By A Road We Do Not Know
A Science Fiction Short Story.
The ashblasted wastes stretched low and level all the way to the scorched horizon, punctuated only by serpentine drifts of pumice that danced in the cemeterial wind as if charmed by the flute of Satan. Each step upon the congealed sands of the late earth sucked away a little more warmth from Rilk’s weary body, as though his scaly soles were siphons by which to drain the precious scintilla of heat left within him on the eve of the third week since the sun abandoned his world to fire and smoke.
That cloaked brigand whose name is Night swiftly overtook Rilk and the boy staggered to a halt, turning west to face the rapidly clotting afterlight before darkness curtained the bleak terrain. His nictitating membranes wappered once over his eyes to slough off a nettlesome dusting of soot. Then he gazed out at what lay before him-
Ashen ruin as far as he could see. Charred logs looming out of the slag like the finned backs of sea dragons. The smoke clouds raw and black against the fuming sunset, as though the sky itself were bleeding to death.
Ragged of breath, Rilk leaned against the fishing spear he’d taken to using as a walking stick like he were a score of annuals older than his mere seventeen. He sighed heavily, a sigh that spluttered out into a wheezing, blood-flecked cough as he half-fell before catching himself on the spearshaft, driving it deeper into the pliant ashes to hold his weight. The ghost of his tortured breath eddying to oblivion in the crimson twilight before him. An omen, he thought, of what was to become of his own ghost not too long from now. Not too long at all…
He was tempted to rest awhile upon one of the fireblackened stumps that rose from the cinereous ground like rotting teeth, but he knew that if he sat he would not be able to rise again and so he stood tottering against his fishing spear like a hatchling taking its first doubtful steps. Coughing pitifully into the cold, shivering all over as the gales howled mercilessly past. He could barely feel his fingers wrapped around the shaft. Not a scrap of clothing adorned Rilk’s body but for the leather toolbelt at his waist. When one lived all one’s life in a balmy jungle, what would have been the point of garments except mere ceremony? He thought of his father’s feather cape, the woven symbol of the Tarak. Then, quickly, almost frantically, he pushed the memory from his mind. Unworthy, you are, unworthy to even contemplate such a thing. Father was right about you. About everything.
After awhile he mustered the strength to go on.
The level sands stretched to infinity. In an odd sort of way, Rilk was thankful he’d been forced to abandon his sledge as he fled for his life from the firestorms; it would have been impossible to drag through the ashfall. He’d been fishing on the day the world ended. The sledge was to transport coelocanths back to the village, for the Feast of the Planting Sun… and his father.
He needed shelter for the night but there was none to be had on this scabbed playa. Nor was there any wood for a fire. The forest had long since been incinerated down to the last twig and the crozzled bark of the fallen trees crumbled at a touch, leaving sticky black residue on Rilk’s fingers as he stumbled along like a blind man in the devil’s hall of mirrors. All he had was the trackway before him, and what smoldering hope he yet carried in his own heart.
He could scarcely feel his toes as he meggled through the frigid wastes, leaving slushpan tracks in his wake as if he were stamping missives into the ash for others to follow. Many animals had come this way before him, the great saurians who first tread this sedimentary highway across the fern prairie- the foliate prints of thornfaces and broadbills, the lacustrine roundels of long-necks pressed into the sludge like wax seals, even the ominous tridactyl marks of a lone dreadfang. The dragged smears of their tails left in their wakes. None of the smaller tracks of his own kind led either way down the path, but he knew that it was the right road, the road back to the village.
All of the footprints on the trail were fringed with thin sheets of an odd, white substance that Rilk had never seen before. It was thin as any leaf but it crackled underfoot. He bent down over the huge pond-print of a longneck that was covered in the anomalous material to inspect it himself. Curious, how even at this ultimate end there were still new things to be discovered, as if the death of the old world were the beginnings of a new, one in which Rilk was both prisoner and pioneer, serving a sentence of ostracism from all that was remotely familiar til he repented for sins unknown.
He skated the sharp point of his claw over the slick, transparent surface, tracing a thin line upon it before the brittle stuff shattered with just a tap. A wheezing laugh escaped his lips, at the absurdity of it all, both his amusement and the object thereof’s mere existence in such a charnel horror house. Then his laugh again sputtered off into a hacking cough, worsened by his proximity to the fine ash carpeting the ground that rose up like accursed pollen to torment his throat and his lungs, and he sat back on his haunches and then fell over on his side and he kept coughing and choking til his chest burned and ached and it seemed hours went by before he was finally able to draw a pathetic breath. He remained on his side for a long time, curled in upon himself like an eggling, hissing feebly as a broken flute.
