Litany of Silence

Samsat Hur was far from the first veteran of the Morning War to make the grueling expedition down into the pits of the desert to find the silent monks in their silent temple. He walked in the preserved footsteps of the legion that had marched west to seek victory or death but had received neither the satisfaction of the former nor the peace of the latter. Samsat limped past half-buried helmets and broken guns left behind by broken soldiers. His own helmet, gun, and dripping pocketknife soon joined them. What use were weapons now in this shattered world where reality had been unmade and made again at the touch of one madman's hand?

He rubbed grains of sand absently between his fingers, squinting at the shining moon above the crimson dunes, and tried to remember. His mind now a labyrinth of memory and myth and dream, fiction and fact running together like a briny sea meeting a pure river—except no denser truth rose above the foam, now. Something wet against his other hand; Samsat held it up to the bright moonlight, surprised. Blood.

There was a name carved into his palm: Samsat Hur. He'd stumbled from the battlefield of glass and twisted earth and weeping souls with that name bleeding on his skin. Did it belong to him? Belong to his beloved friend, or most hated enemy?

Perhaps one of these had been true before this morning. Perhaps they were all true, now. Samsat couldn’t remember what the fighting had been about, but he supposed it must have been important. Just look at all the forever-footprints burned into the desert, there, under the moon that would never set. What had been more important than the sunrise? Who had traded away all their tomorrows?

When Samsat reached the top of a dune he looked back and beheld a city burning on the horizon. Smoke of a thousand colors choked the sky; he wondered whose city it was, which side it belonged to—but then, those answers probably did not matter much anymore. Maybe asking them in the first place is what got them into this trouble. He squinted at the distant glow and bit his lip until it ached. Did he hear moaning on the wind? The never-dying souls of the city, crying out for oblivion?

Somewhere in his mind there was a story about a mother telling her child that wars only exist because people forget. If people couldn't forget, there would only ever be one war: the first one. Memory turned terror into glory, soldiers into heroes, their enemies into monsters. There was a cycle, the mother said to her son. Right after the fighting ends, everyone remembers how terrible it all was. It was easy to remember when the land was scarred and your friends were dead and your own body bore the wounds of the struggle.

But decades pass. Soldiers die, or forget. And folk start being born that had never had to huddle in the shelter of their ruined home, listening in abject fear as bombs whistled down towards them. Folk that never had to look a man in the eye and decide to take his life. For these folk a war is just a story and like all stories can be twisted in its telling. Give it a hundred years, the mother said. A hundred years of peace will make people nice and hungry for something new, a change, even a change for the worse.

What is war? A failure to talk, Samsat's mother had said, or else an unwillingness to. Conflict is in our nature, barked the warmongers up high who had wrought this apocalypse. Samsat remembered them, now, those talking uniforms who had spoken of the bloodshed needed to keep the peace. But his mother had said talking is what people had come up with so that conflicts did not have to end with one man bleeding his life out on the ground. Peace was in our nature, too, and our better one at that. For what was war if not peace interrupted? Yes, and if peace was a conversation then war was an unfinished sentence, terminating in failure—

Damn, but he was remembering now. Samsat ripped his gaze from the burning city and stumbled back down the dune towards the trail of red footprints. Deeper into the desert, deeper into the coiling past. He squeezed his wounded hand into a fist and nauseous pain wrenched his gut, but the queasy sharpness it summoned helped him focus.

Everything would be okay once he reached the silent monks. The certainty of this seemed to be carved into his mind, as surely as some poor bastard's name was carved into his skin. They would help Samsat make sense of this ruined world, if anyone could.

He remembered monks living in temples in mountains and other lovely places with blue skies and suns, and perhaps that had been a true story once. The site of Samsat Hur's salvation was a yawning pit of stairs that stretched down into darkness, set in a valley between towering dunes that cast deep and mournful shadows of moonlight. Everything was wrong now. His feet leapt from stair to stair and he almost fell twice in his haste to reach the bottom.

Shapes turned at his approach, the moon-faced monks peering at him from within their deep hoods of crimson. They had never spoken before the end of everything and did not appear very talkative now, but one of them—a woman—shuffled up to Samsat. Her eyes asked a question.

He nodded, slowly, sinking to his knees. The stone of the temple was cold against his burned skin. She wanted to know: did he remember, now? Did he remember the story of himself?

How long had the city been burning? One year, ten years, a thousand. He remembered being pressed into service on the eve of the Morning War, a meek boy with a head full of his mother’s stories. The reality bomb had just been another story, a myth. Samsat had caught the barest glimpse of it as he’d doggedly explored the war camp, seeking an impossible path towards peace in the eleventh hour before cataclysm. 

He’d been trying to make them remember, before all was lost. That was all. But the generals had not listened, and the device had just been sitting there—and what was the destruction of one army compared to a war that would kill so many more? Samsat had not understood the consequences, but what man ever does?

And so those who had marched west to die for their country would stay in the west to live forever. He’d been shielded in the eye of the event and he’d limped from a battlefield of men and women fused with the ground, with each other, moaning and gibbering in agony, suspended in their un-life. So it was now in the city, in the country, across the world. No one had died in the Morning War and no one would ever die again. 

Tears wetted his cheeks. A gentle hand grasped his own, and he looked up in bleary surprise. The wounds on his palm closed: Samsat Hur vanished from his skin. 

The monk smiled down at him, her cheeks softly dimpling. Her kind eyes asked another question: the last question, always. It was in his power to end it all, to watch the moon finally set on a ruined world of burning cities and souls finally afforded an end; his terrible power, his terrible choice. 

There was only one alternative in this doomed reality in which time itself had been seized and broken at the spine. For who could ever forgive the man who had pressed the button? In what distant epoch of eternity would Samsat Hur earn the peace of death? When would his sentence find its end?

Whose footprints had led him here? The footprints of a man who deserved hell, forever. 

He ignored the monk’s pitying expression, and spoke his choice.

  ***

Samsat Hur was far from the first veteran of the Morning War to make the grueling expedition down into the pits of the desert to find the silent monks in their silent temple...