Driving

Driving

Driving in the dark, tired. Trying to remember something. Out into night beyond the road is endless, still fields. Tall shadows under a clear and moonless sky. The backbone of the Milky Way sprawls in glorious omnipresence, and I feel diminished beneath it, rightfully. Window cracked so I can smoke because Stacy hates getting in and smelling the signature *Camel* scent. Radio crackles to me in whispers— think it’s jazz.

Driving. A straight road to the end of the horizon. A pre-Columbian vision where the world ends, drops off into the dark, and I can imagine so many castaways drifting as payment for their reckless exploration. Twist the dial for the radio, looking for *WQ34-9*, thinking they’ll say something about the game—

I blinked. Jolt. The road is dirt. Narrow. I’m in a field, surrounded by tall shadows. The radio hisses in long, droning notes like I’m listening to the sea crashing on the shore. Sitting in the dark. No wind. No stars. Fingers caked in ash from a stumped cigarette. Something ancient twitches inside me and makes me look skyward, pressing back into my seat, hand clawing for the glovebox, for the gun—

The stars are going out. Darkness spreads. Silence. The radio hissing mixes with the rush of my blood until it’s all I can hear, all I can feel. Something above, something coming, shaking hand closing around cold metal, fumbling and grabbing, trying to pull—

Light cuts the darkness. Bright, unnerving sunlight done in red. An ugly sunrise at midnight. I’m shaking. Sweating, drenched, pulling at the seatbelt, throwing the door open. *Run, run, run*—

The red engulfs me. Numbness erupts, engulfs me. I can *feel* it looking down at me, looking into me, and the familiarity all comes back, the memories explode from hissing silence. Driving to run from the light, to hide. Hoping if I cross state lines I can retreat—

*D O N O T B E A F R A I D*

A chorus of voices.

I’m surrounded. The red light dominates the sky and the darkness of the night fills countless, bottomless eyes.

Godforsaken Place

The Gods have not finished this place. The Gods have abandoned this place.

The Gods have forsaken this place.

When we landed on its shores, we were five hundred thousand. Five thousand remain. Shambling. Pale. Gaunt.

The land is chaos and disaster. Black rock bellows it’s rebellion against the sky and hurls upward into the night. Bone-chilling wind screams across the waste and slashes ceaseless raking claws over us, snatching away breath and tearing our fragile wills into so many ribbons. My footsteps over the ice are little more than stumbling confusion, kept only forward by the men behind me, and those behind them, on and on by discombobulated thousands. The overseers amongst us are mirages, ghosts; even their cruelty has been obliterated by this godforsaken place.

We are running from an angry, rioting Earth. Running at the pace of dead men. We surge toward a looming plateau of barren stone and clinging, hardy grasses. A place of stability. I pray Azh, and Yu-Hueq, and so many others to grant us this place to stand. My frozen toes knock against the ground, my eyes weep and flutter against agonizing cold.

I am not ready to die.

Far away, across the ice, Hell is in revolt. Our army stands in silent awe as the elements do their battle and all the murmuring voices of ten thousand fighting men is vanished. We have become like sentinel statutes on desolate land; monolithic and wordless in the dark. Down below I can see the last vestiges of our straggling legion hurling themselves onto this island of stability and even far so from away their countless star-illuminated faces shine with fear, scrabbling and scurrying like vermin discovered by a wrathful lord. Even now the ground is splitting, swaying under their boots and I know many, too many, will not find safe ground to perch upon.

I can’t look away. Many of us collapse to the hard, unforgiving earth. Men who have fought and killed with spears, with hands and teeth; weep openly. They whisper the name of far away divinities, hands clutching in satchels and beneath frigid plate for effigies, offerings.

Mountains erect themselves in heaving juts where once there had been plains and lowlands like bones in insurrection against the flesh they inhabited. We feel it tremble. Hear the almighty groans surging in waves greater than any battle hymn we have sung. Everything shakes, everything becomes uncertain and unmoored, the foundations of all that is unshackled from order into free-falling pandemonium. We watch in frozen terror as a thousand, more, are swallowed up by darkness which was once ground. Their voices rise up like the begging chorus of the damned.

The glow of an inferno seethes down in those craters and I sway on the lip of the island, mesmerized by a terrifying sight. A glimpse into a world far beneath us. Unfit for Men. Unfit for his Gods.

The Night Church has many followers.

Beneath moist, worn floorboards and in the bellies of listing ships moored at graveyard harbor, they wait.

