I have two chapters complete and a third mostly done, in writing, but I will submit them here a little slower. Chapter one:
With a gentle scrape, the actress' soft shoes slid down the stone, leaving white skids where they passed as she fell to her knees. She'd failed again, as she always did, and she knew for certain she was going to fail again. How could she correct her mistakes when she would have no memory of having made them?
---
Just before dawn, at the crest of a hill. It was a barren hill, more of a dune, made from sand packed down to hardpan over countless years of wind and sun... no rain, never rain here. The hill and the world around it were featureless and empty. Then, suddenly, they were not so empty. With a gentle hiss like tearing silk, a woman fell upon the crest, bending at an unhealthy angle as she hit the ground. Her blood was the first liquid to spill on these dunes in more years than the cloudless sky could recall.
There had been water once, and clouds, and even life. Once, beans and barley and clase had grown reluctantly in the soil; those had been the sad days at the end. Before even that, too long ago even for gods to remember, there had been grass, laughter, and children. The sun - which just now poked its head over the horizon and spread pink light on the crest of hardpan - had burned with a gentle warmth, not the merciless heat which was even now drying what little fluid hadn't soaked into the earth.
The broken figure bleeding herself dry on the hilltop would not remember those green days, nor would she recognise this land for what it had been. Those days were far behind her. It was a pity and a mercy at once. She would not have taken well to knowing it was her own hand which had dried the rivers and brought in the unrelenting torment which was to be her only companion for the next eternity.
--
Much later, a skeletal creature dragged itself half-walking, half-crawling against the side of a steep escarpment. It was barely recognisable as a human, its skin taught and dry across its bones. Its breath came in wheezing gasps, followed by a dry rattle as the remains of its tongue, still holding to the bottom of its mouth by some miracle, shook in the passing air. It wore only minimal clothing, a tattered rag that had once been a fine shirt. Threads of what could only loosely be termed hair still clung to its cracked, dry scalp. Each thread - there could not have been more than a dozen left - was tied and clinging tenaciously to some small, glittering ornament. The tenacity with which this creature still clung to its humanity, if it could be called such, would at once have been revolting and inspiring had there been anyone to observe it.
The creature's talon fingers grasped desperately at the cliffside as if seeking some kind of grip. As it turned to face the stone, away from the sun, three gaping slashes across the ruin of its back came into view. With almost no flesh left to get in the way, the bleached stripes of the sorry creature's ribs were clearly visible. Had there been anything microbes left in this wasteland to threaten it, the creature would likely have caught blood-sickness from the untreated injury, back when it had enough moisture left in it to catch the attention of bacteria. That was no longer a risk; no microbe would infect a mummified corpse.
By nightfall, the creature had ascended the first tier of the cliff face. It crouched pathetically against the stone, making gentle mewling noises as it stared at the ruins of its fingertips. As the moon rose and turned the desert blue, casting its eye on the ruination of the last human in this forsaken waste, the thing which had once called herself Empress finally slumped over and slept.
--
Morning came, and the pitying eye of the moon was traded with the baleful eye of the sun. She glared right into it as it crested the horizon, hissing between her remaining teeth as the lids scraped across her moistureless eyes. Always it looked so accusingly at her!
She knew she'd gone far into madness. There was no way she could avoid it; she had lost count of the sunrises, but they numbered more than a hundred she was sure. Time meant nothing in this waste, especially not to someone cursed as she was. Her joints, which by all rights should have fallen to pieces by now, creaked in protest as she uncurled herself and clattered to the edge of her sleeping-ledge. She gazed down on the desert, now many feet below her, and eventually espied her trail. On the hardpan, she had left little trace, but the wind had not yet scoured most of it away. She could see her scraping, inhuman track wind away, into the sea of gold and grit. Somewhere back there was the point where she'd first noticed the cliff, the first change in this damnable eternity of sand and dunes, where she had first found something to travel to instead of the endless wandering that had dominated her life until then.
Seeing the cliff, she knew, was a turning point. She couldn't truly remember her mind before then, but she new that it was different now. Having something to move towards was better. A new, pathetic meaning to her life: walk to the cliff. Drag yourself to the cliff, woman, get to the cliff. Now she was at the cliff. She was climbing the cliff, with strength in her arms that belied her wasted, skeletal appearance. What would happen if she got to the top, only to see another endless expanse of desert?
Well, then, she would move away from the cliff until she could see it no more. And when she could see it no more, she would wander again until some new goal presented itself. Had she not always wandered? There was no way to be sure, but that sounded about right. Shaking herself, hating the way the ruin of her body clattered as she did so, she turned to face the cliff again. With a sigh like the air drawing into a tomb, she forced the clawed remnants of her fingers into cracks in the stones and resumed her spiderlike ascent.
--
On the third day, she saw the tower. It hung on the edge of the cliff like a tree on a riverbed, projecting out over the desert below as though it had roots deep into the stone. For all she knew, it did. She didn't care; the very sight of something new brought a surge of joy and hope to her chest. She knew there was no cause to hope: no one could live in the tower, there was nothing for them to eat or drink. Nevertheless, it was a sign! Someone had lived here somewhen, and that meant that if she could ever find the end to the desert, she could perhaps find new life as well. "Someone to help", she thought, and then wondered if she meant someone to help her, or someone she could help.