When he finally rolled over to rise, he placed his hand unwittingly on the center of the slickness, in the deepest trough of the longneck’s track. All warmth was sucked from his arm in an instant. It was cold, as white and cold as a burial shroud. Rilk exhaled sharply and withdrew his arm, cradling it close, trying to knead some warmth back into it with his good hand while all about it was cold to cleave the ground and he lay there whimpering in the cold ashes for many hours til at last a gray dawn gelled upon the land and he struggled to rise from his mummied torpor, leaning back against a trunk that had fallen alongside the path.
When he looked out upon the land the ground was green. He blinked. No, it really was green. Green but faintly. Like a kiss of emerald upon the ash. He looked down and saw a fern sprout poking from the scourged ground between his legs. Then another, and another, they and their brethren peppering the whole rolling hillside as if Rilk were seated in a virgin garden. Precious little fiddleheads curled in upon themselves, not yet ready to spread their fronds to meet the day. Rilk stared at them with heart aflutter, afraid to believe, afraid that if he accepted the reality of their green hope they would dissolve, a mere mirage to be promptly banished from this dim Asphodel. He stared as one of the fiddleheads unfurled to meet the sun’s embrace, so like an eggling breaking free of its shell. And still he stared even as those green shoots obeyed his fears and began to fade one by one to white, and their baby fronds fell brittle and dead to the ground when no sun dawned to nourish them. By noon, the green hallucination had vanished like the last brief synapse of a dying world.
Shivering nakedly, unsure of what to make of this brief farce of hope, Rilk held his breath and reached out to rake a blanket of ashes over his body, cloaking himself in the dead world while his chilled brain wound back the tape of his memory to the last conversation he’d had with another of his kind. An argument. Of course. With his father. Of course.
“Rilk, my son. Your catch is a disgrace.”
This he said after examining the coelocanths Rilk had brought back from the lake. Five small fish, scarcely three feet long, one of them bearing grievous scars from some past injury.
Rilk sighed at his father’s admonition. He’d been at the lake all morning and these were the only five that would bite. Yes, yes he had missed a mighty eight-footer whose tailfin flashed a sapphire wake in the glittering dawn, but could he really be blamed for that when Naoma was teasing him from the shore, batting her turquoise eyes at him and tossing her dainty head side to side while she foraged for magnolia flowers and fiddleheads? There would be plenty of days to fish, but rare was a morning when Naoma appeared so lovely…
Rilk looked at his father again, and knew what his answer to such a juvenile inquiry would be. He carefully avoided looking into the old chieftain’s drab amber eyes. His pupils were constricted to the point of being nearly invisible, just faint lines scarcely distinguishable from the soul-squiggles of his irises. He wore the magisterial mitre and cape of sicklewing feathers that were the vestments of his position as Tarak. Clutching in one knobby hand his gingkowood scepter with its polished amber tip. His spiny crest bristled like so many knives, and his normally green-brindled skin was flushed a fuming, arterial crimson. No orange shew on his dewlap, thankfully- that would mean he intended battle. This was just unfocused rage.
“They are fine fish-” Rilk began to protest, before the slam of his father’s fist upon the tabletop cut off his sentence as if it had been rammed by a thornface.
“They are not fit to feed a hatchling!” his father hissed. “Least of all the whole tribe of the Skaeras on the Feast of the Planting Sun! You are the son of Irano, are you not?”
“Yes, I am,” Rilk replied submissively. Inwardly he groaned, for whenever his father began referring to himself in the third person it meant a lecture was forthcoming. Outside, the sun shone bright and the wind toyed with the ferns. He could hear the glacking cries of dactyls rising from the bristling conifer canopies, and he yearned only to be back outside, by the lakeshore with Naoma. The air in his father’s wigwam was clotted with incense, lit each morning when he arose. Good for the lungs, Woota, the shamaness, said. Rilk felt he was being smothered.
“Is Irano not the Tarak of the Skaeras?”
“He is.”
“And therefore, you yourself are a future Tarak, are you not?”
“I am.”
“The Tarak is responsible for upholding the honor of the tribe, yes?”
“He is.”
“Do you think these… these fingerlings bring honor to your tribe?”
Rilk huffed heavily. “No, Father. But the others-”
Again Irano spent his fury upon the table. “The others are as mere dust to you, my son! Have I taught you nothing? The Tarak is the light of the tribe! It is by his will that the Hunt is partaken, that the Law is dispensed, that the Mating is consummated. It is upon his action that the future of the tribe rests, and even the strongest of tribes may be brought to ruin by a weak Tarak!”
