It does not come from the land

There are stories, passed on from the Old Ones who are now long dead, of buildings made from liquid rock and sand reaching endlessly into a clear sky. Once, perhaps, there was proof of their words in what littered the ground beneath the vines and moss and grass. Now there is moss beneath the grass, and vines beneath the moss, on and on forever until the word soil no longer has meaning.

No remnants of the Old Ones remain, not even in the memory of faces, for even those who knew the Old Ones have long been under the moss, their bodies eaten away by the passage of time. Only the fragments of fractured stories survive, no longer worshiped as visions for a future. These days, to find a soul who still believes them, you would have to travel across a great expanse of Green where you will likely perish. You leave behind your family, who you will never see again; your friends, who no longer consider you a friend; and the only home you’ve ever known, and set off across a land that does not want you, only to arrive in one piece and discover the Believer there has set off for another Believer in another Ash-place. And so you set off into the endless Green again, hostile and beautiful and terrifying, hoping you have not been given the wrong directions.

And where there is not Green there is Ash, man-made and ugly but exquisitely survivable. The tiny hills built on mounds of charred plant as gray as the sky fight a constant war. And Ash is how we survive. The caves of Ash in which we live, the heat-hardened clothes of Ash which we wear, the dead entrails of Ash-Green which we eat, the balls of gas-soaked Ash the A.R.M.Y. sends us which we use to alight the Green as it grows ever forward into our homes. Ash is our world.

And it is after Ash that I am named, and it is from Ash that I run.

My grandfather told me a story before he died, before the unquestioning person within me died. When he too lay out beneath the moss, and tiny white plant bloomed over his lifeless body, I had no more reason to stay in this Ash-place called Plite.

“The lucky ones are chosen by the A.R.M.Y.,” all fathers would say to their children, “to go with them to the Great Ash-place in the North where everyone returns from the night watch and fires burn day and night. Perhaps one day you will be a lucky one.”

I was not a lucky one. Lucky ones are strong and dead-eyed and have no questions. But my grandfather told me stories. And I had questions. To my father I was a disappointment and to my mother I was a lost soul. I may have been her child, but Believers have lost their souls and do not often find them again. Was I a Believer then, when my grandfather still told me a story in a whisper in the dead of every night, when I had questions in my head but I didn’t know what they were? I would have said no, but now perhaps my answer is different.

What did I believe in? Nothing, I’d say, except that there was something more than just Ash and Green, and that somewhere, something was keeping me from knowing. That perhaps something, in all those stories I heard and even the ones I didn’t, that some part of it was true, and there was something before Ash and Green.

“Ash!” Lex called to me the night before I left Plite. “Ash, you have to help me!” I remember watching from my ring of light as the grass pulled at his ankles and the vines broke through the moss to tighten around his buckling knees. He called to me but wasn’t it the Ash-place that had failed him, when he tripped into the shadows where the Green lay waiting?

The journey across Green from one Ash-place to another must be completed without pause. If you run fast enough, the grass is not fast enough to grasp at your ankles and the vines cannot quite reach your knees. Old, half-charred roads not quite grown over remain, but you must know where you need to go if they are to be of any use to you. I did not know where I needed to go. There is no map of Ash-places in Plite because no one ever leaves, except to go with the A.R.M.Y. to the Great Ash-place in the North. But I found on that first trip that I could run. Endlessly. Although I was not fast, and although I grew tired, I ran and did not stop until I reached another Ash-place, sticking out of the Green like a goose pimple on the skin.

The people who lived there were as gray as the ones I had left. They called their home Cut, and they did not want me there. I left as soon as I had come, first trading my hat for a handful of Ash-Green. It was enough to feed me for a day.

The Sun was low in the sky when I set off again, filling the sky ahead of me like the color of a dry egg someone from the A.R.M.Y. had once given me on one of my birthdays. In the distance I saw a horizon that was not flat. Its outline rose and fell in tiny humps, and I thought perhaps it was another Ash-place within sight. It was instead something I had never seen before, for they were not visible from Plite. They were rows and rows of Green, rising into the air on thick, hard vines that divided again and again, with a kind of wide, flat grass growing out of the stems every different way. And nestled within those grasses, connected to the hard vines in the same way, were round spheres in colors I had never seen before, colors for which I had no words. When I would ask a friend years later, I would learn those colors were called Apple, Orange, and Plume.

