9
Only the bravest of the clan ventured out when daylight came. Of those brave souls, nearly half retreated almost immediately to the safety of the cave, all the color drained from their faces. They hurried to the back and spoke in frightened whispers. Those who tarried outside a little longer were no less disturbed when they returned. They trod back in with their arms held out to their sides, a glistening black liquid dripping from their bodies. Their eyes, wide and fearful, stood out in stark contrast with the murky fluid that stained their faces. They sought immediately to clean the liquid from their flesh. Some of them claimed it made their skin tingle, others that it made their thoughts spin, as if they were drunk.
Khronos was the last to return.
His mother and mate stared at him as he drew near, clutching one another like frightened children. Ona reached out to him when he approached. “What is that black fluid?” she asked, but he ignored her. He ignored them both.
Instead, he strode to the far corner of the cave where Wali kept her bedding, his movements slow and purposeful, his countenance carefully controlled. Squatting beside the old woman’s hearth, he looked at her gravely and said, “Tell me what you know, crone.”
Fearful of her brutal leader, Wali had drawn back from Khronos when he approached her, but when she saw that he did not mean to chastise her for speaking foolishly before, she leaned forward and ran her fingers down his cheek.
“Know? I know nothing,” she said, examining the dark fluid. She rubbed it between finger and thumb, tasted it, then pulled a face and spit it out. “I feel…” she said.
“So what do you feel?” Khronos pressed her impatiently.
“What I felt before!” the crone said defiantly. Then she looked frightened of him again and shrank away.
“You said Death had been born into the world,” Khronos said.
“Yes, can’t you feel it?”
He didn’t answer immediately, then said in a low voice, “Yes, I feel it.”
The old woman sat forward. “What does it look like outside?”
“The sky is dark and it is raining mud. There are trees fallen over as far as the eye can see. There are… animals… lying dead on the ground. Many animals. The birds have fallen from the sky. Far in the east, beyond the gray hills, there is a column of black smoke stretching from the earth to the heavens, as if from a great fire.”
Wali covered her mouth with her knuckled hand, eyes bulging.
“It is Death,” she whispered fiercely, her entire body trembling. “Death has come to devour the world!”
He questioned her some more, but that is all that she would say. It was all that she could say, he finally decided. She might feel, but she did not know, and so he rose with a grunt of irritation and returned to the mouth of the cave.
He stood there, watching black raindrops splash into black puddles. Not all the nearby trees had fallen over. Some of the nearer ones still stood, but he could see them lying on the hills further away. More and more of them were fallen the further away he looked.
He could not see the column of black smoke from the entrance of the cave. The entrance of the cave did not face in that direction, but that was probably a good thing. If the opening of the cave had been pointed in the direction of the black column, all of the clan probably would have perished the night before.
Khronos did not know this. Like Wali, he only felt it.
What he felt was some nameless dread in his belly, something separate from his shock at the destruction the daylight had revealed. He had felt this dread once before, when he was out hunting on his own one day and realized a large tiger was stalking him. The predator had not given itself away. It had not made a sound. Khronos had suddenly just known it was there, creeping through the underbrush toward him, close enough to pounce, and he had bolted up a tree like a monkey, his heart stuttering in his chest. The fear he shared with Wali that morning was like that. He felt some dread beast stalking him, something filled with a terrible intent. He felt that it threatened his people in some way, that it threatened the whole world, but he also felt that he must see it.
See it and, perhaps, make war on it.
10
What if Wali was right? What if the god of death really had been born into the world? And what if he could lay hands on it? Make war on it? What if he could kill Death?
The implications drove Khronos to distraction.
Khronos was not ordinarily given to flights of fancy. Perhaps his imagination had been inflamed by all the destruction he had witnessed. Perhaps he had been tormented by death and deprivation for so long that the mere notion of destroying death, no matter how farfetched, was just too attractive to dismiss. He stood at the entrance of the cave for most of the day, watching the black rain fall, his brow furrowed in thought. Once or twice, a member of the Gray Wolf Clan approached him, tried to draw him into conversation, but he waved them away with a snarl of annoyance.
What if he could kill Death?
His mother was old now. Not as old as Wali, but it would not be long before she followed his father into the Land of Warm Days. If he could find Death and kill it, would that then mean that she would not have to die? Would it mean that he would not have to die? And his children…! Trava had already birthed two children who had died before their naming ceremony. If he found Death and destroyed it, then no more Gray Wolf Clan children need ever perish again!
It was a child’s reasoning, but no more ridiculous than any other superstition born of mortal mind. Deities with golden penises. Gods with the heads of animals. Planet Nibiru. I sometimes think the more farfetched an idea is, the more seductive humans find it.
And Khronos was seduced.
He was seduced by the thought of tracking down this incarnate god of death, seduced by visions of confronting death and killing it. The Anaki had only a nebulous idea of what a god was. They worshipped animal spirits and the souls of their ancestors. In their lore, the gods were aloof creatures, entities that dwelled in the Land of Warm Days and were not overly concerned with the affairs of mortal men. The Anaki god of death was a mysterious being named Omak, a shapeshifter that sometimes took the form of a snake or a bear, sometimes a great cat. They did not consider it a malevolent entity, more of a trickster, like Coyote of Native American legend. But if the god of death had been born into the world of the living, Khronos reasoned, then it must have some physical form, and if it was a physical being then it followed that it could be killed.