At this last proclamation, Irano slammed the heel of his scepter loudly upon the ground and jabbed an accusatory claw at Rilk. Rilk’s mouth fell open in stunned silence. The world continued on outside- the shrill cries of dactyls down by the lake, the haunting moans of long-necks up to their bellies in the swamps, the hustle and bustle of the village- but inside the wigwam all sound was muffled, and the lake suddenly seemed very, very far away.
Rilk sensed his skin flushing through a mottled rainbow maelstrom of emotion- red anger, bluish guilt, purple embarrassment. He felt like a scolded hatchling. Which, in point of fact, was exactly what his father intended.
Irano heaved out a frustrated sigh and stared down at the table for a long time, letting the stifling silence drag out into awkwardness. His amber gaze scrutinizing the tree-ring grain as if it were some sacred scroll containing all the answers to his dilemma, only in a language he could not yet decipher. Gradually, his skin faded from scarlet to a drab, dried blood brown. Then, he sighed once more, this time in deep contemplation. When he finally spoke his words were carefully measured.
“Rilk, my son. I desire only what is best for you, and our tribe. But you in turn must always choose to do what is best. This you must do, for the survival of our tribe, for the honor of your forefathers, and most of all for yourself! You have brought shame upon your father, and all his fathers before him, by your actions today. How, Rilk my son, am I to pass my cape on to you when you cannot even catch a fish worth mentioning?”
“I can hunt-” Rilk started resolutely, which he immediately regretted when his father hissed and once again flushed carmine.
“No! You cannot hunt until you can fish! Have I raised a rotten egg as my heir? A thornface is a far more formidable adversary than a coelocanth!”
“I could catch a coelocanth if I-”
“If you wanted to succeed!” Irano interrupted. “Rilk, my son, this is your undoing, a curse upon you, and thus upon me as well- laziness! If you only tried to fish, by the Spirit of Ashemu, all the bounty of the sea would lay at your feet. This I know! I know it in here-” he said, rapping a claw against his chest, hard enough to draw a bead of blood. He did not flinch as the crimson rivulet ran down the slope of his chest before dripping onto the table. He stared deep into Rilk’s eyes, forcing Rilk to hold his gaze despite the obvious discomfort it caused him. To stare was to challenge, and in spite of his frustration Rilk had no desire to do battle with his father. Not because he thought he would lose, but because a fight would shred whatever threads of affection were left between them.
“You must be strong, my son. For your tribe. For me.” Irano sighed again, and for the first time ever in his life, Rilk realized his father looked old. Irano’s skin faded back to its natural drab green, and he turned away from his son. He sounded very tired as he raised a dismissing hand. “You may go.”
Rilk flushed blue in shame, trying to think of something to say. Some way to beg his father for forgiveness, for a chance to redeem himself. But no words came to his tongue.
He whirled with a huff and exited the wigwam, charging hunch-shouldered back out into the village where life went on as normal. A group of nestlings betting cowries on a fight between two green-scaled littleclaws. Jakapi, the herdsman, was carrying two of his prized sicklewings in wooden cages to have their iridescently feathered tail plumes plucked to make headdresses for the Feast of the Planting Sun. It was less than a half lunar away now. Rilk was supposed to have provided the fish for smoking, but upon his recent failure Irano had delegated the task to Horuk, the great fisher. There wasn’t any reason he couldn’t still get the fish, though… fish bigger than any Horuk could ever hope to catch in the lake…
He mulled it over as he continued through the village, the seed of an idea blooming like the crops on the terraces above the lake were soon to do. Perhaps, perhaps this was how he could finally please his father. Their endless bickering was intolerable, and the worst of it was Rilk couldn’t comprehend why his father always wished to fight. It had only begun these past two years, as Rilk’s bristle of spines grew in, signaling his ascent to manhood. Before then, his father had been, well, his father. Now he seemed as a stranger, constantly critical and disappointed in everything Rilk did or tried to do.
Rilk stopped to let a trio of womenfolk pass by, earthen jars of water balanced atop their heads. Naoma was bringing up the rear. Rilk straightened in her presence, struggling to force a smile her way when she fluttered her hypnotic turquoise eyes at him again. The sight of her now bittersweet. She was the reason he’d gotten into this mess… but then, he knew that wasn’t true. He couldn’t blame her for his failure. Wasn’t it his duty, as future Tarak, to resist such silly temptations as girls?
They passed each other wordlessly. In her wake her sweet scent lingered enticingly on the breeze but Rilk did not look back after her.
