El and Onine

by Ambroziak, K. P.

  I hope she has your eyes, sapient. I hope she has your will too.

  ***

  “You are more than one of us,” Saturnia’s sister said. “You are greater than all of us.”

  The Kyprian bather had unlocked me from my restraints and taken me off the platform. I stood in front of her now in the hall of stones.

  “I brought you here to show you,” she said. “He believes you are ready.”

  “Who?”

  We spoke Kyprian, and it seemed, at that moment, I couldn’t remember how to speak any other way.

  “The one who has given you sapient life.”

  Onine.

  “Yes,” she said. “Onine.”

  “Minosh?” I wanted to see my cultivator once more, to feel her caress, to know her tenderness. She was foremost in my heart.

  “My little Pchi,” she said. “She is with us—you—always.”

  Despite my induction into her language, her meaning eluded me. I hadn’t felt Minosh for many lunar cycles, since her egress. “Can I see her?”

  The cygnet Venusian glided across the room with her elegant limbs. She was radiant and I admired her beauty. She giggled and tossed her head to the side.

  “My little Pchi,” she said, “stop staring at your own reflection. It is your beauty you see in me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, averting my gaze.

  “You will learn, my little Pchi. It is all yours.”

  Every time she called me by that name, I thought of my creator. The vision I’d seen of her and Onine was so real, I couldn’t imagine it was a dream.

  “It was not a dream,” Saturnia’s sister said.

  “I saw them?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You chose them.” She was patient with my inability to understand. “Now you have another choice to make—sapient or Venusian?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can only regenerate one race,” she said. “Will you choose ours, Kypria, or theirs?”

  Kypria?

  “It is time, goddess. You have sacrificed your purity for this existence and now you must choose. Venus or Terra?” The glass ceiling on the hall of stones cracked and Saturnia’s sister squealed as though she too were cracking. “They are coming,” she said. “Choose.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “It has started, goddess,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to do, what to choose. I didn’t know what choice she was asking me to make. As I pleaded with her to tell me what she meant, her mouth closed and a rough, ridged surface rose up her neck and sealed her face beneath it. Her elegant limbs grew stiff and her golden skin turned the color of ash. Her beauty fell away, as thick rind covered her lithe legs and torso and her feet burrowed into the golden floor of the hall, breaking its slate surface and tearing into the soil beneath it. Her arms stretched up through the open windows in the glass ceiling, as though reaching for the eye. Like the lavender in my dream, Saturnia’s sister metamorphosed, as branches grew from her torso and head, and from those branches green shoots sprouted. She moaned until the final layer of rind nestled itself across her mouth and she was silenced.

  As a horrified witness, I watched the supernal being change into an olive tree, living and green. I reached out and touched her new skin. It was as real as I—cold and hard, but alive. I’d only ever seen a living tree once—the Kyprian tree of life. Now it had a companion and Terra’s forests would boast of more than trees of gold. I touched the bark, paying it the reverence it was due.

  I was pulled from my rapture when a clan of what could only be newly arrived Venusian rushed into the hall of stones. The one nearest me used his stick to put my wrists in clamps before I could drop my hands from the tree.

  “What are you doing?” I cried.

  I’d never seen the Venusian before, a troop of ten, each one more stunning than the next. The leader spoke to the others in shrieks but I’d lost my ability to speak their tongue as easily as I’d found it.

  I looked around me then, and my eyes drank in the splendor of the hall. It had changed in subtle ways. Light from the eye above found its way in between the branches of Saturnia’s sister and was refracted by the large jade stones, forming webs of colors all around us. The gleam off the jade split, fracturing into pieces which found their way back together again and again. The colors danced around the troop of Venusian as though wanting to penetrate their alien flesh. The ten of them stood before me without coverings and I witnessed bare Venusian form for the first time. I looked for the tree with the wax flowers but all I saw was a dead shrub with dried limbs whose blooms had dropped off long ago.

  “Come, sapient,” the leader said. “I have chosen for you.”

  “My keeper,” I said. “Where’s Onine?”

  The entourage moved closer to one another and it looked like their bodies melted together, becoming one single source of light. The sight blinded me and the Venusian shrieks made me deaf. As their screams rose up in chaos, I felt the danger in the very depths of my being. They weren’t there to bring me somewhere. They were there to take me. The clamps on my wrists tightened and I pulled on them but couldn’t free myself.

  “Do not resist,” the leader said. Their voices were one. “We have chosen for you.”

  I didn’t blackout but the light kept me from seeing their crime. I wasn’t saved from the sensation of it though. The disorientation of being tossed on my back, the humiliation of being pinned down, the weight of the beings around me, on me, in me. The sound of their shrieks, the heat of their fire burned me from the inside out, and I screamed until my vocal cords were raw, until I had no voice left. I called for my creator, my maker, my goddess, my end to come. The smell of my singed flesh wasn’t as horrible as the scent of their secretion staining my sapience.

