The Heir of Hevn (Short Story: Speculative Fiction)

(Note from Author: This is a weird one, folks. Cosmic. Speculative. Religious. I can thank Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories, and Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is basically a bastard offspring of Ellison's collection. I'm pushing the limit of my imagination, waiting for the fever-blur of fingers to be interrupted by a nosebleed, a lesion, a tumor. In the mean time--before I die penniless and unappreciated, like all the others--enjoy the story.)

The Elders convened at the Churning Stone, beings made of light, dreams, stardust. Up from the cracked basalt mesa, this lone tower of ancient geology, they rose in webs of vapor, stirring coaldust with their breath. Thirteen gold faces materialized along the mesa’s circumference, black-eyed, wearing high-collared gorgets of pale alloy.

Four moons loomed in the amber atmosphere, each closer than its brother, gray, and blue, and purple, the last so wide its pocked channels covered the eastern horizon.

Those are the Four Princes, they might say, if asked, and this rock (not a planet, we are far too meek to be a planet) is the throne they seek to conquer. There were six princes long ago. And twelve when the child of space was still a shimmer-flash of heat. But each, in their order, has crashed into the throne of Hevn, and shattered against its strength.

No one asked, and no one answered, and the Thirteen moved in sync, drawing in from their places along the mesa’s clockface, the dense atmosphere a tyrant, taking the echo of their footsteps, imbuing it with mass, until great sheets of black-red silicon spread outward in waves two miles high.

This is the Conflux, they might say, if asked, and when the Echowave traverses the harshness of the deserts, and looms again on the horizon, when it slams into itself and triples size, closing over the Churning Stone like the fingers of a red-black fist, our choice will be made, and we will hope (not real hope, for we are incapable of such futile emotional dispensation) the choice was right.

No one asked, and no one answered, and the Thirteen circled with their trident-digit hands, long and thin and bulb-appended, pressing their palms together. Their flesh made contact with a theremin suction, drawing light from the Churning Stone.

It stood between them, an upthrust stalagmite of soapy blue crystal. The light entered their faces, their thorn-ribbed mouths. Sparks gathered in the blackness of their eyes. Then at once, as if signaled, palsy seized their bodies. The high-collared gorgets tightened with a mechanical hiss, stabilizing thirteen skulls now leached of color, ballooning clear to reveal a complexity of luminous circulation.

This is the Apotheosis, they might say, if asked, and when an heir is chosen, one that might withstand the tremendous pressures of ubiquity, we will draw it from the Penumbra, and breathe into its soul (not a true soul, for no such thing exists), in hopes (forgive the idiom) that the Meanderers might be led.

No one asked, and no one answered, and the Churning Stone began to rattle, sinking through its platform, the black mesa, the very rock that was Hevn. The Thirteen laced their fingers as the planetary throb retracted, rushing wavelike up through the tower of black rock, back to its source.

The blue crystal liquefied, melted, flattened, and reshaped, while the Thirteen, perfectly calm, perfectly diaphanous, inclined their heads, spitting foam into the chalice, great tubes of luminescence that flashed across the empty desert for miles, prisms pulled from distant closets of the universe, drawn in pieces that now converged within the Churning Stone’s new shape. And there, down in the concave dish, the first twitch of life, bubbling, bonding molecules, piling carbons, a threaded pulsing nervous system flashing beneath yellow wax, here the slivers of tendon, and there the muscular slab, a being, unfolding from the soup.

White teeth flashed open, Neptune-blue eyes straining to discern its steaming, slick anatomy. Scarlet hair slid down over vertebrae shifting in final configuration beneath the skin. A twitch, a gasp.

Life.

The Echowave of black-red silicon returned to the horizon, obscuring the purple moon. The Thirteen unclasped their suctioned hands and walked backwards to their posts along the mesa, leaving the creature to adjudge.

This is The Choosing, they might say, if asked, where the Heir of Hevn must conclude if he is to lead (not truly lead, for no Meanderer smiles kindly upon leadership) the worlds away from destruction.

There was one to ask, and, pulling himself naked from the pool of his own creation, stumbling and grunting with the first sounds of existence, he did. “What. Am. I?”

The Thirteen stood gold-faced, silent, their eyes returned to pitch, lightless, emotionless, allowing nothing. The tallest and gauntest of them raised a trident-pronged hand.

The Heir of Hevn cocked his head, uncertain, untrusting. “What. Am. I—?” but the last became a scream as a bolt of energy plunged into his forehead.

A world of light swelled behind his eyes, the heir pulling at his scarlet hair, seeing worlds and wars and the black cosmic soups, seeing the first fish flop themselves onto shores choked with tendrils of Precambrian fungus, watching thousands of generations die upon the beach only for the first to live and die within the jungles, the pages flipping and flipping, the shapes growing into lumbering beasts, tearing the roots of bright-colored trees, tearing the flesh of bright-blooded creatures, the pages flipping and flipping, grunts and dances and the first flame, long treks through the snowy pole, a tribe of hursuit hominids dropping to their knees in supplication to the thunderclap, a thing they believed to be their God, the pages flipping and flipping, civilization, bronze and iron and lineage and vehicles locomoted by the toil of men, and wars, such wars, waged in honor of faces and totems and idols, faces that the Heir had perhaps known in dreams, the pages flipping and flipping, warriors and , piling bodies, bound paper from which flowed a sea of blood, black lines arranged in segments, symbols and pictures and perverse moral fictions, the pages flipping and flipping, towers of iron and silicon scraping the bellies of  brown scudding clouds, the oceans black, and again the beached carcasses, and the steam of exhaustion, and the cries for help, for reason, for reckoning, the cries, so many cries, and the thunder, new thunder, pollutant thunder, clapping from horizon to horizon in a mushroom of light, and the people falling to worship it, falling as their ancestors upon the sheets of arctic ice, falling…

When the Heir gasped awake, each eye had faded to a milky cataract, his thick hair reduced to wisps, fallen like jackstraw to the mesa floor. He stumbled back, looking at the Echowave, close, so close, and back to the Thirteen, and back to the Churning Stone, already reshaping its point.

He stumbled to the black mesa’s center, climbed the platform, straddled the crystal fang, and with one last look at the Echowave, and a two words—

“NO MORE!”

—dropped all his weight onto its point.

The Thirteen showed no disappointment or joy. 

Another has fallen, they might say, if asked, and so we wait.

No one asked, and no answered, and the Thirteen lifted their hands in unison, unimpaling the heir’s body with a jerk of levitation, and flinging it over the mesa’s edge.

The tallest, gauntest Elder swiveled its thin neck to watch it fall, bloody flesh turning in a cartwheel. It pulped against the rocks, sliding down the shelf in a cloud of black scree, where it thumped into the other corpses, the other Heirs, their names limitless, stretching back into the age before ages, gods, all dead, all faded into myth.

The Heir looked up from his death pit at the black desert wave, and though only thirty-three seconds had passed here on Hevn, he’d spent a year for each of those seconds in the place they called Earth. The Heir looked down at the crater in his stomach. With a groan, he crawled atop the deathpile, cradling each moldered face, calling them by name, for now he knew them, those heroes of the Greeks and Persians and Visigoths, those idols of Babylonia and Sumer, Atlantis and Lemuria, champions of the ancient Steppes and hulking Himalayas. He held the faces of those that had failed before him, and weeping, died with a bitter smile on his face.

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