STILLSTAR
THE LONG TAIL PART II
By Bren Lynne
Dru woke with the sun.
It would be a full day of running if he was to reach his destination by sundown, so he had a quick morning meal beside the ashes of last night’s fire. A handful of leaves, berries, and mushrooms, washed down with water from a bladderball. As he ate, he peered up through the forest canopy, watching the stars fade as the sky brightened. When he could no longer see a certain star — the stillstar — he finished his meal and stood. He unrolled his stash of speed weed, stuck a wad to the roof of his mouth, then set off through the forest.
He ran all day, tracking the movement of the sun through the branches, on as straight a line as possible through the rocky forest terrain. When possible, he followed animal trails, and made good time. But when the trails strayed too far from his intended direction, he struck off through the trees. He was quick, and silent. This ability to know the world — his place in it, and the way from here to there — was one of the gifts passed to him, in his father’s blood. The forest itself hardly knew he passed.
Around noon, Dru paused at a creek to fill the bladderball. He spat out the spent wad of speed weed and had midday meal. He considered more weed for the afternoon run, but his stash was low, and he would want it for the return. He compromised by eating half of his remaining food supply, figuring he’d forage or hunt as necessary at his destination.
A full belly slowed him down some in the early afternoon, but he pushed himself hard as the shadows grew longer, the sun sinking. As the light dimmed, he began to doubt himself. Doubt his sense of direction. Doubt the picture of the world he held in his head. The doubt grew stronger as the sun dipped below the horizon and the light went all but out of the world. He dreaded finding his way through the forest at night. It would make him slow and noisy. His night sight was good, but not as good as other creatures’. Nor was his hearing, and any noise he made, small as it might be, would bring predators.
But, as was always the case, just as his doubt grew certain, he reached the edge of the forest. The ground sloped down into the mouth of a great valley that carved a jagged path to the horizon. Dru knew the place, and his place in it, though he had passed here only once, many years ago. He looked into the valley, taking deep breaths of relief, as night fell and the stars came out.
Before his skin could cool, he found a nook amid the roots of an old tree about a hundred strides into the forest, and gathered a large pile of leaves. The sweat steamed off him in the cold night air, and his skin bristled with gooseflesh. He had taken a chance having a fire last night — now it was out of the question. Instead, he burrowed into the leaves and ate the last of his food, shivering for warmth.
As sleep came, he stared up at the stillstar. The single star, bright as silver, hung fixed in the sky, while all the others slid behind, so slowly that their motion was imperceptible to all but the most patient.
Patience was another of Dru’s gifts, passed in his mother’s blood.
He quickly established a daily routine. At dawn, he went to the edge of the forest and sat, watching as sunlight first peeked through the spires of the distant mountains, then spilled into the valley. When the wind blew in his face, he took a deep breath, nostril flaring. He saw and smelled nothing of concern.
In the morning, he searched for food along the treeline. The forest well rewarded an omnivore willing to look, and dig a little. He gathered mushrooms, roots, seeds, certain leaves and flowers he knew to be tasty. Insects, he consumed when easily caught, as they were plentiful. As he foraged, he frequently peered across the valley, to the distant mountains.
In the afternoon, he improved his shelter at the base of the tree, building a frame with sticks and vines, then pressing on leaves and grass with mud, as both insulation and camouflage. He doubted even a youngling with an eyeglass could spot the shelter from the valley, hidden as it was in the forest, well back from the treeline.
At night, his shelter was warm and snug as a nest. Dru peered out through a hole in the shell, watching the valley, the mountains, and the stillstar above, until sleep took him.
On the eighth morning, as the sun rose, Dru sat, looking down the valley to the distant horizon. He puzzled for a moment, squinting, confused by what he saw. Was it a shadow moving down the valley? No, it fell in the wrong direction from the sun. Was it a flood of dark water, racing towards him? No, it moved far too slowly.
His stomachs sank when he realized what it was.
It was a Ka’Lik horde. Innumerable, they packed the valley wall to wall, surging forward in a tide, dark carapaces glittering like polished stone. At this distance, they were as one, a single organism wriggling down the valley. When the wind blew from the valley, he could hear the faint, loathsome clicking of the Ka’Lik armoured limbs, scrabbling across the terrain. By noon, he could smell the odious stench of them in his nostril. Even then, he could not yet see the tail of the serpentine mass streaming towards him — their numbers stretched to the horizon.
As a scout, Dru’s orders had been to return with a count of their numbers, so that the city elders might prepare best defenses. But even he, not a military strategist, could see the futility in any attempt. There was no standing against this army’s advance. It would crest the city walls as easily as a storm front.
Then the great city would fall, and with it, the only civilization on the planet. Their libraries and schools and museums — enlightened institutions unknown to the savage and primitive Ka’Lik — would burn, and all the culture and knowledge contained therein would be lost to the sands of time as ash. The heads of their leaders and scholars and artists, and of everyone dear to Dru himself, would be severed by pincers and piled in compost, and their bodies consumed raw, as was the Ka’Lik way.
Dru contemplated the extinction of his kind, and wept, all hope gone from him. He couldn’t even bring himself to flee this place. He may as well be the first to fall.
Paralyzed with dread and surrender, tears streamed from his eye. He wiped them away just in time to see what happened next.
A glittering object dropped from the sky, moving so fast it scored a silver line in his vision, and the valley vanished in a tremendous flash of searing light. Dru had a brief sense of some great force moving towards him very quickly, then an invisible wind, roaring hot, swept over him. He was lifted from the ground and carried into the forest behind him, lucky to not hit a tree, which would surely have broken him. He rolled to a stop, senses reeling, as ragged leaves and broken branches fell around him from the forest canopy. The scorching wind was gone as quickly as it had come.
Dru rose unsteadily, surroundings momentarily unfamiliar, changed as they were. He was barely aware of the blistering burn covering the front half of his body. A new scent wafted up from the valley — the smell of the funeral pyre.
He stumbled down from the ridge, into the valley, scarcely able to comprehend what he was seeing. The verdant channel was gone, replaced with something like a volcano cone. He reached the first of the Ka’Lik, scattered at its perimeter. The bodies were charred and shredded, carapaces burst open, innards steaming. Those few that still clung to life lay twitching, or crawled in blind agony, but the vast majority were dead.
The army was no more.
By noon, Dru reached the centre of what he’d come to realize was a crater, caused by an explosive force previously beyond his ability to imagine. Only historical myths of geological catastrophe provided a reference for the scale of this devastation. The ground itself still smoked, covered with a brittle layer of blast glass that burned and cut his feet, unnoticed.
He was shocked into a detached state of ecstatic horror. An awesome, euphoric dread that had expanded his mind without bounds, sanity drifting away, like smoke from a valley, to be replaced with epiphany.
He fell to his knees at ground zero, surrounded by the crackling corpses of the smote enemy.
He raised his arms to the sky, blinking away tears, to gaze up at the glittering dot far, far above. The stillstar — Dru did not doubt, was in fact certain — had delivered his species’ salvation. Had chosen his people and favoured them above all others. Had found his tribe worthy.
He screamed his thanks skyward, and resolved that he would carry word back to their great city, after a suitable period of prostration and worship. Word of their great, powerful overseer, omniscient and omnipotent. Word of the mysterious being, with power beyond understanding, that watched from above, waiting and wrathful.
Word of God.