When Darkness Begins Read online

  War, collapse, rebuilding—a constant interruption in any part of the ritual.

  Why had she always chosen to be alone?

  Eterili had a singular skill that the Linears did not have. She was a time-walker, able to move into times past of this universe and see far into the future. See, but not visit those times yet to come. Linears had stoned her to mortal death the first time she exhibited this skill. Scattered to the winds, as a moldy corpse does, she had to await the inevitable collapse of the universe to begin again. The interminable boredom of waiting with an inability to do anything stung mightily.

  She was able to die, as evidenced by her stoning, yet it only killed the body she had been born to. The only way to kill her physical body, she had found, was by a severing of the spine. Even the gravest of injuries would re-heal, though not without excruciating pain. Each death she would lie awake as part of the ground awaiting re-birth. Many times she lived as long as the universe. As many times she died a true death early, sometimes by pure accident, other times out of boredom and frustration.

  In future lives, after her stoning, she was much more careful to explore her abilities in solitude and removed herself as soon as possible from Linears. Perhaps she had chosen solitude as a matter of survival and maintained the choice out of habit, a very long-standing habit.

  As she explored her strengths and unusual gifts more, Eterili pushed into the past as far as the beginning of the universe’s timeline, even when she herself had been only a collection of snow on a mountaintop. However, she was unable to move into the future, as that time did not exist yet. Each collapse and rebirth of the universe and herself issued another boundary to move within.

  At first, when the universe was young and she new to it, she had not found time-walking useful. When she realized moving and adjusting time would ultimately adjust the course of the universe itself, it intrigued her. Rebellious in her youth, she had adjusted events and caused the collapse of the universe herself many times. The power was intoxicating, but she eventually grew tired of it.

  What if she adjusted time, adjust things, made herself the ruler of this universe and not merely be a hapless spectator enslaved to constant existence thrown against the shores of time by meaningless chaos?

  The sky had grown dark, and she knew the end of the universe was moments away. Set upon her plan to wield the cosmos to her desires—she waited her next becoming.

  4 NEW BEGINNINGS

  In a freezing and distant land, Eterili’s mother had hidden her as a baby from the others of the clan. They would have torn her to pieces and fed her to the wolves if they had heard the inhuman words that came from her mouth.

  Even as she suckled, she spoke. Not the cooing of a baby but every language known and most not known. Her mother held the child at arm’s length when she had uttered her first words.

  Not one word. A sentence.

  The child had simply spat out the teat it fed from and proclaimed, “Today, I am.”

  Though the voice was soft and hardly shaped, the words were unmistakable. Most of the mother’s clan barely spoke words or grunts let alone utter multiple words strung together. The mother thought more abstractly and hid the fact well lest she be exiled from the clan. She hid her thoughts adeptly. Her child, however, was speaking in a language she did not quite understand but knew it had meaning.

  Though she still bled from the difficult birthing, the mother joined a hunting party and headed north with them, taking the child with her. She traveled quickly and bade the child to keep quiet during their journey, fearing they would be found out and killed. The child seemed to understand and kept quiet.

  In the stillness of their makeshift tent at night, the child taught the mother words and languages. The mother struggled with it and thought she was becoming insane. She could not deny her child, so tried with all of her might to learn no matter how impossible it might seem to her.

  They traveled for moons and the child grew. The child’s hair was black as night and her eyes were gray as a wolf’s fur. She listened to her mother and together they avoided detection. By the time the youngster was walking, a few of the hunting party had died horrible, unexplainable deaths. The mother and child stayed at the edges of the clan and kept to themselves. The hunters cast wary eyes at them and offered no aid save allowing them near the fire. Suspicions grew when the clan found another hunter with his throat slashed and a disproportionally small bloodstain upon the snow. Even the meager hospitality of the fire would soon be withheld from the outcast mother and child.

  The night was cold. While crossing a large expanse of ice, wolves attacked the hunting party. The child, still young and unable to keep up with the group, stayed in a papoose on her mother’s back. The mother kept her back towards the clansmen as they fought the wolves.

  One wolf jumped and took down a clansman closest to the child. It snarled and bit, dispatching the man in a vicious twist of its mighty head. It glared at the toddler and bared its teeth.

  One by one, the wolves rendered the clansman useless until only the mother stood, the toddler on her back.

  The wolves closed in until the pack surrounded the two.

  Mother twisted and pulled the papoose around to hold her baby in her arms, a protective gesture, the last she thought she would have.

  Snow fell on the group, dusting her eyelashes and the wolves’ backs equally. No one moved. Only silence and the sounds of wolves growling filled the air. The baby did not cry. The mother held her sobs for they would do no good now. She waited for death.