She climbed without hesitation, all through the night. As the sun rose the next morning - the damned thing never gave up - the remains of the tormented woman pulled up to the crest of the cliff. She spared barely a moment thinking about what was next; she did not care to look, and find out it was more desert. Instead she focused on the tower, sprawling as she tried to run towards it and lost control of her twisted limbs. After a painful crawl back to her feet, she proceeded at a more careful pace.
If the tower had once stood straight, those days were long gone. The base jutted out almost horizontally from the cusp of the cliff, then gradually, almost organically curved to nearly vertical. It was not a large tower; she estimated that, were it straight, she would almost be able to touch both walls with her outstretched arms. That didn't matter. She had to know what was inside. As she drew closer, she realised that rather than being made of bricks, it seemed to be carved from solid stone. Only the roof, a ramshackle thing of broken tiles, and the door - far too regularly shaped to be natural - gave testimony that the tower was not simply a rock formation. Even so, she worried that what she was seeing was just a product of her madness and the sun.
Casting aside her worries, she dropped through the door (which was far more a hole in the ground than a portal she could walk through). Sand had built up, covering what used to be the floor, but on the curving wall of the tower, a simple metal table was balanced precariously. The woman studied it with interest for a moment, then felt something so alien it took her several minutes to identify the sensation.
Her feet were damp.
She scarcely noticed the protest in her skin and joints and the threads remaining of her muscles as she spun and began clawing at the sand, struggling to uncover the source of the water leaking from what had once been the tower's floor. After a handful of minutes that seemed to take forever, the claws of her once-soft fingertiips hit a hard, curved metal surface. Desperately, no longer human in her torment, she ripped at it until it came free from the sand... a metal nozzle at the end of a snaking, ribbed tube of some kind. As she squeezed it, a spray of muddy sand blasted into her face and eyes. The grit no longer bothered her; she'd lived with grit in her eyes and skin for too long. The moisture under her eyelids was what caught her attention. Had she time to relish it, she would have blinked - ignoring the grit entirely - only to enjoy the sensation of blinking wet eyes again. This, however, was not the time for such trivialities. She squeezed the nozzle again, and a rush of clear, joyous water burbled out, covering her face and body more than it passed down the ruination of her gullet. She shuddered in ecstasy, forgetting her endless torment in that one sparkling moment, and then drank as best she could. With her throat so dry and cracked, she could not swallow; she was sure she had filled her lungs with more water than she'd drunk, but it didn't matter one bit.
Eventually, reluctantly, she let go of the nozzle and curled to the base of the tower, coughing muddy liquid out of her lungs as she relaxed. Pain flowed through her chest and body, but it was a good pain. It was a pain of healing.
--
When she woke, she allowed herself another bath, watching in detached horror as her skin flaked off under the rinse of water, exposing leathery flesh the colour of sand. She drank as much as she could, vomited some of it back up, and fell asleep again. For several days, this was her life. She would not have traded it for anything.
She knew her situation was truly improving when the gashes on her back began to bleed again. The day after that, pieces of her sand-dry flesh began to crust away, revealing tender pink skin underneath. She resisted the urge to pull at her own body, knowing she'd be better off letting it recover on its own.
Eventually, her wounds stopped bleeding and her body stopped falling apart. She could feel the bristles of hair on her scalp, and she could swallow at will. Best of all, she could now appreciate what it truly meant to blink. There was a price: among the healed organs was her stomach, and it didn't merely complain, it wailed in torment. She had no idea where she was getting the nutrients to regrow her body, but she didn't care. Her arms were emaciated, her belly bloated, and her face taught and lined, but she was human again.
--
Two days after she had finished healing, the water stopped flowing. The last few drops came with a gentle "burp", and no fanfare. She resisted the urge to weep as best she could, and made sure to catch the few tears that did fall. It would have been foolish to curse such a blessing, and she was lucky it had lasted as long as it had. She clambered to her feet, setting the nozzle aside like the corpse of her only child, and proceeded to explore the rest of the tower, seeing it for what was essentially the first time.
The table was the first obvious feature. It was made of the same metal as the nozzle, a barely tarnished nondescript silvery substance. Had she been able to remember the word "aluminum" she could have identified it instantly. It was warped and twisted, but seemed to have survived an eternity. She moved towards it, looking up the height of the tower as she did. Once, a curling stair had risen up, but those days were gone. She could see marks where they'd clung to the wall, and remnants of floors where they'd stopped. At the top, most of the floor of the top room seemed intact. It was far too high for her to climb, so she let it be. She had a feeling that whatever purpose the tower had served in its past was long gone, and that by ressurecting her, it had completed its final task. Her feeling was confirmed as she crawled back out the door. As she clambered out and onto the cliff, the tower shuddered, gasped, and let go from the face of the stone, turning end over end once before hitting the cliffside and breaking in half. It took a moment for the sound of its impact to reach her ears, and when it did, she smiled faintly. In the hollow where the tower's base had been, a handful of bent pipes stuck forth like skeletal ribs. One, surely, had led into the nozzle that had restored her hope. She wasted no time to see if there was any moisture left. There would not be.
