Disposition Matrix
Dec. 14th, 2024 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heya_baruThe tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living.
- Marx
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to
awake.
- Ulysses
In vain did Sedna soak a knot of flax in seawater and nail it to the space above the door with a sliver of stone cut from rock shears hidden under virgin snow. Mizar, being the youngest of the Elders, and thus the least likely to fear the night in which Siātu bites the soft flesh of her heart in the cold, found Sedna’s superstition piteous and stated such dreams were fallow and without the fruit of meaning. When her nightmares persisted, Ceres told her that no Ghost had ever spoken of Siātu, and thus all the ink in the world could not explain her visions. She continued to pray for the remittance of her haunted dreams.
A week later I arrived home to find Sedna and her son dead, the hovel’s interior upturned and blood pouring in rivers across the floor, as if the sun itself had bled the last of her corpse onto the stone. Ceres stood in the corner, talking to himself in the language of the Ghosts. He apologized profusely for the murder of his wife and child, stated that Siātu had shown him the end of the world, and that one day I would understand. He then drove his knife into his neck. I took Rhea’s corpse—the boy still young enough for me to carry—into my arms and ran out the door, where Ceres’s blood, swirling with black ink, flowed down the steps.
The next day, Mizar left a cutting of her hair in a shrine the shape ribcage, draped her only clothes over the crib of her grandchild, and hobbled naked through the town before drowning herself in the ocean. Mimas, the last elder to see Ceres alive, ordered the hovel burned and the ashes mixed with salt.
The next time I saw Mimas, stress had drawn deep shadows into the wrinkles under her eyes. I was sitting in her hovel, as hungry as an infant and inching as close to the fire as my clothing would allow. She looked at me across valleys of despair, fire dancing in her right eye and the stars dimming in her left.
“I do not keep up with the daily labors of the Librarians. How long have you two been copying the scripture?” She said.
“Two months.”
She frowned like a wilting flax stalk and reached above the fire for a boiling pot destined for one of her aging tea mugs. Wind beat against the earthen walls. “You have a grim task ahead of you, Nieh.”
I was dimly aware of the blood draining from my cheeks. In the day since the murders I had distanced myself from my body; flesh and mind I had pried in two until one could see only a shadow of the other. “I know.”
Ten years prior, Yildun’s brother neglected to have an elder bless his scythe before carrying it over the step, so it was that a sweating sickness stooped over Yildun in his sleep, whispering curses into his ear every night until the Librarian gave up his breath. His apprentice, Alcor, had only been studying for a week. By the end of the ordeal, Alcor became the man I knew him as today, a man who does not pray but instead touches two fingers of his right hand to his temple before eating, as a quiet insult to the god who cursed him with an abundance of memory.
Mimas took a sip of her tea. “Ceres awaits you in his dolmen; considering the nature of his crimes, any others who remit themselves of life will be interred elsewhere in the meantime. Siātu hangs over us all like a fog, to be cleared with the winds of prayer and incense.”
I pulled my scarf up to chin, a chill creeping into the gaps under Mimas’s door. Dirt and flecks of snow tumbled across the carpets, but Mimas didn’t seem to mind. Age had thickened her skin as grief had done to her soul; during the last harvest god did not upend his ungenerous jar of grain onto the soil, although he drank well from libations of tears that preceded the famine and gorged himself on the bodies that followed, including Mimas’s unborn granddaughter. Mimas’s sister chose to expose herself so the rations would flow to her begotten; Mimas herself did not make such a choice.
“I’ll need a second Librarian. For my back.”
“Alcor can help, if you find that arrangement acceptable. If you would rather have a woman perform the work, it will have to be Syrma, but she is still a student, and her hand is not as skillful as his.”
I nodded, without signifying any kind of commitment.
Mimas reached for her cane and unsteadily pulled herself to her feet. I motioned to help her, but she directed a glance that said otherwise. “You should go. While there is still time in the day.”
The sun, as still as a corpse, rests her body on the horizon and bleeds into the ocean; the warriors who cut her from the sky dance around her body, but we have never followed them in their darting steps. Bells rang in the distance, signaling the end of the working day. Men draped in layers of muddy linens with frost-bitten cheeks and frozen beards hobbled past, their backs bent from a day’s labor. I walked through them with my head down. Most turned to avoid me. Exhaustion had stolen our voices and fled into tomorrow, the streets silent save for the distant roar of ocean waters rutting the permafrost.
I had to beg an ink vial and needle from Alcor before I left for the dolmen, as Ceres’s has been taken by the fire. No one stopped me from entering the dolmen, although I had no reason to believe they would. I stooped my head to avoid the stone as I stepped down the earthen gate into the interment; The wind ceased to bite my cheeks underground, but the cold was still as bitter as a root.
They had laid Ceres out on the stone, naked as a soul before god. I’ve seen corpses before—my father, my grandmother—but I could not shift my gaze away from him, away from the pale-red cut under his chin, away from the letters etched into every segment of his skin. My heart, heavy as a stone, sunk into my stomach as my task laid itself out; I had never seen Ceres naked before, and never realized the extent to which the Librarians covered themselves in ink. Every part of his back, from neck to rump, every piece of his chest and legs in which a letter could be written, had scripture needled into the skin. I pulled up my sleeves to examine the writing on my arm; compared to him my skin was fresh snow, untouched.
Ceres laid my arm on the table and uncorked an urn of grain spirit. He upended the bottle onto my arm, where it bit into a scrape I had obtained the day before. He gently turned my arm over when he noticed the reflexive twitch.
“What happened?” His voice was as placid as the grain fields on a windless day.
“I brushed against a bit of rock. While I was running to get breakfast.”
His expression remained unchanged, but I could see the emotions shift in his eyes. He placed my arm back on the table, and wiped it down with a scrap of linen. “You need to be more careful.”
“Most people cut themselves sooner or later.”
“We’re not most people.”
He let my arm return to the table and broke off the seal on a bottle of ink. He stirred the suspension with the dull end of his needle before he turned it over, wetted the pointed end with ink, pulled the skin on my forearm taught, and started to write. My arm unconsciously twitched at the first bite of the needle.
