Shower of Stones

by Zachary Jernigan

  “Do you recall the conditions of my death?” he asked, white eyebrows nearly meeting over his nose. He furrowed his brow. His lips quivered as he sought words for the idea he knew to be true.

  “My first death,” he clarified.

  She tipped her head back and smiled into the sun.

  “You’re asking me to remember ancient history. But yes. I could never forget. I’d only just died, myself.” She laid her hand upon her mate’s knee. “You still lived, dear—remember? And yet you’d already lived such a short, eventful life.”

  Her mate nodded his massive head, heavy features serene.

  She returned her gaze to the black-skinned man. She nodded to him, and then to the man she could not help but think of as his son. Her smile waned slightly.

  “And you? Well, you’d both been alive for far too long. You were dangerous to yourselves and a greater danger to our world, threatening the existence of an entire continent of people.” She clucked her tongue and shook her head. “These are simple things to say, of course, as if the millennia had turned you from men into monsters. This is nowhere near the truth.”

  The black-skinned man frowned. “What is the truth, then?”

  She sighed. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened.

  “Normal men can indeed be turned into monsters – ordinary, unimaginative monsters. Even with their lives preserved for eons, they are of one design. But you, you were never normal men. There was something of the monster in you from the beginning, an awful potential. And your children, your siblings, they too …”

  She shrugged. Her gaze centered on an indefinite space between the two men. For a span of seconds or hours, she was not among her companions. Her name changed, and changed again. She grew taller, shorter, but no broader, no darker.

  She was another time, another place. Another woman.

  Telling a story, again and again.

  ‡

  Eventually, from a great distance away, the lighter-skinned man said, “You spoke of our world, a place of origin. What was this place called?”

  She blinked, struggling to hold onto the question. She had not completely returned to them, but existed in a liminal space, in the interstices between a hundred lives.

  Her mate gripped her knee, causing her to sigh.

  Her anchor hit soft earth again, connecting her this time, this place.

  “Jeroun,” she said. She repeated the word, her smile once more radiant.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE 2ND OF THE MONTH OF MAGES, 12500 MD DANOOR, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN

  Certain facts were indisputable, even to him, and the most basic was this:

  Not long after the birth of men on Jeroun, less than a thousand years following their emergence from slumber, the god Adrash had engineered a gift for the world.

  A son.

  A lavender-skinned, devil-horned boy named Shavrim Thrall Coranid. He was not born, but tipped from a jar. Nonetheless, he grew as if he were a child.

  The people of Jeroun thought of him as a human boy, knowing he was not—knowing he was a unique creature only in the approximate shape of a child, composed of man, elder, and god in equal proportions, possessed of an immortal body and a vast unfilled intellect. They understood he had neither birth mother nor true father, that he had been conditioned from conception to think of Adrash as his creator, yet they persisted in thinking of him as the god’s proper son.

  This sentimental illusion faded as Shavrim grew into adulthood and assumed his formidable stature, and disappeared completely when Adrash took him as lover. Though the god had not announced his intention to take Shavrim into his bed, the shift from child and son, to demigod and lover, happened fluidly, as though it were the only possible outcome. As though it were fated.

  Men had no reason to doubt that fate and the will of Adrash were one and the same.

  Shavrim had no reason yet to doubt, either.

  ‡

  “You are mine, but I am not yours.”

  He had heard these words many times, always in moments of intimacy. It did not hurt to hear them. He appreciated that Adrash spoke plainly, refusing to call what they shared love. Resentment would indeed come—it could not be avoided entirely, even in one created for the role of companion—but for decades Shavrim considered the words appropriate, even comforting, a frank assurance that all continued according to a plan set out for him.

  A plan he neither understood nor cared to understand.

  A plan that simply was.

  Of course, he had little enough reason to complain over his lot. The world offered him many delights beyond communion with Adrash. With the god’s blessing, he took thousands of lovers. He ate countless varieties of food, drank every drink. He experienced each diversion concocted by the vibrant cultures of man, and became himself a source of fascination and joy.

