(no subject)
The Black Crater
The girl walked along a faint dirt path through the wasteland. Her red cloak shone like an incandescent ruby amidst the discolored, barren landscape around her. She was young, just barely past childhood. Hers was that brave age at the brink of young adulthood, where one understands the world around them but is not yet accustomed to seeing it. That age before the routine of life dulls our senses and our wit, before anyone has yet convinced us that we ought to be afraid of ourselves. No, she went along the desolate path, between the withered trees, and over the ashen soil, and she was not afraid.
She travelled under the sad sky, a patchwork of grey clouds and dust-winds that hid the weak, dying sun. The path brought her to the tall rim of a large, scorched valley. The ground dropped suddenly in front of her, falling down far to the distant floor. The soil and the rock below were as black as charcoal and as smooth as glass, remnants of an ungodly fire. The black valley stretched across the land before her as far as she could see - it was a deep, dark gash in the very earth: an old, enormous crater.
The girl knew that vast expanse well. She had walked along its rim countless times with others from the village, heading or coming back from the well. The women carried the large buckets full of water back to the homes, and the children walked with them, helping out with smaller buckets if they were old enough. The younger kids would dare one another to gape over the edge of the crater, and the women would always yell at them to get back on the path. "You'll brain yourself on that fall!" they warned, "And you wouldn't be the first."
When that didn't work they would frighten the children with the tales of the creatures that lived down below, on the scorched, black earth. They called them the Uurkrai. Hungry creatures that would memorize a child's face if they saw it peeking over that rim, far above. And at the fall of night, when all was quiet and dark, they'd scamper out of the black valley and come looking for that little child. They'd slip into the village, silent shadows in the wind, looking into the houses with their sharp, yellow eyes. And when they found that delicious face, sleeping in its warm bed, they would drag the poor child away into the cold night, leaving as quickly and quietly as they came. By the time the villagers saw the empty bed in the morning, and those big paw-prints on the ash-ground, it would be too late. Far too late. The child would've already been torn apart and eaten, piece by piece, until only the bones were left.
But the girl wasn't afraid of the tales, and there was no one around to tell her otherwise. Today she stood alone on the rim of the crater, watching over the stark black valley that stretched before her - a dark, open wound that marred the land. The hidden sun was beginning to set over that scorched earth, behind its veil of grey clouds. A few feeble rays broke through, and slowly the sky began to color. It slowly became a dirty, dusty orange, and the shadows below grew long and numerous. In the high contrast of the setting sun, the landscape became more angular and jagged, a place full of crevices and hidden angles where the darkness was beginning to breed. The red cloak around the girl billowed gently in the breeze, against the wastes and the westering sky it looked like a last lively flame in a sea of dying cinders.
As she peered over the valley below her, she recalled when she had first heard the tale of the black crater in the west. It had been a cool summer night at the end of a long, arid day of oppressive heat. Above the village had hung one of those rare clear skies through which the stars shone bright, like flowers of light in the darkness. The children had gazed up at them amazed - there were so many of them! They littered and crowded the sky in their clumps and multitudes, and made it seem immense, like a fathomless, upturned chasm that went on forever towards some timeless depth. Under it they had felt so small, and at the same time, so meaningful - the gigantic star-laden night wrapped them up in its blankets of cosmic darkness, looking down upon them with pleased, motherly affection. They had never imagined that behind those vagabond clouds there could lie such a vast garden of cosmic love and understanding, a portal to the unimaginable.
The older men and women had begun then to teach the children of the pictures in the stars, of how there were patterns among them that formed huge figures in the sky - figures of men and animals, of creatures and beasts, of the old tales and the foretellings. Up there, against that ethereal dome of whispering darkness, among the stars one could see the Lightning Lords, and Veiras the Wanderer, and even the Fire Hounds of the end-times. And as the adults and the children gathered around under the star-painted night, a large campfire was kindled, and stools were brought out, and when those ran out, the large buckets were upturned to make seats. The children made do with the soft, dusty earth.
