Seven souls adrift on an unknown sea.
Seven orphans who can go home no more.
Chapter 58. Land of the Cone-Mountains
While they slept, death visited the village.
It came in quaking, rending gashes from the pit below.
It came in steady, streaming torrents from the hills above.
It was death in all its hellish personas.
The shaman was first to confront its many faces.
Alone in the twilight on the shore of the placid lagoon. Searching for her daughters. Finding no one there. Feeling her heart race from the panic building within her.
As she emerged from the forest path, she espied a single, serpentine file of footprints snaking its way across the soft, serrated sand. She followed it to the mouth of the nearby river, where she discovered skid-tracks climbing down from its bank.
She looked out on the lagoon. Nothing marred its smooth surface.
The shaman read the signs and knew:
Her rebellious daughters had fled!
Abandoning their village.
Abandoning their mother.
As a wave of disappointment and loss washed over her, the shaman became aware something else was different. Something disturbing the serenity of the lagoon.
Sensing danger. Troubled by what she saw.
It began as a ripple on the smooth surface of the lagoon. The water became agitated. The ground trembled.
Gazing at the solitary sun on the far horizon, she knew.
Knew the third daughter of the red-yellow-violet Mother of All Being was rising.
Knew she would break her earthly bonds and join her twin sisters in the sky.
Knew the island world would perish.
Knew the end-time was here.
Then the island did shake. Throwing the shaman to the ground and toppling tall trees.
Then the earth did part. Opening a yawning gulf between her and the village.
Then the water did rise. Welling up into a single wide wave crashing ashore and engulfing open beach and dense forest alike.
Then the mountains did weep. Shedding long tears of fire that gathered mass and force as they swept down to flood the village in flame.
Trapped between competing forces, the shaman leaped over the widening vent and sprinted along the forest path leading back to the village. Becoming more unsteady as the quaking ground became more unstable, she fell repeatedly. Slowing her progress along the well-worn path.
When she reached the clearing in front of the village, she froze in horror at the scene that greeted her.
Every structure in the village was afire. And so was every villager. Some running frantically like torches tossed through the air. Others lying still, the fading embers of their former selves.
Recoiling in horror, the shaman was struck by a blast of heat. Forcing her back into the forest. Igniting the trees and brush at the edge of the clearing.
Looking up beyond the destruction of the village, the shaman witnessed the cone-mountains melting beneath streams of fire cascading down their slopes.
They were the last images she would ever behold.
Calling in a croaking, heat-parched voice, she cried out:
“Flee, my daughters! Flee fast and far!”
They were the last words she would ever utter.
Turning her thoughts inward, the shaman marveled at fulfillment of the prophecy. Acknowledging the prophesied return of the missing fire-laden daughter to the great red-yellow-violet Mother of All Being. While grieving the loss of her own.
They were the last thoughts she would ever have.
Like the forest around her, the shaman burst into flame and was herself engulfed in a fountain of fire erupting from the volcanic vent opening beneath her feet. Swallowing and consuming the pulsating embers of all she had been in life.
The vent raced across the island, joining up with other vents before it. Until the retreating earth could hold itself together no longer. And the entire landscape imploded.
Gone are the cone-mountains.
Gone is the shoreline of sand.
Gone are the forest and the village.
Gone are all the singular life-forms spawned in its leeward isolation.
The emerald eminence of the island of cone-mountains, with its towering verdant cone-mountains, is no more.
In its place is a hideous, open sore.
Suppurating flaming fluid from its pores.
Befouling the vanishing lagoon.
Reaching out to the reef whose creatures it seeks to destroy.
Cauterizing all aquatic life within its grasp.
The hellish caldera will continue to pour out its hot spite and deadly malice until a healing ocean washes it clean.
The death and destruction are hidden from view. Masked by a growing column of toxic gas and ash that blossoms into mushroom when it reaches the upper atmosphere. Forming a cicatrix of death over the angry wound in the ocean below.
The sisters gaze wistfully at the curtain of rising cloud as the ocean currents draw them slowly away.
It is the only feature on the flat, wide, empty sea.
The fleecy white columns drop lower and lower as the craft moves steadily away from them. A mere speck on the far horizon, they gradually melt into the dimness of dusk.
Gripped by the enormity of their loss, the sisters gaze dolefully at the retreating image that was their home. Seized by gentle ocean currents, their craft drifts aimlessly. Bearing its vagabond crew ever farther from that home.
For them, it is a time of reflection.
And Mei-o-Peia digs deep within the stirrings of her racial memory to recall the legacy of the life they are leaving.
Flashing back to her earliest memory, she recaptures the exuberance of her first independent venture along the well-worn path leading from her village to the mysterious lagoon.
As a small child, she experienced the wonder and mysticism of the impossibly high cone-mountains frowning down on her village and the smooth, sparkling surface of the sun-filled lagoon beckoning her to its magical clarity and colorful fauna. Those were the carefree, delightful days of early childhood, and she relishes them still.
