By CC Tennant
When empires rise, order is created. The stars are held in place, and laws and logic dictate the actions of man. But when empires fall, that order is lost, and a certain force takes over, not one dictated by laws or logic but superstition, horror, and the mind unimaginable. These forces are darkness, all of them, and the power they hold over lost men shapes the watercourse of life in a way the civilized world of the empire grows to envy, even as it takes it final breath. For a lost man is carnal, and a carnal man is easily deceived.
Behold.
***
In the year 2135 I was a railway technician, working alone on the high speed railway between Denver and California. I was told to reconnect a cell tower in a remote region of the Great Basin, and I was told hazard pay would cover the risk. Fool. In every direction were the high peaks and the salt flats, filled with the unimaginable ruins of ancient military daydreams that evaporated when the empire fell. As I worked, I slipped, plummeting full-on from the track. So alone in the sands I stood, with a broken arm and no way to re-attain my goal but to seek the truth among the sands.
Sand Whisperers they called them, women of the sun and stone. They were Amazonians with New Age ideals, women who went about the desert untamed, unbound. Their gods were the long forgotten zodiac of an ancient people, and they worshipped gemstones and polished rocks like they were miracles. These women were dangerous, I knew, and they had brought about the ire of the Western Magnetic Railway many times since it was constructed in what they considered “their land”. But I didn’t have a choice. I was hers.
I wandered red sands until I came to her, found her in her camp and asked if she could heal me. Her counterparts, chittering girls in their teens and pre-teens, talked amongst themselves as they lead me to the eldest among them, an oracle, a well of power in a world of heaps and scraps.
When first I met her, she was taller than I’d envisioned, her demeanor otherworldly. Her hair was a wavy field of pleated bronze, and she reached at me with sick arms protruding from a hemp robe half-seen. Her perfume was the roses of old Mexico, and her voice was a caracal’s purr. Her eyes brimmed like cat’s eyes made of olivine and her skin: beaten copper on a plain of clay and alabaster.
She took me in her tent, probed my arm and abdomen, and then looked deep into my eyes. She clasped my chin between pointed fingers and she examined me, read my senses.
“You need healing?”
“Yes, is this something you can do for me? I can pay. I’m a rail worker from Denver and I have credit”.
“I don’t need money. If I heal you I will want something else instead”
“What?”
“A settlement”
I hesitated, unsure of what she meant. Just looking at her, her face seemed to shift forms in the low light of the tent. She was many things in that moment: a promise fulfilled, a daydream realized, a hero with an everlasting heart. She took on angles and dimensions few could understand, and when she finished her shapeshifting, she was again the surreptitious woman of the sands, not the many images of the past.
“Fine. But I can’t promise anything more than what I’m able to give”.
So she gathered her things and fled the tent, taking me to a domed hill outside the camp. In the middle of the camp was a skeletal pole, and on it a rope with which to tie my able-bodied hand. Beside this were an array of fanged objects, and a single brass tube with a lens on the end. TELESCOPE. Hmm. The woman worked as I examined the apparatus, then approached me with a bowl of sugar and daydreams and told me I had to awaken the mixture myself.
“Drink”.
“No”
“Drink or I will pike you, as I did the others”.
So I drank, and my world changed immediately. Spirals of fear flew out from my legs and bowels, leaving me limbless in a bed of shifting sand moving in dry ripples towards the empty sunset.
And then the ritual began.
“Hold out your arm, and I’ll bless it with the power of sunlight”.
I moaned.
“Power comes from hidden places, brevo. Even the driest desert contains beautiful things”.
I tried to understand what she was saying, but her figure transposed against the shining sun caused my vision to wilt.
“In disharmony you came to us, so in disharmony we will leave you, lest you take my advice. You have a voice and you can use it. But you have yet to try”.
She took my arm and she held it out. In flashes her green eyes gazed at me, like medusa’s thronged serpents. Wordless she twirled in circles in the pearl sediment, tracing strange geometry with her feet.
“Are you going to heal me?”
“No. I am going to teach you”.
“But my arm, it’s broken. I need to get back to the track”.
She smiled, glory forming in her venom eyes. From a pouch she produced a silver disc, a green ball and a pink octahedron. She held them up.
“Childish man, consider hematite. It’s so shiny yet so brittle. The light of the world is like this. It sends power to endless places and yet it cannot stand against itself.” She snapped the disc. “Now consider rose quartz. It is a powerful thing, endless, eternal. Are they the same? No. Your power will soon fade and ours will rise. Rise and rise until its power blots out all darkness”.
She held the green ball, rolled it around in her fingers. She looked at it with contemplation, but did not explain its meaning. “Do you understand me? The sun does not cease to shine as it reaches the other side. It lives on even when it is hidden from us”.
Her demon vision bored into me as she spoke. I squirmed. I breathed. I tried to remove myself from her gaze. But she was close. Closer even than the moon and the heavenly bodies she so adored.
“Be humbled spawn of awful places. The light of the Shining Cities flows through you but its light is dim, like that of a candlewick against the sun”
The rest of that evening and the night that followed were a blur, something no part of me fully remembers. Ritual beads, gossamer hemp, pungent oils, simmering coals, quick fingers and a cacophony of strange chants, like owls yipping at the moon. In her tent of bones she took me and she cradled me in her arms as I cried away stories of the life I lived at home. Stories of unachievable futures and the silence. Stories of golden bridges and crystal spans to nowhere. Stories of the Martian atmosphere and the way it killed people. I told her things I’d never told anyone, not even those I loved. She listened, listened while I cried. Then she told me that the solar guides, Saturn, Neptune, and another, were an eternal, undying sort of presence whose cool heat would lacerate my misfortunes and heal my bitter soul.
I cried, not knowing why, and when the sun rose the next morning, the Gemstone Woman and her band of Sand Flowers had won, the night against my soul.
I left that next morning ashamed of my follies but thankful I had not been slain or piked. As I wandered back across barren sands, I took one last look at the madwoman and her thousand daughters. As I looked, the Gemstone Woman smiled at me, and told me again how much she cherished my company and the lies I had told her about myself last night.
“All men live by curses eventually, brevo. And in cursed hills the broken oft wander. Eternity only comes when the valley sands swallow them or they find their island in the sky. But yours is not the destiny of the hungry sands, man-friend. I see it in your eyes. I want you to return to me often, lest you forget. I AM WHAT YOU NEED”.
So I turned, not understanding what she meant or how she did it. Flexing my arm, I felt youth, vigor, power, myth. And as I wandered back across the plain toward the genesis of my unfortunate journey, I had only one thing on my mind.
I had a track to fix.
CC Tennant is an author and former educator based out of Fort Collins, Colorado. He writes literary shorts and experimental fiction, and is working on an upcoming graphic novel. He has previously published in Short Beasts, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Atlas Obscura, andScribes *MICRO*Fiction, among other places.