The next morning, Khronos gathered the clan together and announced what he intended to do. He told them of the visions he had had, and what they might stand to gain if he succeeded in his quest. An end to death, he exclaimed. An end to dying! His eyes blazed with a passion very like religious ecstasy.
He expected his tribesmen to be skeptical, to attack his reasoning, to scoff, but they did nothing of the sort. In fact, they were just as excited by the idea as he was.
That night they had a great feast. There was plenty of meat. There were animal carcasses strewn from one end of their territory to the other. They ate until their bellies were swollen, and then Hama, Old Zambi’s young replacement, prayed to the guardian spirits for a successful hunt.
Khronos left out the following morning, accompanied by nine of the clan’s strongest warriors. Tulpac accompanied him, of course. And then there were his two brothers, his last surviving uncle, the oldest man to join the expedition, and five other tribesmen.
The black rain had stopped falling, though the sky remained heavy and dark with cloud. The men headed east, toward the column of smoke, which was still visible on the horizon. Though thinner, it curled from the earth to the heavens like a great vine.
The men were greatly excited at the prospect of finding Death, and they debated as they traveled what form the deity might assume when they confronted it, and how they might then kill it. Their mood darkened as they progressed, however, as the landscape they journeyed through grew ever more severe.
More and more tree
s lay toppled upon the earth the further east they went. They passed an increasing number of dead animals, their carcasses battered and beginning to bloat. And then they rounded a high, rocky ridge, and the forest on the other side was utterly destroyed, not a single tree standing, not a living thing moving.
Perhaps you’ve seen photographs of the Tunguska explosion. On June 30, 1908, in what is now Krasnoyask Krai, Russia, a meteor or cometary fragment exploded about ten kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The kinetic energy released by the hurtling projectile knocked down trees over an area covering 2,150 square kilometers.
The Event that leveled nearly half the territory of the Gray Wolf Clan was no meteor or cometary fragment, and the destruction that it wrought was not quite so extensive, but the sight that greeted these prehistoric men when they rounded the ridge was very similar to the Tunguska explosion. As far as the eye could see, the forest ahead of them lay flattened, as if crushed beneath the heel of a vengeful giant. And these were men who knew very little of the universe beyond the boundaries of their hunting grounds. These were men who attributed the circumstances of their lives, both good and bad, to the whims of fickle spirits.
I’m sure I don’t have to explain why nearly half of the men wanted to return home immediately.
Khronos was enraged by the terror of his fellow tribesmen. He railed at them, called them cowards. Finally, disgusted, he snarled, “Go home then, and cower with your women at the back of the cave! Perhaps you can help them breastfeed your children!” In the end, only two men turned back. They retreated from the leveled forest as those who remained hurled stones and mocking epithets at their backs.
Khronos watched the two retreat, marking the men in his mind. He would turn them out when he returned, he decided. Exile them from the clan. There was no place in their community for such craven hyenas. But for now he had more pressing matters to attend. Vengeance would have to wait.
“It will be dark soon,” Tulpac said at his side. “Perhaps we should make camp here for the night. Continue in the morning.”
“Let us push on a little further,” Khronos replied, still glaring at the diminishing forms of the two deserters. He glanced at his old friend, who looked strangely childlike with his shaved head and beardless face. He smiled, squeezed his cousin on the shoulder. “A little further,” he said in a gentler voice. “Then we rest.”
Tulpac looked to the east nervously, then sighed and nodded his head.
11
If the Event was no meteor, I can see you wondering, then what was it?
I can’t tell you with any certainty. I only experienced it through the ancient memories of another immortal’s senses, but I can tell you what I think it was.
Many modern scientists believe that our reality is merely one universe in a vast celestial froth of universes. That they nestle together like fragile bubbles, each self-contained universe hosting its own unique set of physical laws, eternally separated by curving walls of impregnable space-time. Some even believe that our reality, all that we see and hear and touch and taste, is a holographic projection of events that take place far, far away, perhaps on the inner surface of our own little cosmic soap bubble-- that our world and all that we know, as the Buddhist philosophers have long attested, is simply an illusion.
But what if the membrane that separated our universe from all those others wore thin? What if there was a breach, and something from another reality spilled over into ours?
That is what I believe happened.
I believe the Strix, the symbiont that dwells within us, is a life form from another universe.
Laugh if you want, but I have tasted the memories of this alien being, tasted them in the blood of the First-of-Us himself, and I can think of no better explanation for the visions I’ve beheld.
I saw a terrible alien world, a world where all life was parasitic in nature, where all living creatures were dream-like and constantly shifting, a starless nightmare world with no beauty, no art, no joy. Only hunger. Endless ravening hunger.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it was merely Hell that I saw.