Gathered around the tall flames and inspired by the stars, the villagers had soon begun to tell tales. They were the tales of old that most everyone already knew - the tales of the beginning times, and the tales of the lands, and the tales of the great travelers. They were the stories that weaved the world around them, creating and populating it - the stories that softly brought the past out of the old rocks and into the warm firelight. They were the stories of the wastelands. The adults found them comforting, like the return of an old friend, and the children listened attentively, the words and images swimming vividly in their heads for the first time. They followed along, putting the world together piece by piece in their minds.
The night grew late and the fire, which had crackled loudly, licking violently at the fresh air of the summer night as it danced away the darkness, had begun to grow weaker. Its orange-reds began to settle into a softer music. A number of the children had fallen asleep, and some of the adults had left to carry them to bed. The girl of the red cloak was still awake, and although the rhythm of her mind had slowed with that of the fire-circle, she listened on for more, happy to drift along with the words under the nestling night. That is when the eldest woman had taken her turn and told the story of the black crater to the west.
She began before the world-ashes had fallen upon the wasteland, when the world was still young and full of life. Then, in the ancient ages, she said, the old-worlders lived upon the land. They were an old lineage of men who through countless years had drunk deep of the knowledge of the world. This knowledge gave them great power. They knew the secrets of the earth and the heavens, and they bound the elements to their will. Fire would leap from their fingertips, and they chained down lightning for their use. They soared upon the wind like birds, and harvested the wild water currents. From the ground they would raise tall towers of glass and stone that pierced the sky. But their knowledge had never come without a price, and as their power grew throughout the centuries, so had they slowly become ever more corrupt and greedy. They waged senseless wars upon their neighbors and their brothers, trying to quench a bitter thirst for more power. A never-ending thirst - one that soon saw them, at the very pinnacle of their civilization, immersed in a turbulent sea of violence that shook the very foundations of the world and bled the celestial regiments above.
All throughout the lands, from one end of the world to the other, the old-worlders were at war. Their fire blasted and burned the battlefields, and they struck at one another's keeps with deafening thunder that tore open the very earth. The dead littered the mutilated lands, and the sky was blind with black smoke and endless thunder-storms. The world was drowning in its own blood as the fogs of war enveloped it completely. But among it all one group of men stood tall and victorious, joyful in the face of the chaos and bloodshed. They were the most powerful of all men, and thus also the most wicked and corrupt. They were the men of the Great City to the West. Their city had once been the very centre of the world, to which all eyes and ears had turned for wisdom and direction. Now it was the eye of the blood-storm, the cruelest perpetrator of slaughter and destruction, from whom all cowered in fear and horror. Their city had turned from being a marble resplendence of life and culture, to being a pestilent sore that billowed out death and war. The tall towers that once shone proudly in the sun, now loomed over-head, cyclopean terrors that blocked out all light. The gravel streets were in crumbling disrepair, and the life had withered from the earth. The city had become a labyrinthine web of cracked stone and darkened towers that stretched onwards in every direction, as far as the eye could see - the enormous, crawling cemetery of a once-great people.
Its citizens were chained in great factories of war or fighting in the battlefields. The streets were cramped with the sick and the crippled, whom unable to aid the effort were discarded and thrown aside, to die by themselves. The laughing men, the leaders and conductors of the war-city, who held the true reins of power in their oiled palms, watched it all from their ziggurats, unconcerned with the toils and miseries of the worm-people below. They were the victorious orchestrators of violence, those whose cruel plans were tearing asunder all opponents and whose only interest was to increase the bloodshed, as long as it kept the gold piling up in their coffers and their necropolis extending out forever.