“Ash!” Bear screamed to me as their arm hung limp and the moss began already to bury itself in their legs. “Ash, you have to help me!” I ran to stop the terror from getting any worse, but a wall of vines grew before me and I could go no further. When the vines finally fell back beneath the grass and the moss, Bear’s body had gone and left nothing behind for me to remember them by. Somewhere along the way I had learned that Believers always make it to their destination. No matter what happens, they always make it out alive. Bear may have believed in something, but they were not a Believer.

As I ran through those strange growths, a single sphere fell off one off them and landed in the crook of my elbow, rolling along my forearm into my hand. I screamed and threw it behind me, and within a moment another identical sphere landed in my hand as if it had been thrown there. I held it in my palm and a deep urge to bite into it flowed through me.

Never had I tasted anything so splendid as that which was the color Apple.

The following Ash-places I reached did not want me either, and though I moved through them quickly I heard whispers of “people like me” who had moved through before me in the direction of the falling Sun. So I continued after them, hoping one day to meet one and ask them a question they could answer.

Some of those bizarre plant growths with hard vines went on for miles at a time, where moss was not afraid to reach above grass. There it was dark, and the sound of my feet pounding against the soft ground scarcely raised an echo.

Sometimes I saw strange creatures, tiny-bodied things the color of Apple with huge tails, staring at me from their places on the growths. Their eyes glowed as the Sun began to fall, and they chattered like unhappy children. I did not know what they would do to me if I stopped to look at them.

“You’re looking for Tena, aren’t you?” a man with one hand and white eyes asked me in a tiny Ash-place without a name. I did not know who Tena was, and the man never told me. “Just go that way. Go and don’t come back.”

So I went to look for Tena.

“No one called Tena here,” cried the people of the Ash-place Ser-Vial, and the people of Nevar, and the people of Lye.

“There was someone came through here,” said a girl with the face of a grandmother in Ketch. “Didn’t ask for a name. Didn’t want one. Go that way.”

I don’t think Tena was ever real. Just a word on the lips meant to send the unwanted away in search of something that didn’t exist.

As a child I had kept in secret a Memory, the relics of the Believers. It was the only thing my grandfather had given to me, after he made me swear I would never let it be seen by another. He called it a Foto and it was like a drawing in the Ash, but it was thin and did not look like Ash. My grandfather told me it was rain, like the storms that come every thirty days and fill up our Ash-barrels. This rain did not fall, but lay in depressions in the land and did not disappear after a storm.

I once came to one of these places I had only seen in the Memory, but I do not believe it was made of rain. As I ran along its edge it stretched as long as I could see, and it lapped at the ground with a thick, reeking gurgle. The Green around it was dying. I watched as the vines pushed forward into it and went still, turning black and sticky. It had the color of human excrement and smelled just as bad, like the sour smell of death and something akin to the metallic fuel the A.R.M.Y. always smelled of. I ran beside that not-rain for days, until I could stand it no longer and turned away from it.

I do not think it was natural.

“So what is it you Believers believe?” someone named Kres once asked me on the outskirts of an Ash-place I never learned the name of. It was the question I had wanted my grandfather to answer before he died, but he never told me, so I never knew. I had wondered if it was just that Believers believed something and everyone else believed nothing, but I learned eventually that everyone believes something.

A young recruit pushed me down and held me in the Ash, arm raised as if to hit me. “You Believers are nothing but trouble. I don’t know why the A.R.M.Y. doesn’t just get rid of you. You threaten everything.”

I began to head north, where the Great Ash-place stands. I do not see Ash-places any longer, but I eat the spheres of color that fall into my hand as I pass beneath the plant growths. Sometimes after the Sun falls a light erupts from the sky, like a white Sun, and shows me the way. I wonder if other Ash-places have seen this other Sun, but I do not think they have. It grows colder too, the air beginning to sting as droplets of sweat slide off my shoulders and back underneath my clothes. The air, I feel, is not as thick, and sometimes I fear I have forgotten how to breath as I gasp over and over.

