Saar-Lo awakes to the sound of his own retching, the pain in his belly finally strong enough to rouse him from his fume-induced torpor. This means hunger, he tells himself, and he breathes deep the vapors that emerge from the vents like roots for the canopy of ashy brown clouds that dominates the sky. He wishes he could go back into the embrace of that intangible forest, into the dreamless slumber where there is no thought of thirst or starvation, no pain but the one that reminds him that he is still alive.
Alive and all the more worthless for it.
Saar-Lo drops to all fours and crawls his way to the edge of the rooftop, dragging his distended stomach over the concrete and loose gravel to momentarily appease its demands for nourishment. He must be careful. Night is not yet come, and even this far out there could be competitors willing to fight tooth and claw for a mere morsel – or worse still, deem Saar-Lo a much more appetizing meal than any the land can provide.
From his vantage point, Saar-Lo scans for any danger, disregarding the deafening pleads of his innards. He locks eyes with the shadows, egging them to make the first move, to show him their fangs and match his hunger. Only the evening’s stillness answers his challenge.
Digits ending in black fingernails cling to coarse cement, the skin on each of Saar-Lo’s webbed palms and soles puckering ever so slightly with every step of his face-first descent, releasing and clutching again and again until he has reached the bottom of the wall, his spine almost arching into a parabola as vertical becomes horizontal upon reaching the ground. He pauses for a moment, catching his breath amidst the persistent discomfort of scabs rubbing against each other, threatening to reopen the sores that cover every inch of his skin; the ones on his hands and feet are already weeping, the wall behind him stained with drops of pungent ichor. Something inside him twitches; Saar-Lo has learned to live with purulence, to power through the sting of wounds that never truly heal, yet he cannot rid himself of a hurt far greater than any his malformed body can procure him – an understanding, wordless and insidious, of his own nature.
Upright again, his senses still alert and his legs ready to bolt at the first sign of danger, Saar-Lo walks towards the river. He has grown so used to its stench that his nostrils no longer ache, so used to its bilious waters that he can wade in them with no care for illness. He and the river are of a kind, after all, their blood tainted by the same poison, their existence whispered as a warning. Saar-Lo does not mind the dread he inspires, even when loneliness takes hold in the long nights amongst the fumes of the derelict factory where he has taken refuge. Fear is better than revulsion; being alone is better than being pelted and screamed at; being a monster is better than being dead.
At the place where the river is at its lowest, Saar-Lo stands waist-deep in brownish sludge, toes anchored into the sharp debris that litters the riverbed. The flow of the current is not strong enough to flush him away, but this is a necessary precaution regardless – there are things in these pestilent waters, things that grasp and tug and hunger. The only difference between the eater and the eaten, Saar-Lo has learned, is who spots the other first.
Saar-Lo’s trained eyes fixate on the water that moribundly laps him as if he were but another rock in the river’s path, arms held in position to strike the moment something disturbs the surface. Ten years of tearing sustenance from the corpse of the world have taught him to identify the tell-tale vibrations of most things that can be called food in the miasmic river, maggots in a festering wound.
Saar-Lo does not fancy himself a predator, merely a fisher of downstream debris. Sometimes he will find a corpse washed down from parts unknown, its flesh not yet decayed into inedibility and its marrow still intact. Other times he will find only rusted metal amidst the filth, refuse flowing to the terrible city of steel and sorrow that lies at the edge of the sea, the crumbling behemoth whose countless chimneys choked the world and who even in death towers over the poisoned horizon. If he gets very lucky, however, Saar-Lo will find something still alive, something still squirming and fighting and pouring what willpower it has left to resist being torn from this life, to remain in this world. Any existence – however accursed it may be – is better than none at all, Saar-Lo thinks, and perhaps this is the reason he enjoys living morsels the most: to overcome the will of another, to dominate and devour them against their throes of resistance, is to reassert his own primal drive to live.
There. Something has disturbed the surface of the water. A small ripple, not even a splash, the unquestionable sign of something swimming towards him. Saar-Lo cannot hesitate, cannot think about the size or weight of his target, cannot ponder if he is hunter or hunted. The distance between a full meal and an empty stomach closes in an instant, fingers like talons unfolding at the same time his elbow shifts position and lunges forward in a single motion. Droplets of liquid filth scatter around him, no doubt scaring away whatever prey might lurk in the shallows, but no matter: Saar-Lo digs his fingernails deep into his quarry’s soft skin and pulls, hurling the thing onto the stony riverbank with a moist thump that proclaims victory.
The thing splayed and broken upon the rocks is blind and pale and slimy as befits all creatures who were never meant to see the light of day. Voicelessly, it squirms in fear and agony, its myriad malformed appendages useless against its own weight. Saar-Lo ends its misery with a bite, teeth grinding gelatinous meat and cartilage into foul paste that he swallows in voracious gulps, leaving nothing behind for scavengers. There is flavor beyond the acridness of tainted flesh, beyond the taste of his own stomach juices creeping up his throat in protest at yet another feast of nigh-indigestible gruel – the flavor of his own prolonged existence, the sole triumph to be had in the rotting carcass of the world.
Saar-Lo is so entranced by his meal, so focused on keeping down the food against the revolt of his innards, that he does not notice the figure on the opposite riverbank until they have locked eyes. Green is the first thing he perceives, green nestling infinite blackness, still water in a pond encircled by tender sprouts that refuse to wither, a lingering memento of a world where the skies did not weep ochre tears and the ground did not crawl with feverish decay.
