The Fall and Ascent of Arcadia

(excerpt from HGOB tie-in novel Arcadia to Babylon)

In all her years there had never been a harvest as large as this one, but of course her amazed brain muttered that every year now. She supposed the beaming smile of a god had no limits, and that it could grow beyond their faces, further and further, growing their blessings in turn. Demeter must have been greatly pleased with something the people of Arcadia were doing.

The grape harvest had produced fruits so large and so perfect that they were practically gemstones; she could barely stand to ruin their perfection with her stomping. She plucked one from around her feet and examined it. Rich. Purple. Plump. The size of her palm. She helped herself, having to take multiple bites as if it were a plum.

The flavor must have been a potion brewed by Demeter herself, stirred in a moon crater as cauldron, with a sunbeam as golden rod. Were this her childhood, and she was back stomping sour grapes in a barrel for her family that treated her as a slave, she never would have dared eat one.

Even a single grape would have been deemed too much of a reward for her, too much profit robbed from them, but the grapes of Arcadia filled an entire building, nearly drowned its marble columns. Their fields had produced so much they were now using the old senate rotundas as barrels. Arcadia’s architecture was a marvel the world over, and most of their structures now had multiple floors, but the grapes had filled this place so much she had no idea if she was on the second or third.

Somewhere below her there had be a spout, eventually receiving the juice she was crushing out of them with her big bare feet. She’d been told there was a celebration going on, and they were so in need of refreshment that they couldn’t wait for wine proper. The juice was flowing directly into their crystal goblets, and they deserved it too, for the bounty the governing council had managed to negotiate as patrons of kind Demeter.

Where had all the lazy others gone? The grape stomper stopped and looked around. The harvest sat quietly, fenced in by marble on all sides. A few hours ago the place was full of friendly feet, all dancing away to provide. They’d probably taken a break without telling her, something they often did, arguing that her giant’s feet were the most important and thus needed to do the most work. It was all gentle teasing, and in her mind not undeserved. She was always told she had exceptionally large feet for a woman, and many didn’t even bother to say ‘for a woman’ at the end.

All the better to stomp with. It was fun for her. She could run without the soles of her feet ever hurting. Take a deep breath and have it always be sweet. The juice of her labors was always nearby, measurable, showing her exactly how much joy she’d created down to the drop. Even in her lowly position in Arcadia she had it all, and all it took to get it was one step.

When she was eleven, still owned by her parents, she had been sitting by a tree on an unauthorized break from her duties. The rags that were her clothes smelled foul, so she experimentally pinched and freed her nose repeatedly to see how much the odor dampened her mood.

Her hand was blocking it while it swept in, and she only saw when she pulled her fingers away. The meadow before her was not the one she sat down near. No, this one rolled, was filled with flowers and grass as high as her knees, and it went on for ages. Its greens were so bright that she wondered if they counted as a different color.

Underneath this new land there was a thick skin of lively mist, a feature that could not be mistaken for anything else. She was looking at the fabled land of Arcadia. It had been a mere legend as far as she was concerned, until that very moment, and her heart swelled in disbelief. How did it go? She need to remember every detail before it slipped away.

Arcadia was the roaming pastoral countryside. It stayed alive by flouting the seasons, traveling along on mist like a slug, with the migrating birds to avoid the coldest weather. An Arcadian bloom never shriveled or fell unless attacked. Its fruits couldn’t wither on the vine, only be plucked and savored. Brilliant men and women lived there, and one of them had put the mist under the land with an invention. Another fashioned a golden ram horn that let them talk directly to the gods. Another detected dreams, steering Arcadia like a ship to find the people who needed its lush serenity the most.

Then perhaps it was there for her. The grape stomper stood and rushed forward, to the misty edge. She looked down and saw that it had never stopped moving. In an hour it would be gone, off somewhere else. Her only opportunity was sliding by as she mulled it over, profoundly foolish given that the only joy she experienced in her daily life was squashed between her toes.

With determination filling her massive soles she leapt, with much more flourish than was necessary, from ordinary field into extraordinary. That one impact alone changed her. A weight was lifted, ripped out of her against its clawing will by the breeze of Arcadia and tossed over the side, back to cruel mundanity.

She couldn’t explore it yet though. She had to watch the edge and make sure none of her family came by and boarded. It was her dreams that brought it, of that she was certain, and that certainty burned inside her as a white hot rage. If any of them, mother, father, brother, tried to run and jump on she would push them back. They didn’t deserve it. May all their wine grapes be stomped by a goat that walked through its own waste from that point on.

None of them did come to check, at least not in time. A mountain chain she had never known was so close slid by, blocking out the sun so she could see more of her new world. Each step was heaven, grass caressing her ankles so much that it tickled. Her bare feet sensed that nothing under them would harm them, no stinging bugs, no thorns. She was walking along a pleasant dream after all.

Eventually she had found the Arcadians, come from all across the city-states, joined by longing. They welcomed her in without hesitation, replaced her spent filthy rags with purple robes. With the indefatigable vegetation of the land they had plenty of use for her specific skill, and she was more than happy to provide.

