Carles Velam was 30 years old when the second moon was struck and the flashing streak of the impact was permanently etched above the blue horizon that came in through his window. Every morning he looked at the bright open wound in the fabric of the sky and wondered at the power of the dead god that caused it. This morning, his beloved ritual was postponed by a jolting, yet predictable fall from his bed onto the floor that interrupted the last dream he would ever dream about his absent wife. As the beams of light poured in above his head, the icy floor bit into his skin and gripped his bones. He felt his joints stiffen like those of a much older man. What was it his doctor used to say? “Youth was the slumber of the joints and the silence of the organs.”
He did not move. He lay there, sunk in the stale scent of old rushes and silk lines of incense smoke rising from dead embers in the corner. He listened to the world beyond his cabin walls. The wind-clawed wooden slats of his windows and their tip tap pattern. He could hear the rustling of tiny animals on the cold stone slab near his head, the tide retreating in the distance beyond his village, and the frenzied call of wolfherons scavenging the shoreline. He heard the sounds of all life awaken to its everyday business of being. But what he heard most of all, was the emptiness of his now too-large cabin.
He should have been woken by a sharp elbow in his ribs and a soft murmur thick with sleep accusing him of stealing too much of the bed. He liked to do that in his sleep. But there was no voice, no warmth, not even a sharp elbow. Sami had left. “At least,” he thought out loud, “she left me for a god and not a lesser man.”
He rose and sat on the edge of the bed, pressing his hands into his face and rubbing them back and forth over his slick scalp seven times. He wondered if he should do a ritual for grief: the hollow inhale, the long exhale, the silent sitting still, the widower’s cloth hanging over him like the dead’s shadow, the ashes covering his face. Carles loved a good ritual and it was not without its comfort. But Sami was not dead, just dead to him. No one would cover their face in ash with him or commiserate in his silence, especially over the living. Would anyone grieve with him if she had died? “Better not dwell on that too long.”
A counting of breaths followed to hold together the pieces of himself that threatened to scatter like shattered tiles of a fallen structure over the foundation. He reached for his throat, fingers grazing the smooth bulge beneath the stretched skin. It was worse today. The mass had grown rounder in his throat like a curled up fist with fingers tattooed with unsaid words.
But what did it matter? If it was something fatal, he was already too late. And if it was not, what difference would it make? The thought of disrupting his life any more, of surrendering to the unknown, as Sami had, felt tighter around his chest than accepting whatever fate this mass was preparing to dole out to him. He would go about his morning as he always did.
The ablutions came first. Seven of them, exact and uninterrupted: face, hands, arms, feet, neck, chest, heart. He whispered the old words, though he was not sure if he still believed them. Half the town whispered different words and no one seemed to remember which set of words came first. Everyone took solace in the fact that if words were the measure of eternity, they had every reason to hope to be in the same place as the parents that first taught them to recite their particular order. The solace of loving hope or vengeful hatred, he supposed, would depend on the kind of eternity listening to their parents would buy them. He checked his pockets, once, and a second time, as he stepped outside, and again as he approached the beach.
Down at the shore, his little boat sat on the wet sand leaning to its side over its protruding keel. He pushed the vessel along the granular ground, turning it over under the keel and marking a path along the sand as he went. And taking the oars in his hands, roughened by the sea, he parted the water with a fierce pull and a steady breath.
Beyond the headland, where the cliffs fell away and the expanse opened, the Thanatodons waited. The beasts moved like shadows beneath the water, vast and unknowable, islands sunk beneath the wave drifting in silence across the oceans, studying every coastline. The first time he had seen them, he had been a boy, standing on the docks with his father. The old man had spat into the water and muttered a blessing, his face pale. “Not natural, those things. Not meant for men to look at.”
But Carles had not looked away. He had watched with the meditative awe of religious zeal, as the great creatures turned their immense rolling bodies toward the sky. Their black eyes unreadable but filled with an impossible grace of the wild and colossal kept at a safe distance from the civilized and conquered safety of our small lives. Over the years, he had learned their ways, their patterns. No fear existed between them. What it had become resembled a careful respect, an unspoken comprehension between two orthogonal and alien minds. He would not touch, he would not intrude. And in turn, they let him drift in among them.
The boat rocked as he slipped into the water. The cold embraced him as he swam with slow, measured strokes, feeling the currents shift as the beasts neared. One passed below him, a shadow so large it seemed to dim the light of Herax high beyond its reach. He exhaled, feeling his heartbeat slow in time with the great animal. Here, in the water, in the company of these vast, silent things, he thought, and not for the first time, that he had been made at the wrong scale. The extremely small is almost nothing at all and yet it subsists, thrives, expands, and colonizes the large. A tiny chitterwing is flicked out of existence by a weak swat of a hand and yet its steady, imperceptible buzz can paralyze the mind and it will remain so as it kills and eats one’s tissue. The largest of all things is no thing at all: space. Its immeasurable size, its unsentimental indifference, reminded Carles of his insignificance. The eternal silence of those infinite spaces filled him with dread. All this he thought as he drifted beside the beasts.
A sound rang in his cavernous ears that did not belong. Carles turned, blinking salty foam from his lashes. A ship cut through the waves in their direction. Its stained sails caught the wind like a sack and its hull a scarred white angled to come beside them. He knew what it was before he could think of the word. “Poachers.”