  Though Jeroun bore the scars of a long life, having already outlasted its first race of people, the birth of mankind had made everything new, full of light.

  ‡

  Or rather, this was how Shavrim recalled it now, eons after Adrash abandoned the world to madness. He knew it to be comfortable fiction, a lie, a bandage over old and unhealing wounds. For certain, he misremembered the world as more beautiful, more alive than it had ever been, just as he misremembered Adrash as more cruel, more inhuman.

  Sometimes, this fact made him uncomfortable.

  Other times, he did not care. The events of thousands of years, stored in the branching neural tissue of his spine and limbs, collected over the course of his long, slow adolescence, could be changed if he concentrated—or simply ignored—hard enough, and as he grew older he found little reason to recall with perfect clarity events that had ceased to matter.

  All pasts were versions of pasts. Thus, he interpreted whatever version he liked.

  The most important of what he interpreted, however, the most impactful—these were facts.

  Of this he felt sure, or at least fairly confident.

  ‡

  And so the world had seemed new, full of light, and then it had stopped. Not all at once, true, but being that Shavrim’s existence would be measured in glacial ages rather than decades, compacting normal lives into insignificance, the process could feel no way other than sudden.

  It was the first morning of his four-hundredth year. He and Adrash sat on a red-tiled terrace overlooking the ocean (what island he could not now recall, and it did not matter), enjoying breakfast, talking inconsequentialities, when, as though they had been having another conversation entirely—a deeper, more cutting conversation—the god spoke eight words.

  “Do you really think you are enough, Shavrim?”

  Shavrim set his cup of tea, small in his outsized hands, on the table between them. Not yet worried, merely confused. “I—” He searched for the proper expression, and arrived at a smile. Despite his labyrinthine knowledge of the world and its peoples, his vast collection of experiences, his face was rather blank. Not a man’s at all, but that of a child. Just as the world saw him.

  “I … I don’t know what you’re asking me, Adrash.”

  The god smiled, beautifully. Every movement he made was beautiful, a display of perfect grace. He sat, legs crossed at the knee, naked and at ease, every muscle relaxed yet defined. Warmth radiated from his jet skin: this close, he was a source of heat as sure as the sun itself. He wore the divine armor as a skintight cap in the shape of a helm, its filigreed edges giving the odd impression of white hair on his forehead, white hair curled around his ears.

  “I do not mean this to hurt you,” he said, ignoring Shavrim’s guffaw of contempt. “Nonetheless, it will hurt you. At times I feel dissatisfied with this world, with you—with me. Boredom is as good a word as any, Shavrim.” He waved his right hand vaguely. “But this is not your fault. I will not blame you for being predictable as I designed.”

  Shavrim blinked. The skin of his face felt tight, suddenly hot.

  “You are a symptom of my thinking,” Adras
h continued. “And my thinking on the matter of mankind has been incorrect. For five centuries I have given them too much what they want, and they are becoming complacent, unwilling to grow. I am annoyed by their lackluster art, their spineless leisurely expressions. As exhausting as mankind’s displays of aggression can be, I am saddened to see the fight gone out of them.” He broke Shavrims’s gaze, and stared out to sea.

  “I am tired of being the world’s nanny, of shielding everyone from harm. Furthermore, I need other sources of companionship lest I go mad. I made a minor miscalculation with you, stretching your development unduly. That mistake must be addressed. You must stop being a child.”

  “Adrash,” Shavrim said. “Adrash, I …”

  The god shook his head, silencing his creation with a gesture. “I am sorry, but you have no words of relevance to this. I have decided, already, on a course of action, for you and for the people of Jeroun. I have waited to enact my plan for too long already. My evasion of the topic, I fully believe, is part of the problem.” He sighed. “But enough navel gazing. Soon, within the year, you will have brothers and sisters—five companions. You six will act as mankind’s inspiration, but also as its aggressors. You will spur them to grow. You will grow up with them.”