She turned around, ready to face the land beyond the cliff, and felt her gut wrench. It was not more desert, but there was little difference. Rocks jutted at unnatural angles from the lifeless, gritty dirt of a new wasteland. For a moment, despair wrapped tightly around her, but she restored herself quickly. Her first penance had been paid. The tower showed her that much. If there was more waiting, she would take what was given.
--
As it turned out, she had little to fear from this new waste. The sun was less ferocious this high up. As she walked, she realised she was climbing still higher, but at a more gradual pace now. The air, not very rich in the desert, grew thinner as she climbed, but compared to the dessication of the desert, the dizziness was nothing. At night, she huddled against the jagged stones and slept fitfully; for the first time since she'd arrived her, she dreamt. The dreams were disjointed, jagged as the stones she slept against, but they restored some of what made her human. She remembered emotion, most especially love.
One night, her eyes snapped open long before the moon had completed its course. She stared into the white glow of her only friend in the wastelands, and let out a hesitating, keening wail, screaming until her voice went hoarse. When finally she could no longer scream, she curled into herself, shaking with rage and grief.
She'd finally remembered. Eventually her shaking subsided and she fell again into fitful rest. When she woke, the madness in her eyes had fled, replaced with a cold determination that was far, far worse.
--
Not a week later, the woman - who had been known by many names, and now remember most of them - reached the end of the wasteland. The expanse of jutting stone and gritty dirt ended as a single crack, from which burbled a thin stream of water. The woman crouched and drank her fill, then slept, and drank again when she woke. She was dry again, but this time was nowhere near as bad as the tower; she could, as was painfully obvious by this point, survive tortures far greater than any mortal could imagine. After her second sleep she was refreshed, and ready to continue. She followed the flow of the spring as it cut a narrow ravinebed down the gradual slope of the mountain she'd just climbed. Soon it was met by other flows of water, some spilling from out of the ground or between rocks. By the end of her day's journey, she was walking alongside a swift-flowing river. In the rising moonlight, she was enormously pleased to see the first life besides herself: a murky green slime clinging sadly to the rocks of the streambed. She resisted the urge to pull up a rock and lick it for nutrients; if it could cling to stone in this waterflow, she'd gain nothing but a scraped tongue, and possibly lose her last remaining teeth. The rushing of the river soothed her to sleep, and for the first time, she slept soundly.
The next days brought her first lichen, then dry sticks of brittle grass (which she pulled up and ate gladly and ravenously), then finally, to her tear-filled eyes, the verdant heads of highland thistles. She tore at these gladly, ignoring the cuts to her hands and lips as she ripped them apart and scraped out the juicy cores. They were unhealthy, dry specimens, but the trickle of nutrients into her tormented gut was the finest food she'd tasted. The day passed quickly as she travelled slower along the river, stopping at every plant to drain its stock before continuing. As she descended, the air grew thicker, hotter, and moister, and the plants grew more plentiful. She could see ahead that it would never be a jungle, but soon she would not want for food. Perhaps she could even count on animal life; she knew there had been humans here once.
That night, she crouched at the riverside and wept. She didn't weep for what she'd lost, though certainly she'd have been justified. She didn't even weep for who she had lost, though that would have been better. Instead, she wept of the simple knowledge that she was bound to repeat this same torment - rarely to quite this extent, she was certain - until time itself wore to a close and she was left floating in the abyss without even a place to wander to.
--
By the next day, she had truly passed out of the waste. The terrain had flattened into rolling hills, and the river - now quite a significant flow - had widened into a lazy, winding trail across the plains before her. Tall grasses, still dry and brittle, but healthy, scraped at her bare legs. That night, when she finally found a safe place in a gully by the riverside, she dared to pull up some grass and create a pile by the river, where she was fairly confident she would not set off a spark that ignited the plain. With a satisfied smirk, she laid stalks of grass carefully on the round stones of the riverbed, arranging them in a complex pattern. When she was satisfied with her work, she named her pattern and clapped her hands in childlike joy as it burst into flames. Though the fire was fueled only by a complicated weaving of grass stalks, it burned merrily for many hours. It was a humble fire, but it warmed her bones against the night and blessed her mind with a light more her own than the ever-accusing sun. She fell asleep sucking the marrow from a stalk of grass and dreaming of how fine it would be to catch some insects, or even a fish.
