Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  And they grew.

  Fifteen million years passed, and they watched with their deep, smoldering eyes. They breathed in hot air and exhaled fumes of choking sulfur. Their hides and flesh grew outwards to cover their beaks, their wings grew more leathery, their teeth grew more symmetrical, their tongues more refined. Their faces became more articulated, able to produce a range of intent and emotions. But long before they evolved the gift of speech, they produced song.

  Strange, ululating cries were heard at night, mating calls and warnings to would-be challengers. Some were more nuanced than others, but all registered with the lower life-forms of the world. The Fire Birds were the Planet’s overseers, its caretakers, its rulers.

  Its gods.

  THE TWO MOONS continued to shape the land by producing horrendous tides all across the Planet. Seen from above, almost all the shorelines of the world appeared red. The soil, having formed from decomposed basalt, was rich in iron, and gave it its deep red hue, making it seem as though all continents were outlined with streaks of blood. The waters were a dark blue, except where patches glowed green, due to bioluminescent algae that had taken off in huge numbers, thanks in part to the Fire Birds, who had, over the last few thousand years, eaten away at a species of fish that once fed on the algae.

  Another large asteroid came close to the Planet, but this time smacking into the Large Moon, sending out rocks that rained down on the Planet for several weeks, pummeling parts of the surface and causing a mass extinction across parts of the Ring Continent.

  These were all the major events that helped shape the planet in the next two million years. A relatively peaceful two million years, to be sure, when compared to the previous ages of violence.

  However, on the surface, near the massive rings of volcanoes of each continent, a major shift was slowly taking place. It started with the random mutation of a single virus, one that bore into the brains all species of Fire Birds and made its home there. But the virus had a coding problem, it could not sync with its host, it produced hormonal fluctuations and eroded key portions of the brain that moderated aggression.

  The Fire Birds passed this affliction unknowingly to one another. They went mad, and for two thousand years, they warred.

  They did not have speech, but they had songs, and they understood territory, and they comprehended very well when others were not respecting boundaries. Rather than the usual posturing and defense, they actively invaded other regions, tearing one another apart in bloody struggles that ended with twenty-ton corpses falling from the sky and exploding onto the ground.

  The animals of the world learned to be afraid when they heard certain songs, which were war cries, and they took shelter when they saw this dance of destruction on the ground, trees and whole forests decimated while the beasts sorted out who would rule this particular stretch of land or sea. The Fire Birds from the oceans took a set against their cousins in the deserts, and those in the mountains descended on their brothers in the plains. Great flocks of the beasts assaulted legions of others. The Planet had never seen so much bloodshed. Its first real war.

  It took those two thousand years for the Planet’s greatest titans to settle it all, and for them to finally build a resistance to the virus.

  This prolonged period of violence achieved two great changes to the Planet: first, it thinned out the number of Fire Birds, and second, it left the surviving Fire Birds larger fiefs to rule over. This second achievement meant more food per Fire Bird, more protein, more energy.

  More growth.

  ANOTHER TWO MILLION years—such a stretch of time, such an unimaginable stretch—but that’s what it took for the giants to develop into something else. The Fire Birds might have survived the virus, but the evolutionary processes that had strengthened them had also changed them forever. Like most mutations, there were other consequences that came with it. And one of the consequences was that, for all intents and purposes, the Fire Birds went extinct. That is, they grew stranger, bonier protrusions, longer arms and legs, longer muzzles and sharper teeth, more articulated tongues, larger eyes, larger olfactory nerves, bigger brains.

  Perhaps the most interesting change of all, though, was that each finger on each hand became multi-jointed, one of them even developing some opposable action.

  And, just as a person might emerge from some rage-induced fight with a clearer head the next morning, set on rethinking the trajectory of one’s life and contemplating one’s legacy, the titans of the Planet now took on a slower, more thoughtful approach to their realms. They ate what they needed, when they needed, and they marked the sizes of the larger herds of prey, sensing that if they ate too many too soon, they would not replenish in time for the next winter. They began to understand resource management.