  The pain was palpable and I asked the goddess to turn me into a tree. I begged for the rind to numb my body and let me be covered in the ridged bark Saturnia’s sister had endured. I opened my eyes only once and saw the white light of my violation. The Venusian shattered my body and splayed it in two and I was no longer whole. When they’d each grazed on my treasure, they evaporated as though they’d never been there and I was left on the slab of stone, alone and ruined.

  ***

  I woke outside the hall of stones, somewhere on the path between the golden forest and the Bathing Temple. Luna was high in the sky, full, bright and beautiful. She smiled on me with her blue light, cooling me with her reflected rays.

  I recalled my agony and shame. I was still in my frock but it was torn and singed. I wasn’t wearing a veil and didn’t remember losing it in the wind on the mount. My memory was fuzzy and I’d no idea how much time had passed since I’d seen Bendo in my garden. I needed to find Tal. The last time I’d seen him, I was in his arms, as we sailed through the air away from the beast.

  When I got up from the path, I looked back at the hall of stones. It was shrouded in darkness but I saw the outline of a large tree that hadn’t been there before. In my heart, I knew it was her, standing alive and green. I’d imagined none of it.

  I ran down the path, beyond the silo of liquid luster and water pumps, past the cylinders of fire all the way to the courtyard of the Bathing Temple. I didn’t fear running into the perpetrators of my crime since it was night, but my freedom seemed overrated now, as I was no longer free, sentenced to relive an experience I wanted to forget.

  I headed out on the cobblestones quickly at first and then slowed my pace when the heaviness of my limbs set in. I felt pain in the pit of my stomach, the ravaging aliens deep in my bones. As I replayed the trauma over again, the weight of my sapient flesh became too much for me and I keeled over to expel the horror from my gut, vomiting on the stones. The sticky serum and herbs I’d ingested in the cavern were the first to come up and out of me.

  “Their implant did not take.” The voice was nowhere and everywhere all at once. I released a cry from the depths of my stomach.

  “Onine,” I said with the weight of my
agony.

  The Venusian stood over my crippled body in the dark as he had when he came to my garden. His face was lit with Luna’s blue light and her brilliance gave him a halo.

  “You are safe for now,” he said. “They have not taken you.”

  “I—I—don’t understand.” I was unable to resist the indulgence of my sobs.

  “We must go.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And no.”

  “But I saw—”

  “Be patient, clay-born goddess.” At some point our exchange was in Kyprian, as though our language had never been another. “You will know everything again. It will come back to you when you choose.”

  Like Saturnia’s sister, I understood the words but not their meaning.

  “I’ve seen things,” I said. “I’ve seen things I can’t forget.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But we cannot change anything now. We must move forward with the plan.”

  “The plan?”

  “Be patient, goddess. Let me bring you home.” Onine bent down and reached for me. He didn’t have his stick and was without gloves. He picked me up with his bare Venusian hands and held me in his arms.

  “Is this a dream?” My voice was a muted shriek.

  “No,” he said. “This is real.”

  I let myself fall into him and hoped for nothing but his embrace. We walked in silence and though I had a million questions to ask, I voiced only one. “Am I your youngling?”

  “No,” he said. “But you do come from me.” He looked away with resolve, as though the confession was too much.

  “I am ruined … spoiled by their invasion.”

  He pulled me closer to him. “You are perfect.”

  I fell asleep in his arms and woke on my bed of silks. He was still with me in the shanty. “How are you here with me now in the darkness?”

  “I have prepared for this and will be gone soon.”

  “Please stay,” I said.

  “It is still dangerous. Midan is here and you will have to choose.”

  “Choose what?” My voice evinced my utter frustration at the choice I was to make.

  “You saw what happened to Saturnia’s sister?” He stood over me, as I sat on the bed of silks. I was too weak to stand.

  “She—she—”

  “Yes,” he said. “She revels in the pleasure you have given her. She knew you would choose them.”

  “Who?”

  “Sapient.”

  I don’t know how I knew but suddenly it was all clear to me. The choice was between what I am and what I was—sapient or Venusian.

  “Who were the others?”

  “The unpledged ones,” he said. “Midan’s troop.”

  “Who is—” I stopped myself because I knew who Midan was. I remembered the ambassador, the slick jade trader, the dark passage, the destruction of my planet—Venus.

  “I am Kypria.”

  “Yes, goddess. You are Kypria.”

  “And I must choose between the new species I will forge, and my Venusian retinue, my beloved—you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Your time is running out. The troop will return at the rise of the eye.”

  “But how can I choose?”

  “You already have, my goddess.” He said so much more but I was no longer listening. My mind had dropped away to the other world I once loved—my realm, my pedestal, my flames.

  “I can’t give you up,” I said. “I can’t sacrifice Kyprian for another.”

  “We will live among you. You will see us in Terra’s nature, her organisms, her soil, her people. The Kyprian will never leave you.”

  My sapient storm of emotion couldn’t match my exterior calm—a newfound Kyprian grace—and though I knew the truth, I couldn’t feel it deep within me. “You must be mistaken,” I said. “This can’t be the end.”