But none were safe, and none would win. One night clouds began to heap up over the Great City. They were tall, black, thunderous clouds that rose as titans in the sky, dwarfing all below. The smoke from the factories swirled among the clouds, coiling and twisting around them - long tendrils of darkness worshipping the angered heavens. The wind began to strike at the city, howling its long, cold cry against the tattered stone. The storm brewed into frenzy, and then, out of the rageful black clouds the fire-rain came. The blazing comets fell, other-worldly flames descending from an abysmal night. They burned bright against the stark darkness of the sky, illuminating the imposing storm-clouds for a long, slow moment, before finally crashing upon the city.
A momentary blindness - the world was white-washed with light brighter than the sun, the night was gone and all shadows disappeared; the world was completely lit and depthless. Then all vanished to dust, burned instantaneously by the light, and it was gone. Darkness rushed back into the world and a giant ash-cloud swept the land, blocking out the earth and the sky.
The fire rain had fallen across the world, and it had spared no one. The old-worlders and their cities were consumed by the righteous fires that purified the land. They burned away the ancient age and the old world, and their ashes rose into a storm that raged for three days. And when the storm finally settled, a new earth emerged from the fires - that is the earth of the wastelands, upon which the ashes of the old world came to rest, to remind us all of the world's death and rebirth. And were the most powerful city of the ancient age had lain, dominating over all it saw, there was instead a black crater, deep as a canyon and as large as the horizon.
"For we ought never forget the danger of the folly of man" the old woman had said, looking through her old, dark eyes at those who still lingered by the dying campfire. The young girl had caught her gaze with her bright blue eyes, spell-bound still by her finished tale. They looked at each other for a brief moment, and then the old woman smiled fondly, there, under the star-lit night of an enormous sky. The young girl still remembered that smile, a warm smile, and now as she looked over the expanse of that very coal-black crater, under the dimming light of sunset, she smiled too. One step before another, she walked slowly to the edge of that rocky rim, and carefully working her way down the first few rocks, she came to the steep dirt path that snaked its way to the valley floor. And without hesitation, without a moment's doubt or a look over her shoulder, she put one foot in front of the other and began to make her way down.
No; she was not afraid.
The girl walked along a faint dirt path through the wasteland. Her red cloak shone like an incandescent ruby amidst the discolored, barren landscape around her. She was young, just barely past childhood. Hers was that brave age at the brink of young adulthood, where one understands the world around them but is not yet accustomed to seeing it. That age before the routine of life dulls our senses and our wit, before anyone has yet convinced us that we ought to be afraid of ourselves. No, she went along the desolate path, between the withered trees, and over the ashen soil, and she was not afraid.
She travelled under the sad sky, a patchwork of grey clouds and dust-winds that hid the weak, dying sun. The path brought her to the tall rim of a large, scorched valley. The ground dropped suddenly in front of her, falling down far to the distant floor. The soil and the rock below were as black as charcoal and as smooth as glass, remnants of an ungodly fire. The black valley stretched across the land before her as far as she could see - it was a deep, dark gash in the very earth: an old, enormous crater.
The girl knew that vast expanse well. She had walked along its rim countless times with others from the village, heading or coming back from the well. The women carried the large buckets full of water back to the homes, and the children walked with them, helping out with smaller buckets if they were old enough. The younger kids would dare one another to gape over the edge of the crater, and the women would always yell at them to get back on the path. "You'll brain yourself on that fall!" they warned, "And you wouldn't be the first."
When that didn't work they would frighten the children with the tales of the creatures that lived down below, on the scorched, black earth. They called them the Uurkrai. Hungry creatures that would memorize a child's face if they saw it peeking over that rim, far above. And at the fall of night, when all was quiet and dark, they'd scamper out of the black valley and come looking for that little child. They'd slip into the village, silent shadows in the wind, looking into the houses with their sharp, yellow eyes. And when they found that delicious face, sleeping in its warm bed, they would drag the poor child away into the cold night, leaving as quickly and quietly as they came. By the time the villagers saw the empty bed in the morning, and those big paw-prints on the ash-ground, it would be too late. Far too late. The child would've already been torn apart and eaten, piece by piece, until only the bones were left.
