EVE Fiction

in one piece at http://natpowers.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/slavery-of-my-soul-an-eve-online-competition-entry/


Slavery of My Soul

Let no one say that the gods are not real. Let them neither say that there is only one god. I have seen them. Say neither that they are immortal. I have watched them die, burning alive in their ships, screaming in wretched desperation like animals until their voices weakened and melded with the roar and tumult of flames and the hiss-crackling reverberations of metal caving in on itself, wave upon wave the heat blasting their cocooned bodies in their invincible starships; passing aeons through lifeless space only to burn belly-down, defeated and driven into death by an unknown and living world.

It was late afternoon. The sun was red and still heaving heat waves low through the horizon when Irahi and I saw the first light flicker above us. Tuldi, the horse star. For a long while we watched the star as we picked through the valley looking for hydrogen cells left over by the ancients. Viggod City runs on the old power cells and without them we would be just as blind in the night as the first few from the Gate so many thousands of years ago. Still, we use fires in the evening like the old tribes. Great wicker columns built in the day by the Thukker apprentices come alive at night and cast smoke and glow over the lower Vigg down to the River Oth where it goes further down into mountains that no one has named. The apprentices must learn to work in wood before they can use metal – it is too precious to be wasted – so we burn the wooden effigies of ships that will one day make the long arc into the heavens again.
The valley leading to the mountains was made by the Starship, so we're told. There is a wide swath where nothing grows and ancient metals line the basin on either side of the river, jutting from rocks, melted into the side of cliff faces, growing up from the ground in the forest like imposter trees insisting on life despite their ruin.
Irahi, little sister, seven ages old carrying her Gate toy with her, pointed up at Tuldi and asked shortly “does anybody else think that could be this?” She held up the little stargate, illumined with red fluorescence from river plankton locked away forever in its housing. She made a droning noise.
I smiled back at her as we descended the ravine along the old salvager trail. “I don't see why it couldn't be that. I guess we'll know when when we finally fly with the gods again.”
“But mama said that we weren't s'posed to ever be with the gods.” she stated, hopping down after me, her dark locks trailing and fanning out behind her as she landed. Her woven sandals slapped the little river rocks and a red frog dove for the water.
“I don't know what we're s'posed to do in the end,” I admitted. At twelve, I was the oldest, and papa had given me the right to make decisions that our mother might not agree with, so my word carried weight. But it is only the unwise that go ahead of the judgment of their mothers before the world has learned them otherwise. “But if we fly up there again, we'll find out if there really are any gods at all.”
“Oh I want there to be gods!” Irahi squeaked. “They would be strong and rich, and smart, with big towns that had lots of animals. We only have sheep but they would have the cows that are in the holoreels.”

From down in the damp of the riverbed the sky above was an immense wash of evening colors from the deep purple-black in the coolness of the darkening land to the bright streak of Hek as it cascaded red off the distant asteroid fields that crawled like a ghost-worm across the fading sky. Irahi and I never minded wandering in the riverbed. Mother always sent us out late. It was never as hot, and there are no animals except the fish in the slow shallow river. Their fins cut the surface lazily like up-pointed knives and make slicking sounds when they spook away from our approach.
The old hydrogen cells give off a cool golden glow and the long bank in the ravine, going to the deepest cut of the old starship wreck, has produced hydrogen cells for years – locked away in the silt of the river or wrapped about in the roiling tree roots of the red willows, radiating sadly like candles left unspent in memory of those who once called the ship their home, and to whom it became a grave.
“Pollur!” chirped Irahi, dancing along the shallow bank and pointing up to the ruddy sky. She and I were silhouettes, honored observers witnessing the awakening of the night. The moon, Pollur, was making its swift course skyward, trailing its thick dust and sparkling meteorites across the upper atmosphere in blue and red and gold effervescence – an aurora of light and color that many considered a gift. The ancient ship, when it crashed, struck Pollur on the way in and shattered a portion of the small moon. Like the hydrogen cells, it too pays an homage of silent brightness amid the dark to the ship and those whose names will never be known.
But a strange thing happened as we watched Pollur's dust cascade across the sky. A bright flash on the horizon, followed by a reverberating crack that echoed through the valley, sent a stream of day-bright light across the ravine and then went out and a streak of red drove low across the sky just over the riverbed. A smoke trail chased it and it skittered heavily across the water, sent up plumes of mad steam, and sank itself deep in the high incline of the opposite bank in another bright furious collision of noise and light. A hot wind fell down through the valley. Irahi and I ducked the noise and flash and hid among the exposed river boulders, our eyes shaded in the night for the intensity of the light from the impact. And then we heard screams.

