THE GOD’S HEADS.
The sun was so bright the sky was empty.
I was wearing only the last layer of my clothes, the white undergarment and the skin-tight pants that protected my legs while riding the horse. I was suffocating in the heat and they allowed me this comfort, at least for a little while.
But under the stretching shadow of the mouth of the mountain I allowed the women of the procession — my procession — to dress me up again. In all the clothes I would need to live where I was going. Stacked them up until they could barely clasp the fur cloak. Forcing it closed with a brooch that bore a coat of arms, our coat of arms.
The Chief said… she said something. I can’t remember it now. I agonise before I sleep thinking about it. Maybe it was a blessing or advice. A warning, I dared hope. But all my senses were on that passage between the pillars, off into the strip of eastern sun trying to slide past the cover of the mountains.
“Eskel,” said the Chief, still atop her horse, she hadn’t stepped down from it. The pupils of her cat eyes were pinched into slits. “Take care of yourself, alright? you’ll be well-cared for, and in turn you will care for us.”
I remember hating the noise the coins around my ankles made as I stepped between the walls cutting through the mountain. I remember thinking this place wasn’t made for noise, wasn’t made for me. Wasn’t made for a human being to desecrate it.
But one after the other had done it, now it was my turn.
I tried to listen for the hoofs of the horses but the world outside ceased to exist. There was only the valley now, with me as the only human in the entirety of it.
I knelt on the edge of the path, my knees cushioned by skirts and pants, looking down at the drop that would deposit me on the grassland. Steps crawling their way down the face of the cliff to aid my descend. The sun glared at me with intensity, no obstructions, and I wanted to claw at my skin. It felt like a god was staring down at me. In this place of all places, one probably was.
I heaved, doubling over, expecting to start crying but I was dry.
Not yet, I thought.
I shed the layers of clothes until I wore just the travelling cloak over the camisole. then I used the ceremonial robe, the largest of them, to carry all the other clothes like a sack. Bare, the breeze of the valley hit me in full and I shivered despite the heat of dawn.
Half-way down the steep stairs I saw the falcon, big as a mountain lion. She screamed at me. Despite knowing she would be here, I still startled so bad I almost fell to my death. I laid limp and pathetic on the stone steps, my clothes rolling over the edge and hitching a quicker ride to the grass below. (They would survive the fall, I wouldn’t have). I saw the cloak burst open and my garments carried a few meters by the breeze.
The falcon screamed again. I knew to expect her this time and covered my face when she came close, hiding behind my arms when she flapped gales of wind that whipped back my hair, when dust and bits of rock came loose from the cliff.
Her talons were the size of my hand, thick as my fingers, and they dug into the cliff’s face. Perched in place to look at me.
What do they call you? she asked.
“Eskel,” I said.
They call me Yeona, she said.
“Hello, Yeona.”
I’ll bring you down to the valley.
I didn’t mount. She used those talons to grab my arms and then I was dangling in the air, trusting she wouldn’t drop me.
The landing wasn’t graceful, but I had saved myself the trouble of a hundred more perilous steps down the cliff. This was first contact and it felt anticlimactic, something about me should have changed when touching the brittle grass of the valley. My purpose in life should be jumping out of my chest, manifested into its own animal. Maybe my very heart would grow legs and a tail.
But I busied instead in gathering all my clothes in the cloak-turned-sack again. Sweating along my hairline and down the length of my spine, it gathered on my cupid’s bow.
There wasn’t a lot to set eyes upon. Trees and more rocky cliffs in the distance. If I looked a little closer, paid more attention, I realised some of what I thought to be trunks with no branches were actually half-crumbled stone pillars. The landscape was broken with memories.
Memories I belonged to. Memories that stretched into what my people were today. This was ground zero, this was genesis, this was our cosmogony.
And I was just a woman. Tail thin from strict diets that prepared me for this fate, shivering even while I sweat and my scalp scalded in the sunlight.
At least my first step was clear: get to the old tower.
The Chief said it would be the first thing I saw. That was the one thing we all remembered of the valley, how to get to the tower. And this was probably why: there it was, on the line of the horizon, half-crumbled like everything else. An aching tooth that reached for the cloudless sky.
Yeona was gone, circling around me more like a vulture than a falcon. I would receive no aid for this part. Reaching the old tower was my first task, I had to do it by my own hand (or feet) for it to be worth anything at all.
