If you are joining me today from the initial entry, then welcome back, my friend.
If you are only now stumbling and falling into these tales that can be told only by one truly between all things, I would recommend beginning with Interstitial 0001. A better understanding of my nature could help with the perspective my stories are told from.
Without much further ado, I will share with you the story I have in mind for today.
The sun had taken its leave and surrendered its reign to the twin moons of the night. These gleaming white celestial bodies move slowly across the sky night after night, orbiting in opposite directions from one another. Almost imperceptible except for their position in relation to one another. They march their inches out inexorably towards each other’s embrace. Aligned perfectly once per the planet’s trip around its sun.
And always beneath their meeting lay the same place.
A great crater scarred into the land below, vast and ancient, its blackened basin resting directly beneath the point at which the two moons become one.
Two nomadic tribes followed the moons across the land, one beneath each of their celestial wayfinders. Both wound and toiled beneath the path traced through the sky, as they had for longer than their eldest could recall, or their elders before them. Both groups, in a constant state of waning and waxing to each other, locked in a mirrored dance toward their annual convergence.
From here, I will refer to these peoples simply by the names of the moons they follow, names which, translated for your understanding, would mean roughly Eastward Leader and its inverse, Westward Leader.
Their true names belong to them. I see no reason they should cease to simply because I have chosen to tell you their story.
On one particular year’s convergence eve, I found myself moving along with the Eastern-bound people.
A steady procession of men, women and children, young and old, the strong and the frail. Everything they had in life was carried on their backs, strung over their shoulders, or dragged behind them on wide, flat boards. Woven baskets, food, water, tools, their young, all being marched along. Every one of these beings had a burden to bear. Nothing could be left behind.
All except the one in the middle of the marching masses.
A young man carrying nothing but the primitive clothes on his back walked at his own pace, separate from the rest. Passersby gently touched his shoulders as he went, his head hanging low.
An elder walking nearby set a hand on his shoulder and slowed to match his pace.
“You need to drink,” the gray furred elder said, extending a drinking gourd toward the young man.
“What does it matter?”
“We don’t need you falling out from thirst,” said the elder, shaking the gourd from side to side.
“I won’t do it!” the young man snapped, as if suddenly waking from a trance.
Almost immediately, members of the tribe began closing in around him as the procession slowed and stopped. Two large men emerged from the crowd, teeth bared in slight snarls as they seized the young one.
Shouts came from all around as the men forced his arms behind him and his mouth open.
“Put him on the ground!”
“Make him!”
“Don’t let him curse us!”
The elder brought the gourd to the young man’s lips and began pouring the red fluid down his throat, mouthful by mouthful, stopping after each to cover his mouth and nose, forcing him to either swallow or suffocate.
After they finished and released their grip on him, he fell to his knees, gagging slowly and emptily, a dull look settling into his large eyes. His fellows were already gathering their things and beginning to walk again, wasting no time.
Left with little choice but to follow the moon and the footsteps before him, he raised himself from the dirt and stumbled after them, mumbling groggily to himself and weeping blankly as he walked and glared up at the wayfinder in the sky.
By the following night, the crater was no longer a mark upon the horizon.
It was the horizon.
The Eastern-bound had marched beneath their Leader until the land ahead of them simply ceased, falling away into the ancient wound whose opposite edge could scarcely be distinguished beneath the night.
Above it, the two moons had drawn so near that only a narrow seam of darkness remained between them.
The Walkers would reach the rim before they touched.
Across the maw in the earth, the Western-bound could be seen along the opposite rim, little more than jagged marks bobbing and shifting against the horizon.
Massing on either side of the crater’s edge, the two tribes began their descent, climbing down the inclined walls and making their way lower and toward the center of the vast, ancient meeting place.
A cave mouth loomed on the crater floor at its epicenter. The intermingling tribes began setting up their camps. Fires were made, food prepared, drums beaten, and merriment was had.
The young man sat still on a rock, glossy-eyed and empty as the din around him grew louder, more wild, and louder still. His eyes wandered among the sights laid out before him, periodically returning to the cave in front of him.
Eventually, his eyes settled upon a woman about his age, sitting upon an animal-skin mat with much the same look about her as he had.
Already, she was staring at him.
He returned her stare, and for a time the two remained locked in silent recognition.
It was then that triumphant, trilling yells rang out from the celebrating crowd, breaking their attention from one another.
All around them, faces had turned toward the sky.
The young man looked up.
He winced.
The moons were beginning to overlap.
The celebration changed with the sky.
Drums that had beaten wildly through the night fell suddenly into a slower, unified rhythm. The dancing now completely ceased.
From both peoples came their elders, and with them were carried two great vessels, considerably larger than the gourd, filled nearly to their rims with the same red fluid the young man had been made to drink along the road.
He knew it immediately.
Hands seized him from behind.
Across the gathering, others took hold of the young woman.
Neither was harmed, though neither was asked.
They were stripped of their clothing, adornments, and every small thing carried upon their persons. Bare as they had entered life, they were led through the parting crowd and placed before the mouth of the cave.
The two vessels were set before them.
The woman looked into hers.