The next months passed in a sort of dulling monotony that was, in its own way, as harsh as the desert. She was watered, to be sure, and the grass and the few other plants that grew on the plain brought her body to better condition than it had been (hardly an improvement), but nothing broke the endless flow of hills. Were it not for the everpresent, winding river, she would have feared she was walking in circles. She was a wanderer again, as she'd always been; she had nothing to anchor her and no goal to push her. She was left with nothing but her thoughts, and there lied monsters she couldn't face. Every day she walked until the sun fell; every night she made and named the same pattern of grass-stalks, sometimes careful not to burn the plains, sometimes almost hoping the endless savannah would catch in a conflagration that would put an end to this devastating monotony - at least until the flames died and she was left with a different sort of monotony, one that would not keep her fed. Every night as the flames died down, she felt herself nodding off and struggled vainly with sleep, fearing the dreams and hating herself for being too weak. Too weak to face them, too weak to escape them.
--
I'm standing at the head of an army. I have a sword, it is taller than I am, but most of it is handle. I am feared; I am an empress! My army fears me more than my enemies do. A slave is brought to my feet. I force his chin up with the haft of my spear-sword, and stare into his face. He looks just like his father! I am startled, my feet give out from under me and I'm falling...
into an embrace. My father catches me from the air, and I laugh with an innocence only a child can muster. There are apples, always the smell of apples. He sets me on the branch of a tree in the orchard and I feel my balance slip and I fall again, laughing because I know he will catch me and I'm falling...
this time it is him who catches me and blesses me with a kiss, many kisses all over my face and neck, it has been a long time since I've seen him, I've been gone away and he missed me. I missed him too, so much, I still miss him I'm always missing him and he's never coming back! I wake up, screaming
--
She lay curled up in the hard stones of the riverbed, her face wet with tears, blood running down her chin from her bitten tongue. They were getting worse every day. This monotony, these dreams, they were building on each other. She had survived the physical torment of the desert simply because she could not do otherwise. She had survived the mental stress of the desert because exhaustion and thirst had left her a husk without emotions and thoughts. Now, she was alone with her mind, and she longed for the release of torment, had to force herself not to turn around and flee again to the endless wastes, to lose herself in the insanity and torment that had brought her into this barren, uncaring wasteland. Gradually, pulling herself tighter into her foetal position, she lulled herself back to sleep, murmuring and weeping again as her unfettered mind ventured into places she could not tread when awake.
--
The next day, she found the shrine. It was ancient, there was no question, but though the wind had worn its corners off and a narrow crack had split the stone surface of the altar, no plants had overtaken it, and no rot had diminished its solemn majesty. It was slightly taller than she was, and simple: two heavy, square stone pillars set upright, with a single flat stone altar between. She knelt at the altar and bowed her head in reverence, drinking in the power of the place. At first she felt refreshed, rejuvenated in the peace of a long-forgotten god. Soon, though, her piety was broken; she fell to the grass writhing in pain as her belly was stabbed with spikes of ice and fire, and her mind was split with a voice more potent than she remembered possible.
YOU dare to trespass here, on my last wretched hovel in this wretched land? YOU?
I did not know could not know pleaseohplease whatwhynoplease -
Her pathetic voice was cut off by a scream of anguish from the shrine's spirit, strong enough to launch her physically backwards, where she sprawled in the grass some distance from the shrine. At first she hoped that she had been drawn out of the spirit's influence, but she had no such luck. She felt her arms draw out in front of her as though pulled on ropes, and her legs soon responded in kind. Moving like a puppet, she clambered back to the shrine, and, horrified, dragged herself up onto the surface of the altar. Her hands crawled up to her chest and began to claw at it with a life of their own, the vicious strength that had taken her up the cliff face now acting as her desperate foe. She screamed, her mind rebelling against everything she was experiencing, and then fainted. Darkness overtook her, but in it she found no release.
--
I am standing - floating - in the abyss. A woman stands - floats - in front of me, her body as gaunt and unnourished as mine, her hair as straggled and unhealthy. Quite a pair we are, I worn from my travel through the wastes, she worn from her eons of isolation. She wears a simple blue robe, and in the nothing of the abyss her hair and robe float about her as though she were underwater. I wear nothing; I cannot control my form here as she can. For her to look so, it's clear she has less control than she once did.
"I hold no grudge with you, spirit. Why are you doing this?"
"Are you really so gone that you do not know? I recognised the touch of your mind the instant you knelt at my altar. How can you have forgotten the touch of mine?"
"There is a great deal I've forgotten. I have wandered for a long time."
"There are some things, little one, that you should never forget." The spirit's face is a mask, but in her words I hear something beneath the cold rage: something softer.
"Please, would you punish me without letting me know the crime? I cannot be redeemed if I do not know the cause of my torture." In my worry I have reverted to an older way of talking; I can hear my accent change, and my words with it. The spirit does not take kindly to my plea.
"THERE IS NO REDEMPTION! You have transgressed in ways for which no penance can be paid! The bones of WORLDS lie at your feet!"
I want to protest, to scream that she lies, to draw steel and silence her, to paint a pattern in the air that will end this debate with a blast of light and fire, but I cannot for one simple reason. She is absolutely right. I fall to my knees in the emptiness of the abyss, my tears floating out of my eyes in silent spheres. "I have made as much penance as I can. Let me make more, please."