All this goes through Saar-Lo’s mind in the instant it takes the foreign pair of eyes to blink, the illusion now broken yet forever seared inside him. The greenness, he realizes, is set in a face gaunt, brittle eyelashes and pocked skin, hair like tangled reeds and chapped lips curved with surprise. Calloused hands hold a net woven from coarse black string, arms shaking with indecision whether to throw it at him or remain at rest. Knees dig into the wet earth and tendons tense in preparation to lift the whole body’s weight and dash to safety should Saar-Lo make a move, yet that move never comes. Holding his breath, not daring to swallow what mulch remains in his mouth, Saar-Lo gazes upon the woman, into the mirror of his own lost humanity. After what seems like an eternity, she cautiously gets on her feet, green eyes glued to Saar-Lo’s filth-colored irises, and backtracks into the tangle of rachitic bushes, leaving behind nothing but the imprint of her weight on mud.
Saar-Lo remains still, breath barely contained against the thunder raging inside, not because he fears she will return to slay him with a horde of screaming men, nor because he knows she heralds that others will soon intrude into his hunting grounds. No. Saar-Lo remains frozen in place because for the first time in ages he feels a drive beyond the primal instinct of one who has been reduced to animalism, a want beyond mere survival. He cannot name it, for he was never taught the word, and yet no need exists for Saar-Lo to pierce through his ignorance and grasp its meaning. Such is the seed of a story older than him or any who have lived it, a truth that needs no other speaker than silence.
Saar-Lo dreams many things amidst the fumes. They grant him visions, glimpses of things lurking somewhere beyond the veil, lingering promises of things that never were yet may one day be. Here, anesthetized and weightless, almost free from the discomfort of his own body, even a creature as wretched as himself can afford to dream.
The factory did not stop working even during the final throes of the world; its automaton workers persisted despite having no masters any longer, forcing the wheel to turn and churn and belch out creations ever more nonsensical and useless, mindless in their purpose and incomprehensible to even the most deranged dregs who crept inside to warm themselves amidst the dying embers of the former hearth of industry. Now, the rusted cadavers of the iron servitors lay prostrated as the factory’s automated systems and assembly lines reach the final stages of autophagy, the fumes their dying throes before an eternity of stillness.
Sometimes, Saar-Lo dreams the marching of a thousand metal boots whose clamor drowns out the thunderous herald of acid rain. His hollow mind rings with the shrill wheezing of steam and the rhythmic clang of steel striking steel on the assembly lines, high notes of a discordant symphony. These are tranquil dreams for the most part, for although the survivors of doomsday still choke under their refuse, the mad gods of industry care little for the mite nesting atop their stronghold, the leper whose sole balm is the effluvia of cancerous progress.
Other times, he sees things far more disturbing, the shadowed dreams shared by the dead offering no solace as he is cast into the pit of his own remembrance. He envisions the blurred face of his mother, her features eaten away by time and reduced to ashen silhouettes, her voice low and drowned as he struggles to hear what she says to him. She calls him darling. She calls him beloved son. She calls him a name that is no longer his, a name he can no longer remember because she was the only one who thought he deserved to have it, and when illness ripped her from his arms, so did his name unravel and fade into the miasma.
In these nightmares, Saar-Lo tries to hold his mother tight, to force himself to remember more than the shade of the woman who once was, to gaze upon her face and see in her eyes the love he was once worthy of. The visage of nothingness is all he finds, and then he plummets into the filthy waters, the wrathful glow of countless torches surrounding him as he cowers and tries to plead to the ones who hold flame and blade against him. They call him cursed. They call him unclean. They call him Saar-Lo, bringer of plague. The hurt closes in, and all he can do is run as far as his blistered feet will let him and hide where no harm will befall his purulent flesh.
Tonight, however, Saar-Lo dreams none of these things; tonight, he dreams of green. As a child, before the sores covered his skin, he heard that green is the color of life, fertility, and rebirth – the promise of tomorrow. His imagination filled with trees whose emerald canopies rose like arms reaching for the sun, tender shoots that would one day become giants in whose shade children would play, and fertile soil that would provide as much food as he could ever eat. He wished he could crack open his head and let all these visions pour out, roots burrowing into the earth and doing away with the poisons that had made it barren, leaves syphoning the fumes that made the sky brown so clean rain may fall upon the land and even the rivers may no longer carry death.
But he was a child then, and children cannot truly know the cruelty of reality until it has stripped them of all innocence. When his mother died, when the sores first came and his hands grew skin between their fingers and his hair fell off in thick clumps, when the mob chased him off and the ruins of the factory welcomed him, Saar-Lo learned that some green remained in the world. It was viscous and pungent, twisted and malignant, clinging to life the same way he did – against the world’s efforts to destroy it. It grew on the walls of the factory and on the riverbanks, between the gears of the broken servitors and on the insides of the smokestacks from where the fumes emerged, like a shroud that slowly enveloped and asphyxiated the very rock that had withstood the end of time. It grew on the animals like a rash, creeping into their mouths and nostrils, into their bloodshot, panicked eyes; the madness that followed left behind corpses not even the carrion eaters dared to touch.
It was a mockery of life, this green, a deformed version of Saar-Lo’s dream just as he was an aberration of the child to whom his mother had given birth. And through the many years he had spent amidst that putrefaction, his greatest fear was to wake up one day and find it growing out of his own flesh – the spindly tendrils of the green thing that was not a plant and was not life would fill his every orifice, and even if he could still scream, who would ever come to aid him?