“Why do we always start with arms?” The question came from the raw skin on my arm and crawled up to my throat.
Ceres paused. “You’re new to reading. To memorizing the scripture. If you forget, you can merely look down. Not so much with your back.”
Although the same words were inked into his own arm, he wrote from memory, weaving each word into flesh with measured care. “The cave that Alcor discovered last week, do you remember the words?”
I thought for a moment. “The first part. ‘Whether in lair or in cradle, it may well be it always is upon a day of great ill omen we are born.’”
Ceres wiped the darkened blood from my arm. “Your tongue is adapting their words. You sound like they do. Like a Ghost.”
“Most ghosts don’t sound like that.”
“Does an elder not speak differently, compared to a plowman?”
I flexed my hand under his grip, trying to work the stinging pain out of my skin. It was always worse closer to the wrist, as I had learned with my left arm the month prior. “My grandmother always said that those who listen to the Ghosts will become them.”
He laughed humorlessly. “They fear us, yet respect us.”
Sedna wafted in and placed two shallow cups of beer on the table. I returned the gesture with an awkward smile, which she rotely mirrored. It had taken years for Sedna to warm up to me, though she still withheld her trust; I often wondered if she thought I would tempt Ceres from her bed—an accusation I only suspected yet still resented. I did not know if Ceres had done such a thing before, but on mornings when I woke early, I noticed she always slept with her arms wrapped around his, clinging to him like a child. Rhea bounded up to his mother and tugged the folds of her dress, whispering to her before she lifted him into her arms and carried him away.
“I’ll be gone until tomorrow morning.” Ceres said gruffly.
“Think you found another cave?”
“It’s—” He frowned as he wiped the blood from his hands. A rare display of emotion. “Yes.”
I pulled my arm away when he was done, examining the raw and angry writing set into my skin. “You should take me with you.”
“You’re too new to this. What if Siātu serves as our host?” The corners of his mouth twitched.
“Mizar and Alcor already taught me how to protect myself.”
A tense moment passed between us while I stared him down, although I realized his mind was unchanged. The silence was broken only by the sound of Sedna and Rhea playing from across the room.
“The cave between ten standing stones that Alcor found last year. The ghosts still speak new words, you should go in my place. Mimas and the other Librarians will be expecting someone.” As laconic and impenetrable as always.
“I’ve never been to a cave without you.”
“Only because I’ve always wanted to accompany you.”
Any further protest would only expose my insecurities. Fear swelled in my chest, a hot swirl of air like the gusts that swoop in from the sunlands.
The stinging in my arm subsided, and I looked down to read back the scripture permanently written into flesh:
“The bombs fall silent with the hush of dusk, but little else follows in their slumber. Grievous wails carried on nighttime wind are a blessing compared to the opposite; the heart can only break if it still beats. On nights when the gunshots do not steal our sleep, I return in my mind to my childhood home, outside Denver, where the mountains seemed like the arms of god, swaddling us on warm nights. There was still prairie to burn. I see my mother’s face, the lines in her smile obliterated by the waters of memory. I awake the next morning,—”
“—ungrateful for the breaths god still permits me.”
I read the scripture from Ceres’s arm instead of my own, although I don’t know why. The craftmanship on his skin was different, inked by a long-dead Librarian whom I did not know. He had turned cold and pale, a quality that made him seem less like a person, or former person, and more an object, a wrong thing, as though the black earth under us had made him, a stillborn child of barren soil.
Alcor knocked on the walls of the dolmen before entering. “Mimas told me you had already started.” He skulked across dark corners like an unhappy memory, eyes glinting through layers of clothes draped over his head.
I let my gaze rest on my arm, but Ceres’s naked corpse loomed over my vision. “Were you the one who laid him out?”
Alcor paced through the narrow chamber. “Yes.”
I didn’t notice he was carrying something until he dropped a bundle of kindling on the floor. “You’re going to freeze the moment you start on your legs or stomach. Trust me.” He pulled a flint from the folds of his clothes. “When did Ceres first take you to a cave?”
“Three months ago.”
He cracked two of the flints together until a tendril of yellow flame bloomed through the kindling. “Have the nightmares started yet?”
I paused, halfway through uncorking a bottle of alcohol. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The nightmares you can’t explain.”
When I was a girl my grandmother taught me to carry a candle into my dreams and hold the flame between my third and fourth fingers as one holds a stick of incense; the night after my first cave god came into my dreams and snuffed the flame into his palm, instead showing me what the human body could look like when crushed by those same hands. Corpses heaped in ditches like pot shards. Flame consuming the living and the dead alike. Children without arms, corpses without skin, without faces. The human form obliterated beyond recognition. Those nightmares.
“Do all Librarians see those things?”
He nodded wordlessly; no more explanation was needed between us. I pulled the liquor and ink from my bag, and settled on the scripture carved into the back of his left forearm. It was clear, and I could easily copy it unaided.
Without Ceres, the walls of the eastern cave grasped my heart and stole blood from my limbs. A gust of warm air welcomed me on arrival, and a less welcome scent, one I only knew from the caves—metallic, wet, heavy. It’s the scent of ink, thrashing under the metal, storm waves of memory searching for their shores. Mizar sat hunched against a wall, wearing a frown as bitter as the weather and holding a cup of tea to her reddened cheeks. White hair spilled across her shoulders like snowfall. She acknowledged me with the briefest of sideways glances, the whites of her eyes shimmering with red firelight from the sconces, before returning her attention to the bare hallway in front of her.
“Did Ceres go on another one of his excursions?”
I nodded. Mizar made a noise of displeasure, her eyes shifting to me as she pulled her scarf over her head, and for a moment I sensed a thought making its way to her lips, but she remained silent. A few of the charms hanging from the ceiling swung in the drafty air. I had made a few of them myself when I was younger, at Ceres’s direction: rough circlets of copper, wound with string at precise angles, as a guard against Siātu—the shadow that pours ink meaning madness from his lips, the demon of caves.
Alcor sat facing the wall in the middle of the cave, hunched over and legs crossed, a needle and bowl of ink resting on a stone tablet beside him. He had layers of linen draped over his back, but I could tell it was him from the hand that extended out from the heaps of clothes, one finger absent, taken years ago by frostbite.
