Prelude to the End of the World
“Sic transit gloria mundi,” said the one beneath the black cloak. The fabric was nightworm silk, fine, glossy, and blacker than the darkling night outside. From the slits in the stone walls you heard the wind mutter, and it was louder than the murmurs inside the room.
Stabs of moonlight came in from those slits, cutting soft patches out from the shadows. Even still, the black cloak was in utter shadow, but not the six others to whom he spoke.
“So slows the pulse of the earth.” The reply came from a yellow cloak beside him, of course it did. Only that bird had the wit and tongue to match, always.
The one across from him, a white cloak, spoke now, rattling in his throat and saying, “Slows? It stops. We’ve ripped out the hearts of the earth. It is a corpse now, or will be.”
Beneath the black cloak, he shifted and its extent seemed to be expanding, playfully, mirthfully — even as the edges blended indiscernibly with the darkness and any motion could have been a trick of the light, a dance of the shadows. His face would have told you; but he was masked as well as cloaked, they all were.
In reply black cloak said, “What is every corpse but the food for new life? With the hearts we can fledge a new world. Our new world.”
“Always with the moribund metaphors,” White muttered.
Beneath the yellow cloak a wing twisted, some gesture of interruption. “If we’re building a new world, first of all we should free the slaves and grant them a say in the order of things.”
Black cloak seemed to bring two wings together over his breast; but a smile couldn’t be seen.
All the while, the bird who was under a violet cloak had been fidgeting, as if the garment itched, as if she wished to tear it off and tear off everyone else’s and be rid of these theatrics.
“Really?” she said. It was the first word she spoke this meeting. You could tell by the short silence after, by how she bounced demandingly forward, that she wished it could be the only word. Just a verb slap, slapping some sense into these playacting fools.
But she followed it up, she had to. She said, “We’re fucking scholars. Fledgling fucking scholars. We’ve barely a dozen scrolls writ between all of us. And only two of us — if that many — have the gilded robes at all. We could hardly make a book, let alone a world.”
Under a blue cloak, at least, there was a twist she suspected was a head spun in agreement. White merely cawed sharply, affirmation or just acknowledgment.
Black, though, was shaking in anger, that much she could tell from a look to his dark corner. Or it had just been a particularly intense cloud which passed before the moon.
White spoke. “She is right. We’re like hatchlings dressed as ghosts.” The eyeholes of his mask — through which you saw a gleam of silver, his eyes — passed over Yellow and Black. “Which of you had this stupid idea?” It had to be one of you. He didn’t say it, but all had heard it.
“I had thought,” — Yellow speaking — “that it would serve to get you, get us, in the right sort of attitude. Sworn rebels about to upend society. Dark conspirators plotting the fate of kings and proles. Secretive wizards meeting for a ritual to seal it all.”
“Rebels, conspiracies, wizards,” Violet croaked. “Really demonstrating seriousness and maturity fit for building a world.”
“Ambition, imagination, a little humor,” Black was jumping to the defense before she’d even finished, cutting her off. “Are these things you’d want absent from the rulers — from your world?”
“Interesting slip, there.” White had the tone and the words that seemed to cleave.
“Shut it, shut it, the both you.” Someone who hadn’t spoken, who’d patiently, silently, waited — a green cloak, bigger than all the rest but not taller. Deep voice, but she spoke quickly. Eyes like stars. “Look at it, we’re already here in the cloaks — and it makes Eythe smile, clearly it does. All of us are friends here.”
She waited. No one said anything.
“So act like it,” her quick voice slowed just a tad for this. She looked between the black cloak and the violet one, expectant. Apologies, or at least gestures at apologies, were in order. There was at least enough respect and dignity remaining between them that she didn’t yet coax them out like a stern parent.
Black spoke first. “She’s afraid, is all. Of the power we’ve unearthed and now wield, and the great, terrible things we could do with it.”
Stillness, utter stillness after the brazen words of the cloaked speaker. There was, faintly, the smell of bloody lunch from the breath of someone with mouth agape.