My goddess drifts forward in the darkness, laying her hand on my bowed head. I look up to see that she is no longer frail and worn, but young and supple, and I remember her. "Calli," I breathe her name softly before the blackness takes me again.
---
Just before dawn, at the crest of a hill. It was a barren hill, more of a dune, made from sand packed down to hardpan over countless years of wind and sun... no rain, never rain here. The hill and the world around it were featureless and empty. Then, suddenly, they were not so empty. With a gentle hiss like tearing silk, a woman fell upon the crest, bending at an unhealthy angle as she hit the ground. Her blood was the first liquid to spill on these dunes in more years than the cloudless sky could recall.
There had been water once, and clouds, and even life. Once, beans and barley and clase had grown reluctantly in the soil; those had been the sad days at the end. Before even that, too long ago even for gods to remember, there had been grass, laughter, and children. The sun - which just now poked its head over the horizon and spread pink light on the crest of hardpan - had burned with a gentle warmth, not the merciless heat which was even now drying what little fluid hadn't soaked into the earth.
The broken figure bleeding herself dry on the hilltop would not remember those green days, nor would she recognise this land for what it had been. Those days were far behind her. It was a pity and a mercy at once. She would not have taken well to knowing it was her own hand which had dried the rivers and brought in the unrelenting torment which was to be her only companion for the next eternity.
--
Much later, a skeletal creature dragged itself half-walking, half-crawling against the side of a steep escarpment. It was barely recognisable as a human, its skin taught and dry across its bones. Its breath came in wheezing gasps, followed by a dry rattle as the remains of its tongue, still holding to the bottom of its mouth by some miracle, shook in the passing air. It wore only minimal clothing, a tattered rag that had once been a fine shirt. Threads of what could only loosely be termed hair still clung to its cracked, dry scalp. Each thread - there could not have been more than a dozen left - was tied and clinging tenaciously to some small, glittering ornament. The tenacity with which this creature still clung to its humanity, if it could be called such, would at once have been revolting and inspiring had there been anyone to observe it.
The creature's talon fingers grasped desperately at the cliffside as if seeking some kind of grip. As it turned to face the stone, away from the sun, three gaping slashes across the ruin of its back came into view. With almost no flesh left to get in the way, the bleached stripes of the sorry creature's ribs were clearly visible. Had there been anything microbes left in this wasteland to threaten it, the creature would likely have caught blood-sickness from the untreated injury, back when it had enough moisture left in it to catch the attention of bacteria. That was no longer a risk; no microbe would infect a mummified corpse.
By nightfall, the creature had ascended the first tier of the cliff face. It crouched pathetically against the stone, making gentle mewling noises as it stared at the ruins of its fingertips. As the moon rose and turned the desert blue, casting its eye on the ruination of the last human in this forsaken waste, the thing which had once called herself Empress finally slumped over and slept.
--
Morning came, and the pitying eye of the moon was traded with the baleful eye of the sun. She glared right into it as it crested the horizon, hissing between her remaining teeth as the lids scraped across her moistureless eyes. Always it looked so accusingly at her!
She knew she'd gone far into madness. There was no way she could avoid it; she had lost count of the sunrises, but they numbered more than a hundred she was sure. Time meant nothing in this waste, especially not to someone cursed as she was. Her joints, which by all rights should have fallen to pieces by now, creaked in protest as she uncurled herself and clattered to the edge of her sleeping-ledge. She gazed down on the desert, now many feet below her, and eventually espied her trail. On the hardpan, she had left little trace, but the wind had not yet scoured most of it away. She could see her scraping, inhuman track wind away, into the sea of gold and grit. Somewhere back there was the point where she'd first noticed the cliff, the first change in this damnable eternity of sand and dunes, where she had first found something to travel to instead of the endless wandering that had dominated her life until then.
Seeing the cliff, she knew, was a turning point. She couldn't truly remember her mind before then, but she new that it was different now. Having something to move towards was better. A new, pathetic meaning to her life: walk to the cliff. Drag yourself to the cliff, woman, get to the cliff. Now she was at the cliff. She was climbing the cliff, with strength in her arms that belied her wasted, skeletal appearance. What would happen if she got to the top, only to see another endless expanse of desert?
Well, then, she would move away from the cliff until she could see it no more. And when she could see it no more, she would wander again until some new goal presented itself. Had she not always wandered? There was no way to be sure, but that sounded about right. Shaking herself, hating the way the ruin of her body clattered as she did so, she turned to face the cliff again. With a sigh like the air drawing into a tomb, she forced the clawed remnants of her fingers into cracks in the stones and resumed her spiderlike ascent.
--
On the third day, she saw the tower. It hung on the edge of the cliff like a tree on a riverbed, projecting out over the desert below as though it had roots deep into the stone. For all she knew, it did. She didn't care; the very sight of something new brought a surge of joy and hope to her chest. She knew there was no cause to hope: no one could live in the tower, there was nothing for them to eat or drink. Nevertheless, it was a sign! Someone had lived here somewhen, and that meant that if she could ever find the end to the desert, she could perhaps find new life as well. "Someone to help", she thought, and then wondered if she meant someone to help her, or someone she could help.