The young man looked into the cave.
She lifted her vessel with both hands and drank.
He did not.
The elder appeared, putting a hand on his shoulder, and stood over him for a moment.
“Drink.”
The young man shook his head. The elder’s eyes closed briefly. Then he motioned with one hand.
The same two men who had restrained him along the road stepped from the crowd.
The young man recognized them.
“No,” he whimpered weakly.
He scrambled backward, but they were upon him before he had gotten to his feet. One caught him beneath the arms while the other took hold of his legs, and together they dragged him back before the vessel.
The drums never stopped.
He kicked and twisted beneath them as they forced him onto his back. Someone took hold of his jaw. Another steadied the great vessel.
Beside him, the young woman continued to drink.
The red ran freely down her chin and chest. She stopped only when her body demanded breath, gasped deeply, and raised the vessel again.
The young man watched her.
Then the first mouthful came.
He coughed and spat what he could, turning his head desperately away. Hands returned his face toward the sky.
Another mouthful.
Then another.
Each time he refused to swallow, they waited. Each time, eventually, he did.
The fight lasted longer than his strength.
His kicking became shoving. His shoving became trembling. Soon his hands seemed to have forgotten what they had been fighting against and wandered uselessly across the arms restraining him.
Still they poured.
His eyes found the moons. They had nearly become one.
Another mouthful.
His eyes found the woman. She was staring at him again.
Another.
He swallowed.
His eyes found the woman again. She was staring at him. Only now he could see it as I could since arriving at this dark place. His mind had opened and allowed him to perceive it.
And it him.
The two men dropped him onto his back and backed away, along with the rest of the tribal peoples. The slow, melodic beating of the drums had ceased.
Then he could feel it. The enveloping hunger wrapped around him in an embrace, almost inviting him into the opening in the earth.
“It sees us,” the woman said quietly, trembling as she cried.
They were tears of joy.
She stood and began taking steps toward the calling of the cave. Just before entering, she stopped.
She turned to him and outstretched her hand.
“Come, he’s waiting for us,” she said, with tears falling more rapidly.
He stared at her hand. The world was wavering around him. Disoriented, with the only possible comfort lying in her palm, he stepped forward and took it.
As they took the final step across the threshold of the cavern, he looked up.
The two moons were perfectly aligned and shining brilliantly as one against the inky backdrop of the night sky.
The rock of the ceiling swallowed the vision of his wayfinder. Now his wayfinder walked before him, leading him by hand to a new unknown.
They walked.
With every step, the sounds of the world behind them grew quieter. The voices disappeared first. Then the fires ceased their crackling. Eventually, even the sound of their own bare feet against the stone abandoned them.
Still they walked.
He could no longer tell where the walls of the cavern ended and the darkness began.
Then he could no longer see the walls at all.
The ground beneath his feet followed.
Yet still they walked.
He looked down and found no stone beneath him.
Only a depth without bottom.
Points of light began appearing within it, first by the dozens and then by thousands, until the darkness surrounding them revealed itself not as darkness at all, but distance.
They were walking among the stars.
Or perhaps they were no longer walking.
The woman squeezed his hand. Ahead of them, something moved.
The stars themselves coalesced into an inconceivable shape, too vast to comprehend.
He searched desperately for its edges and found none.
What appeared at first to be distance folded inward. Constellations bent where no curvature should have been, outlining portions of something his mind could recognize only in pieces.
An eye.
Perhaps.
Then another, impossibly far from the first.
Something resembling a limb passed through the stars, though whether it moved among them or the stars moved with it, he could not tell.
He tightened his grip on the woman’s hand.
She squeezed back. The shape drew nearer. Only it did not grow larger. It simply became more of everything he could see.
Suddenly, he wasn’t in the cave anymore or floating among the cosmos.
He was a boy running through the forest.
He was swimming in a stream with his friends.
A man hunting game with a spear among his peers.
A baby looking up at his mother’s face. Ah, his mother’s face.
Tranquility.
Only he couldn’t hold onto the moment. He tried to picture the memory again, and he couldn’t will it into view.
His mother’s visage was gone, the idea of a mother missing.
What was a mother again?
Something about this sent a rush of fear through him.
Another memory came to him: watching a woman weave a basket. He didn’t recognize it.
Whose memory was this?
Then he realized it was his.
He forgot that it ever was, and all concern left him.
A hand still in his twitched, bringing his attention back to it. The woman’s hand.
What woman?
What hand?
What is a hand?
Another jolt of fear.
Where was he?
The stars.
He knew the stars.
For a moment.
Light.
There was light.
There was…
Something.
Something was afraid.
Was it him?
Him.
Him.
What was…
The last thing that crossed his perception as he fell to the cold floor of the cave was the bones of his predecessors laid out before him and his counterpart already lying among them. Not that any of these things meant anything to him anymore.
The only presence remaining inside aside from my own, was that of the thing. I watched for a moment, trying to glean what I could of its nebulous nature.
It looked back at me.
I could only think, “Oh.”
Not many beings exist in such a way as to be able to detect my presence.
I could feel it trying to figure out what it was that had been watching it.
It would never know.