He should be thankful, then, that the green he envisions in his dream is more like the one he yearned for in his childhood, and not the one he knows to beware. Through the oneiric haze, the eyes of the woman pierce him deep, though he cannot yet tell if she sees within or beyond him. Once again, he is frozen in place, careful not to scare her away yet burning to get closer, to extend his webbed hand and not have it rejected. In those moments, suspended in an instant stretched over years of exile, Saar-Lo knows now what he craves, even if he still does not possess the word to name it: to gaze into her eyes and find himself in their watery greenness – not the fiendish creature he knows he is, but the man he could have been in a world less cruel.
When the woman returns the next day, Saar-Lo’s surprise is monumental. Treading carefully, her green eyes never leaving the opposite riverbank from where Saar-Lo observes her in disbelief, she places a small cloth sack on the ground before taking a step back. Her gaze is still fixed on him, brow slightly frowned, yet as she disappears back into the thicket the message is clear: she has brought Saar-Lo a gift.
Saar-Lo does not know what to do. Saar-Lo has never before received a gift, and all that he can muster is a ragged gasp as he debates whether to approach or flee upon this second and more egregious intrusion on his hunting grounds. The wariness that has kept him alive all these years does not abate the burning curiosity that has taken hold of him, even if the most primal fibers in his body tell him it could be a trap. He has seen the cruelty of hidden devices meant to maim and weaken prey by keeping them nailed to the ground, twisting futilely in agony and bleeding out until the devious hunter returns to deliver the final blow. Should his arm become trapped in metal teeth upon opening the sack, would he be able to chew through his own flesh and bone before the mob descends upon him?
As if approaching a sleeping beast, Saar-Lo wades to the other side, stick in hand. His arm is unsteady as he prods the sack, but no mechanism of pain clicks beneath the cloth and no bloodthirsty mandibles crush the stick to splinters, and his curiosity is at last too much to overcome. With frantic hands he undoes the knot, heart pounding as his eyes struggle to understand what they are seeing.
Three red blobs rest within the cloth, their surfaces smooth but irregular, a pitiful stem jutting atop each of them. Shy motes of gold glint on their surfaces, stars in a crimson night unlike any this world has seen in ages. A word begins forming in the far recesses of Saar-Lo’s mind as he takes one of them – solid but light-weighted, cold to the touch – disuse-induced atrophy clutching his throat as he clumsily coughs out the first coherent utterance he has made since his banishment. “Beautiful.”
The crack of a broken branch startles Saar-Lo out of his bewitchment, his primal instinct tensing his body in preparation to flee once he pinpoints where the peril comes from. But when he turns his gaze to the skeletal bushes, all he finds is that green pair of eyes looking at him once again. Slowly, the woman rises from her hiding spot, palms pointed up at waist level to prove she is unarmed. Even slower, her breath strained and her motion rigid, she points with her chin at the red lumps, her lips powering through her nervousness to form a word before her voice becomes strong enough to finally speak it. “Food,” she half-whispers, and motions once again.
Saar-Lo does not take his eyes off the woman as he inspects one of the alien fruits and breathes in its perfume. Something sweet and delectable tingles his appetite, and before any other part of him can protest of hidden poisons and other maledictions, he sinks in his teeth down to their blackened gums. The taste inundates him almost to the point of sensory overload – a torrent of sweetness and bitterness like he has never experienced, as should not be possible in a world as bleak as his, drops of juice running down his chin and over his tongue as the wall of ignorance that kept his deepest yearnings at bay crumbles at the realization that things as precious as this one still exist somewhere beyond this desolation. Strong and hearty, acrid at the very end as if lamenting having to leave him, the fruit disappears in a few bites, core and all.
Saar-Lo eats one fruit after another, leaving nothing behind in his voracity but the few drops gravity claims from him. The woman watches in silence, tension leaving her little by little as Saar-Lo feasts, both feeling the weight of wariness dissipating from their chests just enough to understand that – at least for now – they have nothing to fear from each other.
A different weight has instead settled in Saar-Lo’s chest, and he turns to the woman as it runs up his esophagus and into his mouth in an emetic exhalation, atrophied vocal cords and lips desperately trying to form those words his mother once taught him and that he has so rarely used – thank you. He fails to utter them as his voice cracks, instead excreting a choked, hoarse question that burns with the resentment of one who has been denied the most meager kindness for his entire life.
“Why?”
The woman is silent for a moment, green eyes catching the painful grey light of the waning day and refracting it into glimmering fractals back at Saar-Lo.
“You looked hungry,” she says, and then she is gone.
The last drops of bittersweet juice linger like phantoms in Saar-Lo’s mouth, the gift consumed and the world once more submerged in bleakness. Still, Saar-Lo understands now that there remain things of beauty in this world – and some of them may be within arm’s reach.
Her name is Ansaï, he learns on their fifth meeting, bellies full of fresh fruit allowing trust to creep like a weed through the cracks in their mutual timidity. “Ansaï,” Saar-Lo repeats, botchily at first, but with more confidence again when she smiles in encouragement. “Ansaï,” he greets her every time she comes by morning light to bring him food – not every day, but often enough that he won’t grow restless – and whispers each night before shutting his eyes.
