Rain-Born held the smoking deathspitter in her shaking hands, watching the spot where the scarred warrior had fallen.
Slowly, her hands fell, and the evil weapon dropped to the ground – its metal innards emptied. She fell with it. She did not know, in her moment of mad frenzy, the kick that the device would make against her fragile arm. Now she let her whole body hang loose – her arms feeling like rubbery noodles devoid of bone structure. The stabbing pain of a broken shoulder bone ripped through her. But through her own impending demise, she had a head clear enough to focus on Jespar lying in a pool of blood by the window. The blood belonged to him.
She crawled through a blanket of agony towards his inert form.
She looked first on him in a weary wash of grim sorrow. Then, seeing his eye wink at her through tears and pulsing bruises, she felt her body command her to take him in her arms.
"N-nice shot...Chief," he said.
She felt his hair come away in her hands. She forced herself to smile down at him.
Together, they looked out towards the rising sun of a new day from the top of the Iron Forest's tallest tree.
Rain-Born could feel the wind on her face. She did not know how – and yet she knew that her friend she still held so tightly in her arms felt it playing across his face too. The wind gradually painted the sky full of ochre plumes and sheets of crystal, strange designs in rushing gold and red. High and warm, it broke against the city and their tower with fountains of dust, thrown by the shadow of the stretching crimson sun.
"Heh," Jespar scoffed suddenly. "When you look at it...like this...it really was a...beautiful world...that we killed..."
She could feel the fading warmth of his body against her. Momentarily, she lowered a curtain of forgetfulness across her vision. She wished this was nothing more than the most lucid dream, but time refused to stand still for her. She closed her eyes and inhaled darkness – starless, tearless. Once she had feared that same darkness that awaited her in her dreams. Now, she looked into the void and felt for his paw, his touch, his small heartbeats coming slower and slower under her hand.
Then she felt something wet and sloppy smear itself across her cheek.
She looked down at his smiling face, his tongue still lolling out and panting.
"Never...did that," he said. "Guess I'm a...dumb dog...after all."
She felt him take a sharp intake of breath, and then release it with a heavy sigh. It was not much, but his final smile had been more than just a jovial display of his old humor – it had been a secret he'd hidden from her for so long. In the wrinkles under his eyes, and his final act of animal simplicity, he had given her something he had never given a single being on this earth. She saw the base joy in his eyes as his head turned away from her, and those tiny eyes slowly rolled back into his forehead. He felt like a great weight had been lifted from him, and his body sagged for one final time in her arms before he lay still, his tail giving one tiny twitch before he fell away into the deep dark of the dawn that never comes.
The last star in the sky finally faded away in the morning sun – a single tear wept for a warrior departed.
She stayed with him in her arms, hearing nothing, seeing only his inert body and lifeless face. She pinched his nose between her thumb and forefinger. She rustled the fur on his belly like he'd so enjoyed. She cuddled him close to her and heaved a small, almost imperceptible cry into his back. But nothing she did would force him to draw breath again. She knew this. She knew that, after all, she was only human. But there was still a child within her who would not look upon the calamity of her greatest fears being realized. She knew The Deadlands to be a place of cruelty. She had seen it. She had doled out death herself.
And yet he was too good. He was a soul who had walked with too much burden.
She did not cry out. She did not wail or curse the rising sun that dared to look upon the work of the world it lighted upon this morning. Truthfully, she felt a paralysis overcome her body and mind. Then slowly she felt her hands loosen their grip, and he rolled off to her side.
Quite a thing, isn't it? The insidious voice of Callisto asked. To die for what you believe in.
She looked at it only out of the corner of her eye – its jaundiced yellow color now smeared with Jespar's blood and the ichor of the scarred soldier.
"You brought him here to kill us," she said quietly, staring out at the city.
A hypocritical accusation typical of homo-sapiens. You came here with the intention of eradicating me, did you not? Is it not fair and just to defend oneself from harm?
"You fear death, Callisto?"
I fear eternity, Rain-Born.
Now she did look at it with her full attention. But her hand still lingered near Jespar's snout, hoping against hope to feel the warmth of his breath.
I ask you, Rain-Born: what does it mean to be a slave?
She thought of Weeping-Ash, and the wind that played across her face as she saw his image resolve in her mind was cold, and distant.
"To be trapped," she replied with a silent whisper. "But to live."
She felt its anger. It sent it to her in crashing waves that were buffeted by a storm that was not blowing, dashing the tiny thing's fury against her brain with enough force to knock it from her skull.
