The Lifecycle of Suns Ch 5: Of Onyx and Organs

Outside the cave, living pillars of fire and feather, of onyx and organs prevailed over the horizon.

Zed made to gasp, but there was nothing in him now that could. Whatever matter clung to him had been abandoned, substance for another unfortunate who ventured in front of the angel before the end of the world. He was as dead as he had been for millennia and was not sorry for this reprieve.

How long had he been within the cave? It was night, or the dimly lit time between dawns, at least. With urgency, he looked for any change that would give him a sense of his absence -- low hills further eroded, rocks blown away. There was nothing definitive: a day or a million.

The dead outside the cave were no help, unchanging species as they were. With no hard time limit on any of them, they could be centurions or astronauts, and it would make no difference.

An accounting of the time he could recollect below made things no clearer. The descent felt like ten hours, but there was nothing by which to judge it beyond his thoughts. Before the angel, The Taste of Sunlight on the Rain of a Battlefield, time was irrelevant. That monstrosity owned all within its ineffable sight, even the ticking of minutes to hours, to say nothing of the lost souls cannibalizing one another and themselves while imprisoned.

He may have been beneath years and could not hope he would still be worthy of Shana's vigil. Whatever business she might have to finish, it was not waiting.

Shana stood at the cave entrance, her expression impassive until he called to her. Her face lit up, then her brow furrowed.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing. You waited."

Her furrow deepened. "It was no trouble, friend. It was all of a few minutes. Why are you back so soon?"

He would have told her this was impossible, but what could that word mean to either of them? He omitted the immediate recollection of this misadventure for a more pressing question. "Do you see them?"

Shana looked out in the same direction he was.

"Nothing I don't usually see." She squinted as though to make things clearer, which he suspected bordered on teasing.

Zed told her about the angels, though the words would have caught in his throat if he still had one to restrain the words. He had never known so primal a dread, the horror of knowing that they had been there as long as the dead returned, but likely far longer. Their presence reminded him of something he had seen. Remembering what was an itch that he was incapable of scratching.

The angel gave him, the one who refused a contrived resurrection, this curse-wrapped gift to witness.

"Are they beautiful?" she asked.

"Angels are the most hideous things I have ever experienced. If I were not dead, they would make me wish I were." Was this true? To the living, they might not look as they did to him but as the hope of a far more intricate and potentially loving world. The dead were not given to such optimism, preferring instead the likelihood that angels did not equate to salvation. It was surer mercy that there not be an afterlife on an expiring world.

The angels did not look at him, did not acknowledge that he could see them, and did not care about him as an individual. They had always been there, always navigated around by the unknowing dead. Their ignorance of him now filled him with haunted loneliness.

He could not show them to Shana, not without her undertaking an ordeal from which he wasn't confident he would have the courage to rescue her. Yet, he could show where they were not. He pointed out the divots in the concentration of ghosts, where they avoided the angels, the places he had always taken for buildings long ago razed. From the ground, it was indistinguishable, even that none looked toward the space they occupied. From any height, knowing where to look now, the Earth was pockmarked to Shana and presided over by holy terrors to Zed's eyes.

"What does it mean?"

Zed couldn't imagine an answer, though he was the only one present who would have the capacity to answer. Anything that caused a profusion of angels' attendance could only spell an end to what had been. Unlike the one he met below, no caves had yet formed around these.

"Where are they looking?" she asked, seeing that Zed was not going to give a satisfying response to her last question.

This, more direct, not left to interpretation, was an answer he could give. He pointed northwest.

She made a visor of her hands to scan that direction, an affectation of the living; it provided her no benefit. Zed looked as well, though he was by nature so small beside them that his visual reach was dwarfed.

Zed asked for Shana's patience again. She assured him that he was not asking for much, having waited only minutes. He lay a hand against the nearest angel's gold-furred haunches. His fingers could entwine the curling hair, and he felt the strands or else remembered having once done so. The moment he did, the surrounding dead, who were paying him no special attention, turned to a one away from him. In this intimacy with an angel, he could not be acknowledged, nor could their ignorance of him.

Shana, though, forced herself to watch him. The strain of this was evident in her wince, but she committed to resisting the impulse to look away.