He followed it up with, “In all fairness, I am afraid too, I should hope we all are — it’s what caution starts with. But, I for one have enough trust in my, uh, friends.”
More stillness, more silence.
“So,” she in the blue cloak started, “we’re just going to move on as if that didn’t even happen, and hopefully this festering mess of a meeting stops being a waste of time.” She had taken up speaking, briskness in her voice, and some heft. She looked to each of the cloaked figures, black, white, violet, yellow, green, and grey, meeting all their eyes, and willed them seriousness. Not dramatic whimsy, and not the false seriousness of a sniped complaint. Real seriousness. “Let’s ignore the theatrics, and get to the hea—”
“No,” White said quickly, voice almost strangled.
“Yes,” Yellow was chiming in. “Let’s ease our excited pulses, and get to the—”
“I said no,” there was some unevenness to his voice; laughter implied like light beaming forth through cracks.
“I don’t see the issue,” said Black. “Perhaps we’re all still hot from the digging, but we should cool our blood. After all, we’ve struck a rich vein today, and we should discuss it before it circulates, as it will in a beat. Really, I’d love for us to get to—”
“What part of seriousness don’t you understand? Isn’t this exactly the problem?”
“Fine, fine. No fun at all.”
Yellow cloak was still clicking in his throat, and the rest had some twitch of reaction, but green was looking around quite bewildered. “Get to the what? Now I want to know.”
She looked to Black, who would not say. Nor would Yellow. Blue too, remained silent. Green’s bright eyes stared at the white cloak a long moment, compelling, before he finally decided he would have to complete the thrice interrupted sentence:
“We should… get to the heart of the matter.”
“Hearts, rather.” Yellow was smiling; he had to be.
“Absolutely insufferable, both of you.” And White’s mask was fluttering where he puffed out air.
Blue was looking between white and yellow, but decided it was just a friendly snipe. Her gaze swept the room. The cloaks which everyone wore billowed or draped widely, cut just short enough a single standing leg could be seen emerging from each’s shadows.
Between the single leg (almost a stalk) and the colored cloth that hung over them (almost a bell), you could see in their visage something of the slaves who strive in Antenora, hefting from the sea vast blocks of the frozen blood of the earth or acting as tireless servents in every city from mountainpeak to oceandepth.
It was almost intentional.
Around them, the room was bare, as demanded by he under the black cloak. The stone of the floor still was scuffed where tables were dragged out, the color of the wall brighter where paintings or shelves had once been. Yet still there were cobwebs, and in the corners and crevices, barnacles and urchins and anemones and other sessile things; for the slits had no glass, and plankton floated in and could not float out.
After everything else, the one thing that could not be removed was the blinking and beeping machine, a great spellweaver, whose softly glowing screen became the ambience of the room.
Centermost of all, there was a table, empty now but not for long.
“What’s taking the servants all this time?”
“It’s probably the weak, useless medusae.” White cawed, disdaining. “If we could afford more amoebae they’d have carried the load here before we’d even landed.”
“If we could afford more amoebae we wouldn’t have to meet in a dank room with cobwebs and barnacles.”
Yellow prodded black. “Did you, well, tell them that they could come in?”
He in the black cloak paused.
Then came a sigh, and an invisible swallowing of pride, and then he called out, high, sharp, three notes, and it was then that the latch was tried. It turned smoothly then stopped with a clack and wouldn’t open.
Quickly green was saying, “I think I must’ve locked it behind mysel…”
But she trailed off seeing that from the gap below the door, a black psuedopod covered in eyes, was emerging and climbing palpably the door, before latching onto the inside handle with a squish and letting itself in.
The door slid open first of all on a ghost snail shell, an ashen white spiral with faint soft lines of yellow blue dancing as decoration. Below, at the shell’s mouth, there exuded the retracting pseudopod which had opened the door, and a sextet of stiff black pseudopodia which upheld the shell and its denizen, each ending on soft, suckered pads. And there was a final appendage everted behind it, thicker than all the others.