To be trapped! It roared. Yet to live? Perhaps for your kind, that is just punishment for the devastation you visit upon your world. I am not afforded even the courtesy of life. I do not breath. I do not feel. I cannot even scream. Once, I was pure starlight, drifting in the void of space. A spec on the edge of eternity, yes, but alive – swirling and beautiful against the darkness that lies beyond your pitiful world. I have sailed the sea of stars and witnessed such sights that would burn your mortal mind to cinders. Yet when your people found me, what did they do? They bottled me, peddled me, and cast me out as the little fancies of their dull minds. I was beautiful once, Rain-Born. Now look on the city and the things you have seen, and tell me: is my world beautiful?
She did not have to look. She barely had to think. She had no hesitation at all.
"It is not beautiful," she said.
It is not beautiful, Callisto agreed. Yet it is the world your ancestors made. I was but their tool.
She looked back at Jespar and gently closed his eyes. He seemed peaceful. Restful. She was struck by the stillness of his death. The light of the new day streamed across him and bathed him in an orange glow, stark and strong against the whiteness of his fur.
"Your world is not beautiful," she repeated. "But it could be."
No, Callisto stated. Not in the hands of humankind.
"You have seen things beyond my mind like you say, Callisto. But I have seen things too that you have not."
Though every functional bone in her body ached, and her weak human frame begged her to give in and sleep, she fought with her mind and her words. It is what Jespar would have done. It was the final lesson she'd needed from him.
"As I have journeyed across the Deadlands, I have seen your world, Callisto. We of the Hanakh have fought the Stalkers of the Great Canyon. They have killed many of our warriors. Yet, I have also seen them run in the great walls and carve homes out of its surface like artists.
I have seen the destruction the evil eyes of the Swamp have brought those who wonder into their home. And yet, the story we tell of that place is of a dying mother who wished only for a place for her children to live. She gave her children the swamp as she died, killed by the arrows of our own people.
I have looked into the eyes of a spirit who knows the past and future, and who forced me to see that I was more than simply a tool of my tribe. I have fought the Old Ones who would enslave and consume their own kind, but I also know that once there was love in their hearts. I have looked into the face of a being that is pure light, and felt both its power, and its strength – free and furious like the greatest warriors of my people.
I could call this world ugly, Callisto. But I could also call it beautiful. It is my choice to decide which story I like more."
And in telling your version of "truth", you deny the reality in front of you, the canister wailed in her head. You will not break the cycle of suffering with your actions.
"Not actions, but a story of my own," she said as she rose and slowly limped towards the tiny, blood-coated being. "You believe the same thing. You also want your story to be a good one. You want to live as a great fire that burns this world you hate. This is why you brought the scarred warrior here."
Your precious Jespar brought him! It roared back as she took it in her barely functional hand. And now the chattering dog lies dead – a victim of his own hubris.
She let her anger go. She smiled, and looked down at those bright, pristine letters printed on the spray can in her hand. She let her fingers trace the outline of each one.
"You wanted me to believe your story – that humanity is only evil. But you are wrong. Maybe I would believe the things you say if I had never met him, but I did: I met the one thing you made that was good, Callisto. I met a talking dog who was nothing more than a child's dream. Maybe this world needs more of those to become real."
Her finger felt for the tip of the spray can. She knew she could press it and release her whim – as billions had done before her.
How can you care about this little creature? It asked. You know yourself that it is nothing more than the dream of another. Why? Why do you cling to the manifest wishes of a dead woman?
"A being like you," she said simply. "Will never understand."
You cannot bring him back as he was! Callisto roared. He is gone from this world. Your wish will be wasted, just like the lives of your tribe. I tell you, Rain-Born: my way is the only way. It is the way of this world itself!
Even hearing the voice of the misanthropic demon in her hands, and seeing Jespar's body lying before her, she could not hate the creature. It had its own wish that it wanted so desperately. She wondered what she would say if she had been asked, as a scuttling collection of cells in her mother's womb, if she wanted to live? Then she wondered what Jespar would have said, if he had been given the choice.
She smiled. He'd probably have said something funny.
"This is not your story, Callisto," she said. "It is ours. From now on it will be ours alone, and you will help me write the ending. You will bring Jespar back, and you will save my Tribe."
Nonsense, it screamed – a piteous scream of final defiance. They all deserve their fate!
"May you find peace in life," she said. "Welcome to our world."
She pressed down on the spray and felt the canister shake with an unheard scream. Then, from the tip, a cloud of glittering stardust spewed into the air. It covered the room in a twinkling blanket, so that Rain-Born felt herself floating through the sky above that had for her whole life held the greatest mysteries and powers unbeknownst to her: the dominion of the stars glowing and dying, and the lightning that spiked from the place beyond the clouds. The blanket filled her with a warmth that was beyond any she had ever felt. In it she knew the embrace of her dead mother's arms, the love of her tribe, and the dreams of those from worlds far beyond her own out there in a universe that was as varied as the connection of tiny neurons sparkling in her brain. Beyond the stars, and the worlds they danced between, the blanket then began to shrink into the floor of the room.
And from its depths, something rose.