  They began to think.

  The titans had emerged from their two-thousand-year bloodrage with a clearer head, and with new, articulated limbs, allowing them to build structures a bit more complex than simple nests, and perhaps also with a new respect for the preservation of their species. They were also living much longer, which gave them perspective on the events of the world they occupied.

  In this way, Lyokh watched the age of the Fire Birds slowly fade into obscurity. The age of the Wyrms was now set to commence.

  THERE WAS A breath before it happened, that unmistakable quiet that falls over a room or a forest or a world just before things change forever. Everyone senses it. A kind of thrill in the air, the feeling of being on the brink of some new and awesome change. The hours and ages creep by, all the while the creatures in the environment wait in anticipation. They sense that something is coming.

  This was how it was on the Planet. The quiet came when, over the span of thousands of years, the Fire Birds had gone to sleep, hibernating in caves in the side of cliffs that looked deep into the fiery maw of their volcanic nests, or else huddled around the hydrothermal vents of the oceans. Eggs were laid in small nooks, eggs five feet tall and as heavy as a boulder. Eggs hot to the touch and crackling inside. Eggs with thick pores that drank in sulfur and fire as easily as they took in water.

  The eggs also evolved to have suction cups on their bottoms and sides, and woe to any insect or small animal that alighted on these suckles, for they would become ensnared in a thick mucus and slowly absorbed them into the eggs. In this way, the eggs found protein while the budding life-forms inside slept, harvesting energy from sunlight and lava heat. The suckles on the eggs were yet another evolutionary accident, another attempt by all life to eat other life, absorb it, and find the “oneness” and harmony it always searched for.

  With each generation of hatching Fire Birds, they looked less and less like their parents, and more and more like the Wyrms they were destined to be.

  Even after the Wyrms had arrived, they were still evolving. They would always be evolving. Their hides were rough, yet also scaly in places, as if some distant memory of their reptilian ancestors had come bubbling back up. Those that laid eggs on the tallest mountain peaks adapted to both the cold and to the powerful lightning storms that often raged at high altitudes. These Wyrms grew long and sleek, becoming giant serpents swimming through the air and reveling in the lightning bolts that crashed into them.

  Those Wyrms that preferred caves became accustomed to the darkness, and preferred to hibernate throughout the double-sun season and then hunt during the nightfalls of the single-sun season. Their night-eyes were the keenest of all, naturally, and their hides were black as void, the better to hunt at night.

  Those Wyrms that had evolved to hibernate for hundreds of years beneath the ground lost all pigmentation, and became white as snow. They also lost their eyes. Sightless beasts, they were rarely seen outside of their subterranean caverns, where they roamed and sang lonely songs, and learned to sculpt limestone and redirect river flows and lava veins. They “saw” the world through echolocation, screaming and listening for the sound to return to their ears. Their songs were the loudest of all, and could paralyze lesser creatures.


  Those Wyrms that preferred the icy poles lost most of their pigmentation, as well, and their eyes became a deep blue, more suited for tolerating long stretches of darkness and the expanse of white terrain.

  Those Wyrms that lived by the shores developed keen sight, highly suited for finding prey just beneath the ocean’s surface. They fed almost constantly, learning to dive into the waters and chase massive schools of fish and round them into a swirling underwater tornado before they swam up, opening their immense throats and swallowing thousands at a time. They launched themselves out of the water, flying on heavy wings that stretched fifty feet in each direction, and then plunged back into the sea to seek more prey.

  Those Wyrms that remained around the volcanoes beneath the sea learned to dive deep, deep into the darkest trenches of the world, hunting squids and fishes more than half their own size. They also developed another unique skill; their tails could snap in the water or in the air and produce a heavy cavitation bubble, one that generated tremendous acoustic pressures. The soundwave killed small fish and could paralyze larger animals, and the collapsing cavitation bubble also produced sonoluminescence—light from sound—which was so bright it often blinded other animals.

