Vessel, Book I: The Advent

by Tominda Adkins

  * * * * *

  For the remainder of that night, Ahmul’s sisters stared at the desert sky with solemn grief and awe.

  Like everyone else on their side of the planet, they had just seen the moon for the very first time.

  Before that moment, the moment Dahrkren spoke the words that no one else would ever know, the moon’s orbit had always been fixed within the earth’s shadow, never showing itself. At his incantation, its pale face had lurched into sight, causing oceans and rivers to shift, and the earth to tremble and break in places. The sisters knew all of this, even though everything was still and quiet where they watched. And although they did not know what the moon was or what role it played, they understood that it would follow another path and pattern from that night forward, which is the orbit that we know today.

  They listened and waited until morning, learning from the surprised stars, from the astonished wind and sands, what had happened.

  They were told what Dahrkren the necromancer had done and how. They knew that as he had fallen forward in his own tent, the life gushing out of him by his own hand, that his precautions proved effective. The resin had held his lips fast to Zabur’s, and his dying breath had passed into her.

  And for awhile after that, nothing had happened.

  As the moon shifted to its new course, they were told, Zabur’s death-closed eyes had opened. Her dead body flooded with panic. Her dead lungs struggled to fill themselves, but were constricted. Flailing, she’d pulled the gum from her nose and pushed Dahrkren's slumped body to the ground.

  She sat straight up, staring wildly into the silver darkness, breathing in and out and in and out, a learned motion, a habit.

  She didn’t need to breathe anymore.

  Zabur smeared at the warm blood that had been spilled on her skin, feeling no horror or surprise, just a quizzical calm. Its strong smell, its bold flavor on the tip of her curious tongue, filled her with sensations of overwhelming lightness and strength. She jumped to her feet and down from the bench, thoughtlessly laying waste to that silly circle of white sand.

  The citadel all around the tent was awake with sounds of shock and fear as people sought an explanation for the moon. Zabur heard this. She could feel the pulsations of a hundred beating hearts prickling against her skin. She could smell sweat and life pressing in all around her, as strongly as she could smell the blood curing on her hands. Peering through a small tear in the tent's folds, however, she saw only the moon and her beloved black horse, which was staring back at her, motionless and expectant, possessed of the same fantastic energy. She smiled knowingly and whirled back around into the tent's darkness.

  She knew exactly what to do. A new force was guiding her instincts now, one that would never weaken her body or leave her soul unprotected. It was death, raw and unchecked; it saw through her eyes and touched with her hands. And now, it wanted to taste through her teeth.

  Like a moth to flame, Zabur found the wet, open massacre of Dahrkren’s throat and drank him dry in minutes. The remainder of his blood wasn’t enough to satisfy her instinct, but it soothed her head, sped up the vibrating, twisting sensations inside her body, and made the instructions of her new conscience ring loud and clear. There was more to do. So much more.

  She lifted Dahrkren with tremendous ease and laid him out on the bench, drew open his mouth with reverent tenderness. And then she breathed into him, filling his lungs with the same force that had animated her.

  Just as she had, he lay still for awhile. And then he opened his eyes and rose up, strong and whole, a waking window for something with no name, a void where a person had previously existed. Zabur stepped back, ravenous but reveling, and bowed at his feet, an action symbolic of the moment that death became an operating force on this plane. The moment the Hollows, as they would one day be called, came to be.

  Ahmul's five sisters listened in misery to this, at how these two abominations left the tent and forcibly spread their death disease from one fortress wall of Nifushunm to another, all in the time before dawn. How the morning had passed without any word from Nifushunm’s side of the Ket. How anxious the vengeful king had grown, and also Ahmul, who was being held in Amphet until Zabur’s return.

  And return she did. Just before dusk, Amphet’s river sentries began shouting that the gates of Nifushunm had opened, and that Zabur was riding out, returning to them alive. Citizens rushed the banks to see this for themselves, joyous and amazed. But the joy quickly turned to terror.

  Zabur wasn’t alone.

  No one in Amphet was spared the horrors that swept across the river that evening, not the mightiest soldiers nor the most guarded courtesans, not even the savage king himself. The historians like to say that Zabur slew her father and devoured him completely, or maybe that is what she did to Ahmul. However she sliced it, every human being within Amphet’s walls was dead―or something worse―within three hours of her homecoming.

  From their safe vantage point, miles out into the wild, the five sisters saw all of this in a shared trance. They understood that this force, this disease, this hunger, would never stop. It would consume life after life, people after people, until there wasn’t a beating heart left in the world. And even then it would not be satisfied. It had no conscience or goal, only a bottomless need, and it had learned to speak. Dahrkren, the curious, selfish, gifted, unlucky necromancer, had been chosen as its listener. And he had been deceived in the worst way. He wasn’t going to live forever.

  He was going to spend forever dying.

  And so would all his victims, until there was nothing and no one left. The sisters knew that they must act immediately. They begged answers of their usual guides, asking what could stop these creatures and their hunger. What could drive something without life beyond the clinging force of death? The answer came simply and swiftly: other forces. The forces which rightfully outlasted life and death alike and never ended, five essences which any proven diviner would have known intimately―light, fire, earth, water, and air.

  These ever-living forces wouldn’t succeed on their own; they would need consciousness in order to act. This consciousness, in turn, would require living hands to guide the forces separately, to physically will them against death. It would take a channel, a medium, a carrier.

