backs, playing in the mud and the safety of their groups. Predators looked from higher vantage points, lazily searching for ill or young herdlings to pick off. Bolts of stochastic lightning hunted each other through an ocean of roiling clouds that gradually placated to the east in the early morning colours. Winged leathery creatures illuminated against these and flew as close as they safely could, tossing terrified prey to each other’s claws as they tore them apart or dropped the hard-shelled ones onto rocks below. Some had the luck to fall into the dams, but were then swallowed into endless obliviating rivers underground. The underground rivers had grown large enough to turn dams into cratered lagoons that lay in wait like deadly potholes.
They could see two of the great five villages. Just like their own, these were giant stone domes fashioned into single blocks by Minaptra’s masons. Each dome was outwardly sculpted in an imitation of Minaptra’s heart, the bulging nerve centre of their fungal goddess. The villages were rousing from sleep, with smoke curling upward from many of their apertures. Each village had a single stone cylinder that rose a kilometre into the sky and turned at a right angle towards one another, connecting to the cylinders from the other villages. A cylinder was less than half-a-metre in diameter and only served to house the many fibres that thrummed with the voices of important villagers communicating over long distances. The network allowed for only small delays in communications between elders, each of whom had a certain set of notes to vibrate to let them know that a conversation was meant for them. The network rose above them, and extended horizontally past the waterfall’s peak towards their own village.
Intricate stone structures jutted from the earth in the valleys, chimneys and vents that led into vast and elaborate stone architecture underground. Villages collaborated on these stone structures, and had a strict agreement to keep them away from the eyes of children. Khemelek found that immensely interesting.
The river godsnake below them bunched up towards the hill upon which Minaptra’s heart lay. As the water flowed uphill, it picked up more glowstone deposits that illuminated it from below and killed every animal close by. The plants that couldn’t help but grow nearby went wrong, with flowers’ faces locked mid-mitosis, like single cells failing to separate from one another. Minaptra-mad masons wandered those river banks and holed up in the lagoons to perform secret rituals with the glowstones. The children didn’t see any now.
The river fed into Minaptra’s heart, which was a huge fungal dome dominating a swathe of tectonic cracks and upheaved earth. She spread far underground, some speculated she covered the whole Megiddo, but it was only at her heart that the giant mushrooms grew, as tall as two people. Her heart covered a fabled engine of apocalypse which would devour the world in a ravening cataclysm if Minaptra wasn’t fed the glowstone she needed to spore around it. The river supplied her with raw glowstone, but the masons needed to make up the deficit of her hunger with refined glowstone.
So, the villagers ate the mushrooms to ingest her and her masonic power. They worked the glowstone and delivered it when called to her sporing. At some point, she had grown outward, questing for the glowstone herself, but humans were more efficient and could refine the glowstone for her. Their symbiotic cult of sacrifice allowed them to gain her power, and her to not need to expend more resources to expand for low-grade ore.
They looked for the verrigal’s carcass, but couldn’t see it from their height. They kept climbing, exhausting, wet and wordless hours getting the mason to the waterfall’s summit.
Vegetation flourished here, leading into dense jungles that hid their village. The boys pulled the unconscious twitching man up the final stretch of the cliffside and fell on their backs, breathing heavily with their legs dangling over the edge. The clouds undulated above, while the river coated the earth in mist below. It was a hungry late-afternoon by the time they’d summited, and they lay for a while. Oppon lay next to Tselentin and squeezed him, considering the view. The land sparkled with rainbows, and glinting drops in the light as the rain picked up again.
A drawn-out groan escaped the dying man, and they got up with a start. The boys carried the man further. Oppon recounted rhymes in her head while passing the plants, reminding herself which were bait and which were repellent, which were safe to eat, safe to tread, safe to drain, and medicinal. She hopped over the ones that would snare her and signalled the huffing boys where they were.
The waterfall’s noise grew quieter as they travelled the jungle, and the rhythmic percussion of drums filled the air. One drum beat a rhythm and a chorus of drums followed it, with a panoply of improvisations accenting the tune.
The village’s warm light evaporated the mist like an oven. Yellows and oranges banished the darkness gathering in the twilight and left the rest of the night pure black ink by comparison. Even at a distance, it drowned out the sounds of their own breathing and the caveman’s ragged coughs.
Those drums were celebratory and meant to honour the heroes who harvest a verrigal’s stink sac. A week before, hunters had tracked the monster and riddled its flesh with venomous arrows, making it a sluggish, stumbling porcupine. Five parties of three had gone looking for it the previous night, and there would be celebrations like these every night until it was found. They’d be welcomed back, but without the stink sac. As it was only the second night, they’d be deemed cowards and failures. Oppon looked behind her and exchanged awkward glances with the boys.
“We had no choice” She told Khemelek who’d lowered his eyes. “Next one could be a year away.” He grumbled.
“Could be next month too.” Tselentin said and put a comforting hand on his back, which he shrugged off.
A few kilometres from the village, scouts spotted them from the trees. They whistled in perfect imitations of scaly birds – a greeting to friends and a message to the village.
Four scouts materialised from the shadows. They took the mason from the children and laid him on the ground to check his vitals.
The scout leader, Dolosh, looked at the bulbous man and an almost-imperceptible flash of recognition passed his face. “What happened?”
Tselentin answered: “No verrigal yet. Found him instead.” He gulped to catch his breath. “Had a glowstone on him. Thinking he was making his final pilgrimage.”
Dolosh was stoic, trained to be the first line of defence against ambush predators and hostile tribes. He spent his adult life suppressing fear to do a job, but even so, he recoiled from the caver’s body. After the slightest hesitation, he checked the man’s pulse and breathing, and put his hands under the man’s clothes, feeling for open wounds. His muscles twitched and his arms weakly moved, seemingly at random.
Tselentin watched the brisk work, waiting on instruction now that he was no longer in charge. The previous day had begun weighing on him, and seemed much heavier once the burden of the man had been lifted.
Dolosh was still crouched over the man. “You go ahead, tell master Grik. Minaptra’s heart is in an arrhythmia. We need a solution, fast.”
The children ran toward the drumbeats and entered the village.
The village was a giant stone hemisphere carved from the rocky insides of a hill. Up close, the attention to detail in its construction was easily apparent. It was a near-perfect replica of the heart. Its heat rose in a glowing halo that dissipated the rain around it. It was one of the only respites from the rain. It was warm and brightly lit. Smoke escaped through a series of holes crafted into the curvature of the structure, each hole covered by a horizontal roof to keep rain from falling in, while the choking smoke or a hatch kept wildlife out.
Buildings were staggered into the wall like fat shelves of mushrooms onto tree-trunks, each with its own hatched chimney. The precise architecture formed an inverted pavilion of dwellings that cascaded the echoes of music across the village. Villagers used a series of ladders, platforms, and ropes to move between buildings, and fell onto safety nets whenever they slipped. They often entertained one another with acrobatic shows that dared various degrees of danger as they avoided the nets.
The village’s floor had a central tube to funnel a fresh waterfall that eventually fell into a cordoned-off man-made hole into an underground river. Villagers showered communally in the tube and came and went with containers to store water in their homes. The central clearing also held the dug-out pavilion where villagers gathered for meetings, feasts, or drumming sessions, as well as a field where they trained with slingshots, spears and the hyper-dense diamond-core clubs that the masons made from the rocks.
