Zakary

- Part 1

Stardust shimmered in the storm; threads of white silver spun together, glowing in the current of the wind, the howls—like a thousand fibers woven into one by the wheel of the loom. Out of one great ending—out of a reckoning, a divine collapse—time and force had whirled these celestial ashes across the cosmos and delivered them unto the barren land: the plains of Death. Yet, in a place where nothing lives, these sparks gave light. A beautiful luster glowed from them brightly, beneath the pale light of the moon.

Even in death, some things still shine, Zakary thought, as he stood at the edge of a dune cliff in the desert sea, watching stardust spark in a whirlwind raging through the night.

Then Zakary saw once more, in his eyes, how he came to this place:

From a dark infernal below, complete blindness he saw, as he climbed steps of stone, hands reaching across a narrow corridor. Inside, he felt the primal necessity: to find light, to escape the void. And so, driven by a fire — by scorching flames that whipped out like dagger tongs from below – his body staggered upwards. A spot appeared above. Perhaps it was just a memory. But it grew, and the old man saw another one. He felt a change in the air, a coolness on his cheeks, moisture on his withered lips. There, above him, appeared a doorway. Far, and small. And through it, he saw white dots gleaming.

Stars! the old man thought.

He came to the verge. But at his final steps, his ascendance halted. Paralyzed, he heard a distant howl — a human cry. And his eyes failed to look away, as they beheld something wicked. A pyramid. Gray and grim. Ancient, it threatened the heaven above and defiled everything below.

He heard a far-gone howl — a human cry. The old man saw, at the foot of the primeval structure, green vapors fluttered: the dead. Phantoms weeping, roaming beneath the shadow of the pyramid – trapped in this evil sarcophagus.

Bewitched, the structure held the air back from Zakary’s lungs, collapsing the old man to his knees. And he wept and shivered with the dead; he had known nothing of this treachery, this villainy, this hate—a greed beyond all measure that emanated from the structure. But for what? He could feel it. All of it. As tears flowed from his eyes, he looked across the dunes that stretched from where he lay to the mountain at the edge of the horizon. This was no desert by right—by the flow of the wind or the drying of oceans; it was the place of abandonment, where nothing wished to live.

- Part 2

A ray cracked over the mountain — Zakary awoke at the first light of day. Throughout the night, he had been tormented; a restless state of lethargy befell him. All night, he felt the unblinking gaze of the pyramid’s eye. His body withered. His lips had stuttered lamentations and prayers, as Night-Mares overtook him, worming forth those wicked things he could not forget — the memories of humanity lost:

Thumping chests — heaving and burning — of children in fright, who run and scream as they stagger through the jungle, through the vines and thickness, trying to escape the enemies of their fathers, chasing them through the undergrowth — the vegetation entangling those little thumping hearts into the fate of men.

Masters turn metal spikes in red and blue fire, and draw them out, pressing the screeching tips onto the faces of mothers and fathers — mothers and fathers made to listen as their children bore the same damnation.

A man strikes down his brother with a stone picked from the ground — a ground that is humanity’s only gift, all that was left after they were abandoned to roam under the Godless sky.

But there is a whisper in these memories — something the old man had not remembered, yet recalled all the more. It rose from the vines and trees, from the metal and fire, from the dirt and stones. It is vaporous. It slithers — a thing without shape or form, born of the world given unto us — and it roots itself in the hearts of men, turning blood into hate, and flesh into pain, and brother against brother.

Zakary looked into those first rays of morn — eyes gleaming blankly, with scars upon his face — and he could hear that whisper, that wormtongue in his memories, retreating into the grim-dark entrance of the pyramid.

And then, he looked up.

The stars were slipping away in the light of the coming day. But still persisting in the above, shone Uru An-na.

Are you going to do anything?

Nothing?

Figured as much.

And Zakary set off into the desert sea.

- Part 3

Sand drifted over sand, moving forward with the wind, which was restless. The grains lifted up, shimmered, and fell.

What sort of current is this? Zakary thought.

He walked on. His feet were numb, each step landing on ever-hotter grains as he moved into the day. Then it became too much. Burning. What can an old man do but stagger on? He laughed at himself — a hopeless fool. Thirsty and parched.

Zakary looked back.

There — the opening. A hole, small — made in haste, in struggle, and out of fear — that led back to the dark stairway, from whence he came. It sat still in shadow, a few hundred steps behind. A break in the face of a great hill of rock — dark and brown, sharp and jagged as a spear.

The sun had already climbed to its climax.

Zakary watched it for a moment. And went on.

The wind came harder, rising higher, then crashing down — howling, beating the old man who wandered in its path. Still, he moved onward. What can an old foul do?