  A vessel.

  The sisters were shown how to create these vessels, but they would also need witnesses, people to hear their warnings before the act was finished. So they walked until they crossed a warring tribe, heavily armed men and their families fleeing across the desert after seeing the moon. The sisters explained to them what had happened, and all that would come, and these people were frightened enough to listen. The tribe pledged its assistance, and the sisters got to work.

  As the sun was sinking into the sand, the five of them began moving in a circle, guarded by their new allies. Long into the night they performed a spell that none of the bewildered onlookers could understand, yet its magnitude held the total attention of anyone who watched. Just five lithe bodies winding around a fire, hands linked, whispering fervently. The wind whispered back. The sand shifted. The fire crackled. But that was all.

  Just before dawn, the sisters stopped abruptly and put their backs to the fire and to each other, understanding that they would never again look upon one another―not as they were then. They released their linked hands for the last time and began walking in five separate directions, ever widening the painful distance but never looking back.

  They walked as far as was necessary to carry out the final length of their spell, each accompanied by members of the baffled bedouin tribe. What these escorts saw, they reported, and their accounts have remained intact for generations, for millennia:

  The youngest of the sisters stopped walking when she smelled a thunderstorm. She waited for its coming on a grassy flat, where she remained until struck by lightning.

  The eldest sister merely walked to the closest hip of a Nile tributary and refused to stop. She walked until the top of her head disapp
eared under the current, and did not resurface.

  The wisest instructed the bedouins to build a pyre, upon which she allowed herself to burn alive.

  The strongest of the five stood in the bottom of a ravine and ordered her escorts to bury her.

  And the loveliest sister walked to the rim of the highest canyon she could find and leaped off.

  There were no bodies. No burnt embers or crushed bones. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. The sisters had successfully Become―that is to say, they’d wholly given themselves up to these forces, and in turn, the forces had consumed all of them whole. Their atoms, their essence, their souls―however you want to think of it―had already begun to spread into every grain of sand, drop of water, particle of air, flicker of flame, and ray of light that touched the earth.

  They had given these forces a living conscience. And although that was still only half the plan, it was enough to win part of the battle. By nightfall, the bedouin tribe had regrouped a safe distance from Amphet, on a hilltop where the sisters had told them to meet. And by the light of the frightful moon, they watched the Ket erupt from her cradle. The structures along the riverbanks tumbled to the ground, and the earth beneath both cities sank away, devouring not only several centuries' worth of divining legacy, but also death's origins: nearly all of the Hollows were buried that morning.

  By the hundreds, they fell with their cities into the caving earth, where they would wait indefinitely, starving without nourishment, dying without completion. Only Dahrkren himself managed to escape the flooding of the Ket and flee across the desert for cover. He ran not from the destruction, nor from the bedouins, but from a curse, the most direct result of the sisters’ spell.

  Thanks to their individual sacrifices, Dahrkren found himself suddenly and considerably crippled, unable to roam and feed unchecked. Every ray of sunshine or raindrop scalded him. To touch the sand with his bare flesh was agony, as was the heat of any flame, and even the gentlest of breezes brought pain. The curse was most powerful near the place of his birth, but no amount of distance provided complete relief. What was to be an eternity of power and inhuman strength had suddenly become an everlasting and constant torment.

  That’s what you get for trusting death, I guess.

  The same fate fell upon any Hollow he created from that day forward. Where he began his new following, no one is certain, and so the story ends on that hilltop with forty people. Forty dumbstruck bedouins, who would guard the secret of what they had seen and pass it on to their children like a curse. Children who would centuries later name themselves the Luna Latum, or "the Burial of the Moon". These people alone knew what waited beneath the sand―and what ran loose above it. They also knew what could stop the Hollows, and it was something they sure as hell didn't have.

  Amphet and Nifushunm, even the very banks of the Ket, were gone. There was no indication, not so much as a dent in the sand, telling where the cities had once stood, nor to which spot Dahrkren would inevitably return to raise them. The bedouins had no comprehensive understanding of divinity, so they could not even ask the sands or the dead what to do. They had only the explanations the sisters had given them regarding Dahrkren and his abuse of power, as well as descriptions of the divine arts, basic means by which they might protect themselves while this misused force continued to spread.

  And they had the following words, the last half of the sisters’ plan, the part that made Ghiyath Ayman, Su Kim Khan, Whitney Leroy Jackson, Corin Livingston III, and Jesse Cannon shake in their sleep about eight thousand years later:

  "Keep all of this known well among yourselves and your children, and keep it secret, as others would invoke more evil out of panic. Have patience, remain vigilant, commune with the divine, and wait.

  "We will send others to finish what we ourselves began, in the form of great men, born of woman’s flesh but constructed of the divine forces, five beings of terrible power, fierce and indestructible.

  "They will move light, water and air, flame and earth, with courage and conscience, and they will seek death's origin together, as it will seek them in turn. It will find no place without suffering until that day, when by the sacrifice of Becoming they will defeat the crueler force, and banish its pale eye from the heavens.

  "So preserve yourselves and watch for signs of them; prepare to defend and serve them. Forget our names but heed our forces, for through the coming Vessel, we will again touch the earth with new hands. Until that day, we remain only a part of it."

  C H A P T E R 5