  She waited.

  Snow fell.

  She waited with eyes wide open.

  Only snow fell.

  The wolves sat around her as if awaiting a command. She marveled at it with her mouth agape. It was then she noticed the hand of her baby extended from the papoose. Not a feebly waving limb but an upheld hand in the gesture of a command.

  The wolves put their heads on their paws and growled no more.

  For the rest of their journey, the wolf pack accompanied them—sharing their half consumed kills, treating the mother and child as pups. Eventually they made their way to a cold cave far to the north. The mother built up ice chunks around the entrance of the cave to keep the wind from rushing in and to help keep the fire’s warmth from escaping. There she rested. While she slept, the toddler spoke to the wolves.

  The baby grew and survived. She took the name she had held since her first death: Eterili. She slept, sometimes for centuries, in the ice-cave with her mother’s blood-drained corpse. Other times she sat and listened.

  Isolated. Confined. Disconnected.

  Waiting.

  Then the ice began to recede and she heard other voices calling out: an insistent murmur.

  She had not heard this before in any of her lives. Perhaps she had never listened. Perhaps in her previous life, her own dying wishes for others of her own had made it so in this universe, on this planet at least. Eterili pondered at the stars above her, not for the first time, and wondered if she would ever visit other planets and if there were others like her out there. She listened—but heard nothing beyond the whispers from this planet. It spoke to her in a deafening roar.

  The rocks called to Eterili and led her to a faraway land. She heard the rocks as clearly as the wolves and trees. They spoke in a language sensed, heard, and tasted. The whispered tidings breezed across her skin and pulled her this way and that. She followed the whispers alone in the darkness.

  It took a thousand patient seasons or more to cross the lands, the sea, and the rivers to come to this new and enormous cave—a dark opening in the side of a mountain on a distant land.

  The damp cave went on forever, it seemed, with its multiple entrances s
pread out like abscesses across the hill-stained land.

  She stood at one of the entrances, and looked in. The darkness beyond was no match for her eyes. Eterili clearly saw the shapes of things now, then, and soon to become. She chose her steps wisely and made her way through the rock opening.

  The prodigious passage was wide enough to hold twenty great, hairy, tusked beasts shoulder-to-shoulder. Still, their dark-furred hides would not have touched the rock walls.

  Fireflies flew in front of her and lit the path at her bidding. She did not need them; it was an old woman’s vanity to call them to her side.

  Water trickled its way from the ceiling, dripping down calcite stone-point formations and falling into the mud below. The path of the water left mineral traces adding to the length of the stone-points. Through the ages she saw where they would grow and become walls of stone, blocking passage in future times. Perfect. This would be the home of her people.

  She had to find them first. She knew they were there: others like her. Though she did not think they were as strong as her. This was new. They had not been there in previous lives. They were now. She would unite them. It would take work on her part to push events, and call to them. She would create a safe place for them to grow as a people, ensure their survival, and use them to help keep their clan together safe. This clan would become tied into this universe so they themselves could push forward into the next universe—together—where she would begin anew re-building her people. She would no longer be alone.

  She waited and time rolled by at its plodding pace. Eterili wandered the lands and watched the Linears come to the flatlands at first in small fits and starts and then in numbers. She had seen this progress of inhabitation hundreds of thousands of times.

  Carefully she walked through time calling to her people across the water and in faraway lands. She walked back through time away from the Linears and their inhabitance of the land to a time when only she had stood, a solitary figure. This time—she considered it home-time—existed far in the past from where the Linears existed, far from their intrusion. She called her people here. The strong would prevail and the time-walkers would find her in this solitude. Here they would be safe. Here they would grow, strengthen, evolve.

  Standing in this cold, tremendous cave, far in the past—safe from Linear’s discovery, Eterili peered through the future as it would unfold. She observed where parts of the cave stayed open for would-be adventurers to travel through. The rock would grow and protect all her people would carve and make as their home. None would find evidence of their existence. The earth would swallow their home whole as it grew its rock walls and separated their living areas from any access to the outside world.

  She listened. They heard her call. Eterili smiled, sensing them, hearing them, as they moved towards here across the lands and across time; their movements louder than the rocks that called her here.

  From a small pouch at her waist she chose iron tools. These tools didn’t exist yet on this planet, but soon would if it followed as her experience had seen in previous lives. Hefting a small axe in one hand and using a rock as a hammer in the other she began carving into the stone. It took time, and she reveled in inscribing designs for each family branch that would join her. As if by her own invention each clan became more real to her with every pounding of the rock hammer.

  This was her timeline and she would wield it. She imagined the time-walkers emerged from the chaos of the universe by her own will. The shape of them took form in her mind. They would form families, clans.