A screaming gust knocked him down. He looked into the wind, to his right — and the sky had turned dark, stirring in shades of brown and black. It was hushed, but he could hear its rage — a cosmos of sand-stars, coming, storming, thundering like mad horses dragging chariots of iron and spikes toward Zakary.

And the old man — fibers stretched, bones tempered, skin coarse and burnt — the man-of-dogs, the man-of-dead, the roamer — rose, and staggered on.

The sun was all but gone when the whistle of the storm vanished. In its place came the sound of a great current, crashing like the fall of heaven.

The old man was thrown, lifted, broken, cut.

He saw nothing.

Just a whirlwind.

And still, he could remember. Still, he could hear the whisper — draining the last light from him, from the hearts of men.

- Part 4

It was silent when he awoke, lying on the cool sand. The sky was dark but deep, betraying not the infinite above. A night full of the blinking of stars once again, the steady glow of Neptune, and the moon – shining its pale face. It felt closer, bigger, more enigmatic – as if the tall-tailed face, the mad face, hiding on the other side, was just about to peek over, and look unto humanity with an eye of madness.

I’m sorry, old friend.

Though he did not know why, but that was all for the more.

And, over the horizon of a dune, there lurked the grey-evil, God's Evil, structure, the pyramid, closer and yet nonetheless far away.

Or is it man?

There was a noise, a frog hopping into water, and Zakary looked to his left and saw a lone fountain standing a few paces away, in the mists of a desert night.

The old man raised himself from the ground slowly. Stumbled forward. Inching to the fountain. He fell to the lip of the bowl, resting his body at the edge of a pool of water, a perfect mirror. He saw his face in its reflection. Old. Dying.

He lowered his face to the water.

And therein — before he could taste the cool and sweetness which came off it — he heard a frog’s croak, and the wind.

He looked up, and saw a tall figure draped in a robe of bones woven together in intercrossing fibers of blood-brown cloth. Below a hood, there was no face. But Zakary saw something there: an eye, a thousand eyes. A light, a dim glow. Faces. Emptiness. Blindness. A glow. Someone old. Something yet to come. A darkly.

The figure looked down onto Zakary.

“Zakary, how did you come to be in this place?” the figure asked.

“I didn’t go anywhere, but fate took me where it seems to like,” he replied. “Who are you?”

There was a moment of silence, and Zakary heard his old heart.

“I am the second face of pain, the bringer of good in the plight of pain. I am what doesn’t kill you, what saves the living. I am the salvation of the damned,” the figure spoke. “I am a face of pain. I am the suffering you must endure.”

The old man laughed weakly.

“Must I suffer?” Zakary asked with spite.

“No. But look around you. I don’t always see alternatives. And does not good grow out of ashes...?”

“Look at the moon.” And Zakary did.

“The face you see is kind; you know this. It gives you light of the sun so you may see the little in its absence, and you know this. But, on the other side — the face, the one you don’t see — is torment, for he sees no god-light out there. Only when the moon looks on to man does it look beautiful. What does that say about your suffering...?”

“Thus, it is,” the figure continued. “Maybe it could have been different. But it is not.”

“So why have you come, bearer of good disguised as pain?” the old man asked.

After a moment the figure said, “You are dying.”

“That is good news?” He laughed again but began to cough.

“Maybe, old man. But I also wished to ask you, Zakary, man of men, before you join your dead — why do you wander toward the pyramid?”

“I must see what wicked thing lay in the way of men — what was left with us on this earth to defiles our hearts.” the old man said.

“Will you end it?” the figure asked.

“I can’t,” Zakary said. “As you said, it is not our fate to be without it.”

“I’m sorry, old man,” the figure said.

Zakary heard a rushing sound, saw the fountain of water had disappeared, turned his head and saw a dune collapse, and looked at the place of the figure — and saw, wicked, sick dark entrances of the pyramid, standing in front of him — a hundred steps away.

Zakary looked behind him.

He heard the howls of the desert wind, saw whirlwinds of stardust raging over the barren land — a beautiful luster glowed from them brightly.

Even in death, some things still shine, Zakary thought.

- Part 5

The entrance was narrow, but the walls were tall, and the way dark. At the cusp, Zakary saw carvings on the walls, old hieroglyphs. He did not understand their meanings, yet as he took his first step over the threshold and into the pyramid – into the halls where all light was lost – he pressed his hand to the symbols and followed their story.

In the abyss he walked, his step silent. The air was stiff, withered, and sharp. He swallowed his dry throat, and his heart began to stutter, under threat of suffocation.

There was fear in his heart.

His fibers filled with the primal necessity to escape the void, the coming suffocation. But he stepped forward. And flames drove against him, at him, slashing at the blind man in the dark. He staggered, but held to the wall, afraid of the fire, the evil, the forever darkness. Of death.