“He looks for caves in the gravelands.” Alcor drawled like a grindstone.
Mizar made another noise of displeasure. “He’s an eccentric, not a fool.”
“He is neither. He is a man, like many, who worships knowledge first.” His guttural rasp echoed off the metal walls.
Without Ceres wafting over me like a cloud on a warm day, I let my hand drift to the walls of the cave. The metal was cold and unyielding, colored a soft white, almost like snow, and did not corrode as does the copper of scythes and shovels. Feeling bold, I pressed my palm harder against the metal, and felt a faint pulse, like blood in a vein. The ink.
“I’ve been on one vision today. Your turn.” Alcor drawled.
If either of them sensed my apprehension, they made no comment; I had done this before, but always with Ceres’s calm hand on my shoulder. I stepped towards the gray metal pillar that rose from the floor. Obelisks have the demeanor of a man—warm to the touch but chilled and unmoving in spirit. I steadied my hand and let it rest against the porous metal, gently but with the confidence of an arranged marriage in the minute before consummation; the metal throbbed urgently against my touch, my own body kept in place by obligation and trepidation. Like so many things, it was best to look away at first.
I kept my gaze pinned on the far wall, but the metallic reek of ink weeping from the obelisk invaded my senses before the liquid itself. Ink poured across my arm, just warm enough to raise the hairs on my skin, before it began its slow crawl upwards. Elbow. Shoulder. Chest. Neck. It slithered into my mouth, tasting of blood, then my nose, then ears—the eyes were the worst, the ink writhed like a tongue forced under the eyelids. I heaved briefly. Darkness swallowed the cave.
The ink cleared and scrubbed the cave from my vision. Auva laid atop a bed in a cave whose location we have never known, stretched out like linen on a broken loom. Snowy sunlight poured in from two strips set into the metal ceiling, and I could hear the faint humming of god, a single tuneless note deeper than regret, from the ink that plugged my ears and muffled the distant conversation of Alcor and Mizar. I let my hand fall from the obelisk, now obscured from vision. Auva—the Ghosts never tell us their names, and so we christen them ourselves like corpses after a fire—turned and looked through me. She spoke to something off in the distance.
“I will die before we arrive, and with this I have made peace; I will never set my eyes on Elysium but it is enough to know that I have snatched my children from from the arms of damnation. Messages from home travel over such great distances, crying out over infinite darkness for their readers, but most die having never tasted a human gaze poured into their parched lips; we cannot help them, they cannot help us. We can only listen in horror at the death rattles of the land we left behind. Perhaps we have escaped Dis, but now god has turned our heads behind us so that we may watch the souls of the doomed tumble down—”
“—in our place.”
I had never written into my own skin before then, but I was proud of my work. The first sentence was sloppy as I adjusted to the sting of the needle, yes, but it was legible. I flexed my arm, gingerly keeping my clothes away from the raw skin. I had a poor night’s sleep ahead of me, the skin on one side of my body open.
The stinging in my arm started to center me, yoking my thoughts towards it. I did not want the pain to stop, for if it did, those thoughts would be left to wander the fields of memory on their own, threshing the nerve endings it found.
I poured more of the alcohol over my leg, wafting my hand over my thigh while I waited for it to dry. “If the world ended, how did some of us survive, do you think? I never got to ask Ceres that.”
Alcor seemed surprised by the question, pausing for a moment while he unearthed something in his mind. “When I was a boy I asked the same question of Yildun. He did not know, and told me to ask the question of an elder. So, I asked Meleph, father of Mizar, who told me that an ancestor, Mira, had the same question, and that both the answer and the means of the asking have been passed down from Mira’s niece, Hamal:
“Mira first asked the librarians, who did not know. She then asked the elders, who also did not know. Left with no other authoritative sources, she turned to god, and prayed for seven nights, starting with the end of the question on the first night and the beginning of the question on the seventh night, as god sees time from end to beginning. On the seventh night, god did not provide the answer, but instead an instruction: If Mira begot a daughter who was wise enough to hear the truth, god would tell it in the form of a dream.
“Nine months later Mira gave birth to her first child, whom she raised as a philosopher and theologian from the time she was able to weave mourning veils from her teardrops; Librarians tutored her in the language and history of Ghosts, carried her on their backs to every cave in the lands, and taught her to pray until a beet root placed in her palms turned the color of sand. On the night of her fifteenth birthday, the young woman asked god for an answer to her mother’s question. God denied her, as she was not wise. That night she thew herself into the ocean like a stone and drowned.
“Nine months later, Mira gave birth to her second daughter. This girl she raised as a cartographer, and from the year in which she could reach the bottom of a lake without water in her lungs, she sent her off to every corner of the earth with a borrowed needle and ink, so that she may catalog upon her skin every mountain, hill, snowbank, and cave. On her twentieth birthday, she prayed to god for an answer to her mother’s question. God denied her, as she was not wise. The daughter returned to her life of mapmaking, and never again set her eyes upon her mother or her prayers upon god.
“Aged in both body and soul, Mira stole her sister’s unborn daughter, opening her stomach in the night with a grain scythe sharpened by the gallstones of the dead. She raised her niece as her third daughter and named her Hamal, giving her left half to the Librarians and her right half to the cartographers, so that she would be wise in matters of mind and earth; when the girl wiped her tears with her left arm she would read the prayers of the Ghosts, and when she plunged her right hand into the bushes to search for berries the thorns would spot the gravelands with blood. Unfortunately she came to despise both professions, being an expert in neither Ghosts nor mountains. She would steal inking needles from librarians and plunge them into her aunt’s beets.
“On the night of her sixteenth birthday god told her what Mira had done to her real mother—overcome with rage, Hamal peeled the scripture from her arm using a copper knife cast from a salt mold, then used an inking needle to sew the skin to Mira’s mouth, before she pinched her aunt’s nose between her third and fourth fingers and drained the life from her lungs. As she knelt over Mira’s corpse and wept, God told her the story:
“After a septet of warriors slaughtered the sun and ended the world, there was one who descended to earth to wash the blood from her right hand. Her hair carried the scent of ash, and from a jealous rumor started by the northern winds, she would use the blunt end of her knife to carve the lumps of avarice from old men and eat them with salt. Just as the Earth was beginning to freeze, the warrior plunged her hand into the sea, but the blood would not wash away. The warrior persisted—every day after waking, she would dress herself, speak a prayer in a language her mother taught her by holding a nail under her tongue while she wept as a child, dip her hand into the sea, and wait for the blood to wash away. With each day the Earth grew colder, the stain redder, her guilt deeper.