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A hard, seething anger rose in his throat. “The pod.” The Thanatodons, slow-moving, gentle, had no sense of danger. It was unlikely that such a large creature would ever feel the need to develop a sense of danger. It seemed as unlikely as developing a sense of humor. He treaded water, watching the men move on deck, the giant harpoons glinting in the light of Herax as they peered out of the cannons. He could hear them shouting, could see the ropes coiling like serpents around the capstans and winches. Their tactics were simple. Three or four harpoons would strike the defenseless creatures. They would haul the beast toward them and their crews would mount it and begin the hard and lengthy task of opening it. Once an opening had been made in the limpid body of the bled animal, they would dive into its bowels and extract the precious mawstone.
He swam toward his boat with haste. He pulled on the cord tied around his ankle with a desperate exertion and hauled himself over the edge of the tiny vessel. He rowed maniacally and positioned himself behind the ship, preoccupied as it was only for the poor harassed animals, or so he thought. Had they even noticed he was there?
What to do next? The poachers would not stop. They were a plague unleashed by bad incentives and a market of flesh, decimating entire pods at a time. Mawstone was precious to the new world of industry, to its barons and their emperors, to their armies and their deadly war machines. Sure, they couldn’t sell the mawstone on our shores. Such practices had long been outlawed by all of the powers on the continent. But other nations would buy the mawstone at an increased price just to destroy the native populations of Thanatadons that graced the coastlines of their colonial competitors. It had started as these things do, vying for power in the trade that built all empires in this endless land. But had now turned into the fate of all empires everywhere: to overreach until their greatness became a poison upon the world itself.
What could he do? A man in a single, fragile craft, himself a drifter between colossal forces beyond his understanding. Whatever happened, he knew he would not sit and watch.
He rowed his boat as near the iron-hulled ship as he could, though he couldn’t keep the pace of the large vessel well enough or correct for the motion of the water coursing behind the craft. Not a foothold or handle, or bar, or rope in sight. Nothing to grab a hold of and board the demonic barque. Carles took to waving and yelling at the men making piercing stares at the poor giants below, huddled into a gentle moving land mass just above the forest of kelp feeding them.
“Leave them be! This is unlawful! You have no right!” His voice cracking in exertion and swallowed by the wind, overpowered by water, and the busied noisome frenzy of men at work in a business of death. One of them, a thin-necked brute with a scar across his forehead, turned and spat over the railing and mouthed curses at Carles. But they made no special matter of his presence. “You will not get away with this! I will report you to the magistrate’s guard! I know the name of your ship and you will all face the firing squad for this!”
This last provocation did catch the attention of the ship’s captain, a young man, which was not altogether uncommon in a dangerous trade like harvesting mawstone. Ships were often a family business and their operations in these waters exacted a cost from age and weariness that led to mistakes, casualties, and permanent retirements. But poachers were a different story. Often what held those crews together was violence and experience in wielding brutality as a tool of leadership. It was not the youngest that tended to take charge in such vessels.
The young captain glanced at Carles as a mountain might look upon an insect. “Have it your way, fool!” he called out of his widening grin, and the ship bore down on him. The barque’s steel masts and thunderous pale sails grew larger as they gave chase. He couldn’t outrun them, no matter how hard he rowed.
He took a breath and looked behind him with a wincing shutter of his eyes and a powerful clutch of his oars as the raked bow bore down on his head and the prow slammed his tiny craft into splintered shards of driftwood. The violent impact threw him into the water and there he sank as the light dimmed around him and within him.
“Death,” he wondered perhaps for the last time in the cool of the water. “What is it? What does it feel like?” Sami had once told him that if being dead was any kind of being at all, if there was an experience of being dead, death could not be oblivion. He wondered at the time, if it was not oblivion, could it be reversed? He had no such hope now. It was, as far as he could tell, a slip further and further into nothingness.
He opened his eyes and saw the darkness and the pale silver light bathing the surface above his head and getting further away. His lungs filled with water and burned as he tried to breathe. How long had he been under water? It felt like a moment. He couldn’t breathe and could barely move but he had not drowned. His chest had caved, his ribs were shattered, his skull fractured, skin draped over it, his right arm dangling at the joint, and still submerged.
The surface was far away and the anxious dread gripped him. A shill over his cool body like a stone passing from his throat down into the bowels of the planet brought him low and there he was held, face to face with a Thanatadon. The creature’s eye passed beside him and winked with calm reassurance. Something of their unspoken contract, its quiet affirmation passed into Carles and settled him, as if the spirit of all things communed with him through the creature in a more certain manner than any god known or unknown. Carles was now certain. He was not dead but he didn’t understand how that was possible. All schemes of reason fell away, all the incessant monologuing came to an end and he was led ineluctably to raw sensation. His weariness of life was peeled back like a false skin only to reveal a deeper longing for being without the trappings of life. Colors collided before him in the dark abyss of the sea and out of him rose the heightened ecstasy of containing life-giving power in all its sacredness. He felt he could wield such power with all the benevolence of a generous benefactor. From every cavern of the abyss a beam shot out and crisscrossed a braided path of light into his very heart and went out from him. He willed all things to receive from him and to nourish themselves in him.
His aching body, still unable to breathe or move was no match for the rapture of an eternal moment of unceasing bliss and self-recognition. “Have I always been a god? Have I always been immortal?” As he pondered the joys of godhood and nourished his weakened heart with that cozy subterfuge of aspiration, he realized he had drifted into the kelp forest. No sooner had this new realization dawned, he was poured with the water into the gaping black hole of Thanatadon's mouth. “Another dead god swallowed by the big fish.”