Then, out of his blindness, appeared a spot – a coolness in his heart. A sensation. A shape in his mind. There. A place. Then gone.

And again, as his fingers ran against the lines of an ancient story, it came. Something alive, in his mind, and then the dark form was overcome:

A young man, on his knees, stares through dry blood and dirt at another, who lies struck on the ground – in a pool of red that still runs into the earth.

Tears fall over the old man’ scars.

Then he saw the young man among other men, in a town square, standing around condemned man, stood at edge of a platform with a rope around his neck.

The youth rose above the crowd of men, and shouted, “Who of you, brother of mine, has not done wrong? In your silence, then, ask yourselves why this man, with a rope around his neck, must suffer for your and my sins? For when I stand here, and kill this man with my silence, I am only washing the dirt from my own hands with his blood and am I to call myself forgiven! If he must die, so then I.”

The darkness came again. His fingers were cut, but still the old man grasped at these memories – and he felt pride in his heart.

And then, he saw the young man again, sat beneath a tree, and in his arms was a young woman, who loved him, and who he loved. A fruit fell from the tree, and as they looked at each other, a snake slithered out from the vines and stole the life of the only one he would ever love.

And as the snake retreated into the shadow, there was the whisper, coming from the dark ahead, draining the light from his soul.

Zakary left the path of the wall, for in his heart was only hate. He threw himself forward, towards the whispers, to that wicked fate that stole life from his own hands, and all he loved from his heart.

- Part 6

Out of the darkness, a form began to materialize—reaching from the void, inching toward him with a flat face. Zakary saw it was stone, smoothly rising from the ground. An altar. Pale light radiated from its surface, but from where?

He turned.

And standing at the entrance from where he had come was the moon—floating above the desert plains, offering him one last gift of sight in the chambers of abandonment.

He stepped toward the stone slab. The room, now lit in withering luster, unveiled its full depth of bane. To his right loomed a black rock—a tabulate of suffering. Crucified to its surface were heads: withered and fallen, screaming faces. Eyes open—thousands of them—all suffering, with metal spikes driven through their forelocks, nailed into the black rock. Their ears had been cut off; blood still dripped from the hollows left behind.

To the left, there was another such wall—the same tragedy.

A wind came from behind him, rushing—and the lips of the crucified let out a whistle. It grew into cries, into shrills, into screams. Into pleading.

The pale white and gray of the chamber shifted as the voices and shrills rose—into a deep green.

Zakary turned around again. He saw, behind him, filling the hall from where he had come, the faded phantoms of the dead—green vapors, ghosts of men and women—looking upon him, with the moonlight shining through them.

They fell silent as they saw the man of men look back at them. But in their eyes, they told him to look into the deep, to go onward—for them, for the damned, the trapped, and the abandoned.

Before Zakary, as he turned his eyes back into the chamber, was a tail—scaled and coiled—rising to a height taller than any of man. It stretched forward, winding into the darkness, and slithered in the shadows.

“Wanderer, why did you not wander away?” A thick hiss came from everywhere; from the moving form he could not see.

“I led you not, and yet you came. Are thy past digressions too much for you, old man?”

Zakary rose and stood atop the altar, staring into the formless scales. Silent.

“Answer me!” the shadow screamed.

“I am suffering! I am wicked pain! The wind that brings you the long death! I am Pestilence!” The tails slithered with might and power great like the ocean.

“I am your god, that rose out of abandonment! And you came to me—dost thou hear?”

But Zakary saw, through the shadow, eyes. Eyes in the form. Thousands—green, sick on its own poison.

“I hear a lie which blinds the hearts of men,” he spoke. “I hear a whisper that hides in the wind and calls itself force! An illusion that stinks in the shadows and calls itself god!”

“Who is he who calls me not my name?” boomed the baleful deep, as the shadow covered the entrance and blocked out the moon.

“Whom do you speak for?”

“I am alone: an old man. I speak for myself. But the time is coming when other men will come and stand before thee and speak unto you as I do.

And we shall say:

I am Man.

I refuse to root this Earth with your lies,

To suffer which is wrong.

Every soul is my brother, my sister.

Never again will I raise my hand and strike them down.”

All at once, the form broke, and a storm of a thousand serpents flooded toward him.

In his final moment, Zakary drew a stone from the ground and crushed the head of a serpent,

As the others pulled the old man down, into death.

But indeed—Men came again.

At different times, crawling out of the eternal primal deep,

Through the barren desert plains, the wicked wind,

And into the chamber of abandonment,

To slay the wicked serpents—

One life at a time.

Even in death, men shine brightly.