There are great, solid towers of rock in the north, their surfaces blanketed in great plant growths and long, thin grass that shimmers and dances in the wind. Where the towers end at points in the sky they are covered in something like white Ash. As I grow nearer to it the air bites at the skin and I shiver constantly.

The white Ash is white rain that sits on the ground like the Foto in my pocket. It makes my feet ache when they touch it, and when I hold it it turns to liquid. I could live here and drink forever if it did not make me so tired.

There is no grass or moss here. Only white rain.

I stand at the edge of a cliff where white rain fades once again into Green. It is Sunrise between two rock towers ahead of me and the sky is painted with shades of Orange. I have never seen anything other than gray, and I have never seen the Sun so blinding or so beautiful. Below me a curving, glittering path of stationary rain reflects the light around it, and lines of plant growths border the rolling hills of moss and grass. I haven’t described it as Green in a long time. There is something so horrible about that word, something that doesn’t describe the beauty of it. I feel a vine push against gently my foot and slide along the ground as it reaches for the edge of the cliff and continues over to the land below.

Somewhere I learned, many years ago, that Believers do not need to run through the places that are not Ash. I do not remember whether there was someone told me or I discovered it for myself when on a hot midday I could run no further, but it does not matter now. The vines do not want me to rest beneath the layers of grass and moss; the moss does not wish to make a home in my flesh; the grass does not want to bind my limbs and fill my mouth until I can no longer breathe. For some reason I have passed an unknown test, and I am welcome here amongst the shade of plant growths that bear sweet food beside the cooling roar of rain as it runs off a cliff into the shallow pools below, more welcome than I ever was in any Ash-place.

I have not seen another like me for too many years to count.

“I must tell you a story,” my grandfather told me as he grew weak from years of eating Ash-Green. “It is a story of your name.”

I do not know when I first saw the green lines beneath my skin or took notice of the tiny white plants that blossomed from my knuckles. The skin of my arms was cracked and dry, and beneath it I could feel things moving. I could feel them in my legs and my toes, and around the back of my neck to my ears. Eventually my hair fell out and my skin flaked away bit by bit, and the flowers spread to cover my arm and my shoulder. And they changed in hue and suddenly I knew the colors were red and pink and blue and yellow.

“You must listen carefully, and you must never forget what I tell you.”

My journey took me far to the north—further, I think, than the Great Ash-place where everyone returns from the night watch and fires burn day and night, where the A.R.M.Y. soaks balls of ash in pungent gas to light the Green on fire. I think if those who came from the Great Ash-place had come this far the fires would never end. I would not like that.

“Your name was given to you for a reason. It is something even your father will never understand, but I hope one day you will learn.”

I see myself in the pools of rain that come down from the towers of rock. I have never seen myself before, and though I do not know how I have changed I am sure that I have. I ask myself if this is how all Believers end up. I have never met another Believer. I wonder if they were just a myth, made up to send curious children away and have them fall, forgotten, beneath the moss and grass when they can no longer run.

I wonder if my father still thinks of me back in the Ash-place called Plite. I wonder if he too has been laid out to sleep with my grandfather. I wonder if my mother has joined them. I wonder if their memories lay next to Lex’s, who wanted so badly to be one of the lucky ones. I no longer remember their faces.

I wonder if Bear suffered beneath the grass as their flesh became moss. I wonder what they believed in, and why they followed me to a place of impending demise. Perhaps it is something I can never understand.

“I must tell you the story of Earth, and how it became a world of Green and Ash.”

My fingers stiffen every day, and my legs grow hard to move. One day they will grow into the land on which I sit, in the shade beside the pools of rain. There is something growing inside of me, some Green of my own, but it does not come from the land. There are lilies in my eyes and I can no longer see. The cycle of the Sun as it rises and falls gives me warmth, life. My breathing slows to the heartbeat of the world as it tries to heal. My throat and lungs are filled with tiny, flowering vines that have grown through my lips. Before I go to sleep, as my thoughts grow distant, I hear the whisper that comes on the wind from further north than I will ever see.

It is after Ash that I am named, and it is from Ash that I run.