But the girl wasn't afraid of the tales, and there was no one around to tell her otherwise. Today she stood alone on the rim of the crater, watching over the stark black valley that stretched before her - a dark, open wound that marred the land. The hidden sun was beginning to set over that scorched earth, behind its veil of grey clouds. A few feeble rays broke through, and slowly the sky began to color. It slowly became a dirty, dusty orange, and the shadows below grew long and numerous. In the high contrast of the setting sun, the landscape became more angular and jagged, a place full of crevices and hidden angles where the darkness was beginning to breed. The red cloak around the girl billowed gently in the breeze, against the wastes and the westering sky it looked like a last lively flame in a sea of dying cinders.
As she peered over the valley below her, she recalled when she had first heard the tale of the black crater in the west. It had been a cool summer night at the end of a long, arid day of oppressive heat. Above the village had hung one of those rare clear skies through which the stars shone bright, like flowers of light in the darkness. The children had gazed up at them amazed - there were so many of them! They littered and crowded the sky in their clumps and multitudes, and made it seem immense, like a fathomless, upturned chasm that went on forever towards some timeless depth. Under it they had felt so small, and at the same time, so meaningful - the gigantic star-laden night wrapped them up in its blankets of cosmic darkness, looking down upon them with pleased, motherly affection. They had never imagined that behind those vagabond clouds there could lie such a vast garden of cosmic love and understanding, a portal to the unimaginable.
The older men and women had begun then to teach the children of the pictures in the stars, of how there were patterns among them that formed huge figures in the sky - figures of men and animals, of creatures and beasts, of the old tales and the foretellings. Up there, against that ethereal dome of whispering darkness, among the stars one could see the Lightning Lords, and Veiras the Wanderer, and even the Fire Hounds of the end-times. And as the adults and the children gathered around under the star-painted night, a large campfire was kindled, and stools were brought out, and when those ran out, the large buckets were upturned to make seats. The children made do with the soft, dusty earth.
Gathered around the tall flames and inspired by the stars, the villagers had soon begun to tell tales. They were the tales of old that most everyone already knew - the tales of the beginning times, and the tales of the lands, and the tales of the great travelers. They were the stories that weaved the world around them, creating and populating it - the stories that softly brought the past out of the old rocks and into the warm firelight. They were the stories of the wastelands. The adults found them comforting, like the return of an old friend, and the children listened attentively, the words and images swimming vividly in their heads for the first time. They followed along, putting the world together piece by piece in their minds.
The night grew late and the fire, which had crackled loudly, licking violently at the fresh air of the summer night as it danced away the darkness, had begun to grow weaker. Its orange-reds began to settle into a softer music. A number of the children had fallen asleep, and some of the adults had left to carry them to bed. The girl of the red cloak was still awake, and although the rhythm of her mind had slowed with that of the fire-circle, she listened on for more, happy to drift along with the words under the nestling night. That is when the eldest woman had taken her turn and told the story of the black crater to the west.
She began before the world-ashes had fallen upon the wasteland, when the world was still young and full of life. Then, in the ancient ages, she said, the old-worlders lived upon the land. They were an old lineage of men who through countless years had drunk deep of the knowledge of the world. This knowledge gave them great power. They knew the secrets of the earth and the heavens, and they bound the elements to their will. Fire would leap from their fingertips, and they chained down lightning for their use. They soared upon the wind like birds, and harvested the wild water currents. From the ground they would raise tall towers of glass and stone that pierced the sky. But their knowledge had never come without a price, and as their power grew throughout the centuries, so had they slowly become ever more corrupt and greedy. They waged senseless wars upon their neighbors and their brothers, trying to quench a bitter thirst for more power. A never-ending thirst - one that soon saw them, at the very pinnacle of their civilization, immersed in a turbulent sea of violence that shook the very foundations of the world and bled the celestial regiments above.