“It means loyal,” she tells him, and it is a meaning he struggles to understand, for none have ever been loyal to him. “It is what people are to one another,” she explains. “We care for our kind, we trust each other, and we walk our path together.”
Our kind, she says, and Saar-Lo wonders if he can count himself among them. He of grey scabby skin where she is smooth and coppery, of crooked gait where she walks straight, who has lived like an animal while she learned to be tender and caring – how could he ever be more than this outcast, this dreg? Even his name is no name at all, but a brand of shame, a mark for others to know his curse and stray clear from him. And still, he gazes longingly into her green eyes – green like the tree of hope that now sprouts in his heart, like the dreamt paradise of his childhood – and lets himself believe that perhaps he can one day be amongst people like her, who will show him kindness instead of fear and hatred. Perhaps, he dares in his most private moments, he can one day walk that path with her.
As time passes, Saar-Lo tests the frontier between them both, cautious as he has always been but ever more pressing in his need to get close enough to see himself in Ansaï’s eyes. She allows it, sitting close to him as she tells him stories of things that have happened and things seen only in dreams, showing no revulsion when his scabs fall leaving behind mortified and weeping flesh. Instead, her eyes speak concern, and she shares with Saar-Lo the wisdom of what herbs may soothe his unhealing wounds so he will no longer numb himself with the noxious emissions of the dead factory. In return, he answers as best he can the questions she asks about the river, about the things that float down its foul current and about the dangers he has learned to avoid. He does not understand why she asks this, for all that lives or dies in the river could never be of sustenance to her or her people, but she insists in hearing as much as he can tell, and he obliges. She nods and smiles when he speaks, and Saar-Lo brims with the realization that for the first time in his life his words have worth, that he is useful to someone at long last.
“You should not think of yourself as useful or useless,” she warmly admonishes him upon hearing this. “Everyone has worth regardless of what they may contribute. The children, the elderly, the infirm… we care for them not because they are of use to us, but because they are as human as we are.”
“Human…” Saar-Lo mutters, the word bitter in his mouth.
“Yes, human,” Ansaï says. “Even you, Saar-Lo. You are human, although you have forgotten how to act like one, although your body crawls with plague. You are as I am – kin to my kin.”
“Kin?” Saar-Lo whispers while lowering his sight. His voice quivers, for although Ansaï’s words ring kindly in his head, he has known a different truth for his entire life. No, he tells himself, Saar-Lo has no kin. Saar-Lo is an exile, a pariah, an aberration. How can Ansaï not see it? How can she say that they are both the same?
A warm, soft touch reaches for his hand, caressing it with tenderness to avoid upsetting his lesions. Saar-Lo looks up; in the green expanse, he gazes back at himself. He looks as he expected, mistreated by time and the elements, malformed by the ravages of his own body. His nose is but corroded cartilage, his eyes streaked by purplish veins. The scabs and sores that never truly heal mottle his skin, always molting to reveal an even more twisted form lurking beneath. And yet, beyond this reflection there is something else – a gentle light that does not shy away from him, a welcoming embrace amidst the black inset.
“Kin,” he grins with conviction.
Days march on, and all they do is share meals and stories. She tells him of the fresh fruits and vegetables she brings to him on every visit, calling them a gift from the men in the city of steel that lies where the river meets the sea – a gift to be shared and enjoyed together. What wondrous place could this food come from, neither Saar-Lo nor Ansaï know, for the inhabitants of the city did not claim to have grown it themselves, but for now they are both content with imagining it as lush and fertile, full of all the delicacies they could ever crave: a paradise. They both smile and laugh as if they were children telling tall tales, dreaming of things that may never come yet are worth dreaming for their own sake. But at night, when she goes to her people and he is left alone with his own thoughts of hope renewed, a truth grows out of his lips while no one can hear him: it would only be paradise with her in it.
She does not return the following day, nor the next one, nor any for a very long time. The muddy sun rises and falls on the polluted sky, acid rain comes and goes, and still the bushes remain undisturbed, and Saar-Lo stands alone on his side of the river. He waits for her every morning, his legs restless and his breath held for any possible sign of her arrival, his lips struggling to form mute prayers to gods who departed this land long ago. And again, that hoarse question, that searing word dripping resentment: Why?
He can feel desperation gnawing at his insides, unable to find consolation even in the fumes; they show him visions of horror, of Ansaï meeting a grisly end between the mandibles of the creatures that roam the wilds in search of prey, of her contracting a plague not unlike his and dying in agony. Worst of all, they whisper in his ear that none of these are the reason for her absence. Did you truly think she could care for one as lowly as you? You are a fool, Saar-Lo, for believing you could be their equal. You are worth no more than their spit, no more than the stones they fling at you when they see your purulent hide, no more than the curses they shriek so you will know your truth! Abomination! Wretch! Monster!
Saar-Lo screams until his throat is raw, strikes his fists against concrete until his knuckles bleed, tears at his skin until pus mingles with the tears flowing from his reddened eyes. The green has settled in his chest, its roots piercing his heart and forming vicious knots that strangle him from the inside out. He can feel it pushing its way through his body, filling him with a poison worse than any other – he abhors her absence, he abhors her, and he abhors himself most of all for believing her words, for holding empty hope that things could be any different.
