Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 99
IV.
Her words sowed doubt.
He suspected that was her purpose. That she was jealous. Everyone was jealous of the vessel.
Filled to bursting with the magic from the belly of the world, he gazed out across the valley, and even in his stupor, could not help but gasp.
Swarms of black, serrated monsters with gaping mandibles and multi-faceted eyes poured down from the mountains, so many he could not count them. He could not even name them. He had seen nothing like them in his life.
For the first time, he hesitated.
The head elder put her wizened hand against his bare back. Her touch was cool, startling. It cut through his ambrosia-haze. Suddenly, he wanted to bolt. He felt he was once of those grasshoppers, now, the elders ready to pull of his legs and toss him into oil.
“Wait,” he said.
“There will be no pain,” she said.
“Wait,” he said. “Take someone else.”
“You have been chosen,” she said. “This is what it is, to be the chosen one. Do you understand, now?”
V.
How he longed to be virtuous. To be brave. To be remembered.
How they all longed for the promise of life beyond death; immortality through story, even those who had hardly experienced living.
Such was the power of story.
A touch, light as a feather, and he fell, he fell toward the valley and for one long, long moment as he fell, he realized his hubris.
He, the vessel, burst apart.
It became a searing ball of light; annihilation.
Below him, the seething tide of snapping, spitting, chittering monsters turned instantly to cinders.
He would never know this.
Never see this.
Never experience a single breath, a look, a touch, ever again.
He lived only long enough to sacrifice.
When the light blazed out, and the cinders cooled, the people of the community descended into the valley and collected the ashes of the monsters into great urns. Somberly, dressed all in violet and crimson lace, they walked back up the mountain from whence the creatures had come, and stored the cinders in the back of a deep, warm cave. Inside the urns, the seed heads that had marbled the surface of the monsters lay dreaming and dividing, their germination triggered by the fire.
As the people sealed the cave once more with wax and stone, the head elder raised her gnarled hands and said a prayer of thanks to their sacrifice.
“You live on,” she said. “You live forever. As do we. Because of you.”
Together, they wended their way back down the mountain, the head elder a little slower in step, voice hoarse. Beside her, another elder, newly raised, said softly, “Another generation, and they will rise again. The monsters.”
“That is the way of it.”
“Surely we could end it. Pour out the cinders, drown them, annihilate them –“
The head elder paused. Placed her hand on his cheek. “Oh, child,” she said, “if we were to destroy the creatures, what would we do each year with the sacrifice? Without the creatures, the sacrifice has no meaning.”
“And without the sacrifice?”
She removed her hand, and continued down the narrow, well-worn path. “There will always be a sacrifice,” she said. “Our duty is to give it meaning.”
Behind her, the wind wailed through the craggy mountains. Ahead of her, the villagers burst into song.
END
Kameron Hurley, Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020