Now she had stomped her way through more than a decade worth of Arcadian grapes, and the work had only become more engrossing. That was probably why she hadn’t noticed when everyone else had left, not some snickering trick of theirs. After all, she didn’t even keep track of which region Arcadia was passing these days, and at that very moment she had no idea where their country was.

Pompeii. The city of Pompeii was their current, albeit extremely temporary neighbor, and the volcano known as Mount Vesuvius was theirs. The mountain had been stewing for some time, and it was no coincidence that the smartest land in the world, at that time anyway, was present, but most assuredly at a safe distance.

When the peak gave way to a pyroclastic explosion, creating an immense ash cloud that would soon cover everything, but not before the meteoric debris had its go first, all the grape stomper knew of it was the sound. It was like a bang, but one in which all of the air outside and inside her ears was subject to the detonation.

She thought shock threw her into the grapes, but it was in fact a shock wave, a physical oddity so rare in her time that she’d never experienced even a mild one before. The wave ruptured something beneath her, and the harvest started to drain, taking her with it. A wine whirlpool was also new to her, and she didn’t know if she should hold her breath when it sucked her below its surface.

For once the grapes stomped back; the strange sensation overwhelmed almost everything else. The only information she could gather was that the surface had indeed been in the old rotunda’s third floor, because the sinking sensation lasted too long to have been anything lower.

Finally she tumbled out on a wave of fruit, through the ruptured face of a wooden wall that had been decorated with nothing but a wine nozzle moments before. This was where all her work had been intended to go, though certainly not this quickly or in such a volume. Her entrance made more than a mere clatter, yet it was only enough to turn a few of the many heads in the governing council’s meeting chamber.

Most of the politicians were staring out, through an open wall and into the countryside, into the city of Pompeii beneath them just as it was struck with the first of countless fireballs. The haze of black smoke and red lava created a wave of heat, distorting the details, warming their faces even from that distance, but there was no mistaking the broad strokes, especially the sweep of a lava brush across the entire market district that occurred in seconds.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“What are you doing here?” one of the governors, a gray-haired woman, demanded of the stomper as she picked herself up and plodded forward, hypnotized by fear and a sense of devastation. She didn’t answer, but did notice the woman was still holding a goblet full of her efforts. “We dismissed all of you! You should be down there.”

There was only one ‘down there’ the woman could have been referring to. The truth dawned on the stomper, and even her powerful feet couldn’t bear it, so she dropped to her knees. Her friends and family were down there, turning into specks of steam as the eruption flooded each and every street.

Often they stepped off Arcadia to bring gifts to less fortunate people. The governors had used this, sending them out in celebration, and had apparently known full well what was about to happen. The three people who had found her, those years ago, wide-eyed and hopeful and tiptoeing on foreign soil, were already petrified in front of her, too small to see, but not to be felt in her heart as a piercing emptiness, like the tip of a hollow lance, a hypodermic meant to aggressively and voraciously suck out her soul.

She could not form words, so what came out of her was just a suffering howl that eventually choked itself out. One question continuously tried to rise, but the sight of a fresh blanket of lava destroyed it every time. Why? Why had they done this? There could not possibly be a point to this catastrophic suffering and death.

They already had paradise. None hungered in Arcadia. There was no disease. They had long lives and the gods often spoke to them in their dreams as if it was mere conversation between two people as they washed their clothes. They had transcended the need for money by letting the land itself weed out the unworthy. Only those willing to contribute had dreams that could summon the misty country to their side.

The grape stomper realized something. She’d been told a thousand times that it only came to those with something to offer and the desire to offer it. She’d never needed to worry about her manipulative useless family making it aboard. If they had tried they would’ve been sucked down into the ground and expelled out the bottom like waste, like worms falling from the clumped dirt under a plant as it was repotted.

They never said anything about a requirement of good intentions though. There should have been, even more so than the requirement that was there. The fact that it wasn’t meant that Arcadia’s corruption was not recent. It had been there from the first person who set foot on it, intent to misuse it slowly, indirectly, until it built pressure and became the conflagration eating thousands under them, like a salamander eating sparks that tried to leap out of the fire pit.

It should have been her feet that reached this place first. She would’ve dropped all of Arcadia on top of the volcano like a lid if it had even the slightest chance of giving the people in the commoner city time enough to escape. That was the Arcadian way, the will of Demeter who would never see a full crop of her disciples go up in flames like this.

“Demeter will claim you,” the stomper seethed at the governors. “She will dry all of you out! Hang your shriveled wailing heads in bundles on her wall!”

“We’ll be long gone before she catches wind of any of this,” the gray governor claimed with a bitter huff of a laugh. “Look. We’re rising already.” She was right. Pompeii was getting smaller, and the sky was taking them in. An unseen force pushed smoke and ash out of the way, refused them entrance to Arcadia.

“What’s happening?” the stomper asked as the mists beneath the land expanded into great plumes like cloud-trees. “We can’t leave them! Where are we going!?”