In his dreams, Saar-Lo again sees his shadowed mother, her silhouette fainter than ever before. She is slipping away, he can tell, dissolving into oblivion against the pleading of her child. Saar-Lo wants to cry out to her, to beg on his knees for her not to leave him again through this second death that is forgetfulness, yet all that comes out of his mouth is the groaning of a stricken animal. His feet stick to the ground like walking in quicksand, arms flailing desperately as his mother becomes ever more distant. Crawling, he forces himself forward, more grub than man in his pursuit of the last dying embers of her remembrance.
Child, she murmurs as he weeps at her feet. Do you not realize it? I left you before as she has left you now, ashamed of you, nauseated by the thing you became so shortly after leaving my womb. So frail you were that I thought you would die and grant us both merciful release, but instead you clung to life like a leech, a pest upon this world and all those condemned to witness you.
Cold hands caress his face, bony fingers cupping his ragged cheeks and forcing him to look up. Saar-Lo tries to tear his sight away from the blurry visage of his mother, from the gaping maw of absence where her features should be, but all he can see are those emerald orbs that peer at him from the void, those cursed green eyes that coldly stare out from across the river.
On the day Ansaï returns, Saar-Lo is a frightened beast. Hostile, nervous, he hisses as she tries to approach him, bloodshot brown eyes rejecting the greenness without while the greenness within strangles his innards, his name on her lips a knife thrust and twisted between his ribs as he rejects this new vision of flesh who bears all the things he longs for and loathes.
Only when she sobs sorry does Saar-Lo listen. He listens because no one has ever apologized to him before, and when she says please between her labored breaths he finally sees what has become of her, for who would plead with someone like him if they had not reached the true depths of despair? Ansaï’s visage is more gaunt than before, cheeks sunken and copperish skin dulled, hair devoid of all shine and lips dry to the point of bleeding; what meat once clung to her bones has starved away, and her fingernails have raw flesh beneath them. Only her eyes, twin emeralds dripping crystalline tears, remain as bright as ever.
The dreams of disaster that Saar-Lo dreamt amidst the chimney fumes tear at the green screams that tell him it is all a ploy, that it was her choice to abandon him. But how can he deny her now, at her most vulnerable, when through the cracks in his malaise ooze the words she spoke on their last meeting? We care for them not because they are of use to us, but because they are as human as we are. Saar-Lo’s humanity cries out louder than the infectious resentment gestating in his guts, and he listens to the tale Ansaï tells.
She speaks of her people and their toils, how they strained to subsist off the barren soil and poisoned water. She laments the many children and elderly claimed by famine and plague, the lives lost through infighting as despair took hold. She narrates sleepless days and nights walking through the waste in search of a place not yet utterly consumed by pollution, people dropping dead from exhaustion and littering the ground without hope of receiving proper burial. She tells him how they reached the edge of Saar-Lo’s dwelling, settling only because their bodies were too tired to continue and their spirits were too broken to do anything but wait for the end.
Then, with eyes wide with both wonder and horror, Ansaï tells of the city of steel at the edge of the sea and the men in grey robes who ruled over it, and the ones who ruled over them in turn – men born not of the same dirt as they had, but from the light of errant stars that descended from the heavens. She recalls the day they came to her people bearing crates of fresh fruit unlike any that had grown on this world even before the calamity, how they offered them in exchange for a single request: the bodies of the dead. The men in grey robes and the herald of the star-men promised that they would continue to bring them these miraculous gifts if the people would continue giving them their dead. “The fresher they are, the better,” the star-man had said.
The people walked back on their own trail, picking up the bodies of those who had not survived the journey. They then defiled the tombs of those who had died since, reclaiming their carcasses for the good of the many. But even these many casualties were not endless, and neither was the benevolence of the star-men, whose demands did not change even as the dead became scarce.
The people shivered when they realized where they may get more bodies, but dreaded even more the possibility of their entire group once again facing starvation. Sacrifices must be made, those who fancied themselves leaders claimed, so that more of us may survive. And so they slew the elderly for they had lived long lives already, and slew the infirm for they would perish nonetheless. And for a time, they lived off the spoils of their atrocity, regretful only in the measure they could sate their hunger.
But hunger came again, and the people – desperate for more – decided that all who could not serve the many would be killed and given to the star-men. Everyone scrambled to find something they could do to prove they still serve, that they could still be useful. “That is why I came that first day,” Ansaï says. “That is why I brought my net: to dredge the river in search of any corpses that may be entombed within its sludge.” But she found no body, no corpse worth salvaging to exchange for her own life, even when she ventured upriver; her search had been in vain.
And now, the worst has happened: Ansaï has fallen ill. None yet know it, but her symptoms cannot remain hidden much longer. She is wasting away day by day, becoming weaker at each break of dawn. That is why she has stopped coming to Saar-Lo, why she may not be back ever again. She has brought one last gift for him, one last meal to share: two orbs of a color Saar-Lo has never seen before and thus cannot name, their perfume sharp and bright. She peels them, and though they eat in silence – the taste both sweeter and much more bitter than the first fruit she brought – Saar-Lo feels the urge to scream.
“Stay,” he implores when she rises to leave. He struggles against his own shriveled vocabulary, trying to piece together words that loneliness left to rot at the bottom of his brain. “Stay. They kill you. They take you away from Saar-Lo, from me.”
Ansaï smiles with sadness, but she says nothing. Without thinking, Saar-Lo clasps her arm and pulls towards the factory, towards the place he knows will provide safety. Ansaï cries out and squirms against his grasp, frenzied words demanding to be let go. Saar-Lo hesitates, his fingers loosening just enough for her to pull herself free. Then she is gone, and Saar-Lo is alone once again.
