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I will tell you a story, beloved;
a story of a cradle.
Once,
there was a world,
bobbing and spinning within the center of her space,
infused with life, alit by lights both great and small,
upon her and above her.
From the beginning, she had borne her children
—not to stay, but to leave.
But, the children did not always play well.
And, they did not always leave well.
Sometimes they pushed each other out.
Sometimes, they pushed each other hard.
On this cradle lay a vastness of mountains and forests, lakes and islands, rivers and valleys and plains. Half the cradle, the children called Mikon; the other half was water.
On the land, the children lived.
The children often grew into monsters.
Fires and floods, storms and quakes, blood and steel and wood and life, crackled and cracked. This happened many times in Mikon.
And monsters laughed—
while a mother cried, and a father sighed…
I look upon them with my power, beloved—
with the power that doomed them.
I look through their space; I see their times.
I read their words.
I read their minds.
I will allow them to tell their story, letting them lead where I will look, respecting them.
I will live within them; I will let them teach me.
I will let them speak through me, as they would have spoken.
I will tell what they would have told, had they been able.
I will do no less.
I can do no more.
no more.
❖ ❖ ❖
And so I look along the line of their time. Three sources gleam as lights to begin my hunt, through the darkness of their history—that they do not know has almost reached its end.
I see a stag, stepping cautiously through the dappled shadows of early night, cropping grass as it moved from place to place, comfortable in its confidence, instinctively trusting its nose and ears in the quiet misty dusk.
Its reactions to food, and brush, and paths of unquiet travel were largely predictable; but, the buck couldn’t know this.
So, it was entirely natural for the deer to pass too close to one particular tree.
From behind that tree, now on the deer’s left flank, an unnatural shriek erupted.
The deer’s heart surged! —it leaped away in the other direction, responding precisely in line with its instincts.
Consequently, the deer leaped straight through a wall of brush.
The stag thrashed the entangling branches and leaves, ripping with its rack of antlers. The threatened attack had not yet come, but the stag couldn’t ponder what this meant. It only struggled, eventually tearing free on the brush’s farther side, bleeding from minor cuts, its right eye swollen shut from a poke by a branch.
The stag gasped for air, and gathered itself to leap again—
—one leg crumpled as weight was applied.
The deer crept through the tiny glade, regressing to cries of infancy.
But, it couldn’t bear the physical stress; and so it fell, quietly.
Its ears twitched; its nostrils flared; its neck bobbed, this way and that. All these movements made it feel more comfortable—slightly. Nothing gave it new signs to fear.
The stag began to relax. The starlight-speckled glade was swirling in the deer’s euphoric relief.
The deer felt sleepy.
The deer felt a spike punch through its lungs and heart.
It jerked in response—then spiraled deeper into its relief…no leap could save it from such a wound.
The deer felt only its final need—as if to sleep.
The spike stabbed, twice again. The deer felt neither stab.
The dull-black spike, longer than the body of the deer, withdrew: gripped, by a black hand, of a black arm, glistening with sweat, stretching from the nearby brush. A tall, limber creature raised itself on legs with muscles taut as cables.
Unlike the deer, the only hair the creature wore was thin and close on the top of its head.
Unlike the deer, the creature wore…more—though not much more than hair: short barbadense trousers, harvested from Manavilin Island; woven in Fyzabad City; dyed—black to match the creature’s skin.
The deer would have thought the creature a monster, had it been able to judge.
The creature thought of himself as a man.
But he wondered, as he laid his palm on the deer he had pierced, how close he was to being a monster.
The man did not gloat over his crafty slaying. He had alerted the deer, not only to make it entangle itself—but to give it a fair running start.
He would have trotted silently afterward, tracking the sounds of flight, the sight of starlight-scattering flicks in the night, even the smell of the blood.
Had it escaped detection, he would have bidden the deer goodspeed.
The deer would not, *could *not, have begun to understand fairness.
Sometimes, the man wished neither could he.
In recent weeks especially.
The man returned through the forest, bearing the body away from the quiet nightly hum, the patchy starlit glades. He returned: to the brightening fires of controlled destruction, by which his species survived—even when at peace.
His species hadn’t been at peace for several seasons.
He passed pickets; then paced between the fires at night—a creature who killed: a man of the Guacu-ara…the Hunting Cry.
The men and women around him didn’t see him, as he carried his catch to the cooks of the camp; or, if they happened to see him, they looked away.
They did not speak to him; because he never really spoke to them.
Because he never really spoke to them, words had boiled his brain for weeks. He had bought a book and pen.
So he returned, to where he had put his small, blank book; through dangerous men who shrank away if they saw him, back to each other and back to their fires, back to polishing swords and axes, back to the safety that lay in numbers.
For this man, Seifas, safety had never lain in numbers; but in movement, in striking first and striking last.
Yet, now, as he slid into his own small tent, he faced an enemy he could no longer avoid, with which he must now do battle—perhaps to the death.
He faced his own despair.
Seifas sat, knelt, lay himself down; turned up his small lantern; and started to write:
“It all has fallen apart . . .”
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