Emissary

He lived on a shelf of rock above a frozen sea. It was not home to him, and never had been. It was a space he occupied without inhabiting. He ate there, slept there, scooped up handfuls of liquid time and let it trickle through his fingers. He mourned his siblings and sharpened his crystal awl and watched, always watched, for the sign from the stars that he hoped would come.

But the stars were just pinholes in a distant curtain, and though the white fire of his birthplace shone through, the light was faint. Over the aeons it had grown fainter. Time, he knew, was finite. Even the crucible would have its end.

He could not gauge how long he had been waiting, nor did it seem to matter. When the last believers had died, their sun went dark. That might have been thousands of years ago. It might have been millions. He only knew that it had been a long, long night.

So he waited, and he waited, and when the sign came he was sitting at the cliff’s edge, whistling a tuneless melody, something half-remembered from his younger days, scraping his awl against a whetstone, watching shards of crystalline dust fall onto the sheet of ice below. He saw a shadow flit across the frozen surface, and he looked up. A star was falling.

The star loosed itself from the firmament, plunged toward a peak on the distant horizon. He threw the awl aside, leapt from the crag, and landed on all fours, cracking the ice, fissuring it for miles with his weight.

The falling star met the horizon with an explosion of light, a small nova, a brilliant flash. The point of impact shone with white fire — the white fire of the crucible. If he was lucky, he might return. If he was luckier, he might even die there.

The irony was not lost on him. He had been the youngest of all of them, the least respected, yet perhaps he and he alone would attain the final glory of return. He wondered if they would know. Even though his siblings were gone, he thought he heard them sometimes, whispering across the gulf of time. Perhaps the believers had not been entirely wrong to think them immortal.

He sprinted across the frozen sea, his weight crunching footholds into the ice that kept him from slipping. Beyond the sea were the relics of the believers, their steel husks and fallen girders, their concrete blocks and granite platters. He had watched these cities splinter apart, long ago. He had watched the believers fall, taking his siblings with them.

He reached the base of a mountain that punched out of the ground cleanly and symmetrically, with an uncanny conical shape. If the believers had built it, it would have been a feat of engineering, a timeless work of abstract art, an architectural triumph. But his sister had built this mountain, built it in seconds with a well-placed bolt of energy, and the believers had seen it — rightly, as it happened — as an ill omen, a sign that prefigured the agony that was to come.

On his way to the summit he vaulted himself over boulders and fallen, fossilized trees. The age of the planet was becoming clear to him. The rocks crumbled beneath his feet, yielding to little pressure. They were little more than dust.

At last he reached the glowing crater, and in its center the stone of white fire that had made it when it fell from the sky. Beside the stone, the emissary from his place of birth.

“You’ve come for me,” he said.

“Indeed I have.” When the emissary spoke, the air seemed to tremble.

“You’ve been a long time coming.”

“That we would cross the stars again has been written, but so too has it been written that many aeons would pass before the journey could be made again. Is that not so?”

“What you say is true,” he allowed.

“Much has happened since you left the place of our birth,” said the emissary.

“Much has happened here,” he said. “You can see that.”

He swept his arm in a vague gesture that encompassed the blighted landscape below them.

“Yes,” said the emissary. “The desolation. That has not been written. And where are your siblings? Your sisters and brothers? Have you not told them of my coming arrival? Have they not seen the white flame’s glow?”

He hung his head. “They’re gone.”

The emissary said, “That, too, has not been written.”

“But it happened.”

“What has come to pass? What has gone wrong?”

“It was a mistake to come here. We weren’t alone, not the way we thought. Another race lived here — we called them the believers. They believed in us.”

“You were gods to them,” said the emissary.

“We never intended it.”

“There was a holy war,” said the emissary.

“You couldn’t imagine the viciousness,” he said. “But the blame is ours.”

He thought of the first believers to behold his form. They pointed up at him. They dropped to their knees in a gesture of obeisance. They sensed that he was not one of them — and they were right.

In the early days, there had been an illicit thrill that came with being an object of worship. He had lacked the foresight to anticipate the drawbacks. The irony of godhood — limitless power, yet so many constraints and limitations. The loneliness—his followers were born and died in a blink of time. The strangeness—his followers adored him, and because of that they denied that his siblings even existed.

He shook his head slowly, and looked into the white fire at the emissary.

“I want to go home.”

The emissary said, “You know that has not been written. You were to stay here — you, your sisters, your brothers. You were to establish a colony. You have failed to do so. Would you wish to return to the lodestar as one of the condemned, destined for imprisonment? Would you not rather I leave you here?”

“To live out my last days on a cinder? No,” he said, “there’s another option.”

In a flash he was upon the emissary, and the mountaintop exploded with white fire. The emissary crumbled, and he felt himself crumbling too, the life pouring out of him and into a cinder-world destined for the same fate.

June 2012 (revised March 2014)