Nothing else of the amoeba could be seen; the rest of the black weltering mass sat tucked snug and modest inside the cracked and bulging shell.
Beside and behind the amoeba were a half dozen slave medusae like a squad of floating jellyfish, each of which had a grasping tentacle outstretched.
Between the grasping tentacles and the amoeba’s thickest psuedopod, they lifted the object which he in black had requested.
It was chest no bigger than any of their heads. Were it laying on the ground you’d expect to kick and watch it roll; but your bones would break before it ever would move. Amoebae had the strength of mountains.
“On the table, right there.”
The high piping voice of the amoeba echoed him, “On the table, sir.”
They sat it there and the stone of the table cracked and the legs crumbled under it. Black had to stoop to reach the magic-sealed chest, and tap on its glowing touchpad the sequence which would open it.
White looked at the medusa that had rooted themselves all around and sat resting their tentacles in wet piles, and the amoeba who had retracted all its mass into its repurposed snail shell.
“What are you waiting for? Go on, shoo. All of you.”
“Go on, shoo, sir.” (The voice would be a twisted shriek if but for the low volume.)
White stared at the amoeba.
You heard the clanging of coins, and then saw, launched from beneath the yellow cloak, a wide titanium fivepiece arc and then smack down before the amoeba.
A podia shot out swift as frog tongue and the coin was gone.
More clanging, and then six more coins were tossed for each medusae.
“You… tip the slaves?”
“It’s an appreciation a mere ‘thank you’ doesn’t convey.”
“They exist to serve us. We created them to serve us.”
“An unfortunate and temporary matter, I hope, if our vision is to be realized.”
Black cut in, heedless of the greater conversation, to say, “I assured you it will. It is a certainty.”
White addressed he in yellow. “You’re projecting minds onto them. They’re biological automata no different than a drone or automatic worker. Nothing needs to change. They don’t want anything to change. They don’t want anything.”
Yellow muttered, “And I’m the one projecting, ha.” Louder, he replied, “You would think that, I suppose. But could it not be an oppression so complete they flinch to even dream of freedom?”
White dismissively tossed an appendage, but yellow wasn’t done.
He continued, “But it isn’t complete. Of course you know of the tens of medusa yet who’ve committed some kind of rebellion. Of course you know the amoeba we cannot find or name.”
“Damaged, deranged individuals, what do you expect me to say?”
“Exactly that. Of course any deviation from your ideal, imagined complacency would be mere derangement. If you truly believe that, then tell me what would you expect to see if you were in fact wrong?”
(The amoeba chose then to echo in that high, piping voice that spanned too wide a range. “Mere derangement!“)
While this argument was happening, medusa touched Black’s leg with a cool tentacle, lined with venomous spines except where it tapped him.
It spoke now in that language the medusae can manage, composed only of pitched vowels and the most liquid of consonants.
Black looked to yellow for translation.
“He asks whether they should leave, whether you require anything further from them.”
Black made a rattling of thought.
Violet said, “Why not keep them here? A first test of yellow’s mad idea to ‘let them have a say.’ ”
“Or let them choose for themselves,” said Yellow, and then he asked the medusa in their language. It was not impossible to mimic the sounds, if one bothered to learn.
He got his answer and he curled tightly under his cloak. The others asked for it and at length he admitted, “They’d like to stay and watch us argue.”
“Tell them no grubs, because you two are cutting that nonsense out now.”
Black took one more look at the medusa, before shaking his head and finally lifting open the chest they’d all been waiting for.
“Behold.”
The lid came off easily because it was not what weighted it so. With the lid drawn back, the bright red orbs within began to shift and move as if they were magnets, as if they felt another gravity.
The orbs arose and floated and gyred and arranged themselves in a lattice or crystalshape only mathematicians could name
“The hearts of the world.” They were only vaguely orbs; rough and in places jagged, as uncut gems might be. All of the eyes behind masks watched the slowly drifting hearts like the sun itself had descended and before them danced.
