Work Text:
Here is a story for you.
Let us not trouble ourselves about precisely which one. It is many stories, and none. We have too little time to concern ourselves with specifics. It is, shall we say, elementary.
The story is this: There exists a great evil. The people rise against it. They vanquish the evil, but they cannot destroy it. They can only contain it, so they seal it away.
The seal holds for some time. Fifty years, perhaps, or a hundred, or a thousand. It does its job well. It holds long enough for the people to lose their fear, and become comfortable; to plant their farms, and raise their children. It holds, perhaps, long enough for the evil to pass from memory into myth. If they are very unlucky, it holds long enough for them to forget the evil entirely.
Because, in the end, the seal fails. One might say that this is in fact its role. Stories, after all, rarely concern themselves with the period in which the seal holds and the evil is dormant. They begin when the seal fails, and the evil is released.
You have been running for a long time, Ra Endymion.
How long? Impossible to tell. Your chrono readers failed at fifty years. The Webway will not tell you; it is varied, but unchanging. Where it is dark, it remains dark; where it is light, the walls hold their steady glow. Where it opens planetside, dust builds up; otherwise you leave no trail on its floors. It will not tell you if it has been five years or five thousand.
Here is a way: You have been running for a long time, and walking for a longer one, and the rootstock of your body is only human. The augmented cartilage of your knees is softer than the bone; it wears down over time. The soles of your feet have borne your weight for too long: Your calcaneus strikes the inside of your boot with no padding of fat to absorb the shock; your tarsals rub against each other as your weight rolls forward; the weeping sores that litter your toes throb as your foot pushes off. The round heads of your femurs grind and itch inside their acetabulae. Your healing places demands on you that the Webway cannot fulfil.
You are hungry. You were crafted to minimise the distractions of that animal craving, but it makes its demands of you nonetheless. You cannot run: The fats and sugars that would furnish such activity have been depleted. Your body has turned in on itself, devouring muscle fibres to fuel your vital functions. Dehydration has skinned your lips back to your teeth. Your head pounds relentlessly; you cannot bear bright light. You breathe through your mouth, against the collar of your armour, to conserve moisture. You waver as you walk.
The role of the seal is this: It holds until it can hold no longer.
The first murder is inside you. It curls around the site of the wound it made when your lord thrust it into you. Every step jars it, and sends agony through you. You have come to loathe the inconstancy. You take a step, and pain breaks through the unremitting weight of thirst and hunger and endless exhaustion; then the pain recedes and the misery returns. Never are you permitted to become accustomed to one or the other. Always each batters you with its return.
The first murder is inside you. It wants to be a sword. Why a sword? The first murder was committed with a spear. The first blade was a flint hand-axe. The first weapon man raised in his ancestral hand was a club fashioned from antelope bone. Ah, but the club has other functions. The first humans drove off hyaenas with clubs, scraped hides with hand-axes, butchered meat with knives, hunted fish with spears. The sword has no such pastimes. The only business of the sword is murder.
It is a tenet of legal systems that to kill another in war is distinct from murder. It was a tenet of your creation that any action taken in your lord’s defence was merely justice. The presence of the first murder inside you prohibits such civilised niceties. To kill is its nature; to do so would be to embody it. You who were made to prevail in battle must now at all costs avoid doing so. You are, in this respect, a singularly ill-suited seal.
The nature of the seal is this: It was crafted for its purpose. You were not. You were crafted for another function, and repurposed at need; judged the most suitable of the tools at hand. Your permission for the reassignment was sought no more than your permission for the initial forging. At no point did it occur to you that it might be needed. Nobody asks the iron if it wants to be a blade.
The first murder is inside you. It feels quite at home.
You waver, and waver again. You have been walking for uncounted steps through a dim hallway limned with silver. Sensible to your circumstances, you walk close to the wall; yet now you find that you lack the strength to raise an arm and steady yourself. You collapse.
It is a gentle collapse: You have much basis for comparison. You fall against the wall, then to your knees, then to the floor. The first murder stabs through you from its home in your chest; your skull pounds like an ancient war-drum. Darkness washes your vision.
You are not given the opportunity to consider sleep. Sleep sees an opening and takes it. Sleep pounces upon you, quite without regard for pain, hunger, or thirst.
Some time later, you open your eyes, and see dust.
Dust in the dustless Webway can mean only one thing. Somewhere near is a break in the walls; somewhere nearby a planetary wind has blown planetary stratum into this liminal space. Somewhere nearby is a world with wind, soil, rain, food.
Animal instinct pulls to your hands and knees. Your knees shriek as your patellae are ground in their traces; your stomach overrides them. You crawl, unsteady on the uneven ground, following the dust as it thickens. Once, before your chrono readouts failed, you stood at the threshold to another world and weighed the demands of duty: Your lord’s order to run as far into the Webway as possible, taking your dreadful burden with you, against your body’s need for sustenance – to run, to survive, to make of your existence a cage. No such debate occurs to you now. Your olfactory epithelium can distinguish some two thousand toxins; now your nostrils are flared wide in the primitive search for water.
You find your remittance after some interminable minutes: A low crack in the dark wall, admitting you from a hall of wraithbone to a hall of stone. The scent of water beckons you. Your palm lands on the desiccated corpse of some flying mammal, and without pause you thrust the entire thing into your mouth. Tiny bones splinter under your teeth and fur mats the back of your throat; you crawl on.
The source of the water proves to be a rocky lake at the end of the passage. You fall to your chest to get your face in the pool, and drink great sucking mouthfuls. The relief in your throat is instant and undoing. With your fingernails you scrape scum off the rocky lake bed to eat.
There is this to be grateful for: You were intended to endure long hardships and recover swiftly from them. Unlike a mortal, your stomach does not require weeks of patient refeeding to accustom it to food: The material is provided and your digestive tract reactivates.
You eat. You drink until your stomach registers a different kind of pain, and then you vomit, carefully away from your water source, and drink again. You take the opportunity, in this lonely secluded passage, to sleep some more. On waking you drink again, scrape more algae from the rocks, pace out into the shallow lake and after several attempts succeed in catching some of the blind cave fish that swim around your feet. The first murder’s presence in your chest is an acceptable pain, with hunger and thirst and exhaustion so slaked. You will need more, of course, to return your body to acceptable condition; the resources of this pool alone cannot restore you. Still, it will be prudent to exhaust them before you venture further from the Webway.
You sleep again, and wake to the distant whine of power armour.
And now let us admit to a variation on our earlier theme. Always the seal must break. Sometimes it fails for its own reasons: The ungentle wear of time, or the pressure within it. But not always. Sometimes – indeed, often – the seal is broken.
You venture up the passage. In ten paces, your enhanced hearing makes an unwelcome report: Whoever they are, they are between you and the Webway exit. The first murder, nestled in your chest, laughs and laughs, the hysterical laughter of a man beating in a skull with a club. You retreat, silently, to your rocky pool.
To no avail.
You see the shadow come down the hall: High-crested, misshapen, lit by daemon-light. His power armour shrieks like a woman being flayed. In moments he will see you. Your hand tightens around the haft of your long-dry spear.
If you kill him, you will fail. If he kills you, you will fail.
(At no point does it occur to you to talk your way out. So many years hosting the essence of murder does not incline one’s thoughts towards diplomacy.)
In the end, every seal must break. It may break by itself, or it may be broken by another. The result, ultimately, is the same. That which was contained will be released. The distinction of how matters only to the seal.
What will you do, Ra Endymion?