Fate’s Peak

by Scott Volentine

  FIVE

  William kept his eyes on the ground as he strode into the desolation, the grey soil swirling past each step. Clumps of dead grass and stones splashed different shades of grey along his path, which he stepped around, but the ground was flat and the going was easy. Dimensional connections heightened his reflexes, his legs growing steadier with each step—bearing the weight of his body with ease. The sensations of breaking in a new body absorbed his attention for a long while, the clicking of his bones, the tugging of his tendrils, his muscles burning.

  After a while William’s attention shifted back to his external world, and he stopped to scan the horizon for the point rising over the horizon. Spotting the hazy landmark, he held a couple fingers across his field of vision to conceal it from view. He sighed, wondering how his untrained body could carry him that far, then he raked his gaze across the sky, noting the Sun’s descent towards the same horizon, the pale glare streaming under the brim of his hat. The star’s energy pulled him forward like he was in a race against it—and it was rolling down the hazy sky faster than he dared imagine. He bent his head down and broke into a trot, his heart hammering upon his chest at the thought of the Sun vanishing behind the horizon again, releasing the horrors of the night.

  William’s breath started catching in his throat, forcing him to slow his pace. With no shelter in sight, no sizeable boulders he could use as windbreakers, to hide from the flies, he had to resign himself to spending another night laying in the open desolation, an easy target of those darkest thoughts he had managed to stuff away during the day. He glanced over his shoulder where he had come from and saw nothing to distinguish any pattern, the whole world radiating lethargy through the grey swaths painted across the landscape. No memories beckoned him from behind, so he turned forward to the distant horizon. Logic assured him that his body had the strength to carry him to his hazy destination. He shielded the Sun from his eyes with a hand and saw the point beckoning him on the horizon had not grown a centimeter. I can learn this game.

  Thinking about how the point on the horizon centered his quest, guiding his actions, his attention was snatched by a patch of fresh air wafting over his head; he inhaled deeply, relieving his lungs from the stale air for a moment, treasuring the energy he felt filling his core. The moment passed, and the stench of the next breeze—like a carcass hung up to dry—swept into his lungs like burning cinders, the scent causing his stomach to churn in protest.

  William realized he would have to ignore his sense of smell to retain his sanity amid so many competing stimuli. He set up a mental block over that sense, to which he devoted his full attention as he tipped the brim of his hat down to block the sunlight streaming ever closer to the ground and strode on through the desolation.

  As William’s shadow stretched further behind him, into a thin strand that fettered out into the grey soil, he started to feeling sharp aches and pains in his body, the onset of lethargy. Without warning, the muscles in his thigh cramped up and failed to support his weight. He grimaced and dropped to the ground, massaging his leg to loosen the tightness, ease the burn. A waft of the putrid air slipped up his nostrils and penetrated his defenses with ease. He bent forward and started dry heaving as his stomach tumbled around his guts.

  The last of his energy faded and William dropped to the ground, squirming in the dirt as he waited for the agony to pass. His leg stopped throbbing over time, but his stomach refused to be ignored, gurgling deep within his body. He hugged himself tight, trying to gain control of his body. He felt how his stomach seemed to have shrunk in on itself, realizing it was not revolting against the stench in the air but was calling attention to a deeper problem—reminding him of his mortality.

  William calmed his mind and mulled over the knowledge that had been instilled in him before his birth: visions of fruit flashed through his mind. I’m hungry! He needed to find something to fill his stomach to keep his body going. The bitter aftertaste of the air dusted the back of his throat; he cried out in desperation. Where can I find anything to eat? He glanced around his area and spotted a brown clump of grass a short distance across the ground. Is that edible?

  William crawled through the dirt and grabbed a handful of the withered vegetation, ripping it out of the soil and stuffing it into his mouth. As he chewed, an acrid taste trickled down his throat, causing it to constrict. Against his body’s protest, he swallowed then plucked another handful of grass. His stomach seized up and started heaving, bile rose to his throat and he doubled over, vomiting black cud onto the dirt. William leaned back from the mess and tossed the handful of grass away. He coughed and spat wads of saliva into the dirt until the acrid taste left his mouth.