The children entered to see their friends and siblings standing with necklaces of flowers and large skewers of meat and horns of bamboo-wine. The gifts lilted in their hands as they saw the children’s expressions and haste. They rushed past towards shaman Grik’s hut. It was near the bottom of the village, alongside other village elders’ homes. These lower homes were the largest, and most easily accessible for the high-ranking officials. Younger villagers lived in higher-up homes that the masons crafted smaller to keep the village dome’s centre of gravity stable. The homes formed a single solid structure in the dome. The masons regularly rearranged the insides to meet the village’s needs.
They entered Grik’s dark home. He had no fire lit, and he’d shuttered his chimney to keep out the cold. The whole place had been constructed to muffle the village’s sounds with aphonic patterns carved into each wall.
The children’s reverence for the man kept their voices low when they began calling to him.
“Master Grik?” They whispered as they slowly felt their way around.
Oppon’s eyes adjusted first.
“There.” she said.
“Where?” replied Tselentin, not yet able to make out shapes in the darkness.
She fumbled around for their hands, and took both of them in hers as she led them through the black maze, to an open hatch on the ground.
“Maybe he’s gone to the underpass” Khemelek said.
They looked through the hole and saw dim torches illuminating the cave nearly fifty metres down. The ground-floor buildings all had routes to the underpass river where the central funnel ended its waterfall. It allowed them privacy for important meetings, gave them easy access to inspect underground security and any issues with the water, and gave the village an emergency escape route if another one overcame them.
Khemelek scowled at Oppon and muscled his way past her. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness and he put his foot through the hatch. He flailed it around until he found the ladder’s topmost rung. He led the others in their descent down the claustrophobic, unlit tunnel. The rungs were slippery with collected moisture and moss, and they had to go down slowly and deliberately.
A hushed voice faded in and out barely over the rush of the underground river. It increased and decreased in volume like a flickering flame, and it wasn’t clear if it were a prayer, a monologue, or a conversation with an unheard second party.
Khemelek hesitated, loathe to interrupt the village’s chief shaman.
He looked up the ladder towards his friends. He saw how attentive the two of them were to each other. Tselentin would periodically stop and check that Oppon was okay. He felt a pang of jealousy, but steeled himself. “Never mind them. She was always his anyway.” He yawned, and continued. They all reached the bottom, at a small opening at the underground river. It was barely big enough for an adult to walk through, and a tall person would need to hunch. The river was barely two metres across at this point, and it bent around a corner lit by torchlight. Grik was around the corner. The flames from there threw his shadow onto the wall across the river from the children, bulging, shrinking, and warping as it danced.
The children cautiously moved closer and peeked around the bend before approaching. The cave opened gradually here, and the river grew larger in a labyrinthian nest of tunnels that all met at the village’s central waterfall. One string of the inter-village communication relay ended here, next to a wooden table. A cone dangled from the string inside. Master Grik was on one riverbank. He was wearing his smallclothes, gaunt body riddled in knife carvings where he'd disembowelled and stitched himself up. He wore a bird skull mask with the bottom beak missing. He was covered in gore. It stained and lubricated his hands, and it clumped his wiry hair, wet from river-water, sweat and blood. He crouched over the carcass of a large lizard, next to a wooden table. The table was littered with bloody entrails and jars filled with pickled clumps of mushrooms, hearts, eyes, livers, and organs they didn’t recognise. A raft bobbed in the river, leashed by a chain to a metal pole jutting from the ground next to Grik.
He muttered in a ceaseless drone. He was cutting open the lizard’s belly. The children watched his back; his shadow danced with its own volition.
He struggled with the creature’s guts before pulling its intestine upwards towards the table. He drew his knife across the intestine, exposing partially digested food and mixing its putrid scent with the cave’s earthy and moist ones.
Khemelek gagged as it entered his nose, and his friends snapped their heads toward him with wide eyes. Master Grik was famously temperamental.
But the shaman didn’t stir from his reverie and kept his chant up. He cut off a piece of the fresh intestine and put it in his mouth, savouring its essence before spitting it into the river behind him. His shadow continued its own dance, and fist-sized pseudopod shadows bubbled up from it in an inky goo, covering the lizard, shading it dark where the torchlight should have illuminated it. Something incorporeal travelled from Grik, through his shadow to the lizard making the carcass shudder. Oppon scanned the creature. Its hands were human, its w-shaped pupils cephalopod; it had a beak where its mouth should have been and a long tail that cleft in two. One half ended in a barbed stinger and the other in an ossified club.
Grik continued his chants and cut off more pieces from the creature. “Listen to his inflection.” whispered Oppon, turning her head to Tselentin without taking her eyes off Grik. “He’s asking it questions.” The creature’s humanoid hands twitched and created shapes, playing a bizarre game of necromantic charades.
Grik code-switched to something guttural. His voice became harsh, and his words grated the ear like bones dragged across serrated stone. The creature’s whole body went limp, and hovered up to hang suspended in the air. In a split second, its shadow inflated to a sphere behind the limp carcass before deflating just as quickly. It repeated this motion in regular and repeating patterns.
Grik watched the pulsing pattern in the shadow for minutes. Finally, he sighed and sagged. The carcass drifted to the floor. He considered the ground at his feet for a moment, then used his foot to nudge the creature into the water. It bobbed for a few seconds as his shadow retreated from it, after which its own shadow unpinned from the wall and followed it to the river. The carcass slowly sank and drifted with the current. Grik watched it, lost in thought.
“You can come out now.” He grabbed a bar of animal fat from the table. He knelt to wash himself in the river.
The children didn’t move, not registering what he’d said. He didn’t ask again, but removed the skull from his head. Its grey was subtly different from the rest of the villagers’ bone whites. He dipped his head in the water for a long minute, and came up, tired, but refreshed.
He turned towards the children.
“Minaptra’s mercy, close your mouths. You look like suffocating fish, gills a-tremble.”
They obeyed. He stood still, studying them for a while. His left eyebrow raised into a scowl as his eyes darted between Tselentin and Oppon.
“A new one, Tselentin?”
Oppon narrowed her eyes at Tselentin.
“Same one, master Grik.” Tselentin quickly answered. “Nothing new here.”
Grik chewed something and considered him before answering. “None of my business I s’pose. Still, it wouldn’t be proper, she’s close to your age, but she’s still a child, isn’t she? Out on my hunt?”
“Nothing improper here, master.”
“You believe him, girl? I can make him tell you the truth.”
Oppon cracked a mischievous smile.
“What would it cost me?” she asked.
“His life. Can’t very well corpsetalk a living idiot, can I?”
Her face dropped.
“That doesn’t help me at all.”
“I’m offering you an answer and a cure. Love’s just another kind of curiosity. When it’s sated, it’s over. When you know everything about him, you’ll love the next man. This one hoards broken hearts, at least by reputation.”
Tselentin shifted uncomfortably. Khemelek grinned evilly and felt a small spark of satisfied spite. He thought it would be fun to see his friend squirm.
“What if they were consorting carnally, with her as a child?” Khemelek asked.