“Her grief reached her stomach along with her ashen hair, and after seven months she raised her sword and cut off her hand. Free of guilt, she began to climb the mountains into heaven, but before she could reach the stars she slipped on the blood pouring from her arm, and drowned in the ocean. The twenty-seven bones of her hand, resting in the flesh of a demi-god and impregnated by the blood of the sun, grew into our ancestors.”
I frowned. “That sounds like something an elder would say.”
He threw more kindling into the fire. “Speaking of questions we never asked of the dead—how did you end up here? You always seemed so reluctant for the student of a librarian.”
Flame blossomed in the pile of kindling. I dipped the needle into the bowl of ink, the firelight twinkling in murky blackness. “My mother’s last words, after giving birth to me, became name and fate: Nieh. Librarian. Or so my grandmother told me.”
“A wish made in death is to be broken on pain of death.”
“My grandmother told me that I did not cry when I was born; a newborn, she said, cries in a fit of recalcitrance. A reticent newborn will age into a wise adult, having already accepted life’s hardships.”
Alcor looked up, tired eyes piercing the sepulchral murk between us. “You’re starting to sound like Ceres.”
“Perhaps the ink changes us, some vestige of the Ghosts lingering in our blood long after the vision ends.” I briefly recalled the morning I saw Ceres die, the way is blood poured down the steps, some of it so dark I thought it had turned to ink.
“When I was a boy, Yildun said that for some of us, the ink never leaves.”
We were less than five minutes outside the village before the snow, hard and compacted by freezing rain, slowed our walk to crawl. The wind traveled, as it most often did in stretches between snowfalls, while carrying the ocean on its back like a wailing infant. Ceres unhappily pulled his scarf up past his nose.
“You know Heze? Her family lives in one of the cliff-homes.” He stomped through the snow, fists thrust into his pockets.
“Her daughter and I used to play together in the snow. She would pelt me with snowballs and I would tie her shoelaces together when she wasn’t looking. That was before my grandmother sent me to you, and the pedagogy of Ceres does not extend to snowball-craft. Yet.” Briefly, the memory gorged itself on my heartstrings before leaving through an open window. That was a time before scripture, before the Siātu hung over my dreams, before the Ghosts and their words sunk my feet into the sands of a burial plot the way snowfall strains a poorly-thatched roof. My grandmother told me that nostalgia tastes bitter on the tongue of the wise but sweet on a fool’s.
I hoped he would catch on to my humor at least, but if he recognized that I had made a joke, he didn’t smile. “Her youngest son said he was playing out here the other day, by the cave. Saw something lurking in the shadows of the rocks.”
I stopped. “Siātu.”
Ceres continued trudging through the snow, raising his voice to compensate for the distance. “I’m sure it’s gone, but I thought this would be a teaching opportunity about such things.”
The cave was one of the closest to town, and I knew from experience that children would often dare themselves to venture towards it—although I was always too fearful for such a thing.
As we approached the mouth of the cave, I saw another pair of footprints coming from the west, smaller and shorter in gait. Heze’s son. Ceres stopped to light a liquor-soaked branch before we went inside. He handed the torch to me, took a dozen steps forward into the cave, turned around, and stood completely still in the half-light.
“What have Alcor and Mizar told you?” His stony neutrality cracked in the firelight. Perhaps it was just the darkness of the cave, and the talk of Siātu, but he seemed threatening in way I had never experienced.
“Alcor said you just…know it when you see it.”
“Have you ever had a dream turned into a nightmare?”
“I—I think so.”
“Tell me about it.”
I paused, the silence long enough that I expected Ceres to interject, but he did not. “I dreamt that I had married a boy I had feelings for when I was younger; we lived with his parents, I had a child, we were happy. That joy is the only reason I remember that dream—what a foreign feeling, to look into someone’s eyes and see the unspent years of your life as a grain field instead of a desert. One day someone comes to the door; I know in my heart that I shouldn’t answer it, the knocking felt to me like a sweating sickness in the joints, but I couldn’t help it; on the other side of the door is a woman, I have never seen her but I know she’s my mother; her arms are red with blood up to her elbows and she lunges at me, presses her thumbs into my throat and tells me that I abandoned her in the past, left her soul to die there as one throws something to the sea; she wants to kill me, to pull me under the currents of time with her. After a second, I wake up.”
Ceres tilted his head. I could tell he wasn’t expecting something so personal. “That feeling, that wrongness before a dream sinks under and becomes a nightmare. That’s the Siātu.”
“That’s a feeling, not a thing.”
“Precisely. Sometimes it looks like a Ghost, or a shadow, or a regular person, or the sound of rocks tumbling across the floor. But there will be a feeling, wrapping around your heart, of a nightmare laying in wait.”
“That’s it? That’s what keeps you alive? A feeling?”
Ceres walked backwards, deeper into the cave. “You sound surprised. Fate is snow, not bedrock—always unsteady under one’s feet. We forget about those uncertainties that live in the umbras of god’s watchful gaze; they’re not like food, or water, or shelter, the needs most present in our mind when we consider tomorrow’s uncertainties, but they too keep us alive. You will survive a day without food. But a day without luck, or a day without god to tap gently on your shoulder? Doubtful.”
The cave was long dead—depleted of the ink that welled up from from the central obelisk. Still, I found myself lowering my voice in the chamber, out of respect for the Ghosts. “That’s it, then? That’s the secret to staying alive as a Librarian? Trust your feelings?”
Ceres took the torch from me and walked around the cave’s main chamber, pacing by the walls. If he was somehow inspecting it for signs of the Siātu, or merely thinking, I did not know.
“Not quite. Listening to your intuition is the easy part. You must also learn to look away.”
“I believe the unspoken assumption was that I would simply run away if I saw it. Unless Siātu suffers from as much social anxiety as I do.”