The angel paid no mind as Zed gripped its hair and pulled himself up. His muscles could not tire, nor could a fall do much, but he had not cared to climb anything while among the dead. The hair transitioned to scales, then to small, sharp fangs on pale gray skin, such as he had heard mythical sharks once reputed to possess. The climbing was not much more difficult without fur on which to hold. The angel had a texture -- nothing else did -- and there were intermittent feathers enough he could grip to orient himself.

Below, with increasing comparative smallness, stood Shana. She studied his ascent with intensity. He could envision how this looked, drawing himself further into the air without support. If she had not believed his descriptions of the angels before, this was her evidence. But she had come on this journey with him, had encouraged him when he would have otherwise returned to his fading existence. She had suspended her disbelief long ago.

After another ten minutes of struggle, Zed reached the apex of the angel, craggy with faceted gems. Each could see him. Of this, he was sure. None cared to. He looked as far as he could, counting over seventy, though the number was unclear from there. One angel kilometers away walked with agonizing slowness. When its foot came close to falling, all the dead beneath absently wandered away. Was this something the angel did to prevent their notice, something that spoke of mild caring? Or was it an unconscious instinct built into the dead that they could allow into their conscious minds? Even Repeaters dissipated when the other option was to feel the angel.

A kilometer away, only for a moment, Zed could have sworn he saw a whale swimming through the sky. No, something older, with more teeth and a neck. At once, he knew the word for it, "liopleurodon," but it vanished as quickly as did the ghost of it or his imagination of the ghost. It might have been an angel flapping for all it mattered. It was possibly nothing but a trick of his perceptions.

Zed did not have the motivation to climb down, nor the patience. Morning would come soon, and he did not wish to meet it. He jumped from the angel's head, plummeting to the ground, which he hit no heavier than a thought. /p>

"There are many, all pointed in the same direction."

She began walking diagonally from where the sun would set tomorrow and wake them again. She didn't look over her shoulder to say, "There isn't anything else I can imagine that is more worth doing than this." She paused in her tracks. "You are going to escort me, of course, so that I do not lose my way."

"You think that this is your unfinished business?" he asked when he had bridged the few yards between them.

"I don't care about unfinished business anymore," she said. "I do care about what would interest angels."

"What will you do when the sun rises?"

"There are caves," she said. "There are places to rest. You have no guarantee that we will wake where we have before. We cannot waste this."

He followed her, leading from the back because he knew she wasn't wrong. He had escaped a sure extinction in the ground, among ghouls, watched by a possessive angel. It could have ended there and didn't. Every moment after that had the air of a blessing around it, a gift he bestowed by refusing The Taste of Sunlight on the Rain of a Battlefield.

The angels they passed didn't move from their spots, the one walker out of sight. Their height gave him a warning of when the sun would rise.

The first day, they found a nest in a cave. He could feel the vacancy beneath his feet, though he could not always have done this. Sensing this absence reminded him of the false body in which the angel had enveloped him.

"You need to go down."

She looked for an entrance, a hole or crack, but there was nothing so easy.

"Push through the ground."

She wanted to argue, he saw, but she instead heaved a sigh. This was part of this journey, and she could accept it, unnerving though the act would be. "How far?"

He probed the ground. "Thirty feet, maybe. The light won't come there."

He reached for her hand, feeling the resistance of it in his own. He wiggled into the ground from the abhorrence of having to do this more than anything else. It nauseated him to feel discomfort after so long numb.

The cave was pure blackness to living eyes, though few of the living remained. He felt blind creatures on the floor, but he avoided them out of atavistic displeasure. Something like mucus covered their bodies, and he did not want it near him. Each of them had a tiny blue spark of life within them.

Shana's damp nudity seemed for once to have its place here. She could be the queen of dark and hidden things, those beholden to a sulfurous stream for survival.

They waited on a cliff overlooking the scalding hot stream, containing creatures who had evolved to thrive on hellfire, in conditions most that precede them would have found lethal.

Shana waited for the hidden sun to evaporate her. When enough time passed without this happening, she relaxed onto the floor. In the dark, he wondered what she meant to get from all this, though he welcomed this company. He was more her companion than she was his. Had it been only him, he might have resisted the call longer.