These fond memories only increase the poignancy of the loss of innocence that followed. Adolescence changed everything.
That is when she learned of the darkness brooding over her village. Of the superstitions imprisoning her people. Of the monstrous rituals holding them in thrall.
And that is when she fully grasped the unbridgeable gulf separating herself and her sisters from the males of the village. A divide that reached beyond their striking differences in appearance. Rendering the males a nearly distinct species.
Her personal understanding was informed by observation and instinct, while her outward professions were shaped by the demands of her mother, the village shaman. But her beliefs remained her own. Secret and unspoken.
For they betrayed her people’s traditions and her mother’s faith.
Her people worshiped the cone-mountains, awed by the latent power chronicled in the tales handed down, generation-to-generation, from the ancients who vouchsafed their creation.
The legends were compelling. Rooted in a cosmology validated daily by the physical evidence of the world around them.
In the beginning, their watery world literally dropped from the black sky. From the womb of the great red-yellow-violet Mother of All Being.
No light shone, as their new world was born in the darkness of eternal night.
While the world was covered by deep ocean, a single patch of dry land emerged. It was a bare sand barren, swept constantly by the harsh winds and lashed relentlessly by the angry waves of an unrestrained sea.
In the heavens above, the Mother of All Being gave birth to three fire-laden maidens. Bringing forth light to reflect the majesty of her red-violet-yellow magnificence.
But her vanity had a price.
The very fire that bestowed the Mother’s radiance stoked an inf
ernal torch within the daughters’ souls. A fiery temperament led to three quarrelsome daughters. All jealous of one another. Each lusting to secure the Mother’s favor.
Radiating their spite and wrath, the three suns glared down upon the barren sand turning it into a blaze of fiery heat.
No life dwelt on the hellish land.
Then came the celestial strife that would free the island from the lifeless existence it had endured.
The three suns quarreled over which would be first among them to help the Mother of All Being rule the heavens. And in the war that followed, two suns conspired and cast the third down out of the firmament to the scorched earth below.
Fearing their malice, the third daughter went into the earth, was swallowed by sand and hid in darkness.
Not satisfied, the other daughters deflected their heat away from the island to warm its waters. To lure the small sea-creatures they sought. To set them building a great-reef wall around the island.
Thus did they imprison their fallen sister. Barring her escape from the darkness beneath the earth.
And thus did life begin on and around her island dungeon.
But the third sun became restless. Agitated by the watchful presence of the two suns looming in the sky overhead. She resolved to keep her own watch on her sisters and, to that purpose, created towering cones reaching into the heavens.
But the more she watched, the more grief-stricken she became over her banishment from the celestial realm. So grievously sad that, when she could bear her shame no further, the buried sun wept flaming tears that flowed from the cones of her eyes.
The weeping stopped once she accepted her fate, and the cone-mountains have stood their silent vigil of the heavens ever since.
Giving life a chance.
As the island became lush and filled with life, strange creatures reached its shore and made it their home.
Unlike the native fauna, the invaders walked upright on two limbs alone. And unlike the native fauna, they employed the branches of trees and rocks from the ground for many potent and practical ends.
The alien invaders were the product of a deliberate evolution, nature’s concertmaster on this planet.
Endlessly seeking equilibrium within every species.
Constantly striving for harmony among them.
That is why the perpetuation of life on the planet is as ordered as the movements of a symphony. The offspring of every intelligent species, from the furry bipeds that fled their remote polar home to the erect creatures that made theirs on this isolated island, are regulated both in number and frequency so that perfect equilibrium is maintained.
So that every population remains constant. Equal to its needs. No more, no less.
So that every population leaves a finite footprint on the natural world. No more, no less.
Consonant with the needs of other species. No more, no less.
Every generation.
To the end of time.
That is the destiny of life on the planet. Not on the island of cone-mountains.
The coda of life on this island already is written and, like a clash of cymbals, now has reached its spectacular finale!
It is human nature, in the aftermath of life-changing events, to dispel the darker shadows of the past and recall the fondest memories of times gone by.
So it is with the seven souls adrift on an empty sea as they mourn the loss of their island home.
But life there had been harsh. Bearing witness to human sacrifice, bestial assault and loss of innocence. All in the name of the banished third daughter of the Mother of All Being. Like her, the seven sisters were trapped in bonds of superstition that were as brutish as they were dehumanizing.
A bondage whose island roots stretched back into deep time.
Chapter 59. The Seven Sisters
The males of the island’s newest species were hairless creatures with plain faces, small black eyes, broad, heavily muscled shoulders and a body of smooth skin tinted copper by the rays of two suns. While they exhibited great physical prowess and strength, they were slow and dull-witted in movement and thought.