All throughout the lands, from one end of the world to the other, the old-worlders were at war. Their fire blasted and burned the battlefields, and they struck at one another's keeps with deafening thunder that tore open the very earth. The dead littered the mutilated lands, and the sky was blind with black smoke and endless thunder-storms. The world was drowning in its own blood as the fogs of war enveloped it completely. But among it all one group of men stood tall and victorious, joyful in the face of the chaos and bloodshed. They were the most powerful of all men, and thus also the most wicked and corrupt. They were the men of the Great City to the West. Their city had once been the very centre of the world, to which all eyes and ears had turned for wisdom and direction. Now it was the eye of the blood-storm, the cruelest perpetrator of slaughter and destruction, from whom all cowered in fear and horror. Their city had turned from being a marble resplendence of life and culture, to being a pestilent sore that billowed out death and war. The tall towers that once shone proudly in the sun, now loomed over-head, cyclopean terrors that blocked out all light. The gravel streets were in crumbling disrepair, and the life had withered from the earth. The city had become a labyrinthine web of cracked stone and darkened towers that stretched onwards in every direction, as far as the eye could see - the enormous, crawling cemetery of a once-great people.
Its citizens were chained in great factories of war or fighting in the battlefields. The streets were cramped with the sick and the crippled, whom unable to aid the effort were discarded and thrown aside, to die by themselves. The laughing men, the leaders and conductors of the war-city, who held the true reins of power in their oiled palms, watched it all from their ziggurats, unconcerned with the toils and miseries of the worm-people below. They were the victorious orchestrators of violence, those whose cruel plans were tearing asunder all opponents and whose only interest was to increase the bloodshed, as long as it kept the gold piling up in their coffers and their necropolis extending out forever.
But none were safe, and none would win. One night clouds began to heap up over the Great City. They were tall, black, thunderous clouds that rose as titans in the sky, dwarfing all below. The smoke from the factories swirled among the clouds, coiling and twisting around them - long tendrils of darkness worshipping the angered heavens. The wind began to strike at the city, howling its long, cold cry against the tattered stone. The storm brewed into frenzy, and then, out of the rageful black clouds the fire-rain came. The blazing comets fell, other-worldly flames descending from an abysmal night. They burned bright against the stark darkness of the sky, illuminating the imposing storm-clouds for a long, slow moment, before finally crashing upon the city.
A momentary blindness - the world was white-washed with light brighter than the sun, the night was gone and all shadows disappeared; the world was completely lit and depthless. Then all vanished to dust, burned instantaneously by the light, and it was gone. Darkness rushed back into the world and a giant ash-cloud swept the land, blocking out the earth and the sky.
The fire rain had fallen across the world, and it had spared no one. The old-worlders and their cities were consumed by the righteous fires that purified the land. They burned away the ancient age and the old world, and their ashes rose into a storm that raged for three days. And when the storm finally settled, a new earth emerged from the fires - that is the earth of the wastelands, upon which the ashes of the old world came to rest, to remind us all of the world's death and rebirth. And were the most powerful city of the ancient age had lain, dominating over all it saw, there was instead a black crater, deep as a canyon and as large as the horizon.
"For we ought never forget the danger of the folly of man" the old woman had said, looking through her old, dark eyes at those who still lingered by the dying campfire. The young girl had caught her gaze with her bright blue eyes, spell-bound still by her finished tale. They looked at each other for a brief moment, and then the old woman smiled fondly, there, under the star-lit night of an enormous sky. The young girl still remembered that smile, a warm smile, and now as she looked over the expanse of that very coal-black crater, under the dimming light of sunset, she smiled too. One step before another, she walked slowly to the edge of that rocky rim, and carefully working her way down the first few rocks, she came to the steep dirt path that snaked its way to the valley floor. And without hesitation, without a moment's doubt or a look over her shoulder, she put one foot in front of the other and began to make her way down.
No; she was not afraid.