“To Babylon!” the woman declared, which was picked up and repeated by all the other governors. “To Babylon!” Then they dared to drink to their success. The stomper spun and kicked the goblet out of the woman’s hand and mouth, taking one of her traitorous teeth with it. She screamed and panicked, chasing after the tinkling white nugget on all fours as it slid toward the precipice.

She might have caught it, but at the moment it fell something else rose, knocking the woman backward as it trailed smoke. The thing landed behind her and unfurled, screaming. A man, but he was partially consumed by the petrifying fires of Vesuvius. One side of his body was ablaze, and as he suppressed the gasping flames with smacks the stomper could see that he was half-destroyed, but those parts were still moving.

He must have had a godly blessing upon his flesh, but not one strong enough to withstand the full force of the mountain. It must also have given him the strength to perform a truly divine leap, out of the city and onto the rising platform that was Arcadia.

The governors retreated as the man roared and flailed, with it entirely unclear how much he understood about what just happened, or what just happened to his own body. The only thing he did know was who was responsible.

“You fiends!” he cried. “I’ll kill every last one of you for this! I’ll have my revenge!” The half-petrified Vesuvian’s revenge would have to wait, because he was still steaming, and it still hurt. He went from swiping at the air around the governors to staggering past the stomper, eventually throwing himself into the mound of grapes she’d come crawling out of.

Their pulpy juice helped to extinguish his heat, and with the one eye that wasn’t submerged in purple globes he scanned the chamber. He was checking to see if he was alone, or if anyone else was on his side against the corrupt murderous elite surrounding him. His gaze didn’t find much, just the grape stomper, and one other form passed out in the corner, wrapped in silks and bathing in a puddle of spilled juice.

He was an uninvited guest, but nobody there had the power to physically remove him, as the snoring hulk was a satyr over seven feet tall, and fatter than a rhinoceros. Perhaps when the party animal awoke he would be on their side, but that was still only three. There had to be more. Arcadia was more than that one building, so surely there were at least a hundred others out there that refused to visit Pompeii despite being encouraged.

The governors refused to share any more information with them, but they couldn’t keep them from observing Arcadia’s journey into the sky, although it couldn’t be called the sky exactly, not after they penetrated the first layer of clouds.

The stomper stood as close to the edge as she could, constantly checking over her shoulder to see if any of the governors might attempt pushing her. She felt the moisture of the clouds on her cheeks, but there was another sensation she couldn’t put her finger on. Something strained to keep the air from thinning; it pushed to keep water levels under control, to keep out harsh light and let through only the most delicate rays, and to keep the very systems inside her body pumping, flowing, and blinking as they tended.

When they finally broke through it came with the revelation that this was not the sky of the Earth, nor the skies of Mt. Olympus. They were somewhere else: a where that couldn’t even be placed on a map without the map spontaneously combusting, skipping flames and going straight to ash.

Among the mountainous cloud pillars there was only one landmark. To the grape stomper it looked like a castle, but as they approached she realized it was far larger than anything built by man. Arcadia was a mere clump of moss at the foot of its drawbridge.

Its curved walls were a soft reddish-brown, and she could not find a single seam in the fired claywork anywhere, as if it were an idea brought to life rather than something actually crafted. There were openings all over: drains, windows, and balconies. From them countless giant plants, mostly ferns and succulents, draped over the side and trailed down into the sea of clouds without an end in sight.

The vegetation was bright, as if lit from the inside, each leaf so plump that it looked moments from rupturing. This place was bursting with life, and the stomper sensed that any explosion that did occur would just spread fertile seedlings as shrapnel.

She felt shame, because she knew these plants were greater than any work of Demeter. These gardens were beyond the gods themselves, and she immediately longed for them, suspecting that a return to Earth, even its most lush jungles and forests, would be like dropping into a desert devoid of even bones. She might take her own life if that happened, and all just from glimpsing the hanging gardens of Babylon in that foreign sky.

Before long the country of Arcadia docked on one of the balconies, and every living being on it felt that strange maintaining force shift so that it compelled them to disembark. All their livestock joined them, as well as every confused burrowing rodent that was smelling sky for the first time. So too came the birds and butterflies, moving as one colorful mass, none of the birds taking the opportunity to eat the insects. There was no need for any of that anymore.

Even the plants moved. The grape stomper watched, her eyes barely able to perceive, as fields of grass and full forests stepped over the balcony’s railing, roots daintily avoiding the stunned people as they journeyed into the heart of the gardens to look for a nice open spot to plant themselves for the rest of eternity.

When the migration was complete Arcadia was nothing but disturbed soil and empty buildings. There was a great and terrible cracking sound as the mists beneath it dissipated and it broke up into several pieces. They fell, like a pinch of grit pulled out of a shoe, and Arcadia was no more.

Soon the grape stomper would come to understand what had happened. Using pilfered Olympian magic, the governors had sacrificed the citizenry to convert them into steam and add them to Arcadia’s propelling mists. Such a sacrifice was the blood toll to holy Babylon, where the few would be living out the lives of the many, and then all the rest.

Arcadia had ascended, but its people had not. She cracked the knuckles of her strong toes. The stomper wouldn’t stand for it.