The Night Church has many hymns.

They rise up from cavernous mausoleum keeps and ring out in churches claimed twice; once by the fires of ruin, twice by the hunger of green roots.

The Night Church has many commandments.

Thou shalt stain the snows with hoof prints, thy shalt knock thrice at the windows of fearful parish, thou shalt not cease thy march until row upon row of abbey lies empty and lifeless..

The Night Church has many teachers.

The headless, bare-bodied feminine statue in that hidden garden, where the whispers come from more places than just breeze. The starless-night colored monolith standing sentinel on its cliff faced sanctuary, lulling sailors to dash their fates on razor rocks. The book that weeps bloody tears, tucked under a floorboard, waiting for frightful pages to be turned.

The Night Church has many paths.

Up through rotten cellars and across harvest moon skies, down bottles tainted black by feral touch and into dreams you dare not speak of.

The Night Church is boundless.

The Night Church is eternal.

The Night Church is coming.

EON, USA

This place feels old. Older than it has any right to be.

Hidden between cliffs and the plains, under an untamed sky. Civilization feels like a footnote, a temporary blip in pages eons deep. Even with roads and the first tentative electric lights to challenge the stars, even with the iron horses thumping this way and that across so much empty— the town *feels* old. Maybe it’s the land. Maybe it’s the bones of the earth that it lies upon.

Everyone can feel it, the strangeness. It lingers at the edge of their words and in the fringes of their long, quiet looks beyond the boundaries like an omen.

When the wagon trains first came in their droves, there were stories of eerie stalking shapes across distant hills, and scouts puzzled over three-toed tracks big as a man. In the night there were no howls from wolves, just the sound and scent of an ocean long vanished into time; just the feeling of mighty shapes weightlessly swimming overhead.

The farmers have long since turned a blind eye to their mutilated cattle, butchered and battered into scant piles. Whatever it is that eats them can crack iron like frail bones, and eat a longhorn whole. Braggadocious hunters from both coasts have all retreated into quiet extinction, their eager crusades left with no legacy but disquieting nothingness. The cattle continue to disappear down unseen gullets.

The town is old. Weary, creaking. Even in the age of satellites and highways, it remains. Hidden between cliffs and plains, under an untamed sky, smelling of an ocean vanished to time.

Time is the great band. Beginnings bleed into endings, bleed into beginnings. This is the nature of all things. What dies nurtures the soil, and life rises out of its black foam, and what falls upon it is consumed in turn to nurture what comes next. Out of the muck from the earliest days until the hammer blow of extinction sent it back, only to crawl once again forward— ever forward. Defiant to the cyclical ends that are so numerous. Death. Plague. Conflict.

How many times were our ancestors reduced, resigned back to primitive form? How many generations of potential obliterated by so many fearsome ends, each form cut away by that cold scythe that dictates what lives and what dies? Ninety-nine percent of all life forms upon the Earth have withered and died. A cathedral of the extinct is the greatest achievement of this living world, not the things it has produced that breath and fight and breed, no— it’s mightiest haul is all the bones, all the skeletal remnants tucked away in her soils. The chorus of life is but a whisper to the requiem that follows, millions upon millions of voices strong.

When my people arose it seemed that we were the inheritors of a mighty mantle. An impossible age was upon us. Immortal, invincible— the apotheosis of industries and arts that our minds had summoned from purest imagination to hardest realities. Continents became little more than gardens for us to shape, the weather and its rebellious storms tamed with simple amusement until every day was pleasant and demure to our liking. We forged metal, flesh. Even light became just another palette to the artist and the engineer in all the shapes of our divine whim. We kissed other worlds until the stars in the night sky sang with the influence we wrought. Those first travelers, machines as they may be— they were the heralds of our coming upon the Galaxy..

And then came the loss. The disease that was upon us then was slow and ancient already, a stilling sickness that did not rot flesh or weaken bone; no, no, this silent dredge did nothing more but dull our minds, weaken our wills. Immortality brought weakness, endless resources stifled creativity. Our art, majestic and vast and mighty as it was, and it was mighty!— all of it blended, meshed. We were all doing the same in our countless, same-same-same heavens.

That was not what killed us, no, but it did weaken us just enough. Cracks in the walls from tenacious vines, hungry mold. Just waiting for the right push.

