The force of the box’s seal breaking threw Sparrow into a nearby sand dune. He was still wiping grit from his eyes and mouth when the box, which had fallen on its side, began to rattle.
The rattle grew in size until the trees in front of Sparrow were upended by the throbbing vibrations. A flash of lightning appeared above him and from the bolt’s base, a tornado began sucking roots and leaves and heat into it.
From the box, a pair of hooves emerged. The hooves were black as the night and wafted like smoke in the desert air. They were followed by the body of a bull with the head of a lion. Riding the bull-lion hybrid sat a humanoid wraith whose face was hidden. As the beast and its rider settled on the ground the rider turned towards Sparrow and he saw that the creature had no face. In its place was darkness.
The rider had a giant spear of twisted oak in their hand. The little ghoul girl who’d asked Sparrow to open the box in the first place wandered over to him. A giant smile taking prime position on her face.
‘I did it.’ she said, ‘I opened it. Now, you must keep your end of the bargain.’
The rider said nothing. Sparrow supposed they didn’t have a mouth to say anything with. Instead, the rider simply rammed its gnarled spear through the girl’s chest.
Black blood spilled out, coating the sand. The girl gave a gasp and her mouth opened as if to speak, but the rider twisted its spear and dragged her limp, ghostly body across the ground behind it as it rode towards the east.
Sparrow thought about trying to stop the scary-looking rider. But as he rose in the air another thought came into his head.
Maybe the girl wanted to die? Maybe that was their bargain.
Either way, the box was rattling again as thousands upon thousands of the faceless riders galloped into the east, following the first rider’s hoofprints. With each passing wave, Sparrow became more and more depressed.
‘I knew I shouldn’t have opened that box,’ he said to no one in particular.
Then as the last of them rumbled away the golden box crumbled to ash. Sparrow turned to where the girl had been standing.
‘Damint,’ Sparrow said. In the east there was a slowly disappearing cloud of dust and sand.
Sparrow considered going after them. They had to be doing something sinister. But as he was making his mind up another rumbling started.
The heavens split open and a being, cloaked in light appeared before Sparrow.
‘YOU!’ the being shouted like thunder, ‘YOU OPENED MY BOX. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?’
‘Your box?’ said Sparrow, ‘You put those creatures in that?’
‘YES! AND CURSED THEM TO REMAIN THERE FOREVER.’
‘Why?’
‘BECAUSE I MADE THEM AND THEN I LEARNT TO FEAR THEM.’ The god said, his shining eyes betraying a horror that Sparrow had never come across before.
****
Later, Sparrow and the being who described himself as the ‘god-scientist’ sat on a sand dune watching the sun go down.
The God-Scientest wasn’t anywhere as impressive as he’d been when he first appeared. On the dune he was three times the size of Sparrow, but still seemed short and squat with the squinty eyes of someone who’d spent too much time reading parchments by candlelight.
‘I’m an academic,’ the scientist-god explained, ‘when I created the horde that you just released I was simply doing it to challenge myself.’
His finger wandered absently up to his nose and pulled out a booger the size of a small cat.
‘I must say I did a very good job with the horde. They slaughtered everything they went up against. You see neural networks are amazing things. You set up the right environment, the right conditions and…’
Sparrow’s face was a mask as the god put the booger in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
‘Okay, okay… but why would you leave a whole box of them there?’ Sparrow asked.
‘Have you even heard of entropy?’
‘No. And I don’t really care. Why would you put a plague of really evil creatures into a box and then just leave them sitting on the ground for anyone to find?’
‘I didn’t just leave them there… I started a cult.’
‘A cult?’
‘Yeah… or a religion if you’d prefer, I got a bunch of pink fleshy things-‘
‘-Humans.’
‘Yeah, a bunch of those and hid behind a rock and yelled at them kind of loudly and gave them a rock with a bunch of rules written on it. And they were supposed to protect the box and kill anyone who came and opened it.’
‘Well, why didn’t they kill me?’
‘Entropy, that’s what I was getting at. In a system randomness - and chaos tends to increase over time, the horde were a little too much chaos for this universe so I decided to put them inside a little universe of their own, consisting of a small wooden box. The Berthezies people were supposed to protect the box from anyone opening it.’