He frowned at me. Better than no reaction at all.
He pulled his sleeve over his hand and rubbed away the grime and dirt from a portion of the metal wall. “When I was a boy, and I believe this was before you were even born, a man drowned in the ocean. I found his body when it washed ashore the next morning. I should have just run home to tell someone, but I couldn’t turn from the sight of him, pale, battered, unseeing eyes watching the sky—the rocks along the shore had pummeled him, bones jutting out from bloodless skin, his jaw attached only by the skin of his throat, as though someone had peeled his mouth away from his skull. God nailed my feet to the sand. I could not look away.”
I stepped closer to the portion of the wall that he had cleaned off with his shirt sleeve. “Then how do I look away?”
“Emotionally? Only you can answer that. Physically? You must leave the room.” He tapped his foot on the ground. “You see this part of the cave, where the obelisk sits? Notice the floor.”
I leaned the heel of my shoe into the ground. “It gives, it’s solid but not quite metal.”
He nodded. “leave this room of the cave, and the ink will die. It won’t naturally fall out of your eyes, and you’ll be blinded for a bit, but if you see Siātu in a vision, that will be your escape.”
He stepped back from the wall. “The Ghosts loved to write things on plaques in the caves. Unfortunately, most of it is nonsense, or destroyed.”
He was right. A craftsman who permits no flaws in his labor is a heresiarch, as such a laborer acts in defiance defiance of god, who presses flaws into all things like a thumbprint. The Ghosts must have been master heresiarchs in life, and continue to be so in death: The metal plaque nailed to the wall was perfect in all regards, tarnished only by rust and ice.
VOY###R M####E
YEAR 2#76
Ceres let his hand fall from the wall and trace the curve of his thigh. He spoke from memory, the words traveling from the skin of his leg, up his arm and to his throat:
“Years pass with the stubbornness of a fever, pressing upon our minds with a rancor wielded only by god and grief. You wake up, learn though a river of whispers who has died since you last put your ear to the brook. At first you think of them, of the last time you spoke, ignorant of the finality of the moment. Such thoughts bring too much pain, and after a while, you no longer allow yourself such reflection. Each death is but one drop of water in the most placid harbor of god. I know I will join them soon—the totality of my life, my mother’s love, every utterance of my thoughts, every poem I whisper to myself, and the churning bolus of hate in my chest will become one more drop. I cannot decide if such an act of annihilation, one planned by god for all things into which he pours that poison named life, is an act of mercy or brutality. It was god that made the bombs and the bullets,—”
“—and his only apology is death.”
I rested the blood-tipped needle at the edge of the bowl. Alcor sat in the dirt by the fire, leaning against the stone wall. The pain in my leg had wrapped the gentlest of hands around my chest; I stopped, drawing my attention to my breaths until the hand released itself.
“Ceres. You knew him longer than I. If he believed in the Siātu, why did he let it kill him?” It felt wrong to talk about a man who was right next to me, even if he was dead. I dipped the needle in a bowl of fresh alcohol, before upturning it upon my thigh. I had seen Alcor do such a thing with Syrma many times, but I had no idea how painful it would be. I grit my teeth, suppressing a pathetic whine as my body howled in protest.
“If a man drowns in the ocean, does that mean he believed that the water was incapable of pulling him under?” Alcor lifted himself to his feet. “You’ve covered a good part of your left arm and leg. You should call it for now, until the skin scabs over.”
I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to admit it—if I allowed myself a break from copying Ceres’s skin onto my own, it meant my time with his body, the body of a murderer, of a man I knew since I was a girl, would stretch out, beyond the sun. I felt like an incestuous lover, sharing that cold slab of stone with him, my clothes hiked up to my thigh while he assaulted me with his nudity. I did not know if Sedna would scream or sob.
“How long did it take—for you to copy everything from Yildun’s body after he died?”
His stony expression withered, the flame from the fire drawing terrible lines of memory into his brow. “Long enough.”
Ceres pulled aside a curtain nailed to a maw of metal, where the cave entrance protruded from the Earth, a fragment of bone penetrating tellurian flesh. I rushed in before he had a chance to offer, eager to get out of the cold.
“Of all the caves I wished the Elders would let me show to outsiders, this is the first.” His voice echoed off the warped metal walls, for the cave no longer wished to hear the words of the living.
“What makes this so special?”
“You’ll see.”
It was a short walk to the cave antechamber along ancient and mud-coated hallways. The Ghosts had their own architectural style: blunt and utilitarian slabs of that snowy, immortal metal, occasionally interrupted with details—insets, shelves, ports and openings—whose purpose was long lost to us. This one was no different.
Before I put my hand on the obelisk, Ceres stepped next to me and pressed his palm onto the adjacent side. “I want to see this with you.”
“I didn’t know it worked that way.”
The ink crawled up his arm. “Why wouldn’t it?”
I grit my teeth as the ink poured into my ears, smothering the faint roar of the snowstorm outside. Ceres had taught me to count down from the time it reached my neck, a way to focus the mind on something other than the sensation of ink forcing itself into one’s eyes. I felt the sting on three. Two, the cave started to darken. One, oblivion.
What happened next was so sudden, so far outside the phenomena of waking experience that I would have fled the cave if it wasn’t for Ceres’s placid demeanor. I blinked—or perhaps it wasn’t even a blink, and merely my mind adjusting to the violent disruption of its senses—and the world changed.
The new world projected into my eyes was neither tent, nor room, nor cave itself. Rippling hills, covered in alternating veins of green, tan, and snowy white, stretched on for kilometers, before terminating in a vast peak of jagged, snow-capped mountains.
I reflexively yelped, and if it wasn’t for the muffled sound of my voice returning to me from the cave’s walls, I would have forgotten the ink entirely.
Ceres said nothing, and for a moment I just stood with my jaw hanging from my skull. I felt like a child, membranous reality obliterated by the gentlest breaths of the universe. “This one, it’s—”
“Outside.” Ceres finished for me.
“Does—” Whatever question entered my mind implied a dozen more, and I knew that only God could answer most of them. Tears warmed my cheeks.
“The Ghosts were right.” The lump in my throat roiled between every word. “The world was green.”