“Oh, I’d have to interrogate his corpse so that we may purify her appropriately. Corpsetalking is easy to do with humans, easier still at your age.”
Tselentin realised he’d been holding Oppon’s hand and plucked it away. She looked at him reproachfully. Khemelek saw the movement and grimaced at intrusive thoughts on how Oppon smelled of rain and earth and smoke, and how her wet hair clumped to reveal the nape of her neck.
“We haven’t – I, I would never.” Tselentin began.
“I suppose if she’s a woman now, it’d be fine,” continued Grik “More my confusion, then, that you’d spend her first night as an unchild with an old man in his smallclothes.”
None of the children replied.
“I’m still waiting to hear what you’re doing here!” Grik snapped.
“We’re perfectly innocent. And we’re similarly aged, like you said, just separated in adulthood by the verrigal” Protested Tselentin weakly.
Grik shrugged and was mustering a bored response when Khemelek pushed between the other two, putting more distance between them.
“Master Grik, we were on your hunt, but we found a caver, he had a glowstone in his bare hands.”
Grik looked at him gravely, nodding for him to continue.
“We brought him up the waterfall, and Dolosh took him. He’s bringing him here now – just slowly, he’s hurt, his skin looks like it’s melting. The man won’t last long if you can’t save him.”
“Poor Dolosh, bad way to meet your father again.”
The children looked at him confused.
“That beast just told me.” He pointed to the water where the creature had sunk “Or Minaptra did, through the beast. It’s hard to tell whose shadow dances for me with all the noise lately. Where is the stone?”
Khemelek took off his backpack and fished out the food box. He set it down on Grik’s table.
“Fortified food box. Smart. We’ll wait for Dolosh. Sit, I’ll make us some tea.” He took a cloth and absent-mindedly wiped some gore from the table. He took a pot and emptied it of yellowish-brown viscera over the river. He held it in the river for a rinse, filled it with water and put it over a torch. He took some leaves from a jar on the table, and plucked some mushrooms from the cave floor, and threw both into the pot.
“Knowledge is heavy and dry. It burdens the innocence and moisture of youth and leaves you salted, cracked and wrinkled. That’s why children have such good skin. Now I can tell you have questions. Ask away, I’ll wrinkle you beyond your years.”
Khemelek, emboldened by his prior conversation started.
“That man is Dolosh’s father?”
“Was. Now he’s a caver.”
“So he was a mason?”
Grik poured them each a cup of mushroom tea in a dirty jar.
“Yes, a mason.” He sipped from the jar, contemplative.
“Dolosh said that Minaptra’s heart is in arrhythmia. What does that mean?”
The man swirled tea in his mouth thoughtfully, deciding where to begin.
“In my grandfather’s grandfather’s time, Minaptra was strong. She flourished in every body that ate her, she called them all inevitably, and she always steered them to her heart. In my grandfather’s time, some noise began to interfere with her call. A few masons didn’t make it. They didn’t hear the call, or they got lost, she somehow couldn’t guide them to herself. Now it seems very few masons make it to her, and her call rarely penetrates the noise. I’ve been down here since you left, scrying and divining and dreaming and sometimes querying the other villages. Seems like we’re all finding a lot of mason corpses, and a lot of masons simply didn’t hear her.”
“Are we in danger?” Tselentin asked.
“Stupid question.” Said Grik.
“How bad is it?” asked Khemelek.
“Better question. We need to get some refined glowstone to Minaptra quickly. I’ll discuss it with the mason you found, and he’ll explain who’s to take his place.”
“Wouldn’t we just send mason Pehtur?” asked Oppon.
“I thought of that too, but if he didn’t hear Minaptra’s call, it might be that he’s not welcome there. The heart is no place for the uninvited. But maybe the noise just got in the way. Could be. Could also be she doesn’t want him there. Ah. There you are.”
Grik looked behind the children. Dolosh stood, carrying his father like a sleeping child. It was amazing that Dolosh could carry a mason that over-gorged alone. The sleeping man’s skin had become translucent, with small fungal spikes piercing through. It was almost impossible to tell if he was breathing.
“On the floor with him then.”
Grik moved without particular hurry. He put his ear to the man’s mouth and his first two fingers to his throat.
“Riddle me this, children – what should I do with it? I could buy him a few days to live and talk to us as much as he’s still able... and the body would die trying to heed Minaptra’s call. Or I could interrogate his corpse for answers. What do you think, boy?”
Khemelek swallowed. Grik had given him the tentacles, consigned him to this same eventual fate. “He’s one of us. We have to try to save him.”
“Is he now? Girl?”
Oppon’s mouth was bone dry. She looked at the man, muscles a-twitch on the floor, spasming like a poisoned animal.
“Killing it would be a mercy.”
Grik considered her.
“Would mercy be our motivation?”
“No.” she said, suddenly cold. “This body is Minaptra’s minion, but it’s broken. We need to learn what we can so we can fulfil the job it could not.”
Grik nodded impassively.
“But,” Khem began to object.
Grik ignored him.
“Dolosh, you may leave.”
Dolosh’ jaw was set, determined to show as little emotion as possible.
“I want to stay.”
Grik nodded, and reached behind him, fingers scrabbling like an irate spider. His hand’s shadow snaked out and found a knife on the floor, and tugged at his hand to grab it. He picked it up, and plunged it into the mason’s belly, who let out a wheeze but made no other move. Grik cut open his intestine and pulled it out towards the table. It was mottled, emitting a dull green glow and obviously decaying. A fine mist of spores lit up under the flickering light, looking for purchase in the dank cave.
“The stone,” Grik said
Khemelek put the box in front of him. Grik opened it and removed the stone. He stabbed it into the man’s right eye. He held it there while looking around for something blunt. He found the lunchbox and raised it high, then hammered it to pierce the stone through a thin membrane deeper into the man’s head. The body jerked with the force of each blow. When he was satisfied, he muttered an incantation. The body began breathing slowly and regularly. Grik put the stone’s container on his desk.
He put his hand into the man’s intestine, widening it, and tore it open as he sidled his entire arm up to the shoulder in. His hands were moving in jagged claw-like motions inside of the man’s organ, and the three friends sat dumbstruck, watching. He seemed lost in thought, head cocked to the side, chatting some internal dialogue before reaching a conclusion. He went back over to the man and dug in his insides, grabbed a kidney, and pulled it out, snapping the chords that had connected it to the man. He bit into it, savouring the juices flooding his mouth. He chewed for a while. His shadow elongated and moved into the wound where it pooled and spread. Parts of the man’s body undulated as the shadow moved below his skin.
“Yllish, I know you.” He said suddenly. “Yllish, your flesh is in me, I am in your flesh. Can you speak?”
It made no reply.
“Can you speak?” Grik repeated.
The mason’s body jerked and convulsed like a marionette, pulled upward on invisible strings. It settled on its feet. Its limbs unstiffened, and began moving. It shuffled to the edge of the river and plopped inward, limply drifting to the bottom. The stone in its eye-socket lit up the water and the small creatures that swam inside it with a green glow.