The Adversary came. Our Nemesis. And it was relentless. Merciless. It was the face of annihilation. An out-of-context event that turned so much divinity and so much power into ash, into the painfully folly that was. We crashed, we burned. We broke. So many beautiful fresco shards immolated. The continents we had tended melted away into slag, the storms we had tamed became raging gales that stripped the soil and stone from so many surfaces until all that was left was obliteration. They scoured all that we had touched. Like God erasing our hubris from his creation.

We ran. What else was there to do?

We vanished into the dark. Burning and burying all that was left behind, all that might incriminate the direction of our exodus. Some fled to a distant galaxy, believing this affliction was here and here only, amongst familiar stars. Others buried themselves in obscure, esoteric ritual and mindsets, hoping to vanish into regressive pasts that might unfold. Legions of dreamers and acolytes wove wonderful delusions for themselves, for the minds that remained, bodiless and hidden in tiny alcoves scattered. Others still went out into the Maw, believing they could reason with our oncoming extinction. Their questions were all silenced. One by one.

In our flight we found the ruins. The tombs and abandoned projects, the memories; all of it came with the realization of what had come before. The endless cycles of time realized in fragments, in pieces. Life arose, mind igniting in the sludge and the cold and the harshness, the inevitable ascension. And then the hurried, black silence that was total and uncompromising. Snuffing out civilizations in a methodical diminishing. One by one. Until nothing remained but the silence. When we found the remnants of our distant, forgotten forebears, and the telltale signs of their own inescapable fates, we had no time to mourn. The Adversary was already upon us.

It still is. We are at our Cradle now, though it is unlike to be where we truly originate from. It is all that remains. Our enemy walks the surface and soon will be amongst here, down beneath. Finishing their ultimate work. We do not why. Never will we know.

In our final hour, in our last struggle, we leave this record for you. These few, precious gifts.

May the cycle end with you.

Or let your end be sudden and complete.

You wake in a dramatic place. It seems that way anyway, you think, dramatic.

The fear of waking and knowing *nothing* is a panic so deep that you shiver, exhaling a heavy racking breath. You have no name, plunging down into an empty darkness within trying to find any vestige of what you were—anything, anything, anything. But nothing comes. Just that first formative sense of illumination followed by a breath that feels like it’s been taken after far too long. It fills you entirely and for a moment, you cling to that calmness. Looking around you.

Great banners hang taut from huge, bulging structures done in crimson and azure. It’s seen better days, though, you think— craters litter dusty ground, many of the banners torn and sheered as if great claws have dragged down them. There’s a sky above you, crammed with brilliant stars swimming in languid vermillion waves. Far away stones vast as mountains silently stare back across that void. Something buzzes near you and, with preternatural awareness you did not know you had, you snatch it from the air.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you!”cries a small voice, and you snap to its source with panic and terror and a fragment of excitement. You do know when you were spoken to last (maybe you’ve never been spoken to!), but the notion of communication makes your heart sail. So, you open your fist, fixing your four eyes to them.

It’s a small thing, big enough to fit in your hand comfortably. It twirls, fidgeting with nervousness and excitement, a singular blue eye glowing brightly back at you. This— drone?— feels like it is smiling at you, even if it has no real face to speak of. A nervous smile, you think. You *laugh*. It is a deep, rumbly sound that fills this empty and dramatic place with a unique warmth. You and the drone feel it reverberate out into the silence, and then you laugh again. It feels *good*! The drone joins, it’s tinny voice almost musical.

When the laughter is gone, sailing outward to those far away starlight mountains, you turn back to your companion (yes, that feels *right*), you speak.

*What is your name?*, you ask, mouthparts clicking. Something deep down sparks inside you, something familiar. Words. Speaking. A faintest suggestion that once, words and speeches carried a weight to you, a naturalness—

“I am Clementia”, says your friend. It comes closer, just a few spans from your face. It’s brightness feels so welcoming, so familiar.

“I’m your Ghost, and you”, Clementia says twirling, “are a Guardian— my Guardian.”

When you stand from the ground of the dramatic place, turning to follow Clementias brilliance, you nearly trip over something in the dirt. It’s a great mantle, a thing of bone and metal. It was great *once*, at least, you can see that through the rust and signs of damage; one great horn scorched, the other shattered into several half-buried halves. Another flickering down deep inside you comes, hard as one of those tumbling mountains slamming into you: phantoms of burdens and designs, betrayals that stole sleep and peace from you, a final trial—

“Guardian?” Clementia hovers, pleasant as starlight.

In silence, warmed by a new purpose, you leave the place of your rebirth. Together.