  He stood, and walked down the steps to the beach.

  Shavrim followed, massive shoulders bowed, arms hanging limp at his sides.

  ‡

  The feeling of discontent persisted. It grew, and only rarely retreated to a comfortable distance. Surely, Shavrim had experienced moments of un-happiness before—on rare occasions, his desires had gone unfulfilled—but these were as nothing compared to this new malaise. He absented himself from Adrash for weeks at a time, visiting the places he thought he loved and then quickly leaving, unsatiated. He found himself in new beds, but experienced nothing new.

  The world had not changed, not yet.

  And then, within a year, as Adrash promised, the first of five siblings was tipped from the jar: a girl, grey haired and thin-limbed, clawed at hand and foot and as pale as sun-bleached sand. Adrash passed the childlike creature to Shavrim, and Shavrim stared into her bluegreen eyes as she stared back. She did not cry, which made him resentful. He felt sure he had cried upon breathing his first breath.

  “Bash Ateff,” Adrash named her.

  A month later, the second arrived: an unnaturally ruddy, stubby-winged boy Adrash named Orrus Dabulakm. Shavrim took to him immediately, liking the sound of his hoarse cries better than the sullen silence of the sister who had come before him.

  The next month, the third—a thing of indeterminate gender, a neuter or a new sex entirely—tumbled forth and stood unaided, but did not open its eyes for twelve days. When it did, two slowly spinning wooden orbs were revealed. Adrash called this blind anomaly Sradir Ung Kim, and seemed especially fond of it.

  The fourth and fifth were engineered together, a matching pair. They spilled from the jar locked together, small and hairless and pearlescent, nearly metallic, and refused to untangle from their embrace for a full day. Afterward, they became uncomfortable if separated for longer than a few minutes. Ustert and Evurt Youl, Adrash named them.

  “These,” Adrah said when all five were situated in their nursery high in Adrash’s main keep overlooking the arid Aroonan plains, “are the bringers of a new age, Shavrim. A minor pantheon. As their elder sibling, it is your job to guarantee they keep to the path I have cut for them.”

  Shavrim nodded, and did not ask just what path this was. He would learn in time.

  ‡

  “I’ve killed men before,” Shavrim said a decade later.

  He and Adrash stood on the foredeck of The Atavast, watching the five young demigods cavort unafraid in the shallow, glass-clear water. The sea was no place for earthbound creatures, but today the god had created a hundred-foot sphere of will around his ship, halting the dozens of streamlined serpents and fish—which had quickly been attracted by the smell of flesh—from coming any closer. The siblings dared each other to swim up to the barrier of huge, circling predators. Soon they pushed their courage even further, reaching out their hands to brush the scaled flanks, risking the loss of limbs to giant, toothy mouths.

  Adrash smiled. “Adorable,” he said.

  Shavrim ground his teeth together. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, I am, Shavrim. A moment, though.” Adrash opened his right hand, revealing five coins. He threw them in an arc, causing each to hit the water and fall to the sand a body’s length outside his protective barrier. “We do not leave until each of you has retrieved your coin!” he called, and then turned away from the siblings’ whoops and cries in response.

  “I know you have killed men, Shavrim. It is a joy to watch you fight.” His left hand, which he had caused to be sheathed in the featureless white of the divine armor, fell on Shavrim’s right shoulder. “What I am talking about now is different. You have never killed a man for any reason other than sport—a sport whose rules both parties understood and accepted. A sacrifice. This will not be the same. You will kill for a purpose. You will kill in response to a threat.”

  Shavrim laughed, though it had an edge to it: it was a sound he did not enjoy hearing come from himself, a sound he would not have made a decade previously. “A threat? How many men constitute a threat against me? A hundred? Two hundred? A battalion, either way. You’re joking with me, Adrash.”

  “I am not. Men will soon be a great deal more formidable than they are now.”

  “How?”