I prefer to believe there is no Hell. I believe we continue on when we die, that our consciousness persists. I have seen the spirits of the dead myself. But I do not believe in Hell. Hell is just the wishful thinking of spiteful men and women, an imaginary place where they can consign the souls of those who do not suit them. What terrible deity could conceive of such a place anyway? Certainly no god I would want to worship. But I could be wrong. I am just as fallible of the next incarnate fool.
I hope there is no Hell, as I am almost certainly deserving of it. I’ll find out soon enough, I suppose. But I digress…
12
They came across the Neanderthals the following evening.
They had spent the entire day crossing the ravaged landscape, climbing over toppled trees, trudging through pools of water as black as obsidian. The sky was still heavy and dark, the sun a faintly shining bauble behind an ashy veil. The forest stank of death, of the thousands of mutilated animals that lay scattered in their path, birds mostly, but larger creatures, too. Deer, raccoons, opossums, snakes. They even chanced upon a few of the giants that roamed their prehistoric world. A wooly rhino with a great spear of timber driven through its guts. A saber-toothed cat impaled like an insect on a shattered tree stump. An enormous cave bear, its body torn nearly in two.
They had decided to make camp for the night, and were gathering wood for a fire, when Tulpac gave out a shout. Khronos and the rest of the men ran immediately to see what had alarmed him.
“Ananaki,” Tulpac said, pointing at the debris at his feet.
Half-obscured by a mound of shattered vegetation, a Neanderthal male stared up at the sky with milky, sightless eyes. His flesh was swollen and purpled, his lips parted in a grimace of pain. His exposed flesh was covered in cuts, as if he had been caught in a windstorm of blades. Khronos squatted beside the Other to examine the carcass more closely.
“You think he was one of the Ananaki hunting at the edge of our territory?” Tulpac asked.
“Probably.”
“I wonder if any of the rest survived,” Tulpac muttered, surveying their surroundings.
“It’s possible,” Khronos said, rising. “We survived, didn’t we? We’ll post a guard while we sleep tonight, just in case.”
It was quick growing dark. There could be any number of Ananaki hiding in the tumbled foliage—though in the silence, Khronos thought, it would be hard for anyone to sneak up on them.
“There’s another one over here,” Edric called.
All told, they found nearly twenty Neanderthals in the immediate vicinity, all dead. They were men, women, children. Some of them were ripped to pieces. Others looked as if they merely fallen dead, with no signs of injury whatsoever.
“This land belongs to Death now,” Khronos’s uncle hissed, unnerved by all the corpses. “We should return home while we still can.”
Khronos bristled. The column of black smoke they had been journeying toward was only a day’s walk away now.
“It’s too late to turn back now, Uncle,” he said. “We’ve come to do battle with Death, not race back home at the first sign of our quarry. Find your cock, old man, or have you given it to your woman to wear around her neck like a charm?”
The old man sneered. “You have seduced us with your wild visions, Khronos. Any fool can see that this land is cursed!”
Khronos was tempted to strike the old man, and would have done it if he did not look so much like his father. Despite his annoyance, Khronos was reluctant to raise his hand against the old warrior. He also feared that a violent rebuke would lend credence to the old man’s words. The entire party had caught his uncle’s fear, like an infectious disease. They looked ready to bolt at any moment.
“The whole world has been cursed with Death since time began,” Khronos said evenly. “Now is our chance to kill Death. Won’t you be brave for another day, Uncle? Let us hunt and kill Death togethe
r, and free the clan from its whims!”
The old man sighed. Despite his anxiety, he was moved by his nephew’s eloquence. “Fine, Khronos. I will join you in victory-- or join you in the Land of Warm Days-- but let us not make camp in this valley of death. I won’t sleep knowing the ghosts of so many Ananaki are lingering nearby. I’ve eaten too many of their brothers and sisters.”
Their laughter broke the spell of fear that the dead Neanderthals had cast upon their party. They moved on until they found a clearing with no dead Others lying anywhere nearby.
They made fire, filled their bellies. Khronos took the first watch, and then Tulpac relieved him. The leader of the Gray Wolf Clan drifted off staring up at the starless sky, comforted by the snoring and farting and slurry sleep-talk of all the brave warriors who’d accompanied him on his quest.
When he woke the next morning, he found that two more men had deserted.
13
He dreamed he was being chased across a barren, shifting landscape.
It was dark. There were no stars in the sky. No sun. No moon. The only light was a dim glow emanating from the strange-looking vegetation that sprouted from the mucky soil.
The bizarre plants undulated rhythmically, grasping at him with fleshy fronds as he raced past. Their glowing patterns flashed when they made contact, their grasping stalks leaving a sticky residue on his flesh that smelled a bit like blood.
His entire body was slick with sweat, his breath hot in his chest, his heart pounding. For some reason he was naked, but that didn’t matter because Death was just behind him. Death was chasing him soundlessly through this awful alien dreamscape.
Death, he saw, when he glanced back over his shoulder, was a dark amorphous mass from which dozens of whipping tendrils extended, twisting and snapping in the air, straining out to snare him.
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 4