  Visions of fruit once again danced through William’s mind, compounding his torture with temptation. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind of thought, trying to desensitize himself to his stomach’s demands, just so he could get back on his feet. He had to keep walking and hope to find something edible. Despite his effort to center himself, the fruit continued to dance across his closed eyelids—ripe, bulging with juice, begging to be eaten. A sob wracked through him: I am a slave to my body’s needs, though it be naught but a vessel to carry my mind. Why was my Father so cruel?

  William groaned and opened his eyes, his heart skipping a beat when he saw a bunch of spherical objects that were glimmering purple in the sunlight where they rested upon a weathered rock a few meters across the plain from him. His mind was wiped blank by the impossibility of the fruit’s existence, and he stared at the grapes for several moments, until his stomach gurgled acid up his esophagus. Not taking his eyes from the fruit, William pushed himself to his feet and crept across the ground like a thief at market, expecting the grapes to pop back out of existence if they sensed his approach. William came within reach of the grapes and paused; still they continued to sparkle in the sunlight. A shiver ran down his spine as he reached out his hand and took hold of the bunch by the stem.

  Their weight proved the grapes were not a hallucination. William plucked one from the bunch and inserted it into his mouth, tumbling it around on his tongue and chewing. Juice gushed out, so sweet it brought tears to his eyes. He swallowed and plucked off the next one, then the next, popping them into his mouth in an orgy of flavor that ran down his throat. His stomach ceased to grumble as he tore through the bunch, and his body relaxed as it stopped feeding on itself. What a strange body.

  When the bunch had been reduced to a network of stems, William turned his thoughts to the grapes’ origins. He recalled the morning council with his Father, how He had promised to watch over William. He smiled when he remembered his body had been created full-grown; if his Father could do that, then surely, He could have generated the fruit. I probably should be quicker asking for help. I feel so alone in this land of nothing, I feel like I’m being crushed under nothing, but that doesn’t mean I’m alone.

  William tossed the stems away and saw the rock’s shadow had stretched meters across the dirt. He turned his gaze to his directional point on the horizon, swallowed in the light of setting Sun, and quickly glanced away. Light spiraled through the dusty atmosphere, painting swatches of orange and pink across the sky, like a Divine Painter kept a studio up there and wanted him to know that beauty could still be found in this world. The sight did little to comfort William, not like the sunrise at all. This time he was being fed back into the terror of the night.

  William remembered how loud the flies buzzed as they swarmed across the land, and his heart started hammering in his chest. The closer they came to me, the worse the despair became. I need to guard myself from them, but how could I keep them away? He wracked his mind for any bits of knowledge tucked away in his skull that might help, but he could not figure out why this land displayed such hostility to him, why the realm he had been sent to save seemed like it wanted to kill him. But he knew there had to be some kind of equation that had turned Nature against Life, so he figured that a counterfo
rce had to exist that would correct the skew, to purge the blight that had spilled across the material realm.

  SIX

  The color faded from the sky, the blue deepening almost to black, but Sol Invictus sent a message down to William before the screen of Light disappeared from the sky and the boiling red inferno of the Heavens appeared. The Sun’s energy tingled through him, words whispered into his mind: “Do not fear, child. Night has come and I must make my leave, but do not let the horrors overwhelm you. Remember me as I guided you through the day, lifting you out of the Darkness. Do not fall into the trap again, remember I will not lead you astray. I swear my allegiance to you, William, and I shall be with you to the end of your quest.

  “I sense in you a certain ideal, long absent from this land, and I believe the ideal you embody is enormous, beyond any physical restraint. It shines in your mind with a purity not seen in all stretches of Time, except once… In you I see the counterpoint to all the death that litters my temporal path with gravity traps. In you, I see a grand potential: the ability to create a better world, one that won’t be wasted away by Life as they rush past it and into their graves.