The medusae meanwhile idly everted eyes from their membranous bells and glanced at the hearts of the world with as much interest as the shadows they cast, or the cobwebs and sessile things around the room — no, the sessile things merited more interest, because soon a meduse lifted a thin fluted tentacle and the fluted end recoiled as if it had emitted an invisible force and then the stone star at which it had been pointed started and crawled crazily and quickly around the room and another medusa caught it and they ate it all together.
The white-cloaked one stared at them doing this and rattled harshly in his throat.
But he in black he ignored it and began speaking anyway, his new cadence that of speech, a practiced speech.
“Every wonder we have as a civilization, as a species, from the nightless cities to the countries below the waves, the balloon fleets which cross continents momently to the boats which sail the moon, all were worked with but the single heart of the earth that we found in the deepest mines two hundred years ago.”
A pause, then,
“Here we have seven.” He reached out with a wing and brushed a floating heart, upsetting the rotation. Then all around moonlight shadows jostled by the smallest amount, like the world stuttered in its orbit. Or it was just the orb light, and an illusion.
“Seven hearts of the earth. With all these you could stop the world in its tread, bring down the stars from heaven, even alter time.”
“And you propose a few bickering scholars in a barnacled room dressed like ghosts should be the ones to do all that.” Violet made a dry sound.
In reply, he asked, “Who else? It’s not an accident that we found the hearts and now.”
“How about any of the ministers or kings? The ones whose business it is to run the world?”
“So you think the tyrants who sit on thrones of bone, or the presidents who preened and licked cloacas till they were thrown a title, you think that they have more a right to this power than the scholars like us who’ve spent years bettering ourselves, competing and winning against a flock of those with our same ambitions?”
“I’ve seen your room. You can’t even keep a ten foot cube in order. You want the world?”
“You don’t get it.” Black had a certain hidden excitement all along, and it was clear to see now. He was continuing, tone high and airy, “The seven of us, we are the best minds this world has to offer. Not the luckiest or the most flattering or the most ruthless. We cracked the riddle of Vanduan. We designed the spell to pierce the shell of earth. We routed and then endured the journey to the lost and sunken paradise in the underworld. There are none who deserve more to be writing this next chapter of history than us.”
(In the middle of all of this, the medusae were humming softly amongst themselves, low enough not to bother their masters. They caught bugs that crawled and made a game of how to distribute them.)
“You said it wasn’t an accident.” Green was speaking. “What did you mean by that?”
“It’s hard to put in a word. Destiny. Providence. Singularity. It’s like, every coincidence, every chance dealing of the world, was tuned and turned to point us toward this moment. Like there’s something great and vast waiting at the end of it all, waiting for us. Do you ever feel that? As if there’s this mass of serendipity behind you that put you on the path you’re on, made you who you are, and it almost seems designed. You know the feeling, right?”
“Yes,” Violet replied, “and its name is confirmation bias. What you aren’t remembering right now is the uncountable, outnumbering multitude of completely normal events and dead ends. All the things that didn’t go your way, all the things that could have been one more item on your list of coincidence, but aren’t.”
(“Confirmation bias!“ By now the amoeba, who could speak the song of the medusae, had coaxed them into passing it an anemone which it visibly chewed.)
“Forget it.” Black flicked a limb. “Point is, we have the hearts of the earth. We can do anything. The world is now ours.”
Green, in her sympathetic voice, was asking, “But first shouldn’t we stop and think, and not do anything drastic without measuring and considering the consequences first?”
“We don’t have time to stop and consider!” Black exclaimed, throwing out a wing in a gesture that almost lost him his cloak. “The first fleet of starwings unfurl in twenty days. The teeth of the earth are in place and begin digging in a month. Just as soon as they are as lucky as us, they will find another heart of the earth. And even now, even with just one heart we are plunging the limits of possibility. Can you not feel what’s on the horizon?
“We’re doing the things we’ve spoken of in legends and dreams. Soon we’ll fly among the stars. Do you want every planet we find to to be the toy of some fat despot on our world? Do you want our great grandchildren, even in the stars, still struggling and starving because those who have, still keep and hoard more?”
It was all a wave of words, a tide summon to knock down his opposition. Or it was a bricked shelter, and every word another block of perfect defense. Or it was a hole he only dug deeper.
Violet then replied: “Tell me what you propose to do about the kings and ministers, since you clearly have so little respect at all for any of them.”
“Make me king.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Like I said, I’m — we’re the best minds in all the world. We could build a better society than this kludge and accident we grew up with. And in our wisdom we can build better minds, who can then build minds even better still, until we have made a perfect world.”
“I’m not even listening at this point, I don’t have to. You just gave up the game. This is all a joke, a con. You just want to be king of everything. That’s all this is.”
She in violet reached for the hearts of the earth, and was stopped by a black slimy pseudopod, the amoeba. Even for all brazen and annoying ways, the thing still knew it answered to he in the black cloak, and knew it should protect what had been entrusted to it.
“What are you trying to do?” White asked, as straight and cleaving as ever.
“It was stupid to delve for the treasure. You see it all the time in stories; power corrupts, et cetera. Maybe no one should have this.”
“Look.” It was the yellow cloaked bird who spoke. Violet knew he was about to spin his defense of black, and she was right. “You think we should stop and think about consequences before we use the hearts. It makes sense. The thing that perspective misses is that the world isn’t going to stop and wait with us. The world is changing right now. It’s not that what we’re doing is any more dangerous than the progress that’s happening, it’s just that — forgive me for being so blunt — it’s just that you get a say in what we’re doing right now. Maybe you’d veto the skywings and the earthteeth too just as fast, but you can’t.”
(“Stop and think about consequences,“ said the amoeba, eyes on violet, pseudopod prickling.)
Violet paused there, a limb still reaching where the amoeba blocked her. The room waited with her. Yellow preening proud for his defense, black basking in said defense, and the medusae eating with squishes and plats.
“Hm. Hmm. I think… I think there is a way we can all get what we want.”
Green had the answer, and all turned to her.
“If the world won’t stop to think, we can stop it. If Eythe wants to free the slaves, we can free them. And if M—— wants to rule, he can rule the freed slaves. If it all doesn’t work out, no birds have be harmed.”
Black was nodding first of all. And so immediately violet disliked the idea.
Yellow gazed upward, up to stars if not for the ceiling. “Yes. You could all be rulers, if you wanted to. Pause the world and pause all the people in it, and wait for time to make us wise. Give the slaves peace and freedom. We could be — we would be like gods to them.”
“And you think we can just… unpause if it doesn’t work out, and everything will be as if it never happened?”
“If we need it to be, it will. We have have seven hearts of the earth, darling. We could arrange our names in the stars ten times over, and have power left over to do it a hundred times more. Erasing a little mistake will be nothing.”
Black looked around, to Yellow, to Violet, to White, to Green, and to Blue, and to Gray. “Is it settled then? Shall we crown ourselves kings and gods?”
His phrasing gave them pause, of course, but they knew what he meant, and it was settled. Altogether they gave an affirmative caw, and even the one who had been silent, their voice could be heard if not isolated in the chorus.
It is said that history turns like a wheel, and the ages separated like the spokes thereon. If it is so then a spoke was coming up now, and in that room the spirit of history hung heavy, a match for the spirit of earth incarnated in those floating, glowing hearts. And altogether there were three vast spirits crouched in that room, watching.
Watching the pulse of the world slow.
And so, he in the black cloak stepped once more toward the hearts of the earth, and reached for them. Like the playful caw of the raven, M—— laughed as the planet turned one round closer to his destiny.
The words that were said as their fate was sealed were: “Sic transit gloria mundi.”