The five of them watched the intestines stretch behind the body’s jerky perambulation on the riverbed. It had put its hands on the riverbed and coaxed the stone upward. Seconds passed and the river’s bottom moved – a small bridge raised below Yllish to the surface, carrying him up and damming the river on both sides. The mason crawled to the other side of the river on the new bridge, eerie green glow lighting the cave around him. He got to the other side and put his hands against the wall. They moved into the stone as though it were water, and opened it up – a gaping wound.
“Your pilgrimage is done, Yllish. There is no more life in you.”
The body kept dragging itself forward, paying no attention to Grik.
“Enough! Yllish, I bind you with your own viscera. Your blood, your bile, they are mine to command. I call on your final memories, what is left of you in there.”
The corpse stopped and turned to stare at Grik. Its eye socket was swallowing the glowstone slowly, slurping it into its head. Finally it raised its arm and pointed a finger at Khemelek then at Oppon. It spoke with two voices. One the man’s own, and the other a snarl from something unused to their language.
“Children. Vessels. Follow. Stream. Spore. Prison. Unravelling.”
The glowstones abruptly returned to their regular weak glow. Yllish’s bloated body slumped and slid off of the bridge he raised.
Grik slithered his arm from the man’s intestines with a squelch and washed his arm a second time. He took a sip of his tea.
“Well there’s our answer. Dolosh. Go fetch the two children’s parents. And get Pehtur, I have some torment in store for him.”
The man looked directly at Grik, refusing to acknowledge the corpse. “Yes, master.” He said, and began to leave.
“Dolosh!”
“Master?”
“Make time to mourn, later. Love tethers us to this world and to each other; without it we become lost in our own abstractions. Disconnected. Mad. Grief is exhausted and disappointed love, let it pass through you in full. You hurt the village if you turn grief for what used to be your father into bitterness.”
“Yes master.” He left.
The children watched Grik as he turned inward to his own thoughts. He sat down and drank, ignoring or forgetting them. They didn’t dare speak in his presence again, afraid they’d interrupt some important inner journey. They tried looking through the cavity in the wall, but there was only unlit darkness beyond. Oppon and Tselentin exchanged glances as their hands found one another in secret on the floor. Their stomachs rumbled, she yawned, and then so did he. After what seemed like hours, they could hear the tell-tale rhythmic thuds of feet on ladder rungs. Oppon’s parents had arrived, alongside the mason, Pehtur.
Their warping shadows preceded them from around the corner.
Pehtur was clearly mottling from glowstone exposure. Lately he’d begun gorging at Minaptra’s behest. But he wasn’t far gone enough to become dangerous to the children and be sent to the wilderness. He was still in control of himself, though not as spry as the rest of the villagers his age. Oppon’s parents stood holding each other’s hands for comfort. They were filled with questions they couldn’t express before they were beckoned. They wanted to know why the children were back early and went directly to Grik. They wanted to know where the verrigal’s stink sac was, and why a mason’s corpse had been brought in.
Dolosh spoke first.
“I couldn’t find Khem’s parents, master. Should I continue looking?”
Grik sipped from his dirty jar. “I suspected the boy’s parents wouldn’t be close. They didn’t want to see me make him a minion.” Khemelek looked fearful. Grik continued “You may go, Dolosh, remember what I said.”
Dolosh obeyed, leaving silently around the corner and up the ladder.
Pehtur watched Dolosh leave and turned to Grik. “Harsh as always. Couldn’t comfort a grieving boy?”
“The land is harsh. I am of it. And Dolosh hasn’t been a boy since before Yllish left.”
“Some sympathy for the man, then. He just lost his father.”
“He lost him when Yllish ate the tentacles. The creature we saw here was Minaptra’s, it was not his blood.” Grik shot Khemelek a meaningful look, reminding him of the test he’d just failed, and stood up and moved closer to Pehtur. “You, among all of us, should understand that. How long until you leave, mottle-man? Is your swansong still coming, or has Minaptra rejected you?”
“Minaptra will call me when it is time. What happened here? What became of Yllish?”
Grik searched his eyes.
“Don’t lie to me, fool. It won’t save your mind, flesh, or soul. I’ve been down here questioning every plant, carcass and corpse I could find, and looking at you, it won’t take too long before we get to speak more frankly. My hands will bud in your gut and the answers will blossom from your mouth.”
Pehtur’s jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. The stone under him softened and became viscous fluid.
“Why did you request me, flesh-monger? Why this pageantry? To impress the children with threats and prestidigitation?”
“Request? You request me, mason. I summon you.”
He bent to grab his jar and drank. “I called you to query, and instruct.” You haven’t heard the spore-call? Truly? We’ve kept you here all these years on suspicion that you just might be competent, just might be attuned to the goddess. So, I’ll ask you again, you felt nothing?”
“If I heard the call, I wouldn’t be here, Grik. I’d be a pilgrim, heart-bound or dead, like they were. Don’t you know that? Choice doesn’t factor into it.”
Grik studied his face. Pehtur was barely containing his anger, and the floor around him continued warping and softening as he channeled Minaptra’s gifts. Grik advanced on him on an extending carpet of shadow, solid as the stone below it.
“Well then. Save your strength, Pehtur. The dead man asked young Oppon and Khemelek to finish his pilgrimage. They are to take the glowstone through there.” He nodded his head toward the hole Yllish had opened in the wall. Oppon’s parents gasped and knelt next to her, full of unspoken questions. She didn’t speak.
Grik continued. “They’ve used a lunchbox until now. It’s plugged the hole, but now they need a proper substitute. You must create a new container.”
“The children are to go? But they aren’t masons. Why would Minaptra want them? Why not…” The question polluted the air between them.
“Some never hear the call amidst the noise, Pehtur. Some decompose first and die second. Yllish was already dead when he passed instruction. Minaptra guided his words. I’m unfamiliar with her agenda here, but I felt her disposition. We’d be wise to listen. There is no room for interpretation or modification. You may not go. Neither may I.”
“Well then,” Pehtur said acidly. “Let me make that container. Where is the glowstone?”
“You’ll have to fish it from the body.” He nodded his head to the river. “It’s not that deep. As you would know if you ever came here.” Grik handed him the intestine like a lasso. Pehtur’s lips were pressed together, white. He climbed in. The stream reached up to his waist. He dunked his head in and pulled the stone from the corpse’s eye before climbing back out. Oppon noticed him shivering slightly as he took the container from the table.
Grik turned to Oppon’s parents. They were still looking to their daughter for answers she didn’t have. They turned to Grik warily. No villager was beyond his wrath; he was head shaman when the chieftain was a child, they were all children to him.
“Your child remains a child tonight. She failed in finding a verrigal, failed in gathering its stink sac. She chose to –”
“It was my decision!” Tselentin objected “We had to bring him… it… here.”
“Don’t interrupt me, boy.” Grik said without looking at him.
“I’m just saying it’s not her f-”
One of Grik’s eyes snapped toward him, and stared. Something shifted in the air. Tselentin was suddenly freezing, and the sounds he heard came to him as though through water. He felt too heavy to move. He saw a flash of a different reality, where they were in the same cave, in the same arrangement, but only Grik was in focus. The others were blurred and without faces. Grik was grotesque. His chest was open with his sternum shattered. His ribs lolled out – a living maw all flesh and organs, salivating at him. Grik’s arms were replaced with tentacles made of intestines. They slithered over the ground between Grik and Tselentin, snorting like hog snouts foraging for roots. They moved toward him as though catching his scent. The image disappeared as soon as it came, leaving behind a mild nausea. Tselentin saw a shadow retreat from him back to Grik. None of the others seemed to realise anything had happened.