Ceres nodded. “Trees. Like the berry shrubs, but much taller—taller than a dozen men.” He pointed to the nearest one.
“They just grew like that? Not on farms, just…in the world. What were they for?”
“They weren’t for anything, I believe. They merely populated the Earth, without our help. Like the mountains”
I sat down and pressed my knees into my chest.
“It’s a lot to take in. I know. The mountains. The sky. The land. Everything was different.” After I calmed myself, he motioned with his hand. “Look. Behind you.”
I wiped my cheeks with the backside of my sleeve and slowly pulled myself to my feet.
On the other side of the cave, the rolling hills did not end with the mountains, but with a vast array of towers, like standing stones, but reaching so far into the sky they could have grazed the clouds.
“Is that—did someone make that?”
Ceres’s brow furrowed. “No one is quite sure. Some suspect they served some kind of religious purpose. Alcor thinks that people lived in them. The Ghosts call them buildings.”
“As in, a thing that is built.”
“Yes. How odd, to name something for how it was ushered into existence, but not its purpose. Perhaps because it had no set purpose.” Ceres stepped forward into the cave. “There are regular ghosts here, too. They haven’t said anything new in generations, which is why no one monitors the cave. But usually, if you give them a minute…”
His voice trailed off as he meandered around the cave. The air shifted again, and I whipped around just in time.
It was a Ghost I had seen before; Ceres called her Iklil. Her voice sounded like a river on a warm day.
“I hope this reaches you well. The news says you’re doing fine, but how can one believe what happens so far away? I wish I could spare you the stress of current events, but what else is there to mention? The tents on the street seem to outnumber us. Some run west, others north, others cling to their guns and await the end. I have considered all three, but choice itself is the most bitter of illusions; war travels like a plague, and survival is only a gift—-”
“—If one does not look down to see the corpses underfoot.”
Alcor let out a breath as he finished the last sentence and drew the needle away from my skin, returning it to the dish. Without warning he lifted up the urn of alcohol and poured it over my back. I grit my teeth and let in a sharp breath through my nostrils, but I had otherwise acclimated to the pain.
I came to dread the moments between the bite of the needle. Ceres had turned an awful white, his skin as bloodless as stone. Alcor had covered his head with a sheet, although I couldn’t decide if that lessened the misery of the days I had spent with him, hour after hour, copying every word written upon him. He now seemed decapitated.
“Why do you think the ghosts tell us of such awful things? Corpses, death, grief.”
Alcor walked across the burial chamber to throw more kindling into the fire. “Perhaps that’s all they could think about, before the world ended.”
“What an ugly trick god must have played on them, to drape the world in such beauty, but deprive its inhabitants of joy.”
He laughed mirthlessly. “Perhaps it was god who killed the sun, and ended the world.”
I flexed my shoulders, feeling the blood and alcohol run down my back. “Don’t let the elders hear you say that.”
He scoffed. “If god carved me from stone in my mother’s womb, so too did he carve my stillborn sister.”
“If death is as much an act of creation as life, why does god allow us to grieve?”
“Perhaps grief is an offence. Or perhaps it is no different from the pain one feels from a needle, or a broken bone. God demands it of you in exchange for life, and when that life is returned, the cessation of pain is your reward.”
The fire sparked angrily, filling the cave with a sudden burst of light. I wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.
“Alcor—this doesn’t look like scripture.” I put my hand on Ceres’s right shoulder, a segment of skin devoid of lettering, but instead inked with a crude drawing.
Ceres gently lifted the body from the stone slab, examining the markings through the flickering dance of firelight. We both spoke at once.
“It’s a map.”
I turned in early that night. If Alcor had any idea what I was planning, he didn’t say anything. Perhaps his absence was his way of implicitly telling me that I was an apprentice no longer. Since Ceres’s death I had been living with a family of farmers outside the cliff homes, and I had acclimated to their schedule enough to know I could steal a quick breakfast and leave for the gravelands before any of them awoke.
I had memorized the map on Ceres’s skin, or at least the logic of its topography: west until you reach the three standing stones, north until the river bends east.
Time knows not of the tundra. No dinner bells swing in the midday air, no mothers hurry their children outdoors during the morning prayersong. Life itself is imprisoned in dead air, oppressive stillness broken only by the sound of snow collapsing underfoot, necessitating awkward steps that slowed me even further. By the time I reached the bend in the river, my stomach told me dinner was fast approaching.
Shortly past the river I noticed footprints in the hardened snow. The pocks in the white plain sat less than a knuckle wider than my own boot. Ceres. Less than two weeks prior he had taken this same path, the one he had awkwardly inked onto his own shoulder.
I found myself lengthening my gait until my boots fit into each of his shoeprints, stepping into the depressions as one walks upon stones while crossing a river. I told myself it was easier than letting my foot sink into the snow with every step. After a dozen steps I acclimated to the gait not my own; it was its own rhythm, like the tapping of a needle into skin.
Gaze planted firmly down, my destination came to my vision first in the form of a shadow swallowing snow and sun. What a terrible, ferrous corpse—the chest of some ancient beast, layers of rotting skin stretched over rusting ribs, slowly consumed by centuries of snowdrifts. It looked like one of the buildings from a vision, laid on it side. The interior was familiar from my time in the caves: rounded corners, odd angles and white, rustless metal. A few spikes of light broke through the destroyed corpse, illuminating a tangled din of chairs, tables, and cartilaginous viscera pouring from cuts in the metal. The whole building was at an odd angle, as though it had sunk into the Earth with the passage of time.
A line of text stretching across five meters, etched deeply into the walls of the building, was just visible under the water stains and dust. It took me a moment to read, sounding out the words too obscure for translation—the script stiff and precise, set into the metal with a sharp angularity.
European Space Agency - ARK 5
Ceres waited for the alcohol on my arm to dry, waving his hand a few inches from my left forearm. “You’re nervous.”
I frowned. “You’re very perceptive. Next thing I know, you’re going to tell me it hurts when I stub my toe.”
He dipped his needle in the bowl of ink. “It doesn’t hurt that much. It’s more just…aggravating. Besides, this is the first step in the rest of your life—you’re one of us now.”