  He told me it was not, that it was only the beginning, but I didn’t understand any of it, how I was to choose. It was difficult to see Onine in the darkness but the eye started to make its way up to slay night again with its rays, shining its purple light through the lattice of my shanty, allowing me to see his perfect Kyprian face once more.

  “What will become of you?”

  “You already know, Kypria. We have discussed this, the plan was set long ago. Terra is our only escape. You must do this for us. If not, Kyprian flame will surely die.”

  If I didn’t choose the sapient path I’d been newly born into, Midan would extinguish my devotees and take me as his slave. The troop he’d sent here had already tried to implant me with their flames, to burn away my sapience and steal my purity.

  “They have not succeeded,” Onine said, reading my expression. “The serum you took in the cavern has foiled their attempt. I saw you spurn their spark when you vomited on the path.”

  Their attempt to poison me with Venusian matter was foreseen and we’d planned for it. I knew Onine was right and I mourned the passing that was to come, admiring him as the eye continued to reach for him with its light. Like Saturnia’s sister, like all of my Kyprian followers, he too would metamorphose and become one with Terra.

  “I can’t do it,” I said, as I rushed toward him. “I won’t give you up.”

  He held me again for the last time and I breathed him in deeply. My senses were fooled, he smelled like smoke.

  “You will not forget me, El.” He said my name the way Tal had in the field, as though he’d never said it before, unnatural—alien to him.

  “I can’t do it—I can’t do it.”

  “You must,” Tal said from the entryway of the shanty.

  I pulled away from Onine at the sound of the sapient voice that made my Kyprian shrieks seem foreign. I longed for my new chosen one.

  “He’s coming,” Tal said. “Through the field—the wheat crumbles under his step.”

  The ground shook and the walls of my shanty trembled before they collapsed around us. I stood between Tal and Onine, looking out at the field, and saw the beast coming. He made jerking movements, as though he struggled with the weight of his own body. His color was magnificent, like the jade stones in the hall, his scaly core refracting the eye’s light and making a rainbow of colors shimmer about him. Steam shot from his nostrils, as he barreled toward the three of us. His troop followed him, barely able to keep up. I didn’t have time to say goodbye—the choice was made.

  Tal pulled me to him and forced me to the ground, covering me with his body. I thought I saw Onine’s transformation. When I peeked out from under Tal’s embrace, I saw the roots first and then one wax petal fell to kiss the soil.

  ONINE

  When I had returned to a destroyed Venus, I had questioned my apprentice about the ambassador’s takeover.

  “It was swift,” he had said. “The troops from Menaleck joined forces with the rebels and Midan led them in the seizure of the temples and the ruin of our landscape. We have lost many.” He had meant the flames extinguished in the takeover. My goddess had been saved, though the solarium was theirs by the fall of Jupiter. “Please show me the way to Terra,” he had said. “Let me breach the cold as you have. I cannot stay here. I must escape too.”

  I granted his request since I had promised I would bring him to the new planet. I had explained the risks but he was resolved to go. I could have never known he would betray me and my goddess, and risk every flame in her retinue. I would have never suspected his treason since malfeasance was impossible for a Kyprian to consider. Tiro proved a special case, of course, but he would pay for his disloyalty.

  When I stood in the light of the artificial eye and Saturnia’s sister first told me of his betrayal, I had asked her to repeat what she had discovered. My disbelief made her story seem a fiction. “Your apprentice has been in contact since our escape,” she assured me. “Since the dark passage was sealed and we were shut out of Venus.”

  “How?”

  Perhaps I had been hearing sapient speech too long, for I misunderstood my sibling’s words. She spoke
with a refined Venusian tongue, having shed her terrestrial shell, dressed for the flame of purification in the forge we had built from Terra’s molten core. Our flames rose up together, twisting about one another, as we revived our primal nature.

  “The reptile comes for the sapient,” Saturnia’s sister said. “He travels the same route as we and will breach the sphere through your apprentice.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “His troop follows.”

  “But how can you be sure?”

  “Kypria showed me.” My goddess had seen it in the tome, no doubt. The mysteries of our existence were only puzzling to me. She had prepared for this and told Saturnia’s sister to keep her secret and stay the course to fulfill the Kyprian promise.

  “Your apprentice cannot know the danger,” she said. “He is naïve to the trader’s schemes and the ambassador’s power.”

  “But if we tell Tiro,” I said, “surely he will break his ties with Midan.”

  “He believes his assignment to the sapient is his reward and is greedy for the experience. He desires the youngling more and more though he is oblivious to her appeal.”

  “Can we trick him? Make him a similar promise on the condition he break his transmission with Venus?”

  “It is dangerous to manipulate the script,” she said. “To do so may risk all that is written.”

  Her decision to abstain from interfering was her own, but I trusted her completely and relinquished my position. She would uphold the Kyprian promise and lead us in my goddess’s absence.

  “Assure me you will not reveal our goddess even if you think it may save the youngling,” she said.

  I swore my oath but feared for El at the mention of her. “Will she come to harm?” The thought of her at risk made my fire brighten.