The Dead God
Amidst a landscape of billowing dust and unrelenting haze, the dead god lay like a mountain, its vast bulk rising out of the dirt to precipitous heights, birds encircling the crest of its brow, which was furrowed in death, forming an expression of perpetual confusion. How could a god die? Gods were eternal; they lasted while the world wore away to slivers of bone and fossilized forests. Still, it was the age of apostasy. He walked roads that were nothing but faint outlines in the dirt, and every glimpse of a structure revealed crumbling stones that were more imagination than outline. Sometimes he would stop and bend down to investigate something in the rubble but the object would always be formless, a heap of unidentifiable material, brown or tan, baked by the merciless rays of the sun. He looked, though, as he would always look. There were small ways of keeping faith.
The god seemed to last in his perspective forever, and it wasn’t until he crossed the event horizon that the body began to grow in magnitude exponentially, as though it were moving toward him rather than he trekking toward it. As the distance closed, he kept stopping and staring, straining his eyes, looking for any tremor or tell that the mountain slumbered instead of rotted. But then the smell hit him, a profound reek, and he had to cover his face and blink his watering eyes. What life that remained in this place were dissembling the corpse, working the copious amount of flesh and sinew into their baser elements. Leathery skin hung in great straps; flies and beetles nested in the dried flesh while birds had eaten out its eyes and roosted in the hollow sockets of its orbits. Over the many weeks it had taken to cross the great desert he had seen almost nothing that walked under its own power; a tiny lizard under a stone; a fly landing on his perspiring brow. There was more life writhing through the dead god than in all of the desolate waste, and it horrified him to bear witness to it, made his empty stomach clench and heave at the grotesqueness squirming before his eyes. Are we all parasites he uttered, and his voice stirred the flesh, made it tremble until a cavity opened and two great doors peeled back to release several crested things that stood in the shadow of the god as he retreated to the brightness of the sunlight. They had long beaks and bone-like protrusions jutting from their skulls, and their bodies were long-limbed and diminutive, stunted torsos meant for climbing and scampering. Their lengthy fingers ended in talons that gleamed in the dark shadows, and though he could see no eyes in their heads, he could feel their gaze as they waited for a legible sign. From the sheathe at his hip he removed his sword, and the light glittered on the metal blade, and the creatures, eyeless or not, read his intentions and retreated back into the depths from which they came. Monsters from Rian’s fantasies. His brother had enjoyed tales from foreign lands, hearsay and merchants’ rumors. Yet he lingered still in the castle, locked away in his sequester, shunning the light and the heat and the decay festering about him. He hadn’t wanted to leave, had seen no reason for it. It is safe and cool here. There is water and servants and food of a sort. I hear the echo of conversation and that is enough. Nothing that you seek is true. Our parents have told you lies.
A shimmering caught his eye. One of the great appendages lay outstretched, palm turned upward, the soft meat of the hand gone now, leaving almost nothing but bone, but there was a shard jutting from a cuticle, blade-like, gleaming. A three-foot long splinter of fingernail so sharp that it cut the thick leather of his glove as he reached for it. Only a sudden shadow thrown across the desert before him warned of the beast leaping for his back. With a tremendous heave he pulled the shard loose and swung it in one motion, letting its momentum turn his body like a gyroscope. A head fell free of a body, its crested skull landing softly in the sand. He bent down and picked it up, examining the black blood dripping like oil from its neck. There were no eyes, only taut skin, and the beak had tiny teeth like a saw-blade. He didn’t think the others would bother him now, and why this one had decided to pursue fresh meat instead of feasting on divine flesh perplexed. The lips of the cavity trembled and glistened, quivering with subsurface activity. He would not be going through there, even if there weren’t monsters inhabiting the body.
He stepped onto the hand and began to climb the god’s forearm, using the shattered blade of his sword as a pick, the shard of fingernail carefully wrapped in cloth and tied to his back. The desert sun lowered, sending shadows across the waste, and it was dark by the time he reached the summit of the god’s shoulder. There, on its anterior deltoid, he made camp.
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