She climbed without hesitation, all through the night. As the sun rose the next morning - the damned thing never gave up - the remains of the tormented woman pulled up to the crest of the cliff. She spared barely a moment thinking about what was next; she did not care to look, and find out it was more desert. Instead she focused on the tower, sprawling as she tried to run towards it and lost control of her twisted limbs. After a painful crawl back to her feet, she proceeded at a more careful pace.
If the tower had once stood straight, those days were long gone. The base jutted out almost horizontally from the cusp of the cliff, then gradually, almost organically curved to nearly vertical. It was not a large tower; she estimated that, were it straight, she would almost be able to touch both walls with her outstretched arms. That didn't matter. She had to know what was inside. As she drew closer, she realised that rather than being made of bricks, it seemed to be carved from solid stone. Only the roof, a ramshackle thing of broken tiles, and the door - far too regularly shaped to be natural - gave testimony that the tower was not simply a rock formation. Even so, she worried that what she was seeing was just a product of her madness and the sun.
Casting aside her worries, she dropped through the door (which was far more a hole in the ground than a portal she could walk through). Sand had built up, covering what used to be the floor, but on the curving wall of the tower, a simple metal table was balanced precariously. The woman studied it with interest for a moment, then felt something so alien it took her several minutes to identify the sensation.
Her feet were damp.
She scarcely noticed the protest in her skin and joints and the threads remaining of her muscles as she spun and began clawing at the sand, struggling to uncover the source of the water leaking from what had once been the tower's floor. After a handful of minutes that seemed to take forever, the claws of her once-soft fingertiips hit a hard, curved metal surface. Desperately, no longer human in her torment, she ripped at it until it came free from the sand... a metal nozzle at the end of a snaking, ribbed tube of some kind. As she squeezed it, a spray of muddy sand blasted into her face and eyes. The grit no longer bothered her; she'd lived with grit in her eyes and skin for too long. The moisture under her eyelids was what caught her attention. Had she time to relish it, she would have blinked - ignoring the grit entirely - only to enjoy the sensation of blinking wet eyes again. This, however, was not the time for such trivialities. She squeezed the nozzle again, and a rush of clear, joyous water burbled out, covering her face and body more than it passed down the ruination of her gullet. She shuddered in ecstasy, forgetting her endless torment in that one sparkling moment, and then drank as best she could. With her throat so dry and cracked, she could not swallow; she was sure she had filled her lungs with more water than she'd drunk, but it didn't matter one bit.
Eventually, reluctantly, she let go of the nozzle and curled to the base of the tower, coughing muddy liquid out of her lungs as she relaxed. Pain flowed through her chest and body, but it was a good pain. It was a pain of healing.
--
When she woke, she allowed herself another bath, watching in detached horror as her skin flaked off under the rinse of water, exposing leathery flesh the colour of sand. She drank as much as she could, vomited some of it back up, and fell asleep again. For several days, this was her life. She would not have traded it for anything.
She knew her situation was truly improving when the gashes on her back began to bleed again. The day after that, pieces of her sand-dry flesh began to crust away, revealing tender pink skin underneath. She resisted the urge to pull at her own body, knowing she'd be better off letting it recover on its own.
Eventually, her wounds stopped bleeding and her body stopped falling apart. She could feel the bristles of hair on her scalp, and she could swallow at will. Best of all, she could now appreciate what it truly meant to blink. There was a price: among the healed organs was her stomach, and it didn't merely complain, it wailed in torment. She had no idea where she was getting the nutrients to regrow her body, but she didn't care. Her arms were emaciated, her belly bloated, and her face taught and lined, but she was human again.
--
Two days after she had finished healing, the water stopped flowing. The last few drops came with a gentle "burp", and no fanfare. She resisted the urge to weep as best she could, and made sure to catch the few tears that did fall. It would have been foolish to curse such a blessing, and she was lucky it had lasted as long as it had. She clambered to her feet, setting the nozzle aside like the corpse of her only child, and proceeded to explore the rest of the tower, seeing it for what was essentially the first time.
The table was the first obvious feature. It was made of the same metal as the nozzle, a barely tarnished nondescript silvery substance. Had she been able to remember the word "aluminum" she could have identified it instantly. It was warped and twisted, but seemed to have survived an eternity. She moved towards it, looking up the height of the tower as she did. Once, a curling stair had risen up, but those days were gone. She could see marks where they'd clung to the wall, and remnants of floors where they'd stopped. At the top, most of the floor of the top room seemed intact. It was far too high for her to climb, so she let it be. She had a feeling that whatever purpose the tower had served in its past was long gone, and that by ressurecting her, it had completed its final task. Her feeling was confirmed as she crawled back out the door. As she clambered out and onto the cliff, the tower shuddered, gasped, and let go from the face of the stone, turning end over end once before hitting the cliffside and breaking in half. It took a moment for the sound of its impact to reach her ears, and when it did, she smiled faintly. In the hollow where the tower's base had been, a handful of bent pipes stuck forth like skeletal ribs. One, surely, had led into the nozzle that had restored her hope. She wasted no time to see if there was any moisture left. There would not be.