“She chose to bring a decomposing, air poisoning, almost-corpse here, instead of following direction.” Continued Grik. “She comes home empty handed and leaves our repellent reserves lower than when she left. She comes home a child, deserving to be treated as such.”
Her parents stood up, heads bowed down like children awaiting judgment.
“Still, she serves a purpose. As I was saying, I’ve spoken with an aspect of Minaptra, and it chose her to deliver glowstone to the heart.”
Her mother blanched.
“But why? Surely anyone else is better than a child.”
“The heart flakes, and since our Pehtur seems incapable of making a glowstone container or being worthy of the call, and since she’s been pointed out by entities beyond our ken, she has to go.”
“I’ll accompany her.” Her father said boldly.
“No, you’ll keep here. The heart is no place for an uninfected or uncalled. You’ll remain ready for an attack. The Riverfolk cherish this kind of chaos. She is to go along with the younger boy.” He looked at Pehtur, who seethed while pretending not to listen. The mason placed his ear on the wall and listened for specific resonances as he tapped, rippling energy inward to look for the necessary mineral deposits. He walked down the cave, stroking the wall lightly. Finally, he found what he needed and punched straight into the rock. He set his legs, and pulled out raw material which shaped into sophisticated patterns as it emerged from the stone, rippling the wall like water. He immediately sat down cross-legged and moulded the deposit into something workable. After a few minutes, it was an exact copy of Yllish’s broken container, and he housed the stone in its new casing. He stood up roughly and walked back to place the package on the desk. He left without speaking again.
Grik picked up the item.
“This will do. I will kill anyone who admits this to him, but he’s a fine mason. Now, we do not have time to tarry. Tselentin, tell the boy’s parents he’s left.”
“Wait, please let me accompany them.”
“No. I judge the matter closed.”
The children looked at each other in panic, then to Oppon’s parents who looked just as helpless. The heart was not a place people returned from. Only masons went, and they went there to lay down, die, and nourish Minaptra’s bulging heart.
Khemelek started “I need to go say goodbye to –”
“We are all at stake, child. Saying goodbye here could damn those you love. Boy, grab my repellent and some food from the table. Girl, help me with this raft.”
The children stood up unsteadily. Khemelek’s lip quivered as he realised how exhausted he was. But he obeyed; they all did. Tselentin shared Oppon’s quiet panic. He set his jaw.
Khemelek found the repellent but no food, until a sickening realisation gripped him while he looked at Grik’s jars of floating organs. Some had bites taken from them. He grabbed two jars.
The two children climbed onto the small raft, looking thoroughly lost.
“How will we know where to go?”
“The boy will know. Won’t you boy?”
Khemelek nodded, silently. Oppon looked at him confused. Grik wrestled the torch from the wall, and gave it to Oppon, alongside the container.
Khemelek meekly piped up again. “Please, let me say goodbye to my parents.”
Grik slapped him across the face. “Why do you make me repeat myself? Were you not hoping for adulthood tonight? Have you forgotten the blessing I’ve bestowed on you, ungrateful mongrel?” He studied Khemelek’s face, daring him to answer. The child did not. “Your parents are not coming. They chose to be elsewhere tonight. They did not want to see their boy become Minaptra’s.”
Oppon’s parents hugged her together in a deep embrace, breaking when they felt the shaman’s eyes on them. Tselentin hugged her next. He pulled away, keeping his hands on her arms above the elbows, then leaned closer to whisper into her ear “Stop and wait for me, not too far down river. I’ll find you.”
He caught Khemelek’s eye end averted his gaze quickly from the indignant voltage in his friend’s face. His hands lingered in Oppon’s for a few seconds before he dropped them.
Khemelek and Oppon untied and carried the raft across Yllish’s bridge to the newly opened cavern. They looked back through the hole as they climbed it and shakily pressed their oars against the riverbank. They left without speaking.
The cavern stretched beyond the torchlight. The darkness was punctuated by small coronas of green glows from the walls and on a roof distant enough to make them look like stars. The river here was four metres across, with a bank on each side. It was stronger than the one in Grik’s cave and pulled them swiftly down into the darkness. The sounds of Oppon’s parents, Grik and Tselentin all faded as the river carried them through its twisting corridors. They drifted for minutes before Oppon broke their fearful reverie.
“They shouldn’t be able to see the light anymore, let’s bank here.”
“Master wouldn’t want that.” Khemelek urged. “And Yllish said we need to hurry. We’re putting the whole Megiddo in danger by waiting.”
“We need him!” Oppon whispered.
“No, you just want him here.”
“Maybe I do, but we still need him. It’s always the three of us.”
“No, Him and I used to always be the two of us. Then you came along and it was the three of us. Now it’s always the two of you. But fine.” He eventually said “But if I never see my mother again, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Fine… What are you looking for.”
“My mushrooms.”
“What?”
“Grik gave me tentacles to eat before the hunt. He said it was important that I don’t eat the caps immediately. That I only have them if I go to the heart. He must have known something was happening to the masons.”
Oppon struggled to find a reply. She failed. She willed Tselentin to hurry while Khemelek pulled out the mushrooms by their tiny writhing tentacles. He ate them, and his pupils dilated.
* * *
Grik dismissed his visitors. “Leave me.”
Tselentin panicked, looking around the well-lit cave for a way to sneak past the shaman.
Thinking fast, he asked with practised confidence, “What will you do here, master?”
Grik furrowed his brow. “Why?”
“I’m interested in your craft.”
Grik considered him for a while as the other villagers left.
“More of a hunter, aren’t you? My work is more Oppon’s line, with her memory for biology. Or is she the reason you’re asking?”
“When we were out tonight, she got me interested in plants when she explained some of them. I haven’t chosen a craft to specialise in yet… I could help you with your work.”
“Come closer, let me see your face.”
Tselentin stepped shakily closer, muscles beginning to stiffen from scaling the waterfall.
“You’re infirm. You’d be a liability tonight. You need to rest.”
“I’m not more tired than Khemelek.”
“Or the girl? I imagine you’re keenly aware of her condition.”
Tselentin said nothing.
“Go, bedward with you. I’ve decided to speak further with Yllish. You and I can talk in the morning.”
Tselentin tried to think of an argument, but couldn’t find one. Instead, he rounded the corner to where the ladder was and sat at its base, out of sight, trying to devise a plan. The adrenaline left him while he sat, and he could feel his eyes become heavy. The exhaustion and soothing sounds of the stream and crackling torches caressed him.
“Think” he chided himself internally. He focused on Grik’s sounds. He heard the old man drop in the water and splash around, struggling with Yllish’s corpse. After a while a heavy meat smacked onto the wet ground.