  With a clink she chipped away at the stone and carved. The designs were intricate, and she lost herself in them for months.

  At last she decided that she would name her people Vechey. Eterili put away her tools and looked at her work. She had toiled for years to prepare this place. It awaited them.

  The full moon greeted her when she exited the cave. It was an old friend, and she spoke to him gently, “We will call the Vechey to join us here from wherever they have appeared. They must come home.”

  Pausing, she looked up at the luminous orb above her. This was only the start. There was one more thing to do. She had to help her Vechey escape time as she had, enabling them to move forward with her when this universe ended.

  The stars filled the night sky and again Eterili pondered on what her next steps might be. A meteor shower streaked across the sky and for a moment the moon’s brightness competed with the red and orange stripes across the black void. The meteors spoke to her even as they burned to their death in the upper atmosphere, leaving only charred dust and elements to fall to the ground.

  Nothing more than how I start my existence in each universe, Eterili thought. She thought more on space and time and how to help her people escape time’s linear hold. Her plan came into place. She watched the sun rise and set—repeatedly chasing the moon until he fled the night’s sky completely. The night was dark and moonless when she nodded to herself contently.

  She sat, her thin legs and frame wrapped in a coyote fur. The coyote’s head, eyes replaced with quartz, lolled at her shoulder. It whispered to her of endless ends and beginnings saying, “It is the way of the universe.”

  She smiled, “It is the way of my universe.”

  Eterili waited.

  ***

  The first to hear Eterili’s call was a stooped man, ostracized from his tribe. He had lived long enough to see the tribe migrate away and their children migrate back. His lands of origin were even further away than where Eterili had hid with her mother in an ice-cave so long ago.

  He did not have much language capacity to communicate, but the calls to him from Eterili crept into his dreams at night. In the dreams he saw a symbol carved on a rock wall: three overlapping circles. He carved them on a shell and hung it from his neck as if to ward off the dreams—to no avail.

  Some of those that migrated back joined him and recognized the symbol around his neck from their dreams. Together they moved away from the tribe. They continued traveling across the lands and to the east. They encountered other tribes. Some were welcoming. Some not.

  He and his small clan came across a group on an island that was so much shorter than he. They exchanged bead necklaces, and he showed them the axe he had made. It was very large.

  He found more who had heard Eterili, not many, but a few along his path did.

  By the time they crossed the shallow water, which burned their feet, and arrived at a large island—his tribe had grown to over seventy-five. All were outcasts from their tribes.

  Different. Odd. They did not age the same. They tended to not hunt as much with the others. They walked across time in a limited fashion but had learned quickly to hide their talents.

  Instinctively they separated from the Linear tribes and clumped together, moving and migrating to their own parts of the land.

  Eterili called to them in their dreams. If they ignored her call the very rock and ground they slept upon whispered to them. Her unrelenting call bade them to move.

  The stooped man, who had gathered a large group with him—including a handful from the tribe who were so short they looked like children, looked to his cobbled together tribe.

  In a few words and gesturing, they made a plan.

  Had everyone heard the calling of this distant woman called Eterili?

  They had.

  Her insistent cries told of a safe place for all of their kind. Did they believe it?

  They did.

  She proclaimed they would grow into a new group, a strong tribe. Different and united.

  Yes.

  The journey would be long and difficult. Across water.

  Yes.

  Across time.

 
Yes.

  She vows she will teach them the ways of who they are: the Vechey.

  We go.

  The tribe went. From all corners of the earth small groups, much like the stooped man’s group, worked together to travel across the lands, built boats to hop from island to island, moved tirelessly until they found the dry lands that would lead them towards Eterili.

  It took nearly a thousand moons. They aged considerably during the trip and not all arrived to the new shore, having died along the way. They came from all times and as if drawn together by a current. They found each other as they walked across the forbidding terrain. The Vechey united on the long journey and helped each other find their way, for there were those among them unable to see through time well. Eventually, they came as one to the place and time Eterili had carved for them eons before the Linears would inhabit the lands.

  She stood waiting for them, arms held wide in a welcoming gesture.

  “You have arrived!” she shouted triumphantly. “Vechey! We come here to our home.”

  They did not understand her words but understood the meaning. Groups came in one after the other through all hours of the day and night. They settled in and made their home.

  The first generation of Vechey helped continue to carve and prepare the cave rock for the next generations. Their lifespan was shorter than future Vechey. Eterili established burial rites which would put the bodies of the first generation in a sacred place deep inside of the cave that even the Vechey of future generations would not find.

  She introduced rituals and doctrine. It unified the Vechey even more and served her purposes well.