There is little consolation now, no hope of one final gathering to repair what has been broken, no return to the way things were. Weep, Saar-Lo, the green within whispers. Weep and mourn and bury the truth, for what heart could hold such pain and not tear itself asunder? What can you do, if not pretend that you did not see it, the expression oozing of her green eyes as you begged for her to stay, and know the only thing she felt was fear?
In the weeks that follow, Saar-Lo lies in his chrysalis of anguish, his insides turned into a stormy sea where waves crash against each other, devouring one another, each trying to impose itself on the others before being knocked down and dissolving into insignificant foam. Amidst that tidal wave of emotions, resisting the fury of the waters as if it were a rocky reef, an image remains: gaunt, bony, hardened by a lifetime of survival. Her green eyes preside over the darkness, their glow as hypnotic as the first time Saar-Lo gazed upon them, yet something is different. The blackness within the green, the mirror where he once saw himself in kindly light, is now cloudy, the image within it distorted into an unrecognizable phantom.
The vision is the same every time he closes his eyes: Ansaï, carved in salt-eroded stone, aloof and distant as the illness gnaws at her from the inside out, deaf to Saar-Lo’s pleading. And how could it be any different? Saar-Lo knows he is powerless against the choice Ansaï has made, just as he is powerless against her illness. One way or another, she is bound to leave him forever.
But the screaming does not cease. It calls him weak. It calls him a coward. The fear that surfaced within Saar-Lo during Ansaï's first absence is now a thunderous voice that rebukes and torments him, forcing him to keep his eyes fixed on what he has lost and shaking the foundations of what he once believed in with hope: that illusion, reduced to ashes, of being human. We care for them not because they are of use to us, but because they are as human as we are. And if Saar-Lo were human, wouldn't Ansaï have allowed him to take care of her? Wouldn't she have stayed by his side in those final moments – alongside the one who cherishes her like no other – instead of dying surrounded by those who see her as nothing more than a body to be exchanged for a simple, fleeting bite? No, the voice says. There is no Saar-Lo the human. There is only Saar-Lo the beast, the animal. You do not protect. You do not give comfort. You survive.
But Saar-Lo cannot deny what he has experienced, what he felt when he heard Ansaï's words. He cannot deny the sweet aroma of the fruit they shared, nor the warmth of that first and last time she took his hand. Ansaï's stories, told in a gentle voice against the roar of the storm, echo deep within him. She is the stone idol against which the great wave of fury crashes, eroding but not destroying the conviction that lies at the core of Saar-Lo. She, who found him without seeking him, who stayed even though he was of no use to her, who returned to say goodbye – how could he deny her even the smallest kindness, that of not allowing her memory to be corrupted?
Indeed, Saar-Lo is a beast, a pitiful and twisted creature, a spawn of the poison that corrodes the bowels of the world, unworthy of being human. But even if that humanity is consumed, reduced to stillborn potential as he descends into animalism, into the savagery from where there is no return, still it must surface one last time – to declare, to proclaim its own passing so that at least the putrid soil and the miasmic sky will remember that he was once a man. Once, and no more, but it must be enough.
That is why he cleans his lair as best he can and sets down a bed of burlap in which he does not sleep, why he gathers dry shrubbery and flintstone to make fire. That is why every day he waits at the river and watches the distance, why he stands guard over this last refuge he has prepared. That is why he takes in Ansaï when she returns – delirious with fever, her mouth dry and her feet flayed after fleeing for days – and asks not the questions that stalk at the fringes of his collapsing mind. That is why he holds her hand as she rests in the deathbed he has made for her, why he says nothing as her breath grows so weak it is nothing but a mute hiss, why he silences the green within as the green without – the one inside her eyes, the one he cherishes and covets and hates and desires and loves – grows dull and empty. And that is why, as he crawls atop her to see himself reflected one last time in those emerald pools that have been his treasure and obsession, as his mirrored visage captures the dying light of the hole he has dug for her and himself, he smiles and pretends that the thing etched across the green in those final instants is not the most utter disgust.
It is dark when they come for Ansaï. Faceless shadows elongated by the light of their torches surround their prey, confident that no danger lurks out of sight, expecting only a cold body to drag back to their encampment. They are wrong for two reasons. One, Ansai’s body has not grown cold yet. Two, the thing keeping her warm is in fact very dangerous.
The thing that was once Saar-Lo lunges towards the man in front of the group, a swipe of its blackened fingernails drawing blood as the man stumbles and falls on his back, unable to fight off his surprise before the fiend digs its teeth into his exposed throat. A strike from a wooden club causes it to gasp and let go, only for the attacker to have his eyes gouged out as the creature leaps and clasps his face with devilish strength. Screams tear the night asunder, the mob a pack of frightened and unruly animals besieged by the worst kind of predator – the one that has nothing left to lose.
But they are many, and there is only one Saar-Lo. Five men die before the creature, overwhelmed, falls to its knees with a fountain of blood spraying from its forehead. They beat it. They cut it. They stomp on its broken body to ensure that it will not get up. Then they take the corpse of the one who it protected – the selfish and ungrateful woman who refused to die among them – and the bodies of the ones who perished at the slaying of the monster. As they march to the city of steel where the star-men hold court, many questions are asked, but no one dares answer. What was that creature? Why did it protect the corpse of Ansaï? Did she consort with it? Did they breed? And would the star-men have accepted such an abomination as tribute, had they not shattered it so utterly?