“Come now, Yllish. We’ve got work to do.” Grumbled Grik. Wet flesh tore apart, meat slapped against the earth and bones snapped in something’s maw. Tselentin tried to parse the sounds, but they faded to the background of his consciousness. He’d been watching Grik’s unnatural shadow on the wall for a while. It had lost its semblance of his shape. Instead it moved in swirling hypnotic patterns. It was freeform, always shaping into something almost recognisable before changing direction to something else. It carried a consciousness separate from Grik, and Tselentin’s breath caught as he realised it knew he was there. It was communicating beyond his ability to understand, or it was toying with him, coaxing him to a murky sleep. He was transfixed, stuck in its web, and he had become drowsy.
A tinny twang came through the relay. A tune played that signalled someone on one of the other ends of the relay wanting to talk to Grik. “Snake spit and dammit.” Grik raged.
“Yes. I’m here.”
“None? Not even one mason? Well how much refined glowstone do you have on hand?” He was quiet, listening to the voice on the other end.
“We’ve sent one child. Uninitiated… Yes, it’s dire. We need to get as much as we can to the heart as soon as we can. He’ll plug the hole- I made sure to keep him as an insurance policy by withholding the cap at first, so he should reach there just as the trance teaches him, before all the noise gets in. If we send the other masons after him, we restore her completely. We need to set aside our childish bickerings and meet properly about that noise. It’s already too much, and soon enough we won’t be able to hear Minaptra at all.”
Tselentin swooned in the grip of the shadow. Grik’s sharp voice jerked his eyelids upward every few seconds, but it could not stave off his exhaustion, and he succumbed.
* * *
He woke up with Grik standing over him.
“Couldn’t even make it up the ladder?”
He shot up, panicked.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Long enough to feel refreshed enough to clean for me while I discuss these events with the chief. There’s gore to scrub. Get to it. I’ll be back later.”
Tselentin watched Grik climb the ladder with bulging eyes. Once he was confident that Grik was out of earshot, he rounded the corner and watched the hole in the wall, looking for any sign of light down its passages. He couldn’t make any out. “Dammit, where is it?” Grik’s voice trailed down as he reversed back down the ladder.
“Did you see my bowl? It’s not in my satchel.”
“I think I saw it on the way into the village, by the entrance.” His eyes darted to Yllish’s hole. He was barely able to contain his anguish.
“Don’t be a fool. Help me look.” Grik began to scavenge his workstation.
“Master, the chief must be waiting for your important news. I can bring your satchel for you while you’re there.”
“My bowl. You’re to bring me bowl. I’m wearing my satchel.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll bring your bowl.”
“How do you want to apprentice with me if you can’t listen.”
“I swear I’ll be better, master, please allow me to search for your bowl.”
Grik stroked his stubbly chin.
“Alright, but hurry. I need that bowl.”
“Yes, master.”
The shaman stretched, and made a slow ascent up the ladder. Tselentin looked at him climbing, exasperated.
When Tselentin rounded the corner again, he saw Yllish on the floor. He was gored, animal bitemarks taken from his body. Something was moving under his skin. Whatever he had heard from around the corner had left a grim scene.
Tselentin wasted no time investigating. He ran across Yllish’s land bridge through the hole where Oppon and Khemelek had exited. He reached the bank in the next cavern, and climbed it in a stumbling run.
“Oppon!” he whispered loudly.
“Oppon!” again, with more volume. He felt his way along the dim riverbank as fast as he safely could, periodically calling for Oppon. He swallowed, and continued.
He found them around a corner. Oppon was looking around, afraid, while Khemelek lay on the raft.
“I’m here.” He heaved.
Oppon ran up to him, eyes moist. “Where were you.” She yelled and hit him with an open hand on the shoulder.
“I…”
“We waited forever. We need to hurry.”
“I couldn’t get past Grik. I’m sorry. Come on we need to get go- what’s happening with Khem?”
“He’s had a cap. Hasn’t spoken in a while.”
“A cap, now?”
“As it turns out he had the tentacles before we went on the hunt.”
“What?”
“That’s as much as he told me before he went quiet.”
The unspoken realisation on Khemelek’s earlier question about the tentacles hung between them.
Tselentin and Oppon pushed off while Khemelek lay on his back to look at the small stones glowing in the cavern’s roof.
Tselentin eyed him and shrugged. “Well then I guess we should go.”
The river continued for hours, gradually picking up speed. The stones were dim, but progressively brightened as they continued along the uphill river. They sat in pensive silence, steering with the oars, but slowly needing less effort to row.
Oppon broke the silence first. She was clearly reluctant, but her curiosity overcame the awkwardness.
“Back there, when Grik was asking about you and me… What was he talking about?”
“What do you mean?” He replied.
“What would we be doing that would be so very improper?”
“Come on, you know…”
“Suppose I don’t?”
“Well, you know, men and women.”
She looked at him blankly.
He gaped and looked at Khemelek for help and found none. His friend was nearly catatonic.
“It’s what men and women do, if they love each other, and they’re adults.”
“If they love each other.” She repeated carefully, wheels turning.
“Yes well… you’re not an adult and maybe won’t be for years.”
“In other words, you do love me.” She said, testing the sentence out.
“I… look we’re in a rush. Can we leave it there for now?”
“We very much can not leave it there for now! You’ve never once told me you love me. I’ve said it for you, but the words haven’t managed to part your limp lips yet.”
“I….” Tselentin struggled to find the words, or some escape from the raft.
Oppon frowned. “Right. Well, anyway, what will we do, when we get to the heart?”
“We’ll figure it out when we’re there.” He answered. You can trust me on that.
She looked at him, and found that she did trust him.
“I’m going to help Minaptra spore.” Khemelek said flatly, completely devoid of emotion.
“Now you have something to say.” Tselentin replied dryly.
They drifted in silence before he continued.
“My parents weren’t there tonight. They had a good idea I’d become a mason and they decided they’d rather keep a son than gain a demigod. Joke’s on them, I was already infected the last time I saw them. Now they’ll die before I see them again. Minaptra’s cap has shown me.”
Oppon and Tselentin exchanged a glance. If Khemelek was distressed, it was impossible to tell from his tone of voice.
Khemelek turned onto his side “We might already be too late. You took a long time to reach us.”
His stomach growled, and his eyes trailed over his friends hungrily.
Tselentin was about to reply, but Oppon squeezed his hand and turned his head to hers. She shook her head.
The cave filled with petrichor. They turned a corner and saw the night-time light streaming in through a large crevice onto a placid lagoon.
“Do you hear that?” Asked Tselentin.
Oppon nodded and Khemelek followed. All three had overpowering tinnitus, and an intense air pressure made it difficult to breathe.
Khemelek twitched. His eyes blinked out of unison, and he snapped out of his trance. He listened to an internal voice. “I… I can feel it. The heart. And… the other. The verrigal.”
“The verrigal is here? Has it died yet?”
“No, not yet. You… have to keep it busy while I work on the sporing.”
The colour flushed from Tselentin and Oppon’s faces, they hesitated, then held hands as they reluctantly followed. The three clambered out of the cave, grabbing moss and roots. They summited a few dozen metres from the heart.