Ceres tried, and failed, to pour the warm waters of optimism over his chilly voice. He didn’t mean to condescend, but he always tripped over happiness as a cripple does a rock.
“I think that’s what I’m nervous about.”
Ceres pulled the skin on my forearm tight. I looked away. He was right—it wasn’t painful, but it was impossible not to flex my arm away from the needle, which Ceres resisted with his other hand. After a few minutes, the motion moved to my legs.
I spoke through gritted teeth. “Why don’t we just carve words into things, like the Ghosts did?”
Ceres tittered softly, each of his jabs into my skin prodding me towards madness. “You speak from frustration. It does get easier, as my own skin testifies.” He dipped the needle back in the ink. Back into the skin. “But I’ll answer your question with another question—what’s your earliest memory?”
“Seriously?”
“Not as though you’re going anywhere.”
I had to pause for a moment. “My birthday. When I was little girl. My grandfather threw a plate at me; he missed and it shattered against the wall, shards of clay sliding across the floor. He said I killed my mother, and that if I was never born, she would still be alive.”
He finished writing the sentence into my forearm. “That day still affects you doesn’t it? It changed something in you, how you live, how you see yourself.”
“That’s quite an assumption.”
“Your words stumble over the lump in your throat.”
My cheeks burned.
Ceres didn’t speak for another minute. “My point is, we are a graveyard of our histories. All that trauma, desire, pain, education, fear, agglutinating together to give form to a person. That is why we wear the words on our skin; we preserve them, yes, but we also share their burdens, their pain, which we wear as we do our own.”
“Why take on such a thing?”
“We all take it on. We inherited the ghosts’ caves, their knowledge, their corpse of a world. These burdens we pass down, as we do our traditions, our language, our pain, they last as long as the mountains— should you have a child, they will carry your wounds in their body, even if you never lift a hand to them, never wish them ill, you will still pass them down. What is one more burden for us to shoulder?”
Somewhere in the distance, I heard the sound of the metal needle fall into the inkbowl. “There, done.” He gently dabbed a linen cloth soaked in alcohol over the patch of raw skin. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
It took me a moment to find the courage to turn my head to look over the blood and the ink; there was something wrong about the sight, the patch of skin I had known all my life now changed, marked as it would be from now until I took the flesh to the grave.
“Can you read it?” He said.
Blood welled up from the black expanse of text, consuming the letters into illegibility. I assembled the scripture from memory and the remaining words I could read.
“In the ark Noah must have gone mad; no mind can survive such a vision of apocalypse, the land and its people swallowed whole, the song of human life turned to squalls and then choked into terrible silence. Did he steer his boat through a sea of human flotsam, or hide his face from the waves of the dead? We have all huddled on our arks, the first and perhaps last to do so. There are no corpses in our sea, only stars; no matter how silent the black, we still hear them, night after night, wailing for us to pull them up over the bow and out of the rising seas of war.”
The cave—or perhaps building—was a labyrinthine, porous hallways that opened into cramped, bulbous rooms layered with dust. A few of the rooms were instantly recognizable: bed set into the wall, translucent strips in the ceiling. The same room from dozens of visions.
The interior was as dark as sin and ate footprints like tidal water, I had followed Ceres’s steps up to the entrance but lost them shortly after. Occasional cracks in the ceiling from which light forced its way in served to mark my progress through walls that pressed into my shoulders, sending me down steps and hallways pocked by shattered walls and ice. Every room was as still as a corpse.
By the time I found the obelisk, my legs wept for rest. I must have been deep into the heart of the building, the air noticeably warmer, the surfaces free of dust. Something in the floors hummed awake with my steps, an ancient black beast stirring from rest. I raised my arm to the obelisk then paused—in all likelihood Ceres had planted his feet in this same room a month prior, the room where he met Siātu.
I pressed my palm against the metal. Within moments it warmed to my touch, turning hotter than my own skin. The ink moved languidly up my arm, as though it was still unaccustomed to a host, having seen perhaps two of us in untold generations. It burned in my eyes.
The snow-white walls of the tent fluttered sharply in the wind. I instinctively ducked down, the steeped apex of the fabric narrowly surpassing my head. A clattering bruit, like the sound of rocks falling from a great height, reached the tent from a great distance, leading me to instinctively grasp for the flap that served as a door, my hand passing through the dead, rotting air of the cave beyond. Somewhere outside, a wail cleaved through the din of falling earth.
“By the time you receive this, we will have been killed along with our families.”
I whipped around to face the voice. It was Iklil, but she had aged—gray streaks had sprouted across her hair, her back was hunched like a widow, and dried blood streaked the deep lines of her face.
“The battle, if you can even call it that, is all but over. I escaped with my life and mine alone.” She reached into the tatters of her clothes and pulled out a small, translucent bottle. Ink. “I must have passed a hundred corpses on my way out of Denver, broken lumps of blood and skin and clothing, corpses no longer recognizable as human—never mind. A few of them still had nanites running out of the holes in their skulls.” She shook the bottle. “I collected it.” She unscrewed the top and poured the ink onto her open palm. The fluid crawled up her arm and disappeared into her clothes. “I’m appending their final moments to this message; for whoever is watching this, you can consider what follows to be a memento, a historical record, or a willfully inflicted nightmare. If you are a fool, you will take it as a warning, to not tread the path of your ancestors. God has many tomes of history upon his shelves, but they are all written in blood.” Ink flashed across her eyes, her expression momentarily twisting in pain. “Hitherto this era, human history has always been incomplete; those who are the true witnesses, who look into the eyes of god and do not turn away from his gaze, return silent, or return in boxes. With the nanites packing themselves into every corner of our senses, recording everything, this no longer the case. For that I am sorry. I wish you well on Trappist-1, from all I’ve heard it will be a land of plenty and peace; I’m not sure how one creates plenty on a tidally locked planet, but that will be a question for you to answer. More importantly, it is light years from here. What more could you ask for, at a time like this?”