In the end, none of these questions matter; none but one that will haunt them for many nights: Was it truly dead?
Saar-Lo awakens to a pain more agonizing than any it has felt before, harsher than the protests of its bones as it sets them back in place, flaring hotter than the myriad wounds that have joined its unhealing sores in their mosaic of red and brown. You failed, the voice that has supplanted its own screams from the bottom of its animalistic brain. They took her! They took her away from you! You pathetic worm! Too lowly to be a man, too weak to be a beast!
Saar-Lo growls and the voice is silent, and the pain that ravages its mangled body cedes to a more potent drive. There are tracks on the ground where the men dragged the corpses in improvised stretchers, but Saar-Lo has no need for these; it already knows what it must do, and so it follows the river downstream to the sea, where the city of steel and sorrow rises over the baleful waves.
It takes a day and a night to reach the brine-rusted walls of the city, ruined spires jutting towards the heavens like the broken teeth of a jaw torn open. If it were still a man, Saar-Lo would wonder at how such colossal structures can exist in this world of rubble. If it were still a man, it would fill his heart with dread and fascination how the gaseous lights that tinge the mist around the city with phantasmagorical greens and yellows stay on while the rest of the land is enveloped in darkness. If it were still a man, he would fear the men in grey robes who patrol the streets and gateways like insects in a decaying colony, bound to their duty even as the very foundations of their kingdom rust and collapse around them.
But Saar-Lo is a man no longer, and the drive that has pulled it from the brink of death now pushes it further into the city, webbed palms and soles sticking to the walls with the ease of someone who walks up a flight of stairs. Up goes Saar-Lo, up the wall and down into the pipes that overflow with toxins no man could withstand without vomiting his own innards. It wades in unspeakable filth, so deep at times that the only way through is underwater. And when at last it emerges from the labyrinth of pipes and sewage, Saar-Lo crouches in shadow and waits for others to show it the way.
The men in grey robes arrive soon, carrying with them glossy bags that barely disguise the shape of the inert bodies within. Saar-Lo clings to the ceiling and follows them, its steps making no sound as it prowls like some colossal vermin that has crept up from the sewers. The men in grey robes walk past a circular door so massive that not even a hundred of them could force it open; an unnatural cold seeps from behind its metal frame, thin sheets of frost forming on the translucent viewing port set at its center. If Saar-Lo still possessed some manner of curiosity, its eyes would now gaze through it and behold the rows upon rows of humans stored there like vulgar lumps within the frozen chamber, eyes shut as if in a cursed slumber. But Saar-Lo is too focused on its target to care for such monstrous sights, too driven to stray from course and ponder horrors beyond the imagination of men or beasts.
The group stops at another door, inconspicuous when compared to the one that protects the white vault and its occupants. It opens with a hiss, and the men in grey robes take the bodies in with them. Still on the ceiling, Saar-Lo creeps in before it closes again, eyes adjusting to the darkness within. Several metal slabs, arranged into a circle, await for the cadavers to be placed upon them, a task that the men finish with haste before leaving.
From its vantage point, Saar-Lo peers through the darkness, trying to lock eyes with Ansaï. There she is, strewn limply across the cold metal, her naked frame pitiful and emaciated, tangled hair now shaven, eyes still open as if she too looked for Saar-Lo. A choked whimper pierces its way out of Saar-Lo’s throat as tears well up in his eyes; in that instant of unexpected grief, he is a man again. Ansaï, loyal Ansaï, beautiful Ansaï, Ansaï lost and found again, beloved and treasured. He is here for her, to take her from this place of silence and damnation. He crawls down the wall, towards her, gait straightening as he reaches out, almost touching her, so close that he can already see the faint glint of her green irises calling to him.
A searing white light inundates the room and the door opens again, forcing Saar-Lo to retreat behind the slab upon which Ansaï rests. Two silhouettes enter, and two voices exchange words in a language that Saar-Lo does not comprehend but for the intent they carry.
“This is the latest batch, all freshly decontaminated,” says the man in grey robes, his voice quivery as he struggles to catch up with the unwavering stride of his counterpart. “I– I supervised the delivery myself.”
“Is that relevant to their adequacy?” The shadowed figure – the star-man – replies dryly.
“Of– of course not,” the man in grey sheepishly says. “I only meant to say that–”
The star-man’s boots click sharply as he stops in place.
“Let me make myself very clear, Governor. I am not here to listen to the minutiae of how you acquired these bodies, so you may save your attempts to ingratiate yourself with me. The only reason I am on this putrid hellhole you call a planet is to ensure your compliance with the terms of your agreement with the Immortal Empire”
“Yes. Yes, of course! Apologies, sir.”
The star-man, a shadow cut from the void of night itself, leans over the cadavers and inspects them closely, gloved hands forcing open lips and eyelids, dreadfully silent as he makes unspoken annotations. His movements follow the circle of slabs, slowly working his way one body at the time until he reaches Ansaï. He is so close now that Saar-Lo can almost hear his breath, every instinct telling the intruder to run. But Saar-Lo cannot leave Ansaï here, cannot fail her anew. There must be a way out, a way to leave without anyone stopping them.