  “William, you, alone from all the false redeemers who have passed beneath my gaze, possess true knowledge of the fundamental flaw. Do not doubt my devotion, child. I give you my solemn vow that you will succeed.”

  Sol Invictus addressed these words to William alone, but the implications of the energy signature vibrated and echoed across the whole wasteland, humming down into a cave somewhere out there and resounding through a network of caverns where a multitude of predatory animals lay in hibernation. These beasts, under the thralldom of Death, were shocked out of their stasis by the vibrations in the stale air. Sensing what had been told to William, the beasts came to in a frenzy as they searched for a way out of their confinement, the way to fresh air.

  The caverns became deadlocked at narrow points and where stalagmites funneled the beasts closer together—a mix of bears, assorted large cats, languid wolves and jittery hyenas, the odd boar with its curved tusks, a Komodo dragon and a couple crocodiles, even an anaconda slithering from a deeper chamber followed by pythons, vipers and cobras—all moving towards the fresh air, their bodies wiggling as they pushed together, snarling and snapping at each other, and all of this in total blindness.

  Animal cries ricocheted off the walls as a crocodile lunged and grabbed a hyena in its jaws, which started shrieking as it squirming against the razor teeth, twisting as it bled out on the dusty ground. The scent of death diverted the rest of the horde from their mission and they fell upon each other. A lion roared and lunged at a black bear, gouging blood into the air, but as the bear retaliated the anaconda slithered up behind the lion and wrapped itself around its torso, extending its head and unhinging its jaw to swallow the lion’s head. The bear gouged streaks of crimson along the snake’s body before being bitten by a king cobra. The bear bellowed in fury and stomped its paw down on the cobra, smashing its body into pulp. Wolves swarmed around a leopard, biting chunks out of its flank, while hyena fought off a Komodo dragon that was spitting venom in the air. The savagery echoed through the caverns, shrieks and roars, hisses and growls, cries of rage and pain; the ground soaking in blood as the gore piled up, the cavern reduced to a tomb.

  The commotion caught the attention of the one the beasts were built to serve, the one who had awoken them. The figure of Death appeared silhouetted in the mouth of the cave, draped in a hooded robe and framed by the ruined sky. Death tip-toed down the cave and into the cavern to see what all the noise was about, peaking around a stalagmite at the melee, taking inventory of the different ways the beasts had found to kill each other: a jaguar’s throat ripped out, spurting fountains of blood in the air; a tiger disemboweled, its intestines slopping onto the ground; the rear legs of a hyena sticking out of a python’s mouth; a crocodile squirming on its back and going rigid as poison coursed through its veins.

  Glancing to a corner, Death saw a colossal grizzly bear standing out of the way of the general melee that was circulating around the cavern. The bear sat back and started picking strips of flesh from its teeth with a razor claw, grunting as it flicked the flesh onto the ground. It stood back up and found the brawl had moved further down the cavern. Its eyes flickered red with rage, and with a few bounds of its legs, the bear made its way back into the middle of the fight.

  A wolf began running circles around the bear, looking for an opening to attack. Its tongue hung out, spittle flying through the air as it maneuvered. A gob splashed upon the bear’s nose, sending a shiver racing down its body. The bear roared and reared up on its hindlegs, eliciting a yelp from the wolf, which twisted around and tried to run away. The bear lunged after it, cutting off its escape, and swiped its great paw down upon the wolf’s head, crushing its skull on the ground in a spray of blood.

  The battle of the caverns started to wind down and Death stepped into the open to see most of the combatants sprawled dead in their gore, or else using all their wits to staunch the blood flowing from their injuries. The latter often could do nothing but crawl into the recesses of the cavern so they could die in peace. Only in death did the beasts maintain a sense of dignity, for they were glad to be released from the mortal coil. The moaning and crying gradually faded away, echoing faintly deep into the caverns to remind the beasts that had hid from the battle that these results were the only guarantee in their world.