Tselentin and Oppon stood, awe-stunned. From this distance, the heart was a writhing mass of separate funguses interlocking with each other in a dome shape nearly a hundred metres in diameter. The earth around it was mottled red-brown and sprouted tree-sized mushrooms. A centrifugal force whipped around the dome, forcing the wind so fast that they had to brace themselves to keep their balance. The mushroom trees bent with the force, popping their caps in clouds of spores that fed into the dome and strengthened it. The dome was blotchy and pulsating, thick in some areas and thinning in others as it stretched to cover any holes. Where it stretched, it thinned, and seemingly weakened its grip on the force inside.
Pieces fell inward faster than they could be covered, and the aggregate effect was that the heart was slowly thinning in a perpetual struggle against the hunger eating it from the inside. It was slowly disintegrating. Whatever was inside warped the heart’s innards and sucked in the loosening chunks of Minaptra. The object was visible through parts of Minaptra thin enough to become membranous. It was pure black, with light curving around it. The children looked at it through the membrane and saw around the heart, as though they were watching through the gaps from the other side. They looked back at endless copies of themselves.
A large chunk of the heart thinned to membrane, and reality warped. Gravity changed so that ‘down’ was where the heart was. The heart focused its regrowth there. The process repeated, and the children fell forward in a short nauseating burst each time. Oppon looked around the mutilated landscape. Had the heart broken down enough for the object inside to begin swallowing the whole world? How could no one have noticed?
Gravity shifted again, and she vomited.
Khemelek walked forward with the container in-hand. He was shorter than normal. His feet were inside of the earth, keeping him steady while he waded through it like murky water. He looked back at them.
“There it is. Protect me.”
The other two found a nearby mushroom, bending toward the heart like a yearning lover, gifting leaves into to the gravitational spiral. They grabbed onto it. They looked behind them, and saw the verrigal.
It stood two hundred metres away. This one was three metres tall. Its head resembled a crow’s, and its open eye-sockets wept swarms of locusts. Its serrated spine protruded from its simian body, culminating in a long tail with a hive at the end. The insects ate the vegetation and corpses around it and fed back into its body in an insatiable cycle.
The ground around it was strewn with over-gorged corpses and littered with glowstones. Some of the bodies overrun with locusts were still pathetically trying to move toward the heart. The verrigal hadn’t noticed the children. It absent-mindedly dragged a body by the leg, labouring under the poisonous blowdarts covering its back.
Khemelek stopped at the heart’s periphery. He put one hand on the ground inexpertly as his fledgeling power strained to connect to its larger well of knowledge and power outside him. His palm slowly sank into the ground and came back up holding a fungal tube. Instinctual knowledge budded in his mind. He put his hand in the ground and pulled up a spike of stone, surgically sharp, and began cutting into the fungal flesh. He would make a socket for the refined glowstone.
The heart puffed at the incision. It flaked again, the children and the tree mushroom forward and the clouds concaved above the heart like a waterlogged roof. The verrigal dragged along the grass. Khemelek looked at the verrigal and back to his hands. He nodded to himself, suddenly assured. He thought he knew what to do, but he needed to test it first. He twisted the flesh, cutting off the flow of the glowstone’s energy to the rest of the heart. It broke inward, almost completely membranous, only barely keeping the thing inside from Megiddo. The world crumpled inward towards the heart. The earth cracked, and jutted upward and downward along the burgeoning chasms. The clouds swirled downward like a maelstrom. There was no more air to breathe. The children screamed, but time slowed down as they began falling into the small maw, the tinnitus reached a deafening pitch.
Khemelek felt something reach out to him from the sphere inside the heart. It enveloped his consciousness as fully as dark water at the bottom of a cliff he’d fallen from. Khemelek saw around the sphere at its centre as light bent. The texture of time wrinkled.
“Don’t look at it!” Screamed Tselentin. “Khem, please trust me!” But the words were caught in the spin, travelling sideways.
Khemelek looked back at his friends. Tselentin’s body was elongating.
He rejoined the flesh tube and their bodies snapped to normal. The air died down, leaving the landscape eerily silent. Khemelek had inserted the glowstone, and the mushroom forest grew new caps rapidly, popping and feeding into the heart, thickening it again.
The verrigal saw them. It lifted its fists in the air and screeched locusts into the sky. In the silence, it echoed throughout the valley. It loped towards Khemelek.
“Protect me!” yelled Khemelek. “I know what to do!”
Oppon held onto the tree, paralysed with fear. While Tselentin unhooked a sling from his belt and thumbed a bullet into it. It was heavy for its size, densified in its core to become a deadly missile. He spun it around and squared his shoulders. He planted himself in the ground and bent his knees. The monster shook the earth as it ran, screaming its drugged swarm around it to rocket forward towards Khemelek in a cloud of death.
The stone hit it on the side of its head, half a centimetre from its eye socket. The shape of the swarm contracted as though wounded. But its confusion waned. The swarm regrouped toward the creature. Its neck was bent at an unnatural angle, and it turned toward Tselentin, clearly disoriented. The swarm raged in a pulsating cloud. The Verrigal turned toward Tselentin and stalked closer, cautiously. The two of them circled each other. He’d reloaded his sling and waited for it to make the first move, stopping when he’d put himself between the verrigal and Khemelek. Oppon was bone white with terror. Wasps crawled out of its eye sockets, endlessly they wept forward, like a living helmet that kept healing. Tselentin swallowed, their small bodies weren’t going to stop his stone, but they made it hard to find his target.
The monster shot forward, screaming. Tselentin waited for it to get close. He looked at Oppon, and mouthed to her in the silence “I love you.” He spun his sling and waited. The verrigal came within metres of him and leaped into the air, back arched and arms raised to pummel him to death. He released the bullet, and watched it fly forward in slow motion, then reverse direction and fall the other way. Khemelek had severed the cord again, and everything fell toward Minaptra’s heart. The verrigal’s momentum carried it forward past Tselentin who lost his footing and rolled over the grass in the whipping wind. The creature reached for him as it passed, sending wasps to attack him, but losing them all to the titanic force pulling them closer. It managed to scrape the boy’s chest with a jagged nail mid-air.
Tselentin couldn’t breathe, he looked for the others and only then saw that Khemelek had opened up the earth below them both, so that only their heads protruded in the from the crumbling ground. The mushroom they had held onto uprooted, spaghettifying as it fed into the heart. Seconds stretched, bent and dilated. They became minutes and hours as the world collapsed further in at a glacial pace.
Khemelek closed his eyes and heard no sound but his own breath. Minaptra needed him, everyone needed him, to save them. The ground tore itself apart to reach the ball. He would cross the eternal threshold if he needed, for the sake of the whole Megiddo. The verrigal needed to die to save the heart. If he could kill it here, the other masons could bring the rest of the glowstone. He saw his friend flying through the fungal forest. And the all-consuming void at the centre of the heart compelled his eye. He could not look away. Time’s texture kept wrinkling, like a carpet forced against a wall.
Khemelek stared directly into the sphere.
The world disappeared into blackness. He saw the universe, an infinite obsidian ocean filled with burning pinpoints of stars. They enraptured the boy, who had never seen the sky beyond the clouds. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he looked at an endless series of universes, each one a coruscating membranous soap bubble. They jostled each other gently as they moved, shimmering iridescent. They quivered and mitotically spawned new universes that bumped up and floated above them before gently settling again. Each one multiplied uncountable times before cooling down and becoming inert.