He reached the lake at midday. The sunkissed sands were pleasantly hot beneath his scaly soles as he sat back against an aged cypress draped in hagmoss. He took a deep draught of the clean, misty air and gazed out to where the far shore blurred into the waterline. The skyline consisted in the main of hundred-handed araucarias and the titanic bulks of long-necks half-submerged like boulders in the middle of the lake while they dipped their heads down to feast on water lilies. Nearer to shore swam teeming herds of crested broadbills, grazing their way slowly across one bladderwort buffet to the next, while the blood bay humps of lone thornfaces and stonebacks were strung out like garnets on the hillslope beyond. He wondered if any of them were infected by the blight, that dread sickness that thickened the lungs of saurians and had thinned their herds to such a dire degree that the hunting of them had been forbidden by Woota for two seasons, that they might replenish their numbers. Hence the need for coelocanths for the Feast of the Planting Sun. Yet those herds yonder across the lake seemed healthy enough. Their bellows echoed faintly across the still waters, a stillness punctured occasionally by a screeing dactyl diving to snatch a lungfish. No dreadfangs were in sight but they rarely were, preferring to remain in the trees to hide their titanic bulks, their tooth-filled heads which were as big as a wigwam.
On the nearer shore, just beyond where the village ramparts met the water’s edge, Rilk spied a lonesome dreadclaw in the midst of fishing. It had more prowess at the trade than Rilk. A huge old female, her scaly hide brindled shades of yellow and brown, hauling an eight-foot titan out of the lake by her hacksaw teeth. She pinioned the coelocanth’s thrashing tail under one of her namesake toe-claws and put an end to its struggles with a quick snap of her jaws. As she did so, she locked eyes briefly with Rilk, as if measuring the future Tarak as a potential rival. Then she vanished speedily back into the treeline, hauling her sapphire kill after her.
Rilk watched the proceeding and wondered if that hadn’t been the same coelocanth who’d evaded him while he was busy staring after Naoma. It wasn’t his fault she was so seductive. It wasn’t his fault the fish didn’t bite… his father’s anger seemed so irrational. He sat there on the shore for a long while, brooding over his father’s words. Lazy. Weak link. Rotten egg. That’s what his father had called him, in tongues more suited to their blood-enemies the Iquala. But had he been wrong? No- he had been. Rilk was more than his father thought, he knew. His catch that morning was… it was just a mistake. He’d made a simple mistake and had been verbally scourged for it. Why couldn’t his father see that? Did he enjoy making him miserable?
Oh, he understood his father’s expectations, certainly. Soon, Rilk would take his place as Tarak of the Skaeras. But he didn’t see why this had to make every minute mistake the destruction of the village! His father doled out advice upon the most menial of matters, and no matter what task Rilk undertook, there was always a better way to accomplish it than the one he had chosen. Each needling little incident mounted up into one long, endless argument. He couldn’t wrap his tail around it. He was not lazy. He felt no envy or disdain towards his father. All he wanted to do was please him. And yes, yes he made his fair share of mistakes- but was his father so much more perfect?
Rilk sighed and hurled a stone far across the lake, watching it skip over the hitherto still waters. Well, he would please the old lizard, alright. He’d redeem himself in Irano’s old, bigoted eyes. He thought of Jakapi the herdsman and his sicklewings. He thought of the dreadclaw, hauling out the coelocanth that had eluded Rilk in the midst of his fantasies. The Feast of the Planting Sun was only half a lunar away…
The sun warmed Rilk’s scaly hide and flushed him with energy, and it was there, staring out across the lake, that he made up his mind. He would prove his worth. Oh, he would prove it, and he would make his father proud and they would finally stop arguing and go back to the way things were.
His skin bloomed bright emerald green. His plan was, as most overconfident, spur-of-the-moment plans wrought in the minds of boys are wont to be, quite simple. The great Ford of Sooma was only a three-day journey away, and the coelocanths of the sea- which were far larger and mightier than those residing in the lake- had to cross it on their annual spawning run. And yes, it was forbidden to leave the village alone, but for such a prize…
He told no one. He simply strode back through the village to his wigwam to retrieve his sledge and fishing spears, then headed by an alley-trail between dwellings for the tall sequoia ramparts ringing the settlement.
Furtively he snuck along the wall’s interior perimeter and stole out through one of its carefully hidden, thorn-fronted gates, and pulled it quietly closed behind him. He even tried to smooth back over the clinging ivy weeds that had festooned the gate in the weeks since it was last used. Such leafy plants were newcomers to Rilk’s village, of late constantly threatening to choke out their crops. They grew faster and spread quicker than any of the native ferns and conifers, and their only respite was in the dry season when they inexplicably withered and died, they and the other new plants whose leaves grew in shades of pinks and blues and whites for a few short months before shriveling away. One of several strange new curses being wrought upon his people in these latter days of woe, ivy and blight alike in their smothering of the world.