"Are you frightened?" she whispered.

"Of what?"

"The angels. And what we will find at the end?"

He considered this. "Yes."

She turned over. "Me too."

"But you want to go on?"

"Always."

The walls of the cave were smooth blobs, stalactites and stalagmites of lime and granite that had joined thousands of years ago into a maze of half-made walls. He found reassurance tracing the curves, running his fingers over their contours.

Shana curled up into a corner, miming sleep. He wanted a blanket to cover her, though sleep was an impossibility here and always.

He traced the walls instead of disturbing her, though he wanted to be next to her, feeling the privacy here that evaded him above. No one had died here or, if they had, they did not do so with a burden on their souls. Here, they were for once alone.

After some time, Shana roused herself. By this point, Zed had created his third cairn.

"Why do you do that? Make those piles?"

He looked down at his latest structure as though surprised to see it there. "I can make them. Most cannot or do not try. When I make one of these, I have affected the world in a way that may last. Descending to the angel, I left one there to represent me if I did not come back to you. You wouldn't see it, I know. You wouldn't have come after me, and I am grateful you wouldn't."

She tapped a rock near the top, though her finger went mostly through it. He did not ask if she felt less tangible now, having not absorbed the sunlight that perpetuated them, or if she didn't wish to disturb his creation. "So, these are your gravestones, then?"

Zed wouldn't have phrased it think way, but the truth shone through.

Shana followed one of the etiolated amphibians through its routine, itself eyeless but struggling little with navigation, and went outside his sight into the labyrinthine caverns. She called to him after many minutes of the otherwise silence he spent crafting another cairn.

He followed her voice until he found her standing before a solid metal box. Or he thought it was metal until he laid his hand on it, better identifying it as ceramic or some amalgam that defied both his knowledge and the atmosphere of the cave. Even the limestone had avoided covering it over the centuries. It seemed a solid cube, no seams, almost something improbably formed from nature, but gave a hollow ring. He pressed his hand through the material to finger the contents.

"It is books," he said, "in good condition." The idea of them was so foreign that he almost laughed.

He craved to release them from this prison, but neither of them could deduce a way of doing this. Even in desperation, the two of them rallying their strength to drop a heavy stone on it resulted in nothing more than the rock bouncing harmlessly away.

He remembered then when he had seen something like, in the silent ships that had freed humanity from this doomed planet. This box must have been their legacy, some concrete demonstration even upon the obliteration of the rest of the world that once thinking beings had owned this planet, even if they would never again.

He resented the implication that the dead were not thinking beings. Humanity must have seen that their ancestors were not all empty of cognitive abilities and might at that provide a better testament than books. But, as Shana and he could not contrive how an alien might open this box, he did not feel his most intelligent.

This cave could not have been unusual. There would be other boxes in other caves throughout the world. Humanity would have planned redundancy, no matter that this would burn up and no one could visit the barren, blasted rock.

Zed trusted that, come the end of this world, the angels would still be here, and its destruction would not bother them in the least. Like the ghosts, they were no longer beings that belonged to this world. Unlike the dead, they were not tethered here. They did not need the Earth intact because they were citizens of a greater realm.

Shana did not know when the sun set again and thus when it would be safe to leave their cave. At first, she would not entertain Zed's suggestion that he would push himself above to check. She finally agreed to allow him to rise near the surface and feel if the ground had cooled any. He knew that this would give no reliable testament. The land would stay hot long after the sun had set. Still, they could not spend their existence among the salamanders. He would take this chance.

Climbing through the rock reminded him of summiting the angel. He did not know when to stop, so his head broke above the ground. He was safe from the sun, but only because an angel now provided apathetic shade. He waited behind the enormity of the creature, the phosphorescent glow of its extended talons, until the sun set on its wings. Like the mist of morning, the dead formed into discrete shapes and began their nightly routines.

He fell beneath the crust again to report to Shana.

She met him with fury. "You were gone too long," she said, on the border of rage and crying. "I thought I lost you up there. Could you even have found me again if the sun took you away?"

He didn't know that he could, but he did not feel the need to apologize for this. He did not tell her that only by the shade of an angel saved him, assuring her only that they would be safe to continue their journey.