My feet and legs ached and it felt as if i would never reach the end of the grassland. I looked over my shoulder, back to the cliffs, to calculate how much I had advanced. Until I was standing in a point of limbo, were where I’d come from was as far as my destination and I was alone. With no place to go. Mountains blue in the distance, clouds gathering on their crowns, the sun beating down on my shoulders. It felt as if it could force me down to my knees. With nothing but my hands and the clothes to protect me from whatever the sky would want to do to me.
Yeona screamed, as if to remind me of her presence. Maybe warning me against being idle too long, I had to make it to the tower. Otherwise I was but another animal in the valley, instead of coming here with a purpose.
The ruined tower wasn’t made for the living.
The entrance was still standing, though just barely, but it was like building a door in the middle of the air. There were gaps on the walls big enough for me to climb through. I made the decision of walking through the way it was intended, if only to follow the steps I knew would have made the Chief happiest. Even if I knew she would never know about this.
Yeona was waiting for me inside, perched on the decapitated neck of a statue that resembled a woman pouring water out of a dry jug.
I looked to the ceiling with distress, because there was none. The tower would still be standing if there was. The angle of the sun allowed for long and cold shadows, but there would come a point in the day that it would find me again, even inside. I couldn’t sleep here.
I walked through the first door I saw, didn’t think much of it. I just wanted to be somewhere away from the blue sky for a moment.
The cold hit me like a stab to the stomach. It pricked the hairs on my legs and my arms, I hugged the makeshift sack to my chest. Hesitated for barely a second, whatever this was I would see it eventually, anyways. I was to live and die here, why save secrets for some other day?
A mist blanketed the floor up to my ankles, I could feel the cold stone through the leather soles of my sandals. I put a hand on the wall to keep my balance and found it frosted, like a flower in winter. It got worse the farther in you went, until icicles extended at like spears out of the walls and down from the ceiling. All pointed towards the same thing.
I’d known about this too. Like I’d known about the tower. The old stories had few but consistent characters in them, if you could call characters entities that were real as water and fire.
The A.I made less sense in person than in the tales. And you know tales, they always embellish things to make them memorable. But looking at this… this thing. I don’t think they made it justice.
LUX was a sun in itself, but the way suns are in a kid’s drawing. An orb of yellow light surrounded by pointy rays, except these spun like rings with a mind of their own. Into shapes and angles that made me screw my eyes shut when it hurt something in my retinas or my very brain to stare. It scrambled my perception.
I ran out of there, smacking my shoulder against a corner and gasped as if removing myself from its presence had released a grip that had curled around my lungs.
You’ve found the machine, Yeona said. She was watching me from on top of a half-crumbled pillar now.
“I — ” No, I would not cry yet. Those before me had gone into the chamber and managed the A.I, I could do it too, but I couldn’t see how. I couldn’t see why we would build something that felt like that. “How do I — ”
You’ll get used to it, Yeona said.
We blinked at each other. Her head tilted so she could look at me with one of her side-set eyes.
It will show you where to find the Prodigies.
“O-oh.” I had fallen to my knees again, like I’d done when I first entered the valley. I hadn’t even noticed. I pushed myself back to my feet, leaving the makeshift sack on the floor. “I didn’t see — ”
You need to activate the map, Yeona said.
“How do I — ”
Figure it out. Yeona flapped her wings, ready to take off again. With the size of her, the gust of wind made me cough dust. I will wait for you outside, for when you’re ready to see the first group.
Group.
Group?
No, there were eleven prodigies and they were all single-species. They couldn’t reproduce. Only created and there was no one else to create them.
I unmade the sack and clasped the cloak over my shoulders, now that I knew LUX’s chamber would be cold.
It was easier the second time but i still had to bow my head against the light and the impossible shape of it. LUX whirred faintly, like there was a motor inside of it — there probably was. The antithesis of its existence, a bright orange-coloured sun that emanated a sheer cold to frost the entire chamber, was another cause for the pain in my brain.
But, then again, I suppose you must create something impossible to think about taking over the job of a god.
The control board was a slab of stone cut at an angle, cold as the walls but mercifully un-frosted and un-icicled. The buttons were carved shapes, seemingly just decorative, but when my hands came close they glowed the gentle colour of rainbows in a drizzle.
“Show me the map,” I whispered, but LUX had no audio recognition software. It was all done through the control board.
There were no symbols in the shapes, just blank squares and circles and triangles and other such shapes. The ancestors had taken too many precautions, left no hints, just a knowledge you were meant to have. The Chief said it lived inside every chosen guardian, that it was something physical nested between my heart and my stomach. All I felt was the revulsion of being in LUX’s presence.
“Map,” I said again and pressed my fingers on the top left corner of a grid of squares. Hoping maybe I was being guided by outside forces to make the right choices.