Turning round to face the wilderness, Rilk was surprised to see Woota, the shamaness, standing just beyond the ramparts. She was wrinkled and old, hunched over in her colorful feather cape, similar to Irano’s but even brighter for as the shamaness she was the heart of the tribe as he was its fist. Her eyes were glazed with cataracts and Rilk had no idea how she had gotten outside the village, or even if she knew she was, in fact, beyond the safety of the walls and facing the howling jungle.
He didn’t think she had seen him, and so he hoisted the sledge upon his back, slow as he dared so none of his tools might jangle, and made a wide berth skirting round her, hoping she would not hear his footfalls on the pine duff coating the forest floor. She made no reaction, save closing her futile eyes and inhaling a deep draught of the earthy forest air. But right when Rilk thought he was in the clear, Woota began to chuckle. Rilk froze, almost reverted to playing dead as nestlings were wont to do, so total was his surprise.
“Son of Irano, you need not fear my betrayal,” Woota said softly, still staring sightlessly into the whimpling ferns. Rilk turned slowly to face her, and when she perceived his attentions were undividedly upon her, she continued. “I am told a new star has been born in the northern sky… it is a great adversary of the Spirit, which threatens the end of all things.”
Rilk said nothing, for none spoke to the shamaness unless she directly asked one’s reply. To speak without invitation was to bring many curses down upon your blood. So he stood, and waited, and then the shamaness inhaled deeply, sadly, as the songs of birds echoed across the ancient woods.
“Gaze well, son of Irano, upon the Road of Stars these next several nights, for ye shall not see the likes of it evermore. There is to be great sorrow upon this realm, and after the dawn of this neverending dark, you and I shall both be going home by a road we do not know.”
Rilk swallowed tightly. He stared back at the shamaness and she seemed, somehow, to hold his gaze even through her cloudy, unseeing eyes. Not in challenge, but in the sad sort of compassion that only comes with a great, weighty knowledge. She sighed sadly. Then her thin lips curled into a smile, and she held up an old, gnarled palm to him, the yellowed and worn claws of her twin thumbs knocking against each other in blessing. Without another word she turned back to pass through the gate and closed it silent as an eye behind her, leaving Rilk to wonder just what in the Spirit’s name her prophecy had meant.
There was no time to dwell on it. He had to move fast to avoid being spotted by a wall-guard and recalled by his father, scolded again before he could secure his triumph… and approval.
Sledge in tow, Rilk traveled all through the night and well into the next day, refusing sleep and stopping but briefly to bask at dawn to recover his strength. All the time he feared an attack by dreadclaws or Iquala raiders, but none came to harry him.
He reached the Ford of Sooma by the second moondown, and was rewarded for his efforts with a warm, brilliant dawn over the shimmering eastern sea, and the sight of hundreds of coelocanths thrashing their way up the ford. Breathing in that glorious, seasalt morn, he speared five of the biggest fishes of the run, and soon his sledge was so heavily laden it was difficult to drag off the beach back into the uplands. But his skin was flushed bright green with pride, and he thought nothing of his aching muscles as he hauled the fine catch after him. He was compelled to defend it once, from a pack of littleclaws, which slinked away in hissing defeat when their leader lunged at Rilk and was rewarded by catching the tip of his fishing spear in its gullet.
It was on the first night of his journey home, when he was thinking of how proud his father would be, and how they could finally go back to the way things were before their long argument began, when the world ended.
One moment, Rilk was enjoying the feel of the cool prairie ferns neath his scrinching toes, the satisfying weight of the sledge dragging behind him. His ears full of katydids and crickets and the whispering breeze and the endless roar of the distant sea. Call me a rotten egg now, Father! Five mighty coelocanths! I have acted as a Tarak ought- have I not? You will be proud. I know you will be proud.
He saw in the dirt beside him the three-toed tracks of a mighty dreadfang, heading in the opposite direction. The bleeding Moon arose full and wan, silvering the sea beneath its beams, while ammonites and belemnites glew their eerie greens and blues in the surf at the bottom of the hillside.
Then, a second sun bloomed upon the horizon. A dread sphere of searing light erupting out of the waters, wide as the world itself. Night changed to blinding day, banishing Moon and star alike. Rilk shielded his eyes and stood watching as the light dimmed to ominous orange, boiling away the sea before him.
It was the last time any light would play across the land before endless night descended upon it like a curtain, drawing a close to the play of life.