“Sir, if I may…” the Governor ventures. “When will the next cargo ship be arriving? The people outside the walls are growing… restless without more of your produce. They are hungry, desperate, and some have even spoken of monsters lurking in–”
“Monsters?” The star-man turns, and on the reflection of the slab next to him Saar-Lo sees his face for the first time: he looks like any other man, pale and ravenhaired, his mouth curving into a subtle grin as he addresses the Governor. His eyes, however, are sunken and pitiless, polished by years upon years of witnessing atrocities – or performing them. “I would stoke those fears if I were you. It gives them something to occupy themselves with, keeps them from paying too much attention to you and what you did to this planet.”
“P-pardon?”
“Think about it. Monsters stalk the wilds, sowing terror. Your city, with our generous help, is now the only thing that stands between the people and the things that go bump in the night. If you play your hand well, you might end up being remembered as the saviors of your world, instead of its destroyers.”
“And the food?”
“The Empire will deliver on its end of the bargain once I produce my report. Or they will not, if they deem you are not in compliance. Until then, do keep quiet.”
The star-man moves on to inspect the last cadaver, and Saar-Lo begins eyeing for an exit. Above him is a ventilation duct; he could crawl inside once they leave and make his way out, but could he carry Ansaï with him? Saar-Lo is strong, yes, but he does not overestimate his power. Again he is Saar-Lo the man, and right now he needs to be a beast.
“I have finished my inspection, Governor,” the star-man says, and Saar-Lo again stays still as the boots begin moving. He cannot help, however, peer off the edge of his hiding place. “Only one test remains, as always. Do pick the specimen this time; the one you find the least unsightly.”
The Governor, a shriveled husk of a man, his skin as ashen as his robes and his beady eyes moist with fear, hesitates before lifting a trembling hand and pointing at Ansaï. The star-man arches his eyebrows as if unsurprised by the choice, then leans over Ansaï and whispers something in her ear.
As with the rest of their words, Saar-Lo could never hope to understand what the star-man says, but the mere murmur of the foreigner’s tongue is enough to chill Saar-Lo’s bones, his flesh crawling with a million insect legs and slimy things that live in the dark. His teeth gnash against his will, breath captured in his lungs and screaming to be let out as his throat contracts and saliva boils in his mouth. A ragged gasp echoes through the chamber, and for an instant Saar-Lo fears he has revealed his hiding place, only to realize with horror that it was not his chest that let out such an exhalation. On the table, Ansaï heaves and struggles against her cadaveric stiffness, eyes wide open yet lifeless.
“Very well,” the star-man seems satisfied in his assessment of the monstrosity he has worked. “The Immortal Empire will be pleased with this batch. I estimate your supplies should arrive in a week, at most.”
“Th-thank y-you,” the Governor shivers.
Saar-Lo hides no more. The horror, the impiety… it burrows deep into his core, fanning the flame of beastly wrath that refuses to die without a fight, a primal scream forming in his infected lungs to proclaim his choice to perish if it ensures that these monsters who wear the faces of men will profane Ansaï no longer. Inside his heart, the vicious green that has pushed him to embrace the animalistic urges of his true nature collides with the righteous anger born from the fragments of humanity that Ansaï kept warm in her embrace, exploding like a chemical reaction in a flash of sharp fingernails and uncoiled muscle, both sides of his essence reconciled for an instant as he lunges forward and strikes.
His hand still on Ansaï’s cheek, the star-man’s eyes widen with surprise; the reflection Saar-Lo casts in them burns in a backdrop of immaculate fear. He stumbles back, Saar-Lo drawing blood as the star-man instinctively raises his arm to protect his pale face. A hard right punch to the gut, and Saar-Lo hits the ground, stunned and gagging for air while the man in grey cowers next to one of the slabs and the star-man – the sorcerer – assesses the damage to his left arm. A grim light glows on the fingertips of his injured limb, a crackling sound growing louder as he points to Saar-Lo and releases the growling thunder. Saar-Lo dodges, the beam impacting behind him and filling the room with the stench of burnt flesh. Saar-Lo barely has time to process what has happened when already the star-man is holding him by the throat, his iron grip crushing Saar-Lo’s windpipe, his pitiless black orbits eager to see the light go out in his victim’s eyes.
Saar-Lo tries to bite the smoldering fingers, digs his fingernails deep into the devil arm, but all he finds is an unbreakable thing beneath the first layer of skin, an unyielding surface of perverse metal indifferent to pain or violence. A final gag is followed by silence, and Saar-Lo drops with a wet thud. He does not get up again.
“Wh-what was that?” The Governor trembles, his finger still on the alarm button – the one truly useful thing he has done thus far.
Aníbal does not immediately answer. The pathetic thing whose life he just ended is evidently a mutant – perhaps even the monster the locals spoke about – but the reason why it would crawl so far from its lair eludes the necromancer. He retraces his steps, the wounds on his artificial arm already closing as the self-repair protocols kick in. A sequence of events begins forming in his mind: the inspection of the corpses, the selection of the resurrection candidate, his lips speaking the command to arise on the corpse’s ear, his fingers on her face as he returned her to nothingness, the roar and the pain…
The woman’s corpse is sprawled on the slab, half her torso evaporated by Aníbal’s bolt; she is collateral damage even in death. He quickly fills in the gaps in the story, then drags the mutant’s corpse and allows it to rest next to her, two sets of dead eyes – green and brown – gazing into each other in a morbid mockery of what it might have once been like. There is no point in salvaging them; they are too damaged to serve the Empire’s goals, so they might as well share a grave. Aníbal contemplates his handiwork and smirks.
“A case of jealousy, I would say.”