Along the trail were bits of molten metal, cooled into bright pebbles, and flecks of still-warm glass forged in the crash. We stepped over these with reverence like stars fallen at our feet. Down into an alcove we walked silently and full of trepidation until we heard breathing in the dark.
Without hesitation or fear, Irahi broke from my hand and ran to him, using the gate as a light. What she came to was much, much less than a god. I cursed and held Irahi away from the man. He stared off into the rocks, stricken, and I was terrified as his eyes slowly rolled in their orbits to peer at us through the carapace of a shattered helmet that must have only recently been bright like gold. There were designs of all sorts, graceful and coiling, etched into the metal. He wore a bright suit made of a material we did not recognize. If he were standing he would be very tall. There was an immense solidness to his presence and his face was neither blemished nor worn by age, but he had all the trials of a hundred lifetimes in his eyes and his withholding of his pain. He seemed to be relieved all at once and let out a sigh and that's when I saw his leg. From hip to heel it was slashed, bloodied, and contorted in a way that legs are not meant.
“Are you a god?” asked Irahi.
He stared back at us with no answer.
“Don't worry. We'll get some food, and some help, and a blanket because it gets cold,” she made quick promises and he watched her intensity and concern and in his mind understood what her strange language could not tell him. He held up a hand for her to slow down. He shook his head and covered his mouth with a hand and stared at us.
“He wants us to not tell,” Irahi looked up at me.
“I think so.”
The man then removed the once grand helmet and let it fall by his side. His face was angular and very pale. No hair grew on his head. He reclined as best as he could and popped tense vertebrae in his neck and then looked at me a moment while he thought. He gestured to his ruined leg and there I saw a small ovular attachment to the clothes. It looked like half of an eggshell. He waved for me to remove the thing. On doing so, it chirped in my hand and four little red lights blinked on and stayed. I gave it to him and he reclined on the rocks, holding the thing close to him.
“We have to go,” I said. He understood my meaning and nodded. Some actions are older than all the languages. When Irahi went to tie a small carrying scarf about his head he motioned her away and drew over a long black hood from the nape of his suit. His shrouded visage sunk backward into the cloth like some distant creature recessed into a cave, after whose passing at the threshold there is nothing but darkness again and the vacant arch where it has gone.
“At least you won't be cold,” she said. “We'll bring water, too.”