“Nearly there,” Rilk whispered, trying to force the memory back into its coffin. His voice a strange, alien sound ringing out across the desolate waste. As if he no longer belonged to this world which seemed to be slowly disassembling itself back down to its constituent atoms. The great reptiles shriveling in over their ribs as they starved. Trees spilling into ash. Mountains disgorging their fiery innards. Sun and Moon each banished from their respective halves of the sky. Everything at last coming untethered from its moorings, spiraling forth into an endless gyre of chaos, yet still Rilk spoke. There was something hollowly defiant in croaking out such missives to no one at all. As if he could be reassured by the fact that he still drew breath, and could always count himself his own steadfast ally even as all else faded to oblivion.
When he ceased to speak the winds devoured his words as the sea consumes the drowned, leaving behind only the same indifferent cold and silence that had come before. He looked down, partly to shield his eyes from the gritty wind and partly because there was nothing to see ahead but more charcoal forest, more hillsides laid raw and bare. The only other living things he’d seen were fuzzy black didels, scurrying about in the ashes, greedily stuffing their cheeks with grubs and nuts. They were disease-ridden vermin, detestable egg thieves, but Rilk was almost starved enough to try his hand at trapping them. He had twine, and should he need to take another detour he would have to begin setting snares.
The carbon night enveloped him. He squinted into the murk one more time to check his bearings. Yes. The low scarp of hills to the west, he recognized. Nothing else remained to judge his location but the game trail, sans game.
He was confident they were all dead now, the great saurians. He hadn’t heard any of their starved cries in over a week. Once in the early nights he’d encountered a dreadfang. He’d heard it stamping along through the infernally luminous smoke and left his sledge on the trail to dive into a firewarm tree hollow right as the beast emerged from the ember haze. A great, slobbering mountain of muscle and scale. Its entire left side was seared blackraw and it dragged itself along miserably through the ingle-light, blind in one eye. Occasionally shaking its head as if to briefly exorcise the agony.
Its nostrils dilated as it sniffed round keenly for Rilk, and found him with ease. The whole tree groaned and skewed as the beast leaned upon it, scraping at its trunk with its small, two-clawed hands. It tried to force its huge boulder of a head into the black hollow without success, and Rilk pressed himself as deep into the soot at its bottom as he could. The dreadfang’s tongue lolled aslobber at the prospect of a fresh meal, and Rilk took his knife from his belt and flailed at the beast like an andabate while it pressed its whole weight against the tree, trying to doze its prey’s little haven aside. Rilk got in a swipe or two at its tongue, its probing hands, but to a grizzled and starving beast such pricks meant little. It wanted to eat him but simply couldn’t reach.
Eventually it sniffled and groaned, and withdrew its head from the hollow. Rilk poked his head out warily to watch the dreadfang leave and what he saw was its body slumped low in anguish and its tail dragging in the ash like the pennon of a defeated army, and not once did it turn back. The lunting smoke consumed the dreadfang in silence and in greed as it marched off with earthquake tread, excusing itself to oblivion.
Slumping down against a windfall at the edge of the trail, Rilk perversely hoped he was right about the beast’s extinction. He was dying, and should any predator still live to hunt him he would not be able to fend off an attack. It was a risk, sleeping in the trail, but so long as he felt the bumples of the trackway under his toes he had his bearings, and he knew that if he wandered off it in the night he would never find it again.
This night he was warm. He’d chanced upon a gnetum bush, blackened and dead, just before the last gray ember of the day was whisked away into the haunted dark. Three quick strikes of his flint and it was ablaze, providing a feeble sort of warmth to at least one half of his body. He curled about the bush like an eggling round its yolk, cherishing the flickering warmth upon his face. Even the errant sparks striking his body like shrapnel were welcome in that blinding cold. The ashpile he’d heaped around him quickly grew pleasantly hot under the flames. In those early nights when the world still burned he’d slept in several such firewarmed ashheaps, watching pagan flames devouring the tinderbox woods far away while he listened to the mournful death-dirges of the saurians as their herds were devoured by the infernos. Blackened trees jabbed out of the flames like accusing fingers, demanding recompense for their own annihilation.
It had taken three weeks for him to weave a torturous route back amidst the destruction while the fires steadily burned themselves out. His journey had taken him across the border into Iquala lands. They were blood enemies by tradition, but there did not seem to be any left to oppose Rilk’s advance. He could only pray that his own people had fared better.
Now the whole world seemed to be sinking into the grim sleep of death, and he found himself missing the perils of the dancing flames. The fire could kill, oh so easily could it kill, but that searing heat was delicious compared to the present torment of the cold. He shivered convulsively as he stared into the blazing bush. Watching the brown leaves crinkle and dissolve into carbon effigies, he thought- Yes. Here the destruction continues, in its own small way. I, too, am a destroyer of worlds.