Sparrow rubbed his forehead, it felt like they were having three conversations at the same time.
‘Why… were… there… no… people… to… stop… me… opening… the… very… bad… box?’
‘Oh, I think it had something to do with my spelling.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, on the tablet I wrote a few rules - don’t let anyone open the box, don’t eat beans on a Friday, that sort of thing, and I don’t know if I’ve already told you this, but I’m a really big fan of water.’
‘Water?’
‘Yeah you know, the stuff that goes splishy splashy when you stomp through puddles, well… it turns out it’s really important when you’re building basically any type of creature, even like, a leaf is a large portion water and so I wanted this cult I’d created to follow to really respect water so I told them to keep their water holey.’
‘Right…’
‘And well… I spelt it h-o-l-e-y with an E instead of h-o-l-y because I’m a god, and a scientist and learning to spell human words isn’t something I consider a useful use of my time. I thought they’d just get the gist of it.’
The god shuddered, ‘But in the third generation there was this really messed up guy, father left when he was young, mother was savaged by wolves, uncle really liked to drink, all that sort of thing, and he was also really ugly too… you know not his face or anything, just his nature. He’d pull wings off flies or dig up worms and leave them in the hot sun and laugh as he watched them squirm. Anyway… bad dude. And one day while he’s out there in the desert stomping on ants' nests he comes across a dictionary. I don’t know how it got in the ant’s nest, maybe the ants thought it was food or something… but anyway, he gets this dictionary and he starts reading, and in his reading he discovered that holey and holy were two different words, and he became convinced that all water containers had to be holey.’
The god slapped his palm over his face, ‘holey… like… they live in a desert and this nutcase gets it in his head that all water containers need to have lots of holes in them. So… he starts his own cul-I mean religion, and gets a couple of followers and then gets kicked out of the area by the rational people who didn’t take my words so literally. A few generations pass, and you end up with two different religions, each with thousands of devotees and then the ones who have holes in their water tanks decide the others are heathens and they sneak into their camps and night and put holes in all their opponents' water storage, then there’s a big war, the ones who folllow the holey water win and slaughter the ones who believe in holy water.’
Sparrow took a moment to decipher exactly what he’d heard, ‘So… why weren’t the holey people there to stop me opening the box?’
The god shrugged, ‘Well, I sort of made another spelling mistake… You know… your head holds all your brains and I thought it was important to make sure your head was well looked after so I wrote…’
‘Let me guess, you wrote, the head should be holey.’
The god sighed, ‘Yeah…’ for a moment he looked ashamed, and then the cogs turned in his head and he beamed, ‘But anyway… I’ve got this great idea for a…’
Sparrow shook his head. Stone skin flowed down his arm. He wanted to punch the god. Make him feel some pain for all the hurt he’d caused. To show him that power requires some form of responsibility.
‘Damn gods!’ he shouted as he flew through the sky, ‘You know what!?...’ he turned to face the direction the god-scientist paced, ‘...go and clean up your own mess. You might actually learn something for once!?!’
The god-scientist gave him a strange look, but continued speaking, head bouncing as he bumbled through his new ideas.
Sparrow shook his head, ‘No, I’m not going down there and cleaning up his mess… nope. I’m going to travel in the opposite direction to that… horde. I’m going to walk. I’m going to let nature and the god’s stupidity take its course I’m going to….’
He was interrupted by a tooting sound. The god had made an elephant out of sand. Only instead of walking on it’s feet the elephant walked on four trunks and each trunk made a honking sound when the elephant walked. A large balloon was tied to the elephant’s chest. After a while, it started to fly. The creature was obviously in a great deal of pain.
A tear dropped down Sparrow’s cheek. He thought about all the suffering the horde was going to cause and felt a strange jealousy stretch across his chest. He wished he could be as absent-minded and callous as the God-Scientist. As his feet hit the sand and he walked away from the horde he’d unleashed he tried to tell himself it wasn’t his problem, that the gods - the powerful should be protecting the weak.
His footprints disappeared into the hot sand, leaving no trail.