She turned around, ready to face the land beyond the cliff, and felt her gut wrench. It was not more desert, but there was little difference. Rocks jutted at unnatural angles from the lifeless, gritty dirt of a new wasteland. For a moment, despair wrapped tightly around her, but she restored herself quickly. Her first penance had been paid. The tower showed her that much. If there was more waiting, she would take what was given.
--
As it turned out, she had little to fear from this new waste. The sun was less ferocious this high up. As she walked, she realised she was climbing still higher, but at a more gradual pace now. The air, not very rich in the desert, grew thinner as she climbed, but compared to the dessication of the desert, the dizziness was nothing. At night, she huddled against the jagged stones and slept fitfully; for the first time since she'd arrived her, she dreamt. The dreams were disjointed, jagged as the stones she slept against, but they restored some of what made her human. She remembered emotion, most especially love.
One night, her eyes snapped open long before the moon had completed its course. She stared into the white glow of her only friend in the wastelands, and let out a hesitating, keening wail, screaming until her voice went hoarse. When finally she could no longer scream, she curled into herself, shaking with rage and grief.
She'd finally remembered. Eventually her shaking subsided and she fell again into fitful rest. When she woke, the madness in her eyes had fled, replaced with a cold determination that was far, far worse.
--
Not a week later, the woman - who had been known by many names, and now remember most of them - reached the end of the wasteland. The expanse of jutting stone and gritty dirt ended as a single crack, from which burbled a thin stream of water. The woman crouched and drank her fill, then slept, and drank again when she woke. She was dry again, but this time was nowhere near as bad as the tower; she could, as was painfully obvious by this point, survive tortures far greater than any mortal could imagine. After her second sleep she was refreshed, and ready to continue. She followed the flow of the spring as it cut a narrow ravinebed down the gradual slope of the mountain she'd just climbed. Soon it was met by other flows of water, some spilling from out of the ground or between rocks. By the end of her day's journey, she was walking alongside a swift-flowing river. In the rising moonlight, she was enormously pleased to see the first life besides herself: a murky green slime clinging sadly to the rocks of the streambed. She resisted the urge to pull up a rock and lick it for nutrients; if it could cling to stone in this waterflow, she'd gain nothing but a scraped tongue, and possibly lose her last remaining teeth. The rushing of the river soothed her to sleep, and for the first time, she slept soundly.
The next days brought her first lichen, then dry sticks of brittle grass (which she pulled up and ate gladly and ravenously), then finally, to her tear-filled eyes, the verdant heads of highland thistles. She tore at these gladly, ignoring the cuts to her hands and lips as she ripped them apart and scraped out the juicy cores. They were unhealthy, dry specimens, but the trickle of nutrients into her tormented gut was the finest food she'd tasted. The day passed quickly as she travelled slower along the river, stopping at every plant to drain its stock before continuing. As she descended, the air grew thicker, hotter, and moister, and the plants grew more plentiful. She could see ahead that it would never be a jungle, but soon she would not want for food. Perhaps she could even count on animal life; she knew there had been humans here once.
That night, she crouched at the riverside and wept. She didn't weep for what she'd lost, though certainly she'd have been justified. She didn't even weep for who she had lost, though that would have been better. Instead, she wept of the simple knowledge that she was bound to repeat this same torment - rarely to quite this extent, she was certain - until time itself wore to a close and she was left floating in the abyss without even a place to wander to.
--
By the next day, she had truly passed out of the waste. The terrain had flattened into rolling hills, and the river - now quite a significant flow - had widened into a lazy, winding trail across the plains before her. Tall grasses, still dry and brittle, but healthy, scraped at her bare legs. That night, when she finally found a safe place in a gully by the riverside, she dared to pull up some grass and create a pile by the river, where she was fairly confident she would not set off a spark that ignited the plain. With a satisfied smirk, she laid stalks of grass carefully on the round stones of the riverbed, arranging them in a complex pattern. When she was satisfied with her work, she named her pattern and clapped her hands in childlike joy as it burst into flames. Though the fire was fueled only by a complicated weaving of grass stalks, it burned merrily for many hours. It was a humble fire, but it warmed her bones against the night and blessed her mind with a light more her own than the ever-accusing sun. She fell asleep sucking the marrow from a stalk of grass and dreaming of how fine it would be to catch some insects, or even a fish.
The next months passed in a sort of dulling monotony that was, in its own way, as harsh as the desert. She was watered, to be sure, and the grass and the few other plants that grew on the plain brought her body to better condition than it had been (hardly an improvement), but nothing broke the endless flow of hills. Were it not for the everpresent, winding river, she would have feared she was walking in circles. She was a wanderer again, as she'd always been; she had nothing to anchor her and no goal to push her. She was left with nothing but her thoughts, and there lied monsters she couldn't face. Every day she walked until the sun fell; every night she made and named the same pattern of grass-stalks, sometimes careful not to burn the plains, sometimes almost hoping the endless savannah would catch in a conflagration that would put an end to this devastating monotony - at least until the flames died and she was left with a different sort of monotony, one that would not keep her fed. Every night as the flames died down, she felt herself nodding off and struggled vainly with sleep, fearing the dreams and hating herself for being too weak. Too weak to face them, too weak to escape them.