  One other mild mutation began to take shape. Recall that random sack of gases from far, far, far back in time, that sack of gases that had grown inside the throats of the Fire Birds. Recall how they were useless, left over from a time when their much smaller ancestors had used them to stun prey. Now those gases—hydroquinone, hydrogen peroxide, and other exotic gases—were being produced in large quantities deep in the Wyrms’ bellies, and they needed somewhere to go. Oftentimes the gases were belched out, but occasionally—just occasionally—they ignited into flame.

  It took ten million years for these evolutionary processes to take root. Ten million years of one transformation after the next. Ten million years of speciation and struggling and lonely, passive, meaningless interstellar drift. There came another ice age that lasted a mere five hundred years, barely a quarter of the average Wyrm’s lifespan.

  All the while, the Wyrms flew and ate and swam.

  And sang.

  LYOKH LISTENED TO their songs. The Wyrms’ songs had become more intricate, some of the notes taking on special meaning, used only to identify the sun or the moons or the clouds or the rain. The songs were no longer just warnings or challenges, they were identifiers. They laid claim to things.

  There were night-songs and sun-songs. There were sky-songs and wing-songs and water-songs, fish-songs and hunting-songs, fire-songs, killing-songs, mourning-songs, fighting-songs and joy-songs and eating-songs. There were songs sang when a female finally chose her mate, a ritual that had become important and intertwined in their budding culture. There were songs sung when a new egg hatched, and there were songs sung when a hatchling completed its first hunt.

  The songs grew only more nuanced and complex as the ages rolled by, some of them involving body language. Sometimes, the songs could only be appreciated with proper acoustics, which necessitated the building of a structure to create an effect. Giant, cylindrical nests, like amphitheaters. And some songs could only be sung while the singer etched a design into stone. They used their new opposable fingers to do this, and some were more gifted than others and became artisans of sorts. The Cave Wyrms became particularly adept at carving out intricate designs, doorways, and even monuments in the shape of themselves.

  Songs also marked change, such as when the Planet barely avoided disaster one evening when a thousand-mile-wide ball of rock came close to it, at an angle and a speed that, rather than sending it away, allowed it to become captured. The giant gray-white rock encircled the Planet between its two moons. The Planet now had three moons, as well as the beautiful display of rings in its sky.

  The Wyrms noticed this, and their night-songs changed to include reverence for this new addition to the sky.

  And the sky itself was soon to take on a whole new significance.

  IT BECAME CLEAR to the Wyrms that all things mighty and powerful dwelled in the sky. The blue sun and the white sun—which in time were referred to in song as Blue Father and White Mother, or the Eternal Ones—were obviously the greatest of all things. Just below them were the Three Children, the moons that kept a close watch over the Planet during the nightfalls of single-sun seasons, when the Father and Mother could not see the Planet. Below the Three Children were all the flying creatures, the mightiest among them being the Wyrms. They were at the top of the food chain, the dominant life-forms on the Planet, their only competition each other.

  And so surely the Wyrms were the chosen guardians of the world, they reasoned, keepers of a paradise built just for them. Both their songs and their monuments evolved to reflect this. All songs included this special note to future generations: Blue Father and White Mother are to be respected, the Children’s silent vigil are also to be revered, and we must all do our part to keep this world.

  The Sea Wyrms built monuments to the Eternal Ones in the castles they had carved for themselves around hydrothermal vents in those dark ocean trenches. The Mountain Wyrms carved monuments into the sides of their volcanic nests. The Cave Wyrms made giant spires that all but they were forbidden to visit. The Plains Wyrms built no monuments, but they often hunted for no other reason than to shed blood and give sacrifice to the Eternal Ones. The Desert Wyrms shaped sand and stone into patterns that they found pleasing, patterns only noticeable when viewed from the sky. The Shore Wyrms shaped all their beaches and cliff faces with rows upon rows of chiseled statues that paid homage to the Eternal Ones.