Dawn congealed upon the land as gray and bleak as the one that came before. Rilk sat up sluggishly and stared off into a leaden east where there should have been a mellow canvas of violets and pinks. Shivering, clutching at himself midst the cold ashes. The gnetum bush had burned out sometime in the night and he felt as one of the living dead, his mind working in slow motion, his body slower still. Once he tipped his frigid head back and cried out for the choked sky to return the stolen sun. In reply the earth offered only a banshee wind which carried upon it whole powdered forests.
It wasn’t until noon that he was finally able to force himself to rise and continue down the trail. A low skew of stone looming out of the chary distance. Beyond this, the village. Home, at last. He could just barely make out the log ramparts atop the hill and he breathed a silent prayer to Ashemu that all would be well, that his father and the tribe would still be there, still living, and warm, and well-fed, and everything Rilk was not.
The dead trees reared up like a thicket of snastes, and Rilk was surprised to see the ground carpeted in the skullcap bulbs of mushrooms, gorging themselves on a final feast of the dead. Poison, all, and Rilk had to resist the temptation to eat of them, not just to fill his empty stomach but to end his long train of miseries.
He thought he would reach the village by sundown. Not that the sun set so much as faded, anymore. Thrice he thought he would not make it, but each time his mind flashed an image of his father standing proudly, arms crossed, scepter in hand, feather cape plumed behind him. Casting a judgmental gaze upon Rilk. Between falls his delirious mind crafted faux images of Naoma out of the ashen ether. She pranced ahead of him on the sepulchral wind. Just far enough for her bounding figure to be distinguished from the swirling soot, compelling him to stagger on towards her siren mirage.
“Wait,” he called after her, “Wait for me. I’m coming. I’m here.”
The hallucination, or ghost, or whatever she was, merely batted her eyes coyly and beckoned to him with an outstretched claw.
“Wait, Naoma,” Rilk wheezed. He tried to pick up his pace but he was already moving as fast as he could in his moribund condition. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled forward like one of the lower lizards, hacking bloody phlegm onto the ash as he desperately clambered on. When he looked up again he saw his father looming over him, nodding in understanding, but the wraith held his eye for only a second before dissolving into ash. Before him lay the hill.
From its base the hill seemed to Rilk’s bechilled mind as tall as one of the western mountains, though it couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet of gentle slope. The firestorms had passed through here same as everywhere else, reducing what once was a vast jungle of ferns and cycads to a loose scree of black ash. The picked bones of a thornface laying askance halfway up the slope. Stamped round by multiple sizes of tridactyl footprints where starving predators had been at it like a pharaoh’s embalmers. Upon the crest Rilk could see the log ramparts still looming out of the soot. The dead trees were a charcoal frieze but the village… the village had to be there, just on the other side, safe and sound.
Rilk began scrabbling up over the mine tailings of the dead world, dragging himself forward only under the power of his own yearning for home. His sluggish mind shuttering through still images of memory. The broad, blue lake, limned by gingkos and soft-needled conifers. Broadbills wading in the shallows. The songs of birds. Reclining in the shade of a cycad. Warmth of the sun filtering through the fronds. His father handing him his first fishing spear. So proud, so proud of him when he hooked his first lungfish. Much later, Naoma at his side, pointing and naming the dactyls as they flapped past. Snacking on delectable gingko nuts while they sat on the beach, scrinching their toes in the water’s edge. Her smile… radiant as the sun.
The village…
At last he crested that slag heap hill, wheezing deep draughts of the ash-ladden air. It didn’t matter anymore. He was home, home at the village which never in all the long memory of the Skaeras had been touched by even the worst of disasters. Crisp, clean air. Dactyls in their millions nesting in the horsetails. One particularly grumpy stoneback laying claim to the north shore of the lake. He shoved through one of the charred gates and…
His memory ran out of film and in an instant he was staring down into an annihilated ruin. Most of the wigwams reduced to bare ribbing. Blackened beams jutting out of the gritty loess like ribcages. Improbably, Irano’s wigwam stood intact midst the rubble, stout as a boulder on a shore swept by storm. Between the rubbled huts the ground was littered with the charred bodies of his kinfolk. Nothing moved. No smoke. No sign of life.
Beyond the village was the cracked and fissured lakebed, a dried playa flecked with patches of the odd, transparent slickness Rilk had observed before. Dusted by a recent fall of ash that squegged over the mud like tortured worms. At the center of the mudcaked bed was a dim wet spot surrounded by the bleached bones of saurians. Three broadbills. A flock of strytas. A young thornface. All waiting in the silent sleep of the dead for a dawn that would never come.