  Adrash turned and leaned his forearms on the railing. Shavrim sighed and followed suit, surveying his siblings at their dangerous play. There was no real risk, he supposed: though not as sturdy as their eldest brother, each was possessed of an immensely durable body. They would never bleed out or have their heads severed from their bodies. Should they lose a limb, it would regrow. Orrus had recently lost one of his growing wings to a weapon master’s blade, and already its replacement reached half the size of the original.

  Sradir and Orrus, Shavrim’s favorite and least favorite, had already retrieved their coins. Orrus, forever dissatisfied, plagued by voices he could not name, frowned at his accomplishment and dived under the hull—to sulk, for reasons no one but Shavrim understood. Sradir bled from a shallow wound in its side, but it stopped as Shavrim watched. It looked up at Adrash (not blind, they had discovered, yet not seeing as men saw, either), a small smile on its oddly angular, androgynous face.

  It did not even glance at Shavrim.

  “You said men will become stronger than they are now, Adrash. How?”

  Adrash clapped as the diminutive twins shot forward and retrieved their coins, Ustert landing a stiff-fingered jab into the snout of an advancing bonefish. He laughed as Bash, who could never resist showing off, swam slowly but gracefully toward her coin, rolling away from snapping jaws effortlessly, and picked up the final coin with her mouth. Shavrim wondered if he and Adrash’s conversations had always been so broken, if the god had always been so distracted. He also questioned his own moods. Had he not been happy, being Adrash’s lover but not the center of his world? Had he not been content, even overjoyed, to be part of a greater plan?

  Yes, he had. And no, Adrash had not always been as he was now.

  “Men will discover a secret,” Adrash finally said. “Something right under their nose. Tell, me, have you ever wondered why I included elder material in your makeup? Elder corpses are rare, but besides not rotting like a man’s body does they are virtually useless. Correct? Was I merely being sentimental for the people this world has lost?”

  Shavrim flexed his fists alternately, in time with the doubled beating of his hearts.

  “I was not,” Adrash said, needlessly. “There is more to elder physiology than anyone knows, a fact I have hidden from the world but will hide no longer.”

  “What is more?”

  Adrash chuckled. “You are becoming irritable in your middle age, Shavrim. Good, I suppose: anger will be useful, tho
ugh I would not have you unhappy every moment of the day.” He smiled, white against black. When Shavrim only grunted in response, the god’s smile grew. “Power is what we are discussing. Immense power, outshining even the oldest technologies that existed before your birth and only remain in memory.”

  “And the rarity of elder corpses?” Shavrim asked. “There’s a solution for that, as well?”

  “Yes. There is a graveyard—a graveyard for an entire species. You will reveal it to the world.”

  ‡

  He did so, exactly as commanded. At the foot of The Steps, the elder’s greatest monument, a mountain turned mausoleum, he helped excavate the first perfectly preserved corpse.

  And immediately set it aflame.

  The gathered people marveled at how it burned but was not consumed. Shavrim then reconstituted its ancient blood and allowed ten men to take sips of it. They battled each other for a day, sustaining wounds that would kill normal men. Lastly, he fed every individual a small measure of the corpse’s ground bone. A week later, having eaten and drunk nothing, having not slept an hour, the people stood hale.

  They celebrated, and began mining their new, nearly inexhaustible resource.

  Thereby, men grew into maturity—or rather, into the wielding of power. Within two generations, the world had split and its peoples had become fractious threats to each other. Their arts turned violent, viciously inventive, seasoned with elder-corpse fire and blood. They relied less and less upon what remained of their old technologies, and then proceeded to forget this inheritance completely. Manipulating their acquired magic consumed them completely. Old cities were abandoned and new cities built, spanning chasms and straddling mountaintops, each lit by the glow of thousands upon thousands of magelamps.

  Adrash rejoiced in mankind’s rekindled passion. He orchestrated their development, wielding Shavrim and his siblings like blades, cutting nations in two, separating culture from culture, beginning wars and stopping wars. He spoke of symbols, of the importance of identity, and using arcane means fashioned weapons unique to each of his creations: