Things Fall Apart

Chapter I

Ere fall the stones of heaven. The flare and the thunderclap and the stars driving headlong their downward course along the vapory shores of the world like a spread of gems on a wheel. The day was one of August, just so. The storms had not gone and the sun not come up yet in some farther quadrant of that glinting cupola the night had grown luminescent for the plummet of a point of sapphirine light like an egg. Old eosphorus unslotted at last. Tumbling twixt the nomadic house of war, the wandered house of sea like a comet and with portents no less dire towards a parched and godless earth like some fiery absconder fugitive among its brethren.

A ship then, such a ship as it is. A carrier twirling mutely aglow like a crude windup toy loosed of its gears. Its silvered hull blushing white and peeling fast away and the peeled plates winking phosphorescently in the midnight like chaff and the metal skirts molten belling upwards against a furious drift as if they had the constancy of wax and the spires unmoored from its belly turned in its wake like the splintered lances of knights invisible but for the stars eclipsed by their passing. And the engines fired madly. The twinned set mounted in the stern were one dead and the other dying, the portside machinery sputtering smoke and the starboard disintegrating in midair and the whole of the ship descending like some pyrogenic ore loosed from the sun.

All that night figures could be seen egressing the wreckage. Beings like stenciled apparitions shifting shade to shade in the warping firelight like the faint afterlives of some violent sect of the damned who in this vague existence bore a semblance of man and were perhaps of as much substance. They stitched across the face of the waters bleeding and dying and crying aloud for the intercession of a pantheon no less silent than those ravenous entities who cry themselves for blood and the blood of sons and more blood. And then they are gone in the darkness.

The raw redness of the dawn appeared the pilot. Fallen out this glass fanged portal, pursued by fire adown this welted superstructure. To tarmac. It rose. It staggered to the edge of the runway and stepped off into a roiling rutilant smoke. Far below there was a dull slap of water. The waves rippling out. And stilling. And stilling. It surged upwards and a bloody froth regurgitated into a blackish harbor beclot with corpse through which it must wade like some doleful sinner wrought out of a lake of blood. To this shore where fire has barbered the sedge. Up this embankment of ash, this concrete apron webbed by fissure, under a crumbled bridge where gray gilleted crows roosted in terror on the girders. It looked up, all their avian eyes upon it, went on. Ascended the sharp turns of these stairs. At the uppermost landing a guardrail in improbable contortion. Here the road. Slabs of macadam like a pair of ophidian vertebrates hammered out upon the earth whereon in scattering its fellow starfarers sat bestilled by the sheer immensity of their infortunes.

A few turned to watch it. That dark ananias. As if it were some fabled faith healer called upon to bring out the dead among that rabble of bloodblacked maimfolk no less drenched in blood itself. A parabolic gash wound about its right adderlike eye and that eye was cracked and flushed with blood, the capillaries all broken up and a hellish terra incognita contained within those tinctured pupils. Its right arm was splayed to a silver sheening bone and its trousers were wet with blood and its jacket wore dark unblinking eyelets around little shards of glass like the monuments of a rabid and parasitic denomination and its undershirt clung to it like a scab. In these tattered cerements it seemed a creature baptized in the liquefied bones of prior species as if somehow this impostor had usurped the blessing of antecessors with whom no lineage was shared save in the common temporality derived from that elemental egg which exploded the universe.

Nothing was said and it shambled mutely past the mazy ranks of the stunned and inambulate to the border of a sylvan hell beyond the roadside whereupon a rude stump like a throne it set and beheld the dusty gotterdammerung land where had terminated its fall.

A broiling hellscape. General with fire and germed with sparks flurried on searwinds blown for to gasp the land dry. In the west lay an apocalyptic backtrack through an old world forest. A long breach of trees erred and smoking like censers along a cauterized trough. Its eyes drifted. Here I am. Here I am. All before an inferno. All behind a cinerary waste.

The pilot didnt know how long it set there. When it woke it was without knowledge that it had woken or even that it had slept at all. Standing before it now was a waterbearer. A diminutive creature in a shawl of silicate rage. It carried in its arms an urn and it gave it…him. Her. Gave her water to drink. Tilting up the urn by the base. The pilot closed her eyes. The water was cool and good. When the urn let down again the waterbearer was staring back at her frail and unafraid in a clapping hurricane of fire that absolved in one ashy gust this benevolent phantom from sight and no amount of scrying would recall even a trace of it for it was gone. Nor was there any other to see for save herself there was no soul other upon the road for even from that nubilated terrain had the sun routed the survivors for all that they had yet been in darkness.

She rose. She went down the road through a plague of fireflies born aloft in smoke. She walked as far as the JD bridge passing as she went a few nameless laggards who pursued her like zombies. She ascended a caged ladderwell up to the old trackway for to ascertain her surroundings from the perilous vantage of the lattice pylons installed along the track but the country was filled with smoke and it was not long before the winds howled her down.

Her wanderings now become blind. The crew had dispersed through the countryside and she encountered them so often, small moribund scatterings of vexed decerebrates brainsicked by incubus wondering dumbly a steppe scalded to the loam. Others who had infiltrated among the crispened trunks of pine and white oak for the cooler shade to be had there.

There is a meaningless woe present in the wake of all calamities and by that most dread she tracked her mates to a gutted wood where a few remnant bands had gathered in a grim menagerie of suffering where lies a woe to wash the stones. To mute them. Already the ground become a muxy batter so watered itd been by blood.

Among others she trickled in and set to touring the camp. Everywhere lay crew with blanched hides or skins that sloughed off like wet mache and some clutched limbs oddly truncate or flesh swolled by the displacement of bones. She came across the navigator where he lay in the mud. His face had been crushed and the frontal lobes squeezed out below his eyes like an intracranial vomit. These aliens that have fallen have tendrils out their heads both thin and thick and alive and his were dead and burst. Through this world and others they move by feet like the ossifrage and manipulate them with that likeness and they are two tongued. Beside the navigator were piles of limbs sorted by appendage. The hands outstretched in every vector, reaching, clutching. What for? Theres only air.

Her thread through this discrete misery passed her by a legless technician with a face abraded. The stumps had been tied off with belts but they still leaked steadily their oil hued blood. When the dying one saw her he clasped upon her ankle and began to gibber. She raised her leg as if out of a dungheap and tried to shake loose of him but he would not let go. She stamped his throat. A sad crunch that broke his windpipe.

Hasti!

Her feathered ears pricked and slowly wanded whilst the aural sectors of her brain divided out of that fearful ambiance the voice which had called. It called again and it was behind her. Another voice asked if it were the dagestai and the first agreed that it was so.

Dorsin?

The voice called back that he was that officer and the second said that it, Azilel, was also himself too.

Their voices led her through the dust. A strange sibilance of vowels that slipped through the teeth. They were doctor and patient set by sides on a felled tree debarked by fire. They were finely scaled in hues of green and dark discolorings after their kind and shades of blue as their kind did bruise. The doctor bore a steel spike through his side but the other seemed more the dire. They spoke in their own tongue these approximations and what they said was as follows:

Regret passing up captainship now? said Azilel.

The pilot smiled a witch’s smile, full of fangs. She held out her arms, that wounded one not so high.

Calamity is the sport of the divine, to be in one so excessive beggars asking: what watches and wherefore? And why art thou glum? Thee aught be an excellent sportsman by now. Wheres Hrecki?

Could I answer he were in fire, began Dorsin, Id trust justice yet reports have him scaped unscathed. Wherever the fiend is he is the epicenter of this sabotage, this or any other conspiracy.

A conspiracy, antiphoned the pilot, a conspiracy sure. Tis a true drought when even misfortune’s well’s dry. Or must illness now ration? Trust each shall have his portion, if I unknitted this scene itd be seen wetted by the ichorice drool of the leerer Yandvilai.

Azilel drew his smallest talon across his forehead. Gods damned is wasted breath. Hang their agents, theres at least necks a rope can compass but any betrayed aught examine their company first ere trying to hang the universe.

Dying prating hypocrite, hissed the pilot. Ill not misplace my blame.

Then find something mortal to share it with.

Tis a wide course in me where rage flows, thou shouldst care it not brook thee.

Azilel tapped the end of the spike almost contemplatively. He didnt look away but he didnt speak.

The pilot turned to Dorsin. What bane’s befallen you?

Belief of thine death, he answered. In thy blood I saw thee that thee were dead.

Romantic to thy end. I survive. But not in this way lixao, these are working hours.

Azilel leveled a twig towards the ship. What happened? he said.

Azilel shall desist speech. Wheres Mai-kin?

Deceased, said Dorsin. Command is yours.

The pilot laughed. Another trite shirker of messes.

Art thy blind that thy are mirthful?

Ive naught to do with this, said the pilot.

Tis a function of a dagestai.

Defined as does as wishes not whats asked.

Nor whats required, muttered Azilel.

I cede command, said Dorsin. Hithia Azilel Grevat you shall stand as my witness.

I so stand.

Not doing.

Tis done.

I recuse myself on grounds of conflicting interests.

Tis yours.

The pilot cast her sight woodenly about as if pulled upon by wires. Mine? she said. Mine? My designs? She gestured widely at the pines about. Cylindric beings strange of substance did I inaugurate the laws of the world? Does sickness spread on my account? No. Where is the xriagai?

In no one place. Probably you passed a piece of him along the way.

The pilot spat on the doctor.

And you? she said.

Dorsin looked up. He began to say but thought better the showing of it. He bent slightly at the waist and rolled up his pantleg. The leg underneath was broke. An angular tripod of ebony bones connecting knee and ankle, the two anterior of which were broken and all desleeved of flesh and fascia. The pilot bent to inspect it, turning it without concern of his wincing. She tugged the legging down.

Canst thou feel?

No. I wont again. Wilt thou not take command?

The pilot scratched viciously at her throat as though her voice were an itch to her. He guilts it on, justice art thou are? How many are we here?

Shy of a hundred, said Dorsin. Twas a winding route but common. Mostly we were on the road ere it began to melt. Its heat put us off. It will drive us out here too.

Is there a better place found?

Anyplace.

Make due here.

Azilel pointed towards a distant glow in the dust like a second sun. Not for my sake alone, he said, but our priority should be the Nghorro, we need desperate mending.

The pilot laughed. Its fastly docked and no concern the tide.

Azilel glared balefully. Weve no tools.

She let off a slow disapproving series of tongue tsks. Never a less unjestful lot. Draw thy splinter then assemble to me.

He gestured offhandedly at the spike without looking at it. Im pained beyond duty, whom shall I subrogate to my stead? Myasti.

No.

No?

Thou shalt come with me.

Hes head of the iatric compliment, said Dorsin.

The matter? Were he my head hed go. And my head attends.

I would not send him.

And you are not Adelinda. Azilel, go. And be no long time.

Azilel touched his wound but there was no dissuading her. He pushed off from the log and turned stiffly and hobbled away.