  Dust hung in the air like a veil concealing the depths of destruction that had been wrought, but the dust dissipated, becoming a haze through which the corpse-strewn floor seemed like a dream. When the dust settled, nothing remained to conceal the victors from their bloody deeds. Not even the most bestial animal was accustomed to such a sight, so the survivors made a mad dash towards the cave’s opening, stampeding past Death and disappearing onto the plain.

  Inside the cavern, only one beast remained, padding from corpse to corpse, sniffing them to find the death wounds and pushing the bodies around like playthings. While it snuffled around a lion’s carcass, Death crept up behind the bear.

  “I see you take an interest in death as well.” Death’s pale face shone deep in its hood, its lipless mouth showing rotted teeth, a nose so flat it seemed nothing but a lump, and deep red orbs glowing in its eye sockets. The bear grunted and turned around to see what the interruption was; though it was a dumb beast, it knew Death. Nodding its head, the bear walked over to Death and sat down at its right-hand side, waiting to see what would happen next.

  Death chuckled and patted the bear on its head. “Good boy. You seem pretty smart for a bear. Good for you. You can stay and watch me clean up if you wish.” Death marched to the center of the cavern, rolling up its sleeves to expose more bone, and it started chanting an atonal mantra, shuffling its feet and waving its hands through the air. As the dance concluded, Death clapped its hands and all the corpses scattered across the cavern burst into incandescent flames. The flames burned for a moment, and when the light faded away the corpses disappeared with them.

  Death started whistling as it strolled towards the mouth of the cave, and the bear followed at his side. They stopped under the red glow of the night sky, the cosmic ruins, and Death looked down at the bear, sighing. “Hey, bear, don’t you have somewhere else to be? I don’t need any companions. I work alone.”

  The beast sat back on its haunches and watched as Death patted its robes, searching the hidden pockets, to make sure nothing had been left behind, and when Death walked out onto the plain, the bear rumbled after it. Stomping its feet, Death shouted, “God dammit, I can’t stand the nights around here! You, bear, you stay with me tonight, but I want you gone first thing in the morning.”

  The bear growled in subservience as the duo set off to find shelter from the swarms of flies. Half an hour later a wolf loped out of the cave’s mouth and disappeared onto the plain.

  SEVEN

  The energy of Sol Invictus did littl
e to relieve William’s panic. The dawn was too far off to think about, with the long night ahead of him. He scurried across the ground, looking for some way to guard himself. As the sunset deepened and flared to burnt ochre, an image of flames flashed through William’s mind, and sensations from an unlived life: the texture of stems and branches being fed into a campfire. He crossed the plain to a clump of the dead grass and ripped it all out by the roots, gathering all the blades into a pile on the ground.

  William closed his eyes and held his hands over the grass. Father, he prayed, I fear the night coming on. The horror. I beg you, fire could keep the flies away. He opened his eyes to see a spark glowing within the clump of grass, a flash of fire consuming the withered vegetation in a moment, sputtering into a cloud of smoke that drifted into William’s eyes. He blinked and wiped a few tears away, then looked around the dusk landscape in a light daze.

  The last sliver of the Sun dipped beneath the horizon and the sky opened on the Galactic wasteland, on all the shattered stars. William looked up as the red glow washed down from the sky and saturated the land, quickly bringing his gaze to the ground, the dirt and rocks glowing in the radiation. His ears picked up a faint buzzing in the distance, trembling as the swarm grew louder. At a loss, he did the only thing he could: curling up on the ground and whipping his cape over his body.

  William cringed as the flies landed on his thin cocoon and started milling around the cape. He wondered if he would be able to survive another night like this, but he caught himself: I can’t think like that. Survival is required of me, so I will survive.

  William let his thoughts drift away, and he had to wonder where the flies disappeared to during the day. Did these automatons have families to return to? How could they? They seemed to operate through a hive mind, so the swarm was their family. Had they dug burrows around the wasteland where they could hide from the Sun, or did they simply disappear into thin air? What function did they serve in this wasteland?