Callisto

The Harvester

They only saw more of them as they pressed on passed the park. Rain-Born started noticing taller entities sitting at tables outside cafes, gesturing with their arms as though locked in conversation, meandering around pretending to cradle objects in their arms, playing at hanging out clothes on washing lines. All around them, the descent of night brought these shadows out into the open streets, where they acted out the activities of city life without a care for Rain-Born or her companion. The only time either was acknowledged was when they entered a new street or sidewalk, and the dark echoes were forced to see that, for a moment, the living were amongst them. Then they simply returned to their routine.

"It's an instinct," Jespar said suddenly, alarming Rain-Born by breaking their hours-long silence. "These are memories more than they're people. These are the last things they were doing before the end."

Rain-Born looked at the mute specters drifting around the street, engaged in their eternal pantomime.

"Why?" She asked. "Who would wish to remain on this earth and not pass on to the world beyond?"

He stopped. Two ghosts – parent and child holding hands and walking together – passed through him as though he didn't exist.

"You've never wished for anything in your life, have you?" he asked without looking back.

She hesitated. She felt the eyes of the dark apparitions looking at her, expecting an answer.

"Do you remember what I asked you back in that house in the suburb? Everyone has dreams. You still haven't told me what yours is yet."

There was something in his voice she despised. She couldn't shake the feeling that this was not Jespar who was talking. His question was too much charged with loathing. Loathing of – who? Her? Himself? The specters that floated around them?

She clenched her fists and breathed her response.

"And you have told me nothing of who you are," she began. "You have kept your whole being from me, yet I have trusted you. I have sacrificed to save you, and you were going to let me die."

She said it without thinking, the way a child throws insults at their parents, knowing just where to wound them in a moment of fury, knowing too that they are wrong to do so. She repeated it, even knowing that she regretted everything the statement meant.

"You were going to let me die."

He still did not look back at her. Instead, his low-hanging face jerked up to see the tower they were approaching. Just a few more streets, and it would all be over.

"I warned you not to trust me," was all he said, and then walked on ahead between the legs of the shadowed ones.

She wondered if he would have continued even if she had turned back now. Within her heart, she knew that he sought Callisto too. Perhaps she had always known. Yet there was a fragment of her being that longed for him to tell her that he wanted her here with him. That one admission alone would erase all her sins.

But as she looked at his weary form plod forward like he was sinking into the stones beneath his paws, she knew this would never come. This dream was not one for her.

So together, yet apart, they walked like pilgrims towards the tower that pierced the clouds, borne on a path paved with the ghosts of the dead.

...

By midnight, the weary travelers of the Deadlands had made it to the plaza at the base of the Iron Forest's tallest tree. And once again, Rain-Born was forced to confront a vision that her mind begged her to deny.

The foot of the tower was a graveyard. This place, once a thriving square bustling with activity, with a marble fountain that gushed out the waters of life, was now littered with the corpses of those who had made it this far and failed. But the human bodies had not simply expired – they had been cut apart. As she looked closer, Rain-Born noticed each human's eviscerated limbs and torsos lay beside their screaming mouths like the floor of a Hanakh meat cutter preparing a meal for his young. As both Rain-Born stepped forward, her feet sank into the fly-ridden ribcages of dead men or the rotted mucus of some creature of the Deadlands that Rain-Born had never even seen. Yet, looking closer, there were forms that she did recognize strewn amidst the eviscerated dead – there were canyon Stalkers here, their limbs upturned and mangled, their toothy maws open in death throes. Unlike the humans, their dead forms seemed much more intact.