  In time, these monuments, along with songs sung during their construction, began to tell stories. They told how Blue Father and White Mother were truly giant eggs filled with fire, and long ago they had hatched to spill their Children and the Wyrms. They continually burned and gave life to all things, bathing the world in beauty and light.

  And there were stories of bloody wars that came before, perhaps some distant memory recalled in their blood, a memory of the time when their ancestral Fire Birds had raged against one another. These long-songs were sung by all Wyrms, but sometimes they contradicted. The Mountain Wyrms disagreed with the long-songs of the Sea Wyrms, and the Sea Wyrms were offended by the long-songs of the Desert Wyrms, and so on.

  Disagreements abounded, leading to divergences in culture and preferences, as well as a mistrust of outsiders.

  LYOKH WATCHED ALL this like a child watching his first play, or listening to a lullaby, and yet also like a student trying to take notes, and yet still like a man inside a dream.

  The Mountain Wyrms, being closest to the Eternal Ones by day and having the freshest air, were far more adventurous and exploratory, and with their high vantage they could see the kingdoms of the world even while perched. They were larger and stronger than all other Wyrms, but also more reckless. Their songs were often tinged with respect for strength and bravery.

  The Cave Wyrms, by far the most reclusive, reigned over the underworld and dug only deeper, utilizing ore in ways alien to all other Wyrms, using their fiery breath to melt and temper steel. These secrets they guarded jealously, certain that if others learned them it would spell the end of their reign underground. They hibernated throughout the double-sun seasons and came out only at night to hunt. Their blindness made them better listeners, less vain, and less materialistic. They were also the longest-lived, giving them a deeper perspective on time and the events that shaped the Planet. The songs of all Cave Wyrms showed a clear bias for knowledge and wisdom.

  The Plains Wyrms were not reclusive, yet they were not exactly explorers, either. They remained mostly around the Ring Continent. Nomads, the lot of them. Always on the move, always following the giant herds of animals that migrated around the Ring Continent. They were the most brutal, the hungriest, the most likely to kill one another. Vicious and clannish, they did not suffer the presence of a newcomer lightly, and they often marked their territory by scorching their borders with their whit
e-hot breath. Plains Wyrm songs always included a war cry, mockery of the defeated, and a promise of more bloodshed to come.

  The Desert Wyrms spent their days bathing in the sunslight, and mating by the rim of a volcano. They preferred day over night, light over dark, fire over all other things. Heat-blasted for generations, their hides grew the toughest of all the Wyrms, their bodies as impenetrable as the glassified fortresses they had erected all around themselves. Their songs always held the note of legacy, and a respect for all artificial structures forged by their claws.

  The Sea Wyrms were the most difficult to reach of all the Wyrms by far, for none could reach their undersea kingdoms. But they were not reclusive. In fact, they had a better than working relationship with the Shore Wyrms, and even developed the first examples of trade the world had ever known. The Sea Wyrms brought the rarest of fish up from the depths to trade the Shore Wyrms for whatever they had foraged from far inland. Having access to deep veins of minerals and oils in the submarine trenches of the world, the Sea Wyrms were second only to the Cave Wyrms in terms of access to rare resources. They acted in riddles, gazed deeply into the dark trenches for days on end, and draped themselves in the bioluminescent algae of the sea in a kind of clothing. The Sea Wyrms’ songs were a nearly unintelligible mix of slang and portentous warnings about some unknown doom.

  And finally, the Shore Wyrms, being creatures that bridged the worlds between sea and land, between fire and ice, were the most social, the least threatening, and therefore the most accepted by all others. They sought no glory, they reveled in no death, they thirsted for only enough blood and meat as was required to sate them. They lounged on the sandy shores and fished the shallow shoals. Their songs developed a unique elegance for describing the world all around them, a poetry lent to the skies and the Eternal Ones. They did not seek great knowledge, only great self-awareness. They sought the perfection of their selves.