One drew his attention. He could feel himself inside it, even as he watched from without. Its membrane was thinner than those of the others. It pulled in colours from its neighbours, siphoning until the strain on its skin became too much. It tore open in thousands of tiny holes, but stayed steady. The colours that had wisped into it now poured into a messy jumble. The careful swirl of patterned mosaics inside of it became nothing but chaotic visual noise.
“What does it mean?” he thought, uncomprehending. Then he was pulled back towards his body, with a weight like an anchor around his neck. It pulled him faster, accelerating into the chaos, and he plopped into it. He kept pulling downward in its swirl. Into the world, back through the clouds, back until he hovered above his own body, standing with Minaptra’s fleshy cords in his hands. He looked up. He could see the other worlds, but the weight around his neck kept him chained to this one. And then his spirit re-entered his body.
He saw the verrigal fly past him, through the membranous boundary of the heart. The membrane recovered with a wobble, but was becoming impossibly frail and thin. Dendritic fibres fell inward as it failed and began to unleash the furnace inside on the world in full.
“Now.” He reinserted the glowstone. Tselentin fell on the broken ground next to him rolling forward as though downhill. The momentum dissipated supernaturally quickly and the weather died down instantly.
The verrigal’s shadow stood out from the inside of the membranous heart, obfuscating as it healed. The fading silhouette was frozen mid-air, locked behind an event horizon.
Tselentin stumbled up and staggered towards Oppon, to help her from the clay-like stone. She was bruised but didn’t have any serious injuries. Khemelek channelled his newfound powers to liquefy the earth around him and climb out, exhausted beyond anything he had known before.
Then the ground rumbled. Something foundational in the world had cracked, and it was waking up.
Khemelek fell to the ground and didn’t move. His breath was shallow, but steady. Tselentin stumble-ran to him, holding one hand to his chest-wound and cradled his friend’s head in the other.
“Khem! Khemelek! Wake up! Oppon, help me carry him, we need to get him back to the village.”
She looked at him. “Tselentin! You’re hurt!”
The flap of skin had fallen forward on his chest where the verrigal had scratched him, he needed to return to Grik to prevent the parasitic larvae it planted from turning him into the next verrigal.
“I’ll be fine.” He smiled at her unconvincingly. “This story is a hell of a lot better than just finding a corpse, isn’t it?”
Their friend’s eyes fluttered and closed. “We’re safe now.” Khemelek said “Until the next time.”
As the two picked him up, the ground split below them, and they fell in a shower of detritus into the lagoon where they had left their raft. They sputtered in the furious water, but Tselentin maintained his hold on Khemelek’s unconscious body. He swam him through the vibrating river, past the earthen detritus to the shore where the raft was beached. Oppon kept her head above the chop and looked to the sky, terrified, before following Tselentin.
“Quick! We need to get out of the cave!” Tselentin yelled. They made their way to the small beach and looked for a way up the stones they had used before, but the ridge had broken into jagged pieces impossible to climb while they shook. They breathed heavily and Tselentin tugged his friends to the raft.
“We can’t go into the river.” Oppon protested.
“We don’t have a choice. We have to.”
They lay Khemelek down and grabbed the oars. They pushed off and followed the furious river boiling with broken stones.
The river roared in the darkness. Something tore open beneath them, and the water spilled into a new, lower cavern. Unconsciousness engulfed them as they spilled down in a shower of water and stone.
* * *
Oppon woke up, face down on the raft. She was groggy and confused, momentarily forgetting everything but the tactile sensations around her. Eyes closed, she took in the wet wood and salt smell and sounds of waves on rocks.
Memory came fast. The truth crushed out her liminal reality. She opened her eyes, scrambling to keep her balance in rhythm with the tidal force.
The moment she sat up, she was stunned. A vast sky filled with endless points of light, constellations and clouds muted everything. She couldn't think to do anything but stare at its enormity.
Khemelek sat next to her, he nodded without speaking. He was bathed in bright moonlight. Behind him a massive mountain jutted from the ocean, rising so high that its peaks disappeared into the clouds. Small waterfalls trickled out its jagged sides, their mouths hidden behind mist.
After what seemed like hours, she whispered reverently.
“Are we dead? Is this what comes... Is that Minaptra?”
Her voice trailed off, leaving a heavy pause as she pointed to the moon.
He sat silently for a while, staring at the sky. “I don't know.” he whispered back finally.
Some flotsam collided gently with their raft, mildly pulling their attention. Khemelek realised his friend was draped across it.
He nudged Oppon gently so that her eyes followed his. Unreality coated them, and he found himself moving as in a dream to Tselentin's corpse. He pulled him to the raft and held his head in his hands. It was crushed at the back with viscera spilling out. The larvae in his chest wound wriggled around, trying to escape the saltwater.
He looked at Oppon, mouth agape and she at him, finally seeming to snap out of it.
Is he?
Her voice cracked.
Khemelek nodded.
Her face contorted in a battle between grief and disbelief. She scrambled over, nearly capsizing the raft and threw herself over Tselentin. Ugly jerks convulsed through her body as she let out silent sobs.
Khemelek sat with his friend’s head on his lap, and could think of nothing else to do but stroke Oppon’s hair. He caught himself before he did, seeing his hands glistening wet and sticky in the moonlight. Gently he rinsed them in the water before touching her.
She made no response, entirely consumed by Tselentin’s death. After a moment, she buried her face deeper in his, and screamed an animal grunt, wordless pain thronging from her throat into the open air.
Khemelek looked around, trying to find his bearings. The mountains behind them must be the world he’d known before, and they must have catapulted out from some orifice now invisible between mists or clouds. From here he could see the cloud-roof he'd considered the end of creation.
“What is this?” She murmured into his hair, almost too soft to hear. How can this be the after if there is still death here.
“We aren't dead, he said. Megiddo is behind us. Look, we’re on the other side of the mountains.”
She looked at him with the utter contempt of someone faced with wilful idiocy.
“Other side of the mountains? You mean we’re outside the world? We’re not in the after, we’re in the...” she struggled with the thought “outer?”
“I don’t know... I just... Aren’t those the mountains and those the clouds above them? Unless Minaptra’s heart ripped open and we're in the flooded remains of the land?”
She didn’t respond. She buried herself in Tselentin’s chest. They sat there wordless, watching the brilliant symphony of infinity in the sky reflecting in the still ocean. Hours passed, until something began chasing darkness away from the horizon. Black sky gave away to pink, orange and blue, while the placid ocean turned to deep aquamarine.
The two sat mesmerised. No one they knew had ever described a sunrise before. They didn’t notice as the ocean nudged Tselentin’s corpse from the raft and swallowed him.
Hours later, Khemelek broke from his stupefaction. “Oppon,” he whispered.
“Oppon, look!”
“What is that?” She asked rhetorically.
A massive steamship was heading toward them, pugnacious smoke billowing into the sky. They saw a glint of glass from a tall column in its middle. Someone had seen them.
Oppon squinted up at the sun and rubbed her arm. Her skin was rapidly reddening.
“It hurts. Why does it hurt so much?”
The ship approached them, with a ladder unrolled. Crew members yelled at them in a strange tongue. They looked at each other, shrugged, and climbed up to the ship heading for the city of Calcoria.