On seeing him awake, Irahi jumped like a mouse across the last few rocks in the path and up to the man and presented the water in its huskbag. He reached a tired arm toward it and drank carefully. We passed and shared the bread and goat with him as well, none of us speaking. Irahi was calm and enrapt with how he moved his hands and maintained his poise despite his wounds. We would have to make a splint for his leg if he was to walk. After we had eaten our fill, we wrapped the leavings in a flat coarse paper and he accepted them with a nod and then looked very sternly at Irahi.
“I don't know,” she looked at me. He was glaring at what she held now.
“He's looking at the gate.” I said.
“Do the gods use gates to get around? I would think they didn't have to.”
I leaned in close to her, “he's not one of them.” For the first time, looking again at the man's ruined leg, she did not move to argue.
The man motioned to see the bauble closer and Irahi passed it to him and he held it a moment, then moved it upward against the sky. With the other hand he took a small rock and moved it to the gate and then passed it to the other side and set it down away from him, then back up again and to the gate form the other side and made a low hissing sound, signaling the arrival of the rock on the other side again. He nodded toward the crash.
“You do use the gates!” whispered Irahi. But what he said next was not expected.
He pointed up to the star, bright and hot above and thankfully shaded where we were, and said one word, “Hek.”
I did not know it then, but I should have killed him. I should have taken a rock and broken his head and not stopped until I had tired beyond lifting the rock again. I should have done this when he tapped Irahi on the forehead with a smile and said “Matari”, and then touched his own chest flat-handedly and said “Amarr”. I should have spilled his knowledge on the rocks and taken the food we had left and let the ants and beetles tend to the remains – for my sister, my mother and father, and all the people on this world and others, I should have destroyed him. But I did not know. I smiled instead and wondered at how he knew what we called our people. Irahi and I held our dark arms up next to his and laughed at the stark difference in our ruddiness and his astral paleness. He seemed to enjoy our time, and even once managed a full smile. I wondered how he could do this with all his friends dead in a burned-out ship just a thousand feet away, but he had made no mention of their deaths, as if it did not matter and they could be resurrected again somewhere back up in the stars. Perhaps this is how gods think – without consequence. Without death.
I moved to gather some small saplings nearby to make him a splint, but he refused. He instead retrieved the small half-egg device from between the rocks beside him. He looked at it a moment and then set it on the ground and touched it on the side. When he did this, a small columnar light issued forth and a voice came from it.
“Is it spirits?” Irahi whispered, eyes wide and alert but not frightened.
The man spoke back to the light and tapped the device again and then another light, bright red and thinner than a hair, shot straight upward through the trees and pierced the sky and continued on into the deep blue distance above where it was lost to the eye. The red line hung there like a rope, taught, as if attached to something, and in moments there was a cracking sound, just as before the crash, and something small flashed in the sky and then darkened as it made a half circle through the altitudes and clouds, growing in size in its descent.
“Irahi!” I waved for her to come with me. I was leaving. The man had called his fellows and if they crashed again we would die here in the shifting shade trees by the rocks. Irahi was staring upward, unfettered, even as the wind began to shift the tops of the trees and the low drone of the object in descent became louder and more powerful in the air.

For ten years we reflected often on the man. Father passed away one year working in the fields and when the men brought him to the house he was very peaceful and still bore the sweat of his work. But unlike the god we had seen, who looked very old but young, our father looked young even in his age. His body was beaten by years of work and dirt and injury, but the life in it had been young, only once spent. The god-man, there had been many lives in him, perhaps thousands, and it was not long after we buried our father that we told our mother about the god-man and showed her the tool he had left with us as children. She wanted to believe us but her despair was too great and she spent a long time mourning. We hid the device out in the rocks where no one would find it but us and we hoped time would not destroy it. And then, one warm spring morning, a fist closed over the sun. The dew was just glistening off the grass blades and the wind was thick with the fragrance of new flowering plants in the field, and there came a shadow moving in the sky. It hung heavy, miles above, immense as a moon. The gods came after that.
They came calmly at first, with more ships than we could count, and then they came with violence and great numbers. They scoured the Matari cities. For the first week we watched plumes of smoke rise from the capital Viggod many miles away over the mountains. Bright golden rods of destruction rained down from the darkness suspended above and metal sprites sprinted low through the sky, blasting the villages with red beams of heat and death. It was Irahi who reminded me of the tool the man had left, the morning of our choosing, as the drones wailed overhead in our own village, igniting the shipyards across the river, scaling the mountainside and dropping down again in a rage of flashing rapid lights burning into houses, farms, livestock, people. Mother would not be moved from the house, so Irahi and I ran the way many others were running – to the forest, the rocky escapes, the old river tunnels where we had hunted energy cells as children. We found the device and, mimicking what the man had done years before, caused it to issue upward a red hair-thin beam.
“Somsa.” Irahi said to me as if it was any other day. “Mother must come here with us.”
I was frantically hoping against time and hope itself that something magical would happen from the light – that the drones would cease to fly, the distant booms and smoke pillars would go silent and dark, that the shade over the sun would dissipate, and while I looked up to where the beam vanished in the burned sky, Irahi disappeared. I looked back down to where she had been standing, and she was gone.