The females were altogether different in appearance and temperament. So different they seemed a distinct species.
Like the males, they had the same smooth, copper skin. And like the males, they wore neither adornment nor concealment of any kind. Clothed only in the richly pigmented skin the two suns provided.
Unlike the males, they sported long, smooth muscles on lithe, graceful limbs. And instead of slow movement and even slower wit, they fairly bristled with high energy, firm purpose and keen intelligence.
But the females' most distinctive feature was their oval face: large luminous-green eyes, perfectly symmetrical brows, long curling lashes, a pert nose, full pouty lips and delicately sculpted ears. All crowned by a mane of flowing tresses of fine cascading raven-black hair that caught the light of two suns and reflected it back in every prismatic hue.
The traits distinguishing males from females had been passed down from generation to generation without variation. Every male was the image of every male before him. Every female identical to every female before her.
Like other life-forms in the most remote habitats of this planet, the species in this secluded, protected place were evolutionary isolates. Developing along unique lines of their own. Unaffected by the world beyond the great reef.
The very blueprint of life here had a singularity shared only by the creatures of other isolated ecosystems. In these special places, sheltered from the world at large, the phylogeny of life was not driven by dominant and recessive gene patterns, with their predictive distribution of traits.
For these isolated species, evolution was shaped by genes which were exclusive or reclusive.
Both were possessed by the males and females of each species, but it was the females alone whose hormonal messaging determined the sex of the offspring. And those instructions held the numbers of males to females in stasis and rigorously segregated gender traits so males were kept unlike females in every important way.
Gregor Mendel would have been none the wiser from tending peas in these gardens where diversity did not exist!
It is this genetic legacy of sameness that made Mei-o-Peia and her six sisters appear to be like every other female.
They were not.
They were different in ways the eye could not see. They were, in fact, “freaks” of their race.
While they were the mirror-image of the other females of the village, they were unlike the others in their constant questioning of tradition and their refractory views of the world.
Even their mother, the village shaman, had been alarmed by their constant questioning and irreverent skepticism. And she had strongly cautioned them to silence lest they suffer the fate of the Chosen.
The Chosen were selected from among the adolescent males of the village to satisfy a ritual the shaman was required to perform each time the red-violet-yellow Mother of All Being hid one of her daughters. Leaving only a single watchful sun remaining in the sky.
It was at these times, and these times alone, that the earthbound daughter sought to break free and ascend once more into the heavens.
If that were allowed, the legend clearly warned, then all life on the island would perish. For it was the third daughter’s presence under the earth, and her presence alone, that made life possible on the sandy surface above.
To prevent her escape and to demonstrate fidelity to the legend, the shaman selected two young males. Festooning them with garlands, the village elders—all female—marched them up the two tallest cone-mountains and hurled them into the bubbling lava within the open craters.
Only thus, the legend held, could the third daughter be distracted long enough for the hidden second daughter to return to her rightful place in the visible sky.
For their part, Mei-o-Peia and her sisters disbelieved the legend and the grim bargain the village made each time only one sun rose overhead. While all seven si
sters were strong of muscle and keen of mind, they took no satisfaction in marching children to a violent and needless death.
The absence of the second sun also occasioned another ritual. A painful, impersonal conjugation dreaded by every village female.
The rutting.
While this rite was not as cruel as the sacrifice of village boys, it was as abhorrent to the village girls as it was essential to the survival of their race.
It was the coupling of the adolescent females with the males.
The females saw no beauty in the stark, barren, unlovely features of their hairless counterparts, and the males were too stolid and obtuse to appreciate beauty in the females.
A purely physical act. Without lust.
An act of obligation. Without sentiment.
And where passion is absent, modesty takes a holiday. Thus accounting for the unabashed nakedness of both sexes.
These are the painful memories that crowd out the sisters’ initial sense of loss and nostalgia as the day wears on.
By the time the solitary sun dips down to the horizon, they are glad they chose this day to depart. They are relieved to be quit of the rite of rutting, the ritual of sacrifice, and the tyranny of superstition that demanded them.
That is why they now find themselves alone on the broad ocean. Drifting away from the only home they have ever known. And that is why they have escaped the destruction unleashed by forces beyond their experience or understanding.
Mei-o-Peia smiles sardonically at the irony as the setting of the solitary sun shakes her out of her reverie. She is confident there is a natural explanation for the periodic absence of the second sun. She also is convinced there is not now, nor ever has been, a third sun. And she muses over the folly of a legend that condemned a non-existent body to the darkness of an unknown fate.
While blackness bleeds over the wide ocean.
The seven sisters are restless this night. Filled with uncertainty for what lies ahead and a gnawing lament for those they left behind.
Next morning, waking to an empty sea, their grief surrenders to the hollow despair of separation.
Long leagues of ocean divide them from the ancestral island of the cone-mountains. From the horrific spectacle of its utter destruction.
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