Something unknowable in the vision shifted, just as the air grows angry before lightning. The edges of my vision started to fade, but not to the color of dying ink, as it would at the end of a vision, but the burning, angry blue. I stumbled backwards and landed on my back, my body hitting the soft, porous floor in a cave that seemed as distant as a half-forgotten dream. Bilious terror boiled in the back of my throat as I blindly crawled through the room, hand clawing the air in front of me while I searched for the exit. My hands finally hit hard, unyielding metal. I pulled myself to my feet just as I felt the ink writhe in my eyes.
A moment later the sun—blindingly bright, very much alive, and high in the sky—filed my vision. I stepped back, my heel finding the edge of the room before I stopped. The buildings I had seen before, great standing stones as tall as god and as perfect as a knife’s edge, flanked me from all sides. That clattering sound, like rocks, grew louder. The earth shook. Fire and stone welled up from the earth, swallowing the sun.
Nahn doubled over and collapsed onto her knees, heaving like a bad tide. Ink poured from her mouth and into the floor, tendrils of black fluid writhing across the tiles and dispersing back into the cave.
I sat against the wall and turned a stone over in my hands. “It’s hard the first time. You’ll get used to it.”
Ink drained from the corners of her eyes, connecting at her chin and dripping onto the ground. I let the silence hang between us for a number of minutes, until she was ready to speak, and until the ink had purged itself from her senses.
“That’s—that’s what the Earth looked like, before the world ended?”
I paused briefly, choosing my words carefully. “An Earth. Something like that.”
She wiped a smearing of ink from the corner of her mouth, and let it squirm its way from her palm onto the floor. “War travels like a plague. What does that word mean?”
I shrugged. “Their language falls between the gaps in our flesh, like water clasped in the hands. Night. Day. War. Some only appear once, we have no translation for such things.”
She clenched her eyes shut, face twisting.
“The headaches are normal at first, as well.”
“How long until they’re not normal?”
“It will take you however long it takes. Pain is an uninvited guest, he sleeps at your stoop, where he will remain until you let him in.”
Nahn frowned. She sat on her knees and leaned forward, waiting for the ink to drain from her sinuses. “Does it get easier at least?”
“It does.”
I pulled myself to my feet. “Feeling better?”
Nahn sniffled and nodded her head, although I could tell her first vision of a ghost had changed her, altered something in her eyes the painful invasion of ink could not alone account for. “I think so.”
I reached out my hand and helped her to her feet, she winced as her clothes brushed against the fresh writing on her arm.
“You should go home. We can do grammar some other day. One cave is enough work.”
I pulled my scarf over my nose and started to walk out of the cave. She followed, chasing after me like a child. “Are you sure? It wasn’t that tiring.”
“If history does not yet weigh upon you like the ocean, then savor the moment. Soon it will.”
We left and started our journey back towards town. The weather remained uncommonly favorable, a dozing patriarch content to leave his children with calm winds and thin snowfall, until he would unhappily stumble to his feet to bluster and howl again.
Nahn, nearly a head shorter than me, loped through the snow to keep up. “Syrma says you don’t believe in the Siātu.”
Her voice trailed off as the sentence left her, as though she was afraid the snow might overhear us. I did not turn my head, although I let my eyes drift to their corners to stare her down. “At least you’re talking to the other librarians. I clung to Ceres like a child while he was still alive.”
Her gaze darted between the ground and myself. “Well? Do you?”
“It’s a meaningless question. When you awake from a nightmare it may seem as real as a lie, but the parts of you that experienced that nightmare, the wrinkled flesh of your mind, the prickling of your skin, the thumping of your heart in your chest—those are all real, are they not? Every nightmare you’ve ever had once traversed your body, a traveler through wet and sanguine flesh, who buries his parents under shallow Cairns and does not pray before breakfast.”
A brief gout of wind poured over the frigid earth, sending motes of snow and sand across the ground while bells clattered angrily. I pulled my scarf up to my nose, but the cold air bit no less. A few people stopped and stared at me as they walked home; I ignored them. The stillborn sun hung floated lifelessly atop the waters of a dead planet, bathing the village in a crimson light.
“Nahn said I’d find you here, although I feel as though I could have done without her.” It was Alcor, yelling over the howl of the wind as he walked over. I did not move. “She seems as though she’s doing well.”
I turned to look at him over a furrowed brow; Alcor was a man who held needless conversation behind his teeth, as one holds the name of god in an argument. “Not the wisest girl, but she is kind.”
He scoffed. “To mix wine and sea salt wastes both. So it is with mixing insults and compliments.”
“I did not expect the elders to give me a student; we do not see eye to eye.”
“There are too few of us for the elders to play favorites. Heresy, even alleged, can have its mitigating factors.”
I sensed a smile in his voice, buried under layers of linen and beard.
“Is that your way of saying you believe me? About the arks?”
“I think truth is a bitter fruit that poisons most who eat it. We starve no less if we decide this Earth is not the one we thought.”
I turned my gaze away from him. “What do you want, anyway?”
“I’m not allowed to make small talk with a former student?” The lie could not fit over his tongue, stretching until it split like a drowned corpse.
I looked down at the black patch of earth at my feet, just past the center of town, where the snow gently dusted the charred corpse of a long-gone building, black bones stubbornly reaching into the world of the living. “Two years, and it’s still here.”
“No one wants to build here. The plot belongs to Siātu now, if one can say such a thing.”
I did not look up to meet his gaze, which I could feel pressing into my back like a stone. “You don’t have to keep checking up on me.” The ashes of Ceres’s home drew me in, as they had for months.
“Tell that to Mimas.”
“I keep on expecting to wake up and find it gone, the land just sand and snow. No trace of them, of Ceres, of Sedna. What time cannot heal with distance it inters with dust.”
Alcor stepped forward and ran the sole of his shoe through the ash and snow, creating a black opening through white earth. “For some of us, perhaps the ash never leaves. Like ink.”
He tightened his scarf around his cheeks, turned around, and left.
His words trapped themselves in the netting of my mind; the past was a dead sun, yet still it shines low in the sky, smothered with ink and ash until it was as black as a welt.
I pulled a knife from my belt and pressed the tip to the crook of my arm. Blood welled up where the copper sunk into skin, and I drew it away. I held my hand out, waiting, letting the blood slowly trickle down until it pooled into the ashen soil, streaks of inky black running down my fingertips.