Drymouthed, Rilk stumbled downslope into the village. Everything flammable had been scoured to its component ashes. White bones shew through the soot, the one splash of color in all that grey despair. A heap of the dead down by the lakeshore where his kin had tried and failed to find refuge from the inferno. They were half mired in the vitrified sands. Skins seared black and stretched taut over their bones. Those whose hands weren’t clutching at themselves had arms outstretched towards the vanished waters, forever yearning to join the mummied saurians at the dead lake’s core.
They were all the same. The same scorched skins, the same howling mouths. Gone off to the same fate with their collective ends duly noted by the same indifferent world. Naoma was somewhere among them. Perhaps even Woota the shamaness.
Old Irano was not. He’d remained in his wigwam to the end. The place a silent tomb. Rilk entered hesitantly, as if he thought his father might still be living, that it might yet be possible to embrace him.
He sat crosslegged on the floor before his son. His skin black and crisp, face cold and hard as a stone, the scaly lips drawn back taut as wire over the whites of his denticled teeth. The amber scepter lay across his chest, its wooden handle scorched black, as though in his final moments before the flames swept over him he had assumed the poise of a mummy to prepare his soul for travel to the afterworld.
Rilk fell to his knees and stared at his father. What was left of his father. The bogfolk shell. The eyes sightless and shut. The eternal grimace of pain and unyielding determination to meet death with dignity. And Rilk wept.
“I did not leave you, Father,” he cried. His tears the first true warmth he had felt in weeks. “I did not leave you in anger. I left only to please you. I left to make you proud. I… I have come home, Father…”
The nightmare would have been made bearable had Irano’s mummied mouth gasped to life, had his scorched throat croaked back some ghostly reply. But in the unending waking torment of this burnt, benighted world death was final and Rilk could only gaze upon his dead father and sob. All of his ambitions, all the hopes and dreams he had ever entertained for himself or his son, forever under lock and key behind the firesealed lids of his eyes.
The vanished sun was clotting in the west by the time Rilk ran out of tears to weep. The hot runnels began to freeze on his cheeks as the skies darkened around him and he knew he needed fire but there was nothing left in the village to burn.
When he exited his father’s wigwam he did not look back. He made his way torpidly down to the former shore of the lake, staring across the dried bed at the cairn of saurian bones. His hunger and thirst were great but he no longer cared to slake them. Nor did he care to find warmth, to insult himself trying to make charcoaled branches burn again. He no longer had the will to even speak to himself. Not even to whisper. All remaining energy he had was focused solely on keeping his heart and brain active, the embers of warmth retreating headlong from his extremities, from his core, from his very blood, surrendering them all to the unyielding cold to keep him alive for still another moment. Another precious moment.
He took a feeble step forward. Then another. And then he could walk no more. His feet had no feeling in them at all. Not even pain. He slumped down onto a rock near the edge of what had once been the waterline, and stared out at the cauterized wastes beyond.
Am I the last? his chilled mind wondered, as it slowly wound down. If I am, how could I know?
Father should have been the last. He would have been a noble end to us. I am but a beetle in his shadow.
Yet, I am the last…
He sat there for a long time nestled in his own arms, until a squeaking sound near his feet roused him. He looked down glazedly at the source of the sound and saw two small, black shapes covering his feet. He kicked weakly and the shapes scurried off.
He heard the squeaking again and slowly craned his head to face it. Two didels, seated a few tails away. They seemed immune to the cold. Their fur black as the night, their snouts narrow and weaselly, flashing greedy fangs. They sat back on their haunches, staring at him through eerie yellow eyes that shone brightly even in the darkling dregs of the evening. As if the sun had been imprisoned in their pupils.
Groggily, he realized something wet was touching his foot. Rilk looked down and saw that the didels had been nibbling at his toes. The wetness he felt was some of his own blood oozing from their incisions. He looked back at the furballs.
“Wait awhile longer, fuzzy ones!” Rilk called weakly. “I am not yet cured!”
So saying, he contented himself to slouch forward, crossing his arms over his knees and resting his head in the little nest they provided.
Nest. He remembered the warmth of his own, when he first hatched seventeen seasons ago. The mosses and feathers and leaves and furs warm as a hearth. A green canopy overhead. Sunlight toying with the pine needles above. His father’s scent strong as he lowered morsels of flesh into Rilk’s eager mouth.
Rilk nestled his head even deeper into his arms, as if he were trying to fit back inside his egg.
I will make you proud, Father. I just need to rest for awhile…
Just… awhile…
Poor sweet Rilk. I love him.
What an inventive take on the KT event. Thank you!