--
I'm standing at the head of an army. I have a sword, it is taller than I am, but most of it is handle. I am feared; I am an empress! My army fears me more than my enemies do. A slave is brought to my feet. I force his chin up with the haft of my spear-sword, and stare into his face. He looks just like his father! I am startled, my feet give out from under me and I'm falling...
into an embrace. My father catches me from the air, and I laugh with an innocence only a child can muster. There are apples, always the smell of apples. He sets me on the branch of a tree in the orchard and I feel my balance slip and I fall again, laughing because I know he will catch me and I'm falling...
this time it is him who catches me and blesses me with a kiss, many kisses all over my face and neck, it has been a long time since I've seen him, I've been gone away and he missed me. I missed him too, so much, I still miss him I'm always missing him and he's never coming back! I wake up, screaming
--
She lay curled up in the hard stones of the riverbed, her face wet with tears, blood running down her chin from her bitten tongue. They were getting worse every day. This monotony, these dreams, they were building on each other. She had survived the physical torment of the desert simply because she could not do otherwise. She had survived the mental stress of the desert because exhaustion and thirst had left her a husk without emotions and thoughts. Now, she was alone with her mind, and she longed for the release of torment, had to force herself not to turn around and flee again to the endless wastes, to lose herself in the insanity and torment that had brought her into this barren, uncaring wasteland. Gradually, pulling herself tighter into her foetal position, she lulled herself back to sleep, murmuring and weeping again as her unfettered mind ventured into places she could not tread when awake.
--
The next day, she found the shrine. It was ancient, there was no question, but though the wind had worn its corners off and a narrow crack had split the stone surface of the altar, no plants had overtaken it, and no rot had diminished its solemn majesty. It was slightly taller than she was, and simple: two heavy, square stone pillars set upright, with a single flat stone altar between. She knelt at the altar and bowed her head in reverence, drinking in the power of the place. At first she felt refreshed, rejuvenated in the peace of a long-forgotten god. Soon, though, her piety was broken; she fell to the grass writhing in pain as her belly was stabbed with spikes of ice and fire, and her mind was split with a voice more potent than she remembered possible.
YOU dare to trespass here, on my last wretched hovel in this wretched land? YOU?
I did not know could not know pleaseohplease whatwhynoplease -
Her pathetic voice was cut off by a scream of anguish from the shrine's spirit, strong enough to launch her physically backwards, where she sprawled in the grass some distance from the shrine. At first she hoped that she had been drawn out of the spirit's influence, but she had no such luck. She felt her arms draw out in front of her as though pulled on ropes, and her legs soon responded in kind. Moving like a puppet, she clambered back to the shrine, and, horrified, dragged herself up onto the surface of the altar. Her hands crawled up to her chest and began to claw at it with a life of their own, the vicious strength that had taken her up the cliff face now acting as her desperate foe. She screamed, her mind rebelling against everything she was experiencing, and then fainted. Darkness overtook her, but in it she found no release.
--
I am standing - floating - in the abyss. A woman stands - floats - in front of me, her body as gaunt and unnourished as mine, her hair as straggled and unhealthy. Quite a pair we are, I worn from my travel through the wastes, she worn from her eons of isolation. She wears a simple blue robe, and in the nothing of the abyss her hair and robe float about her as though she were underwater. I wear nothing; I cannot control my form here as she can. For her to look so, it's clear she has less control than she once did.
"I hold no grudge with you, spirit. Why are you doing this?"
"Are you really so gone that you do not know? I recognised the touch of your mind the instant you knelt at my altar. How can you have forgotten the touch of mine?"
"There is a great deal I've forgotten. I have wandered for a long time."
"There are some things, little one, that you should never forget." The spirit's face is a mask, but in her words I hear something beneath the cold rage: something softer.
"Please, would you punish me without letting me know the crime? I cannot be redeemed if I do not know the cause of my torture." In my worry I have reverted to an older way of talking; I can hear my accent change, and my words with it. The spirit does not take kindly to my plea.
"THERE IS NO REDEMPTION! You have transgressed in ways for which no penance can be paid! The bones of WORLDS lie at your feet!"
I want to protest, to scream that she lies, to draw steel and silence her, to paint a pattern in the air that will end this debate with a blast of light and fire, but I cannot for one simple reason. She is absolutely right. I fall to my knees in the emptiness of the abyss, my tears floating out of my eyes in silent spheres. "I have made as much penance as I can. Let me make more, please."
My goddess drifts forward in the darkness, laying her hand on my bowed head. I look up to see that she is no longer frail and worn, but young and supple, and I remember her. "Calli," I breathe her name softly before the blackness takes me again.